Since it has suddenly become relevant, here are two results from this year’s survey (data still being collected):
When asked to rate feminism on a scale of 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable), the most common answer was 5 and the least common answer was 1. The mean answer was 3.82, and the median answer was 4.
When asked to rate the social justice movement on a scale of 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable), the most common answer was 5 and the least common answer was 1. The mean answer was 3.61, and the median answer was 4.
In Crowder-Meyer (2007), women asked to rate their favorability of feminism on a 1 to 100 scale averaged 52.5, which on my 1 to 5 scale corresponds to a 3.1. So the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman (who herself is slightly more favorably disposed than the average man).
I can’t find a similar comparison question for social justice favorability, but I expect such a comparison would turn out the same way.
the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman
Maybe that’s exactly what makes LW a good target. There are too many targets on the internet, and one has to pick their battles. The best place is the one where you already have support. If someone would write a similar article about a website with no feminists, no one on the website would care. Thus, wasted time.
In the same way, it is more strategic to aim this kind of criticism towards you personally than it would be e.g. towards me. Not because you are a worse person (from a feminist point of view). But because such criticism will worry you, while I would just laugh.
There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the “us versus them” dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the “us” side is falling apart.
There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the “us versus them” dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the “us” side is falling apart.
In my experience, groups that want something to attack will attack groups that are generally aligned with them, rather than groups that are further away—possibly due to the perceived threat of losing members to the similar group.
I’ve seen so many Communists get called Nazis by other Communist groups—and those groups never go after people who actually call themselves Nazis.
Perhaps this is obvious already, but the positions people explicitly endorse on surveys are not necessarily those they implicitly endorse in blog comments.
Among lurkers, the average feminism score was 3.84. Among people who had posted something—whether a post on Main, a post in Discussion, or a comment, the average feminism score was 3.8. A t-test failed to reveal any significant difference between the two (p = .49). So there is no difference between lurkers and posters in feminism score.
Among people who have never posted a top-level article in Main, the average feminism score is 3.84. Among people who have posted top-level articles in Main, the average feminism score is 3.47. A t-test found a significant difference (p < .01). So top-level posters were slightly less feminist than the Less Wrong average. However, the average feminism of top-level posters (3.47) is still significantly higher than the average feminism among women (3.1).
My conclusion is that most posters in LW have conventionally liberal views (at least on social issues) but many of them refrain from participating in the periodic discussions that erupt touching on these issues. Some possible reasons for this: i) they hold these opinions in a non-passionate way that does not incline them to argue for them; ii) they are more interested in other stuff LW has to offer like logic or futurism and see politics as a distraction; iii) they mistakenly believe their opinions are unpopular and they will suffer a karma hit.
I agree that this is a very plausible possibility as well. However, IADBOC for two reasons.
First, a large part of views like “feminism” and “social justice” are plausibly terminal values. These terminal values are probably absorbed from the surrounding culture, but it is not clear how they could be argued for against someone who held opposite values. In addition, for the descriptive components of these views, “most people hold them absorbed from general culture and can’t argue for them” is not correlated with “unjustified, untrue beliefs”. The same description would apply to most ordinary scientific beliefs held by non-experts.
“most people hold them absorbed from general culture and can’t argue for them” is not correlated with “unjustified, untrue beliefs”
But is, as Yvain has explained on his blog, more likely to be associated with true or at least reasonable beliefs. Reasonable beliefs are more likely to become commonly accepted beliefs, and most people who hold commonly accepted beliefs absorbed them from general culture and have never seen a need to make sound arguments for them.
Observe that this argument applies even more strongly to beliefs that have lasted a long time. In particular it applies much more strongly to religion.
I don’t think that that is an important distinction. Most of the effect I was talking about is that it is easier for something reasonable (something with a relatively large probability of being true) to make the jump from controversial belief to generally accepted belief. Once something is generally accepted and people stop arguing about it, there is no strong mechanism rejecting false beliefs.
To the contrary, new beliefs can seem more reasonable by being associated with previously accepted beliefs, so beliefs in clusters of strongly held beliefs such as religions and certain ideologies are less likely to be true than the first belief in the cluster to become generally accepted.
