If I understand correctly, the purpose of the self-censorship was to make this site more friendly for women. Which creates a paradox: An idea that one can speak openly with men, but with women a self-censorship is necessary, is kind of offensive to women, isn’t it?
(The first rule of Political Correctness is: You don’t talk about Political Correctness. The second rule: You don’t talk about Political Correctness. The third rule: When someone says stop, or expresses outrage, the discussion about given topic is over.)
Or maybe this is too much of a generalization. What other topics are we self-censoring, besides sexual behavior and politics? I don’t remember. Maybe it is just politics being self-censored; sexual behavior being a sensitive political topic. Problem is, any topic can become political, if for whatever reasons “Greens” decide to identify with a position X, and “Blues” with a position non-X.
We are taking the taboo on political topics too far. Instead of avoiding mindkilling, we avoid the topics completely.
Although we have traditional exceptions: it is allowed to talk about evolution and atheism, despite the fact that some people might consider these topics political too, and might feel offended. (Global warming is probably also acceptable, just less attractive for nerds.) So let’s find out what exactly determines when a potentially political topic becomes allowed on LW, or becomes self-censored?
My hypothesis is that LW is actually not politically neutral, but some political opinion P is implicitly present here as a bias. Opinions which are rational and compatible with P, can be expressed freely. Opinions which are irrational and incompatible with P, can be used as examples of irrationality (religion being the best example). Opinions which are rational but incompatible with P, are self-censored. Opinions which are irrational but compatible with P are also never mentioned (because we are rational enough to recognize they can’t be defended).
As to political correctness, its great insidiousness lies that while you can complain about it in a manner of a religious person complaining abstractly about hypocrites and Pharisees, you can’t ever back up your attack with specific examples, since if do this you are violating scared taboos, which means you lose your argument by default.
The pathetic exception to this is attacking very marginal and unpopular applications that your fellow debaters can easily dismiss as misguided extremism or even a straw man argument.
The second problem is that as time goes on, if reality happens to be politically incorrect on some issue, any other issue that points to the truth of this subject becomes potentially tainted by the label as well. You actively have to resort to thinking up new models as to why the dragon is indeed obviously in the garage. You also need to have good models of how well other people can reason about the absence of the dragon to see where exactly you can walk without concern. This is a cognitively straining process in which everyone slips up.
I recall my country’s Ombudsman once visiting my school for a talk wearing a T-shirt that said “After a close up no one looks normal.” Doing a close up of people’s opinions reveals no one is fully politically correct, this means that political correctness is always a viable weapon to shut down debates via ad hominem.
By merely mentioning political correctness means that many readers will instantly see you or me as one of those people, sly norm violating lawyers and outgroup members who should just stop whining.
As to political correctness, its great insidiousness lies that while you can complain about it in a manner of a religious person complaining abstractly about hypocrites and Pharisees, you can’t ever back up your attack with specific examples
My fault for using a politically charged word for a joke (but I couldn’t resist). Let’s do it properly now: What exactly does “political correctness” mean? It is not just any set of taboos (we wouldn’t refer to e.g. religious taboos as political correctness). It is a very specific set of modern-era taboos. So perhaps it is worth distinguishing between taboos in general, and political correctness as a specific example of taboos. Similarities are obvious, what exactly are the differences?
I am just doing a quick guess now, but I think the difference is that the old taboos were openly known as taboos. (It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest, but it is allowed to say: “It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest.”) The modern taboos pretend to be something else than taboos. (An analogy would be that everyone knows that when you walk in a sacred forest, you will be tortured to death, but if you say: “It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest”, the answer is: “No, there is no sacred forest, and you can walk anywhere you want, assuming you don’t break any other law.” And whenever a person is being tortured for walking in a sacred forest, there is always an alternative explanation, for example an imaginary crime.)
Thus, “political correctness” = a specific set of modern taboos + a denial that taboos exist.
If this is correct, then complaining, even abstractly, about political correctness, is already a big achievement. Saying that X is an example of political correctness equals to saying that X is false, which is breaking a taboo, and that is punished—just like breaking any other taboo. But speaking about political correctness abstractly is breaking a meta-taboo built to protect the other taboos; but unlike those taboos, the meta-taboo is more difficult to defend. (How exactly would one defend it? By saying: “You should never speak about political correctness because everyone is allowed to speak about anything”? The contradiction becomes too obvious.)
Speaking about political correctness is the most politically incorrect thing ever. When this is done, only the ordinary taboos remain.
By merely mentioning political correctness means that many readers will instantly see you or me as one of those people, sly norm violating lawyers and outgroup members who should just stop whining.
Of course, people recognize what is happening, and they may not like it. But would still be difficult to have someone e.g. fired from university only for saying, abstractly, that political correctness exists.
