So you’d want it to be straight men only. Presumably with the option to create a straight girls’ group. Gays would be able to form pairs only with opposite sex counterparts, and bisexuals would be shit out of luck, is that the idea?
I think you’re being a little unfair to brazil84′s comment. Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all (edit: many, not all) men because they feel an impulse to compete for her. A gay guy won’t cause this reaction.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Some mixed gender groups do have downsides, which may be important to some people. In my experience, being in a group with many males and few females feels slightly less comfortable than either an all-male group or an evenly mixed group.
Except the policy debates that actually come up in real life are not drawn uniformly from the space of all policy debates. The one-sided issues are typically not worth mentioning, simply because they are one-sided.
Exactly. Another way to put it would be—policy debates should not appear one-sided, so long as you do not consider all proposals about policy to constitute policy debates.
(“PDSNAOS” does not mean “people don’t have bad ideas”)
Well, if we’re being picky: for all natural numbers n, let P(n) be the proposal “all future policy decisions should be decided by a sack containing n potatoes”.
Right, but there really aren’t any good arguments for adopting P(n) for any n—none worth considering, at least. And that’s a countably infinite number of policy debates that we don’t need to have!
No cheaper than leaving out the sack and the potatoes. Do you really think that there are any benefits of P(n) for any n that would justify having a debate over it? I think all the arguments go the same way for sufficiently small values of “all”—that is, it’s “one-sided” enough that it shouldn’t even be brought up.
One reason to bring up argument X against policy P when policy P is clearly better is that there might be a slight modification of P that retains the advantages of P while addressing argument X.
Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all men because they feel an impulse to compete for her.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Describing it as an “impulse to compete” is inaccurate. It’s more like an increased desire to be seen/noticed, that results in increased competition, aggression, and risk-taking behaviors as a side-effect, with the strongest effects occurring when there’s only one or two females, and several males present. (Perhaps a lekking instinct is being triggered.)
Anyway, it’s certainly possible to suppress the behaviors the impulse is suggesting, but merely being aware that one is being biased in this direction is not the same thing as stopping the bias.
In fact, it’s likely to motivate one to try to show off just how not competing you are… i.e., to stand out by making a show of not standing out, by being… “mature” as you put it.
So, if you’ve been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it’s probably because your brain selected a display of “maturity” as your strategy for competing. ;-)
IOW, it is a “live fire exercise” in debiasing behavior.
So, if you’ve been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it’s probably because your brain selected a display of “maturity” as your strategy for competing. ;-)
It certainly can happen in virtual venues, but IME the experience is nowhere near as visceral. Until you mentioned the idea, it actually hadn’t occurred to me it could happen without actually seeing or hearing the people involved.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.
It still triggers my “wtf” detector, but the single-sex rationalist group experiment may be worth running.
Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.
Not just unusual, mistaken about a general claim. Humans (of either sex) behave differently in a mixed group. The social rules and payoffs are entirely different. Not behaving differently would be a mistake, even for those people who can emulate a different personality expression consistently in the long term with no adverse effects. If others are being more competitive you need to push back just to hold your ground.
Mind you I consider rationalist meetups a terrible place to meet women. Apart from being a hassle to deal with all the other guys (and annoying for the swarmed girls) the gender imbalance inflates social value. Basic economics ensures that for a given amount of social capital you can get a more desirable mate at other locations. There are plenty of intelligent and rational women out there that don’t go to rationalist meetups and you encounter them when you are a breath of fresh air and a kindred spirit rather than one of a dozen walking stereotypes.Then there is the unfortunate tendency for people (of either gender) with inflated social value in a specific context to be kind of a pain in the ass.
Writing off that particular social domain could be considered lazy or otherwise low status but I prefer to consider it one of the MIN parts of the min max equation. While it is still necessary to behave differently in the mixed group and be somewhat more aggressive it frees up a bunch of background processing and eliminates a swath of social-political constraints. Although you still have to pay more attention to the approval of the scarce women. They have far more social power and influence than they otherwise would so can damage you by more than just their own personal disinterest. Not that social politics matters much at all for occasional meetups where there is not much of a hierarchy anyway. More of a work consideration.