First, a large part of views like “feminism” and “social justice” are plausibly terminal values.
Disagree here. Unless your terminal values include things like “everyone believing X regardless of it’s truth value” or “making everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off”, the SJ policy proposals don’t actually promote the terminal values they claim to support. One could equally well claim that opposition to cryonics is based on terminal values.
In addition, for the descriptive components of these views, “most people hold them absorbed from general culture and can’t argue for them” is not correlated with “unjustified, untrue beliefs”. The same description would apply to most ordinary scientific beliefs held by non-experts.
Or for that matter religious views by non-theologian theists.
Your model of Feminism/SJ differs from mine. Most of the cluster of my-model-of-SJ-space consists of the terminal value “people should not face barriers to doing what they want to do on account of factors orthogonal to that goal” (which I endorse).
My model of SJ also includes (as a smaller component) the terminal value “no one should believe there are correlations between race/sex/gender and any other attribute or characteristic”, which I don’t endorse.
“people should not face barriers to doing what they want to do on account of factors orthogonal to that goal”
What kind of factors count as “orthogonal to that goal”? If my goal is to become a physicist, say, does the fact that I’m not very intelligent count as an “orthogonal factor”? If the answer is no, then this is one form of my claim of them trying to make everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off.
If the answer is yes, the question arises what they’re objection is to some disciplines having demographics that differ from the general population. Given that they tend to take this as ipso facto evidence of racism/sexism/etc. this shows that denial of correlations between race/sex and other attributes is in fact much more central to their belief system then you seem to think.
BTW, the other form of my claim can be seen in the following situation: You need to choose between three candidates A, B and C for a position, you know that A is qualified and that one of B or C is also qualified (possibly slightly more qualified then A) but the other is extremely unqualified (as it happens B is the qualified one but you don’t know that). However, for reasons beyond either A or B’s control it is very hard to check which of B or C is the qualified one. Does hiring A, even though this is clearly unfair to B, count as “creating a barrier orthogonal to the goal”?
If my goal is to become a physicist, say, does the fact that I’m not very intelligent count as an “orthogonal factor”?
No.
If the answer is no, then this is one form of my claim of them trying to make everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off.
If “they” believe that. If you know of a large number of people who believe this, I am not aware of them.
Does hiring A, even though this is clearly unfair to B, count as “creating a barrier orthogonal to the goal”?
Hiring isn’t creating the barrier; the barrier—the inability to determine which candidate is qualified—is already there.
If my goal is to become a physicist, say, does the fact that I’m not very intelligent count as an “orthogonal factor”?
No.
Did you mean to say “Yes” and get confused by the double negative? (That would be more consistent with the rest of your comment.)
If the answer is no, then this is one form of my claim of them trying to make everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off.
If “they” believe that. If you know of a large number of people who believe this, I am not aware of them.
I never said they believed that, at most they alieve that. My claim is that is what you get if you try to steel man their position as based on terminal values rather than factual confusion.
Confused: There doesn’t appear to be a double-negative.
If you’re not very intelligent, that is relevant to your physicist aspirations. It is not orthogonal.
I do not understand how your description is a steel man. It may be an attempt to extrapolate instrumental values from a certain set of terminal values, but that doesn’t help us in our matter-of-fact disagreement about the terminal values of the SJ cluster.
If you want to steel man social justice, substitute the entire works of John Rawls.
Confused: There doesn’t appear to be a double-negative.
Sorry, my mistake.
If you want to steel man social justice, substitute the entire works of John Rawls.
The part of his work that I have read, consisted of him making a social contract-type argument saying that since the contract must be made before risk preferences, i.e., whether one is risk averse to risk loving are assigned, we should treat everyone as maximally risk averse. There was also some talk about utility that mostly consisted of him misunderstanding the concept. This did not leave me particularly inclined to read the rest.
In my case it’s something similar to (ii)… I often feel that arguing in favor of my views will not be a useful contribution to the discussions that periodically erupt on these issues, so I don’t. (Sometimes I do.)
For the sake of simplicity, I used sex rather than gender and ignored nonbinaries. The average man on the site has a feminism approval score of 3.75; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.40. These are significantly different at p < .001.
The average man on the site has a social justice approval score of 3.55; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.21. These are, again, significantly different at p < .001.