If this is correct, then complaining, even abstractly, about political correctness, is already a big achievement.
It has been said that even having a phrase for it, has reduced its power greatly because now people can talk about it, even if they are still punished for doing so.
Of course, people recognize what is happening, and they may not like it. But would still be difficult to have someone e.g. fired from university only for saying, abstractly, that political correctness exists.
True. However a professor complaining about political correctness abstractly still has no tools to prevent its spread to the topic of say optimal gardening techniques. Also if he has a long history of complaining about political correctness abstractly, he is branded controversial.
I think it was Sailer who said he is old enough to remember when being called controversial was a good thing, signalling something of intellectual interest, while today it means “move along nothing to see here”.
Doing a close up of people’s opinions reveals no one is fully politically correct, this means that political correctness is always a viable weapon to shut down debates via ad hominem.
Taboo “political correctness”… just for a moment. (This may be the first time I’ve ever used that particular LW locution.) Compare the accusations, “you are a hypocrite” and “you are politically incorrect”. The first is common, the second nonexistent. Political correctness is never the explicit rationale for shutting someone out, in a way that hypocrisy can be, because hypocrisy is openly regarded as a negative trait.
So the immediate mechanism of a PC shutdown of debate will always be something other than the abstraction, “PC”. Suppose you want to tell the world that women love jerks, blacks are dumber than whites, and democracy is bad. People may express horror, incredulity, outrage, or other emotions; they may dismiss you as being part of an evil movement, or they may say that every sensible person knows that those ideas were refuted long ago; they may employ any number of argumentative techniques or emotional appeals. What they won’t do is say, “Sir, your propositions are politically incorrect and therefore clearly invalid, Q.E.D.”
So saying “anyone can be targeted for political incorrectness” is like saying “anyone can be targeted for factual incorrectness”. It’s true but it’s vacuous, because such criticisms always resolve into something more specific and that is the level at which they must be engaged. If someone complained that they were persistently shut out of political discussion because they were always being accused of factual incorrectness… well, either the allegations were false, in which case they might be rebutted, or they were true but irrelevant, in which case a defender can point out the irrelevance, or they were true and relevant, in which case shutting this person out of discussions might be the best thing to do.
It’s much the same for people who are “targeted for being politically incorrect”. The alleged universal vulnerability to accusations of political incorrectness is somewhat fictitious. The real basis or motive of such criticism is always something more specific, and either you can or can’t overcome it, that’s all.
A political correctness (without hypocrisy) feels from inside as a fight against factual incorrectness with dangerous social consequences. It’s not just “you are wrong”, but “you are wrong, and if people believe this, horrible things will happen”.
Mere factual incorrectness will not invoke the same reaction. If one professor of mathematics admits belief that 2+2=5, and other professor of mathematics admit belief that women in average are worse in math than men, both could be fired, but people will not be angry at the former. It’s not just about fixing an error, but also about saving the world.
Then, what is the difference between a politically incorrect opinion, and a factually incorrect opinion with dangerous social consequences? In theory, the latter can be proved wrong. In real life, some proofs are expensive or take a lot of time; also many people are irrational, so even a proof would not convince everyone. But still I suspect that in case of factually incorrect opinion, opponents would at least try to prove it wrong, and would expect support from experts; while in case of politically incorrect opinion an experiment would be considered dangerous and experts unreliable. (Not completely sure about this part.)
A political correctness (without hypocrisy) feels from inside as a fight against factual incorrectness with dangerous social consequences. It’s not just “you are wrong”, but “you are wrong, and if people believe this, horrible things will happen”.
It may feel like that for some people. For me the ‘feeling’ is factual incorrectness agnostic.
I agree that concern about the consequences of a belief is important to the cluster you’re describing. There’s also an element of “in the past, people who have asserted X have had motives of which I disapprove, and therefore the fact that you are asserting X is evidence that I will disapprove of your motives as well.”
I am confused by this comment. I was agreeing with Viliam that concern about consequences was important, and adding that concern about motives was also important… to which you seem to be responding that the idea is that concern about consequences is important. Have I missed something, or are we just going in circles now?
Strictly speaking, path dependency may not always be rational—but until we raise the sanity line high enough, it is a highly predictable part of human interaction.
To me, asserting that one is “politically incorrect” is a statement that one’s opponents are extremely mindkilled and are willing to use their power to suppress opposition (i.e. you).
But there’s nothing about being mindkilled or willing to suppress dissent that proves one is wrong. Likewise, being opposed by the mindkilled is not evidence that one is not mindkilled oneself.
That dramatically decreases the informational value of bringing up the issue of political correctness in a debate. And accusing someone of adopting a position because it complies with political correctness is essentially identical to an accusation that your opponent is mindkilled—hence it is quite inflammatory in this community.
