Ice-Bound is a novel about an AI recreation of a struggling writer, brought to life to finish his now-legendary novel. The player looks at the printed compendium via their iPad to unlock the hidden reality between the lines; at the same time the pages that the player shows to AI writer that ‘lives’ in the iPad determine the story that he will write.
It is running a Kickstarter campaign that ends today; all the funds will go towards a print run of the print book. The list of backers includes all the usual suspects of the tiny world of interactive fiction, which is kinda sad at the same time, as I believe this kind of project deserves wider publicity.
Just to add to this recommendation, Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna is one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve read/played. It’s practically novel-length, well-written, contains some interesting puzzles to solve (or skip, if that’s not your jam), and has some pretty rich world-building. And it’s free.
Also, for those interested in interactive fiction, Andrew Plotkin’s long-delayed commercial IF Hadean Lands is finally available. I haven’t yet finished it, so I can’t offer a fully informed recommendation, but I’m enjoying it so far. It’s very puzzle-dense, and a lot of the puzzles center around its extremely elaborate alchemy system. Figuring out how alchemy works in the game has a sort of HPMOR-esque “apply rationalist methods to a magical system” feel. Avoid if you don’t like having to sort through a deluge of information in order to solve puzzles and make progress.
And, finally, if you are unfamiliar with Plotkin’s work, I highly highly recommend Spider and Web, which is free to play. It also has the theme of figuring out how things work in an almost-but-not-quite-familiar setting (technological rather than magical, this time around). It has a very clever narrative hook, where you’re a captured spy being inerrogated and the game is your (often unreliable) account of what happened. And it has probably the best narrative-integrated puzzle in any game I’ve played (you’ll know it when you see it—or solve it, rather).
You’ll need to install a Z-code interpreter like Gargoyle to play any of these.
I also rate it as pretty sucky, but I don’t see that it’s a ripoff of the SMBC comic or even trying to do the same thing.
The SMBC comic is about a utility monster. The EC comic is about the term “utility monster”.
The SMBC comic asks the question “what would the world look like, if we maximized utility and there were a utility monster” (and answers it in a silly fashion). The EC comic asks the question “wouldn’t it be funny to draw a comic with a utility monster that—ahahahaha—actually looked like a monster?” (and, perhaps unfortunately, answers yes).
The SMBC comic would be exactly as interesting, and exactly as funny, if the particular term “utility monster” had never existed. The EC comic would be 100% pointless if that particular term had never existed.
Oh yeah, that too. (I’m in the UK where that term isn’t so commonly used; it didn’t occur to me when I saw the comic.) So there’s a rather weak pun on “utility” and a rather weak pun on “monster”.
Of course, Elon Musk’s ability to make money from scratch doesn’t seem problematic when progressives want to shake him down for some of it at gunpoint.
Which shows non sequitur thinking and an ignorance of history. A lot of problems look really hard, and a lot of people fail at them, as they explore the solution spaces to try to find ways to solve them. When someone stumbles on a feasible solution, from a kind of hindsight bias we tend to forget about the failures and take the success for granted.
I find this whole Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction/Neopatriarchy development fascinating because it shows the failure of the progressive project to control the human mind. In the U.S., at least, progressives have a lot of control in centrally planning the culture towards Enlightenment notions of democracy, feminism, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, etc. Yet thanks to the internet, men who previously wouldn’t have had the means to communicate with each other have organized in a Hayekian fashion to discover that they have had similar damaging experiences with, for example, women in a feminist regime, and they have come to similar politically incorrect conclusions about women’s nature. And this has happened despite the policies and preferences of the people who hold the high ground in education, academia, law, government and the entertainment industry.
I can see why the emergence of secular sexism drives progressive nuts, because they wrongly believed that sexism depended on certain kinds of god beliefs that have fallen into decline, as this AlterNet article explores. Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that? We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?
We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?
Of course you can. Theology is very easily observable. One can ask what the theology should be blamed on, but that goes back to the dawn of history and is but speculation and fog.
So here’s some speculation for why patriarchal traditions are so prevalent, which I suppose has been at the back of my mind for as long as I’ve been aware of such issues, although I’ve never seen it stated so starkly as I am about to.
Men are physically stronger than women.
Without modern science, paternity cannot be observed, only enforced (see (1)).
It seems to me that these two facts are a sufficient explanation for the entire phenomenon of both religious and secular suppression of women. Men have been able to, men have wanted to, men have done. Might makes might. “If you want a picture of the past, imagine a man’s boot stamping on a woman’s face – for ever.”
Explanations of how all women really want to be controlled by a strong man are window dressing, excreted by the virtual outcome pumps in the heads of those who find current mores uncongenial to continuing in that way, and who nowadays must use ideas as ammunition instead of stones.
My reading of the situation is not that women prefer abusive men or prefer to be controlled. My reading is that women (warning: crude generalizations incoming) like to be/feel protected and prefer strong men. Given this, some women consider being abusive to be evidence of strength, and some women are willing to trade some control or some abuse for getting a strong man. This may or may not be a good trade, depending on the circumstances.
For what (little) I have read about abusive relationship, my pet theory is that abuses are like superstimulus for things like assertiveness, confidence, strength, etc.
Some women get imprinted with this kind of behaviour in such a way they are no more able to find attractive kinder men.
Some women are. I don’t have the feeling for what proportion of women are willing to have relationships with obviously abusive men.
The usual account of abusive relationships is that the abusive escalates fairly slowly—I don’t know whether the initially abusive relationship is too embarrassing to talk about.
Without modern science, paternity cannot be observed, only enforced (see (1)).
You left out a few important ones:
3. A man can potentially impregnate many women.
4. Having a man to help raise a woman’s children greatly increases their prospects (this is the reason your (2) matters).
5. Unlike his sperm, a man’s attention is a rather limited resource.
So, women would prefer to have children by an alpha male. They would also prefer to find a beta male to help raise them (they would like even more to have the alpha male raise them but see (5)). Men don’t what to raise children that aren’t theirs.
Having a man to help raise a woman’s children greatly increases their prospects
This is no longer true in countries where women can earn their own living.
So, women would prefer [...]
Don’t generalize. Women are individuals, not a monolithic bloc.
Men don’t what to raise children that aren’t theirs.
Again, don’t generalize. I’d much rather adopt an orphan than increase the amount of living people, all the while knowing my genes would much rather be copied. I don’t fear my moral inclinations will be outbred; I can just teach them to my adopted children. Every man (and woman, and genderless person, and all variations thereupon) has hir own motivations and interests. Ignoring individual differences is one of the problems with this particular brand of sexism.
