This is a stronger case than the one Anderson made, I think, and it is one I take seriously (which is why I plan to approach this problem by reading material first to see what the landscape is actually like).
Any field that has dogma’s that aren’t allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
I agree with this statement, but the question is whether modern gender studies is actually such a field. Trying to make bold claims about the quality of academic discussion in a field neither I nor my conversation partner has actually investigated seriously strikes me as a futile exercise. I think it’s probably a bad idea to judge the quality of academic feminism by the merits of tumblr or ‘pop’ feminism in the same way it would be unfair to judge skeptic movements by the intellectual standards of r/atheism.
I’m also deeply skeptical of the idea that inviting feminists to participate in discussion would lead to an opening of the hellgates. LessWrong is a community that has examined infohazards and sees participants from a wide variety of political backgrounds including many that are considered extreme by most people, so my prior is that we’re better than most communities at managing political discord in a sane way.
We lost a room in which we held LW meetups in Berlin because LW discusses topics that shouldn’t be discussed. The discussion in itself is ‘unsafe’ regardless of how you discuss or what conclusions are reached.
That’s norms for using a meeting room. When it comes to norms that the gender studies community expects there own members to follow, a person who has a reputational stake in the community has a lot more to lose from violating norms in that way.
This isn’t even a question of the academic quality of their discourse. a/atheism doesn’t attack people in a way that destroys careers and isn’t dangerous to anyone. This is different here. I wouldn’t want a lone reasonable person in the gender studies field to lose their social capital and/or career for associating with this place.
The standard way LW historically handled politics is by discouraging it’s discussion. SSC did things differently and payed a price for it.
Amusingly, the article you linked redirected to a different article which seems to reinforce your first point and I think helped clarify for me the exact dynamics of the situation. The author defends Dr. Littman’s paper on what she terms ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ against the heavy backlash it received (mostly on twitter, it seems) and especially Harvard’s response to that backlash.
I find it difficult to imagine that healthy academic discourse could take place in an environment that conflict-heavy. Critically, this does not require the field itself to be nonsense but rather so deeply joined to the social justice culture war that the normal apparatuses of academia are hijacked.
This has raised my estimation of the risk of inviting gender studies researchers to participate in discussions on LW significantly, especially since as you point out, that risk runs in both directions.
There may still be ideas worth salvaging from the gender studies community and I’m really curious at what a ‘rationalist gender studies’ field looks like but the risk does look salient enough it may not be worth the effort.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics. I think we’d agree that intellectual progress halts when important topics become too charged to touch and I don’t want feminism to become like that in the rationalist sphere.
But rationalist sphere != LessWrong and perhaps this isn’t the right place for progress in that area to happen. You bring up the differing approaches of SSC and LW and I actually quite like SSC’s approach of high-discussion-norms while not shying from sensitive topics, but you’re not wrong about paying a price for that.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields and what would the discussion there have to look like to keep people safe?
The answer might be ‘nowhere’. This could be a fundamentally irreconcilable difference and if that’s the case then I will be sad about it and move on. I don’t think I have enough evidence to conclude this yet, but I will concede that is this place does exist, LessWrong probably isn’t it.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics.
No, I lost it because it was a LessWrong meetup and there are such discussions on LessWrong (and our meetup.com page says SSC/LW, so SSC association was also a problem). The problem was not that the topics might be discussed on the meetup with was more applied rationality focused.
The problem was one of association, not one of meetup content. We could have held the meetup if we wouldn’t link from any LW or SSC branded page and called it ‘rationality meetup’.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where?
The ‘Darwinian Gender Studies’ facebook group seems one place worth mentioning. TheMotte was founded to have a place where discussion could be happen with less collateral damage.
There might still be a risk for any insider to participate in them with their public identity attached. Private discussions behind closed doors would be less risky.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields
This is a stronger case than the one Anderson made, I think, and it is one I take seriously (which is why I plan to approach this problem by reading material first to see what the landscape is actually like).
