Feminism in particular has a bad history of leaning on a community to make changes—to the point where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity. I may be overreacting, but I don’t even want to hear or discuss anything from that direction. It’s textbook derailing. “But what you’re doing is anti-woman” has been played out by feminists, over and over again, to get their demands met from community after community. From Atheism+ to Occupy Wall Street, the result is never pretty.
And honestly, attacking open discourse as anti-woman and anti-minority is very, uhh, squicky. I don’t have a better way of putting my thoughts down on the matter—it’s just very, very concerning to me. It feels like a Stalinist complaining that we aren’t putting enough bullets in the heads of dissenters—except it’s a feminist complaining that we aren’t torpedoing the reputation of enough people who express “anti-woman” ideas. Just… ew. No. It doesn’t help that this idea is getting obfuscated with layers and layers of complicated English and parenthetical thoughts breaking up the sentence structure.
Some choice quotes:
I thus require adherence to these ideas or at least a lack of explicit challenges to them on the part of anyone speaking to me before I can entertain their arguments in good faith.
Big warning flag right here. It’s threatening to ignore, ostracize, or attack those who disagree with their sacred cows. That’s an unconscionably bad habit to allow oneself.
I may be overreacting, but I don’t even want to hear or discuss anything from that direction.
[later]
It’s threatening to ignore, ostracize, or attack those who disagree with their sacred cows. That’s an unconscionably bad habit to allow oneself.
throws hand in air
You’d think if we were such hot stuff at dispassionately debating things, we could handle outgroup criticism like this without either ignoring opposing views or devolving into tribal politics. But as Tarski would say, “if we can’t, I want to believe we can’t,” and I admit I’d rather not discuss this sort of thing than always discuss this sort of thing.
To maximize open discourse, you have to close down discourse against open discourse.
It’s just Marcuse’s paradox (which I’m pretty sure I’m coining here): to maximize tolerance, you have to be intolerant toward intolerance. Or in the legal arena: “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
There are two arguments in that post: “certain elements within the rationality thing signal more than is necessary”, the correction of which would aid the goal of generating high-quality open discourse, and “certain conclusions should not even be considered, certain arguments should not be made, no matter their strength, because certain people have memetic immune reactions to them that drive them away from participating at all”, the correction of which would mean an end to open discourse. Given that ThrustVectoring (presumably) values open discourse, the response of “I don’t even want to discuss anything from that direction” is exactly correct.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t be discussed, of course; it just means that a community that values open discourse can’t discuss it. If apophemi wants there to be a community based around limited rationality—that is, rationality-minus-discourse-about-certain-things—well, one can always be started. Secession is always an option, and online, you don’t even have to figure out how to build a seastead to secede.
Humorous, off-topic response: But the Declaration of Independence is!
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
This is harsh, but I think it’s basically right. A useful rule of thumb: any time you see the words “safe space” used in the context of deliberation or political discussion (as opposed to, y’know, providing actual, safe, spaces to people threatened with actual bodily harm) you can substitute “echo chamber” and see whether their argument still makes sense. Yes, sometimes echo chambers generate worthwhile political arguments, but that’s kind of the exception, not the rule. And these arguments still need to be evaluated openly, if only because this is the only way of acquiring durable credibility in a political or deliberative context.
I agree about political discussion. But LessWrong isn’t about political discussion. Far more important to a typical LessWronger would be something like community building, which correct me if I’m wrong but that’s pretty much a textbook example of what “safe space” is good for. This criticism was not directed at us per se, but we can extract useful information from it.
Fair point. It is about deliberation, though. And make no mistake, these folks use “safe space” in the political/echo-chamber sense all the time. To me, this makes their overall argument extremely problematic—they’re showing no appreciation at all for the benefits of open discussion.
Also, yes, real-world communities, meetups etc. are quite different and some important concerns do come into play. But LW folks have been quite aware of this, and we’ve seen plenty of useful discussion about related issues, with very little controversy.
They’re showing no appreciation at all for the benefits of open discussion.
Yes, creating a safe space does prevent an entirely open discussion. So downvoting to oblivion people to talk about the merits of killing everyone in Asia, or the validity of Christianity. As a community, we have decided that there are certain discussions we don’t want to have, and certain topics we don’t want to discuss.
Not all safe spaces are equal. A safe space for a support group for trans folk would have a different meaning for a safe space for African Americans. I think Less Wrong could have its own version of a safe space, with the spirit behind the rules being something like “don’t say/advocate for violence against others, don’t be needlessly rude, don’t use personal attacks.”
1) We already do have a kind of safe space in theory, it’s mostly the name “safe space” that turns people off more than the actual idea.
2) We’re doing part of that wrong, because it was people advocating ideas that would be dangerous to the OP that turned her off from LW in the first place.
I think you are covering a lot of distance by stretching “don’t advocate violence” into “don’t say anything that someone feels the widespread adoption of could be potentially dangerous.”
Actually, this is something I’ve been a bit confused about the whole time. What posts is she talking about? The OP says Yvain’s posts, but from the substance of the article the article it sounds like she’s talking about reactionaries.
Considering the much higher than average rate of homocide towards trans people based on todays standards, a reinforcement of gender roles would almost certainly increase that rate.
Are Atheism+ and Occupy Wall Street examples “where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity”? Could you spell out what you mean or point to discussion of their changes?
The Occupy Wall Street example in particular was talking about their use of what they call “the Progressive Stack” to organize meetings. The general idea was this—people want to speak up, but not everyone can talk at the same time, so we need some sort of system for choosing who gets to speak when. First in first out isn’t fair enough when you factor in things like minorities or women feeling more inhibited about speaking, so let’s let them jump the queue and speak before people who are white and/or male.
It’s an idea that sounds just fair enough to be considered, and has the benefit of both having passionate supporters on the left and of having an obvious path to paint opponents as sexist racists that want to silence women and minorities. The left won on this point at the cost of driving off much of their popular support, and the movement has been marginalized since.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described. As far as I understand it, though, it’s the major mistake that the movement made—it let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups’ nominal goals. She’s responsible for the whole “elevatorgate” debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins’ claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness. It says it’s not a call for a boycott, but it’s a call for a boycott (“Nope, I didn’t call for a boycott. I’m relaying the fact that I have no interest in giving this person any more of my money or attention.” I read that as “I want to hurt Dawkins personally but realize that I don’t have the social capital to carry off leading a boycott, so I’m going to encourage people to boycott Dawkins while saying that I’m not doing so)
I actually haven’t done all that much analysis of Atheism+. I pretty much have discarded it as a group of people who have been successfully derailed by people like Rebecca Watson talking about sexism constantly within the atheist and skeptical community, and want to do the same. Just look at the first sentence of their FAQ
Atheism Plus is a term used to designate spaces, persons, and groups dedicated to promoting social justice and countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, ableism and other such bigotry inside and outside of the atheist community.
They are essentially policing the atheist community for compliance with social justice ideas. Their own website is saying the same things I am about them with different wording and connotations.
[Occupy Wall Street] let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
When discussing OWS and similar political movements, the term “social justice” gets quite ambiguous. OWS has always been about social justice, by any reasonable meaning of the term. To be clear, you obviously mean identity politics, the notion that self-styled “minority” groups are more equal than everyone else.
