Suppose also that there is a can of Mountain Dew handy. I know that Mountain Dew contains caffeine and that caffeine will make me alert.
I am hesitant to bring it up because I don’t want to become the multiculturalism police on LessWrong, but I found this distracting. American Mountain Dew contains a large caffeine content yet in most other countries Mountain Dew is Caffeine free. There is a significant minority of LessWrong participants who do not dwell in America and those readers can not help but become distracted when posts seem to be clearly intended for those of a different Mountain Dew recipe.
Surely substituting ‘Coke’ or ‘Pepsi’ would make the Australians and Canadians among us feel more welcome.
I’m sure you thought this would be cute or funny or something, but the objections aren’t commensurate. I wasn’t making a sweeping statement about the alertness-giving properties of Mountain Dew. Trying to do that would have been beside the point, since I was giving an individual example about my own beverage-related limitations, and living where I live, a Mountain Dew that might materialize in my home would have plenty of caffeine. To compare, I wouldn’t have blinked if Psychohistorian had phrased the original remark about women as “I’ll still find women alluring”, making it about himself instead of about women.
Alternatively, I could just protest that in my idiolect, Mountain Dew refers to a beverage that contains caffeine, and your wacky foreign Mountain Dew is not Mountain Dew at all.
Trying to do that would have been beside the point, since I was giving an individual example about my own beverage-related limitations, and living where I live, a Mountain Dew that might materialize in my home would have plenty of caffeine.
Where you “attribute [your] distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience”, I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed American audience. It is regarding this presumption that I demand commensurate consideration. Such consideration could perhaps take the form of a simple acknowledgement: “Oh, really? I never new that! Next time I’ll either use a different example or I’ll throw in brief a parenthetised comment or footnote to make the text accessible to the non-American reader.”
Alternatively, I could just protest that in my idiolect, Mountain Dew refers to a beverage that contains caffeine, and your wacky foreign Mountain Dew is not Mountain Dew at all.
You could make that protestation. Yet you are dismissing the alternate experience as ‘wacky foreign’ as a point demonstrating how gender specific descriptions is incommensurably more significant than nationality-specificity. This is distressing. It would seem to lend support to a conclusion that your objections have been less about the implicit exclusion of minority participants and more about mere political manouvering in favour of your own particular group. This significantly reduces the credibility of any objections that you may make, at least in my eyes. I could quite fairly be accused of having an anti-hypocricy bias.
Where you “attribute [your] distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience”, I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed American audience.
Here’s where your analogy runs off the rails. Alicorn’s text isn’t directed at a presumed American audience—it’s directed at an audience presumed to be able to infer that Mountain Dew contains caffeine where she lives. Your rejoinder skips over this exact point made by Alicorn:
I wouldn’t have blinked if Psychohistorian had phrased the original remark about women as “I’ll still find women alluring”, making it about himself instead of about women.
My rejoinder did not so much skip the point as not see the point as significant. One of the strengths of analogies is that they can help trace where exactly the difference in thinking or opinion lies. I actually don’t see Psycho’s presumption of audience as more significant than that of Alicorn; I can infer that Psycho is speaking from his individual experience as a male just as easily as that Ali is speaking from her individual experience as an American.
The difference is that Phycohistorian was describing experiences that he intended the audience to recognize and identify with as their own, while Alicorn was describing her own experience as her own unique experience.
That does seem like a bizarre thing for Psycho to intend! I gave him a little more benefit of the doubt. Perhaps I was too generous in my interpretation, I get that a lot!
It isn’t necessarily a deliberate, conscious intent. However:
I know that Mountain Dew contains caffeine and that caffeine will make me alert. However, I also know that I hate Mountain Dew.
vs.
It’s part of that set of things that doesn’t go away no matter what you say or think about them. Women will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo’s David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon.
I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear, but the choice of the words “wacky foreign” was to be silly (in an apparently failed attempt to keep the discussion light), not to indicate an actual belief about the relative wackiness of foreign and domestic soft drinks.
