I believe that “the problem of the nerdy heterosexual male” is surely one of the worst social problems today that you can’t even acknowledge as being a problem—the more so, if you weight the problems by how likely academics like me are to know the sufferers and to feel a personal stake in helping them. How to help all the young male nerds I meet who suffer from this problem, in a way that passes feminist muster, and that triggers the world’s sympathy rather than outrage, is a problem that interests me as much as P vs. NP, and that right now seems about equally hard.
Reading debates like this makes me sad. I realize that just like everything else, feminism also is a tool that different people can use for different purposes. Some people can use it to support empathy towards other human beings. Some people use it to deny empathy towards other human beings. Somehow the latter seem more prominent on the internet.
There is something in the impersonal online communication that emphasises sociopathic traits in people. When in real life you see a suffering man, you usually don’t see feminists running to him screaming “actually, I have it much worse!”. But when you see a man writing about his suffering online, this is what often happens. Maybe it’s because behaving like an asshole in real life is likely to bring you a punch in the face or at least a loss of status, while doing the same on internet generates page views and income, if you do it properly.
Like polymathwannabe wrote, there is a meaningful definition of “privilege” (although I would prefer the word “advantage”), which is: “Maybe you are just a lucky person who doesn’t have this problem, so you don’t think about this problem, and you may even find it unbelievable, but for some other people this is an important factor in their lives.” This is the core that makes sense.
The part of the online discource that doesn’t make sense is the frequent claim that this “privilege” is unidirectional: “If you separate people into two groups X and Y, exactly one of them will have problems that the other side doesn’t see.” There is an illogical jump from “group X has on average more problems than group Y” to “problems of the group X are a strict superset of problems of the group Y”. This implicit assumption manifests in a debate when people from group Y are told to “check their privilege”, but is assumed that people from group X have no provilege to check. (Unless we consider some other dimension, so e.g. people from X1 may have privilege over people from X2, but still never a privilege over Y1.)
Like Sarunas described, the problem is replacing the reality with a simplified multilinear model. First problem, the model depends on which variables are included and which are excluded, which is somewhat an arbitrary decision, so of course people are prone to include the variables which “prove” their oppression, and exclude the variables which “disprove” it. (For example, there is usually a strong emphasis on “male privilege”, but very little emphasis on “rich privilege”. Which is coincidentally exactly the kind of bias you would expect if the theory is popular among female Harvard students.) Second problem, the multilinear assumption itself may be wrong, even if we include all the relevant variables. Third problem, even if the multilinear model would descibe the averages of groups accurately, individuals are not the averages of their groups. It doesn’t make much sense to assume that a random black homeless man has a lot of power and money just because a different individual from the “black male” group happens to be a US president.
For example, there is usually a strong emphasis on “male privilege”, but very little emphasis on “rich privilege”.
This is, in my estimation, a real problem for the sometimes disjunct groups of rationalists and social justice types alike, and one I haven’t yet come up with a good solution for other than “talk about class a lot”.
I guess most people who talk about “class” don’t actually have a good idea about what it means. We have the approximate idea of “if you have more money and more power, you are a higher class”, but most people are completely uncalibrated; they do not know how the power ladder actually works. So, as would be expected of humans, they usually divide the whole society into two classes, US and THEM, where “us” means people who make as much money as me, or less; and “them” means people who make more money than me. So the guy next door who makes twice as much money as I do is put into the same set as the oligarchs who rule the country. Then the oligarchs will make a law that increases the tax for the guy next door, and I will celebrate it.
(For example, the government of Slovakia created a new extra tax for “people with income between 2000 and 3000 euro monthly, except for lawyers” and called it “the millionaire tax”. It was depressing to see all the left-wing people celebrating it, because if it is called “the millionaire tax” in the pro-government media, then of course it targets the millionaires, and not just some IT guy next doors. One could naively think that being ruled by Marxists for almost a century should give these people at least some insight into the class fight. But they merely remember the passwords.)
In my opinion, the critical part is to realize that class isn’t money, although it correlates. Imagining that people with a lot of money are automatically upper-class, that is confusing the cause and the effect. The real causation is in the opposite direction. The upper-class people have sources of money unavailabble to muggles, but sometimes also an incredibly smart, intelligent and hard-working muggle can accumulate comparable amounts of money using completely different strategies. Morearticles from the same author:
Rich people are not automatically upper class. Steve Jobs was a billionaire but never entered it; he remained middle-class (in social position, not wealth) his entire life. His children, if they want to enter its lower tier, have a shot. Bill Gates is lower-upper class at best, and has worked very hard to get there. Money alone won’t buy it, and entrepreneurship is (by the standards of the upper class) the least respectable way to acquire wealth. Upper class is about social connections, not wealth or income.
The wealth of the upper class follows from social connection, and not the other way around. Americans frequently make the mistake of believing (especially when misled on issues related to taxation and social justice) that members of the upper class who earn seven- and eight-digit salaries are scaled-up versions of the $400,000-per-year, upper-middle-class neurosurgeon who has been working intensely since age 4. That’s not the case. The hard-working neurosurgeon and the well-connected parasite are diametric opposites, in fact. They have nothing in common and could not stand to be in the same room together, because their values are too much at odds.
Consider two analysts at a prestigious financial firm, both 24 years old and of equal drive, intelligence, and talent. Let’s also assume, for now, that none of their co-workers or managers know either analyst’s family background, except through their behavior. The middle-class kid spends the bulk of his time trying not to offend, not to behave in a way that might jeopardize the job he worked so hard to get and could not easily replace if he lost it. He doesn’t invite himself to meetings, avoids contact with high-ranking executives, and doesn’t offer suggestions when in meetings. Thanks to the fear he experiences on a daily basis, he’s seen as “socially awkward” and “mousy” by higher-ups. … Even when they are cognitively aware of how to manage authority, the stakes of the career game for a middle-class striver, who will fall into humiliation and possibly poverty if he fails it, are so severe that only the well-trained and steel-nerved few can prevent these calamitously high risks from, at least to some degree, disrupting their game.
The rich kid, on the other hand, relates even to the highest-ranking executives as equals, because he knows that they are his social equals. He’ll answer to them, but with an understanding that his subordination is limited and offered in exchange for mentoring and protection. He views them as partners and colleagues, not judges or potential adversaries. Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but most of his bosses like this. His career advances fast. He respects others and himself and has an uncanny air of effortless “coolness” (by which I mean freedom from anxiety) that enables him to actually get things done. It becomes common knowledge that he’s “up-and-coming”, a rising star in his company. Even if his performance is smack-average or somewhat below, his effortless rise will not be deterred.
This “middle path” between self-defeat and entitled arrogance is narrow– a tightrope, metaphorically speaking. It is, I should note, of equal width and tension for both rich and poor. There is no intentional preference given to one class over the other. The difference is that children of wealth traverse it at a height of one meter over a mattress, while the middle-class and poor traverse it at a height of 20 meters over a lava pit.
I think I might have an advantage of being born in a Communist country, where the class differences not only existed just as strongly as they exist today (despite of what our propaganda was saying back then), but they existed in their raw form—the power of social connections translated directly into the ability to help or hurt people, unobscured by the red herrings of education, skills and salary. (Education and skills are important to make this world a better place, but the social class is a different topic.)
Taxing the upper middle class is a generally good idea; they are the ones most capable and willing to pay taxes. Many European countries apply progressive tax rates. Calling it a millionanaire tax is a misnomer, or course, but otherwise I would support that (I’m from Latvia FYI)
Michael O. Church is certainly an interesting writer, but you should take into account that he basically is a programmer with no academic qualifications. Most of his posts appear to be wild generalizations of experiences personally familiar to him. (Not exclusively his own experiences, of course.) I suspect that he suffers heavily from the narrative fallacy.
The reason why I like those articles are that they are compatible with my (very limited) experience with what I consider upper-class people. Of course I may be wrong, or me and the author can share the same bias, etc… I am just saying that there is more for me than merely interesting writing.
Taxing the middle class allows the government to get a lot of money easily: those are people who already have enough money that can be taken, but not enough money to defend themselves. From that angle, it is a good idea. On the other hand, the strategy of “taking money where taking money is easy” contributes to increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, and to elimination of the most productive part of the population, which some people would consider a bad idea. Unfortunately, the consequences of getting more tax money come quickly, and the consequences of destroying the middle class take more time.