“We are unusual” is not a licence to say “We have a significant chance of being unusual in this particular manner that just happens to be convenient to my argument.”
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
I wasn’t primarily arguing that it does not apply, more that it might not apply.
As for reasons that it might not apply—for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
Cutting out half the potential membership out of a rationalist group seems to me a high enough price to pay (especially given how few we are, especially given the impresison it’d give to outsiders) that we ought consider very carefully how big the downsides of gender inclusiveness really are, in the given situation. Not just say “standard ape behaviour”.
As for reasons that it might not apply—for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
That’s certainly an excellent start. But awareness of and being able to cope with a bias doesn’t make it go away—it takes considerable practice until you’re not just compensating for it. The mind is a very thin layer on top of a chimp—the biases run deep.
I agree that Cousin It’s statement is literally false due to his use of the word all, but given that not all men are perfectly mature in your sense, I expect the essential concern to remain valid: adding a woman to a male-only group will tend to change the social dynamics, in part due to the impulse that Cousin It mentions.
(I mention this for the sake of completeness; speaking only for myself, I think that explicitly single-sex groups are a terrible idea and would not participate in one.)
What exactly is your point here? Are you saying that my proposal is imperfect because it could never remove all sexual distractions for everyone? Are you saying that my proposal is unfair to homosexuals?
I think it would be valuable for you to spell out your argument.
I was mostly mocking you, rather than making an argument. The nearest item in argumentspace translates to something like “if sexual impulses are counter-productive, then non-straight people cannot work in groups without this handicap, which implies that asexuals are magic and gay/bi people are never going to be as effective at collective rationality as straight people who segregate their genders; empirically, asexuals are not magic, and there is no evidence that bisexuals/gay people are less effective in groups than straights who happen or arrange to group themselves with others of the same sex”.
AdeleneDawner is correct. I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a “protected” feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever). (This is importantly different from forming communities based on non-protected features, like willingness to pay membership dues or expertise in a topic, and also importantly different from forming communities in which my presence would be pointless, e.g. I would have no reason whatsoever to be at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.)
I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a “protected” feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever).
I would recommend that you make an attempt to free yourself of this dislike. While some ‘protected features’ have few real consequences (skin colour won’t make you out of place anywhere except possibly a tanning salon), many do, gender definitely being one of them. Sometimes it will be easy to ignore or work around those consequences, and sometimes it will not.
If brazil84 does sincerely find that his ability for rational discussion is hampered by female pheromones (metonymy), and you do happen to emit female pheromones, you certainly shouldn’t be blamed for that, but neither should he—it is a weakness of him, but one that falls well within the demands of a modern and open society. While you are absolutely required to behave in a civil manner even in the presence of romantic attraction, it is acceptable if it causes you to perform less than optimally.
As long as he (a) recognises that in a modern and open society, he will eventually need to learn to think and behave rationally even when surrounded by women, and (b) does not by his actions prevent women from joining a rationality club, I do not think he is going out of bounds when he wishes to establish a group that caters to this need of his.
I hate that I cannot come up with a better, less loaded example (I fall into a pretty damn privileged demographic), but: I would understand if I needed to join a rape victim support group and ran into one that wouldn’t let me in because the women members were uncomfortable to talk about these experiences around a 191cm / 90 kg bearded deep-voiced man. Of course, I would find it unacceptable if that were the only support group in my area and it chose to leave me completely in the cold rather than create some discomfort to other members.
I have nothing to say against this eminently upvotable comment, of course. It just so happens that (no doubt primed somewhat by a recent conversation with Vladimir_M) I feel the need to take note of a remarkable milestone:
the women members were uncomfortable to talk about these experiences
This is literally the very first non-native-English-speaker shibboleth that I’ve ever detected in any of your comments. (The more idiomatic construction is “uncomfortable talking”.) I think I’ve managed to “catch” all the other prominent near-perfect non-natives at some point long before now (Morendil, the various Vladimirs, even Kaj Sotala), but you were the last holdout, by a significant margin. Well done!
Can you say a little more about what a “protected” feature is in this context?
That is, suppose I wish to form a community in which Xes are unwelcome, and I want to predict whether you will dislike it if I announce that wish.