Yeah, I’m talking about the more narrow definition that gets made fun of in /r/tumblrinaction. As opposed to what I think of as “economic justice”, which involves things like banking reform, fairness in income distribution, taking care of the poor and homeless, etc.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups’ nominal goals. She’s responsible for the whole “elevatorgate” debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins’ claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness.
It got worse.
Jen McCreight and PZ Myers have been circulating unverifiable accusations of rape, allegedly relied from anonymous sources, against big-name activists in the Skeptics movement, including Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer, who didn’t happen to have jumped on the Atheism+ bandwagon.
Knowing nothing about this, “who didn’t happen to have” looks unfair. Membership in Atheism+ wasn’t distributed randomly, so it’s possible people who chose not to join have different views on women.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
Watson’s response to Dawkins comes after he gave a response to her ridiculing her for feeling uncomfortable about getting asked out on an elevator.
And as for the mission statement, I don’t think there’s a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
False dilemma.
Social justice warriors are not the only kind of people on this planet who care about safety and well-being of other people. Also, feminists sometimes send death threats, too.
The sexual harassment by public figures certainly has to stop, the perpetrators have to be punished: legally when possible, and removed from positions of power within the community.
Giving more power to feminists and social justice warriors is not the only way to do this. It is one of the possible solutions, but not the only possible solution.
As Nancy said, what other movement that you could see becoming active in the atheist movement that supports this?
And yes, they send death threats too. But at a ridiculously lower rate than is currently done, considering many popular female bloggers say they get death/rape threats every time they say something controversial.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a strong movement for Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People.
Well, usually that doesn’t fall under the rubric of a political movement at all. We just call it civility—a core moral value of any physical community where people seek to be protected from bodily harm and thrive in a nurturing environment.
If there is any political question here, it’s who or what should be included under “people”. Folks who are similar enough to you in e.g. culture that you can intuitively trust them? Any Homosapien’s? Any Hominidae (i.e. including other Great Apes)? Other animal species on a case-by-case basis, such as dolphins and whales? Robots and other man-made intelligences? Corporations?
But it’s quite unclear how deferring to the so-called “social justice movement” would be helpful in approaching these hard questions. It seems that their “politics” is much too simplistic, so they just ignore them.
You’ve underestimated what a Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People Movement would cover.
It might be pacifist. It would certainly be very cautious about war. It would be pro-refugee.
And push for a rational justice system. civil behavior by police, and good prison conditions.
Oppose domestic violence, and be emphatic that this applies to men, women, and children.
Oppose bullying, both in schools and workplaces.
I’m not sure I’ve included all the major categories.
A lot of this isn’t being done reliably, and some of it faces a lot of opposition
I’m not going to say that the social justice movement is the only source of valuable information, but it’s done some good work in pointing out that there’s violence which isn’t taken seriously—for example, violence against trans people.
For another source (overlapping SJ, I think), check out work being done by whores for them to be treated as normal parts of civil society.
There’s a lot of work to be done even if you aren’t worried about apes and dolphins.
Sure, and political/social movements exist which pursue all of these goals. But the underlying moral principle is very much not a matter of ideology or any political “plank”, even though ‘left-wing’- or ‘progressive’- leaning folks are perhaps more likely to care about it in a political sense. Jonathan Haidt is of course very clear on this, and the general idea is older than Haidt’s work—check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics or Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival.
This is probably one reason why the so-called “SJ movement” went so clearly astray in trying to piggyback on any and all of these quite diverse causes, and somehow join them all in some kind of ‘big tent’ movement. It doesn’t work like that - ‘big tent’ organizations are always a result of coalition-forming within existing civic institutions and processes. Movements need more flexibility, as well as a stronger commitment from their participants.
I don’t know whether anyone noticed my list is basically libertarian. It’s a very challenging agenda, but it just covers allowing freedom and protection from violence. It doesn’t cover ongoing help for people who can’t fully take care of themselves.
A meta solution would be to start this movement. Which would be extremely difficult on a scale of society, but perhaps easier within a community.
As an outsider, I have no idea how large the “people who frequently go to atheist meetups and already mostly know each other” group is. Perhaps five or ten of them could start this kind of a movement inside that community.
and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm
Wasn’t it rather the adoption of this as an explicit policy that created trouble? And that’s not surprising, because it suggests that the problem is prevalent in the group to an extent that makes the explicit policy needed, which insinuation will naturally offend some members of the group.
I don’t think there’s a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
The problem is that this derails the discussion into arguing whether Y is x-phobic rather than whether Y is bad.
I think the mission statement is a good thing. But, I agree how the policy is carried out (e.g. crying “That’s racist!” and nothing more) is ineffective.
Alternative: If somebody says something x-phobic, the response should be something along the lines of “Saying X is harmful to group Y because....”
[Retracted] You’re citing a blogpost from August 2012 for the claim that these bad things “still occur today”? I’m no fan of the atheist movement, and I agree that its proponents can be occasionally lacking in basic kindness and social graces (as do many others, who refuse to self-identify as ‘atheists’ for this very reason). But still, you’re not providing much evidence for your claim here. [/Retracted]
Edited to add: Apparently you only meant to refer to the time ‘Atheism+’ was actually getting off the ground—the “elevatorgate” controversy and whatnot. If so, I misinterpreted your comment, for which I apologize—but that would make your point rather trivial, since ThrustVectoring was clearly objecting to “Atheism+”’s continued [assumed to be detrimental] influence on the atheist movement.
That was an article justifying the creation of atheism+. This was a discussion of why there was a problem in the atheist movement that lead to its creation.
Is the quoted “still occur today” in bogus’s comment a fabricated quotation, a quotation of something you’ve since edited away, or a quotation of something I’m being too blind to see?
(If it’s the second of those, you probably ought to indicate the fact somehow.)
I definitely think it still does, but I haven’t said anything about that in this thread so far.
I guess you could interpret my use of the present tense in the first post I made as still happening today? But that was supposed to be talking about when Atheism+ was created.
EDIT: Having a sexual harassment policy is standard now. The other two I mentioned...still a problem.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described.
I would be very interested in any references or notes on this you might be willing to share! Also on the history of any other such movements, because it seems very much directly relevant to the research I’m doing for my blog.
I’ve nothing to say about OWS, but as an ex-member of Freethought Blogs and I’ve written a bit about the problems with that clique, for example here. (PZ Myers is the most popular blogger on the FTB network, and not all bloggers do the kind of shit he does but quite a few do.)
Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they’re wrong* isn’t any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it’s wrong. We have agreed this is a topic we’re not interested in discussing any more, and it does not have a place on Less Wrong.
*Of course, people will have different views on what qualifies for this. And that’s an entirely different discussion, that I don’t want to get into today.
Except that the broad umbrella of ideas which even a reasonable person might construe to be “racist, misogynist, or queerphobic” covers a lot of things which are nowhere close to being settled questions the way theism is.
And furthermore, that umbrella of ideas is a moving target anyways. Social justice movements have fighting X-ism as a terminal goal, so when they run out of X-ist things in a community to fight, they move the goalposts until there are X-ist things to fight.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate assertion about “social justice movements” as a whole. It seems to me that almost all* of the X-isms that social justice movements attack are real, legitimately undesirable power imbalances and prejudices. The fact that they have yet to run out of such X-isms to fight probably says more about the typical structure of human societies than it does about the social justice movements.