Read Paul Fussell on socioeconomic class. (Kate Fox in her book Watching the English also has some interesting UK-specific commentary on class.) Some of the best stuff out there (that I know of).
Both of them focus on cultural and lifestyle differences, though—just as a word of warning if that’s not what you’re looking for.
Gladwell in Outliers also has some interesting things to say on the influence of an upper class background on the skill to forge social connections, specifically in regards to comparing the respective achievements of Robert Oppenheimer (upper class) and Christopher Langan (very high IQ, but lower/middle class).
I find the “labor and gentry” division interesting.
There is a sort of conservation argument against the sustainability of elite networks in the absence of the right sorts of coercive power. In addition, our emotion reactions to prestige, which depend more on relative position than absolute power, lead us to exaggerate how much domestic power is actually wielded by elites in a country like Sweden, or even the United States (this includes the self-perceptions of elites). The narrative tone that tends to be used when discussing elites is evidence of this.
Much of the identified elite are the decay products of the former upper echelons of labor and gentry. The known determinants of personal traits make it seem implausible that this group is self-sustaining (as an elite, rather than an upper-middle, group) in the manner that he describes (i.e. shared family environment leading to a dominant personality): And so the cost of valuing an elite appointee in excess of the expected value of their connections (versus investing in a meritocrat) should be large. Unless you can replenish the “wealth” of the network in a non-meritocratic way, this can’t last. So this story says that elites are slowly being relieved of their resources down to the value of their non-network traits, knowingly (via donations) or by fitter agents, with the stock of elites being occasionally replenished by the other ladders. The rate of decay might depend on things like the relative growth rate of the elite, their access to corrupt power, and the strategies of other classes (taxation, exile, killing them, etc). We’d prefer the rate of decay to be higher rather than slower.
Does this argument make sense and predict anything useful? I’m not sure.
I’m thinking about the United States, and what the linked article describes as an “elite” social class. I’m trying to be more explicit that what explains the character of an elite class is the attempt to control the transfer of elite status to the next generation of elites. The linked article doesn’t explaining this well, presenting a model without much predictive value. A better model is something like:
People enter the elite class from other backgrounds via raw money and power. The initial entrant might be a military conquerer, a dominant politician, or a self-made billionaire. They will try to transfer their status to their children and friends, who display more the characteristic social traits of the elite. But the traits that initially propel people into the elite class aren’t transfered perfectly. Specifically, you see regression on cognitive ability, personality, and luck. A good model of an elite class will be mostly a model of how elites try to prevent this regression on traits from bringing about a regression in social class.
Elites have historically used many strategies, but the best way is to make explicit political appointments. Even here, a society that does too much of this will find itself facing displacement by more meritocratic societies, and a segment of society that does more of this will face pressure from other segments. If an elite is only able to make commercial appointments, it faces an accelerated version of this pressure: The companies that get saddled with too many nth-generation-regressed elites will be eventually be displaced by more meritocratic companies, or more meritocratic internal divisions, or whatever.
The author tells several stories (about young nth generation elites) that exaggerate the ability of family environment to compensate for this regression in traits, and obscure the long term constraints that elites face. Historically, the strategy of elites encouraging the idea that particular social behaviors create elites (and then teaching their children those behaviors) doesn’t seem to have much impact once you account for access to direct political appointments. The instant an elite group can no longer pass on special titles or get sinecures in the Royal Navy, we find that the social shibboleths are quickly discarded. It’s a strategy based on obscuring the real nature of the transfer.
What he may have in mind, but doesn’t say explicitly, is that making commercial appointments is only a sustainable way to transfer elite status if you can use commercial appointments to get some sort political power, and then convert that political power into a non-meritocratic source of further political power or commercial wealth. Not surprisingly, this is what American elites, (who are forced to rely on commercial appointments more than most historic elites), generally do: You mostly can’t use political power to make direct political appointments, or use commercial power to give sustainable commercial power to descendants, but you can sort of bounce back and force between the two and hope to get enough edge.
I hope I’ve expressed that clearer. People have a vague sense of “money and politics” as the central thing in the American elite system, but I don’t think they realize that this is simply elites trying to pass on elite status in the face of a reformed political system and commercial pressures that make the older methods less effective. Comparison of the United States to places like Russia are a mixed bag, because while the class system might have the same general form, American elites really are using quite different strategies.
When in real life you see a suffering man, you usually don’t see feminists running to him screaming “actually, I have it much worse!”. But when you see a man writing about his suffering online, this is what often happens.
I wonder if this is because the set of visibly suffering men (e.g., most of the panhandlers I pass when driving anywhere in my town) doesn’t overlap much with the set of men writing online about their suffering.
Not sure what exactly you wanted to say. It feels to me like unless a man is suffering extremely (unless he is disabled or homeless), it is not real suffering, and he does not deserve compassion. On the other hand, when a damsel is offended by a shirt...
Offering a hypothesis for difference between meatspace and cyberspace behavior based on some informal observations (that isn’t “everyone is awful on the internet”, which may nevertheless be a better description of the problem).
Oh yes, sorry. Yes, “how much people suffer” and “how much people complain about their suffering online” are two different things; most obvious example being the people without internet access.
If I understood the story correctly, Scott Aaronson was attacked mostly for paying too little attention to the feminist (well, not only theirs) concept of “privilege”.
I will try to paraphrase the concept of “privilege” (if I understand it correctly) using the terms of statistics in a way that, I imagine, might lead someone to accept the concept. This way, hopefully, I will be able to clearer express myself.
Suppose you can quantify suffering (let’s use the word “suffering” even though in everyday language it is quite strong word, whereas I’ll use it to describe even very small annoyances). And suppose you are trying to create a statistical model, that could predict total suffering of an individual without actually measuring his/her suffering without paying attention to a particular situation (just some kind of “total average suffering”), using explanatory variables that are easy to measure. Suppose you decide that you will use belonging to a specific social group of people as your explanatory variables. As you can see, nothing in these terms guarantees that this model will actually be good (i.e. if the error terms are symmetric, etc.), because, for example, it is not clear whether explanatory variables denoting whether a person belongs to a certain group are actually enough to make a model good, etc.
If you try, for example, linear regression, you will obtain something like this:
S = a + b_1*x_1 + … b_n*x_n + e.
In addition to that, you can have additional variables of the form x_i*x_j or x_i*(1-x_j) to model interaction between different variables.
Here S is total suffering, a is an intercept term, x_i is an expanatory Boolean variable denoting whether a person belongs to an i-th social group (some groups are mutually exclusive, some aren’t, for example, let’s say that we assign 1 to blue eyed people and 0 to others), and if b_1 is negative, then b_1 could be said to measure “privilege” of people who belong to i-th group. If I understand correctly, people who employ this concept use it this way. Let’s denote Ŝ= a + b_1*x_1 + … b_n*x_n and call it “predicted suffering”.
As you can see, claims that privilege is very important and thus everyone must pay a lot of attention to it depend on many assumptions. The model itself might be unsatisfactory if does not account for many important explanatory variables that are as important (or even more important) than those already in a model. Few people are interested in “testing” the model and justifying the variables, most people simply choose several variables and use them.
Modeling total average suffering without paying attention to a specific situation may be misleading if the values of b_i varies a lot depending on a situation.
Another thing is that it is not clear whether error terms e are actually small. If your model of total suffering fails to account for many sources of suffering, then error terms probably dwarfs predicted suffering. It is my impression that, when people see a linear model, their default thinking is that error terms as smaller (perhaps much smaller) than the conditional mean, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Therefore saying that a model has predictive power without saying that it has huge error terms might mislead a lot of people about what the model says.
Some people might claim that they, for some reason, are only interested in specific types of suffering, i.e. suffering from prejudice, biased institutions, politics, laws, conventions of public life or something like that. That doesn’t mean that individual variation and error terms are small. If they aren’t, then you cannot neglect their importance.
The values of coefficients b_i may be hard to determine.
