I think that “microaggression” is a poor term, it adds negative connotation and restricted usage to standard, if subconsciously biased, human behaviors. The article uses another one, “implicit bias”, which has exact same meaning but without the baggage.
In my experience, “implicit bias” and “microaggression” aren’t used to refer to the exact same things — although I can see the analogy.
“Implicit bias” refers to a measurable unconscious tendency to favor one group over another, even when one doesn’t have any explicit beliefs justifying that favoritism. For instance, if you ask someone, “Are green weasels scarier, stinkier, or otherwise less pleasant than blue weasels?” and they (honestly) say that they do not believe so … but when you look at their behavior, on average they choose to sit further away from green weasels on the bus, that could be described as implicit bias. They claim that they are not repelled by green weasels, but they measurably act like they are.
We might link implicit bias to Gendler’s concept of alief), or to Kahneman’s concept of a System 1 response.
“Microaggression” describes a social exchange that — without deliberately attacking or insulting a group — reinforces negative stereotypes about that group, or an assumption that the group is lower-status or beneath consideration. A few examples:
Acting surprised that a person you meet does not match a stereotype reinforces the idea that the stereotype is normal or expected.
Telling jokes that depend on having a particular perspective reinforces the idea that this perspective is expected and that people in the conversation who lack it are outsiders.
Complimenting someone on their deviation from a negative stereotype may sound positive to people who are not targeted by that stereotype, but still often comes across as an insult. (“He’s so pretty for a green weasel!” implies that you expect green weasels to not be pretty.)
The thing that “microaggression” and “implicit bias” have in common is that they’re unintentional, and even unrecognized, by the person doing them. A microaggression is a specific act, though, whereas implicit bias is a measured aggregate tendency.
“Implicit bias” refers to a measurable unconscious tendency to favor one group over another, even when one doesn’t have any explicit beliefs justifying that favoritism. For instance, if you ask someone, “Are green weasels scarier, stinkier, or otherwise less pleasant than blue weasels?” and they (honestly) say that they do not believe so … but when you look at their behavior, on average they choose to sit further away from green weasels on the bus, that could be described as implicit bias. They claim that they are not repelled by green weasels, but they measurably act like they are.
The problem with this definition is that it’s very possible for someone’s explicit beliefs to be false and “implicit beliefs” to be true. Thus it is problematic to call this a “bias” without establishing that the underlying beliefs are false.
“Microaggression” strikes me as an epicycles attempting to rescue the theory that race and gender don’t correlate with anything. Original theory: all these differences are due to differences in the way society treats these people, so we bad treating them differently and even implement laws requiring preferential treatment. However, the achievement gaps remain, they can’t be due to innate differences because that would be racist and sexist, hence they must be because those evil witches are cursing them these evil white men are engaging in microaggressions.
The problem with this definition is that it’s very possible for someone’s explicit beliefs to be false and “implicit beliefs” to be true. Thus it is problematic to call this a “bias” without establishing that the underlying beliefs are false.
A different approach: Are my aliefs interfering with my agentiness? For instance, if I’m trying to get a project done with a team of programmers, and my aliefs keep identifying the women on my team as “mothers” instead of as “coders” (or more generally “workers”), that might interfere with my ability to usefully work with them towards my explicit goal.
In other words, even if it is true that those women could very well be or become mothers, in the context of deliberately pursuing a goal involving writing code, that isn’t pertinent. (It’s not as if they’re choosing to flash their motherliness at me!) The implicit association of “woman” with “mother” and not “worker” might be encumbering me from being as agenty as I would like to be.
I’m having difficulty reconciling your comment about microaggressions with how I hear the term used, to the extent that I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing at all. I’m reminded of Davidson on beavers, as cited by Eliezer here.
A better example is: if there are women on the team and my aliefs keep identifying them as worse coders but my beliefs tell me that women are just as good a coding as men.
In this case it very much matters whether the beliefs or aliefs are true.
In this case it very much matters whether the beliefs or aliefs are true.
