I’m not going to spend much effort in the comment section here because my activity will only empower the ideological dynamic at work. I refuse to engage in a losing strategy. Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn’t a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean. While I hold some right wing positions I’m not talking about mainstream Conservatism here but conservatism towards the LessWrong culture and ethos as I knew them. Even this comment is likely a mistake but I just can’t keep quiet on this because of internal anguish.
It is not the opening material that bother me so bitterly, since I found that it had interesting examples of experience to share. Gathering and posting it also seemed a good idea to me in my optimism some weeks ago. The comment section however… I disagreed about it being too nitpicky, but now I wonder if I was wrong. I think some are plain avoiding attacking the fundamental assumptions, in a way similar to how I’m about to briefly do, in order to avoid the gender drama LW is infamous for. If so the game is already over.
The personal experiences shared basically give examples of “privilege” and “microaggressions”. That is, relatively small but pervasive uncomfortable or inconvenient defaults and related status moves which one notices from time to time. People with low social awareness don’t see when they occur to them, so hearing them described explicitly they go “wow this is horrible, how X group suffers”. The voting shows systematic appreciation for a male posture of “protecting women”. This posture does little good for women, much like like signalling how much you hate child molesters does the opposite of helping child abuse victims.*
For nearly anyone not living hermit’s life experiences like these are common, but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our public attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering, but on the most viable political coalitions. And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features—not bugs—of how social apes work. Ah, but this kind of observation violatessacred norms that prevail in our society. Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I’ve read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I’ve asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it’s not obvious to me that it’s impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn’t identical to the same total ill effect.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I’m very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like.
This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they’ve dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I’m aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.
Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.
Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I’m aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.
That’s a reasonable point—but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don’t have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
That’s probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan.
Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I’m not sure we’ve really hit that point that substantially.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like.
I’m not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don’t have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I’d consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help—but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don’t seem to have that, either. Humans just aren’t automatically strategic.
My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail—it felt like being on the receiving end of “I can’t explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I’m going to keep attacking until I feel better”.
This does not mean they were totally in the wrong—one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers—abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
This sounds like “I wouldn’t use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur.” Would you agree with that restatement?
Fair enough, yes. My use of the word obligation tends to revolve strictly around the personal, so I can see why you’d prefer this version if you use the word in the more typical sense. (Sorry about the confusion. I tend towards egoism, and have a tendency to redefine words to fit the philosophy.)
That would only work if the abuser would prefer not to be abusive. (One characteristic of many abusive relationships is that the abuser gets angry regardless of what the victim actually does—there really isn’t any way to avoid making them mad and “triggering” more abuse.)
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn’t that people’s system I has ‘racist’ aliefs, it’s that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
I’ve written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don’t matter—where they’re considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven’t really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that’s what I’d consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of ‘skin dyes’ for aesthetic purposes.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense—white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn’t just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you’d need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons—it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
I don’t understand what you mean by “matter.” People don’t care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn’t seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
That depends on what you mean by “strongly.” I would tentatively posit that even if race isn’t strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don’t know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I’ve recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled “racism” is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don’t really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that’s really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person’s race might tell you “I can get away with this”).
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
People are usually not “exactly correct” about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?
Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.
Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?
I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it’d be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier’s assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.
Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much “racist” as what we have today. (I don’t have a high confidence in this number, I just though it would be fair to write my opinion if I am asking about yours.) So cca 30% of the racism can be explained by people updating incorrectly, but that still leaves the remaining 70% to be explained otherwise. Therefore focusing on the incorrect updates misses the greater part of the whole story.
I think that affirmative action hurts both ways. And it also keeps the feeling of resentment alive, which again hurts people.
As a simple example, in my country most people in IT are male. So on one hand you have the “prejudice” that women in general are not good with computers, but on the other hand, if you meet a female programmer, you know that she specifically is good enough. She passed the filter.
I imagine that in an alternative reality where IT companies would be legally required to have 50% female programmers, the “prejudice” would expand, and it would say that women programmers are not good with computers. A female programmer would have to work harder to pass the filter. Even participating in a successful project would not be enough, because others would think that the males in her team did most of the work, and she was there mostly for political reasons. To prove herself, she would have to win some programming competition (and tell everyone about it). But those who can do it, they have no problem finding a programming job in our world, too.
Affirmative action would work best if you could legislate it and make everyone forget that it exists. Perhaps legislating it and making taboo of discussing it openly, is a step in this direction. Still, if the differences in abilities are real, people will notice the result, even if they are not informed about the causes.
In the alternative reality where IT companies are legally required to have 50% women programmers, and the law is successfully kept secret from everyone except the HR departments, programmers would still notice the differences in their colleagues’ skills. Although… this knowledge would exist only among the programmers, because only they see it firsthand. You could still convince the public that what the programmers see is not real, that it is merely their sexism.
So now I think that social enginnerings of this kind are successful only if people are prevented from discussing them openly. Even a lie told with good intentions makes the truth forever your enemy. Of course that makes it difficult to evaluate whether the policy really helps or not.
I’d have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties.
My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.
Who’s “focusing”? I would argue, if we take your numbers, that the incorrect 30% are disproportionately problematic compared to the remaining 70%, and that there are other, non-epistemic problems involved in racism. Eugine_Nier said that “the problem” is the 70%. That’s the disagreement that’s going on here. My claim is not that modern-day racism is on average a greater distortion of the facts than an inability to perceive race would be.
There are at least two confounding factors for the crime statistics. One is that the justice system is pretty sloppy, and more so for black men. Another is that even if your crime statistics are accurate, it’s hard to identify a criminal’s exact motives. Was a beating part of a robbery? Was it a simple attack initiated by one side, or was it a quarrel that escalated?
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I’d assign over 70% assuming he’s completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn’t as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I’ve noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn’t particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it’s strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I’ll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He’s way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers—the younger one’s father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he’s speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is?
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race.
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I’d expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
That is a necessary prerequisite, yes. As long as such an actual correlation is in place, it will be observed and will result in a perceived correlation.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I’d be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
criminality
Citation?
Again, I suspect—though I’m not certain—that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
It sounds like you’re using the word “correlation” to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; “correlation” just refers to certain kinds of association.
It’s trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you’re getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
The hereditarian model of Black–White IQ differences proposed in Section 2 (50% genetic and 50% environmental), far from precluding environmental factors, requires they be found. Although evidence in Sections 3 to 11 provided strong support for the genetic component of the model, evidence from Section 12 was unable to identify the environmental component. On the basis of the present evidence, perhaps the genetic component must be given greater weight and the environmental component correspondingly reduced.
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you’re asking for.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look “prettier”? I’m not sure that’s the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn’t matter.
I’m thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I’m thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he “really” black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
Skin colour is a red herring. Race is was originally about rich people with empires and status justifying their success as inevitable and righteous, and still is about their descendants justifying living off the inheritance of empires (and off plundering the bounty of continents already in use by other people). Race-like oppressions can exist where there is no visible distinction (burakumin in Japan). “Where do your family come from?”. Colour blindness (dye or otherwise) without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
That’s one conclusion—but there’s a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.
In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven’t found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I’d be sorely tempted to use it.
That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.
Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don’t think it’s a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.
As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a “wierdtopia”. Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer suddenly transported to contemporary New York. Feminism is slowed by feminists dragging their feet. Anti-racism is slowed by anti-racists who shy away from how much wealth and resources and control of the future they’d have to give back.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
And as for weirdtopia, in some ways we’re already there. It took me three or four years to stop thinking that having gay marriage as a serious political issue wasn’t something out of 1950s satirical science fiction. I was never opposed to it, just surprised that it ever got on the agenda.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
Uh.
This might be an outside context problem.
I see people talk about that plenty—I’ve been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They’re usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.
Also, we may be talking about somewhat different things—do the groups you mention talk about it as a goal, or do they ever talk about having succeeded, even for moderate periods of time?
The groups in question had it as just a basic matter of operating policy. It was often a balancing act, and it wasn’t without hiccups, but it worked pretty well. Example: A support group at which I facilitated for a while; the going approach was “safer space”: they knew they couldn’t ensure it was safe, full stop, for everybody in all situations—safety in this context being construed as “a buncha different people from a bunch of different backgrounds with varying experiences of oppression need to use this space, and they won’t always speak each other’s language about that, and we want to minimize the sense that this place is a hostile environment.”
It usually ran pretty smoothly. I can only recall one person who really ran afoul of it, and they did blatantly insult about half the group in the space of a couple minutes on their first visit, and escalated badly in response to people saying something about it.
I can think of some reasons why what you saw was different from what I saw, and it’s pretty much that you had a self-chosen group which was meeting in person and had work the members wanted to get done.
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane’s “Door into...” series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn’t a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.
Let me put it this way—I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn’t even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) “biologically compatible as-is” or “biologically compatible with medical help” (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn’t assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn’t correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.
Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn’t a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean.
Summary for people who don’t have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):
The political struggle between conservative and progressive ideology is essentially of religious character, evolving from the ancient conflict between Catholics and Protestants respectively; that conflict, the Catholics mostly lost.
Progressives in general are more or less unaware that they are upholding a religious doctrine.
Conservatives either have been or are incapable of being successful in convincing progressives of this fact, or alternatively, are themselves unaware of its essentially religious content.
Therefore, in engaging in political discourse, conservatives have already conceded the main point.
The proper course of action is to switch venues (e.g., refuse to participate in elections) or to convince Progressives that “while they may think they’re rebels, they’re actually loyal servants of a theocratic one-party state.”
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn’t you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives?
And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
This is what I consider among his most important insights.
Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
Probably yes, but I’m not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.
Probably yes, but I’m not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.
Not that confident of what? Something I said?
I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There’s a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world.
Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.
If the hidden nature of the theocracy is the main problem, we’ll have to wait for a societal wide embrace of Stirner for relief. I’m not holding my breath on that one.
I had hoped that Hitchens might someday turn on his fellow “atheists”, and bring the fight to moral theocracies as he had to supernatural theocracies. Guess not.
Can you think of any moderately prominent person or group who might make the case, and might be listened? I can’t.
EDIT:
On further review of Moldbug, he has a short series of Anti-Idealism blog posts that makes some of the same basic points that Stirner does. He even makes a similar point to what I have above about the New Atheists.
Is that a problem of theocracy per se? That’s a problem in a lot of systems. And there’s no reason one can’t in principle have a theocracy with robust free speech rights. It may well be that that hasn’t happened more because the ideas which are generally anti-theocratic are often clustered with ideas about open discourse. That said, it does seem plausible that a theocracy will be more likely to run into the sort of problems you discuss, purely because if one is thinking in religious terms, then the already high stakes involved in politics become even higher.
there’s no reason one can’t in principle have a theocracy with robust free speech rights.
I’ve yet to hear an argument for free speech that didn’t lean heavily on the risk that any particular policy or belief might be erroneous. My impression is that theocracy is defined as government based on the principal that there are some (divinely revealed?) facts for which there is no risk of error.
If we were sure (risk of error epsilon) of some set of facts and could unambiguously determine whether an assertion conflicted with those facts, why would we tolerate opposition?
