LessWrong/Overcoming Bias used to be a much more interesting place. Note how lacking in self-censorship Vassar is in that post. Talking about sexuality and the norms surrounding it like we would any other topic. Today we walk on eggshells.
A modern post of this kind is impossible despite its great personal benefit to in my estimation at least 30% of the users of this site and making available a better predictive models of social reality for all the users.
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.
Summary of IRC conversation in the unoffical LW chatroom.
On the IRC channel I noted that there are several subjects on which discourse was better or more interesting in OB/LW 2008 than today, yet I can’t think of a single topic on which LW 2012 has better dialogue or commentary. Another LWer noted that it is in the nature of all internet forums to “grow more stupid over time”, I don’t think LW is stupider, I just I think it has grown more boring and definitely isn’t a community with a higher sanity waterline today than back then, despite many individuals levelling up formidably in the intervening period.
some new place started by the same people, before LW was OB. before OB was SL4, before that was… I don’t know
This post is made in the hopes people will let me know about the next good spot.
I wasn’t here in 2008, but seems to me that the emphasis of this site is moving from articles to comments.
Articles are usually better than comments. People put more work into articles, and as a reward for this work, the article becomes more visible, and the successful articles are well remembered and hyperlinked. Article creates a separate page where one main topic is explored. If necessary, more articles may explore the same topic, creating a sequence.
Even some “articles” today don’t have the qualities of the classical article. Some of them are just a question / a poll / a prompt for discussion / a reminder for a meetup. Some of them are just placeholders for comments (open thread, group rationality) -- and personally I prefer these, because they don’t polute the article-space.
Essentially we are mixing together “article” paradigm and a “discussion forum” paradigm. But these are two different things. Article is a higher quality piece of text. Discussion forum is just a structure of comments, without articles. Both have their place, but if you take a comment and call it “article”, of course it seems that the average quality of articles deteriorates.
Assuming this analysis is correct, we don’t need much of a technical fix, we need a semantic fix; that is: the same software, but different rules for posting. And the rules nees to be explicit, to avoid gradual spontaneous reverting.
“Discussion” for discussions: that is, for comments without a top-level article (open thread, group rationality, meetups). It is not allowed to create a new top-level article here, unless the community (in open thread discussion) agrees that a new type of open thread is needed.
“Articles” for articles: that is for texts that meet some quality treshold—that means that users should vote down the article even if the topic is interesting, if the article is badly written. Don’t say “it’s badly written, but the topic is interesting anyway”, but “this topic deserves a well-written article”.
Then, we should compare the old OB/LW with the “Article” section, to make a fair comparison.
EDIT: How to get from “here” to “there”, if this plan is accepted? We could start by renaming “Main” to “Articles”, or we could even keep the old name; I don’t care. But we mainly need to re-arrange the articles. Move the meetup announcements to “Discussion”. Move the higher-quality articles from “Discussion” to “Main”, and… perhaps leave the existing lower-quality articles in “Discussion” (to avoid creating another category) but from now on, ban creating more such articles.
EDIT: Another suggestion—is it possible to make some articles “sticky”? Regardless of their date, they would always show at the top of the list (until the “sticky” flag is removed). Then we could always make the recent “Open Thread” and “Group Rationality” sticky, so they are the first things people see after clicking on Discussion. This could reduce a temptation to start a new article.
before LW was OB. before OB was SL4, before that was…
There used to be solitary transhumanist visionaries/nutcases, like Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson (very different in their amount of “rationality”), and there used to be, say, fans of Hofstadter or Jaynes, but the merging of “rationalism” and… orientation towards the future was certainly invented in the 1990s. Ah, what a blissful decade that was.
I regularly see people make frank comments about sexuality. There’s maybe 4-5 people whose comments would be considered offensive in liberal circles. Many more people whose comments would at at least somewhat offputting. Whenever the subject comes up (no matter who brings it up, and which political stripes they wear), it often explodes into a giant thread of comments that’s far more popular than whatever the original thread was ostensibly about.
I sometimes avoid making sex related comments until after the thread has exploded, because most people have already made the same points already, they’re just repeating themselves because talking about pet political issues is fun. (When I do end up posting in them, it’s almost always because my own tribal affiliations are wrankled and my brain thinks that engaging with strangers on the internet is an affective use of my time. I’m keenly aware as I write this that my justifications for engaging with you are basically meaningless and I’m just getting some cognitive cotton candy). Am I self-censoring in a way you consider wrong?
