I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
I haven’t been downvoting for this phenomenon so far, but I’m going to start doing so if it keeps happening.
To whoever is upvoting this, it seems like you must be taking one of the following positions:
It is safe to post any view on LessWrong. Doing so will not get you in trouble, or cause blowups.
It is unsafe to post certain views on LessWrong, but if you hold such a view, you are morally obliged to argue for it and suffer the punishment (possibly at the hands of me or my allies).
It is unsafe to post certain views on LessWrong, and you are allowed not to argue for them, but you are not allowed to suggest that this unsafety has any sort of distorting effect on the resulting discussion.
I upvoted Prismatic, and I’m taking this position: 4. It may or may not be safe to post certain views on Less Wrong, but whatever they are, I precommit that I will not be part of a blowup over them. If your views are justified, I will update on them, and if they are not, I will calmly state my objections, but I will not punish you for dissent. If other people punish you unfairly for dissent, I will punish them. I would rather you post your dissenting views than hide them, and I will support you for doing so.
If enough of Less Wrong takes this position, eventually position 1. will be correct. I hope to bring about this state of affairs.
That looks like option 2 minus the parenthetical. “These punishments are most regrettable, and maybe one day in a utopian future they will have stopped existing, but in the mean time stick your neck out and be punished or I’m going to complain at you.”
Isn’t is possible that Prismattic’s comment could be receiving so many upvotes because other people also find comments of the sort described irritating and are embracing the opportunity to signal that irritation? Like Prismattic, I don’t generally downvote comments on this basis alone. But I’m definitely tired of seeing the types of comments described, especially in those instances when, at least to my eyes, the commenters seem to be affecting a certain world-weary sorrow and wisdom while hinting at the profound truths that could be freely discussed but for -alas!- the terrible tyranny of modern social norms. But because the commenters are hiding the exact substance of their own views, there’s no basis on which to judge whether these views are, as Prismattic suggests, actually more correct than the mainstream view, or perhaps equally or even more wrong in some different direction.
If what’s suggested is “You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore I win the debate”, I agree that’s unreasonable. If what’s suggested is “You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore no real debate has taken place”, I think that’s far more reasonable.
To do so consistently and stay safe, you’d need to take the unusual or otherwise identifiable parts of your set of concepts, favorite examples, verbal quirks, patterns of reasoning, and so on, and split everything into two: one part for use under your true identity, and one part for pseudonymous use. Even then, each of your novel ideas could taint each of your other novel ideas. There would also still be the harm to LessWrong’s reputation as a whole. And what would it accomplish? It’s notoriously hard to get people to change their minds on these topics, even here, and if you do there’s no clear causal path from that to better long-term future outcomes. I’d rather just collectively give up.
It’s notoriously hard to get people to change their minds on these topics, even here, and if you do there’s no clear causal path from that to better long-term future outcomes.
I do wonder why Luke puts so much effort into writing about romantic relationships, given all the other things on his to do list. Perhaps he wants to demonstrate that rationality has big concrete, immediate benefits, as a way to help expand our community?
I’d rather just collectively give up.
I think that’s unlikely, unless someone who wants to see it happen makes a big push for it (e.g., get Eliezer to declare it a rule, or write a really convincing top-level post arguing for it and build the necessary consensus). My suggestion was made under the assumption of the current status quo.
Trying to put words to my own intuitions on the matter, I would stipulate a modified 3:
It may be unsafe (in terms of image/status/etc—I would certainly expect and hope not physically) to express certain views, particularly those sufficiently far from both societal mainstream and LW mainstream, and particularly those that touch too heavily on mind-killing topics.
It is reasonably within norms to acknowledge this, particularly with an eye to reducing its effect.
What is decidedly a violation of norms, I think, is to do so in a self-serving manner.
“Norms forbid honest discussion of my pet issue X, therefor X” is obviously flawed.
“Norms forbid discussion of my pet issue X, and I have strong evidence for X but can’t share it because of those norms, so just trust me that X” amounts to the same thing, in terms of what kinds of discussions are possible. It is also, to some degree, inconsistent—it is unlikely that we forbid evidence for a proposition while allowing discussion otherwise implying/assuming it.
Perhaps my view is one of 1-3, but I’m finding it difficult to categorize it:
It is ill-advised to discuss certain topics on LessWrong; if they are discussed anyway, the following choices are in the decreasing order of preference: a) not join the discussion; b) state your view clearly and be prepared to defend it; c) hint at your view but refuse to explain it or cite evidence for it, claiming that’ll violate a social norm.
b) is much better than c), but a) is much better than b).
It’s the same attitude that I think already exists on LW for politics (strongly influenced by the mind-killer post).
Yes, why should the heretic have the right to remain silent! If he speaks truth the good doctors of the holy mother church will surely update their theological arguments accordingly and if not, well why is he risking his immortal soul by relying only on his feeble and fallible mind?
We’re not discussing anyone’s right to remain silent. The objection is to a heretic’s tendency to announce himself as a heretic without mentioning any doctrinal specifics, then run away giggling.
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
So you prefer the situation in which a dubious mainstream view remains entirely unchallenged to a situation where a doubter, instead of remaining silent, states that it is likely wrong but that spelling out an explicit argument why it is so would violate social norms? As far as I see, the information made available in the second case is a proper superset of the information available in the former. So how can this constitute “obscurantism” in any reasonable sense of the term?
I’d prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of “politically correct” as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
I have mostly grown tired of making comments where I mention a contrarian position. I get asked to explain myself; it sometimes leads to an argument, and I put a lot of work into comments that often end up at negative karma. I suspect those threads add to LW, but the feedback I’m getting is that they don’t.
I’ll understand if you refuse, but… would you mind terribly saving me the work of searching for an example of what you’re talking about? Cause, see, if I’m right about what you’re referring to (something I’m not sure of, hence the question) I generally do upvote things like that.
Also I’ve only been here, like, two months, so if you have some kind of reputation I’m not aware of it.
The most recent example would be my comment that everyone becoming bisexual might lead to a net social loss, although the karma scores have gone up since that discussion happened (and so maybe I just need to wait before updating on the karma of contrarian comments).
I spent way too long looking through other comments I’ve made, and only really came across this example. I suspect this was misapplying discontent caused by other arguments. I had already noticed a while back that when I made a sloppy comment it would often get downvoted, although I would be able to make up the karma by explaining myself downthread. The only other significant example I can think of was in a thread about infanticide where I accidentally implied that I could be for the criminalization of abortion, and that comment got kicked down to −3 karma, with +1 karma from my following comments. (It’s hard to decide how that whole thread contributes to this question, because the person who said “well, I can’t say this many places, but I’m in favor of infanticide” got upvoted to 41 karma. That suggests to me their position isn’t contrarian locally, but I suspect it is contrarian globally.)
and so maybe I just need to wait before updating on the karma of contrarian comments
In general, it’s been observed that a comment on a controversial topic will be downvoted heavily in a quick flurry but then usually recovers; high-quality such comments tend to end up significantly positive.
In general, it’s been observed that a comment on a controversial topic will be downvoted heavily in a quick flurry but then usually recovers; high-quality such comments tend to end up significantly positive.
And now I have seen it observed by someone who isn’t me. Good to hear external confirmation! :)
Also the punishment (mainly in the form of lowered status and tarnished reputation) that would be foisted upon LW as an institution by the broader society if it were to become a welcoming environment for various kinds of views that aren’t very respectable.
Also: Being habitually mentioned in the same breath with outrageous positions that one has taken in the past. Having such words applied to one as cause people they are repeatedly applied to to be shunned.
What I’m really displeased about is that we are so casually dismissed as troublemakers, arguing in bad faith or tarred with negative characteristics.
Look at our profiles. Look at our comments. You will find many very active and well received posters who you would otherwise consider an asset to the community. And then consider how massively up voted some comments expressing such sentiments are! There are many more who never voice it but share chunks of this proposed map of reality.
Yes many on LessWrong are knee jerk contrarians, but please consider just how large a fraction of reasonable, polite, intelligent, sceptical LW contributors have basically thrown out certain popular overly optimistic ideas out of their model of the world, because the ideas in question just don’t pay rent and and are useful for signalling only. I dare say many, found the departure from some of those ideas more painful and difficult than admitting to themselves that the religion of their childhood was false.
There are different degrees of severity. Being perceived as weird in a nerdy way is low-status, but it’s nothing compared to being perceived as harboring fundamentally evil views. Most notably, the former sort of low status isn’t infectious; you can associate with weird nerdy people without any consequence for the other aspects of your life. Not so when it comes to associating with the latter sort of people.
My question wasn’t what tools of punishment are available, but whether there is actually a substantial amount of such punishment occurring merely for taking non-mainstream views.
Downvoted for invoking the name of the magic in vain, risking summoning its counterpart twin demon to devour us when you had no just cause! None I say!
My purpose in using the word was not to contrast good us to bad them, but rather to emphasize that the action Prismattic disagrees with (that of withholding one’s opinion) is a move forced by an incentive that needn’t itself have been set (and shouldn’t have been set if Prismattic is right that opinion withholding is bad), and so it’s more reasonable for Prismattic to complain to the incentive setters than to the incentive followers. Does that make sense?
The “people aren’t villains of their own narratives” line always struck me as a little glib. Villains believe they’re not villains, but does that mean they falsely believe they’re some particular thing that truly is not a villain, or does it merely mean they correctly believe they’re some particular thing that they falsely believe is not a villain (fail to label as villainous)? In my intuition these are two different things and the saying uses the plausibility of the disjunction of the two things to suggest only the first thing. Clearly villains usually gain some sort of satisfaction from their role in the world, perhaps even moral satisfaction, but that’s not the same thing as there having been a good-faith effort to be a hero. I don’t know, I may just be confused here.
Anyway, what matters is who’s a villain in God’s narrative (in the atheist sense of God). :)
it’s more reasonable for Prismattic to complain to the incentive setters than to the incentive followers.
I disagree with this, at least it’s not at all obvious.
does that mean
It means that at least on LW, they would also describe their behavior as rational (in certain contexts where reason is seen as an enemy, not everyone would be claiming the title “rational”).
these are two different things and the saying uses the plausibility of the disjunction of the two things to suggest only the first thing.
People punishing norm violations aren’t the villains of their own narratives, they think they’re responding rationally.
Which does not necessarily mean we should change the way we treat them. They can tell themselves whatever story they like. And by punishing them appropriately they will either change their behavior or, perhaps most importantly, those witnessing the punishment will avoid the behavior that visibly invokes community disapproval.
I’d prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
This does not answer my question. You claim that a situation in which information X and Y is made available constitutes “obscurantism” relative to the situation where only information X is provided. Now you say that you would prefer that not just X and Y, but also information Z be provided. That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t explain why (X and Y) is worse than just (X), if (X and Y and Z) is better than just (X and Y). What is this definition of “obscurantism,” according to which the level of obscurantism can rise with the amount of information about one’s beliefs that one makes available?
I still consider myself relatively new here, only been around for a year—but in that year I haven’t seen any actual fact presented in LessWrong that’s enflamed spirits one tenth as much as the obscure half-hints by trolls like sam and his “I can’t say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I’m not, therefore I’m not making them” style of debate.
The “obscurantism” that Prismatic is talking about isn’t yet as bad as that, but it has that same flavour, to a lesser degree. This sort of thing is… annoying—hinting at evidence, but refusing to provide it—and blaming this obscurity at the hypothetical actions by people who haven’t actually done them yet.
If the issue is e.g. whether science seems to indicate that the statistical distribution of physical and intellectual characteristic isn’t identical across racially-defined subgroups of the human race, or across genders, or across whatever, then it can be discussed politely, if the participants actually seek a polite discussion, instead of just finding the most insulting way possible to talk about them. And if the participants are willing to use words like “average” and “median” and “distribution” and things like that, instead of using phrases that are associated with the worst metaphorical Neanderthals that exist in the modern world.
What I think enflames things far far worse is when people imply that you are incapable of discussing topics, but nonetheless hint at them. If the topic can’t be discussed, then don’t discuss it or hint at it at all. If it can be discussed, then discuss it plainly, clearly, politely; not trollishly or deliberately offensively or carelessly offensively. Take a single minute to see if you can impart the same (or more) information in a less offensive mannere.g. “Is there a causal connection between the absence of Y chromosome and average levels of mathematical aptitude”? may need a couple seconds more to write, but it’ll probably lead to a better discussion than “Why and how do women suck at math”?
If the topic can’t be discussed, then don’t discuss it or hint at it at all.
You are presenting the situation as if such hints were coming out of the blue in discussions of unrelated topics. In reality, however, I have seen (or given) such hints only in situations where a problematic topic has already been opened and discussed by others. In such situations, the commenter giving the hint is faced with a very unpleasant choice, where each option has very serious downsides. It seems to me that the optimal choice in some situations is to announce clearly that the topic is in fact deeply problematic, and there is no way to have a no-holds-barred rational discussion about it that wouldn’t offend some sensibilities. (And thus even if it doesn’t break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
At the very least, this can have the beneficial effect of lowering people’s confidence in the biased conclusions of the existing discussion, thus making their beliefs more accurate, even in a purely reactive way. However, you seem to deny that this choice could ever be optimal. Yet I really don’t see how you can write off the possibility that both alternatives—either staying silent or expressing controversial opinions about highly charged issues openly—can sometimes lead to worse results by some reasonable measure.
You also seem to think that merely phrasing your opinion in polite, detached, and intellectual-sounding terms is enough to avoid the dangers of bad signaling inherent to certain topics. I think this is mistaken. It might lead to the topic in question being discussed rationally on LW—and in fact, this will likely happen on LW unless the topic is gender-related and if it manages to elicit interest—but it definitely won’t escape censure by the outside world.
(And thus even if it doesn’t break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
This.
I really really don’t want such discussion to be very prominent, because they attract the wrong contrarian cluster. But I don’t want LW loosing ground rationality wise with debates that are based on some silly premises, especially ones that are continually reinforced by new arrivals and happy death spirals!
Attracting the wrong people, and alienating some of the “right” people is a bigger concern to me than the reputation of the site as a whole (though that counts too). Another concern is that hot-button issues might eat up the conversations and get too important (they are not issues I care that much about debating here).
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis—and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
Could you give some examples? I don’t like the thought of my brain being happy-death-spiralled without my noticing. I promise to upvote your comment even if it makes me angry.
You also seem to think that merely phrasing your opinion in polite, detached, and intellectual-sounding terms is enough to avoid the dangers of bad signaling inherent to certain topics. I think this is mistaken. It might lead to the topic in question being discussed rationally on LW—and in fact, this will likely happen on LW unless the topic is gender-related and if it manages to elicit interest—but it definitely won’t escape censure by the outside world.
Which is I think the current situation when it comes to criticism of say democracy.
Actually, general criticism of democracy isn’t such a big problem. It can make you look wacky and eccentric, but it’s unlikely to get you categorized among the truly evil people who must be consistently fought and ostracized by all decent persons. There are even some respectable academic and scholarly ways to trash democracy, most notably the public choice theory.
Criticisms of democracy are really dangerous only when they touch (directly or by clear implication) on some of the central great taboos. Of course, respectable scholars who take aim at democracy would never dare touch any of these with a ten foot pole, which necessarily takes most teeth out of their criticism.
That is true, but you get into truly dangerous territory once you drop the implicit assumption that your criticism applies to democracy in all places and times, and start analyzing what exactly correlates with it functioning better or worse.
I expect it depends on what distinctions you’re using for what corelates with how democracies do. For example, claiming that there’s an optimal size for democracies that’s smaller than a lot of existing countries could get contentious, but I don’t think it would blow up as hard as what I suspect you’re thinking of.
trolls like sam and his “I can’t say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I’m not, therefore I’m not making them” style of debate.
Sam dosen’t do that. Sam trolls by stating his opinions fully. He then refuses to provide evidence.
If the issue is e.g. whether science seems to indicate that the statistical distribution of physical and intellectual characteristic isn’t identical across racially-defined subgroups of the human race, or across genders, or across whatever, then it can be discussed politely, if the participants actually seek a polite discussion, instead of just finding the most insulting way possible to talk about them.
Race differences have already been explicitly discussed with little problem, if not prominently so, do a search. Gender, sexuality and sexual norms are the great unPC problem of LessWrong.
And if the participants are willing to use words like “average” and “median” and “distribution” and things like that, instead of using phrases that are associated with the worst metaphorical Neanderthals that exist in the modern world.
Dishonest generalization, find two posters in addition to Sam who do this. I will wait.
Now contrast this to the average (even average anon double log in account) pro-hereditarian LW-er who brings up such points. There are far more Quirrells than Sams here, and Sams get heavily downvoted except on the rare occasions they make more reasonable posts (though the particular poster has probably burned out some people’s patience and will get downvoted no matter what he says because he has consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to adapt to our norms).
This is quickly devolving into the worst kind of politicking one finds on otherwise intelligent forums.
What I think enflames things far far worse is when people imply that you are incapable of discussing topics, but nonetheless hint at them. If the topic can’t be discussed, then don’t discuss it or hint at it at all.
But it is other people who keep dragging them up and discussing them. Politely stating that you disagree and they are wrong, getting then heavily up voted (which indicates a significant if far from majority fraction of LWers agree with the comment) is surely better than not interrupting what you see as a happy death spiral?
If it can be discussed, then discuss it plainly, clearly, politely; not trollishly or deliberately offensively or carelessly offensively
Have we been visiting the same forum? I have often up-voted your responses to Sam0345′s posts, indeed you nearly always successfully rebuke him. But I think your extensive interactions with him may be leading you to mistake an individual for a group.
Gender, sexuality and sexual norms are the great unPC problem of LessWrong.
I’ve decided to bow out of this thread—as I’ve not significantly studied either PUA, nor cared to read about previous PUA-related threads in LessWrong, I can barely understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps you’ve noticed a real problem that I haven’t, exactly because you’re focusing on different type of threads than I do.
And if the participants are willing to use words like “average” and “median” and “distribution” and things like that, instead of using phrases that are associated with the worst metaphorical Neanderthals that exist in the modern world.
Dishonest generalization, find two posters in addition to Sam who do this.
If it can be discussed, then discuss it plainly, clearly, politely; not trollishly or deliberately offensively or carelessly offensively
Have we been visiting the same forum?
The thing I had in mind was things like e.g. the guy who repeatedly and deliberately kept using the diminutive word “girls” to refer to female rationalists but “men” to refer to the male counterparts. This by itself—when I perceived he intended to belittle women in this fashion, or at least didn’t give a damn about not insulting them—prevented any meaningful discussion of the actual argument he was engaged in, (whether a male-only meetup would be useful or detrimental for the purposes of LessWrong).
The thing I had in mind was things like e.g. the guy who repeatedly and deliberately kept using the diminutive word “girls” to refer to female rationalists but “men” to refer to the male counterparts.
I’ve decided to bow out of this thread—as I’ve not significantly studied either PUA, nor cared to read about previous PUA-related threads in LessWrong, I can barely understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps you’ve noticed a real problem that I haven’t, exactly because you’re focusing on different type of threads than I do.
OB and early LW consistently blew up whenever PUA and related issues where discussed.
Sam dosen’t do that. Sam trolls by stating his opinions fully. He then refuses to provide evidence.
I provide ample evidence, which you guys vote into oblivion when you don’t like it:
Examples:
What is the race of the overwhelming majority of people who make race hate attacks, people who physically attack people merely for being of race different from their own?
Who had greater freedom of speech: Modern novelists and scriptwriters, or Elizabethan novelists and playwrights?
I provided plenty of evidence, and if you claim I did not, will provide it all over again, to be voted into oblivion all over again.
Who had greater freedom of speech: Modern novelists and scriptwriters, or Elizabethan novelists and playwrights?
Modern novelists and scriptwriters do.
You never provided a single piece of evidence that Elizabethan novelists and playwrights had greater freedom of speech. It was a completely unsubstantiated claim—and a ludicrous one given how well known the political restriction in free speech were at the time. You also completely refused to acknowledge all the detailed pieces of data for specifics bits of censorship or political pressure in Shakespeare that I provided.
Since you never acknowledge anything we say, nor ever provide any evidence to support the claims we actually dispute, and keep making further ludicrous claims instead, you’re properly considered a troll.
EDIT TO ADD:
What is the race of the overwhelming majority of people who make race hate attacks, people who physically attack people merely for being of race different from their own?
That depends on whether we’re discussing your nation or mine. Racial hate attacks are most definitely a white thing in Greece. Or Libya. I’m guessing in America it’s the other way around, corresponding to higher black crime statistics in general (whether hate crime or otherwise).
“Is there a causal connection between the absence of Y chromosome and average levels of mathematical aptitude”? may need a couple seconds more to write, but it’ll probably lead to a better discussion than “Why and how do women suck at math”?
I appreciate your point here, but you could have chosen a better example. Those two questions have the same capacity for offensiveness. They have the same content and are compatible with the same presuppositions and connotations. They just use different language.
Now perhaps there are people who, upon seeing “women suck at math”, read “boo women!”, and upon seeing words like “causal” and “Y chromosome”, think about causes and effects. So if you’re talking to one of those people, you’ll want to use the fancier language. But not everyone is like that.
I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my mathematician colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it, without gratuitously offending people.
Those two questions have the same capacity for offensiveness. They have the same content and are compatible with the same presuppositions and connotations. They just use different language.
I am really curious how you can demonstrate equivalence between a question that follows the pattern “Why is (X) the case?” and a question that follows the pattern “Is (Y) the case?”—even if (Y) is arguably equivalent to (X), only phrased in more polite language.
As far as I see, the first one asks for the explanation of something that is presumed to be an established fact, while the second one expresses uncertainty about whether (arguably) the same fact is true. How on Earth can these two be said to have “the same content” and be “compatible with the same presuppositions”?
However, you are quite right that these two questions have the same potential for offensiveness, in that outside a few quirky places like LW, neither the polite phrasing nor the expression of uncertainty will get you off the hook, contrary to what Aris Katsaris seems to believe.
Ah, I see, you’re right; the content of the two questions are different. I noticed there was a substantial difference in language, and assumed that was the point of the example.
Those two questions have the same capacity for offensiveness.
Surely that’s a hyperbole. Now, I know lots of people would be offended by both questions, but I doubt most people would be equally offended by both, and plenty of people would be offended by one but not the other. As a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I am down to discuss the first question, but the second one makes me want to slap you.
(Of course, by declaring myself a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I have already proven my own nonexistence, so my opinion can, no doubt, safely be ignored.;) )
As a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I am down to discuss the first question, but the second one makes me want to slap you.
Is it ok to threaten (or declare the desire to do) physical violence upon someone if you don’t get your way simply because you are a woman? Careful which stereotypes you support. You don’t usually get “heh. Female violence is harmless and cute!” without a whole lot of paternalism bundled in.
On the other hand, hasn’t there been some discussion of the idea that you have to believe something, however briefly, to understand it?
Even though expressing a desire to slap has no macro bodily effect [1], it still has an emotional effect which is going to affect how a conversation goes, however slightly. [2]
[1] Tentative phrasing used to respect the idea that everything is physical, including thoughts and emotions, but that some things affect people physically more than others.
[2] I believe that “just ignore it” leaves out that ignoring things is work.
If I said something to offend you over the internet, and you said it made you feel like hitting me, I would think it was no big thing, especially if you went on to explicitly clarify that you would never actually hit me. I would not perceive it as a serious threat in any case.
If you said something like that in real life, in full public view with many onlookers, I might depending on your body language be slightly more concerned, but I would probably just raise an eyebrow and imply that you were being a creep. If I said the same to you, I wouldn’t look as ridiculous, since most likely you’re bigger and stronger than me, but I doubt it would win anyone over either.
If you actually physically attacked me, I would do my best to see that criminal charges were brought, and I would not physically attack anyone myself if I were unwilling to defend my actions in court. That last scenario is so far from what actually happened here that it really seems like a red herring, though.
If I said something to offend you over the internet, and you said it made you feel like hitting me, I would think it was no big thing, especially if you went on to explicitly clarify that you would never actually hit me. I would not perceive it as a serious threat in any case.
Really? My instincts anticipate a significant negative response if I said I wanted to hit someone around here. On the order of a substantial faux pas not a personal security risk. But to be honest I haven’t exactly calibrated that intuition all that much. Because I just don’t go around saying I want to hit people.
If another data point helps, I basically agree with you… if someone told me that what I’d said made them want to hit me, I’d consider it rude, possibly funny (depending on context), and not significantly changing my estimate that they would actually hit me.
That’s uncalled-for. I am not asking either question. It’s okay if you’re offended by one but not the other.
Again, I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it — without gratuitously offending people.
What, exactly, is uncalled-for? The “makes me want to slap you” part? It does. I thought that might be useful information for you to have. I will not actually slap you, even if by some improbable circumstance I ever have the opportunity.
Golly, it’s too bad some people take things so personally!
On a tangential note, if a man said to a woman that he wanted to slap her as a reaction to some offensive statement she made, would you consider it acceptable?
Mind you, I have no problem in principle with social norms that set different boundaries for the behavior of men and women. (In particular, if someone wants men’s threats of violence to women, even humorous and hyperbolic ones, to be judged more harshly than vice versa, I certainly find it a defensible position.) I just find it funny to see egalitarians who profess principled opposition to such norms caught in inconsistencies, like for example here, where very few (if any) of them would react to your statement with the same visceral horror and outrage as if the sexes were reversed.
I’m glad to hear that the two of you share a sense of humor, but the relevant comparison would be how you’d feel if a strange man mentioned slapping you in response to something you said, whether in the context of a public debate such as here or elsewhere. I would be surprised if you would be willing to take that nonchalantly. And even if you are an exception in this regard, there is no denying that the usual standards of discourse are highly asymmetric here, since there is no way that a similar statement by a man to a woman would not have caused firestorms of outrage.
Now, as I explained, I have no problem with this standard in principle. I am not expressing any condemnation of your words or attitudes. I am just using this opportunity to highlight the apparent contradiction with the general principle held by the contemporary respectable opinion that sex-asymmetric social norms are morally dubious, or worse—and not because I wish to score a petty rhetorical point, but because I believe that if adequately considered, it would open some very important and general questions.
And even if you are an exception in this regard, there is no denying that the usual standards of discourse are highly asymmetric here, since there is no way that a similar statement by a man to a woman would not have caused firestorms of outrage.
I don’t consider this to be established, for one thing. For another, what I said hasn’t exactly passed without comment, so I’m not very sympathetic right now to the idea that women get a free pass.
But though I think your example is weak, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that double standards in both directions continue to flourish. I’m not sure why that’s relevant here, or why people think they have to be so shady about saying this kind of thing on LW. It all seems sort of melodramatic to me; I live in the southern US, and there’s probably no disreputable idea you’d dare hint at that I don’t hear proudly trumpeted by many of my neighbors, and nobody seems to beat them up or fire them for it.
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to rednecks. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’m human, and it’ll probably happen. Consider this!)
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to rednecks. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’m human, and it’ll probably happen. Consider this!)
I think VM is quite open about the fact that his secret beliefs are low status. I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas.” I think it’s interesting that you similarly lack examples. Maybe this is the only source of reviled beliefs, or maybe it’s a US blind-spot.
Well, beliefs don’t even need to be in the “reviled” category for one to conclude that it might be prudent not to express them openly. One might simply conclude that they’re apt to break down the discourse, as has indeed happened on LW many times with statements that might be controversial, but fall short of “reviled” in the broader society.
Also, I think you’re applying some popular but grossly inaccurate heuristics here. I can easily think of several beliefs that: (1) are squarely in the “reviled” category in today’s respectable discourse in Western societies, (2) have been held by a large number of people historically, or are still held by a large number of people worldwide, and (3) are practically nonexistent, or exceptionally rare, among the segment of the U.S. population that can be labeled “rednecks” by any reasonable definition. (For beliefs that make sense only given some cultural background, I mean “exceptionally” relative to other local cultures that provide this background.)
In any case, think about the following. For any human society in history about which you have some reasonably accurate picture, except the present Western ones, you’ll probably be able to think of some beliefs that are true, or at least defensible enough that one shouldn’t be considered as malicious or delusional for holding them, but also unacceptable in that society. (So that even if expressing them is not outright dangerous, it would face blind hostility and no chance of rational consideration.) Either there are such beliefs in the modern Western societies too, or there is something outstandingly unique and exceptional about these societies that makes such cases impossible. But what could this be?
“Redneck ideas” is certainly an oversimplification, but I am not sure it is such a grossly inaccurate one. The ideology behind bad treatment of women and minorities in parts of the third world also comes in for Western opprobrium, and might be likewise reviled by or at least of little consequence to rednecks depending on the instance. But it does not seem like an entirely different category—what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
In a separate category one has cruelty toward animals (which probably coincidentally I also associate with redneck stereotypes), and cruelty toward children. I can’t think of any other categories of reviled ideas.
In any case, think about the following. For any human society in history about which you have some reasonably accurate picture, except the present Western ones, you’ll probably be able to think of some beliefs that are true, or at least defensible enough that one shouldn’t be considered as malicious or delusional for holding them, but also unacceptable in that society. (So that even if expressing them is not outright dangerous, it would face blind hostility and no chance of rational consideration.) Either there are such beliefs in the modern Western societies too, or there is something outstandingly unique and exceptional about these societies that makes such cases impossible. But what could this be?
I see what you’re getting at but I don’t know enough to judge. Certainly there have been many famous superstitions and manias in history, but I worry that my models of them have been too much influenced by certain parts of modern culture. (It occurs to me I have never read an account of the Salem trials that was written in the two hundred fifty years between them and the Miller play.) As to what might be exceptional about modern society, it contains huge numbers of people who are not bored by ideas and who have some basic equipment, such as literacy, for analyzing them. This might be of some consequence when thinking about the content and enforcement of the rules for respectable discourse, now and then.
But it does not seem like an entirely different category—what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
Looking from the outside it seems to me “Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional and don’t have any extenuating circumstances (at least ones modern society would find acceptable) for being so.
That’s an improvement on Sewing Machine’s claim, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Groups despise other groups. “Rednecks” form a group, it’s predictably despised by another group. The low status are despised by the high status. Rednecks are low status, they’re despised by SWPLs, who are high status. The term “redneck” refers to the condition of their neck, which is a way of referring to their occupation and therefore to their station in life. Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors, likely to be looked down on by caucasians who work indoors. Probably rural, likely to be looked down on by the urban (who are urbane, sophisticated, in contrast to the rednecks who are rustic, unsophisticated).
People love to look down on other people. It’s a pastime. It’s a way to magnify one’s own feeling of having high status. There’s a site called “people of walmart” which is devoted to the pastime of looking down on other people. A lot of humor, possibly most humor, is devoted to ridiculing a group to which one does not belong. It’s always easy to come up with rationalizations for the contempt after the fact.
Personally I prefer the humor of self-ridicule. I assume that the SWPL site is self-ridicule of high status whites. I also assume that Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck” routine is self-ridicule of rednecks. In contrast, “people of walmart” is not self-ridicule.
“Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional
High Status: Unemployed and unemployable MFA (Master of Fine Arts) who is unfortunately in between arts grants and low paid teaching jobs at the moment, and has been for some considerable time.
Lower Status: Artist who makes decent money by selling reproductions of his art to the despised bourgeoisie, but has no MFA, never gets grants, and never holds a job in academia, in part because the pay is low, but mostly because they would not hire such an inferior and low status person anyway.
Lowest Status: Wealthy farmer, who was a farmer’s son, and makes lots of money by feeding thousands of people, his neck turning red in the process as he works outdoors.
Farmers who own a lot of land, and their sons (though strangely not their daughters) also “rednecks”, and hated and despised accordingly. They are discriminated against in university admissions. Are they poor and dysfunctional?
The hatred of rednecks is a less extreme form of the “Occupy Wall Street” demands for jobs in the virtue and cultural uplift industries. The ruling class thinks that producing value is low status, and producing value by working outside is really low status, regardless of income.
Just as an unemployed and severely dysfunctional Occupy Wall Street protestor, who has a Masters in Fine Arts and is therefore a genuine official artist, despises the mere peddler of kitsch, despite the fact that no one would pay for the MFA’s “art” with their own money, and right now his grant has run out, the lesser artist, though his status is inferior due to the fact that he got his money merely from members of la bourgeoisie buying his art, rather than grants, his status is nonetheless superior to that of the even wealthier farmer’s son, whose work is largely done outdoors, and whose neck is therefore red.
Redneck has had connotations beyond “someone who works outside”, “someone who does farm work”, or even “someone who is white and does farm work” for some time.
Yet strangely, the MFA at “Occupy Wall Street” whose grant ran out long ago, and whose teaching job is extreme low pay, would not consider a better paid job that involved working out of doors.
Indeed, he is reluctant even to consider jobs outside the virtue industry.
How is this a response to anything I said? Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”? But then, your last sentence seems to contradict that. They value working in their field, just like anyone else. Maybe they value it too highly, in the face of economic reality. Maybe there are other, additional pressures that are leading their decisions. Maybe they are turning their noses up at some specific jobs because they seem too “redneck” but you haven’t shown evidence of it. But this isn’t even the point I was making.
While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “redneck” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage. Or, for that matter, an inverse with an MFA. Blue collar work—particularly non-manufacturing blue collar work—is a feature of the stereotype, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine category membership.
“While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “[Jew]” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. [Such as hooked noses and penny pinching business practices]
Wow, you really love that negative karma, don’t you?
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity. If we wish to pick these apart into Jew(S), Jew(R), and Jew(E), then that would be an antiquated but reasonably accurate description of Jew(S).
There is no corresponding Redneck(R) or Redneck(E). There is a redneck as the term was originally used—Redneck(O), let’s say.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
An attempt to reclaim it is not necessarily unreasonable, but it should be explicit. Attempting to do it implicitly is inviting confusion of the nature that originally caused me to comment.
You should now see the mismatch of your FTFY—Jew(S) is not at all the most prevalent usage of Jew.
There are nonetheless still occasions when I would recommend someone interpret “Jew” as Jew(S); if, as I recall observing in Junior high, one person asks to borrow money, is refused, and responds “You Jew!”, clearly interpreting that as Jew(R) or Jew(E) would be absurd—doubly so when you are aware that the refuser is neither.
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity.
I would say there is at least one more. Jewishness is as much a cultural association as a religious one, and there are plenty of people who identify as Jewish culturally, but not religiously.
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity
When someone calls a penny pincher a Jew, that is not an alternate meaning for Jew, but a metaphor, like calling an overweight woman a whale. Jew means Jew by race or religion, and Redneck means someone who does a low status job, or whose ancestors did a low status job.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
Yet oddly, an Master of Fine arts can never be a redneck, however poor and socially conservative he may be, even though MFAs are infamous for being poor and dysfunctional. Nor can a slush pile reader be a redneck, even though slush pile readers earn the smell of an oil rag..
Just as Jew means Jew by race or religion, not a penny pincher, redneck means a person who works in a low status job—no matter how highly paid that job may be.
And similarly, “racist” merely means person of low status, or insufficient status for the role he attempts to perform. Thus that rednecks are “racist” merely means that certain jobs are low status.
Chris Rock claimed to redefine nigga as not meaning a black man, but merely meaning a black man that fits the stereotype—and then he said that when he withdrew money from the teller machine, he looked behind him for niggas. Actual usage of the term “redneck” is similarly revealing.
Indeed, Chris Rock’s famous rant about niggas begins and ends with punch lines that falsify his claim to redefinition, probably deliberately, as the falsification, combined with the claim, is comical.
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
When a group of people is stereotyped, this does not create a new meaning of the name of the group. Let’s review what a stereotype is. Using the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary, their definition of “stereotype” is:
a fixed idea that people have about what someone or something is like, especially an idea that is wrong
False fixed ideas (beliefs) about group G are not new definitions for the name of the group G. G is not split into two, G(O) and G(S). The false fixed belief is a belief about G(O). The stereotype concerns the (original) group, it does not create a new group.
Imagine if it were otherwise! Imagine if, every time some false belief about some thing T popped into your head, then T split into two, T(O) and T(S). For one thing, you would never again have a false belief, because rather than being a false belief about T(O), your belief would actually be a definition for a new thing T(S) about which it was true.
To put it more briefly, a stereotype is an idea, a belief, about something. A belief can be true or false. In contrast, a definition or meaning is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. So to call a stereotype a meaning is to commit a simple category mistake.
Your whole argument is stated in terms of this category mistake, so to salvage it you would need to toss it and start from scratch.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings. This doesn’t mean that anyone would have the guts (or possibly lack of good sense—that lack might be equivalent to guts) to produce such a dictionary.
A concept might be in many people’s minds, and yet be inaccurate. A dictionary might note that while listing the concept.
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings.
Merriam Webster and the other good descriptivist dictionaries do include meanings that match particular stereotypes when they are common meanings, which they rarely but occasionally are.
But importantly, it is only particular stereotypes of a given thing that become meanings—it has to be this way, in order to avoid confusion. For example, the verb “to jew” (which you can look up in any sufficiently comprehensive dictionary) has a meaning which matches a particular stereotype of Jews. That particular stereotype is not “the” stereotype of Jews, because to say it was “the” stereotype would be to imply that there is only one stereotype, and there are many stereotypes of Jews.
Also importantly, meanings corresponding to stereotypes are not automatically generated whenever stereotypes arise. It has to be this way, because it’s common that many stereotypes of a given thing arise, and if a meaning were automatically generated for each stereotype, then it would be difficult to tell, among all the stereotypes, which stereotype was meant when the word was used. Nor does a meaning automatically arise that includes all stereotypes together, as we know from the example of the verb “to jew”. Rather, on occasion, certain stereotypes are adopted as meanings. It doesn’t automatically happen, and it ought not blithely be assumed to have happened.
Here’s another pair of examples. Similarly to the verb “to jew”, there is also the verb “to dog”, which corresponds to one particular stereotype about dogs. And the verb “to wolf” (as in to wolf down) corresponds to another particular stereotype about wolves (and, as it happens, about their close relatives the dogs). Had linguistic history taken a different turn, the verbs “to dog” and “to wolf” might have had entirely different meanings, or might not have existed at all.
your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings
I seem to recall an Italian dictionary which did give something like “a miser” as one of the definition of ebreo, though with the annotation fig. before it. :-)
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Indeed. in case there has been any confusion, I did not argue otherwise. I wrote: “Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors.” Note my use of the word “originally”. This acknowledges that the term “redneck” has evolved since then. I was speculating about its origin.
It may well be—to speculate further—that the term “red neck” originally arose in the South, possibly applied by the Southern upper, indoors-dwelling (or otherwise sun-protected) classes to the Southern lower, outdoors-laboring classes.
This point does not take away from my argument as far as I can tell. Certainly I was aware of it, hence I used the word “originally”.
I’m pretty sure we’re talking past each other here. I think my usage of stereotype was actually reasonably correct, consider for instance:
In the analysis of personality, the term archetype is often broadly used to refer to a stereotype—personality type observed multiple times, especially an oversimplification of such a type[...]
As it stands, there are four meanings of “Jew”. The first three, the religion, the ethnicity, and the culture, have to do with individuals. The last is a fictional model of an individual comprised of various beliefs (true and false) that the are held, or have been held, in the community recently enough and prominently enough to be recognizable to most members of the community.
I contend that people do, in fact, make reference to these models in communication without necessarily adopting the belief that the model is valid.
This is not to say that I think they should do so; there is legitimate concern about propagating false beliefs when the models are commonly believed, and about bleeding over of associations when they are not.
It fixes part of it but I don’t think you capture what’s really going on. To use a fresh aspect of the concept of the redneck, as Nancy points out “redneck” has a regional component. MW’s definition of “redneck” for example, is: “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”. That’s an aspect of what you would call Redneck(O). So when you write:
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
you’re claiming that when people use the term, they predominantly do not use it to mean “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”, but rather, the stereotypes which we have been discussing, which were introduced by Sewing Machine, namely:
what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
and elaborated or modified by konkvistador:
it seems to me “Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional
So here we have three stereotypes about rednecks: bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional. These are the stereotypes that were introduced, and that were given as reasons for rednecks being despised. I offered a quite different, and conflicting, theory as to why rednecks are despised, and I claimed that these stereotypes are in fact not reasons, but rationalizations, excuses, for the contempt so often and so publicly and so gleefully expressed about rednecks.
You’ve offered a new theory of the concept of the “redneck”, distinct from that of Sewing Machine and Konkvistador (the negative stereotypes on their expressed view do not constitute the concept, but are merely associated with the category). Your new theory amounts to an almost perfect excuse for the contempt. According to you, when people use the term, they predominantly mean Redneck(S). In context, then, what your statement amounts to, is the statement that when people use the term “redneck”, they mean “someone who is bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional”. If it were true, this would excuse the contempt shown to rednecks, maybe not the “poor” part, but “bigoted” certainly and “dysfunctional” probably. So when people say, “rednecks are bigots” and “rednecks are dysfunctional”, on your view of it, they are merely stating tautologies, i.e., “bigots are bigots” and “dysfunctional people are dysfunctional.”
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
In fact, the comedian Chris Rock did take something like your approach to a similar issue. He has a monolog in which he takes a common derogatory term for a whole group and redefines it (for the duration of his monolog) as referring only to those members to whom common negative stereotypes apply, and not to all members of the group. This is certainly not how it is normally used, and if you don’t belong to the group yourself, you would be well advised not to start using this term on the theory that it refers only to those members who satisfy the negative stereotypes. Chris Rock’s monolog, from wikiquote:
There’s a lot of racism going on. Who’s more racist, black people or white people? It’s black people! You know why? Because we hate black people too! Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people ,and there’s two sides, there’s black people and theres niggas. The niggas have got to go. You can’t have shit when you around niggas, you can’t have shit. You can’t have no big screen TV! You can have it, but you better move it in at 3 in the morning. Paint it white, hope niggas think it’s a bassinet. Can’t have shit in your house! Why?! Because niggas will break into your house. Niggas that live next door to you break into your house, come over the next day and go, “I heard you got robbed.” Nigga, you know you robbed me. You didn’t see shit ’cause you was doing shit! You can’t go see a movie, you know why? ’Cause niggas is shooting at the screen, “This movie’s so good I gotta bust a cap in here!” You know the worst thing about niggas? Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids.” You’re supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? “I ain’t never been to jail!” What do you want, a cookie?! You’re not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!
Someone who is not black would be well advised to avoid saying:
You can’t have shit when you around niggas, you can’t have shit. … Why?! Because niggas will break into your house.
If we were to apply your theory of “redneck” to “nigga”, then the above statement would be an empty tautology, since it would mean essentially, “black people who break into your house, break into your house.” This is indeed what this means in the context of Chris Rock’s monolog. But it’s not what it would mean in everyday language. It is no empty tautology.