But the problem I want to talk about the most is this. If you can observe the value of response variable S (total average suffering of an individual or total average suffering of an individual which is caused by a specific sets of reasons) then focusing on predicted value Ŝ is a mistake, since observation of response variable S screens off the the whole point of making a prediction Ŝ. For example, you can use university degrees to predict the qualifications of a job applicant, but if you can already observe their qualifications, you do not need to make predictions based on those degrees. It is my impression that most people, who talk about privilege, sometimes pay little attention to actual suffering S, but, due to mental habits obtained, perhaps, by reading the literature about the topic, pay a lot of attention to predicted suffering Ŝ. For example, Scott Aaronson describes his individual S in his comment here and gets a response here. The author says she empathizes with Scott Aaronson’s story (S), then starts blaming Scott for not talking about Ŝ, and proceeds to talk about average (Ŝ) female and male nerds. Ŝ is not what any individual feels, but it seems to be the only thing some people are able to talk about. If the size of Ŝ does not dwarf model error terms e, then by talking about Ŝ and not talking about S they are throwing away the reality.
In addition to that, there is, If I understand correctly, another source of confusion, and it is ambiguity of the vague concepts “institutional” and “structural”. If we are talking, e.g. about suffering from biased institutions, prejudices, structures in society etc. (if for some reason we are paying more attention to only this specific type of suffering), then S (and not Ŝ) is what actually measures it. However, it is my impression that some people use these words to refer to Ŝ only, without error terms e. In this case, they should remember, that S is what actually exists in the world and, if error terms are huge, then there might be very few situations where neglecting them talking about Ŝ instead actually illuminates anything. It is my impression that some people who are interested in things like “privilege” tend to overestimate the size of Ŝ and underestimate the size of e, perhaps due to availability heuristic.
Many people, who argue against feminists, tend to claim that the latter estimate Ŝ incorrectly. This may or may not be true, but I don’t think that it is a good way to convince them to pay attention to problems that are different from what they are used to dealing with. Instead, I think that there might be a chance to convince them by emphasizing that S, and not Ŝ is what exists in the real world, emphasizing that error terms e may be huge, and not allowing them to change the topic from S to Ŝ. If you make them concede that a problem X, which their model does not use as a explanatory variable, exists and person_1, person_2, … person_n suffer from problem X. Perhaps then they will not be hostile to the idea of noticing the pattern. To sum up, it seems to me that feminism tends to explain all things in top-down fashion and model their enemies as being top-down as well. My guess is that making them to think in “bottom-up” style terms may make their thinking somewhat less rigid.
Of course, all this is an attempt to guess how a specific part of a solution (stopping feminists from trying to complicate any kind of solution) might look like
“Privilege” is not really a well-defined concept, but in its most cogent and consistent version, it doesn’t really have much to do with suffering at all. It’s a rather confusing way of referring to a “biased point of view”. Saying that “Person A has privilege” wrt. some issue is a claim that A’s overall observations and experiences are unrepresentative, and so she should rely on others’ experiences as much as on her own.
It’s similar to the argument that truthful Bayesian debaters “can’t agree to disagree”, except that in the real world, humans don’t generally have a clean separation between “different priors” and “different experiences”. So, if your priors seem to be somehow different from others’, this should make you suspect that something is amiss, because we don’t really know of a good reason to reject common priors, if only as an abstract goal.
From this point of view, Scott Aaronson’s claim that “privilege” doesn’t apply to him is not very meaningful. If anything, a better argument would be that the SJWish folks who have pattern-matched his comment to “Self-proclaimed nice guy(TM) complains about ‘feminists’, reveals his boorish, entitled attitudes” are showing privilege wrt. nerdy, socially awkward straight males who are expected to navigate the not-altogether-trivial problem of how to interact with women both socially and romantically in a way that’s respectful of everyone’s autonomy.
It’s a rather confusing way of referring to a “biased point of view”. Saying that “Person A has privilege” wrt. some issue is a claim that A’s overall observations and experiences are unrepresentative, and so she should rely on others’ experiences as much as on her own.
That’s not quite correct; I think it’s best to start with the concept of systematic oppression. Suppose for the sake of argument that some group of people is systematically oppressed, that is, on account of their group identity, the system in which they find themselves denies them access to markets, or subjects them to market power or physical violence, or vilifies them in the public sphere—you can provide your own examples. The privileged group is just the set complement of the oppressed group. An analogy: systematic oppression is the subject and privilege (in the SJ jargon sense) is the negative space.
The “biased point-of-view” thing follows as a near-corollary because it’s human nature to notice one’s oppression and to take one’s absence-of-oppression for granted as a kind of natural status quo, a background assumption.
Next question: in what way did Aaronson’s so-called wealthy white male privilege actually benefit him? To answer this, all we need to do is imagine, say, a similarly terrified poor black trans nerd learning to come out of their shell. Because I’ve chosen an extreme contrast, it’s pretty clear who would have the easier time of it and why. Once you can see it in high contrast, it’s pretty easy to relax the contrast and keep track of the relative benefits that privilege conveys.
“Privilege” is [...] a rather confusing way of referring to a “biased point of view”.
It’s more than that. It refers to unearned advantages that prevent you from empathizing with other people’s experiences.
For example, you don’t usually think how special it is that you can read and have internet access, but compared to the rest of the world, it’s a privilege; acknowledging your class privilege means not forgetting about the lots of people who through no fault of their own don’t have those luxuries.
If you’re cisgendered, you have the privilege of not being constantly asked to explain your appearance and behavior to others; acknowledging your cis privilege means not forgetting that other people have it harder than you.
If you live in any part of the Americas, you benefit from the systematic displacement and extermination of Native cultures. Even if you didn’t personally steal a Native’s land, acknowledging your Western privilege means not forgetting that your current standard of life is partly dependent on a historic crime.
Even if you didn’t personally steal a Native’s land, acknowledging your Western privilege means not forgetting that your current standard of life is partly dependent on a historic crime.
No more than your existence depending on some paternal ancestor raping some maternal ancestor, which stochastically also happened. Being neither a believer in kin liability*, and skeptical at best about collective guilt (for past events, no less), why should I—or you, or anyone—feel responsible?
(As an aside, just for the hypothetical: The Natives that were displaced could well be those tribes who previously themselves successfully displaced/replaced other tribes, no? Back the guilt ball rolls, to the first microbe. At least it can’t be triggered, not having a brain and all. Then again, that’s no protection for Tumblristas either.)
* Excluding otherkin liability, because otherkin are the epitome of what’s wrong with the world. When anything wrong happens somewhere in the world, the closest otherkin should be put on a public show-trial, incarcerated and/or have his/her rotary blades removed.
True, collective guilt is a wrong idea. Acknowledging privilege is not about apologizing; it’s rather about not taking your good life for granted. You’re not supposed to feel liable for the many ancient crimes that gave you your present advantages, but you’re expected to be mindful of those who still suffer as a consequence.
You’re not supposed to feel liable for the many ancient crimes that gave you your present advantages, but you’re expected to be mindful of those who still suffer as a consequence.
What does this being mindful look like, in concrete terms?
Here is a short list of things I do and some things I have heard suggested:
Consume media created by members of disadvantaged groups
Notice when members of disadvantaged groups are absent from a particular setting. Ask yourself or others why this might be the case, and whether this serves the desired objectives, or if there’s even clarity on what the desired objectives are. (Example: holding a meeting on a college campus that lacks public parking.)
If you attend professional conferences, ask organizers what they are doing to ensure all presentation proposals get fair consideration. (If you’re so inclined, ask what they are doing to support diversity among presenters.)
Update towards the belief that, regardless of your good intentions, members of disadvantaged groups may interpret certain things you say uncharitably. Avoid saying such things, or take pains to avoid offloading your discomfort onto them. For examples of things to watch out for, you may find it helpful to read Derailing for Dummies.
Some addenda:
If you have experiences that you feel make you better able to empathize with members of a disadvantaged group, great! When you are with members of the disadvantaged group, do not bring up these experiences unless you are specifically asked.
Do not claim to share an identity with members of the disadvantaged group unless explicitly and enthusiastically invited to do so. Even so, this dispensation is good only when you’re among the people who extended it to you. (Example: a campus LGBTQA group whose members are persistently and vocally excited about the “and allies!” bit.)
If you feel someone is stereotyping you unfairly, consider whether you are the target audience for this piece of media. Do not reply, with a possible exception being for when you are being named specifically (and not referred to by group identity.)
Carefully consider the relative magnitude of a wrong you have suffered before airing righteous indignation, even as a group bonding activity.