I’ve seen numerous non-gender political threads get downvoted with a comment like “politics is the mindkiller” and then fade away quietly. My impression is that gender threads (even if downvoted) end up getting discussed in detail. People don’t self censor, which includes both criticism of ideas people disagree with and/or are offended by.
Whenever the subject comes up (no matter who brings it up, and which political stripes they wear), it often explodes into a giant thread of comments that’s far more popular than whatever the original thread was ostensibly about.
I think this observation is not incompatible with a self-censorship hypothesis. It could mean that topic is somewhat taboo, so people don’t want to make a serious article about it, but not completely taboo, so it is mentioned in comments in other articles. And because it can never be officially resolved, it keeps repeating.
What would happen if LW had a similar “soft taboo” about e.g. religion? What if the official policy would be that we want to raise the sanity waterline by bringing basic rationality to as many people as possible, and criticizing religion would make many religious people unwelcome, therefore members are recommended to avoid discussing any religion insensitively?
I guess the topic would appear frequently in completely unrelated articles. For example in an article about Many Worlds hypothesis someone would oppose it precisely because it feels incompatible with Bible; so the person would honestly describe their reasons. Immediately there would be dozen comments about religion. Another article would explain some human behavior based on evolutionary psychology, and again, one spark, and there would be a group of comments about religion. Etc. Precisely because people wouldn’t feel allowed to write an article about how religion is completely wrong, they would express this sentiment in comments instead.
We should avoid mindkilling like this: if one person says “2+2 is good” and other person says “2+2 is bad”, don’t join the discussion, and downvote it. But if one person says “2+2=4” and other person says “2+2=5″, ask them to show the evidence.
What would happen if LW had a similar “soft taboo” about e.g. religion?
There is a rather large difference between LW attitudes to religion and to gender issues.
On religion, nearly everyone here agrees about religion: all religions are factually wrong, and fundamentally so. There are a few exceptions but not enough to make a controversy.
On gender, there is a visible lack of any such consensus. Those with a settled view on the matter may think that their view should be the consensus, but the fact is, it isn’t.
I could write a post, but it wouldn’t be in agreement with that one.
I had no interest in the opposite sex in High School. I was nerd hardcore. And was approached by multiple girls. (I noticed some even in my then-clueless state, and retrospection has made several more obvious to me; the girl who outright kissed me, for example, was hard to mistake for anything else.) I gave the “I just want to be friends” speech to a couple of them. I also, completely unintentionally, embarrassed the hell out of one girl, whose friend asked me to join her for lunch because she had a crush on me. She hid her face for sixty seconds after I came over, so I eventually patted her on the head, entirely unsure what else to do, and went back to my table.
...yeah, actually, I doubt any of the girls who pursued me in High School ever tried to take the initiative again.
Maybe there’s a stable reason girls/women don’t initiate; earlier onset of puberty in girls means that their first few attempts fail miserably on boys who don’t yet reciprocate that interest.
Since you mention this, I find it weird we still group students by their age, as if date of manufacture was the most important feature of their socialization and education.
We are forgetting how fundamentally weird it is to segregate children by age in this way from the perspective of traditional culture.
Have you read The Nurture Assumption? There’s a chapter on that; in the West someone who’s small/immature for his class level will be at the bottom of the pecking group throughout his education, whereas in a traditional society where kids self-segregate by age in a more flexible manner, kids will grow from being the smallest of their group to the largest of their group, so will have a wider diversity of experience.
It’s a pretty convincing reason to not make your kid skip a class.
The post is about decent (although rather US-centric and imprecise), but reading through the comments there, I’m very grateful for whatever changes the community has undergone since then. Most of them are unpleasant to read for various reasons.
You do make the rules because the male must court you. He can’t expect that you will court him. This isn’t rocket science, but it looks as thought i’m going to have to break it down for you:
See, women don’t typically approach men. Get it? If women do not approach men, then men have two, and only two, options. These options are as follows:
Option A: Die alone, a virgin, unmarried, unloved, ignored, never experience a meaningful relationship with a woman, cold, numb, inhuman, tossed aside, emasculated, branded a “loser,” praying for death rather than live a life of unbearable loneliness, regret, and bitterness (that is of course unless you are particularly disturbed, in which case you can shoot up your community college and spread your misery).
Option B: Approach women.
Are you beginning to understand the reality of the opposite sex yet?
Is it still fuzzy? Maybe you need me to connect the dots further. See, because most men are forced to choose option B, that means that most women can count on being approached. If it is true that you can count on being approached, you have two options. They are as follows:
Option A: Wait to be approached.
Option B: Apporach men.
