Could you be a little more specific about what exactly you perceive the problem to be here? I see a discussion treating beggars as human beings whose welfare we are interested in, that assumes that they respond to incentives. I’m not sure how accurate people’s begging models are, but I didn’t notice anything particularly offensive about them. It’s possible I’m missing something though, so would appreciate being enlightened.
I didn’t see anything that I would find offensive in this discussion.
However, if I would apply some the criteria mentioned in some of the other
debates; for example, take the The Nature of Offense; examples of
things that people find insulting are:
to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person (Alicorn)
analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it (orthonormal)
exclusion from the intended audience (Eliezer)
I would argue that this applies to beggars too. They may not be the intended
audience, but they are definitely put in ‘the group being analyzed’; and they
are treated as a ‘non person’ in a way that is not too different from what
some in the ‘gender discussion’ considered inappropriate for women.
Note, I personally haven’t seen anything that is offensive, and I think LW is a
very friendly and stimulating environment. It just suggests that rules like
the ones above are untenable.
I’m afraid that I still don’t really see the supposed double standard—bear with me!
In particular, I’m interested in what specific aspects of the discussion you think treat beggars as “non-persons”.
As for points 2 and 3, I took these to be primarily issues of effective writing for one’s audience. As such, they just don’t seem especially relevant here, and I’m unclear why they’re supposed to be untenable in general.
Regarding the non-person issue: in previous discussions, the objection was raised (see above) that some comments treat women like non-persons, objects. My point is that the comments about beggars are of the same kind. Either they are both offensive, or they both aren’t.
Points 2-3 are not just about effective writing; they are about the kind of statements that should be avoided because they are considered offending. Once more, my point was that if we consider these sufficient indicators for ‘offense’, this would also apply to the beggars discussed here.
So, my point would be that if we would really want such rules, it would be hard to have the discussion like we had here involving beggar without breaking them… that is why I called them ‘untenable’.
My point is that the comments about beggars are of the same kind.
Sorry for being dim, but I’m still struggling to see why you would think this. My impression is that they are not of the same kind. But I am interested to know why somebody else would think differently. Would you mind pointing to specific examples of comments you think treat beggars as non-persons/objects, and explain how/why they do so?
(FWIW, if you can convince me that they do so, I probably will agree that they are, to that extent, “offensive”.)
Points 2-3 are not just about effective writing; they are about the kind of statements that should be avoided because they are considered offending.
I do not expect people to go significantly out of their way to write in a manner that is inclusive of people not in their audience. I do expect people to make a reasonable effort to write in a way that is inclusive of people who are in their potential audience. I don’t think these expectations constitute a double standard of any sort. Is there anything we disagree about here?
Let me try once more; I am a bit sorry for bringing up this debate here. But I
appreciate your persistence.
There have been many comments about the kind of comments we should avoid in
the last few days, and there is no group opinion.
I think Sayeth the Girl has
some posts which were considered offensive. The one linked as ‘jerkitude’
really goes a step further—about manipulating people to make them do what
you want. But the others (like the one named ‘objectification’) is not more
about objectifying women than some of the post were about beggars.
One important point—and your persistance pays off here—is that the latter
two articles do emphasize the importance for the target audience. So if we
consider beggars not to be target audience, then there is not really an
inconsistency. They can’t be choosers, after all.
I agree with you that we should try to be inclusive for the target audience --
although I think that generally trying to be rational (which includes avoiding
biases, stereotyping and so on) should also select for the target audience.
But the others (like the one named ‘objectification’) is not more about objectifying women than some of the post were about beggars.
Unfortunately, we seem to be coming from quite different places here, so I still don’t understand why you think this. Could you please try to explain? I don’t mean to be belligerent, but from my perspective it seems as though you’re just repeatedly restating your conclusion, when what I need to understand are your reasons for reaching that conclusion.
FWIW, my take on what constitutes “objectification” can be found here: I think it corresponds roughly to treating other people as means to an end, without regard for their interests.* I did not notice anything in the discussion of begging that appeared to do this (though jajvirta raised a legitimate concern). Do you think I’ve missed something in the discussion here?
Or is it rather that you don’t think the behaviour Alicorn originally objected to was objectifying in this sense? In the claimed instance of “jerkitude” I think it pretty clearly was (and I assume from your comment that you’d agree). The claimed instance of “objectification” is less extreme. It’s true that talk about “getting” members of the opposite (or indeed the same) sex doesn’t necessarily mean that the speaker doesn’t care about their interests. But I do think that the language Roko used, and in the context it was used, tended to promote thinking about women as trophies rather than human beings. Again, I may be missing something, but the parallel to the begging discussion isn’t obvious to me.
