This post about jokes and attitudes the provide cover for bad social actors really caught my interest. But the blogger’s position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
The point of the blog post is that jokes about certain gender and relationship stereotypes (men are idiots, women are the ball-and-chain) allow actual abusers slide by under the radar by asserting that they are joking whenever they are publically called out on inappropriate behavior. It really resonated with me—and to be frank, it seems aimed at the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
But the blogger’s position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
I object most to is what is left unsaid. For a faint second the author talks in gender balanced ways, then she drops it to spend the rest of the discussion showing how men do this thing wrong. The author could have used an additional anecdote about how women the equivalent, or a gender neutral anecdote, or an offhanded comment noting where women do it too.
But she didn’t.
Instead we’re left with the impression that unconscious oppression is something men perpetrate on women. It’s a similar trick to what she’s talking about in her post. Her post is still insightful regarding feminism, but it could have been more. Underneath the overt message I hear her saying that oppression and abuse is a male thing, and her responses in the comments reinforce that. Again, a very good post for feminism, but I had been hoping for humanism, and I left disappointed.
I thought she was saying it was a consent problem. The specific example involves a man, but I didn’t see her as saying that women can’t violate consent. In fact, her mocking of the January issue of Cosmo magazine includes calling out glamorizing of female-perpetrator identity theft.
More generally, can’t an advocate notice that the plurality or majority of the perpetrators of this type of problem are male, even while calling for a better social dynamic for both sexes? I don’t think the blogger would disagree.
I don’t think the majority of the people who do this are male. I can think of half a dozen occasions just over the holidays where this was done by a woman (and I can recall only one male counterexample). She probably sees it otherwise given her politics, but I’d say it’s equally split at best.
I do not expect her to make an equal opportunity blog post. However, you wanted to know why it’s met with hostility by some people. The post sends out hostility towards men in an unspoken way, so it is responded to in kind.
One reason gender politics is especially “mind-killing” is that the two least interesting/statistically significant/improbable positions (males are more THIS than females, females more THAT than males) also happen to be the two positions seen as the “strongest”.
I was in the past a regular reader of her blog, until an incident (inspired in large part by a rebuke authored by me, in point of fact) which is still referred to on other feminist blogs as evidence of her… unbalanced perspective, to put it politely. Holly is not a rationalist by any stretch of the imagination, and her blog is very “Our team versus their team.”
That title looks correct, but I do not visit her blog anymore as a rule—I was asked to leave, and I won’t violate that—so I’m not 100% certain. It wasn’t my position in the argument; the worst apparently came after I had left, when she started attacking random commenters. AFAIK my main role in the debacle was getting her riled up. My information on what happened after I left is secondhand, however, so I can’t point you at specific comments.
This may come back to haunt me re: prisoner’s dilemma but- I don’t respect rules that have vanishingly small chance of negative consequence if violated.
Surely she’s not monitoring IP addresses to call you out in public that you visited her blog when you said you didn’t? And even if she were- proxies! Google cache!
I’m an egoist, specifically of Objectivist bent; my rules exist and are followed for my sake, not hers. And I don’t stay where I’m not wanted; I can go where I am wanted, and it will be both a more productive use of my time, and more emotionally healthy for me.
But the blogger’s position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here’s a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.
Also simple contrarianism, though that’s not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.
the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
More sympathetically, people might (well, I’m sure some people do) see avoiding stereotype-based jokes as a step towards there being things you can’t say, and prefer some additional risk of saying harmful things to moving in that direction (possibly down a slippery slope).
the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
What are those?
On the object level, it isn’t a success of rational discussion that assertions like “privilege is a social dynamic which exists” turn immediately to the defensive reaction you mentioned. Reversing the discrimination is an extreme remedy, and like all extreme remedies, it gets deserved push-back. But there’s no sustained discussion of middle ground positions.
Although I may be mindkiled about this, I think that I am open to discussion of less extreme ways of reducing the pernicious effects of the privilege social dynamic. But even if one thinks that this social dynamic is not pernicious, it booggles my mind that people don’t acknowledge the dynamic occurs.
I think a significant amount of that hostility isn’t necessarily denying the existence of privilege, but denying that it’s a useful way of framing problems.
I also suspect a lot of it is backlash from over-enthusiastic social justice advocates trying to shoehorn absolutely every social problem imaginable into a context of unilateral power dynamics.
It once was the case that privilege was seen as unilateral and one dimensional. I’m not sure this is the case anymore on the cutting edge of so-called privilege theory.
A black man in the United States might suffer from some effects of white-privilege (vs. white men) while benefiting from some aspects of speaking-English-privilege (vs. recent immigrants).
More generally, I’m not aware of any other framing analysis that is (1) acceptable to anti-feminists and (2) sufficiently nuanced to be useful. Hansonian status analysis is not really capable of providing insight into what we should do to solve the perceived problem—even if it is descriptively accurate (at a high level).
Speaking for myself, I find the privilege framework to be the one lacking in nuance or pragmatic application. I use the term “unilateral” because its core mechanic appears to be “person A has power person B doesn’t, and person B suffers as a result”. Coming from a game-theoretic perspective, which routinely deals with unexpected and perverse outcomes from agents being given different sets of choices, this seems crude in the extreme.
On the subject of multidimensionality, I’ve read up on intersectionality in good faith, and made an effort to engage with it, but it seems to boil down to multivariate analysis, only instead of using data, simply making stuff up.
What do you want out of a framework? What should it do, and why is agreement important?
I will quite happily construct a model to try and capture the behaviour of real-world social problems, drawing on a variety of methods and disciplines. I’m not sure I need agreement from any other party to do that. How well it describes or predicts real-world events is an empirical question.
When I see people talking about privilege, it generally isn’t because they want to go out and solve social problems, but because they want to show how sophisticated and moral and liberal they are, or to identify other sophisticated moral liberal people by engaging in exclusive dialogue with them. If that’s what such a framework is used for, I’m not entirely sure the absence of one is all that important.
I want analysis that tells me what to do to create the changes that I want in society. Not just imposed top-down, but deeply settled as part of how society works—on the level of “get a job” or “be polite.” The sort of thing “equal-pay-for-equal-work” aspires towards, but maybe hasn’t reached.
