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!
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”.