On the contrary, if you’re in a situation of collaborating with someone, then it’s pretty widely recognized as a bad social habit to be constantly trying to judge them. Even worse if you’re judging them on their group memberships (or other generalities) rather than their actual individual performance in the collaboration!
It’s impractical to build consensual working relationships with people who notice that you’re treating them as inferiors. (Oh hey, are we talking about microaggressions again? Maybe …)
Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project? Have you ever worked with idiots on a coding project? It’s very important to know who you can trust and whose code has to be double checked. Also I have a question I need to know who I can ask to get an answer and who would simply be a waste of time.
Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project?
Yep! I’ve been in the industry for fifteen years, and you’ve almost certainly benefited from stuff I’ve worked on. But you’re acting hostile, so I don’t care to give you any more stalker fodder.
As far as I can tell, some of the worst people I’ve worked with were ① the judgmental, arrogant, abusive assholes; and ② people who had been victims of said assholes, and so had taken a “heads down gotta look busy” attitude out of fear and shame, instead of a transparent, work-together attitude.
Or to put it another way, ① the people whom you can’t ask questions of, because they will call you an idiot and a waste of time; and ② the people who have been called idiots and wastes of time so much that they don’t ask questions when they should.
The technical incompetents are straightforward to filter out. Tests like FizzBuzz weed out the people who claim that they can code but actually cannot. It’s the attitude incompetents, the collaboration incompetents, — the ones who harm other people’s capability rather than amplifying it — that are more worth worrying about.
(Oh, and everyone’s code has to be double-checked.)
Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to. That’s logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn’t belong on the site, not that you disagree with it. If it doesn’t belong on the site, then responding to it and continuing the conversation also doesn’t belong.
That’s logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn’t belong on the site, not that you disagree with it
I don’t think this follows. If a comment contains a glaring logical fallacy, I could consistently both downvote it and point out the flaw in the argument. Not claiming that’s what’s happening here, though.
Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to.
I agree that this is generally good advice, but question your assumption (unless you have inside information?) that Azathoth123 is doing that. He’s getting an awful lot of downvotes on his comments in this discussion too.
[EDITED to add: The reason why that’s evidence against the Azathoth123-mass-downvoting hypothesis is that it increases the credibility of a different explanation for those downvotes, namely that some third party doesn’t want this sort of discussion at all and is downvoting everyone involved.]
Azathoth123, if you’re reading this: Would you care to comment on whether you’ve been dealing out dozens of downvotes to people who have disagreed with you in this discussion? (My guess is that you haven’t, but explicit confirmation would be nice to have.)
Whoever is doing it, if you’re reading this: If you are aiming to stop the discussion or to stop participants on one or the other side, it isn’t working and I don’t think it’s likely to work. If you are aiming to stop discussion of mindkilling topics, again it isn’t working and I think the actual effect is that you are increasing the mindkillingness of the topic by making people feel more under attack. If you are aiming to make people feel harassed and upset in the hope that they will leave LW, or something of the kind, then fuck you; that kind of behaviour is not welcome here and I hope you get kicked off with extreme prejudice.
I have sent a private message to Villiam Bur asking him to check whether Azathoth123 is posting from the same IP as Eugine_Nier.
Azathoth appeared shortly after Eugine was banned, and holds similar political opinions. They have similar posting patterns, and both have been accused of downvote abuse. This is only a hypothesis based on circumstantial evidence, but I think it needs to be investigated.
I sympathize with Azathoth’s willingless to have a rational discussion about this publicly, and have frequently upvoted him. However, this downvote abuse thing is ruining the community and needs to be dealt with.
To add to the circumstantial evidence:
-Nicknames that end in numbers are a minor sign of inauthentic accounts.
-Naming an account after a Cthulhu God would fit in the general neoreactionary pattern.
-Both accounts like to quote Nassim Taleb in the quotes thread.
I feel a bit embarrassed for not noticing it earlier but I think it’s with 90% Eugine.