Why betas should have longer attention span than alphas?
...seriously?
The point Azathoth is making is that there is only so many hours in a day. An alpha male may sleep with many women, but he can only give his attention to one or a few. Beta males, who are lucky to have one woman, are free to concentrate all their attention on her and her children. Therefore, females who fail to attract the alpha male for anything but a quickie have a preference for fooling beta males into raising the resulting alpha male’s children. Beta males, obviously, do not share this preference.
Beta males, who are lucky to have one woman, are free to concentrate all their attention on her and her children.
But this is not a successful reproduction strategy. If your genes dictates that you devote all your attention to a female that already has one children that is not yours, then your genes will be marginalized very quickly. Thus, only short attention span children are raised.
This request is likely to be ineffectual without something more concrete. The OP makes several rambling points, it’s not clear which you disagree with.
I agree that the tone sucks. However, some of the points are valid. For example, the large chunk of opposition to (online) feminism is now from the mens rights crowd, not from traditional-gender-roles crowd. And this pattern should be expected to continue in the future.
For example, the main opposition to assisted suicide in the US is currently religion-motivated. However, in Canada and elsewhere where religion is only a minor player, the main opposition is from the secular disability rights movements. The advocates of the right to die with dignity will find themselves opposing similarly “progressive”, kind and compassionate people, once the issue is no longer about faith.
You can probably name another issue or two where overcoming one obstacle only leaves you bashing against a different, unexpected one, without having made much progress.
I don’t particularly care about whether the points are valid. This kind of discussion isn’t what LessWrong is for, especially when it’s being posted with this sort of tone.
Yes, ha ha. This is a serious matter, though. I believe that it really truly doesn’t matter whether someone’s political points are good or not. LessWrong should not allow itself to be a venue for this sort of behavior, especially when it’s accompanied by this sort of tone.
In order for the LessWrong community to flourish, I think it is critical that it be divorced from bickering over political matters. So when it comes to posts like this one, I really truly don’t care whether their arguments are valid or not—either way, they shouldn’t be on LessWrong
LessWrong should not allow itself to be a venue for this sort of behavior
For discussion of political matters? A bit late for that, I think. This train has left the station.
In order for the LessWrong community to flourish, I think it is critical that it be divorced from bickering over political matters.
I disagree. “Bickering”, of course, is a word with negative connotations, but I see no reason to taboo political discussions here. Politics of all sorts are important in real life and having a giant blind spot doesn’t look too useful for that winning thing that rationality is supposed to be about :-/
So far on LW people have shown their ability to have civilized discussions even while disagreeing about politics. That’s a good thing.
For discussion of political matters? A bit late for that, I think. This train has left the station.
Has it? Insofar as it has, that’s been thanks to our own failure to tend to basic principles. I think that in order to better reach as many people as possible, it’s critical that LW avoid politics and the potential biases that can result.
I do agree that having civilized discussions even while disagreeing about politics is important. But there are other venues for that, like Slate Star Codex, and if we indeed need more of this I think it’s better to move it off-site.
Re-read that post carefully :-) It doesn’t say not to discuss politics, it says don’t be an ass about it.
in order to better reach as many people as possible
I am unaware that this is a goal of LW. If, by any chance, it is, LW is spectacularly unsuccessful at it :-D
I think it’s better to move it off-site
Well, we disagree about that. In a fairly civilized fashion, so far :-)
P.S. And most discussion here is actually about political philosophy, not politics themselves. Notice how today’s US elections which flipped the Senate got zero posts on LW.
Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.
The purpose of LessWrong is to discuss and learn rationality, so I think politics are almost never appropriate here. But even if we think that civilized discussion of political matters is appropriate, the post I was critiquing was not, IMO, up to our standards of civility and polite discussion.
the post I was critiquing was not, IMO, up to our standards of civility and polite discussion.
I don’t think it was out of line. May I suggest instead that you reject it because of its ideological content which you find unacceptable? Fighting against the political mindkill you fall prey precisely to what you object to.
shminux is right here, this is not a helpful attitude on your part. While it’s important to avoid encouraging political debates on LessWrong, exercising virtues such as moderation and tolerance when such issues do come up is even more important.
While it’s important to avoid encouraging political debates on LessWrong, exercising virtues such as moderation and tolerance when such issues do come up is even more important.
I agree. That’s why I looked at advancedatheist’s comment history before replying. If this were the only such comment, I would not have called it out—but this user has a history of posting similar comments.
Now, advancedatheist has also posted comments that advocate neoreactionary positions in ways that I consider totally appropriate for LessWrong—this one, for example. But IMO there’s a clear difference in tone and tenor between that and this.
The linked article is so misleading that I wouldn’t try to derive any true statements about reality from it. It fails to mention any legitimate points of their opponents, and then concludes they don’t have any. Five minutes on google would probably give better results.
(I strongly bite my tongue here to avoid going into specific details, but I spent the last month observing GamerGate and it is fascinating to watch how good job can media do to prevent some information from being ever mentioned, and how all information about this topic ultimately comes from the same two or three people.)
One thing, though. The article is pushing a narrative “all our opponents are actually the same” while in fact the only thing conecting them is, well, being opponents of one specific group in one specific topic. For example, there are many feminists in the GamerGate movement (no, Christina Hoff Sommers is not the only example), and also there are many people believing that feminism and men’s rights are not contradictory. So the whole paradigm of “dark forces are rising” may be just a convenient excuse to explain away some specific failures or a specific group.
Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction is an ideology by a very small amount of bloggers who don’t matter in the overall discourse. It’s in no way the same thing as the MRA-movement.
I can see why the emergence of secular sexism drives progressive nuts, because they wrongly believed that sexism depended on certain kinds of god beliefs that have fallen into decline, as this AlterNet article explores. Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that?
Starting with a straw man and then asking ” Why would anyone have ever thought that” is pretty bad form. National Socialism in Germany was largely a secular movement that also was sexist. Assuming that in general progressive thought ignores that history is something that says a lot more about the writer than about progressive ideas.
We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along.
LOL: “had” to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?
Why not? I mean, I don’t say that we should or shouldn’t put women in a bad light, nor that we should or shouldn’t blame theology for that. But why we can’t blame theology? It’s not like memes evolve to attain truthiness, or that humans are automatic maximizers / strategizers. Pretty any memeplex I know of has some form of “push away / ostracize my enemies”. Understood, any meme that contains “kill all women” would have a pretty short lifespan. But one containing “enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle” could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not.