Whose options do you think are better? Now, because most women can count on being approached due to the highly unattractive nature of the male option A, women get to play judge and jury. See, you’re like an employer sitting comfortably behind a desk and screening applicants. You’re in the position of power, not I. Therefore, it’s your rules that apply. I don’t get to decide what you expect of me anymore than a job applicant gets to decide what his potential employer requires in an applicant.
You’re the egg; the prize. Men who jostle and compete for your attention are like the millions of sperm struggling to swim up the birth canal, all but one who is doomed. Do you get it yet?
Are you beginning to appreciate the reality of the opposite sex? I realize that women give it very little thought—after all, it’s women who are victimized by a cold, superficial, and dysfunctional male dominated society with all its harsh and unrealistic expectations of women. Women meekly scamper about a social wasteland making every effort to please men whose affection is required to validate their existence, while men, of course, highfive their frat bro douchebag buddies and reduce women to sex objects for fun. It couldn’t be possible that men tailor their behavior to conform with women’s expectations, that’s crazy talk. Men aren’t lonely, they don’t require intimate contact with the opposite sex or social validation or human warmth. They’re all just looking to get laid, right?....
and
“The term is meant to call attention to the fact that the archetypical Nice Guy(TM) mistakenly thinks of himself as a nice person.”
I don’t really think this is very understanding of the Nice Guy Syndrome. I think the archetypical Nice Guy does not think of himself as a very nice person, but is rather self-consciously aware of his shortcomings, such as social ineptitude and shyness. The point is rather, that he has been indoctrinated (by women and by women-oriented popular culture) to believe that women find such shortcomings endearing and lovable.
God forbid for us to have sympathy with low status males. This might trick some to think their lives and well being is worth as much as that of real people!
Imagine if our society cared for low status men as much as about the feelings of low status women … the horror!
Those comments should’ve been better formulated and written in a better tone. Nothing is wrong with most individual sentences, but overall it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
If you only do it for a day or so, you get just a few corruption points, and may continue serving the Imperium at the price of but a tiny portion of your soul. Chaos has great gifts in store for those who refuse to be consumed by it!
Agreed. The advantage of LW_2012 over OB_2008 is that there are no longer posts like this or this, which promote horribly incorrect gender stereotypes.
I flat out disagree, Male Sati is a perfectly ok article. There is in my opinion nothing harmful or unseemly about it at least nothing in excess of what we see on other topics here.
Do you have any idea at all what reading this site is like if you have a different set of preferences? We never make any effort at all to make this site at all more inclusive of ideological or value diversity, when it is precisely this that might help us refine the art more!
Here are a handful of my specific objections to Modern Male Sati:
Hanson is arguing that cryonicists’ wives should be accepting of the fact that their husbands are a) spending a significant portion of their income on life extension, and b) spending a lot of time thinking about what they are going to do with their wives are dead, and if they can’t accept these things, they are morally equivalent to widow-burners. This is not only needlessly insulting, but also an extremely unfair comparison.
In making this comparison, Hanson is also calling cryonicists’ wives selfish for not letting their husbands do what they want. This is a very male view of what a long-term relationship should be like, without anything to counterbalance it. It comes off like a complaint, sort of like, “my wife won’t let me go out to the bar with my male friends.”
Hanson writes: ” It seems clear to me that opposition is driven by the possibility that it might actually work.” This is wrong—it seems pretty obvious that your spouse believing in the “a)” and “b)” I listed above are valid reasons to be frustrated with them, regardless of whether you actually believe them. Also, this line strikes me as cheap point-scoring for cryonics (although I don’t know if Hanson intended it this way).
Hanson implicitly assumes that this is a gender issue, and talks about it as such, but this isn’t necessarily so. What about men who have cryonicist wives? It’s quite possible that there actually is a gender element involved here, but not even asking the question is what I object to.
Hanson’s tone encourages others to talk about women in a specific way, as an “other,” or an out-group. This is bad for various reasons that should be somewhat self-evident.
Do you have any idea at all what reading this site is like if you have a different set of preferences? We never make any effort at all to make this site at all more inclusive of ideological or value diversity, when it is precisely this that might help us refine the art more!
No, I don’t think I know what it’s like reading this site with a different set of preferences. That said, I would like to see some value diversity, and I would welcome some frank discussions of gender politics. But. There should also be people writing harshly-worded rebuttals when someone says something dreadfully wrong about the opposite gender or promotes some untrue stereotype.