* As noted here I do not think that objectification in this sense is always and everywhere problematic. Whether it is or not also depends on context.
ETA: I just noticed that you’d been voted down above. FWIW, this is not me.
But I do think that the language Roko used, and in the context it was used, tended to promote thinking about women as trophies rather than human beings.
Did it promote you thinking that way?
And what do you mean by “promote”, anyway?
Hm. I think I’m beginning to see something about the whole social status and offense thing that I didn’t see before.
See, that sentence doesn’t “promote” in the sense of “encourage others to think” or “put that idea in their heads”. It simply is a statement that would make sense to people who already have the idea of women being trophies in their head.
IOW—if you don’t on some level already have the idea in your head (and I do not), the statement can’t mean that to you, so it clearly means something else.
And this is independent of whatever the original speaker actually meant. In other words, it could easily be that Roko meant something that is not what either I or Alicorn took him to mean—we are each simply using whatever interpretation of his words “makes sense” in our own model of the world. To me, women are not trophies, and the statement does not say that, so it’s impossible for me to take it that way.
At the same time, I can see how somebody who does think of women as trophies might take Roko’s statement as implicitly supporting their position. And further, that someone else, who is sensitized to the existence of a faction of people who think that way, might then treat Roko’s statement as explicitly supporting that position, or defining him as a member of that fashion.
After all, in that person’s world, the “trophies” definition is more emotionally salient (albeit negative), and our brains are biased to retrieve the most emotional (especially negative) interpretations of current events… leading to it being as impossible for them to take seriously the idea that the comment was innocent, as it is for me to take seriously the idea that it was objectifying.
Interesting. I agree with you that the effects of statements are independent of the original speaker’s intentions. (At least in the sense of not being necessarily related; I would expect the two to be statistically dependent). For that reason I can easily accept that the comment was innocently intended, but at the same time think that such statements, in general, are not innocent in effect, and that they should ideally be reduced.
However, I don’t agree with this at all:
that sentence doesn’t “promote” in the sense of “encourage others to think” or “put that idea in their heads”
I wonder whether part of the reason is that I think that both the attitudes in question (e.g. “thinking of women as trophies”) and the means of their promotion can be (and probably are) less conscious than your analysis suggests. It seems perfectly possible to me that someone could both consciously affirm the proposition “women are not trophies”, and that they could nonetheless think about women in a way that bears problematic resemblance to the way they would think about trophies. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not intend to accuse anybody here of this.)
As a result, it also seems perfectly possible for language to promote thinking of women as trophies even if (a) individuals’ do not consciously interpret its meaning as affirming the proposition “women are trophies”, and/or (b) the individuals would consciously deny such a proposition themselves. I do think that the extent to which someone consciously believes “women are not trophies” should reduce any subconscious effect of this sort, but I see little reason to think that it must necessarily have no effect for that reason; and it’s not at all clear to me why the idea that women are trophies must already be in somebody’s head for such an effect to occur at all. In part from personal experience, it seems to me that the cumulative effect of language that normalizes particular patterns of thought can be quite strong.
NB: As a vaguely related aside, one thing that has struck me about many defenses made here of particular forms of language use is the extent to which they rely on claims about how reasonable people should consciously interpret a statement’s meaning. For a site that so frequently discusses issues of subconscious priming and bias, this focus has always struck me as a little odd.
I do agree with her that some of the posts went a bit overboard—in particular, the ones about manipulating people (‘jerkitude’). But, for example, Roko’s comment about ‘manipulation’ seemed benign—it seems to me that it’s used in the sense of ‘interaction’ rather than ‘trickery’.
But, as you suggest, I did not agree with the ‘objectification’-part, and I saw (albeit) tacit support for that in Elizier’s and Wei_Dai’s posts, as I have been trying to show.
I couldn’t see much difference from (with regards to their ‘objectification-value’) between:
“Women are attracted to rich men, so if I were rich I would get attractive women”
and some of the comments about beggars—which jajvirta has already explained much better than I can.
Note, that my point is not that these comments are somehow inappropriate, but really that they are can be seen as similarly ‘objectifying’. And furthermore, that you can disagree with some of the comments, but you can do so on rationalist grounds, for example by challenging unsupported statements (esp. generalizations).
Unfortunately I still don’t feel as though I’ve gotten an explanation of your position as much as another restatement of it. You seem to have just reiterated that you can’t see much difference between the cases, rather than actually explaining how they are relevantly similar.