I’m pretty clear that you will dislike it if X in {woman, Caucasian, queer, attracted-to-men, attracted-to-women} and not (necessarily) if X in {unwilling-to-pay, non-expert-in-$FOO}.
What about X in {adult, American, non-recovering alcoholic, hearing, sighted}?
More generally: is there a rule I could apply to predict the result for given X, supposing I knew the relevant demographic facts about Alicorn?
I waver on to what extent age is a protected category but normally err on the side of not caring about age-specific community arrangements to the extent that these overlap with pointlessness or have equivalents for multiple age groups. (E.g. a nursing home is not obliged to have children’s classes if they have adult classes, because that would be silly, and a driving school does not need to admit twelve-year-olds, because for reasons that are not the school’s responsibility twelve-year-olds may not drive).
Disability status (sensory, mental, physical, and to a lesser extent disease/addiction related) is protected but interacts strongly with pointlessness. Disease/addiction are less protected to the point where one might exclude alcoholics from a wine tasting on that characteristic alone, or send a kid home from school because ey has a contagious disease which is incidentally causing a temporary disability.
Nationality is weakly protected but interacts (through geographic location and language/culture) with pointlessness and with non-protected features, so tends not to look protected in terms of my reaction to various items.
If I had to describe a rule, I’d describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so. So, for example, race is maximally protected, because it’s completely involuntary, racism is totally a thing humans do, and it’s difficult to conceal.
So if you moved to a community where people with your color hair were routinely discriminated against and hair dye illegal, you would dislike the idea of a not-your-hair-color-only club, but in a community without such constraints you would be all right with it?
If I had to describe a rule, I’d describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so.
What about something like IQ? It satisfies all of your criteria for being maximally protected, but also seems relevant to many tasks. Plus somehow I don’t think you object to the existence on MENSA.
Using an arbitrary and subjective “pointlessness” exception, you can derive any conclusions you like. Just apply the general principle consistently as long as you like the conclusions, and otherwise proclaim that the “pointlessness” exception applies. And voila, you can bask in the glow of your high principles, which just happen to imply conclusions to your complete liking. (Of course, the general principle would produce absurd and impractical results if really applied consistently, so someone who subscribes to it has to operate with some such unprincipled exceptions.)
The distinction between “protected” and “non-protected” characteristics is of course similarly arbitrary and ultimately serves a similar purpose, though you don’t have personal control over that one, as the power of defining it is a prerogative of the state.
That said, I don’t mean to point a finger specifically at you by pointing this out. This mode of thinking is all-pervasive in modern society, and nobody is immune to it completely. But on a forum dedicated to exposing biases and fallacies, it should be pointed out.
Such criteria are always arbitrary, since there is no universally agreed definition. How exactly do you decide whether the presence and participation of a person in a group is “pointless” or not? Ask five different people, and you’ll get five different answers. Yes, you can point to extreme examples where almost all would agree, but the problem is that things are often not that clear.
The “protected” criterion is similarly arbitrary, except that the government gets to define that one. Even then, if you ask for a precise definition of when some category is considered protected in a given context, you must refer to a whole library of case law. (And you should also consult an expert lawyer who is knowledgeable about the unwritten norms and informal intricacies that usually apply.)
Unsurprisingly, humans being what they are, when they use such arbitrary criteria to answer problematic questions of law, ethics, etc., what they end up with are rationalizations for attitudes held for different reasons. Again, please note that I’m talking about something that practically everyone engages in, not some personal vice of yours.
So you’d want it to be straight men only. Presumably with the option to create a straight girls’ group. Gays would be able to form pairs only with opposite sex counterparts, and bisexuals would be shit out of luck, is that the idea?
I think you’re being a little unfair to brazil84′s comment. Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all (edit: many, not all) men because they feel an impulse to compete for her. A gay guy won’t cause this reaction.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Some mixed gender groups do have downsides, which may be important to some people. In my experience, being in a group with many males and few females feels slightly less comfortable than either an all-male group or an evenly mixed group.
Yes, the vast majority of debates in the space of possible policy debates should appear one-sided.
Except the policy debates that actually come up in real life are not drawn uniformly from the space of all policy debates. The one-sided issues are typically not worth mentioning, simply because they are one-sided.
