In its worst form, the position that you’re not allowed to have a view on an issue (or that any possible view is invalid) because you are not the oppressed party.
Another bad form (I’m not going to claim it’s worse) is that your privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus.
There’s a much saner form that’s worth noting, when it is shorthand for “You overlap through at least one of the following categories:heterosexual, male, white, high socioeconomic bracket, and so you are less likely to have personal experience of the sort of problem that is going on here and might not notice when it occurs.” This is essentially an issue of an illusion of transparency, in that often members of specific groups have issues that they are more aware of, and the amount of share experience leads to problems of inferential distance.
Essential agreement that the other two meanings are deeply counter-rational. Unfortunately, exactly what someone means by it isn’t always clear.
I think that “privilege” (in its more reasonable forms) basically refers to a special case of the Typical Mind Fallacy, one where people are prone to dismissing or understating the problems of one group because they don’t personally experience them in the same way. For a relatively neutral example, there’s this bit in Yvain’s post:
I can’t deal with noise. If someone’s being loud, I can’t sleep, I can’t study, I can’t concentrate, I can’t do anything except bang my head against the wall and hope they stop. I once had a noisy housemate. Whenever I asked her to keep it down, she told me I was being oversensitive and should just mellow out. I can’t claim total victory here, because she was very neat and kept yelling at me for leaving things out of place, and I told her she needed to just mellow out and you couldn’t even tell that there was dust on that dresser anyway. It didn’t occur to me then that neatness to her might be as necessary and uncompromisable as quiet was to me, and that this was an actual feature of how our minds processed information rather than just some weird quirk on her part.
I would say that these are pretty much perfect examples of privilege: situations in which the perfectly reasonable problems of one party are completely invisible to the other, to the point that the other cannot even see what the problem is and thinks that the other person is just complaining about nothing.
The metabolically privileged don’t believe in metabolic privilege, since they are able to lose weight by trying! harder! to diet and exercise, and the diet and exercise actually work the way they’re supposed to…
So “privilege” is a useful concept, one which has actually already seen use in the LW community. In this context, “check your privilege” is a call to re-evaluate one’s assumptions and to take into account the factors which make the situation genuinely problematic for others but a non-problem for you.
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one—there are plausibly positions where people frequently and commonly become guilty of the Typical Mind Fallacy, and where a consensus of the people who’ve given the issue some thought agrees on this, and people who disagree are likely to just be flat-out wrong. (You could say that it’s the SJW version of “read the Sequences”.)
A classic SJW example of privilege that I think is justified is the case of sexual harassment of women, where men frequently react to cases of harassment with variations of “I don’t see the problem here, if someone did that to me I’d just be flattered”. In that case, the fallacy involves an inability to take into account the fact that a behavior that one might consider flattering if it only happened rarely will become unbearable if repeated sufficiently often (obligatory link), and also that men being stronger women creates a sense of accompanying danger that wouldn’t be present in the case of women harassing men.
I thought Of Dogs and Lizards was also a nice illustration of these concepts:
This is where things get a bit tricky to understand. Because most examples of social privilege aren’t that straightforward. Let’s take, for example, a basic bit of male privilege:
A man has the privilege of walking past a group of strange women without worrying about being catcalled, or leered at, or having sexual suggestions tossed at him.
A pretty common male response to this point is “that’s a privilege? I would love if a group of women did that to me.”
And that response, right there, is a perfect shining example of male privilege.
To explain how and why, I am going to throw a lengthy metaphor at you. In fact, it may even qualify as parable. Bear with me, because if it makes everything crystal clear, it will be worth the time.
Imagine, if you will, a small house, built someplace cool-ish but not cold, perhaps somewhere in Ohio, and inhabited by a dog and a lizard. The dog is a big dog, something shaggy and nordic, like a Husky or Lapphund – a sled dog, built for the snow. The lizard is small, a little gecko best adapted to living in a muggy rainforest somewhere. Neither have ever lived anywhere else, nor met any other creature; for the purposes of this exercise, this small house is the entirety of their universe.
The dog, much as you might expect, turns on the air conditioning. Really cranks it up, all the time – this dog was bred for hunting moose on the tundra, even the winter here in Ohio is a little warm for his taste. If he can get the house to fifty (that’s ten C, for all you weirdo metric users out there), he’s almost happy.
The gecko can’t do much to control the temperature – she’s got tiny little fingers, she can’t really work the thermostat or turn the dials on the A/C. Sometimes, when there’s an incandescent light nearby, she can curl up near it and pick up some heat that way, but for the most part, most of the time, she just has to live with what the dog chooses. This is, of course, much too cold for her – she’s a gecko. Not only does she have no fur, she’s cold-blooded! The temperature makes her sluggish and sick, and it permeates her entire universe. Maybe here and there she can find small spaces of warmth, but if she ever wants to actually do anything, to eat or watch TV or talk to the dog, she has to move through the cold house.
Now, remember, she’s never known anything else. This is just how the world is – cold and painful and unhealthy for her, even dangerous, and she copes as she knows how. But maybe some small part of her thinks, “hey, it shouldn’t be like this,” some tiny growing seed of rebellion that says who she is right next to a lamp is who she should be all the time. And she and the dog are partners, in a sense, right? They live in this house together, they affect each other, all they’ve got is each other. So one day, she sees the dog messing with the A/C again, and she says, “hey. Dog. Listen, it makes me really cold when you do that.”
The dog kind of looks at her, and shrugs, and keeps turning the dial.
This is not because the dog is a jerk.
This is because the dog has no fucking clue what the lizard even just said.
Consider: he’s a nordic dog in a temperate climate. The word “cold” is completely meaningless to him. He’s never been cold in his entire life. He lives in an environment that is perfectly suited to him, completely aligned with his comfort level, a world he grew up with the tools to survive and control, built right in to the way he was born.
So the lizard tries to explain it to him. She says, “well, hey, how would you like it if I turned the temperature down on you?”
The dog goes, “uh… sounds good to me.”
What she really means, of course, is “how would you like it if I made you cold.” But she can’t make him cold. She doesn’t have the tools, or the power, their shared world is not built in a way that allows it – she simply is not physically capable of doing the same harm to him that he’s doing to her. She could make him feel pain, probably, I’m sure she could stab him with a toothpick or put something nasty in his food or something, but this specific form of pain, he will never, ever understand – it’s not something that can be inflicted on him, given the nature of the world they live in and the way it’s slanted in his favor in this instance. So he doesn’t get what she’s saying to him, and keeps hurting her.
Most privilege is like this.
A straight cisgendered male American, because of who he is and the culture he lives in, does not and cannot feel the stress, creepiness, and outright threat behind a catcall the way a woman can. His upbringing has given him fur and paws big enough to turn the dials and plopped him down in temperate Ohio. When she says “you don’t have to put up with being leered at,” what she means is, “you don’t ever have to be wary of sexual interest.” That’s male privilege. Not so much that something doesn’t happen to men, but that it will never carry the same weight, even if it does.
So what does this mean? And what are we asking you to do, when we say “check your privilege” or “your privilege is showing”?
Well, quite simply, we want you to understand when you have fur. And, by extension, when that means you should listen. See, the dog’s not an asshole just for turning down the temperature. As far as he knows, that’s fine, right? He genuinely cannot feel the pain it causes, he doesn’t even know about it. No one thinks he’s a bad person for totally accidentally doing harm.
