This is interesting—neither bogus’ nor JoeW’s definition of intersectionality exactly matches what I’d picked up from reading Racefail and the like.
I think of intersectionality as acknowledging that people have multiple traits, some of which give social advantages and some of which give social disadvantages. Having an advantage in one way doesn’t take away the disadvantage in another, and vice versa. Furthermore, people are not required to choose a single identity based on one trait.
I have never seen situational privilege mentioned before. I thought that if people had a trait that was usually privileged, they were just supposed to endure any mistreatment they received for it.
Would anyone happen to know the history of the adoption of the idea of intersectionality? I’m willing to bet that it was a hard fight, but I’m guessing.
I thought that if people had a trait that was usually privileged, they were just supposed to endure any mistreatment they received for it.
That’s not actually a standard norm—one thing worth noting is that when you look at the recent history of online SJ, what you’re seeing is the proliferation of terms, tactics, ideas and theoretical frameworks from the last century, in a variety of contexts, suddenly become very visible and popular. Lots of people are discovering it, and in many cases what took decades or longer to develop in some groups is being adopted wholesale by people who are often familiar with summaries, or a few key texts.
A lot of people are finding it very empowering. Those people are not especially more likely to have deep insight, uncommon empathy, or a very broad view of the world than anyone else. This means they’re going to be doing all the things people do in addition to talk about SJ, when talking about SJ.
Yes, this does mean some will be bullies, and sometimes whole groups will endorse that, essentially because in the process of bullying the person is also saying stuff they agree with, that they find empowering, and that is widely deprecated in society in general (often in ways that cause them tangible harm).
The trick is that bully-detection can run afoul of a related, but not similarly-pathological phenomenon. I wanna unpack this a little more because it’s kind of complicated, and how well you see or agree that there’s a distinction is often dependent on your own social values. It goes like this:
Some people have set up spaces to discuss some element of their experience in a SJ context—say, a blog that deals with racism in popular culture, posted online. While technically anyone can access it if they know the URL, the blog is not written so as to be maximally-understandable to the widest cross-section of possible audiences. This is fine—this is no different than discussing biology or astronomy publicly despite the sheer number of people who’d feel it was controversial to assert certain facts about evolution or cosmology, or who just don’t know much about the topic.
People who aren’t very knowledgeable about the topic, or have issues with it being discussed as a factual matter at all, may discover the blog and the discussion going on there. When they do, they’ll often attempt to participate in the discussion from their own starting point, and when the immediate responses don’t satisfy them, they’ll keep pushing at it.
Thing is, it is really, emphatically not up to the bloggers or the commentators to bring them up to speed. It just isn’t—yes, education is important, yes communicating your point persuasively to outsiders is an important skill, but we don’t expect the journal Nature to give everybody a basic, elementary-level understanding of physics before talking about the latest interesting results out of $LABORATORY. There’s nothing especially wrong with pointing that out; doing so confrontationally might not seem very polite, but politeness may not actually be warranted either, as it’ll merely encourage the person to keep demanding time and attention the folks there want for doing what it was they got together to do in the first place.
Explaining that this is not the place to come to be educated, or that it’s not something they’re volunteering to do, is seldom easy or productive to do gently. The goal is to get the person to stop trying to participate in a discussion they’re derailing. Social and communication norms will play a big part in how that’s phrased, too. It may be anything from arm’s-length polite to trollish depending on the community and the individual involved. The common factor is that the purpose of communication on this topic is to end the discussion, which is consuming scarce resources of time, attention and energy.
Every time I touch the social justice core community, I wish I hadn’t. I can read some of it without exploding, and I have some friends from it who I can talk to without wanting to smack them, but the central community is toxic. It’s not just about 101 spaces needing to be a separate thing; it’s negative-sum echo chambers. Here’s a recent example of someone biting me (skim post for context, search my name for my comment, the blogger’s reply is two down).
What’s the central community? I wasn’t aware SJ had one. Certainly given the strife between its disparate elements, I’d be a little surprised if one existed.
Well-known feminist/antiracist bloggers and well-trafficked parts of tumblr are most of what I’m thinking about. There’s plenty of infighting (that’s what makes it negative sum); that doesn’t mean it’s not a category I can point at.
I agree with Alicorn and NancyLebovitz that “social justice” discourse on the internet often suffers from echo-chambers and affective death spirals which give it an overall impression of being extremely phyg-ish and vulnerable to all sorts of biases and limited cognition.