Also, Azatoth123 is knowledgeable about modern physics at a deeper-than-teacher’s-passwords level (see e.g. the thread where he and I were trying to disabuse Thomas of his misconceptions about special relativity), as was Eugine.
1:1 he is, but I don’t object to him making a clean start as long as he behaves himself this time around. The recent downvote “abuse” doesn’t actually sound that egregious to me.
I also would not object to a clean start. However, I think any systematic downvoting of a user’s old comments, regardless of the scale, is abuse. This is not only likely to drive new people away from the community, it is prima facie evidence that the perpetrator is mindkilled.
Neoreactionaries come to the rationalist blogosphere because we are the only people on the internets who are willing to engage them in debate. This is because we have a community standard that tells us to listen to people as long as they are arguing in good faith and appear to have acceptable epistemic standards. However, when they turn discussions into “wars” and use not only their arguments but also their downvotes as soldiers, they are violating the very community standards that brought them in.
The rationalist blogosphere can either call them on it, or risk turning into an outpost of of their “dark enlightenment”.
Neoreactionaries come to the rationalist blogosphere because [...]
Isn’t it possible—likely, even—that some of them are in the rationalist blogosphere because, as well as being neoreactionaries they are in fact rationalists? Just as some other participants in the rationalist blogosphere are socialists, Buddhists, polyamorists, or members of any other not-completely-bugfuck-crazy group you might care to mention?
Framing the issue in terms of dangerous invaders messing up our territory is tempting, but I don’t like the look of some other things it pattern-matches to, and I’m not sure it isn’t just plain factually wrong. And the moral and practical implications of the behaviour we’re talking about don’t really depend on where the neoreactionaries in and around the LW community came from.
I agree with this. I did not intend to imply that all neoreactionaries are non-rationalists or that they are all mindkilled. I understand that my comment could be interpreted that way, and I apologize for this. My criticism was intended to apply only to the subset of participants who try to shut out other contributors by downvoting their old comments, or by using other dirty discussion tactics that turn arguments into war. These people exist on both ends of the political spectrum.
I am convinced that many neo-reactionaries have made a huge contribution to Less Wrong, and I very much appreciate their presence here. Politically, I am very strongly in favor of enlightenment values, but I also appreciate seeing arguments against my values stated in their strongest possible and purest form. This allows me to create a much better model of my opponents, and gives me a much clearer view of the failure modes of my own political philosophy. Because of these discussions, I have accepted that neo-reactionaries have important things to say about several current political issues (though I reject their overall philosophy)
The fact that I can engage with these arguments in the rationalist blogosphere but not at my academic institution (where similar discussion would be shut down immediately with extreme prejudice, regardless of the quality of the arguments), is very telling both about the current state of academia, and about the importance of forums like Less Wrong
While your explicit claims may be true, I think we should be careful about framing civility problems in terms of ideology, if only because such seems like it could exacerbate the problem.
I’ve also noticed a pretty strong tendency for my posts to be downvoted at about the same time that Azathoth posts a dissenting reply (in previous conversations). The association is strong enough that I have some reflexive negative feelings about dialogue with them- I’m distinctly getting ‘trained’ not to reply to Azathoth’s comments, whether or not it’s Azathoth who is actually doing the downvoting.
EDIT: Normally, I wouldn’t ask who it was that downvoted this comment. But for obvious reasons, a −1 score on this post isn’t a very clear signal. If you downvoted this comment and are not Azathoth, then letting me know who you are would help avoid misunderstandings.
OK, so my probability estimate for Azathoth123 being Eugine redivivus is increasing.
Anyway, for anyone else who is feeling that same sense of being “trained not to reply” (to Azathoth123 or anyone else), I strongly recommend fighting it. Don’t let abusive manipulators win!
(For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a general recommendation to ignore downvotes. Only to ignore them in situations where it’s reasonably clear that they don’t in fact carry much signal and there’s strong reason to suspect that someone is trying to exploit the system.)
If we work with people on a coding project letting their code speak for them is probably a lot more useful then making your assessment based on prior information that has nothing to do with coding.