Political correctness is also an evidence of filtering evidence. Some people are saying X because it is good signalling, and some people avoid saying non-X, because it is a bad signalling. We shouldn’t reverse stupidity, but we should suspect that we were not exposed to the best arguments against X yet.
To me, asserting that one is “politically incorrect” is a statement that one’s opponents are extremely mindkilled and are willing to use their power to suppress opposition (i.e. you).
It is just as likely to mean that the opponents are insufficiently mind killed regarding the issues in question and may be Enemies Of The Tribe.
By merely mentioning political correctness means that many readers will instantly see you or me as one of those people, sly norm violating lawyers and outgroup members who should just stop whining.
You really, really, aren’t coming across as sly. I suspect they would go with the somewhat opposite “convey that you are naive” tactic instead.
Oh I didn’t mean to imply I was! Its just that when someone talks about political correctness making arguments difficult people often get facial expressions like he is cheating in some way, so I got the feeling this was:
“You are violating a rule we can’t explicitly state you are violating! That’s an exploit, stop it!”
I’m less confident in this I am in someone talking about political correctness being an out group marker, but I do think its there. On LW we have different priors, we see people being naive and violating norms in ignorance, when often outsiders would see them as violating norms on purpose.
“You are violating a rule we can’t explicitly state you are violating! That’s an exploit, stop it!”
To me the reaction is more like “You are trying to turn a discussion of facts and values into whining about being oppressed by your political opponents”.
(actually, I’m not sure I’m actually disagreeing with you here, except maybe about some subtle nuances in connotation)
“You are trying to turn a discussion of facts and values into whining about being oppressed by your political opponents”
If this is so, it is somewhat ironic. From the inside objecting to political correctness feels like calling out intrusive political dreailment or discussions of should in a factual discussion about is.
There are arguments for this, being the sole up tight moral preacher of political correctness often gets you similar looks to being the one person objecting to it.
But this leads me to think both are just rationalizations. If this is fully explained by being a matter of tribal attrie and shibboleths what exactly would be different? Not that much.
It may be a rationalization, but it’s one that may be more likely to occur than “that’s an exploit”!
I agree there’s a similar sentiment going both ways, when a conversation goes like:
A: Eating the babies of the poor would solve famine and overpopulation!
B: How dare you even propose such an immoral thing!
A: You’re just being politically correct!
At each step, the discussion is getting more meta and less interesting—from fact to morality to politics. In effect, complaining about political correctness is complaining about the conversation being too meta, by making it even more meta. I don’t think that strategy is very likely to lead to useful discussion.
Viliam_Bur makes a similar point. But I stand by my response that the fact that one’s opponent is mindkilled is not strong evidence that one is not also mindkilled.
And being mindkilled does not necessarily mean one is wrong.
If your opponent is mindkilled that probably is evidence that you are mindkilled as well, since the mindkilling notion attaches to topics and discourses rather than to individuals.
you can’t ever back up your attack with specific examples, since if do this you are violating scared taboos, which means you lose your argument by default
I bet you 100 karma that I could spin (the possibility of) “racial” differences in intelligence in such a way as to sound tragic but largely inoffensive to the audience, and play the “don’t leave the field to the Nazis, we’re all good liberals right?” card, on any liberal blog of your choosing with an active comment section, and end up looking nice and thoughtful! If I pulled it off on LW, I can pull it off elsewhere with some preparation.
My point is, this is not a total information blockade, it’s just that fringe elements and tech nerds and such can’t spin a story to save their lives (even the best ones are only preaching to their choir), and the mainstream elite has a near-monopoly on charisma.
I hope you realize that by picking the example of race you make my above comment look like a clever rationalization for racism if taken out of context.
Also you are empirically plain wrong for the average online community. Give me one example of one public figure who has done this. If people like Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen can’t pull this off you need to be a rather remarkable person to do so in a random internet forum where standards of discussion are usually lower.
As to LW, it is hardly a typical forum! We have plenty of overlap with the GNXP and the wider HBD crowd. Naturally there are enough people who will up vote such an argument. On race we are actually good. We are willing to consider arguments and we don’t seem to have racists here either, this is pretty rare online.
Ironically us being good on race is the reason I don’t want us talking about race too much in articles, it attracts the wrong contrarian cluster to come visit and it fries the brains of newbies as well as creates room for “I am offended!” trolling.
Even if I for the sake of argument granted this point it dosen’t directly addressed any part of my description of the phenomena and how they are problematic.
If people like Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen can’t pull this off you need to be a rather remarkable person to do so in a random internet forum where standards of discussion are usually lower.