Same applies to “redneck”. Redneck means what the dictionary says it means (yes, the dictionary can be wrong, but in this case it’s not). You might be able to cook up a comedy monolog in which “redneck” means “bigoted person”, but it’s not what it means in everyday English. Someone tweaked me for referring to a dictionary—if MW agrees with me, I must be right. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I do think that dictionaries are usually very good evidence about what words mean.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern of people in an out-group attacking the members of their own group who most resembled the negative stereotype. I’ve heard of (but not heard directly) Jews complaining about “kikes”.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern
I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. The question isn’t what he did or did not invent. The question is, what is the everyday, common meaning. I brought up Chris Rock to illustrate what it would be like if dlthomas’s analysis of “redneck” applied to “nigga”. Everybody would all the time be talking the way that Chris Rock talks in his monolog without any negative consequences since they would not be implying anything about blacks in general. But clearly, that is not the case. Furthermore, Chris Rock explains his own meaning early in his monolog where he contrasts “black people” with “niggas”, which demonstrates that he does not expect his audience to apply that meaning as a default. Evidently, then, Chris Rock’s meaning is not the default common, everyday meaning of “nigga”.
As with your earlier response, I wonder whether there was some miscommunication, since you brought up a point that I don’t recall denying explicitly or implicitly.
The Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in didn’t do this… we mostly ignored the Jewish stereotypes in the larger culture altogether. But the queer community I attached myself to as a late adolescent did have something like this.
I’ve never heard of anything like that in my jewish community either. Though honestly I’ve almost never heard the term “kike” actually used before. Even anti-semites just use the word Jew as far as I know.
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
That is a ridiculously Platonic view of language. These aren’t categories that apply entirely or not at all—applicability of words is gradual. If someone fits every connotation of “redneck” except “racist”, people will apply the label to them and they clearly do not deserve the portion of the contempt associated with the label on the basis of it’s containing the connotation of “racist”. Typically, showing contempt or praise to groups whose membership is not strict is messy enough to be a bad idea.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
Well, if Messrs. Merriam and Webster are on your side, you can’t be wrong!
Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”?
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
The word “redneck” has nothing to do with MFA’s employment choices, or the Ivy League’s selection criteria
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist for exactly the same reason as Herman Cain is supposedly an Uncle Tom—it has absolutely nothing to do with the political views of Cain or the redneck. Rather, Cain lacks the requisite ruling elite credentials.
I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands. How about an inverse who is a slush pile reader? Could he be a redneck? I don’t think so, even though slush pile readers are apt to be low paid.
You are probably correct that people would feel comfortable calling a guy who works in a garage a redneck if he had the demonized redneck attitudes, but they would consider it joking or ironic to call a bookkeeper a redneck no matter what his attitudes, and there is no way they are going to call an MFA a redneck, except ironically, regardless of what that MFA’s tastes and political attitudes are, and regardless of how infrequent and small the MFA’s grants are.
Indeed, I use MFA as an example, because MFAs are notoriously starving, while looking down their noses at those who succeed in doing grubby inferior jobs at decent pay.
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Neither Herman Cain (to say the very least) nor the modal tea party member are uneducated or work in low-status jobs.
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
An interesting claim. I don’t know enough of the socio-linguistic history to really comment. I still don’t really think it was a reasonable response to my original comment. You had seemed to be using “redneck” to mean farmers, generally; I still maintain that this is an unrealistic representation of what people typically use the phrase to mean, and will likely lead to misunderstanding in both directions.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
There are unquestionably social groups wherein academia is accorded the highest status, yes. People value status, yes. Undoubtedly, some people with an MFA belong to some of those social groups, and this factored in to their decision. I have no data either way to support typicality or atypicality of MFA’s in particular. I have basically no experience with Occupy Wall Street. From my limited direct observation of Occupy Oakland, however, this does not seem terribly representative of the protesters there.
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact. Nonetheless, it is certainly the case that knowledge work is accorded higher status in many circles.
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities.
“Redneck” is low status in my mind because it is associated with the puerile humor of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry The Cable Guy. Jobs involving a lot of manual labor are not inherently low status in my mind—that stuff needs doing too, and plumbers have saved more lives than doctors. I wouldn’t do it because I have a job that pays well that I find interesting.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because the term is associated predominately with the American south which has, in recent history, harbored a higher level of racism (particularly that directed toward blacks) than other regions. Yes, this is a stereotype—it doesn’t even necessarily represent the typical individual from the region—but it’s stereotypes we are discussing.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands.
Yes. As I said, blue collar work is a feature of the stereotype, and so an examples with that attribute are going to seem to fit better than examples without.
I don’t see any reason a slush pile reader wouldn’t be labeled a redneck, if he spent his off hours drinking cheap beer and making racist jokes while listening to country music and working on his truck. Unless he instead got the label “hipster”—which seems to also be low status, but I expect would be precluded by the country music.
It is conceivable that a part of this is just a regional difference in how liberally the term is applied—around here, there aren’t very many white farm workers.
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact.
Interesting. It would seem to be literally true, then, that “the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers.” I am not sure, however, whether the normative weight you give it is appropriate.
“The Ivy League discriminates” is trivially true—that’s what their admission’s board is for. The question is whether particular discrimination is justified. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate, if that is what is going on. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers on the grounds that they are associated with farming and we don’t like that is obviously inappropriate. If the examination of the ROTC, 4-H, etc, officership and awards controlled well for other factors, then this would be evidence of the latter, and should be fixed.
I could see it simply being a correlation, however—people who take officership in these organizations or earn awards there probably have some interest and time invested there, and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board is looking for; being that they are not an agricultural school, it makes sense that they prioritize other things. And if the student has a genuine interest in farming and wishes to pursue it further, they will probably benefit much more from attending UC Davis, Michigan State, or Texas A&M than they would from attending Harvard, Yale, or Brown.
Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate,
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwiseequal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
I was ambiguous—i don’t know whether it confused you. If there are farmers that would get less out of it and vice-versa, then they should be discriminated against exactly like anyone else who would get less out of it and vice-versa. I did not intend to assert that this is true of farmers universally, and whether it is true statistically more often than reference populations is an open question as far as I can tell.
If you want a potential reason this could be the case, I gave one previously—someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
“Seems obvious” leaves much room for bias. As I said—if it is “simple snobbery”, it should be addressed. It is obvious that this is possible—it is not obvious that some other explanation is impossible, or even unlikely. I have no direct experience of Ivy League admissions, and limited second- or third-hand knowledge.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
What then is your explanation for discrimination against ROTC members.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
Your reading is very strange:
The article states:
Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
UC Berkeley was originally an agriculture school and still maintains an ag department (now under the name of Agricultural and Resource Economics, but that’s common to several schools better known for their ag programs). Stanford’s got one, too. I’m on the wrong coast to know much about the Ivy League, unfortunately.
I can’t think of any other categories of reviled ideas.
Reactionary elitism, for one (almost by definition not a redneck attitude).
As to what might be exceptional about modern society, it contains huge numbers of people who are not bored by ideas and who have some basic equipment, such as literacy, for analyzing them.
This seems crazily optimistic — literacy and intellectualism, however widespread, don’t do much to protect people from holding ideological taboos.
what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
The term for racist—and anyone that is less enlightened than the wonderful ruling class—is “racist”
“redneck” literally means white guy who works outdoors, unlike their masters who work in offices, and when I see people use the term, it is clear that whatever they say they mean, that is what they do mean. For example: the discrimination of Ivy League universities against the sons of farmers. Does the Ivy League have reason to believe that the sons of farmers are more racist than others?
I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas”
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
I don’t have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don’t object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn’t involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
If we’re just talking about what I have defensible objections to, I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents (1).
That said, I nevertheless find the notion of human sacrifice deeply disturbing and I’m confident that my opinion of someone who participated in it would change significantly for the worse if I found out.
I also find most forms of cannibalism disturbing in much the same way, though not quite as extremely, and I can imagine fringe cases that might not disturb me much. The same is true for many forms of bestiality, though it’s much easier to come up with cases that don’t disturb me. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how much I anthropomorphize the animal in question.)
Incest—again, assuming consent (1) -- doesn’t bug me much at all.
==
(1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents
I notice that this is something that I have instrumental reasons to support. Anybody who considers cryonics to be a rite of ‘nerd religion’ should thereby consider the early, voluntary preservation of someone with Alzheimers a ritual human sacrifice meant to purify them for the afterlife.
A related observation is that, since cryonics can (as you note) be framed as a ‘nerd religion’ form of human sacrifice, social norms opposing human sacrifice can be framed as opposing cryonics as well. It follows that if you support cryonics, you might do well to work against those norms, all else being equal.
I suppose something similar is true of Christian Scientists other sects that reject medical care, whose practices can similarly be framed as a form of human sacrifice. Also people who perform or receive abortions, I guess. We could all band together to form the Coalition to Support Things that Can be Thought of as Resembling Human Sacrifice (Including Of Course Human Sacrifice Itself).
Well, OK, maybe we should have a catchier name.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Although assisting suicide seems to be a felony in most states in the US according to wikipedia.
Of course for the majority of people wikipedia page itself is all the assistance they would require.
My discovery of the day: Suicide by locking yourself in the garage with the car on just aint what it used to be. Apparently it was once painless and only minimally unpleasant due to the large amount of carbon monoxide produced. These days, however, we have more efficient engines and catalytic converters. This means you need an awful lot of exhaust fumes to get enough carbon monoxide to kill you—and exhaust fumes still aren’t pleasant.
Evidently it is better to use a barbeque (charcoal burner) than a car if you really want to off yourself with CO.
I don’t much care if suicide is illegal just so long as those that are enabling the suicider aren’t vulnerable to punishment for obvious reasons. Well, unless our legal system is expected to last as is until after recovery from cryopreservation is implemented. That’d be awkward.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
I’d support this more confidently if I believed that the legal mechanisms distinguishing “enabling suicide” from “murder” would align well with my own intuitions about the distinction.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
This seems like a bad idea as long as most people aren’t getting cryonicly preserved. A lot of what we’ve learned about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s as well as other forms of brain damage comes from autopsies and we’re still learning. Similarly, in some cases the brain will be severely damaged by the form of death (such as say many cases of blunt trauma) and in some of those cases (such as murder investigations) autopsies may be necessary.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
I would require that explicit consent be granted by the patient in a will or, if the will does not mention the subject, then require the consent from the next of kin as opposed to requiring the next of kin to actively request that no head-destruction be done. Because cops aren’t going to make it easy for next of kin to hinder their investigation by making such a request but they are almost always going to get permission that is required so that they don’t face criminal charges.
(I don’t have any particular objection to donation of one’s body or brain to science for them to do as they please.)
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d consider that a sacrifice as such, even if I strain myself to view it through a religious frame. Ritual sacrifice seems to cluster around giving up something physical and valuable in order to sanctify some external object or concept; essentially costly signaling of devotion. There’s no external sanctification going on here, and I’m not sure how valuable I’d consider continued life under those circumstances; early cryopreservation seems more like sokushinbutsu or something similar. “Mortification of the flesh” is probably the closest Christian analogy, although it’s not a perfect one.
Giving up the immediate prospect of a conventional life, before and during the process of the disease setting in, to demonstrate faith in future technological developments?
So the objection, if based off this prediction, would be one of paternalism? ie. You think you know better about what they ‘really’ want than they do? (Not that I’m saying you don’t.)
Well, not that alone; but also the fact that sacrifice (as I understand it, at least) is irreversible, so someone who doesn’t want to be sacrificed right now can change their mind, but not vice versa.
They’ve got it wrong you see, it’s not about instant sacrifice, it’s about gradually giving yourself over to the Price, giving only as much as you deserve to give at any one time.
There those people working at industrial jobs, seeming to be accident prone day after day and begging to keep their jobs; they don’t claim workman’s compensation after losing a finger or after a metal fragment pierces their eye.They splash their mouth with alcohol to cover for their “incompetence” or beg not to take a drug test because of their “habit”. Notice how hard working they are, taking every over-time hour they can get. Some or religious and all are hard-working, wanting to keep their job. The upper management seem to turn a blind eye, often belonging to the same social clubs or churches with these model workers. This gradual sacrifice of a body one piece at a time, shows a continued dedication to the Prince. Much more than blindly jumping into a soup pot once.
== (1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
There’s no way that consent could ever be simple or unambiguous here. Wanting to die might be a temporary state of mind, while death is a very permanent effect. The victim would have to be completely unable to change his/her mind ever in his/her life.
I don’t think if a friend asks you to kill him, you should do it. No, clearly your friend needs mental help, and hopefully his suicidal urges are temporary.
I agree with you that consent is not simple… indeed, I said as much in the first place.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
Did I understand you right?
==
(1) For conventional understandings of death. I acknowledge that many people on this site consider, for example, having my brain removed from my skull and cryogenically preserved to not be an example of death, because the potential for reconstituting me still exists. Personally, I’m inclined to still call that death, while allowing for the possibility of technologically mediated resurrection. That said, that’s ultimately a disagreement about words, and not terribly important, as long as we’re clear on what we’re talking about.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
I think people often misjudge situations, especially in relation to ending their own life. And consent in case of permanent damage is probably not sufficient to say anything about morals. If their death actually did have higher value than other options then I suppose it is just a tragic situation.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others. Also, it cuts the other way too. For example, when my grandfather suffered a stroke, nobody expected him to recover, and both he and his loved ones preferred him dead rather than continuing to live bedridden, frequently delirious, and in constant pain. The law prevented us from killing him, though. I consider every day of his life after that point far more tragic than his eventual death.
I agree that knowledge about consent is not always sufficient to make a moral judgment.
I think if we switch from talking about expected-value judgements to moral judgements, we will have to back up a very long way before we can keep making progress, since I’m not sure we have a shared understanding about what a moral judgement even is.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives.
I have experienced a Cartesian-demon-like urge to rationalise “I should kill myself”. While similar dispositions exist in e.g. anosognosics, I expect situations that cause them are rare.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant to say that if their death had higher value then I would agree that it would be the better decision. It is tragic that there are no positive solutions, and only negative ones.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
Consider the situations where people consider suicide. They often are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable. Sometimes there is a euphoric response when people decide that everything will be over soon. Obviously, I can’t think of any statistics or anything, so I guess we just have to disagree.
I’m content to disagree, but I’m not sure we even do.
Certainly I agree with you that people often misjudge the decision to end their own lives, often for the reasons you cite.
What I’m saying is that, for example, people who are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable also make decisions about whether to get out of bed, whether to go to work, whether to take their medication, whether to talk to friends about what’s going on in their lives, whether to take psychoactive drugs, whether to get more sleep, whether to exercise regularly, whether to punch their neighbor in the head, whether to buy revolvers, and on and on and on.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
We suck at these decisions, but the consequences tend to be significantly more severe. Good defaults before the unstability starts also help; for example, “go to work” is much more likely to be on the radar at all than “punch someone out of the blue”.
But to address your point: yup, there are specific bugs that are triggered solely by considering suicide. Though how you’d measure their frequency I don’t know.
I agree that the consequences of an incorrect decision about dying are severe compared to most of the other decisions we make.
I agree that there are specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering suicide. There are also specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering all kinds of other things.
I agree that existing predispositions to explicitly consider/not consider certain decisions, and to decide them in particular ways, affect how we make those decisions.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
And that’s where we disagree. I don’t think suicidal people are just as reliable in their decision-making as others.
I recommend that you take a break from this thread, go think about something else for a while, come back to what I said, and see if you still believe I’m making a claim about comparisons between two groups of people.
If you do, then I agree that we should end this discussion here.
I don’t know. I mentioned before there is a euphoric response to having things finally end in peace. This is why so many people can believe in something like the rapture. It’s not a frightening thought. They get caught up in the idea that everything will be all right. Suicide sounds like it would trigger that appeal as well, so I’m still inclined to disagree.
I’m glad you’re now seeing what I said. It makes useful discussion much easier.
I share your belief that such an anticipation of relief might be triggered by contemplating suicide. That has certainly been my experience, at least.
I infer (though not very confidently) that you believe such anticipation is a more powerful motivator than various other feelings such people have that cause them to make unreliable decisions in other contexts. If you do in fact believe that, then yes, we disagree.
Er… what about pets? Not all animals we kill and eat, you know...
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
Comparison? It wasn’t a comparison. It was a clarification. Having sex with pets is also bestiality.
You’re against it? Why? You’re just sounding arbitrary.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent (similar to pedophilia). So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
By “that we have” do you mean “that we do have” or “that we should have?” I think it would difficult to claim that existing bans on bestiality are really based on the idea of consent, which they predate. (Note that e.g. “rape” (of humans) refers to something conceptually quite different than it did back in the bad old days.)
22:22 If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel.
22:23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
22:24 Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
22:25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.
22:26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:
22:27 For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.
22:28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
22:29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Indeed, in the US the last state was North Carolina in 1993, and even still it tends to be a lesser offense (assault, battery, or spousal abuse). wikipedia.
Of course, my wife and I tend to call shenanigans on the concept. Thought experiment:
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim. So someone who didn’t want their life ruined (jail time, permanent sex offender registry, etc.) would do well to make certain sure they can establish that consent was given. Various methods would work to some degree—signed documents, video tapes, witnesses, the presence of a government official...
As ridiculous as it would seem to get all of those things together for the recording of consent for sex, it so happens we actually do have an institution that incorporates all of those things—marriage. We actually have a tradition that involves getting the entirety of both families together, in front of a government official, with signed government documents, usually on videotape, where both parties agree (often speaking directly to their respective deities) that they will do certain things with each other, traditionally understood to prominently include sex. A bit over the top, but sometimes you have to do crazy things to avoid litigation.
Except now, even going through all that is insufficient to establish consent. It’s a world gone mad.
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim.
Compared to other crimes, rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
Quick sanity check: According to RAINN (disclosure: citing an organization I’ve supported), 58% chance of a conviction for rape. A questionable Wikipedia article claims that the conviction rate for crimes in general is “84% in Texas, 82% in California, 72% in New York, 67% in North Carolina, and 59% in Florida.” (as of 2000). Thus, it seems plausible that rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
For clarity, the RAINN stats are rape-specific and the Wikipedia stats are for all crimes, right?
Crime-specific conviction rates seem to be hard to find. A 1997 DoJ press release claims 87% conviction rates for all crimes in federal court (a skewed sample, though) and 86% for violent crime, but doesn’t break it down further. The situation could plausibly have changed in the last fourteen years due to changes in culture or forensic science.
Statistics from the California DoJ (pages 49-50; PDF file) suggest that around 67% of felony arrests (not trials) in the state result in conviction, and that that rate has slowly been increasing since the Seventies (when the number was around 45%).
I tried looking up statistics, but it seems like my Google-Fu has failed. I found numbers for federal court, but most of what it says is that the vast majority of federal indictments are resolved with guilty pleas, and there don’t seem to be very many rape trials in federal court.
Trying to break down the numbers further:
According to the numbers given, In 2005 there were 3065 jury convictions and 430 jury acquittals in federal court, making a total of 3,495 federal jury trials and a conviction rate of 88%. Under the “sexual abuse” category, there were 24 jury trials that ended in a conviction and 8 that ended in an acquittal. The sample size is small, but it gives a conviction rate of 75%.
Which tells me… basically nothing, because the sample size is very small, most rape cases would be prosecuted in state courts rather than federal courts, and cases that actually go to trial are unusual anyway because both the prosecution and the defense have to prefer a trial to the alternatives of not taking the case to court at all or pleading guilty.
Actually, the traditional part of the wedding vows (in America, at least, and I assume other English-speaking countries) referring to sexual obligation—“serve”—faded into disuse well before spousal rape became criminalized, and in any event a key feature of sexual consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time.
There are of course enforcement problems which may complicate cases where there’s no other physical abuse, but pertaining to my original point, at least, I’d contend that most late moderns would agree that spousal rape is both logically coherent and evil, because it meets the “consent” conception of rape, whereas most earlier peoples would not, operating as they were from a property crime framework.
it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim.
There are certainly those who would dispute claims 1 and 3. (And obviously, in doing so, use a broader definition of “easy” which includes cultural norms and foreseeable consequences.)
To clarify: do you and your wife believe that the presumption of consent that marriage entails is sufficient to overcome any potential evidence of rape, or merely that it is sufficient to raise the bar significantly?
If the latter, I agree; if the former, I disagree. Your comment seems to suggest the former, but you may simply be indulging in entertaining hyperbole.
Thought experiment: suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me? Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me?
Yes, I’d generally consider “X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so” or everything else severally (weakly) sufficient to justify that claim.
Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
My presumption above is that ‘nonconsentual sex’ and ‘marriage’ are inconsistent. If X is your spouse, then X was asserting something inconsistent in X’s shamefaced admission, and you were in your accusation. If you want to withdraw your consent, then get a divorce.
Well, even if marriage was a contract to say “I want to have sex with you” it’s a little ridiculous for it to say “I want to have sex with you whenever you want.”
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
One’s spouse isn’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex. That is not their purpose.
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
All right, slavery is too strong.
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife says “I don’t care,” and has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
[I]’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
“You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters.
From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction.
From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances
I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife says “I don’t care,” and has sex with you anyway.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
you … misunderstand the issue
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
It’s ridiculous to assume that it must mean the latter when we generally take it to mean the former (although even then, not always). I am not sure it is ridiculous to allow both options, but confusing the two is harmful.
Indeed. I was clarifying, more than correcting. I think the perspective you introduced (or made explicit, if that’s what wedrifid was thinking) is interesting and relevant to the discussion.
What is the intended message of the Deuteronomy quote? It seems to imply that rape implies non-consent. In this case the relevance of the rape is that the betrothed rape victim is excused from punishment for the crime of adultery.
Right, consent is relevant insofar as it determines whether the maiden is complicit in the harm to her fiance. But it’s not a determinant of whether harm was done, or even the severity of it. If you have sex with another man’s wife or fiance, you die. If she’s not betrothed then the pottery barn rule kicks in and you make restitution to her owner. If there’s contested ownership (e.g., if she’s your slave but someone else’s fiancee) you pay a fine (Leviticus 19:20-22.)
In all cases the person whose consentH^H^H^H^H^H injury matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
In all cases the person whose consent matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
That’s certainly not the case in the passage quoted here. In fact in no place in the passage is the fiance, husband or father even able to give consent. These particular rules apply even if for some reason the fiance or husband said “go for your life, she’s yours for the taking”. The only consent that is mentioned at all is the consent of the betrothed damsel, the giving of which will get her killed alongside her lover—it is male consent that does not happen to matter at all.
The issues you have with sexism in these collections of religious text seem to be overshadowing what this passage has to say about rape. (And those issues may be valid and important in their own right as independent subjects!)
That does seem likely to be the reason there were such strict laws against adultery. Robin Hanson explores why adultery (and so cuckoldry) is a more significant issue for males.
even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape
Which seems ridiculous to me. And that isn’t an objection with respect to people should being punished for what is called statuary rape. It is an objection to the crime against language!
I’d say it falls naturally out of the construction of consent, actually. Looks pretty different from a consequential perspective, but from a deontological one the only relevant problems show up around the consent-capable/consent-incapable border, or relate to what to do when both partners are considered incapable—none of which is much of a surprise if you’re using a consent criterion. I’m pretty sure there’s similar strangeness in contract law.
There’s some more or less analogous stuff going on in the earlier property-crime construction, too.
(also, even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape)
If I’m not mistaken statutory rape is based on the age of consent. The law is claiming that the people do not have the right to consent to such acts, much in the same way that children many times do not understand what is happening in cases of pedophilia.
Specific laws and ages of consent have problems and flaws, of course. But when you say “even with consent,” that is what people are disagreeing about. Do they really have consent?
Not True consent. Because we want to call the sex ‘rape’ and rape is forcing someone to have sex with you without consent. So what they did when they said “I want you baby. #$%# me now.” then tore of the clothes of the ‘rapist’ and forced them down on the bed couldn’t have been consent. Consent in this context must mean “whatever it takes for me to not call the act rape”.
Repeated disclaimer: This isn’t a claim about morality or what punishment is appropriate for any given sexual act. It’s about word use!
Why is consent required for sex but not for killing and eating?
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living. But whether or not this is right it’s clearly just a post-hoc rationalization of the fact that I/DoubleReed/most people think it’s super duper gross.
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living.
If that was really the reason, people would express more outrage and disgust over the idea of factory farming than over the idea of bestiality (I suspect zoophiliacs would also argue that they treat their animals very well and that the animals enjoy it—I don’t doubt some enjoy it more than what factory-farmed animals go through).
So yes, I think that that, and consent, are post-hoc rationalizations, and are not remotely related to the true reasons we find bestiality super duper gross.
You know, I agree that at first my ideas were post-hoc, but that could just be where it started.
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues. There are still issues of course (usually in terms of irreversible or serious harm).
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues.
On the contrary rape is exactly the example I bring up to reject that adage as a moral absurdity.
I don’t go and tear a girl’s clothes off and do to her just because I’d like it if she tore off my clothes and did to me!
That would be rape. And rape is bad. Therefore following the adage would make me bad.
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent. Along the lines of of “Three Worlds Collide” morality (as it applies to me and by those in the set I consider to be the pool of potential mates and without any interest in being free to do such things myself to others). That would be seriously awesome. Much more exciting!
Wait… are we talking about the old adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or the new adage that doesn’t appear when googling for it, “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you”. I was assuming the former whereas the latter is actually kind of awesome. It’s kind of like pre-emptive tit for tat. If people want to kill you then you are morally obliged to kill them.
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual. That does not defeat what I am saying. It’s not like first part overrides the second part or something.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual.
That is not what he said. He said, “If I did not consent and she did, I would still want her to do it.” Your objection does not apply to this, but others clearly do...
Edited to add: He may be conflating “consent” and “voiced consent”?
More like the idea of precommitting to consent, really. After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent? This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent?
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
Hmm. Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood). And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Reminds me of the idea of designated, legally-sanctioned areas where anyone in the area can use violent force against anyone else in the area without fear of prosecution for such, but which develop a social equilibrium with very little nonconsensual violence because people mostly go there to enjoy the polite-with-undetones-of-danger ambiance.
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
I believe I would call this “still consent”, provided the draw of the situation was the fact of the situation including such acts.
Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood).
The more you elaborate, the more I find myself intrigued by the idea.
And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Is it something I would like them to do to me? Yes or No.
Do all parties involved consent that this is what they want to do? Yes or No.
The first question doesn’t override the second question. Both parts has to say yes. If the you don’t care about consent, that only affects the first question.
OK, I begin to understand how you are including consent into the moral principle. It seems like it puts most of the moral work into the “Don’t do things to people without their consent” part but that is at least safer than actually following the adage itself and does rule out any problem which includes “things are done to people without their consent.” This leaves only those inefficiencies that, well, fall short of the extremes of brutal, unwelcome violations.
Yeah, the currently established rules of consent are really for the purposes of safety—to prevent tragedies borne out of miscommunication, to prevent plausible excuses from either party.
It’s an excellent rule, but it’s not the absolutely fundamental point, the goal unto itself—the real goal is to prevent the physical and emotional suffering associated with undesired violations of one’s person.
In a hypothetical world where true preferences could be determined and established without a hint of potential miscommunication or the possibility of denial-after-the-fact (e.g. by the electronic monitoring and recording of thoughts), the situation could well be different and the issue of consent might drop away to be replaced by the concept of ascertained shared preferences—atleast in persons mature enough, well-informed enough, and in a stable enough mental state to be able to evaluate said desires/preferences in a sane manner.
Yea, the major issues I’ve seen are when consent is ambiguous, like pedophilia/bestiality, but also with long term damage. After all, if something is permanent, then they may not want it later. It is impossible to give “eternal consent” as far as I’ve seen and that is where there are serious moral ambiguities. Like if someone asked you to kill him. That has a permanent effect of a hopefully temporary state of mind.
Clearly, we don’t care about animals’ consent when we kill and eat them. So I guess we can have sex with them all we want. Kind of an odd train of thought, I admit...
Although the meaning is already unambiguous if you reread the part in your third “[...]” it should be even more clear.
I am against having sex with ALL animals (ie. a number of sex acts upon animals that is as at least as large as the number of animals) because I can multiply. This isn’t a terribly important point so I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it if was going to make DoubleReed so confused. It is only relevant in as much as it was part of an explanation of why the Err… didn’t make any sense in the context.
the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
I get it. I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur. (Though it would be more clear if “I’m against it” were quoted between “also bestiality” and “You’re against it?”)
Also, I wish you would stop using such hurtful terms as “pervert”. I highly doubt I’ll make my way through all the sponges in the next hundred years anyway.
I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur.
They would have to also not understand the part that is plain logic and even then requires “would seem to make perfect sense to them” since sincere misunderstanding doesn’t make things logically follow.
I know, the problem being that it you presented it with an “Er...” as though somehow it made my comment about bestiality incorrect… which it wouldn’t unless bestiality involved having sex with any or all animals… which it doesn’t.
Following along on your tangent for curiosity’s sake I note that I have killed and eaten my pets. They happen to have been sheep, cows, a goat and some roosters (that we raised by hand). They tend to get fairly obnoxious at a certain age. Especially the roosters, given that the mating habit of that species is basically rape.
But you DO have objections to bestiality. Just not all cases of it.
No I don’t. I have no idea why you are saying that.
Having sex with any nonhuman animal is bestiality. That’s literally what it is.
Which is why I am still rejecting the relevance of pets. Since bestiality only requires that a person have sex with one animal even if someone declared or assumed sex with pets was forbidden (which you seemed to) it still wouldn’t be a rejection of bestiality. Because it does not require that you have or desire to have sex with all animals including pets.
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
In other words, he’s against an alternative, nonstandard definition of bestiality, which is not the same thing as the kind of bestiality for which he has no objections.
The allusion to torture vs. dust and his emphasis of standard bestiality “only requir[ing] that a person have sex with one animal” suggests that he is against this sort of serial bestiality because the numbers involved become large.
No, I said I’m against “the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts”. I said that because that would be what required for your mention of pets as a reason to reject or ‘clarify’ my earlier declaration of non-objection to be valid.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent
The issue of consent is probably how I’d choose to justify my objection to bestiality on the basis of rights. The concept of rights is among the highest-status deontological ethics in the world today, so may have the best chance of convincing others.
But I think my true objection may be just that I feel it horribly demeans the humans involved, lowering them to the status of (lesser) animals.
I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas”
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Also: pedophilia; the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
To clarify terminology here, pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is a different word, which is escaping me at the moment, for a sexual preference for adolescents.
I’ve no disagreement with your comment Atelos, but—why do those words exist?
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
Telling someone, “I define the word ‘wiggin’ to mean a person with green eyes and black hair”, by Gricean implication, asserts that the word “wiggin” will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages.
If green-eyes and black hair have no greater than default probability to be found together, nor does any other property occur at greater than default probability along with them, then the word “wiggin” is a lie: The word claims that certain people are worth distinguishing as a group, but they’re not.
In this case the word “wiggin” does not help describe reality more compactly—it is not defined by someone sending the shortest message—it has no role in the simplest explanation. Equivalently, the word “wiggin” will be of no help to you in doing any Bayesian inference. Even if you do not call the word a lie, it is surely an error.
And the way to carve reality at its joints, is to draw your boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace.
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations. Also note that 15-25 and 18-21 are typically given as the prime age ranges of female physical attractiveness by Roissy and his commenters (although since these are arbitrary cut-offs, there’s no need to give them a name). The 15-19 age range of “ephebophilia” cuts across this age range seemingly at random.
The same goes for hebephilia, attraction to 11-14 year-olds. There is no discontinuity in the characteristics of a typical human between 14 and 15 years of age, and I don’t see why hebephiles should form a compact cluster in thingspace either.
On the other hand paedophilia does seem a valid word, because attraction to pre-pubescents seems qualititatively different from attraction to fertile human beings (there are evolutionary considerations at play, and there are great physical changes in a short space of time during puberty). Properties shared in common by paedophiles are presumably qualitative differences in “brain wiring” in comparison to humans of typical sexuality.
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
There are people with a sexual preference for people from the age of their birth right up to and even past the age of their death. Since there are many such people it is easier to have words that give a ballpark to their sexual preference than to say “someone with a specific sexual preference for humans between the ages of X and Y” every single time.
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
(With the caveat that it is stupid to use the same word for the preference for males and females at this stage. Both groups are more similar to adults of their sex than they are to each other!)
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations.
Or, in this case, the opposite. In most cases injecting the word ephebophile into a context will expunge connotations rather than introducing them. In the case of a sexually active ephobophile using the word ensures that all “people who have sex with those who are under the age at which it is legally permissible to have sex with them” aren’t lumped in together. Because they aren’t @#@%ing pedophiles and because while both practices are illegal they have entirely different moral connotations. For that matter the active practice of the various illegal chronophilias also have different practical implications. Counter-intuitively (unless you think about it) in the case of rape I seem to recall that a rape of a girl that is sexually mature does greater psychological damage on average than than the rape of a younger girl (probably something Robin Hanson cited).
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females) the age range 15-19 is rather close to the widely agreed-upon (by men) 5-year age range of females in their physical prime of roughly 18-22. 15-year olds have been reproductively viable for about 4 years on average. 19-year-old women are about as attractive as they’ll ever be!
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Even if the girl in quesiton is 15, it seems that the extent to which an older man might target her as a mate in today’s society depends more on how up-tight, how scrupulous or how socialised he is – whether he prefers slightly younger (by 3 years) women than the average man would generally be difficult to tell from outside, and being “normal” in this regard doesn’t preclude attraction to a 15-year-old any more than it does attraction to a 25-year-old in any case.
There are words like “creeper” and “pervert” that might be used to describe the type of person who appears to pay undue attention to younger teenage girls. This seems to exhaust the social utility of having a word for someone who prefers slightly younger women than does the average man. Note that this concept is also highly contingent; plenty of human societies would consider overt sexual attraction to young teenage girls, insofar as sexual attraction is acceptable in general, to be unremarkable (as Hanson’s piece points out).
Ephebophilia therefore appears to be useful, if at all, as a scientific term only. And in that case, where is the evidence that ephebophiles form a meaningful category? Why not have special words for adults who are attracted to 22-25 year-olds in particular (equally unusual), and so forth? Why name a specific age range at all, rather than having a general word for “prefers fertile women, but of unusually young age”, if not just to lend the term a bogus scientific air?
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms. I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”. On the other hand achondroplasia dwarfism is a term that cleaves reality at its joints. (NB: no offense intended by this analogy, which implies no similarity beyond the use of words to refer to variations in some characteristic of humans).
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
In most cases that’s probably true, but the more discriminating question might be why this confusion exists so widely. After all it’s quite a severe accusation.
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults. So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
The point is about arbitrary “scientific” gradings pulled out of thin air. Short, very short, diminutive—they are vague context-dependent categorisations that are suitable given the continuous nature and contingent relevance of the variation in question. This is not comparable to rigid, highly specific classifications like my putative “veryshortman”, which is how I would characterise words like ephebophilia. There should be a good reason for the existence of such a term, and that reason is not apparent.
The other problem with the specificity of “ephebophilia” is also that it overlaps with the typical 5-year window in which an average male would find a female most physically attractive. Therefore it can’t even be justified on the grounds that the psychologists are binning males into continuous but arbitrarily demarcated categories of “normal”, “ephebophile” and “hebephile”.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults.
You said: “Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with”. I pointed out that this alleged use to which the word might be put is redundant, since 15-19 year-old women are among the most attractive to men in any case. Generally the large majority of heterosexual men would want to have sex, if the conditions were right, with an attractive girl of this age, particularly a 19-year-old!
I went on to point out that if we look at the other extreme (15-year-olds) scrupulousness and other character traits probably play a bigger role than ephebophilia in assessing the likelihood of a man attempting to mate with a girl of that age, in this society.
So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
That sounds about as reasonable, given the definition of ephebophile, as suggesting that an average man would be more attracted to a plain 18-year-old than to a 27-year-old supermodel. I.e. unreasonable, unless I missed the part where it is defined as exlusive attraction to 15-19 year-olds (in which case I would ask for some evidence that such people even exist).
If you actually did wonder that back through the analogy you would probably look at the third sentence of the wikipedia article and follow the link.
I did so already, and noticed that teleiophilia and gerontophilia are not specified by age range. If ephebophilia and hebephilia were likewise merged into a word that meant “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical” (I agree with you that having the same word for female-male and male-female attraction is also foolish) then I would admit the legitimacy of that word. It is the pretense to specificity, or having idenitified some actual clusters in thingspace that I object to.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
Such a word could be the word meaning “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical”. No need to pretend that there is clustering into the groups “sexually normal men”, “ephebophiles” and “hebephiles” rather than a continuum.
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures.
I don’t see why another word apart from pederasty is needed for that.
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females)
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures. Paedophilia… I would have put that one as an even split with perhaps the most notorious sterotypical applications being with respect to male attraction to young boys (eg. ‘priests’).
I’d say it depends on the man’s age, too. A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me. And, while most men prefer younger women, it’s not like the typical man prefers women between 18 and 22 no matter how old he is—see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see. The writer is advocating the idea that men should target older women, because they’ll face less competition.
A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me.
I’m sure the 70-year-old, given the opportunity to be transported into a younger attractive body with his mind in-tact, would be just as keen on the 16-year-old as the 22-year-old is. You are probably trying to imagine a 70-year-old hitting on a 16-year-old, which would indeed be remarkable but is beside the point.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see.
The median 23-year-old man sets 18 years as the least possible age for a match, whereas the median 48-year-old man sets 32 years for the same. This effect is much smaller if you see who people write messages to, but it’s still there (see the red in the bottom right corner of the relevant graph).
Imagine asking a lot of men of different ages if, all other things being equal, they’d prefer a 16-year-old woman (assuming the men are from somewhere the age of consent is less than that—tweak if necessary) or a 26-year-old one. Do you really believe that many more men from any given age range would choose the former? (Heck, I would choose the latter, and I’m 24.)
I suspect that the difference between messaging behavior and the minimum age setting is related to the fact that those settings are publicly available. That adds a signaling component to the game, and for 48-year-old straight males I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the dominant one: I don’t have any actual data here, but it seems likely that a middle-aged man setting the age of consent as his threshold sends a clear “dirty old man” signal that a 32yo threshold wouldn’t. Not a signal that a hypothetical dirty old man wants to send, I think; meanwhile, you can send messages to whoever you like, and large-scale messaging preferences are opaque to everyone but password holders. Actually, messaging someone below your nominal age limit might send a weak positive signal: “I like you enough to make an exception”.
The smaller of the effects discussed is probably genuine, though.
Fascinating. Following those links I just discovered I’m a teleiophile. Also a gynephile but I probably could have guessed that one myself.
I’m somewhat nonplussed with having the word ephebophilia refer to a preference for either females of approximately 14-16 or for males of an equivalent level of development (so slightly older). Unless for some reason people with one preference have a particularly high chance of also having the other preference. Because by this age it is an entirely different kind of preference so if you are going to go to all the trouble of making up names for various categories you may as well have “likes young men” different to “likes young women”. Having just one word for pedophilia and perhaps hebophilia makes somewhat more sense given the much smaller difference between sexes at the younger ages.
It’s very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma”, and many other people interpret as “raping particularly vulnerable people”.
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to “reclaim the word” by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It—unsurprisingly—still didn’t go well for him).
What person would it be physically impossible to have sex with? Though, that depends on what qualifies as “real sex” vs. what is merely foreplay/Xth base/etc., which is a whole other issue.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object: that is, if A wants to have sex with B and C and D, but A is unfortunately trapped inside a giant transparent hamster ball, with B-Z all on the outside looking in.
You would achieve the same effect if A were attracted to people trapped inside giant transparent hamster balls. Now we just need a single word for this kind of attraction.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object
Yes, I was primed to think in terms of the subject—and the kind of subject that people are inclined to shame. That is, pathetic people. As in, “pathetic people who can’t get laid”.
To translate into the language of physical impossibility would, I suppose, require observing that humans are not black boxes that can freely do anything within the realms of human possibility. Going against instinct and indoctrination really is hard and for the kind of people I was primed to think about (pathetic people) they just couldn’t. Because being proactively vile and evil requires initiative and the ability to overcome inhibitions so most people in that hypothetical category couldn’t have sex with the people they wanted to (due to their pathetic nature).
It seemed entirely plausible to me that there was a jargon term for “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with [because you’re a pathetic loser], and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma” that people also used as an indicator that the subject is more likely to be a rapist. That is exactly the kind of prejudice that humans tend to enjoy engaging in. What surprised me was that I wasn’t familiar with the jargon in question. My confusion is now resolved.
the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
This opinion is widely held by many active participants in mainstream US culture. “Reviled” should be replaced with “reviled by ___” in order for this conversation to be precise.
I downvoted this for mindkilling. I often see this view attributed to members of tribe USleft by members of tribe USright, but I’ve rarely encountered members of tribe USleft actually taking this position.
I was going to raise a similar objection, then observed that his claim was that people who believe this are typically “lefty types,” not that “lefty types” typically believe this. The former might even be true, for all I know. (Though I can’t quite see why anyone should care.)
I know exactly one person who has expressed an opinion even remotely like this; he is an ethnically Chinese American who identified as a Republican for most of his life but changed that identification in the last decade or so. I wouldn’t call him a “lefty type” personally, but Vaniver might. Then again, I suspect he only expresses this opinion to screw with people in the first place. In any case, one case isn’t much to draw on.
That said, I certainly agree that specifying who’s doing the reviling usefully increases precision.
While I’m here, I will note that eliminating the comma between “types” and “who” would make the sentence noticeably less wrong.
I have deleted the relevant section. I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position, and I often see comments to that effect on the xkcd forums (where the typical person is progressive and technocratic), but as I know more USleft types than USright types (and the USright types I know are typically libertarians, and thus anti-technocrats) and have rarely asked people about it directly, I can see that my experience may not be sufficient to identify the types of people who hold that opinion.
I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”? I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the US mainstream endorsing what amounts to technocracy; I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom. I’m fairly sure that this is both the main thing that Emile meant when he was thinking of what you can’t say, and the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”?
Consider someone who wants judicial fiat to impose some policy they approve of- like, say, gay marriage. Is that anti-democracy? That’s the extent to which I’m including anti-democracy in that position.
The desire for a progressive regulatory state is conditioned on the idea that some people know what should be done better than others, which is an inherently anti-democratic notion; democratic opposition to things in the people’s best interest is an obstacle to be overcome not an objection to be heard out.
That said, I think most of the people I know would at least complain if they had to move to a Singapore-style “democracy” (well-run but lacking rights like free speech). People have inconsistent political preferences all the time.
I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom.
A number of people I know take overpopulation and environmental threats very seriously. Many of them approve of the results of China’s multiple-child tax, though many of them complain about the implementation and the limitation on freedom. I don’t remember any of them acknowledging that the only way to get Chinese levels of results was with Chinese levels of political freedom, but I’m sure at least one made that connection.
the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Ah. The first thing that comes to mind for me, when comparing the Chinese government and the American government, is that the Chinese government is comprised of engineers and the American government is comprised of lawyers, and I suspect that is true for most people who would hold some version of that opinion.