*Obviously there are some pathological examples, like otherkin &c, although these are not particularly mainstream
IMHO, feminism has flat-out won. Women have the vote, they have reproductive rights, they have no-fault divorce, they have a majority of the collegiate student body, and they have equality of opportunity. Single, childless women who live in cities make more than their male counterparts. Wife-beating has been vilified. Society is hyper-vigilant about domestic violence.
What’s left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison—especially given the institutional, social, and organizational power they wield. They’re still fighting for the rights of women, sure—but that’s more because they don’t have anything else to do with themselves.
I do think that street harassmeent is a serious issue. I however only have anedcotal reports. Can you point me to some statistics that describe the situation on a more general level?
Is it mainly an issue of the big cities where people don’t know each other? How do different countries compare against each other? How many cases of street harassment does the average woman experience per year?
Well, ours have produced data that’s useful at least for questions relating to LW. So I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But if you’re trying to answer a political question...
If you want data to understand whether the average woman who participate on Lesswrong are subject to substantial sexual harrasment the lesswrong data is okay. To the extend that we think about modifying how we talk about certain issues on Lesswrong that’s the demographic that we care about.
Having the question in the lesswrong data set also allows us to see whether the answer to the question correlates with other answers on the survey.
To the extend that we think about modifying how we talk about certain issues on Lesswrong that’s the demographic that we care about.
When we talk about these things, it’s most often in the context of potentially driving away demographics whose representatives might offer underrepresented insights or perspectives. Sampling from a set self-selected to not have been driven away yet isn’t going to give us the data we want.
When that’s not the context, we’re usually talking about issues depending on the general population, and the pitfalls of using LW data for that are obvious.
When that’s not the context, we’re usually talking about issues relevant to the general population, and the pitfalls of using LW data for that are obvious.
I don’t think we only care about the general population. We care about the people with whom we are interacting on a daily basis. We have a bunch of people in this community who want spend time with rational friends instead of spending time with an average member of society.
Even if we are not intending with rational people we are still unlikely to interact with the average person.
Most woman I meet, I meet during Salsa dancing. That activity selects for woman who are okay with strangers physically touching them during Salsa dancing.
Why? The survey allows for finding correlations with existing questions. It means that you get answers to questions such as whether being harrased correlates with IQ for free.
Those answers also tend to be more likely to generalize to the general population than the absolute values of the amount of people who report being harrased.
It seems to me that a good survey on street harassment would be fairly long and the survey is already long enough. Still, if there’s still interest when the next survey is being discussed, it’s a possible topic. Prediction
Just defining harassment is difficult.
IQ (especially at LW levels) doesn’t strike me as likely to give much information. IQ might correlate with spending time in better neighborhoods, or with being more distracted (less likely to notice minor harassment? more likely to get harassed by men who don’t like being ignored) or with being less distracted (more likely to notice harassment).
I’d like more research on the subject—I suspect that local culture makes a huge difference. I also realize that discussions of street harassment are more likely to attract women who’ve been harassed.
IQ is just an example. We also have questions about moral beliefs. We have questions about how likely you find various risks.
At this stage the results wouldn’t be conclusive but they would increase the grasp I would have on the issue. Having a question on the LW survey wouldn’t give the same level of detail as a in depth study, but it would be an improvement.
I’d like more research on the subject—I suspect that local culture makes a huge difference.
I think the local culture question is one of the questions that interests me most.
Should I expect that this is an issue for the woman I meet in daily life, given that I live in Germany? Women like my sister don’t bring the issue up, even in discussions about the value of feminism.
I know a bunch of women through the internet who report being troubled by street harassment and those don’t live in Germany. Given the reports of those woman, I do think that the issue is serious.
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really. I don’t know where the links in the ancestor were posted, but you could end up with anything from bad—a bunch of random demographic filters that are next to impossible to control for—to terrible, roughly the equivalent of surveying a Young Republicans meeting about Barack Obama’s economic policy. Except ten percent of the attendees are only there for kicks and will answer every question with “fish”.
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really.
Depends on what you are worried about, really :-/ And I don’t think it will be a raid, just, y’know, a field trip. The 4chan people are a helpful crowd and would love to leave lots of responses to the survey...
The survey says: “Nearly 95 percent of female respondents were honked at one or more times and 40 percent said they are honked at as frequently as monthly.”
This survey raises the question of what distinguishes those 5% of woman who were never honked at. Is it something like physical attractiveness? Is it about the locating at which the woman is living? Walking around with a confident posture?
If one considers this a serious issue than I would expect that someone has data that answers the question.
If I read about honking, it also not clear how seriously to take it. Sure it’s not fun if someone honks at you, but it’s not a big deal.
Then there are “sexist comments”. If good deconstructivist can label a lot of comments as sexist. You could label the act of open a door and saying: “After the lady.” as a sexist comment. I would where I now what the terms means.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some honks at women aren’t noticed by the woman they’re directed towards, and some honks are taken to be harassment that are directed at someone else.
Yes. But given that there are woman studies departments at universities and this seems to be a topic they ought to care about, I would expect at least some of those academics do serious work and running good surveys.
The key term is “useful”. They produce some data, but it’s likely to be misleading, primarily because of self-selection bias. So, no, you can NOT conclude that “there’s a good bit of street harassment, and it’s fairly frequent” on the basis of putting up a survey on a web page and keeping it there for a month or two.
What’s left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison
Actually, there is a lot left for feminists to fight… but most of that is in other countries. Female genital mutilation being the most obvious example.
Two problems with that.
First, all humans are naturally selfish. My own hurt thumb feels like a greater tragedy than someone else being killed. In the same way, a sexist comment somewhere on internet feels like a greater issue than someone being mutilated on the other side of the planet, if the former is about me and the latter isn’t. It’s the same reason why Occupy is more popular than Effective Altruism; both are about people who have more giving to people who have less, but only in the former you are included in the list of possible recipients.
Second, there are political alliances, because the more applause lights you put together, the more applause you get. Unfortunately, at some moments some of the applause lights get in conflict. How can you believe “female genital mutilation is evil” and “all cultures are completely equal” or even “all native cultures are noble and perfect” at the same time? Let’s rather focus on the non-issues which avoid these paradoxes; you can always safely speak about the evil of the white hetero cis males.
Maybe we need another movement that will care about eradicating female genital mutilation in the world. Even if doing so requires saying politically incorrect things.
Oh, okay, I think I understand your original comment better now. I thought you were criticizing the constant move towards “new” X-isms to fight against. (i.e., moving from race to LGBT). I think it’s possible that feminist groups wield power disproportionate to the egregiousness of what they are now combating, serious though implicit sexism can be.
There a ban on talking about religion on Lesswrong that I’m aware off. I’m aware off a ban on talking about the basilisk and a ban from talking about advocating specific violence.
Could you point to an discussion in which Lesswrong supposedly agreed that talking about religion is wrong?
I think it’s more of a matter that this community lacks people who can make interesting arguments in favor of religion.
The last interesting discussion about religions on Lesswrong I remember was how the catholics scored best on the reverse ideological turing test.