They don’t know how, because they haven’t researched previous attempts and don’t have a good angle of attack etc. You ought to push the “what if” angle and self-abase and warn people about those scary scary racists and other stuff… I bet that high-status geeks can’t do it because they still think like geeks. I bet I can think like a social butterfly, as unpleasant as this might be for me.
Let us actually try! Hey, someone, pick the time and place.
Also, see this article by a sufficiently cautious liberal, an anti-racist activist no less:
All that said, however, I have come to the conclusion that arguing for racial equity on the grounds that race is non-scientific and unrelated to intelligence, or that the notion of intelligence itself is culturally biased and subjective, is the wrong approach for egalitarians to take. By resting our position on those premises, we allow the opponents of equity and the believers in racism to frame the discussion in their own terms. But there is no need to allow such framing. The fact is, the moral imperative of racial equity should not (and ethically speaking does not) rely on whether or not race is a fiction, or whether or not intelligence is related to so-called racial identity.
Indeed, I would suggest that resting the claim for racial equity and just treatment upon the contemporary understanding of race and intelligence produced by scientists is a dangerous and ultimately unethical thing to do, simply because morality and ethics cannot be determined solely on the basis of science. Would it be ethical, after all, to mistreat individuals simply because they belonged to groups that we discovered were fundamentally different and in some regards less “capable,” on average, than other groups? Of course not. The moral claim to be treated ethically and justly, as an individual, rests on certain principles that transcend the genome and whatever we may know about it. This is why it has always been dangerous to rest the claim for LGBT equality on the argument that homosexuality is genetic or biological. It may well be, but what if it were proven not to be so? Would that now mean that it would be ethical to discriminate against LGBT folks, simply because it wasn’t something encoded in their biology, and perhaps was something over which they had more “control?”
First, that’s basically what I would say in the beginning of my attack. Second, read the rest of the article. It has plenty of strawmen, but it’s a wonderful example of the art of spin-doctoring. Third, he doesn’t sound all that horrifyingly close-minded, does he?
The moral claim to be treated ethically and justly, as an individual, rests on certain principles that transcend the genome and whatever we may know about it. This is why it has always been dangerous to rest the claim for LGBT equality on the argument that homosexuality is genetic or biological. It may well be, but what if it were proven not to be so? Would that now mean that it would be ethical to discriminate against LGBT folks, simply because it wasn’t something encoded in their biology, and perhaps was something over which they had more “control?”
Were it not political, this would serve as an excellent example of a number of things we’re supposed to do around here to get rid of rationalizing arguments and improper beliefs. I hear echoes of “Is that your true rejection?” and “One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens” …
“Certain principles that transcend the genome” sounds like bafflegab or New-Agery as written — but if you state it as “mathematical principles that can be found in game theory and decision theory, and which apply to individuals of any sort, even aliens or AIs” then you get something that sounds quite a lot like X-rationality, doesn’t it?
If you’ve found such an angle of attack on the issue of race please share it and point to examples that have withstood public scrutiny. Spell the strategy out, show how one can be ideologically neutral and get away talking about this? Jensen is no ideologue, he is a scientist in the best sense of the word.
You should see straigh away why Tim Wise is a very bad example. Not only is he ideologically Liberal, he is infamously so and I bet many assume he dosen’t really believe in the possibility of racial differences but is merely striking down a straw man. Remember this is the same Tim Wise who is basically looking forward to old white people dying so he can have his liberal utopia and writes gloating about it. Replace “white people” with a different ethnic group to see how fucked up that is.
Also you miss the point utterly if I’m allowed to be politically correct when liberal, gee, maybe political correctness is a political weapon! The very application of such standards means that if I stick to it on LW I am actively participating in the enforcement of an ideology.
Where does this leave libertarians (such as say Peter Thiel) or anarchists or conservative rationalist? What about the non-bourgeois socialists? Do we ever get as much consideration as the other kinds of minorities get? Are our assessments unwelcome?
I’ll dig those up, but if you want to find them faster, see some of my comments floating around in my Grand Thread of Heresies and below Aurini’s rant. I have most definitely said things to that effect and people have upvoted me for it. That’s the whole reason I’m so audacious.
Also you miss the point utterly if I’m allowed to be politically correct when liberal, gee, maybe political correctness is a political weapon! The very application of such standards means that if I stick to it on LW I am actively participating in the enforcement of a ideology.
No! No! No! All you’ve got to do is speak the language! Hell, the filtering is mostly for the language! And when you pass the first barrier like that, you can confuse the witch-hunters and imply pretty much anything you want, as long as you can make any attack on you look rude. You can have any ideology and use the surface language of any other ideology as long as they have comparable complexity. Hell, Moldbug sorta tries to do it.
Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen him here and there around the net, and he holds himself to rather high standards on his own blog, which is where he does his only real evangelizing, yet he gets into flamewars, spews directed bile and just outright trolls people in other places.
I guess he’s only comfortable enough to do his thing for real and at length when he’s in his little fortress. That’s not at all unusual, you know.
and tech nerds and such can’t spin a story to save their lives (even the best ones are only preaching to their choir), and the mainstream elite has a near-monopoly on charisma.
This “charisma” thing also happens to incorporate instinctively or actively choosing positions that lead to desirable social outcomes as a key feature. Extra eloquence can allow people to overcome a certain amount of disadvantage but choosing the socially advantageous positions to take in the first place is at least as important.
We are taking the taboo on political topics too far. Instead of avoiding mindkilling, we avoid the topics completely.
Quite recently even economics and its intersection with bias have apparently entered the territory of mindkillers. Economics was always political in the wider world, but considering this is a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality we couldn’t really afford such basic concepts to be mind killers.
Can we now?
I mean how could we explore mechanisms such as prediction markets without that? How can you even talk about any kind of maximising agents without invoking lots of econ talk?
My hypothesis is that LW is actually not politically neutral, but some political opinion P is implicitly present here as a bias. Opinions which are rational and compatible with P, can be expressed freely. Opinions which are irrational and incompatible with P, can be used as examples of irrationality (religion being the best example).
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Opinions which are rational but incompatible with P, are self-censored.
Not entirely, but I agree that they are likely far more often self-censored than those compatible with P. They are less often self-censored, I suspect, than on other sites with a similar political bias.
Opinions which are irrational but compatible with P are also never mentioned (because we are rational enough to recognize they can’t be defended)
I’m skeptical of this claim, but would agree that they are far less often mentioned here than on other sites with a similar political demographic.
If I understand correctly, the purpose of the self-censorship was to make this site more friendly for women. Which creates a paradox: An idea that one can speak openly with men, but with women a self-censorship is necessary, is kind of offensive to women, isn’t it?
(The first rule of Political Correctness is: You don’t talk about Political Correctness. The second rule: You don’t talk about Political Correctness. The third rule: When someone says stop, or expresses outrage, the discussion about given topic is over.)
Or maybe this is too much of a generalization. What other topics are we self-censoring, besides sexual behavior and politics? I don’t remember. Maybe it is just politics being self-censored; sexual behavior being a sensitive political topic. Problem is, any topic can become political, if for whatever reasons “Greens” decide to identify with a position X, and “Blues” with a position non-X.
We are taking the taboo on political topics too far. Instead of avoiding mindkilling, we avoid the topics completely.
Although we have traditional exceptions: it is allowed to talk about evolution and atheism, despite the fact that some people might consider these topics political too, and might feel offended. (Global warming is probably also acceptable, just less attractive for nerds.) So let’s find out what exactly determines when a potentially political topic becomes allowed on LW, or becomes self-censored?
My hypothesis is that LW is actually not politically neutral, but some political opinion P is implicitly present here as a bias. Opinions which are rational and compatible with P, can be expressed freely. Opinions which are irrational and incompatible with P, can be used as examples of irrationality (religion being the best example). Opinions which are rational but incompatible with P, are self-censored. Opinions which are irrational but compatible with P are also never mentioned (because we are rational enough to recognize they can’t be defended).
As to political correctness, its great insidiousness lies that while you can complain about it in a manner of a religious person complaining abstractly about hypocrites and Pharisees, you can’t ever back up your attack with specific examples, since if do this you are violating scared taboos, which means you lose your argument by default.
The pathetic exception to this is attacking very marginal and unpopular applications that your fellow debaters can easily dismiss as misguided extremism or even a straw man argument.
The second problem is that as time goes on, if reality happens to be politically incorrect on some issue, any other issue that points to the truth of this subject becomes potentially tainted by the label as well. You actively have to resort to thinking up new models as to why the dragon is indeed obviously in the garage. You also need to have good models of how well other people can reason about the absence of the dragon to see where exactly you can walk without concern. This is a cognitively straining process in which everyone slips up.
I recall my country’s Ombudsman once visiting my school for a talk wearing a T-shirt that said “After a close up no one looks normal.” Doing a close up of people’s opinions reveals no one is fully politically correct, this means that political correctness is always a viable weapon to shut down debates via ad hominem.
By merely mentioning political correctness means that many readers will instantly see you or me as one of those people, sly norm violating lawyers and outgroup members who should just stop whining.
My fault for using a politically charged word for a joke (but I couldn’t resist). Let’s do it properly now: What exactly does “political correctness” mean? It is not just any set of taboos (we wouldn’t refer to e.g. religious taboos as political correctness). It is a very specific set of modern-era taboos. So perhaps it is worth distinguishing between taboos in general, and political correctness as a specific example of taboos. Similarities are obvious, what exactly are the differences?