Is that a problem of theocracy per se?
As Eliezer noted in the piece I cited, this is a problem of most political systems.
My impression is that theocracy is defined as government based on the principal that there are some (divinely revealed?) facts for which there is no risk of error.
So I was in the process of replying saying that there was potentially an issue here of definitions, but thinking about this more, other definitions I can think of seem about equivalent. So, operating under that definition, one could have a theocracy where for example people said “there’s no risk of error, but the deity in charge likes free will a lot, to the point where as long as they aren’t in the process of actively resisting the divine government, they are free to damn themselves” or something equivalent.
If that’s really the dogma of this (extremely hypothetical) religion, why is it important that the government be religiously based?
Traditionally, religions wanted a slice (or more) of political power to (a) avoid persecution and (b) implement their preferred policies. If (a) is not already resolved, this religion is in no position to argue about what the nation would look like if it were in charge.
I agree. The extreme length which I needed to go to construct a religion which even might have some chance of this is a strong argument that theocracies just won’t act this way. I suppose they could have a commandment in their holy text “run the government”, but this is clearly an extreme stretch.
I personally think that theocracy is bad because it combines the worst features of a totalitarian dictatorship on the one hand, and uncritical thinking on the other. As such, it could potentially turn out much worse than even a run-of-the-mill totalitarian dictatorship; in the latter case, at least the dictator and his politburo have some sort of a real plan...
Probably what came first were several examples of theocracies and other dictatorships in the real world; me realizing they were bad; then me looking for an explanation; which led to the conclusion above.
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn’t you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives?
Probably, but the context of that particular quote was only about convincing progressives.
And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
I don’t understand this (and don’t have the time to read Moldbug): if the whole struggle is essentially of religious character, then aren’t both sides upholding religious doctrines? So how does engaging with the progressives mean “conceding the main point”—aren’t the progressives likewise conceding the main point when engaging with the conservatives?
Maybe the intended meaning is that the progressives denounce conservatives for being religious, while actually being religious themselves? That would make some sense, but not all conservatives are actually basing their arguments in religion. After all, Konkvistador was talking about “conservatism on Less Wrong”, which certainly wouldn’t fit the bill.
And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features—not bugs—of how social apes work.
The other things you say sound convincing, but this particular sentence sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy. There are lots of “features” built into humans, such as old age and Alzheimers, myopia, inability to multiply large numbers very quickly, etc. But humans have been working steadily over the ages to mitigate these weaknesses with technology, and thus I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.
I didn’t mean to say they are how things should work, merely how I think they do work, they are the unfortunate compromises we end up nearly always making. A feature need not be desirable in itself to be necessary or the best out of a bad set of options.
Up voted for pointing this out though, since I suspect others may have read it that way as well.
Fixing human biology is easy, but the game theory that often pushed the biology there in the first place can be far more tricky.
Yes, you are probably right about that. Still, “tricky” is not the same as “impossible”. Humans have made sweeping social changes before, after all; for example, outright slavery is considered to be immoral by a large proportion of humans currently living on Earth, which did not use to be the case in the past. Though, admittedly, such changes would probably be more difficult to effect than, say, the cure for Alzheimers...
I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the ‘right technology’ does not currently exist, and isn’t likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope—you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
Exactly, this is why there haven’t been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that’s the word in my local Baron’s court.
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren’t representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time—it would surprise me if there wasn’t gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human “barons” with the space of all possible human “popularity contests” and decide which one is more “civilized” across multiple criteria.
This seems a straw man.He didn’t say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn’t make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world—if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user’s posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how “the PC hive mind” is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one’s “opponents” are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men’s Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
What is a “default” human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day—despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope...
The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.
That would be more charitable, but less accurate. Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning, and built elaborate reform programs on the idea that they could eradicate everything from discrimination to selfishness through aggressive re-education efforts. I’m not inclined to let them sweep that bit of hubris under the rug, especially since the same groups are in many cases continuing to advocate for the same reform programs despite the fact that one of their key assumptions has been disproved.
I’ll certainly concede that we don’t currently know exactly what the landscape of human behavioral tendencies and constraints looks like, but this should be a motivation for reform advocates to be cautious rather than dismissing the concern. Blithely assuming that you can suppress an infinite variety of undesired behaviors with sufficient social pressure is a recipe for disaster—the end result is likely to be a long buildup of resentment and covert resistance, followed by a sudden revolution that replaces the reformer’s desired social order with a new regime that feels more psychologically comfortable to whatever faction manages to seize power.
Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning
That’s the special case of “every point in the state space”, isn’t it?
And I’m not even sure it’s true. Marxist ideology, for example, explicitly disclaims that sort of neuroplasticity: its big idea (oversimplifying like crazy here) is that people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups, and that this sort of group agency is stable enough to be exploited when promoted to conscious awareness. Far from implying a tabula rasa, it actually requires certain stable psychology.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
Isn’t the whole Marxist project based on the idea that you can bring about radical changes in human behavior by reorganizing society? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can only work if humans are so malleable that basic greed, laziness, selfishness and ambition can be eradicated through social programs.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
It’s less about social conditioning and more about the extent to which people pursue group interests regardless of social conditioning. To people subscribing to Marxist ideas of class, behaviors which we might perceive as individualistic ambition in fact serve partly—even primarily—to further the interests of the social class in which an actor is embedded, unbeknownst to the actor; when a Marxist talks about capitalist greed, they’re not talking about the selfishness of individual capitalists, they’re accusing capitalists as a group of greed for the resources of other social groups. None of this requires any grand scheme of brainwashing (though social conditioning does come into play when we start talking about “false consciousness” and related ideas); it’s all seen as implicit in people’s native behavior.
It wouldn’t be too far wrong to describe Marxism as primarily a theory of group agency; originally it covered only coarse-grained economic classes, but modern descendants of Marxist ideology have extended it to cover other common interests as well. You’re probably more likely to encounter the latter these days.
I think we mean different things by ‘brainwashing’ and ‘social conditioning’, which is causing some terminology confusion. The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I call this an incorrect belief because more recent research in cognitive science reveals that there are strong constraints on what kinds of mental adaptations will actually happen in practice, and thus on what kinds of social organizations will actually be stable enough to survive for any great length of time.
For example, humans have an innate tendency to form ingroup / outgroup distinctions and to look down on members of their outgroup, which is one of the factors responsible for a lot of bigotry and racism. Society can tell people who to include in these groups with a high degree of success, and can encourage or discourage the abuse of outgroup members. But you can’t eliminate the underlying desire for an outgroup, and if you try you’ll get odd phenomena like people who violently hate their political opponents while honestly believing themselves to be paragons of love and tolerance.
Again, this is not to say that reforms are impossible. Rather, the point is that you can’t fix everything simultaneously, because every social change has unpredictable side effects that currently no one knows how to eliminate. This is one reason why grand social engineering projects almost always fail—because they carelessly pile up lots of big changes in a short period of time, and the accumulated side effects create so much social chaos that they get deposed and replaced with someone more psychologically comfortable.
The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I feel like I’m explaining this poorly. You can’t make arbitrary changes to behavior under the Marxist worldview by making social reforms. You can get people to further the interests of their social class more effectively by changing their perception of class, or get them to further the interests of other social classes by making them aware of common social goals, but to a Marxist this follows preexisting and fairly strict principles of how people relate to the class structure. To an orthodox Marxist, for example, improving social conditions by means of placing constraints on the behavior of socially dominant classes would be doomed to failure without a corresponding increase in the power of socially subordinate classes: other forms of exploitation would be found, and class relations would regress to the mean.
It’s not that you can do whatever you want by hacking society in a certain way; it’s that people’s psychology is organized in such a way as to lead to more equitable outcomes if you hack society in particular ways. And even describing this as “hacking” is a little misleading; Marx didn’t see any of it as a social project, more as the inevitable result of existing social forces. (Incidentally, this is a main point of divergence between orthodox Marxism and Leninism or Maoism, both of which aimed to produce Marxist revolutions “early”.)
This comment is interesting but needlessly long-winded.
In one sentence, did you mean something like “Status-based oppression and emotional violence will always exist and some group will always get the worst of it; therefore, we shouldn’t get worked up about the victims currently in the spotlight and shouldn’t waste community attention on their particular problems—but it’s impolite to just tell them to shut up and suffer quietly”?
If phrased like that, then yes, your post is already causing me a deep emotional disturbance.
(And you wonder why decent people don’t like reactionaries.)
Nope I take the argument further. You are about to experience more distress. What I’m saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most. What I’m saying is that magnitude or widespread nature of suffering has no strong consistent relation in itself to which group gets our public attention. I’m surprised you missed that.
I’m also saying that often the signalling and politics allegedly done to reduce the kind of “micro-suffering” of group X does nothing of the kind. At worst merely increasing their sensitivity to it making them miserable and resentful of other members of society, while propping up new structures of deprivilege for other groups. A clear utilitarian fail.
Having politics about such microaggression and privillige based suffering be acceptable means that the groups least capable of defending themselves with such politics will suffer at best just as much as before and simply have to pay the additional opportunity cost and at worst will suffer more. Having a taboo on such politics improves the position. It doesn’t seem obvious to me why should groups bad at politics be more deserving of suffering than groups good at politics? Why do you think the former are more numerous or more sensitive than the latter?
Recall that everyone is a member of many such classes and groups. Deep down this kind of attempt at justice in society is based on nothing more than might makes right powered by human intuitions based on sacredness and holier than thou signalling.
What I’m saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most.
Probably true, and possibly a tautology.
However, I think it’s the same fallacy as judging societies only by how the lowest status people are treated. It’s ignoring what happens to a large proportion, perhaps the majority of people.
Also, if better treatment can be figured out for some groups, then perhaps the knowledge can be applied to other suffering when it gets noticed. Life with people isn’t entirely zero-sum.
If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person’s status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).
Even if life is solely a zero-sum game, it would still be possible to narrow the status differences. It’s one thing to have most people think you’re funny-looking, and another to be at risk of being killed on sight.
That is true, but narrowing the status differences would severely penalize anyone whose status is higher than the minimum (or possibly only those with above-average status, depending on the scale you’re using). If we measure quality of life solely in terms of status, then such an action would be undesirable.
Granted, if we include other measures in our calculation, then it all depends on what weights we place on each measure, status included.
Again, as far as I understand, Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals. If we assume that this is true, then I believe my comments are correct.
Is that actually true, though ? Are humans driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status (in addition to the desires directly related to physical survival, of course) ? I don’t know, but maybe Konkvistador has some evidence for the proposition—assuming, of course, that I’m not misinterpreting his viewpoint.
Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals.
This needs to be consideredseparately as (1) a descriptive statement about actions (2) a descriptive statement about subjective experience (3) a normative statement about the utilitarian good. It seems much more accurate as (1) than (2) or (3), and I think Konkvistador means it as (1); meanwhile, statements about “quality of life” could mean (2) or (3) but not (1).
Yes, thank you. As far as I can tell, (1) and (2) are closest to the meaning I inferred. I understand that we can consider them separately, but IMO (2) implies (1).
