Everyone has been treated badly by members of a different group at some point in their life, and responsible adults are expected to get over it and get on with things.
This may be the way now, but it doesn’t have to be the way always. Max Hastings, my favourite WW2 historian, says in his All Hell Let Loose:
One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own circumstances. The fact that, objectively and statistically, the sufferings of some individuals were less terrible than those of others elsewhere in the world was meaningless to those concerned. It would have seemed monstrous to a British or American soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many times greater. It would have been insulting to invite a hungry Frenchman, or even an English housewife weary of the monotony of rations, to consider that in besieged Leningrad starving people were eating each other, while in West Bengal they were selling their daughters. Few people who endured the Luftwaffe’s 1940–41 blitz on London would have been comforted by knowledge that the German and Japanese peoples would later face losses from Allied bombing many times greater, together with unparalleled devastation. It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants.
In other words, a boy being bullied at school or a girl shrinking in disgust and fear from a drunken man’s cat-call do experience suffering and negative emotion on their own scale of awfulness—and the fact that millions of people in the 3rd world have it much worse “objectively” doesn’t take away from the trauma of a “minor” incident in a happier life.
Of course, the objectively worse suffering in the 3rd world should be dealt with as a higher priority. But this doesn’t mean that, given a choice of spending a bit of resources and attention on relief from such “minor” evils (at a low enough alternative cost), we should tell their victims: “Stop whining, we don’t care.”
If we stop aspiring to treat every individual according to our ideals—as sacred, an end in themselves—then there’s no Schelling point to stop at; we might as well come to some absurd hedonic utilitarianism, painting smiles on souls, or overwriting people’s brains with a simple utility function, or such! Did you, perchance, choose specks on torture vs. specks? If you did, please think and reflect hard before discounting “minor” oppression.
Another angle on context: when I was a kid, I read a book by a holocaust survivor. Towards the end, she wrote about her current situation, which included being worried about heart disease.
I remember being surprised, and then realizing that I’d assumed that if you’d been through the holocaust, nothing much smaller could frighten you, and that my assumption was wrong.
The problem with this seemingly high-minded ideal is that every intervention has a cost, and they add up quickly. When oppression is blatant, violent and extreme it’s relatively easy to identify, the benefits of mitigating it are large, and the cost to society is low. But when the ‘oppression’ is subtle and weak, consisting primarily of personal conversations or even private thoughts of individuals, the reverse is true. You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one’s accusers—and even then, success is unlikely.
Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree. As you noted yourself, individuals tend to rate the trauma of an unpleasant incident relative to their own experiences. So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn’t do any good. Each generation feels that they’re as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the ‘victim’ group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.
So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn’t do any good. Each generation feels that they’re as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the ‘victim’ group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.
Do you seriously think that proves we shouldn’t try to stop what we asses to be “oppression”? Diminishing returns do not equal zero returns.
You either missed the point of the grandparent, or are missing some of the prerequisite concepts needed to think clearly about this subject, it seems to me.
I’m quite certain that Multiheaded is well aware of the law of diminishing returns and its implications, and has a fairly good grasp of how to do expected utility evaluations. Everything else you said in your post was, AFAICT, already all stated or implied by the grandparent, except:
Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree.
I find this claim dubious. I consider myself a victim of the oppressive historical patriarchy and dominance of gender-typing, and yet I’m fully satisfied with the current, ongoing efforts and measures that people all around the world are doing to fix it, as well as my own personal involvement and the efforts of my close circles.
You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one’s accusers—and even then, success is unlikely.
Those are not particularly convincing examples of Good Principles that we’d want to have in an ideal society that we should aspire towards. My own brain is screeching at the first three in particular, and finds the named legal principles crude and unrefined when compared to other ideals to aspire to.
You don’t think freedom of speech, religion and association are important things for a society to defend? Well, in that case we don’t have much to talk about.
I will, however, suggest that you might do well to spend some time thinking about what your ideal society will be like after the principle that society (i.e. government) can dictate what people say, think and do to promote the social cause of the day becomes firmly entrenched. Do you really think your personal ideology will retain control of the government forever? What happens if a political group with views you oppose gets in power?
I will, however, suggest that you might do well to spend some time thinking about what your ideal society will be like after the principle that society (i.e. government) can dictate what people say, think and do to promote the social cause of the day becomes firmly entrenched. Do you really think your personal ideology will retain control of the government forever? What happens if a political group with views you oppose gets in power?