I’m not sure that the case for being mindful only to those who suffer because of an ancient crime from which you benefit and not towards those who suffer for other reasons is strong.
I rather focus on the people who suffer and how to alleviate suffering than go to much into the historical background of why they might suffer.
The subthread had arrived at a discussion on the definition of privilege, and that’s the context where I made those comments. That context required a focus on a specific subset of injustices. I didn’t mean or expect it to be understood as a dismissal of all other types of injustices.
Determining suffering and determining injustice are two different strategies.
I can emphatize with a person who’s suffering without going into an intellectual analysis of whether his suffering is just or injust.
If you think in terms of injustice you need to presume that you understand the plight of the other person well enough to be able to tell whether they are suffering justly.
That means you won’t emphatize with people who suffer for reasons you don’t understand.
I can see a person suffering without understanding why they are suffering. I don’t need to judge the suffering as right or wrong in oder to emphatize.
Knowing about the fact that native Americans get slaughtered hundreds of years ago doesn’t allow me to determine whether a native American I’m meeting is suffering. It’s quite irrelevant to the question of whether the specific person is suffering.
I do much better by actually engaging in empathic listening. Instead of judging a person based on what happened in the past I can interact with them in the present.
One root pattern in the set of issues (race, gender, religion) is of between-group variance attracting more attention than within-group variance.
I suspect this pattern has deeper roots than a simple neglect of variance: At least some participants seem to fully accept that a model of suffering based only on group membership may involve too much noise to apply to individuals, but still feel very concerned about the predicted group differences, and don’t feel a pressing need to develop better models of individual suffering.
(BTW, this is the heart of my critique of Jonathon Haidt’s claim that left-leaning people think predominately along the care/harm axis.)
In any case, we probably care more about group differences for political reasons, and because our group definitions may correspond to “levers” that are easier to pull. Another theory is that group inequality really is a leading cause of suffering, because we’ve evolved to feel the stigma of belonging to less well-off group as much more painful than the raw difference in non-group-related suffering would predict. Or perhaps we fear that group differences can diverge much more rapidly, and so must be monitored very closely (there is some historical evidence for this).
Finally, we might feel that group membership (in something like race or gender) is not morally assignable to a single member, while the error terms (what I’d call the contributing factors to within-group variance) are morally assignable to individuals. But this is just a restatement of the idea that “fairness” concerns are involved.
This perspective also frames another perennial puzzle of these debates, which is the appearance of both of a critique of stereotypical thinking (which is typically a neglect of within-group variance), and an approach that focuses so heavily on group differences!
If I understood the story correctly, Scott Aaronson was attacked mostly for paying too little attention for the feminist (well, not only theirs) concept of “privilege”.
Not, the question is who happens to be privileged:
But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things
[...]
Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts. As Bertrand Russell wrote of his own adolescence: “I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”
[...]
The same girls who I was terrified would pepper-spray me and call the police if I looked in their direction, often responded to the crudest advances of the most Neanderthal of men by accepting those advances. Yet it was I, the nerd, and not the Neanderthals, who needed to check his privilege and examine his hidden entitlement!
Although Scott was too modest to point this out, part of the reason he is right is that nerds massively contribute to our economy and defense making anything that harms their (our) productivity significant.
Unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. His social troubles made him withdraw into mathematics. If he would have got a girlfriend in his school time he might have spent less time with math.
If he would have got a girlfriend in his school time he might have spent less time with math.
You say that like it’s his fault that he didn’t try and get one. The whole point of his comment is to explain why that’s not the case.
Secondly, yes, there is some tradeoff between cultivating a romantic relationship and pursuing outside interests. But even rare and fleeting romances, if pursued from a position of secure social standing and self-esteem, would’ve been far preferable to what Scott actually got, which apparently was bad enough to make him wish for meds that would suppress his sex drive.
No, I didn’t say that it’s his fault. The main point is that if your goal is raising productivity of intellectuals it’s not clear that getting them girls is helpful.
Would you rephrase this, or expand upon it? I’m having a hard time coming up with an interpretation that isn’t “nerd desires should be prioritized above most others’ desires”, which is both gross and seems difficult to support.
It is unfair and perhaps gross, but I still think it’s true. For utilitarian reasons, U.S. should prioritize the productivity of high math ability people (who are often nerds) over that of the average citizen.
edit: in particular, in light of the average nerd’s reliance on lots of non-nerd workers. (I did just envision a lot of infrastructure that incentivizes nerd support, which I admit I kind of like, but not, I’m afraid, for particularly well-thought-out reasons.)
My claim is that the average nerd creates far more positive externalities through his/her work then the average American does. I do not have rigorous statistics to back this up, but I believe it is probably true because nerds have high IQ and conscientiousness and this is strongly correlated with income (and so taxes paid) and nerds tend to work in STEM fields and these, I believe, have more positive externalties than most fields do, and nerds dominate the software industry and this industry plays a big part in U.S. economic growth and military power. Also, if (like me) you believe that the future of mankind will come down to whether we get friendly AI right, then our species’ fate is in the hands of a few ultra-nerds.
I’m actually not sure how true this is on average. Nerds are overrepresented in tech and other abstraction-heavy fields, yes; but not all nerds have a personality or a set of interests that lends itself to such a career, and the nerd package seems to be bad news outside of one. If the set of nerds that successfully go into those careers is small enough relative to the set of nerds at large, then the demographic might not end up being disproportionately economically important, despite what you’d guess from looking at e.g. Bill Gates. I don’t think anyone’s studied this halfway rigorously, but anecdotally the nerds I know seem to end up with massively bimodal financial outcomes.
Of course, anything that impacts the productivity of any demographic without commensurate gains elsewhere is going to end up being negative, and I’m pretty skeptical about possible gains here.
That’s such a strange comment. It seems like he was an especially sensitive young man who had a weird psychological reaction to reading radical feminist writings.
Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem. Not many young men read radfem tracts to begin with. Having that kind of extreme reaction must be very rare.
Aaronson’s description felt very familiar to me, describing my middle and early high school years pretty well. In my case this didn’t involve reading radical feminist writing, just paying attention to what adults said about how people were to treat each other.
(And despite having had several relationships and now being married I’ve still never initiated a relationship, mostly out of really not wanting to come off as creepy.)
Scott was probably one of the few people to actually believe what he was told about sexual harassment. For example, if you tell 18-year-old men that they are “bad” if they stare at a beautiful woman whom they are not in a relationship with, most will think you’re being silly. If Scott, however, thought this was a commonly held belief I can understand why it would cause him extreme anxiety.
I don’t think he read radfem with 12. Fear or being scored at when a girl finds out that a low status guy loves her doesn’t need any radfem literature.
He read that literature because from his perspective it was the obvious way to deal with the problem.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem.
How sure are you of that claim? What percentage would you guess if we would ask a similar percentage at a LW census?
Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.
My interpretation was that Scott was blaming feminism for worsening his emotional problems:
Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.
Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts.
He does seem to me to be blaming feminism for worsening his problems. I think it’s worth pointing out that 99% of the mental torment he went through was baseless. I was a nerdy male and I asked girls out in high school/college with no problems except getting rejected a few times. (The trick is to not ask out girls who are massively higher in status than you.)
Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.
I agree that it’s out on the tail of the distribution, but I don’t think it’s a very wide distribution. Fear of those specific consequences is rare; general fear and anxiety severe enough to seriously impact quality of life, up to and including risk of suicide, is not nearly as rare. Social anxiety is, after all, a relatively common problem. I mean, here we are in a subthread on another website with a pretty small user base, and you have three “me too” responses within 12 hours.
The kind of feminist ideas Scott talks about are really important in the general case. But they are also predictably harmful to people predisposed to a certain kind of anxiety. To steal an analogy I’ve seen elsewhere: telling a hypochondriac that they should pay more attention to their health is probably harmful, even though that’s a good message for the general population. A little more nuance can help—like emphasizing the target (“interact with women as full human beings”, “maintain your health”), not just the direction required to reach the target (“worry more about making women uncomfortable”, “worry more about possible symptoms”). Because some people have overshot the target, and need to come back the other direction.
This isn’t to say “nerdy men should get a free pass on being creeps” or something dumb like that. But it would be great to have more activists/therapists/bloggers/etc that aren’t actively, viciously anti-helpful about it.