I am just doing a quick guess now, but I think the difference is that the old taboos were openly known as taboos. (It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest, but it is allowed to say: “It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest.”) The modern taboos pretend to be something else than taboos. (An analogy would be that everyone knows that when you walk in a sacred forest, you will be tortured to death, but if you say: “It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest”, the answer is: “No, there is no sacred forest, and you can walk anywhere you want, assuming you don’t break any other law.” And whenever a person is being tortured for walking in a sacred forest, there is always an alternative explanation, for example an imaginary crime.)
Thus, “political correctness” = a specific set of modern taboos + a denial that taboos exist.
If this is correct, then complaining, even abstractly, about political correctness, is already a big achievement. Saying that X is an example of political correctness equals to saying that X is false, which is breaking a taboo, and that is punished—just like breaking any other taboo. But speaking about political correctness abstractly is breaking a meta-taboo built to protect the other taboos; but unlike those taboos, the meta-taboo is more difficult to defend. (How exactly would one defend it? By saying: “You should never speak about political correctness because everyone is allowed to speak about anything”? The contradiction becomes too obvious.)
Speaking about political correctness is the most politically incorrect thing ever. When this is done, only the ordinary taboos remain.
Of course, people recognize what is happening, and they may not like it. But would still be difficult to have someone e.g. fired from university only for saying, abstractly, that political correctness exists.
It has been said that even having a phrase for it, has reduced its power greatly because now people can talk about it, even if they are still punished for doing so.
True. However a professor complaining about political correctness abstractly still has no tools to prevent its spread to the topic of say optimal gardening techniques. Also if he has a long history of complaining about political correctness abstractly, he is branded controversial.
I think it was Sailer who said he is old enough to remember when being called controversial was a good thing, signalling something of intellectual interest, while today it means “move along nothing to see here”.
Taboo “political correctness”… just for a moment. (This may be the first time I’ve ever used that particular LW locution.) Compare the accusations, “you are a hypocrite” and “you are politically incorrect”. The first is common, the second nonexistent. Political correctness is never the explicit rationale for shutting someone out, in a way that hypocrisy can be, because hypocrisy is openly regarded as a negative trait.
So the immediate mechanism of a PC shutdown of debate will always be something other than the abstraction, “PC”. Suppose you want to tell the world that women love jerks, blacks are dumber than whites, and democracy is bad. People may express horror, incredulity, outrage, or other emotions; they may dismiss you as being part of an evil movement, or they may say that every sensible person knows that those ideas were refuted long ago; they may employ any number of argumentative techniques or emotional appeals. What they won’t do is say, “Sir, your propositions are politically incorrect and therefore clearly invalid, Q.E.D.”
So saying “anyone can be targeted for political incorrectness” is like saying “anyone can be targeted for factual incorrectness”. It’s true but it’s vacuous, because such criticisms always resolve into something more specific and that is the level at which they must be engaged. If someone complained that they were persistently shut out of political discussion because they were always being accused of factual incorrectness… well, either the allegations were false, in which case they might be rebutted, or they were true but irrelevant, in which case a defender can point out the irrelevance, or they were true and relevant, in which case shutting this person out of discussions might be the best thing to do.
It’s much the same for people who are “targeted for being politically incorrect”. The alleged universal vulnerability to accusations of political incorrectness is somewhat fictitious. The real basis or motive of such criticism is always something more specific, and either you can or can’t overcome it, that’s all.
A political correctness (without hypocrisy) feels from inside as a fight against factual incorrectness with dangerous social consequences. It’s not just “you are wrong”, but “you are wrong, and if people believe this, horrible things will happen”.
Mere factual incorrectness will not invoke the same reaction. If one professor of mathematics admits belief that 2+2=5, and other professor of mathematics admit belief that women in average are worse in math than men, both could be fired, but people will not be angry at the former. It’s not just about fixing an error, but also about saving the world.
Then, what is the difference between a politically incorrect opinion, and a factually incorrect opinion with dangerous social consequences? In theory, the latter can be proved wrong. In real life, some proofs are expensive or take a lot of time; also many people are irrational, so even a proof would not convince everyone. But still I suspect that in case of factually incorrect opinion, opponents would at least try to prove it wrong, and would expect support from experts; while in case of politically incorrect opinion an experiment would be considered dangerous and experts unreliable. (Not completely sure about this part.)
It may feel like that for some people. For me the ‘feeling’ is factual incorrectness agnostic.