I think that making arguments on that level about religion is welcome on LW.
“talking about the validity of religion because it’s wrong.”
The discussion I referenced was about that an ideological turing test is a way to test the validity of arguments.
I don’t think that you are forbidden to talk about the validity of religion because it’s wrong. It just that there aren’t many interesting things you can say about the issue.
If you write a boring post against religion that argues against a few strawman you get voted down, but that doesn’t mean that the topic is inherently forbidden.
Let’s say Nassim Taleb would come to Lesswrong and argue his position on religion. Do you really think that LW consensus would be: “Go away, because the topic is dealt with.”?
No, the discussion could be a fruitful discussion about how to choose bayesian priors.
Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they’re wrong* isn’t any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it’s wrong.
I have a simpler idea: How about a policy against saying wrong things regardless of topic, or since it’s hard to know ahead of time whether something is wrong a policy against making claims without evidence.
This response is why I put overtly in there. I think there are certain things we can agree on, and this is the de facto policy of LW, since these views getting heavily downvoted.
Ok, define “overtly”. What about saying that race is correlated with intelligence, propensity to commit violent crime, and a bunch of other important stuff?
That such things are often left hanging probably squicks out a lot of people. Being able to say that certain races are statistically more violent and less intelligent than others has historically been correlated with lynch mobs and skewed priorities when making arrests. Recurse a few levels, and what you’re really saying is “After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since”. African American’s tend to be descended from slaves who were treated poorly before and after emancipation, while the San Francisco Bay area still has all that money from the Gold Rush. Of course there are going to be statistical differences, given those starting points.
[edit: What I’m saying, I think, is that naked statistics on these topics is not new, and in the past, were used as excuses for things that were physically and emotionally harmful. To simply state them pattern-matches to nineteenth century style racism/sexism/etc, against which the underclass rebelled after sufficient abuse.]
Recurse a few levels, and what you’re really saying is “After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since”.
Remind me again, why do Han Chinese have higher IQ than Europeans?
There is an unfortunate American tendency to treat all issues of race in the purely white-and-black context.
The world is much more diverse than that. Most people are brown.
What you’ve said is reasonable (and I’ve read your link before). I’ve also read that issues such as poor nutrition during pregnancy can have heritable effects lasting for several generations (so by this model, even if all the impoverished people in the world were suddenly given all the best resources, one wouldn’t expect to see significant intelligence/behavior improvements until their great-great-grandchildren or so). The suggestion of environmental influences was more an argument against genetic explanations as a curiosity stopper (as you said, there is no reason that there should be a singular mechanism of effect for the observed disparities).
In the context of this thread, though, I was replying to the question of whether simply pointing out the statistics might be seen as overt racism by outsiders. “Blacks are over all less intelligent and more prone to violent crime as compared to whites and Asians” sounds very much like what the educated nineteenth century racists said, the same way “I like eugenics” sounds like “I like genocide” to someone who could reasonably expect to be victimized by policies based on those ideas.
(Similarly, “Blacks are less likely to be employed compared to whites, all things equal” and “blacks are disproportionately likely to be targeted by police” sound like naive progressivism, but they are also true statements.)
I’ve also read that issues such as poor nutrition during pregnancy can have heritable effects lasting for several generations (so by this model, even if all the impoverished people in the world were suddenly given all the best resources, one wouldn’t expect to see significant intelligence/behavior improvements until their great-great-grandchildren or so).
For a bayesian who thinks about whether to hire a black person or a white one, it’s irrelevant whether intelligence difference are due to parents being poor and haven’t eaten enough food during pregnance or whether they are due to genetic differences.
As far as I understand the social justice movement they would approve of both justifications because both are essentially that the person gets judged by their background and get’s treated as a member of an underclass.
I can’t remember someone on lesswrong making a claim as strong as claiming that black should be stopped from procreating by eugenic measures. You find people who argue that overpopulation and African getting children is the central problem of humanity at the moment but nobody is making the argument directly.
Nutrition is discussed in the link as a possible explanation.
In the context of this thread, though, I was replying to the question of whether simply pointing out the statistics might be seen as overt racism by outsiders. “Blacks are over all less intelligent and more prone to violent crime as compared to whites and Asians” sounds very much like what the educated nineteenth century racists said, the same way “I like eugenics” sounds like “I like genocide” to someone who could reasonably expect to be victimized by policies based on those ideas.
I think it’s less a curiosity stopper and more a controversy stopper? The idea being that if there’s an environmental cause of something bad AND a genetic cause, we can more easily and with less controversy start with addressing the environmental cause and still do a lot of good.
Being able to say that certain races are statistically more violent and less intelligent than others has historically been correlated with lynch mobs and skewed priorities when making arrests.
But that’s qualitatively different from the way a lot of people who are religious are wrong. Religious people are often wrong on many factual questions.
On Lesswrong I would see no case where religious views should get forbidden because they are dangerous and religious people do awful things.
attacking open discourse as anti-woman and anti-minority is very, uhh, squicky. I don’t have a better way of putting my thoughts down on the matter—it’s just very, very concerning to me. It feels like a Stalinist complaining that we aren’t putting enough bullets in the heads of dissenters
There is no such thing as open discourse any more than there can ever be such a thing as a ‘free’ market. Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
Perhaps what I was saying wasn’t precise enough there. I’m talking about how when a community starts responding to certain arguments by vilifying their proponents, there’s a chilling effect on the discourse in the community.
Openness of discourse is more of a matter of degree than on/off, anyways, much like a ‘free’ market.
There is no such thing as open discourse … Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
What makes you think that this is a functional workaround, as opposed to compounding the problem? The underlying idea seems to be a preference for “safe spaces”—hardly a move towards more openness.
I don’t see anyone pointing at any particular workaround, just someone pointing at the concept-vector of pushing towards outside of a certain set of conditions.
For instance, Omega could give you a box that contains a million utilons iff you pretend within your discourse and marketing that every player is on equal grounds with identical game matrices… but I’m not sure how much that messes with stuff and I’m not in the mood for maths.
Just throwing out there that one may have directed a rebuke at a pile of straw.
Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both.
If I register an anonymous account on a forum than power doesn’t prevent me from speaking. I might get disapproval, I might even get banned but I don’t have to expect repercussion for my daily life from speaking my mind.
It’s not like a face to face conversation where you have serious consequences for speaking against power.
That a bad example given that the user in question wasn’t anonymous. His address was easily found by another person without access to law enforcement resources.
There’s definitely speech that can give you problems if it can be backtracked to your identity. In Western society using Tor and not leaking personal information should be sufficient for protecting that kind of speech.
For some kind of speech you have to think more about protecting your anonymous speech by technical means such as Tor than for other kinds of speech.
The guy in the example had the problem that he didn’t expect repercussion for his actions and therefore didn’t do the necessary protection of his anonymity.
Feminism in particular has a bad history of leaning on a community to make changes—to the point where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity. I may be overreacting, but I don’t even want to hear or discuss anything from that direction. It’s textbook derailing. “But what you’re doing is anti-woman” has been played out by feminists, over and over again, to get their demands met from community after community. From Atheism+ to Occupy Wall Street, the result is never pretty.