The privilege-framework says that the way to do that is to call out privilege when you see it. If someone makes the non-consent joke the blogger highlighted, say “Wow! That’s not right.” (Then change the topic, probably).
Do you think that response won’t work, isn’t worth the effort, is aimed at a non-problem, or other criticism?
why is agreement important?
Assuming the counter-parties share terminal values but are applying inconsistent interventions, at least one party is doing something that doesn’t help solve the problem, and may even be interfering with the good solution. Worst case scenario is that both parties are doing it wrong.
Do you think that response won’t work, isn’t worth the effort, is aimed at a non-problem, or other criticism?
I have a lot of time for the sentiment in the blog post you linked to, but don’t think privilege is a necessary concept in order to appreciate it. I don’t even believe it’s the most obvious criticism of the behaviour in question.
By way of analogy, lets say Pat wanders around everywhere with a sword and Chris doesn’t wander around everywhere with a sword. If Pat stabs the defenceless Chris in the chest with a sword, you could frame this in the context of power dynamics, and bemoan how Pat has “sword privilege”, but this doesn’t really get to the core of the problem.
Calling out Pat’s sword privilege doesn’t offer any explanation as to why Pat has the sword, or why Pat was motivated to stab Chris. It provides us with a narrative for establishing blame and victimhood, but it doesn’t actually tell us anything about the underlying situation or how to remedy it, at any level.
Ultimately, I think that a lot of ordinary social injustice arises because no one speaks out loud “Don’t do that.” Essentially, unwillingness to discuss social rules.
Saying “Parental Abuse is Wrong” is a useless Applause Light for most people.
Calling out Pat’s sword privilege doesn’t offer any explanation as to why Pat has the sword, or why Pat was motivated to stab Chris.
In case it isn’t clear, I agree that calling out sword-privilege is only worthwhile if it reduces similar sword-privilege-abuse in the future. It’s an empirical question whether (1) calling out privilege reduces abuse or (2) explaining why Pat has the sword is helpful to anything (figuring out what the abuse is, how to response effectively, or anything else). I suspect yes for both. But even if the answer to (2) is no, that doesn’t demonstrate the answer to (1) is no.
Does it not seem odd to you to view the case of an unarmed person being stabbed by an armed assailant as an issue of social justice by default?
This is perhaps an unfair question, because I placed it in that context to begin with, but one of the things that’s so maddening about the whole subject is how (for want of a better term) privilege is so privileged as an explanatory mechanism. There are certainly circumstances where it has merit, but it seems a ridiculous weapon of choice in circumstances where more appropriate explanatory mechanisms exist.
Does it not seem odd to you to view the case of an unarmed person being stabbed by an armed assailant as an issue of social justice by default? . . . This is perhaps an unfair question . . .
Perhaps? :) I choose not to fightyour hypothetical and you get upvotes for closing the trap. Not a big deal, but not cool.
more appropriate explanatory mechanisms exist.
I’m interested in hearing about them, and using them to figure out how to be more effective in figuring out what social changes are better for my terminal values and causing those changes.
Edit: Also, let’s not forget that there are high status locals who deny that the problem we are talking about even exists.
It wasn’t intended as a trap. Part of the point of the hypothetical was that “sword-privilege” is a bit of a silly idea, and not an obvious go-to choice for reasoning about people stabbing other people. I genuinely didn’t expect you to put up a defence for it.
As for explanatory mechanisms, I tend to favour explanations from economics and systems-based sciences, as they have a rich catalogue of unusual behaviour patterns that arise from interacting parties being given different choices. I’m generally quite cautious in their application, though, because it doesn’t take much for an elegant and aesthetically-pleasing model to be subtly wrong.
As for explanatory mechanisms, I tend to favour explanations from economics and systems-based sciences
Fair enough. As you noted, the risk with any analytical framework is that it intentionally or unintentionally becomes a single variable analysis—and thus useless. My sense is that economics applied to social interactions is particularly at risk for this type of problem—leading either to Marxism or blogosphere ev. psych.
It wasn’t intended as a trap. Part of the point of the hypothetical was that “sword-privilege” is a bit of a silly idea, and not an obvious go-to choice for reasoning about people stabbing other people.
Ah, I see. You were trying to change the topic—and I missed it.
I certainly agree that privilege is a terrible framework for analyzing actual swords-in-unarmed-people situations. But that wasn’t the topic and I didn’t want to talk about those situations—so I assumed you were making a somewhat hostile metaphor and choose not to call you on the hostility in order to keep engaging in the conversation. Talk about long inferential distance. :)
The privilege-framework says that the way to do that is to call out privilege when you see it.
Be careful not to confuse “Online SJ-oriented callout culture” with “the idea of power gradiants and institutionalized privilege as a tool for analyzing complex social and cultural phenomena.”
Absolutely, but it’s not necessarily as simple as patternmatching to “claims label” and “is visible and obvious to me personally.” Especially when you’re dealing with stuff like religion, ideology, culture or politics, it can be hard to make any really meaningful statements that generalize usefully.
How does socialism work out in practice? It’s tempting for some folks to point to the USSR, but that’s just because it’s a big obvious thing with the word “Socialism” prominently emblazoned on it. The EU is pretty darn relevant there as well.
When most Westerners think “Islam”, they don’t think “polyandric, matrifocal, highly-educated pluralists comfortable with secularism” either, but the Minangkabau people outnumber al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban combined. Those latter have a lot more to do with the first things that spring to mind when Westerners hear the word “Islam” though.
What I’m saying is, “How does this work out in practice” is terribly vulnerable to the availability bias.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think socialism (State Communism) and socialism (western Europe—I’m not sure what the best name is for democracies with strong safety nets) are the same thing—they have extremely different practices and trajectories. I think this supports your point that you need to actually know something before you try to address the question of how an idea works out in practice.
If it’s any consolation, I don’t just wonder that sort of thing for social justice. I’ve thought how Atlas Shrugged, a novel which is an extended attack on crony capitalism, has led to people who support corporations in general.