Here’s where he becomes an asshole: the minute the gecko says, “look, you’re hurting me,” and he says, “what? No, I’m not. This ‘cold’ stuff doesn’t even exist, I should know, I’ve never felt it. You’re imagining it. It’s not there. It’s fine because of fur, because of paws, because look, you can curl up around this lamp, because sometimes my water dish is too tepid and I just shut up and cope, obviously temperature isn’t this big deal you make it, and you’ve never had to deal with mange anyway, my life is just as hard.”
And then the dog just ignores it. Because he can. That’s the privilege that comes with having fur, with being a dog in Ohio. He doesn’t have to think about it. He doesn’t have to live daily with the cold. He has no idea what he’s talking about, and he will never, ever be forced to learn. He can keep making the lizard miserable until the day they both die, and he will never suffer for it beyond the mild annoyance of her complaining. And she, meanwhile, gets to try not to freeze to death.
privilege: situations in which the perfectly reasonable problems of one party are completely invisible to the other, to the point that the other cannot even see what the problem is and thinks that the other person is just complaining about nothing.
That definition is incomplete without having power mentioned in it.
For example, it’s culturally difficult for “straight cisgendered male Americans” to show weakness. It’s not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her “check your privilege”?
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one
For example, it’s culturally difficult for “straight cisgendered male Americans” to show weakness. It’s not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her “check your privilege”?
Depends on who you ask. I would say yes, some would say no.
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Right, a literal “never allowed to have” cannot be. What I meant to say was that positions that might easily seem like “you are never allowed to have this opinion” might actually be positions of “this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with”, which can sometimes (though definitely not always) be reasonable.
actually be positions of “this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with”
Sure, there are lots of those. But notice the difference in accents: “I think you have no clue to the extent that I am not going to bother and waste my time”—vs. ” You have no right to your opinion”, especially if there’s an explicit or implicit “because you belong to a privileged class”.
What on earth could it possibly mean for you to have (or not have) “a right to your opinion”?
One possibility that occurs to me is that the expression “I have a right to my opinion!” has to do with whether people will give you the last word — it’s a claim to power over other people in conversation. Asserting “I have a right to my opinion” is a way of saying, “Shut up! I’m not talking about this with you any more!” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is a way of saying, “No, I won’t shut up; I will go on trying to convince you that you are wrong.”
Another possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is a statement that one intends to continue to confidently assert a view which has been undermined by evidence or argument, without acknowledging or responding to the criticism. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “you are being epistemically rude; stop it.”
A third possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is an assertion that some topics are too socially volatile to be exposed to much criticism. This seems to be what people mean when they bring up “the right to your opinion” in matters of religious doctrine. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I’m not going to stop publicly debunking your religion just because you don’t like me doing it.”
Fourth, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be a demand to not be treated worse socially by others on account of one’s opinion, even if others may fear that the opinion may lead you to treat them worse. This would seem to be a demand for unilateral disarmament: “I will go on being bigoted against Blues, and I demand that Blues not treat me badly, even if they fear that I will treat them badly.” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “Yes, I am going to treat your opinion as evidence about your character and your future actions, and treat you accordingly.”
Lastly, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be an effort to tar one’s (nonviolent) critics by associating them with some sort of (violent) censors — an Inquisition, a secret police — and to rally defenders of freedom to attack those critics. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I do not pose the kind of threat that you are claiming. You have no business invoking the defense of freedom on your opinion’s behalf, since freedom is not threatened. This is not a matter of ‘rights’; it is a matter of conversation, argument, and evidence. Stop trying to escalate it into a matter of ‘rights’.”
It’s also possible that “I have a right to my opinion” can mean “I have a right to enough time to assimilate new information without being told I have to think differently because someone else is sure they’re right.”
It might be interesting, the next time you come across someone who says “I have a right to my opinion”, to ask them what they mean.
After seeing your comment, I went and read what Wikipedia had to say about that incident.
I’d heard about Summers’ resignation only at some remove, and only really from bloggers who had opinions on one side or the other on the women-in-science issue. As a result, I hadn’t known that there were other contributing factors to Summers’ resignation besides that one. It seems that there were — including other conflicts with the faculty … and a corruption scandal involving Russia’s post-Soviet privatization program that led to Harvard paying a $26.5 million settlement to the Federal government.
I guess that goes to show the consequences of getting news from partisan sources. The rest of the story is substantially less exciting to folks who care about the “Social Justice vs. Political Incorrectness” Blue-Green war, though, so it’s no surprise it didn’t get as much press.
Sure. I didn’t read the original as a literal quote but rather as a rough characterization of a perceived attitude, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the exact wording, since I treated it as referring to a set of many different statements that include both of the variants in your comment, as well as others.
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Are you simply going to say you disagree with Kaj here on this last part or actually respond to their comment, especially say the end of the sentence you cut off where Kaj said:
there are plausibly positions where people frequently and commonly become guilty of the Typical Mind Fallacy, and where a consensus of the people who’ve given the issue some thought agrees on this, and people who disagree are likely to just be flat-out wrong. (You could say that it’s the SJW version of “read the Sequences”.)
I am going to point out that “you’re not allowed to have any other opinion” and “I believe your opinion is wrong because of A, B, and C” are very different statements.
How much depends on what one means by allowed? For example, it isn’t unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist- because I have nowhere near the physics background to remotely understand the question beyond at an extremely basic level.
it isn’t unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist
That depends on who’s doing the talking.
It’s not unreasonable for you to decide that you shouldn’t have an opinion on X until you found out more about X.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
CYP doesn’t come up in discussions of neutrinos, it comes up in discussion of sociopolitical issues and in that context allowing or not allowing people to have certain opinions has a long and ugly history.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
Is it similarly true, if another party tells me that the very first issue that pops up under certain circumstances is X, that the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide what the very first issue is and isn’t?
This seems to me a silly way to treat ordinary discourse.
When you tell me that X is the very first issue to pop up, I take that to mean you’re more interested in discussing X than anything else. If someone tells me I shouldn’t have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they’re not interested in hearing about my opinion. Yes, in both cases they are expressing themselves as though their personal preferences were facts about the world, but I just treat that as a fairly basic rhetorical maneuver to establish their conversation status.
I take that to mean you’re more interested in discussing X than anything else
Generally speaking, no, it doesn’t mean that I’m more interested in X. What it means is that the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z so we might as well start with X because we’ll end up there anyway.
If someone tells me I shouldn’t have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they’re not interested in hearing about my opinion.
I take that differently—I understand that as containing a moral judgment as to which opinions are acceptable/allowed and which are not. After all in this case you can have an opinion as long as it is the correct “social justice” one. Any color as long as it’s black.
So it sounds like on your account, if I were to rail against you for deciding that we’re going to talk about X now and that I’m not allowed to talk about Y and Z, I would be missing the point, because what’s really going on has nothing to do with who is deciding what and who has the power.
Rather, you’re just pointing out that, since the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z, there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first. On your account, you aren’t expressing a moral judgment about what topics are acceptable/allowed, you’re just saying that some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes?