No idea—I revoked my downvote from the grandparent after you changed it.
Edit: On further reflection, I suspect you are getting dinged for positing a technocratic-democratic dichotomy. It is possible to be a technocrat and a small-d democrat. A more accurate opposition would be technocratic-populist, which is not the same thing.
He’s not exactly left (and not exactly right or centrist or...), but Scott Adams seems to take this tack. I am not sure just how much it is genuine, and how much it is “dance, monkeys, dance”.
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Focusing on the ideas that are held by people stupid enough to blurt them out leaves you vulnerable to a selection effect. If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Was the latter what was desired? Then I could mention ideas like eugenics, weighting voting power by IQ, banning theism in general or monotheism in particular, panopticon cities (or other means for global surveillance).
I don’t support the last two, but I bet I could make some good arguments about them. The first two I’d probably actually approve of, depending on the specific implementation.
But are these ideas really so offensive that it’d be dangerous for people to reveal them? I don’t think so.
Right now the maximally defensible political idea that I’d not feel very safe to discuss in Greece is that my country should recognize the Republic of Macedonia under that name. I don’t think that idea is offensive to anyone here, even though it’s synonymous with treason in Greece.
If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
Science fiction is useful in allowing people to describe political ideas but maintain plausible deniability.
Building Weirdtopia may be a relevant thread, though it’d be wrong for people to think that I actually support the weird ideas I mentioned there.
I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
Bestiality.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Human sacrifice
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape).
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
I wouldn’t call any of the above “ideas” at all. You are listing outlawed practices, not tabooed beliefs. True, “support for incest” is an idea, but if there is a covert ideology behind it it is not nearly as extensive and widespread as the ideology behind e.g. sexism.
Regardless of whether dead people can be considered victims or not, it’s still really, really upsetting to a lot of living people. Whether it ought to be upsetting is another matter, but it is.
I don’t see why not. If we consider the corpses of dead relatives to have reverted to just objects then necrophilarizing means having sex with our stuff. I would still find that somewhat upsetting!
If you have statistics about sibling incest being prominent to “rednecks” in a significantly higher degree than other populations, let me know. If not, I don’t approve of unsubstantiated stereotyping.
That’s absolutely hilarious. I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t, because “redneck” isn’t an acknowledged sociological distinction. It’s a stereotype. Anyone who gestures toward vaguely “redneck ideas” should not be surprised when incest comes up. The fact that you did not know this makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
I’ve heard the jokes about cousin incest, and even made an initial reply to your pre-edited post, saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries—when you edited your post to refer specifically to sibling marriage, I deleted that answer which no longer applied.
makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece, no need to assume anything.
I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t,
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
Perhaps I exaggerated a little too far for the sake of the joke, then.
saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries
I actually didn’t know this, interestingly.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece
I did that a lot for a while, but it seemed like hardly anyone put anything there so I eventually stopped bothering. Also, I’m surprised (and a bit disturbed) that someone in Greece knows anything about ‘rednecks’, so nevermind.
Wikipedia tells me that “redneck” is a term that refers to rural southern whites
I guess I must be a redneck then!
But if you want data about these topics, here’s
I knew all this already, and am not disputing it. That’s not the point.
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
Look: there is a difference between “green-eyed black-haired ideas” and “wiggin ideas”.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
They seem not to exist; apparently the best indicators would be some unreported fraction of general child abuse, but no leads on what the fraction might be.
I know the jokes about cousin marriages—but frankly such didn’t even count as incest in most Western societies until relatively recently, and it still doesn’t count as such in some non-Western societies.
On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to rednecks.
Haha, I think you’re displaying some serious prejudice (in multiple directions) by thinking that I’m supposed to mind this so badly.
“Prejudice” may not be the mot juste. If I filled one pickup truck with rednecks, and another with members of my own family, I’m not sure you’d be able to tell the difference. Hell, a few people would probably have to go in both trucks.
It wasn’t so much that I expected you to be viscerally horrified by the association with low-SES rural Southern whites, as that being pattern-matched to rednecks has what I thought were obvious drawbacks. Just for one: this being Less Wrong, I’m pretty confident you don’t think zygotes have souls. No doubt there are many other, less obviously incongruent beliefs in the redneck belief cluster you wouldn’t remotely endorse.
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to rednecks. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’m human, and it’ll probably happen. Consider this!)
Not being American or part of the Anglosphere or Western European derived culture I read this as:
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards [low status] ideas but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to [low status poor person from ethnic group we defeated in war]. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’m human, and it’ll probably happen. Consider this!)
There’s a certain subset of mostly Western, white men, largely middle-class rather than extremely wealthy or poor, who see the existence of civil rights activism on behalf of various minorities and the fact that it has succeeded in making it somewhat more costly to signal prejudice socially in polite company, and quite a bit moreso to do so openly in an institutional capacity, and conclude that this therefore means that it is now beyond the pale to do anything other than adhere to rigid standards of political correctness for the sake of controlling thought.
These are people, by and large, who in coming of age and seeking to support themselves, didn’t break through all their barriers to self-actualization or realize their wildest dreams of success, but managed to get some kind of payoff for their effort in terms of making ends meet (even if it’s difficult and provides no insulation from suffering or strife in their lives), and certainly don’t feel like they directly benefitted from any unethical practices or prejudices (even passively-conferred ones common in society). Since humans tend to model the emotions of others from their own baseline, they find it difficult to believe that anyone could genuinely have it that much worse, and conclude that activist groups of women and minorities are out to demonize them and censor them. They find it difficult to conceive that anybody else’s life, at least in their own cultural sphere, could really be that bad, unless the person had just failed on merits, and wanted to blame someone else or hijack the fruits of their own effort out of laziness.
Then, in an environment dominated numerically by similar people, they find it similarly plausible to think that if they voice a belief that is uncharitable towards, or does not reflect well upon, some social minority or other, they will be...well, it’s not clear what. Censored? Hunted down and sued? I’m not sure what they’re really afraid of, but they’re angry about the idea that it might happen to them.
There’s a certain subset of mostly Western, white men, largely middle-class rather than extremely wealthy or poor, who see the existence of civil rights activism on behalf of various minorities and the fact that it has succeeded in making it somewhat more costly to signal prejudice socially in polite company, and quite a bit moreso to do so openly in an institutional capacity, and conclude that this therefore means that it is now beyond the pale to do anything other than adhere to rigid standards of political correctness for the sake of controlling thought.
The rhetorical sleight of hand here is that “prejudice” is used with an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, this word is used for any application of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, which are deemed to be immoral according to a certain ideological view. On the other hand, it is supposed to refer to the use of conditional probabilities about people that are inaccurate due to biases caused by ignorance or malice. Now, it is logically possible that the latter category just happens to subsume the former—but the real world, of course, is never so convenient.
And if the latter category does not subsume the former, as it clearly does not, then approving of penalties (of whatever sort) for expressing beliefs in the former category means that you approve of penalties for expressing at least some true beliefs. Even if you can make a good case for that, it requires much more than dismissing them as “prejudice” with all the ambiguity and rhetorical trickery that this term introduces—and no matter how good a case you have, “controlling thought” will be a completely accurate description for what you advocate. (And for the record, I am completely open to the idea that some ways of controlling thought may be beneficial by some reasonable criteria, or even necessary for the functioning of human society. But if we’re going to advocate this view on a forum like this, let’s call it what it is.)
Note also that even without any idealistic pursuit of truth for its own sake, it is a non-trivial question what the practical consequences will be of suppressing the expression and use of certain correct beliefs about conditional probabilities. Wrong probabilities lead to wrong decisions, from the pettiest personal ones, up to and including decisions about grand projects by the government and other powerful institutions that are based on theories that assume these probabilities. On LW, of all places, the importance of this point should be clear.
I apologize for the confusion—you seem to think that my using the noun constitutes an attempt to bill some unspecified set of statements and ideas as examples of the first thing you listed.
What I’m actually doing, just so you can read my post accurately, is saying that prejudice is a thing (as per your second definition which you apparently thought I was being sneaky about), that it exists (I presume this at least is uncontentious to you?), and that in general it’s a true statement it’s now more costly to signal certain forms of that openly, according to prevailing social mores.
In other words, if you have no objection to the assertion: “An employer in the US these days cannot generally refuse a job applicant by openly referring to the applicant’s race as a disqualifying factor, without expecting some form of social reprisal”, then you now understand what I meant when I used the word prejudice in that sentence.
So, just to be sure I’m absolutely clear, since this is apparently confusing:
When I say
it has succeeded in making it somewhat more costly to signal prejudice socially in polite company
I mean that it is now more difficult to signal certain forms of prejudice (not specific as to what particular things constitute prejudice; pick an example you find unobjectionable) casually or irrespective of one’s audience, without garnering some social risk.
What I’m actually doing, just so you can read my post accurately, is saying that prejudice is a thing (as per your second definition which you apparently thought I was being sneaky about), that it exists (I presume this at least is uncontentious to you?), and that in general it’s a true statement it’s now more costly to signal certain forms of that openly, according to prevailing social mores.
You are still obscuring the issue. Yes, of course that people frequently hold prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice, and that some categories of such beliefs (though by no means all) have become more costly to signal in recent history. The question, however, is whether there are also some true beliefs, or uncertain beliefs that may turn out to be true given the present state of knowledge, that are also costly to express (or even just to signal indirectly) nowadays. Would you really assert that the answer to that question is no?
And if your answer to that question is yes, then what basis do you have for asserting that “a broader social pattern into which [you] see [my] behavior falling” consists of people who are unhappy because they find it costly to express prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice?
The question, however, is whether there are also some true beliefs, or uncertain beliefs that may turn out to be true given the present state of knowledge, that are also costly to express (or even just to signal indirectly) nowadays. Would you really assert that the answer to that question is no?
I would not.
I am doubting your claim that your beliefs are really so beyond the pale to the social mores of your peers here, that you’d be unfairly suppressed and/or censored, or otherwise hurt “the cause” of LW any moreso than you might be saying what you already do freely.
I could be wrong about that, but I also have different estimates of the real, net social cost to signalling something unpopular, especially for someone who consistently signal-boosts in your observed patterns in this environment.
I would be unsurprised to learn you believe that IQ represents general intelligence and that it is primarily genetic, and that all personality traits are ultimately genetic or inconsequential in the scheme of things, and that they are linked to race, and that this could get people upset at you if you just said it at random at a party.
I would be very surprised if it got you successfully sued, persecuted in a tangible way, or indeed anything worse than flamed on the internet for voicing this openly. Or arrested, or fired from your job, or targeted by a group like Anonymous for ongoing harassment...
However, based on what you’ve said about your reasons for not revealing some subset of your beliefs here, you appear to fear consequences considerably more significant than just someone being mad at something you said on the internet, and this seems...disproportionate, incorrect, biased—a skewed misunderstanding of the reality of your likely risks and costs.
I would be very surprised if it got you successfully sued, persecuted in a tangible way, or indeed anything worse than flamed on the internet for voicing this openly.
What do you think happened to Stephanie Grace—don’t you think a private email sent to a few friends has affected her career prospects ? James Watson and Lawrence Summers also got lynched for their opinions.
I don’t think anybody risks getting sued or arrested, but they can have their careers harmed.
James Watson, Lawrence Summers and Stephanie Grace did not get lynched for their opinions.
As to what actually happened to Stephanie Grace:
She spoke an opinion that sounds pretty calm and not hateful, but certainly controversial, that is frequently interpreted as far more loaded with those things due to historical associations.
She also evidently posed the discussion as though it were a matter of some legitimate scientific consensus, relatively unobjectionable from a theoretical standpoint.
This despite the fact that the statistical significance of IQ heritability and its mechanisms of inheritance are still matters of significant debate and little consensus has emerged as yet—let alone the degree to which IQ represents “General intelligence” in fact (to say nothing of the ongoing difficulties of defining that term), the ongoing Flynn Effect (still not adequately explained), the substantial effects of postnatal nutrition (protein supplementation even in the children of the rural poor producing significant increases; longer breastfeeding periods improve scores, exposure to prenatal drug use or environmental pollutants can significantly impact them negatively) and environmental stimulation on the development of the brain and its results for IQ scores, the dearth of actual replicated studies showing genetic mechanisms for IQ, the difficulty of determining whether a difference is innate versus not...this stuff is still up in the air.
Basically the strong push to interpret these IQ differences along race lines as principally genetic is massively overstated next to the evidence favoring that claim—to treat the question as a matter of simple fact whose implications might need to be discussed more soberly is to so blatantly favor the hypothesis that it speaks poorly of her critical thinking and levels of information about this.
It’s not that it’s impossible that there are signficant gaps clustering around race (indeed, it seems pretty straightforward and established that this is the case); it’s also not that it’s impossible this is primarily a genetic thing (although there’s little evidence to bolster that claim so strongly that it should be the default assumption, let alone the null hypothesis, and much evidence that conflicts with it). It’s that hyper-focusing on this particular fact and this particular attempt to account for it, usually in the same breath as public policy discussions, is often a great big indicator of what that person perceives as the implications.
In other words, a charitable assumption is that Stephanie Grace is guilty only of ignorant or uncritical reasoning about the topic, staggeringly bad timing and social signalling, and even worse spin control. But there are lots of venues—like LessWrong itself, where the idea that IQ is general intelligence and the gap is genetic and all other interpretations are PC revisionist hogwash gets so much traction that I find it difficult to believe Vladimir_M, who is posting anonymously, will suffer consequences more unpleasant than a lengthy argument he doesn’t want to have with somebody who does not agree with him. Indeed, he has already said the same things openly, and no jackbooted thugs, no PC police, no lynch mobs have extracted reprisal against him.
First you misrepresent the statements of this woman, whose name I don’t even want to mention in such an ugly context in a public discussion. Rather than claiming that the problematic beliefs are a matter of consensus, she expressed a mere lack of certainty that the opposite is the case, and this takes only a few seconds to check by googling. Making incorrect attributions to people in public on such a sensitive topic and under their real names is, at best, callously irresponsible.
Then you go on and say that I have “said the same things openly,” thus dragging me into this controversy, about which I have said nothing at all in this thread—and about which I have never written anything here, to the best of my recollection, that would make this characterization correct under any reasonable interpretation. That this nonsense has been upvoted has lowered my opinion of LW more than probably anything else I ever saw here before.
And then people wonder why I may be reluctant to speak openly on controversial matters.
Yes, “lynch” is hyperbole, probably unnecessary (“vilified” seems a bit weak. You might want to tell off these websites for incorrect use of the term “lynching”).
You spend a lot of time addressing the issue of Race and IQ; I am mostly concerned of how Stephanie Grace was treated for what was a quite reasonable private email. In an ancestor comment you wrote:
Then, in an environment dominated numerically by similar people, they find it similarly plausible to think that if they voice a belief that is uncharitable towards, or does not reflect well upon, some social minority or other, they will be...well, it’s not clear what. Censored? Hunted down and sued? I’m not sure what they’re really afraid of, but they’re angry about the idea that it might happen to them.
To me, it’s very clear “what”: what happened to Stephanie Grace. It’s unlikely, but a small chance of having your career ruined is not a risk most people are willing to take. Those chances increase if one of the people involved becomes somewhat famous, or if some well meaning anti-racist (or other) activist takes interest in the discussion. Nobody wants a Google search of their name return a hate page on the first page of results.
What surprises me the most is that you find this unclear, that you don’t understand how that can be a concern for somebody.
To me, it’s very clear “what”: what happened to Stephanie Grace.
Some people she didn’t know said she was a bad person, and then her life went on. She got the job she was intending to get, and hardly anyone will remember the ‘scandal’.
Interesting, thanks; I had briefly googled for that kind of info but hadn’t found any. She is probably somewhat helped by having a pretty common name and surname, but I’m still updating my estimate of “negative consequences for being target of a hate campaign” downwards a bit.
Well, without the threatened torture, house arrest and other problems. On the other hand, she was treated the way she was without trying publish her views and or trying to spread them to the general public. Overall, a Galileo comparison doesn’t work very well.
Ahh, it’s annoying that messed up links just fail to show anything at all. Especially when typing in what is in the imperfectly formatted link (ie. missing http://) into the browser sometimes would work just fine!
You spend a lot of time addressing the issue of Race and IQ;
I was trying to unpack what she actually did—she didn’t just say something unpopular and get burned for it, she said something seriously, massively unwarranted in a sensitive situation where people decided they didn’t like it, and furthermore something that for many people is rather close to a hot-button issue. It is difficult nigh unto impossible to signal effectively in that situation, and even if it shouldn’t be the case that just saying something brings on associations to other, otherwise-unrelated situations, people signalling what she did and how she did it frequently have some really nasty agendas for doing so.
She’s been vilified for it, yes—I’m not downplaying that, but you’re downplaying the actual situation.
What surprises me the most is that you find this unclear, that you don’t understand how that can be a concern for somebody.
Because frankly? Stephanie Grace was a law school student at Harvard University, a high-profile institution, and it seems to be a whole lot more focused on when people do this in situations like that, than when some random person off the street, or in an internet forum, or whatever, just says There are so many venues in which the cost of signalling that is minimal, and this rather-homogenous website in which Vladimir_M is a fairly typical member seems like one of them.
How does your original description not cover the Stephanie Grace case?
Then, in an environment dominated numerically by similar people, they find it similarly plausible to think that if they voice a belief that is uncharitable towards, or does not reflect well upon, some social minority or other, they will be...well, it’s not clear what. Censored? Hunted down and sued? I’m not sure what they’re really afraid of, but they’re angry about the idea that it might happen to them.
It’s clear to me that Stephanie Grace should have been aware that even if in her environment people think like her, voicing a belief that doesn’t reflect well upon blacks is dangerous. No, she won’t be censored or sued, but her prospects will take a sharp turn downwards. She should have been afraid, and maybe angry about what might happen to her if she dared speak honestly, even in a private email.
And yet, you seem to think that she had nothing to be afraid of, and that her being afraid or angry would have been kind of silly and stupid on her behalf (or at least, that’s the impression I get from the way you write).
(Note that I’m not saying this is the main reason sensitive topics should be avoided on LessWrong. There are better reasons to avoid those topics.)
I find it difficult to believe Vladimir_M, who is posting anonymously, will suffer consequences more unpleasant than a lengthy argument he doesn’t want to have with somebody who does not agree with him.
As far as anonymity goes Vladimir_M isn’t really really up there. Enough comments to earn 7k karma gives away rather a lot of information. And I wasn’t aware Vladimir_M was a pseudonym.
Writing stuff you don’t want associated with you on the internet is a terrible idea.
She also evidently posed the discussion as though it were a matter of some legitimate scientific consensus, relatively unobjectionable from a theoretical standpoint.
No—that’s what the blogger linked to in the grandparent did.
the idea that IQ is general intelligence and the gap is genetic
It’s often a good idea to point directly to statements people have made. This is particularly true when the claim is about “LessWrong itself”. If an idea is common, one can surely find multiple people espousing or assuming it, and if the idea is part of the LW consensus, that would be reflected in comments to the cited sources.
If an idea is common, one can surely find multiple people espousing or assuming it, and if the idea is part of the LW consensus, that would be reflected in comments to the cited sources.
There is probably a difference in IQ between different groups with any significant historical causal relationship between the members. Race certainly qualifies. It would be astounding if some difference between the IQ of various races was not present. I don’t know or particularly care which groups are higher than other groups.
EDIT: If the meaning isn’t clear I was just reassuring lessdazed that lesswrong does, in fact, have examples of people accepting that prior to any observations of any race we should expect there to be some degree of genetically based IQ difference between races or genetically related populations. Since it was links to examples that were requested not examples themselves I fulfilled the technicality with a wry self-reference. This was not intended to offend anyone or suggest anything about anything anyone had said beyond answering lessdazed’s request.
I’m not sure that phrased that way that Jandila necessarily will disagree with you that much.
I’m curious which of the following statements you agree with and which Jandila agrees with:
It is likely that there are genes in the human gene pool which effectively code for tendencies in IQ and are not fixed throughout all humans, and where the non-fixed versions aren’t things that lead to what is normally classed as mental retardation or something similar.
It is likely that some of those genes either through causal historical issues, or random drift and founder effects are distributed through different human populations in different ways, where populations in question include various groups often classified as “ethnic” or “racial” groups.
There are groups in society which have been historically mistreated and may still be mistreated. This can lead to environmental impacts on IQ. Similarly, different cultures have different norms about learning, test-taking and child-raising that can with a decent probability impact IQ.
I suspect that both of you will agree on all three of those points. I suspect more disagreement is really occurring on how 2 and 3 interact implicitly. In particular, Jandila believes that the environmental issues likely swamp any genetic effect. Moreover, there’s an apparent disagreement in whether IQ is an effective proxy for the general notion of “intelligence”.
I’m also going to use this to interject from minor factual issue that may be relevant: In multiple cultures where there is a minority that has been historically persecuted, the minority does not do as well on many forms of tests. One example that will likely be not mindkilling for most English speakers are the Ainu in Japan. Why this pattern exists is a distinct issue but this data point does seem to be relevant.
I’m not sure that phrased that way that Jandila necessarily will disagree with you that much.
I disagree on the word ‘the’. It’s a surprisingly big deal—for me at least. It may be a disagreement that is significantly influenced by mere careless presentation of ideas but then I think details of communication are what Jandila’s comment was most criticized for by others too.
I haven’t looked closely with what Jandila has said beyond that which is quoted by lessdazed. I’m not especially interested in Stephanie Grace. I did follow the ‘Lynching’ link and learned all sorts of things about various forms of vigilante social sanction. Then some interesting facts about bitumen and pine tar (via the association with feathers).
Ah yes, that makes sense. I get the feeling that a lot of the arguments occurring here are over view clusters rather than actual views. No one for example has stated explicitly that the “racial group X” has more or less genetic intelligence in this thread, but given the discussion in the thread about Stephanie Grace and others it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that that’s only marginally below the surface.
No one for example has stated explicitly that the “racial group X” has more or less genetic intelligence in this thread
I’ve been told Jews are smarter on average than most races. But I was told that by Jews so it is conceivable that self serving bias could apply. I mention this because if what the pop-theory suggested was accurate (not something I would particularly support) it would be a case where environmental pressures and all sorts of discrimination of a specific group of people actually increased relative IQ.
Tangent: The data is actually about Ashkenazic Jews only. The result is consistent across a wide range of tests, including not just IQ but also Wonderlic and others. It is deeply unclear if this is due to environmental, genetic or other effects. There’s also been some suggestion that the Ashkenazic population for some reason has a lot of outliers that are what is actually causing the result. There’s a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners who fit in that category. However, it is important to note that Ashkenazic Jews are one of the most widely studied groups in the world when it comes to genetics and so far no alleles that seem to have to do with intelligence have been discovered in the population.
I think that, for many centuries, the Ashkenazi environment rewarded establishing a rigid social structure that studies and followed strict rules (preventing assimilation), but selected very strongly for individuals that could step outside the status quo at the right time. I can see how that would lead to Nobel prize winners.
Given the time scale involved, it doesn’t seem like genetic selection could change more than how well you integrate successful memes. Some anecdotes from my own genealogy about relevant selection pressures:
Marriages were usually arranged by parents to get the best possible match. My great, great grandfather was wealthy for the village they were in. When he needed a husband for his daughter, he asked around for the most promising yeshiva student, and gave him a ten year stipend to continue study for marrying her (apparently the standard was more like 2 years).
When Poland got jumped, my grandparents ended up on the Soviet side of the line. My grandmother went back to the Nazi side twice to try to convince her friends and family that they had a better chance of surviving with the Soviets, but they didn’t want to leave the cities to go somewhere unknown. They were all trapped in the Ghetto system, and liquidated within four years.
My grandfather escaped the soviets twice—the first time, he noticed that his transport train was picking up stowaways who would jump off around curves (turned out they were farmers who lived near the tracks but not a station), and he just pretended to be one of them while everyone else stayed on the train to Siberia. The second time he drank all night with the guards, and convinced them that they would never get in trouble for letting him go to find his wife. Shortly after his third capture, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and all the Poles were released to go fight the Germans. He always said that you need an escape plan for everything in life, and refused to enter any room with only one exit.
My grandfather escaped the soviets twice—the first time, he noticed that his transport train was picking up stowaways who would jump off around curves (turned out they were farmers who lived near the tracks but not a station), and he just pretended to be one of them while everyone else stayed on the train to Siberia. The second time he drank all night with the guards, and convinced them that they would never get in trouble for letting him go to find his wife. Shortly after his third capture, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and all the Poles were released to go fight the Germans. He always said that you need an escape plan for everything in life, and refused to enter any room with only one exit.
He emigrated to Israel in 1948 with a wife, two kids, and no money. He worked as a day laborer, claiming various construction skills to whoever pulled up and asked. One time he claimed he was a plumber in the old country, and spent two days installing an outdoor toilet. He finally saved up enough to buy a small grocery, so that he could run his own business. He walked out back after buying the place to find—the outhouse he had built years before.
He was definitely a badass, but the cancer was pretty far along by the time I knew him and I didn’t speak Hebrew.
There’s also been some suggestion that the Ashkenazic population for some reason has a lot of outliers that are what is actually causing the result.
That does not seem to me a very plausible suggestion. Outliers could explain the Nobel prizes, but would not affect the mean, which is measured to be different. It is conceivable that some non-gaussian distribution would explain both, but larger populations that have been studied in more detail exhibit bell curves, or at least thin tails (ie, not affecting the mean).
However, it is important to note that Ashkenazic Jews are one of the most widely studied groups in the world when it comes to genetics and so far no alleles that seem to have to do with intelligence have been discovered in the population.
This fact alone leads me to think that the most parsimonious explanation is just that Ashkenazi Jews have a cultural tradition of scholarship, whereas public-school culture in the English-speaking world is often starkly anti-intellectual. If we’ve turned over the genetic rock and had a good look under it without finding anything interesting, we should update to think it more likely that the explanation is under a different rock.
Confused. Your link seems to go to this post itself.
In fact it goes specifically to the comment itself. And the comment itself contains an example of that which is required in such a link. Fancy that. ;)
Technically impressive. Unamusing given the serious nature of what is being discussed and the fairly obnoxious way this apparently expresses a point in a passive-aggressive way that is on the passive enough side that it isn’t fully clear what the point is. This damages the signal to noise ratio.
(ETA: Ah, you made the comment in two edits so you’d know the comments permanent link. Clever.)
(ETA: In case it isn’t clear, the more controversial an issue the more reason to try not to be a dick if the conversation has a remote chance of being productive.)
Passive aggressive? Obnoxious? WHAT? I gave an example of the kind requested so that whatever conversation may be taking place wouldn’t be derailed by “Where are your links?” demands. It gives confirmation that people (or, technically, at least one person) understands basic probability and how to form priors. ie. There are differences in traits between different populations, IQ is a trait.
Obnoxious? WHAT? I gave an example of the kind requested
Downvoted—yes, obnoxious, because you could have just said “this comment here”, but you sought to amuse yourself by providing a link that leads back to itself and thus obfuscating, and when tensions are high, amusing yourself and not communicating clearly sends all the wrong signals that you are disrespecting the other person.
Passive aggressive? Obnoxious? WHAT? I gave an example of the kind so that whatever conversation wouldn’t be derailed by “Where are your links?” demands.
The implied point seems to be some sort of claim that the type of statement had not been made in the thread up to that point. Rather than asserting that explicitly or even just upvoting lessdazed’s remark you made it harder for people to wade through this conversation.
This is the second time you have leveled that charge at me inappropriately in the last few days.
Most humans will generally not be very good evaluators of whether their comments contribute well to signal/noise issues. So the assertion that they are inappropriate isn’t that helpful. Although the fact that your earlier comment where I did make that remark is currently at +2 tentatively suggests that more people than not disagree with my assessment in that context. In that context, it does strongly look like you were using inflammatory language whether or not you realized that it would be so.
I can only assume it is personal (and passive aggressive) because otherwise it makes no sense.
It isn’t personal. Until you pointed it out I didn’t even remember that my other comment in the context of the SMBC cartoon was to you. I suppose it could have been occurring in some sort of back of my mind, but I don’t think so. Also, I don’t think there’s anything that passive aggressive about those sorts of remarks, I’d consider my comments to be missing the “passive” bit and being pretty aggressive statements of noting when things are not helpful for rational discussion here.
But if you want even more blunt I can do so: You are coming across as a dick. Your earlier “pussy” remark made you come across as a sexist dick. When one is having a conversation about a controversial issue involving sex and gender issues it is generally a good idea to not come across as a sexist dick because it will a) emotionally inflame people who don’t agree with you and make them less likely to listen to you and b) turn away from Less Wrong people who might otherwise be interested in seeing what Less Wrong is about.
In general, calm interaction is better than hot interaction. Explicitly stated points are better than implicit and vague points. Polite statements are better than uncivil statements. I’ve been repeatedly tempted to go through most of this thread and just downvote everyone for making Less Wrong resemble the areas of the internet I try to avoid. It is very clear that the issues being touched on here are mindkillers for many people, and that the karma scores involved reflect to a large extent which mindkilled tribalistic groups happen to have more people around here not in any substantial way a reflection of the arguments (except to a very weak level). None of these are good things. You are, along with other people, acting in a way that makes these problems more, not less extreme. None of this is good if one is trying to actually have rational dialogue.
You are coming across as a dick. Your earlier “pussy” remark made you come across as a sexist dick.
It just occurred to me now and I don’t believe I missed the irony when reading the first time. I don’t want to imply I consider this to be particularly offensive (well, except the part where you called me a dick) but do you realize that you called me a dick both earlier (about something unrelated) and also here because I used a word for genitalia as a negative descriptor?
Yes, I did realize that. (Although note that I didn’t say you are a dick, I said you were coming across as a dick. These aren’t the same thing.) Two issues guided that word choice: First, it was an attempt (possibly a poor one) to speak in a language closer to the sort you were using so the point might come across better. Second, in this particular context, the relevant point is that in a highly male environment you were using a negative term for the genitalia of the other gender. That said, neither of these were probably very good arguments. While one could potentially argue that in our society “dick” is more gender neutral as an negative term than “pussy”, that argument seems to be more of a rationalization than a genuinely useful argument. I suspect that there may have also been some degree of priming occurring given that I had earlier today had a conversation with a female homo sapiens who expressed disinterest in Less Wrong because it “looked like a sausage-fest” (and also apparently that this thread as well as some of the other relationship related threads were “creepy”). Some amount of Phil Plait’s speech was also floating around. But even that is an explanation more than a good reason. So I’ll just say that I was aware of what I was doing, made a conscious decision to do so, but in retrospect had poor reasons for doing it.
It should also mention that judgement about whether something is subject to to Rule 1 interpretation should be particularly suspect. Recursive inclusiveness is implicit. For this reason It is also a charge nearly impossible to defend oneself from directly.
The implied point seems to be some sort of claim that the type of statement had not been made in the thread up to that point.
That wasn’t the point at all, as far as I can tell. The point seemed to be that wedrifid was volunteering to be a representative of the point of view in question (while engaging in some nonverbal humor of the sort that is only possible in online forums).
Your [wedrifid’s] earlier “pussy” remark made you come across as a sexist dick.
Did you forget to update on the new information that was provided?
That wasn’t the point at all, as far as I can tell.
Yes, I think reasonable individuals can read the statement differently. I suspect that my reading was on the more negative end of the spectrum, and I do have to wonder what primed me to think of it, and I don’t have a good explanation for that. That said, it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable interpretation. It seems that the difficulty of reading what other humans mean in a text medium is really quite difficult. While this is a known fact, I apparently don’t compensate for it as well as I should. That said, I suspect that I am very likely not the only person who read the comment in the way I read it.
Did you forget to update on the new information that was provided to you?
No. I did update, but see elsewhere in this subthread where I discussed the relevance of that remark.
I downvoted that comment for confusing levels, not for inappropriate language. Maybe other downvotes are attributable to that problem with it. Maybe upvotes are in spite of the language. Hard to tell.
That’s a good point. I’m making a bad assumption that other humans will focus on the same issues in a comment that I will especially when it is long and contains a variety of different points.
Note: JoshuaZ must have caught the comment before I removed the part replying to ‘signal to noise’ (and the second two quotes are selected from that part). While I would stand by everything I said there would accomplish anything useful. I did not wish to edit the history of the conversation to distort the flow or to leave the parent making no sense—more to prevent the conversation altogether.
You are coming across as a dick. Your earlier “pussy” remark made you come across as a sexist dick.
I had hoped the reply to you by komponisto would have resolved that feeling for you. It came with a wikipedia link!
I had hoped the reply to you by komponisto would have resolved that feeling for you. It came with a wikipedia link!
Komponisto’s comment there and the ensuing discussion was etymologically fascinating. I doubt the vast majority of readers were already aware of the relevant etymology (indeed, you were unaware of the etymology). Remember, rationalists should win. If something has a connotation that is likely to be extremely distracting and trigger strong emotional reactions, then using the excuse that a sufficiently intelligent, educated and rational reader would not have that reaction is not helpful.
I think, incidentally, that one of the issues that may be occurring in our disagreement of how your remarks contributed to the signal/noise is what constitutes signal and noise. In particular, it is possible that I’m using a broader notion of what information is being conveyed in some sense, so I consider emotional triggers to be noise even if they aren’t denotatively part of a message.
It’s not that it’s impossible that there are signficant gaps clustering around race (indeed, it seems pretty straightforward and established that this is the case)...the gap is genetic
That was describing the measured gap in which certain race clusters are measured at higher IQs than others.
wedrifid said:
It would be astounding if some difference between the IQ of various races was not present.
This is a point that I have made several times, but that does not qualify as a counterexample because it is not the claim that is supposedly consensus on LW.
I don’t know or particularly care which groups are higher than other groups.
One of the straw men in Jandila’s argument was that the specific measured gaps in IQ scores among racial groups was caused primarily by genetics (that is reading charitably, for a very plausible interpretation is that the supposed belief is that it is exclusively caused by genetics, which is just silly). As you claim not to know “which groups are higher than other groups,” you did not find an example supporting the argument.
I agree with your point entirely and hope my comment is not taken as support of whatever Jandila is saying. I meant only to give a prototypical example of what people (including myself) do actually say on the subject. As you no doubt picked up I was careful to avoid what would be an absurd claim—that genetics was the only factor and even the merely controversial claims about which way such genetic factors would be an influence.
I unequivocally affirm the use of my testimony about what credible lesswrongians have tended to say now or in the past as evidence in support of your argument. :)
Tangent: I’m actually not sure which way the intelligence difference would go between Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens. Michael Vassar actually boasts that he may have saved the world by convincing a genetic biologist to stop trying to go all “Jurassic Park” on Neanderthal DNA. After all they are an apex predator that have comparable intelligence to us and could plausibly be more intelligent in some aspects.
Actually, randomized controlled studies show that breastfeeding has no effect on IQ. More generally, decades of RCT have failed to demonstrate a causal basis of any of breastfeeding’s correlates.
Actually, randomized controlled studies show that breastfeeding has no effect on IQ. More generally, decades of RCT have failed to demonstrate a causal basis of any of breastfeeding’s correlates.
Really? Not even immune system response? This ‘colostrum’ stuff is a scam?
Sorry, maybe I implied more studies than there have been. My impression is that the RCTs have been very focused, a terrible waste of randomization. If you find an RCT addressing the immune system, tell me about it.
If you find an RCT addressing the immune system, tell me about it.
None spring to mind. The closest I have explored to the subject is the effectiveness of supplementing with bovine colostrum on adult humans. The limited effectiveness I saw there can’t exactly be considered a surprise of the same order.
I agree with much of this analysis but I don’t think that Vladimir_M has (as far as I can tell) made any substantive comments in the direction you imply.
I have made comments about this topic on LW on several occasions, but the part about me “ha[ving] said the same things openly,” the “same things” referring to the views characterized in the last paragraph of the same post, is pure confabulation. (In fact, I’d find it surprising if this relatively new commenter is even aware of what I wrote about the topic in the past, since I don’t remember mentioning it in quite a while.)
Moreover, the claim about “hyper-focusing” is particularly absurd, given that nobody mentioned this concrete topic at all, until Jandila brought it up and attributed it to me in bizarre fashion, clearly striving to bring this topic into focus. This attribution started with the statement “I would be unsurprised to learn you believe ”—and after a few comments, in which I made no specific mention of , it morphed into “[V.M.] has already said the same things [referring to a caricatured version of ] openly.” Surely it is not unreasonable to demand higher standards of discourse than that—and here, of all places?
But even aside from all that, the analysis is full of various other more or less subtle misleading claims and rhetorical tricks. Unless the standards on LW have really deteriorated, finding these should be a fairly simple exercise for the reader.
Surely it is not unreasonable to demand higher standards of discourse than that—and here, of all places?
Reading this thread I’m somewhat dispirited to feel that you indeed may be right in most of your points with regard to the failings on the community.
One can feel the McCarthaynist undertones of the discourse. Meta discussions seem to have been skilfully misdirected and subverted into what is for nearly all intents and purposes political and ideological warfare, where guilty until proven innocent reigns as the norm.
In other words, a charitable assumption is that Stephanie Grace is guilty only of ignorant or uncritical reasoning about the topic, staggeringly bad timing and social signalling, and even worse spin control.
For example, just to lower my Karma even further, could it be that the fact that old fashioned standards of credit worthiness had disparate impact on certain races and neighborhoods, not be a sign that those standards were “racist”, but rather a sign that certain races and neighborhoods, were, on average, no damned good.
Could it be that the prohibition against certain thoughts has cost the American taxpayer over a trillion dollars, about ten thousand dollars per tax payer.
The evidence for this proposition is overwhelming, but no one is allowed to discuss it.
While I think that political and regulatory decision making as to which loans were risky and which were not is guaranteed to lead to disaster even in the absence of affirmative action, affirmative action is particularly deadly, because a financial system requires truth and that lies be punished, whereas affirmative action requires lies and that truth be punished, so when affirmative action meets finance, it is like matter and antimatter.
When official truth meets finance, the financial system is likely to implode. When the official truths of affirmative action meet finance, the financial system is guaranteed to implode.
I don’t think there is any connection between affirmative action and the recent “financial crises”. If you do, you may have been mindkilled by your dislike of affirmative action. Maybe this idea sounded ridiculous at first, but you flinched away from betraying an ally, and now you actually believe it?
I don’t think there is any connection between affirmative action and the recent “financial crises”.
You are in denial. Search Trulia.com for foreclosure sales, for suburbs for which you know the racial distribution.
If we look at where the defaults were, they were where the Hispanics were, and to a lesser extent, where the blacks were.. In the first year of the crisis lily white suburbs had less than one percent as many defaults as suburbs with a significant black or Hispanic population.
Why, did the banks lower the their lending standards? There were a pile of government papers telling them that lending standards were racist, since they had disparate impact. Beverly Hills Bank failed to lower its standards, and was condemned as “Substantially non compliant with the CRA”, which is to say, “racist”.
The gap between Hispanics and whites was extreme in the first year or so of the crisis, because most Hispanics never made a single payment, while whites took a while to get into trouble. So today the ratio is about twenty to one, while shortly after the crisis it was about one hundred to one. But the ratio is still extreme and glaringly obvious, though not quite as extreme and glaringly obvious as it was in 2008-2009
However, every empirical study that has looked at CRA loans has concluded that they were safer than subprime mortgages that were purely profit driven, and CRA loans accounted for a tiny fraction of total subprime mortgages (107)
...
In November 2009 55% of commercial real estate loans were currently underwater, despite being completely unaffected by the CRA.[114]
...
He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA, and another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. Barr noted that institutions fully regulated by CRA made “perhaps one in four” sub-prime loans, and that “the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight”.[123]
From Wikipedia, but still in accord with what I’ve read elsewhere, and there are plenty of cites for you to check in their Community Reinvestment Act article.
Besides that, even if the bad loans were made because of ‘affirmative action’ that doesn’t make the crisis the fault of affirmative action, just as if I loan my hypothetical shifty brother-in-law $100 that I don’t expect back in order to keep peace with my equally hypothetical wife, it wouldn’t be my wife’s fault if I don’t have rent money at the end of the month because I was budgeting as if I would get that money back.
However, every empirical study that has looked at CRA loans has concluded that they were safer than subprime mortgages that were purely profit driven, and CRA loans accounted for a tiny fraction of total subprime mortgages (107)
I give the CRA as an example of official truth deviating wildly from the truth that anyone can see, and you respond that official truth must be true because official sources say it is true?
They were government and academic studies, therefore report official reality, not observable reality, not the reality accessible to the senses, but the reality generated by official consensus.
And this is exactly my original point: That on politically sensitive issues, government and academic official truth violently and ludicrously contradicts the truth that everyone can plainly see, and no one dares mention.
Any article that speaks of CRA loans, is a transparent lie:
For starters, there is no such category as “CRA loans”. All loans are subject to the CRA, just as affirmative action affects every student. When regulators examined banks for compliance with the CRA during the events that caused the crisis (2000 to 2005), they did not mention any special subset of loans as “CRA loans”, nor any category of loans as being more CRA than another. The category “CRA loans” did not exist in the minds of bankers or regulators when they issued papers on the compliance of particular banks, or was too insignificant to mention.
Hence any study that makes an assertion about “CRA loans” is transparently lying.
To speak of “CRA loans” is to imply that even after 2000, when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, the CRA was just a tiny tiny little thing, which is a transparent lie. If one lie, all lies. CRA dominated the banks, as “Diversity” dominates academic admissions.
Where are the “CRA loans” in this report, which report resulted in acts of compliance that sent the eminently solvent and well run Beverly Hills Bank broke?
In the case of Beverly Hills Bank, I am sure that Wikipedia, academia, and government, can say that not a single “CRA loan” failed, since there is no indication that Beverley Hills bank ever made a single loan in the official category “CRA”, if such a category still existed at the time, but they were nonetheless driven into bankruptcy by the CRA.
You don’t necessarily need to leave. You are not incapable of non-motivated cognition.
Regardless of the accuracy of your claims, you are obviously not being effective here.
Rationalists should win: if you are not convincing people and want to then the fact that you believe you have an excuse is irrelevant. Ultimately what matters is whether you are accomplishing your goals.
Having certain topics discussed too openly on Lesswrong could result in several unfortunate things happening.
It could make certain potential rationalists be deterred from participating in the community.
It could attract the attention of certain contrarians who are less-than-rational and, for various reasons, should not necessarily be considered potential rationalists.
Most importantly, from the standpoint of the Singularity Institute (or, at least, what I think is its standpoint), it could increase the probability of human extinction by harming the SI’s reputation.