Now that I think about it, Rand’s “concrete bound mentality” (grabbing on to a specific and not necessarily relevant example—she’s against it) is a special case of availability bias.
nod But they both draw from a common wellspring of thought, and are influenced by many of the same formative works (having since developed themselves in greatly different directions). They’re both socialism, in the same sense that a platypus (lays eggs, sweats milk, senses electricity, has simple teeth) and a human (gives live birth to well-developed offspring, has dedicated milk glands, no electroception at all, complex teeth) are both mammals: it’s a fact of their origins. They’ve simply diverged substantially—but this divergence isn’t so great that it’s meaningless to speak of them as both forms of mammal (has hair, endothermic metabolism, produces milk, three middle ear bones, has neocortex, is of amniote clade—the critical bit is that these commonalities are not coincidental, they are not convergent traits).
If I’m doing something analytically wrong here, please feel free to give specifics. Crocker’s Rule: I promise not to withdraw or lash out simply because I’m defensive about your criticism—I’m saying this to you, not the world.
PS. I don’t understand the relevance of the quoted text.
The discussion here appears to be talking about “privilege” in a way that looks, from the outside of the conversation, like the use of the term “privilege” by both participants is based on attempting to reverse-engineer its theoretical structure from the way it’s used online by social justice activists.
The idea of “privilege”, as an academic notion within critical theories, does not boil down to “the thing that when you see it, you should call it out.” Exploring and unpacking the idea may or may not come with exhortations to any particular course of action; this is especially so in the case of texts where the idea is being formulated, criticized, elaborated upon or revisited. That isn’t even necessarily implied.
On the other hand it’s very common to the use of the term by a certain subset of online activists, and it seems like for a lot of LWers group is their first or primary exposure to the idea. The result is akin to talking about socialism in general, by modelling it in terms of the Red Guard youth movement during China’s Cultural Revolution.
Here was my attempt at a brief articulation, early in this conversation. I’m trying not to just reverse engineer from social justice blogging. But if I screwed things up, I’m open to suggestion.
I agree that privilege isn’t inherently unjust. It just turns out that certain kinds of privilege are antithetical to my terminal values—and calling out appears to be the best response.
On the other hand it’s very common to the use of the term by a certain subset of online activists, and it seems like for a lot of LWers group is their first or primary exposure to the idea. The result is akin to talking about socialism in general, by modelling it in terms of the Red Guard youth movement during China’s Cultural Revolution.
Well, I didn’t say that (I’m not aware offhand of a plausible instance of the thing the term refers to that doesn’t strike me as undesirable/wrong insofar as Jandila’s morality function ouputs wrong).
From the bit you linked:
I’m not sure this is the case anymore on the cutting edge of so-called privilege theory.
Your wording makes me wince a little but I’m not sure if I can unpack why here (something about the implied model of intellectual discourse). In any case, you are quite correct that a simplistic analysis of the idea is not the best that critical theory has to offer, although LW doesn’t have many people in the cluster (it’s more than a matter of just reading a couple texts).
LW doesn’t have many people in the [critical theory] cluster
Yes, the core problem is that LW lacks this population—and doesn’t seem to care.
Your wording [about cutting edge theory] makes me wince a little but I’m not sure if I can unpack why here
Maybe it’s a relic of fact that most of my contact with “soft” academics is legal academia.
Legal issues go from non-existent to unsettled to settled. Tenure lies in writing only about unsettled. Cutting edge legal theories are a thing, even for practicing lawyers (I’ve even got one I’m waiting for the right case to test). Then the caselaw thickens—and your theory is now settled practice or Timecube level crazy.
In short, sorry for making you wince. Well, sorta sorry. :)
Yes, the core problem is that LW lacks this population—and doesn’t seem to care.
nod It’s pretty synonymous with stuff like the Sokal affair to them.
Maybe it’s a relic of fact that most of my contact with “soft” academics is legal academia.
That does go rather a long way toward explaining it, yeah. I come at it from anthropology and linguistics, with a side order each of biology and semiotics, so my go-to ideas about “the progression of theories and the state of the art in this field” are...substantially harder to capture, but basically it looks a bit like evolution in language or biology with a generous dose of lateral transfer a la art.
Then the caselaw thickens—and your theory is now settled practice or Timecube level crazy.Then the caselaw thickens—and your theory is now settled practice or Timecube level crazy.
A law graduate friend of mean feels compelled to add: “Or both.”
In short, sorry for making you wince. Well, sorta sorry. :)
Is there any discussion in this literature about whether this cluster of theory necessarily implies an anti-realist metaethical position? My own metaethical theories have mostly been driven by the implications of these types of social theories—but it wouldn’t surprise me if my conclusions in that regard were unsophisticated and suspect.
I generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.
That is, if I endorse the privilege framework because I believe it effectively motivates right action according to my values better than the alternatives, then one option is to embrace it and act accordingly. If my belief is correct, one consequence of that will be that I am more reliably motivated to act rightly by my values. If I also talk about my actions and my motivations for those actions, I will provide evidence of that to others, thereby encouraging them to also embrace the privilege framework (at least, insofar as they share my values, and possibly even if they don’t).
In the meantime, they won’t, and (as you say) we won’t be perfectly efficient. Hysteresis is like that.
The advantage of hysteresis is that if it turns out I’m wrong and the privilege framework doesn’t optimally motivate right action, there’s a greater chance of collecting evidence of that truth before we’ve collectively invested too much in a suboptimal practice.
Given how often we’re wrong about stuff, that seems like a worthwhile advantage to preserve.
I could probably word that more succinctly as “Practice beats proselytizing.”
It didn’t seem directly relevant to TimS’s comment. That said, it would be a remarkable coincidence if a framework reliably motivated right action without corresponding to reality.
Agreed that if the only metric for right action is whether the action is motivated by my framework, then it’s not a coincidence at all that my framework motivates right action. It’s also true that if I know of no metric at all for right action, then I can’t know whether a framework reliably motivates it.
That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Some of my motive is reducing inferential distance. Some of the response to daenerys’ recent post on female experiences was essentially “I didn’t realize that type of harm was occurring.” Ideally, having a useful framework will help others notice those types of harms more easily.