By contrast, on your account, the “social justice” warriors who say that, for example, men aren’t entitled to an opinion about the prevalence of sexism against women in our culture, aren’t making any such claim. There is no model of conversational dynamics they operate from such that such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully. In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first
Not so much even a failure mode, as an observation that the optimal path is X → Y → Z and if you start anywhere else you’ll have to come back to X soon, anyway.
some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes.
such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully.
More than that, CYP generally aims at putting a full stop to a particular branch of a conversation. It’s like “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it”.
In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
Claims to power, yes, not necessarily the actual power.
I don’t agree with your position generally, but I certainly agree that there exist individuals who have the kind of “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it” attitude towards what we’ve been calling “social justice”, and there exist many communities where such individuals exert disproportionate power.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
I think you may want to see Kaj’s comment here, which I think clarifies what is going on.
You’re right about the ignorance part of privilege—and contrary to SJW, it’s quite possible for people in the less privileged categories to be ignorant about at least some of the problems of people in the more privileged categories.
I’d love to find a way to disentangle the ignorance part of the idea of privilege from the power grab, but I haven’t figured out how to do it.
My general tactic has been when people use the term to say more or less the version like what you quoted is “problematic” and then explain more or less the ok meaning. Most of the time if you do so, people will be more careful at least for the remainder of the conversation.
On the other hand, at least once when I did so, I was informed that what I was attempting to do was “mansplaining” and “coming from a position of privilege to control what it means to have privilege” and I more or less threw up my hands. I don’t know if the individual in question was hopelessly mindkilled or not, but it exceeded my patience level.
You overlap through at least one of the following categories:heterosexual, male, white, high socioeconomic bracket
An interesting set. So let’s see who doesn’t overlap at least one category—it got to be a lesbian (or at least bi) poor non-white woman.
So everybody who is not a lesbian poor non-white woman (which I would estimate to be 98-99% of the population) is vulnerable to the cry of Check Your Privilege! Interesting...
Well, in the sane version this isn’t about vulnerability or conversation point scoring/status but actually trying to make an observation.
And in the sane contexts, most of them aren’t going to be relevant. If for example, one discussing say voting rights issues, I don’t think (sane) people are going to argue that sexual orientation matters, even as race and income might.
Although, if you do want to focus on how narrow it can get, I’ve also seem to the term in the context of people who are Christian not realizing how uncomfortable people from other religious backgrounds can easily be in parts of the US, and especially how that applies to atheists. But again, I don’t think the argument would be made that all the issues are relevant at the same time.
So, maybe, make it? There is, of course, the trivial point that for any issue there are people who had personal experience with it and people who had not, but “check your privilege” is very much not about personal experiences but about treating people solely as members of a certain class.
There is a reasonable way to put what you’re trying to say—it would go along the lines of “You are making assumptions X, Y, and Z and they don’t work in this situation because of A, B, and C and so what you expect to happen doesn’t”. But “check your privilege” is not that—it’s a shorthand for “sit down, shut up, and feel guilty”.
Or it can be shorthand for “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions, and it will take time to go through all of them, but you can conclude from someone who has actually been in the relevant situation that you are wrong about the actual situation on the ground.” That’s a common enough sentiment in many different contexts where inferential distance matters, and it may help to think in terms of this thread which tried to expand most of those issues in other contexts.
It helps to not try to interpret every statement people who make as the most irrational possible just because you already disagree with them or have seen other irrational aspects that particularly irk you.
If you have interesting examples of such a relatively positive use of “check your privilege”, I’d like to see them.
My experience is the same as Lumifer’s—I have only seen this phrase used to shut down unwanted opinions or unwanted participants. Theoretically, it could stand for what you said, and I’d love it if it did, but in practice it doesn’t seem to happen.
(Interestingly, the same seems to be true about the obnoxious -splaining family: “mansplaining”, “cissplaining” etc. That is, I can well imagine their uses that, while rude, seem somewhat justified. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually observed such a justified use; all the uses I’ve seen were always as a way to attack an opinion based on race/sex/identity of whoever offered it).
FWIW, in my social circle it’s often used in the first person. As in, “my first response was to dismiss X as completely unnecessary; then I checked my privilege and reconsidered what X might offer to groups G1, G2, and G3.” I don’t necessarily claim that these sorts of uses are interesting or positive (that’s a discussion I don’t choose to get into here), but I don’t quite see how it involves shutting anyone down.
As for “-splaining”, I more often see it used as a way to attack a conversational strategy than directly to attack an opinion… though of course many people will choose to attack a conversational strategy as an indirect way of attacking the opinions being expressed using that strategy, or the individuals expressing them.
Similarly, many people will choose to attack word choices in such an indirect fashion, as well, in order to indirectly attack the opinions being expressed using those words or the individuals expressing them, but that doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate to challenge inappropriate word choices.
Or it can shorthand for “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions, and it will take time to go through all of them, but you can conclude from someone who has actually been in the relevant situation that you are wrong about the actual situation on the ground.”
It can. But for me to accept this requires me to grant A LOT of credibility to the speaker.
It helps to not try to interpret every statement people who make as the most irrational possible just because you already disagree with them
Well, we can talk empirics, then. I’ve had “check your privilege” card pulled on me numerous times. In the great majority of the cases it was done to shut me up and shame me. In the great majority of cases people saying that had zero idea about my personal experiences and were just assuming what it was convenient for them to assume. In most cases this card was pulled when people were badly losing a rational argument.
So while in theory “check your privilege” can mean various things, I am pretty certain about what it means in practice.
In most cases this card was pulled when people were badly losing a rational argument.
Inferential distance issues is actually very high on the list of things that can make someone think that someone else is “badly losing” an argument. On at least one occasion I’ve had someone who was insisting that .9999… !=1 come away from a conversation with me convinced that they had “clearly won”.
But your point does have some validity, and if you look back at the original comment you replied to, I agreed with Nancy that it can be used in irrational ways. My point was about the more rational ways people can and do use the term. So what precisely are you trying to argue here?
This sounds then like an assertion not that people don’t use the phrase more rationally, but that you or others are unlikely to treat it as having a more rational meaning even when it does, because it has a history of being used more often in a more irrational fashion by people you politically disagree with. Is that a fair summary?
It is an assertion that in my personal experience people do not use the phrase rationally. YMMV and all that, of course.
This personal experience leads me to consider this particular phrase as an indicator of certain characteristics of people who us it, both with respect to their ideology and their rationality.
This personal experience leads me to consider this particular phrase as an indicator of certain characteristics of people who us it, both with respect to their ideology and their rationality.
Does it matter who they use that phrase to? Because some of us know how to speak “social justice-ese” to those who respond well to it, and “rational-ese” to those who respond better to that—but it can sometimes be frustrating when talking to a mixed audience. Whichever language one chooses, the other half will sense a betrayal.
I don’t know that I agree with that. I’ve found, for example, that plenty of social justice crusaders are perfectly willing and capable of learning rationalist thinking, but only from someone who has identified as a member of their pack. And plenty of rationalists express a desire for social justice people to behave more rationally. At what point should instrumental “skillful means” be seen as manipulation, and at what point is it a necessary handshake protocol?
plenty of social justice crusaders are perfectly willing and capable of learning rationalist thinking
Sure, if you recall that rationalist thinking is defined as winning.
but only from someone who has identified as a member of their pack.