Isn’t the whole Neoreactionary movement born under the fallacy that equates survivability with adherence to truth? I find this to be a somewhat inclusive description.
Despite this, I still find the linked article to be appalingly bad at presenting the issue with some form of objectivity. They are not even trying. But I don’t know the site and I’m possibly mistaken assuming that it has as mission disseminating informations of some quality.
Deleterious things get locked into fixation in genomes and biological systems all the time. I see no reason that deleterious traits cannot get fixed into cultures.
Oh, they surely can. But that gives those cultures a disadvantage and maintaining this disadvantage “indefinitely” seems to be a stretch, especially given how cultures are malleable and tend to change anyway.
It’s not that it offers no advantage, is that it offers no immediate disadvantage.
A discriminating culture that happens to have more material advantage at the start could just wipe other more egalitarian cultures without much concerns.
It’s only very recently that physical strength has lost its importance as a driving force in cultures clashes.
It is possible that in a future where intellect matters much more, but life is still cheap, a more egalitarian society will employ women more efficiently and thus prevail against discriminating ones. But it seems that the more material wealth we have, the more relaxed we are about the whole killing other people stuff.
Lack of real-life societies which enslaved all their women should be a big hint.
Think about it for a bit. Half the population is slaves. Somebody has to watch them, guard them, suppress their attempts at rebellion, etc. Your hypothetical society will have to spend a LOT of resources on just keeping things under control while having significantly lower economic productivity. And in the case of war they can’t field a large army because a lot of men are prison wardens and can’t leave women slaves unattended.
The idea is just very obviously bad and unworkable.
I think this idea of slavery does not match with what historically has been the reality of enslavement. It’s not that you need one slavemaster for every slave, or that slaves are kept perpetually in prison.
To have slaves you ‘just’ need less education, the prevalent idea that they need a master, hard labor and some form of punishment for transgressing. I think this set better describes what has been the reality of (say) women in ancient China or Middle-East, black people under the colonial empires, etc.
But let’s just taboo “slave”, the main issue is another: a meme that asserts “women are inferior beings and they should be treated as such” does not pose an immediate threat to the surivival of a tribe, and for this reason can be latched into a culture for a very long period of time, in the millennia range. To say that memetic evolution selects for truth is just silly.
I’m not sure if you disagree with my last paragraph and precisely on what.
I’m not clear where you place the controversy. Do you think that the striking difference is between the degree of bad treatment (enslaving vs treating as inferior) or the survivability of the meme (survive indefinitely vs not an immediate threat)? In the second case, that’s not my motte, because I clearly state that I think “not an immediate threat” yelds “indefinite survivability”. In the first case, I can just notice that you think there’s a sharp divide where I see just a continuum between the cost of the two memes. But that’s not a problem, I’ll be happy to stay in the bailey and taboo “slavery”, as the article you link suggested, to see if there’s a real disagreement here.
LOL: “had” to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
What definition of “sexism” are you using here? The word “had” there serves an important point, contrast this with the fact that people don’t have to live with other ethnic groups.
It’s not like memes evolve to attain truthiness,
Yes, they do. If this wasn’t the case we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
But one containing “enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle” could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not.
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can’t survive for long simply because they aren’t immediately destructive.
The word “had” there serves an important point, contrast this with the fact that people don’t have to live with other ethnic groups.
Yes, but it could also imply that women are difficult to endure, and men would be better off without them. But of course this meaning was unintended, thus the humor.
Yes, they do. If this wasn’t the case we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
But where does the selective pressure comes from? Why this pressure has not made the atomistic idea, or the spherical Earth, formulated almost three thousands of year ago, immediately popular? Why there are people that still believe in magic? Why we still believe in both relativity and quantum mechanics, despite these ideas being incompatible and more than a century old?
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can’t survive for long simply because they aren’t immediately destructive.
Yes, avoiding to be immediately destructive is not sufficient to guarantee a meme survivability, but cultures can lock all kind of memes if there’s no immediate selective pressure against them. For example, a society that has to battle on phyisical grounds, with physical strength, gains no immediate disadvantage over a more egalitarian society if it enslaves women. A false meme can even gain a society some advantage, such as the case of an ethnic group that enslaves another ethnic group and makes them work for hard labor. Past history was about guns, germs and steel, not about truth. Those are what has been selected. The rest of the memes are purely random junk.
We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along.
Rather then mocking his phrasing maybe you should try actually paying attention to his point.
I was doing both. And nobody has yet pointed to a valid reason why, just by the mere presence, truth should ooze out of things directly into our minds.
The process of intentionally acquiring truth is costly and fragile: you need to experiment, be willing to discard ideas, formulate wildly new theories. If the truth is not immediately strategic, i.e. it offers no immediate and perceptible disadvantage, it has no particular selective pressure against in a clash between cultures or different memetic spaces. The truth can even hinders the success of a tribe, acting through our biased brains.
A ship disappearing behind the horizon, fire, women are all observable phoenomena, and yet we had (have) flat earth, flogiston and discrimination.
“If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?”
This starts from a false assumption (“the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition”) and implies a false dichotomy (that men either dominate society because of religious beliefs, or because of some reason that progressives would prefer not to blame), and someone who posts on a website dedicated to rationality should see that. I also don’t agree with the claim that history paints women in a bad light compared to men. Until recently we’ve seen an ugly domination of both men and women by men, and we still that in much of the world.
I see other commenters making the assumptions that historical authoritarianism by men signifies that this trait must have at some point either been advantageous to the species, or advantageous to women who chose to mate with “dominant” men and/or the children they bore. This assumption underlies a lot of anti-feminist philosophy online. Have you considered the possibility that there have been men who have passed along their genes by intimidating others (including other men)? Considering our species’ history of violence, is it any wonder that tyrannical and Machiavellian males have had an evolutionary advantage? I have noticed that, especially in large societies, living under said men appears to be unpleasant for the masses who don’t reign supreme.
Have you considered the possibility that there have been men who have passed along their genes by intimidating others (including other men)? Considering our species’ history of violence, is it any wonder that tyrannical and Machiavellian males have had an evolutionary advantage?
Is the same true for violent and Machiavellian women? If so why doesn’t the rest of your logic apply, if not why not?
It only proves that religion is useful, but not indispensable, if you can equally use any excuse to mistreat women, let’s say, for example, a heavily motivated interpretation of evolutive psychology.
Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that? We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?
Well, nearly all of progressivism can be summarized as an attempt to ignore this kind of logic and see what happens.