I agree that concern about the consequences of a belief is important to the cluster you’re describing. There’s also an element of “in the past, people who have asserted X have had motives of which I disapprove, and therefore the fact that you are asserting X is evidence that I will disapprove of your motives as well.”
Not just motives—the idea is that those beliefs have reliably led to destructive actions.
I am confused by this comment. I was agreeing with Viliam that concern about consequences was important, and adding that concern about motives was also important… to which you seem to be responding that the idea is that concern about consequences is important. Have I missed something, or are we just going in circles now?
Sorry—I missed the “also” in “There’s also an element....”
I wish I had another upvote.
Strictly speaking, path dependency may not always be rational—but until we raise the sanity line high enough, it is a highly predictable part of human interaction.
To me, asserting that one is “politically incorrect” is a statement that one’s opponents are extremely mindkilled and are willing to use their power to suppress opposition (i.e. you).
But there’s nothing about being mindkilled or willing to suppress dissent that proves one is wrong. Likewise, being opposed by the mindkilled is not evidence that one is not mindkilled oneself.
That dramatically decreases the informational value of bringing up the issue of political correctness in a debate. And accusing someone of adopting a position because it complies with political correctness is essentially identical to an accusation that your opponent is mindkilled—hence it is quite inflammatory in this community.
Political correctness is also an evidence of filtering evidence. Some people are saying X because it is good signalling, and some people avoid saying non-X, because it is a bad signalling. We shouldn’t reverse stupidity, but we should suspect that we were not exposed to the best arguments against X yet.
It is just as likely to mean that the opponents are insufficiently mind killed regarding the issues in question and may be Enemies Of The Tribe.
In my experience, using “political correctness” frequently has this effect, but mentioning its referent needn’t and often doesn’t.
You really, really, aren’t coming across as sly. I suspect they would go with the somewhat opposite “convey that you are naive” tactic instead.
Oh I didn’t mean to imply I was! Its just that when someone talks about political correctness making arguments difficult people often get facial expressions like he is cheating in some way, so I got the feeling this was:
“You are violating a rule we can’t explicitly state you are violating! That’s an exploit, stop it!”
I’m less confident in this I am in someone talking about political correctness being an out group marker, but I do think its there. On LW we have different priors, we see people being naive and violating norms in ignorance, when often outsiders would see them as violating norms on purpose.
To me the reaction is more like “You are trying to turn a discussion of facts and values into whining about being oppressed by your political opponents”.
(actually, I’m not sure I’m actually disagreeing with you here, except maybe about some subtle nuances in connotation)
If this is so, it is somewhat ironic. From the inside objecting to political correctness feels like calling out intrusive political dreailment or discussions of should in a factual discussion about is.
There are arguments for this, being the sole up tight moral preacher of political correctness often gets you similar looks to being the one person objecting to it.
But this leads me to think both are just rationalizations. If this is fully explained by being a matter of tribal attrie and shibboleths what exactly would be different? Not that much.
It may be a rationalization, but it’s one that may be more likely to occur than “that’s an exploit”!
I agree there’s a similar sentiment going both ways, when a conversation goes like:
At each step, the discussion is getting more meta and less interesting—from fact to morality to politics. In effect, complaining about political correctness is complaining about the conversation being too meta, by making it even more meta. I don’t think that strategy is very likely to lead to useful discussion.
Viliam_Bur makes a similar point. But I stand by my response that the fact that one’s opponent is mindkilled is not strong evidence that one is not also mindkilled.
And being mindkilled does not necessarily mean one is wrong.
If your opponent is mindkilled that probably is evidence that you are mindkilled as well, since the mindkilling notion attaches to topics and discourses rather than to individuals.
Evidence yes. But being mind-killed attaches to individual-topic pairs, not the topics themselves.
I bet you 100 karma that I could spin (the possibility of) “racial” differences in intelligence in such a way as to sound tragic but largely inoffensive to the audience, and play the “don’t leave the field to the Nazis, we’re all good liberals right?” card, on any liberal blog of your choosing with an active comment section, and end up looking nice and thoughtful! If I pulled it off on LW, I can pull it off elsewhere with some preparation.
My point is, this is not a total information blockade, it’s just that fringe elements and tech nerds and such can’t spin a story to save their lives (even the best ones are only preaching to their choir), and the mainstream elite has a near-monopoly on charisma.
I hope you realize that by picking the example of race you make my above comment look like a clever rationalization for racism if taken out of context.
Also you are empirically plain wrong for the average online community. Give me one example of one public figure who has done this. If people like Charles Murray or Arthur Jensen can’t pull this off you need to be a rather remarkable person to do so in a random internet forum where standards of discussion are usually lower.