I think as far as 1 goes, it seems to me like that’s already happening—I know a few people not on this site (who discovered it independently of myself, none of whom know each other), and many more I’ve encountered about online, who explicitly view LW as essentially compromised by 2, hence they have no interest in being here. YMMV how much those people are reachable or desireable, of course, but it’s difficult for me to disagree with their basic perception that this place is already full of contrarian-cluster types who’re intellectuals but still quite biased.
I also wonder about signalling now, re: “less-than-rational”—given what I understand of rationality as it’s described and the reasons humans don’t tend to display that trait most of the time, it seems like it’s only asymptotically-reachable—you can reduce the frequency of incorrect decisions and amend certain biases in short or long-term ways, but you probably can’t get rid of it altogether. Who here is truly “rational?” Even Eliezer Yudkowsky still has his own biases—the most you can hope for is, well, “less wrong”, and that is work to achieve.
So assuming (big assumption here!) that I understand the about rationality and how LW views it, and why it’s desireable and how much realistically a human being can self-optimize for that trait, it seems like “less than rational” should probably be avoided. Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all going to be until such time as we come up with some kind of game-breaking thing that allows a person to really just run rationality full-time if that’s what they want?
You seem to be suggesting that, since the community already falls short of its stated goal, there’s no particular reason to avoid a practice that makes that goal less likely.
First, that “we might draw people less-than-rational, and that’s undesireable” seems to suggest, in a Sapir-Whorf kinda way, that the utterers consider themselves to be rational, rather than rationality being a thing which is valuable to increase in oneself, and that this suggests to me a degree of reflective incoherence on the part of those whose mental model can be described that way, which is at conflict with the goal of being less wrong.
Second, that members of this community should probably not give themselves too much credit for rationality or presume that any given proficiency in the methods of rationality has adequately compensated for their biases—at any given point it is still overwhelmingly likely that their cognition is affected by some unnoticed, unaddressed and significant bias, which may not be obvious to other members of this largely-homogenous community. This also amounts to reflective incoherence.
Corollary: That this state of affairs is obvious to an unknown but possibly significant number of people who might be supportive of the community’s aggregate goals and methods, but who are put off by the perception of such missed blind spots; that is, not everyone who looks at LW and rejects it is rejecting rationality, or unsuited for it, or just incapable of learning it—and nobody here, even the seasoned and highly-upvoted contributors, is without bias.
“Less than rational” isn’t the phrase I’d use; as you say, rationality really shouldn’t be understood as a discrete state but as an asymptotic goal, and even then it’s probably preferable to speak in terms of individual biases or cognitive skills as appropriate. But J_Taylor’s second point doesn’t lose much of its force if you cast it in terms of individuals seeking company in their specific contrarian beliefs, for whom this whole “rationality” business might be little more than a group-identifying label or a justifying habit of thought. Granted, it might eventually be possible to bring such a demographic around to actual truth-seeking, but it’ll take more work than debiasing someone who’s already posting in good faith—and this site isn’t so large or so stable that it can afford to spend a lot of time dragging people out of self-constructed ideological labyrinths in which they’re quite comfortable.
It’s a particularly nasty problem, though: ideology looks like common sense from the inside, and so it’s hard to tell to what extent the site culture’s already corrupted by arational ideas that’ve just happened to achieve local hegemony. I’d like to say that a careful and fearless examination of any beliefs that look like common sense to us should turn up the major problems, but frankly I don’t think we’re there yet—and an outside view, unfortunately, isn’t necessarily going to be helpful. There’s plenty of motivated cognition out there, too.
Nornagest defended the point better than I probably could. Nonetheless, I would like to clarify that “less-than-rational” was myself being slightly too euphemistic. I meant to say that some contrarians are contrarians due to highly problematic reasons. Some of them should not even be considered contrarians, but merely individuals who retain the beliefs of tribes which are not respected within mainstream intellectual culture. These individuals, due to opportunity costs if nothing else, should probably not be considered potential rationalists at this time.
For the record, I agree with your last two paragraphs. I might agree with your first suggestion as well.… I agree that “rational” constantly runs the risk of becoming a mere tribal marker used to enforce in-group/out-group boundaries and thus detached from any actual improvement in decision-making skills, and that different people here succumb to that temptation to different degrees at different times.
I’m less confident about the idea that being concerned about the quality of people attracted to the site, or endorsing decisions on the basis of such concern, is particularly reliable evidence that the speaker is succumbing to that temptation… but I’m no longer confident you’re even suggesting that.
Oh, I was just chiming in about how Vladimir_M claims that his positions are too unacceptable to be voiced publicly (even though, presumably, he believes they are true), when given what details I know or have inferred about him it seems more likely that his estimate of the cost of signalling is overstated (and what censure or punishment apart from reproving comments by people who disagree on the internet he expects to suffer is unclear to me). I was trying to explain a broader social pattern into which I see his behavior falling, to the person who’d expressed skepticism about his concerns.
I was trying to explain a broader social pattern into which I see his [i.e. mine—V.] behavior falling, to the person who’d expressed skepticism about his concerns.
For someone who wields the word “prejudice” as derogatory, you tend to assume an awful lot about people whom you don’t know at all except for a few paragraphs of their writing about impersonal and abstract topics.
I’m not “wielding” the word prejudice; it’s not a weapon. Also, in the above case I’m very specifically referring to prejudice as a phenomenon, and it being something less acceptable to signal—not saying that anything I don’t like qualifies as prejudice. I’m using a specific noun with a pretty basic definition—not suggesting that any particular set of statements is a case example.
Trent Lott’s Senate career was destroyed because he praised Strom Thurmond. I’m not saying that sort of thing happens often, but it’s not nothing.
I wish more people would extrapolate from their own vulnerability to insults to the idea that people in general are vulnerable to insults, but this doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
In particular, if someone wants men’s threats of violence to women, even humorous and hyperbolic ones, to be judged more harshly than vice versa, I certainly find it a defensible position.
Most effectively by insulting the masculinity of any male who disagrees with you. I’ve actually seen this done. It was almost comical in the degree it went to.
I’m not interested in debating this particular issue, but clearly a reasonable argument could be made based on the disparities in physical strength.
What makes the broader context interesting, however, is that issues like these demonstrate that principled egalitarianism is not a viable Schelling point for basing social norms. This however clearly leads to some very problematic questions.
If I chose to defend such a position, I’d defend it by arguing it’s more dangerous to indirectly encourage the physically-stronger group to exert violence on the physically-weaker group than vice-versa. The words “on average” to be inserted as appropriate in the preceding sentence.
Probably, but then I would have missed out on the surreal experience of getting jumped all over for admitting that I am offended by a statement that was intended as an example of something offensive, in a thread about how impossible it is to have a conversation about these things without getting jumped all over. It’s been great so far!
Same capacity for offensiveness, perhaps—in that some overly defensive people will surely choose to feel attacked (“be offended”) just as much by either question. But same average offensiveness? I seriously doubt it.
Signalling is important. “Offensiveness” functions by signalling you an enemy. If you signal strongly enough that your question is about a desire to understand neurobiological causes of a statistical phenomenon, not about an attempt to attack groups of people, fewer people will feel attacked.
Now some people will surely argue that people just “ought grow tougher skins” instead. But that’s an “ought”-argument, and I’m referring to an “is”-question, which choice of words and sentences leads to a better discussion.
Those questions are not remotely equivalent. I suppose as a second order implication, if you assume that the average man is not very good at math, you could also assume that the average women is really not very good at math, but obviously both the male and female distributions have people above their respective means. In any case, “Why and how do women suck at math” sounds to me like “Why do all women suck at math,” not like “Why does the average woman suck at math,” even if the latter question was based on an accurate presupposition.
and what can be done about it, without gratuitously offending people.
The distinction between gratuitously offending people, and inadvertently offending people, does not seem to be widely noticed, whether on Less Wrong or other places. Less Wrong has established implicit rules for what may be said, so there is a narrow class of things that can be said on Less Wrong without getting into trouble, that cannot be said elsewhere without getting into trouble, but that class is narrow and subject to change, so narrow, twisty, complex, and obscure, that I do not find it interesting, though Vladimir does seem to find it interesting.
To participate in consensus building on Occupy Wall Street, you need an Ivy League Education in political correctness. Less Wrong is not nearly as bad as that, but Less Wrongers that tread near forbidden topics as Vladimir does, are developing more expertise in what is permissible thought, and what means are permissible to express them, than they are developing expertise in forbidden topics.
but in that year I haven’t seen any actual fact presented in LessWrong that’s enflamed spirits one tenth as much as the obscure half-hints by trolls like sam and his “I can’t say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I’m not, therefore I’m not making them” style of debate.
For the purposes of anyone reading: When someone makes a list of two dozen supposed “rules”, then they must also offer a method to prioritize between them—or their claims become unfalsifiable and “not even wrong”, since by cherrypicking rules, one can then explain anything.
E.g. sam says people are not allowed to “criticize blacks, women, homosexuals”—and yet at other times he accuses people of only being allowed to praise Romney (a white man), but attack Cain (a black man) and Palin (a woman). To explain this he can apply a different rule about “left-wing Republicans”—but does this rule always supercede or not? Nobody knows, so the claim is unfalsifiable.
People often bash Paris Hilton—though she’s both a parasite, and female as well. This would falsify two of sam’s supposed rules, but he can use a different rule (about being allowed to bash whites) to explain this away as well.
Things like “no enemies on the left, no friends to the right” are likewise unfalsifiable since someone can arbitrarily label people like Gaddafi’s Libya or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda or even Fidel Castro’s Cuba “right-wing” if one wants to.
Compare and contrast with the actually excellent response by lessdazed who provided just two rules, clearly prioritized, and which yet explain a far vaster list of taboo subjects more precisely and comprehensively that sam’s list does, by connecting them all back to the core issue of egalitarianism. That ruleset has predictive capacity, because that ruleset could be falsified, if it were false.
For the purposes of anyone reading: When someone makes a list of two dozen supposed “rules”, then they must also offer a method to prioritize between them—or their claims become unfalsifiable and “not even wrong”, since by cherrypicking rules, one can then explain anything.
They explain less, to the extent that the rules contradict each other. It is unlikely that they explain nothing—in fact they would probably have to be explicitly contrived for that purpose.
What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that “I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I’m not going to share it, because most people can’t handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion.”
Obscurantism (French: obscurantisme, from the Latin obscurans, “darkening”) is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: 1) restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the public, and, 2) deliberate obscurity—an abstruse style (as in literature and art) characterized by deliberate vagueness....
What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that “I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I’m not going to share it, because most people can’t handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion.”
That’s not necessarily the claim (explicit or implied). It can also be that even if the information were to be handled in a non-mind-killing fashion, the resulting conclusions would be beyond the pale of what is acceptable under the current social norms.
As for the definition of obscurantism you gave, this is definitely not obscurantism under (1), since it withholds less information to the public than if one remains completely silent. As for (2), it doesn’t involve abstruseness, deliberate or not, since the claim is in fact very simple (as e.g. spelled out above). The most you can say is that it involves deliberate vagueness, but even there, the purpose of the vagueness is not to mislead, confuse, or perform some rhetorical legerdemain, but merely to hand out a limited but perfectly clear piece of information.
It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well… disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I’ve been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another.
Everything? I don’t believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.
Yes, of course, it’s not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.
I agree with you completely regarding privacy. If you feel that you must absolutely prevent some piece of information from leaking out into the world for all to see, you must treat every communication medium—and the Internet specifically—as insecure. The world is littered with dead political careers of people who did not heed this warning.
That said though (to paraphrase the old adage), are we rationalists or are we mice ? If you hold some beliefs that can get you burned at the stake (figuratively speaking… hopefully...), then isn’t it all the more important to determine if these beliefs are true ? And how are you going to do that all by yourself, with no one to critique your ideas and to expose your biases ?
This is just a quibble because I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but the traffic could conceivably be archived in its encrypted state for decryption later.
Yes, I theoretically have to consider how good people from the distant future who particularly want to know what I said now are at playing with large primes. Because there is always the possibility that a man in the middle is saving the encrypted data stream just in case it becomes possible to decipher in the future.
Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don’t think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.
(I downvoted because I saw the comment as decreasing the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio: as Nick noted, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t archive private pages or emails, and is therefore not relevant.)
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
I support this proposal and would like to join the mailing list if one becomes available. But why do you think a mailing list would fare better than a website? Because of restricted access?
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
Is 1100 enough karma? I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it.
Yes, that’s another way in which it just doesn’t look like a good idea. When you’re organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you’re doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I’m glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that “I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I’m not going to share it, because most people can’t handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion.”
That’s not necessarily the claim (explicit or implied). It can also be that even if the information were to be handled in a non-mind-killing fashion, the resulting conclusions would be beyond the pale of what is acceptable under the current social norms.
It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. (“Offends” in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it’s smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
Well, it’s fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I’m not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was notalone in that interpretation (I see you’ve already responded to one of those comments as well).
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
In that case, I’m somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.
If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
The trouble is, I really don’t see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don’t want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I’d hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.
To take a prominent example, it’s impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman’s sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it’s usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of “prejudice” and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).
On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.
Perhaps if you started by sharing your dataset first (with names changed to protect the guilty, etc.), then the conclusions you drew from it, and only afterwards the advice you would give to a younger version of yourself?
So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you’re willing, I’d like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won’t personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?
Well, it’s a topic for a whole book, not a brief comment buried deep in a vast old thread. But for some concrete examples, see e.g. the comments I left in this subthread.
So basically, if a guy tries to have a long-term relationship with a girl who’s had a lot of partners, he better study Game or there’s a good chance she’ll get bored, because she’s used to very attractive guys? That makes sense; I wouldn’t think of that as very controversial. Of course, that ignores that some women actually do also make an effort to work on their long-term relationship skills and find ways to deal with periods where their partners seem less attractive.
I didn’t see anything about looks in that subthread; does something similar apply to dating someone very good-looking?
By “looks” I didn’t mean the level of attractiveness, but more generally, all clues available from people’s appearance. Clearly, this is going to lead to strife once people start recognizing themselves, or someone they care about, in the criteria under discussion. (This may in fact be due to understandable annoyance on part of someone who represents an actual statistical exception, but again, this makes it no less a barrier to rational discussion.)
Re: relationships with women who’ve had a lot of partners, the problem is that for a typical man, the extreme skew of the male attractiveness distribution and the asymmetry of the male-female mating strategies mean that even with some dedication to studying and practice of game, he’ll likely end up in an unfavorable position. But again, talking about this stuff in plainer and more concrete ways is hard to do without crossing the bounds that have repeatedly shown to be a trigger of discourse breakdown on LW.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
Re: looks, are we talking the “blonde = ditzy, glasses = geeky” level of stereotype? Or are you talking about the way someone’s mood, shyness, introversion, and so forth can be read from body language? Or something as straightforward as someone wearing a lot of makeup spent a lot of time on her appearance, and thus probably wants attention/cares what people think of her a lot?
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
One idea: we’ve had a thread on LW where people post their online dating profiles for feedback. I think it’d be an interesting game to post pictures of people, either ours or other random pictures, and see what kind of guesses we come up with about them based on clues from their appearance.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
That depends on what exactly you’re aiming for. Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand. Clearly, you shouldn’t worry too much if it’s really just a throwaway relationship that will soon end one way or another. (Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation, and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
In fact, the situation has gotten significantly worse on LW in this regard since I started commenting here around two years ago. Back then, it seemed to me like discussions of these topics on LW might result in interesting insight whose worth would be greater than the trouble. However, ever since then, a string of ever worse and more cringe-worthy failures that occurred whenever these topics were opened has convinced me in the opposite.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum. (Though admittedly these days none are anywhere as good as what could be found during the heyday of the contrarian blogosphere some years ago.) I really don’t see any point in trying to open them in a forum like this one, which has conclusively shown to be a bad place for them.
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
It was the first thought I had. The association in my mind went something like
girl with lots of partners ---> girl is sexually awesome ---> female partners and group sex ---> if someone thinks having multiple partners is bad, is that bad?
Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand
No, I meant long term.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
(Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
I am incredibly curious about your thoughts in these matters. You hint lots of things but don’t spell them out. I disagree with your assertions that LW’s gotten worse and is a bad place for these discussions, and I get that you don’t want to post them publicly on LW, but can you PM me? I promise to keep them private if you’d like.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum.
The ones I’ve seen either a) take weird conservative positions, b) are filled with bitterness and hatred towards women, c) deteriorate into madonna/whore complexes, slut-shaming, and name calling, without much intelligent discussion or reasoning, or d) seem sane to me, but agree with my viewpoint on things.
Besides, I want to know what you think. You’re sane, reasonable, intelligent, and have a viewpoint that’s very different from mine, but seems like it might have a lot to offer. Please PM me. You’re giving me half of thoughts that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and can’t find on fora elsewhere, and I want the other half!
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation,
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
Rather than counting things for or against the girl how about we frame it in terms of to what extent these new behaviors (female partners and group sex with you) also fit into the previously mentioned correlation cluster.
This is of course a more accurate and useful way of stating the problem in general terms.
The specific question still stands, though. Let’s say it’s true that a guy dating a girl who’s had many past partners will have certain problems, as VM suggests. Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
I would be rather surprised if this has been studied in the same way that the “sexual partners—divorce rate” correlations have been. That said, the second question seems to be equivalent to “does having group sex cause or correlate to lower expected duration of the pair bond”. An answer of “Yes, but it’s worth it!” seems plausible.
As for correlations between bulk female-female liaisons in the history of the female partner of a heterosexual pair bond and pair bond duration and level of social game required by the male partner—the only direct evidence I have been exposed to is in the form of anecdotal evidence from my own experience and that of reports. My prediction must be based primarily on what I know about human psychology in general—things like conservativeness and the ‘openness’ personality trait. The prediction I would give is “makes less difference than if all those liaisons were with males but still makes a difference in the same direction”.
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
(I might be joking now, but my jimmies are overall quite rustled with his entire soap opera; moreso when I consider how clear-headed and constructive he can be with simple and ideology-free comments.)
Based on the comments you’ve left so far in response to what I’ve been writing, I estimate a low probability that you are genuinely intrigued by what I might think about certain questions, and a much higher probability that you are baiting.
However, just in case the less probable hypothesis is true, I will for once respond to you. Namely, if you want me to talk about things that I’m reluctant to discuss because I’m not sure if it’s worth the controversy it will cause, then I’d first like to see that you’re making some effort to understand the arguments that I have already made on related topics. So far, I’ve seen zero indication of this, which makes it likely that you are indeed baiting.
Now, this may be a misunderstanding on my part, but honestly, I can hardly see how it might be so. Someone who is genuinely curious about my contrarian opinions would make some effort to respond intelligently to those comments where I have already discussed them, even if I’ve done it only in a cautious and indirect way. You, on the other hand, have shown absolutely no inclination to do so. Rather, you are behaving as if you are eager to get some juicy soundbites that would be a convenient target for attack. And you can’t possibly claim that my writings so far have been devoid of substance, since dozens of other people have evidently found enough substance in them to write well-thought-out responses.
Sorry, but I’m just stunned by such an interpretation. Okay, I’ll try to assess some of your more outstanding and upvoted comments as fairly as I can and respond to the best of my ability, if that’s what it takes to initiate a dialogue. I was, however, quite unaware that my remarks could’ve been taken to express any disrespect of your intelligence and epistemic virtue, or disregard for your viewpoints.
Indeed, if you take a look at the enormous thread that was LW’s response to my query in this fascinating direction, you’ll see that I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why). I honestly don’t understand why my desire to learn new perspectives, to consider their implications—and, yes, argue about them, but without aiming for their suppression or vilification of their holders—has now been met with such derision.
If you feel that the above is just so much self-congratulation and platitude, go ahead and tell me so, but, now at least, I really believe that I tried my best and sparked off valuable, constructive discussion with that post.
I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why).
I’m trying to abstain from posting, but, in brief, I suspect it’s the same thing that prompted e.g. my (over)reaction to reading Three Worlds Collide, the infanticide thread by Bakkot and some other stuff here. When encountering strong arguments against some element of ordinary, mainstream, liberal commonsense ethics (alongside with guilt for hardly living up to those in the first place), I tend to feel morally imperiled, disgusted by aspects of my own character, unsure of my worth as a person and easy to turn to “evil”. I know how wild and unhealthy this sounds, but such things always appear so personal and not-abstract to me, I just can’t help it.
Someone here once told me that this might be not unusual for people who perceive sociopathic tendencies within themselves and repress them; they view all such tricky problems through the prism of their own perceived moral deficiencies. Sigh, I wish I could explain in a less obtuse manner.
Hmm. I think I understand. I’m the opposite in some ways: I get a wild thrill of excitement and happiness at “taboo” thoughts or ideas, and I’m biased towards them. I remember first discovering Holocaust revisionists and being amazingly awed at the daring and conviction and wrongness of what they were saying.
I don’t know what this says about my personality.
That said, I get somewhat annoyed at overly cynical or oversimplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as when people say that the educational system or the legal system is all about status signaling, or the PUA theory that everything is a test and it’s all about dominance and social value.
What “evil” bothers you the most? And what was your reaction to TWC? You can probably guess what mine was.
Jokes aside, in a properly arranged duel this would probably work; when directly attempting to persuade his audience of something, Eliezer is among the most convincing writers I’ve ever read (I was similarly impressed by e.g. George Orwell and Hannah Arendt).
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
You had me convinced that Vladimir really was all talk and bluff until other links in recent comments lead me to some rather detailed explanations by Vladimir of his position.
I have an even stronger dislike than normal for cheap rhetoric when I realize that I have been taken in by it. All future anti-Vladimir_M claims by yourself will now be treated with extreme skepticism.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy, the point is the same—just by talking here. Maybe it’s all out of my league, and maybe I’m operating under a massive self-deception. I’ll take a couple days off LW at least and won’t think about the whole matter at all. Maybe I’ll have to take a longer break.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy
Without trying to condescend too much—Something to keep in mind when managing your own sense of adequacy and inclusion is that personal challenges are much more controversial (and likely to be challenged and counterattacked) than more straightforward positions. While direct challenges are sometimes appropriate it is almost always always more practical to avoid them unless you are already feeling entirely secure in your position and not especially vulnerable to potential disagreement.
The above applies both here and elsewhere and even when you are being entirely reasonable.
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Is 1100 enough karma?
I have over 1500 karma as of today; I think 1100 ought to be enough.
I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
I think the mailing list should be set up as invitation only, with some place where one can request an invitation. Then current members could look at their posts, and if the person has a lot of contributions and looks open-minded enough, they can be allowed on. There wouldn’t have to be a hard-and-fast karma cutoff if every new member was “previewed” and disruptive members could be banned easily.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members. The LW moderators and/or Lukeprog* is an obvious Schelling point, but they may not have the time or inclination. Conversely, I could probably figure out how to create a mailing list and would be willing to do so, but I don’t have the reputation here to be seen as a valid judge of who’s non-ideological enough to join.
*Lukeprog would presumably have a significant amount to post to such a list, and is widely respected by the community despite not having moderator powers.
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Those are more literally correct, but the acronyms don’t work out as ironically.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members.
Well, given that the idea is to create a place where certain norm-violating ideas can be discussed, it seems like the ones with veto power ought to be the ones who have come up with the idea but are reluctant to discuss it in public (I admit I’ve rather lost track of who this is, in this instance). If nothing else, the veto would be exercised by simply not discussing the topic.
The problem with setting up such a society is that it’s about as secure as a house of cards. If I was a potential attacker, all I’d need to do would be,
Create a new account on Less Wrong (or just use my existing one if I was willing to burn it)
Act really open-minded and gain a lot of karma
Join the Contrarian Conspiracy
Archive all its messages for a few months, then publish them on Slashdot, 4chan, and the National Enquirer
In fact, the first three steps aren’t even necessary, if you assume that instead of being an outside attacker, I’m an internal member who’d gone rogue. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping a person like that.
Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.
One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.
The needed barriers to entry are basically taken care of in who gets invited in the first place. On the list itself I don’t actually see that strong a reason to even know which mail address is who, in fact since many people don’t really have all that recognisable a style this might work to improve rationality by breaking up existing sympathies and antipathies.
I saw it as a way of messing up the apparent signal-to-noise ratio for outside observers. However, if one were to wish to do so, there are probably better ways.
This is a good idea, but it does not guarantee security; and I’m not sure how effective it would be against a determined attacker. It would be relatively easy to collect a large enough corpus of text and then use it to match up “46233782482@gmail.com″ with “Bugmaster of LessWrong”. And, of course, this assumes that Google won’t roll over and surrender all of Mr. 46233782482′s contact information to the authorities when said authorities come knocking.
How determined an attacker are we planning for, here? The original goal was to just meliorate the damage that a theoretical rogue member could cause (as it seems hopeless to try to prevent that). Are you really anticipating “the authorities” getting involved?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way. On the other hand, our authorities have been getting quite jumpy lately; for example, merely having an Arabic-sounding last name is already enough for the FBI to attach a tracking device to your car. When you put the two factors together, it seems reasonable to expect said authorities to take an interest in the membership of the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way.
Where on Earth did you read anything like that anywhere in my comments? Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
This, by the way, is another way in which expressing opinions about controversial and charged topics can be more dangerous than one might assume. Already in the second- or third-hand retelling, your opinion is not at all unlikely to be distorted and amplified into a caricatured soundbite that sounds far more crude and awful than anything you ever meant to say or actually said. If such things happen even on the “meta” level, what can one expect to happen when concrete topics are broached?
Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
Ok, I tried doing just that right now, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thread at all at any capacity. So, firstly, I have to withdraw my comment for lack of evidence; my apologies. But secondly, can you offer some advice for navigating gigantic threads on Less Wrong ? For example, is there a way to search just a single thread for comments with certain keywords, or to flatten the thread, or something ?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way.
Such a belief does not exist! Vladimir_M is a liar. A dirty, dirty liar!
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly, unless it is intended to force the assailant into a particularly dangerous form of confrontation.
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly
It could also work as a curse of the gods that keeps the poor soul forever hiding in fear for its life.
The first thing that comes to mind is a bit of a stretch, but:
10 The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. 11 Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” 13 Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear. 14 Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
(From Genesis 4.)
So, the curse doesn’t directly cause anyone to attack him, but it does indirectly create a situation in which Cain has to expose himself to attackers. Of course, this version of the curse lasts for all of one verse; in the next, God revises it into the Mark of Cain, which is perhaps even more cruel than the original curse.
I like this idea, but since I have very little karma, I would be a bit sad to see it happen. Could an email list be contrived in such a way that users with lower karma could read the correspondences of the group without having the ability to post messages? If possible, it seems like that would maintain the integrity of discussion while also allowing interested parties to learn new things.
If you don’t have a lot of karma, and the requisite posting history of being nonpartisan, how could the Conspirators trust you not to spread around the Deep Dark Secrets that would give the site a bad reputation?
(If I seem to be giving off mixed signals, it’s because I’m not sure how I feel about this idea myself yet. I’m having a really hard time imagining what could be somehow so beyond the pale as to be impossible to allude to in public.)
Good question. I don’t have an answer, but I guess there could be tiers? Like, if a person* has a couple hundred karma, has been active on the site for a while, and has conducted him/herself well then that person could receive low level access. With the concern you brought up it’s hard to choose criteria that would make a user trustworthy but that wouldn’t warrant just letting them in completely. I guess I would advocate less stringent requirements. Like, nobody with negative karma and to be accepted you need to have been on the site for x amount of time and have been polite/non-inflammatory/thoughtful in all previous discussions. If a person has low karma because they rarely comment, they likely won’t post much in the email list anyway.
If we need a way to find out if someone’s trustworthy, can’t we just ask them to raise their right hand?
To take an attested example, discussion of the beliefs and tactics of the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community was either heavily discouraged or banned, I forget which, because of the unpleasant air it seemed to give to this site.
Apolitical Conspiracy could be abbreviated as APC, a vehicle useful to well-resourced partisans who want to decide when and where to engage without resorting to sneaking about dressed as civilians.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
[09:05] Eliezer: what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don’t have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they’re going to misinterpret something then you shouldn’t say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head
[09:06] Eliezer: often you are just screwed unless you want to go back and teach them rationality from scratch, and in a case like that, all you can do is say whatever creates the least inaccurate image
[09:06] X: 10 to 1000 is misleading when you say it to a nonrationalist?
[09:06] Eliezer: “I don’t know” is a good way to duck when you say it to someone who doesn’t know about probability distributions
[09:07] Eliezer: if they thought I was certain, or that my statement implied actual knowledge of the tree
[09:07] Eliezer: then the statement would mislead them
[09:07] Eliezer: and if I knew this, and did it anyway for my own purposes, it would be a lie
[09:08] Eliezer: if I just couldn’t think of anything better to say, then it would be honest but not true, if you can see the distinction
[09:08] Eliezer: honest for me, but the statement that formed in their minds would still not be true
[09:09] X: most people will say to you.… but you said....10-1000 apples
[09:09] Eliezer: then you’re just screwed
[09:10] Eliezer: nothing you can do will create in their minds a true understanding, not even “I don’t know”
[09:10] X: why bother, why not say i don’t know?
[09:10] Eliezer: honesty therefore consists of misleading them the least and telling them the most
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
Observe, however the comment section of certain horribly non PC blogs. By and large. they are very smart, and remarkably well informed. Censorship is never necessary, whereas in more politically correct environments, censorship is essential, because when non PC views are spoken, commenters take it upon themselves to silence the heretic by any means necessary, disrupting communication.
If the blog owner posts fairly heretical views, and himself refrains from censoring or intemperately and rudely attacking views in the comments that are even more heretical than his own, then no one in the comments intemperately or rudely attacks any views that anyone expresses in the comments or on the blog.
The blog owner can say that left wing views are held by fools and scoundrels, but because left wing views are high prestige, a left commenter will not be called a fool and a scoundrel. If the blog owner refrains from saying that views more right wing than his own are held by fools and scoundrels, then commenters with views more right wing than his own will not be called fools and scoundrels in the comments.
Because right wing views are low prestige, it requires only the slightest encouragement from the blog owner to produce a dog fight in the comments, should someone further right than the blog owner comment, but not so easy to produce a dog fight when someone lefter than the blog owner comments.
This was previously discussed here. Right now, it’s sounding like whatever (if anything) comes out of this will fail by being overly inclusive. My guess is that if this sort of thing ends up working well, it will be because some small group of people who happen to have good taste end up making decisions on a “trust me” basis, rather than because LessWrong as a community successfully applies some attempt at a transparently fair algorithm.
I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of “politically correct” as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn’t find, but here is a discussion on it.
What I think we’re in danger of forgetting is that, anywhere but Less Wrong, “That’s offensive!” is actually a really persuasive argument. People who blithely ignore even the strongest of evidence will often shut up and look stupid if you successfully play the offense card. PC arguments may be so commonly heard, not because they are the “best” (most valid) arguments that could be made in support of a given assertion, but because they totally work.
If someone says, with no factual basis at all, that members of Group X murder children, piles and piles of evidence may not be enough to make the claim go away, but if you can convince people that to say so is offensive and Anti-X, you’re home free. So why bother presenting the evidence?
“You’re wrong” implies “you’re a liar,” or a more direct response could be “that’s a lie.” If the goal is to make someone look stupid, this can work better. Admittedly that’s not always a major goal, cases won’t overlap, etc.
But I think we do see people make fact-citing arguments that are delivered in the tone of “that’s offensive”, so the methods aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, any argument beginning “There is no scientific evidence that...” in an appropriately shrill tone sends the message that offense is taken and sidesteps the logical evidence to highlight the strongest available evidence, the absence of scientific evidence.
Even if the offense argument is explicit, factual arguments could at least be added to it.
Yes. To gwern (verb) it, to reconstruct it from quotes according to the Pareto principle:
...Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told...
If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have...
What can’t we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for.
Of course, we’re not just looking for things we can’t say. We’re looking for things we can’t say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall…
This won’t get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy...
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose “inappropriate” to the dreaded “divisive.” In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as “divisive” or “racially insensitive” instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—“sexist”, for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?...
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can’t say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted?
Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there’s something we can’t say, it’s often because some group doesn’t want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous...
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don’t seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle...
Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?...
...If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them...
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it’s better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed...
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends...
...Who thinks they’re not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she’s open-minded. Hasn’t she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they’ll say the same thing: they’re pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid “wrong” as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like “negative” or “destructive”.)...
...And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is “hate speech?” This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical. And if it isn’t false, it shouldn’t be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why...
If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical. And if it isn’t false, it shouldn’t be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why...
Add “politically correct” to the set of possible x and y and we are in agreement. This was the point of my original comment on the matter.
Saying things violate Paul Grahm’s principle isn’t used here to dismiss ideas, only to, as you said, put the burden of proof on them as being prima facie false. I don’t think that “heretical” was quite the same way, nor are “racist” and “fascist”, etc.
I would never say “prima facie proves” so maybe we are using some words to express very different concepts.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true.
This may be evidence that the critics fear that, but it isn’t always the case. Sometimes they just think that there can be damage if people are mislead by the falsehoods for example.
Sure, it’s not always the case. But if I just think that there can be damage if people are misled by a falsehood, I will probably claim it’s false, and argue for that point.
This isn’t really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn’t stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
How do people respond to the claims? I acknowledge that any response other than just “that’s false” de-emphasizes the falsity of it, but if the response is “That’s a lie and illegal,” that’s a different sort of thing to say than “That’s classist,” or the like for other claims. If people respond with “The powerful Jews will lock you up for saying such a thing, by the way I think it’s 15% likely true,” then that’s an interesting case too, one that isn’t a counterexample.
In one sense legal coercion is at the far end of a single scale from mild disapproval to ostracization to illegalization,but in another sense it is qualitatively different. A country within which saying something is illegal might have most endorse the illegal idea, or most oppose it by simply calling it “false”, or most oppose it by emphasizing its illegality and somewhat mentioning its illegality, etc., or no majority of any type. What’s important here is the social climate around the statements, for which the laws on the books are important evidence but alone don’t make an example or counterexample of a country.
Yes, this is the precise complaint! To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe, one so beloved of tabloid hacks that practically any right of centre* talking point can be described as politically incorrect (“you can’t say [thing I’m saying right now on prime-time television] any more” and so on).
Why declarations of politically incorrectness are taken any more seriously than claims to be totally mad/random or the life of the party I shall never know.
*am I being, ah what’s the equivalent here—unserious perhaps? populist? - if I suggest that this trick is mostly limited to the right? That political correctness just means any non-socialist leftwing opinion, with the added implication that the opinion is both hegemonic and baseless. When left wing commentators trip over themselves to avoid criticising america or soldiers, or rush to condemn protests at the first sign of a black mask, nobody talks about political correctness. Despite all the talk about how OWS has made it acceptable to moral issues in ways that were previously beyond the pale, nobody calls it an anti-PC movement.
Perhaps we should have a separate term to describe this phenomenon, if we are going to keep going on about political correctness, and pretending we aren’t talking about politics? Since otherwise we reach a point where commentators are unable to call people fascists, for being so PC is decidedly politically incorrect.
To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness.
First, politically correct arguments are obviously a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
Second, that conflates levels.
People don’t randomly decide which arguments to give justifying their statements and actions, they tend to give the strongest ones they have available. Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments. The argument that an argument is politically correct is a non-truth-citing argument. Non-truth-citing arguments are generally weaker than truth-citing arguments.
See here. If someone presents a NTC argument, I infer they don’t have a TCA unless there are extenuating circumstances such that I think that they would have presented a NTCA even when they had a TCA.
Likewise when someone’s presents a TCA, one can infer, all else being equal, that they don’t have a much more compelling one available. Even weak TCAs ought to lower one’s degree of belief something is true when they are presented by someone who probably would have used a better argument had it been available, even though the argument is a valid and novel one, and one had expected the arguments for the position to be better.
Imagine you are watching two people. The first makes a claim about a subject with which you aren’t familiar. At that point, you assign it a certain credibility. The second objects with a NTCA. At that point, you should think the claim more likely than before because the best objection the second person could make was weak and your original estimate had expected them to do better. If the first person objects to the objection with a NTCA, then you should think the claim less likely than at the second point, because the best counterobjection the first person could make was weak and your estimate at the second point in time had expected them to do better.
That “To frame an argument as politically incorrect” is an argument roughly as bad as a politically correct argument does not salvage politically correct arguments.
So, I think I have a reasonable sense of what people mean when they say an argument, or an assertion, is politlcally incorrect. Reading this, though, I begin to suspect that I have no idea what you mean when you say an argument is politically correct.
Ordinarily, I don’t hear that term used to describe arguments at all, I hear it used to describe people who object to politically incorrect arguments… or who object to arguments on the grounds that they are politically incorrect.
Among other things, I can’t tell if you intend for “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” to be jointly exhaustive terms, or whether there’s a middle ground between them. If the latter, I think I agree with most of what you say here, though I’m not sure how many real-world arguments it applies to.
I begin to suspect that I have no idea what you mean when you say an argument is politically correct.
I mean an argument with a few characteristics:
Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments.
For example, they don’t take the form “It’s not true that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants.” They take the form “It’s insensitive to say that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants.”
They are a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
For example, “We’ve done experiments, and the results suggest no difference in intelligence between Koreans and Chinese, controlling for other factors, there are probably no measurable differences between the groups” is not a PC argument, because it appeals to truth. “The assumption that Koreans are smarter than Chinese is racist, if you properly controlled for environmental differences, there would be no measured difference between the groups,” has a very similar conclusion, and is a PC argument. It’s not the argument’s conclusion that makes it PC or not.
Not all non-truth-citing arguments are PC ones.
For example, arguing that something is wrong because “A Muslim said it” is obviously neither truth citing nor PC. PC arguments are those that are rationalizations for a particular set of conclusions.
Truth-citing and non-truth-citing are just poles of a range. Arguments such as evolutionarydebunking arguments attempt to show a loose relationship between a proposition and the truth—loose, neither tight nor non-existent.
Unlike PC arguments, PI arguments are just those with conclusions or implicit assumptions targeted by PC arguments. Mercy said “To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe...” this is largely true. The framing corresponds to a certain degree with reality in each case.
Positions for which the best argument is “My opponent’s arguments is PC,” are weak. This weakness is because the accusation that the argument is a rationalization for a predetermined conclusion, i.e. that it is a PC argument, does not attack the conclusion directly. The accusation is a form of evolutionary debunking argument, and weakens the evidence brought for the conclusion without destroying the evdence and without attacking the conclusion. The accusation is weak in a way similar to all PC arguments.
Mercy went wrong in thinking that because calling out arguments as being PC and thus not tightly bound to truth of their conclusions does not address the conclusions either, arguments’ actual status as PC arguments is unimportant.
The reason to especially doubt arguments usually supported by the argument “This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument,” is that valid arguments with true premises and conclusions can usually do better. There is an excuse to say “This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument,” so long as one has prioritized better arguments, or if it is to explain rather than argue for something, e.g. to explain why someone was fired but not why the statement that person was fired for is true.
Your question rests on an assumption that obscurantism must decrease information, but I see that assumption as incorrect. In fact, under this assumption I should never regard anything said to me as obscurantist, as it should never decrease the amount of information available to me.
Wikipedia defines “obscurantism” as “the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known”, and it seems to fit the bill. Of course, it may be useful or beneficial species of obscurantism, though I agree with Prismatic that it is not.
The situation as you describe it seems pre-biased by postulating that the mainstream view is dubious. This may be obvious to you, but to me, the person who’s faced with the “hints” as described, it is not—if it were, I shouldn’t need the hints to begin with. I think it’s incorrect to condition on the dubiousness of the mainstream view. If I am to decide on how to best to take into account hints of that nature, the possibility that the mainstream view is correct after all, and the hint entirely specious, should not be disregarded. In fact, in real-life situations where such hints are offered, this may be the more frequent scenario.
The hint that says “this view is incorrect, but I will not explain why, for doing that will violate a social norm” is annoying and distracting; it engages my attention, bringing no real evidence for its claims. Because it posits a mystery, I’m likely to err on the side of giving it more attention than it deserves. The benefit is that it may cause me to investigate the view more thoroughly than I would otherwise have, and realize it is incorrect. If I precommit to ignoring such signals, I will miss some chances of that, and I will also avoid giving my attention, and more closely investigating, all those views that are correct after all, and where the signal was specious. The bargain may well be worth it.
Your question rests on an assumption that obscurantism must decrease information, but I see that assumption as incorrect. In fact, under this assumption I should never regard anything said to me as obscurantist, as it should never decrease the amount of information available to me.
What makes obscurantism a relevant category is that certain ways of withholding information and intentional abstruseness can be very effective for misleading people and producing convictions without evidence. In LW parlance, it is a particular kind of Dark Arts. Now, of course, it makes no sense to debate definitions when there is a true disagreement about them, but I think it shouldn’t be controversial to insist that the normal meaning of “obscurantism” involves this Dark Arts element. In other words, it involves withholding information with the intent to mislead and produce mistaken or unsubstantiated beliefs, and it cannot be applied to every act of withholding information intentionally.
I do think the Wikipedia definition you quoted is unreasonably overbroad, considering the standard usage of the word. It would cover all sorts of completely honest, reasonable, and non-misleading acts of communication where one chooses to limit the amount of information given—for example, saying that you got a new job but not disclosing the salary, or writing blog comments under a pseudonym.
If I am to decide on how to best to take into account hints of that nature, the possibility that the mainstream view is correct after all, and the hint entirely specious, should not be disregarded. [...] The hint that says “this view is incorrect, but I will not explain why, for doing that will violate a social norm” is annoying and distracting; it engages my attention, bringing no real evidence for its claims.
It is not true that it brings no significant evidence, if the source of the hint is someone about whom you have other information—and information about the intellectual abilities, knowledge, and likely biases of frequent commenters is easy to get in a forum like this one (if you don’t in fact have it already). And you can always simply ignore such hits if you believe you have insufficient information, or you don’t feel like looking for it, the way you presumably ignore any other comments that are not of interest to you.
Also, I note that your complaint here doesn’t state that these hits are misleading and apt to trigger biases leading to incorrect beliefs, so you must indeed be working with the broadest possible (and I would say overbroad) definition of “obscurantism.”
If I precommit to ignoring such signals, I will miss some chances of that, and I will also avoid giving my attention, and more closely investigating, all those views that are correct after all, and where the signal was specious. The bargain may well be worth it.
It may indeed—but why precommit unconditionally, without considering the source of these signals?
Nothing would ever be obscurantist for a perfectly rational mind that correctly evaluates every sensory input according to whatever evidence it provides for any logically possible hypothesis.
Not technically true. It is possible to make a perfectly rational mind produce worse predictions about the world by providing it with selected information. This relies on it having insufficient information about your obscuring tendencies or motives. The new probabilities that the rational agent has will necessarily be a subjectively objective improvement but can still produce worse predictions of the relevant aspects of the world in an objective sense.