When faced with an uncertain uncomfortable situation the average nerd seeks out the rules to solve the situation.
I don’t think he’s the only person that starts to reading feminist writing to understand how to behave.
That kind of writing usually doesn’t help. It provides quite broad definitions of sexual harrasment and will in many cases increase the fear of acting wrongly.
In most cases it won’t get a guy to seek chemical castration, but most kids don’t complain when they get into programming at 11 years of age that they got a late start and their peer got it earlier.
When faced with an uncertain uncomfortable situation the average nerd seeks out the rules to solve the situation. I don’t think he’s the only person that starts to reading feminist writing to understand how to behave.
There is a genuine tension here. I don’t think we get to have the “enthusiastic consent, yes-means-yes!” ethic that most sex-positive feminists would want to apply in these matters, without also having some straightforward guidelines about what sexual scripts are both ethically unproblematic and genuinely likely to be effective. My fear is that sensitive, socially awkward males are the proverbial canary in the coalmine—they’re telling us that the whole project in its current form is on track to being a complete failure, with hard-to-foresee but potentially very bad consequences.
(What’s somewhat encouraging is that the non-redpill part of the PUA community—yes, it does exist—has been hard at work in crafting these sorts of ‘scripts’. However, PUA itself is quite controversial, so outright endorsement of this pursuit has not exactly been forthcoming. The best we can point to is some careful and nuanced assessments from the likes of Clarisse Thorn (see her “Confessions of a Pickup-Artist Chaser”).
My interpretation was that Scott was blaming feminism for worsening his emotional problems:
So, I think a common underlying model of “feminism,” though more specifically of “social justice” in general, is that it goes like “environment → negative emotions → better environment.” It seems to me pretty obvious that the first link happens.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem.
It sounds like Aaronson had an uncommonly severe version, but the general form of the problem doesn’t seem exceptionally rare, among the subpopulation in question.
Figuring out what we can usefully do about it, without trading one problem for another, that’s the hard part.
(Part of me also wants to point out that exactly how uncommon it is doesn’t matter very much, due to a perhaps irrational fear that someone wants to say “well, it’s not common” and then forget the problem exists.)
Scott Aaronson
Reading debates like this makes me sad. I realize that just like everything else, feminism also is a tool that different people can use for different purposes. Some people can use it to support empathy towards other human beings. Some people use it to deny empathy towards other human beings. Somehow the latter seem more prominent on the internet.
There is something in the impersonal online communication that emphasises sociopathic traits in people. When in real life you see a suffering man, you usually don’t see feminists running to him screaming “actually, I have it much worse!”. But when you see a man writing about his suffering online, this is what often happens. Maybe it’s because behaving like an asshole in real life is likely to bring you a punch in the face or at least a loss of status, while doing the same on internet generates page views and income, if you do it properly.
Like polymathwannabe wrote, there is a meaningful definition of “privilege” (although I would prefer the word “advantage”), which is: “Maybe you are just a lucky person who doesn’t have this problem, so you don’t think about this problem, and you may even find it unbelievable, but for some other people this is an important factor in their lives.” This is the core that makes sense.
The part of the online discource that doesn’t make sense is the frequent claim that this “privilege” is unidirectional: “If you separate people into two groups X and Y, exactly one of them will have problems that the other side doesn’t see.” There is an illogical jump from “group X has on average more problems than group Y” to “problems of the group X are a strict superset of problems of the group Y”. This implicit assumption manifests in a debate when people from group Y are told to “check their privilege”, but is assumed that people from group X have no provilege to check. (Unless we consider some other dimension, so e.g. people from X1 may have privilege over people from X2, but still never a privilege over Y1.)
Like Sarunas described, the problem is replacing the reality with a simplified multilinear model. First problem, the model depends on which variables are included and which are excluded, which is somewhat an arbitrary decision, so of course people are prone to include the variables which “prove” their oppression, and exclude the variables which “disprove” it. (For example, there is usually a strong emphasis on “male privilege”, but very little emphasis on “rich privilege”. Which is coincidentally exactly the kind of bias you would expect if the theory is popular among female Harvard students.) Second problem, the multilinear assumption itself may be wrong, even if we include all the relevant variables. Third problem, even if the multilinear model would descibe the averages of groups accurately, individuals are not the averages of their groups. It doesn’t make much sense to assume that a random black homeless man has a lot of power and money just because a different individual from the “black male” group happens to be a US president.
This is, in my estimation, a real problem for the sometimes disjunct groups of rationalists and social justice types alike, and one I haven’t yet come up with a good solution for other than “talk about class a lot”.
I guess most people who talk about “class” don’t actually have a good idea about what it means. We have the approximate idea of “if you have more money and more power, you are a higher class”, but most people are completely uncalibrated; they do not know how the power ladder actually works. So, as would be expected of humans, they usually divide the whole society into two classes, US and THEM, where “us” means people who make as much money as me, or less; and “them” means people who make more money than me. So the guy next door who makes twice as much money as I do is put into the same set as the oligarchs who rule the country. Then the oligarchs will make a law that increases the tax for the guy next door, and I will celebrate it.
(For example, the government of Slovakia created a new extra tax for “people with income between 2000 and 3000 euro monthly, except for lawyers” and called it “the millionaire tax”. It was depressing to see all the left-wing people celebrating it, because if it is called “the millionaire tax” in the pro-government media, then of course it targets the millionaires, and not just some IT guy next doors. One could naively think that being ruled by Marxists for almost a century should give these people at least some insight into the class fight. But they merely remember the passwords.)
So far the best description of class system I found online is “The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S.” (I guess it pretty much works for other countries, too).
In my opinion, the critical part is to realize that class isn’t money, although it correlates. Imagining that people with a lot of money are automatically upper-class, that is confusing the cause and the effect. The real causation is in the opposite direction. The upper-class people have sources of money unavailabble to muggles, but sometimes also an incredibly smart, intelligent and hard-working muggle can accumulate comparable amounts of money using completely different strategies. More articles from the same author:
I think I might have an advantage of being born in a Communist country, where the class differences not only existed just as strongly as they exist today (despite of what our propaganda was saying back then), but they existed in their raw form—the power of social connections translated directly into the ability to help or hurt people, unobscured by the red herrings of education, skills and salary. (Education and skills are important to make this world a better place, but the social class is a different topic.)
Taxing the upper middle class is a generally good idea; they are the ones most capable and willing to pay taxes. Many European countries apply progressive tax rates. Calling it a millionanaire tax is a misnomer, or course, but otherwise I would support that (I’m from Latvia FYI)
Michael O. Church is certainly an interesting writer, but you should take into account that he basically is a programmer with no academic qualifications. Most of his posts appear to be wild generalizations of experiences personally familiar to him. (Not exclusively his own experiences, of course.) I suspect that he suffers heavily from the narrative fallacy.
The reason why I like those articles are that they are compatible with my (very limited) experience with what I consider upper-class people. Of course I may be wrong, or me and the author can share the same bias, etc… I am just saying that there is more for me than merely interesting writing.
Taxing the middle class allows the government to get a lot of money easily: those are people who already have enough money that can be taken, but not enough money to defend themselves. From that angle, it is a good idea. On the other hand, the strategy of “taking money where taking money is easy” contributes to increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, and to elimination of the most productive part of the population, which some people would consider a bad idea. Unfortunately, the consequences of getting more tax money come quickly, and the consequences of destroying the middle class take more time.
Read Paul Fussell on socioeconomic class. (Kate Fox in her book Watching the English also has some interesting UK-specific commentary on class.) Some of the best stuff out there (that I know of).
Both of them focus on cultural and lifestyle differences, though—just as a word of warning if that’s not what you’re looking for.
Gladwell in Outliers also has some interesting things to say on the influence of an upper class background on the skill to forge social connections, specifically in regards to comparing the respective achievements of Robert Oppenheimer (upper class) and Christopher Langan (very high IQ, but lower/middle class).
I find the “labor and gentry” division interesting.
There is a sort of conservation argument against the sustainability of elite networks in the absence of the right sorts of coercive power. In addition, our emotion reactions to prestige, which depend more on relative position than absolute power, lead us to exaggerate how much domestic power is actually wielded by elites in a country like Sweden, or even the United States (this includes the self-perceptions of elites). The narrative tone that tends to be used when discussing elites is evidence of this.