It might also be worth noting that lack of value diversity is the reason I object to OB_2008. Factual content aside, Modern Male Sati and Is Overcoming Bias Male? promote a very specific view of gender politics that will anger and deter some potential readers. This creates a kind of evaporation cooling effect where posters can be even more wrong about gender politics and have no one to call them out on it.
a) spending a significant portion of their income on life extension, and b) spending a lot of time thinking about what they are going to do with their wives are dead, and if they can’t accept these things, they are morally equivalent to widow-burners.
Indian widows would use up a great deal of the husband’s estate while living on for unknown years or decades (the usual age imbalance + the female longevity advantage). As for thinking about afterwards… well, I imagine they would if they had had the option, as does anyone who takes out life insurance and isn’t expected to forego any options or treatments.
This is not only needlessly insulting, but also an extremely unfair comparison.
Assuming the conclusion. The question is are the outcomes equivalent… Reading your comment, I get the feeling you’re not actually grappling with the argument but instead venting about tone and values and outgroups.
Hanson is also calling cryonicists’ wives selfish for not letting their husbands do what they want.
Oh, so if the husband agrees not to go out to bars, then cryonics is now acceptable to you and the wife? A mutual satisfaction of preferences, and given how expensive alcohol is, it evens the financial tables too! Color me skeptical that this would actually work...
If this were a religious dispute, like, say, which faith to raise the kids in, would you be objecting? Is it ‘selfish’ for a Jewish dad to want to raise his kids Jewish? If it is, you seem to be seriously privileging the preferences of wives over husbands on all matters, and if not, it’d be interesting to see you try to find a distinction which makes some choices of education more important than cryonics!
What about men who have cryonicist wives? It’s quite possible that there actually is a gender element involved here, but not even asking the question is what I object to.
Opposition to cryonics really is a gender issue: look at how many men versus women are signed up! That alone is sufficient (cryonicist wives? rare as hen’s teeth), but actually, there’s even better data than that in “Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics”, by Michael G. Darwin, Chana de Wolf, and Aschwin de Wolf; look at the table in the appendix.
Assuming the conclusion. The question is are the outcomes equivalent…
It’s an unfair comparison because widow-burning comes with strong emotional/moral connotations, irrespective of actual outcomes. It’s like (forgive me) comparing someone to Hitler, in the sense that even if the outcome you’re talking about is equivalent to Hitler, the emotional reaction that “X is like Hitler” provokes is still disproportionately too large. (Meta-note: Let’s call this Meta-Godwin’s Law: comparing something to comparing something to Hitler.)
As for the actual outcomes: It seems to me that there is some asymmetry because the widow is spending their husband’s money after they are dead, whereas the cryonicist is doing the spending while they are still around. But I’ll drop this point because, as you said, I am less interested in the actual argument and more interested in how it was framed.
Reading your comment, I get the feeling you’re not actually grappling with the argument but instead venting about tone and values and outgroups.
Yes; I explicitly stated this in my fifth bullet point.
Oh, so if the husband agrees not to go out to bars, then cryonics is now acceptable to you and the wife? A mutual satisfaction of preferences, and given how expensive alcohol is, it evens the financial tables too! Color me skeptical that this would actually work...
This is not at all what I’m arguing. I am arguing that Hanson’s post pattern-matches to a common male stereotype, the overly-controlling wife. Quoting myself, “This is a very male view of what a long-term relationship should be like, without anything to counterbalance it.” I don’t think the exchange you describe would actually work in practice.
If this were a religious dispute, like, say, which faith to raise the kids in, would you be objecting? Is it ‘selfish’ for a Jewish dad to want to raise his kids Jewish? If it is, you seem to be seriously privileging the preferences of wives over husbands on all matters, and if not, it’d be interesting to see you try to find a distinction which makes some choices of education more important than cryonics!
Forgive me, I do not understand how this is related to the point I was making. I don’t see the correspondence between this and cryonics.
Additionally, this example is a massive mind-killer for me for personal reasons and I don’t think I’m capable of discussing it in a rational manner. I’ll just say a few more things on this point: I am not accusing cryonicists of being selfish. I am saying that it is unreasonable for Hanson to accuse wives of being selfish because of the large, presumably negative impact it has on a relationship. I am also not attempting to privilege wives’ preferences over husbands; apologies for any miscommunication that caused that perception. I should probably also add that I am male, which may help make this claim more credible.
try to find a distinction which makes some choices of education more important than cryonics!
Side comment: I have no idea how to even begin comparing these two things, but I think this point is indicative of the large inferential gap between you and I. My System 1 response was to value choice of religious education over cryonics, whereas you seem to be implying (if I’m parsing your comment correctly, which I may not be) that the latter is clearly more important.