Agreed, the problem is that when you do that “what the code says” tends to be correlated with all kinds of other stuff that it is politically incorrect to notice.
A better example is: if there are women on the team and my aliefs keep identifying them as worse coders but my beliefs tell me that women are just as good a coding as men.
In principle it is possible that women in general are just as good a coding as men in general but the particular women on your team happen to be worse than the particular men on your team.
I think that “microaggression” is a poor term, it adds negative connotation and restricted usage to standard, if subconsciously biased, human behaviors. The article uses another one, “implicit bias”, which has exact same meaning but without the baggage.
In my experience, “implicit bias” and “microaggression” aren’t used to refer to the exact same things — although I can see the analogy.
“Implicit bias” refers to a measurable unconscious tendency to favor one group over another, even when one doesn’t have any explicit beliefs justifying that favoritism. For instance, if you ask someone, “Are green weasels scarier, stinkier, or otherwise less pleasant than blue weasels?” and they (honestly) say that they do not believe so … but when you look at their behavior, on average they choose to sit further away from green weasels on the bus, that could be described as implicit bias. They claim that they are not repelled by green weasels, but they measurably act like they are.
We might link implicit bias to Gendler’s concept of alief), or to Kahneman’s concept of a System 1 response.
“Microaggression” describes a social exchange that — without deliberately attacking or insulting a group — reinforces negative stereotypes about that group, or an assumption that the group is lower-status or beneath consideration. A few examples:
Acting surprised that a person you meet does not match a stereotype reinforces the idea that the stereotype is normal or expected.
Telling jokes that depend on having a particular perspective reinforces the idea that this perspective is expected and that people in the conversation who lack it are outsiders.
Complimenting someone on their deviation from a negative stereotype may sound positive to people who are not targeted by that stereotype, but still often comes across as an insult. (“He’s so pretty for a green weasel!” implies that you expect green weasels to not be pretty.)
The thing that “microaggression” and “implicit bias” have in common is that they’re unintentional, and even unrecognized, by the person doing them. A microaggression is a specific act, though, whereas implicit bias is a measured aggregate tendency.
The problem with this definition is that it’s very possible for someone’s explicit beliefs to be false and “implicit beliefs” to be true. Thus it is problematic to call this a “bias” without establishing that the underlying beliefs are false.
“Microaggression” strikes me as an epicycles attempting to rescue the theory that race and gender don’t correlate with anything. Original theory: all these differences are due to differences in the way society treats these people, so we bad treating them differently and even implement laws requiring preferential treatment. However, the achievement gaps remain, they can’t be due to innate differences because that would be racist and sexist, hence they must be because
those evil witches are cursing themthese evil white men are engaging in microaggressions.A different approach: Are my aliefs interfering with my agentiness? For instance, if I’m trying to get a project done with a team of programmers, and my aliefs keep identifying the women on my team as “mothers” instead of as “coders” (or more generally “workers”), that might interfere with my ability to usefully work with them towards my explicit goal.
In other words, even if it is true that those women could very well be or become mothers, in the context of deliberately pursuing a goal involving writing code, that isn’t pertinent. (It’s not as if they’re choosing to flash their motherliness at me!) The implicit association of “woman” with “mother” and not “worker” might be encumbering me from being as agenty as I would like to be.
I’m having difficulty reconciling your comment about microaggressions with how I hear the term used, to the extent that I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing at all. I’m reminded of Davidson on beavers, as cited by Eliezer here.
A better example is: if there are women on the team and my aliefs keep identifying them as worse coders but my beliefs tell me that women are just as good a coding as men.
In this case it very much matters whether the beliefs or aliefs are true.
On the contrary, if you’re in a situation of collaborating with someone, then it’s pretty widely recognized as a bad social habit to be constantly trying to judge them. Even worse if you’re judging them on their group memberships (or other generalities) rather than their actual individual performance in the collaboration!