And honestly, attacking open discourse as anti-woman and anti-minority is very, uhh, squicky. I don’t have a better way of putting my thoughts down on the matter—it’s just very, very concerning to me. It feels like a Stalinist complaining that we aren’t putting enough bullets in the heads of dissenters—except it’s a feminist complaining that we aren’t torpedoing the reputation of enough people who express “anti-woman” ideas. Just… ew. No. It doesn’t help that this idea is getting obfuscated with layers and layers of complicated English and parenthetical thoughts breaking up the sentence structure.
Some choice quotes:
Big warning flag right here. It’s threatening to ignore, ostracize, or attack those who disagree with their sacred cows. That’s an unconscionably bad habit to allow oneself.
[later]
throws hand in air
You’d think if we were such hot stuff at dispassionately debating things, we could handle outgroup criticism like this without either ignoring opposing views or devolving into tribal politics. But as Tarski would say, “if we can’t, I want to believe we can’t,” and I admit I’d rather not discuss this sort of thing than always discuss this sort of thing.
To maximize open discourse, you have to close down discourse against open discourse.
It’s just Marcuse’s paradox (which I’m pretty sure I’m coining here): to maximize tolerance, you have to be intolerant toward intolerance. Or in the legal arena: “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
There are two arguments in that post: “certain elements within the rationality thing signal more than is necessary”, the correction of which would aid the goal of generating high-quality open discourse, and “certain conclusions should not even be considered, certain arguments should not be made, no matter their strength, because certain people have memetic immune reactions to them that drive them away from participating at all”, the correction of which would mean an end to open discourse. Given that ThrustVectoring (presumably) values open discourse, the response of “I don’t even want to discuss anything from that direction” is exactly correct.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t be discussed, of course; it just means that a community that values open discourse can’t discuss it. If apophemi wants there to be a community based around limited rationality—that is, rationality-minus-discourse-about-certain-things—well, one can always be started. Secession is always an option, and online, you don’t even have to figure out how to build a seastead to secede.
Humorous, off-topic response: But the Declaration of Independence is!
Completely tangentially, what does this mean?
In theory it means that it’s better to NOT follow the (established / agreed-to) rules when it clearly leads to major negative consequences.
In practice it usually means “We really want to do this and we’re not going to have mere laws stand in our way”.
Got it, thanks. It’s a nice pithy way of phrasing it.
This is harsh, but I think it’s basically right. A useful rule of thumb: any time you see the words “safe space” used in the context of deliberation or political discussion (as opposed to, y’know, providing actual, safe, spaces to people threatened with actual bodily harm) you can substitute “echo chamber” and see whether their argument still makes sense. Yes, sometimes echo chambers generate worthwhile political arguments, but that’s kind of the exception, not the rule. And these arguments still need to be evaluated openly, if only because this is the only way of acquiring durable credibility in a political or deliberative context.
I agree about political discussion. But LessWrong isn’t about political discussion. Far more important to a typical LessWronger would be something like community building, which correct me if I’m wrong but that’s pretty much a textbook example of what “safe space” is good for. This criticism was not directed at us per se, but we can extract useful information from it.
Fair point. It is about deliberation, though. And make no mistake, these folks use “safe space” in the political/echo-chamber sense all the time. To me, this makes their overall argument extremely problematic—they’re showing no appreciation at all for the benefits of open discussion.
Also, yes, real-world communities, meetups etc. are quite different and some important concerns do come into play. But LW folks have been quite aware of this, and we’ve seen plenty of useful discussion about related issues, with very little controversy.
Yes, creating a safe space does prevent an entirely open discussion. So downvoting to oblivion people to talk about the merits of killing everyone in Asia, or the validity of Christianity. As a community, we have decided that there are certain discussions we don’t want to have, and certain topics we don’t want to discuss.
Not all safe spaces are equal. A safe space for a support group for trans folk would have a different meaning for a safe space for African Americans. I think Less Wrong could have its own version of a safe space, with the spirit behind the rules being something like “don’t say/advocate for violence against others, don’t be needlessly rude, don’t use personal attacks.”
But those already are the rules on LW......aren’t they?
Yeah, in theory. This leads to two things:
1) We already do have a kind of safe space in theory, it’s mostly the name “safe space” that turns people off more than the actual idea.
2) We’re doing part of that wrong, because it was people advocating ideas that would be dangerous to the OP that turned her off from LW in the first place.
I think you are covering a lot of distance by stretching “don’t advocate violence” into “don’t say anything that someone feels the widespread adoption of could be potentially dangerous.”
Actually, this is something I’ve been a bit confused about the whole time. What posts is she talking about? The OP says Yvain’s posts, but from the substance of the article the article it sounds like she’s talking about reactionaries.
Considering the much higher than average rate of homocide towards trans people based on todays standards, a reinforcement of gender roles would almost certainly increase that rate.
It is about honest discussion of issues with political implications, I believe, without unnecessarily belaboring those implications.
Are Atheism+ and Occupy Wall Street examples “where the target becomes a feminist institution that no longer functions in its original capacity”? Could you spell out what you mean or point to discussion of their changes?
The Occupy Wall Street example in particular was talking about their use of what they call “the Progressive Stack” to organize meetings. The general idea was this—people want to speak up, but not everyone can talk at the same time, so we need some sort of system for choosing who gets to speak when. First in first out isn’t fair enough when you factor in things like minorities or women feeling more inhibited about speaking, so let’s let them jump the queue and speak before people who are white and/or male.
It’s an idea that sounds just fair enough to be considered, and has the benefit of both having passionate supporters on the left and of having an obvious path to paint opponents as sexist racists that want to silence women and minorities. The left won on this point at the cost of driving off much of their popular support, and the movement has been marginalized since.
The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described. As far as I understand it, though, it’s the major mistake that the movement made—it let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
As far as Atheism+ goes, it’s an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged—outraged—at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups’ nominal goals. She’s responsible for the whole “elevatorgate” debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins’ claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness. It says it’s not a call for a boycott, but it’s a call for a boycott (“Nope, I didn’t call for a boycott. I’m relaying the fact that I have no interest in giving this person any more of my money or attention.” I read that as “I want to hurt Dawkins personally but realize that I don’t have the social capital to carry off leading a boycott, so I’m going to encourage people to boycott Dawkins while saying that I’m not doing so)
I actually haven’t done all that much analysis of Atheism+. I pretty much have discarded it as a group of people who have been successfully derailed by people like Rebecca Watson talking about sexism constantly within the atheist and skeptical community, and want to do the same. Just look at the first sentence of their FAQ
They are essentially policing the atheist community for compliance with social justice ideas. Their own website is saying the same things I am about them with different wording and connotations.
When discussing OWS and similar political movements, the term “social justice” gets quite ambiguous. OWS has always been about social justice, by any reasonable meaning of the term. To be clear, you obviously mean identity politics, the notion that self-styled “minority” groups are more equal than everyone else.
Yeah, I’m talking about the more narrow definition that gets made fun of in /r/tumblrinaction. As opposed to what I think of as “economic justice”, which involves things like banking reform, fairness in income distribution, taking care of the poor and homeless, etc.
Using words like this to describe ideas you don’t like seems distasteful, and in fact similar to what the blogger was originally complaining about.
It got worse.
