If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why.
I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
If Multiheaded wrote a post of the kind you recommend with the intent of convincing LW conservatives, it would be a wasted effort. Also, I’m pretty sure a post of that sort would be heavily downvoted, and not just by people who disagree with him politically.
Some of those guys certainly seem irrational and stuck in their ways, but… to be honest, if there are any coherent responses to Moldbug & co. I have yet to see them. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of literature that they’re stubbornly ignoring. If you actually brought them rational arguments that they were forced to confront, I think at least some of them would update their beliefs—this is LessWrong, after all.
EDIT: In response to your edit: (For those reading, it initially just said “I doubt this very much.”)
The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
This doesn’t seem obvious to me. Could you list those reasons?
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal. This is not the sort of disagreement I expect to see someone resolve in a blog post.
Now for a more blatantly left-wing argument: It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. … . The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people
Heh. Well, there was a period in my life when I was very very poor. No money to take public transportation (so I walked), no money to buy a can of soda (so I drank water), etc. I lived in a mostly-black area of the city with gunshots heard at night every week or so.
Unfortunately for your argument I’m not a leftist or a progressive, I do not get hysterical about social inequities and you probably would say that I don’t realize the extent and import of my current privilege (I’m not very poor any more).
Unfortunately for your argument I’m not a leftist or a progressive, I do not get hysterical about social inequities and you probably would say that I don’t realize the extent and import of my current privilege (I’m not very poor any more).
I don’t see how any of this is all that unfortunate for my argument. Perhaps you think I’m saying that only progressives can recognize their privilege along some axis, or that recognizing privilege is sufficient to induce support for progressive policies? Well, I don’t believe either of these things. What I do believe is that recognizing the consequences and extent of privilege undercuts the force of several right-wing arguments.
It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. … The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people
I have been a marginalized person. I did not acquire a realization of “the extent and import” of my privilege, neither do I acknowledge that certain social inequities (you didn’ t specify which ones, so I can’t be sure) are “deeply oppressive”.
Ah, I see. My intent was not to suggest that all (or even most) marginalized people experience inequity as oppressive, although I can see how I could be read that way. I should also note that I believe there’s something to the idea of false consciousness. Oppressed people often do not acknowledge the fact of their own oppression, although I’m not saying that’s the case for past-you. Note that I didn’t say the best way to acquire information about the impact of privilege is to be a marginalized person.
Also, the impact of marginalization along some axis (economic status, say) can be considerably mitigated by privilege along other axes (race/education/gender/etc.). I’ve been quite poor too—while I was a grad student—but my experience of poverty was, I’m pretty sure, qualitatively different from that of an inner-city African American single mother (even one with the same income I had) or a Dalit in rural India.
Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved—an essay which I value because it drew parallels between the way libertarians think most people kid themselves about the value of government and the way (most?) feminists think most people fail to notice patriarchy.
Perhaps the concept does have that role in Marxism, but I’m not a Marxist. I don’t buy “false consciousness” because it is an integral part of some rickety theoretical superstructure that I need to preserve. I think “false consciousness” is a useful concept because there is evidence that various groups that are provably disadvantaged according to certain indicators either underestimate their disadvantage or deny it entirely when asked. There is also evidence that in many of these cases the cause of this is a social system that either hides relevant information from the disadvantaged group or molds their outlook on the world so that they are motivated to deny (or ignore) the evidence.
As such, it’s no more an excuse to protect against conflicting evidence than, say, the claim that people in general dramatically overestimate their relative performance at everyday tasks.
I think “false consciousness” is a useful concept because there is evidence that various groups that are provably disadvantaged according to certain indicators either underestimate their disadvantage or deny it entirely when asked.
As opposed to being evidence that you’re looking at the wrong indicators. At best this amounts to “the people don’t care enough about the things I think they should, therefore there’s something wrong with the people”.
Edit: Also up-thread you said regarding the basis of your argument:
This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
And yet you’re perfectly willing to dismiss those same anecdotes as “false consciousness” if they don’t support your ideas about how much impact there should be on the “lives and psyches of the population affected”.
At best this amounts to “the people don’t care enough about the things I think they should, therefore there’s something wrong with the people”.
It could amount to this, I guess. But I don’t see why you’d think this is all it could amount to at best. Do you really consider it outside the realm of possibility that people could be genuinely better off with certain social changes and yet fail to acknowledge this fact due to conditioning?
And yet you’re perfectly willing to dismiss those same anecdotes as “false consciousness” if they don’t support your ideas about how much impact there should be on the “lives and psyches of the population affected”.