Because the Internet is weird? I’ve seen conversations in which the only feminists were men and the only MRAs were women.
(Myself, I expected the difference to have the same sign but be an order of magnitude smaller.)
BTW, FWIW in the survey on your blog men thought that being a woman is 3% worse than being a man and women thought that being a man is 3% better than being a woman, though the exact numbers varied noticeably depending on which question exactly they were answering.
Perhaps what he expected was for men to call themselves more feminist than women, for some sort of signalling reasons (of course anon survey responses aren’t much use for signalling, but maybe the idea is that people get into the habit of describing themselves in particular ways and then continue to do so for consistency even in contexts where there’s no signalling benefit.
Updating to “LW is somehow the inverse of Western populations in general, among which support for feminist policies tends to be far more widespread than support of feminism-as-identity.”
So the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman (who herself is slightly more favorably disposed than the average man).
Or the average Less Wronger knows that supporting feminism is the correct response to such a question and answers accordingly.
Saying you agree with feminism is easy. Being a feminist is incredibly hard. If a man at a LW meetup said something objectifying, misogynist, or racist, would another male LWer call them out for it? Such behavior is absolutely essential to create a space that women feel permitted to inhabit (consistent objectification is one of the main reasons programming as an industry remains a boy’s club and a great deal of feminist agitation has been leveled against this), but as we all know dissenting is hard, and while I’m sure every self-identified feminist man would feel uncomfortable in such a situation, I doubt most of them would speak up.
Even without explicit deception or implicit social desirability bias, it’s entirely possible to think oneself a feminist and still do and say things that would be entirely off-putting to the author of this piece. It’s possible to identify as a feminist but refuse to acknowledge a variety of oppressions. It’s possible to identify as a feminist but appoint yourself gatekeeper of acceptable feminist politic—imagine the irony of a “feminist” man telling a woman what feminism is! Yudkowsky himself is in this category, since he thinks himself skilled enough in feminism to entirely dismiss sex-radical feminism, lesbian separatist feminism, and virtually all radical strains of feminism (as per http://hpmor.com/a-rant-thereof/, spoilers HPMOR ch. 93). I wouldn’t attempt to discuss probability theory with any MIRI researcher without having a strong grasp over at least the key texts I can discern the relevance of, but I’m willing to predict with 95% confidence that Yudkowsky has never read a Dworkin book. (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/22850)
Feminism, feminist theory, critical race theory, and social justice in general are not something humans automatically get correct. They cannot be intuitied. They come from a space of questioning deeply held beliefs and holding those beliefs up to the highest possible ethical considerations. It is absolutely foolish to believe that it is possible to intuit these concepts, but arguments about feminism or anti-racism on Less Wrong commonly come to a feminist stating some widely-accepted notion from feminist theory or feminist psychology, and a LWer stating that the notion must be false because of some intuition.
This sort of dismissal and appeal to intuition comes from male or white privilege. It is male privilege that convinces men that the things they think are correct by default, especially the things they think about matters pertaining to gender. This is a dangerous and insidious bias that persists deep into the feminist education of men; most men who think themselves feminists have not trained themselves to realize this bias and still engage in easily identified behavior (“mainsplaining”) caused by it.
Really, this is what the author of the linked article is commenting on: the reality of the LW environment being simply uncomfortable for women to inhabit. I’ve tried to introduce LW to several of my friends, partners, and comrades, as I believe its lessons to be useful, but nearly all of the people without male privilege have been turned away by it.
For LW to be actually feminist (instead of merely claiming to support feminism), it must be an unsafe space for discussions that probabilistically trigger response modes corresponding to male privilege or the oppression of women. It must be unsafe to say objectifying or misogynist things. It must be unsafe to discuss the oppression of social groups as an abstract intellectual concept rather than as a lived reality by the majority of humans. Attempting to discuss such issues dispassionately is a sign of privilege, and insisting that they be discussed dispassionately is an act of oppression. It’s impossible to be dispassionate about a boot on your own face. It’s irrational to attempt to be calm when the hot iron approaches your face. We’re rationalists, not straw vulcans.
Attempting to discuss such issues dispassionately is a sign of privilege, and insisting that they be discussed dispassionately is an act of oppression.