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful.
What is obscurantist exactly? What I said is perfectly clear, if you look at the context of the two preceding posts.
No particular claim about male-female relations was intended (although if you want to know I endorse Roissy’s view of male-female relations, if not his value-set); I was objecting to the idea that “mindkilling” should be redefined as “saying things likely to offend mainstream sensibilities”. Mindkilling refers to the effect of political content on human reasoning powers in general, and the suggested redefinition struck me as Orwellian.
It is not your post that I think is obscurantist. I was commenting on the undesirability of posts that presuppose option 2 has been selected and proceed to imply that the mainstream view is false without actually making explict what alternative is being proposed.
I think the alpha-beta classification is excessively reductive. I would say that I am fairly physically intimidating to a majority of other males, but this doesn’t translate into automatic adoration by nearby females.
After diligently reading through most of Vladimir_M’s comment history, I have no option but to express my fervent agreement. I’ve always had a great dislike of vague hints, but the style in which he does those is just fucking unbearable.
I don’t know why you addressed this to me, because I was merely trying (possibly failing) to resolve Vladimir_M and Konkvistador’s disagreement. Redefining “mindkilling” to mean “dissent” is Orwellian and deserves comment. Or perhaps you think that the mainstream is the truth by definition?
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
I haven’t been downvoting for this phenomenon so far, but I’m going to start doing so if it keeps happening.
To whoever is upvoting this, it seems like you must be taking one of the following positions:
It is safe to post any view on LessWrong. Doing so will not get you in trouble, or cause blowups.
It is unsafe to post certain views on LessWrong, but if you hold such a view, you are morally obliged to argue for it and suffer the punishment (possibly at the hands of me or my allies).
It is unsafe to post certain views on LessWrong, and you are allowed not to argue for them, but you are not allowed to suggest that this unsafety has any sort of distorting effect on the resulting discussion.
Could you guys clarify?
I upvoted Prismatic, and I’m taking this position: 4. It may or may not be safe to post certain views on Less Wrong, but whatever they are, I precommit that I will not be part of a blowup over them. If your views are justified, I will update on them, and if they are not, I will calmly state my objections, but I will not punish you for dissent. If other people punish you unfairly for dissent, I will punish them. I would rather you post your dissenting views than hide them, and I will support you for doing so.
If enough of Less Wrong takes this position, eventually position 1. will be correct. I hope to bring about this state of affairs.
I always appreciate when someone else comes along and explains my position better than I did, so thanks.
That looks like option 2 minus the parenthetical. “These punishments are most regrettable, and maybe one day in a utopian future they will have stopped existing, but in the mean time stick your neck out and be punished or I’m going to complain at you.”
Isn’t is possible that Prismattic’s comment could be receiving so many upvotes because other people also find comments of the sort described irritating and are embracing the opportunity to signal that irritation? Like Prismattic, I don’t generally downvote comments on this basis alone. But I’m definitely tired of seeing the types of comments described, especially in those instances when, at least to my eyes, the commenters seem to be affecting a certain world-weary sorrow and wisdom while hinting at the profound truths that could be freely discussed but for -alas!- the terrible tyranny of modern social norms. But because the commenters are hiding the exact substance of their own views, there’s no basis on which to judge whether these views are, as Prismattic suggests, actually more correct than the mainstream view, or perhaps equally or even more wrong in some different direction.
If what’s suggested is “You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore I win the debate”, I agree that’s unreasonable. If what’s suggested is “You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore no real debate has taken place”, I think that’s far more reasonable.
Why not publish the “unsafe” arguments under a pseudonym (or an alternate pseudonym if your main identity is already a pseudonym)?
To do so consistently and stay safe, you’d need to take the unusual or otherwise identifiable parts of your set of concepts, favorite examples, verbal quirks, patterns of reasoning, and so on, and split everything into two: one part for use under your true identity, and one part for pseudonymous use. Even then, each of your novel ideas could taint each of your other novel ideas. There would also still be the harm to LessWrong’s reputation as a whole. And what would it accomplish? It’s notoriously hard to get people to change their minds on these topics, even here, and if you do there’s no clear causal path from that to better long-term future outcomes. I’d rather just collectively give up.
I do wonder why Luke puts so much effort into writing about romantic relationships, given all the other things on his to do list. Perhaps he wants to demonstrate that rationality has big concrete, immediate benefits, as a way to help expand our community?
I think that’s unlikely, unless someone who wants to see it happen makes a big push for it (e.g., get Eliezer to declare it a rule, or write a really convincing top-level post arguing for it and build the necessary consensus). My suggestion was made under the assumption of the current status quo.
I second this question.
Trying to put words to my own intuitions on the matter, I would stipulate a modified 3:
It may be unsafe (in terms of image/status/etc—I would certainly expect and hope not physically) to express certain views, particularly those sufficiently far from both societal mainstream and LW mainstream, and particularly those that touch too heavily on mind-killing topics.
It is reasonably within norms to acknowledge this, particularly with an eye to reducing its effect.
What is decidedly a violation of norms, I think, is to do so in a self-serving manner.
“Norms forbid honest discussion of my pet issue X, therefor X” is obviously flawed.
“Norms forbid discussion of my pet issue X, and I have strong evidence for X but can’t share it because of those norms, so just trust me that X” amounts to the same thing, in terms of what kinds of discussions are possible. It is also, to some degree, inconsistent—it is unlikely that we forbid evidence for a proposition while allowing discussion otherwise implying/assuming it.
I am also interested in a clarification.
Perhaps my view is one of 1-3, but I’m finding it difficult to categorize it:
It is ill-advised to discuss certain topics on LessWrong; if they are discussed anyway, the following choices are in the decreasing order of preference: a) not join the discussion; b) state your view clearly and be prepared to defend it; c) hint at your view but refuse to explain it or cite evidence for it, claiming that’ll violate a social norm.
b) is much better than c), but a) is much better than b).
It’s the same attitude that I think already exists on LW for politics (strongly influenced by the mind-killer post).
Yes, why should the heretic have the right to remain silent! If he speaks truth the good doctors of the holy mother church will surely update their theological arguments accordingly and if not, well why is he risking his immortal soul by relying only on his feeble and fallible mind?
We’re not discussing anyone’s right to remain silent. The objection is to a heretic’s tendency to announce himself as a heretic without mentioning any doctrinal specifics, then run away giggling.
So you prefer the situation in which a dubious mainstream view remains entirely unchallenged to a situation where a doubter, instead of remaining silent, states that it is likely wrong but that spelling out an explicit argument why it is so would violate social norms? As far as I see, the information made available in the second case is a proper superset of the information available in the former. So how can this constitute “obscurantism” in any reasonable sense of the term?
I’d prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of “politically correct” as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
Do you upvote people that do?
I have mostly grown tired of making comments where I mention a contrarian position. I get asked to explain myself; it sometimes leads to an argument, and I put a lot of work into comments that often end up at negative karma. I suspect those threads add to LW, but the feedback I’m getting is that they don’t.
I’ll understand if you refuse, but… would you mind terribly saving me the work of searching for an example of what you’re talking about? Cause, see, if I’m right about what you’re referring to (something I’m not sure of, hence the question) I generally do upvote things like that.
Also I’ve only been here, like, two months, so if you have some kind of reputation I’m not aware of it.
The most recent example would be my comment that everyone becoming bisexual might lead to a net social loss, although the karma scores have gone up since that discussion happened (and so maybe I just need to wait before updating on the karma of contrarian comments).
I spent way too long looking through other comments I’ve made, and only really came across this example. I suspect this was misapplying discontent caused by other arguments. I had already noticed a while back that when I made a sloppy comment it would often get downvoted, although I would be able to make up the karma by explaining myself downthread. The only other significant example I can think of was in a thread about infanticide where I accidentally implied that I could be for the criminalization of abortion, and that comment got kicked down to −3 karma, with +1 karma from my following comments. (It’s hard to decide how that whole thread contributes to this question, because the person who said “well, I can’t say this many places, but I’m in favor of infanticide” got upvoted to 41 karma. That suggests to me their position isn’t contrarian locally, but I suspect it is contrarian globally.)
In general, it’s been observed that a comment on a controversial topic will be downvoted heavily in a quick flurry but then usually recovers; high-quality such comments tend to end up significantly positive.
And now I have seen it observed by someone who isn’t me. Good to hear external confirmation! :)
Careful—if you’ve stated it out loud, the observation noted above might be your own.
By the way, +1 for noting the tension between “Is that your true rejection” and “Policy debates should not appear one-sided”.
It sounds, then, as though you should be talking to the people punishing norm violations, not to the people responding rationally to such punishment.
Who is punishing? (In the context of Lesswrong)
Lowered karma. Rebuke. Deletion of posts. We might have some form of banning. Might want to check the wiki.
Also the punishment (mainly in the form of lowered status and tarnished reputation) that would be foisted upon LW as an institution by the broader society if it were to become a welcoming environment for various kinds of views that aren’t very respectable.
Also: Being habitually mentioned in the same breath with outrageous positions that one has taken in the past. Having such words applied to one as cause people they are repeatedly applied to to be shunned.
What I’m really displeased about is that we are so casually dismissed as troublemakers, arguing in bad faith or tarred with negative characteristics.
Look at our profiles. Look at our comments. You will find many very active and well received posters who you would otherwise consider an asset to the community. And then consider how massively up voted some comments expressing such sentiments are! There are many more who never voice it but share chunks of this proposed map of reality.
Yes many on LessWrong are knee jerk contrarians, but please consider just how large a fraction of reasonable, polite, intelligent, sceptical LW contributors have basically thrown out certain popular overly optimistic ideas out of their model of the world, because the ideas in question just don’t pay rent and and are useful for signalling only. I dare say many, found the departure from some of those ideas more painful and difficult than admitting to themselves that the religion of their childhood was false.
I know I did.
Update accordingly.
Aren’t we already?
There are different degrees of severity. Being perceived as weird in a nerdy way is low-status, but it’s nothing compared to being perceived as harboring fundamentally evil views. Most notably, the former sort of low status isn’t infectious; you can associate with weird nerdy people without any consequence for the other aspects of your life. Not so when it comes to associating with the latter sort of people.
My question wasn’t what tools of punishment are available, but whether there is actually a substantial amount of such punishment occurring merely for taking non-mainstream views.
Downvoted for invoking the name of the magic in vain, risking summoning its counterpart twin demon to devour us when you had no just cause! None I say!
What should I have said instead? “Incentive-followingly”? Maybe the fashion pendulum has swung too far toward not using the word.
“Calmly”, “by punishing the punishment”, “to the substance of the matter regardless of punishment”.
People punishing norm violations aren’t the villains of their own narratives, they think they’re responding rationally.
My purpose in using the word was not to contrast good us to bad them, but rather to emphasize that the action Prismattic disagrees with (that of withholding one’s opinion) is a move forced by an incentive that needn’t itself have been set (and shouldn’t have been set if Prismattic is right that opinion withholding is bad), and so it’s more reasonable for Prismattic to complain to the incentive setters than to the incentive followers. Does that make sense?
The “people aren’t villains of their own narratives” line always struck me as a little glib. Villains believe they’re not villains, but does that mean they falsely believe they’re some particular thing that truly is not a villain, or does it merely mean they correctly believe they’re some particular thing that they falsely believe is not a villain (fail to label as villainous)? In my intuition these are two different things and the saying uses the plausibility of the disjunction of the two things to suggest only the first thing. Clearly villains usually gain some sort of satisfaction from their role in the world, perhaps even moral satisfaction, but that’s not the same thing as there having been a good-faith effort to be a hero. I don’t know, I may just be confused here.
Anyway, what matters is who’s a villain in God’s narrative (in the atheist sense of God). :)
I disagree with this, at least it’s not at all obvious.
It means that at least on LW, they would also describe their behavior as rational (in certain contexts where reason is seen as an enemy, not everyone would be claiming the title “rational”).
Clever.
Which does not necessarily mean we should change the way we treat them. They can tell themselves whatever story they like. And by punishing them appropriately they will either change their behavior or, perhaps most importantly, those witnessing the punishment will avoid the behavior that visibly invokes community disapproval.
“Straightforwardly,” perhaps, or “shortsightedly” if you want to speak ill of them.
This does not answer my question. You claim that a situation in which information X and Y is made available constitutes “obscurantism” relative to the situation where only information X is provided. Now you say that you would prefer that not just X and Y, but also information Z be provided. That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t explain why (X and Y) is worse than just (X), if (X and Y and Z) is better than just (X and Y). What is this definition of “obscurantism,” according to which the level of obscurantism can rise with the amount of information about one’s beliefs that one makes available?
I still consider myself relatively new here, only been around for a year—but in that year I haven’t seen any actual fact presented in LessWrong that’s enflamed spirits one tenth as much as the obscure half-hints by trolls like sam and his “I can’t say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I’m not, therefore I’m not making them” style of debate.
The “obscurantism” that Prismatic is talking about isn’t yet as bad as that, but it has that same flavour, to a lesser degree. This sort of thing is… annoying—hinting at evidence, but refusing to provide it—and blaming this obscurity at the hypothetical actions by people who haven’t actually done them yet.
If the issue is e.g. whether science seems to indicate that the statistical distribution of physical and intellectual characteristic isn’t identical across racially-defined subgroups of the human race, or across genders, or across whatever, then it can be discussed politely, if the participants actually seek a polite discussion, instead of just finding the most insulting way possible to talk about them. And if the participants are willing to use words like “average” and “median” and “distribution” and things like that, instead of using phrases that are associated with the worst metaphorical Neanderthals that exist in the modern world.
What I think enflames things far far worse is when people imply that you are incapable of discussing topics, but nonetheless hint at them. If the topic can’t be discussed, then don’t discuss it or hint at it at all. If it can be discussed, then discuss it plainly, clearly, politely; not trollishly or deliberately offensively or carelessly offensively. Take a single minute to see if you can impart the same (or more) information in a less offensive mannere.g. “Is there a causal connection between the absence of Y chromosome and average levels of mathematical aptitude”? may need a couple seconds more to write, but it’ll probably lead to a better discussion than “Why and how do women suck at math”?
You are presenting the situation as if such hints were coming out of the blue in discussions of unrelated topics. In reality, however, I have seen (or given) such hints only in situations where a problematic topic has already been opened and discussed by others. In such situations, the commenter giving the hint is faced with a very unpleasant choice, where each option has very serious downsides. It seems to me that the optimal choice in some situations is to announce clearly that the topic is in fact deeply problematic, and there is no way to have a no-holds-barred rational discussion about it that wouldn’t offend some sensibilities. (And thus even if it doesn’t break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
At the very least, this can have the beneficial effect of lowering people’s confidence in the biased conclusions of the existing discussion, thus making their beliefs more accurate, even in a purely reactive way. However, you seem to deny that this choice could ever be optimal. Yet I really don’t see how you can write off the possibility that both alternatives—either staying silent or expressing controversial opinions about highly charged issues openly—can sometimes lead to worse results by some reasonable measure.
You also seem to think that merely phrasing your opinion in polite, detached, and intellectual-sounding terms is enough to avoid the dangers of bad signaling inherent to certain topics. I think this is mistaken. It might lead to the topic in question being discussed rationally on LW—and in fact, this will likely happen on LW unless the topic is gender-related and if it manages to elicit interest—but it definitely won’t escape censure by the outside world.
This.
I really really don’t want such discussion to be very prominent, because they attract the wrong contrarian cluster. But I don’t want LW loosing ground rationality wise with debates that are based on some silly premises, especially ones that are continually reinforced by new arrivals and happy death spirals!
Attracting the wrong people, and alienating some of the “right” people is a bigger concern to me than the reputation of the site as a whole (though that counts too). Another concern is that hot-button issues might eat up the conversations and get too important (they are not issues I care that much about debating here).
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
I agree with this. But I wish to emphasise:
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis—and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
Could you give some examples? I don’t like the thought of my brain being happy-death-spiralled without my noticing. I promise to upvote your comment even if it makes me angry.
(Eh, he’s been inactive for the last three months anyway.)
Which is I think the current situation when it comes to criticism of say democracy.
Actually, general criticism of democracy isn’t such a big problem. It can make you look wacky and eccentric, but it’s unlikely to get you categorized among the truly evil people who must be consistently fought and ostracized by all decent persons. There are even some respectable academic and scholarly ways to trash democracy, most notably the public choice theory.
Criticisms of democracy are really dangerous only when they touch (directly or by clear implication) on some of the central great taboos. Of course, respectable scholars who take aim at democracy would never dare touch any of these with a ten foot pole, which necessarily takes most teeth out of their criticism.
I think criticism of democracy goes over less well if you have something specific that you want to replace it with.
That is true, but you get into truly dangerous territory once you drop the implicit assumption that your criticism applies to democracy in all places and times, and start analyzing what exactly correlates with it functioning better or worse.
I expect it depends on what distinctions you’re using for what corelates with how democracies do. For example, claiming that there’s an optimal size for democracies that’s smaller than a lot of existing countries could get contentious, but I don’t think it would blow up as hard as what I suspect you’re thinking of.
Yes, of course, my above characterization was imprecise in this regard.
As a potshot, let’s just fucking spell it out: genetics, and “Race” in particularly.
Sam dosen’t do that. Sam trolls by stating his opinions fully. He then refuses to provide evidence.
Race differences have already been explicitly discussed with little problem, if not prominently so, do a search. Gender, sexuality and sexual norms are the great unPC problem of LessWrong.
Dishonest generalization, find two posters in addition to Sam who do this. I will wait.
Now contrast this to the average (even average anon double log in account) pro-hereditarian LW-er who brings up such points. There are far more Quirrells than Sams here, and Sams get heavily downvoted except on the rare occasions they make more reasonable posts (though the particular poster has probably burned out some people’s patience and will get downvoted no matter what he says because he has consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to adapt to our norms).
This is quickly devolving into the worst kind of politicking one finds on otherwise intelligent forums.
But it is other people who keep dragging them up and discussing them. Politely stating that you disagree and they are wrong, getting then heavily up voted (which indicates a significant if far from majority fraction of LWers agree with the comment) is surely better than not interrupting what you see as a happy death spiral?
Have we been visiting the same forum? I have often up-voted your responses to Sam0345′s posts, indeed you nearly always successfully rebuke him. But I think your extensive interactions with him may be leading you to mistake an individual for a group.
I’ve decided to bow out of this thread—as I’ve not significantly studied either PUA, nor cared to read about previous PUA-related threads in LessWrong, I can barely understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps you’ve noticed a real problem that I haven’t, exactly because you’re focusing on different type of threads than I do.
The thing I had in mind was things like e.g. the guy who repeatedly and deliberately kept using the diminutive word “girls” to refer to female rationalists but “men” to refer to the male counterparts. This by itself—when I perceived he intended to belittle women in this fashion, or at least didn’t give a damn about not insulting them—prevented any meaningful discussion of the actual argument he was engaged in, (whether a male-only meetup would be useful or detrimental for the purposes of LessWrong).
He really shouldn’t have done that.
OB and early LW consistently blew up whenever PUA and related issues where discussed.
I provide ample evidence, which you guys vote into oblivion when you don’t like it:
Examples:
What is the race of the overwhelming majority of people who make race hate attacks, people who physically attack people merely for being of race different from their own?
Who had greater freedom of speech: Modern novelists and scriptwriters, or Elizabethan novelists and playwrights?
I provided plenty of evidence, and if you claim I did not, will provide it all over again, to be voted into oblivion all over again.
Modern novelists and scriptwriters do.
You never provided a single piece of evidence that Elizabethan novelists and playwrights had greater freedom of speech. It was a completely unsubstantiated claim—and a ludicrous one given how well known the political restriction in free speech were at the time. You also completely refused to acknowledge all the detailed pieces of data for specifics bits of censorship or political pressure in Shakespeare that I provided.
Since you never acknowledge anything we say, nor ever provide any evidence to support the claims we actually dispute, and keep making further ludicrous claims instead, you’re properly considered a troll.
EDIT TO ADD:
That depends on whether we’re discussing your nation or mine. Racial hate attacks are most definitely a white thing in Greece. Or Libya. I’m guessing in America it’s the other way around, corresponding to higher black crime statistics in general (whether hate crime or otherwise).
Are attacks by police and the justice system which seem likely to be racially based included under race hate attacks?
And when I provide evidence that I provide evidence, you also vote that into oblivion
I appreciate your point here, but you could have chosen a better example. Those two questions have the same capacity for offensiveness. They have the same content and are compatible with the same presuppositions and connotations. They just use different language.
Now perhaps there are people who, upon seeing “women suck at math”, read “boo women!”, and upon seeing words like “causal” and “Y chromosome”, think about causes and effects. So if you’re talking to one of those people, you’ll want to use the fancier language. But not everyone is like that.
I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my mathematician colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it, without gratuitously offending people.
I am really curious how you can demonstrate equivalence between a question that follows the pattern “Why is (X) the case?” and a question that follows the pattern “Is (Y) the case?”—even if (Y) is arguably equivalent to (X), only phrased in more polite language.
As far as I see, the first one asks for the explanation of something that is presumed to be an established fact, while the second one expresses uncertainty about whether (arguably) the same fact is true. How on Earth can these two be said to have “the same content” and be “compatible with the same presuppositions”?
However, you are quite right that these two questions have the same potential for offensiveness, in that outside a few quirky places like LW, neither the polite phrasing nor the expression of uncertainty will get you off the hook, contrary to what Aris Katsaris seems to believe.
Ah, I see, you’re right; the content of the two questions are different. I noticed there was a substantial difference in language, and assumed that was the point of the example.
Surely that’s a hyperbole. Now, I know lots of people would be offended by both questions, but I doubt most people would be equally offended by both, and plenty of people would be offended by one but not the other. As a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I am down to discuss the first question, but the second one makes me want to slap you.
(Of course, by declaring myself a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I have already proven my own nonexistence, so my opinion can, no doubt, safely be ignored.;) )
Is it ok to threaten (or declare the desire to do) physical violence upon someone if you don’t get your way simply because you are a woman? Careful which stereotypes you support. You don’t usually get “heh. Female violence is harmless and cute!” without a whole lot of paternalism bundled in.
Slaps, generally, are relatively harmless. Unfulfilled desires to slap, even more so.
On the other hand, hasn’t there been some discussion of the idea that you have to believe something, however briefly, to understand it?
Even though expressing a desire to slap has no macro bodily effect [1], it still has an emotional effect which is going to affect how a conversation goes, however slightly. [2]
[1] Tentative phrasing used to respect the idea that everything is physical, including thoughts and emotions, but that some things affect people physically more than others.
[2] I believe that “just ignore it” leaves out that ignoring things is work.
If I said something to offend you over the internet, and you said it made you feel like hitting me, I would think it was no big thing, especially if you went on to explicitly clarify that you would never actually hit me. I would not perceive it as a serious threat in any case.
If you said something like that in real life, in full public view with many onlookers, I might depending on your body language be slightly more concerned, but I would probably just raise an eyebrow and imply that you were being a creep. If I said the same to you, I wouldn’t look as ridiculous, since most likely you’re bigger and stronger than me, but I doubt it would win anyone over either.
If you actually physically attacked me, I would do my best to see that criminal charges were brought, and I would not physically attack anyone myself if I were unwilling to defend my actions in court. That last scenario is so far from what actually happened here that it really seems like a red herring, though.
Really? My instincts anticipate a significant negative response if I said I wanted to hit someone around here. On the order of a substantial faux pas not a personal security risk. But to be honest I haven’t exactly calibrated that intuition all that much. Because I just don’t go around saying I want to hit people.
If another data point helps, I basically agree with you… if someone told me that what I’d said made them want to hit me, I’d consider it rude, possibly funny (depending on context), and not significantly changing my estimate that they would actually hit me.
What sort of thing would change your estimate of whether someone would actually hit you?
Hitting me.
Hitting others.
Demonstrating poor impulse control in general.
Physically intimidating me (e.g., looming up in my personal space).
In general, someone using their words increases my estimate that they will continue using their words.
That’s uncalled-for. I am not asking either question. It’s okay if you’re offended by one but not the other.
Again, I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it — without gratuitously offending people.
What, exactly, is uncalled-for? The “makes me want to slap you” part? It does. I thought that might be useful information for you to have. I will not actually slap you, even if by some improbable circumstance I ever have the opportunity.
Golly, it’s too bad some people take things so personally!
On a tangential note, if a man said to a woman that he wanted to slap her as a reaction to some offensive statement she made, would you consider it acceptable?
Mind you, I have no problem in principle with social norms that set different boundaries for the behavior of men and women. (In particular, if someone wants men’s threats of violence to women, even humorous and hyperbolic ones, to be judged more harshly than vice versa, I certainly find it a defensible position.) I just find it funny to see egalitarians who profess principled opposition to such norms caught in inconsistencies, like for example here, where very few (if any) of them would react to your statement with the same visceral horror and outrage as if the sexes were reversed.
I don’t know who you’re talking about, but it isn’t me. My husband sometimes jokes about beating me. I laugh.
I’m glad to hear that the two of you share a sense of humor, but the relevant comparison would be how you’d feel if a strange man mentioned slapping you in response to something you said, whether in the context of a public debate such as here or elsewhere. I would be surprised if you would be willing to take that nonchalantly. And even if you are an exception in this regard, there is no denying that the usual standards of discourse are highly asymmetric here, since there is no way that a similar statement by a man to a woman would not have caused firestorms of outrage.
Now, as I explained, I have no problem with this standard in principle. I am not expressing any condemnation of your words or attitudes. I am just using this opportunity to highlight the apparent contradiction with the general principle held by the contemporary respectable opinion that sex-asymmetric social norms are morally dubious, or worse—and not because I wish to score a petty rhetorical point, but because I believe that if adequately considered, it would open some very important and general questions.
I don’t consider this to be established, for one thing. For another, what I said hasn’t exactly passed without comment, so I’m not very sympathetic right now to the idea that women get a free pass.
But though I think your example is weak, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that double standards in both directions continue to flourish. I’m not sure why that’s relevant here, or why people think they have to be so shady about saying this kind of thing on LW. It all seems sort of melodramatic to me; I live in the southern US, and there’s probably no disreputable idea you’d dare hint at that I don’t hear proudly trumpeted by many of my neighbors, and nobody seems to beat them up or fire them for it.
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to rednecks. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’m human, and it’ll probably happen. Consider this!)
I think VM is quite open about the fact that his secret beliefs are low status. I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas.” I think it’s interesting that you similarly lack examples. Maybe this is the only source of reviled beliefs, or maybe it’s a US blind-spot.
Well, beliefs don’t even need to be in the “reviled” category for one to conclude that it might be prudent not to express them openly. One might simply conclude that they’re apt to break down the discourse, as has indeed happened on LW many times with statements that might be controversial, but fall short of “reviled” in the broader society.
Also, I think you’re applying some popular but grossly inaccurate heuristics here. I can easily think of several beliefs that: (1) are squarely in the “reviled” category in today’s respectable discourse in Western societies, (2) have been held by a large number of people historically, or are still held by a large number of people worldwide, and (3) are practically nonexistent, or exceptionally rare, among the segment of the U.S. population that can be labeled “rednecks” by any reasonable definition. (For beliefs that make sense only given some cultural background, I mean “exceptionally” relative to other local cultures that provide this background.)
In any case, think about the following. For any human society in history about which you have some reasonably accurate picture, except the present Western ones, you’ll probably be able to think of some beliefs that are true, or at least defensible enough that one shouldn’t be considered as malicious or delusional for holding them, but also unacceptable in that society. (So that even if expressing them is not outright dangerous, it would face blind hostility and no chance of rational consideration.) Either there are such beliefs in the modern Western societies too, or there is something outstandingly unique and exceptional about these societies that makes such cases impossible. But what could this be?
Let’s link to it again: Paul Grahm’s What You Can’t Say.
“Redneck ideas” is certainly an oversimplification, but I am not sure it is such a grossly inaccurate one. The ideology behind bad treatment of women and minorities in parts of the third world also comes in for Western opprobrium, and might be likewise reviled by or at least of little consequence to rednecks depending on the instance. But it does not seem like an entirely different category—what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
In a separate category one has cruelty toward animals (which probably coincidentally I also associate with redneck stereotypes), and cruelty toward children. I can’t think of any other categories of reviled ideas.
I see what you’re getting at but I don’t know enough to judge. Certainly there have been many famous superstitions and manias in history, but I worry that my models of them have been too much influenced by certain parts of modern culture. (It occurs to me I have never read an account of the Salem trials that was written in the two hundred fifty years between them and the Miller play.) As to what might be exceptional about modern society, it contains huge numbers of people who are not bored by ideas and who have some basic equipment, such as literacy, for analyzing them. This might be of some consequence when thinking about the content and enforcement of the rules for respectable discourse, now and then.
Looking from the outside it seems to me “Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional and don’t have any extenuating circumstances (at least ones modern society would find acceptable) for being so.
That’s an improvement on Sewing Machine’s claim, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Groups despise other groups. “Rednecks” form a group, it’s predictably despised by another group. The low status are despised by the high status. Rednecks are low status, they’re despised by SWPLs, who are high status. The term “redneck” refers to the condition of their neck, which is a way of referring to their occupation and therefore to their station in life. Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors, likely to be looked down on by caucasians who work indoors. Probably rural, likely to be looked down on by the urban (who are urbane, sophisticated, in contrast to the rednecks who are rustic, unsophisticated).
People love to look down on other people. It’s a pastime. It’s a way to magnify one’s own feeling of having high status. There’s a site called “people of walmart” which is devoted to the pastime of looking down on other people. A lot of humor, possibly most humor, is devoted to ridiculing a group to which one does not belong. It’s always easy to come up with rationalizations for the contempt after the fact.
Personally I prefer the humor of self-ridicule. I assume that the SWPL site is self-ridicule of high status whites. I also assume that Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck” routine is self-ridicule of rednecks. In contrast, “people of walmart” is not self-ridicule.
High Status: Unemployed and unemployable MFA (Master of Fine Arts) who is unfortunately in between arts grants and low paid teaching jobs at the moment, and has been for some considerable time.
Lower Status: Artist who makes decent money by selling reproductions of his art to the despised bourgeoisie, but has no MFA, never gets grants, and never holds a job in academia, in part because the pay is low, but mostly because they would not hire such an inferior and low status person anyway.
Lowest Status: Wealthy farmer, who was a farmer’s son, and makes lots of money by feeding thousands of people, his neck turning red in the process as he works outdoors.
Farmers who own a lot of land, and their sons (though strangely not their daughters) also “rednecks”, and hated and despised accordingly. They are discriminated against in university admissions. Are they poor and dysfunctional?
The hatred of rednecks is a less extreme form of the “Occupy Wall Street” demands for jobs in the virtue and cultural uplift industries. The ruling class thinks that producing value is low status, and producing value by working outside is really low status, regardless of income.
Just as an unemployed and severely dysfunctional Occupy Wall Street protestor, who has a Masters in Fine Arts and is therefore a genuine official artist, despises the mere peddler of kitsch, despite the fact that no one would pay for the MFA’s “art” with their own money, and right now his grant has run out, the lesser artist, though his status is inferior due to the fact that he got his money merely from members of la bourgeoisie buying his art, rather than grants, his status is nonetheless superior to that of the even wealthier farmer’s son, whose work is largely done outdoors, and whose neck is therefore red.
Redneck has had connotations beyond “someone who works outside”, “someone who does farm work”, or even “someone who is white and does farm work” for some time.
Yet strangely, the MFA at “Occupy Wall Street” whose grant ran out long ago, and whose teaching job is extreme low pay, would not consider a better paid job that involved working out of doors.
Indeed, he is reluctant even to consider jobs outside the virtue industry.
How is this a response to anything I said? Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”? But then, your last sentence seems to contradict that. They value working in their field, just like anyone else. Maybe they value it too highly, in the face of economic reality. Maybe there are other, additional pressures that are leading their decisions. Maybe they are turning their noses up at some specific jobs because they seem too “redneck” but you haven’t shown evidence of it. But this isn’t even the point I was making.
While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “redneck” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage. Or, for that matter, an inverse with an MFA. Blue collar work—particularly non-manufacturing blue collar work—is a feature of the stereotype, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine category membership.
This is not to say that I think the stereotype to be a useful generalization.
You clearly understand the reasons why sam’s post was irrelevant gibberish. So why did you respond to it?
Personal edification.
Fixed it for you.
Wow, you really love that negative karma, don’t you?
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity. If we wish to pick these apart into Jew(S), Jew(R), and Jew(E), then that would be an antiquated but reasonably accurate description of Jew(S).
There is no corresponding Redneck(R) or Redneck(E). There is a redneck as the term was originally used—Redneck(O), let’s say.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
An attempt to reclaim it is not necessarily unreasonable, but it should be explicit. Attempting to do it implicitly is inviting confusion of the nature that originally caused me to comment.
You should now see the mismatch of your FTFY—Jew(S) is not at all the most prevalent usage of Jew.
There are nonetheless still occasions when I would recommend someone interpret “Jew” as Jew(S); if, as I recall observing in Junior high, one person asks to borrow money, is refused, and responds “You Jew!”, clearly interpreting that as Jew(R) or Jew(E) would be absurd—doubly so when you are aware that the refuser is neither.
I would say there is at least one more. Jewishness is as much a cultural association as a religious one, and there are plenty of people who identify as Jewish culturally, but not religiously.
Oh, absolutely.
When someone calls a penny pincher a Jew, that is not an alternate meaning for Jew, but a metaphor, like calling an overweight woman a whale. Jew means Jew by race or religion, and Redneck means someone who does a low status job, or whose ancestors did a low status job.
Yet oddly, an Master of Fine arts can never be a redneck, however poor and socially conservative he may be, even though MFAs are infamous for being poor and dysfunctional. Nor can a slush pile reader be a redneck, even though slush pile readers earn the smell of an oil rag..
Just as Jew means Jew by race or religion, not a penny pincher, redneck means a person who works in a low status job—no matter how highly paid that job may be.
And similarly, “racist” merely means person of low status, or insufficient status for the role he attempts to perform. Thus that rednecks are “racist” merely means that certain jobs are low status.
Chris Rock claimed to redefine nigga as not meaning a black man, but merely meaning a black man that fits the stereotype—and then he said that when he withdrew money from the teller machine, he looked behind him for niggas. Actual usage of the term “redneck” is similarly revealing.
Indeed, Chris Rock’s famous rant about niggas begins and ends with punch lines that falsify his claim to redefinition, probably deliberately, as the falsification, combined with the claim, is comical.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
When a group of people is stereotyped, this does not create a new meaning of the name of the group. Let’s review what a stereotype is. Using the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary, their definition of “stereotype” is:
False fixed ideas (beliefs) about group G are not new definitions for the name of the group G. G is not split into two, G(O) and G(S). The false fixed belief is a belief about G(O). The stereotype concerns the (original) group, it does not create a new group.
Imagine if it were otherwise! Imagine if, every time some false belief about some thing T popped into your head, then T split into two, T(O) and T(S). For one thing, you would never again have a false belief, because rather than being a false belief about T(O), your belief would actually be a definition for a new thing T(S) about which it was true.
To put it more briefly, a stereotype is an idea, a belief, about something. A belief can be true or false. In contrast, a definition or meaning is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. So to call a stereotype a meaning is to commit a simple category mistake.
Your whole argument is stated in terms of this category mistake, so to salvage it you would need to toss it and start from scratch.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings. This doesn’t mean that anyone would have the guts (or possibly lack of good sense—that lack might be equivalent to guts) to produce such a dictionary.
A concept might be in many people’s minds, and yet be inaccurate. A dictionary might note that while listing the concept.
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Merriam Webster and the other good descriptivist dictionaries do include meanings that match particular stereotypes when they are common meanings, which they rarely but occasionally are.
But importantly, it is only particular stereotypes of a given thing that become meanings—it has to be this way, in order to avoid confusion. For example, the verb “to jew” (which you can look up in any sufficiently comprehensive dictionary) has a meaning which matches a particular stereotype of Jews. That particular stereotype is not “the” stereotype of Jews, because to say it was “the” stereotype would be to imply that there is only one stereotype, and there are many stereotypes of Jews.
Also importantly, meanings corresponding to stereotypes are not automatically generated whenever stereotypes arise. It has to be this way, because it’s common that many stereotypes of a given thing arise, and if a meaning were automatically generated for each stereotype, then it would be difficult to tell, among all the stereotypes, which stereotype was meant when the word was used. Nor does a meaning automatically arise that includes all stereotypes together, as we know from the example of the verb “to jew”. Rather, on occasion, certain stereotypes are adopted as meanings. It doesn’t automatically happen, and it ought not blithely be assumed to have happened.
Here’s another pair of examples. Similarly to the verb “to jew”, there is also the verb “to dog”, which corresponds to one particular stereotype about dogs. And the verb “to wolf” (as in to wolf down) corresponds to another particular stereotype about wolves (and, as it happens, about their close relatives the dogs). Had linguistic history taken a different turn, the verbs “to dog” and “to wolf” might have had entirely different meanings, or might not have existed at all.
I seem to recall an Italian dictionary which did give something like “a miser” as one of the definition of ebreo, though with the annotation fig. before it. :-)
(Wait… by produce you meant “exhibit” not “manufacture”, right?)
Indeed. in case there has been any confusion, I did not argue otherwise. I wrote: “Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors.” Note my use of the word “originally”. This acknowledges that the term “redneck” has evolved since then. I was speculating about its origin.
It may well be—to speculate further—that the term “red neck” originally arose in the South, possibly applied by the Southern upper, indoors-dwelling (or otherwise sun-protected) classes to the Southern lower, outdoors-laboring classes.
This point does not take away from my argument as far as I can tell. Certainly I was aware of it, hence I used the word “originally”.
I’m pretty sure we’re talking past each other here. I think my usage of stereotype was actually reasonably correct, consider for instance:
from the wikipedia page on Archetype
But it is probably better to simply taboo it:
I contend that people do, in fact, make reference to these models in communication without necessarily adopting the belief that the model is valid.
This is not to say that I think they should do so; there is legitimate concern about propagating false beliefs when the models are commonly believed, and about bleeding over of associations when they are not.
To your mind, does it fix things if you read “model of a stereotypical X” for “stereotype”? That is closer to how I intended it.
It fixes part of it but I don’t think you capture what’s really going on. To use a fresh aspect of the concept of the redneck, as Nancy points out “redneck” has a regional component. MW’s definition of “redneck” for example, is: “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”. That’s an aspect of what you would call Redneck(O). So when you write:
you’re claiming that when people use the term, they predominantly do not use it to mean “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”, but rather, the stereotypes which we have been discussing, which were introduced by Sewing Machine, namely:
and elaborated or modified by konkvistador:
So here we have three stereotypes about rednecks: bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional. These are the stereotypes that were introduced, and that were given as reasons for rednecks being despised. I offered a quite different, and conflicting, theory as to why rednecks are despised, and I claimed that these stereotypes are in fact not reasons, but rationalizations, excuses, for the contempt so often and so publicly and so gleefully expressed about rednecks.
You’ve offered a new theory of the concept of the “redneck”, distinct from that of Sewing Machine and Konkvistador (the negative stereotypes on their expressed view do not constitute the concept, but are merely associated with the category). Your new theory amounts to an almost perfect excuse for the contempt. According to you, when people use the term, they predominantly mean Redneck(S). In context, then, what your statement amounts to, is the statement that when people use the term “redneck”, they mean “someone who is bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional”. If it were true, this would excuse the contempt shown to rednecks, maybe not the “poor” part, but “bigoted” certainly and “dysfunctional” probably. So when people say, “rednecks are bigots” and “rednecks are dysfunctional”, on your view of it, they are merely stating tautologies, i.e., “bigots are bigots” and “dysfunctional people are dysfunctional.”
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
In fact, the comedian Chris Rock did take something like your approach to a similar issue. He has a monolog in which he takes a common derogatory term for a whole group and redefines it (for the duration of his monolog) as referring only to those members to whom common negative stereotypes apply, and not to all members of the group. This is certainly not how it is normally used, and if you don’t belong to the group yourself, you would be well advised not to start using this term on the theory that it refers only to those members who satisfy the negative stereotypes. Chris Rock’s monolog, from wikiquote:
Someone who is not black would be well advised to avoid saying:
If we were to apply your theory of “redneck” to “nigga”, then the above statement would be an empty tautology, since it would mean essentially, “black people who break into your house, break into your house.” This is indeed what this means in the context of Chris Rock’s monolog. But it’s not what it would mean in everyday language. It is no empty tautology.
Same applies to “redneck”. Redneck means what the dictionary says it means (yes, the dictionary can be wrong, but in this case it’s not). You might be able to cook up a comedy monolog in which “redneck” means “bigoted person”, but it’s not what it means in everyday English. Someone tweaked me for referring to a dictionary—if MW agrees with me, I must be right. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I do think that dictionaries are usually very good evidence about what words mean.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern of people in an out-group attacking the members of their own group who most resembled the negative stereotype. I’ve heard of (but not heard directly) Jews complaining about “kikes”.
I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. The question isn’t what he did or did not invent. The question is, what is the everyday, common meaning. I brought up Chris Rock to illustrate what it would be like if dlthomas’s analysis of “redneck” applied to “nigga”. Everybody would all the time be talking the way that Chris Rock talks in his monolog without any negative consequences since they would not be implying anything about blacks in general. But clearly, that is not the case. Furthermore, Chris Rock explains his own meaning early in his monolog where he contrasts “black people” with “niggas”, which demonstrates that he does not expect his audience to apply that meaning as a default. Evidently, then, Chris Rock’s meaning is not the default common, everyday meaning of “nigga”.
As with your earlier response, I wonder whether there was some miscommunication, since you brought up a point that I don’t recall denying explicitly or implicitly.
I’m not sure about miscommunication—I may be trying to read too fast, and doing some pattern-matching.
The Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in didn’t do this… we mostly ignored the Jewish stereotypes in the larger culture altogether. But the queer community I attached myself to as a late adolescent did have something like this.
I’ve never heard of anything like that in my jewish community either. Though honestly I’ve almost never heard the term “kike” actually used before. Even anti-semites just use the word Jew as far as I know.
If you hear from a member of group X that group X says Y, it is usually true.
If you hear that group X says Y, from those who do not like group X, it often true.
If you hear that those who don’t like group X say Y, from those who don’t like those who don’t like group X, it is seldom true.
That is a ridiculously Platonic view of language. These aren’t categories that apply entirely or not at all—applicability of words is gradual. If someone fits every connotation of “redneck” except “racist”, people will apply the label to them and they clearly do not deserve the portion of the contempt associated with the label on the basis of it’s containing the connotation of “racist”. Typically, showing contempt or praise to groups whose membership is not strict is messy enough to be a bad idea.
Well, if Messrs. Merriam and Webster are on your side, you can’t be wrong!