If an agent seeks to maximize its sense of well-being (as it would reasonable to assume humans do), then we would expect the agent to take actions which it believes will achieve this effect. Its beliefs could be wrong, of course, but since the agent is descended from a long line of evolutionarily successful agents, we can expect it to be right a lot more often that it’s wrong.
Thus, if the agent’s sense of well-being can be accurately predicted as being proportional to its status (regardless of whether the agent itself is aware of this or not), then it would be reasonable to assume that the agent will take actions that, on average, lead to raising its status.
What I’m saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most… …I’m also saying that often the signalling and politics allegedly done to reduce the kind of “micro-suffering” of group X does nothing of the kind. At worst merely increasing their sensitivity to it making them miserable and resentful of other members of society, while propping up new structures of deprivilege for other groups… …Recall that everyone is a member of many such classes and groups. Deep down this kind of attempt at justice in society is based on nothing more than might makes right powered by human intuitions based on sacredness and holier than thou signalling.
...“Mercer,” Rick said. “I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands. “No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.” “How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?” “To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.” “Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.” The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” “That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said...
Okay, so… you’re going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can’t for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
Meanwhile, you’d seemingly like to deny the practical use of identity politics as self-defense for the “mainstream” cases like gender-based aggression—all for the greater good. Such a proposition indeed feels cruel and morally corrupt to me.
That strikes me as a remarkably uncharitable reading, and in any case a false one—the suffering of undersocialized straight white dudes gets plenty of public attention, albeit much of it in “point and laugh” form (cf. Big Bang Theory).
The most marginalized groups on the planet, almost by definition, are the ones you’ve never heard of. Take Burkina Faso for example—small West African country, #181 of 187 in Human Development Index, and the only reason I know I’ve read about it before is that the Wikipedia link’s purple instead of blue in my browser. #187, the absolute bottom of the barrel, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: slightly better-known, but extremely underserved by Western media relative to the magnitude of all the bad shit going down there. The Second Congo War (1998 − 2003) was the single worst conflict by body count since World War II, but I couldn’t describe a single major news report on it that reached my ears.
And those are entire countries—if I wanted to dig up serious contemporary misery and oppression at the subculture level, I’m almost sure that the famous examples, while certainly terrible, wouldn’t be the worst I could find.
Okay, so… you’re going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most?
Eh no. I’m saying we ignore the groups who suffer the most. Under-socialized white males have weak counter-cultures working in their favour. But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.
Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can’t for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
That you can’t think of them is very weak evidence they aren’t there. May I remind you that if we where having this debate in the 1920s people might talk about women as such a group but not homosexuals. The thought wouldn’t even occur to them. Today you are shunned for questioning the thought.
I can give you many many examples but it will get me into trouble. One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.
One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.
This is, indeed, an excellent example of a place where the process has utterly failed to produce a humane and compassionate outcome.
But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.
As a white South African male, I think that if those are the sorts of articles that you’re relying on for a true idea of what goes on in this country, then you may be over-estimating it.
In short; South Africa is a country polarised into two groups, with all that that entails. Actually, there’s at least four groups (counting “foreigners” and the nearly extinct “Khoisan” as seperate groups), but two of those groups are loud enough to drown out all the others. For quite some time, one of those groups (those who were officially “white”) was dominant, despite the fact that said group was not numerically superior. However, one of the means of retaining said dominance was by providing substandard education to all other groups (along with pretty brutal repression, not being allowed to vote, and so on).
Then, in 1994, everyone was allowed to vote. There was a sudden and very predictable change of government without most of the negative effects of actual revolution (we had very good leadership at a critical time). The trouble now is that, in the eyes of far too many people, there are stilltwo groups. If you listen to one side, then THEY robbed everyone during apartheid and refuse to help the people they once hurt; if you listen to the other side, then THEY are a bunch of violent, corrupt lunatics who will kill you as soon as you let your guard down for an instant. And both sides will gleefully report on any facts that appear to support their stance.
As a white South African male, I think that if those are the sorts of articles that you’re relying on for a true idea of what goes on in this country, then you may be over-estimating it.
Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable.
If anything I in think in general Western reports let alone regular Western ideas about life in South Africa are likely to be underestimating white South African suffering. In addition I would argue there are gains in signalling games for well off white South Africans to downplay the suffering of their group.
I do agree South Africa in general has been rather lucky but there is potential for major problems because white South Africans are a market dominant minority.
We have a clear example of what could have and still some day might happen in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable.
I didn’t say that anything in the linked article was directly false—merely that the evidence is biased, having been picked out by one group, and therefore that it gives an overall false impression.
Consider, for example, from the article on farm murders:
in 2001 61% of farm attack victims were White, yet White people make up only 9,2% of the population.
I’m willing to believe that both of those statistics are correct, individually, but put together like that they present an incorrect impression. To obtain a correct impression, one needs to find the answer to this question: in 2001, what percentage of South African farmers were white?
Due to the aftereffects of Apartheid, I can say with extremely high probability that it’s higher than the 9.2% figure quoted; indeed, it would not surprise me to learn that it was more than 70% (which completely changes the significance of that first figure). Unfortunately, in a few minutes’ googling, I was unable to find any source for the figure in question (census data is supposed to be available, but not necessarily in an easily searched format).
As for BEE, it is (as I understand the original idea) an attempt to redress the “market dominant minority” problem without widespread suffering; yes, there is a certain amount of economic discrimination against me, but it’s not an impossible barrier to overcome. And it does continually reduce the potential for the major problems that you describe. (What it has become is in some cases different to what was intended—sometimes because of the greed of a few, the new “black elite” who have got rather rich by exploiting any loopholes they could find—sometimes because of poorly drafted legislation—but there are enough voices in parliament calling for the original idea to keep pulling it back on course). I suppose it could be seen as a sort of ‘social safety valve’, giving the less-dominant majority a way to achieve part of the market without pulling the whole market down and rebuilding it from scratch.
And I should add that there are people (I know of several) who would take every word of those articles and mutter darkly that “you don’t know the half of it”. I personally don’t always agree with them, but they are there (and may be suffering psychologically in ways that I hadn’t fully considered until now).
So, I’m not saying that there is no suffering. I’m just saying that I think that it might be over-presented in some places.
We have a clear example of what could have and still some day might happen in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Yes, and Zimbabwe is very much in the public eye here. Enough people are looking at it, and comparing it to the current situation, that any attempt to start moving down that same path will be highlighted mercilessly, and shied away from (no-one wants to end up in Mugabe’s position, at least not as far as I can imagine). I’m not saying that we can’t end up in similar straits (though I consider it unlikely), but at the very least we’ll get there by a substantially different path.
Anecdote: I didn’t search as well as I should have because I had a weird emotional “what if some automated FBI filter flags me for googling ‘pedophilia’?” reaction—which also seems to be part of the problem.
So, literally an unknown unknown? This is a very empirical claim, and my prior on it is low. Unless such groups have unusual barriers placed against them socially and ideologically, you’d think that, over time, individuals in them would’ve made some effort to carve out a niche in identity politics.
I think you just aren’t getting it. Putting some effort towards carving a niche has bad returns for these groups. See paedophiles.
Because they lose the political battle their very efforts to organize along these lines are seen as more evidence at how dangerous and weird they are you instantly categorize them as deserving their fate.
Also to put it in familiar terms the false conspicuousness of members of the group experience may make such activism unthinkable for them. If there is no force that weakens or breaks down that memeplex the political war can’t get started.
And again! Why do you assume might makes right? Why do you assume that any group with a genuine grievance and suffering shall be victorious in the long run? What possible reason would you have for this in a non-caring non-Christian universe.
Okay, so… you’re going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can’t for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?
Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we’ve had over the past oh… 5 years?
That is the interpretation I made, as well, but perhaps I was mistaken ? I upvoted your comment primarily because I want Konkvistador to clarify whether this interpretation is correct.
Nearly anyone not living hermits life experiences situations like these but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering but on the most viable political coalitions.
I quite agree, and considered posting along these lines myself. Perhaps you were right to be oblique; I’d have been a lot more explicit.
In fact, I will. A large part of this isn’t just about forming viable political coalitions—which is perhaps benign—it’s about suppressing alternate coalitions. It’s about making it impossible for people with a different understanding of the world to co-ordinate. For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation. And of course anyone who gives it will be the designated patsy and thereby validate the feelings of moral superiority the coalition has been endowing itself with.
It’s also about a wish to avoid responsibility, but that’s a post in its own right.
The solution, of course, is to form a higher status coalition against it. For instance:
“As an Arab and a Muslim, I feel the concept of feminism is an Orientalist dog-whistle. You only need to look down this thread to see the real targets are always the Otherized women wearing burkas—whose perspective is totally missing. The venom is just barely below the surface—a discussion of a boy asking a girl out quickly becomes a ritual condemnation of Afghan customs. Analysing a father’s advice quickly leads to back-slapping about how much Saudi Arabia “stinks”. Anyone who calls themselves a feminist is perpetuating white privilege and racism.”
Actually, that depends on what you mean by ‘known’.
Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don’t feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation.
However, I don’t think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.
I made quite a few substantive points about the discussion in that comment. Why don’t we talk about those? Unfortunately almost all the replies has been about this side-issue, which I have already stated I am not going to discuss.
For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne))
I realize that I’m being lazy, but is there a way you can summarize this reason ? I have not read the book, and I fear I may not have the time to do so.
Humans, in any situation, invent something to do, simply because “doing nothing” is not an option. A stupid social interaction is usually preferable to no social interaction. On the other hand, an intimate interaction increases the risk of being hurt, so with strangers people prefer rituals. Ritual provides some small social interaction at almost zero risk.
If I understand it correctly, Salemicus suggests that catcalling is simply a ritual. It is more than nothing. It is less than a personalized message. It is what other people (of the same social group) in the same situation would do.
Why exactly this ritual instead of something else? Dunno. Tradition. You usually don’t invent rituals, you inherit them from your ancestors. Somewhere in the past, there was some reason. Maybe a good reason, maybe a random incident. Doesn’t matter today. This is the ritual we have. This is what we do when we want to do something, but not something personal.
And of course anyone who gives [the reason] will be the designated patsy and thereby validate the feelings of moral superiority the coalition has been endowing itself with.
is there a way you can summarize this reason?
As I already stated in the original post—no!
Besides, you don’t need to read the book to know the reason. It’s the obvious reason. I simply referred to that book because it explains the entire social dynamic around it.
Your comments on this thread seem to be evidence that there is no such “obvious” reason, and that you are in fact pretending that such an “obvious” reason exists, as some sort of status play, or perhaps for didactic reasons. Do you agree that this is the reasonable conclusion that readers of this thread should reach? If not, why not?
Honestly, I’m curious too—I can think of several candidate reasons, but nothing blindingly obvious.
If you’re concerned about looking like a patsy, or about possible retributive behavior from being un-PC or perhaps excessively PC, there’s nothing stopping you from spinning up a throwaway account and using that. I’d say sockpuppetry is acceptable in that case.
It’s not even obvious to me that only one of several reasons is right (i.e., I suspect there are several different reasons each of which explain a sizeable fraction, but not the near-totality, of cases of catcalling).