It’s impractical to build consensual working relationships with people who notice that you’re treating them as inferiors. (Oh hey, are we talking about microaggressions again? Maybe …)
Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project? Have you ever worked with idiots on a coding project? It’s very important to know who you can trust and whose code has to be double checked. Also I have a question I need to know who I can ask to get an answer and who would simply be a waste of time.
Yep! I’ve been in the industry for fifteen years, and you’ve almost certainly benefited from stuff I’ve worked on. But you’re acting hostile, so I don’t care to give you any more stalker fodder.
As far as I can tell, some of the worst people I’ve worked with were ① the judgmental, arrogant, abusive assholes; and ② people who had been victims of said assholes, and so had taken a “heads down gotta look busy” attitude out of fear and shame, instead of a transparent, work-together attitude.
Or to put it another way, ① the people whom you can’t ask questions of, because they will call you an idiot and a waste of time; and ② the people who have been called idiots and wastes of time so much that they don’t ask questions when they should.
The technical incompetents are straightforward to filter out. Tests like FizzBuzz weed out the people who claim that they can code but actually cannot. It’s the attitude incompetents, the collaboration incompetents, — the ones who harm other people’s capability rather than amplifying it — that are more worth worrying about.
(Oh, and everyone’s code has to be double-checked.)
Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to. That’s logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn’t belong on the site, not that you disagree with it. If it doesn’t belong on the site, then responding to it and continuing the conversation also doesn’t belong.
I don’t think this follows. If a comment contains a glaring logical fallacy, I could consistently both downvote it and point out the flaw in the argument. Not claiming that’s what’s happening here, though.
I agree that this is generally good advice, but question your assumption (unless you have inside information?) that Azathoth123 is doing that. He’s getting an awful lot of downvotes on his comments in this discussion too.
[EDITED to add: The reason why that’s evidence against the Azathoth123-mass-downvoting hypothesis is that it increases the credibility of a different explanation for those downvotes, namely that some third party doesn’t want this sort of discussion at all and is downvoting everyone involved.]
Azathoth123, if you’re reading this: Would you care to comment on whether you’ve been dealing out dozens of downvotes to people who have disagreed with you in this discussion? (My guess is that you haven’t, but explicit confirmation would be nice to have.)
Whoever is doing it, if you’re reading this: If you are aiming to stop the discussion or to stop participants on one or the other side, it isn’t working and I don’t think it’s likely to work. If you are aiming to stop discussion of mindkilling topics, again it isn’t working and I think the actual effect is that you are increasing the mindkillingness of the topic by making people feel more under attack. If you are aiming to make people feel harassed and upset in the hope that they will leave LW, or something of the kind, then fuck you; that kind of behaviour is not welcome here and I hope you get kicked off with extreme prejudice.
I have sent a private message to Villiam Bur asking him to check whether Azathoth123 is posting from the same IP as Eugine_Nier.
Azathoth appeared shortly after Eugine was banned, and holds similar political opinions. They have similar posting patterns, and both have been accused of downvote abuse. This is only a hypothesis based on circumstantial evidence, but I think it needs to be investigated.
I sympathize with Azathoth’s willingless to have a rational discussion about this publicly, and have frequently upvoted him. However, this downvote abuse thing is ruining the community and needs to be dealt with.
To add to the circumstantial evidence: -Nicknames that end in numbers are a minor sign of inauthentic accounts. -Naming an account after a Cthulhu God would fit in the general neoreactionary pattern. -Both accounts like to quote Nassim Taleb in the quotes thread.
I feel a bit embarrassed for not noticing it earlier but I think it’s with 90% Eugine.
Also, Azatoth123 is knowledgeable about modern physics at a deeper-than-teacher’s-passwords level (see e.g. the thread where he and I were trying to disabuse Thomas of his misconceptions about special relativity), as was Eugine.
10:1 s/he isn’t Eugene Nier.
1:1 he is, but I don’t object to him making a clean start as long as he behaves himself this time around. The recent downvote “abuse” doesn’t actually sound that egregious to me.