Fine, then let me be passionate. You know what your atttitude reminds me most of? Those assholes in my old Greek highschool decades ago, or those assholes in the Greek media as far back as I remember, those assholes in the Greek society in general, who keep raging about how Jews/Germans/Americans/Turks/Slav Macedonians are oppressing us Greeks, those people who call it treason to have any different opinion on any “national issue”}, those people who call “toadies of foreigners” anyone who doesn’t hate Jews/Germans/Americans/Turks/Slav Macedonians (who are after all oppressing us so very much that it should be actively unsafe to defend such people.)
If one defends such oppressors, they should be dragged to the courts, or beaten up, or perhaps stabbed to death. That’s how the Greek establishment ensures the “unsafe” space for open discourse of issues that you also seem to be advocating for anyone who doesn’t toe your favoured positions.
It must be “unsafe” to have a different opinion? Fuck you and your fascism. Fuck all the ways you use to justify your oppression. Every damn oppressor in the history of the world knows how to plays the role of the poor victim.
You think it so very advanced and so very progressive to HATE, HATE, HATE the oppressor? Well, Greek schoolchildren spent years learning such, and the result is that they end up electing Neonazis to the parliament when they grow up.
A true progressive like me is that one person in a hundred who wants to improve everyone’s lives, rather than spent his time moaning about the damn privileged oppressors of another race/religion/tribe/nation/gender, and who think that by blaming other people his life will miraculously become better.
I hope you liked the passion in the above, since after all being dispassionate is supposedly a sign of privilege.
imagine the irony of a “feminist” man telling a woman what feminism is
Why? Does being born with a wrong chromozome prevent a person from understanding feminism?
A few lines sooner, you said “Being a feminist is incredibly hard.” Is it hard only for men, or also for women? If it is also hard for women, then wouldn’t a man who succeeds somewhat in being a feminist be qualified enough to tell women what feminism is?
Read the following sentence and try to think what is wrong about it:
imagine the irony of a “mathematician” woman telling a man what mathematics is
You know, there used to be people who believed it to be just as self-evident as what you said.
By the way, some feminists do disagree with other feminists, so even disagreeing with some feminists does not contradict being a feminist.
the reality of the LW environment being simply uncomfortable for women to inhabit.
So how do you explain the women who are here? I guess they must be white or otherwise inferior...
I’ve tried to introduce LW to several of my friends, partners, and comrades, as I believe its lessons to be useful, but nearly all of the people without male privilege have been turned away by it.
Nearly all of my friends, regardless of their gender, were not interested in LW. I would guess that even most of your male friends weren’t.
It must be unsafe to say objectifying or misogynist things.
Let’s add misandrist things to the list. Oops, now your comment would violate the rules...
(yeah, yeah, I get it; I didn’t read Dworkin, therefore I am using completely wrong definitions, and furthermore I am a white man which means I can’t understand anything)
At this point probably the best option would be to start a new rationalist site with the following rules:
all members are assumed to be “white male” (WM), unless personally verified by moderators;
a WM user is not allowed to see non-WM user’s username, only their comment; unless the non-WM user flagged their comment as “private”, in which case WM user sees nothing;
any non-WM user can delete any comment made by a WM user; maybe even trusted WM users can delete any comment made by a WM user.
I guess this would be enough for a version 1.0; in version 2.0 you can add intersectionality and more complex rules of evaluating privileges. There are probably many people believing that this is a good way to have discussions, so you could cooperate with them to create this necessary software.
In the same way being a rationalist is hard (i.e., it’s cognitively difficult.)
If a man at a LW meetup said something objectifying, misogynist, or racist, would another male LWer call them out for it?
My mental model says yes, and I have actually seen it happen twice.
I doubt most of them would speak up
I think this is strictly correct, but I predict better outcomes in the case where one person says to the offender “Hey, that’s out of line” than when everyone in the room castigates the offender in unison.
imagine the irony of a “feminist” man telling a woman what feminism is!
Maybe you meant “what oppression is”? (And maybe that would be a helpful distinction to make in general.)
arguments about feminism or anti-racism on Less Wrong commonly come to a feminist stating some widely-accepted notion from feminist theory or feminist psychology, and a LWer stating that the notion must be false because of some intuition.