The silver lining is that these detrimental features also eliminate its potential of exerting any kind of adverse influence on real-world politics and society. This is why I encourage people to refrain from commenting as “outsiders” on such blogs, so as to save their limited time and effort.
Heh. I take it you’ve been reading RationalWiki again.
(Edited to add: I regret having to explain the joke, but anyway: the obvious difference between the rationalist and SJ cmmunities is that the rationalist community is equipped with the proper cognitive tools and social norms for dealing with phyg-like tendencies, whereas social justice groups—broadly understood—are not. This marks a big difference between the two—which incidentally explains why I do find it at least marginally worthwhile to participate in LW. Equating these two situations really is not that different from what RationalWiki states in its LessWrong page: the denotation is broadly correct—the article may well be a useful sanity check for LW users—but the connotation is arguably very misleading.)
EDIT: Y’know what, actually, forget snippy replying back to the snip. What I find damn fascinating about this reply is that the suggestion that any of those labels might apply here immediately prompted a guess at which Other Tribe I must be secretly infiltrating from.
the obvious difference between the rationalist and SJ cmmunities is that the rationalist community is equipped with the proper cognitive tools and social norms for dealing with phyg-like tendencies, whereas social justice groups—broadly understood—are not.
To me this reads more as rationalist cheering than as a good argument in favor of LW social norms. Yes, we’ve generally got a good opinion of LW culture around here—that’s why we’re posting here rather than on, say, Tiger Beatdown. But that’s hardly surprising.
What are the specific norms and cognitive tools that make the LW community so well equipped, and where’s the evidence that we’re actually implementing them successfully? If we don’t have a good answer to that, we shouldn’t be making the claim.
To me this reads more as rationalist cheering than as a good argument in favor of rationalist social norms.
You may want to refer to EY’s article about Guardians of Ayn Rand. Objectivists may have been “rationalists” in some sense, but did they ever claim to have good cognitive and social tools against phyg-ishness? Of course they didn’t, because they expended no effort on developing such tools, and coming up with tools or successfully applying them conferred no status benefits within their social group. Do you spot the difference now? Good, it’s nice that we’re clearing this up.
If we don’t have a good answer to that, we shouldn’t be making the claim.
I agree that we should not be focusing too much (or at all) on this particular claim about ourselves, as a matter of basic epistemic hygiene: as LW insiders, we should fear and alieve that we really are being too phyg-ish, as opposed to not phyg-ish at all. Nonetheless, there are exceptions—such as when a naïve comparison is drawn between LessWrong and garden-variety social and political movements. At some point, it really becomes important to set the record straight.
Objectivists may have “rationalists” in some sense, but did they ever claim to have good cognitive and social tools against phyg-ishness? Of course they didn’t, because they expended no effort on developing such tools...
Depends how wide your scope is. It’s fairly rare for groups to use the cult terminology (my impression is that LW developed its vocabulary in that area mainly thanks to early accusations of being a personality cult centered on EY; consider Two Cult Koans). But it’s quite common for groups to identify as “the non-clique clique”, to borrow a phrase from a recent conversation: that’s an identity shared by all of Objectivism, LW rationality, and most strains of social justice. Their methods for attempting that status vary, but all indications are that it’s a hard problem, which is exactly why we should wait on data before making any strong claims about our methodology.
As to Objectivism specifically, my knowledge of the group is limited to Rand’s writings, but she seems to have been under the impression that what she saw as rigorous axiomatization would be enough to prevent the pitfalls of ideology. She put a huge amount of effort into streamlining her philosophy along those lines, far more than we’ve put into combating happy death spirals and the affect heuristic directly. In retrospect that was clearly a bad approach, but in her own context it wasn’t obviously so; it seemed to have worked for mathematics, after all, which was making huge strides around when she was writing.
But it’s quite common for groups to identify as “the non-clique clique”, to borrow a phrase from a recent conversation:
Unfortunately, “the non-clique clique” is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It’s all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints. It’s not clear that this adds anything in terms of basic hygiene.
… what she saw as rigorous axiomatization would be enough to prevent the pitfalls of ideology. She put a huge amount of effort into streamlining her philosophy along those lines …
I assume that Objectivism was not in fact the first known attempt at “rigorous axiomatized” philosophy—so the outside view should’ve been fairly clear, even at the time. Besides, it’s not clear what you (or perhaps Rand herself) mean by “ideology”: informally, rigorous axiomatization seems to be a recipe for absolute-sounding, black-and-white statements. Is it really plausible that this would not be understood at the time?
