When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.
By the way, this is stupid even from the “we only care about the ‘good’ people (women, black, trans, etc.)” viewpoint, because the consequences sometimes look like this:
2) Medical research done on volunteers (the expendable males) finds a new cure.
3) It appears that the cure works better for men, and may be even harmful for women (because it was never tested on women separately, and no one even dared to suggest it should be). Angry screams again—unfortunately no reflection of what actually happened; instead the usual scapegoat blamed again.
More meta lessons for the LW audience: The world is entangled, you can’t conveniently split it into separate magisteria. If you decide to remove a part of reality from your model, you don’t know how much it will cost you: because to properly estimate the cost of X you need to have X in your model.
“we only care about the ‘good’ people (women, black, trans, etc.)”
As someone from the other side of the fence, I should warn you that your model of how liberals think about social justice seems to be subtly but significantly flawed. My experience is that virtually no liberals talk or (as far as I can tell) think in terms of “good” vs. “bad” people, or more generally in terms of people’s intrinsic moral worth. A more accurate model would probably be something like “we should only be helping the standard ‘oppressed’ people (women, black, trans, etc.)”. The main difference being that real liberals are far more likely to think in terms of combating social forces than in terms of rewarding people based on their merit.
Haidt’s claim is that liberals rely on purity/sacredness relatively less often, but it’s still there. Some of the earlier work on the purity axis put heavy emphasis on sex or sin. Since then, Haidt has acknowledged that the difference between liberals and conservatives might even out if you add food or environmental concerns to purity.
Yeah, environmentalist attitudes towards e.g. GMOs and nuclear power look awfully purity-minded to me. I’m not sure whether I want to count environmentalism/Green thought as part of the mainline Left, though; it’s certainly not central to it, and seems to be its own thing in a lot of ways.
(Cladistically speaking it’s definitely not. But cladistics can get you in trouble when you’re looking at political movements.)
Maybe it’s about rationalization. The same feeling could be expressed by one person as: “this is a heresy” (because “heresy” is their party’s official boo light) and by another person as: “this could harm people” (because “harming people” is their party’s official boo light). But in fact both people just feel the idea is repulsive to them, but can’t quickly explain why.
I think this could be generalized into a model with predictions: If we suppose that it’s easier to get people to nominally than actually abandon one of Haidt’s moral axes (from Wikipedia, to save people some lookups: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), we should expect that people who disclaim one of the axes will find ways to relabel violations of that axis to make it sound like it’s violating a professed axis.
To be specific, if you have a group that officially disclaims the fairness/cheating axis, I expect they’ll be quick to explain how cheating is a form of harm. Or drop the care/harm axis, and we’ll probably hear about how harm is a form of oppression. And so forth.
Yes, but I don’t believe it. As a test, imagine someone offers to give $1 billion to a city if it makes one public water fountain white’s only. I bet most liberals would be horrified at the idea of the city accepting the offer.
I imagine that most people in the US would find such a transaction rather unnerving, regardless of political leanings, so this is not a good test of liberal views. Do you have a better example of a correlation between valuing political correctness and liberal views?
I don’t think it matters of it’s racial. The general principle of having someone try to buy out a government’s espoused moral principles sounds Very Bad. The reasoning is that if the government can be bought once, it can be bought twice, and thus it can be bought in general and is in the control of moneyed donors rather than the voting populace, proof by induction on the naturals—so to speak.
Lobbyists and their money already have massive influence over governments. Plus, whether it’s a good or bad idea, my claim is that most liberals would find the idea disgusting.
Haidt acknowledges that liberals feel disgust at racism and that this falls under purity/sacredness (explicitly listing it in a somewhat older article on Table 1, pg 59). His claim is that liberals rely on the purity/sacredness scale relatively more often, not that they never engage it. Still, in your example, I’d expect the typical reaction to be anger at a fairness violation rather than disgust.
You’re familiar with the idea of anthropomorphization, right? Well, by analogy to that, I would call what you did here “rationalistomorphization,” a word I wish was added to LessWrong jargon.
This reaction needs only scope insensitivity to explain, you don’t need to invoke purity. Though I actually agree with you that liberals have a disgust moral center.
If you are told a billion dollars hasn’t been taxed from people in a city, how many people getting to keep a thousand dollars (say) do you imagine? Probably not a million of them. How many hours not worked, or small things that they buy do you imagine? Probably not any.
But now that I think about it, I’d rather have an extra thousand dollars than be able to drink at a particular drinking fountain.
But I don’t think fairness the morality center is necessarily fairness over differing amounts of harm. It could be differing over social status. You could have an inflated sense of fairness, so that you cared much more than the underlying difference in what people get.