Do you have some examples for this?
I generally agree that there are problems with how SJ issues are addressed around here, but my experience as an Actual Female On LW doesn’t correspond to the picture you are painting of it being a bunch of intellectually snobby dudebros.
Since it has suddenly become relevant, here are two results from this year’s survey (data still being collected):
When asked to rate feminism on a scale of 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable), the most common answer was 5 and the least common answer was 1. The mean answer was 3.82, and the median answer was 4.
When asked to rate the social justice movement on a scale of 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable), the most common answer was 5 and the least common answer was 1. The mean answer was 3.61, and the median answer was 4.
In Crowder-Meyer (2007), women asked to rate their favorability of feminism on a 1 to 100 scale averaged 52.5, which on my 1 to 5 scale corresponds to a 3.1. So the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman (who herself is slightly more favorably disposed than the average man).
I can’t find a similar comparison question for social justice favorability, but I expect such a comparison would turn out the same way.
If this surprises you, update your model.
Maybe that’s exactly what makes LW a good target. There are too many targets on the internet, and one has to pick their battles. The best place is the one where you already have support. If someone would write a similar article about a website with no feminists, no one on the website would care. Thus, wasted time.
In the same way, it is more strategic to aim this kind of criticism towards you personally than it would be e.g. towards me. Not because you are a worse person (from a feminist point of view). But because such criticism will worry you, while I would just laugh.
There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the “us versus them” dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the “us” side is falling apart.
EDIT: Seems like you already know this.
“A heretic is someone who shares almost all of your beliefs. Kill him.”—Some card game
Upvoted for that.
In my experience, groups that want something to attack will attack groups that are generally aligned with them, rather than groups that are further away—possibly due to the perceived threat of losing members to the similar group.
I’ve seen so many Communists get called Nazis by other Communist groups—and those groups never go after people who actually call themselves Nazis.
Perhaps this is obvious already, but the positions people explicitly endorse on surveys are not necessarily those they implicitly endorse in blog comments.
Also, people are free to interpret blog comments as it suits their goals.
Anyone want to set up an implicit association test for LW?
Update: Likely that feminist-inclined LWers are less likely to comment/vote and more more likely to take surveys.
Meta-update: This hypothesis ruled highly-improbable based on more data from Yvain.
Among lurkers, the average feminism score was 3.84. Among people who had posted something—whether a post on Main, a post in Discussion, or a comment, the average feminism score was 3.8. A t-test failed to reveal any significant difference between the two (p = .49). So there is no difference between lurkers and posters in feminism score.
Among people who have never posted a top-level article in Main, the average feminism score is 3.84. Among people who have posted top-level articles in Main, the average feminism score is 3.47. A t-test found a significant difference (p < .01). So top-level posters were slightly less feminist than the Less Wrong average. However, the average feminism of top-level posters (3.47) is still significantly higher than the average feminism among women (3.1).
I update in the direction that the model of people I form based on LW comments is pretty inaccurate.
My conclusion is that most posters in LW have conventionally liberal views (at least on social issues) but many of them refrain from participating in the periodic discussions that erupt touching on these issues. Some possible reasons for this: i) they hold these opinions in a non-passionate way that does not incline them to argue for them; ii) they are more interested in other stuff LW has to offer like logic or futurism and see politics as a distraction; iii) they mistakenly believe their opinions are unpopular and they will suffer a karma hit.
iv) they absorbed these views from their surrounding culture and don’t actually have good arguments for them.
I agree that this is a very plausible possibility as well. However, IADBOC for two reasons.
First, a large part of views like “feminism” and “social justice” are plausibly terminal values. These terminal values are probably absorbed from the surrounding culture, but it is not clear how they could be argued for against someone who held opposite values. In addition, for the descriptive components of these views, “most people hold them absorbed from general culture and can’t argue for them” is not correlated with “unjustified, untrue beliefs”. The same description would apply to most ordinary scientific beliefs held by non-experts.
But is, as Yvain has explained on his blog, more likely to be associated with true or at least reasonable beliefs. Reasonable beliefs are more likely to become commonly accepted beliefs, and most people who hold commonly accepted beliefs absorbed them from general culture and have never seen a need to make sound arguments for them.