Opposition to cryonics really is a gender issue: look at how many men versus women are signed up! That alone is sufficient (cryonicist wives? rare as hen’s teeth), but actually, there’s even better data than that in “Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics”, by Michael G. Darwin, Chana de Wolf, and Aschwin de Wolf; look at the table in the appendix.
There should also be people writing harshly-worded rebuttals when someone says something dreadfully wrong about the opposite gender or promotes some stereotype.
Can I write a harshly-worded rebuttal of the idea that promoting stereotypes is always morally wrong? Or perhaps an essay on how stereotypes are useful?
Oh, of course. In fact, before I saw your comment I changed the wording to “untrue stereotype.” Some stereotypes are indeed true and/or useful. What I object to is assuming that certain stereotypes are true without evidence, and speaking as if they are true, especially when said stereotypes make strong moral claims about some group. This is what Hanson does in Modern Male Sati and Is Overcoming Bias Male?
Edit: Tone is also important. Talking about some group as if they are an out-group is generally a bad thing. The two posts by Hanson that I mentioned talk about women as if they are weird alien creatures who happen to visit his blog.
Hold on a minute, though—I’m not sure we actually agree here. I envision this kind of norm excluding posts like Modern Male Sati and Is Overcoming Bias Male?. Do you?
I’m ok as long as we get to have a fair meta debate about a norm of excluding interesting posts like modern male sati and the like first. Also that one is allowed to challenge such norms later if circumstances change.
I mean what kind of a world would it be if people violated every norm they disagreed with? As long as the norm making system is generally ok, its better to not sabotage it. And who knows maybe I would be convinced in such a debate as well.
Sex, Nerds, and Entitlement
LessWrong/Overcoming Bias used to be a much more interesting place. Note how lacking in self-censorship Vassar is in that post. Talking about sexuality and the norms surrounding it like we would any other topic. Today we walk on eggshells.
A modern post of this kind is impossible despite its great personal benefit to in my estimation at least 30% of the users of this site and making available a better predictive models of social reality for all the users.
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.
Summary of IRC conversation in the unoffical LW chatroom.
On the IRC channel I noted that there are several subjects on which discourse was better or more interesting in OB/LW 2008 than today, yet I can’t think of a single topic on which LW 2012 has better dialogue or commentary. Another LWer noted that it is in the nature of all internet forums to “grow more stupid over time”, I don’t think LW is stupider, I just I think it has grown more boring and definitely isn’t a community with a higher sanity waterline today than back then, despite many individuals levelling up formidably in the intervening period.
This post is made in the hopes people will let me know about the next good spot.
I wasn’t here in 2008, but seems to me that the emphasis of this site is moving from articles to comments.
Articles are usually better than comments. People put more work into articles, and as a reward for this work, the article becomes more visible, and the successful articles are well remembered and hyperlinked. Article creates a separate page where one main topic is explored. If necessary, more articles may explore the same topic, creating a sequence.
Even some “articles” today don’t have the qualities of the classical article. Some of them are just a question / a poll / a prompt for discussion / a reminder for a meetup. Some of them are just placeholders for comments (open thread, group rationality) -- and personally I prefer these, because they don’t polute the article-space.
Essentially we are mixing together “article” paradigm and a “discussion forum” paradigm. But these are two different things. Article is a higher quality piece of text. Discussion forum is just a structure of comments, without articles. Both have their place, but if you take a comment and call it “article”, of course it seems that the average quality of articles deteriorates.
Assuming this analysis is correct, we don’t need much of a technical fix, we need a semantic fix; that is: the same software, but different rules for posting. And the rules nees to be explicit, to avoid gradual spontaneous reverting.
“Discussion” for discussions: that is, for comments without a top-level article (open thread, group rationality, meetups). It is not allowed to create a new top-level article here, unless the community (in open thread discussion) agrees that a new type of open thread is needed.
“Articles” for articles: that is for texts that meet some quality treshold—that means that users should vote down the article even if the topic is interesting, if the article is badly written. Don’t say “it’s badly written, but the topic is interesting anyway”, but “this topic deserves a well-written article”.
Then, we should compare the old OB/LW with the “Article” section, to make a fair comparison.
EDIT: How to get from “here” to “there”, if this plan is accepted? We could start by renaming “Main” to “Articles”, or we could even keep the old name; I don’t care. But we mainly need to re-arrange the articles. Move the meetup announcements to “Discussion”. Move the higher-quality articles from “Discussion” to “Main”, and… perhaps leave the existing lower-quality articles in “Discussion” (to avoid creating another category) but from now on, ban creating more such articles.