So you are using the expression as a tribal membership sign? With the implication that “check your privilege” is a valid tribal marker?
At what point should instrumental “skillful means” be seen as manipulation, and at what point is it a necessary handshake protocol?
Depends on what you are promising and implying. Note the difficulty of using “skillful means” in mixed audiences, as mentioned above. By incorporating the right signs into the handshake protocols you represent yourself as a bona fide member of the tribe. And if then you start speaking as an outsider, tribe members will come to the correct conclusion that you only pretended to be a member of the tribe.
And from a tribal perspective, this illustrates the need for liminal / shamanistic roles—people who can be a bona fide member of the tribe, and yet also speak outsider language. There’s plenty of evidence that cultures from our ancestral environment codified roles that were allowed to break such taboos.
Well, we use the word “tribal” in such contexts, but we don’t really mean tribes in a literal sense. Even in tribal cultures, political and other alliances form and break off at a much smaller scale.
Sure, if you recall that rationalist thinking is defined as winning
I suspect that isn’t the definition that ialdabaoth is using here, but rather is talking about the cluster in meme space such as cognitive biases, tabooing terms, explicitly acknowledging inferential distance, making beliefs pay rent, etc.
In my biased opinion the social justice warriors would have trouble with this cluster. Their position is very much ideological and ideologies are not friendly towards this cluster.
In my biased opinion the social justice warriors would have trouble with this cluster. Their position is very much ideological and ideologies are not friendly towards this cluster.
What do you mean by ideology? Is say neo-reactionism an ideology? Is libertarianism an ideology?
In any event, this has little to do with my point since I was clarifying what ialdabaoth was talking about.
However, as long as were talking about biased, personal experiences, I’m going to need to strongly disagree in the specific case of people who self-identity as involved in social justice. In fact, the notion of inferential distance at least seems to be one that once you explain it, jumps out as a thing precisely because they are aware of examples of it, but don’t really have a separate term, or a decent overarching explanation for what is going on. I have to wonder if perhaps you are going into conversations with SJs or people on the left or far left with a more adversarial bent, and that’s contributing to the differences in experience?
I have to wonder if perhaps you are going into conversations with SJs or people on the left or far left with a more adversarial bent, and that’s contributing to the differences in experience?
That is likely.
SJWs also are prone to going into adversarial mode pretty quickly when talking to me. I tend to believe that sacred cows make the best hamburger and they are usually quite fond of their sacred cows :-D
Pissing off ideologues or trolling people in real life can be fun, but it isn’t a useful way to get information about their actual beliefs or how rational they are.
Pissing off ideologues or trolling people in real life can be fun, but it isn’t a useful way to get information about their actual beliefs
Oh, I disagree. Pissed-off people often get agitated enough to actually state their true beliefs which they would normally mask and camouflage and hedge about.
There’s this common belief that people when angry say what they are really thinking, but I suspect that often what is coming out is oversimplified statements that given a few more seconds of thought they’d even say to themselves “No, I don’t really believe that.” Speaking personally, one thing I like a fair bit about the internet is that I can reread a statement and make sure it has all the necessary nuance, and isn’t a completely off the cuff remark that doesn’t include any disclaimers that are bouncing around in my head but didn’t make it to the keyboard.
There’s this common belief that people when angry say what they are really thinking
First, not always—sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. However what people are willing to say, even under provocation, often offers insight into their minds.
Second, I was talking about beliefs which are less controlled by the conscious mind.
Values, as well as maps (in the map/territory meaning).
So, that’s two very broad categories and is most human thoughts. So when you say these beliefs are less controlled by the conscious mind, that’s opposed to what other thoughts?
That’s opposed to explicit logical (or “logical”) reasoning.
The distinction between underwater structures of the human mind and activity that happens in full sight above the water is rather basic and runs throughout the Sequences, for example.
There’s a massive difference between manipulating people and using vocabulary whose meaning people understand. To use a different example, I’ve ran into similar issues when having a discussion about religious matters in a group with both Jews and Christians.
Not actually a comparable situation. In one case, the goal of the conversation is to have a conversation and to share information and ideas, and hopefully come to a mutual understanding. The other one has a goal of getting in someone’s pants. I don’t think most people consider it manipulative to adjust vocabulary to match someone else’s in order to exchange ideas. Or if you want a different example: physicists and mathematicians sometimes use different notations (for example physicists like their bracket notation a lot). That’s in part a function of what objects one is most frequently talking about. Adjusting notation isn’t manipulative (although I suspect that a mixed group of mathematicians and physicists will mind such notational issues substantially less).
the goal of the conversation is to have a conversation and to share information and ideas
The conversations where “check your privilege” comes up are usually not about sharing information and ideas. They are usually about “I’m right and you’re wrong”.
In particular, by the time one party to the conversation tells the other “check your privilege” that conversation is clearly adversarial. This expression is not used in friendly discussion by people who respect each other.
This expression is not used in friendly discussion by people who respect each other.
My personal experience has falsified that statement many times. Perhaps you are not interacting with particularly intelligent or open social justice warriors, or perhaps I am interacting with atypically intelligent and open ones, but either way, I can attest that you are making an overgeneralization.
Perhaps you are not interacting with particularly intelligent or open social justice warriors
Perhaps. As I said, YMMV...
I would probably say that my conversations with smart social justice warriors usually short-circuit to value disagreements so quickly that CYP doesn’t even come up. Conversations that result tend to be about much more fundamental things.
I thought we just established that people can use that phrase in other ways, but that you find it to have too many bad connotations attached. Moreover, the actual comment you responded to was the statement that:
Does it matter who they use that phrase to? Because some of us know how to speak “social justice-ese” to those who respond well to it, and “rational-ese” to those who respond better to that—but it can sometimes be frustrating when talking to a mixed audience. Whichever language one chooses, the other half will sense a betrayal.
So I’m confused by your focus on apparently adversarial contexts.
I consider the phrase to be inherently adversarial.
That seems like a distinct claim than your earlier that
It is an assertion that in my personal experience people do not use the phrase rationally. YMMV and all that, of course.
This personal experience leads me to consider this particular phrase as an indicator of certain characteristics of people who us it, both with respect to their ideology and their rationality.
And given that multiple people on this thread have discussed non-adversarial interpretations of the phrase, I’m confused by how you can now assert that the phrase is inherently adversarial. That’s not even “often” or “frequently” or “the vast majority of the time”. What justifies this belief?
My opinion that CYP unrolls to “You’re wrong and you can’t even possibly come to the right conclusion because you are inherently deficient so you’ll have to trust what I am telling you and accept it. Oh, and you opinion is morally bad, you should be ashamed of having it”.
I have sufficient experience of meeting CYP in real life. I understand it could mean other things, it’s just that in reality it rarely does. Yes, that may be a function of the the subset of people I have interacted with and may not be representative, but that’s fine. I am not claiming this as a universal truth but as my opinion. Other people based on their experience can have different opinions, this fact does not force me to change mine.
FWIW, I probably agree with you that it’s more common for people to use that phrase as an adversarial shaming tactic than not.
Of course, I would say the same of many phrases, since it’s very common for people to adopt adversarial stances in conversation and for people to try to shame each other.