False dilemma. You’re also strawmanning my argument.
Freedom of religion is trivially equivalent to freedom of anti-epistemology. According to everything we know, it is extremely likely that only one set of beliefs can be true, and if so, there are clearly some that have more evidence supporting them. As such, “freedom to choose” which one set to believe is irrational and somewhat equivalent to trusting word-of-mouth rumours that fire does not harm you when you are naked.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association, in their current incarnations, are similarly problematic, though not as obviously so.
Absolute enforcement of these three freedoms is not required to avoid the failure modes of society that you enumerate, and I never mentioned that said ideal society would even remotely look like what’s contained withing your (apparently very tiny) hypothesis space of possible societies, let alone that my ideology would be the Rule of Law or that this society would even be composed of humans as we know them with all their flawed brains and flimsy squishy bits that give up and die way too fast.
In fairness, the claim that removing these freedoms is extremely dangerous isn’t the same as the claim that no conceivable society could function without them.
You may now continue with your regularly scheduled being right.
Each generation feels that they’re as oppressed as the one before
That has not been my impression. Some advocates might think things are as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I’m not aware of anyone with influence who thinks things are as bad as 50 years ago. Or any advocate at all who thinks no improvement has happened in the last 500 years.
His assertion is that if you scanned the brain of a victim 50 or 500 years ago you’d find the same amount of subjective “oppressed feeling” as scanning a modern victim, i.e., that people have an “oppression set point” similar to the happiness set point.
Well, 500 years ago there was plenty of brutal physical oppression going on, and I’d expect that kind of thing to have lots of other negative effects on top of the first-order emotional reactions of the victims.
But I would claim that if you did a big brain-scan survey of, say, Western women from 1970 to the present, you’d see very little correlation between their subjective feeling of oppression and their actual treatment in society.
He does have influence, but I don’t read that as saying things are as bad as they were in the 1950s. He’s pointing out that a lot of the power structure of the Confederacy is still around, to the point that imagining if the Confederates had won is less different from now than many folks ignorant of history believe.
Ta-Nehisi has written very pointedly about DT’s victory, but even then I don’t read him as saying things are the same as 50 years ago. Factually, I don’t see how anyone could claim that. Leading protest in 1950-1960s was literally life threatening. Blessedly, that doesn’t seem to be true in the present.
This may be the way now, but it doesn’t have to be the way always. Max Hastings, my favourite WW2 historian, says in his All Hell Let Loose:
In other words, a boy being bullied at school or a girl shrinking in disgust and fear from a drunken man’s cat-call do experience suffering and negative emotion on their own scale of awfulness—and the fact that millions of people in the 3rd world have it much worse “objectively” doesn’t take away from the trauma of a “minor” incident in a happier life.
Of course, the objectively worse suffering in the 3rd world should be dealt with as a higher priority. But this doesn’t mean that, given a choice of spending a bit of resources and attention on relief from such “minor” evils (at a low enough alternative cost), we should tell their victims: “Stop whining, we don’t care.”
If we stop aspiring to treat every individual according to our ideals—as sacred, an end in themselves—then there’s no Schelling point to stop at; we might as well come to some absurd hedonic utilitarianism, painting smiles on souls, or overwriting people’s brains with a simple utility function, or such! Did you, perchance, choose specks on torture vs. specks? If you did, please think and reflect hard before discounting “minor” oppression.
Another angle on context: when I was a kid, I read a book by a holocaust survivor. Towards the end, she wrote about her current situation, which included being worried about heart disease.
I remember being surprised, and then realizing that I’d assumed that if you’d been through the holocaust, nothing much smaller could frighten you, and that my assumption was wrong.
The problem with this seemingly high-minded ideal is that every intervention has a cost, and they add up quickly. When oppression is blatant, violent and extreme it’s relatively easy to identify, the benefits of mitigating it are large, and the cost to society is low. But when the ‘oppression’ is subtle and weak, consisting primarily of personal conversations or even private thoughts of individuals, the reverse is true. You find yourself restricting freedom of speech, religion and association, creating an expanding maze of ever-more-draconian laws governing every aspect of life, throwing out core legal principles like innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront one’s accusers—and even then, success is unlikely.