“the non-clique clique” is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It’s all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints.
Which is exactly my point. Everyone thinks this, and most of them are wrong. What I’m hoping for is some data point that suggests, from the outside view, that our approach of focusing on the underlying heuristics and biases is more effective at preventing actual affective death spirals than Rand’s axiomatization or SJ’s focus on symptoms. Once again, knowledge of bias isn’t well correlated with reduction of bias, and there’s very little consistency here in actual epistemic hygiene practice. The minicamps might have data, but I’m not involved in those.
Objectivism was not in fact the first known attempt at “rigorous axiomatized” philosophy—so the outside view should’ve been fairly clear [...] Besides, it’s not clear what you (or perhaps Rand herself) mean by “ideology”: informally, rigorous axiomatization seems to be a recipe for absolute-sounding, black-and-white statements.
Rand was looking for absolute-sounding statements; indeed, she was looking for absolute statements, things you could treat as theorems and therefore wouldn’t need to worry about bias in. It’s not too far wrong to describe Objectivism as an attempt to axiomatize political philosophy (and to a lesser extent other branches of philosophy, though her attempts at these were much weaker) along mathematical lines. This had been tried before (I believe Leibniz took a whack at it), but not successfully, and not famously.
It still seems to add up to that I (as a white person) am supposed to show unlimited patience. Also, the sort of anger you’re describing doesn’t just show up against people who show up in a dedicated online group which isn’t interested in doing 101 yet another time.
It still seems to add up to that I (as a white person) am supposed to show unlimited patience.
In what context? Nobody said you had to participate in the discussion, right? Is it vitally important that you be there, having that conversation with those people?
Also, the sort of anger you’re describing doesn’t just show up against people who show up in a dedicated online group which isn’t interested in doing 101 yet another time.
I...said that, yeah. I said that first, in fact. That was the first part of my post, before the other thing...
Ah, thank you, you’ve just crystalised some thoughts for me.
I think my definition of intersectional social justice now includes explicit precommitment to bypassing & minimising defensiveness. It’s as valued, encouraged and sought after as bypassing & minimising irrational biases are here.
Your comment prompted this when I realised that for me, external calls for me to get past my defensiveness cause very similar frustration to when I feel like I’m being told to be more patient/tolerant/self-effacing than I think is reasonable. It may be that it works similarly for you and others, too.
More specifically, no, no-one is supposed to show unlimited patience; minorities do not automatically “win” (qv. situational & relative privilege, plus lack of privilege does not confer a magical anti-jerk field). However we are all asked to do the work in acknowledging any defensiveness and its downstream reactions & responses.
I have other early ideas about defensiveness as a cognitive bias, too. :)
This is interesting—neither bogus’ nor JoeW’s definition of intersectionality exactly matches what I’d picked up from reading Racefail and the like.
I think of intersectionality as acknowledging that people have multiple traits, some of which give social advantages and some of which give social disadvantages. Having an advantage in one way doesn’t take away the disadvantage in another, and vice versa. Furthermore, people are not required to choose a single identity based on one trait.
I have never seen situational privilege mentioned before. I thought that if people had a trait that was usually privileged, they were just supposed to endure any mistreatment they received for it.
Would anyone happen to know the history of the adoption of the idea of intersectionality? I’m willing to bet that it was a hard fight, but I’m guessing.
That’s not actually a standard norm—one thing worth noting is that when you look at the recent history of online SJ, what you’re seeing is the proliferation of terms, tactics, ideas and theoretical frameworks from the last century, in a variety of contexts, suddenly become very visible and popular. Lots of people are discovering it, and in many cases what took decades or longer to develop in some groups is being adopted wholesale by people who are often familiar with summaries, or a few key texts.
A lot of people are finding it very empowering. Those people are not especially more likely to have deep insight, uncommon empathy, or a very broad view of the world than anyone else. This means they’re going to be doing all the things people do in addition to talk about SJ, when talking about SJ.
Yes, this does mean some will be bullies, and sometimes whole groups will endorse that, essentially because in the process of bullying the person is also saying stuff they agree with, that they find empowering, and that is widely deprecated in society in general (often in ways that cause them tangible harm).