EDIT: Another suggestion—is it possible to make some articles “sticky”? Regardless of their date, they would always show at the top of the list (until the “sticky” flag is removed). Then we could always make the recent “Open Thread” and “Group Rationality” sticky, so they are the first things people see after clicking on Discussion. This could reduce a temptation to start a new article.
Religion.
Maybe. We’ve become less New Atheisty than we used to be this is quite clear.
Fuck yeah.
There used to be solitary transhumanist visionaries/nutcases, like Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson (very different in their amount of “rationality”), and there used to be, say, fans of Hofstadter or Jaynes, but the merging of “rationalism” and… orientation towards the future was certainly invented in the 1990s. Ah, what a blissful decade that was.
Russian communism was a type of rationalist futurism: down with religion, plan the economy…
Hmm, yeah. I was thinking about the U.S. specifically, here.
Unpack what you mean by self-censorship exactly?
I regularly see people make frank comments about sexuality. There’s maybe 4-5 people whose comments would be considered offensive in liberal circles. Many more people whose comments would at at least somewhat offputting. Whenever the subject comes up (no matter who brings it up, and which political stripes they wear), it often explodes into a giant thread of comments that’s far more popular than whatever the original thread was ostensibly about.
I sometimes avoid making sex related comments until after the thread has exploded, because most people have already made the same points already, they’re just repeating themselves because talking about pet political issues is fun. (When I do end up posting in them, it’s almost always because my own tribal affiliations are wrankled and my brain thinks that engaging with strangers on the internet is an affective use of my time. I’m keenly aware as I write this that my justifications for engaging with you are basically meaningless and I’m just getting some cognitive cotton candy). Am I self-censoring in a way you consider wrong?
I’ve seen numerous non-gender political threads get downvoted with a comment like “politics is the mindkiller” and then fade away quietly. My impression is that gender threads (even if downvoted) end up getting discussed in detail. People don’t self censor, which includes both criticism of ideas people disagree with and/or are offended by.
What exactly would you like to change?
I think this observation is not incompatible with a self-censorship hypothesis. It could mean that topic is somewhat taboo, so people don’t want to make a serious article about it, but not completely taboo, so it is mentioned in comments in other articles. And because it can never be officially resolved, it keeps repeating.
What would happen if LW had a similar “soft taboo” about e.g. religion? What if the official policy would be that we want to raise the sanity waterline by bringing basic rationality to as many people as possible, and criticizing religion would make many religious people unwelcome, therefore members are recommended to avoid discussing any religion insensitively?
I guess the topic would appear frequently in completely unrelated articles. For example in an article about Many Worlds hypothesis someone would oppose it precisely because it feels incompatible with Bible; so the person would honestly describe their reasons. Immediately there would be dozen comments about religion. Another article would explain some human behavior based on evolutionary psychology, and again, one spark, and there would be a group of comments about religion. Etc. Precisely because people wouldn’t feel allowed to write an article about how religion is completely wrong, they would express this sentiment in comments instead.
We should avoid mindkilling like this: if one person says “2+2 is good” and other person says “2+2 is bad”, don’t join the discussion, and downvote it. But if one person says “2+2=4” and other person says “2+2=5″, ask them to show the evidence.
There is a rather large difference between LW attitudes to religion and to gender issues.
On religion, nearly everyone here agrees about religion: all religions are factually wrong, and fundamentally so. There are a few exceptions but not enough to make a controversy.
On gender, there is a visible lack of any such consensus. Those with a settled view on the matter may think that their view should be the consensus, but the fact is, it isn’t.
I could write a post, but it wouldn’t be in agreement with that one.
I had no interest in the opposite sex in High School. I was nerd hardcore. And was approached by multiple girls. (I noticed some even in my then-clueless state, and retrospection has made several more obvious to me; the girl who outright kissed me, for example, was hard to mistake for anything else.) I gave the “I just want to be friends” speech to a couple of them. I also, completely unintentionally, embarrassed the hell out of one girl, whose friend asked me to join her for lunch because she had a crush on me. She hid her face for sixty seconds after I came over, so I eventually patted her on the head, entirely unsure what else to do, and went back to my table.
...yeah, actually, I doubt any of the girls who pursued me in High School ever tried to take the initiative again.
I know how you feel, I utterly missed such interest myself back then.
Maybe there’s a stable reason girls/women don’t initiate; earlier onset of puberty in girls means that their first few attempts fail miserably on boys who don’t yet reciprocate that interest.
Since you mention this, I find it weird we still group students by their age, as if date of manufacture was the most important feature of their socialization and education.