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
The word “redneck” has nothing to do with MFA’s employment choices, or the Ivy League’s selection criteria
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist for exactly the same reason as Herman Cain is supposedly an Uncle Tom—it has absolutely nothing to do with the political views of Cain or the redneck. Rather, Cain lacks the requisite ruling elite credentials.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands. How about an inverse who is a slush pile reader? Could he be a redneck? I don’t think so, even though slush pile readers are apt to be low paid.
You are probably correct that people would feel comfortable calling a guy who works in a garage a redneck if he had the demonized redneck attitudes, but they would consider it joking or ironic to call a bookkeeper a redneck no matter what his attitudes, and there is no way they are going to call an MFA a redneck, except ironically, regardless of what that MFA’s tastes and political attitudes are, and regardless of how infrequent and small the MFA’s grants are.
Indeed, I use MFA as an example, because MFAs are notoriously starving, while looking down their noses at those who succeed in doing grubby inferior jobs at decent pay.
Neither Herman Cain (to say the very least) nor the modal tea party member are uneducated or work in low-status jobs.
An interesting claim. I don’t know enough of the socio-linguistic history to really comment. I still don’t really think it was a reasonable response to my original comment. You had seemed to be using “redneck” to mean farmers, generally; I still maintain that this is an unrealistic representation of what people typically use the phrase to mean, and will likely lead to misunderstanding in both directions.
There are unquestionably social groups wherein academia is accorded the highest status, yes. People value status, yes. Undoubtedly, some people with an MFA belong to some of those social groups, and this factored in to their decision. I have no data either way to support typicality or atypicality of MFA’s in particular. I have basically no experience with Occupy Wall Street. From my limited direct observation of Occupy Oakland, however, this does not seem terribly representative of the protesters there.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact. Nonetheless, it is certainly the case that knowledge work is accorded higher status in many circles.
“Redneck” is low status in my mind because it is associated with the puerile humor of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry The Cable Guy. Jobs involving a lot of manual labor are not inherently low status in my mind—that stuff needs doing too, and plumbers have saved more lives than doctors. I wouldn’t do it because I have a job that pays well that I find interesting.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because the term is associated predominately with the American south which has, in recent history, harbored a higher level of racism (particularly that directed toward blacks) than other regions. Yes, this is a stereotype—it doesn’t even necessarily represent the typical individual from the region—but it’s stereotypes we are discussing.
Yes. As I said, blue collar work is a feature of the stereotype, and so an examples with that attribute are going to seem to fit better than examples without.
I don’t see any reason a slush pile reader wouldn’t be labeled a redneck, if he spent his off hours drinking cheap beer and making racist jokes while listening to country music and working on his truck. Unless he instead got the label “hipster”—which seems to also be low status, but I expect would be precluded by the country music.
It is conceivable that a part of this is just a regional difference in how liberally the term is applied—around here, there aren’t very many white farm workers.
Once again, my favorite and much repeated citation, favorite because it reveals the same pathology as “Occupy Wall Street” and “Joe the puppeteer” reveals, but provides statistics rather than mere anecdote:‘”Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”’
Interesting. It would seem to be literally true, then, that “the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers.” I am not sure, however, whether the normative weight you give it is appropriate.
“The Ivy League discriminates” is trivially true—that’s what their admission’s board is for. The question is whether particular discrimination is justified. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate, if that is what is going on. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers on the grounds that they are associated with farming and we don’t like that is obviously inappropriate. If the examination of the ROTC, 4-H, etc, officership and awards controlled well for other factors, then this would be evidence of the latter, and should be fixed.
I could see it simply being a correlation, however—people who take officership in these organizations or earn awards there probably have some interest and time invested there, and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board is looking for; being that they are not an agricultural school, it makes sense that they prioritize other things. And if the student has a genuine interest in farming and wishes to pursue it further, they will probably benefit much more from attending UC Davis, Michigan State, or Texas A&M than they would from attending Harvard, Yale, or Brown.
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
I was ambiguous—i don’t know whether it confused you. If there are farmers that would get less out of it and vice-versa, then they should be discriminated against exactly like anyone else who would get less out of it and vice-versa. I did not intend to assert that this is true of farmers universally, and whether it is true statistically more often than reference populations is an open question as far as I can tell.
If you want a potential reason this could be the case, I gave one previously—someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
“Seems obvious” leaves much room for bias. As I said—if it is “simple snobbery”, it should be addressed. It is obvious that this is possible—it is not obvious that some other explanation is impossible, or even unlikely. I have no direct experience of Ivy League admissions, and limited second- or third-hand knowledge.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
What then is your explanation for discrimination against ROTC members.
Your reading is very strange:
The article states: Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
Emphasis added
UC Berkeley was originally an agriculture school and still maintains an ag department (now under the name of Agricultural and Resource Economics, but that’s common to several schools better known for their ag programs). Stanford’s got one, too. I’m on the wrong coast to know much about the Ivy League, unfortunately.
Ahhh! That’s where the name redneck comes from. I hadn’t even thought about it enough to wonder.
Reactionary elitism, for one (almost by definition not a redneck attitude).
This seems crazily optimistic — literacy and intellectualism, however widespread, don’t do much to protect people from holding ideological taboos.
The term for racist—and anyone that is less enlightened than the wonderful ruling class—is “racist”
“redneck” literally means white guy who works outdoors, unlike their masters who work in offices, and when I see people use the term, it is clear that whatever they say they mean, that is what they do mean. For example: the discrimination of Ivy League universities against the sons of farmers. Does the Ivy League have reason to believe that the sons of farmers are more racist than others?
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
I don’t have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don’t object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn’t involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
If we’re just talking about what I have defensible objections to, I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents (1).
That said, I nevertheless find the notion of human sacrifice deeply disturbing and I’m confident that my opinion of someone who participated in it would change significantly for the worse if I found out.
I also find most forms of cannibalism disturbing in much the same way, though not quite as extremely, and I can imagine fringe cases that might not disturb me much. The same is true for many forms of bestiality, though it’s much easier to come up with cases that don’t disturb me. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how much I anthropomorphize the animal in question.)
Incest—again, assuming consent (1) -- doesn’t bug me much at all.
== (1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
I notice that this is something that I have instrumental reasons to support. Anybody who considers cryonics to be a rite of ‘nerd religion’ should thereby consider the early, voluntary preservation of someone with Alzheimers a ritual human sacrifice meant to purify them for the afterlife.
Legalize human sacrifice!
Fair point.
A related observation is that, since cryonics can (as you note) be framed as a ‘nerd religion’ form of human sacrifice, social norms opposing human sacrifice can be framed as opposing cryonics as well. It follows that if you support cryonics, you might do well to work against those norms, all else being equal.
I suppose something similar is true of Christian Scientists other sects that reject medical care, whose practices can similarly be framed as a form of human sacrifice. Also people who perform or receive abortions, I guess. We could all band together to form the Coalition to Support Things that Can be Thought of as Resembling Human Sacrifice (Including Of Course Human Sacrifice Itself).
Well, OK, maybe we should have a catchier name.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Good idea!
I submit “social reification” in the mild hope that someone will improve on it.
I thought the word was “politics.”
A lot of things are ‘politics’. More specific names are also handy.
I think khafra’s comment was intended more for snark than for a serious submission.
“Bootleggers and baptists” is a related concept.
Hell, just legalize suicide. :P
If you commit suicide it’s not like you’re going to jail.
Besides, the policy against suicide attempts is usually psychological treatment not jailtime or something.
Although assisting suicide seems to be a felony in most states in the US according to wikipedia.
Of course for the majority of people wikipedia page itself is all the assistance they would require.
My discovery of the day: Suicide by locking yourself in the garage with the car on just aint what it used to be. Apparently it was once painless and only minimally unpleasant due to the large amount of carbon monoxide produced. These days, however, we have more efficient engines and catalytic converters. This means you need an awful lot of exhaust fumes to get enough carbon monoxide to kill you—and exhaust fumes still aren’t pleasant.
Evidently it is better to use a barbeque (charcoal burner) than a car if you really want to off yourself with CO.
(nods) My dad once attempted and failed to kill himself by the former method and reported something similar.
I don’t much care if suicide is illegal just so long as those that are enabling the suicider aren’t vulnerable to punishment for obvious reasons. Well, unless our legal system is expected to last as is until after recovery from cryopreservation is implemented. That’d be awkward.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
I’d support this more confidently if I believed that the legal mechanisms distinguishing “enabling suicide” from “murder” would align well with my own intuitions about the distinction.
This seems like a bad idea as long as most people aren’t getting cryonicly preserved. A lot of what we’ve learned about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s as well as other forms of brain damage comes from autopsies and we’re still learning. Similarly, in some cases the brain will be severely damaged by the form of death (such as say many cases of blunt trauma) and in some of those cases (such as murder investigations) autopsies may be necessary.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
I would require that explicit consent be granted by the patient in a will or, if the will does not mention the subject, then require the consent from the next of kin as opposed to requiring the next of kin to actively request that no head-destruction be done. Because cops aren’t going to make it easy for next of kin to hinder their investigation by making such a request but they are almost always going to get permission that is required so that they don’t face criminal charges.
(I don’t have any particular objection to donation of one’s body or brain to science for them to do as they please.)
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d consider that a sacrifice as such, even if I strain myself to view it through a religious frame. Ritual sacrifice seems to cluster around giving up something physical and valuable in order to sanctify some external object or concept; essentially costly signaling of devotion. There’s no external sanctification going on here, and I’m not sure how valuable I’d consider continued life under those circumstances; early cryopreservation seems more like sokushinbutsu or something similar. “Mortification of the flesh” is probably the closest Christian analogy, although it’s not a perfect one.
Giving up the immediate prospect of a conventional life, before and during the process of the disease setting in, to demonstrate faith in future technological developments?
I’d assign a high probability (about 80%) that a random person consenting to being sacrificed would not do so if they knew more, thought faster, and were more the person they wished they were.
But clearly the person they wished they were is someone who has been sacrificed!
A relationships thread on a rationality site has become a discussion of human sacrifice? :-)
We’re anticipating the post where he talks about compromise.
So the objection, if based off this prediction, would be one of paternalism? ie. You think you know better about what they ‘really’ want than they do? (Not that I’m saying you don’t.)
Well, not that alone; but also the fact that sacrifice (as I understand it, at least) is irreversible, so someone who doesn’t want to be sacrificed right now can change their mind, but not vice versa.
What about a sacrifice which takes place incrementally over a period of years?
Like what?
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?363769-nMage-the-other-99-999-Leaves&p=11220674#post11220674
Also, human sacrifice is creepy!
I think that’s enormously underconfident. That said, I’m also not sure why it matters.
There’s no way that consent could ever be simple or unambiguous here. Wanting to die might be a temporary state of mind, while death is a very permanent effect. The victim would have to be completely unable to change his/her mind ever in his/her life.
I don’t think if a friend asks you to kill him, you should do it. No, clearly your friend needs mental help, and hopefully his suicidal urges are temporary.
I agree with you that consent is not simple… indeed, I said as much in the first place.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
Did I understand you right?
==
(1) For conventional understandings of death. I acknowledge that many people on this site consider, for example, having my brain removed from my skull and cryogenically preserved to not be an example of death, because the potential for reconstituting me still exists. Personally, I’m inclined to still call that death, while allowing for the possibility of technologically mediated resurrection. That said, that’s ultimately a disagreement about words, and not terribly important, as long as we’re clear on what we’re talking about.
I think people often misjudge situations, especially in relation to ending their own life. And consent in case of permanent damage is probably not sufficient to say anything about morals. If their death actually did have higher value than other options then I suppose it is just a tragic situation.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others. Also, it cuts the other way too. For example, when my grandfather suffered a stroke, nobody expected him to recover, and both he and his loved ones preferred him dead rather than continuing to live bedridden, frequently delirious, and in constant pain. The law prevented us from killing him, though. I consider every day of his life after that point far more tragic than his eventual death.
I agree that knowledge about consent is not always sufficient to make a moral judgment.
I think if we switch from talking about expected-value judgements to moral judgements, we will have to back up a very long way before we can keep making progress, since I’m not sure we have a shared understanding about what a moral judgement even is.
I have experienced a Cartesian-demon-like urge to rationalise “I should kill myself”. While similar dispositions exist in e.g. anosognosics, I expect situations that cause them are rare.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant to say that if their death had higher value then I would agree that it would be the better decision. It is tragic that there are no positive solutions, and only negative ones.
Consider the situations where people consider suicide. They often are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable. Sometimes there is a euphoric response when people decide that everything will be over soon. Obviously, I can’t think of any statistics or anything, so I guess we just have to disagree.
I’m content to disagree, but I’m not sure we even do.
Certainly I agree with you that people often misjudge the decision to end their own lives, often for the reasons you cite.
What I’m saying is that, for example, people who are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable also make decisions about whether to get out of bed, whether to go to work, whether to take their medication, whether to talk to friends about what’s going on in their lives, whether to take psychoactive drugs, whether to get more sleep, whether to exercise regularly, whether to punch their neighbor in the head, whether to buy revolvers, and on and on and on.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
We suck at these decisions, but the consequences tend to be significantly more severe. Good defaults before the unstability starts also help; for example, “go to work” is much more likely to be on the radar at all than “punch someone out of the blue”.
But to address your point: yup, there are specific bugs that are triggered solely by considering suicide. Though how you’d measure their frequency I don’t know.
I agree that the consequences of an incorrect decision about dying are severe compared to most of the other decisions we make.
I agree that there are specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering suicide. There are also specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering all kinds of other things.
I agree that existing predispositions to explicitly consider/not consider certain decisions, and to decide them in particular ways, affect how we make those decisions.
And that’s where we disagree. I don’t think suicidal people are just as reliable in their decision-making as others.
I recommend that you take a break from this thread, go think about something else for a while, come back to what I said, and see if you still believe I’m making a claim about comparisons between two groups of people.
If you do, then I agree that we should end this discussion here.
When I was in a similar circumstance I had to try very hard to stop myself from making puns on DoubleReed.
That didn’t even occur to me. (hat-tip)
Oh snap.
Oh I see what you’re saying.
I don’t know. I mentioned before there is a euphoric response to having things finally end in peace. This is why so many people can believe in something like the rapture. It’s not a frightening thought. They get caught up in the idea that everything will be all right. Suicide sounds like it would trigger that appeal as well, so I’m still inclined to disagree.
I’m glad you’re now seeing what I said. It makes useful discussion much easier.
I share your belief that such an anticipation of relief might be triggered by contemplating suicide. That has certainly been my experience, at least.
I infer (though not very confidently) that you believe such anticipation is a more powerful motivator than various other feelings such people have that cause them to make unreliable decisions in other contexts. If you do in fact believe that, then yes, we disagree.
The meaning of this ‘consent’ term seems to be drifting closer and closer to ‘whatever it takes for the action to be considered morally right’.
How so?
Obviously permanent and long-term effects have more issues with consent. I don’t see how that’s particularly wishy-washy.
Edit: If anything I’m declaring a harsh limit on how far consent goes. It is insufficient for certain moral situations.
Er… what about pets? Not all animals we kill and eat, you know...
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
What have I ever done to you?!
Comparison? It wasn’t a comparison. It was a clarification. Having sex with pets is also bestiality.
You’re against it? Why? You’re just sounding arbitrary.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent (similar to pedophilia). So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
By “that we have” do you mean “that we do have” or “that we should have?” I think it would difficult to claim that existing bans on bestiality are really based on the idea of consent, which they predate. (Note that e.g. “rape” (of humans) refers to something conceptually quite different than it did back in the bad old days.)
Can you clarify this? I don’t understand your point on rape. Even in the old days, I’m pretty sure rape implied not-consent...
Is the idea of consent really that modern?
Deuteronomy:
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Indeed, in the US the last state was North Carolina in 1993, and even still it tends to be a lesser offense (assault, battery, or spousal abuse). wikipedia.
Of course, my wife and I tend to call shenanigans on the concept. Thought experiment:
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim. So someone who didn’t want their life ruined (jail time, permanent sex offender registry, etc.) would do well to make certain sure they can establish that consent was given. Various methods would work to some degree—signed documents, video tapes, witnesses, the presence of a government official...
As ridiculous as it would seem to get all of those things together for the recording of consent for sex, it so happens we actually do have an institution that incorporates all of those things—marriage. We actually have a tradition that involves getting the entirety of both families together, in front of a government official, with signed government documents, usually on videotape, where both parties agree (often speaking directly to their respective deities) that they will do certain things with each other, traditionally understood to prominently include sex. A bit over the top, but sometimes you have to do crazy things to avoid litigation.
Except now, even going through all that is insufficient to establish consent. It’s a world gone mad.
Compared to other crimes, rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
Quick sanity check: According to RAINN (disclosure: citing an organization I’ve supported), 58% chance of a conviction for rape. A questionable Wikipedia article claims that the conviction rate for crimes in general is “84% in Texas, 82% in California, 72% in New York, 67% in North Carolina, and 59% in Florida.” (as of 2000). Thus, it seems plausible that rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
For clarity, the RAINN stats are rape-specific and the Wikipedia stats are for all crimes, right?
Crime-specific conviction rates seem to be hard to find. A 1997 DoJ press release claims 87% conviction rates for all crimes in federal court (a skewed sample, though) and 86% for violent crime, but doesn’t break it down further. The situation could plausibly have changed in the last fourteen years due to changes in culture or forensic science.
Statistics from the California DoJ (pages 49-50; PDF file) suggest that around 67% of felony arrests (not trials) in the state result in conviction, and that that rate has slowly been increasing since the Seventies (when the number was around 45%).
Yes. Editing.
I was waiting for someone to cry foul on empirical grounds. I was arguing from popular perception. Do you have a source?
Good question.
I tried looking up statistics, but it seems like my Google-Fu has failed. I found numbers for federal court, but most of what it says is that the vast majority of federal indictments are resolved with guilty pleas, and there don’t seem to be very many rape trials in federal court.
Trying to break down the numbers further:
According to the numbers given, In 2005 there were 3065 jury convictions and 430 jury acquittals in federal court, making a total of 3,495 federal jury trials and a conviction rate of 88%. Under the “sexual abuse” category, there were 24 jury trials that ended in a conviction and 8 that ended in an acquittal. The sample size is small, but it gives a conviction rate of 75%.
Which tells me… basically nothing, because the sample size is very small, most rape cases would be prosecuted in state courts rather than federal courts, and cases that actually go to trial are unusual anyway because both the prosecution and the defense have to prefer a trial to the alternatives of not taking the case to court at all or pleading guilty.
Sigh...
Actually, the traditional part of the wedding vows (in America, at least, and I assume other English-speaking countries) referring to sexual obligation—“serve”—faded into disuse well before spousal rape became criminalized, and in any event a key feature of sexual consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time.
There are of course enforcement problems which may complicate cases where there’s no other physical abuse, but pertaining to my original point, at least, I’d contend that most late moderns would agree that spousal rape is both logically coherent and evil, because it meets the “consent” conception of rape, whereas most earlier peoples would not, operating as they were from a property crime framework.
There are certainly those who would dispute claims 1 and 3. (And obviously, in doing so, use a broader definition of “easy” which includes cultural norms and foreseeable consequences.)
Edit: that goes double for marital rape.
To clarify: do you and your wife believe that the presumption of consent that marriage entails is sufficient to overcome any potential evidence of rape, or merely that it is sufficient to raise the bar significantly?
If the latter, I agree; if the former, I disagree. Your comment seems to suggest the former, but you may simply be indulging in entertaining hyperbole.
Thought experiment: suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me? Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
Yes, I’d generally consider “X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so” or everything else severally (weakly) sufficient to justify that claim.
My presumption above is that ‘nonconsentual sex’ and ‘marriage’ are inconsistent. If X is your spouse, then X was asserting something inconsistent in X’s shamefaced admission, and you were in your accusation. If you want to withdraw your consent, then get a divorce.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Well, even if marriage was a contract to say “I want to have sex with you” it’s a little ridiculous for it to say “I want to have sex with you whenever you want.”
Is it? Here I thought that was the point.
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
Cold comfort for someone getting repeatedly forced to have sex while they wait for the divorce to be finalized.
It was my understanding that most divorce proceedings encourage separation early on in the process.
In some states, it is mandatory to have a period of separation prior to divorce, and having sex with your spouse will reset the timer.
All right, slavery is too strong.
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Possibly. Looking up the word, “without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel” pretty much matches my meaning.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
Yes, that’s probably right. It seems it has to come down to either:
You don’t think not having sex constitutes misery/suffering, or
You don’t think withholding something that would alleviate misery/suffering from a loved one is cruel / lacking compassion
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters. From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction. From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
Or maybe 3. He thinks that having sex when one doesn’t want to constitutes misery/suffering that outweighs the misery/suffering of not having sex.
For the record: I think this is often true, but largely irrelevant to my current exchange with thomblake.
That implies 2, or else is irrelevant to the claim that it is inhumane.
ETA: For reference, I also think 3 is often true, for some reasonable methods of “weighing”.
It certainly isn’t #2.
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
I think more typically tension arises from points on the spectrum between these extremes.
Absolutely agreed.
Fair enough.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Having an overwhelmingly low prior for your husband saying something like this for reasons that are cruel certainly helps!
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
These aren’t similar statements, in that while monogamy demands fidelity 24⁄7, refusing sex should generally be a temporary.
However, in a situation where the latter is permanent, then I agree that we have a problem.
I see no reason it should be so black and white.
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
Because it is rape?
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
Is it “they” or “you”?
Missed one. They.
That’s precisely begging the question.
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
Brilliant! I am totally using this for private contracts in the future. Is that done already?
I think I’ll prefer ECDSA for my documents. Elliptic Curves are so much sexier.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
Yes, that’s the scenario I was imagining. The hashed part presumably could be arbitrarily verbose and specific, thus rendering it indecipherable.
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
It’s the gist of any digital signature algorithm.
As for using it in a wedding? I’ve never been to such a ceremony, certainly...
But you already signed the contract. Like what if it happens before you get divorced?
Ridiculous? This seems to actually be rather similar to what wedrifid is describing (correct me if I’m wrong).
It’s ridiculous to assume that it must mean the latter when we generally take it to mean the former (although even then, not always). I am not sure it is ridiculous to allow both options, but confusing the two is harmful.
Okay, agreed.
Indeed. I was clarifying, more than correcting. I think the perspective you introduced (or made explicit, if that’s what wedrifid was thinking) is interesting and relevant to the discussion.
What is the intended message of the Deuteronomy quote? It seems to imply that rape implies non-consent. In this case the relevance of the rape is that the betrothed rape victim is excused from punishment for the crime of adultery.
Right, consent is relevant insofar as it determines whether the maiden is complicit in the harm to her fiance. But it’s not a determinant of whether harm was done, or even the severity of it. If you have sex with another man’s wife or fiance, you die. If she’s not betrothed then the pottery barn rule kicks in and you make restitution to her owner. If there’s contested ownership (e.g., if she’s your slave but someone else’s fiancee) you pay a fine (Leviticus 19:20-22.)
In all cases the person whose consentH^H^H^H^H^H injury matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
That’s certainly not the case in the passage quoted here. In fact in no place in the passage is the fiance, husband or father even able to give consent. These particular rules apply even if for some reason the fiance or husband said “go for your life, she’s yours for the taking”. The only consent that is mentioned at all is the consent of the betrothed damsel, the giving of which will get her killed alongside her lover—it is male consent that does not happen to matter at all.
The issues you have with sexism in these collections of religious text seem to be overshadowing what this passage has to say about rape. (And those issues may be valid and important in their own right as independent subjects!)
You’re right, consent was the wrong word to use in that context. I was being sloppy and meant that the men in question were the wronged party.
That does seem likely to be the reason there were such strict laws against adultery. Robin Hanson explores why adultery (and so cuckoldry) is a more significant issue for males.
The relevant comparison would be vandalism or theft.
Yes.
In many traditional cultures marital rape is/was not considered as rape.
(also, even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape)
Which seems ridiculous to me. And that isn’t an objection with respect to people should being punished for what is called statuary rape. It is an objection to the crime against language!
Won’t somebody think of the statues?!
I know, the poor statues already get enough unwelcome deposits from seagulls and pigeons. They certainly don’t deserve any more!
I’d say it falls naturally out of the construction of consent, actually. Looks pretty different from a consequential perspective, but from a deontological one the only relevant problems show up around the consent-capable/consent-incapable border, or relate to what to do when both partners are considered incapable—none of which is much of a surprise if you’re using a consent criterion. I’m pretty sure there’s similar strangeness in contract law.
There’s some more or less analogous stuff going on in the earlier property-crime construction, too.
If I’m not mistaken statutory rape is based on the age of consent. The law is claiming that the people do not have the right to consent to such acts, much in the same way that children many times do not understand what is happening in cases of pedophilia.
Specific laws and ages of consent have problems and flaws, of course. But when you say “even with consent,” that is what people are disagreeing about. Do they really have consent?
Not True consent. Because we want to call the sex ‘rape’ and rape is forcing someone to have sex with you without consent. So what they did when they said “I want you baby. #$%# me now.” then tore of the clothes of the ‘rapist’ and forced them down on the bed couldn’t have been consent. Consent in this context must mean “whatever it takes for me to not call the act rape”.
Repeated disclaimer: This isn’t a claim about morality or what punishment is appropriate for any given sexual act. It’s about word use!
Why is consent required for sex but not for killing and eating?
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living. But whether or not this is right it’s clearly just a post-hoc rationalization of the fact that I/DoubleReed/most people think it’s super duper gross.
If that was really the reason, people would express more outrage and disgust over the idea of factory farming than over the idea of bestiality (I suspect zoophiliacs would also argue that they treat their animals very well and that the animals enjoy it—I don’t doubt some enjoy it more than what factory-farmed animals go through).
So yes, I think that that, and consent, are post-hoc rationalizations, and are not remotely related to the true reasons we find bestiality super duper gross.
You know, I agree that at first my ideas were post-hoc, but that could just be where it started.
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues. There are still issues of course (usually in terms of irreversible or serious harm).
On the contrary rape is exactly the example I bring up to reject that adage as a moral absurdity.
I don’t go and tear a girl’s clothes off and do to her just because I’d like it if she tore off my clothes and did to me!
That would be rape. And rape is bad. Therefore following the adage would make me bad.
Did you somehow miss the “when you factor in ideas of consent” part?
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent. Along the lines of of “Three Worlds Collide” morality (as it applies to me and by those in the set I consider to be the pool of potential mates and without any interest in being free to do such things myself to others). That would be seriously awesome. Much more exciting!
Wait… are we talking about the old adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or the new adage that doesn’t appear when googling for it, “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you”. I was assuming the former whereas the latter is actually kind of awesome. It’s kind of like pre-emptive tit for tat. If people want to kill you then you are morally obliged to kill them.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual. That does not defeat what I am saying. It’s not like first part overrides the second part or something.
Anyway, this is getting way off topic.
That is not what he said. He said, “If I did not consent and she did, I would still want her to do it.” Your objection does not apply to this, but others clearly do...
Edited to add: He may be conflating “consent” and “voiced consent”?
More like the idea of precommitting to consent, really. After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent? This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
Hmm. Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood). And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Reminds me of the idea of designated, legally-sanctioned areas where anyone in the area can use violent force against anyone else in the area without fear of prosecution for such, but which develop a social equilibrium with very little nonconsensual violence because people mostly go there to enjoy the polite-with-undetones-of-danger ambiance.
I believe I would call this “still consent”, provided the draw of the situation was the fact of the situation including such acts.
The more you elaborate, the more I find myself intrigued by the idea.
Are they allowed to use roofies or tasers?
This would be the one of the other objections I was alluding to, yes.
I understand. What I mean is:
Is it something I would like them to do to me? Yes or No.
Do all parties involved consent that this is what they want to do? Yes or No.
The first question doesn’t override the second question. Both parts has to say yes. If the you don’t care about consent, that only affects the first question.
FYI: Could have been but wasn’t.
OK, I begin to understand how you are including consent into the moral principle. It seems like it puts most of the moral work into the “Don’t do things to people without their consent” part but that is at least safer than actually following the adage itself and does rule out any problem which includes “things are done to people without their consent.” This leaves only those inefficiencies that, well, fall short of the extremes of brutal, unwelcome violations.
Yeah, the currently established rules of consent are really for the purposes of safety—to prevent tragedies borne out of miscommunication, to prevent plausible excuses from either party.
It’s an excellent rule, but it’s not the absolutely fundamental point, the goal unto itself—the real goal is to prevent the physical and emotional suffering associated with undesired violations of one’s person.
In a hypothetical world where true preferences could be determined and established without a hint of potential miscommunication or the possibility of denial-after-the-fact (e.g. by the electronic monitoring and recording of thoughts), the situation could well be different and the issue of consent might drop away to be replaced by the concept of ascertained shared preferences—atleast in persons mature enough, well-informed enough, and in a stable enough mental state to be able to evaluate said desires/preferences in a sane manner.
Yea, the major issues I’ve seen are when consent is ambiguous, like pedophilia/bestiality, but also with long term damage. After all, if something is permanent, then they may not want it later. It is impossible to give “eternal consent” as far as I’ve seen and that is where there are serious moral ambiguities. Like if someone asked you to kill him. That has a permanent effect of a hopefully temporary state of mind.
Uhm… did you miss “is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent.”
If the girl consents to that, then there is no rape and it is not bad.
I was referring to pets in that statement.
Clearly, we don’t care about animals’ consent when we kill and eat them. So I guess we can have sex with them all we want. Kind of an odd train of thought, I admit...
Huh? No I don’t. I didn’t even mention pets until you did. Your replies in this conversation all seem non sequitur.
Although the meaning is already unambiguous if you reread the part in your third “[...]” it should be even more clear.
I am against having sex with ALL animals (ie. a number of sex acts upon animals that is as at least as large as the number of animals) because I can multiply. This isn’t a terribly important point so I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it if was going to make DoubleReed so confused. It is only relevant in as much as it was part of an explanation of why the Err… didn’t make any sense in the context.
I get it. I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur. (Though it would be more clear if “I’m against it” were quoted between “also bestiality” and “You’re against it?”)
Also, I wish you would stop using such hurtful terms as “pervert”. I highly doubt I’ll make my way through all the sponges in the next hundred years anyway.
They would have to also not understand the part that is plain logic and even then requires “would seem to make perfect sense to them” since sincere misunderstanding doesn’t make things logically follow.
I know, the problem being that it you presented it with an “Er...” as though somehow it made my comment about bestiality incorrect… which it wouldn’t unless bestiality involved having sex with any or all animals… which it doesn’t.
Following along on your tangent for curiosity’s sake I note that I have killed and eaten my pets. They happen to have been sheep, cows, a goat and some roosters (that we raised by hand). They tend to get fairly obnoxious at a certain age. Especially the roosters, given that the mating habit of that species is basically rape.
This is what you said:
But you DO have objections to bestiality. Just not all cases of it.
Having sex with any nonhuman animal is bestiality. That’s literally what it is.
No I don’t. I have no idea why you are saying that.
Which is why I am still rejecting the relevance of pets. Since bestiality only requires that a person have sex with one animal even if someone declared or assumed sex with pets was forbidden (which you seemed to) it still wouldn’t be a rejection of bestiality. Because it does not require that you have or desire to have sex with all animals including pets.
I’m really confused.
1) You said you had no objections to bestiality. 2) I bring up pets. 3) You say that you are against that. Therefore, (3) is a clarification of (1).
This is not a meaningful direction for debate. Let me clear things up for both of you.
He meant: “I have no objection to acts just because the label ‘bestiality’ can be applied.”
You took him to mean: “I have no objection to any acts to which the label ‘bestiality’ can be applied.”
Thank you.
No, he specifically said:
In other words, he’s against an alternative, nonstandard definition of bestiality, which is not the same thing as the kind of bestiality for which he has no objections.
The allusion to torture vs. dust and his emphasis of standard bestiality “only requir[ing] that a person have sex with one animal” suggests that he is against this sort of serial bestiality because the numbers involved become large.
No, I said I’m against “the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts”. I said that because that would be what required for your mention of pets as a reason to reject or ‘clarify’ my earlier declaration of non-objection to be valid.
The issue of consent is probably how I’d choose to justify my objection to bestiality on the basis of rights. The concept of rights is among the highest-status deontological ethics in the world today, so may have the best chance of convincing others.
But I think my true objection may be just that I feel it horribly demeans the humans involved, lowering them to the status of (lesser) animals.
Also: pedophilia; the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
“Sex between adults and young teenagers, as long as there is no obvious coercion involved, is not nearly as harmful as generally supposed” is definitely something that you can’t say—and the fact that you can’t say it has been demonstrated experimentally.
To clarify terminology here, pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is a different word, which is escaping me at the moment, for a sexual preference for adolescents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia depending on which stage of adolescence you’re talking about.
I’ve no disagreement with your comment Atelos, but—why do those words exist?
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
Eliezer on the subject of words that should not exist:
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations. Also note that 15-25 and 18-21 are typically given as the prime age ranges of female physical attractiveness by Roissy and his commenters (although since these are arbitrary cut-offs, there’s no need to give them a name). The 15-19 age range of “ephebophilia” cuts across this age range seemingly at random.
The same goes for hebephilia, attraction to 11-14 year-olds. There is no discontinuity in the characteristics of a typical human between 14 and 15 years of age, and I don’t see why hebephiles should form a compact cluster in thingspace either.
On the other hand paedophilia does seem a valid word, because attraction to pre-pubescents seems qualititatively different from attraction to fertile human beings (there are evolutionary considerations at play, and there are great physical changes in a short space of time during puberty). Properties shared in common by paedophiles are presumably qualitative differences in “brain wiring” in comparison to humans of typical sexuality.
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
There are people with a sexual preference for people from the age of their birth right up to and even past the age of their death. Since there are many such people it is easier to have words that give a ballpark to their sexual preference than to say “someone with a specific sexual preference for humans between the ages of X and Y” every single time.
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
(With the caveat that it is stupid to use the same word for the preference for males and females at this stage. Both groups are more similar to adults of their sex than they are to each other!)
Or, in this case, the opposite. In most cases injecting the word ephebophile into a context will expunge connotations rather than introducing them. In the case of a sexually active ephobophile using the word ensures that all “people who have sex with those who are under the age at which it is legally permissible to have sex with them” aren’t lumped in together. Because they aren’t @#@%ing pedophiles and because while both practices are illegal they have entirely different moral connotations. For that matter the active practice of the various illegal chronophilias also have different practical implications. Counter-intuitively (unless you think about it) in the case of rape I seem to recall that a rape of a girl that is sexually mature does greater psychological damage on average than than the rape of a younger girl (probably something Robin Hanson cited).
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females) the age range 15-19 is rather close to the widely agreed-upon (by men) 5-year age range of females in their physical prime of roughly 18-22. 15-year olds have been reproductively viable for about 4 years on average. 19-year-old women are about as attractive as they’ll ever be!
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Even if the girl in quesiton is 15, it seems that the extent to which an older man might target her as a mate in today’s society depends more on how up-tight, how scrupulous or how socialised he is – whether he prefers slightly younger (by 3 years) women than the average man would generally be difficult to tell from outside, and being “normal” in this regard doesn’t preclude attraction to a 15-year-old any more than it does attraction to a 25-year-old in any case.
There are words like “creeper” and “pervert” that might be used to describe the type of person who appears to pay undue attention to younger teenage girls. This seems to exhaust the social utility of having a word for someone who prefers slightly younger women than does the average man. Note that this concept is also highly contingent; plenty of human societies would consider overt sexual attraction to young teenage girls, insofar as sexual attraction is acceptable in general, to be unremarkable (as Hanson’s piece points out).
Ephebophilia therefore appears to be useful, if at all, as a scientific term only. And in that case, where is the evidence that ephebophiles form a meaningful category? Why not have special words for adults who are attracted to 22-25 year-olds in particular (equally unusual), and so forth? Why name a specific age range at all, rather than having a general word for “prefers fertile women, but of unusually young age”, if not just to lend the term a bogus scientific air?
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms. I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”. On the other hand achondroplasia dwarfism is a term that cleaves reality at its joints. (NB: no offense intended by this analogy, which implies no similarity beyond the use of words to refer to variations in some characteristic of humans).
In most cases that’s probably true, but the more discriminating question might be why this confusion exists so widely. After all it’s quite a severe accusation.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults. So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
If you actually did wonder that back through the analogy you would probably look at the third sentence of the wikipedia article and follow the link.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
The point is about arbitrary “scientific” gradings pulled out of thin air. Short, very short, diminutive—they are vague context-dependent categorisations that are suitable given the continuous nature and contingent relevance of the variation in question. This is not comparable to rigid, highly specific classifications like my putative “veryshortman”, which is how I would characterise words like ephebophilia. There should be a good reason for the existence of such a term, and that reason is not apparent.
The other problem with the specificity of “ephebophilia” is also that it overlaps with the typical 5-year window in which an average male would find a female most physically attractive. Therefore it can’t even be justified on the grounds that the psychologists are binning males into continuous but arbitrarily demarcated categories of “normal”, “ephebophile” and “hebephile”.
You said: “Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with”. I pointed out that this alleged use to which the word might be put is redundant, since 15-19 year-old women are among the most attractive to men in any case. Generally the large majority of heterosexual men would want to have sex, if the conditions were right, with an attractive girl of this age, particularly a 19-year-old!
I went on to point out that if we look at the other extreme (15-year-olds) scrupulousness and other character traits probably play a bigger role than ephebophilia in assessing the likelihood of a man attempting to mate with a girl of that age, in this society.
That sounds about as reasonable, given the definition of ephebophile, as suggesting that an average man would be more attracted to a plain 18-year-old than to a 27-year-old supermodel. I.e. unreasonable, unless I missed the part where it is defined as exlusive attraction to 15-19 year-olds (in which case I would ask for some evidence that such people even exist).
I did so already, and noticed that teleiophilia and gerontophilia are not specified by age range. If ephebophilia and hebephilia were likewise merged into a word that meant “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical” (I agree with you that having the same word for female-male and male-female attraction is also foolish) then I would admit the legitimacy of that word. It is the pretense to specificity, or having idenitified some actual clusters in thingspace that I object to.
Such a word could be the word meaning “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical”. No need to pretend that there is clustering into the groups “sexually normal men”, “ephebophiles” and “hebephiles” rather than a continuum.
I don’t see why another word apart from pederasty is needed for that.
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures. Paedophilia… I would have put that one as an even split with perhaps the most notorious sterotypical applications being with respect to male attraction to young boys (eg. ‘priests’).
I’d say it depends on the man’s age, too. A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me. And, while most men prefer younger women, it’s not like the typical man prefers women between 18 and 22 no matter how old he is—see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see. The writer is advocating the idea that men should target older women, because they’ll face less competition.
I’m sure the 70-year-old, given the opportunity to be transported into a younger attractive body with his mind in-tact, would be just as keen on the 16-year-old as the 22-year-old is. You are probably trying to imagine a 70-year-old hitting on a 16-year-old, which would indeed be remarkable but is beside the point.
The median 23-year-old man sets 18 years as the least possible age for a match, whereas the median 48-year-old man sets 32 years for the same. This effect is much smaller if you see who people write messages to, but it’s still there (see the red in the bottom right corner of the relevant graph).
Imagine asking a lot of men of different ages if, all other things being equal, they’d prefer a 16-year-old woman (assuming the men are from somewhere the age of consent is less than that—tweak if necessary) or a 26-year-old one. Do you really believe that many more men from any given age range would choose the former? (Heck, I would choose the latter, and I’m 24.)
I suspect that the difference between messaging behavior and the minimum age setting is related to the fact that those settings are publicly available. That adds a signaling component to the game, and for 48-year-old straight males I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the dominant one: I don’t have any actual data here, but it seems likely that a middle-aged man setting the age of consent as his threshold sends a clear “dirty old man” signal that a 32yo threshold wouldn’t. Not a signal that a hypothetical dirty old man wants to send, I think; meanwhile, you can send messages to whoever you like, and large-scale messaging preferences are opaque to everyone but password holders. Actually, messaging someone below your nominal age limit might send a weak positive signal: “I like you enough to make an exception”.
The smaller of the effects discussed is probably genuine, though.
okCupid data. Of interest is the third graph.
Fascinating. Following those links I just discovered I’m a teleiophile. Also a gynephile but I probably could have guessed that one myself.
I’m somewhat nonplussed with having the word ephebophilia refer to a preference for either females of approximately 14-16 or for males of an equivalent level of development (so slightly older). Unless for some reason people with one preference have a particularly high chance of also having the other preference. Because by this age it is an entirely different kind of preference so if you are going to go to all the trouble of making up names for various categories you may as well have “likes young men” different to “likes young women”. Having just one word for pedophilia and perhaps hebophilia makes somewhat more sense given the much smaller difference between sexes at the younger ages.
It’s very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma”, and many other people interpret as “raping particularly vulnerable people”.
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to “reclaim the word” by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It—unsurprisingly—still didn’t go well for him).
This guy is a hero. Okay, not a very effective hero, but still.
Heroism in the classical sense (as I understand it) means being great, and has little if anything to do with being good or getting good results.
Unsurprisingly indeed. Still, somebody has to be first, and I admire his willingness to do so.
Which word is this?
Isn’t it perfectly clear which one MixedNuts means?
Err… no? That’s why I asked. Could you write the word please?
Oh, wait. I read “can’t” literally. As opposed to “it is illegal to”. The meaning was entirely changed.
What person would it be physically impossible to have sex with? Though, that depends on what qualifies as “real sex” vs. what is merely foreplay/Xth base/etc., which is a whole other issue.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object: that is, if A wants to have sex with B and C and D, but A is unfortunately trapped inside a giant transparent hamster ball, with B-Z all on the outside looking in.
You would achieve the same effect if A were attracted to people trapped inside giant transparent hamster balls. Now we just need a single word for this kind of attraction.
Ahaptophilia? (Attraction to people whom you cannot touch)
Pushing Daisies had both its protagonists suffer from this.
Yes, I was primed to think in terms of the subject—and the kind of subject that people are inclined to shame. That is, pathetic people. As in, “pathetic people who can’t get laid”.
To translate into the language of physical impossibility would, I suppose, require observing that humans are not black boxes that can freely do anything within the realms of human possibility. Going against instinct and indoctrination really is hard and for the kind of people I was primed to think about (pathetic people) they just couldn’t. Because being proactively vile and evil requires initiative and the ability to overcome inhibitions so most people in that hypothetical category couldn’t have sex with the people they wanted to (due to their pathetic nature).
It seemed entirely plausible to me that there was a jargon term for “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with [because you’re a pathetic loser], and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma” that people also used as an indicator that the subject is more likely to be a rapist. That is exactly the kind of prejudice that humans tend to enjoy engaging in. What surprised me was that I wasn’t familiar with the jargon in question. My confusion is now resolved.
I’ve heard of people getting crushes on historical figures. I don’t know if there are people with a strong preference for famous dead people.