The trick is that bully-detection can run afoul of a related, but not similarly-pathological phenomenon. I wanna unpack this a little more because it’s kind of complicated, and how well you see or agree that there’s a distinction is often dependent on your own social values. It goes like this:
Some people have set up spaces to discuss some element of their experience in a SJ context—say, a blog that deals with racism in popular culture, posted online. While technically anyone can access it if they know the URL, the blog is not written so as to be maximally-understandable to the widest cross-section of possible audiences. This is fine—this is no different than discussing biology or astronomy publicly despite the sheer number of people who’d feel it was controversial to assert certain facts about evolution or cosmology, or who just don’t know much about the topic.
People who aren’t very knowledgeable about the topic, or have issues with it being discussed as a factual matter at all, may discover the blog and the discussion going on there. When they do, they’ll often attempt to participate in the discussion from their own starting point, and when the immediate responses don’t satisfy them, they’ll keep pushing at it.
Thing is, it is really, emphatically not up to the bloggers or the commentators to bring them up to speed. It just isn’t—yes, education is important, yes communicating your point persuasively to outsiders is an important skill, but we don’t expect the journal Nature to give everybody a basic, elementary-level understanding of physics before talking about the latest interesting results out of $LABORATORY. There’s nothing especially wrong with pointing that out; doing so confrontationally might not seem very polite, but politeness may not actually be warranted either, as it’ll merely encourage the person to keep demanding time and attention the folks there want for doing what it was they got together to do in the first place.
Explaining that this is not the place to come to be educated, or that it’s not something they’re volunteering to do, is seldom easy or productive to do gently. The goal is to get the person to stop trying to participate in a discussion they’re derailing. Social and communication norms will play a big part in how that’s phrased, too. It may be anything from arm’s-length polite to trollish depending on the community and the individual involved. The common factor is that the purpose of communication on this topic is to end the discussion, which is consuming scarce resources of time, attention and energy.
Every time I touch the social justice core community, I wish I hadn’t. I can read some of it without exploding, and I have some friends from it who I can talk to without wanting to smack them, but the central community is toxic. It’s not just about 101 spaces needing to be a separate thing; it’s negative-sum echo chambers. Here’s a recent example of someone biting me (skim post for context, search my name for my comment, the blogger’s reply is two down).
What’s the central community? I wasn’t aware SJ had one. Certainly given the strife between its disparate elements, I’d be a little surprised if one existed.
Well-known feminist/antiracist bloggers and well-trafficked parts of tumblr are most of what I’m thinking about. There’s plenty of infighting (that’s what makes it negative sum); that doesn’t mean it’s not a category I can point at.
You know that doesn’t even add up to internet-famous, right? This is not the center of anything—just the slice of it most visible to you.
Imagine I used some other word, then. (Other slices are also visible to me, but they are less popular, and do not make me angry.)
I agree with Alicorn and NancyLebovitz that “social justice” discourse on the internet often suffers from echo-chambers and affective death spirals which give it an overall impression of being extremely phyg-ish and vulnerable to all sorts of biases and limited cognition.
The silver lining is that these detrimental features also eliminate its potential of exerting any kind of adverse influence on real-world politics and society. This is why I encourage people to refrain from commenting as “outsiders” on such blogs, so as to save their limited time and effort.
Why, it’s almost like LessWrong.
Heh. I take it you’ve been reading RationalWiki again.
(Edited to add: I regret having to explain the joke, but anyway: the obvious difference between the rationalist and SJ cmmunities is that the rationalist community is equipped with the proper cognitive tools and social norms for dealing with phyg-like tendencies, whereas social justice groups—broadly understood—are not. This marks a big difference between the two—which incidentally explains why I do find it at least marginally worthwhile to participate in LW. Equating these two situations really is not that different from what RationalWiki states in its LessWrong page: the denotation is broadly correct—the article may well be a useful sanity check for LW users—but the connotation is arguably very misleading.)
EDIT: Y’know what, actually, forget snippy replying back to the snip. What I find damn fascinating about this reply is that the suggestion that any of those labels might apply here immediately prompted a guess at which Other Tribe I must be secretly infiltrating from.
I think that says a lot.
To me this reads more as rationalist cheering than as a good argument in favor of LW social norms. Yes, we’ve generally got a good opinion of LW culture around here—that’s why we’re posting here rather than on, say, Tiger Beatdown. But that’s hardly surprising.
What are the specific norms and cognitive tools that make the LW community so well equipped, and where’s the evidence that we’re actually implementing them successfully? If we don’t have a good answer to that, we shouldn’t be making the claim.