I am afraid I missed that. The plain literal interpretation actually seemed to me to more closely fit the remainder of the reply. The core of your reply took the discussion from ‘light and slightly silly’ to serious while simultaniously dismissing the underlying serious message, which rather shocked me. ‘Light and silly’ just doesn’t seem to work when rapport is broken, which I tend to discover rather often!
In any case, I wouldn’t change a word of either of my preceeding posts yet am intrigued by the response. (And also somewhat glad karma can be gained so readily on trivial topics that it can be freely spent on those that I feel actually matter.)
There’s quite a difference between a parochialism that is, at worst, confusing, and a parochialism that makes some people feel ignored or excluded (regardless of whether or not this feeling is justified).
There’s a big difference between parochialism that is, at worst, confusing, and parochialism that makes some people feel ignored or excluded (even if they aren’t being ignored or excluded).
You realize that this is an anti-applause light that conveys little informational value, right?
The actual argument is that since women comprise half the population and are severely underrepresented on LW as it is, if phrasing that implies the audience is uniformly male makes women feel excluded it is detrimental to the goal of spreading rationality. Do you actually have an argument against this?
Please note that “women won’t actually feel excluded” is demonstrably false.
You realize that this is an anti-applause light that conveys little informational value, right?
No. It adequately serves as a descriptive reference to the social dynamics involved in determining what is Right, moral, acceptable enlightened or otherwise good. If you can suggest a substitute phrase then I would happily adopt it. Arguments along the lines of ‘something to do with political correct therefore something bad about the other side’ are common. It is to be expected that some will assume a similar error of reasoning is being applied whenever the phrase is being used no matter the actual content and I would prefer to have a phrase that avoided this hassle.
… Do you actually have an argument against this?
No. I can see a few minor arguments that could be made but why would I make them? It is a conclusion that I support. However, I find some of the soldiers used to support said conclusion distasteful, inconsistent in their application and neglecting some of the spirit of compromise and mutual understanding necessary when communicating across a cultural barrier. I reject posts and certain of the normative demands contained therein on their own merit as I see it.
… the audience is uniformly male makes women feel excluded it is detrimental to the goal of spreading rationality.
While it doesn’t make any difference for the purposes of my reply, that is not the ‘actual conclusion’. It is reasonable to desire an inclusive environment independently of the influence this improved environment may have on the spread of rationality. I for one accept inclusiveness a terminal value while ‘spreading rationality’ is not a goal of mine at all.
Please note that “women won’t actually feel excluded” is demonstrably false.
That claim in the quotes would be an insane claim to make.
No. It adequately serves as a descriptive reference to the social dynamics involved in determining what is Right, moral, acceptable enlightened or otherwise good. If you can suggest a substitute phrase then I would happily adopt it. Arguments along the lines of ‘something to do with political correct therefore something bad about the other side’ are common. It is to be expected that some will assume a similar error of reasoning is being applied whenever the phrase is being used no matter the actual content and I would prefer to have a phrase that avoided this hassle.
The phrase you’re looking for is probably “socially acceptable” or “social norm”. The phrase “politically correct” is primarily used as a connotationally-loaded derogatory for social norms the speaker disagrees with, and to signal, in a beliefs-as-attire manner, group membership with certain political positions. If you want to criticize social norms, which I agree is a rewarding and enjoyable hobby, you would do better to name the specific norms you take issue with, rather than using a catch-all term for norms you dislike.
For instance: Which claims of exclusion are not acceptable to raise that you think ought to be? Why? What norms would you prefer?
I reject posts and certain of the normative demands contained therein on their own merit as I see it.
Okay. Which specific normative demands are you rejecting?
It is reasonable to desire an inclusive environment independently of the influence this improved environment may have on the spread of rationality. I for one accept inclusiveness a terminal value while ‘spreading rationality’ is not a goal of mine at all.
So you accept inclusiveness as valuable, but disagree with explanations given by individuals who felt excluded for why they felt that way, and feel that others are neglecting the spirit of mutual understanding across a cultural barrier? I’m not sure I follow.
The phrase you’re looking for is probably “socially acceptable” or “social norm”.