This opinion is widely held by many active participants in mainstream US culture. “Reviled” should be replaced with “reviled by ___” in order for this conversation to be precise.
I downvoted this for mindkilling. I often see this view attributed to members of tribe USleft by members of tribe USright, but I’ve rarely encountered members of tribe USleft actually taking this position.
I was going to raise a similar objection, then observed that his claim was that people who believe this are typically “lefty types,” not that “lefty types” typically believe this. The former might even be true, for all I know. (Though I can’t quite see why anyone should care.)
I know exactly one person who has expressed an opinion even remotely like this; he is an ethnically Chinese American who identified as a Republican for most of his life but changed that identification in the last decade or so. I wouldn’t call him a “lefty type” personally, but Vaniver might. Then again, I suspect he only expresses this opinion to screw with people in the first place. In any case, one case isn’t much to draw on.
That said, I certainly agree that specifying who’s doing the reviling usefully increases precision.
While I’m here, I will note that eliminating the comma between “types” and “who” would make the sentence noticeably less wrong.
I have deleted the relevant section. I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position, and I often see comments to that effect on the xkcd forums (where the typical person is progressive and technocratic), but as I know more USleft types than USright types (and the USright types I know are typically libertarians, and thus anti-technocrats) and have rarely asked people about it directly, I can see that my experience may not be sufficient to identify the types of people who hold that opinion.
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”? I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the US mainstream endorsing what amounts to technocracy; I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom. I’m fairly sure that this is both the main thing that Emile meant when he was thinking of what you can’t say, and the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Consider someone who wants judicial fiat to impose some policy they approve of- like, say, gay marriage. Is that anti-democracy? That’s the extent to which I’m including anti-democracy in that position.
The desire for a progressive regulatory state is conditioned on the idea that some people know what should be done better than others, which is an inherently anti-democratic notion; democratic opposition to things in the people’s best interest is an obstacle to be overcome not an objection to be heard out.
That said, I think most of the people I know would at least complain if they had to move to a Singapore-style “democracy” (well-run but lacking rights like free speech). People have inconsistent political preferences all the time.
A number of people I know take overpopulation and environmental threats very seriously. Many of them approve of the results of China’s multiple-child tax, though many of them complain about the implementation and the limitation on freedom. I don’t remember any of them acknowledging that the only way to get Chinese levels of results was with Chinese levels of political freedom, but I’m sure at least one made that connection.
Ah. The first thing that comes to mind for me, when comparing the Chinese government and the American government, is that the Chinese government is comprised of engineers and the American government is comprised of lawyers, and I suspect that is true for most people who would hold some version of that opinion.
That’s not necessarily a win for China.
Engineers may not be a great pool to select political authority figures from, but I have to say that lawyers strike me as an even worse option.
Hm. I appear to have lost 3 karma for agreeing that the offending text should not be part of my comment. Anyone have an explanation?
No idea—I revoked my downvote from the grandparent after you changed it.
Edit: On further reflection, I suspect you are getting dinged for positing a technocratic-democratic dichotomy. It is possible to be a technocrat and a small-d democrat. A more accurate opposition would be technocratic-populist, which is not the same thing.
He’s not exactly left (and not exactly right or centrist or...), but Scott Adams seems to take this tack. I am not sure just how much it is genuine, and how much it is “dance, monkeys, dance”.
I briefly read that as a colon...
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Focusing on the ideas that are held by people stupid enough to blurt them out leaves you vulnerable to a selection effect. If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
Was the latter what was desired? Then I could mention ideas like eugenics, weighting voting power by IQ, banning theism in general or monotheism in particular, panopticon cities (or other means for global surveillance).
I don’t support the last two, but I bet I could make some good arguments about them. The first two I’d probably actually approve of, depending on the specific implementation.
But are these ideas really so offensive that it’d be dangerous for people to reveal them? I don’t think so.
Right now the maximally defensible political idea that I’d not feel very safe to discuss in Greece is that my country should recognize the Republic of Macedonia under that name. I don’t think that idea is offensive to anyone here, even though it’s synonymous with treason in Greece.
Science fiction is useful in allowing people to describe political ideas but maintain plausible deniability.
Building Weirdtopia may be a relevant thread, though it’d be wrong for people to think that I actually support the weird ideas I mentioned there.
I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
I wouldn’t call any of the above “ideas” at all. You are listing outlawed practices, not tabooed beliefs. True, “support for incest” is an idea, but if there is a covert ideology behind it it is not nearly as extensive and widespread as the ideology behind e.g. sexism.
Aw, no mention of Necrophilia? It’s even a victimless crime!
Lifeist! (There are credible reasons why dead people can be considered victims—even if I don’t happen to share them as values.)
Well, that’s one way to pay the rent while you’re in cryonic suspension.
Regardless of whether dead people can be considered victims or not, it’s still really, really upsetting to a lot of living people. Whether it ought to be upsetting is another matter, but it is.
I don’t see why not. If we consider the corpses of dead relatives to have reverted to just objects then necrophilarizing means having sex with our stuff. I would still find that somewhat upsetting!
Necrophilandering, not “necrophilarizing”.
(Note to self: don’t have sex with any of wedrifid’s stuff.)
Feel free to buy it off me if you are really want to. It’s a territorial thing, not a moral judgement! :P
Yeah, no redneck would be caught dead marryin’ his sister. Nosirree!
If you have statistics about sibling incest being prominent to “rednecks” in a significantly higher degree than other populations, let me know. If not, I don’t approve of unsubstantiated stereotyping.
That’s absolutely hilarious. I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t, because “redneck” isn’t an acknowledged sociological distinction. It’s a stereotype. Anyone who gestures toward vaguely “redneck ideas” should not be surprised when incest comes up. The fact that you did not know this makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
I’ve heard the jokes about cousin incest, and even made an initial reply to your pre-edited post, saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries—when you edited your post to refer specifically to sibling marriage, I deleted that answer which no longer applied.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece, no need to assume anything.
Wikipedia tells me that “redneck” is a term that refers to rural southern whites and then got connotations of all-around bigotry. But if you want data about these topics, here’s the map that shows South was the last to repeal antimiscegenetion laws, here are maps for estimated same-sex marriage opposition, here is which states didn’t ratify the Equal Rights Amendment
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
Perhaps I exaggerated a little too far for the sake of the joke, then.
I actually didn’t know this, interestingly.
I did that a lot for a while, but it seemed like hardly anyone put anything there so I eventually stopped bothering. Also, I’m surprised (and a bit disturbed) that someone in Greece knows anything about ‘rednecks’, so nevermind.
I guess I must be a redneck then!
I knew all this already, and am not disputing it. That’s not the point.
Look: there is a difference between “green-eyed black-haired ideas” and “wiggin ideas”.
They seem not to exist; apparently the best indicators would be some unreported fraction of general child abuse, but no leads on what the fraction might be.
I know the jokes about cousin marriages—but frankly such didn’t even count as incest in most Western societies until relatively recently, and it still doesn’t count as such in some non-Western societies.
From now on I shall assume Vladimir is a NAMBLA member who tends a small shrine to Pol Pot, regardless of the evidence.
So, p(Vladimir is a NAMBLA member who tends a small shrine to Pol Pot) = 1, as far as you’re concerned?
Uh oh… I must quickly decide that you are not a truth-seeking agent, lest I be forced by Aumann to agree!
Whenever I see people say things like this, I always imagine Old Man Aumann standing behind them with a gun.
That’s more or less what I was going for, yes.
I almost said “great minds think alike” before I realized that might be taken as a restatement of AAT.
Old Man Aumann says: Great minds think alike… or else.
Ah, the hipster’s genocidal tyrant.
Haha, I think you’re displaying some serious prejudice (in multiple directions) by thinking that I’m supposed to mind this so badly.
“Prejudice” may not be the mot juste. If I filled one pickup truck with rednecks, and another with members of my own family, I’m not sure you’d be able to tell the difference. Hell, a few people would probably have to go in both trucks.
It wasn’t so much that I expected you to be viscerally horrified by the association with low-SES rural Southern whites, as that being pattern-matched to rednecks has what I thought were obvious drawbacks. Just for one: this being Less Wrong, I’m pretty confident you don’t think zygotes have souls. No doubt there are many other, less obviously incongruent beliefs in the redneck belief cluster you wouldn’t remotely endorse.
Not being American or part of the Anglosphere or Western European derived culture I read this as:
Noticed you assumed I’m a Yankee, considered challenging you to a duel, decided with this crowd it probably wouldn’t go over.
Ah sorry, then it was just classism! :)
I think the crowd would love the idea. But I’m biased.
There’s a certain subset of mostly Western, white men, largely middle-class rather than extremely wealthy or poor, who see the existence of civil rights activism on behalf of various minorities and the fact that it has succeeded in making it somewhat more costly to signal prejudice socially in polite company, and quite a bit moreso to do so openly in an institutional capacity, and conclude that this therefore means that it is now beyond the pale to do anything other than adhere to rigid standards of political correctness for the sake of controlling thought.
These are people, by and large, who in coming of age and seeking to support themselves, didn’t break through all their barriers to self-actualization or realize their wildest dreams of success, but managed to get some kind of payoff for their effort in terms of making ends meet (even if it’s difficult and provides no insulation from suffering or strife in their lives), and certainly don’t feel like they directly benefitted from any unethical practices or prejudices (even passively-conferred ones common in society). Since humans tend to model the emotions of others from their own baseline, they find it difficult to believe that anyone could genuinely have it that much worse, and conclude that activist groups of women and minorities are out to demonize them and censor them. They find it difficult to conceive that anybody else’s life, at least in their own cultural sphere, could really be that bad, unless the person had just failed on merits, and wanted to blame someone else or hijack the fruits of their own effort out of laziness.
Then, in an environment dominated numerically by similar people, they find it similarly plausible to think that if they voice a belief that is uncharitable towards, or does not reflect well upon, some social minority or other, they will be...well, it’s not clear what. Censored? Hunted down and sued? I’m not sure what they’re really afraid of, but they’re angry about the idea that it might happen to them.
The rhetorical sleight of hand here is that “prejudice” is used with an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, this word is used for any application of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, which are deemed to be immoral according to a certain ideological view. On the other hand, it is supposed to refer to the use of conditional probabilities about people that are inaccurate due to biases caused by ignorance or malice. Now, it is logically possible that the latter category just happens to subsume the former—but the real world, of course, is never so convenient.
And if the latter category does not subsume the former, as it clearly does not, then approving of penalties (of whatever sort) for expressing beliefs in the former category means that you approve of penalties for expressing at least some true beliefs. Even if you can make a good case for that, it requires much more than dismissing them as “prejudice” with all the ambiguity and rhetorical trickery that this term introduces—and no matter how good a case you have, “controlling thought” will be a completely accurate description for what you advocate. (And for the record, I am completely open to the idea that some ways of controlling thought may be beneficial by some reasonable criteria, or even necessary for the functioning of human society. But if we’re going to advocate this view on a forum like this, let’s call it what it is.)
Note also that even without any idealistic pursuit of truth for its own sake, it is a non-trivial question what the practical consequences will be of suppressing the expression and use of certain correct beliefs about conditional probabilities. Wrong probabilities lead to wrong decisions, from the pettiest personal ones, up to and including decisions about grand projects by the government and other powerful institutions that are based on theories that assume these probabilities. On LW, of all places, the importance of this point should be clear.
I apologize for the confusion—you seem to think that my using the noun constitutes an attempt to bill some unspecified set of statements and ideas as examples of the first thing you listed.
What I’m actually doing, just so you can read my post accurately, is saying that prejudice is a thing (as per your second definition which you apparently thought I was being sneaky about), that it exists (I presume this at least is uncontentious to you?), and that in general it’s a true statement it’s now more costly to signal certain forms of that openly, according to prevailing social mores.
In other words, if you have no objection to the assertion: “An employer in the US these days cannot generally refuse a job applicant by openly referring to the applicant’s race as a disqualifying factor, without expecting some form of social reprisal”, then you now understand what I meant when I used the word prejudice in that sentence.
So, just to be sure I’m absolutely clear, since this is apparently confusing:
When I say
I mean that it is now more difficult to signal certain forms of prejudice (not specific as to what particular things constitute prejudice; pick an example you find unobjectionable) casually or irrespective of one’s audience, without garnering some social risk.
You are still obscuring the issue. Yes, of course that people frequently hold prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice, and that some categories of such beliefs (though by no means all) have become more costly to signal in recent history. The question, however, is whether there are also some true beliefs, or uncertain beliefs that may turn out to be true given the present state of knowledge, that are also costly to express (or even just to signal indirectly) nowadays. Would you really assert that the answer to that question is no?
And if your answer to that question is yes, then what basis do you have for asserting that “a broader social pattern into which [you] see [my] behavior falling” consists of people who are unhappy because they find it costly to express prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice?
I would not.
I am doubting your claim that your beliefs are really so beyond the pale to the social mores of your peers here, that you’d be unfairly suppressed and/or censored, or otherwise hurt “the cause” of LW any moreso than you might be saying what you already do freely.
I could be wrong about that, but I also have different estimates of the real, net social cost to signalling something unpopular, especially for someone who consistently signal-boosts in your observed patterns in this environment.
I would be unsurprised to learn you believe that IQ represents general intelligence and that it is primarily genetic, and that all personality traits are ultimately genetic or inconsequential in the scheme of things, and that they are linked to race, and that this could get people upset at you if you just said it at random at a party.
I would be very surprised if it got you successfully sued, persecuted in a tangible way, or indeed anything worse than flamed on the internet for voicing this openly. Or arrested, or fired from your job, or targeted by a group like Anonymous for ongoing harassment...
However, based on what you’ve said about your reasons for not revealing some subset of your beliefs here, you appear to fear consequences considerably more significant than just someone being mad at something you said on the internet, and this seems...disproportionate, incorrect, biased—a skewed misunderstanding of the reality of your likely risks and costs.
What do you think happened to Stephanie Grace—don’t you think a private email sent to a few friends has affected her career prospects ? James Watson and Lawrence Summers also got lynched for their opinions.
I don’t think anybody risks getting sued or arrested, but they can have their careers harmed.
(vilified)
You know what “lynch” actually means, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching
James Watson, Lawrence Summers and Stephanie Grace did not get lynched for their opinions.
As to what actually happened to Stephanie Grace:
She spoke an opinion that sounds pretty calm and not hateful, but certainly controversial, that is frequently interpreted as far more loaded with those things due to historical associations.
She also evidently posed the discussion as though it were a matter of some legitimate scientific consensus, relatively unobjectionable from a theoretical standpoint.
This despite the fact that the statistical significance of IQ heritability and its mechanisms of inheritance are still matters of significant debate and little consensus has emerged as yet—let alone the degree to which IQ represents “General intelligence” in fact (to say nothing of the ongoing difficulties of defining that term), the ongoing Flynn Effect (still not adequately explained), the substantial effects of postnatal nutrition (protein supplementation even in the children of the rural poor producing significant increases; longer breastfeeding periods improve scores, exposure to prenatal drug use or environmental pollutants can significantly impact them negatively) and environmental stimulation on the development of the brain and its results for IQ scores, the dearth of actual replicated studies showing genetic mechanisms for IQ, the difficulty of determining whether a difference is innate versus not...this stuff is still up in the air.
Basically the strong push to interpret these IQ differences along race lines as principally genetic is massively overstated next to the evidence favoring that claim—to treat the question as a matter of simple fact whose implications might need to be discussed more soberly is to so blatantly favor the hypothesis that it speaks poorly of her critical thinking and levels of information about this.
It’s not that it’s impossible that there are signficant gaps clustering around race (indeed, it seems pretty straightforward and established that this is the case); it’s also not that it’s impossible this is primarily a genetic thing (although there’s little evidence to bolster that claim so strongly that it should be the default assumption, let alone the null hypothesis, and much evidence that conflicts with it). It’s that hyper-focusing on this particular fact and this particular attempt to account for it, usually in the same breath as public policy discussions, is often a great big indicator of what that person perceives as the implications.
In other words, a charitable assumption is that Stephanie Grace is guilty only of ignorant or uncritical reasoning about the topic, staggeringly bad timing and social signalling, and even worse spin control. But there are lots of venues—like LessWrong itself, where the idea that IQ is general intelligence and the gap is genetic and all other interpretations are PC revisionist hogwash gets so much traction that I find it difficult to believe Vladimir_M, who is posting anonymously, will suffer consequences more unpleasant than a lengthy argument he doesn’t want to have with somebody who does not agree with him. Indeed, he has already said the same things openly, and no jackbooted thugs, no PC police, no lynch mobs have extracted reprisal against him.
How on Earth do you come up with this stuff?
First you misrepresent the statements of this woman, whose name I don’t even want to mention in such an ugly context in a public discussion. Rather than claiming that the problematic beliefs are a matter of consensus, she expressed a mere lack of certainty that the opposite is the case, and this takes only a few seconds to check by googling. Making incorrect attributions to people in public on such a sensitive topic and under their real names is, at best, callously irresponsible.
Then you go on and say that I have “said the same things openly,” thus dragging me into this controversy, about which I have said nothing at all in this thread—and about which I have never written anything here, to the best of my recollection, that would make this characterization correct under any reasonable interpretation. That this nonsense has been upvoted has lowered my opinion of LW more than probably anything else I ever saw here before.
And then people wonder why I may be reluctant to speak openly on controversial matters.
Yes, “lynch” is hyperbole, probably unnecessary (“vilified” seems a bit weak. You might want to tell off these websites for incorrect use of the term “lynching”).
You spend a lot of time addressing the issue of Race and IQ; I am mostly concerned of how Stephanie Grace was treated for what was a quite reasonable private email. In an ancestor comment you wrote:
To me, it’s very clear “what”: what happened to Stephanie Grace. It’s unlikely, but a small chance of having your career ruined is not a risk most people are willing to take. Those chances increase if one of the people involved becomes somewhat famous, or if some well meaning anti-racist (or other) activist takes interest in the discussion. Nobody wants a Google search of their name return a hate page on the first page of results.
What surprises me the most is that you find this unclear, that you don’t understand how that can be a concern for somebody.
Some people she didn’t know said she was a bad person, and then her life went on. She got the job she was intending to get, and hardly anyone will remember the ‘scandal’.
Recent story mentioning her
Interesting, thanks; I had briefly googled for that kind of info but hadn’t found any. She is probably somewhat helped by having a pretty common name and surname, but I’m still updating my estimate of “negative consequences for being target of a hate campaign” downwards a bit.
So basically she pulled a Galileo.
Well, without the threatened torture, house arrest and other problems. On the other hand, she was treated the way she was without trying publish her views and or trying to spread them to the general public. Overall, a Galileo comparison doesn’t work very well.
Is a word missing there? ‘scandal’?
Whoops, I screwed up the formatting, fixed, thanks.
Ahh, it’s annoying that messed up links just fail to show anything at all. Especially when typing in what is in the imperfectly formatted link (ie. missing http://) into the browser sometimes would work just fine!
I was trying to unpack what she actually did—she didn’t just say something unpopular and get burned for it, she said something seriously, massively unwarranted in a sensitive situation where people decided they didn’t like it, and furthermore something that for many people is rather close to a hot-button issue. It is difficult nigh unto impossible to signal effectively in that situation, and even if it shouldn’t be the case that just saying something brings on associations to other, otherwise-unrelated situations, people signalling what she did and how she did it frequently have some really nasty agendas for doing so.
She’s been vilified for it, yes—I’m not downplaying that, but you’re downplaying the actual situation.
Because frankly? Stephanie Grace was a law school student at Harvard University, a high-profile institution, and it seems to be a whole lot more focused on when people do this in situations like that, than when some random person off the street, or in an internet forum, or whatever, just says There are so many venues in which the cost of signalling that is minimal, and this rather-homogenous website in which Vladimir_M is a fairly typical member seems like one of them.
How does your original description not cover the Stephanie Grace case?
It’s clear to me that Stephanie Grace should have been aware that even if in her environment people think like her, voicing a belief that doesn’t reflect well upon blacks is dangerous. No, she won’t be censored or sued, but her prospects will take a sharp turn downwards. She should have been afraid, and maybe angry about what might happen to her if she dared speak honestly, even in a private email.
And yet, you seem to think that she had nothing to be afraid of, and that her being afraid or angry would have been kind of silly and stupid on her behalf (or at least, that’s the impression I get from the way you write).
(Note that I’m not saying this is the main reason sensitive topics should be avoided on LessWrong. There are better reasons to avoid those topics.)
As far as anonymity goes Vladimir_M isn’t really really up there. Enough comments to earn 7k karma gives away rather a lot of information. And I wasn’t aware Vladimir_M was a pseudonym.
Writing stuff you don’t want associated with you on the internet is a terrible idea.
No—that’s what the blogger linked to in the grandparent did.
It’s often a good idea to point directly to statements people have made. This is particularly true when the claim is about “LessWrong itself”. If an idea is common, one can surely find multiple people espousing or assuming it, and if the idea is part of the LW consensus, that would be reflected in comments to the cited sources.
Ooh, here we go, I found one.
EDIT: If the meaning isn’t clear I was just reassuring lessdazed that lesswrong does, in fact, have examples of people accepting that prior to any observations of any race we should expect there to be some degree of genetically based IQ difference between races or genetically related populations. Since it was links to examples that were requested not examples themselves I fulfilled the technicality with a wry self-reference. This was not intended to offend anyone or suggest anything about anything anyone had said beyond answering lessdazed’s request.
I’m not sure that phrased that way that Jandila necessarily will disagree with you that much.
I’m curious which of the following statements you agree with and which Jandila agrees with:
It is likely that there are genes in the human gene pool which effectively code for tendencies in IQ and are not fixed throughout all humans, and where the non-fixed versions aren’t things that lead to what is normally classed as mental retardation or something similar.
It is likely that some of those genes either through causal historical issues, or random drift and founder effects are distributed through different human populations in different ways, where populations in question include various groups often classified as “ethnic” or “racial” groups.
There are groups in society which have been historically mistreated and may still be mistreated. This can lead to environmental impacts on IQ. Similarly, different cultures have different norms about learning, test-taking and child-raising that can with a decent probability impact IQ.
I suspect that both of you will agree on all three of those points. I suspect more disagreement is really occurring on how 2 and 3 interact implicitly. In particular, Jandila believes that the environmental issues likely swamp any genetic effect. Moreover, there’s an apparent disagreement in whether IQ is an effective proxy for the general notion of “intelligence”.
I’m also going to use this to interject from minor factual issue that may be relevant: In multiple cultures where there is a minority that has been historically persecuted, the minority does not do as well on many forms of tests. One example that will likely be not mindkilling for most English speakers are the Ainu in Japan. Why this pattern exists is a distinct issue but this data point does seem to be relevant.
I disagree on the word ‘the’. It’s a surprisingly big deal—for me at least. It may be a disagreement that is significantly influenced by mere careless presentation of ideas but then I think details of communication are what Jandila’s comment was most criticized for by others too.
I haven’t looked closely with what Jandila has said beyond that which is quoted by lessdazed. I’m not especially interested in Stephanie Grace. I did follow the ‘Lynching’ link and learned all sorts of things about various forms of vigilante social sanction. Then some interesting facts about bitumen and pine tar (via the association with feathers).
Sorry, which use of “the” are you referring to?
see
Ah yes, that makes sense. I get the feeling that a lot of the arguments occurring here are over view clusters rather than actual views. No one for example has stated explicitly that the “racial group X” has more or less genetic intelligence in this thread, but given the discussion in the thread about Stephanie Grace and others it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that that’s only marginally below the surface.
I’ve been told Jews are smarter on average than most races. But I was told that by Jews so it is conceivable that self serving bias could apply. I mention this because if what the pop-theory suggested was accurate (not something I would particularly support) it would be a case where environmental pressures and all sorts of discrimination of a specific group of people actually increased relative IQ.
Tangent: The data is actually about Ashkenazic Jews only. The result is consistent across a wide range of tests, including not just IQ but also Wonderlic and others. It is deeply unclear if this is due to environmental, genetic or other effects. There’s also been some suggestion that the Ashkenazic population for some reason has a lot of outliers that are what is actually causing the result. There’s a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners who fit in that category. However, it is important to note that Ashkenazic Jews are one of the most widely studied groups in the world when it comes to genetics and so far no alleles that seem to have to do with intelligence have been discovered in the population.
I think that, for many centuries, the Ashkenazi environment rewarded establishing a rigid social structure that studies and followed strict rules (preventing assimilation), but selected very strongly for individuals that could step outside the status quo at the right time. I can see how that would lead to Nobel prize winners.
Given the time scale involved, it doesn’t seem like genetic selection could change more than how well you integrate successful memes. Some anecdotes from my own genealogy about relevant selection pressures:
Marriages were usually arranged by parents to get the best possible match. My great, great grandfather was wealthy for the village they were in. When he needed a husband for his daughter, he asked around for the most promising yeshiva student, and gave him a ten year stipend to continue study for marrying her (apparently the standard was more like 2 years).
When Poland got jumped, my grandparents ended up on the Soviet side of the line. My grandmother went back to the Nazi side twice to try to convince her friends and family that they had a better chance of surviving with the Soviets, but they didn’t want to leave the cities to go somewhere unknown. They were all trapped in the Ghetto system, and liquidated within four years.
My grandfather escaped the soviets twice—the first time, he noticed that his transport train was picking up stowaways who would jump off around curves (turned out they were farmers who lived near the tracks but not a station), and he just pretended to be one of them while everyone else stayed on the train to Siberia. The second time he drank all night with the guards, and convinced them that they would never get in trouble for letting him go to find his wife. Shortly after his third capture, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and all the Poles were released to go fight the Germans. He always said that you need an escape plan for everything in life, and refused to enter any room with only one exit.
Your grandfather sounds like a badass.
He emigrated to Israel in 1948 with a wife, two kids, and no money. He worked as a day laborer, claiming various construction skills to whoever pulled up and asked. One time he claimed he was a plumber in the old country, and spent two days installing an outdoor toilet. He finally saved up enough to buy a small grocery, so that he could run his own business. He walked out back after buying the place to find—the outhouse he had built years before.
He was definitely a badass, but the cancer was pretty far along by the time I knew him and I didn’t speak Hebrew.
That does not seem to me a very plausible suggestion. Outliers could explain the Nobel prizes, but would not affect the mean, which is measured to be different. It is conceivable that some non-gaussian distribution would explain both, but larger populations that have been studied in more detail exhibit bell curves, or at least thin tails (ie, not affecting the mean).
This fact alone leads me to think that the most parsimonious explanation is just that Ashkenazi Jews have a cultural tradition of scholarship, whereas public-school culture in the English-speaking world is often starkly anti-intellectual. If we’ve turned over the genetic rock and had a good look under it without finding anything interesting, we should update to think it more likely that the explanation is under a different rock.
Confused. Your link seems to go to this post itself.
In fact it goes specifically to the comment itself. And the comment itself contains an example of that which is required in such a link. Fancy that. ;)
Technically impressive. Unamusing given the serious nature of what is being discussed and the fairly obnoxious way this apparently expresses a point in a passive-aggressive way that is on the passive enough side that it isn’t fully clear what the point is. This damages the signal to noise ratio.
(ETA: Ah, you made the comment in two edits so you’d know the comments permanent link. Clever.)
(ETA: In case it isn’t clear, the more controversial an issue the more reason to try not to be a dick if the conversation has a remote chance of being productive.)
Passive aggressive? Obnoxious? WHAT? I gave an example of the kind requested so that whatever conversation may be taking place wouldn’t be derailed by “Where are your links?” demands. It gives confirmation that people (or, technically, at least one person) understands basic probability and how to form priors. ie. There are differences in traits between different populations, IQ is a trait.
Downvoted—yes, obnoxious, because you could have just said “this comment here”, but you sought to amuse yourself by providing a link that leads back to itself and thus obfuscating, and when tensions are high, amusing yourself and not communicating clearly sends all the wrong signals that you are disrespecting the other person.
A contrary view: I’m broadly in favor of people amusing themselves.
The implied point seems to be some sort of claim that the type of statement had not been made in the thread up to that point. Rather than asserting that explicitly or even just upvoting lessdazed’s remark you made it harder for people to wade through this conversation.
Most humans will generally not be very good evaluators of whether their comments contribute well to signal/noise issues. So the assertion that they are inappropriate isn’t that helpful. Although the fact that your earlier comment where I did make that remark is currently at +2 tentatively suggests that more people than not disagree with my assessment in that context. In that context, it does strongly look like you were using inflammatory language whether or not you realized that it would be so.
It isn’t personal. Until you pointed it out I didn’t even remember that my other comment in the context of the SMBC cartoon was to you. I suppose it could have been occurring in some sort of back of my mind, but I don’t think so. Also, I don’t think there’s anything that passive aggressive about those sorts of remarks, I’d consider my comments to be missing the “passive” bit and being pretty aggressive statements of noting when things are not helpful for rational discussion here.
But if you want even more blunt I can do so: You are coming across as a dick. Your earlier “pussy” remark made you come across as a sexist dick. When one is having a conversation about a controversial issue involving sex and gender issues it is generally a good idea to not come across as a sexist dick because it will a) emotionally inflame people who don’t agree with you and make them less likely to listen to you and b) turn away from Less Wrong people who might otherwise be interested in seeing what Less Wrong is about.
In general, calm interaction is better than hot interaction. Explicitly stated points are better than implicit and vague points. Polite statements are better than uncivil statements. I’ve been repeatedly tempted to go through most of this thread and just downvote everyone for making Less Wrong resemble the areas of the internet I try to avoid. It is very clear that the issues being touched on here are mindkillers for many people, and that the karma scores involved reflect to a large extent which mindkilled tribalistic groups happen to have more people around here not in any substantial way a reflection of the arguments (except to a very weak level). None of these are good things. You are, along with other people, acting in a way that makes these problems more, not less extreme. None of this is good if one is trying to actually have rational dialogue.
It just occurred to me now and I don’t believe I missed the irony when reading the first time. I don’t want to imply I consider this to be particularly offensive (well, except the part where you called me a dick) but do you realize that you called me a dick both earlier (about something unrelated) and also here because I used a word for genitalia as a negative descriptor?
Yes, I did realize that. (Although note that I didn’t say you are a dick, I said you were coming across as a dick. These aren’t the same thing.) Two issues guided that word choice: First, it was an attempt (possibly a poor one) to speak in a language closer to the sort you were using so the point might come across better. Second, in this particular context, the relevant point is that in a highly male environment you were using a negative term for the genitalia of the other gender. That said, neither of these were probably very good arguments. While one could potentially argue that in our society “dick” is more gender neutral as an negative term than “pussy”, that argument seems to be more of a rationalization than a genuinely useful argument. I suspect that there may have also been some degree of priming occurring given that I had earlier today had a conversation with a female homo sapiens who expressed disinterest in Less Wrong because it “looked like a sausage-fest” (and also apparently that this thread as well as some of the other relationship related threads were “creepy”). Some amount of Phil Plait’s speech was also floating around. But even that is an explanation more than a good reason. So I’ll just say that I was aware of what I was doing, made a conscious decision to do so, but in retrospect had poor reasons for doing it.
Given that wedrifid said this less than a day ago:
That’s priming.
Rule 1 was incomplete. Judgments that things are of equal value are obviously suspect as well.
It should also mention that judgement about whether something is subject to to Rule 1 interpretation should be particularly suspect. Recursive inclusiveness is implicit. For this reason It is also a charge nearly impossible to defend oneself from directly.
If “pussy” is a sexist slur, isn’t “dick”, also?
It should be, but compared to women, most men are relatively less offended at the slur. Double standards; go figure.
That wasn’t the point at all, as far as I can tell. The point seemed to be that wedrifid was volunteering to be a representative of the point of view in question (while engaging in some nonverbal humor of the sort that is only possible in online forums).
Did you forget to update on the new information that was provided?
EDIT: I seem to have missed this.
Yes, I think reasonable individuals can read the statement differently. I suspect that my reading was on the more negative end of the spectrum, and I do have to wonder what primed me to think of it, and I don’t have a good explanation for that. That said, it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable interpretation. It seems that the difficulty of reading what other humans mean in a text medium is really quite difficult. While this is a known fact, I apparently don’t compensate for it as well as I should. That said, I suspect that I am very likely not the only person who read the comment in the way I read it.
No. I did update, but see elsewhere in this subthread where I discussed the relevance of that remark.
I downvoted that comment for confusing levels, not for inappropriate language. Maybe other downvotes are attributable to that problem with it. Maybe upvotes are in spite of the language. Hard to tell.
That’s a good point. I’m making a bad assumption that other humans will focus on the same issues in a comment that I will especially when it is long and contains a variety of different points.
Note: JoshuaZ must have caught the comment before I removed the part replying to ‘signal to noise’ (and the second two quotes are selected from that part). While I would stand by everything I said there would accomplish anything useful. I did not wish to edit the history of the conversation to distort the flow or to leave the parent making no sense—more to prevent the conversation altogether.
I had hoped the reply to you by komponisto would have resolved that feeling for you. It came with a wikipedia link!
Komponisto’s comment there and the ensuing discussion was etymologically fascinating. I doubt the vast majority of readers were already aware of the relevant etymology (indeed, you were unaware of the etymology). Remember, rationalists should win. If something has a connotation that is likely to be extremely distracting and trigger strong emotional reactions, then using the excuse that a sufficiently intelligent, educated and rational reader would not have that reaction is not helpful.
I think, incidentally, that one of the issues that may be occurring in our disagreement of how your remarks contributed to the signal/noise is what constitutes signal and noise. In particular, it is possible that I’m using a broader notion of what information is being conveyed in some sense, so I consider emotional triggers to be noise even if they aren’t denotatively part of a message.
Reasonable expressions of genuine confusion should not be downvoted.
Jandila said:
That was describing the measured gap in which certain race clusters are measured at higher IQs than others.
wedrifid said:
This is a point that I have made several times, but that does not qualify as a counterexample because it is not the claim that is supposedly consensus on LW.
One of the straw men in Jandila’s argument was that the specific measured gaps in IQ scores among racial groups was caused primarily by genetics (that is reading charitably, for a very plausible interpretation is that the supposed belief is that it is exclusively caused by genetics, which is just silly). As you claim not to know “which groups are higher than other groups,” you did not find an example supporting the argument.
I agree with your point entirely and hope my comment is not taken as support of whatever Jandila is saying. I meant only to give a prototypical example of what people (including myself) do actually say on the subject. As you no doubt picked up I was careful to avoid what would be an absurd claim—that genetics was the only factor and even the merely controversial claims about which way such genetic factors would be an influence.
I unequivocally affirm the use of my testimony about what credible lesswrongians have tended to say now or in the past as evidence in support of your argument. :)
Tangent: I’m actually not sure which way the intelligence difference would go between Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens. Michael Vassar actually boasts that he may have saved the world by convincing a genetic biologist to stop trying to go all “Jurassic Park” on Neanderthal DNA. After all they are an apex predator that have comparable intelligence to us and could plausibly be more intelligent in some aspects.
I’ve said the same.
Or which group would have more deviation from its mean.
I applaud you on your sanity.
That’s probably a more interesting question—and perhaps even harder to filter out from environmental influences.
Actually, randomized controlled studies show that breastfeeding has no effect on IQ. More generally, decades of RCT have failed to demonstrate a causal basis of any of breastfeeding’s correlates.
Really? Not even immune system response? This ‘colostrum’ stuff is a scam?
Sorry, maybe I implied more studies than there have been. My impression is that the RCTs have been very focused, a terrible waste of randomization. If you find an RCT addressing the immune system, tell me about it.
None spring to mind. The closest I have explored to the subject is the effectiveness of supplementing with bovine colostrum on adult humans. The limited effectiveness I saw there can’t exactly be considered a surprise of the same order.
I may get down-voted for saying this but, I can’t help but feel this is politicking-inspired misrepresentation.
I agree with much of this analysis but I don’t think that Vladimir_M has (as far as I can tell) made any substantive comments in the direction you imply.
I have made comments about this topic on LW on several occasions, but the part about me “ha[ving] said the same things openly,” the “same things” referring to the views characterized in the last paragraph of the same post, is pure confabulation. (In fact, I’d find it surprising if this relatively new commenter is even aware of what I wrote about the topic in the past, since I don’t remember mentioning it in quite a while.)
Moreover, the claim about “hyper-focusing” is particularly absurd, given that nobody mentioned this concrete topic at all, until Jandila brought it up and attributed it to me in bizarre fashion, clearly striving to bring this topic into focus. This attribution started with the statement “I would be unsurprised to learn you believe ”—and after a few comments, in which I made no specific mention of , it morphed into “[V.M.] has already said the same things [referring to a caricatured version of ] openly.” Surely it is not unreasonable to demand higher standards of discourse than that—and here, of all places?
But even aside from all that, the analysis is full of various other more or less subtle misleading claims and rhetorical tricks. Unless the standards on LW have really deteriorated, finding these should be a fairly simple exercise for the reader.
Reading this thread I’m somewhat dispirited to feel that you indeed may be right in most of your points with regard to the failings on the community.
One can feel the McCarthaynist undertones of the discourse. Meta discussions seem to have been skilfully misdirected and subverted into what is for nearly all intents and purposes political and ideological warfare, where guilty until proven innocent reigns as the norm.
(Excuse me, I see this is redundant)
Do you think Grace deserved what happened to her?
For example, just to lower my Karma even further, could it be that the fact that old fashioned standards of credit worthiness had disparate impact on certain races and neighborhoods, not be a sign that those standards were “racist”, but rather a sign that certain races and neighborhoods, were, on average, no damned good.
Could it be that the prohibition against certain thoughts has cost the American taxpayer over a trillion dollars, about ten thousand dollars per tax payer.
The evidence for this proposition is overwhelming, but no one is allowed to discuss it.
I’d like to see your math on that point.
While I think that political and regulatory decision making as to which loans were risky and which were not is guaranteed to lead to disaster even in the absence of affirmative action, affirmative action is particularly deadly, because a financial system requires truth and that lies be punished, whereas affirmative action requires lies and that truth be punished, so when affirmative action meets finance, it is like matter and antimatter.
When official truth meets finance, the financial system is likely to implode. When the official truths of affirmative action meet finance, the financial system is guaranteed to implode.
And it did.
I don’t think there is any connection between affirmative action and the recent “financial crises”. If you do, you may have been mindkilled by your dislike of affirmative action. Maybe this idea sounded ridiculous at first, but you flinched away from betraying an ally, and now you actually believe it?
You are in denial. Search Trulia.com for foreclosure sales, for suburbs for which you know the racial distribution.
If we look at where the defaults were, they were where the Hispanics were, and to a lesser extent, where the blacks were.. In the first year of the crisis lily white suburbs had less than one percent as many defaults as suburbs with a significant black or Hispanic population.
Why, did the banks lower the their lending standards? There were a pile of government papers telling them that lending standards were racist, since they had disparate impact. Beverly Hills Bank failed to lower its standards, and was condemned as “Substantially non compliant with the CRA”, which is to say, “racist”.
The gap between Hispanics and whites was extreme in the first year or so of the crisis, because most Hispanics never made a single payment, while whites took a while to get into trouble. So today the ratio is about twenty to one, while shortly after the crisis it was about one hundred to one. But the ratio is still extreme and glaringly obvious, though not quite as extreme and glaringly obvious as it was in 2008-2009
Gilroy (Hispanic) Palo Alto (White and North East Asian)
...
...
From Wikipedia, but still in accord with what I’ve read elsewhere, and there are plenty of cites for you to check in their Community Reinvestment Act article.
Besides that, even if the bad loans were made because of ‘affirmative action’ that doesn’t make the crisis the fault of affirmative action, just as if I loan my hypothetical shifty brother-in-law $100 that I don’t expect back in order to keep peace with my equally hypothetical wife, it wouldn’t be my wife’s fault if I don’t have rent money at the end of the month because I was budgeting as if I would get that money back.
Do you think fault is other than a social construct?
I give the CRA as an example of official truth deviating wildly from the truth that anyone can see, and you respond that official truth must be true because official sources say it is true?
They were government and academic studies, therefore report official reality, not observable reality, not the reality accessible to the senses, but the reality generated by official consensus.
And this is exactly my original point: That on politically sensitive issues, government and academic official truth violently and ludicrously contradicts the truth that everyone can plainly see, and no one dares mention.
Any article that speaks of CRA loans, is a transparent lie:
For starters, there is no such category as “CRA loans”. All loans are subject to the CRA, just as affirmative action affects every student. When regulators examined banks for compliance with the CRA during the events that caused the crisis (2000 to 2005), they did not mention any special subset of loans as “CRA loans”, nor any category of loans as being more CRA than another. The category “CRA loans” did not exist in the minds of bankers or regulators when they issued papers on the compliance of particular banks, or was too insignificant to mention.
Hence any study that makes an assertion about “CRA loans” is transparently lying.
To speak of “CRA loans” is to imply that even after 2000, when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, the CRA was just a tiny tiny little thing, which is a transparent lie. If one lie, all lies. CRA dominated the banks, as “Diversity” dominates academic admissions.
Where are the “CRA loans” in this report, which report resulted in acts of compliance that sent the eminently solvent and well run Beverly Hills Bank broke?
In the case of Beverly Hills Bank, I am sure that Wikipedia, academia, and government, can say that not a single “CRA loan” failed, since there is no indication that Beverley Hills bank ever made a single loan in the official category “CRA”, if such a category still existed at the time, but they were nonetheless driven into bankruptcy by the CRA.
Please go away. You’ve earned yourself −262 Karma points in the last 30 days; you should take the hint.
(Relevant post.)
And how did I earn −262 points:
By citing facts that are evidence for forbidden truths, and mentioning issues that others dance around.
Further comments by you may be deleted without warning or notice. Please leave Less Wrong.
By giving us no reason to think that you’re capable of non-motivated cognition.
You don’t necessarily need to leave. You are not incapable of non-motivated cognition.
Regardless of the accuracy of your claims, you are obviously not being effective here.
Rationalists should win: if you are not convincing people and want to then the fact that you believe you have an excuse is irrelevant. Ultimately what matters is whether you are accomplishing your goals.
Having certain topics discussed too openly on Lesswrong could result in several unfortunate things happening.
It could make certain potential rationalists be deterred from participating in the community.
It could attract the attention of certain contrarians who are less-than-rational and, for various reasons, should not necessarily be considered potential rationalists.
Most importantly, from the standpoint of the Singularity Institute (or, at least, what I think is its standpoint), it could increase the probability of human extinction by harming the SI’s reputation.
Mm, those reasons do make some sense.
I think as far as 1 goes, it seems to me like that’s already happening—I know a few people not on this site (who discovered it independently of myself, none of whom know each other), and many more I’ve encountered about online, who explicitly view LW as essentially compromised by 2, hence they have no interest in being here. YMMV how much those people are reachable or desireable, of course, but it’s difficult for me to disagree with their basic perception that this place is already full of contrarian-cluster types who’re intellectuals but still quite biased.