Economics being what it is, this is evidence that your hypothetical segregationist throwback is expecting to get more than a billion dollars of value out of the deal. That doesn’t quite establish that someone’s trying to screw the city, but it does gesture pretty emphatically in that direction; actual political sentiments hardly enter into it, except insofar as they provide exploitable tensions.
(If I were the mayor, I’d take the money and then build the fountain as part of a practical exhibit in a civil rights museum.)
Since “politically incorrect” in this context basically means “most views that liberals disagree with”, it’s hardly surprising that they’re repulsed by views in that category.
Most people, independent of political faction, can’t have civil political disagreements. This effect tends to be exacerbated when they are surrounded by like-minded people and mitigated when they are surrounded by political opponents. Conservatives in elite academic environments are usually in the latter category, so I do think they will tend to be more civil in political disagreements than their liberal counterparts. However, I suspect that this situation would be reversed in, say, a military environment, although I have no experience with the military.
You could look at Fox News, where conservative contributors are generally far more bombastic and partisan than their liberal counterparts. Many liberals allege that Fox News deliberately hires milquetoast liberals in order to make liberalism look bad, but I don’t think we need to posit a top-down agenda to explain the “Fox News liberal” phenomenon. It’s simply the case that people are much less comfortable expressing their political views vigorously when they see themselves as being in enemy territory, especially if they need to make a home in that territory, rather than just briefly visiting it.
Are you claiming that there is a significant proportion of liberals who declare that their opponents have no right to express their opinion? I’m pretty sure that’s false.
Maybe not a significant portion, but it happens more often than you might think. On the other hand, I highly doubt that this kind of disruptive rhetorical behavior is more common on one side of the left-right spectrum than on the other.
My model is that it’s: “we want to help everyone who is suffering” but also: “the only real suffering is the suffering according to our definitions”.
Or more precisely: “the suffering according to our definitions influences millions of people, and anything you said (assuming you are not lying, which is kinda dubious, considering you are not one of us) is merely one specific weird exception, which might be an interesting footnote in an academic debate, but… sorry, limited resources”.
I understand that with given model of reality, this is the right thing to do. But unfortunately, the model seems to suffer horribly from double-counting the evidence for it and treating everything else (including the whole science, if necessary) as an enemy soldier. A galaxy-sized affective death spiral. -- On the other hand, this is my impression mostly from the internet debates, and the internet debates usually show the darker side of humanity, in any direction, because the evaporative cooling is so much easier there.
(Off-topic: Heh, I feel I’m linking Sequences better than a Jehovah’s Witness could quote the Bible. If anyone gets a cultish vibe from this, let me note that I am translating the whole thing these days, and I have just finished the “Politics is the Mindkiller” part, so it’s all fresh in my memory.)
(Off-topic: Heh, I feel I’m linking Sequences better than a Jehovah’s Witness could quote the Bible. If anyone gets a cultish vibe from this, let me note that I am translating the whole thing these days, and I have just finished the “Politics is the Mindkiller” part, so it’s all fresh in my memory.)
Cultish? No, it’s how you signal that you’re a rationalist and your readers are rationalists, and they should therefore actually consider what you’re saying, rather than dismissing you as some kind of mainstream Traditionally Rational idiot with a snide recitation of “Bro, do you even Bayes?”
I don’t think he’s surprised to hear that claim. How would you distinguish the hypotheses? Perhaps you should hold the question in mind for a week as you think as a liberal and listen to liberals.
By the way, here is a recent example of just such a bad consequence for women. Basic summery:
1) Latest extreme sport added to olympics.
2) The playing field and obstacles will be the same for men and women; otherwise, it would be sexist and besides its cheaper to only build one arena. (We will of avoid thinking about why we have separate women’s and men’s competitions.)
3) Women wind up playing on the area designed for men and frequently get seriously injured at much higher rates.
1) How do you reliably measure potential? You could have leagues based on ability (similar to the way major/minor league baseball works today). But notice that no one cares about the minors.
2) You do realize the practical effect of this in most sports would be that all the levels above amateur would be massively male dominated?
3) In more violent sports you’d have to deal with the cultural taboo against male on female violence. (You could eliminate that taboo, but somehow I’d don’t think the feminists would be happy with that outcome.)
4) The feminists are likely to cry bloody sexism over (2) and (3) above.
You can’t reliably measure potential, though there’s been some work on genes and sports.
Weight (and possibly height) classes would be a start. Not the gender issue, but I think there should be an anti-dehydration standard for sports with weight classes.
By the way, this is stupid even from the “we only care about the ‘good’ people (women, black, trans, etc.)” viewpoint, because the consequences sometimes look like this:
1) Someone suggests there could be biological differences between men and women. Angry screams, research abandoned.
2) Medical research done on volunteers (the expendable males) finds a new cure.