Just because I think an anecdote reflects false consciousness doesn’t mean I’m dismissing it’s evidentiary value. A marginalized person doesn’t have to be saying “Look how I oppressed I am” in order for us to listen to them and realize they’re oppressed. Judgments of oppression are judgments about the objective conditions of people’s lives, not subjective facts about how they feel.
A personal example: I’ve volunteered to conduct surveys in rural India in the past, and this involved talking to women in Indian villages. Virtually none of these women explicitly referred to themselves as oppressed, and I doubt most of them consider themselves oppressed, because they have a host of bullshit religious and traditional beliefs that prevent that realization. But hearing about their lives, it was evident to someone who does not share those bullshit beliefs that they were in fact oppressed.
So when I said that one needs to listen to marginalized people in order to fully appreciate the impact of a lack of privilege, I wasn’t just referring to marginalized people who’re yelling about oppression. The only thing I’m “dismissing” (although this is probably not the right word) when I talk about false consciousness is the idea that people’s subjective judgments about their oppression are a reliable guide to the objective facts.
And just to be somewhat even-handed, let me acknowledge that I think there are certain social justice communities where the unreliability runs in the opposite direction, where people are conditioned to view everything through a framework of oppression, and they overestimate the extent to which various practices are oppressive.
Being “oppressed” is starting to seem like an XML tag with no connection to reality. At the very least can you give a definition of being “oppressed” that doesn’t cash out as “whatever pragmatist says it is”.
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
As a right-winger I must strongly disagree with the characterization of the right wing position given in your comment. In particular it seems to me that the left-wing position contains a number of specific falsifiable (and false) beliefs, for example, the false belief that all the policies leftists tend to promote to “help the poor and oppressed” actually help the poor and oppressed in the long run.
In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they’re willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal.
So I agree there are a number of falsifiable beliefs on both sides. But the mere fact of falsifiability doesn’t mean the disagreements are easy to resolve, partly for “politics is the mind-killer” type reasons, and partly because it is legitimately difficult to find conclusive experimental evidence for causal claims in the social sciences.
I do, however, think there are important value disagreements about how to trade off efficiency and equity between left and right, and I also think your description of the “main value disagreement” is a caricature. I’m pretty sure I could easily come up with socio-political thought experiments where all (non-moral) facts are made explicit, leaving no room for disagreement on them, but where we would still disagree about the best policy, and I assure you I’m not one of the “pathological” egalitarians you describe (although you would probably consider my views pathological for other reasons).
In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they’re willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.
A few examples? (Preferably ones where the conclusion that the policy leads to an anti-Pareto improvement is based on real-world data rather than on dry-water economic models.)
That’s an interesting thought. Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal. I don’t think this is pathological. In somewhat of a paradox what matters most to absolute well-being is our relative material wealth not our absolute wealth. Now, of course, when looked at as a ranking nothing can be done about the fact that some will have more wealth than others. Nothing short of trying to make everyone equal (and no one wants that). But the ranking is not the only thing that matters. There has always been a distribution of wealth but the those at the top have not always had so much more than the median. Making everyone a little worse off materially to make the distribution a bit narrower may make the absolute well-being greater.
Also I wonder if right wingers would support a distributionist policy to help the poor and oppressed even if such a policy were certain to be effective. My hunch is that they would not because they are opposed, in principle, to any redistribution.
Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal.
Maybe some policies fail at helping the poor and at making people more equal.
I can imagine a policy done in the name of the poor which results at everyone being poorer… except for the people who organized the redistribution… you know, the powerful good guys.
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
I’ll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you’re saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But… I don’t understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I’m currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs—we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as −5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like −15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it’s necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman’s experience in a terrible job, saying “read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be”. I don’t see why we can’t do the same here. It’s not that hard to find stories of marginalized people’s experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.
To phrase it in more statistical terms it would be something like “take into account how selection bias has changed your impressions of things.”
E.g. as a white male in a liberal western nation I intuitively think buying food or finding a place to live is easy, so might not credit reports of someone else finding it difficult. But if prejudice against a group I am not part of was endemic I wouldn’t be aware of it. So checking your privilege is a reminder that your experience may differ from others and to be aware of that.
Guessing by how this word is typically used, it means: “My opponents are cognitively inferior. They can’t understand my situation, because they have never experienced it. On the other hand, I can perfectly understand their situation (despite never experiencing it, too).”
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don’t give accurate information if they’ll be punished for it*).
Unfortunately, the true parts of the idea of privilege are apt to get swamped by the way it’s used as a power grab.
*The original version framed this as an absolute. I’m quite willing to be probabilistic about it.
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status.