“Language is a tin drum on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope our music will move the stars.”
I consider the phrase to be inherently adversarial.
And then later you stated:
I am not claiming this as a universal truth but as my opinion
which are both hard to reconcile, with
Or it can shorthand for “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions, and it will take time to go through all of them, but you can conclude from someone who has actually been in the relevant situation that you are wrong about the actual situation on the ground.”
It can. But for me to accept this requires me to grant A LOT of credibility to the speaker.
None of these seem to be interconsistent.
And it makes particularly little sense to use any of them in the context of Ialdabaoth’s remark about using the correct vocabulary with different groups.
I don’t see why. The “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions...” expression is still adversarial. It is a polite version of the same underlying meaning—“You are wrong, I am right and you should just trust me that I’m right”.
Now, sometimes, rarely, that expression is actually correct—the party to whom it’s addressed really doesn’t have a clue about what being in a certain situation means. And that party can submit—accept that it doesn’t have a clue and should shut up and listen. This, as I said, requires the speaker to have a lot of credibility. And, by the way, doesn’t change the inherently adversarial character of the phrase.
Hmm. It seems to me that if you treat it as “adversarial” when someone provides you with clarifying information that they reasonably and correctly believe that you don’t possess, then you’re not going to learn very much.
The “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions...” expression is still adversarial
This may say more about your own attitudes than anything else, or you may have a different notion of what one means by adversarial. If someone seems to be making implicit assumptions, what is wrong with pointing that out?
If someone seems to be making implicit assumptions, what is wrong with pointing that out?
Because of two things. First, the emphasized parts in “You are wrong, I am right and you should just trust me that I’m right”. Second, CYP has a strong shaming component.
So, you seem to be extremely intent on not actually adjusting your views despite that many people have given examples of contexts where this is reasonable at this point, including TheOtherDave and Kaj I’m going try one more personal example and then give up. A while back, when discussing voting restrictions that increase the amount of time it takes for people to get IDs acceptable for voting and increase the wait time to actually vote, I was arguing with someone that this wasn’t a big deal since people could just take a few hours out of their day to do it. The response of CYP caused me to think about the matter more, and I immediately realized that the relevant issue was socioeconomic bracket: people in lower socioeconomic brackets can’t just take a few hours off or even if they can, they’ll end up losing income that they need. In this case, a three-word phrase was sufficient communication.
So, you seem to be extremely intent on not actually adjusting your views despite that many people have given examples of contexts where this is reasonable
In which direction do you think my views should be adjusted and on the basis of which evidence? Do notice that imagining contexts where something is possible or even likely does not constitute evidence.
...one more personal example
I am not sure what this personal anecdote is supposed to demonstrate? That you personally react well to CYP? Sure, that’s one datapoint. What’s next?
Oh, and by the way, in this particular context I don’t believe the conclusion you came to.
In one case, the goal of the conversation is to have a conversation and to share information and ideas, and hopefully come to a mutual understanding. The other one has a goal of getting in someone’s pants.
What does it tell about me that the first thing some part of my brain thought after reading those two sentences was ‘well, in some sense the latter is just a special case of the former’? Probably, just that I’ve read this too many times! ;-)
Another bad form (I’m not going to claim it’s worse) is that your privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus.
There’s a much saner form that’s worth noting, when it is shorthand for “You overlap through at least one of the following categories:heterosexual, male, white, high socioeconomic bracket, and so you are less likely to have personal experience of the sort of problem that is going on here and might not notice when it occurs.” This is essentially an issue of an illusion of transparency, in that often members of specific groups have issues that they are more aware of, and the amount of share experience leads to problems of inferential distance.
Essential agreement that the other two meanings are deeply counter-rational. Unfortunately, exactly what someone means by it isn’t always clear.
I think that “privilege” (in its more reasonable forms) basically refers to a special case of the Typical Mind Fallacy, one where people are prone to dismissing or understating the problems of one group because they don’t personally experience them in the same way. For a relatively neutral example, there’s this bit in Yvain’s post:
I would say that these are pretty much perfect examples of privilege: situations in which the perfectly reasonable problems of one party are completely invisible to the other, to the point that the other cannot even see what the problem is and thinks that the other person is just complaining about nothing.
Similarly, Eliezer has explicitly used the term “metabolic privilege” in pretty much this sense:
So “privilege” is a useful concept, one which has actually already seen use in the LW community. In this context, “check your privilege” is a call to re-evaluate one’s assumptions and to take into account the factors which make the situation genuinely problematic for others but a non-problem for you.
Even the “privilege means you’re not allowed to have any opinion other than the social justice consensus” sense can be a somewhat reasonable one—there are plausibly positions where people frequently and commonly become guilty of the Typical Mind Fallacy, and where a consensus of the people who’ve given the issue some thought agrees on this, and people who disagree are likely to just be flat-out wrong. (You could say that it’s the SJW version of “read the Sequences”.)
A classic SJW example of privilege that I think is justified is the case of sexual harassment of women, where men frequently react to cases of harassment with variations of “I don’t see the problem here, if someone did that to me I’d just be flattered”. In that case, the fallacy involves an inability to take into account the fact that a behavior that one might consider flattering if it only happened rarely will become unbearable if repeated sufficiently often (obligatory link), and also that men being stronger women creates a sense of accompanying danger that wouldn’t be present in the case of women harassing men.
I thought Of Dogs and Lizards was also a nice illustration of these concepts:
That definition is incomplete without having power mentioned in it.
For example, it’s culturally difficult for “straight cisgendered male Americans” to show weakness. It’s not a problem for women. Take the stereotypical situation when a couple is lost and the man refuses to ask for directions. The woman is annoyed at him. Can he tell her “check your privilege”?
I strongly disagree. It cannot be.
Depends on who you ask. I would say yes, some would say no.
Right, a literal “never allowed to have” cannot be. What I meant to say was that positions that might easily seem like “you are never allowed to have this opinion” might actually be positions of “this position is so likely to be wrong as to not be worth wasting our time with”, which can sometimes (though definitely not always) be reasonable.
Sure, there are lots of those. But notice the difference in accents: “I think you have no clue to the extent that I am not going to bother and waste my time”—vs. ” You have no right to your opinion”, especially if there’s an explicit or implicit “because you belong to a privileged class”.
What on earth could it possibly mean for you to have (or not have) “a right to your opinion”?
One possibility that occurs to me is that the expression “I have a right to my opinion!” has to do with whether people will give you the last word — it’s a claim to power over other people in conversation. Asserting “I have a right to my opinion” is a way of saying, “Shut up! I’m not talking about this with you any more!” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is a way of saying, “No, I won’t shut up; I will go on trying to convince you that you are wrong.”
Another possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is a statement that one intends to continue to confidently assert a view which has been undermined by evidence or argument, without acknowledging or responding to the criticism. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “you are being epistemically rude; stop it.”
A third possibility is that “I have a right to my opinion!” is an assertion that some topics are too socially volatile to be exposed to much criticism. This seems to be what people mean when they bring up “the right to your opinion” in matters of religious doctrine. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I’m not going to stop publicly debunking your religion just because you don’t like me doing it.”