Progressives hold that stereotypes promote arbitrary, random and generally false beliefs about groups of people. But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations? And why don’t people ever get their stereotypes mixed up?
For example, if some said that he didn’t mind having registered sex offenders as neighbors because their presence wouldn’t hurt property values and his community’s reputation, you wouldn’t praise this guy for his lack of stereotypical thinking. Instead you would question his judgment.
Ironically progressives don’t have a problem at all with promoting stereotypes which put rich people and businessmen in a bad light. The popularity of Ayn Rand’s alternative humanism pisses them off because she got some market share in reversing these stereotypes, and again in defiance of progressives’ central planning to reshape the human mind like clay,.
But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations?
Not defending the progressives in general here, but there are two very simple explanations for your question.
1) Some stereotypes don’t remain stable across generations.
For example, I heard that in the past, pink was considered a “boy color” and blue was considered a “girl color”; or that it was believed that black people would be bad at sport. So, some stereotypes change and some don’t; and we would need a meta review to find out whether there is something special about those unchanging stereotypes, or whether it just means that if you flip a coin two or three times, sometimes you will get the same result repeatedly.
2) If a stereotype already exists, it is more easy to keep believing in the existing one (confirmation bias) than to invent a new one.
(Disclaimer: None of this is meant as a general proof that all stereotypes are incorrect. It’s only an explanation of how a stereotype that happens to be wrong could remain stable across generations.)
But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations?
Rational expectations equalibria are a thing. To take a somewhat exagerated example, if everyone thinks that girls suck at math, so no one teaches girls to do math, then no one will ever find out whether or not girls actually suck at math.
“Throwing like a girl” is a prime example of that sort of thing. Throwing like a girl turns out to be throwing like someone who’s inexperienced with throwing.
If a boy throws like a girl, he’s taught and/or shamed out of it as quickly as possible. If a girl throws like a girl, well, what did you expect?
I’ve phrased this in the present tense, but the culture’s improved on the subject.
Strength is determined by biology and behavior; the stereotype reflects both biological reality and cultural expectations. Note that boys are/were expected to be stronger than girls even before puberty actually creates a meaningful biological gap...
I don’t think most progressives assume stereotypes are arbitrary or random. The standard progressive view seems to be that the stereotypes were based on the fundamental attribution error: attributing negative traits that a group has to their innate nature rather than to negative influences.
Example: Members of group A enter region dominated by group B. The educational system in region B focuses on entirely different languages and historical periods than the educational system in region A. Group B considers intelligence to be demonstrated by a mastery of language and history. Group B then assumes that members of Group A are inherently unintelligent, instead of assuming that there’s a good reason why otherwise competent members of Group A are completely inept at Group B language and history.
Group C denies group D access to certain types of training for reasons that are, at the time, valid. The reasons become invalid. Group D asks for access to those types of training. Group C points out that Group D currently has no demonstrated skill at those types of tasks. Group D is being stereotyped as inherently bad at something, when in fact they are merely untrained.
Why don’t progressives put the same effort into dismantling insulting stereotypes of their political opponents (certain types of rich people) in the same way that we do for other groups? Presumably, because rich people can afford to hire PR agents, and are not suffering harm from stereotypes*, and because people generally do not make their political opponents look better.
*I haven’t seen evidence for rich people being harmed by stereotype threat, but if some study shows they are, please link me to one.
The standard progressive view seems to be that the stereotypes were based on the fundamental attribution error: attributing negative traits that a group has to their innate nature rather than to negative influences.
Not sure what is the “standard” progressive view, but the one I see a lot says that stereotypes are tools of oppression and domination.
I’m sorry if this is a rude request, but I’m very new to the LW commenting process, so if anyone knows why my comments here were downvoted, I’d really appreciate it if that person would tell me, so I can improve my future participation on this site.
At the moment, all your comments seem to be net-upvoted, so there seems no evidence of a systematic objection to your participation. As I’ve observed elsewhere as well, comments that can be taken as supportive of progressive positions have lately garnered a few downvotes early on, which tend to get reversed by subsequent upvotes over the next few days. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I suppose there isn’t really a standard progressive view, but I attend Young Democrats meetings, my school voted with something like a ⅔ majority for Obama in the last mock election, and I read newspapers and magazines that target a progressive audience, so I encounter a lot of progressive viewpoints.
I thought that the “tools of oppression and domination” was a reference to how stereotypes are used, not how they are formed. I don’t really picture a bunch of people in positions of power deciding that the best method to oppress people was to assume insulting things about them, instead of, say, passing harmful legislation, so I assumed that other progressives would agree with me on that point.
Also, I wanted to discuss stereotype origins without using phrasing that made the originators of those stereotypes look immoral, because I thought that doing so would distract for advancedatheist from the point I was trying to make, so I shied away from that explanation.
I thought that the “tools of oppression and domination” was a reference to how stereotypes are used, not how they are formed.
If you are into that kind of thing, you can view stereotypes as soldiers in memetic warfare. If you want to win, you want to shape your soldiers and not just pick whichever ones happen to come along.
The standard progressive view seems to be that the stereotypes were based on the fundamental attribution error: attributing negative traits that a group has to their innate nature rather than to negative influences.
The problem is that progressives consider it evil to attribute negative traits to innate nature and will refuse to update in that direction even if changing influences doesn’t improve the trait.
Thus if a negative trait happens to actually have an innate cause, progressives end up going on witch hunts trying to find the witch oppressor whose evil spells micro-aggressions are causing the negative influences.
Other Media Thread
Ongoing webcomic Strong Female Protagonist has impressed me so far. I recommend reading all of what has currently been drawn of it.
Been reading it for months. Seconded.
Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration is an upcoming indie game combining an iPad app and an augmented reality-enabled print book by Aaron A. Reed and Jason Garbe.
Ice-Bound is a novel about an AI recreation of a struggling writer, brought to life to finish his now-legendary novel. The player looks at the printed compendium via their iPad to unlock the hidden reality between the lines; at the same time the pages that the player shows to AI writer that ‘lives’ in the iPad determine the story that he will write.
It is running a Kickstarter campaign that ends today; all the funds will go towards a print run of the print book. The list of backers includes all the usual suspects of the tiny world of interactive fiction, which is kinda sad at the same time, as I believe this kind of project deserves wider publicity.
Help spread the word by upvoting: r/kickstarter, r/indiegames, and especially r/writing (look for post on ‘Upgrading prose’)
Just to add to this recommendation, Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna is one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve read/played. It’s practically novel-length, well-written, contains some interesting puzzles to solve (or skip, if that’s not your jam), and has some pretty rich world-building. And it’s free.