Observe that this argument applies even more strongly to beliefs that have lasted a long time. In particular it applies much more strongly to religion.
I don’t think that that is an important distinction. Most of the effect I was talking about is that it is easier for something reasonable (something with a relatively large probability of being true) to make the jump from controversial belief to generally accepted belief. Once something is generally accepted and people stop arguing about it, there is no strong mechanism rejecting false beliefs.
To the contrary, new beliefs can seem more reasonable by being associated with previously accepted beliefs, so beliefs in clusters of strongly held beliefs such as religions and certain ideologies are less likely to be true than the first belief in the cluster to become generally accepted.
Memetic evolution. The fact that a belief has survived for a long time, and survived the rise and fall of civilizations, is evidence in it’s favor.
Disagree here. Unless your terminal values include things like “everyone believing X regardless of it’s truth value” or “making everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off”, the SJ policy proposals don’t actually promote the terminal values they claim to support. One could equally well claim that opposition to cryonics is based on terminal values.
Or for that matter religious views by non-theologian theists.
Your model of Feminism/SJ differs from mine. Most of the cluster of my-model-of-SJ-space consists of the terminal value “people should not face barriers to doing what they want to do on account of factors orthogonal to that goal” (which I endorse).
My model of SJ also includes (as a smaller component) the terminal value “no one should believe there are correlations between race/sex/gender and any other attribute or characteristic”, which I don’t endorse.
What kind of factors count as “orthogonal to that goal”? If my goal is to become a physicist, say, does the fact that I’m not very intelligent count as an “orthogonal factor”? If the answer is no, then this is one form of my claim of them trying to make everyone as equal as possible even at the cost of making everyone worse off.
If the answer is yes, the question arises what they’re objection is to some disciplines having demographics that differ from the general population. Given that they tend to take this as ipso facto evidence of racism/sexism/etc. this shows that denial of correlations between race/sex and other attributes is in fact much more central to their belief system then you seem to think.
BTW, the other form of my claim can be seen in the following situation: You need to choose between three candidates A, B and C for a position, you know that A is qualified and that one of B or C is also qualified (possibly slightly more qualified then A) but the other is extremely unqualified (as it happens B is the qualified one but you don’t know that). However, for reasons beyond either A or B’s control it is very hard to check which of B or C is the qualified one. Does hiring A, even though this is clearly unfair to B, count as “creating a barrier orthogonal to the goal”?
No.
If “they” believe that. If you know of a large number of people who believe this, I am not aware of them.
Hiring isn’t creating the barrier; the barrier—the inability to determine which candidate is qualified—is already there.
Did you mean to say “Yes” and get confused by the double negative? (That would be more consistent with the rest of your comment.)
I never said they believed that, at most they alieve that. My claim is that is what you get if you try to steel man their position as based on terminal values rather than factual confusion.
Confused: There doesn’t appear to be a double-negative.
If you’re not very intelligent, that is relevant to your physicist aspirations. It is not orthogonal.
I do not understand how your description is a steel man. It may be an attempt to extrapolate instrumental values from a certain set of terminal values, but that doesn’t help us in our matter-of-fact disagreement about the terminal values of the SJ cluster.
If you want to steel man social justice, substitute the entire works of John Rawls.
Sorry, my mistake.
The part of his work that I have read, consisted of him making a social contract-type argument saying that since the contract must be made before risk preferences, i.e., whether one is risk averse to risk loving are assigned, we should treat everyone as maximally risk averse. There was also some talk about utility that mostly consisted of him misunderstanding the concept. This did not leave me particularly inclined to read the rest.
Could you talk a little more about/give an example of what you have in mind here?
In my case it’s something similar to (ii)… I often feel that arguing in favor of my views will not be a useful contribution to the discussions that periodically erupt on these issues, so I don’t. (Sometimes I do.)
Possible, but I suspect the “Why our kind can’t cooperate” both has a stronger effect and is more likely.
Indeed. I weep to imagine what the author of the linked article would think of us if she decided to check out the discussion her piece had inspired.
Would love to see these numbers broken down by gender.