3) It appears that the cure works better for men, and may be even harmful for women (because it was never tested on women separately, and no one even dared to suggest it should be). Angry screams again—unfortunately no reflection of what actually happened; instead the usual scapegoat blamed again.
More meta lessons for the LW audience: The world is entangled, you can’t conveniently split it into separate magisteria. If you decide to remove a part of reality from your model, you don’t know how much it will cost you: because to properly estimate the cost of X you need to have X in your model.
A side note to your otherwise excellent comment:
As someone from the other side of the fence, I should warn you that your model of how liberals think about social justice seems to be subtly but significantly flawed. My experience is that virtually no liberals talk or (as far as I can tell) think in terms of “good” vs. “bad” people, or more generally in terms of people’s intrinsic moral worth. A more accurate model would probably be something like “we should only be helping the standard ‘oppressed’ people (women, black, trans, etc.)”. The main difference being that real liberals are far more likely to think in terms of combating social forces than in terms of rewarding people based on their merit.
My model of how liberals think, based on teaching at a left wing college, is that liberals find “politically incorrect” views disgusting.
I would guess this approach is much more female than male.
I do teach at a women’s college.
I thought the research was that liberals didn’t have purity axis of morality (Haidt, is it?).
Haidt’s claim is that liberals rely on purity/sacredness relatively less often, but it’s still there. Some of the earlier work on the purity axis put heavy emphasis on sex or sin. Since then, Haidt has acknowledged that the difference between liberals and conservatives might even out if you add food or environmental concerns to purity.
Yeah, environmentalist attitudes towards e.g. GMOs and nuclear power look awfully purity-minded to me. I’m not sure whether I want to count environmentalism/Green thought as part of the mainline Left, though; it’s certainly not central to it, and seems to be its own thing in a lot of ways.
(Cladistically speaking it’s definitely not. But cladistics can get you in trouble when you’re looking at political movements.)
Maybe it’s about rationalization. The same feeling could be expressed by one person as: “this is a heresy” (because “heresy” is their party’s official boo light) and by another person as: “this could harm people” (because “harming people” is their party’s official boo light). But in fact both people just feel the idea is repulsive to them, but can’t quickly explain why.
I think this could be generalized into a model with predictions: If we suppose that it’s easier to get people to nominally than actually abandon one of Haidt’s moral axes (from Wikipedia, to save people some lookups: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), we should expect that people who disclaim one of the axes will find ways to relabel violations of that axis to make it sound like it’s violating a professed axis.
To be specific, if you have a group that officially disclaims the fairness/cheating axis, I expect they’ll be quick to explain how cheating is a form of harm. Or drop the care/harm axis, and we’ll probably hear about how harm is a form of oppression. And so forth.
Related: Fake Morality
Yes, but I don’t believe it. As a test, imagine someone offers to give $1 billion to a city if it makes one public water fountain white’s only. I bet most liberals would be horrified at the idea of the city accepting the offer.
I imagine that most people in the US would find such a transaction rather unnerving, regardless of political leanings, so this is not a good test of liberal views. Do you have a better example of a correlation between valuing political correctness and liberal views?
Hate speech. The liberal response to what Larry Summers said about women and math seems motivated by disgust.
I don’t think it matters of it’s racial. The general principle of having someone try to buy out a government’s espoused moral principles sounds Very Bad. The reasoning is that if the government can be bought once, it can be bought twice, and thus it can be bought in general and is in the control of moneyed donors rather than the voting populace, proof by induction on the naturals—so to speak.
Lobbyists and their money already have massive influence over governments. Plus, whether it’s a good or bad idea, my claim is that most liberals would find the idea disgusting.
Haidt acknowledges that liberals feel disgust at racism and that this falls under purity/sacredness (explicitly listing it in a somewhat older article on Table 1, pg 59). His claim is that liberals rely on the purity/sacredness scale relatively more often, not that they never engage it. Still, in your example, I’d expect the typical reaction to be anger at a fairness violation rather than disgust.
But since the harm is trivial, no one is being treated unfairly absent disgust considerations.
You’re familiar with the idea of anthropomorphization, right? Well, by analogy to that, I would call what you did here “rationalistomorphization,” a word I wish was added to LessWrong jargon.
This reaction needs only scope insensitivity to explain, you don’t need to invoke purity. Though I actually agree with you that liberals have a disgust moral center.
How so?
If you are told a billion dollars hasn’t been taxed from people in a city, how many people getting to keep a thousand dollars (say) do you imagine? Probably not a million of them. How many hours not worked, or small things that they buy do you imagine? Probably not any.
But now that I think about it, I’d rather have an extra thousand dollars than be able to drink at a particular drinking fountain.
But I don’t think fairness the morality center is necessarily fairness over differing amounts of harm. It could be differing over social status. You could have an inflated sense of fairness, so that you cared much more than the underlying difference in what people get.
