As always there’s a bias against anything that might be considered to give aid and succour to the enemy. Since the time of Hitler, there’s therefore a politically motivated bias in favor of egalitarianism, in all its forms, and against the strong linking of aptitudes, especially mental aptitudes, to genetics. And especially when statistically linked to politically relevant groups and politically relevant aptitudes. E.g nobody cares that Irish have red hair more commonly than Greeks, but to link average IQ and racial groups causes political shitstorms.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
I don’t think it’s useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic. Even if the whole class of biases you describe were absent, there would still be plenty of questions where (in my opinion, at least) a consistent skeptic would have to take up issue with the consensus of the academic institutions. (By “consensus” I also mean situations where there exist significant disagreements within the academic mainstream, but all the positions acceptable within the respectable mainstream share some underlying assumptions, which it is not possible to dispute without consigning oneself to an unacceptable contrarian status.)
In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren’t particularly scandalous, and one doesn’t have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them. (Unless one aims for an academic career in a field under direct bureaucratic control by the purveyors of the disputed official truth, of course.) The problem is that contrarian statements tend to sound just laughably wacky, like the rants of a physics crackpot, unless one accompanies them with lengthy and careful arguments in order to bridge the inferential distances. (And finds an audience willing to give them a fair hearing instead of just laughing them off, of course.) This is often just too time-consuming, and possibly also too demanding on one’s interlocutors.
However, the existence of such topics is, in my opinion, particularly damning for the selective skeptics of the sort I’ve been criticizing. Here they don’t even have the excuse that contrarian opinions would be too offensive and inflammatory to bring up. Their silence betrays either complete lack of critical thinking about such topics or the unwillingness to take even a minor status hit by dissenting from the highest-status purveyors of respectable opinion—in any case making their self-designation farcical.
For example, in economics and in all kinds of fields related to health and lifestyle, there are many issues where the academic mainstream appears to be seriously detached from reality, and the falsities and delusions purveyed by it cause very real damage in practice. Attacking these is unlikely to be dangerous, but it will put you in a position where you’re presumed to be a crackpot until proven otherwise (and likely even after that), since the word of the accredited experts is against you.
Now, if some people speak up against one sort of delusion and falsity, I certainly don’t think that they are obliged to speak against all of them. However, if there is mass gathering where purported skeptics and free-thinkers assemble to discuss a broad agenda of topics where, according to them, skeptics must speak up because dangerous delusions and falsities are rampant, then their choice of included and omitted topics sends a message by itself.
I don’t think it’s useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic.
It does not seem to make much difference, whether examples are charged or uncharged: When I give, as an example, the seemingly uncharged mechanisms of speciation, the reaction is every bit as hostile, as when I give, as an example, the obviously highly charged female incapacity in science and maths.
People are happy with your criticism of academia in the abstract—but are unhappy with any particular example whatsoever. Indeed if there was a particular example that they were not unhappy with, then it would not be an example. Academia would be able to handle it OK.
Certain elsewhere controversial criticisms of academia are ok here sam, if one sticks to LW standards. Let me demonstrate, by what would be in many less reasonable place cause a blow up, even though its pretty obvious to be true:
Academia is biased against hereditary explanation of group differences.
While I will refuse to speculate on how good the hereditarian explanation is in this thread (anyone reading my comment history can figure out where I stand on that), I don’t think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
But, you are obviously right in the sense of many more LWers thinking they are open minded to such criticism than they actually are. Despite your previous perceived norm violations, note that this particular comment isn’t downvoted below −1, despite basically Eliezer Yudkowsky himself branding you generally a troll or disruptive element. I’m actually quite sure the exact same post made by someone else would be in the +1 to +4 range.
I don’t think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
In which post you piously denied all the differences that allegedly make women different and superior.
But since women are in fact superior in certain ways (though not those listed), your post was politically correctness in the face of reality.
Let us suppose you instead had listed the ways that women really are inferior, or merely genuinely different. Then you would have been downvoted to oblivion
For example you piously denied that women are better mothers than men are fathers. How very PC of you
Suppose you had instead said, that men are bad mothers and women are bad fathers, that boys without a natural father are apt to become petty thugs, no matter how much mothering they get, and girls without a natural father are apt to become whores, that it takes a intact marriage to raise a child, you would have been downvoted.
Had you said that women drivers disproportionately cause deadly accidents despite their disproportionately slower, more sober, and more cautious driving, that women have difficulty reading maps and parking cars, that everyone, male or female, hates female bosses in the workplace, you would have been downvoted into utter oblivion.
Tell me, what makes those statements contrary to LW standards while asserting that men are as good at fathering as women are at mothering is OK?