I’ve tried to explain why I don’t see the comments about beggars and women as equivalent according to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of objectification. The discussion about beggars seemed to me to assume that beggars are people with interests, and that we are generally concerned to further those interests—the question was how best to do that. This stands in stark contrast to talk about “getting” women, which (I think) promotes thinking about them as prizes whose main value is their instrumental value to the men “getting” them.
This seems to me to provide a clear distinction between the two conversations. You seem to disagree, but I still can’t tell exactly why. Is it that:
you do not think the distinction I am drawing is tenable, either because:
(a) you disagree that the sort of language Roko used tends to promote treating women as prizes of primarily instrumental value; or
(b) you think the the discussion of begging did in fact neglect the fact that beggars have interests or tended to promote viewing them as objects without interests; or is it that
you think that my definition of objectification is wrong (or at least differs from that relied on by others, such as Alicorn), and that on the “correct” definition there is no difference between the two cases?
In order to try to make some progress here, could you perhaps tell me (a) which of these you believe, and (b) why you believe it? (Alternatively, if you don’t think any of these is the source of our disagreement, then perhaps you could let me know what you think the actual source is.)
Thanks!
ETA: I realise that you appear to state at the beginning of your previous comment that it’s 1(a), but the rest of your comment suggests to me that it might actually be something else, and in any event, I’m still not sure why you think 1(a) (if you do).
well, i think some of the posts about women were considered offensive because they discussed how you could ‘get’ them, or manipulate them with some tricks; then here i saw some somewhat generalizing comments here about beggars (some were written after my first post of course), about how they don’t necessarily want to work, have mental problems but, given the right incentives, might be pushed in the right direction—or the idea that you understand what they think. I felt that in a few posts, and that is why I wrote the comment in the first place.
Regarding my definition of objectification… I would say that it includes your definition, but has some more components, such as the assumption that people have no own opinion, that they lack self-determination and so on. I think the Wiki definition is pretty good. This is also what jajvirta referred to, I think.
Thus, my definition of objectification is a bit wider than the one you use; but I assume (maybe incorrectly) that it is the more common one.
But reading all over this—in can see now why my writing was confusing. Why was apparently pointing out cases of ‘objectification’ but also disagreed there was any problem. I think my point is there is a fine line between writing about people abstractly, in terms of wants and needs… and objectifying them. Some people were quite eager to point at that line in previous discussions. And I wondered where that fine line lied for beggars.
So, to answer your questions:
1a: while Roko’s language could may have been improved, I found there was not really a problem with it. But I can imagine people thinking differently.
1b: yes, it seemed to me that in some posts beggars were treated as an out-group of which you can make sweeping statements about what they think/do. See above.
my definition is a bit wider.
Hopefully this clears things up. I want to commend you for being so persistent and pointing unclarities etc. in my statements. This is really the rationalist spirit—and it sharpens my mind to make clearer statements.
Thanks again for bearing with me on this. I think I’ve now got a much clearer idea of where you’re coming from, and even if we don’t completely agree, I’m not sure we’re all that far apart.
Like you, I suspect that your definition of objectification is probably more common (although, to be honest, I suspect that many people do not have a clear definition in mind when they use the term). I prefer mine because I think it more clearly focuses in on what (from my perspective) is especially problematic: as you allude to, broadening the definition too much can sometimes make it difficult to talk abstractly about anything. (Though actually, I do think some of the begging-related statements that were made after your original comment were getting close to what I would consider problematic anyway.)
That said, it’s worth emphasising that I do not think that all instances of “objectification” (even in my narrower sense of the term) are necessarily problematic: whether they are or not still depends quite crucially on context. In that sense, I would agree with you that a rule against all objectification isn’t sensible. I do however, tend to think that (a) there are some contexts where it quite clearly is a problem; and (b) it’s something we should be careful about in general, even outside the clearly problematic contexts.
ah, great, it seems we have cleared things up. so part of the discussion was really about having a different definition of the term ‘objectification’. I should be more careful in defining such terms before using them...
now, about the ‘non-problematic’ use cases for the term… literally, the term is not necessarily negative at all of course, but maybe we should try to reserve it for negative cases. most of the cases (including most of the once in this discussion) are relatively benign, and i think people should not be too sensitive. And as I said before, things like prejudice and sweeping generalizations can be countered with mere rationalism and pointing to biases, without accusations of ‘objectification’ at all.
Thanks for persisting with me. I appreciate it! However, with all due respect, it seems to me that you’ve once again simply restated your position without explaining it. Sorry for not getting it! Saying “I couldn’t see much difference” doesn’t really explain your position.