For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation.
One of the key third-wave critiques is that second-wave feminism was only ever really about middle-class white women. Obviously, an actual third-wave feminist wouldn’t have concluded that feminism is about white privilege; they’d have said we need to change the direction of feminism to make it more inclusive of “diverse perspectives” or some such.
I was joking when I implied they were trolling feminism, but if a group of saboteurs had gone undercover to make the movement irrelevant, I don’t think they could have done any better.
Regarding my own comment, I was not condemning afghan customs in the context of their treatment of women, but in their treatment of thievery and other such crimes (I was specifically thinking of the process of escalating blood feuds that often result from that process).
It’s too long since I read the book to recall all of the Games in detail, and the list on the book’s home page (linked from the Wiki article) doesn’t seem to have this game, but no matter: Berne did not claim to be presenting an exhaustive taxonomy and encouraged his readers to discover more Games.
I recommend the book. I think it’s essential reading for anyone confused (as so many LWers profess to be, and there’s a Game right there) about aspects of social life that are not usually explicitly described. (The reasons why people don’t talk about them form yet more Games.) Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them. Once you have this, what is going on with catcalling will be transparent.
The theoretical background of the book, Transactional Analysis, you can take or leave; it gives Berne a conceptual vocabulary to talk about Games, but one need not make any ontological commitment to TA, to make use of the book.
I bought & read a copy of Games People Play some years ago. (But thanks for the recommendation.) Although I’ve read the book, “the” reason why men catcall remains opaque to me. I can think of multiple reasons, and multiple ways to describe catcalling as a Game, so merely pointing at the book tells me nothing new.
By the principle of charity, I figured Salemicus had something more usefully specific in mind. So I looked at the table of contents, guessed at some Games they might have been thinking of, and put them out there as a starting point. I wasn’t about to reread the whole book just to try making Salemicus’s comment click.
“Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them.”
From Berne: “Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him.”
So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female’s (albeit negative) attention.
I’m not sure I grasp at all what you’re referring to by those “dynamics”. The nitpicking? The pointing at small things rather than the fundamental assumption(s)? (if so, what’s the perceived fundamental assumption(s) and which are the small things? Is the fundamental assumption the claim “Women have a larger inferential distance to LW because difference in life experiences”?)
Among the most upvoted comments in this section, it seems that about 2⁄3 are displaying “protecting women” signalling.
I disagree on this, ISTM that many of those are displaying things substantially different, such as “helping people in general” or “protecting people being harassed”.
The personal experiences shared basically give examples of “privilege” and “microagressions”. (...) Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
That whole paragraph rings very true, and deserves upvotes IMO, contingent of me having any idea what “dynamics” you’re pointing at.
You seem to be using jargon I am unfamiliar with. Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one’s status, indistinguishable from other status plays?
Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one’s status, indistinguishable from other status plays?
Among other things.
A normal person living life will receive micro aggressions with some regularity, but views these aggressions through a lens shaped by current political thinking. Thus, those aggressions which are aligned with political perspectives on the evilness of sexism will have greater salience than those which are just random aggressive events. Even if the probability of receiving a micro aggression is equal for both men and women, only those which are towards women and seem to be caused by their sex will be elevated to the level of explicit political discourse.
Even if the probability of receiving a micro aggression is equal for both men and women, only those which are towards women and seem to be caused by their sex will be elevated to the level of explicit political discourse.
Consider the D&D example given in this post. The DM saying “no, you’re playing my game wrong” is easy to interpret as a micro aggression, but to gamers (especially ones who’ve sat at both sides of the table) it’s seen as part of gaming, and someone who gets upset about it probably shouldn’t be at the table (in part because they can probably find a DM more suited to their interests). This particular example is being discussed publicly because a poster thought it was an example of sexism; if someone had posted a similar anecdote on the site outside of the context of LW Women it would not be seen as anywhere near as relevant.
A normal person living life will receive micro aggressions with some regularity
Please consider just how strongly the likelyhood of such microaggressions is inversely correlated with a person’s conformity to any given implicit norm! That’s why I find it more than purple prose to refer to the victims of oppression as “the weak”; by not conforming, they simply start in a much much weaker position than someone who reasonably fits within the norms. The current beneficiaries of identity politics- like transfolk—certainly have the field tilted against them, and talking to them of “equal opportunity” or “equality before the law” is outright cruel; you’ve got to privilege those worst off to end up with a remotely fair outcome. (Which leads to the problem of incentives, which leads me to questioning capitalism and meritocracy altogether, but that’s another story.)
So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out. A rock that’s thrown downwards at someone hurts much more—and is easier to hit with—than the same rock thrown back up with equal force! The fact that a few people might try to profit politically from redefining “up” and “down” doesn’t make the objective social circumstances less real.
So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out.
And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression?
To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?
True, there are other things that arguably have a bigger impact, e.g., whether they’ll be punished for complaining, whether their complaint is likely to change anything. For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.
I’d expect a maximum somewhere in the middle of the range for internally generated complaints.
The countries and regions which are best at human rights get few or no complaints. The countries and regions which are bad but not horrendous get the most complaints. The countries which have a strong pattern of punishing complainers get a few complaints. The most vicious countries get no complaints.
That’s just for internally generated complaints. Outsiders may be saying that conditions are very bad in the worst countries.
I think your underestimating how many complaints get generated in countries with good human rights that would be considered frivolous by an international standard, e.g., arguing that refusing to subsidize condoms constitutes a “war on women”.
For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.
It is not particularly controversial to note that nations concerned about human rights focus their advocacy / attention / pressure on countries that care somewhat about human rights themselves. (i.e. the US pressures Turkey about human rights problems, not North Korea).
That said, I don’t think that was Eugine_Nier’s point. I suspect that I disagree with his intended assertion (denotatively if not connotatively).
The purpose of this, if I understood correctly, was to increase empathy with and understanding of the emotions of women in these situations. It’s less evidence than neurohacking.
Correspondence with reality is a subgoal of many other goals, but it is not the only purpose neurohacking can serve. The claustrophobe knows they are perfectly safe in small spaces; they still want to leave them.
Or you simply want to propagate something that seems important throughout your belief network (e.g. a moral injunction against too-convenient dubious actions), or move your values towards reflective equilibrium.
Please be specific. In the post I had already quickly explained a few terms like “microaggression” and used relevant links. I assume familiarity with some terms like “signalling” because they are standard on LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
I’m not sure what it is about your post that I’m missing, since I thought I knew what all those terms meant (except microaggression, and WP says my guess was basically right). Maybe you’re using terms in ways I’m not used to, or maybe I’m just confused as to what your overall point is. MugaSofer’s question seems like a good distillation of mine, so I’m hoping you’ll answer it.
I summarized what appeared to be the point of your comment; since I am unfamiliar with terms used, I thought it better to check if I had misunderstood.
I’m curious if you buy into Moldbug’s narration about Catholic v. Protestant as being an overarching framework for liberal v. conservative issues.
Frankly, the idea of conservativism always failing seems to be more an issue of what ideas survive: If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive. Changes to society which get rolled back become more or less forgotten and don’t come up in how we think of it. Alcohol prohibition would be one example, where excepting a very tiny group the issue has simply fallen out of contemporary political discourse.
I think you are mixing up different issues. Certainly conservatives manage to roll back some stuff, but that is not relevant to:
If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive
MM claims that all net changes are originated on the progressive side, which is a well-defined side with centuries of coherence. Do you claim that there are net changes that originated on the conservative side and were written into the history of liberals? Prohibition is certainly not an example of this. Do you even claim that there are any net changes originated by conservatives? Or do you disagree that there are two clear sides, and it is anachronistic to identify the parties of successful changes in different eras? Prohibition certainly shows that there is not complete identify of proposed changes across time, but that is hardly evidence of discontinuity. If you dispute continuity, what are two such parties that you think do should not be identified?
I don’t think there are two clear sides at all, and yes the anachronism issue is a problem also. Moreover, in so far as there’s almost anything like two clear sides, a lot of changes have come from what is commonly identified as the conservative end. For example, over the last seventy years in the US in many ways we moved more in the direction of free markets, a conservative ideal. One example is how it used to be outright illegal in the US to own gold bullion where now there’s a thriving market.
If the problem of identifying two sides is not just continuity, what is an example of its difficulty at a single point in time?
Owning gold bullion seems to me a poor example. First, it was rolled back in 45 years, longer than prohibition, but not very long. Second, it was only a means to the end of devaluing the dollar. When Nixon moved entirely off of the gold standard, it became irrelevant. Nixon moving completely off of the gold standard might qualify as a non-progressive doing something, though.
In general, rolling back FDR’s policies is not a net change.
MM would probably say that conservatives don’t have ideals. They talk in terms of ideals because they don’t know how else to fight progressives who have ideals. Or because they have been infected with progressive ideologies. I believe that free trade and the free market are Whig ideas. Certainly they were in the 19th century, though if you trace them to the French, they no longer fit in the Tory/Whig divide.
I’m not going to spend much effort in the comment section here because my activity will only empower the ideological dynamic at work. I refuse to engage in a losing strategy. Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn’t a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean. While I hold some right wing positions I’m not talking about mainstream Conservatism here but conservatism towards the LessWrong culture and ethos as I knew them. Even this comment is likely a mistake but I just can’t keep quiet on this because of internal anguish.
It is not the opening material that bother me so bitterly, since I found that it had interesting examples of experience to share. Gathering and posting it also seemed a good idea to me in my optimism some weeks ago. The comment section however… I disagreed about it being too nitpicky, but now I wonder if I was wrong. I think some are plain avoiding attacking the fundamental assumptions, in a way similar to how I’m about to briefly do, in order to avoid the gender drama LW is infamous for. If so the game is already over.
The personal experiences shared basically give examples of “privilege” and “microaggressions”. That is, relatively small but pervasive uncomfortable or inconvenient defaults and related status moves which one notices from time to time. People with low social awareness don’t see when they occur to them, so hearing them described explicitly they go “wow this is horrible, how X group suffers”. The voting shows systematic appreciation for a male posture of “protecting women”. This posture does little good for women, much like like signalling how much you hate child molesters does the opposite of helping child abuse victims.*
For nearly anyone not living hermit’s life experiences like these are common, but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our public attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering, but on the most viable political coalitions. And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features—not bugs—of how social apes work. Ah, but this kind of observation violates sacred norms that prevail in our society. Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I’ve read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I’ve asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it’s not obvious to me that it’s impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn’t identical to the same total ill effect.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I’m very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they’ve dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I’m aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.
I’ve got some sympathy for people who don’t want to shut down organizations merely because they’ve succeeded.
Stable organizations are hard to create, and people apt to have a lot of valuable social relationships in them.
Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.
Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I’m aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.
That’s a reasonable point—but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don’t have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
That’s probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan.
Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I’m not sure we’ve really hit that point that substantially.
Yes, fuel efficiency can be increased at the expanse of something else, e.g., cost, safety, etc.
I’m not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don’t have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I’d consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help—but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don’t seem to have that, either. Humans just aren’t automatically strategic.