Exactly. Another way to put it would be—policy debates should not appear one-sided, so long as you do not consider all proposals about policy to constitute policy debates.
(“PDSNAOS” does not mean “people don’t have bad ideas”)
“One-sided”, as I understand it, doesn’t mean that, on net, one side wins by a comfortable margin; it means all the arguments go the same way.
Well, if we’re being picky: for all natural numbers n, let P(n) be the proposal “all future policy decisions should be decided by a sack containing n potatoes”.
I meant that as saying all the considerations for deciding any given issue go the same way, not all issues to be decided go the same way.
Right, but there really aren’t any good arguments for adopting P(n) for any n—none worth considering, at least. And that’s a countably infinite number of policy debates that we don’t need to have!
But that’s an example of “wins by a comfortable margin”, not “all the arguments go the same way”. For example, P(n) is cheap to implement for low n.
No cheaper than leaving out the sack and the potatoes. Do you really think that there are any benefits of P(n) for any n that would justify having a debate over it? I think all the arguments go the same way for sufficiently small values of “all”—that is, it’s “one-sided” enough that it shouldn’t even be brought up.
One reason to bring up argument X against policy P when policy P is clearly better is that there might be a slight modification of P that retains the advantages of P while addressing argument X.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Describing it as an “impulse to compete” is inaccurate. It’s more like an increased desire to be seen/noticed, that results in increased competition, aggression, and risk-taking behaviors as a side-effect, with the strongest effects occurring when there’s only one or two females, and several males present. (Perhaps a lekking instinct is being triggered.)
Anyway, it’s certainly possible to suppress the behaviors the impulse is suggesting, but merely being aware that one is being biased in this direction is not the same thing as stopping the bias.
In fact, it’s likely to motivate one to try to show off just how not competing you are… i.e., to stand out by making a show of not standing out, by being… “mature” as you put it.
So, if you’ve been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it’s probably because your brain selected a display of “maturity” as your strategy for competing. ;-)
IOW, it is a “live fire exercise” in debiasing behavior.
This is depressing.
Question: is this the depressing bit?
(My tentative solution: figure myself out before others do. Then I feel much better about it.)
Wouldn’t what you are describing be happening to some extent on this forum as well?
It certainly can happen in virtual venues, but IME the experience is nowhere near as visceral. Until you mentioned the idea, it actually hadn’t occurred to me it could happen without actually seeing or hearing the people involved.
Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.
It still triggers my “wtf” detector, but the single-sex rationalist group experiment may be worth running.
Not just unusual, mistaken about a general claim. Humans (of either sex) behave differently in a mixed group. The social rules and payoffs are entirely different. Not behaving differently would be a mistake, even for those people who can emulate a different personality expression consistently in the long term with no adverse effects. If others are being more competitive you need to push back just to hold your ground.
Mind you I consider rationalist meetups a terrible place to meet women. Apart from being a hassle to deal with all the other guys (and annoying for the swarmed girls) the gender imbalance inflates social value. Basic economics ensures that for a given amount of social capital you can get a more desirable mate at other locations. There are plenty of intelligent and rational women out there that don’t go to rationalist meetups and you encounter them when you are a breath of fresh air and a kindred spirit rather than one of a dozen walking stereotypes.Then there is the unfortunate tendency for people (of either gender) with inflated social value in a specific context to be kind of a pain in the ass.
Writing off that particular social domain could be considered lazy or otherwise low status but I prefer to consider it one of the MIN parts of the min max equation. While it is still necessary to behave differently in the mixed group and be somewhat more aggressive it frees up a bunch of background processing and eliminates a swath of social-political constraints. Although you still have to pay more attention to the approval of the scarce women. They have far more social power and influence than they otherwise would so can damage you by more than just their own personal disinterest. Not that social politics matters much at all for occasional meetups where there is not much of a hierarchy anyway. More of a work consideration.
If we’re not unusual, we wouldn’t be in Less Wrong. We supposedly pride ourselves on being more sane than the average population, no?
“We are unusual” is not a licence to say “We have a significant chance of being unusual in this particular manner that just happens to be convenient to my argument.”
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
I wasn’t primarily arguing that it does not apply, more that it might not apply.