Socially acceptable is suitable, I edited. In most situations I avoid it since it is an applause light that is still yet to be diffused. In this context, however, it feels more like a neutral descriptor.
Okay. Which specific normative demands are you rejecting?
Then I confess I am at a loss as to what your point in all this was, as you seem to have stated is a rejection of something that other people said without any real explanation as to what you’re rejecting, or why.
As I stated, I intend no point other than those particular assertions made in my posts.
If you insist that I must only deploy arguments in support of a particular political agenda then said agenda is this: Bad arguments and hypocrisy presented in support of positions I approve of are still bad arguments and hypocrisy.
I don’t normally remark on such things, but I’m a bit discouraged to note the following:
The parent comment was the first time Cameron_Taylor has posted anything in roughly a month, in a long-dead argument in which he and I were disagreeing.
At roughly the same time the parent comment was posted, roughly the last 80 or so posts I’ve made were all voted down, consecutively, once each, for no discernable reason.
I recall at least two other commenters mentioning being voted down suddenly on multiple unrelated comments previously while arguing with Cameron_Taylor.
Karma is easy-come, easy-go, but I’m thinking that someone is not exactly participating in good faith here.
By way of confirmation, this has indeed happened to both myself and at least one other commenter previously (I’ll leave it to them whether they want to reveal themselves). I had been waiting to see whether it would happen again to be sure, but we now seem to have pretty good evidence of bad faith.
As SoullessAutomaton notes, the karma itself is not much of an issue, but it’s nonetheless rather disappointing to see this sort of behavior. It’s not immediately clear whether there’s much to be done about it other than public shaming, but as a possible means of preventing this happening again, I don’t suppose there’s any way to revoke the downvoting privileges of those who seem to be abusing the system?
For the record, I’ve been known to downvote large numbers of posts at once (since I’m only here looking at comments for short periods of time, and downvote a lot of posts) but I read them first. Not so much lately, due to the extremely limited number of downvotes available.
While I do not profess to understand the motivation for it, your apparent conviction that a substantial percentage of comments ought to be voted down is of an entirely different character than a mass downvoting aimed at a specific person, targetting what seems to be all of their comments from the past three weeks or so. The latter kind of behavior I would expect on sites like Digg; I tend to expect better of people here.
Let’s consider a less convenient possible world. I come across several stupid comments, realize that the author has a lot of karma, and then start reading their old comments. Careful reading, including the context when necessary, leads me to believe half of their old comments are bad or overrated, and deserving of a downvote. I would argue that making those downvotes is justified, but I’d like to think I have better things to do than read and vote on comments on dead threads.
Edit: this comment may be confusing, please read my follow up to orthonormal.
I’m sorry I was unclear. I didn’t mean to suggest that this was an alternative explanation for this event. In fact, as you point out, the hypothetical I described contradicts SA’s testimony in an important way (the proportion of the comments downvoted).
The reason I brought up the hypothetical was to promote discussion about scenarios that are more difficult to evaluate than what actually appears to have occurred.
The reason the subject came up at all is because this instance was particularly blatant. Otherwise, we don’t generally have enough information to evaluate other scenarios reliably—this is why Eliezer wants a way to monitor voting abuse.
Even so I’m willing to grant that it could be something innocuous (and will apologize if that is the case), but the evidence so far leans toward abuse.
If you want to promote discussion about the issue, a top-level post is probably in order, as you yourself previously noted; feel free to make one.
Okay. Which specific normative demands are you rejecting?
Those that I specifically reject in any specific post that I make. I have neither the obligation nor inclination to use my posts to make a united stance for one particular political position that I identify with. I in fact choose to disagree with poor arguments for opinions I approve of.
Surely substituting ‘Coke’ or ‘Pepsi’ would make the Australians and Canadians among us feel more welcome.
This actually loses something in context, though—Mt. Dew (in the USA) has a somewhat higher caffeine content than those (about 20% more, I think), and also has a reputation as something people drink primarily for the caffeine content, not the flavor.