Much of the identified elite are the decay products of the former upper echelons of labor and gentry. The known determinants of personal traits make it seem implausible that this group is self-sustaining (as an elite, rather than an upper-middle, group) in the manner that he describes (i.e. shared family environment leading to a dominant personality): And so the cost of valuing an elite appointee in excess of the expected value of their connections (versus investing in a meritocrat) should be large. Unless you can replenish the “wealth” of the network in a non-meritocratic way, this can’t last. So this story says that elites are slowly being relieved of their resources down to the value of their non-network traits, knowingly (via donations) or by fitter agents, with the stock of elites being occasionally replenished by the other ladders. The rate of decay might depend on things like the relative growth rate of the elite, their access to corrupt power, and the strategies of other classes (taxation, exile, killing them, etc). We’d prefer the rate of decay to be higher rather than slower.
Does this argument make sense and predict anything useful? I’m not sure.
Well, this was too complicated; I am not sure what you are saying. ELI5?
I’m thinking about the United States, and what the linked article describes as an “elite” social class. I’m trying to be more explicit that what explains the character of an elite class is the attempt to control the transfer of elite status to the next generation of elites. The linked article doesn’t explaining this well, presenting a model without much predictive value. A better model is something like:
People enter the elite class from other backgrounds via raw money and power. The initial entrant might be a military conquerer, a dominant politician, or a self-made billionaire. They will try to transfer their status to their children and friends, who display more the characteristic social traits of the elite. But the traits that initially propel people into the elite class aren’t transfered perfectly. Specifically, you see regression on cognitive ability, personality, and luck. A good model of an elite class will be mostly a model of how elites try to prevent this regression on traits from bringing about a regression in social class.
Elites have historically used many strategies, but the best way is to make explicit political appointments. Even here, a society that does too much of this will find itself facing displacement by more meritocratic societies, and a segment of society that does more of this will face pressure from other segments. If an elite is only able to make commercial appointments, it faces an accelerated version of this pressure: The companies that get saddled with too many nth-generation-regressed elites will be eventually be displaced by more meritocratic companies, or more meritocratic internal divisions, or whatever.
The author tells several stories (about young nth generation elites) that exaggerate the ability of family environment to compensate for this regression in traits, and obscure the long term constraints that elites face. Historically, the strategy of elites encouraging the idea that particular social behaviors create elites (and then teaching their children those behaviors) doesn’t seem to have much impact once you account for access to direct political appointments. The instant an elite group can no longer pass on special titles or get sinecures in the Royal Navy, we find that the social shibboleths are quickly discarded. It’s a strategy based on obscuring the real nature of the transfer.
What he may have in mind, but doesn’t say explicitly, is that making commercial appointments is only a sustainable way to transfer elite status if you can use commercial appointments to get some sort political power, and then convert that political power into a non-meritocratic source of further political power or commercial wealth. Not surprisingly, this is what American elites, (who are forced to rely on commercial appointments more than most historic elites), generally do: You mostly can’t use political power to make direct political appointments, or use commercial power to give sustainable commercial power to descendants, but you can sort of bounce back and force between the two and hope to get enough edge.
I hope I’ve expressed that clearer. People have a vague sense of “money and politics” as the central thing in the American elite system, but I don’t think they realize that this is simply elites trying to pass on elite status in the face of a reformed political system and commercial pressures that make the older methods less effective. Comparison of the United States to places like Russia are a mixed bag, because while the class system might have the same general form, American elites really are using quite different strategies.
I wonder if this is because the set of visibly suffering men (e.g., most of the panhandlers I pass when driving anywhere in my town) doesn’t overlap much with the set of men writing online about their suffering.
Not sure what exactly you wanted to say. It feels to me like unless a man is suffering extremely (unless he is disabled or homeless), it is not real suffering, and he does not deserve compassion. On the other hand, when a damsel is offended by a shirt...
Offering a hypothesis for difference between meatspace and cyberspace behavior based on some informal observations (that isn’t “everyone is awful on the internet”, which may nevertheless be a better description of the problem).
Oh yes, sorry. Yes, “how much people suffer” and “how much people complain about their suffering online” are two different things; most obvious example being the people without internet access.
If I understood the story correctly, Scott Aaronson was attacked mostly for paying too little attention to the feminist (well, not only theirs) concept of “privilege”. I will try to paraphrase the concept of “privilege” (if I understand it correctly) using the terms of statistics in a way that, I imagine, might lead someone to accept the concept. This way, hopefully, I will be able to clearer express myself.
Suppose you can quantify suffering (let’s use the word “suffering” even though in everyday language it is quite strong word, whereas I’ll use it to describe even very small annoyances). And suppose you are trying to create a statistical model, that could predict total suffering of an individual without actually measuring his/her suffering without paying attention to a particular situation (just some kind of “total average suffering”), using explanatory variables that are easy to measure. Suppose you decide that you will use belonging to a specific social group of people as your explanatory variables. As you can see, nothing in these terms guarantees that this model will actually be good (i.e. if the error terms are symmetric, etc.), because, for example, it is not clear whether explanatory variables denoting whether a person belongs to a certain group are actually enough to make a model good, etc.
If you try, for example, linear regression, you will obtain something like this: S = a + b_1*x_1 + … b_n*x_n + e. In addition to that, you can have additional variables of the form x_i*x_j or x_i*(1-x_j) to model interaction between different variables. Here S is total suffering, a is an intercept term, x_i is an expanatory Boolean variable denoting whether a person belongs to an i-th social group (some groups are mutually exclusive, some aren’t, for example, let’s say that we assign 1 to blue eyed people and 0 to others), and if b_1 is negative, then b_1 could be said to measure “privilege” of people who belong to i-th group. If I understand correctly, people who employ this concept use it this way. Let’s denote Ŝ= a + b_1*x_1 + … b_n*x_n and call it “predicted suffering”.
As you can see, claims that privilege is very important and thus everyone must pay a lot of attention to it depend on many assumptions.
The model itself might be unsatisfactory if does not account for many important explanatory variables that are as important (or even more important) than those already in a model. Few people are interested in “testing” the model and justifying the variables, most people simply choose several variables and use them.
Modeling total average suffering without paying attention to a specific situation may be misleading if the values of b_i varies a lot depending on a situation.
Another thing is that it is not clear whether error terms e are actually small. If your model of total suffering fails to account for many sources of suffering, then error terms probably dwarfs predicted suffering. It is my impression that, when people see a linear model, their default thinking is that error terms as smaller (perhaps much smaller) than the conditional mean, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Therefore saying that a model has predictive power without saying that it has huge error terms might mislead a lot of people about what the model says.
Some people might claim that they, for some reason, are only interested in specific types of suffering, i.e. suffering from prejudice, biased institutions, politics, laws, conventions of public life or something like that. That doesn’t mean that individual variation and error terms are small. If they aren’t, then you cannot neglect their importance.
The values of coefficients b_i may be hard to determine.
But the problem I want to talk about the most is this. If you can observe the value of response variable S (total average suffering of an individual or total average suffering of an individual which is caused by a specific sets of reasons) then focusing on predicted value Ŝ is a mistake, since observation of response variable S screens off the the whole point of making a prediction Ŝ. For example, you can use university degrees to predict the qualifications of a job applicant, but if you can already observe their qualifications, you do not need to make predictions based on those degrees. It is my impression that most people, who talk about privilege, sometimes pay little attention to actual suffering S, but, due to mental habits obtained, perhaps, by reading the literature about the topic, pay a lot of attention to predicted suffering Ŝ. For example, Scott Aaronson describes his individual S in his comment here and gets a response here. The author says she empathizes with Scott Aaronson’s story (S), then starts blaming Scott for not talking about Ŝ, and proceeds to talk about average (Ŝ) female and male nerds. Ŝ is not what any individual feels, but it seems to be the only thing some people are able to talk about. If the size of Ŝ does not dwarf model error terms e, then by talking about Ŝ and not talking about S they are throwing away the reality.