My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail—it felt like being on the receiving end of “I can’t explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I’m going to keep attacking until I feel better”.
This does not mean they were totally in the wrong—one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers—abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
Are you saying that abuse victims have an obligation to coach their abusers in how not to be abusive?
I would say… yes, actually, insofar as they want that abuse to end while changing nothing else about the dynamic.
This sounds like “I wouldn’t use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur.” Would you agree with that restatement?
Fair enough, yes. My use of the word obligation tends to revolve strictly around the personal, so I can see why you’d prefer this version if you use the word in the more typical sense. (Sorry about the confusion. I tend towards egoism, and have a tendency to redefine words to fit the philosophy.)
That would only work if the abuser would prefer not to be abusive. (One characteristic of many abusive relationships is that the abuser gets angry regardless of what the victim actually does—there really isn’t any way to avoid making them mad and “triggering” more abuse.)
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
For the abused, the practical limit is not personal willingness, but financing and social stigma.
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn’t that people’s system I has ‘racist’ aliefs, it’s that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
Why do you believe that people’s prejudices are generally accurate?
Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.
They show that East Asian are smarter in average than White Americans, and I’m not sure that many people alieve that.
Any such statistic would also reflect any bias in the law-enforcement system. How do we know how many white people commit crimes but don’t get caught?
I do; am I mistaken to do so?
Asian-Americans also have lower crime rates than White Americans. Are you saying this is likely due to “bias in the law-enforcement system”?
Probably not; but IMO the criterion of mistakenness for aliefs (unlike for beliefs) is not being instrumentally useful (rather than not being epistemically accurate). If I’m trying to attract women, alieving that I’m unattractive would be a mistaken alief (though the linked article doesn’t use the word “alief”).
I’ve written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
Having good aliefs about criminality, for example, is instrumentally useful.
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don’t matter—where they’re considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven’t really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that’s what I’d consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of ‘skin dyes’ for aesthetic purposes.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense—white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
I don’t want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don’t think that’s possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn’t just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you’d need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons—it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
I don’t understand what you mean by “matter.” People don’t care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn’t seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
That depends on what you mean by “strongly.” I would tentatively posit that even if race isn’t strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don’t know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I’ve recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled “racism” is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don’t really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that’s really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Or would be if people weren’t actively rigging said information such that this is not the case. And that’s before getting into tail-effects.
Which really doesn’t happen these days. (It’s certainly much rarer than someone being beaten up for being white.)
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person’s race might tell you “I can get away with this”).
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
People are usually not “exactly correct” about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?
Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.
Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?
I’d bet on closer to a perfectly equal society, but it’s rather hard to do the experiment.
It’s certainly my (a) true rejection of “the problem is that [people] are updating correctly”. What did you expect I was rejecting?
I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it’d be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier’s assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.
I confess, I was sacrificing some precision for snark. I meant “the problem is that [people] are updating correctly, to the extant they are”.
Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much “racist” as what we have today. (I don’t have a high confidence in this number, I just though it would be fair to write my opinion if I am asking about yours.) So cca 30% of the racism can be explained by people updating incorrectly, but that still leaves the remaining 70% to be explained otherwise. Therefore focusing on the incorrect updates misses the greater part of the whole story.
Really? I’d estimate more like 120%.
Edit: especially consider affirmative action and the desperate impact doctrine.
I think that affirmative action hurts both ways. And it also keeps the feeling of resentment alive, which again hurts people.
As a simple example, in my country most people in IT are male. So on one hand you have the “prejudice” that women in general are not good with computers, but on the other hand, if you meet a female programmer, you know that she specifically is good enough. She passed the filter.
I imagine that in an alternative reality where IT companies would be legally required to have 50% female programmers, the “prejudice” would expand, and it would say that women programmers are not good with computers. A female programmer would have to work harder to pass the filter. Even participating in a successful project would not be enough, because others would think that the males in her team did most of the work, and she was there mostly for political reasons. To prove herself, she would have to win some programming competition (and tell everyone about it). But those who can do it, they have no problem finding a programming job in our world, too.
Affirmative action would work best if you could legislate it and make everyone forget that it exists. Perhaps legislating it and making taboo of discussing it openly, is a step in this direction. Still, if the differences in abilities are real, people will notice the result, even if they are not informed about the causes.
In the alternative reality where IT companies are legally required to have 50% women programmers, and the law is successfully kept secret from everyone except the HR departments, programmers would still notice the differences in their colleagues’ skills. Although… this knowledge would exist only among the programmers, because only they see it firsthand. You could still convince the public that what the programmers see is not real, that it is merely their sexism.
So now I think that social enginnerings of this kind are successful only if people are prevented from discussing them openly. Even a lie told with good intentions makes the truth forever your enemy. Of course that makes it difficult to evaluate whether the policy really helps or not.
I’d have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties.
My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.
Well two points:
1) There is a huge confounding factor, namely technological progress.
2) In general, labor intensive goods aren’t even produced in America anymore.
Who’s “focusing”? I would argue, if we take your numbers, that the incorrect 30% are disproportionately problematic compared to the remaining 70%, and that there are other, non-epistemic problems involved in racism. Eugine_Nier said that “the problem” is the 70%. That’s the disagreement that’s going on here. My claim is not that modern-day racism is on average a greater distortion of the facts than an inability to perceive race would be.
Taboo “perfectly equal society”.
Evidence? Also, are you including assault by the police in your comparison?
Look at crime statistics.
Sure, it doesn’t change its truth.
There are at least two confounding factors for the crime statistics. One is that the justice system is pretty sloppy, and more so for black men. Another is that even if your crime statistics are accurate, it’s hard to identify a criminal’s exact motives. Was a beating part of a robbery? Was it a simple attack initiated by one side, or was it a quarrel that escalated?
I don’t think this is a valuable response to being asked for evidence.
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I’d assign over 70% assuming he’s completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn’t as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I’ve noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn’t particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it’s strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I’ll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He’s way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers—the younger one’s father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he’s speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
I’d say that this is another very strong possibility.
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I’d expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
That is a necessary prerequisite, yes. As long as such an actual correlation is in place, it will be observed and will result in a perceived correlation.
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I’d be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
Citation?
Again, I suspect—though I’m not certain—that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.
It sounds like you’re using the word “correlation” to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; “correlation” just refers to certain kinds of association.
It’s trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you’re getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you’re asking for.
Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look “prettier”? I’m not sure that’s the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn’t matter.
I’m thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I’m thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he “really” black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
Dr. Seuss wrote about this.
Skin colour is a red herring. Race is was originally about rich people with empires and status justifying their success as inevitable and righteous, and still is about their descendants justifying living off the inheritance of empires (and off plundering the bounty of continents already in use by other people). Race-like oppressions can exist where there is no visible distinction (burakumin in Japan). “Where do your family come from?”. Colour blindness (dye or otherwise) without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
That’s one conclusion—but there’s a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.
In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven’t found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I’d be sorely tempted to use it.
That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.
Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don’t think it’s a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.
As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a “wierdtopia”. Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer suddenly transported to contemporary New York. Feminism is slowed by feminists dragging their feet. Anti-racism is slowed by anti-racists who shy away from how much wealth and resources and control of the future they’d have to give back.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
And as for weirdtopia, in some ways we’re already there. It took me three or four years to stop thinking that having gay marriage as a serious political issue wasn’t something out of 1950s satirical science fiction. I was never opposed to it, just surprised that it ever got on the agenda.
Uh.
This might be an outside context problem.
I see people talk about that plenty—I’ve been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They’re usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.
It could well be an outside view problem.
Also, we may be talking about somewhat different things—do the groups you mention talk about it as a goal, or do they ever talk about having succeeded, even for moderate periods of time?
Hey, sorry it took a while to reply.
The groups in question had it as just a basic matter of operating policy. It was often a balancing act, and it wasn’t without hiccups, but it worked pretty well. Example: A support group at which I facilitated for a while; the going approach was “safer space”: they knew they couldn’t ensure it was safe, full stop, for everybody in all situations—safety in this context being construed as “a buncha different people from a bunch of different backgrounds with varying experiences of oppression need to use this space, and they won’t always speak each other’s language about that, and we want to minimize the sense that this place is a hostile environment.”
It usually ran pretty smoothly. I can only recall one person who really ran afoul of it, and they did blatantly insult about half the group in the space of a couple minutes on their first visit, and escalated badly in response to people saying something about it.
No problem with the delay.
I can think of some reasons why what you saw was different from what I saw, and it’s pretty much that you had a self-chosen group which was meeting in person and had work the members wanted to get done.
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane’s “Door into...” series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn’t a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.
Let me put it this way—I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn’t even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) “biologically compatible as-is” or “biologically compatible with medical help” (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn’t assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn’t correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.
Summary for people who don’t have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):
The political struggle between conservative and progressive ideology is essentially of religious character, evolving from the ancient conflict between Catholics and Protestants respectively; that conflict, the Catholics mostly lost.
Progressives in general are more or less unaware that they are upholding a religious doctrine.
Conservatives either have been or are incapable of being successful in convincing progressives of this fact, or alternatively, are themselves unaware of its essentially religious content.
Therefore, in engaging in political discourse, conservatives have already conceded the main point.
The proper course of action is to switch venues (e.g., refuse to participate in elections) or to convince Progressives that “while they may think they’re rebels, they’re actually loyal servants of a theocratic one-party state.”
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn’t you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives?
And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
This is what I consider among his most important insights.
Probably yes, but I’m not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.
Think Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Not that confident of what? Something I said?
I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There’s a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world.
Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.
Not that confident the media/academia belief pump cycle is a greater advantage than the hidden nature of their theocracy.
If the hidden nature of the theocracy is the main problem, we’ll have to wait for a societal wide embrace of Stirner for relief. I’m not holding my breath on that one.
I had hoped that Hitchens might someday turn on his fellow “atheists”, and bring the fight to moral theocracies as he had to supernatural theocracies. Guess not.
Can you think of any moderately prominent person or group who might make the case, and might be listened? I can’t.
EDIT: On further review of Moldbug, he has a short series of Anti-Idealism blog posts that makes some of the same basic points that Stirner does. He even makes a similar point to what I have above about the New Atheists.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-atheists-believe-in-religion.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-planet-is-infested-with-pseudo.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealism-is-not-great.html
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/unlikely-appeal-of-nonidealism.html
If not for said belief pump, would “theocracy” necessarily even be a boo light?
In what way does the existence or non-existence of a belief pump bear on whether “theocracy” is a boo light?
Why do people believe “theocracy” to be bad? The proximate cause is that it’s what they’ve been taught.
If your brother tries to tell you why [your social theory is wrong], then do not debate him or set forth your own evidence; do not perform replicable experiments or examine history; but turn him in at once to the secret police.
Theocracy doesn’t exactly have a self-correction mechanism to avoid that problem.
Is that a problem of theocracy per se? That’s a problem in a lot of systems. And there’s no reason one can’t in principle have a theocracy with robust free speech rights. It may well be that that hasn’t happened more because the ideas which are generally anti-theocratic are often clustered with ideas about open discourse. That said, it does seem plausible that a theocracy will be more likely to run into the sort of problems you discuss, purely because if one is thinking in religious terms, then the already high stakes involved in politics become even higher.