Also, I think there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy inherent in some anti-feminist frameworks. To use a totally different example, I expect most Republicans in the US House of Representatives hate Alinsky, but they sure seem to have learned his lesson that procedural rules benefit the status quo—and therefore, those who oppose the status quo have less reason to respect them.
That’s the opposite of the point being made in the post, not a generalization of it.
At least, if I’ve understood you correctly — you’re saying that when people make jokes about coercive/irresponsible men and passive-aggressive/nagging women, they are expressing a universal truth that society refuses to hear stated. To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as “All relationships are abusive”.
The post TimS links to asserts, rather, that these jokes represent a blurring of distinctions that society fails to recognize. There actually do exist relationships that are more consensual and ones that are more abusive — the distinction — but insofar as everyone pretends that all men are coercive and all women passive-aggressive, they blur this distinction.
Moreover, blurring this distinction provides cover for the actual abusers by making the good relationships out to be just as bad as the abusive ones. If everyone is required to talk about their relationships in nonconsensual/abusive terms, then the people in consensual relationships cannot distinguish themselves as such. Hence, the post: “Even though Rowdy’s brother-in-law wasn’t really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn’t want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would.”
It’s a little like Soviet-era “moral equivalence” arguments, or more generally the tu quoque fallacy, when tu don’t actually do quoque!
There’s a lot of truth in stereotypes. Not all women nag, but more do than men. Not all men are irresponsible, but more are than women. Since it’s very difficult to make statements like that seriously in modern society—usually, you can only say it either anonymously or in groups of close friends whom you trust to not take it personally—a lot of people embed it in comedy, where the filters are lower, and where there’s more reason for it to come up in the first place than just expressing bias.
It’s not a harmless practice, of course, but it does provide a useful safety valve sometimes.
I seriously doubt that most people who make up jokes or stereotypes truly have enough data on hand to reasonably support even a generalization of this nature.
Stereotypes are largely consensus-based, which gives them a larger data pool than any individual would have. If a comedian starts making jokes about the foibles of a large group, and most people haven’t experienced those same foibles, they’re not going to find it funny. Now, smaller groups can get a lot nastier treatment, both because there’s less evidence to contradict a stereotype, and because they can turn into the token butt of jokes(Newfies being the stereotypical example where I’m from—nobody actually believes the jokes, but everybody makes them just because they’re the group you make dumb-people jokes about). But “women” is a far too common group to get much in the way of false stereotypes, for example.
At this point, I should also point out the dangers of stereotypes that are true only because culture forces them to be. For example, saying that women needed protection in the 19th century was basically true, but it was largely true because we didn’t let women protect themselves. Feedback loops are a real danger.
I think you are discounting effects such as confirmation bias, which lead us to notice what we expect and can easily label while leading us to ignore information that contradicts our beliefs. If 99 out of 100 women don’t nag and 95 out of 100 men don’t nag, given a stereotype that women nag, I would expect people think of the one woman they know that nags, rather than the 5 men they know that do the same.
Frankly, without data to support the claim that:
There is a lot of truth in stereotypes
I would find the claim highly suspect, given even a rudimentary understanding of our psychological framework.
It’s a system seriously prone to false positives, of course. But I think the odds of a true stereotype getting established are sufficiently higher than the odds of a false one getting established that it still counts as positive evidence.
Edit: Per discussion below, I should clarify that I’m referring to a particular think that a particular group engages in(“political correctness”), not the psychological phenomenon in general.
And, sure, if nobody can seriously express the sentiment that women nag more than men do, or that men are more irresponsible than women, then being able to humorously express the sentiment that all women nag and all men are irresponsible is, as you say, a useful way of averting groupthink. It’s not good, but it’s better than nothing.
I’m not nearly as confident as you sound that the premise is true, but I agree that the conclusion follows from it.
It’s sometimes helpful to draw a distinction between “lots of people do X” and “nobody is allowed to do Y.”
The groupthink Alsadius is positing is the latter; it involves nobody being allowed to express certain sentiments. As I said, I don’t see where he’s getting his confidence that this is true, as I don’t see much compelling evidence for it, but accepting it as a hypothetical I agree that the “safety valve” theory he’s talking about follows from it.
The groupthink you’re positing is the former and suggests different tactics.
FWIW, I don’t think it is true—you don’t have far to go to find a claim that, say, women are crazy, or black people steal, or half a dozen other terribly politically incorrect things(true ones and false ones). But a big part of the reason is because we have these unofficial lines of communication. Good luck finding official data on things like racial crime stats—self-censorship has basically destroyed that. Chris Rock is all we’re left with.
Huh, it seems it’s not as bad as I’ve thought. I’ve heard a lot of debate over the years about police forces not collecting the data, but I suppose that’s not true everywhere. Good to know.
So, OK, if you don’t think it’s true that the use of stereotypes in humor is a safety valve to avert groupthink, I’m not exactly sure why you said that when I asked, but I’m happy to drop that line of discussion.
Now you seem to be saying that the use of stereotypes in humor is a safety valve to avert censorship… do you actually think that?
It’s a way of saying things that aren’t supposed to be said. Whether the level of “supposed to” is a bit of moral outrage(like it is today), or a gulag(like it was in the Soviet Union), people use jokes to get around barriers. That serves the function of evading censorship sometimes, as well as the function of undermining certain kinds of groupthink to a certain extent. It’s not perfect, but it serves a role.
And now we’ve switched from talking about the value of stereotypes in humor to the value of humor more generally. I agree with your statements about the value of humor more generally, and am otherwise tapping out here.
I tend to think of stereotypes as a comedic aid, at least the sort that can easily be discussed here. I think that’s why the conversation has shifted. I will admit that I sort of lost the plot, though.
The stereotypes I actually use to guess at people’s traits tend to be embedded in details of how people dress, talk, and act—I’ve successfully pegged people’s personalities pretty closely from nothing more than the glasses they wear before—but that’s not the sort of thing you can discuss very easily on a text board.