A better example might be “energy drinks” like Red Bull, which are typically dense, syrupy carbonated beverages with twice the caffeine content of a cola, but I’m not sure how common those are in other areas.
EDIT: This comment was written on the premise that the parent was a genuine request for greater acknowledgement of LW readers not in the USA, not a disingenuous attempt to make an off-topic point about something completely unrelated to this post. Disregard this comment as appropriate.
The grandparent was a genuine request. The sincerity of the disingenuous EDIT in the reply I have ironic doubts about.
I reevaluated the comment after seeing the downvotes it received and based on the apparent attempt to score a point in a discussion on a different post. If you were being genuine then okay, I accept your word on the matter and retract the edit with my apologies.
I am hesitant to bring it up because I don’t want to become the multiculturalism police on LessWrong, but I found this distracting. American Mountain Dew contains a large caffeine content yet in most other countries Mountain Dew is Caffeine free. There is a significant minority of LessWrong participants who do not dwell in America and those readers can not help but become distracted when posts seem to be clearly intended for those of a different Mountain Dew recipe.
Surely substituting ‘Coke’ or ‘Pepsi’ would make the Australians and Canadians among us feel more welcome.
I’m sure you thought this would be cute or funny or something, but the objections aren’t commensurate. I wasn’t making a sweeping statement about the alertness-giving properties of Mountain Dew. Trying to do that would have been beside the point, since I was giving an individual example about my own beverage-related limitations, and living where I live, a Mountain Dew that might materialize in my home would have plenty of caffeine. To compare, I wouldn’t have blinked if Psychohistorian had phrased the original remark about women as “I’ll still find women alluring”, making it about himself instead of about women.
Alternatively, I could just protest that in my idiolect, Mountain Dew refers to a beverage that contains caffeine, and your wacky foreign Mountain Dew is not Mountain Dew at all.
Where you “attribute [your] distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience”, I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed American audience. It is regarding this presumption that I demand commensurate consideration. Such consideration could perhaps take the form of a simple acknowledgement: “Oh, really? I never new that! Next time I’ll either use a different example or I’ll throw in brief a parenthetised comment or footnote to make the text accessible to the non-American reader.”
You could make that protestation. Yet you are dismissing the alternate experience as ‘wacky foreign’ as a point demonstrating how gender specific descriptions is incommensurably more significant than nationality-specificity. This is distressing. It would seem to lend support to a conclusion that your objections have been less about the implicit exclusion of minority participants and more about mere political manouvering in favour of your own particular group. This significantly reduces the credibility of any objections that you may make, at least in my eyes. I could quite fairly be accused of having an anti-hypocricy bias.
Here’s where your analogy runs off the rails. Alicorn’s text isn’t directed at a presumed American audience—it’s directed at an audience presumed to be able to infer that Mountain Dew contains caffeine where she lives. Your rejoinder skips over this exact point made by Alicorn:
My rejoinder did not so much skip the point as not see the point as significant. One of the strengths of analogies is that they can help trace where exactly the difference in thinking or opinion lies. I actually don’t see Psycho’s presumption of audience as more significant than that of Alicorn; I can infer that Psycho is speaking from his individual experience as a male just as easily as that Ali is speaking from her individual experience as an American.
The difference is that Phycohistorian was describing experiences that he intended the audience to recognize and identify with as their own, while Alicorn was describing her own experience as her own unique experience.
That does seem like a bizarre thing for Psycho to intend! I gave him a little more benefit of the doubt. Perhaps I was too generous in my interpretation, I get that a lot!
It isn’t necessarily a deliberate, conscious intent. However:
vs.
Surely you see the difference?
I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear, but the choice of the words “wacky foreign” was to be silly (in an apparently failed attempt to keep the discussion light), not to indicate an actual belief about the relative wackiness of foreign and domestic soft drinks.
I am afraid I missed that. The plain literal interpretation actually seemed to me to more closely fit the remainder of the reply. The core of your reply took the discussion from ‘light and slightly silly’ to serious while simultaniously dismissing the underlying serious message, which rather shocked me. ‘Light and silly’ just doesn’t seem to work when rapport is broken, which I tend to discover rather often!