It is true that it is now safe to challenge many of the politically correct beliefs about women that first appeared in Victorian times—but in your post you only challenged those Victorian beliefs that are now safe to challenge. That there is nothing wrong with bastards, and that women are equally capable in many fields where they are obviously not equally capable is Victorian PC, and to challenge that Victorian PC is now even more dangerous than it was in Victorian times.
Although Victorians, unlike moderns, did not suggest that women were equally good at being lumberjacks and firemen and should be equally engaged in competitive team sports, they did, like moderns, pressure people to pretend to believe that women were equally good at being bosses, scientists, musical composers, and mathematicians, and that fatherhood is unimportant.
And, as I recently remarked, some of the 219 censured theses are still censured, or perhaps have been re-censured.
Tell me, what makes those statements contrary to LW standards?
Being unnecessarily mean perhaps?
Let me try and quickly restate them:
Boys without a father figure raising them have higher rates of delinquency
Girls raised without a father figure tend to have more sexual partners and higher divorce rates
Children raised in intact marriages have better life outcomes in a wide variety of measurable ways
Women drivers while more careful drivers and having fewer accidents, cause more accidents with lethal outcomes
Female superiors in nearly all types of organizations are generally more disliked than male superiors.
We’ll see if taking away the meanness makes them discussable or not on LW. Not claiming one can do so without controversy obviously, but I’m pretty sure I can discuss all of those in appropriate threads without getting down voted to oblivion.
Have no problems believing the first three, though I’d like to see the different correlations between widows/divorcees/never-married/lesbian couples and the levels of deliquency/promiscuity in the children; not just a generic “lack of father figure”, but the reason for the lack of father figure.
The sentence about women drivers seems the exact opposite than reality, if my half-minute of googling on statistical studies on the subject led me right—That link says statistically women have more accidents, but male drivers are the ones who are associated more with fatalities and the more serious accidents.
As for gender-likeability in bosses; I’d like to see the studies for that one too. And in what cultures they were taken. If I had to guess I’d guess that women in Iran would fare differently (and worse) than Texas which in turn would fare differently (and worse) than Sweden: that’s my prediction on the subject.
Since, in the ancestral environment, women were seldom bosses, whereas that minority of males that became ancestors frequently became ancestors because they were successful bosses, it is unsurprising that men are
inherently better adapted to it by a very large margin, a margin that is as large and obvious as the difference in upper body strength, or possibly larger.
To argue that women bosses are on average equally likeable as bosses, is like arguing that women are on average as strong as men. It is just nuts.
To argue that women bosses are on average equally likeable as bosses
Nobody here argued that, as far as I can tell. What you seem to find offensive is the prediction that female bosses may be more likeable in Sweden than in Texas.
As for the evolutionary argument, even if I acknowledged modern-day bosses of capitalist companies to be the equivalent of the sword-swinging warlords and kings, it doesn’t explain to me why Queen Elizabeth is seen as so much more likeable than Prince Charles, and in an informal poll I just found here it doesn’t explain why four out of five favourite monarchs from everyone seem to be female.
Evolutionary arguments often merely have the shape of a justification, but in reality they’re like snakes that you can twist them any old way to plug into any bottomline one seeks. After all one could just as well argue that male bosses could use physical strength and intimidation to frighten opponents, but his consorts needed to be well liked in order to have favorite position to produce the heirs—so likeability goes to women, and physical strength goes to men. Evolutionary arguments are often of very little use.
I wish to emphasise I didn’t mean to imply I agree with all of the statements or think they are likley to be true. I just rephrased them to reduce unnecessary meanness and demonstrated they can be discussed in the usual LW way.
But since women are in fact superior in certain ways (though not those listed), your post was politically correctness in the face of reality.
blinks
Okaaay. You do realize I was responding to:
Many modern PC beliefs about women first showed up in Victorian times, which beliefs were I to mention them would be get me as down voted now as much as they would get a Victorian gentlemen in trouble.
Right? I wasn’t trying to optimize the post to be PC, I was just challenging a specific claim you made. Can you agree that claim basically wasn’t true (I’m not talking about your recent point, just the quote above)?
Let us suppose you instead had listed the ways that women are inferior, or merely genuinely different.
Women have a different distribution of abilities and personalties, much of which is caused by differences that have their roots in biology. I talk about such differences all the time!
Remember it was me opening the discussion about how female hypergamy matters when thinking about the sexual marketplace in the polyamory thread.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
Aaaaaaaaaaand because espousing such a belief probably means you are “the enemy”, that you’re a reasonable person who came to the same conclusion (and didn’t have the sense to introduce it in a more effective way) is probably much less likely.
By correlating X with Y (where e.g. X=race and Y=average intelligence), other people end up correlating “People who correlate X with Y” with Z (Z=people who are evil racist bastards).
That’s a proper correlation, but it’s still a epistemological bias to prejudice against the idea, just because the speakers of that idea are often evil.