We are forgetting how fundamentally weird it is to segregate children by age in this way from the perspective of traditional culture.
Have you read The Nurture Assumption? There’s a chapter on that; in the West someone who’s small/immature for his class level will be at the bottom of the pecking group throughout his education, whereas in a traditional society where kids self-segregate by age in a more flexible manner, kids will grow from being the smallest of their group to the largest of their group, so will have a wider diversity of experience.
It’s a pretty convincing reason to not make your kid skip a class.
Also a good reason to consider home-schooling or even having them enrol in primary school education one year later.
As a very rough approximation:
A normal western kid will mostly get used to a relatively fixed position in the group in terms of size / maturity
A normal kid in a traditional village society will experience the whole range of size/maturity positions in the group
A homeschooled kid will not get as much experience being in a peer group
It’s not clear that homeschooling is better than the fixed position option (though it may be! But probably for other reasons).
The post is about decent (although rather US-centric and imprecise), but reading through the comments there, I’m very grateful for whatever changes the community has undergone since then. Most of them are unpleasant to read for various reasons.
Be specific.
and
This is just very very low-status.
God forbid for us to have sympathy with low status males. This might trick some to think their lives and well being is worth as much as that of real people!
Imagine if our society cared for low status men as much as about the feelings of low status women … the horror!
Those comments should’ve been better formulated and written in a better tone. Nothing is wrong with most individual sentences, but overall it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
(“The underclasses are starting to get desperate. Your turn.”—“Desperate.”—“Desperate.”—“Desperate.”)
I can agree with that. But this is then a dispute about levels of writing skill not content no?
These are connected. What and how we write influences what and how we think.
Well sure but dosen’t this undermine the argument that:
If you only do it for a day or so, you get just a few corruption points, and may continue serving the Imperium at the price of but a tiny portion of your soul. Chaos has great gifts in store for those who refuse to be consumed by it!
Well done, I had to up vote the reference. :D
This is plain true in a descriptive sense.
Is it?
OF COURSE it is. My problem is with the tone and the general style.
Agreed. The advantage of LW_2012 over OB_2008 is that there are no longer posts like this or this, which promote horribly incorrect gender stereotypes.
I wish LW had a stronger lingering influence from Robin Hanson. For any faults it may have OB is not a boring site.
That’s sort of orthogonal to my point, but yes.
I flat out disagree, Male Sati is a perfectly ok article. There is in my opinion nothing harmful or unseemly about it at least nothing in excess of what we see on other topics here.
Do you have any idea at all what reading this site is like if you have a different set of preferences? We never make any effort at all to make this site at all more inclusive of ideological or value diversity, when it is precisely this that might help us refine the art more!
Here are a handful of my specific objections to Modern Male Sati:
Hanson is arguing that cryonicists’ wives should be accepting of the fact that their husbands are a) spending a significant portion of their income on life extension, and b) spending a lot of time thinking about what they are going to do with their wives are dead, and if they can’t accept these things, they are morally equivalent to widow-burners. This is not only needlessly insulting, but also an extremely unfair comparison.
In making this comparison, Hanson is also calling cryonicists’ wives selfish for not letting their husbands do what they want. This is a very male view of what a long-term relationship should be like, without anything to counterbalance it. It comes off like a complaint, sort of like, “my wife won’t let me go out to the bar with my male friends.”
Hanson writes: ” It seems clear to me that opposition is driven by the possibility that it might actually work.” This is wrong—it seems pretty obvious that your spouse believing in the “a)” and “b)” I listed above are valid reasons to be frustrated with them, regardless of whether you actually believe them. Also, this line strikes me as cheap point-scoring for cryonics (although I don’t know if Hanson intended it this way).
Hanson implicitly assumes that this is a gender issue, and talks about it as such, but this isn’t necessarily so. What about men who have cryonicist wives? It’s quite possible that there actually is a gender element involved here, but not even asking the question is what I object to.
Hanson’s tone encourages others to talk about women in a specific way, as an “other,” or an out-group. This is bad for various reasons that should be somewhat self-evident.
No, I don’t think I know what it’s like reading this site with a different set of preferences. That said, I would like to see some value diversity, and I would welcome some frank discussions of gender politics. But. There should also be people writing harshly-worded rebuttals when someone says something dreadfully wrong about the opposite gender or promotes some untrue stereotype.
It might also be worth noting that lack of value diversity is the reason I object to OB_2008. Factual content aside, Modern Male Sati and Is Overcoming Bias Male? promote a very specific view of gender politics that will anger and deter some potential readers. This creates a kind of evaporation cooling effect where posters can be even more wrong about gender politics and have no one to call them out on it.