As to LW, it is hardly a typical forum! We have plenty of overlap with the GNXP and the wider HBD crowd. Naturally there are enough people who will up vote such an argument. On race we are actually good. We are willing to consider arguments and we don’t seem to have racists here either, this is pretty rare online.
Ironically us being good on race is the reason I don’t want us talking about race too much in articles, it attracts the wrong contrarian cluster to come visit and it fries the brains of newbies as well as creates room for “I am offended!” trolling.
Even if I for the sake of argument granted this point it dosen’t directly addressed any part of my description of the phenomena and how they are problematic.
They don’t know how, because they haven’t researched previous attempts and don’t have a good angle of attack etc. You ought to push the “what if” angle and self-abase and warn people about those scary scary racists and other stuff… I bet that high-status geeks can’t do it because they still think like geeks. I bet I can think like a social butterfly, as unpleasant as this might be for me.
Let us actually try! Hey, someone, pick the time and place.
Also, see this article by a sufficiently cautious liberal, an anti-racist activist no less:
http://www.timwise.org/2011/08/race-intelligence-and-the-limits-of-science-reflections-on-the-moral-absurdity-of-racial-realism/
First, that’s basically what I would say in the beginning of my attack. Second, read the rest of the article. It has plenty of strawmen, but it’s a wonderful example of the art of spin-doctoring. Third, he doesn’t sound all that horrifyingly close-minded, does he?
Were it not political, this would serve as an excellent example of a number of things we’re supposed to do around here to get rid of rationalizing arguments and improper beliefs. I hear echoes of “Is that your true rejection?” and “One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens” …
“Certain principles that transcend the genome” sounds like bafflegab or New-Agery as written — but if you state it as “mathematical principles that can be found in game theory and decision theory, and which apply to individuals of any sort, even aliens or AIs” then you get something that sounds quite a lot like X-rationality, doesn’t it?
If you’ve found such an angle of attack on the issue of race please share it and point to examples that have withstood public scrutiny. Spell the strategy out, show how one can be ideologically neutral and get away talking about this? Jensen is no ideologue, he is a scientist in the best sense of the word.
You should see straigh away why Tim Wise is a very bad example. Not only is he ideologically Liberal, he is infamously so and I bet many assume he dosen’t really believe in the possibility of racial differences but is merely striking down a straw man. Remember this is the same Tim Wise who is basically looking forward to old white people dying so he can have his liberal utopia and writes gloating about it. Replace “white people” with a different ethnic group to see how fucked up that is.
Also you miss the point utterly if I’m allowed to be politically correct when liberal, gee, maybe political correctness is a political weapon! The very application of such standards means that if I stick to it on LW I am actively participating in the enforcement of an ideology.
Where does this leave libertarians (such as say Peter Thiel) or anarchists or conservative rationalist? What about the non-bourgeois socialists? Do we ever get as much consideration as the other kinds of minorities get? Are our assessments unwelcome?
I’ll dig those up, but if you want to find them faster, see some of my comments floating around in my Grand Thread of Heresies and below Aurini’s rant. I have most definitely said things to that effect and people have upvoted me for it. That’s the whole reason I’m so audacious.
No! No! No! All you’ve got to do is speak the language! Hell, the filtering is mostly for the language! And when you pass the first barrier like that, you can confuse the witch-hunters and imply pretty much anything you want, as long as you can make any attack on you look rude. You can have any ideology and use the surface language of any other ideology as long as they have comparable complexity. Hell, Moldbug sorta tries to do it.
Moldbug cannot survive on a progressive message board. He was hellbanned from Hacker News right away. Log in to Hacker News and turn on showdead: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moldbug
Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen him here and there around the net, and he holds himself to rather high standards on his own blog, which is where he does his only real evangelizing, yet he gets into flamewars, spews directed bile and just outright trolls people in other places.
I guess he’s only comfortable enough to do his thing for real and at length when he’s in his little fortress. That’s not at all unusual, you know.
There should be a term for the idealogical equivalent of Turing completeness.
This “charisma” thing also happens to incorporate instinctively or actively choosing positions that lead to desirable social outcomes as a key feature. Extra eloquence can allow people to overcome a certain amount of disadvantage but choosing the socially advantageous positions to take in the first place is at least as important.
Quite recently even economics and its intersection with bias have apparently entered the territory of mindkillers. Economics was always political in the wider world, but considering this is a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality we couldn’t really afford such basic concepts to be mind killers. Can we now?
I mean how could we explore mechanisms such as prediction markets without that? How can you even talk about any kind of maximising agents without invoking lots of econ talk?
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Not entirely, but I agree that they are likely far more often self-censored than those compatible with P. They are less often self-censored, I suspect, than on other sites with a similar political bias.
I’m skeptical of this claim, but would agree that they are far less often mentioned here than on other sites with a similar political demographic.