Fourth, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be a demand to not be treated worse socially by others on account of one’s opinion, even if others may fear that the opinion may lead you to treat them worse. This would seem to be a demand for unilateral disarmament: “I will go on being bigoted against Blues, and I demand that Blues not treat me badly, even if they fear that I will treat them badly.” Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “Yes, I am going to treat your opinion as evidence about your character and your future actions, and treat you accordingly.”
Lastly, “I have a right to my opinion!” could be an effort to tar one’s (nonviolent) critics by associating them with some sort of (violent) censors — an Inquisition, a secret police — and to rally defenders of freedom to attack those critics. Thus, to say “you have no right to your opinion” is to say “I do not pose the kind of threat that you are claiming. You have no business invoking the defense of freedom on your opinion’s behalf, since freedom is not threatened. This is not a matter of ‘rights’; it is a matter of conversation, argument, and evidence. Stop trying to escalate it into a matter of ‘rights’.”
It’s also possible that “I have a right to my opinion” can mean “I have a right to enough time to assimilate new information without being told I have to think differently because someone else is sure they’re right.”
It might be interesting, the next time you come across someone who says “I have a right to my opinion”, to ask them what they mean.
For a trivial example, it turned out that Larry Summers did not have a right to his opinion about why women are underrepresented in certain fields.
After seeing your comment, I went and read what Wikipedia had to say about that incident.
I’d heard about Summers’ resignation only at some remove, and only really from bloggers who had opinions on one side or the other on the women-in-science issue. As a result, I hadn’t known that there were other contributing factors to Summers’ resignation besides that one. It seems that there were — including other conflicts with the faculty … and a corruption scandal involving Russia’s post-Soviet privatization program that led to Harvard paying a $26.5 million settlement to the Federal government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Summers#President_of_Harvard
I guess that goes to show the consequences of getting news from partisan sources. The rest of the story is substantially less exciting to folks who care about the “Social Justice vs. Political Incorrectness” Blue-Green war, though, so it’s no surprise it didn’t get as much press.
Of course it didn’t end there...
Sure. I didn’t read the original as a literal quote but rather as a rough characterization of a perceived attitude, so I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the exact wording, since I treated it as referring to a set of many different statements that include both of the variants in your comment, as well as others.
Are you simply going to say you disagree with Kaj here on this last part or actually respond to their comment, especially say the end of the sentence you cut off where Kaj said:
I am going to point out that “you’re not allowed to have any other opinion” and “I believe your opinion is wrong because of A, B, and C” are very different statements.
How much depends on what one means by allowed? For example, it isn’t unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t have an opinion on whether or not sterile neutrinos exist- because I have nowhere near the physics background to remotely understand the question beyond at an extremely basic level.
That depends on who’s doing the talking.
It’s not unreasonable for you to decide that you shouldn’t have an opinion on X until you found out more about X.
When another party tells you that you are not allowed to have an opinion on X the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide which opinions you are allowed to have and which not?
CYP doesn’t come up in discussions of neutrinos, it comes up in discussion of sociopolitical issues and in that context allowing or not allowing people to have certain opinions has a long and ugly history.
Is it similarly true, if another party tells me that the very first issue that pops up under certain circumstances is X, that the very first issue that pops up is what power/authority does that other party have to decide what the very first issue is and isn’t?
This seems to me a silly way to treat ordinary discourse.
When you tell me that X is the very first issue to pop up, I take that to mean you’re more interested in discussing X than anything else. If someone tells me I shouldn’t have an opinion about X, I take that to mean they’re not interested in hearing about my opinion. Yes, in both cases they are expressing themselves as though their personal preferences were facts about the world, but I just treat that as a fairly basic rhetorical maneuver to establish their conversation status.
Generally speaking, no, it doesn’t mean that I’m more interested in X. What it means is that the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z so we might as well start with X because we’ll end up there anyway.
I take that differently—I understand that as containing a moral judgment as to which opinions are acceptable/allowed and which are not. After all in this case you can have an opinion as long as it is the correct “social justice” one. Any color as long as it’s black.
So it sounds like on your account, if I were to rail against you for deciding that we’re going to talk about X now and that I’m not allowed to talk about Y and Z, I would be missing the point, because what’s really going on has nothing to do with who is deciding what and who has the power.
Rather, you’re just pointing out that, since the answer to X will influence and affect discussions of Y and Z, there is a conversational failure mode we can avoid by talking about X first. On your account, you aren’t expressing a moral judgment about what topics are acceptable/allowed, you’re just saying that some topics will cause the conversation to proceed more usefully (by addressing the fundamental issues first) and others will cause it to proceed less usefully.
Yes?
By contrast, on your account, the “social justice” warriors who say that, for example, men aren’t entitled to an opinion about the prevalence of sexism against women in our culture, aren’t making any such claim. There is no model of conversational dynamics they operate from such that such expressions of opinion can be expected to cause a conversation to proceed less usefully. In that case it really is about who is deciding what and who has the power.
So the two aren’t comparable.
Yes?
Not so much even a failure mode, as an observation that the optimal path is X → Y → Z and if you start anywhere else you’ll have to come back to X soon, anyway.
Yes.
More than that, CYP generally aims at putting a full stop to a particular branch of a conversation. It’s like “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it”.
Claims to power, yes, not necessarily the actual power.
Yes.
OK; thanks for clarifying.
I don’t agree with your position generally, but I certainly agree that there exist individuals who have the kind of “This here is a Sacred Truth, all you can do is accept it, and we will tolerate no doubts about it” attitude towards what we’ve been calling “social justice”, and there exist many communities where such individuals exert disproportionate power.
I think you may want to see Kaj’s comment here, which I think clarifies what is going on.
You’re right about the ignorance part of privilege—and contrary to SJW, it’s quite possible for people in the less privileged categories to be ignorant about at least some of the problems of people in the more privileged categories.
I’d love to find a way to disentangle the ignorance part of the idea of privilege from the power grab, but I haven’t figured out how to do it.
My general tactic has been when people use the term to say more or less the version like what you quoted is “problematic” and then explain more or less the ok meaning. Most of the time if you do so, people will be more careful at least for the remainder of the conversation.
On the other hand, at least once when I did so, I was informed that what I was attempting to do was “mansplaining” and “coming from a position of privilege to control what it means to have privilege” and I more or less threw up my hands. I don’t know if the individual in question was hopelessly mindkilled or not, but it exceeded my patience level.
An interesting set. So let’s see who doesn’t overlap at least one category—it got to be a lesbian (or at least bi) poor non-white woman.
So everybody who is not a lesbian poor non-white woman (which I would estimate to be 98-99% of the population) is vulnerable to the cry of Check Your Privilege! Interesting...
Well, in the sane version this isn’t about vulnerability or conversation point scoring/status but actually trying to make an observation.
And in the sane contexts, most of them aren’t going to be relevant. If for example, one discussing say voting rights issues, I don’t think (sane) people are going to argue that sexual orientation matters, even as race and income might.
Although, if you do want to focus on how narrow it can get, I’ve also seem to the term in the context of people who are Christian not realizing how uncomfortable people from other religious backgrounds can easily be in parts of the US, and especially how that applies to atheists. But again, I don’t think the argument would be made that all the issues are relevant at the same time.