Also, for those interested in interactive fiction, Andrew Plotkin’s long-delayed commercial IF Hadean Lands is finally available. I haven’t yet finished it, so I can’t offer a fully informed recommendation, but I’m enjoying it so far. It’s very puzzle-dense, and a lot of the puzzles center around its extremely elaborate alchemy system. Figuring out how alchemy works in the game has a sort of HPMOR-esque “apply rationalist methods to a magical system” feel. Avoid if you don’t like having to sort through a deluge of information in order to solve puzzles and make progress.
And, finally, if you are unfamiliar with Plotkin’s work, I highly highly recommend Spider and Web, which is free to play. It also has the theme of figuring out how things work in an almost-but-not-quite-familiar setting (technological rather than magical, this time around). It has a very clever narrative hook, where you’re a captured spy being inerrogated and the game is your (often unreliable) account of what happened. And it has probably the best narrative-integrated puzzle in any game I’ve played (you’ll know it when you see it—or solve it, rather).
You’ll need to install a Z-code interpreter like Gargoyle to play any of these.
https://github.com/Soares/Randometer.hs
Peter Singer investigates a basement flood (comic)
I rate this as “sucky ripoff of the original utility monster comic” http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2569
I also rate it as pretty sucky, but I don’t see that it’s a ripoff of the SMBC comic or even trying to do the same thing.
The SMBC comic is about a utility monster. The EC comic is about the term “utility monster”.
The SMBC comic asks the question “what would the world look like, if we maximized utility and there were a utility monster” (and answers it in a silly fashion). The EC comic asks the question “wouldn’t it be funny to draw a comic with a utility monster that—ahahahaha—actually looked like a monster?” (and, perhaps unfortunately, answers yes).
The SMBC comic would be exactly as interesting, and exactly as funny, if the particular term “utility monster” had never existed. The EC comic would be 100% pointless if that particular term had never existed.
[EDITED to fix a trivial but boneheaded mistake.]
I guess the joke is that “utilities” can refer to piped water.
Oh yeah, that too. (I’m in the UK where that term isn’t so commonly used; it didn’t occur to me when I saw the comic.) So there’s a rather weak pun on “utility” and a rather weak pun on “monster”.
This comic is basically a pun. I don’t see why would you compare it to SMBC’s one.
Bloggers go here?
Over at Dale Carrico’s mostly neglected blog, he posts:
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2014/11/among-sooper-brains.html
Of course, Elon Musk’s ability to make money from scratch doesn’t seem problematic when progressives want to shake him down for some of it at gunpoint.
And also:
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2014/11/space-is-too-hard-for-money-grubbers.html
Which shows non sequitur thinking and an ignorance of history. A lot of problems look really hard, and a lot of people fail at them, as they explore the solution spaces to try to find ways to solve them. When someone stumbles on a feasible solution, from a kind of hindsight bias we tend to forget about the failures and take the success for granted.
Honestly, I’m having a hard time extracting an actual point from all the dog-whistle in those posts.
AlterNet discovers the Manosphere’s “secular sexism”:
http://www.alternet.org/gender/christian-right-dying-who-fuels-misogyny-enter-secular-sexists-gamergate-and-mra-movement
I find this whole Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction/Neopatriarchy development fascinating because it shows the failure of the progressive project to control the human mind. In the U.S., at least, progressives have a lot of control in centrally planning the culture towards Enlightenment notions of democracy, feminism, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, etc. Yet thanks to the internet, men who previously wouldn’t have had the means to communicate with each other have organized in a Hayekian fashion to discover that they have had similar damaging experiences with, for example, women in a feminist regime, and they have come to similar politically incorrect conclusions about women’s nature. And this has happened despite the policies and preferences of the people who hold the high ground in education, academia, law, government and the entertainment industry.
I can see why the emergence of secular sexism drives progressive nuts, because they wrongly believed that sexism depended on certain kinds of god beliefs that have fallen into decline, as this AlterNet article explores. Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that? We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?
Of course you can. Theology is very easily observable. One can ask what the theology should be blamed on, but that goes back to the dawn of history and is but speculation and fog.
So here’s some speculation for why patriarchal traditions are so prevalent, which I suppose has been at the back of my mind for as long as I’ve been aware of such issues, although I’ve never seen it stated so starkly as I am about to.
Men are physically stronger than women.
Without modern science, paternity cannot be observed, only enforced (see (1)).
It seems to me that these two facts are a sufficient explanation for the entire phenomenon of both religious and secular suppression of women. Men have been able to, men have wanted to, men have done. Might makes might. “If you want a picture of the past, imagine a man’s boot stamping on a woman’s face – for ever.”
Explanations of how all women really want to be controlled by a strong man are window dressing, excreted by the virtual outcome pumps in the heads of those who find current mores uncongenial to continuing in that way, and who nowadays must use ideas as ammunition instead of stones.
Then way are women so willing to throw themselves in front of abusive men?
Some women are willing to throw themselves in front of abusive men. It doesn’t follow that all women really want to be controlled by a strong man.
I think a lot of women believe that they are and/or should be able to improve abusive men.
Yes, and this belief appears to be sufficiently pervasive and impervious to evidence that its clear there is something more driving it.
My reading of the situation is not that women prefer abusive men or prefer to be controlled. My reading is that women (warning: crude generalizations incoming) like to be/feel protected and prefer strong men. Given this, some women consider being abusive to be evidence of strength, and some women are willing to trade some control or some abuse for getting a strong man. This may or may not be a good trade, depending on the circumstances.
Yes, this is the position I’m trying to argue.
For what (little) I have read about abusive relationship, my pet theory is that abuses are like superstimulus for things like assertiveness, confidence, strength, etc.
Some women get imprinted with this kind of behaviour in such a way they are no more able to find attractive kinder men.
Some women are. I don’t have the feeling for what proportion of women are willing to have relationships with obviously abusive men.
The usual account of abusive relationships is that the abusive escalates fairly slowly—I don’t know whether the initially abusive relationship is too embarrassing to talk about.
I don’t generally bother pointing out typos, but this one might be worth fixing.
Thanks. Corrected.
Really, can you show me where?
You left out a few important ones:
3. A man can potentially impregnate many women.
4. Having a man to help raise a woman’s children greatly increases their prospects (this is the reason your (2) matters).