Another important factor is the fact that those who consider themselves victims will never be satisfied, and indeed this whole campaign in their name quickly ceases to improve their lives to any measurable degree. As you noted yourself, individuals tend to rate the trauma of an unpleasant incident relative to their own experiences. So once you stamp out the big, easily measured objective forms of oppression, you find yourself on a treadmill where working harder and harder to suppress the little stuff doesn’t do any good. Each generation feels that they’re as oppressed as the one before, even if objectively things have changed dramatically in their favor. The only way off the treadmill is for the ‘victim’ group to stop viewing every experience through the lens of imagined oppression.
Do you seriously think that proves we shouldn’t try to stop what we asses to be “oppression”? Diminishing returns do not equal zero returns.
You either missed the point of the grandparent, or are missing some of the prerequisite concepts needed to think clearly about this subject, it seems to me.
I’m quite certain that Multiheaded is well aware of the law of diminishing returns and its implications, and has a fairly good grasp of how to do expected utility evaluations. Everything else you said in your post was, AFAICT, already all stated or implied by the grandparent, except:
I find this claim dubious. I consider myself a victim of the oppressive historical patriarchy and dominance of gender-typing, and yet I’m fully satisfied with the current, ongoing efforts and measures that people all around the world are doing to fix it, as well as my own personal involvement and the efforts of my close circles.
Those are not particularly convincing examples of Good Principles that we’d want to have in an ideal society that we should aspire towards. My own brain is screeching at the first three in particular, and finds the named legal principles crude and unrefined when compared to other ideals to aspire to.
You don’t think freedom of speech, religion and association are important things for a society to defend? Well, in that case we don’t have much to talk about.
I will, however, suggest that you might do well to spend some time thinking about what your ideal society will be like after the principle that society (i.e. government) can dictate what people say, think and do to promote the social cause of the day becomes firmly entrenched. Do you really think your personal ideology will retain control of the government forever? What happens if a political group with views you oppose gets in power?
False dilemma. You’re also strawmanning my argument.
Freedom of religion is trivially equivalent to freedom of anti-epistemology. According to everything we know, it is extremely likely that only one set of beliefs can be true, and if so, there are clearly some that have more evidence supporting them. As such, “freedom to choose” which one set to believe is irrational and somewhat equivalent to trusting word-of-mouth rumours that fire does not harm you when you are naked.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association, in their current incarnations, are similarly problematic, though not as obviously so.
Absolute enforcement of these three freedoms is not required to avoid the failure modes of society that you enumerate, and I never mentioned that said ideal society would even remotely look like what’s contained withing your (apparently very tiny) hypothesis space of possible societies, let alone that my ideology would be the Rule of Law or that this society would even be composed of humans as we know them with all their flawed brains and flimsy squishy bits that give up and die way too fast.
In fairness, the claim that removing these freedoms is extremely dangerous isn’t the same as the claim that no conceivable society could function without them.
You may now continue with your regularly scheduled being right.
That has not been my impression. Some advocates might think things are as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I’m not aware of anyone with influence who thinks things are as bad as 50 years ago. Or any advocate at all who thinks no improvement has happened in the last 500 years.
That wasn’t ewbrownv’s assertion.
His assertion is that if you scanned the brain of a victim 50 or 500 years ago you’d find the same amount of subjective “oppressed feeling” as scanning a modern victim, i.e., that people have an “oppression set point” similar to the happiness set point.
Well, 500 years ago there was plenty of brutal physical oppression going on, and I’d expect that kind of thing to have lots of other negative effects on top of the first-order emotional reactions of the victims.
But I would claim that if you did a big brain-scan survey of, say, Western women from 1970 to the present, you’d see very little correlation between their subjective feeling of oppression and their actual treatment in society.
Interesting to read this shortly after this. Does Ta-Nehisi Coates have “influence”?
He does have influence, but I don’t read that as saying things are as bad as they were in the 1950s. He’s pointing out that a lot of the power structure of the Confederacy is still around, to the point that imagining if the Confederates had won is less different from now than many folks ignorant of history believe.
Ta-Nehisi has written very pointedly about DT’s victory, but even then I don’t read him as saying things are the same as 50 years ago. Factually, I don’t see how anyone could claim that. Leading protest in 1950-1960s was literally life threatening. Blessedly, that doesn’t seem to be true in the present.