In any case, I wouldn’t change a word of either of my preceeding posts yet am intrigued by the response. (And also somewhat glad karma can be gained so readily on trivial topics that it can be freely spent on those that I feel actually matter.)
There’s quite a difference between a parochialism that is, at worst, confusing, and a parochialism that makes some people feel ignored or excluded (regardless of whether or not this feeling is justified).
There’s a big difference between parochialism that is, at worst, confusing, and parochialism that makes some people feel ignored or excluded (even if they aren’t being ignored or excluded).
Parochialism exhibits itself perhaps most significantly when it comes to deciding which claims of exclusion are socially acceptable to make.
You realize that this is an anti-applause light that conveys little informational value, right?
The actual argument is that since women comprise half the population and are severely underrepresented on LW as it is, if phrasing that implies the audience is uniformly male makes women feel excluded it is detrimental to the goal of spreading rationality. Do you actually have an argument against this?
Please note that “women won’t actually feel excluded” is demonstrably false.
No. It adequately serves as a descriptive reference to the social dynamics involved in determining what is Right, moral, acceptable enlightened or otherwise good. If you can suggest a substitute phrase then I would happily adopt it. Arguments along the lines of ‘something to do with political correct therefore something bad about the other side’ are common. It is to be expected that some will assume a similar error of reasoning is being applied whenever the phrase is being used no matter the actual content and I would prefer to have a phrase that avoided this hassle.
No. I can see a few minor arguments that could be made but why would I make them? It is a conclusion that I support. However, I find some of the soldiers used to support said conclusion distasteful, inconsistent in their application and neglecting some of the spirit of compromise and mutual understanding necessary when communicating across a cultural barrier. I reject posts and certain of the normative demands contained therein on their own merit as I see it.
While it doesn’t make any difference for the purposes of my reply, that is not the ‘actual conclusion’. It is reasonable to desire an inclusive environment independently of the influence this improved environment may have on the spread of rationality. I for one accept inclusiveness a terminal value while ‘spreading rationality’ is not a goal of mine at all.
That claim in the quotes would be an insane claim to make.
The phrase you’re looking for is probably “socially acceptable” or “social norm”. The phrase “politically correct” is primarily used as a connotationally-loaded derogatory for social norms the speaker disagrees with, and to signal, in a beliefs-as-attire manner, group membership with certain political positions. If you want to criticize social norms, which I agree is a rewarding and enjoyable hobby, you would do better to name the specific norms you take issue with, rather than using a catch-all term for norms you dislike.
For instance: Which claims of exclusion are not acceptable to raise that you think ought to be? Why? What norms would you prefer?
Okay. Which specific normative demands are you rejecting?
So you accept inclusiveness as valuable, but disagree with explanations given by individuals who felt excluded for why they felt that way, and feel that others are neglecting the spirit of mutual understanding across a cultural barrier? I’m not sure I follow.
Socially acceptable is suitable, I edited. In most situations I avoid it since it is an applause light that is still yet to be diffused. In this context, however, it feels more like a neutral descriptor.
Do not presume so much.
Then I confess I am at a loss as to what your point in all this was, as you seem to have stated is a rejection of something that other people said without any real explanation as to what you’re rejecting, or why.
As I stated, I intend no point other than those particular assertions made in my posts.
If you insist that I must only deploy arguments in support of a particular political agenda then said agenda is this: Bad arguments and hypocrisy presented in support of positions I approve of are still bad arguments and hypocrisy.
I don’t normally remark on such things, but I’m a bit discouraged to note the following:
The parent comment was the first time Cameron_Taylor has posted anything in roughly a month, in a long-dead argument in which he and I were disagreeing.
At roughly the same time the parent comment was posted, roughly the last 80 or so posts I’ve made were all voted down, consecutively, once each, for no discernable reason.
I recall at least two other commenters mentioning being voted down suddenly on multiple unrelated comments previously while arguing with Cameron_Taylor.
