Scott’s examples have a fair amount of selection bias. If you take Chile, Russia, NK, or Zimbabwe, those who play dirty prevail. However, I agree that building a walled garden and making it attractive to join is a far better strategy whenever feasible.
This is class bias though. Some people are not in a position to create and live in a walled garden, either in real life or on the internet, especially in places without an internet connection. Sure its great for the kind of people who use less wrong, educated, white middle class, mainly male (as I know there are several women who post regularly), obviously internet access, lots of free time to write intense blog posts.
I suppose you may cancelled this out with whenever feasible, but I also suspect the average less wrong poster would not be a good judge of feasible.
I’ve put a lot of thought into the politics of anger and I see value and problems on both sides. Arthur Chu appears to have expressed a much more intense version than I’ve seen in say, Feministe or Atheism+. Although one Feministe commentator expressed her belief that she would be morally correct to murder or burn down the house of people doing things which don’t justify such a response in my personal opinion.
I’ve never come across the idea of deception in precisely the way that Scott framed Arthur Chu’s comments. Is there a link to the actual comment made by Chu?
This is class bias though. Some people are not in a position to create and live in a walled garden, either in real life or on the internet, especially in places without an internet connection.
Sucks to be them. You seem to be arguing something I’ve seen elsewhere, and which for the sake of definiteness I’ll state in the strongest form.
No-one ever achieves anything through their own efforts. All “success” is due to privilege, which is oppression. So-called self-help is privilege used as an excuse to blame the unprivileged for their situation, which situation is in reality due to oppression by the privileged. Showing people what they can do for themselves is disempowerment. Blaming their troubles on the forces of privilege is empowerment. Individual action is vice. Collective action is virtue.
Do your thoughts point in that direction?
I’ve put a lot of thought into the politics of anger and I see value and problems on both sides. Arthur Chu appears to have expressed a much more intense version than I’ve seen in say, Feministe or Atheism+. Although one Feministe commentator expressed her belief that she would be morally correct to murder or burn down the house of people doing things which don’t justify such a response in my personal opinion.
“A lot of thought” is not a phrase that leaps to my mind on reading that. Does any of this seeing value and problems, and having personal beliefs and opinions lead to anything but more words on blogs? I’m glad you don’t think murder and arson should be freely employed, but what does it mean to say that judgement is your personal opinion? That it doesn’t matter?
I don’t think that individual advice is useless. I’m skeptical that certain people are giving useful advice. Useful here involves a criterion of novelty. Giving someone advice they have heard 1000 times is not helpful. I guess necessary but not sufficient is a good description of personal effort in this context.
Working three jobs doesn’t leave a lot of time to get educated and then use that education to post large amounts of philosophical text on a Reddit like rationalist site. And being poor and black in the real world isn’t the optimal condition for creating meat space walled gardens.
As far as individual action, its my opinion that individual charity is helpful but not sufficient. And often comes with coercion I don’t approve of. Religious charity would be a good example here. Strings attached? More like ropes.
For the second thing you quoted, I wouldn’t say that I am the most productive person in helping the less fortunate. Although that’s somewhat for psychological and/or financial reasons. This is orthogonal to the efficacy of certain strategies to promote social change. Just because I don’t turn on the faucet doesn’t mean that if I did water wouldn’t come out.
Could you taboo “oppression”. SJ types (and Marxists in general) love throwing around that word, but I’ve never seen a coherent definition beyond connoting something they disapprove of.
Scott’s examples have a fair amount of selection bias. If you take Chile, Russia, NK, or Zimbabwe, those who play dirty prevail. However, I agree that building a walled garden and making it attractive to join is a far better strategy whenever feasible.
This is class bias though. Some people are not in a position to create and live in a walled garden, either in real life or on the internet, especially in places without an internet connection. Sure its great for the kind of people who use less wrong, educated, white middle class, mainly male (as I know there are several women who post regularly), obviously internet access, lots of free time to write intense blog posts.
I suppose you may cancelled this out with whenever feasible, but I also suspect the average less wrong poster would not be a good judge of feasible.
I’ve put a lot of thought into the politics of anger and I see value and problems on both sides. Arthur Chu appears to have expressed a much more intense version than I’ve seen in say, Feministe or Atheism+. Although one Feministe commentator expressed her belief that she would be morally correct to murder or burn down the house of people doing things which don’t justify such a response in my personal opinion.
I’ve never come across the idea of deception in precisely the way that Scott framed Arthur Chu’s comments. Is there a link to the actual comment made by Chu?
Yes.
Sucks to be them. You seem to be arguing something I’ve seen elsewhere, and which for the sake of definiteness I’ll state in the strongest form.
No-one ever achieves anything through their own efforts. All “success” is due to privilege, which is oppression. So-called self-help is privilege used as an excuse to blame the unprivileged for their situation, which situation is in reality due to oppression by the privileged. Showing people what they can do for themselves is disempowerment. Blaming their troubles on the forces of privilege is empowerment. Individual action is vice. Collective action is virtue.
Do your thoughts point in that direction?
“A lot of thought” is not a phrase that leaps to my mind on reading that. Does any of this seeing value and problems, and having personal beliefs and opinions lead to anything but more words on blogs? I’m glad you don’t think murder and arson should be freely employed, but what does it mean to say that judgement is your personal opinion? That it doesn’t matter?
That paragraph sounds awful. No, I don’t think that. I’ll be lazy and point to John Scalzi I guess: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
I don’t think that individual advice is useless. I’m skeptical that certain people are giving useful advice. Useful here involves a criterion of novelty. Giving someone advice they have heard 1000 times is not helpful. I guess necessary but not sufficient is a good description of personal effort in this context.
Working three jobs doesn’t leave a lot of time to get educated and then use that education to post large amounts of philosophical text on a Reddit like rationalist site. And being poor and black in the real world isn’t the optimal condition for creating meat space walled gardens.
As far as individual action, its my opinion that individual charity is helpful but not sufficient. And often comes with coercion I don’t approve of. Religious charity would be a good example here. Strings attached? More like ropes.
For the second thing you quoted, I wouldn’t say that I am the most productive person in helping the less fortunate. Although that’s somewhat for psychological and/or financial reasons. This is orthogonal to the efficacy of certain strategies to promote social change. Just because I don’t turn on the faucet doesn’t mean that if I did water wouldn’t come out.
I think that the answer to this problem is that it will simply be neccesary for class oppression to be ended then.
Could you taboo “oppression”. SJ types (and Marxists in general) love throwing around that word, but I’ve never seen a coherent definition beyond connoting something they disapprove of.
How do you know? Because the news you read about Chile, Russia, NK and Zimbabwe tell you so?