I also would not object to a clean start. However, I think any systematic downvoting of a user’s old comments, regardless of the scale, is abuse. This is not only likely to drive new people away from the community, it is prima facie evidence that the perpetrator is mindkilled.
Neoreactionaries come to the rationalist blogosphere because we are the only people on the internets who are willing to engage them in debate. This is because we have a community standard that tells us to listen to people as long as they are arguing in good faith and appear to have acceptable epistemic standards. However, when they turn discussions into “wars” and use not only their arguments but also their downvotes as soldiers, they are violating the very community standards that brought them in.
The rationalist blogosphere can either call them on it, or risk turning into an outpost of of their “dark enlightenment”.
Isn’t it possible—likely, even—that some of them are in the rationalist blogosphere because, as well as being neoreactionaries they are in fact rationalists? Just as some other participants in the rationalist blogosphere are socialists, Buddhists, polyamorists, or members of any other not-completely-bugfuck-crazy group you might care to mention?
Framing the issue in terms of dangerous invaders messing up our territory is tempting, but I don’t like the look of some other things it pattern-matches to, and I’m not sure it isn’t just plain factually wrong. And the moral and practical implications of the behaviour we’re talking about don’t really depend on where the neoreactionaries in and around the LW community came from.
I agree with this. I did not intend to imply that all neoreactionaries are non-rationalists or that they are all mindkilled. I understand that my comment could be interpreted that way, and I apologize for this. My criticism was intended to apply only to the subset of participants who try to shut out other contributors by downvoting their old comments, or by using other dirty discussion tactics that turn arguments into war. These people exist on both ends of the political spectrum.
I am convinced that many neo-reactionaries have made a huge contribution to Less Wrong, and I very much appreciate their presence here. Politically, I am very strongly in favor of enlightenment values, but I also appreciate seeing arguments against my values stated in their strongest possible and purest form. This allows me to create a much better model of my opponents, and gives me a much clearer view of the failure modes of my own political philosophy. Because of these discussions, I have accepted that neo-reactionaries have important things to say about several current political issues (though I reject their overall philosophy)
The fact that I can engage with these arguments in the rationalist blogosphere but not at my academic institution (where similar discussion would be shut down immediately with extreme prejudice, regardless of the quality of the arguments), is very telling both about the current state of academia, and about the importance of forums like Less Wrong
While your explicit claims may be true, I think we should be careful about framing civility problems in terms of ideology, if only because such seems like it could exacerbate the problem.
I’ve also noticed a pretty strong tendency for my posts to be downvoted at about the same time that Azathoth posts a dissenting reply (in previous conversations). The association is strong enough that I have some reflexive negative feelings about dialogue with them- I’m distinctly getting ‘trained’ not to reply to Azathoth’s comments, whether or not it’s Azathoth who is actually doing the downvoting.
EDIT: Normally, I wouldn’t ask who it was that downvoted this comment. But for obvious reasons, a −1 score on this post isn’t a very clear signal. If you downvoted this comment and are not Azathoth, then letting me know who you are would help avoid misunderstandings.
OK, so my probability estimate for Azathoth123 being Eugine redivivus is increasing.
Anyway, for anyone else who is feeling that same sense of being “trained not to reply” (to Azathoth123 or anyone else), I strongly recommend fighting it. Don’t let abusive manipulators win!
(For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a general recommendation to ignore downvotes. Only to ignore them in situations where it’s reasonably clear that they don’t in fact carry much signal and there’s strong reason to suspect that someone is trying to exploit the system.)
It was happening within a handful of minutes. I wouldn’t call it mass-downvoting, just the bad practice of downvote-and-disagree.
If we work with people on a coding project letting their code speak for them is probably a lot more useful then making your assessment based on prior information that has nothing to do with coding.
Agreed, the problem is that when you do that “what the code says” tends to be correlated with all kinds of other stuff that it is politically incorrect to notice.
Everybody’s. Including my own.
In principle it is possible that women in general are just as good a coding as men in general but the particular women on your team happen to be worse than the particular men on your team.