Indian widows would use up a great deal of the husband’s estate while living on for unknown years or decades (the usual age imbalance + the female longevity advantage). As for thinking about afterwards… well, I imagine they would if they had had the option, as does anyone who takes out life insurance and isn’t expected to forego any options or treatments.
Assuming the conclusion. The question is are the outcomes equivalent… Reading your comment, I get the feeling you’re not actually grappling with the argument but instead venting about tone and values and outgroups.
Oh, so if the husband agrees not to go out to bars, then cryonics is now acceptable to you and the wife? A mutual satisfaction of preferences, and given how expensive alcohol is, it evens the financial tables too! Color me skeptical that this would actually work...
If this were a religious dispute, like, say, which faith to raise the kids in, would you be objecting? Is it ‘selfish’ for a Jewish dad to want to raise his kids Jewish? If it is, you seem to be seriously privileging the preferences of wives over husbands on all matters, and if not, it’d be interesting to see you try to find a distinction which makes some choices of education more important than cryonics!
Opposition to cryonics really is a gender issue: look at how many men versus women are signed up! That alone is sufficient (cryonicist wives? rare as hen’s teeth), but actually, there’s even better data than that in “Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics”, by Michael G. Darwin, Chana de Wolf, and Aschwin de Wolf; look at the table in the appendix.
It’s an unfair comparison because widow-burning comes with strong emotional/moral connotations, irrespective of actual outcomes. It’s like (forgive me) comparing someone to Hitler, in the sense that even if the outcome you’re talking about is equivalent to Hitler, the emotional reaction that “X is like Hitler” provokes is still disproportionately too large. (Meta-note: Let’s call this Meta-Godwin’s Law: comparing something to comparing something to Hitler.)
As for the actual outcomes: It seems to me that there is some asymmetry because the widow is spending their husband’s money after they are dead, whereas the cryonicist is doing the spending while they are still around. But I’ll drop this point because, as you said, I am less interested in the actual argument and more interested in how it was framed.
Yes; I explicitly stated this in my fifth bullet point.
This is not at all what I’m arguing. I am arguing that Hanson’s post pattern-matches to a common male stereotype, the overly-controlling wife. Quoting myself, “This is a very male view of what a long-term relationship should be like, without anything to counterbalance it.” I don’t think the exchange you describe would actually work in practice.
Forgive me, I do not understand how this is related to the point I was making. I don’t see the correspondence between this and cryonics. Additionally, this example is a massive mind-killer for me for personal reasons and I don’t think I’m capable of discussing it in a rational manner. I’ll just say a few more things on this point: I am not accusing cryonicists of being selfish. I am saying that it is unreasonable for Hanson to accuse wives of being selfish because of the large, presumably negative impact it has on a relationship. I am also not attempting to privilege wives’ preferences over husbands; apologies for any miscommunication that caused that perception. I should probably also add that I am male, which may help make this claim more credible.
Side comment: I have no idea how to even begin comparing these two things, but I think this point is indicative of the large inferential gap between you and I. My System 1 response was to value choice of religious education over cryonics, whereas you seem to be implying (if I’m parsing your comment correctly, which I may not be) that the latter is clearly more important.
Whoops. Ok. I didn’t realize that.
Can I write a harshly-worded rebuttal of the idea that promoting stereotypes is always morally wrong? Or perhaps an essay on how stereotypes are useful?
Oh, of course. In fact, before I saw your comment I changed the wording to “untrue stereotype.” Some stereotypes are indeed true and/or useful. What I object to is assuming that certain stereotypes are true without evidence, and speaking as if they are true, especially when said stereotypes make strong moral claims about some group. This is what Hanson does in Modern Male Sati and Is Overcoming Bias Male?
Edit: Tone is also important. Talking about some group as if they are an out-group is generally a bad thing. The two posts by Hanson that I mentioned talk about women as if they are weird alien creatures who happen to visit his blog.
Ah ok! I have no problem with such a proposed norm then.
Hold on a minute, though—I’m not sure we actually agree here. I envision this kind of norm excluding posts like Modern Male Sati and Is Overcoming Bias Male?. Do you?
I’m ok as long as we get to have a fair meta debate about a norm of excluding interesting posts like modern male sati and the like first. Also that one is allowed to challenge such norms later if circumstances change.
I mean what kind of a world would it be if people violated every norm they disagreed with? As long as the norm making system is generally ok, its better to not sabotage it. And who knows maybe I would be convinced in such a debate as well.
Fair point. Out of curiosity, what norms would you promote in this meta debate?