You may want to refer to EY’s article about Guardians of Ayn Rand. Objectivists may have been “rationalists” in some sense, but did they ever claim to have good cognitive and social tools against phyg-ishness? Of course they didn’t, because they expended no effort on developing such tools, and coming up with tools or successfully applying them conferred no status benefits within their social group. Do you spot the difference now? Good, it’s nice that we’re clearing this up.
I agree that we should not be focusing too much (or at all) on this particular claim about ourselves, as a matter of basic epistemic hygiene: as LW insiders, we should fear and alieve that we really are being too phyg-ish, as opposed to not phyg-ish at all. Nonetheless, there are exceptions—such as when a naïve comparison is drawn between LessWrong and garden-variety social and political movements. At some point, it really becomes important to set the record straight.
Depends how wide your scope is. It’s fairly rare for groups to use the cult terminology (my impression is that LW developed its vocabulary in that area mainly thanks to early accusations of being a personality cult centered on EY; consider Two Cult Koans). But it’s quite common for groups to identify as “the non-clique clique”, to borrow a phrase from a recent conversation: that’s an identity shared by all of Objectivism, LW rationality, and most strains of social justice. Their methods for attempting that status vary, but all indications are that it’s a hard problem, which is exactly why we should wait on data before making any strong claims about our methodology.
As to Objectivism specifically, my knowledge of the group is limited to Rand’s writings, but she seems to have been under the impression that what she saw as rigorous axiomatization would be enough to prevent the pitfalls of ideology. She put a huge amount of effort into streamlining her philosophy along those lines, far more than we’ve put into combating happy death spirals and the affect heuristic directly. In retrospect that was clearly a bad approach, but in her own context it wasn’t obviously so; it seemed to have worked for mathematics, after all, which was making huge strides around when she was writing.
Unfortunately, “the non-clique clique” is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It’s all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints. It’s not clear that this adds anything in terms of basic hygiene.
I assume that Objectivism was not in fact the first known attempt at “rigorous axiomatized” philosophy—so the outside view should’ve been fairly clear, even at the time. Besides, it’s not clear what you (or perhaps Rand herself) mean by “ideology”: informally, rigorous axiomatization seems to be a recipe for absolute-sounding, black-and-white statements. Is it really plausible that this would not be understood at the time?
Which is exactly my point. Everyone thinks this, and most of them are wrong. What I’m hoping for is some data point that suggests, from the outside view, that our approach of focusing on the underlying heuristics and biases is more effective at preventing actual affective death spirals than Rand’s axiomatization or SJ’s focus on symptoms. Once again, knowledge of bias isn’t well correlated with reduction of bias, and there’s very little consistency here in actual epistemic hygiene practice. The minicamps might have data, but I’m not involved in those.
Rand was looking for absolute-sounding statements; indeed, she was looking for absolute statements, things you could treat as theorems and therefore wouldn’t need to worry about bias in. It’s not too far wrong to describe Objectivism as an attempt to axiomatize political philosophy (and to a lesser extent other branches of philosophy, though her attempts at these were much weaker) along mathematical lines. This had been tried before (I believe Leibniz took a whack at it), but not successfully, and not famously.
It still seems to add up to that I (as a white person) am supposed to show unlimited patience. Also, the sort of anger you’re describing doesn’t just show up against people who show up in a dedicated online group which isn’t interested in doing 101 yet another time.
Recent example—gender issues, not race.
In what context? Nobody said you had to participate in the discussion, right? Is it vitally important that you be there, having that conversation with those people?
I...said that, yeah. I said that first, in fact. That was the first part of my post, before the other thing...
Ah, thank you, you’ve just crystalised some thoughts for me.
I think my definition of intersectional social justice now includes explicit precommitment to bypassing & minimising defensiveness. It’s as valued, encouraged and sought after as bypassing & minimising irrational biases are here.
Your comment prompted this when I realised that for me, external calls for me to get past my defensiveness cause very similar frustration to when I feel like I’m being told to be more patient/tolerant/self-effacing than I think is reasonable. It may be that it works similarly for you and others, too.
More specifically, no, no-one is supposed to show unlimited patience; minorities do not automatically “win” (qv. situational & relative privilege, plus lack of privilege does not confer a magical anti-jerk field). However we are all asked to do the work in acknowledging any defensiveness and its downstream reactions & responses.
I have other early ideas about defensiveness as a cognitive bias, too. :)