Economics being what it is, this is evidence that your hypothetical segregationist throwback is expecting to get more than a billion dollars of value out of the deal. That doesn’t quite establish that someone’s trying to screw the city, but it does gesture pretty emphatically in that direction; actual political sentiments hardly enter into it, except insofar as they provide exploitable tensions.
(If I were the mayor, I’d take the money and then build the fountain as part of a practical exhibit in a civil rights museum.)
Since “politically incorrect” in this context basically means “most views that liberals disagree with”, it’s hardly surprising that they’re repulsed by views in that category.
That still doesn’t explain why they can’t disagree with a view in a civil manner.
Most people, independent of political faction, can’t have civil political disagreements. This effect tends to be exacerbated when they are surrounded by like-minded people and mitigated when they are surrounded by political opponents. Conservatives in elite academic environments are usually in the latter category, so I do think they will tend to be more civil in political disagreements than their liberal counterparts. However, I suspect that this situation would be reversed in, say, a military environment, although I have no experience with the military.
You could look at Fox News, where conservative contributors are generally far more bombastic and partisan than their liberal counterparts. Many liberals allege that Fox News deliberately hires milquetoast liberals in order to make liberalism look bad, but I don’t think we need to posit a top-down agenda to explain the “Fox News liberal” phenomenon. It’s simply the case that people are much less comfortable expressing their political views vigorously when they see themselves as being in enemy territory, especially if they need to make a home in that territory, rather than just briefly visiting it.
There’s a difference between being bombastic and declaring that you’re opponents shouldn’t have the right to express their opinion.
Are you claiming that there is a significant proportion of liberals who declare that their opponents have no right to express their opinion? I’m pretty sure that’s false.
Maybe not a significant portion, but it happens more often than you might think. On the other hand, I highly doubt that this kind of disruptive rhetorical behavior is more common on one side of the left-right spectrum than on the other.
My model is that it’s: “we want to help everyone who is suffering” but also: “the only real suffering is the suffering according to our definitions”.
Or more precisely: “the suffering according to our definitions influences millions of people, and anything you said (assuming you are not lying, which is kinda dubious, considering you are not one of us) is merely one specific weird exception, which might be an interesting footnote in an academic debate, but… sorry, limited resources”.
I understand that with given model of reality, this is the right thing to do. But unfortunately, the model seems to suffer horribly from double-counting the evidence for it and treating everything else (including the whole science, if necessary) as an enemy soldier. A galaxy-sized affective death spiral. -- On the other hand, this is my impression mostly from the internet debates, and the internet debates usually show the darker side of humanity, in any direction, because the evaporative cooling is so much easier there.
(Off-topic: Heh, I feel I’m linking Sequences better than a Jehovah’s Witness could quote the Bible. If anyone gets a cultish vibe from this, let me note that I am translating the whole thing these days, and I have just finished the “Politics is the Mindkiller” part, so it’s all fresh in my memory.)
Okay, your model is better than I thought. Sorry for nitpicking your hyperbole :-)
It’s good to sometimes say the obvious things explicitly. (Also, some other person could have said the same thing non-hyperbolically.)
Cultish? No, it’s how you signal that you’re a rationalist and your readers are rationalists, and they should therefore actually consider what you’re saying, rather than dismissing you as some kind of mainstream Traditionally Rational idiot with a snide recitation of “Bro, do you even Bayes?”
I don’t think he’s surprised to hear that claim. How would you distinguish the hypotheses? Perhaps you should hold the question in mind for a week as you think as a liberal and listen to liberals.
By the way, here is a recent example of just such a bad consequence for women. Basic summery:
1) Latest extreme sport added to olympics.
2) The playing field and obstacles will be the same for men and women; otherwise, it would be sexist and besides its cheaper to only build one arena. (We will of avoid thinking about why we have separate women’s and men’s competitions.)
3) Women wind up playing on the area designed for men and frequently get seriously injured at much higher rates.
Thoughts about having leagues/categories based on measured potential rather than male/female?
1) How do you reliably measure potential? You could have leagues based on ability (similar to the way major/minor league baseball works today). But notice that no one cares about the minors.
2) You do realize the practical effect of this in most sports would be that all the levels above amateur would be massively male dominated?
3) In more violent sports you’d have to deal with the cultural taboo against male on female violence. (You could eliminate that taboo, but somehow I’d don’t think the feminists would be happy with that outcome.)
4) The feminists are likely to cry bloody sexism over (2) and (3) above.
You can’t reliably measure potential, though there’s been some work on genes and sports.
Weight (and possibly height) classes would be a start. Not the gender issue, but I think there should be an anti-dehydration standard for sports with weight classes.