5. Unlike his sperm, a man’s attention is a rather limited resource.
So, women would prefer to have children by an alpha male. They would also prefer to find a beta male to help raise them (they would like even more to have the alpha male raise them but see (5)). Men don’t what to raise children that aren’t theirs.
Any library or bookshop.
This is no longer true in countries where women can earn their own living.
Don’t generalize. Women are individuals, not a monolithic bloc.
Again, don’t generalize. I’d much rather adopt an orphan than increase the amount of living people, all the while knowing my genes would much rather be copied. I don’t fear my moral inclinations will be outbred; I can just teach them to my adopted children. Every man (and woman, and genderless person, and all variations thereupon) has hir own motivations and interests. Ignoring individual differences is one of the problems with this particular brand of sexism.
Markdown automatically renumbered your 5 to 3; if you want it not to, add backslashes i.e.
3\.,4\.and5\..Thanks, fixed.
I find this to be the weakest point. Why betas should have longer attention span than alphas?
...seriously?
The point Azathoth is making is that there is only so many hours in a day. An alpha male may sleep with many women, but he can only give his attention to one or a few. Beta males, who are lucky to have one woman, are free to concentrate all their attention on her and her children. Therefore, females who fail to attract the alpha male for anything but a quickie have a preference for fooling beta males into raising the resulting alpha male’s children. Beta males, obviously, do not share this preference.
But this is not a successful reproduction strategy. If your genes dictates that you devote all your attention to a female that already has one children that is not yours, then your genes will be marginalized very quickly. Thus, only short attention span children are raised.
Please stop making comments like this.
This request is likely to be ineffectual without something more concrete. The OP makes several rambling points, it’s not clear which you disagree with.
I disagree with the general concept that LW is an appropriate place to post bizarre, mindkilled political rants.
I agree that the tone sucks. However, some of the points are valid. For example, the large chunk of opposition to (online) feminism is now from the mens rights crowd, not from traditional-gender-roles crowd. And this pattern should be expected to continue in the future.
For example, the main opposition to assisted suicide in the US is currently religion-motivated. However, in Canada and elsewhere where religion is only a minor player, the main opposition is from the secular disability rights movements. The advocates of the right to die with dignity will find themselves opposing similarly “progressive”, kind and compassionate people, once the issue is no longer about faith.
You can probably name another issue or two where overcoming one obstacle only leaves you bashing against a different, unexpected one, without having made much progress.
I don’t particularly care about whether the points are valid. This kind of discussion isn’t what LessWrong is for, especially when it’s being posted with this sort of tone.
Ah. You did mention something about “mindkilled”, right?
Yes, ha ha. This is a serious matter, though. I believe that it really truly doesn’t matter whether someone’s political points are good or not. LessWrong should not allow itself to be a venue for this sort of behavior, especially when it’s accompanied by this sort of tone.
In order for the LessWrong community to flourish, I think it is critical that it be divorced from bickering over political matters. So when it comes to posts like this one, I really truly don’t care whether their arguments are valid or not—either way, they shouldn’t be on LessWrong
For discussion of political matters? A bit late for that, I think. This train has left the station.
I disagree. “Bickering”, of course, is a word with negative connotations, but I see no reason to taboo political discussions here. Politics of all sorts are important in real life and having a giant blind spot doesn’t look too useful for that winning thing that rationality is supposed to be about :-/
So far on LW people have shown their ability to have civilized discussions even while disagreeing about politics. That’s a good thing.
Has it? Insofar as it has, that’s been thanks to our own failure to tend to basic principles. I think that in order to better reach as many people as possible, it’s critical that LW avoid politics and the potential biases that can result.
I do agree that having civilized discussions even while disagreeing about politics is important. But there are other venues for that, like Slate Star Codex, and if we indeed need more of this I think it’s better to move it off-site.
Re-read that post carefully :-) It doesn’t say not to discuss politics, it says don’t be an ass about it.
I am unaware that this is a goal of LW. If, by any chance, it is, LW is spectacularly unsuccessful at it :-D
Well, we disagree about that. In a fairly civilized fashion, so far :-)
P.S. And most discussion here is actually about political philosophy, not politics themselves. Notice how today’s US elections which flipped the Senate got zero posts on LW.
The purpose of LessWrong is to discuss and learn rationality, so I think politics are almost never appropriate here. But even if we think that civilized discussion of political matters is appropriate, the post I was critiquing was not, IMO, up to our standards of civility and polite discussion.
I don’t think it was out of line. May I suggest instead that you reject it because of its ideological content which you find unacceptable? Fighting against the political mindkill you fall prey precisely to what you object to.
Mind killed means that someone is using ineffective heuristics. You can follow pretty irrational heuristics and still get the correct answer by luck.
No. “Mindkilled” means that someone is not amenable to reason.
Not being amenable to reason is following an irrational heuristics for determining truth.
And the main point still stands regardless. You can get the right answer even when you are not amenable to reason.
shminux is right here, this is not a helpful attitude on your part. While it’s important to avoid encouraging political debates on LessWrong, exercising virtues such as moderation and tolerance when such issues do come up is even more important.
I agree. That’s why I looked at advancedatheist’s comment history before replying. If this were the only such comment, I would not have called it out—but this user has a history of posting similar comments.
Now, advancedatheist has also posted comments that advocate neoreactionary positions in ways that I consider totally appropriate for LessWrong—this one, for example. But IMO there’s a clear difference in tone and tenor between that and this.
The linked article is so misleading that I wouldn’t try to derive any true statements about reality from it. It fails to mention any legitimate points of their opponents, and then concludes they don’t have any. Five minutes on google would probably give better results.
(I strongly bite my tongue here to avoid going into specific details, but I spent the last month observing GamerGate and it is fascinating to watch how good job can media do to prevent some information from being ever mentioned, and how all information about this topic ultimately comes from the same two or three people.)
One thing, though. The article is pushing a narrative “all our opponents are actually the same” while in fact the only thing conecting them is, well, being opponents of one specific group in one specific topic. For example, there are many feminists in the GamerGate movement (no, Christina Hoff Sommers is not the only example), and also there are many people believing that feminism and men’s rights are not contradictory. So the whole paradigm of “dark forces are rising” may be just a convenient excuse to explain away some specific failures or a specific group.
I believe advancedatheist is using it to illustrate the Progressive reaction to the Manosphere.
Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction is an ideology by a very small amount of bloggers who don’t matter in the overall discourse. It’s in no way the same thing as the MRA-movement.