Jen McCreight and PZ Myers have been circulating unverifiable accusations of rape, allegedly relied from anonymous sources, against big-name activists in the Skeptics movement, including Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer, who didn’t happen to have jumped on the Atheism+ bandwagon.
Link
Knowing nothing about this, “who didn’t happen to have” looks unfair. Membership in Atheism+ wasn’t distributed randomly, so it’s possible people who chose not to join have different views on women.
When women in the atheist movement still get sexually harassed by public figures, get rape and death threats, and when having a “no sexual harassment” policy creates a firestorm, all from other people within the atheist movement, the movement does need to be more pro-women and more pro-social justice.
(Link to a blog that has a source for all the incidents I’m talking about, plus a few more http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2012/08/30/atheism-plus-and-some-thoughts-on-divisiveness/)
Watson’s response to Dawkins comes after he gave a response to her ridiculing her for feeling uncomfortable about getting asked out on an elevator.
And as for the mission statement, I don’t think there’s a problem with countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, or ableism. That sounds like a good thing. You may disagree with what they label as x-phobia, but the discussion should be about what is x-phobic, not whether we should care about x-phobia.
False dilemma.
Social justice warriors are not the only kind of people on this planet who care about safety and well-being of other people. Also, feminists sometimes send death threats, too.
The sexual harassment by public figures certainly has to stop, the perpetrators have to be punished: legally when possible, and removed from positions of power within the community.
Giving more power to feminists and social justice warriors is not the only way to do this. It is one of the possible solutions, but not the only possible solution.
As Nancy said, what other movement that you could see becoming active in the atheist movement that supports this?
And yes, they send death threats too. But at a ridiculously lower rate than is currently done, considering many popular female bloggers say they get death/rape threats every time they say something controversial.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a strong movement for Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People.
I’m concerned that it’s really hard to get people to do political things unless there’s some excessive opposition to a defined group.
Well, usually that doesn’t fall under the rubric of a political movement at all. We just call it civility—a core moral value of any physical community where people seek to be protected from bodily harm and thrive in a nurturing environment.
If there is any political question here, it’s who or what should be included under “people”. Folks who are similar enough to you in e.g. culture that you can intuitively trust them? Any Homosapien’s? Any Hominidae (i.e. including other Great Apes)? Other animal species on a case-by-case basis, such as dolphins and whales? Robots and other man-made intelligences? Corporations?
But it’s quite unclear how deferring to the so-called “social justice movement” would be helpful in approaching these hard questions. It seems that their “politics” is much too simplistic, so they just ignore them.
You’ve underestimated what a Maintaining Decent Treatment for All People Movement would cover.
It might be pacifist. It would certainly be very cautious about war. It would be pro-refugee.
And push for a rational justice system. civil behavior by police, and good prison conditions.
Oppose domestic violence, and be emphatic that this applies to men, women, and children.
Oppose bullying, both in schools and workplaces.
I’m not sure I’ve included all the major categories.
A lot of this isn’t being done reliably, and some of it faces a lot of opposition
I’m not going to say that the social justice movement is the only source of valuable information, but it’s done some good work in pointing out that there’s violence which isn’t taken seriously—for example, violence against trans people.
For another source (overlapping SJ, I think), check out work being done by whores for them to be treated as normal parts of civil society.
There’s a lot of work to be done even if you aren’t worried about apes and dolphins.
Sure, and political/social movements exist which pursue all of these goals. But the underlying moral principle is very much not a matter of ideology or any political “plank”, even though ‘left-wing’- or ‘progressive’- leaning folks are perhaps more likely to care about it in a political sense. Jonathan Haidt is of course very clear on this, and the general idea is older than Haidt’s work—check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics or Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival.
This is probably one reason why the so-called “SJ movement” went so clearly astray in trying to piggyback on any and all of these quite diverse causes, and somehow join them all in some kind of ‘big tent’ movement. It doesn’t work like that - ‘big tent’ organizations are always a result of coalition-forming within existing civic institutions and processes. Movements need more flexibility, as well as a stronger commitment from their participants.
I don’t know whether anyone noticed my list is basically libertarian. It’s a very challenging agenda, but it just covers allowing freedom and protection from violence. It doesn’t cover ongoing help for people who can’t fully take care of themselves.
A meta solution would be to start this movement. Which would be extremely difficult on a scale of society, but perhaps easier within a community.
As an outsider, I have no idea how large the “people who frequently go to atheist meetups and already mostly know each other” group is. Perhaps five or ten of them could start this kind of a movement inside that community.
Wasn’t it rather the adoption of this as an explicit policy that created trouble? And that’s not surprising, because it suggests that the problem is prevalent in the group to an extent that makes the explicit policy needed, which insinuation will naturally offend some members of the group.
Asked into someone’s hotel room, actually.
The problem is that this derails the discussion into arguing whether Y is x-phobic rather than whether Y is bad.
That’s true, let me add to my statements:
I think the mission statement is a good thing. But, I agree how the policy is carried out (e.g. crying “That’s racist!” and nothing more) is ineffective.
Alternative: If somebody says something x-phobic, the response should be something along the lines of “Saying X is harmful to group Y because....”
[Retracted] You’re citing a blogpost from August 2012 for the claim that these bad things “still occur today”? I’m no fan of the atheist movement, and I agree that its proponents can be occasionally lacking in basic kindness and social graces (as do many others, who refuse to self-identify as ‘atheists’ for this very reason). But still, you’re not providing much evidence for your claim here. [/Retracted]
Edited to add: Apparently you only meant to refer to the time ‘Atheism+’ was actually getting off the ground—the “elevatorgate” controversy and whatnot. If so, I misinterpreted your comment, for which I apologize—but that would make your point rather trivial, since ThrustVectoring was clearly objecting to “Atheism+”’s continued [assumed to be detrimental] influence on the atheist movement.
That was an article justifying the creation of atheism+. This was a discussion of why there was a problem in the atheist movement that lead to its creation.
Is the quoted “still occur today” in bogus’s comment a fabricated quotation, a quotation of something you’ve since edited away, or a quotation of something I’m being too blind to see?
(If it’s the second of those, you probably ought to indicate the fact somehow.)
I definitely think it still does, but I haven’t said anything about that in this thread so far.
I guess you could interpret my use of the present tense in the first post I made as still happening today? But that was supposed to be talking about when Atheism+ was created.
EDIT: Having a sexual harassment policy is standard now. The other two I mentioned...still a problem.
I would be very interested in any references or notes on this you might be willing to share! Also on the history of any other such movements, because it seems very much directly relevant to the research I’m doing for my blog.
I’ve nothing to say about OWS, but as an ex-member of Freethought Blogs and I’ve written a bit about the problems with that clique, for example here. (PZ Myers is the most popular blogger on the FTB network, and not all bloggers do the kind of shit he does but quite a few do.)
Here’s my view:
Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they’re wrong* isn’t any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it’s wrong. We have agreed this is a topic we’re not interested in discussing any more, and it does not have a place on Less Wrong.
*Of course, people will have different views on what qualifies for this. And that’s an entirely different discussion, that I don’t want to get into today.
Except that the broad umbrella of ideas which even a reasonable person might construe to be “racist, misogynist, or queerphobic” covers a lot of things which are nowhere close to being settled questions the way theism is.