Do I read it correctly as: ”..therefore, to focus on the opinions of lower-status people, it is necessary to exclude the higher-status people from the debate (because otherwise people would by instinct turn their attention only to what the higher-status people said—which is probably not a new information for anyone—and ignore the rest of the debate).”?
I would agree with that. -- And by the way, in some situations an average woman is actually higher-status than an average man, so perhaps we should debate those situations by excluding the women’s voice. Actually, if a “dating market” is an example of such situation, that would explain the necessity of PUA debates (as in: the debate about dating is culturally framed by women’s terms, so we need a place where men are allowed to explain how they feel without automatically taking a status hit for doing so).
Perhaps the problem is at not making a difference between “hypothesis generating” and “hypothesis debating” parts of reasoning. Excluding higher status people from some hypothesis-generating discussions is good, because it allows people to hear the opinions they would otherwise not hear. But when those hypotheses are already generated, they shouldn’t be accepted automatically. (There is a difference between “you oppress me by using your status to prevent me from speaking my hypothesis” and “you oppress me by providing an argument against my hypothesis”.) In theory, a group of lower-status people doesn’t have a monolithic opinion, so they could make the debate among themselves. But sometimes the dissenting subgroup can be accused of being not-low-status-enough. (As in: “this topic should be only discussed by women, because only women understand how women feel. oh, you are a woman and you still disagree with me? well, that’s because you are a privileged white woman!”)
As an unpolitical analogy, it makes sense to use some special rules for brainstorming, to help generate new ideas. But it does not mean that the ideas generated by these special rules should be protected by them forever. It makes sense to use brainstorming for generating ideas, and then to use experiments and peer review for testing them. -- So while it can be good to use brainstorming to generate an idea for a peer-reviewed journal… it would be silly to insist that the journal must accept the idea uncritically, because otherwise it ruins the spirit of brainstorming.
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don’t give accurate information if they’ll be punished for it*).
I would like to point out that Yvain’s post that progressive like to site elsewhere in this thread makes the exact opposite argument.
It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of literature that they’re stubbornly ignoring.
The mainstream of political philosophy and political science is pretty much opposed to their positions. While none of it specifically addresses the topics covered by Molbuggians and neo-reactionaries in the terms they use, the burden of proof seems to be on them to prove there is something massively wrong with the mainstream before the mainstream has to specifically craft responses to their arguments.
I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
Wrong. I used to be a reasonable, well adjusted progressive, even a quite ideologically passionate one (leaning towards anarchism). Moldbug’s intelligent analysis (for all its flaws) convinced me that I was wrong. I can’t be the only one who is capable of responding to argument.
I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
If Multiheaded wrote a post of the kind you recommend with the intent of convincing LW conservatives, it would be a wasted effort. Also, I’m pretty sure a post of that sort would be heavily downvoted, and not just by people who disagree with him politically.
Why?
Some of those guys certainly seem irrational and stuck in their ways, but… to be honest, if there are any coherent responses to Moldbug & co. I have yet to see them. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of literature that they’re stubbornly ignoring. If you actually brought them rational arguments that they were forced to confront, I think at least some of them would update their beliefs—this is LessWrong, after all.
EDIT: In response to your edit: (For those reading, it initially just said “I doubt this very much.”)
This doesn’t seem obvious to me. Could you list those reasons?
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal. This is not the sort of disagreement I expect to see someone resolve in a blog post.
Now for a more blatantly left-wing argument: It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
Heh. Well, there was a period in my life when I was very very poor. No money to take public transportation (so I walked), no money to buy a can of soda (so I drank water), etc. I lived in a mostly-black area of the city with gunshots heard at night every week or so.
Unfortunately for your argument I’m not a leftist or a progressive, I do not get hysterical about social inequities and you probably would say that I don’t realize the extent and import of my current privilege (I’m not very poor any more).
Belief update time? :-D
I don’t see how any of this is all that unfortunate for my argument. Perhaps you think I’m saying that only progressives can recognize their privilege along some axis, or that recognizing privilege is sufficient to induce support for progressive policies? Well, I don’t believe either of these things. What I do believe is that recognizing the consequences and extent of privilege undercuts the force of several right-wing arguments.
Your argument was
I have been a marginalized person. I did not acquire a realization of “the extent and import” of my privilege, neither do I acknowledge that certain social inequities (you didn’ t specify which ones, so I can’t be sure) are “deeply oppressive”.
Ah, I see. My intent was not to suggest that all (or even most) marginalized people experience inequity as oppressive, although I can see how I could be read that way. I should also note that I believe there’s something to the idea of false consciousness. Oppressed people often do not acknowledge the fact of their own oppression, although I’m not saying that’s the case for past-you. Note that I didn’t say the best way to acquire information about the impact of privilege is to be a marginalized person.