Starting with a straw man and then asking ” Why would anyone have ever thought that” is pretty bad form. National Socialism in Germany was largely a secular movement that also was sexist. Assuming that in general progressive thought ignores that history is something that says a lot more about the writer than about progressive ideas.
LOL: “had” to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
Why not? I mean, I don’t say that we should or shouldn’t put women in a bad light, nor that we should or shouldn’t blame theology for that. But why we can’t blame theology?
It’s not like memes evolve to attain truthiness, or that humans are automatic maximizers / strategizers. Pretty any memeplex I know of has some form of “push away / ostracize my enemies”. Understood, any meme that contains “kill all women” would have a pretty short lifespan. But one containing “enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle” could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not. Isn’t the whole Neoreactionary movement born under the fallacy that equates survivability with adherence to truth? I find this to be a somewhat inclusive description.
Despite this, I still find the linked article to be appalingly bad at presenting the issue with some form of objectivity. They are not even trying. But I don’t know the site and I’m possibly mistaken assuming that it has as mission disseminating informations of some quality.
I wonder if you realize that a direct implication of this statement is that treating women as not cattle offers no advantage to a society..?
Deleterious things get locked into fixation in genomes and biological systems all the time. I see no reason that deleterious traits cannot get fixed into cultures.
Oh, they surely can. But that gives those cultures a disadvantage and maintaining this disadvantage “indefinitely” seems to be a stretch, especially given how cultures are malleable and tend to change anyway.
Indefinitely meant more “comparably to a culture lifespan” than “until the heat death of the universe”.
It’s not that it offers no advantage, is that it offers no immediate disadvantage.
A discriminating culture that happens to have more material advantage at the start could just wipe other more egalitarian cultures without much concerns. It’s only very recently that physical strength has lost its importance as a driving force in cultures clashes.
It is possible that in a future where intellect matters much more, but life is still cheap, a more egalitarian society will employ women more efficiently and thus prevail against discriminating ones. But it seems that the more material wealth we have, the more relaxed we are about the whole killing other people stuff.
Really, you think so?
Really, I think so.
You don’t? Care enough to point to a counterexample?
Lack of real-life societies which enslaved all their women should be a big hint.
Think about it for a bit. Half the population is slaves. Somebody has to watch them, guard them, suppress their attempts at rebellion, etc. Your hypothetical society will have to spend a LOT of resources on just keeping things under control while having significantly lower economic productivity. And in the case of war they can’t field a large army because a lot of men are prison wardens and can’t leave women slaves unattended.
The idea is just very obviously bad and unworkable.
I think this idea of slavery does not match with what historically has been the reality of enslavement. It’s not that you need one slavemaster for every slave, or that slaves are kept perpetually in prison.
To have slaves you ‘just’ need less education, the prevalent idea that they need a master, hard labor and some form of punishment for transgressing. I think this set better describes what has been the reality of (say) women in ancient China or Middle-East, black people under the colonial empires, etc.
But let’s just taboo “slave”, the main issue is another: a meme that asserts “women are inferior beings and they should be treated as such” does not pose an immediate threat to the surivival of a tribe, and for this reason can be latched into a culture for a very long period of time, in the millennia range. To say that memetic evolution selects for truth is just silly.
I’m not sure if you disagree with my last paragraph and precisely on what.
Heh. Such a nice example of motte and bailey.
Behold, here is your bailey:
and here is your motte:
You do notice the difference, right? :-)
I’m not clear where you place the controversy.
Do you think that the striking difference is between the degree of bad treatment (enslaving vs treating as inferior) or the survivability of the meme (survive indefinitely vs not an immediate threat)?
In the second case, that’s not my motte, because I clearly state that I think “not an immediate threat” yelds “indefinite survivability”.
In the first case, I can just notice that you think there’s a sharp divide where I see just a continuum between the cost of the two memes. But that’s not a problem, I’ll be happy to stay in the bailey and taboo “slavery”, as the article you link suggested, to see if there’s a real disagreement here.
Both places.
That doesn’t look like a reasonable position, at least if you use words in their normal meaning.
Ah, so there are two memes here? So which one are we talking about and which one corresponds to what you want to claim?
What definition of “sexism” are you using here? The word “had” there serves an important point, contrast this with the fact that people don’t have to live with other ethnic groups.
Yes, they do. If this wasn’t the case we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can’t survive for long simply because they aren’t immediately destructive.
Yes, but it could also imply that women are difficult to endure, and men would be better off without them. But of course this meaning was unintended, thus the humor.
But where does the selective pressure comes from? Why this pressure has not made the atomistic idea, or the spherical Earth, formulated almost three thousands of year ago, immediately popular? Why there are people that still believe in magic? Why we still believe in both relativity and quantum mechanics, despite these ideas being incompatible and more than a century old?
Yes, avoiding to be immediately destructive is not sufficient to guarantee a meme survivability, but cultures can lock all kind of memes if there’s no immediate selective pressure against them.
For example, a society that has to battle on phyisical grounds, with physical strength, gains no immediate disadvantage over a more egalitarian society if it enslaves women.
A false meme can even gain a society some advantage, such as the case of an ethnic group that enslaves another ethnic group and makes them work for hard labor.
Past history was about guns, germs and steel, not about truth. Those are what has been selected. The rest of the memes are purely random junk.
As advancedatheist said in the OC:
Rather then mocking his phrasing maybe you should try actually paying attention to his point.
In particular truths about metallurgy and the chemistry of gunpowder.
I was doing both. And nobody has yet pointed to a valid reason why, just by the mere presence, truth should ooze out of things directly into our minds.
The process of intentionally acquiring truth is costly and fragile: you need to experiment, be willing to discard ideas, formulate wildly new theories.
If the truth is not immediately strategic, i.e. it offers no immediate and perceptible disadvantage, it has no particular selective pressure against in a clash between cultures or different memetic spaces. The truth can even hinders the success of a tribe, acting through our biased brains.
A ship disappearing behind the horizon, fire, women are all observable phoenomena, and yet we had (have) flat earth, flogiston and discrimination.
Memetic evolution does just that.
Yes, but not in an orderly, cumulative, feedback driven fashion.
If memetics is like genetics, you should observe very often useless memes become fixed in a population.
“If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?”
This starts from a false assumption (“the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition”) and implies a false dichotomy (that men either dominate society because of religious beliefs, or because of some reason that progressives would prefer not to blame), and someone who posts on a website dedicated to rationality should see that. I also don’t agree with the claim that history paints women in a bad light compared to men. Until recently we’ve seen an ugly domination of both men and women by men, and we still that in much of the world.