So, maybe, make it? There is, of course, the trivial point that for any issue there are people who had personal experience with it and people who had not, but “check your privilege” is very much not about personal experiences but about treating people solely as members of a certain class.
There is a reasonable way to put what you’re trying to say—it would go along the lines of “You are making assumptions X, Y, and Z and they don’t work in this situation because of A, B, and C and so what you expect to happen doesn’t”. But “check your privilege” is not that—it’s a shorthand for “sit down, shut up, and feel guilty”.
Or it can be shorthand for “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions, and it will take time to go through all of them, but you can conclude from someone who has actually been in the relevant situation that you are wrong about the actual situation on the ground.” That’s a common enough sentiment in many different contexts where inferential distance matters, and it may help to think in terms of this thread which tried to expand most of those issues in other contexts.
It helps to not try to interpret every statement people who make as the most irrational possible just because you already disagree with them or have seen other irrational aspects that particularly irk you.
If you have interesting examples of such a relatively positive use of “check your privilege”, I’d like to see them.
My experience is the same as Lumifer’s—I have only seen this phrase used to shut down unwanted opinions or unwanted participants. Theoretically, it could stand for what you said, and I’d love it if it did, but in practice it doesn’t seem to happen.
(Interestingly, the same seems to be true about the obnoxious -splaining family: “mansplaining”, “cissplaining” etc. That is, I can well imagine their uses that, while rude, seem somewhat justified. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually observed such a justified use; all the uses I’ve seen were always as a way to attack an opinion based on race/sex/identity of whoever offered it).
FWIW, in my social circle it’s often used in the first person. As in, “my first response was to dismiss X as completely unnecessary; then I checked my privilege and reconsidered what X might offer to groups G1, G2, and G3.” I don’t necessarily claim that these sorts of uses are interesting or positive (that’s a discussion I don’t choose to get into here), but I don’t quite see how it involves shutting anyone down.
As for “-splaining”, I more often see it used as a way to attack a conversational strategy than directly to attack an opinion… though of course many people will choose to attack a conversational strategy as an indirect way of attacking the opinions being expressed using that strategy, or the individuals expressing them.
Similarly, many people will choose to attack word choices in such an indirect fashion, as well, in order to indirectly attack the opinions being expressed using those words or the individuals expressing them, but that doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate to challenge inappropriate word choices.
It can. But for me to accept this requires me to grant A LOT of credibility to the speaker.
Well, we can talk empirics, then. I’ve had “check your privilege” card pulled on me numerous times. In the great majority of the cases it was done to shut me up and shame me. In the great majority of cases people saying that had zero idea about my personal experiences and were just assuming what it was convenient for them to assume. In most cases this card was pulled when people were badly losing a rational argument.
So while in theory “check your privilege” can mean various things, I am pretty certain about what it means in practice.
Inferential distance issues is actually very high on the list of things that can make someone think that someone else is “badly losing” an argument. On at least one occasion I’ve had someone who was insisting that .9999… !=1 come away from a conversation with me convinced that they had “clearly won”.
But your point does have some validity, and if you look back at the original comment you replied to, I agreed with Nancy that it can be used in irrational ways. My point was about the more rational ways people can and do use the term. So what precisely are you trying to argue here?
My feeling is that the term is irretrievably tainted. I see its use as an ideological marker.
I accept that what it tries to express can be a useful point but this particular phrase by now carries way too much baggage.
This sounds then like an assertion not that people don’t use the phrase more rationally, but that you or others are unlikely to treat it as having a more rational meaning even when it does, because it has a history of being used more often in a more irrational fashion by people you politically disagree with. Is that a fair summary?
It is an assertion that in my personal experience people do not use the phrase rationally. YMMV and all that, of course.
This personal experience leads me to consider this particular phrase as an indicator of certain characteristics of people who us it, both with respect to their ideology and their rationality.
Does it matter who they use that phrase to? Because some of us know how to speak “social justice-ese” to those who respond well to it, and “rational-ese” to those who respond better to that—but it can sometimes be frustrating when talking to a mixed audience. Whichever language one chooses, the other half will sense a betrayal.
Correctly, too. Few like being manipulated and “two-faced” is not endearment.
I don’t know that I agree with that. I’ve found, for example, that plenty of social justice crusaders are perfectly willing and capable of learning rationalist thinking, but only from someone who has identified as a member of their pack. And plenty of rationalists express a desire for social justice people to behave more rationally. At what point should instrumental “skillful means” be seen as manipulation, and at what point is it a necessary handshake protocol?
Sure, if you recall that rationalist thinking is defined as winning.
So you are using the expression as a tribal membership sign? With the implication that “check your privilege” is a valid tribal marker?
Depends on what you are promising and implying. Note the difficulty of using “skillful means” in mixed audiences, as mentioned above. By incorporating the right signs into the handshake protocols you represent yourself as a bona fide member of the tribe. And if then you start speaking as an outsider, tribe members will come to the correct conclusion that you only pretended to be a member of the tribe.
And from a tribal perspective, this illustrates the need for liminal / shamanistic roles—people who can be a bona fide member of the tribe, and yet also speak outsider language. There’s plenty of evidence that cultures from our ancestral environment codified roles that were allowed to break such taboos.
It’s not a taboo if you are, without a doubt, the member of the tribe.
If you haven’t established that you belong, behaving as an outsider will likely be interpreted as treachery or evidence of two-facedness.
I suspect this may be extending the tribe metaphor too far.
Can you elaborate on your suspicion? Because I think it’s using the metaphor precisely where the mapping is tightest.
Well, we use the word “tribal” in such contexts, but we don’t really mean tribes in a literal sense. Even in tribal cultures, political and other alliances form and break off at a much smaller scale.
I suspect that isn’t the definition that ialdabaoth is using here, but rather is talking about the cluster in meme space such as cognitive biases, tabooing terms, explicitly acknowledging inferential distance, making beliefs pay rent, etc.
In my biased opinion the social justice warriors would have trouble with this cluster. Their position is very much ideological and ideologies are not friendly towards this cluster.
What do you mean by ideology? Is say neo-reactionism an ideology? Is libertarianism an ideology?
In any event, this has little to do with my point since I was clarifying what ialdabaoth was talking about.
However, as long as were talking about biased, personal experiences, I’m going to need to strongly disagree in the specific case of people who self-identity as involved in social justice. In fact, the notion of inferential distance at least seems to be one that once you explain it, jumps out as a thing precisely because they are aware of examples of it, but don’t really have a separate term, or a decent overarching explanation for what is going on. I have to wonder if perhaps you are going into conversations with SJs or people on the left or far left with a more adversarial bent, and that’s contributing to the differences in experience?
That is likely.
SJWs also are prone to going into adversarial mode pretty quickly when talking to me. I tend to believe that sacred cows make the best hamburger and they are usually quite fond of their sacred cows :-D
Pissing off ideologues or trolling people in real life can be fun, but it isn’t a useful way to get information about their actual beliefs or how rational they are.
Oh, I disagree. Pissed-off people often get agitated enough to actually state their true beliefs which they would normally mask and camouflage and hedge about.