And furthermore, that umbrella of ideas is a moving target anyways. Social justice movements have fighting X-ism as a terminal goal, so when they run out of X-ist things in a community to fight, they move the goalposts until there are X-ist things to fight.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate assertion about “social justice movements” as a whole. It seems to me that almost all* of the X-isms that social justice movements attack are real, legitimately undesirable power imbalances and prejudices. The fact that they have yet to run out of such X-isms to fight probably says more about the typical structure of human societies than it does about the social justice movements.
*Obviously there are some pathological examples, like otherkin &c, although these are not particularly mainstream
IMHO, feminism has flat-out won. Women have the vote, they have reproductive rights, they have no-fault divorce, they have a majority of the collegiate student body, and they have equality of opportunity. Single, childless women who live in cities make more than their male counterparts. Wife-beating has been vilified. Society is hyper-vigilant about domestic violence.
What’s left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison—especially given the institutional, social, and organizational power they wield. They’re still fighting for the rights of women, sure—but that’s more because they don’t have anything else to do with themselves.
Street harassment takes some of the fun out of life.
Getting rape and murder threats on line really does distress and distract people, and it seems to be much more likely to happen to women.
I do think that street harassmeent is a serious issue. I however only have anedcotal reports. Can you point me to some statistics that describe the situation on a more general level?
Is it mainly an issue of the big cities where people don’t know each other? How do different countries compare against each other? How many cases of street harassment does the average woman experience per year?
The founder of an anti-street-harassment website conducted “two informal, anonymous online surveys”.
“Informal, anonymous online surveys” do not produce useful data.
Well, ours have produced data that’s useful at least for questions relating to LW. So I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But if you’re trying to answer a political question...
Perhaps we should add questions that measure street harassment to the next Lesswrong survey?
We’re no less demographically skewed than your average feminist site. More, probably.
Skrewing depends on the purpose of your data.
If you want data to understand whether the average woman who participate on Lesswrong are subject to substantial sexual harrasment the lesswrong data is okay. To the extend that we think about modifying how we talk about certain issues on Lesswrong that’s the demographic that we care about.
Having the question in the lesswrong data set also allows us to see whether the answer to the question correlates with other answers on the survey.
When we talk about these things, it’s most often in the context of potentially driving away demographics whose representatives might offer underrepresented insights or perspectives. Sampling from a set self-selected to not have been driven away yet isn’t going to give us the data we want.
When that’s not the context, we’re usually talking about issues depending on the general population, and the pitfalls of using LW data for that are obvious.
I don’t think we only care about the general population. We care about the people with whom we are interacting on a daily basis. We have a bunch of people in this community who want spend time with rational friends instead of spending time with an average member of society.
Even if we are not intending with rational people we are still unlikely to interact with the average person. Most woman I meet, I meet during Salsa dancing. That activity selects for woman who are okay with strangers physically touching them during Salsa dancing.
I don’t think it belongs in the survey, but it might be worth doing as a separate project.
Why? The survey allows for finding correlations with existing questions. It means that you get answers to questions such as whether being harrased correlates with IQ for free.
Those answers also tend to be more likely to generalize to the general population than the absolute values of the amount of people who report being harrased.
It seems to me that a good survey on street harassment would be fairly long and the survey is already long enough. Still, if there’s still interest when the next survey is being discussed, it’s a possible topic. Prediction
Just defining harassment is difficult.
IQ (especially at LW levels) doesn’t strike me as likely to give much information. IQ might correlate with spending time in better neighborhoods, or with being more distracted (less likely to notice minor harassment? more likely to get harassed by men who don’t like being ignored) or with being less distracted (more likely to notice harassment).
I’d like more research on the subject—I suspect that local culture makes a huge difference. I also realize that discussions of street harassment are more likely to attract women who’ve been harassed.
IQ is just an example. We also have questions about moral beliefs. We have questions about how likely you find various risks.
At this stage the results wouldn’t be conclusive but they would increase the grasp I would have on the issue. Having a question on the LW survey wouldn’t give the same level of detail as a in depth study, but it would be an improvement.
I think the local culture question is one of the questions that interests me most. Should I expect that this is an issue for the woman I meet in daily life, given that I live in Germany? Women like my sister don’t bring the issue up, even in discussions about the value of feminism.
I know a bunch of women through the internet who report being troubled by street harassment and those don’t live in Germany. Given the reports of those woman, I do think that the issue is serious.
A fair point. But then, imagine 4chan becoming interested in an online anonymous survey about sexual harassment… X-D
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really. I don’t know where the links in the ancestor were posted, but you could end up with anything from bad—a bunch of random demographic filters that are next to impossible to control for—to terrible, roughly the equivalent of surveying a Young Republicans meeting about Barack Obama’s economic policy. Except ten percent of the attendees are only there for kicks and will answer every question with “fish”.
Depends on what you are worried about, really :-/ And I don’t think it will be a raid, just, y’know, a field trip. The 4chan people are a helpful crowd and would love to leave lots of responses to the survey...
They produce at least a little data. This one is admittedly filtered in a bunch of ways, both by internet access and interest in street harassment.
Still, it at least implies that there’s a good bit of street harassment, and it’s fairly frequent but not constant.
The survey says: “Nearly 95 percent of female respondents were honked at one or more times and 40 percent said they are honked at as frequently as monthly.”
This survey raises the question of what distinguishes those 5% of woman who were never honked at. Is it something like physical attractiveness? Is it about the locating at which the woman is living? Walking around with a confident posture?
If one considers this a serious issue than I would expect that someone has data that answers the question.
If I read about honking, it also not clear how seriously to take it. Sure it’s not fun if someone honks at you, but it’s not a big deal.
Then there are “sexist comments”. If good deconstructivist can label a lot of comments as sexist. You could label the act of open a door and saying: “After the lady.” as a sexist comment. I would where I now what the terms means.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some honks at women aren’t noticed by the woman they’re directed towards, and some honks are taken to be harassment that are directed at someone else.
It would take some work to design a good survey.
Yes. But given that there are woman studies departments at universities and this seems to be a topic they ought to care about, I would expect at least some of those academics do serious work and running good surveys.
The key term is “useful”. They produce some data, but it’s likely to be misleading, primarily because of self-selection bias. So, no, you can NOT conclude that “there’s a good bit of street harassment, and it’s fairly frequent” on the basis of putting up a survey on a web page and keeping it there for a month or two.
Actually, there is a lot left for feminists to fight… but most of that is in other countries. Female genital mutilation being the most obvious example.
Two problems with that.
First, all humans are naturally selfish. My own hurt thumb feels like a greater tragedy than someone else being killed. In the same way, a sexist comment somewhere on internet feels like a greater issue than someone being mutilated on the other side of the planet, if the former is about me and the latter isn’t. It’s the same reason why Occupy is more popular than Effective Altruism; both are about people who have more giving to people who have less, but only in the former you are included in the list of possible recipients.
Second, there are political alliances, because the more applause lights you put together, the more applause you get. Unfortunately, at some moments some of the applause lights get in conflict. How can you believe “female genital mutilation is evil” and “all cultures are completely equal” or even “all native cultures are noble and perfect” at the same time? Let’s rather focus on the non-issues which avoid these paradoxes; you can always safely speak about the evil of the white hetero cis males.