I see other commenters making the assumptions that historical authoritarianism by men signifies that this trait must have at some point either been advantageous to the species, or advantageous to women who chose to mate with “dominant” men and/or the children they bore. This assumption underlies a lot of anti-feminist philosophy online. Have you considered the possibility that there have been men who have passed along their genes by intimidating others (including other men)? Considering our species’ history of violence, is it any wonder that tyrannical and Machiavellian males have had an evolutionary advantage? I have noticed that, especially in large societies, living under said men appears to be unpleasant for the masses who don’t reign supreme.
Is the same true for violent and Machiavellian women? If so why doesn’t the rest of your logic apply, if not why not?
It only proves that religion is useful, but not indispensable, if you can equally use any excuse to mistreat women, let’s say, for example, a heavily motivated interpretation of evolutive psychology.
Well, nearly all of progressivism can be summarized as an attempt to ignore this kind of logic and see what happens.
Progressives hold that stereotypes promote arbitrary, random and generally false beliefs about groups of people. But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations? And why don’t people ever get their stereotypes mixed up?
For example, if some said that he didn’t mind having registered sex offenders as neighbors because their presence wouldn’t hurt property values and his community’s reputation, you wouldn’t praise this guy for his lack of stereotypical thinking. Instead you would question his judgment.
Ironically progressives don’t have a problem at all with promoting stereotypes which put rich people and businessmen in a bad light. The popularity of Ayn Rand’s alternative humanism pisses them off because she got some market share in reversing these stereotypes, and again in defiance of progressives’ central planning to reshape the human mind like clay,.
Not defending the progressives in general here, but there are two very simple explanations for your question.
1) Some stereotypes don’t remain stable across generations.
For example, I heard that in the past, pink was considered a “boy color” and blue was considered a “girl color”; or that it was believed that black people would be bad at sport. So, some stereotypes change and some don’t; and we would need a meta review to find out whether there is something special about those unchanging stereotypes, or whether it just means that if you flip a coin two or three times, sometimes you will get the same result repeatedly.
2) If a stereotype already exists, it is more easy to keep believing in the existing one (confirmation bias) than to invent a new one.
(Disclaimer: None of this is meant as a general proof that all stereotypes are incorrect. It’s only an explanation of how a stereotype that happens to be wrong could remain stable across generations.)
Except as you’ve just pointed out:
Identifying a mechanism pushing towards outcome X is not inconsistent with observing that sometimes the outcome not-X happens.
Rational expectations equalibria are a thing. To take a somewhat exagerated example, if everyone thinks that girls suck at math, so no one teaches girls to do math, then no one will ever find out whether or not girls actually suck at math.
“Throwing like a girl” is a prime example of that sort of thing. Throwing like a girl turns out to be throwing like someone who’s inexperienced with throwing.
If a boy throws like a girl, he’s taught and/or shamed out of it as quickly as possible. If a girl throws like a girl, well, what did you expect?
I’ve phrased this in the present tense, but the culture’s improved on the subject.
Now consider a similar-sounding stereotype: “Men are physically stronger than women”. Think that’s fixable by different expectations?
While some stereotypes reflect cultural expectations, some reflect biological reality.
Strength is determined by biology and behavior; the stereotype reflects both biological reality and cultural expectations. Note that boys are/were expected to be stronger than girls even before puberty actually creates a meaningful biological gap...
I don’t think most progressives assume stereotypes are arbitrary or random. The standard progressive view seems to be that the stereotypes were based on the fundamental attribution error: attributing negative traits that a group has to their innate nature rather than to negative influences.
Example: Members of group A enter region dominated by group B. The educational system in region B focuses on entirely different languages and historical periods than the educational system in region A. Group B considers intelligence to be demonstrated by a mastery of language and history. Group B then assumes that members of Group A are inherently unintelligent, instead of assuming that there’s a good reason why otherwise competent members of Group A are completely inept at Group B language and history.
Group C denies group D access to certain types of training for reasons that are, at the time, valid. The reasons become invalid. Group D asks for access to those types of training. Group C points out that Group D currently has no demonstrated skill at those types of tasks. Group D is being stereotyped as inherently bad at something, when in fact they are merely untrained.
Why don’t progressives put the same effort into dismantling insulting stereotypes of their political opponents (certain types of rich people) in the same way that we do for other groups? Presumably, because rich people can afford to hire PR agents, and are not suffering harm from stereotypes*, and because people generally do not make their political opponents look better.
*I haven’t seen evidence for rich people being harmed by stereotype threat, but if some study shows they are, please link me to one.
Not sure what is the “standard” progressive view, but the one I see a lot says that stereotypes are tools of oppression and domination.
I’m sorry if this is a rude request, but I’m very new to the LW commenting process, so if anyone knows why my comments here were downvoted, I’d really appreciate it if that person would tell me, so I can improve my future participation on this site.
Thanks in advance!
The request is not rude and actually fairly common (but is not guaranteed to bring responses).
Note that LW up/downvoting is a noisy process and you shouldn’t attempt to find meaning in every single vote. Also, this.
At the moment, all your comments seem to be net-upvoted, so there seems no evidence of a systematic objection to your participation. As I’ve observed elsewhere as well, comments that can be taken as supportive of progressive positions have lately garnered a few downvotes early on, which tend to get reversed by subsequent upvotes over the next few days. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I think LW just hates progressives
I suppose there isn’t really a standard progressive view, but I attend Young Democrats meetings, my school voted with something like a ⅔ majority for Obama in the last mock election, and I read newspapers and magazines that target a progressive audience, so I encounter a lot of progressive viewpoints.
I thought that the “tools of oppression and domination” was a reference to how stereotypes are used, not how they are formed. I don’t really picture a bunch of people in positions of power deciding that the best method to oppress people was to assume insulting things about them, instead of, say, passing harmful legislation, so I assumed that other progressives would agree with me on that point.
Also, I wanted to discuss stereotype origins without using phrasing that made the originators of those stereotypes look immoral, because I thought that doing so would distract for advancedatheist from the point I was trying to make, so I shied away from that explanation.
If you are into that kind of thing, you can view stereotypes as soldiers in memetic warfare. If you want to win, you want to shape your soldiers and not just pick whichever ones happen to come along.
The problem is that progressives consider it evil to attribute negative traits to innate nature and will refuse to update in that direction even if changing influences doesn’t improve the trait.
Thus if a negative trait happens to actually have an innate cause, progressives end up going on witch hunts trying to find the
witchoppressor whose evilspells micro-aggressions are causing the negative influences.