For stereotypes specifically, I think the only dangerous thing that they really avert is excessive political correctness. Insisting that people be perfectly blind to observable characteristics of others is a silly position to take, and stereotypes are sort of an implicit summary of the evidence attached to an observable characteristic. Actual data is preferable, when it’s available, but for some of the soft attributes it’s not. “Groupthink” was a bit of a snarky way of phrasing it, and not a particularly accurate one. I’m not speaking about groupthink in general, I’m speaking about a particular kind that happens to be present in some parts of modern society.
I agree that insisting that people be perfectly blind to observable characteristics of others is a silly position to take, and I can see where using stereotypes in humor stands in opposition to that position, and therefore provides some (though not necessarily net) positive value.
I didn’t think I was dismissing an opposing argument; rather, pointing out that the article TimS linked to was making the opposite of the claim that you stated as a generalization of its point: not “these jokes express unstated general truths” but rather “these jokes express false generalizations … and thereby leave significant distinctions unstated and, indeed, more difficult to state.”
This is true regardless of whether the “things you can’t say” are true. Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It’s a death spiral. All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you’re wrong.
There are no red pills, only blue pills with red sugar coatings.
This is true regardless of whether the “things you can’t say” are true.
Not quite. The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
Nevertheless, I agree that the joke is no substitute for an argument. It’s necessary to get society to the point where it’s possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.
The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
Nonsense. All it takes is that the audience want to believe it. Experience is not truth; a large part of people’s “experience” is their own beliefs. This is just the same death spiral again. If they laugh, that proves I’m right; if they boo, that proves I’m right.
It’s necessary to get society to the point where it’s possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.
The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Experience is not truth; a large part of people’s “experience” is their own beliefs.
Heck, a large part of people’s “experience” is fiction.
For instance: By the age of fifteen, if there are no doctors and nobody chronically ill in your immediate family, you’ve likely spent more time watching and reading fiction about doctors and medicine than you’ve spent discussing medicine with actual doctors. So your ideas of what doctors do are going to be based more directly on fiction than reality. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of common false beliefs promulgated by medical fiction. (Warning, TVTropes.)
For that matter, I suspect many fifteen-year-olds have heard more lawyer jokes than they have heard sentences spoken by an actual lawyer other than a politician. (Though one can hope they’ve taken more of an impression from Atticus Finch than from kill-all-the-lawyers jokes.)
(And yet, many fifteen-year-olds decide to become doctors … and lawyers … and other professions whose reputation and habits they have learned about chiefly through fiction, jokes, and stories rather than through observation.)
For that matter, the claim that “the joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience” implies that the erstwhile popularity of jokes about Poles being stupid and impractical was good evidence that Poles actually were stupid and impractical.
implies that the erstwhile popularity of jokes about Poles being stupid and impractical was good evidence that Poles actually were stupid and impractical.
The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
If they laugh, that proves I’m right;
Note the difference in meaning between the two italicized phrases?
if they boo, that proves I’m right.
What did I say that could reasonably be interpreted this way?
(Edit: thinking about it, I think I see how you got that impression: Laughter is evidence that you’re right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you’re onto something. Indifference, or a non-extreme negative reaction is thus evidence that you’re wrong.)
That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Seriously, could you at least try not to straw-man my position?
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It’s a death spiral.
I don’t think you should call an idea a death spiral. It is vulnerable in the way you say, but that doesn’t reflect on the idea, it just means we humans have to be really careful with it.
We do have a whole sequence on how to deal with such ideas. None of the advice is “don’t believe it”.
All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you’re wrong.
Again, we have plenty of material on LW for conserving expected evidence and watching for biases.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses, I recommend that you spend your time convincing them to study rationality instead of convincing them to believe things for reasons other than truth.
The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists. Eugene had explicitly generalized to other taboo issues anyway.
There are idiots who say such things, but there are also a lot of really interesting ideas (in the sense that they are important and debateable) that don’t get discussed enough because people punish anyone who brings them up. Censorship of whole topics doesn’t really seem like a good way to handle a few vile idiots.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers). This apparent difference in the power of the arguments can confuse naive open-minded people (like myself a few days ago). Please consider this when responding to dumb ideas.
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers).
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
This is a good point. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I’ve been having a crisis of faith on quite a few of those “red pill” ideas recently and I’m sure this will be useful next time I think about any of it.
That said, it seems to me that the standard cult attractor advice and conservation of expected evidence is sufficient to diffuse this effect. Do you think so, too? Or do you think we are not good enough at it such that we have to add extra caution? Or something else?
Basically what do you recommend for a well-sequenced LWer to do to entangle their beliefs with reality on these sorts of issues?
That is not my observation.
Huh. I wonder why. I don’t really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet? I guess then we would see the opposite on PUA forums; mostly average idiots who can’t handle the is-ought distinction, and a few intelligent mainstreamers coming in and poking holes in people’s tripe (I also might expect a few more troll raids from mainstreamers than there are troll raids from PUA to mainstreamer areas, though this could easily be confounded by other factors)
The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting.
That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...
I did notice (since you sent me there looking for it) that it was callous and condescending and such (even for cracked). I also noticed that I don’t usually notice that kind of stuff outside LW and other “intellectual areas”. If you hadn’t pointed it out, I would have just filtered the crusty crap and kept the good advice at it’s core. I guess it’s a habit I picked up from 4chan.
The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be.
I’ve got a better one. I summed up the whole thing with “Just Do It!”. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article. Here’s why:
I run into pieces of genuine good advice all the time, on LW and elsewhere, and I’ve noticed that I can’t really learn or take advice from just a summary of it. Summaries of ideas works really well to precipitate concepts that you already have all the support for, and to convey dry facts, but not for advice and experience. See moral truth in fiction for an analogous argument. As an example, When I read truly a part of you, I was like “yeah that’s cool”, it wasn’t until later that I figured the idea out for myself and realized “holy crap someone already told me this.”
So with that said, even if you can boil down the essential idea of an article to a single sentence, it may still have substantial value as something that creates the experience required for you to actually get the idea. I think that cracked article works like this. It’s a simple idea (not even 6 simple ideas), but all the added inflammatory crust create an experience the actually communicates the idea, instead of just saying it.
I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it’s exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn’t get the point across.