For the sake of simplicity, I used sex rather than gender and ignored nonbinaries. The average man on the site has a feminism approval score of 3.75; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.40. These are significantly different at p < .001.
The average man on the site has a social justice approval score of 3.55; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.21. These are, again, significantly different at p < .001.
Wow, this is exactly opposite of what I expected. Thank you!
You expected men to be more feminist than women? Why?
Because the Internet is weird? I’ve seen conversations in which the only feminists were men and the only MRAs were women.
(Myself, I expected the difference to have the same sign but be an order of magnitude smaller.)
BTW, FWIW in the survey on your blog men thought that being a woman is 3% worse than being a man and women thought that being a man is 3% better than being a woman, though the exact numbers varied noticeably depending on which question exactly they were answering.
Do you mean that this specific demographic difference is “weird” on the internet relative to real life?
Perhaps what he expected was for men to call themselves more feminist than women, for some sort of signalling reasons (of course anon survey responses aren’t much use for signalling, but maybe the idea is that people get into the habit of describing themselves in particular ways and then continue to do so for consistency even in contexts where there’s no signalling benefit.
They are if you signal for the group and expect other people do the same.
I’m not sure about that. To my System 1, “50/100” means ‘mediocre’, whereas “3 stars (out of 5)” means ‘decent’.
Offtopic, but ETA on the survey results being published?
Probably before the end of this month.
How big is the probability?
Updating to “LW is somehow the inverse of Western populations in general, among which support for feminist policies tends to be far more widespread than support of feminism-as-identity.”
Or the average Less Wronger knows that supporting feminism is the correct response to such a question and answers accordingly.
Saying you agree with feminism is easy. Being a feminist is incredibly hard. If a man at a LW meetup said something objectifying, misogynist, or racist, would another male LWer call them out for it? Such behavior is absolutely essential to create a space that women feel permitted to inhabit (consistent objectification is one of the main reasons programming as an industry remains a boy’s club and a great deal of feminist agitation has been leveled against this), but as we all know dissenting is hard, and while I’m sure every self-identified feminist man would feel uncomfortable in such a situation, I doubt most of them would speak up.
Even without explicit deception or implicit social desirability bias, it’s entirely possible to think oneself a feminist and still do and say things that would be entirely off-putting to the author of this piece. It’s possible to identify as a feminist but refuse to acknowledge a variety of oppressions. It’s possible to identify as a feminist but appoint yourself gatekeeper of acceptable feminist politic—imagine the irony of a “feminist” man telling a woman what feminism is! Yudkowsky himself is in this category, since he thinks himself skilled enough in feminism to entirely dismiss sex-radical feminism, lesbian separatist feminism, and virtually all radical strains of feminism (as per http://hpmor.com/a-rant-thereof/, spoilers HPMOR ch. 93). I wouldn’t attempt to discuss probability theory with any MIRI researcher without having a strong grasp over at least the key texts I can discern the relevance of, but I’m willing to predict with 95% confidence that Yudkowsky has never read a Dworkin book. (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/22850)
Feminism, feminist theory, critical race theory, and social justice in general are not something humans automatically get correct. They cannot be intuitied. They come from a space of questioning deeply held beliefs and holding those beliefs up to the highest possible ethical considerations. It is absolutely foolish to believe that it is possible to intuit these concepts, but arguments about feminism or anti-racism on Less Wrong commonly come to a feminist stating some widely-accepted notion from feminist theory or feminist psychology, and a LWer stating that the notion must be false because of some intuition.
This sort of dismissal and appeal to intuition comes from male or white privilege. It is male privilege that convinces men that the things they think are correct by default, especially the things they think about matters pertaining to gender. This is a dangerous and insidious bias that persists deep into the feminist education of men; most men who think themselves feminists have not trained themselves to realize this bias and still engage in easily identified behavior (“mainsplaining”) caused by it.
Really, this is what the author of the linked article is commenting on: the reality of the LW environment being simply uncomfortable for women to inhabit. I’ve tried to introduce LW to several of my friends, partners, and comrades, as I believe its lessons to be useful, but nearly all of the people without male privilege have been turned away by it.