I’ve tried to explain why I don’t see the comments about beggars and women as equivalent according to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of objectification. The discussion about beggars seemed to me to assume that beggars are people with interests, and that we are generally concerned to further those interests—the question was how best to do that. This stands in stark contrast to talk about “getting” women, which (I think) promotes thinking about them as prizes whose main value is their instrumental value to the men “getting” them.
This seems to me to provide a clear distinction between the two conversations. Given this, I can see a few possible sources of our disagreement:
You do not think the distinction I am drawing is tenable, either because:
(a) you disagree that the sort of language Roko used tends to promote treating women as prizes of primarily instrumental value;
(b) you think the the discussion of begging did in fact neglect the fact that beggars have interests or tended to promote viewing them as objects without interests; or
You think that my definition of objectification is wrong (or at least differs from that relied on by others, such as Alicorn), and that on the “correct” definition there is no difference between the two cases.
Could you perhaps tell me (a) which of these you believe, and (b) why you believe it? (Alternatively, if you don’t think any of these is the source of our disagreement, then perhaps you could let me know what you think the actual source is.)
But the others (like the one named ‘objectification’) is not more about objectifying women than some of the post were about beggars.
Unfortunately, we seem to be coming from quite different places here, so I still don’t understand why you think this. Could you please try to explain? I don’t mean to be belligerent, but from my perspective it seems as though you’re just repeatedly restating your conclusion, when what I need to understand are your reasons for reaching that conclusion.
FWIW, my take on what constitutes “objectification” can be found here: I think it corresponds roughly to treating other people as means to an end, without regard for their interests.* I did not notice anything in the discussion of begging that appeared to do this (though jajvirta raised a legitimate concern). Do you think I’ve missed something in the discussion here?
Or is it rather that you don’t think the behaviour Alicorn originally objected to was objectifying in this sense?
* As noted here I do not think that objectification in this sense is always and everywhere problematic. Whether it is or not also depends on context.
To be fair, it’s not inconceivable that a homeless person could be reading Less Wrong—internet access in public libraries is pretty common these days, for instance.
I see a discussion treating beggars as human beings whose welfare
we are interested in, that assumes that they respond to incentives.
(This is somewhat tangential to your actual comment so don’t look on this like it’s a counter-argument.)
This idea of using incentives to guide their behavior is to impose our value system on them. It’s one thing to say that you don’t want to help these people at all, but to actually try to use the power (through money) to influence the way these people live their lives is morally not justified. Just because we have the power, doesn’t mean we have the moral right to say how each of these individuals should live their lives.
Of course, we do impose our value systems in using our money in other circumstances too, but in this context we have a really unbalanced relationship where the other side typically doesn’t have this particular power at all and those considering helping have loads.
If you are concretely deciding whether or not to give money to someone begging and you base the decision on what the person is going to spend the money on, you are using your power in this context to try to dictate how the other person lives his/her life. What if the thing he most needs right now is to buy a pack of cigarettes or get drunk or whatever? What gives you the right the impose your values on the person?
What if the thing he [sic] most needs right now is to buy a pack of cigarettes or get drunk or whatever?
This is a valid question, but I think you also need to allow the possibility that these things are not what the beggar most needs right now. Not all attempts to substitute one’s own decisions for someone else’s involve “impos[ing] your values on the person.” Sometimes people make decisions that do not further their own values, and in such cases, I think it is morally justified to try to respect their values rather than just their choices. Not to say that this is easy, and that we shouldn’t be incredibly wary of the possibility that we’re actually just projecting our own values on others. But claiming that others’ decisions are morally inviolable seems like an overreaction to me (albeit one that is founded in a legitimate concern).
It’s worth noting that a non-trivial percentage of homeless individuals are considered mentally ill, which generally means that society has, for better or worse, deemed them systematically incapable of making appropriate choices.
A lot of the homelessness problem in the USA came about from the big deinstitutionalization push in the 60s that… didn’t really work as intended. Policy on homelessness since then has mostly been built around “make them go somewhere else”.
I am uneasy with that sentiment although I’m having a hard time putting my finger one exactly why. But this is how I see it: there are vastly more people in the world than I could possibly ever help and some of them are so poor and downtrodden that they spend most of their money on food since they can’t afford luxuries such as drugs. Eventually, I might give money to the drug user if I had solved all the other problems first, but I would prefer my money to be spent on something more essential for survival first before I turn to subsidizing people’s luxury spending.
Imposing my values on somebody seems to more aptly describe a situation where I use authority to compel the drug user to not use drugs.
This position conflicts with consequentialist ethics.
Situation 1: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because this way my money brings more expected benefit to the beggar: it might help this particular one to bounce back, whereas with a crack addict there’s almost no chance.