As always there’s a bias against anything that might be considered to give aid and succour to the enemy. Since the time of Hitler, there’s therefore a politically motivated bias in favor of egalitarianism, in all its forms, and against the strong linking of aptitudes, especially mental aptitudes, to genetics. And especially when statistically linked to politically relevant groups and politically relevant aptitudes. E.g nobody cares that Irish have red hair more commonly than Greeks, but to link average IQ and racial groups causes political shitstorms.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
I don’t think it’s useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic. Even if the whole class of biases you describe were absent, there would still be plenty of questions where (in my opinion, at least) a consistent skeptic would have to take up issue with the consensus of the academic institutions. (By “consensus” I also mean situations where there exist significant disagreements within the academic mainstream, but all the positions acceptable within the respectable mainstream share some underlying assumptions, which it is not possible to dispute without consigning oneself to an unacceptable contrarian status.)
In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren’t particularly scandalous, and one doesn’t have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them. (Unless one aims for an academic career in a field under direct bureaucratic control by the purveyors of the disputed official truth, of course.) The problem is that contrarian statements tend to sound just laughably wacky, like the rants of a physics crackpot, unless one accompanies them with lengthy and careful arguments in order to bridge the inferential distances. (And finds an audience willing to give them a fair hearing instead of just laughing them off, of course.) This is often just too time-consuming, and possibly also too demanding on one’s interlocutors.
However, the existence of such topics is, in my opinion, particularly damning for the selective skeptics of the sort I’ve been criticizing. Here they don’t even have the excuse that contrarian opinions would be too offensive and inflammatory to bring up. Their silence betrays either complete lack of critical thinking about such topics or the unwillingness to take even a minor status hit by dissenting from the highest-status purveyors of respectable opinion—in any case making their self-designation farcical.
I didn’t choose it for being charged, I chose it for being the clearest and simplest example IMO.
In contrast, I read your three paragraphs above, and I don’t know what in the name of Cthulhu you’re actually talking about.
Can you name one or two, then?
For example, in economics and in all kinds of fields related to health and lifestyle, there are many issues where the academic mainstream appears to be seriously detached from reality, and the falsities and delusions purveyed by it cause very real damage in practice. Attacking these is unlikely to be dangerous, but it will put you in a position where you’re presumed to be a crackpot until proven otherwise (and likely even after that), since the word of the accredited experts is against you.
Now, if some people speak up against one sort of delusion and falsity, I certainly don’t think that they are obliged to speak against all of them. However, if there is mass gathering where purported skeptics and free-thinkers assemble to discuss a broad agenda of topics where, according to them, skeptics must speak up because dangerous delusions and falsities are rampant, then their choice of included and omitted topics sends a message by itself.
It does not seem to make much difference, whether examples are charged or uncharged: When I give, as an example, the seemingly uncharged mechanisms of speciation, the reaction is every bit as hostile, as when I give, as an example, the obviously highly charged female incapacity in science and maths.
People are happy with your criticism of academia in the abstract—but are unhappy with any particular example whatsoever. Indeed if there was a particular example that they were not unhappy with, then it would not be an example. Academia would be able to handle it OK.
Certain elsewhere controversial criticisms of academia are ok here sam, if one sticks to LW standards. Let me demonstrate, by what would be in many less reasonable place cause a blow up, even though its pretty obvious to be true:
Academia is biased against hereditary explanation of group differences.
While I will refuse to speculate on how good the hereditarian explanation is in this thread (anyone reading my comment history can figure out where I stand on that), I don’t think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
But, you are obviously right in the sense of many more LWers thinking they are open minded to such criticism than they actually are. Despite your previous perceived norm violations, note that this particular comment isn’t downvoted below −1, despite basically Eliezer Yudkowsky himself branding you generally a troll or disruptive element. I’m actually quite sure the exact same post made by someone else would be in the +1 to +4 range.
In which post you piously denied all the differences that allegedly make women different and superior.
But since women are in fact superior in certain ways (though not those listed), your post was politically correctness in the face of reality.
Let us suppose you instead had listed the ways that women really are inferior, or merely genuinely different. Then you would have been downvoted to oblivion
For example you piously denied that women are better mothers than men are fathers. How very PC of you
Suppose you had instead said, that men are bad mothers and women are bad fathers, that boys without a natural father are apt to become petty thugs, no matter how much mothering they get, and girls without a natural father are apt to become whores, that it takes a intact marriage to raise a child, you would have been downvoted.
Had you said that women drivers disproportionately cause deadly accidents despite their disproportionately slower, more sober, and more cautious driving, that women have difficulty reading maps and parking cars, that everyone, male or female, hates female bosses in the workplace, you would have been downvoted into utter oblivion.
Tell me, what makes those statements contrary to LW standards while asserting that men are as good at fathering as women are at mothering is OK?