I’ve yet to hear an argument for free speech that didn’t lean heavily on the risk that any particular policy or belief might be erroneous. My impression is that theocracy is defined as government based on the principal that there are some (divinely revealed?) facts for which there is no risk of error.
If we were sure (risk of error epsilon) of some set of facts and could unambiguously determine whether an assertion conflicted with those facts, why would we tolerate opposition?
As Eliezer noted in the piece I cited, this is a problem of most political systems.
So I was in the process of replying saying that there was potentially an issue here of definitions, but thinking about this more, other definitions I can think of seem about equivalent. So, operating under that definition, one could have a theocracy where for example people said “there’s no risk of error, but the deity in charge likes free will a lot, to the point where as long as they aren’t in the process of actively resisting the divine government, they are free to damn themselves” or something equivalent.
If that’s really the dogma of this (extremely hypothetical) religion, why is it important that the government be religiously based?
Traditionally, religions wanted a slice (or more) of political power to (a) avoid persecution and (b) implement their preferred policies. If (a) is not already resolved, this religion is in no position to argue about what the nation would look like if it were in charge.
I agree. The extreme length which I needed to go to construct a religion which even might have some chance of this is a strong argument that theocracies just won’t act this way. I suppose they could have a commandment in their holy text “run the government”, but this is clearly an extreme stretch.
I personally think that theocracy is bad because it combines the worst features of a totalitarian dictatorship on the one hand, and uncritical thinking on the other. As such, it could potentially turn out much worse than even a run-of-the-mill totalitarian dictatorship; in the latter case, at least the dictator and his politburo have some sort of a real plan...
Which came first, that argument, or you believing that theocracy is bad?
Probably what came first were several examples of theocracies and other dictatorships in the real world; me realizing they were bad; then me looking for an explanation; which led to the conclusion above.
Probably, but the context of that particular quote was only about convincing progressives.
He might, but not here.
I don’t understand this (and don’t have the time to read Moldbug): if the whole struggle is essentially of religious character, then aren’t both sides upholding religious doctrines? So how does engaging with the progressives mean “conceding the main point”—aren’t the progressives likewise conceding the main point when engaging with the conservatives?
Maybe the intended meaning is that the progressives denounce conservatives for being religious, while actually being religious themselves? That would make some sense, but not all conservatives are actually basing their arguments in religion. After all, Konkvistador was talking about “conservatism on Less Wrong”, which certainly wouldn’t fit the bill.
The other things you say sound convincing, but this particular sentence sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy. There are lots of “features” built into humans, such as old age and Alzheimers, myopia, inability to multiply large numbers very quickly, etc. But humans have been working steadily over the ages to mitigate these weaknesses with technology, and thus I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.
I didn’t mean to say they are how things should work, merely how I think they do work, they are the unfortunate compromises we end up nearly always making. A feature need not be desirable in itself to be necessary or the best out of a bad set of options.
Up voted for pointing this out though, since I suspect others may have read it that way as well.
Yes, you are probably right about that. Still, “tricky” is not the same as “impossible”. Humans have made sweeping social changes before, after all; for example, outright slavery is considered to be immoral by a large proportion of humans currently living on Earth, which did not use to be the case in the past. Though, admittedly, such changes would probably be more difficult to effect than, say, the cure for Alzheimers...
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the ‘right technology’ does not currently exist, and isn’t likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope—you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
Exactly, this is why there haven’t been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that’s the word in my local Baron’s court.
You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
performs mitosis
You say there was what size bang?
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
You know what it’s like living with popularity contests Have you lived with a Baron?
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren’t representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time—it would surprise me if there wasn’t gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human “barons” with the space of all possible human “popularity contests” and decide which one is more “civilized” across multiple criteria.
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
This seems a straw man.He didn’t say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn’t make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world—if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user’s posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how “the PC hive mind” is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one’s “opponents” are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men’s Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
What is a “default” human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day—despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.
The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.
That would be more charitable, but less accurate. Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning, and built elaborate reform programs on the idea that they could eradicate everything from discrimination to selfishness through aggressive re-education efforts. I’m not inclined to let them sweep that bit of hubris under the rug, especially since the same groups are in many cases continuing to advocate for the same reform programs despite the fact that one of their key assumptions has been disproved.
I’ll certainly concede that we don’t currently know exactly what the landscape of human behavioral tendencies and constraints looks like, but this should be a motivation for reform advocates to be cautious rather than dismissing the concern. Blithely assuming that you can suppress an infinite variety of undesired behaviors with sufficient social pressure is a recipe for disaster—the end result is likely to be a long buildup of resentment and covert resistance, followed by a sudden revolution that replaces the reformer’s desired social order with a new regime that feels more psychologically comfortable to whatever faction manages to seize power.
That’s the special case of “every point in the state space”, isn’t it?
And I’m not even sure it’s true. Marxist ideology, for example, explicitly disclaims that sort of neuroplasticity: its big idea (oversimplifying like crazy here) is that people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups, and that this sort of group agency is stable enough to be exploited when promoted to conscious awareness. Far from implying a tabula rasa, it actually requires certain stable psychology.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
Isn’t the whole Marxist project based on the idea that you can bring about radical changes in human behavior by reorganizing society? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can only work if humans are so malleable that basic greed, laziness, selfishness and ambition can be eradicated through social programs.
It’s less about social conditioning and more about the extent to which people pursue group interests regardless of social conditioning. To people subscribing to Marxist ideas of class, behaviors which we might perceive as individualistic ambition in fact serve partly—even primarily—to further the interests of the social class in which an actor is embedded, unbeknownst to the actor; when a Marxist talks about capitalist greed, they’re not talking about the selfishness of individual capitalists, they’re accusing capitalists as a group of greed for the resources of other social groups. None of this requires any grand scheme of brainwashing (though social conditioning does come into play when we start talking about “false consciousness” and related ideas); it’s all seen as implicit in people’s native behavior.
It wouldn’t be too far wrong to describe Marxism as primarily a theory of group agency; originally it covered only coarse-grained economic classes, but modern descendants of Marxist ideology have extended it to cover other common interests as well. You’re probably more likely to encounter the latter these days.
I think we mean different things by ‘brainwashing’ and ‘social conditioning’, which is causing some terminology confusion. The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I call this an incorrect belief because more recent research in cognitive science reveals that there are strong constraints on what kinds of mental adaptations will actually happen in practice, and thus on what kinds of social organizations will actually be stable enough to survive for any great length of time.
For example, humans have an innate tendency to form ingroup / outgroup distinctions and to look down on members of their outgroup, which is one of the factors responsible for a lot of bigotry and racism. Society can tell people who to include in these groups with a high degree of success, and can encourage or discourage the abuse of outgroup members. But you can’t eliminate the underlying desire for an outgroup, and if you try you’ll get odd phenomena like people who violently hate their political opponents while honestly believing themselves to be paragons of love and tolerance.
Again, this is not to say that reforms are impossible. Rather, the point is that you can’t fix everything simultaneously, because every social change has unpredictable side effects that currently no one knows how to eliminate. This is one reason why grand social engineering projects almost always fail—because they carelessly pile up lots of big changes in a short period of time, and the accumulated side effects create so much social chaos that they get deposed and replaced with someone more psychologically comfortable.
I feel like I’m explaining this poorly. You can’t make arbitrary changes to behavior under the Marxist worldview by making social reforms. You can get people to further the interests of their social class more effectively by changing their perception of class, or get them to further the interests of other social classes by making them aware of common social goals, but to a Marxist this follows preexisting and fairly strict principles of how people relate to the class structure. To an orthodox Marxist, for example, improving social conditions by means of placing constraints on the behavior of socially dominant classes would be doomed to failure without a corresponding increase in the power of socially subordinate classes: other forms of exploitation would be found, and class relations would regress to the mean.
It’s not that you can do whatever you want by hacking society in a certain way; it’s that people’s psychology is organized in such a way as to lead to more equitable outcomes if you hack society in particular ways. And even describing this as “hacking” is a little misleading; Marx didn’t see any of it as a social project, more as the inevitable result of existing social forces. (Incidentally, this is a main point of divergence between orthodox Marxism and Leninism or Maoism, both of which aimed to produce Marxist revolutions “early”.)
This comment is interesting but needlessly long-winded.
In one sentence, did you mean something like “Status-based oppression and emotional violence will always exist and some group will always get the worst of it; therefore, we shouldn’t get worked up about the victims currently in the spotlight and shouldn’t waste community attention on their particular problems—but it’s impolite to just tell them to shut up and suffer quietly”?
If phrased like that, then yes, your post is already causing me a deep emotional disturbance.
(And you wonder why decent people don’t like reactionaries.)
Nope I take the argument further. You are about to experience more distress. What I’m saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most. What I’m saying is that magnitude or widespread nature of suffering has no strong consistent relation in itself to which group gets our public attention. I’m surprised you missed that.
I’m also saying that often the signalling and politics allegedly done to reduce the kind of “micro-suffering” of group X does nothing of the kind. At worst merely increasing their sensitivity to it making them miserable and resentful of other members of society, while propping up new structures of deprivilege for other groups. A clear utilitarian fail.
Having politics about such microaggression and privillige based suffering be acceptable means that the groups least capable of defending themselves with such politics will suffer at best just as much as before and simply have to pay the additional opportunity cost and at worst will suffer more. Having a taboo on such politics improves the position. It doesn’t seem obvious to me why should groups bad at politics be more deserving of suffering than groups good at politics? Why do you think the former are more numerous or more sensitive than the latter?
Recall that everyone is a member of many such classes and groups. Deep down this kind of attempt at justice in society is based on nothing more than might makes right powered by human intuitions based on sacredness and holier than thou signalling.
Probably true, and possibly a tautology.
However, I think it’s the same fallacy as judging societies only by how the lowest status people are treated. It’s ignoring what happens to a large proportion, perhaps the majority of people.
Also, if better treatment can be figured out for some groups, then perhaps the knowledge can be applied to other suffering when it gets noticed. Life with people isn’t entirely zero-sum.
If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person’s status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).
Even if life is solely a zero-sum game, it would still be possible to narrow the status differences. It’s one thing to have most people think you’re funny-looking, and another to be at risk of being killed on sight.
That is true, but narrowing the status differences would severely penalize anyone whose status is higher than the minimum (or possibly only those with above-average status, depending on the scale you’re using). If we measure quality of life solely in terms of status, then such an action would be undesirable.
Granted, if we include other measures in our calculation, then it all depends on what weights we place on each measure, status included.
It also depends on just how much narrowing we’re doing. I think that eliminating “able to literally get away with murder” wouldn’t be a great loss.
Is there a reason we might want to do this? It feels like your comments in this thread unjustifiably privilege this model.
Again, as far as I understand, Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals. If we assume that this is true, then I believe my comments are correct.
Is that actually true, though ? Are humans driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status (in addition to the desires directly related to physical survival, of course) ? I don’t know, but maybe Konkvistador has some evidence for the proposition—assuming, of course, that I’m not misinterpreting his viewpoint.