As for reasons that it might not apply—for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
Cutting out half the potential membership out of a rationalist group seems to me a high enough price to pay (especially given how few we are, especially given the impresison it’d give to outsiders) that we ought consider very carefully how big the downsides of gender inclusiveness really are, in the given situation. Not just say “standard ape behaviour”.
That’s certainly an excellent start. But awareness of and being able to cope with a bias doesn’t make it go away—it takes considerable practice until you’re not just compensating for it. The mind is a very thin layer on top of a chimp—the biases run deep.
I agree that Cousin It’s statement is literally false due to his use of the word all, but given that not all men are perfectly mature in your sense, I expect the essential concern to remain valid: adding a woman to a male-only group will tend to change the social dynamics, in part due to the impulse that Cousin It mentions.
(I mention this for the sake of completeness; speaking only for myself, I think that explicitly single-sex groups are a terrible idea and would not participate in one.)
Agreed. Edited the comment. Sorry.
What exactly is your point here? Are you saying that my proposal is imperfect because it could never remove all sexual distractions for everyone? Are you saying that my proposal is unfair to homosexuals?
I think it would be valuable for you to spell out your argument.
I was mostly mocking you, rather than making an argument. The nearest item in argumentspace translates to something like “if sexual impulses are counter-productive, then non-straight people cannot work in groups without this handicap, which implies that asexuals are magic and gay/bi people are never going to be as effective at collective rationality as straight people who segregate their genders; empirically, asexuals are not magic, and there is no evidence that bisexuals/gay people are less effective in groups than straights who happen or arrange to group themselves with others of the same sex”.
Or, put more simply, brazil84′s model appears to be flawed.
(This doesn’t necessarily imply that the effect he’s claiming to have observed doesn’t exist, though.)
And why exactly were you mocking me if you (mostly) weren’t making an argument? I really would like to know.
My guess is that my post pushed some emotional button with you.
This is a fairly predictable result of telling someone you don’t consider them welcome.
AdeleneDawner is correct. I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a “protected” feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever). (This is importantly different from forming communities based on non-protected features, like willingness to pay membership dues or expertise in a topic, and also importantly different from forming communities in which my presence would be pointless, e.g. I would have no reason whatsoever to be at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.)
I would recommend that you make an attempt to free yourself of this dislike. While some ‘protected features’ have few real consequences (skin colour won’t make you out of place anywhere except possibly a tanning salon), many do, gender definitely being one of them. Sometimes it will be easy to ignore or work around those consequences, and sometimes it will not.
If brazil84 does sincerely find that his ability for rational discussion is hampered by female pheromones (metonymy), and you do happen to emit female pheromones, you certainly shouldn’t be blamed for that, but neither should he—it is a weakness of him, but one that falls well within the demands of a modern and open society. While you are absolutely required to behave in a civil manner even in the presence of romantic attraction, it is acceptable if it causes you to perform less than optimally.
As long as he (a) recognises that in a modern and open society, he will eventually need to learn to think and behave rationally even when surrounded by women, and (b) does not by his actions prevent women from joining a rationality club, I do not think he is going out of bounds when he wishes to establish a group that caters to this need of his.
I hate that I cannot come up with a better, less loaded example (I fall into a pretty damn privileged demographic), but: I would understand if I needed to join a rape victim support group and ran into one that wouldn’t let me in because the women members were uncomfortable to talk about these experiences around a 191cm / 90 kg bearded deep-voiced man. Of course, I would find it unacceptable if that were the only support group in my area and it chose to leave me completely in the cold rather than create some discomfort to other members.
Your point with the support group example is well-taken. I will reevaluate and possibly revise my dispositions here.
I have nothing to say against this eminently upvotable comment, of course. It just so happens that (no doubt primed somewhat by a recent conversation with Vladimir_M) I feel the need to take note of a remarkable milestone:
This is literally the very first non-native-English-speaker shibboleth that I’ve ever detected in any of your comments. (The more idiomatic construction is “uncomfortable talking”.) I think I’ve managed to “catch” all the other prominent near-perfect non-natives at some point long before now (Morendil, the various Vladimirs, even Kaj Sotala), but you were the last holdout, by a significant margin. Well done!
What do you think the gender demographics are for lesswrong?