Situation 2: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because I enjoy the power rush of controlling other people like the controlling father that tried to control Aaron Swartz with his controlling money.
The net result is the same, only the thoughts differ. Discriminating between the two situations sounds like deontological ethics. It works okay on the small scale but breaks down very quickly when the stakes rise and you realize that the universe doesn’t care about your personal hangups.
Could you be a little more specific about what exactly you perceive the problem to be here? I see a discussion treating beggars as human beings whose welfare we are interested in, that assumes that they respond to incentives. I’m not sure how accurate people’s begging models are, but I didn’t notice anything particularly offensive about them. It’s possible I’m missing something though, so would appreciate being enlightened.
I didn’t see anything that I would find offensive in this discussion.
However, if I would apply some the criteria mentioned in some of the other debates; for example, take the The Nature of Offense; examples of things that people find insulting are:
I would argue that this applies to beggars too. They may not be the intended audience, but they are definitely put in ‘the group being analyzed’; and they are treated as a ‘non person’ in a way that is not too different from what some in the ‘gender discussion’ considered inappropriate for women.
Note, I personally haven’t seen anything that is offensive, and I think LW is a very friendly and stimulating environment. It just suggests that rules like the ones above are untenable.
I’m afraid that I still don’t really see the supposed double standard—bear with me!
In particular, I’m interested in what specific aspects of the discussion you think treat beggars as “non-persons”.
As for points 2 and 3, I took these to be primarily issues of effective writing for one’s audience. As such, they just don’t seem especially relevant here, and I’m unclear why they’re supposed to be untenable in general.
Sorry if I was unclear.
Regarding the non-person issue: in previous discussions, the objection was raised (see above) that some comments treat women like non-persons, objects. My point is that the comments about beggars are of the same kind. Either they are both offensive, or they both aren’t.
Points 2-3 are not just about effective writing; they are about the kind of statements that should be avoided because they are considered offending. Once more, my point was that if we consider these sufficient indicators for ‘offense’, this would also apply to the beggars discussed here.
So, my point would be that if we would really want such rules, it would be hard to have the discussion like we had here involving beggar without breaking them… that is why I called them ‘untenable’.
Sorry for being dim, but I’m still struggling to see why you would think this. My impression is that they are not of the same kind. But I am interested to know why somebody else would think differently. Would you mind pointing to specific examples of comments you think treat beggars as non-persons/objects, and explain how/why they do so?
(FWIW, if you can convince me that they do so, I probably will agree that they are, to that extent, “offensive”.)
I do not expect people to go significantly out of their way to write in a manner that is inclusive of people not in their audience. I do expect people to make a reasonable effort to write in a way that is inclusive of people who are in their potential audience. I don’t think these expectations constitute a double standard of any sort. Is there anything we disagree about here?
Let me try once more; I am a bit sorry for bringing up this debate here. But I appreciate your persistence.
There have been many comments about the kind of comments we should avoid in the last few days, and there is no group opinion.
I think Sayeth the Girl has some posts which were considered offensive. The one linked as ‘jerkitude’ really goes a step further—about manipulating people to make them do what you want. But the others (like the one named ‘objectification’) is not more about objectifying women than some of the post were about beggars.
In The Nature of Offense this is referred to, as well as in Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
One important point—and your persistance pays off here—is that the latter two articles do emphasize the importance for the target audience. So if we consider beggars not to be target audience, then there is not really an inconsistency. They can’t be choosers, after all.
I agree with you that we should try to be inclusive for the target audience -- although I think that generally trying to be rational (which includes avoiding biases, stereotyping and so on) should also select for the target audience.
Unfortunately, we seem to be coming from quite different places here, so I still don’t understand why you think this. Could you please try to explain? I don’t mean to be belligerent, but from my perspective it seems as though you’re just repeatedly restating your conclusion, when what I need to understand are your reasons for reaching that conclusion.
FWIW, my take on what constitutes “objectification” can be found here: I think it corresponds roughly to treating other people as means to an end, without regard for their interests.* I did not notice anything in the discussion of begging that appeared to do this (though jajvirta raised a legitimate concern). Do you think I’ve missed something in the discussion here?
Or is it rather that you don’t think the behaviour Alicorn originally objected to was objectifying in this sense? In the claimed instance of “jerkitude” I think it pretty clearly was (and I assume from your comment that you’d agree). The claimed instance of “objectification” is less extreme. It’s true that talk about “getting” members of the opposite (or indeed the same) sex doesn’t necessarily mean that the speaker doesn’t care about their interests. But I do think that the language Roko used, and in the context it was used, tended to promote thinking about women as trophies rather than human beings. Again, I may be missing something, but the parallel to the begging discussion isn’t obvious to me.