It is true that it is now safe to challenge many of the politically correct beliefs about women that first appeared in Victorian times—but in your post you only challenged those Victorian beliefs that are now safe to challenge. That there is nothing wrong with bastards, and that women are equally capable in many fields where they are obviously not equally capable is Victorian PC, and to challenge that Victorian PC is now even more dangerous than it was in Victorian times.
Although Victorians, unlike moderns, did not suggest that women were equally good at being lumberjacks and firemen and should be equally engaged in competitive team sports, they did, like moderns, pressure people to pretend to believe that women were equally good at being bosses, scientists, musical composers, and mathematicians, and that fatherhood is unimportant.
And, as I recently remarked, some of the 219 censured theses are still censured, or perhaps have been re-censured.
Being unnecessarily mean perhaps?
Let me try and quickly restate them:
Boys without a father figure raising them have higher rates of delinquency
Girls raised without a father figure tend to have more sexual partners and higher divorce rates
Children raised in intact marriages have better life outcomes in a wide variety of measurable ways
Women drivers while more careful drivers and having fewer accidents, cause more accidents with lethal outcomes
Female superiors in nearly all types of organizations are generally more disliked than male superiors.
We’ll see if taking away the meanness makes them discussable or not on LW. Not claiming one can do so without controversy obviously, but I’m pretty sure I can discuss all of those in appropriate threads without getting down voted to oblivion.
Have no problems believing the first three, though I’d like to see the different correlations between widows/divorcees/never-married/lesbian couples and the levels of deliquency/promiscuity in the children; not just a generic “lack of father figure”, but the reason for the lack of father figure.
The sentence about women drivers seems the exact opposite than reality, if my half-minute of googling on statistical studies on the subject led me right—That link says statistically women have more accidents, but male drivers are the ones who are associated more with fatalities and the more serious accidents.
As for gender-likeability in bosses; I’d like to see the studies for that one too. And in what cultures they were taken. If I had to guess I’d guess that women in Iran would fare differently (and worse) than Texas which in turn would fare differently (and worse) than Sweden: that’s my prediction on the subject.
You would like to see Harvard bless a fact that runs contrary to Harvard doctrine? You will have a long wait.
Yet the fact is evident, so evident that to make a study would be as ludicrous as a study to confirm that women have less upper body strength. There is, however, a study which reports, not that female bosses are less likeable, but that every single person surveyed is so horribly sexist, racist, stupid, and nasty, that they do not like female bosses
Since, in the ancestral environment, women were seldom bosses, whereas that minority of males that became ancestors frequently became ancestors because they were successful bosses, it is unsurprising that men are inherently better adapted to it by a very large margin, a margin that is as large and obvious as the difference in upper body strength, or possibly larger.
To argue that women bosses are on average equally likeable as bosses, is like arguing that women are on average as strong as men. It is just nuts.
Nobody here argued that, as far as I can tell. What you seem to find offensive is the prediction that female bosses may be more likeable in Sweden than in Texas.
As for the evolutionary argument, even if I acknowledged modern-day bosses of capitalist companies to be the equivalent of the sword-swinging warlords and kings, it doesn’t explain to me why Queen Elizabeth is seen as so much more likeable than Prince Charles, and in an informal poll I just found here it doesn’t explain why four out of five favourite monarchs from everyone seem to be female.
Evolutionary arguments often merely have the shape of a justification, but in reality they’re like snakes that you can twist them any old way to plug into any bottomline one seeks. After all one could just as well argue that male bosses could use physical strength and intimidation to frighten opponents, but his consorts needed to be well liked in order to have favorite position to produce the heirs—so likeability goes to women, and physical strength goes to men. Evolutionary arguments are often of very little use.
I wish to emphasise I didn’t mean to imply I agree with all of the statements or think they are likley to be true. I just rephrased them to reduce unnecessary meanness and demonstrated they can be discussed in the usual LW way.
Thanks, on my part at least I understood that.
blinks
Okaaay. You do realize I was responding to:
Right? I wasn’t trying to optimize the post to be PC, I was just challenging a specific claim you made. Can you agree that claim basically wasn’t true (I’m not talking about your recent point, just the quote above)?
Women have a different distribution of abilities and personalties, much of which is caused by differences that have their roots in biology. I talk about such differences all the time!
Remember it was me opening the discussion about how female hypergamy matters when thinking about the sexual marketplace in the polyamory thread.
Aaaaaaaaaaand because espousing such a belief probably means you are “the enemy”, that you’re a reasonable person who came to the same conclusion (and didn’t have the sense to introduce it in a more effective way) is probably much less likely.
That’s pretty much the same point I made in a different thread
By correlating X with Y (where e.g. X=race and Y=average intelligence), other people end up correlating “People who correlate X with Y” with Z (Z=people who are evil racist bastards).
That’s a proper correlation, but it’s still a epistemological bias to prejudice against the idea, just because the speakers of that idea are often evil.
Well said!