There’s this common belief that people when angry say what they are really thinking, but I suspect that often what is coming out is oversimplified statements that given a few more seconds of thought they’d even say to themselves “No, I don’t really believe that.” Speaking personally, one thing I like a fair bit about the internet is that I can reread a statement and make sure it has all the necessary nuance, and isn’t a completely off the cuff remark that doesn’t include any disclaimers that are bouncing around in my head but didn’t make it to the keyboard.
First, not always—sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. However what people are willing to say, even under provocation, often offers insight into their minds.
Second, I was talking about beliefs which are less controlled by the conscious mind.
That’s part of what the SJWs are doing, too—trying to guess at what people are really like from small clues.
What do you mean by beliefs?
Values, as well as maps (in the map/territory meaning).
So, that’s two very broad categories and is most human thoughts. So when you say these beliefs are less controlled by the conscious mind, that’s opposed to what other thoughts?
That’s opposed to explicit logical (or “logical”) reasoning.
The distinction between underwater structures of the human mind and activity that happens in full sight above the water is rather basic and runs throughout the Sequences, for example.
There’s a massive difference between manipulating people and using vocabulary whose meaning people understand. To use a different example, I’ve ran into similar issues when having a discussion about religious matters in a group with both Jews and Christians.
Let me rephrase the original quote a bit:
Because some of us know how to speak PUA to girls who respond well to it, and “rational-ese” to those who respond better to that.
Still fine with that? Can be frustrating when talking to a mixed audience, yes :-/
Not actually a comparable situation. In one case, the goal of the conversation is to have a conversation and to share information and ideas, and hopefully come to a mutual understanding. The other one has a goal of getting in someone’s pants. I don’t think most people consider it manipulative to adjust vocabulary to match someone else’s in order to exchange ideas. Or if you want a different example: physicists and mathematicians sometimes use different notations (for example physicists like their bracket notation a lot). That’s in part a function of what objects one is most frequently talking about. Adjusting notation isn’t manipulative (although I suspect that a mixed group of mathematicians and physicists will mind such notational issues substantially less).
The conversations where “check your privilege” comes up are usually not about sharing information and ideas. They are usually about “I’m right and you’re wrong”.
In particular, by the time one party to the conversation tells the other “check your privilege” that conversation is clearly adversarial. This expression is not used in friendly discussion by people who respect each other.
My personal experience has falsified that statement many times. Perhaps you are not interacting with particularly intelligent or open social justice warriors, or perhaps I am interacting with atypically intelligent and open ones, but either way, I can attest that you are making an overgeneralization.
Perhaps. As I said, YMMV...
I would probably say that my conversations with smart social justice warriors usually short-circuit to value disagreements so quickly that CYP doesn’t even come up. Conversations that result tend to be about much more fundamental things.
What values?
Basic ones :-D The balance of individual and community; the freedoms and responsibilities involved, the role of the state, etc.
And notice, we’re talking about smart SJWs. Most don’t have the faintest clues about economics...
I thought we just established that people can use that phrase in other ways, but that you find it to have too many bad connotations attached. Moreover, the actual comment you responded to was the statement that:
So I’m confused by your focus on apparently adversarial contexts.
I consider the phrase to be inherently adversarial.
That seems like a distinct claim than your earlier that
And given that multiple people on this thread have discussed non-adversarial interpretations of the phrase, I’m confused by how you can now assert that the phrase is inherently adversarial. That’s not even “often” or “frequently” or “the vast majority of the time”. What justifies this belief?
My opinion that CYP unrolls to “You’re wrong and you can’t even possibly come to the right conclusion because you are inherently deficient so you’ll have to trust what I am telling you and accept it. Oh, and you opinion is morally bad, you should be ashamed of having it”.
And that people on this thread have given other possible meanings of what that phrase is short-hand for?
Yes, and..?
I have sufficient experience of meeting CYP in real life. I understand it could mean other things, it’s just that in reality it rarely does. Yes, that may be a function of the the subset of people I have interacted with and may not be representative, but that’s fine. I am not claiming this as a universal truth but as my opinion. Other people based on their experience can have different opinions, this fact does not force me to change mine.
FWIW, I probably agree with you that it’s more common for people to use that phrase as an adversarial shaming tactic than not.
Of course, I would say the same of many phrases, since it’s very common for people to adopt adversarial stances in conversation and for people to try to shame each other.
“Language is a tin drum on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope our music will move the stars.”
So, what do you mean when you use the word “inherently”? And in what context did you reply to Ialdabaoth’s comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/j5i/the_craft_and_the_community_the_basics_apologizing/a3n5 here, given that that’s clear not the meaning of the phrase or similar phrases he’s intending to use? And how does that work with your statement http://lesswrong.com/lw/j5i/the_craft_and_the_community_the_basics_apologizing/a3mf ?
Oh, please. I am not going to fisk multiple posts—if you feel I have contradicted myself, be specific.
Sure, I’m confused by your statement that:
And then later you stated:
which are both hard to reconcile, with
None of these seem to be interconsistent.
And it makes particularly little sense to use any of them in the context of Ialdabaoth’s remark about using the correct vocabulary with different groups.
I don’t see why. The “You are making a long list of implicit assumptions...” expression is still adversarial. It is a polite version of the same underlying meaning—“You are wrong, I am right and you should just trust me that I’m right”.
Now, sometimes, rarely, that expression is actually correct—the party to whom it’s addressed really doesn’t have a clue about what being in a certain situation means. And that party can submit—accept that it doesn’t have a clue and should shut up and listen. This, as I said, requires the speaker to have a lot of credibility. And, by the way, doesn’t change the inherently adversarial character of the phrase.
Hmm. It seems to me that if you treat it as “adversarial” when someone provides you with clarifying information that they reasonably and correctly believe that you don’t possess, then you’re not going to learn very much.
No, they don’t provide me with clarifying information. They provide me with a ready-made conclusion which they insist I must accept on trust.
I’ll take my chances.
This may say more about your own attitudes than anything else, or you may have a different notion of what one means by adversarial. If someone seems to be making implicit assumptions, what is wrong with pointing that out?
Because of two things. First, the emphasized parts in “You are wrong, I am right and you should just trust me that I’m right”. Second, CYP has a strong shaming component.
So, you seem to be extremely intent on not actually adjusting your views despite that many people have given examples of contexts where this is reasonable at this point, including TheOtherDave and Kaj I’m going try one more personal example and then give up. A while back, when discussing voting restrictions that increase the amount of time it takes for people to get IDs acceptable for voting and increase the wait time to actually vote, I was arguing with someone that this wasn’t a big deal since people could just take a few hours out of their day to do it. The response of CYP caused me to think about the matter more, and I immediately realized that the relevant issue was socioeconomic bracket: people in lower socioeconomic brackets can’t just take a few hours off or even if they can, they’ll end up losing income that they need. In this case, a three-word phrase was sufficient communication.
In which direction do you think my views should be adjusted and on the basis of which evidence? Do notice that imagining contexts where something is possible or even likely does not constitute evidence.
I am not sure what this personal anecdote is supposed to demonstrate? That you personally react well to CYP? Sure, that’s one datapoint. What’s next?
Oh, and by the way, in this particular context I don’t believe the conclusion you came to.
What does it tell about me that the first thing some part of my brain thought after reading those two sentences was ‘well, in some sense the latter is just a special case of the former’? Probably, just that I’ve read this too many times! ;-)