I will throw in that the “come on aren’t you man enough to hear the truth?” thing is toxic as a rhetorical device, as it can make otherwise worthless stuff more compelling. (because if you don’t even read this then you are weak).
I don’t really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet?
Like cracked.com and 4chan? Sensibleness is not the filter for popularity on the internet.
That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...
Different people respond to different forms. Some are suckers for a man in a white coat intoning “studies have shown”. Some will lap up Deep Wisdom from anyone in Tibetan robes. Some will believe anyone who shouts at them loudly enough. (Makes for some interesting dynamics on PUA and NLP forums, where assertion is alpha, but both agreement and disagreement are beta.)
However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article.
It’s more that you can write the same content with a completely different 99%, with many completely different 99%s. Ayn Rand, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Feynman could have written the same content, in different ways. How does one determine whether one is responding to the clothing of the message, rather than the content? The red pill idea is particularly attractive to anyone who thinks they’re smarter than those around them. And look where we are, LessWrong, where “contrarian” is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.
I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it’s exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn’t get the point across.
Skilful means, as the Buddhists put it. But of those who think they learned something from that article, how many would have learned whatever message the writer might have expressed in the same style?
And look where we are, LessWrong, where “contrarian” is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.
Can you link to an example of someone using it as a compliment? I don’t think this is actually the case. It’s simply much less of an insult here than it is in most “skeptic” communities.
In the first link you quoted me describing Moldbug, I should clarify it was used as a put down. I’ve said quite explicitly in other posts that I strongly agree with Hanson on contrarianism.
In the second link the person continues:
The result is that I’m biased towards contrarian theses, which I think is useful for improving group rationality in most cases, but still isn’t rational.
The third is a good example but it is in an article talking about how weird LessWrong is for its love of contrarianism.
I did mean “and most of all contrarian” quite seriously, I just didn’t expect readers to take that as good. It was meant as a warning since I think Moldbug would be a better thinker if he was less contrarian but I’ll update on you reading of it when using the term in the future.
This apparent misunderstanding on second thought isn’t surprising since this community is self-selected for the kind of people who like enjoy contrarian arguments. Weird out there (not saying incorrect) beliefs such as buying cryonics being a good idea otherwise wouldn’t be popular here.
In addition to this if you visit a site where examples of human cognitive failure are investigate every day and individual debasing techniques discussed, but little ephasis is given on how to build communities that have good epistemology or avoid the biases one seems likely to find the story of “lone genius exposes establishment consensus as nonsense” more plausible than otherwise.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
For what it’s worth, I agree that this poster is at least as characteristic of the meme cluster we’re talking about as its more polite/locally celebrated/refined advocates. What’s worse, I suspect that it’s the locally celebrated “red-pill” contrarians who are shrinking from the conclusions of many of their (anti-egalitarian, etc) memes and that this poster just logically extrapolates the “red-pill” premises to produce his alarming view of gender, “deviancy”, etc.
Another far more famous example is Theodore Beale/Vox Day… and a few other bloggers whom I’d rather not link to.
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers).
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers).
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers).
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill merchant.
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers).
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill merchant.
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers).
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill merchant.
This apparent difference in the power of the arguments can confuse naive open-minded people (like myself a few days ago).
Whoa, damn, you mean to say you recanted? That’s cool, I guess. Now join me in my meta-meta-meta-contrarian ivory tower; you’re smarter and more diligent than me. Although less interested in politics, I guess.
I’ve sort of gone back on one specific piece of evidence, which was that contrarians on some issues tend to have much stronger arguments, and therefor are probably right.
Yvain explained that quite well by noting that believers of popular belief have no incentive to seriously engage contrarians, lest they “legitimize” them or appear like they were taking them seriously. It is much more individually beneficial to point and laugh.
An extension of that, though is that you can get signalling absurdity arms-races that cause the mainstream position to become as absurd as possible. (see for example, Australia banning small-breast porn and most of the world banning drawn loli porn because “can’t let those damn pedos get off”).
Yvain ignored the implications for mainstream belief quality (at least as far as I could tell). But it seems pretty damning to me.
That’s what the quoted comment was referring to.
I’m unsure where I stand relative to you, Konkvistador, Moldbug, etc in all this. I’m still mostly Universalist in morality (universal brotherhood fuck yeah, let’s tear apart and rebuild the universe if it disagrees, etc), but pretty much reject all of its factual claims about literal equality, effectiveness of collective governance, etc. If you like, we could talk in more detail about this. (I would like that; I’m interested in your view, but haven’t had a chance to figure it out).
Don’t know why you think I’m smarter or more diligent, but you’re right that I think politics is a waste of time (except to root out political crud that you didn’t know you had, which is what I’ve been doing recently).
Now join me in my meta-meta-meta-contrarian ivory tower
That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
I’ve been thinking of making a new political slogan aimed at the “thoughtcrime” crowd: “What you need is red ink, not red pills!” Meaning that there really aren’t horrible truths about society that are hidden from the ignorant masses but revealed to the brave and sufficiently cynical few; most people (even the “average” ones) do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in, but cannot articulate and communicate it, so on some topics only a scrambled message of discontent and anger can be heard.
(Sorry for getting into tribal matters, but this is explicitly about tribalism:)
In particular, a long time ago I asked you and your alt-right associates: why do they think liberals are so adamantly in denial about the possiblity of racial differences in intelligence. All the alt-right/reactionary commenters everywhere seem to think that it’s clear-cut: liberals hate Truth in all its forms, and “elite” liberals especially hate it, and they simply want to speed the collapse of decent society with such anti-Truth policies.
I tentatively suggested, however, 1) that there are no real contradictions between the ideology of modern liberalism/progressivism (as it is preached and written), and, say, the average Jew having higher IQ than the average European having higher IQ than average black people—and 2) that the semi-official ban on the topic in liberal academia exists because of complicated self-image and methodology issues going back to the Enlightenment era, and because of sincere, well-intentioned fear of resurgent racist oppression.
So, essentially, nobody is deliberately spreading lies, deliberately concealing truths, making up stories about a dragon in the garage, etc. Instead we have a complex, silent carpet brawl around the meta question on the proper relation of the normative and the descriptive in politics—e.g. given how much we value moral equality, should we try to justify it with facts/axioms about our environment, or with a deontological, non-disprovable position? - where neither side is even psychologically able to state the issue. That’s how hard sufficient levels of reflection are.