In addition to that, there is, If I understand correctly, another source of confusion, and it is ambiguity of the vague concepts “institutional” and “structural”. If we are talking, e.g. about suffering from biased institutions, prejudices, structures in society etc. (if for some reason we are paying more attention to only this specific type of suffering), then S (and not Ŝ) is what actually measures it. However, it is my impression that some people use these words to refer to Ŝ only, without error terms e. In this case, they should remember, that S is what actually exists in the world and, if error terms are huge, then there might be very few situations where neglecting them talking about Ŝ instead actually illuminates anything. It is my impression that some people who are interested in things like “privilege” tend to overestimate the size of Ŝ and underestimate the size of e, perhaps due to availability heuristic.
Many people, who argue against feminists, tend to claim that the latter estimate Ŝ incorrectly. This may or may not be true, but I don’t think that it is a good way to convince them to pay attention to problems that are different from what they are used to dealing with. Instead, I think that there might be a chance to convince them by emphasizing that S, and not Ŝ is what exists in the real world, emphasizing that error terms e may be huge, and not allowing them to change the topic from S to Ŝ. If you make them concede that a problem X, which their model does not use as a explanatory variable, exists and person_1, person_2, … person_n suffer from problem X. Perhaps then they will not be hostile to the idea of noticing the pattern. To sum up, it seems to me that feminism tends to explain all things in top-down fashion and model their enemies as being top-down as well. My guess is that making them to think in “bottom-up” style terms may make their thinking somewhat less rigid.
Of course, all this is an attempt to guess how a specific part of a solution (stopping feminists from trying to complicate any kind of solution) might look like
“Privilege” is not really a well-defined concept, but in its most cogent and consistent version, it doesn’t really have much to do with suffering at all. It’s a rather confusing way of referring to a “biased point of view”. Saying that “Person A has privilege” wrt. some issue is a claim that A’s overall observations and experiences are unrepresentative, and so she should rely on others’ experiences as much as on her own.
It’s similar to the argument that truthful Bayesian debaters “can’t agree to disagree”, except that in the real world, humans don’t generally have a clean separation between “different priors” and “different experiences”. So, if your priors seem to be somehow different from others’, this should make you suspect that something is amiss, because we don’t really know of a good reason to reject common priors, if only as an abstract goal.
From this point of view, Scott Aaronson’s claim that “privilege” doesn’t apply to him is not very meaningful. If anything, a better argument would be that the SJWish folks who have pattern-matched his comment to “Self-proclaimed nice guy(TM) complains about ‘feminists’, reveals his boorish, entitled attitudes” are showing privilege wrt. nerdy, socially awkward straight males who are expected to navigate the not-altogether-trivial problem of how to interact with women both socially and romantically in a way that’s respectful of everyone’s autonomy.
That’s not quite correct; I think it’s best to start with the concept of systematic oppression. Suppose for the sake of argument that some group of people is systematically oppressed, that is, on account of their group identity, the system in which they find themselves denies them access to markets, or subjects them to market power or physical violence, or vilifies them in the public sphere—you can provide your own examples. The privileged group is just the set complement of the oppressed group. An analogy: systematic oppression is the subject and privilege (in the SJ jargon sense) is the negative space.
The “biased point-of-view” thing follows as a near-corollary because it’s human nature to notice one’s oppression and to take one’s absence-of-oppression for granted as a kind of natural status quo, a background assumption.
Next question: in what way did Aaronson’s so-called wealthy white male privilege actually benefit him? To answer this, all we need to do is imagine, say, a similarly terrified poor black trans nerd learning to come out of their shell. Because I’ve chosen an extreme contrast, it’s pretty clear who would have the easier time of it and why. Once you can see it in high contrast, it’s pretty easy to relax the contrast and keep track of the relative benefits that privilege conveys.
It’s more than that. It refers to unearned advantages that prevent you from empathizing with other people’s experiences.
For example, you don’t usually think how special it is that you can read and have internet access, but compared to the rest of the world, it’s a privilege; acknowledging your class privilege means not forgetting about the lots of people who through no fault of their own don’t have those luxuries.
If you’re cisgendered, you have the privilege of not being constantly asked to explain your appearance and behavior to others; acknowledging your cis privilege means not forgetting that other people have it harder than you.
If you live in any part of the Americas, you benefit from the systematic displacement and extermination of Native cultures. Even if you didn’t personally steal a Native’s land, acknowledging your Western privilege means not forgetting that your current standard of life is partly dependent on a historic crime.
No more than your existence depending on some paternal ancestor raping some maternal ancestor, which stochastically also happened. Being neither a believer in kin liability*, and skeptical at best about collective guilt (for past events, no less), why should I—or you, or anyone—feel responsible?
(As an aside, just for the hypothetical: The Natives that were displaced could well be those tribes who previously themselves successfully displaced/replaced other tribes, no? Back the guilt ball rolls, to the first microbe. At least it can’t be triggered, not having a brain and all. Then again, that’s no protection for Tumblristas either.)
* Excluding otherkin liability, because otherkin are the epitome of what’s wrong with the world. When anything wrong happens somewhere in the world, the closest otherkin should be put on a public show-trial, incarcerated and/or have his/her rotary blades removed.
True, collective guilt is a wrong idea. Acknowledging privilege is not about apologizing; it’s rather about not taking your good life for granted. You’re not supposed to feel liable for the many ancient crimes that gave you your present advantages, but you’re expected to be mindful of those who still suffer as a consequence.
What does this being mindful look like, in concrete terms?
Here is a short list of things I do and some things I have heard suggested:
Consume media created by members of disadvantaged groups
Notice when members of disadvantaged groups are absent from a particular setting. Ask yourself or others why this might be the case, and whether this serves the desired objectives, or if there’s even clarity on what the desired objectives are. (Example: holding a meeting on a college campus that lacks public parking.)
If you attend professional conferences, ask organizers what they are doing to ensure all presentation proposals get fair consideration. (If you’re so inclined, ask what they are doing to support diversity among presenters.)
Update towards the belief that, regardless of your good intentions, members of disadvantaged groups may interpret certain things you say uncharitably. Avoid saying such things, or take pains to avoid offloading your discomfort onto them. For examples of things to watch out for, you may find it helpful to read Derailing for Dummies.
Some addenda:
If you have experiences that you feel make you better able to empathize with members of a disadvantaged group, great! When you are with members of the disadvantaged group, do not bring up these experiences unless you are specifically asked.
Do not claim to share an identity with members of the disadvantaged group unless explicitly and enthusiastically invited to do so. Even so, this dispensation is good only when you’re among the people who extended it to you. (Example: a campus LGBTQA group whose members are persistently and vocally excited about the “and allies!” bit.)
If you feel someone is stereotyping you unfairly, consider whether you are the target audience for this piece of media. Do not reply, with a possible exception being for when you are being named specifically (and not referred to by group identity.)
Carefully consider the relative magnitude of a wrong you have suffered before airing righteous indignation, even as a group bonding activity.
I’m not sure that the case for being mindful only to those who suffer because of an ancient crime from which you benefit and not towards those who suffer for other reasons is strong.
I rather focus on the people who suffer and how to alleviate suffering than go to much into the historical background of why they might suffer.
I didn’t say or imply that.
If you would advocate to be empathic towards everyone then why speak about those ancient crimes?
The subthread had arrived at a discussion on the definition of privilege, and that’s the context where I made those comments. That context required a focus on a specific subset of injustices. I didn’t mean or expect it to be understood as a dismissal of all other types of injustices.
Determining suffering and determining injustice are two different strategies.
I can emphatize with a person who’s suffering without going into an intellectual analysis of whether his suffering is just or injust. If you think in terms of injustice you need to presume that you understand the plight of the other person well enough to be able to tell whether they are suffering justly.
That means you won’t emphatize with people who suffer for reasons you don’t understand.
That’s part of the point I was trying to make. Privilege blinds you to the suffering of people who you may not even know are suffering.
I can see a person suffering without understanding why they are suffering. I don’t need to judge the suffering as right or wrong in oder to emphatize.
Knowing about the fact that native Americans get slaughtered hundreds of years ago doesn’t allow me to determine whether a native American I’m meeting is suffering. It’s quite irrelevant to the question of whether the specific person is suffering.
I do much better by actually engaging in empathic listening. Instead of judging a person based on what happened in the past I can interact with them in the present.
Expected by whom?
By the standards of basic decency.
One root pattern in the set of issues (race, gender, religion) is of between-group variance attracting more attention than within-group variance.