* As noted here I do not think that objectification in this sense is always and everywhere problematic. Whether it is or not also depends on context.
ETA: I just noticed that you’d been voted down above. FWIW, this is not me.
Did it promote you thinking that way?
And what do you mean by “promote”, anyway?
Hm. I think I’m beginning to see something about the whole social status and offense thing that I didn’t see before.
See, that sentence doesn’t “promote” in the sense of “encourage others to think” or “put that idea in their heads”. It simply is a statement that would make sense to people who already have the idea of women being trophies in their head.
IOW—if you don’t on some level already have the idea in your head (and I do not), the statement can’t mean that to you, so it clearly means something else.
And this is independent of whatever the original speaker actually meant. In other words, it could easily be that Roko meant something that is not what either I or Alicorn took him to mean—we are each simply using whatever interpretation of his words “makes sense” in our own model of the world. To me, women are not trophies, and the statement does not say that, so it’s impossible for me to take it that way.
At the same time, I can see how somebody who does think of women as trophies might take Roko’s statement as implicitly supporting their position. And further, that someone else, who is sensitized to the existence of a faction of people who think that way, might then treat Roko’s statement as explicitly supporting that position, or defining him as a member of that fashion.
After all, in that person’s world, the “trophies” definition is more emotionally salient (albeit negative), and our brains are biased to retrieve the most emotional (especially negative) interpretations of current events… leading to it being as impossible for them to take seriously the idea that the comment was innocent, as it is for me to take seriously the idea that it was objectifying.
Hm. Interesting.
Interesting. I agree with you that the effects of statements are independent of the original speaker’s intentions. (At least in the sense of not being necessarily related; I would expect the two to be statistically dependent). For that reason I can easily accept that the comment was innocently intended, but at the same time think that such statements, in general, are not innocent in effect, and that they should ideally be reduced.
However, I don’t agree with this at all:
I wonder whether part of the reason is that I think that both the attitudes in question (e.g. “thinking of women as trophies”) and the means of their promotion can be (and probably are) less conscious than your analysis suggests. It seems perfectly possible to me that someone could both consciously affirm the proposition “women are not trophies”, and that they could nonetheless think about women in a way that bears problematic resemblance to the way they would think about trophies. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not intend to accuse anybody here of this.)
As a result, it also seems perfectly possible for language to promote thinking of women as trophies even if (a) individuals’ do not consciously interpret its meaning as affirming the proposition “women are trophies”, and/or (b) the individuals would consciously deny such a proposition themselves. I do think that the extent to which someone consciously believes “women are not trophies” should reduce any subconscious effect of this sort, but I see little reason to think that it must necessarily have no effect for that reason; and it’s not at all clear to me why the idea that women are trophies must already be in somebody’s head for such an effect to occur at all. In part from personal experience, it seems to me that the cumulative effect of language that normalizes particular patterns of thought can be quite strong.
NB: As a vaguely related aside, one thing that has struck me about many defenses made here of particular forms of language use is the extent to which they rely on claims about how reasonable people should consciously interpret a statement’s meaning. For a site that so frequently discusses issues of subconscious priming and bias, this focus has always struck me as a little odd.
Indeed, it’s the ‘Or’-paragraph in your comment.
I do agree with her that some of the posts went a bit overboard—in particular, the ones about manipulating people (‘jerkitude’). But, for example, Roko’s comment about ‘manipulation’ seemed benign—it seems to me that it’s used in the sense of ‘interaction’ rather than ‘trickery’.
But, as you suggest, I did not agree with the ‘objectification’-part, and I saw (albeit) tacit support for that in Elizier’s and Wei_Dai’s posts, as I have been trying to show.
I couldn’t see much difference from (with regards to their ‘objectification-value’) between:
and some of the comments about beggars—which jajvirta has already explained much better than I can.
Note, that my point is not that these comments are somehow inappropriate, but really that they are can be seen as similarly ‘objectifying’. And furthermore, that you can disagree with some of the comments, but you can do so on rationalist grounds, for example by challenging unsupported statements (esp. generalizations).
Thanks for persisting with me. I appreciate it!
Unfortunately I still don’t feel as though I’ve gotten an explanation of your position as much as another restatement of it. You seem to have just reiterated that you can’t see much difference between the cases, rather than actually explaining how they are relevantly similar.
I’ve tried to explain why I don’t see the comments about beggars and women as equivalent according to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of objectification. The discussion about beggars seemed to me to assume that beggars are people with interests, and that we are generally concerned to further those interests—the question was how best to do that. This stands in stark contrast to talk about “getting” women, which (I think) promotes thinking about them as prizes whose main value is their instrumental value to the men “getting” them.