Also, the impact of marginalization along some axis (economic status, say) can be considerably mitigated by privilege along other axes (race/education/gender/etc.). I’ve been quite poor too—while I was a grad student—but my experience of poverty was, I’m pretty sure, qualitatively different from that of an inner-city African American single mother (even one with the same income I had) or a Dalit in rural India.
“False consciousness” seems suspiciously like an excuse to protect one’s social theories from conflicting evidence.
Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved—an essay which I value because it drew parallels between the way libertarians think most people kid themselves about the value of government and the way (most?) feminists think most people fail to notice patriarchy.
Perhaps the concept does have that role in Marxism, but I’m not a Marxist. I don’t buy “false consciousness” because it is an integral part of some rickety theoretical superstructure that I need to preserve. I think “false consciousness” is a useful concept because there is evidence that various groups that are provably disadvantaged according to certain indicators either underestimate their disadvantage or deny it entirely when asked. There is also evidence that in many of these cases the cause of this is a social system that either hides relevant information from the disadvantaged group or molds their outlook on the world so that they are motivated to deny (or ignore) the evidence.
As such, it’s no more an excuse to protect against conflicting evidence than, say, the claim that people in general dramatically overestimate their relative performance at everyday tasks.
As opposed to being evidence that you’re looking at the wrong indicators. At best this amounts to “the people don’t care enough about the things I think they should, therefore there’s something wrong with the people”.
Edit: Also up-thread you said regarding the basis of your argument:
And yet you’re perfectly willing to dismiss those same anecdotes as “false consciousness” if they don’t support your ideas about how much impact there should be on the “lives and psyches of the population affected”.
It could amount to this, I guess. But I don’t see why you’d think this is all it could amount to at best. Do you really consider it outside the realm of possibility that people could be genuinely better off with certain social changes and yet fail to acknowledge this fact due to conditioning?
Just because I think an anecdote reflects false consciousness doesn’t mean I’m dismissing it’s evidentiary value. A marginalized person doesn’t have to be saying “Look how I oppressed I am” in order for us to listen to them and realize they’re oppressed. Judgments of oppression are judgments about the objective conditions of people’s lives, not subjective facts about how they feel.
A personal example: I’ve volunteered to conduct surveys in rural India in the past, and this involved talking to women in Indian villages. Virtually none of these women explicitly referred to themselves as oppressed, and I doubt most of them consider themselves oppressed, because they have a host of bullshit religious and traditional beliefs that prevent that realization. But hearing about their lives, it was evident to someone who does not share those bullshit beliefs that they were in fact oppressed.
So when I said that one needs to listen to marginalized people in order to fully appreciate the impact of a lack of privilege, I wasn’t just referring to marginalized people who’re yelling about oppression. The only thing I’m “dismissing” (although this is probably not the right word) when I talk about false consciousness is the idea that people’s subjective judgments about their oppression are a reliable guide to the objective facts.
And just to be somewhat even-handed, let me acknowledge that I think there are certain social justice communities where the unreliability runs in the opposite direction, where people are conditioned to view everything through a framework of oppression, and they overestimate the extent to which various practices are oppressive.
Being “oppressed” is starting to seem like an XML tag with no connection to reality. At the very least can you give a definition of being “oppressed” that doesn’t cash out as “whatever pragmatist says it is”.
As a right-winger I must strongly disagree with the characterization of the right wing position given in your comment. In particular it seems to me that the left-wing position contains a number of specific falsifiable (and false) beliefs, for example, the false belief that all the policies leftists tend to promote to “help the poor and oppressed” actually help the poor and oppressed in the long run.
In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they’re willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.
I did say this:
So I agree there are a number of falsifiable beliefs on both sides. But the mere fact of falsifiability doesn’t mean the disagreements are easy to resolve, partly for “politics is the mind-killer” type reasons, and partly because it is legitimately difficult to find conclusive experimental evidence for causal claims in the social sciences.
I do, however, think there are important value disagreements about how to trade off efficiency and equity between left and right, and I also think your description of the “main value disagreement” is a caricature. I’m pretty sure I could easily come up with socio-political thought experiments where all (non-moral) facts are made explicit, leaving no room for disagreement on them, but where we would still disagree about the best policy, and I assure you I’m not one of the “pathological” egalitarians you describe (although you would probably consider my views pathological for other reasons).
A few examples? (Preferably ones where the conclusion that the policy leads to an anti-Pareto improvement is based on real-world data rather than on dry-water economic models.)