How’d you say? (And btw, do you think that my meltdown about all this meta crap qualifies as evidence? I realize that my thinking is… not very close to “standard” liberal or right-wing thought, but might there be similar psychological tension generated in their long-standing conflicts?)
In particular, a long time ago I asked you and your allies
“Me and my allies.”
I refuse to frame a debate in such terms for obvious reasons and am despondent you have chosen them. Honestly I think you are being mind-killed about this and are pattern matching my positions to ones I just don’t hold.
You are completely correct. This was indeed indefensible and inexcusable of me, and pretty much a direct spit upon your goodwill. I was frustrated by my inability to “get even” with an opposing group that has long trumpeted its honesty and accused my views of hypocrisy. I let this primitive emotion get the better of me.
Such little things are what shits up the whole discourse. I understand and agree. I’m sorry.
For someone who’s done as much well-known and controversial stuff in his life as Gould, you’re really going to have to narrow it down for me. I’m not sufficiently familiar with this debate to know what you’re referring to.
To address the average racial IQ thing, I think that a big part of the left’s dislike of it is cognitive dissonance, in a similar fashion to the right’s reflexive denial of climate change. They’re facts that tend to get used in ways that they find repulsive, and it’s easier to deny the fact than it is to make a claim of “It’s true, but let’s not worry too much about it”. In both cases, deniers tend to deny even when questioned in private in my experience(and I’m using friends as my reference group here, so I assume they’d fess up to it being tactical if it was). In both cases, there seems to be a more intellectual strain(which I’m a part of in both cases) that actually does make the “It’s real, but who cares?” argument.
(Hopefully that illustrative parallel doesn’t turn into an AGW flame war...)
All the alt-right/reactionary commenters everywhere seem to think that it’s clear-cut: liberals hate Truth in all its forms, and “elite” liberals especially hate it, and they simply want to speed the collapse of decent society with such anti-Truth policies.
This is, simply put, the usual rallying cry of hatred: the claim that the Enemy knows the truth but denies it; knows the good and hates it, deliberately works to corrupt it; etc. — see, e.g., Torquemada or Luther regarding Jews, Kramer and Sprenger regarding “witches”, Lenin regarding kulaks; Pol Pot regarding intellectuals; and so on. It’s not a factual claim based on evidence; it is a form of dark cheerleading.
(It is also not specific to a particular ideology or political faction — left, right, “Third Way”, secular, religious. It is, however, a common precursor to the dark times when adherents of an ideology decide to stop arguing and start killing.)
do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in
No.
Humans are neither smart or sane enough to be likely do what they want to do with the information available to them. As a whole we have a only minuscule chance of ordering matter in the next few million years in a way likeable to our values.
We are playing in a universe set to difficulty setting without an eye for human ability. Normal people can’t even predict the weather for a few days in advanced, and our entire civilization can’t in principle do so for more than a few weeks, yet here we are arguing about things like the economy or a culture or governments made up of millions of human brains and algorithms running on computers that can predict the weather for several days.
You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for—but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren’t needed so much—say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace—and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.
Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of “unknown knowns” about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them—all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds—and that consciously interpreting and articulating these “unknown knowns” can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.
We have no reason to trust human intuitions for societies orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number. They are feedback as to how individual humans are going to end up feeling in any society and that is important since humans are presumably what we care about but there is very little sense in giving much weight to such heuristics as usable maps for political action or institution reform.
Why do you think religious conservatives are so adamant about abortion or contraception?
I think you haven’t understood the exact question. Opposition to abortion or contraception are policies; racial differences in intelligence are an entirely external fact which should only affect policy after you filter it through the lens of your ethics. A better analogy would be confronting a Catholic with a claim that allowing abortion would make for much less poverty and death in the 3rd world. And even then, a liberal confronted with race differences in intelligence would not be similarly pressured to allow e.g. apartheid, if there is an explicit and sufficiently high value for moral equality between the races in the liberal mindset, and this moral equality demands some sort of practical egalitarianism!
What I claim in this particular example is that, since the secularization of progressivism/liberalism around the Enlightenment—and its pragmatist/utilitarian posturing—it has been having trouble deriving moral equality from first principles here, and deep down there’s awareness of that. So liberals desperately try to derive an egalitarian “ought” from an inconvenient “is”—even though nobody’s forcing them to!
I think you haven’t understood the exact question.
It wasn’t exactly analogous, but it wasn’t meant as such. If I wanted to do that I would have brought up Creationism among Protestant Americans.
I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is. There obviously are good secular conservative arguments in favour of religious thinking guiding how our society develops though.
I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is.
Throughout the 19th century, there have been leftist thinkers—from moderate and “respectable” ones to hardcore radicals—who either had no problem acknowledging differences in average intelligence, or were even outright racists/white supremacists. E.g., I’ve read that many American abolitionists either acted xenophobic towards actual black people when they met them, believed that blacks can never match whites in ability or achievement, etc. Yet their moral and religious opposition to slavery—all men are created in God’s image, and ought to be treated as such—covered the immorality of one race subjugating another. So… eh, it’s contradictory and messy. But ultimately egalitarianism, like all moral emotions, need not be chained to any particular empirical belief.
What I claim in this particular example is that, since the secularization of progressivism/liberalism around the Enlightenment—and its pragmatist/utilitarian posturing—it has been having trouble deriving moral equality from first principles here, and deep down there’s awareness of that. So liberals desperately try to derive an egalitarian “ought” from an inconvenient “is”—even though nobody’s forcing them to!
This seems like an ok model to describe what his happening.
It is not at all obvious to me that any other hypothesis is needed to explain Gould. Why, he practically says that he kept telling himself “human equality is a contingent fact of history” until he believed it.
But Jared Diamond does appear to me to be deliberately concealing truths, because he is fairly careful not to outright lie (and because he used to be into human biodiversity).
I said meh because meh was what I meant. I feel a very strong moralizing dimension to the post and the link that just left me shaking my head. A kind of projection of internal life to a universe, assuming it that runs on stories.