I agree with this statement, but the question is whether modern gender studies is actually such a field. Trying to make bold claims about the quality of academic discussion in a field neither I nor my conversation partner has actually investigated seriously strikes me as a futile exercise. I think it’s probably a bad idea to judge the quality of academic feminism by the merits of tumblr or ‘pop’ feminism in the same way it would be unfair to judge skeptic movements by the intellectual standards of r/atheism.
I’m also deeply skeptical of the idea that inviting feminists to participate in discussion would lead to an opening of the hellgates. LessWrong is a community that has examined infohazards and sees participants from a wide variety of political backgrounds including many that are considered extreme by most people, so my prior is that we’re better than most communities at managing political discord in a sane way.
We lost a room in which we held LW meetups in Berlin because LW discusses topics that shouldn’t be discussed. The discussion in itself is ‘unsafe’ regardless of how you discuss or what conclusions are reached.
That’s norms for using a meeting room. When it comes to norms that the gender studies community expects there own members to follow, a person who has a reputational stake in the community has a lot more to lose from violating norms in that way.
This isn’t even a question of the academic quality of their discourse. a/atheism doesn’t attack people in a way that destroys careers and isn’t dangerous to anyone. This is different here. I wouldn’t want a lone reasonable person in the gender studies field to lose their social capital and/or career for associating with this place.
The standard way LW historically handled politics is by discouraging it’s discussion. SSC did things differently and payed a price for it.
That’s all separate from the actual quality of the academic discourse but it matters. As far as the discourse goes https://quillette.com/2019/09/17/i-basically-just-made-it-up-confessions-of-a-social-constructionist/ is an article by an insider where he reflects on the low standards he used over the decades.
Amusingly, the article you linked redirected to a different article which seems to reinforce your first point and I think helped clarify for me the exact dynamics of the situation. The author defends Dr. Littman’s paper on what she terms ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ against the heavy backlash it received (mostly on twitter, it seems) and especially Harvard’s response to that backlash.
I find it difficult to imagine that healthy academic discourse could take place in an environment that conflict-heavy. Critically, this does not require the field itself to be nonsense but rather so deeply joined to the social justice culture war that the normal apparatuses of academia are hijacked.
This has raised my estimation of the risk of inviting gender studies researchers to participate in discussions on LW significantly, especially since as you point out, that risk runs in both directions.
There may still be ideas worth salvaging from the gender studies community and I’m really curious at what a ‘rationalist gender studies’ field looks like but the risk does look salient enough it may not be worth the effort.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics. I think we’d agree that intellectual progress halts when important topics become too charged to touch and I don’t want feminism to become like that in the rationalist sphere.
But rationalist sphere != LessWrong and perhaps this isn’t the right place for progress in that area to happen. You bring up the differing approaches of SSC and LW and I actually quite like SSC’s approach of high-discussion-norms while not shying from sensitive topics, but you’re not wrong about paying a price for that.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields and what would the discussion there have to look like to keep people safe?
The answer might be ‘nowhere’. This could be a fundamentally irreconcilable difference and if that’s the case then I will be sad about it and move on. I don’t think I have enough evidence to conclude this yet, but I will concede that is this place does exist, LessWrong probably isn’t it.
No, I lost it because it was a LessWrong meetup and there are such discussions on LessWrong (and our meetup.com page says SSC/LW, so SSC association was also a problem). The problem was not that the topics might be discussed on the meetup with was more applied rationality focused.
The problem was one of association, not one of meetup content. We could have held the meetup if we wouldn’t link from any LW or SSC branded page and called it ‘rationality meetup’.
The ‘Darwinian Gender Studies’ facebook group seems one place worth mentioning. TheMotte was founded to have a place where discussion could be happen with less collateral damage.
There might still be a risk for any insider to participate in them with their public identity attached. Private discussions behind closed doors would be less risky.
Perhaps /r/TheMotte?! (Backstory.)
Hmm, that might be worth exploring. Thanks