For LW to be actually feminist (instead of merely claiming to support feminism), it must be an unsafe space for discussions that probabilistically trigger response modes corresponding to male privilege or the oppression of women. It must be unsafe to say objectifying or misogynist things. It must be unsafe to discuss the oppression of social groups as an abstract intellectual concept rather than as a lived reality by the majority of humans. Attempting to discuss such issues dispassionately is a sign of privilege, and insisting that they be discussed dispassionately is an act of oppression. It’s impossible to be dispassionate about a boot on your own face. It’s irrational to attempt to be calm when the hot iron approaches your face. We’re rationalists, not straw vulcans.
Fine, then let me be passionate. You know what your atttitude reminds me most of? Those assholes in my old Greek highschool decades ago, or those assholes in the Greek media as far back as I remember, those assholes in the Greek society in general, who keep raging about how Jews/Germans/Americans/Turks/Slav Macedonians are oppressing us Greeks, those people who call it treason to have any different opinion on any “national issue”}, those people who call “toadies of foreigners” anyone who doesn’t hate Jews/Germans/Americans/Turks/Slav Macedonians (who are after all oppressing us so very much that it should be actively unsafe to defend such people.)
If one defends such oppressors, they should be dragged to the courts, or beaten up, or perhaps stabbed to death. That’s how the Greek establishment ensures the “unsafe” space for open discourse of issues that you also seem to be advocating for anyone who doesn’t toe your favoured positions.
It must be “unsafe” to have a different opinion? Fuck you and your fascism. Fuck all the ways you use to justify your oppression. Every damn oppressor in the history of the world knows how to plays the role of the poor victim.
You think it so very advanced and so very progressive to HATE, HATE, HATE the oppressor? Well, Greek schoolchildren spent years learning such, and the result is that they end up electing Neonazis to the parliament when they grow up.
A true progressive like me is that one person in a hundred who wants to improve everyone’s lives, rather than spent his time moaning about the damn privileged oppressors of another race/religion/tribe/nation/gender, and who think that by blaming other people his life will miraculously become better.
I hope you liked the passion in the above, since after all being dispassionate is supposedly a sign of privilege.
Why? Does being born with a wrong chromozome prevent a person from understanding feminism?
A few lines sooner, you said “Being a feminist is incredibly hard.” Is it hard only for men, or also for women? If it is also hard for women, then wouldn’t a man who succeeds somewhat in being a feminist be qualified enough to tell women what feminism is?
Read the following sentence and try to think what is wrong about it:
You know, there used to be people who believed it to be just as self-evident as what you said.
By the way, some feminists do disagree with other feminists, so even disagreeing with some feminists does not contradict being a feminist.
So how do you explain the women who are here? I guess they must be white or otherwise inferior...
Nearly all of my friends, regardless of their gender, were not interested in LW. I would guess that even most of your male friends weren’t.
Let’s add misandrist things to the list. Oops, now your comment would violate the rules...
(yeah, yeah, I get it; I didn’t read Dworkin, therefore I am using completely wrong definitions, and furthermore I am a white man which means I can’t understand anything)
At this point probably the best option would be to start a new rationalist site with the following rules:
all members are assumed to be “white male” (WM), unless personally verified by moderators;
a WM user is not allowed to see non-WM user’s username, only their comment; unless the non-WM user flagged their comment as “private”, in which case WM user sees nothing;
any non-WM user can delete any comment made by a WM user; maybe even trusted WM users can delete any comment made by a WM user.
I guess this would be enough for a version 1.0; in version 2.0 you can add intersectionality and more complex rules of evaluating privileges. There are probably many people believing that this is a good way to have discussions, so you could cooperate with them to create this necessary software.
In the same way being a rationalist is hard (i.e., it’s cognitively difficult.)
My mental model says yes, and I have actually seen it happen twice.
I think this is strictly correct, but I predict better outcomes in the case where one person says to the offender “Hey, that’s out of line” than when everyone in the room castigates the offender in unison.
Maybe you meant “what oppression is”? (And maybe that would be a helpful distinction to make in general.)
Do you have some examples for this?
I generally agree that there are problems with how SJ issues are addressed around here, but my experience as an Actual Female On LW doesn’t correspond to the picture you are painting of it being a bunch of intellectually snobby dudebros.