This needs to be considered separately as (1) a descriptive statement about actions (2) a descriptive statement about subjective experience (3) a normative statement about the utilitarian good. It seems much more accurate as (1) than (2) or (3), and I think Konkvistador means it as (1); meanwhile, statements about “quality of life” could mean (2) or (3) but not (1).
I don’t understand what (1) means, can you explain ?
The three interpretations I mean are:
(1) People’s behavior is accurately predicted by modeling them as status-maximizing agents.
(2) People’s subjective experience of well-being is accurately predicted by modeling it as proportional to status.
(3) A person is well-off, in the sense that an altruist should care about, in proportion to their status.
Is that clearer?
Yes, thank you. As far as I can tell, (1) and (2) are closest to the meaning I inferred. I understand that we can consider them separately, but IMO (2) implies (1).
If an agent seeks to maximize its sense of well-being (as it would reasonable to assume humans do), then we would expect the agent to take actions which it believes will achieve this effect. Its beliefs could be wrong, of course, but since the agent is descended from a long line of evolutionarily successful agents, we can expect it to be right a lot more often that it’s wrong.
Thus, if the agent’s sense of well-being can be accurately predicted as being proportional to its status (regardless of whether the agent itself is aware of this or not), then it would be reasonable to assume that the agent will take actions that, on average, lead to raising its status.
Consider this explanation, too.
...“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.” “Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said...
(-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Okay, so… you’re going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can’t for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
Meanwhile, you’d seemingly like to deny the practical use of identity politics as self-defense for the “mainstream” cases like gender-based aggression—all for the greater good. Such a proposition indeed feels cruel and morally corrupt to me.
That strikes me as a remarkably uncharitable reading, and in any case a false one—the suffering of undersocialized straight white dudes gets plenty of public attention, albeit much of it in “point and laugh” form (cf. Big Bang Theory).
The most marginalized groups on the planet, almost by definition, are the ones you’ve never heard of. Take Burkina Faso for example—small West African country, #181 of 187 in Human Development Index, and the only reason I know I’ve read about it before is that the Wikipedia link’s purple instead of blue in my browser. #187, the absolute bottom of the barrel, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: slightly better-known, but extremely underserved by Western media relative to the magnitude of all the bad shit going down there. The Second Congo War (1998 − 2003) was the single worst conflict by body count since World War II, but I couldn’t describe a single major news report on it that reached my ears.
And those are entire countries—if I wanted to dig up serious contemporary misery and oppression at the subculture level, I’m almost sure that the famous examples, while certainly terrible, wouldn’t be the worst I could find.
Eh no. I’m saying we ignore the groups who suffer the most. Under-socialized white males have weak counter-cultures working in their favour. But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.
That you can’t think of them is very weak evidence they aren’t there. May I remind you that if we where having this debate in the 1920s people might talk about women as such a group but not homosexuals. The thought wouldn’t even occur to them. Today you are shunned for questioning the thought.
I can give you many many examples but it will get me into trouble. One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.
This is, indeed, an excellent example of a place where the process has utterly failed to produce a humane and compassionate outcome.
As a white South African male, I think that if those are the sorts of articles that you’re relying on for a true idea of what goes on in this country, then you may be over-estimating it.
In short; South Africa is a country polarised into two groups, with all that that entails. Actually, there’s at least four groups (counting “foreigners” and the nearly extinct “Khoisan” as seperate groups), but two of those groups are loud enough to drown out all the others. For quite some time, one of those groups (those who were officially “white”) was dominant, despite the fact that said group was not numerically superior. However, one of the means of retaining said dominance was by providing substandard education to all other groups (along with pretty brutal repression, not being allowed to vote, and so on).
Then, in 1994, everyone was allowed to vote. There was a sudden and very predictable change of government without most of the negative effects of actual revolution (we had very good leadership at a critical time). The trouble now is that, in the eyes of far too many people, there are still two groups. If you listen to one side, then THEY robbed everyone during apartheid and refuse to help the people they once hurt; if you listen to the other side, then THEY are a bunch of violent, corrupt lunatics who will kill you as soon as you let your guard down for an instant. And both sides will gleefully report on any facts that appear to support their stance.
Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable.
If anything I in think in general Western reports let alone regular Western ideas about life in South Africa are likely to be underestimating white South African suffering. In addition I would argue there are gains in signalling games for well off white South Africans to downplay the suffering of their group.
I do agree South Africa in general has been rather lucky but there is potential for major problems because white South Africans are a market dominant minority.
We have a clear example of what could have and still some day might happen in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
I didn’t say that anything in the linked article was directly false—merely that the evidence is biased, having been picked out by one group, and therefore that it gives an overall false impression.
Consider, for example, from the article on farm murders:
I’m willing to believe that both of those statistics are correct, individually, but put together like that they present an incorrect impression. To obtain a correct impression, one needs to find the answer to this question: in 2001, what percentage of South African farmers were white?
Due to the aftereffects of Apartheid, I can say with extremely high probability that it’s higher than the 9.2% figure quoted; indeed, it would not surprise me to learn that it was more than 70% (which completely changes the significance of that first figure). Unfortunately, in a few minutes’ googling, I was unable to find any source for the figure in question (census data is supposed to be available, but not necessarily in an easily searched format).
As for BEE, it is (as I understand the original idea) an attempt to redress the “market dominant minority” problem without widespread suffering; yes, there is a certain amount of economic discrimination against me, but it’s not an impossible barrier to overcome. And it does continually reduce the potential for the major problems that you describe. (What it has become is in some cases different to what was intended—sometimes because of the greed of a few, the new “black elite” who have got rather rich by exploiting any loopholes they could find—sometimes because of poorly drafted legislation—but there are enough voices in parliament calling for the original idea to keep pulling it back on course). I suppose it could be seen as a sort of ‘social safety valve’, giving the less-dominant majority a way to achieve part of the market without pulling the whole market down and rebuilding it from scratch.
And I should add that there are people (I know of several) who would take every word of those articles and mutter darkly that “you don’t know the half of it”. I personally don’t always agree with them, but they are there (and may be suffering psychologically in ways that I hadn’t fully considered until now).
So, I’m not saying that there is no suffering. I’m just saying that I think that it might be over-presented in some places.
Yes, and Zimbabwe is very much in the public eye here. Enough people are looking at it, and comparing it to the current situation, that any attempt to start moving down that same path will be highlighted mercilessly, and shied away from (no-one wants to end up in Mugabe’s position, at least not as far as I can imagine). I’m not saying that we can’t end up in similar straits (though I consider it unlikely), but at the very least we’ll get there by a substantially different path.
On further reflection regarding the pedophile example:
How many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of homosexuality? sociopathy? schizophrenia? ADHD? autism?
Now, how many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of pedophilia?
Googling those terms found a few, though most of them seem pretty tentative right now.
Thanks!
Anecdote: I didn’t search as well as I should have because I had a weird emotional “what if some automated FBI filter flags me for googling ‘pedophilia’?” reaction—which also seems to be part of the problem.
I agree with your last paragraph.
So, literally an unknown unknown? This is a very empirical claim, and my prior on it is low. Unless such groups have unusual barriers placed against them socially and ideologically, you’d think that, over time, individuals in them would’ve made some effort to carve out a niche in identity politics.
I think you just aren’t getting it. Putting some effort towards carving a niche has bad returns for these groups. See paedophiles.
Because they lose the political battle their very efforts to organize along these lines are seen as more evidence at how dangerous and weird they are you instantly categorize them as deserving their fate.
Also to put it in familiar terms the false conspicuousness of members of the group experience may make such activism unthinkable for them. If there is no force that weakens or breaks down that memeplex the political war can’t get started.
And again! Why do you assume might makes right? Why do you assume that any group with a genuine grievance and suffering shall be victorious in the long run? What possible reason would you have for this in a non-caring non-Christian universe.
Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?
Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we’ve had over the past oh… 5 years?
That is the interpretation I made, as well, but perhaps I was mistaken ? I upvoted your comment primarily because I want Konkvistador to clarify whether this interpretation is correct.
I quite agree, and considered posting along these lines myself. Perhaps you were right to be oblique; I’d have been a lot more explicit.
In fact, I will. A large part of this isn’t just about forming viable political coalitions—which is perhaps benign—it’s about suppressing alternate coalitions. It’s about making it impossible for people with a different understanding of the world to co-ordinate. For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation. And of course anyone who gives it will be the designated patsy and thereby validate the feelings of moral superiority the coalition has been endowing itself with.
It’s also about a wish to avoid responsibility, but that’s a post in its own right.
The solution, of course, is to form a higher status coalition against it. For instance:
“As an Arab and a Muslim, I feel the concept of feminism is an Orientalist dog-whistle. You only need to look down this thread to see the real targets are always the Otherized women wearing burkas—whose perspective is totally missing. The venom is just barely below the surface—a discussion of a boy asking a girl out quickly becomes a ritual condemnation of Afghan customs. Analysing a father’s advice quickly leads to back-slapping about how much Saudi Arabia “stinks”. Anyone who calls themselves a feminist is perpetuating white privilege and racism.”
Unfortunately, I fear that this troll has already been done.
EDIT: Edited to include links.
Has any other reader figured out yet what this obvious reason is supposed to be? I’m mystified.
I’m mystified, too. Furthermore, I bet there isn’t just one reason.
I suspect that statement was meant to be semantically equivalent to “the reason that men go to strip clubs is, or should be, well known to everyone”.
I’m confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?
Ok, a better way to phrase that would be “the reason that men like looking at naked women is, or should be, well known to everyone”.
Actually, that depends on what you mean by ‘known’.
Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don’t feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation.
However, I don’t think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.
Agreed. I suspect that Salemicus’s statement was meant to be interpreted in the same way.
I think the point is that feminism tends to assume that it’s for some kind of sinister toxic masculinity sex thing?
I made quite a few substantive points about the discussion in that comment. Why don’t we talk about those? Unfortunately almost all the replies has been about this side-issue, which I have already stated I am not going to discuss.
I realize that I’m being lazy, but is there a way you can summarize this reason ? I have not read the book, and I fear I may not have the time to do so.
Let me guess (I read the book years ago).
Humans, in any situation, invent something to do, simply because “doing nothing” is not an option. A stupid social interaction is usually preferable to no social interaction. On the other hand, an intimate interaction increases the risk of being hurt, so with strangers people prefer rituals. Ritual provides some small social interaction at almost zero risk.
If I understand it correctly, Salemicus suggests that catcalling is simply a ritual. It is more than nothing. It is less than a personalized message. It is what other people (of the same social group) in the same situation would do.
Why exactly this ritual instead of something else? Dunno. Tradition. You usually don’t invent rituals, you inherit them from your ancestors. Somewhere in the past, there was some reason. Maybe a good reason, maybe a random incident. Doesn’t matter today. This is the ritual we have. This is what we do when we want to do something, but not something personal.
As I already stated in the original post—no!
Besides, you don’t need to read the book to know the reason. It’s the obvious reason. I simply referred to that book because it explains the entire social dynamic around it.