That’s an interesting thought. Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal. I don’t think this is pathological. In somewhat of a paradox what matters most to absolute well-being is our relative material wealth not our absolute wealth. Now, of course, when looked at as a ranking nothing can be done about the fact that some will have more wealth than others. Nothing short of trying to make everyone equal (and no one wants that). But the ranking is not the only thing that matters. There has always been a distribution of wealth but the those at the top have not always had so much more than the median. Making everyone a little worse off materially to make the distribution a bit narrower may make the absolute well-being greater.
Also I wonder if right wingers would support a distributionist policy to help the poor and oppressed even if such a policy were certain to be effective. My hunch is that they would not because they are opposed, in principle, to any redistribution.
Maybe some policies fail at helping the poor and at making people more equal.
I can imagine a policy done in the name of the poor which results at everyone being poorer… except for the people who organized the redistribution… you know, the powerful good guys.
I’ll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you’re saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But… I don’t understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I’m currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs—we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as −5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like −15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it’s necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman’s experience in a terrible job, saying “read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be”. I don’t see why we can’t do the same here. It’s not that hard to find stories of marginalized people’s experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.
Also, while we’re here, would you mind defining what you mean by “privilege”?
To phrase it in more statistical terms it would be something like “take into account how selection bias has changed your impressions of things.”
E.g. as a white male in a liberal western nation I intuitively think buying food or finding a place to live is easy, so might not credit reports of someone else finding it difficult. But if prejudice against a group I am not part of was endemic I wouldn’t be aware of it. So checking your privilege is a reminder that your experience may differ from others and to be aware of that.
Guessing by how this word is typically used, it means: “My opponents are cognitively inferior. They can’t understand my situation, because they have never experienced it. On the other hand, I can perfectly understand their situation (despite never experiencing it, too).”
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don’t give accurate information if they’ll be punished for it*).
Unfortunately, the true parts of the idea of privilege are apt to get swamped by the way it’s used as a power grab.
*The original version framed this as an absolute. I’m quite willing to be probabilistic about it.
Do I read it correctly as: ”..therefore, to focus on the opinions of lower-status people, it is necessary to exclude the higher-status people from the debate (because otherwise people would by instinct turn their attention only to what the higher-status people said—which is probably not a new information for anyone—and ignore the rest of the debate).”?
I would agree with that. -- And by the way, in some situations an average woman is actually higher-status than an average man, so perhaps we should debate those situations by excluding the women’s voice. Actually, if a “dating market” is an example of such situation, that would explain the necessity of PUA debates (as in: the debate about dating is culturally framed by women’s terms, so we need a place where men are allowed to explain how they feel without automatically taking a status hit for doing so).
Perhaps the problem is at not making a difference between “hypothesis generating” and “hypothesis debating” parts of reasoning. Excluding higher status people from some hypothesis-generating discussions is good, because it allows people to hear the opinions they would otherwise not hear. But when those hypotheses are already generated, they shouldn’t be accepted automatically. (There is a difference between “you oppress me by using your status to prevent me from speaking my hypothesis” and “you oppress me by providing an argument against my hypothesis”.) In theory, a group of lower-status people doesn’t have a monolithic opinion, so they could make the debate among themselves. But sometimes the dissenting subgroup can be accused of being not-low-status-enough. (As in: “this topic should be only discussed by women, because only women understand how women feel. oh, you are a woman and you still disagree with me? well, that’s because you are a privileged white woman!”)
As an unpolitical analogy, it makes sense to use some special rules for brainstorming, to help generate new ideas. But it does not mean that the ideas generated by these special rules should be protected by them forever. It makes sense to use brainstorming for generating ideas, and then to use experiments and peer review for testing them. -- So while it can be good to use brainstorming to generate an idea for a peer-reviewed journal… it would be silly to insist that the journal must accept the idea uncritically, because otherwise it ruins the spirit of brainstorming.
I would like to point out that this is impossible by the definition of “high status”.
I would like to point out that Yvain’s post that progressive like to site elsewhere in this thread makes the exact opposite argument.
The mainstream of political philosophy and political science is pretty much opposed to their positions. While none of it specifically addresses the topics covered by Molbuggians and neo-reactionaries in the terms they use, the burden of proof seems to be on them to prove there is something massively wrong with the mainstream before the mainstream has to specifically craft responses to their arguments.
(For reference here’s an example of what I mean by mainstream ‘progressive’ writing which argue that democracy has empirically better outcomes for its citizens and outlines democratic peace theory )
Wrong. I used to be a reasonable, well adjusted progressive, even a quite ideologically passionate one (leaning towards anarchism). Moldbug’s intelligent analysis (for all its flaws) convinced me that I was wrong. I can’t be the only one who is capable of responding to argument.