This seems to me to provide a clear distinction between the two conversations. You seem to disagree, but I still can’t tell exactly why. Is it that:
you do not think the distinction I am drawing is tenable, either because: (a) you disagree that the sort of language Roko used tends to promote treating women as prizes of primarily instrumental value; or (b) you think the the discussion of begging did in fact neglect the fact that beggars have interests or tended to promote viewing them as objects without interests; or is it that
you think that my definition of objectification is wrong (or at least differs from that relied on by others, such as Alicorn), and that on the “correct” definition there is no difference between the two cases?
In order to try to make some progress here, could you perhaps tell me (a) which of these you believe, and (b) why you believe it? (Alternatively, if you don’t think any of these is the source of our disagreement, then perhaps you could let me know what you think the actual source is.)
Thanks!
ETA: I realise that you appear to state at the beginning of your previous comment that it’s 1(a), but the rest of your comment suggests to me that it might actually be something else, and in any event, I’m still not sure why you think 1(a) (if you do).
well, i think some of the posts about women were considered offensive because they discussed how you could ‘get’ them, or manipulate them with some tricks; then here i saw some somewhat generalizing comments here about beggars (some were written after my first post of course), about how they don’t necessarily want to work, have mental problems but, given the right incentives, might be pushed in the right direction—or the idea that you understand what they think. I felt that in a few posts, and that is why I wrote the comment in the first place.
Regarding my definition of objectification… I would say that it includes your definition, but has some more components, such as the assumption that people have no own opinion, that they lack self-determination and so on. I think the Wiki definition is pretty good. This is also what jajvirta referred to, I think.
Thus, my definition of objectification is a bit wider than the one you use; but I assume (maybe incorrectly) that it is the more common one.
But reading all over this—in can see now why my writing was confusing. Why was apparently pointing out cases of ‘objectification’ but also disagreed there was any problem. I think my point is there is a fine line between writing about people abstractly, in terms of wants and needs… and objectifying them. Some people were quite eager to point at that line in previous discussions. And I wondered where that fine line lied for beggars.
So, to answer your questions:
1a: while Roko’s language could may have been improved, I found there was not really a problem with it. But I can imagine people thinking differently. 1b: yes, it seemed to me that in some posts beggars were treated as an out-group of which you can make sweeping statements about what they think/do. See above.
my definition is a bit wider.
Hopefully this clears things up. I want to commend you for being so persistent and pointing unclarities etc. in my statements. This is really the rationalist spirit—and it sharpens my mind to make clearer statements.
Thanks again for bearing with me on this. I think I’ve now got a much clearer idea of where you’re coming from, and even if we don’t completely agree, I’m not sure we’re all that far apart.
Like you, I suspect that your definition of objectification is probably more common (although, to be honest, I suspect that many people do not have a clear definition in mind when they use the term). I prefer mine because I think it more clearly focuses in on what (from my perspective) is especially problematic: as you allude to, broadening the definition too much can sometimes make it difficult to talk abstractly about anything. (Though actually, I do think some of the begging-related statements that were made after your original comment were getting close to what I would consider problematic anyway.)
That said, it’s worth emphasising that I do not think that all instances of “objectification” (even in my narrower sense of the term) are necessarily problematic: whether they are or not still depends quite crucially on context. In that sense, I would agree with you that a rule against all objectification isn’t sensible. I do however, tend to think that (a) there are some contexts where it quite clearly is a problem; and (b) it’s something we should be careful about in general, even outside the clearly problematic contexts.
ah, great, it seems we have cleared things up. so part of the discussion was really about having a different definition of the term ‘objectification’. I should be more careful in defining such terms before using them...
now, about the ‘non-problematic’ use cases for the term… literally, the term is not necessarily negative at all of course, but maybe we should try to reserve it for negative cases. most of the cases (including most of the once in this discussion) are relatively benign, and i think people should not be too sensitive. And as I said before, things like prejudice and sweeping generalizations can be countered with mere rationalism and pointing to biases, without accusations of ‘objectification’ at all.
Thanks for persisting with me. I appreciate it! However, with all due respect, it seems to me that you’ve once again simply restated your position without explaining it. Sorry for not getting it! Saying “I couldn’t see much difference” doesn’t really explain your position.
I’ve tried to explain why I don’t see the comments about beggars and women as equivalent according to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of objectification. The discussion about beggars seemed to me to assume that beggars are people with interests, and that we are generally concerned to further those interests—the question was how best to do that. This stands in stark contrast to talk about “getting” women, which (I think) promotes thinking about them as prizes whose main value is their instrumental value to the men “getting” them.