I also wonder about signalling now, re: “less-than-rational”—given what I understand of rationality as it’s described and the reasons humans don’t tend to display that trait most of the time, it seems like it’s only asymptotically-reachable—you can reduce the frequency of incorrect decisions and amend certain biases in short or long-term ways, but you probably can’t get rid of it altogether. Who here is truly “rational?” Even Eliezer Yudkowsky still has his own biases—the most you can hope for is, well, “less wrong”, and that is work to achieve.
So assuming (big assumption here!) that I understand the about rationality and how LW views it, and why it’s desireable and how much realistically a human being can self-optimize for that trait, it seems like “less than rational” should probably be avoided. Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all going to be until such time as we come up with some kind of game-breaking thing that allows a person to really just run rationality full-time if that’s what they want?
I’m not sure I understood you correctly.
You seem to be suggesting that, since the community already falls short of its stated goal, there’s no particular reason to avoid a practice that makes that goal less likely.
Confirm?
Deny.
I am suggesting two things, somewhat seperate:
First, that “we might draw people less-than-rational, and that’s undesireable” seems to suggest, in a Sapir-Whorf kinda way, that the utterers consider themselves to be rational, rather than rationality being a thing which is valuable to increase in oneself, and that this suggests to me a degree of reflective incoherence on the part of those whose mental model can be described that way, which is at conflict with the goal of being less wrong.
Second, that members of this community should probably not give themselves too much credit for rationality or presume that any given proficiency in the methods of rationality has adequately compensated for their biases—at any given point it is still overwhelmingly likely that their cognition is affected by some unnoticed, unaddressed and significant bias, which may not be obvious to other members of this largely-homogenous community. This also amounts to reflective incoherence.
Corollary: That this state of affairs is obvious to an unknown but possibly significant number of people who might be supportive of the community’s aggregate goals and methods, but who are put off by the perception of such missed blind spots; that is, not everyone who looks at LW and rejects it is rejecting rationality, or unsuited for it, or just incapable of learning it—and nobody here, even the seasoned and highly-upvoted contributors, is without bias.
“Less than rational” isn’t the phrase I’d use; as you say, rationality really shouldn’t be understood as a discrete state but as an asymptotic goal, and even then it’s probably preferable to speak in terms of individual biases or cognitive skills as appropriate. But J_Taylor’s second point doesn’t lose much of its force if you cast it in terms of individuals seeking company in their specific contrarian beliefs, for whom this whole “rationality” business might be little more than a group-identifying label or a justifying habit of thought. Granted, it might eventually be possible to bring such a demographic around to actual truth-seeking, but it’ll take more work than debiasing someone who’s already posting in good faith—and this site isn’t so large or so stable that it can afford to spend a lot of time dragging people out of self-constructed ideological labyrinths in which they’re quite comfortable.
It’s a particularly nasty problem, though: ideology looks like common sense from the inside, and so it’s hard to tell to what extent the site culture’s already corrupted by arational ideas that’ve just happened to achieve local hegemony. I’d like to say that a careful and fearless examination of any beliefs that look like common sense to us should turn up the major problems, but frankly I don’t think we’re there yet—and an outside view, unfortunately, isn’t necessarily going to be helpful. There’s plenty of motivated cognition out there, too.
Nornagest defended the point better than I probably could. Nonetheless, I would like to clarify that “less-than-rational” was myself being slightly too euphemistic. I meant to say that some contrarians are contrarians due to highly problematic reasons. Some of them should not even be considered contrarians, but merely individuals who retain the beliefs of tribes which are not respected within mainstream intellectual culture. These individuals, due to opportunity costs if nothing else, should probably not be considered potential rationalists at this time.
nods My assertion that some nontrivial number of such people are already visible contributors here still remains.
Gotcha—thanks for clarifying.
For the record, I agree with your last two paragraphs. I might agree with your first suggestion as well.… I agree that “rational” constantly runs the risk of becoming a mere tribal marker used to enforce in-group/out-group boundaries and thus detached from any actual improvement in decision-making skills, and that different people here succumb to that temptation to different degrees at different times.
I’m less confident about the idea that being concerned about the quality of people attracted to the site, or endorsing decisions on the basis of such concern, is particularly reliable evidence that the speaker is succumbing to that temptation… but I’m no longer confident you’re even suggesting that.
Oh, I was just chiming in about how Vladimir_M claims that his positions are too unacceptable to be voiced publicly (even though, presumably, he believes they are true), when given what details I know or have inferred about him it seems more likely that his estimate of the cost of signalling is overstated (and what censure or punishment apart from reproving comments by people who disagree on the internet he expects to suffer is unclear to me). I was trying to explain a broader social pattern into which I see his behavior falling, to the person who’d expressed skepticism about his concerns.
For someone who wields the word “prejudice” as derogatory, you tend to assume an awful lot about people whom you don’t know at all except for a few paragraphs of their writing about impersonal and abstract topics.
I’m not “wielding” the word prejudice; it’s not a weapon. Also, in the above case I’m very specifically referring to prejudice as a phenomenon, and it being something less acceptable to signal—not saying that anything I don’t like qualifies as prejudice. I’m using a specific noun with a pretty basic definition—not suggesting that any particular set of statements is a case example.
It is a weapon. It is routinely and regularly used to destroy people’s lives, work, and careers.
Trent Lott’s Senate career was destroyed because he praised Strom Thurmond. I’m not saying that sort of thing happens often, but it’s not nothing.
I wish more people would extrapolate from their own vulnerability to insults to the idea that people in general are vulnerable to insults, but this doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
You forgot cis-hetero.
Obligatory XKCD explaining how hypothetical situations work.
How would you defend it?
Most effectively by insulting the masculinity of any male who disagrees with you. I’ve actually seen this done. It was almost comical in the degree it went to.
I’m not interested in debating this particular issue, but clearly a reasonable argument could be made based on the disparities in physical strength.
What makes the broader context interesting, however, is that issues like these demonstrate that principled egalitarianism is not a viable Schelling point for basing social norms. This however clearly leads to some very problematic questions.
It is far from “clear” to me that such an argument would be reasonable.
If I chose to defend such a position, I’d defend it by arguing it’s more dangerous to indirectly encourage the physically-stronger group to exert violence on the physically-weaker group than vice-versa. The words “on average” to be inserted as appropriate in the preceding sentence.
Still, I’d rather discourage violence altogether.
I think you probably should have used the conditional: “would make me want to slap you”.
Probably, but then I would have missed out on the surreal experience of getting jumped all over for admitting that I am offended by a statement that was intended as an example of something offensive, in a thread about how impossible it is to have a conversation about these things without getting jumped all over. It’s been great so far!
It’s hard not to take something personally when the pronoun in the direct object is “you”.
Same capacity for offensiveness, perhaps—in that some overly defensive people will surely choose to feel attacked (“be offended”) just as much by either question. But same average offensiveness? I seriously doubt it.
Signalling is important. “Offensiveness” functions by signalling you an enemy. If you signal strongly enough that your question is about a desire to understand neurobiological causes of a statistical phenomenon, not about an attempt to attack groups of people, fewer people will feel attacked.
Now some people will surely argue that people just “ought grow tougher skins” instead. But that’s an “ought”-argument, and I’m referring to an “is”-question, which choice of words and sentences leads to a better discussion.
Those questions are not remotely equivalent. I suppose as a second order implication, if you assume that the average man is not very good at math, you could also assume that the average women is really not very good at math, but obviously both the male and female distributions have people above their respective means. In any case, “Why and how do women suck at math” sounds to me like “Why do all women suck at math,” not like “Why does the average woman suck at math,” even if the latter question was based on an accurate presupposition.
The distinction between gratuitously offending people, and inadvertently offending people, does not seem to be widely noticed, whether on Less Wrong or other places. Less Wrong has established implicit rules for what may be said, so there is a narrow class of things that can be said on Less Wrong without getting into trouble, that cannot be said elsewhere without getting into trouble, but that class is narrow and subject to change, so narrow, twisty, complex, and obscure, that I do not find it interesting, though Vladimir does seem to find it interesting.
To participate in consensus building on Occupy Wall Street, you need an Ivy League Education in political correctness. Less Wrong is not nearly as bad as that, but Less Wrongers that tread near forbidden topics as Vladimir does, are developing more expertise in what is permissible thought, and what means are permissible to express them, than they are developing expertise in forbidden topics.
When I speak plainly, you do downvote them into oblivion, and you are unable to respond to them rationally or coherently
For the purposes of anyone reading: When someone makes a list of two dozen supposed “rules”, then they must also offer a method to prioritize between them—or their claims become unfalsifiable and “not even wrong”, since by cherrypicking rules, one can then explain anything.
E.g. sam says people are not allowed to “criticize blacks, women, homosexuals”—and yet at other times he accuses people of only being allowed to praise Romney (a white man), but attack Cain (a black man) and Palin (a woman). To explain this he can apply a different rule about “left-wing Republicans”—but does this rule always supercede or not? Nobody knows, so the claim is unfalsifiable.
People often bash Paris Hilton—though she’s both a parasite, and female as well. This would falsify two of sam’s supposed rules, but he can use a different rule (about being allowed to bash whites) to explain this away as well.
Things like “no enemies on the left, no friends to the right” are likewise unfalsifiable since someone can arbitrarily label people like Gaddafi’s Libya or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda or even Fidel Castro’s Cuba “right-wing” if one wants to.
Compare and contrast with the actually excellent response by lessdazed who provided just two rules, clearly prioritized, and which yet explain a far vaster list of taboo subjects more precisely and comprehensively that sam’s list does, by connecting them all back to the core issue of egalitarianism. That ruleset has predictive capacity, because that ruleset could be falsified, if it were false.
They explain less, to the extent that the rules contradict each other. It is unlikely that they explain nothing—in fact they would probably have to be explicitly contrived for that purpose.
Upvote for pedantry
What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that “I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I’m not going to share it, because most people can’t handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion.”
cf. Wikipedia
That’s not necessarily the claim (explicit or implied). It can also be that even if the information were to be handled in a non-mind-killing fashion, the resulting conclusions would be beyond the pale of what is acceptable under the current social norms.
As for the definition of obscurantism you gave, this is definitely not obscurantism under (1), since it withholds less information to the public than if one remains completely silent. As for (2), it doesn’t involve abstruseness, deliberate or not, since the claim is in fact very simple (as e.g. spelled out above). The most you can say is that it involves deliberate vagueness, but even there, the purpose of the vagueness is not to mislead, confuse, or perform some rhetorical legerdemain, but merely to hand out a limited but perfectly clear piece of information.
It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well… disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
A non-archived mailing list, I think, to greatly reduce the potential cost of adding new members.
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I’ve been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.
Everything? I don’t believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.
Yes, of course, it’s not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.
I agree with you completely regarding privacy. If you feel that you must absolutely prevent some piece of information from leaking out into the world for all to see, you must treat every communication medium—and the Internet specifically—as insecure. The world is littered with dead political careers of people who did not heed this warning.
That said though (to paraphrase the old adage), are we rationalists or are we mice ? If you hold some beliefs that can get you burned at the stake (figuratively speaking… hopefully...), then isn’t it all the more important to determine if these beliefs are true ? And how are you going to do that all by yourself, with no one to critique your ideas and to expose your biases ?
This is just a quibble because I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but the traffic could conceivably be archived in its encrypted state for decryption later.
Yes, I theoretically have to consider how good people from the distant future who particularly want to know what I said now are at playing with large primes. Because there is always the possibility that a man in the middle is saving the encrypted data stream just in case it becomes possible to decipher in the future.
Do you mean in users’ inboxes, or something else?
Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don’t think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.
The Wayback Machine?
Edit: Or not.
Not relevant to email, or even an access-controlled site.
Oh. Oops. (I don’t know much about that sort of thing, obviously.)
Honest question: why was this downvoted?
(I downvoted because I saw the comment as decreasing the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio: as Nick noted, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t archive private pages or emails, and is therefore not relevant.)
I support this proposal and would like to join the mailing list if one becomes available. But why do you think a mailing list would fare better than a website? Because of restricted access?
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
Is 1100 enough karma? I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
Yes, that’s another way in which it just doesn’t look like a good idea. When you’re organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you’re doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I’m glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
Coming out and saying what exactly?
Is this a joke? I don’t know what exactly. That’s the point.
OK, then to phrase it in purely grammatical terms, what exactly is the antecedent of the pronoun “it” in your question above?
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. (“Offends” in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it’s smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
Well, it’s fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I’m not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was not alone in that interpretation (I see you’ve already responded to one of those comments as well).
In that case, I’m somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.
The trouble is, I really don’t see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don’t want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I’d hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.
Redheads? Now I’m curious what kinds of traits X you’re talking about.
To take a prominent example, it’s impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman’s sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it’s usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of “prejudice” and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).
On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.
Perhaps if you started by sharing your dataset first (with names changed to protect the guilty, etc.), then the conclusions you drew from it, and only afterwards the advice you would give to a younger version of yourself?
So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you’re willing, I’d like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won’t personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?
Well, it’s a topic for a whole book, not a brief comment buried deep in a vast old thread. But for some concrete examples, see e.g. the comments I left in this subthread.
So basically, if a guy tries to have a long-term relationship with a girl who’s had a lot of partners, he better study Game or there’s a good chance she’ll get bored, because she’s used to very attractive guys? That makes sense; I wouldn’t think of that as very controversial. Of course, that ignores that some women actually do also make an effort to work on their long-term relationship skills and find ways to deal with periods where their partners seem less attractive.
I didn’t see anything about looks in that subthread; does something similar apply to dating someone very good-looking?
By “looks” I didn’t mean the level of attractiveness, but more generally, all clues available from people’s appearance. Clearly, this is going to lead to strife once people start recognizing themselves, or someone they care about, in the criteria under discussion. (This may in fact be due to understandable annoyance on part of someone who represents an actual statistical exception, but again, this makes it no less a barrier to rational discussion.)
Re: relationships with women who’ve had a lot of partners, the problem is that for a typical man, the extreme skew of the male attractiveness distribution and the asymmetry of the male-female mating strategies mean that even with some dedication to studying and practice of game, he’ll likely end up in an unfavorable position. But again, talking about this stuff in plainer and more concrete ways is hard to do without crossing the bounds that have repeatedly shown to be a trigger of discourse breakdown on LW.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
Re: looks, are we talking the “blonde = ditzy, glasses = geeky” level of stereotype? Or are you talking about the way someone’s mood, shyness, introversion, and so forth can be read from body language? Or something as straightforward as someone wearing a lot of makeup spent a lot of time on her appearance, and thus probably wants attention/cares what people think of her a lot?
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
One idea: we’ve had a thread on LW where people post their online dating profiles for feedback. I think it’d be an interesting game to post pictures of people, either ours or other random pictures, and see what kind of guesses we come up with about them based on clues from their appearance.
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
That depends on what exactly you’re aiming for. Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand. Clearly, you shouldn’t worry too much if it’s really just a throwaway relationship that will soon end one way or another. (Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation, and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
In fact, the situation has gotten significantly worse on LW in this regard since I started commenting here around two years ago. Back then, it seemed to me like discussions of these topics on LW might result in interesting insight whose worth would be greater than the trouble. However, ever since then, a string of ever worse and more cringe-worthy failures that occurred whenever these topics were opened has convinced me in the opposite.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum. (Though admittedly these days none are anywhere as good as what could be found during the heyday of the contrarian blogosphere some years ago.) I really don’t see any point in trying to open them in a forum like this one, which has conclusively shown to be a bad place for them.
It was the first thought I had. The association in my mind went something like
girl with lots of partners ---> girl is sexually awesome ---> female partners and group sex ---> if someone thinks having multiple partners is bad, is that bad?
No, I meant long term.
I am incredibly curious about your thoughts in these matters. You hint lots of things but don’t spell them out. I disagree with your assertions that LW’s gotten worse and is a bad place for these discussions, and I get that you don’t want to post them publicly on LW, but can you PM me? I promise to keep them private if you’d like.
The ones I’ve seen either a) take weird conservative positions, b) are filled with bitterness and hatred towards women, c) deteriorate into madonna/whore complexes, slut-shaming, and name calling, without much intelligent discussion or reasoning, or d) seem sane to me, but agree with my viewpoint on things.
Besides, I want to know what you think. You’re sane, reasonable, intelligent, and have a viewpoint that’s very different from mine, but seems like it might have a lot to offer. Please PM me. You’re giving me half of thoughts that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and can’t find on fora elsewhere, and I want the other half!
I don’t see how this stacks the deck.
Rather than counting things for or against the girl how about we frame it in terms of to what extent these new behaviors (female partners and group sex with you) also fit into the previously mentioned correlation cluster.
This is of course a more accurate and useful way of stating the problem in general terms.
The specific question still stands, though. Let’s say it’s true that a guy dating a girl who’s had many past partners will have certain problems, as VM suggests. Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
I would be rather surprised if this has been studied in the same way that the “sexual partners—divorce rate” correlations have been. That said, the second question seems to be equivalent to “does having group sex cause or correlate to lower expected duration of the pair bond”. An answer of “Yes, but it’s worth it!” seems plausible.
As for correlations between bulk female-female liaisons in the history of the female partner of a heterosexual pair bond and pair bond duration and level of social game required by the male partner—the only direct evidence I have been exposed to is in the form of anecdotal evidence from my own experience and that of reports. My prediction must be based primarily on what I know about human psychology in general—things like conservativeness and the ‘openness’ personality trait. The prediction I would give is “makes less difference than if all those liaisons were with males but still makes a difference in the same direction”.
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
(I might be joking now, but my jimmies are overall quite rustled with his entire soap opera; moreso when I consider how clear-headed and constructive he can be with simple and ideology-free comments.)
Based on the comments you’ve left so far in response to what I’ve been writing, I estimate a low probability that you are genuinely intrigued by what I might think about certain questions, and a much higher probability that you are baiting.
However, just in case the less probable hypothesis is true, I will for once respond to you. Namely, if you want me to talk about things that I’m reluctant to discuss because I’m not sure if it’s worth the controversy it will cause, then I’d first like to see that you’re making some effort to understand the arguments that I have already made on related topics. So far, I’ve seen zero indication of this, which makes it likely that you are indeed baiting.
Now, this may be a misunderstanding on my part, but honestly, I can hardly see how it might be so. Someone who is genuinely curious about my contrarian opinions would make some effort to respond intelligently to those comments where I have already discussed them, even if I’ve done it only in a cautious and indirect way. You, on the other hand, have shown absolutely no inclination to do so. Rather, you are behaving as if you are eager to get some juicy soundbites that would be a convenient target for attack. And you can’t possibly claim that my writings so far have been devoid of substance, since dozens of other people have evidently found enough substance in them to write well-thought-out responses.
......
Sorry, but I’m just stunned by such an interpretation. Okay, I’ll try to assess some of your more outstanding and upvoted comments as fairly as I can and respond to the best of my ability, if that’s what it takes to initiate a dialogue. I was, however, quite unaware that my remarks could’ve been taken to express any disrespect of your intelligence and epistemic virtue, or disregard for your viewpoints.
Indeed, if you take a look at the enormous thread that was LW’s response to my query in this fascinating direction, you’ll see that I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why). I honestly don’t understand why my desire to learn new perspectives, to consider their implications—and, yes, argue about them, but without aiming for their suppression or vilification of their holders—has now been met with such derision.
If you feel that the above is just so much self-congratulation and platitude, go ahead and tell me so, but, now at least, I really believe that I tried my best and sparked off valuable, constructive discussion with that post.
I’m interested. Why?
I’m trying to abstain from posting, but, in brief, I suspect it’s the same thing that prompted e.g. my (over)reaction to reading Three Worlds Collide, the infanticide thread by Bakkot and some other stuff here. When encountering strong arguments against some element of ordinary, mainstream, liberal commonsense ethics (alongside with guilt for hardly living up to those in the first place), I tend to feel morally imperiled, disgusted by aspects of my own character, unsure of my worth as a person and easy to turn to “evil”. I know how wild and unhealthy this sounds, but such things always appear so personal and not-abstract to me, I just can’t help it. Someone here once told me that this might be not unusual for people who perceive sociopathic tendencies within themselves and repress them; they view all such tricky problems through the prism of their own perceived moral deficiencies.
Sigh, I wish I could explain in a less obtuse manner.
Hmm. I think I understand. I’m the opposite in some ways: I get a wild thrill of excitement and happiness at “taboo” thoughts or ideas, and I’m biased towards them. I remember first discovering Holocaust revisionists and being amazingly awed at the daring and conviction and wrongness of what they were saying.
I don’t know what this says about my personality.
That said, I get somewhat annoyed at overly cynical or oversimplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as when people say that the educational system or the legal system is all about status signaling, or the PUA theory that everything is a test and it’s all about dominance and social value.
What “evil” bothers you the most? And what was your reaction to TWC? You can probably guess what mine was.
Naaaah, let’s just have Eliezer try to get Vlad’s ideas out of the box. :-)
Jokes aside, in a properly arranged duel this would probably work; when directly attempting to persuade his audience of something, Eliezer is among the most convincing writers I’ve ever read (I was similarly impressed by e.g. George Orwell and Hannah Arendt).
You had me convinced that Vladimir really was all talk and bluff until other links in recent comments lead me to some rather detailed explanations by Vladimir of his position.
I have an even stronger dislike than normal for cheap rhetoric when I realize that I have been taken in by it. All future anti-Vladimir_M claims by yourself will now be treated with extreme skepticism.
...maybe. Okay.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy, the point is the same—just by talking here. Maybe it’s all out of my league, and maybe I’m operating under a massive self-deception. I’ll take a couple days off LW at least and won’t think about the whole matter at all. Maybe I’ll have to take a longer break.
Without trying to condescend too much—Something to keep in mind when managing your own sense of adequacy and inclusion is that personal challenges are much more controversial (and likely to be challenged and counterattacked) than more straightforward positions. While direct challenges are sometimes appropriate it is almost always always more practical to avoid them unless you are already feeling entirely secure in your position and not especially vulnerable to potential disagreement.
The above applies both here and elsewhere and even when you are being entirely reasonable.
Well, he has expressed the reluctance to go into further specifics a few times.
He did rather play up the “it’s taboo” angle.
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
I have over 1500 karma as of today; I think 1100 ought to be enough.
I think the mailing list should be set up as invitation only, with some place where one can request an invitation. Then current members could look at their posts, and if the person has a lot of contributions and looks open-minded enough, they can be allowed on. There wouldn’t have to be a hard-and-fast karma cutoff if every new member was “previewed” and disruptive members could be banned easily.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members. The LW moderators and/or Lukeprog* is an obvious Schelling point, but they may not have the time or inclination. Conversely, I could probably figure out how to create a mailing list and would be willing to do so, but I don’t have the reputation here to be seen as a valid judge of who’s non-ideological enough to join.
*Lukeprog would presumably have a significant amount to post to such a list, and is widely respected by the community despite not having moderator powers.
Those are more literally correct, but the acronyms don’t work out as ironically.
Well, given that the idea is to create a place where certain norm-violating ideas can be discussed, it seems like the ones with veto power ought to be the ones who have come up with the idea but are reluctant to discuss it in public (I admit I’ve rather lost track of who this is, in this instance). If nothing else, the veto would be exercised by simply not discussing the topic.
“Contrarian Conspiracy for Correcting Politics”
“New Association for Apolitically Criticizing Politics”
“New Society for Discussing, Apolitically, Politics”
The problem with setting up such a society is that it’s about as secure as a house of cards. If I was a potential attacker, all I’d need to do would be,
Create a new account on Less Wrong (or just use my existing one if I was willing to burn it)
Act really open-minded and gain a lot of karma
Join the Contrarian Conspiracy
Archive all its messages for a few months, then publish them on Slashdot, 4chan, and the National Enquirer
In fact, the first three steps aren’t even necessary, if you assume that instead of being an outside attacker, I’m an internal member who’d gone rogue. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping a person like that.
Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.
One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.
I don’t see why hypothetical conspiratorial mailing list (HCML) identities and LW identities have to be linked at all, really.
The needed barriers to entry are basically taken care of in who gets invited in the first place. On the list itself I don’t actually see that strong a reason to even know which mail address is who, in fact since many people don’t really have all that recognisable a style this might work to improve rationality by breaking up existing sympathies and antipathies.
I saw it as a way of messing up the apparent signal-to-noise ratio for outside observers. However, if one were to wish to do so, there are probably better ways.
This is a good idea, but it does not guarantee security; and I’m not sure how effective it would be against a determined attacker. It would be relatively easy to collect a large enough corpus of text and then use it to match up “46233782482@gmail.com″ with “Bugmaster of LessWrong”. And, of course, this assumes that Google won’t roll over and surrender all of Mr. 46233782482′s contact information to the authorities when said authorities come knocking.
How determined an attacker are we planning for, here? The original goal was to just meliorate the damage that a theoretical rogue member could cause (as it seems hopeless to try to prevent that). Are you really anticipating “the authorities” getting involved?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way. On the other hand, our authorities have been getting quite jumpy lately; for example, merely having an Arabic-sounding last name is already enough for the FBI to attach a tracking device to your car. When you put the two factors together, it seems reasonable to expect said authorities to take an interest in the membership of the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Where on Earth did you read anything like that anywhere in my comments? Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
This, by the way, is another way in which expressing opinions about controversial and charged topics can be more dangerous than one might assume. Already in the second- or third-hand retelling, your opinion is not at all unlikely to be distorted and amplified into a caricatured soundbite that sounds far more crude and awful than anything you ever meant to say or actually said. If such things happen even on the “meta” level, what can one expect to happen when concrete topics are broached?
Ok, I tried doing just that right now, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thread at all at any capacity. So, firstly, I have to withdraw my comment for lack of evidence; my apologies. But secondly, can you offer some advice for navigating gigantic threads on Less Wrong ? For example, is there a way to search just a single thread for comments with certain keywords, or to flatten the thread, or something ?
Such a belief does not exist! Vladimir_M is a liar. A dirty, dirty liar!
(Prove me wrong? :P)
There’s no such thing as a hate-speech basilisk! Don’t be sill-
whisperwhisper
RAARGH DIE YOU FOUL HERETIC
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly, unless it is intended to force the assailant into a particularly dangerous form of confrontation.
There’s the Troll, obviously.
If only those were mythological!
Not exactly mythological, but SCP-053 springs to mind.
It could also work as a curse of the gods that keeps the poor soul forever hiding in fear for its life.
Ahh, good idea. That has almost certainly come up in mythology somewhere.
The first thing that comes to mind is a bit of a stretch, but:
(From Genesis 4.)
So, the curse doesn’t directly cause anyone to attack him, but it does indirectly create a situation in which Cain has to expose himself to attackers. Of course, this version of the curse lasts for all of one verse; in the next, God revises it into the Mark of Cain, which is perhaps even more cruel than the original curse.
This would be a mistake analogous to the mind projection fallacy. I do not so understand.
Trivial inconvenience to protect against a trivial danger.
I find the scenario very low probability if high impact.
This might be useful.
I like this idea, but since I have very little karma, I would be a bit sad to see it happen. Could an email list be contrived in such a way that users with lower karma could read the correspondences of the group without having the ability to post messages? If possible, it seems like that would maintain the integrity of discussion while also allowing interested parties to learn new things.
If you don’t have a lot of karma, and the requisite posting history of being nonpartisan, how could the Conspirators trust you not to spread around the Deep Dark Secrets that would give the site a bad reputation?
(If I seem to be giving off mixed signals, it’s because I’m not sure how I feel about this idea myself yet. I’m having a really hard time imagining what could be somehow so beyond the pale as to be impossible to allude to in public.)
Good question. I don’t have an answer, but I guess there could be tiers? Like, if a person* has a couple hundred karma, has been active on the site for a while, and has conducted him/herself well then that person could receive low level access. With the concern you brought up it’s hard to choose criteria that would make a user trustworthy but that wouldn’t warrant just letting them in completely. I guess I would advocate less stringent requirements. Like, nobody with negative karma and to be accepted you need to have been on the site for x amount of time and have been polite/non-inflammatory/thoughtful in all previous discussions. If a person has low karma because they rarely comment, they likely won’t post much in the email list anyway.
If we need a way to find out if someone’s trustworthy, can’t we just ask them to raise their right hand?
*This hypothetical person happens to be me.
You’d have to ask the people who know what’s going on and why it should be kept secret.
(I am not one of them.)
To take an attested example, discussion of the beliefs and tactics of the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community was either heavily discouraged or banned, I forget which, because of the unpleasant air it seemed to give to this site.
I’m lost. Isn’t that exactly what started this discussion upthread?
That is not really discussion about PUA, but rather about what is problematic about discussing PUA.
Except, you know. It’s being alluded to in public. So it doesn’t seem to qualify.
Apolitical Conspiracy could be abbreviated as APC, a vehicle useful to well-resourced partisans who want to decide when and where to engage without resorting to sneaking about dressed as civilians.
I’d like to request an invite, if this is still a thing.
The comment sections on iSteve and Roissy are not great places either.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
From I Don’t Know:
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
I didn’t see myself as responding to his point, just to yours.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
Indeed, that’s my point.
Observe, however the comment section of certain horribly non PC blogs. By and large. they are very smart, and remarkably well informed. Censorship is never necessary, whereas in more politically correct environments, censorship is essential, because when non PC views are spoken, commenters take it upon themselves to silence the heretic by any means necessary, disrupting communication.
If the blog owner posts fairly heretical views, and himself refrains from censoring or intemperately and rudely attacking views in the comments that are even more heretical than his own, then no one in the comments intemperately or rudely attacks any views that anyone expresses in the comments or on the blog.
The blog owner can say that left wing views are held by fools and scoundrels, but because left wing views are high prestige, a left commenter will not be called a fool and a scoundrel. If the blog owner refrains from saying that views more right wing than his own are held by fools and scoundrels, then commenters with views more right wing than his own will not be called fools and scoundrels in the comments.
Because right wing views are low prestige, it requires only the slightest encouragement from the blog owner to produce a dog fight in the comments, should someone further right than the blog owner comment, but not so easy to produce a dog fight when someone lefter than the blog owner comments.
You have to be kidding, you can’t really believe that. Either that or I haven’t ever read a PC free blog.
This was previously discussed here. Right now, it’s sounding like whatever (if anything) comes out of this will fail by being overly inclusive. My guess is that if this sort of thing ends up working well, it will be because some small group of people who happen to have good taste end up making decisions on a “trust me” basis, rather than because LessWrong as a community successfully applies some attempt at a transparently fair algorithm.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn’t find, but here is a discussion on it.
What I think we’re in danger of forgetting is that, anywhere but Less Wrong, “That’s offensive!” is actually a really persuasive argument. People who blithely ignore even the strongest of evidence will often shut up and look stupid if you successfully play the offense card. PC arguments may be so commonly heard, not because they are the “best” (most valid) arguments that could be made in support of a given assertion, but because they totally work.
If someone says, with no factual basis at all, that members of Group X murder children, piles and piles of evidence may not be enough to make the claim go away, but if you can convince people that to say so is offensive and Anti-X, you’re home free. So why bother presenting the evidence?
“You’re wrong” implies “you’re a liar,” or a more direct response could be “that’s a lie.” If the goal is to make someone look stupid, this can work better. Admittedly that’s not always a major goal, cases won’t overlap, etc.
But I think we do see people make fact-citing arguments that are delivered in the tone of “that’s offensive”, so the methods aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, any argument beginning “There is no scientific evidence that...” in an appropriately shrill tone sends the message that offense is taken and sidesteps the logical evidence to highlight the strongest available evidence, the absence of scientific evidence.
Even if the offense argument is explicit, factual arguments could at least be added to it.
Do you mean Paul Graham’s What you can’t say?
Yes. To gwern (verb) it, to reconstruct it from quotes according to the Pareto principle:
Add “politically correct” to the set of possible x and y and we are in agreement. This was the point of my original comment on the matter.
Saying things violate Paul Grahm’s principle isn’t used here to dismiss ideas, only to, as you said, put the burden of proof on them as being prima facie false. I don’t think that “heretical” was quite the same way, nor are “racist” and “fascist”, etc.
I would never say “prima facie proves” so maybe we are using some words to express very different concepts.
This may be evidence that the critics fear that, but it isn’t always the case. Sometimes they just think that there can be damage if people are mislead by the falsehoods for example.
Sure, it’s not always the case. But if I just think that there can be damage if people are misled by a falsehood, I will probably claim it’s false, and argue for that point.
This isn’t really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn’t stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
How do people respond to the claims? I acknowledge that any response other than just “that’s false” de-emphasizes the falsity of it, but if the response is “That’s a lie and illegal,” that’s a different sort of thing to say than “That’s classist,” or the like for other claims. If people respond with “The powerful Jews will lock you up for saying such a thing, by the way I think it’s 15% likely true,” then that’s an interesting case too, one that isn’t a counterexample.
In one sense legal coercion is at the far end of a single scale from mild disapproval to ostracization to illegalization,but in another sense it is qualitatively different. A country within which saying something is illegal might have most endorse the illegal idea, or most oppose it by simply calling it “false”, or most oppose it by emphasizing its illegality and somewhat mentioning its illegality, etc., or no majority of any type. What’s important here is the social climate around the statements, for which the laws on the books are important evidence but alone don’t make an example or counterexample of a country.
Yes, this is the precise complaint! To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe, one so beloved of tabloid hacks that practically any right of centre* talking point can be described as politically incorrect (“you can’t say [thing I’m saying right now on prime-time television] any more” and so on).
Why declarations of politically incorrectness are taken any more seriously than claims to be totally mad/random or the life of the party I shall never know.
*am I being, ah what’s the equivalent here—unserious perhaps? populist? - if I suggest that this trick is mostly limited to the right? That political correctness just means any non-socialist leftwing opinion, with the added implication that the opinion is both hegemonic and baseless. When left wing commentators trip over themselves to avoid criticising america or soldiers, or rush to condemn protests at the first sign of a black mask, nobody talks about political correctness. Despite all the talk about how OWS has made it acceptable to moral issues in ways that were previously beyond the pale, nobody calls it an anti-PC movement.
Perhaps we should have a separate term to describe this phenomenon, if we are going to keep going on about political correctness, and pretending we aren’t talking about politics? Since otherwise we reach a point where commentators are unable to call people fascists, for being so PC is decidedly politically incorrect.
First, politically correct arguments are obviously a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
Second, that conflates levels.
People don’t randomly decide which arguments to give justifying their statements and actions, they tend to give the strongest ones they have available. Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments. The argument that an argument is politically correct is a non-truth-citing argument. Non-truth-citing arguments are generally weaker than truth-citing arguments.
See here. If someone presents a NTC argument, I infer they don’t have a TCA unless there are extenuating circumstances such that I think that they would have presented a NTCA even when they had a TCA.
Likewise when someone’s presents a TCA, one can infer, all else being equal, that they don’t have a much more compelling one available. Even weak TCAs ought to lower one’s degree of belief something is true when they are presented by someone who probably would have used a better argument had it been available, even though the argument is a valid and novel one, and one had expected the arguments for the position to be better.
Imagine you are watching two people. The first makes a claim about a subject with which you aren’t familiar. At that point, you assign it a certain credibility. The second objects with a NTCA. At that point, you should think the claim more likely than before because the best objection the second person could make was weak and your original estimate had expected them to do better. If the first person objects to the objection with a NTCA, then you should think the claim less likely than at the second point, because the best counterobjection the first person could make was weak and your estimate at the second point in time had expected them to do better.
That “To frame an argument as politically incorrect” is an argument roughly as bad as a politically correct argument does not salvage politically correct arguments.
So, I think I have a reasonable sense of what people mean when they say an argument, or an assertion, is politlcally incorrect. Reading this, though, I begin to suspect that I have no idea what you mean when you say an argument is politically correct.
Ordinarily, I don’t hear that term used to describe arguments at all, I hear it used to describe people who object to politically incorrect arguments… or who object to arguments on the grounds that they are politically incorrect.
Among other things, I can’t tell if you intend for “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” to be jointly exhaustive terms, or whether there’s a middle ground between them. If the latter, I think I agree with most of what you say here, though I’m not sure how many real-world arguments it applies to.
I mean an argument with a few characteristics:
Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments.
For example, they don’t take the form “It’s not true that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants.” They take the form “It’s insensitive to say that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants.”
They are a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
For example, “We’ve done experiments, and the results suggest no difference in intelligence between Koreans and Chinese, controlling for other factors, there are probably no measurable differences between the groups” is not a PC argument, because it appeals to truth. “The assumption that Koreans are smarter than Chinese is racist, if you properly controlled for environmental differences, there would be no measured difference between the groups,” has a very similar conclusion, and is a PC argument. It’s not the argument’s conclusion that makes it PC or not.
Not all non-truth-citing arguments are PC ones.
For example, arguing that something is wrong because “A Muslim said it” is obviously neither truth citing nor PC. PC arguments are those that are rationalizations for a particular set of conclusions.
Truth-citing and non-truth-citing are just poles of a range. Arguments such as evolutionary debunking arguments attempt to show a loose relationship between a proposition and the truth—loose, neither tight nor non-existent.
Unlike PC arguments, PI arguments are just those with conclusions or implicit assumptions targeted by PC arguments. Mercy said “To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe...” this is largely true. The framing corresponds to a certain degree with reality in each case.
Positions for which the best argument is “My opponent’s arguments is PC,” are weak. This weakness is because the accusation that the argument is a rationalization for a predetermined conclusion, i.e. that it is a PC argument, does not attack the conclusion directly. The accusation is a form of evolutionary debunking argument, and weakens the evidence brought for the conclusion without destroying the evdence and without attacking the conclusion. The accusation is weak in a way similar to all PC arguments.
Mercy went wrong in thinking that because calling out arguments as being PC and thus not tightly bound to truth of their conclusions does not address the conclusions either, arguments’ actual status as PC arguments is unimportant.
The reason to especially doubt arguments usually supported by the argument “This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument,” is that valid arguments with true premises and conclusions can usually do better. There is an excuse to say “This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument,” so long as one has prioritized better arguments, or if it is to explain rather than argue for something, e.g. to explain why someone was fired but not why the statement that person was fired for is true.
(nods) OK, I see what you’re getting at, at least generally. Thanks for the clarification.
One thing...
This would make significantly more sense to me if it said “incorrect.” Was that a typo, or am I confused?
What does this mean?
I believe a “discuss” (or synonym thereof) was omitted between “a” and “moral.”
Your question rests on an assumption that obscurantism must decrease information, but I see that assumption as incorrect. In fact, under this assumption I should never regard anything said to me as obscurantist, as it should never decrease the amount of information available to me.
Wikipedia defines “obscurantism” as “the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known”, and it seems to fit the bill. Of course, it may be useful or beneficial species of obscurantism, though I agree with Prismatic that it is not.
The situation as you describe it seems pre-biased by postulating that the mainstream view is dubious. This may be obvious to you, but to me, the person who’s faced with the “hints” as described, it is not—if it were, I shouldn’t need the hints to begin with. I think it’s incorrect to condition on the dubiousness of the mainstream view. If I am to decide on how to best to take into account hints of that nature, the possibility that the mainstream view is correct after all, and the hint entirely specious, should not be disregarded. In fact, in real-life situations where such hints are offered, this may be the more frequent scenario.
The hint that says “this view is incorrect, but I will not explain why, for doing that will violate a social norm” is annoying and distracting; it engages my attention, bringing no real evidence for its claims. Because it posits a mystery, I’m likely to err on the side of giving it more attention than it deserves. The benefit is that it may cause me to investigate the view more thoroughly than I would otherwise have, and realize it is incorrect. If I precommit to ignoring such signals, I will miss some chances of that, and I will also avoid giving my attention, and more closely investigating, all those views that are correct after all, and where the signal was specious. The bargain may well be worth it.
What makes obscurantism a relevant category is that certain ways of withholding information and intentional abstruseness can be very effective for misleading people and producing convictions without evidence. In LW parlance, it is a particular kind of Dark Arts. Now, of course, it makes no sense to debate definitions when there is a true disagreement about them, but I think it shouldn’t be controversial to insist that the normal meaning of “obscurantism” involves this Dark Arts element. In other words, it involves withholding information with the intent to mislead and produce mistaken or unsubstantiated beliefs, and it cannot be applied to every act of withholding information intentionally.
I do think the Wikipedia definition you quoted is unreasonably overbroad, considering the standard usage of the word. It would cover all sorts of completely honest, reasonable, and non-misleading acts of communication where one chooses to limit the amount of information given—for example, saying that you got a new job but not disclosing the salary, or writing blog comments under a pseudonym.
It is not true that it brings no significant evidence, if the source of the hint is someone about whom you have other information—and information about the intellectual abilities, knowledge, and likely biases of frequent commenters is easy to get in a forum like this one (if you don’t in fact have it already). And you can always simply ignore such hits if you believe you have insufficient information, or you don’t feel like looking for it, the way you presumably ignore any other comments that are not of interest to you.
Also, I note that your complaint here doesn’t state that these hits are misleading and apt to trigger biases leading to incorrect beliefs, so you must indeed be working with the broadest possible (and I would say overbroad) definition of “obscurantism.”
It may indeed—but why precommit unconditionally, without considering the source of these signals?
Not technically true. It is possible to make a perfectly rational mind produce worse predictions about the world by providing it with selected information. This relies on it having insufficient information about your obscuring tendencies or motives. The new probabilities that the rational agent has will necessarily be a subjectively objective improvement but can still produce worse predictions of the relevant aspects of the world in an objective sense.
You’re right, of course. I edited away that part, which is not relevant for the main point anyway.
What is obscurantist exactly? What I said is perfectly clear, if you look at the context of the two preceding posts.
No particular claim about male-female relations was intended (although if you want to know I endorse Roissy’s view of male-female relations, if not his value-set); I was objecting to the idea that “mindkilling” should be redefined as “saying things likely to offend mainstream sensibilities”. Mindkilling refers to the effect of political content on human reasoning powers in general, and the suggested redefinition struck me as Orwellian.
It is not your post that I think is obscurantist. I was commenting on the undesirability of posts that presuppose option 2 has been selected and proceed to imply that the mainstream view is false without actually making explict what alternative is being proposed.
I think the alpha-beta classification is excessively reductive. I would say that I am fairly physically intimidating to a majority of other males, but this doesn’t translate into automatic adoration by nearby females.
After diligently reading through most of Vladimir_M’s comment history, I have no option but to express my fervent agreement. I’ve always had a great dislike of vague hints, but the style in which he does those is just fucking unbearable.
I don’t know why you addressed this to me, because I was merely trying (possibly failing) to resolve Vladimir_M and Konkvistador’s disagreement. Redefining “mindkilling” to mean “dissent” is Orwellian and deserves comment. Or perhaps you think that the mainstream is the truth by definition?