To clarify: I would expect that a men-only rationality club would indeed limit women’s access to rationality clubs.
Can you say a little more about what a “protected” feature is in this context?
That is, suppose I wish to form a community in which Xes are unwelcome, and I want to predict whether you will dislike it if I announce that wish.
I’m pretty clear that you will dislike it if X in {woman, Caucasian, queer, attracted-to-men, attracted-to-women} and not (necessarily) if X in {unwilling-to-pay, non-expert-in-$FOO}.
What about X in {adult, American, non-recovering alcoholic, hearing, sighted}?
More generally: is there a rule I could apply to predict the result for given X, supposing I knew the relevant demographic facts about Alicorn?
I waver on to what extent age is a protected category but normally err on the side of not caring about age-specific community arrangements to the extent that these overlap with pointlessness or have equivalents for multiple age groups. (E.g. a nursing home is not obliged to have children’s classes if they have adult classes, because that would be silly, and a driving school does not need to admit twelve-year-olds, because for reasons that are not the school’s responsibility twelve-year-olds may not drive).
Disability status (sensory, mental, physical, and to a lesser extent disease/addiction related) is protected but interacts strongly with pointlessness. Disease/addiction are less protected to the point where one might exclude alcoholics from a wine tasting on that characteristic alone, or send a kid home from school because ey has a contagious disease which is incidentally causing a temporary disability.
Nationality is weakly protected but interacts (through geographic location and language/culture) with pointlessness and with non-protected features, so tends not to look protected in terms of my reaction to various items.
If I had to describe a rule, I’d describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so. So, for example, race is maximally protected, because it’s completely involuntary, racism is totally a thing humans do, and it’s difficult to conceal.
(nods) I think I follow.
So if you moved to a community where people with your color hair were routinely discriminated against and hair dye illegal, you would dislike the idea of a not-your-hair-color-only club, but in a community without such constraints you would be all right with it?
Actually, I disapprove of hair dye for unrelated reasons, but yeah, you seem to have the gist of it.
What about something like IQ? It satisfies all of your criteria for being maximally protected, but also seems relevant to many tasks. Plus somehow I don’t think you object to the existence on MENSA.
Using an arbitrary and subjective “pointlessness” exception, you can derive any conclusions you like. Just apply the general principle consistently as long as you like the conclusions, and otherwise proclaim that the “pointlessness” exception applies. And voila, you can bask in the glow of your high principles, which just happen to imply conclusions to your complete liking. (Of course, the general principle would produce absurd and impractical results if really applied consistently, so someone who subscribes to it has to operate with some such unprincipled exceptions.)
The distinction between “protected” and “non-protected” characteristics is of course similarly arbitrary and ultimately serves a similar purpose, though you don’t have personal control over that one, as the power of defining it is a prerogative of the state.
That said, I don’t mean to point a finger specifically at you by pointing this out. This mode of thinking is all-pervasive in modern society, and nobody is immune to it completely. But on a forum dedicated to exposing biases and fallacies, it should be pointed out.
It’s reasonable for people to care about how much of the world they’re welcome in.
What is your evidence that my pointlessness criterion is arbitrary?
Such criteria are always arbitrary, since there is no universally agreed definition. How exactly do you decide whether the presence and participation of a person in a group is “pointless” or not? Ask five different people, and you’ll get five different answers. Yes, you can point to extreme examples where almost all would agree, but the problem is that things are often not that clear.
The “protected” criterion is similarly arbitrary, except that the government gets to define that one. Even then, if you ask for a precise definition of when some category is considered protected in a given context, you must refer to a whole library of case law. (And you should also consult an expert lawyer who is knowledgeable about the unwritten norms and informal intricacies that usually apply.)
Unsurprisingly, humans being what they are, when they use such arbitrary criteria to answer problematic questions of law, ethics, etc., what they end up with are rationalizations for attitudes held for different reasons. Again, please note that I’m talking about something that practically everyone engages in, not some personal vice of yours.
Could you characterize what you mean by a “protected” feature?
Most likely one that is difficult to change / not obviously under conscious control.
Aren’t most human “features” of such a nature?
“Most” depends on what set of features you consider, but I would happily agree with “many.”