Maybe we need another movement that will care about eradicating female genital mutilation in the world. Even if doing so requires saying politically incorrect things.
Oh, okay, I think I understand your original comment better now. I thought you were criticizing the constant move towards “new” X-isms to fight against. (i.e., moving from race to LGBT). I think it’s possible that feminist groups wield power disproportionate to the egregiousness of what they are now combating, serious though implicit sexism can be.
There a ban on talking about religion on Lesswrong that I’m aware off. I’m aware off a ban on talking about the basilisk and a ban from talking about advocating specific violence.
Could you point to an discussion in which Lesswrong supposedly agreed that talking about religion is wrong?
I think it’s more of a matter that this community lacks people who can make interesting arguments in favor of religion.
The last interesting discussion about religions on Lesswrong I remember was how the catholics scored best on the reverse ideological turing test. I think that making arguments on that level about religion is welcome on LW.
Sorry, the ”...talking about religion because it’s wrong” should have said “talking about the validity of religion because it’s wrong.”
The discussion I referenced was about that an ideological turing test is a way to test the validity of arguments.
I don’t think that you are forbidden to talk about the validity of religion because it’s wrong. It just that there aren’t many interesting things you can say about the issue.
If you write a boring post against religion that argues against a few strawman you get voted down, but that doesn’t mean that the topic is inherently forbidden.
Let’s say Nassim Taleb would come to Lesswrong and argue his position on religion. Do you really think that LW consensus would be: “Go away, because the topic is dealt with.”?
No, the discussion could be a fruitful discussion about how to choose bayesian priors.
I have a simpler idea: How about a policy against saying wrong things regardless of topic, or since it’s hard to know ahead of time whether something is wrong a policy against making claims without evidence.
This response is why I put overtly in there. I think there are certain things we can agree on, and this is the de facto policy of LW, since these views getting heavily downvoted.
Ok, define “overtly”. What about saying that race is correlated with intelligence, propensity to commit violent crime, and a bunch of other important stuff?
That such things are often left hanging probably squicks out a lot of people. Being able to say that certain races are statistically more violent and less intelligent than others has historically been correlated with lynch mobs and skewed priorities when making arrests. Recurse a few levels, and what you’re really saying is “After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since”. African American’s tend to be descended from slaves who were treated poorly before and after emancipation, while the San Francisco Bay area still has all that money from the Gold Rush. Of course there are going to be statistical differences, given those starting points.
[edit: What I’m saying, I think, is that naked statistics on these topics is not new, and in the past, were used as excuses for things that were physically and emotionally harmful. To simply state them pattern-matches to nineteenth century style racism/sexism/etc, against which the underclass rebelled after sufficient abuse.]
Remind me again, why do Han Chinese have higher IQ than Europeans?
There is an unfortunate American tendency to treat all issues of race in the purely white-and-black context.
The world is much more diverse than that. Most people are brown.
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Exposure to lead affects intelligence and criminality
More on the subject
Its very unfortunate that lead and lead are homographs, makes it hard to Google information on the subject.
What you’ve said is reasonable (and I’ve read your link before). I’ve also read that issues such as poor nutrition during pregnancy can have heritable effects lasting for several generations (so by this model, even if all the impoverished people in the world were suddenly given all the best resources, one wouldn’t expect to see significant intelligence/behavior improvements until their great-great-grandchildren or so). The suggestion of environmental influences was more an argument against genetic explanations as a curiosity stopper (as you said, there is no reason that there should be a singular mechanism of effect for the observed disparities).
In the context of this thread, though, I was replying to the question of whether simply pointing out the statistics might be seen as overt racism by outsiders. “Blacks are over all less intelligent and more prone to violent crime as compared to whites and Asians” sounds very much like what the educated nineteenth century racists said, the same way “I like eugenics” sounds like “I like genocide” to someone who could reasonably expect to be victimized by policies based on those ideas.
(Similarly, “Blacks are less likely to be employed compared to whites, all things equal” and “blacks are disproportionately likely to be targeted by police” sound like naive progressivism, but they are also true statements.)
For a bayesian who thinks about whether to hire a black person or a white one, it’s irrelevant whether intelligence difference are due to parents being poor and haven’t eaten enough food during pregnance or whether they are due to genetic differences.
As far as I understand the social justice movement they would approve of both justifications because both are essentially that the person gets judged by their background and get’s treated as a member of an underclass.
I can’t remember someone on lesswrong making a claim as strong as claiming that black should be stopped from procreating by eugenic measures. You find people who argue that overpopulation and African getting children is the central problem of humanity at the moment but nobody is making the argument directly.
Nutrition is discussed in the link as a possible explanation.
Fair enough.
test
I think it’s less a curiosity stopper and more a controversy stopper? The idea being that if there’s an environmental cause of something bad AND a genetic cause, we can more easily and with less controversy start with addressing the environmental cause and still do a lot of good.
But that’s qualitatively different from the way a lot of people who are religious are wrong. Religious people are often wrong on many factual questions.
On Lesswrong I would see no case where religious views should get forbidden because they are dangerous and religious people do awful things.
There is no such thing as open discourse any more than there can ever be such a thing as a ‘free’ market. Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
Perhaps what I was saying wasn’t precise enough there. I’m talking about how when a community starts responding to certain arguments by vilifying their proponents, there’s a chilling effect on the discourse in the community.
Openness of discourse is more of a matter of degree than on/off, anyways, much like a ‘free’ market.
What makes you think that this is a functional workaround, as opposed to compounding the problem? The underlying idea seems to be a preference for “safe spaces”—hardly a move towards more openness.
I don’t see anyone pointing at any particular workaround, just someone pointing at the concept-vector of pushing towards outside of a certain set of conditions.
For instance, Omega could give you a box that contains a million utilons iff you pretend within your discourse and marketing that every player is on equal grounds with identical game matrices… but I’m not sure how much that messes with stuff and I’m not in the mood for maths.
Just throwing out there that one may have directed a rebuke at a pile of straw.
If I register an anonymous account on a forum than power doesn’t prevent me from speaking. I might get disapproval, I might even get banned but I don’t have to expect repercussion for my daily life from speaking my mind.
It’s not like a face to face conversation where you have serious consequences for speaking against power.
That rather depends on what’s on your mind. Example.
That a bad example given that the user in question wasn’t anonymous. His address was easily found by another person without access to law enforcement resources.
There’s definitely speech that can give you problems if it can be backtracked to your identity. In Western society using Tor and not leaking personal information should be sufficient for protecting that kind of speech.
For some kind of speech you have to think more about protecting your anonymous speech by technical means such as Tor than for other kinds of speech.
The guy in the example had the problem that he didn’t expect repercussion for his actions and therefore didn’t do the necessary protection of his anonymity.
Being truly anonymous on the ’net is harder than most people imagine.
I am not sure this is the case. Example.
Oh, and in this context what’s special about a Western society?
Not an example of speech that happens within a forum.
We have a concepts such as guilty until proven innocent with makes it hard to sentence people based on statistical stylometry data.
The interest in censorship is also lower. It’s much easier to simply ignore speech because Western society is more resilient.
It’s an example of someone “using Tor and not leaking personal information”.
“Innocent until proven guilty” you mean?
Yes ;)