It is not “obvious” to me. I am a man, and I’ve never had the desire to catcall; from my perspective, catcalling is something cartoon characters do.
Your comments on this thread seem to be evidence that there is no such “obvious” reason, and that you are in fact pretending that such an “obvious” reason exists, as some sort of status play, or perhaps for didactic reasons. Do you agree that this is the reasonable conclusion that readers of this thread should reach? If not, why not?
It is also possible that he’s operating here under an illusion of transparency.
Honestly, I’m curious too—I can think of several candidate reasons, but nothing blindingly obvious.
If you’re concerned about looking like a patsy, or about possible retributive behavior from being un-PC or perhaps excessively PC, there’s nothing stopping you from spinning up a throwaway account and using that. I’d say sockpuppetry is acceptable in that case.
It’s not even obvious to me that only one of several reasons is right (i.e., I suspect there are several different reasons each of which explain a sizeable fraction, but not the near-totality, of cases of catcalling).
Are you sure you’re not generalizing from one example? Just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean it must be obvious to everybody, especially on a website with average AQ in the high twenties. Hanlon’s razor, guys.
Can you explain how what you are implying has anything to do with with Third Wave Feminism? Because I’m not seeing it.
One of the key third-wave critiques is that second-wave feminism was only ever really about middle-class white women. Obviously, an actual third-wave feminist wouldn’t have concluded that feminism is about white privilege; they’d have said we need to change the direction of feminism to make it more inclusive of “diverse perspectives” or some such.
I was joking when I implied they were trolling feminism, but if a group of saboteurs had gone undercover to make the movement irrelevant, I don’t think they could have done any better.
Regarding my own comment, I was not condemning afghan customs in the context of their treatment of women, but in their treatment of thievery and other such crimes (I was specifically thinking of the process of escalating blood feuds that often result from that process).
“If It Weren’t For Him”? “Rapo”? “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch”?
None of the above.
It’s too long since I read the book to recall all of the Games in detail, and the list on the book’s home page (linked from the Wiki article) doesn’t seem to have this game, but no matter: Berne did not claim to be presenting an exhaustive taxonomy and encouraged his readers to discover more Games.
I recommend the book. I think it’s essential reading for anyone confused (as so many LWers profess to be, and there’s a Game right there) about aspects of social life that are not usually explicitly described. (The reasons why people don’t talk about them form yet more Games.) Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them. Once you have this, what is going on with catcalling will be transparent.
The theoretical background of the book, Transactional Analysis, you can take or leave; it gives Berne a conceptual vocabulary to talk about Games, but one need not make any ontological commitment to TA, to make use of the book.
Here’s Kurt Vonnegut’s review, from 1965.
I bought & read a copy of Games People Play some years ago. (But thanks for the recommendation.) Although I’ve read the book, “the” reason why men catcall remains opaque to me. I can think of multiple reasons, and multiple ways to describe catcalling as a Game, so merely pointing at the book tells me nothing new.
By the principle of charity, I figured Salemicus had something more usefully specific in mind. So I looked at the table of contents, guessed at some Games they might have been thinking of, and put them out there as a starting point. I wasn’t about to reread the whole book just to try making Salemicus’s comment click.
[Belated edit to fix that dangling modifier.]
“Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them.”
From Berne: “Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him.”
So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female’s (albeit negative) attention.
Speaking of which, a tweet by Sister Y I liked a lot:
“the men are competing amongst themselves to see who can loudestly inform the lady that she is a viable rape target”
That’s a solid dig at people who perform a particular kind of behavior that one deprecates. But it just isn’t true!
That sounds wildly inaccurate. I think that the most violent and threatening catcalling happens with only one man
I’m not sure I grasp at all what you’re referring to by those “dynamics”. The nitpicking? The pointing at small things rather than the fundamental assumption(s)? (if so, what’s the perceived fundamental assumption(s) and which are the small things? Is the fundamental assumption the claim “Women have a larger inferential distance to LW because difference in life experiences”?)
I disagree on this, ISTM that many of those are displaying things substantially different, such as “helping people in general” or “protecting people being harassed”.
That whole paragraph rings very true, and deserves upvotes IMO, contingent of me having any idea what “dynamics” you’re pointing at.
How could we test this?
(Also, this issue might be address somewhat via shorter paragraphs)
You seem to be using jargon I am unfamiliar with. Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one’s status, indistinguishable from other status plays?
Among other things.
A normal person living life will receive micro aggressions with some regularity, but views these aggressions through a lens shaped by current political thinking. Thus, those aggressions which are aligned with political perspectives on the evilness of sexism will have greater salience than those which are just random aggressive events. Even if the probability of receiving a micro aggression is equal for both men and women, only those which are towards women and seem to be caused by their sex will be elevated to the level of explicit political discourse.
Consider the D&D example given in this post. The DM saying “no, you’re playing my game wrong” is easy to interpret as a micro aggression, but to gamers (especially ones who’ve sat at both sides of the table) it’s seen as part of gaming, and someone who gets upset about it probably shouldn’t be at the table (in part because they can probably find a DM more suited to their interests). This particular example is being discussed publicly because a poster thought it was an example of sexism; if someone had posted a similar anecdote on the site outside of the context of LW Women it would not be seen as anywhere near as relevant.
Please consider just how strongly the likelyhood of such microaggressions is inversely correlated with a person’s conformity to any given implicit norm! That’s why I find it more than purple prose to refer to the victims of oppression as “the weak”; by not conforming, they simply start in a much much weaker position than someone who reasonably fits within the norms. The current beneficiaries of identity politics- like transfolk—certainly have the field tilted against them, and talking to them of “equal opportunity” or “equality before the law” is outright cruel; you’ve got to privilege those worst off to end up with a remotely fair outcome. (Which leads to the problem of incentives, which leads me to questioning capitalism and meritocracy altogether, but that’s another story.)
So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out. A rock that’s thrown downwards at someone hurts much more—and is easier to hit with—than the same rock thrown back up with equal force! The fact that a few people might try to profit politically from redefining “up” and “down” doesn’t make the objective social circumstances less real.
(Sorry if this all sounds like banal platitudes.)
And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression?
To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?
I think people are somewhat more likely to complain when they’re hurt.
True, there are other things that arguably have a bigger impact, e.g., whether they’ll be punished for complaining, whether their complaint is likely to change anything. For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.
I’d expect a maximum somewhere in the middle of the range for internally generated complaints.
The countries and regions which are best at human rights get few or no complaints. The countries and regions which are bad but not horrendous get the most complaints. The countries which have a strong pattern of punishing complainers get a few complaints. The most vicious countries get no complaints.
That’s just for internally generated complaints. Outsiders may be saying that conditions are very bad in the worst countries.
I think your underestimating how many complaints get generated in countries with good human rights that would be considered frivolous by an international standard, e.g., arguing that refusing to subsidize condoms constitutes a “war on women”.
[citation needed]
It is not particularly controversial to note that nations concerned about human rights focus their advocacy / attention / pressure on countries that care somewhat about human rights themselves. (i.e. the US pressures Turkey about human rights problems, not North Korea).
That said, I don’t think that was Eugine_Nier’s point. I suspect that I disagree with his intended assertion (denotatively if not connotatively).
(I think this was intended as an observation of high noise levels, not a moral judgement of sexism generally.)
So … don’t trust anecdotal evidence, basically.
Yeah. We overestimate their importance.
The purpose of this, if I understood correctly, was to increase empathy with and understanding of the emotions of women in these situations. It’s less evidence than neurohacking.
If you neurohack, presumably you want to move yourself towards more correspondence with reality.
Correspondence with reality is a subgoal of many other goals, but it is not the only purpose neurohacking can serve. The claustrophobe knows they are perfectly safe in small spaces; they still want to leave them.
EDIT: A better example, courtesy of NancyLebovitz.
That depends on what you mean by ‘know’. It’s one thing to know something on a verbal level, and another to have your whole nervous system believe it.
Do you think Alicorn’s polyhacking would be a better example? I don’t really know that many good examples of neurohacking.
I think so, but it’s been a while since I’ve read it. Her work on being happier would definitely qualify.
I’ve seen claims that cognitive psychology has the effect of calming the over-excitable part of the brain in people with OCD.
Excellent, thanks.
Or you simply want to propagate something that seems important throughout your belief network (e.g. a moral injunction against too-convenient dubious actions), or move your values towards reflective equilibrium.
Please be specific. In the post I had already quickly explained a few terms like “microaggression” and used relevant links. I assume familiarity with some terms like “signalling” because they are standard on LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
I’m not sure what it is about your post that I’m missing, since I thought I knew what all those terms meant (except microaggression, and WP says my guess was basically right). Maybe you’re using terms in ways I’m not used to, or maybe I’m just confused as to what your overall point is. MugaSofer’s question seems like a good distillation of mine, so I’m hoping you’ll answer it.
I summarized what appeared to be the point of your comment; since I am unfamiliar with terms used, I thought it better to check if I had misunderstood.
I’m curious if you buy into Moldbug’s narration about Catholic v. Protestant as being an overarching framework for liberal v. conservative issues.
Frankly, the idea of conservativism always failing seems to be more an issue of what ideas survive: If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive. Changes to society which get rolled back become more or less forgotten and don’t come up in how we think of it. Alcohol prohibition would be one example, where excepting a very tiny group the issue has simply fallen out of contemporary political discourse.
I think you are mixing up different issues. Certainly conservatives manage to roll back some stuff, but that is not relevant to:
MM claims that all net changes are originated on the progressive side, which is a well-defined side with centuries of coherence. Do you claim that there are net changes that originated on the conservative side and were written into the history of liberals? Prohibition is certainly not an example of this. Do you even claim that there are any net changes originated by conservatives? Or do you disagree that there are two clear sides, and it is anachronistic to identify the parties of successful changes in different eras? Prohibition certainly shows that there is not complete identify of proposed changes across time, but that is hardly evidence of discontinuity. If you dispute continuity, what are two such parties that you think do should not be identified?
I don’t think there are two clear sides at all, and yes the anachronism issue is a problem also. Moreover, in so far as there’s almost anything like two clear sides, a lot of changes have come from what is commonly identified as the conservative end. For example, over the last seventy years in the US in many ways we moved more in the direction of free markets, a conservative ideal. One example is how it used to be outright illegal in the US to own gold bullion where now there’s a thriving market.
If the problem of identifying two sides is not just continuity, what is an example of its difficulty at a single point in time?
Owning gold bullion seems to me a poor example. First, it was rolled back in 45 years, longer than prohibition, but not very long. Second, it was only a means to the end of devaluing the dollar. When Nixon moved entirely off of the gold standard, it became irrelevant. Nixon moving completely off of the gold standard might qualify as a non-progressive doing something, though.
In general, rolling back FDR’s policies is not a net change.
MM would probably say that conservatives don’t have ideals. They talk in terms of ideals because they don’t know how else to fight progressives who have ideals. Or because they have been infected with progressive ideologies. I believe that free trade and the free market are Whig ideas. Certainly they were in the 19th century, though if you trace them to the French, they no longer fit in the Tory/Whig divide.