This seems to me to provide a clear distinction between the two conversations. Given this, I can see a few possible sources of our disagreement:
You do not think the distinction I am drawing is tenable, either because: (a) you disagree that the sort of language Roko used tends to promote treating women as prizes of primarily instrumental value; (b) you think the the discussion of begging did in fact neglect the fact that beggars have interests or tended to promote viewing them as objects without interests; or
You think that my definition of objectification is wrong (or at least differs from that relied on by others, such as Alicorn), and that on the “correct” definition there is no difference between the two cases.
Could you perhaps tell me (a) which of these you believe, and (b) why you believe it? (Alternatively, if you don’t think any of these is the source of our disagreement, then perhaps you could let me know what you think the actual source is.)
Unfortunately, we seem to be coming from quite different places here, so I still don’t understand why you think this. Could you please try to explain? I don’t mean to be belligerent, but from my perspective it seems as though you’re just repeatedly restating your conclusion, when what I need to understand are your reasons for reaching that conclusion.
FWIW, my take on what constitutes “objectification” can be found here: I think it corresponds roughly to treating other people as means to an end, without regard for their interests.* I did not notice anything in the discussion of begging that appeared to do this (though jajvirta raised a legitimate concern). Do you think I’ve missed something in the discussion here?
Or is it rather that you don’t think the behaviour Alicorn originally objected to was objectifying in this sense?
* As noted here I do not think that objectification in this sense is always and everywhere problematic. Whether it is or not also depends on context.
To be fair, it’s not inconceivable that a homeless person could be reading Less Wrong—internet access in public libraries is pretty common these days, for instance.
Probably not likely, though.
I’ve been homeless twice while a student, and often slept in computer rooms.
(This is somewhat tangential to your actual comment so don’t look on this like it’s a counter-argument.)
This idea of using incentives to guide their behavior is to impose our value system on them. It’s one thing to say that you don’t want to help these people at all, but to actually try to use the power (through money) to influence the way these people live their lives is morally not justified. Just because we have the power, doesn’t mean we have the moral right to say how each of these individuals should live their lives.
Of course, we do impose our value systems in using our money in other circumstances too, but in this context we have a really unbalanced relationship where the other side typically doesn’t have this particular power at all and those considering helping have loads.
If you are concretely deciding whether or not to give money to someone begging and you base the decision on what the person is going to spend the money on, you are using your power in this context to try to dictate how the other person lives his/her life. What if the thing he most needs right now is to buy a pack of cigarettes or get drunk or whatever? What gives you the right the impose your values on the person?
All credit to Aaron Swartz.
This is a valid question, but I think you also need to allow the possibility that these things are not what the beggar most needs right now. Not all attempts to substitute one’s own decisions for someone else’s involve “impos[ing] your values on the person.” Sometimes people make decisions that do not further their own values, and in such cases, I think it is morally justified to try to respect their values rather than just their choices. Not to say that this is easy, and that we shouldn’t be incredibly wary of the possibility that we’re actually just projecting our own values on others. But claiming that others’ decisions are morally inviolable seems like an overreaction to me (albeit one that is founded in a legitimate concern).
It’s worth noting that a non-trivial percentage of homeless individuals are considered mentally ill, which generally means that society has, for better or worse, deemed them systematically incapable of making appropriate choices.
A lot of the homelessness problem in the USA came about from the big deinstitutionalization push in the 60s that… didn’t really work as intended. Policy on homelessness since then has mostly been built around “make them go somewhere else”.
I am uneasy with that sentiment although I’m having a hard time putting my finger one exactly why. But this is how I see it: there are vastly more people in the world than I could possibly ever help and some of them are so poor and downtrodden that they spend most of their money on food since they can’t afford luxuries such as drugs. Eventually, I might give money to the drug user if I had solved all the other problems first, but I would prefer my money to be spent on something more essential for survival first before I turn to subsidizing people’s luxury spending.
Imposing my values on somebody seems to more aptly describe a situation where I use authority to compel the drug user to not use drugs.
This position conflicts with consequentialist ethics.
Situation 1: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because this way my money brings more expected benefit to the beggar: it might help this particular one to bounce back, whereas with a crack addict there’s almost no chance.
Situation 2: I give money to those beggars who are more likely to buy bread than drugs, because I enjoy the power rush of controlling other people like the controlling father that tried to control Aaron Swartz with his controlling money.
The net result is the same, only the thoughts differ. Discriminating between the two situations sounds like deontological ethics. It works okay on the small scale but breaks down very quickly when the stakes rise and you realize that the universe doesn’t care about your personal hangups.