Karma is easy-come, easy-go, but I’m thinking that someone is not exactly participating in good faith here.
By way of confirmation, this has indeed happened to both myself and at least one other commenter previously (I’ll leave it to them whether they want to reveal themselves). I had been waiting to see whether it would happen again to be sure, but we now seem to have pretty good evidence of bad faith.
As SoullessAutomaton notes, the karma itself is not much of an issue, but it’s nonetheless rather disappointing to see this sort of behavior. It’s not immediately clear whether there’s much to be done about it other than public shaming, but as a possible means of preventing this happening again, I don’t suppose there’s any way to revoke the downvoting privileges of those who seem to be abusing the system?
I was the other commenter, and confirm the observation.
This is unfortunate, perhaps there should be a top level post to discuss the wise way to respond.
For the record, I’ve been known to downvote large numbers of posts at once (since I’m only here looking at comments for short periods of time, and downvote a lot of posts) but I read them first. Not so much lately, due to the extremely limited number of downvotes available.
While I do not profess to understand the motivation for it, your apparent conviction that a substantial percentage of comments ought to be voted down is of an entirely different character than a mass downvoting aimed at a specific person, targetting what seems to be all of their comments from the past three weeks or so. The latter kind of behavior I would expect on sites like Digg; I tend to expect better of people here.
Let’s consider a less convenient possible world. I come across several stupid comments, realize that the author has a lot of karma, and then start reading their old comments. Careful reading, including the context when necessary, leads me to believe half of their old comments are bad or overrated, and deserving of a downvote. I would argue that making those downvotes is justified, but I’d like to think I have better things to do than read and vote on comments on dead threads.
Edit: this comment may be confusing, please read my follow up to orthonormal.
Don’t use “least convenient possible world” to mean “a different hypothesis to explain what you’re seeing”. We don’t want the usage to get confused.
EDIT: Also, it’s unlikely for this effect to result in every one of SA’s last 80 comments being downvoted once.
I’m sorry I was unclear. I didn’t mean to suggest that this was an alternative explanation for this event. In fact, as you point out, the hypothetical I described contradicts SA’s testimony in an important way (the proportion of the comments downvoted).
The reason I brought up the hypothetical was to promote discussion about scenarios that are more difficult to evaluate than what actually appears to have occurred.
The reason the subject came up at all is because this instance was particularly blatant. Otherwise, we don’t generally have enough information to evaluate other scenarios reliably—this is why Eliezer wants a way to monitor voting abuse.
Even so I’m willing to grant that it could be something innocuous (and will apologize if that is the case), but the evidence so far leans toward abuse.
If you want to promote discussion about the issue, a top-level post is probably in order, as you yourself previously noted; feel free to make one.
I’ve previously asked Tricycle for the ability to monitor this sort of thing. I will ask them again.
For the record, this sort of systematic downvoting is not only not in good faith, but grounds for removal of the ability to downvote.
Those that I specifically reject in any specific post that I make. I have neither the obligation nor inclination to use my posts to make a united stance for one particular political position that I identify with. I in fact choose to disagree with poor arguments for opinions I approve of.
I don’t believe following is your intent.
This actually loses something in context, though—Mt. Dew (in the USA) has a somewhat higher caffeine content than those (about 20% more, I think), and also has a reputation as something people drink primarily for the caffeine content, not the flavor.
A better example might be “energy drinks” like Red Bull, which are typically dense, syrupy carbonated beverages with twice the caffeine content of a cola, but I’m not sure how common those are in other areas.
EDIT: This comment was written on the premise that the parent was a genuine request for greater acknowledgement of LW readers not in the USA, not a disingenuous attempt to make an off-topic point about something completely unrelated to this post. Disregard this comment as appropriate.
In Australia at least we have Red Bull and that does seem to be a better substitute.
The grandparent was a genuine request. The sincerity of the disingenuous EDIT in the reply I have ironic doubts about.
I reevaluated the comment after seeing the downvotes it received and based on the apparent attempt to score a point in a discussion on a different post. If you were being genuine then okay, I accept your word on the matter and retract the edit with my apologies.