I suspect this pattern has deeper roots than a simple neglect of variance: At least some participants seem to fully accept that a model of suffering based only on group membership may involve too much noise to apply to individuals, but still feel very concerned about the predicted group differences, and don’t feel a pressing need to develop better models of individual suffering.
(BTW, this is the heart of my critique of Jonathon Haidt’s claim that left-leaning people think predominately along the care/harm axis.)
In any case, we probably care more about group differences for political reasons, and because our group definitions may correspond to “levers” that are easier to pull. Another theory is that group inequality really is a leading cause of suffering, because we’ve evolved to feel the stigma of belonging to less well-off group as much more painful than the raw difference in non-group-related suffering would predict. Or perhaps we fear that group differences can diverge much more rapidly, and so must be monitored very closely (there is some historical evidence for this).
Finally, we might feel that group membership (in something like race or gender) is not morally assignable to a single member, while the error terms (what I’d call the contributing factors to within-group variance) are morally assignable to individuals. But this is just a restatement of the idea that “fairness” concerns are involved.
This perspective also frames another perennial puzzle of these debates, which is the appearance of both of a critique of stereotypical thinking (which is typically a neglect of within-group variance), and an approach that focuses so heavily on group differences!
Not, the question is who happens to be privileged:
Although Scott was too modest to point this out, part of the reason he is right is that nerds massively contribute to our economy and defense making anything that harms their (our) productivity significant.
Unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. His social troubles made him withdraw into mathematics. If he would have got a girlfriend in his school time he might have spent less time with math.
You say that like it’s his fault that he didn’t try and get one. The whole point of his comment is to explain why that’s not the case.
Secondly, yes, there is some tradeoff between cultivating a romantic relationship and pursuing outside interests. But even rare and fleeting romances, if pursued from a position of secure social standing and self-esteem, would’ve been far preferable to what Scott actually got, which apparently was bad enough to make him wish for meds that would suppress his sex drive.
No, I didn’t say that it’s his fault. The main point is that if your goal is raising productivity of intellectuals it’s not clear that getting them girls is helpful.
There the Xkcd comic about Debian developer productivity: http://xkcd.com/306/
Would you rephrase this, or expand upon it? I’m having a hard time coming up with an interpretation that isn’t “nerd desires should be prioritized above most others’ desires”, which is both gross and seems difficult to support.
It is unfair and perhaps gross, but I still think it’s true. For utilitarian reasons, U.S. should prioritize the productivity of high math ability people (who are often nerds) over that of the average citizen.
Please justify your claim.
edit: in particular, in light of the average nerd’s reliance on lots of non-nerd workers. (I did just envision a lot of infrastructure that incentivizes nerd support, which I admit I kind of like, but not, I’m afraid, for particularly well-thought-out reasons.)
My claim is that the average nerd creates far more positive externalities through his/her work then the average American does. I do not have rigorous statistics to back this up, but I believe it is probably true because nerds have high IQ and conscientiousness and this is strongly correlated with income (and so taxes paid) and nerds tend to work in STEM fields and these, I believe, have more positive externalties than most fields do, and nerds dominate the software industry and this industry plays a big part in U.S. economic growth and military power. Also, if (like me) you believe that the future of mankind will come down to whether we get friendly AI right, then our species’ fate is in the hands of a few ultra-nerds.
I’m actually not sure how true this is on average. Nerds are overrepresented in tech and other abstraction-heavy fields, yes; but not all nerds have a personality or a set of interests that lends itself to such a career, and the nerd package seems to be bad news outside of one. If the set of nerds that successfully go into those careers is small enough relative to the set of nerds at large, then the demographic might not end up being disproportionately economically important, despite what you’d guess from looking at e.g. Bill Gates. I don’t think anyone’s studied this halfway rigorously, but anecdotally the nerds I know seem to end up with massively bimodal financial outcomes.
Of course, anything that impacts the productivity of any demographic without commensurate gains elsewhere is going to end up being negative, and I’m pretty skeptical about possible gains here.
That’s such a strange comment. It seems like he was an especially sensitive young man who had a weird psychological reaction to reading radical feminist writings.
That’s sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem. Not many young men read radfem tracts to begin with. Having that kind of extreme reaction must be very rare.
Aaronson’s description felt very familiar to me, describing my middle and early high school years pretty well. In my case this didn’t involve reading radical feminist writing, just paying attention to what adults said about how people were to treat each other.
(And despite having had several relationships and now being married I’ve still never initiated a relationship, mostly out of really not wanting to come off as creepy.)
Scott was probably one of the few people to actually believe what he was told about sexual harassment. For example, if you tell 18-year-old men that they are “bad” if they stare at a beautiful woman whom they are not in a relationship with, most will think you’re being silly. If Scott, however, thought this was a commonly held belief I can understand why it would cause him extreme anxiety.
I don’t think he read radfem with 12. Fear or being scored at when a girl finds out that a low status guy loves her doesn’t need any radfem literature.
He read that literature because from his perspective it was the obvious way to deal with the problem.
How sure are you of that claim? What percentage would you guess if we would ask a similar percentage at a LW census?
Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.
My interpretation was that Scott was blaming feminism for worsening his emotional problems:
He does seem to me to be blaming feminism for worsening his problems. I think it’s worth pointing out that 99% of the mental torment he went through was baseless. I was a nerdy male and I asked girls out in high school/college with no problems except getting rejected a few times. (The trick is to not ask out girls who are massively higher in status than you.)
I agree that it’s out on the tail of the distribution, but I don’t think it’s a very wide distribution. Fear of those specific consequences is rare; general fear and anxiety severe enough to seriously impact quality of life, up to and including risk of suicide, is not nearly as rare. Social anxiety is, after all, a relatively common problem. I mean, here we are in a subthread on another website with a pretty small user base, and you have three “me too” responses within 12 hours.
The kind of feminist ideas Scott talks about are really important in the general case. But they are also predictably harmful to people predisposed to a certain kind of anxiety. To steal an analogy I’ve seen elsewhere: telling a hypochondriac that they should pay more attention to their health is probably harmful, even though that’s a good message for the general population. A little more nuance can help—like emphasizing the target (“interact with women as full human beings”, “maintain your health”), not just the direction required to reach the target (“worry more about making women uncomfortable”, “worry more about possible symptoms”). Because some people have overshot the target, and need to come back the other direction.
This isn’t to say “nerdy men should get a free pass on being creeps” or something dumb like that. But it would be great to have more activists/therapists/bloggers/etc that aren’t actively, viciously anti-helpful about it.
When faced with an uncertain uncomfortable situation the average nerd seeks out the rules to solve the situation. I don’t think he’s the only person that starts to reading feminist writing to understand how to behave.
That kind of writing usually doesn’t help. It provides quite broad definitions of sexual harrasment and will in many cases increase the fear of acting wrongly.
In most cases it won’t get a guy to seek chemical castration, but most kids don’t complain when they get into programming at 11 years of age that they got a late start and their peer got it earlier.
There is a genuine tension here. I don’t think we get to have the “enthusiastic consent, yes-means-yes!” ethic that most sex-positive feminists would want to apply in these matters, without also having some straightforward guidelines about what sexual scripts are both ethically unproblematic and genuinely likely to be effective. My fear is that sensitive, socially awkward males are the proverbial canary in the coalmine—they’re telling us that the whole project in its current form is on track to being a complete failure, with hard-to-foresee but potentially very bad consequences.
(What’s somewhat encouraging is that the non-redpill part of the PUA community—yes, it does exist—has been hard at work in crafting these sorts of ‘scripts’. However, PUA itself is quite controversial, so outright endorsement of this pursuit has not exactly been forthcoming. The best we can point to is some careful and nuanced assessments from the likes of Clarisse Thorn (see her “Confessions of a Pickup-Artist Chaser”).
So, I think a common underlying model of “feminism,” though more specifically of “social justice” in general, is that it goes like “environment → negative emotions → better environment.” It seems to me pretty obvious that the first link happens.
It sounds like Aaronson had an uncommonly severe version, but the general form of the problem doesn’t seem exceptionally rare, among the subpopulation in question.
Figuring out what we can usefully do about it, without trading one problem for another, that’s the hard part.
(Part of me also wants to point out that exactly how uncommon it is doesn’t matter very much, due to a perhaps irrational fear that someone wants to say “well, it’s not common” and then forget the problem exists.)