I’m used to being at least intrigued by your posts, that one proved an exception.
Instead we have a complex, silent carpet brawl around the meta question on the proper relation of the normative and the prescriptive in politics—e.g. given how much we value moral equality, should we try to justify it with facts/axioms about our environment, or with a deontological, non-disprovable position? - where neither side is even psychologically able to state the issue. That’s how hard sufficient levels of reflection are.
Perhaps this is happening in the system as a whole, but I wouldn’t call this a silent brawl if none of the involved know what the fight is about. And since you posit such a complex explanation…
Meaning that there really aren’t horrible truths about society that are hidden from the ignorant masses but revealed to the brave and sufficiently cynical few; most people (even the “average” ones) do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in, but cannot articulate and communicate it, so on some topics only a scrambled message of discontent and anger can be heard.
Lets begin with this. Do you take this argument seriously? Or is it just armament? I refuse to think you don’t have any clue as to how utterly devastating this argument is when applied to the left in the 20th century.
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Okay, this joke’s totally on you! Dick (and some earlier Gnostics) essentially made the very same suggestion on metaphysical knowledge that I entertain here about social knowledge; it’s an unknown known that most people already happen to possess, but which must be brought to the forefront of consciousness via a revelation event he called “Anamnesis”.
Actually you are right, here I was doing the pattern matching.
I think this is because how I see Gnostic like beliefs working out in the world. Humans being social will tend to share them and such movements spiritual or otherwise consist in a large part of an enlightened guru with special gnosis telling you what you have “forgotten” and must learn relearn.
That leftists were wrong to force their propaganda, clever and logically superior as it might appear, upon the masses who wisely stuck to conservatism since forever and understood conservative wisdom on a gut level? Yeah, yeah, you’d say that it’s just as bad or worse than the modern “thoughtcrime” currents I mentioned—but I think there is a significant difference.
For the last 200 years, lots of revolutionary/populist left-wing movements, even non-Marxist ones (incl. ultimately triumphant ones like 1st/2nd-wave feminism or abolitionism), have been using variations on class consciousness as a theoretical foundation for their agitation and rabble-rousing. And at least their official descriptions of “consciousness-raising” have been much like what I mean—and what I assume Zizek means—by “articulating the unknown knowns”.
Of course, reality is messy and politics fucks shit up, but ultimately I feel that the idea of consciousness-raising is not a clever trick, a deception of the masses who know better but are led astray. In the right hands it can serve as social psychoanalysis of sorts, to resolve deep-seated exploitation and oppression by dragging them from the collective unconscious into the light. A good example is how Western countries are practically at the end of homophobia. It was first systematically opposed by the Left’s critical theory and Freudo-Marxism; now it’s vanishing even on the right. Of course, there have been failures, which naturally resound louder—such as the reckless politics of “national liberation” leading to rivers of blood and zero liberty in the decolonized countries.
But here, before you say: “Aha, so you admit that this radical meddling is irresponsible and unaccountable!”, I’d ask you to consider, what if the masses have always had a desire for emancipation, what if the ideas of left intellectuals could never have been so transformative without a mute but powerful demand for them?
Every revolution has a fundamentally real reason! It might not even be a “good” reason—see the “men’s rights movement” and their politics of bitterness—but a revolutionary trend cannot be kicked off with simply propaganda, mass psychosis or shallow moral fashion! This reason can stay deep and strong under a calm surface, dormant for ages. Slaves did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position in America; women did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position before feminism. This fundamental psychosocial reality of oppression is what the oft-derided Marxist Historical Materialism is clear-headed about, and what can lead a right-wing thinker to denial (e.g. Moldbug on the Russian revolution) or biting bullets (e.g. Chesterton on the French one).
And, like Gramsci said, the oppressed masses can and do generate their own intellectuals who are driven to become a voice for the voiceless—by their origins, not by whim or ethical abstractions. Who taught racial equality or feminism to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave (who must’ve simply got a jackpot in the genetic lottery)? Evil power-hungry Northern abolitionists?
No, it must be the same process by which a black PUA-practicing guy commenting on a men’s issues blog can realize how his struggle is very similar to that of women, despite all the public hostility between feminists and PUAs. When he articulates the prejudice and oppression that have been a personal concern in his life, he can’t help but notice that other groups face very similar oppression. Grassroots leftism!
You ever notice that the most strident voices about “The decline of Western civilization” and supporters of the “Send their asses back to the kitchen” type of rhetoric are mainly white males between the ages of 30-50? [Censored], [censored], [censored], just to name a few...
As a black man anytime I hear things about how women should know their place, or that society is being ruined by women taking an active role in society, you know what I do? Take the word “women” out and insert “blacks”, or nowadays in SoCal where I live “Mexicans”. See where I’m going? They talk about the “good old days”. What good old days? Good for who? White men between 30 and 50? Why would I be interested in going back to the 50s? Or 30s? Or mid 1800s? Who does that benefit?
P.S.: Konkvistador asked if Nazism could count as a catastrophic and evil consequence of this sort of thing. The communist terror in China could, I think—but not Nazism. The Nazis killed and enslaved people under a wholly illusory cover of fighting an arbitrary Other. Their violence was not directed at the real social system.
A more compelling example of a social revolution causing catastrophic evil things would be the Red Terror and the Cultural Revolution in China. It was indeed mostly driven from below with encouragement from Mao; it was a part of sweeping systemic changes; it concluded decades of chaos and strife, and centuries of misery and exploitation; this still doesn’t justify an orgy of slaughter and cannibalism. I don’t know in what way to talk about it.
Overall this post has left me of mixed feelings. I liked it because it is exensive and gives insight into your chain of reasoning, making much of it explicit. I dislike it strongly because I don’t see any evidence that you have updated on the arguments I mad in our previous discussions here, here and here, which I think more or less defeat a crucial part of your reasoning here.
I’ll try to rephrase your argument to make sure I’m not failing at interpreting it:
Heuristics people evolved to deal with other humans are useful at detecting bad stuff happening in our social environment. Such feelings of distress can be repressed by socialization or overwhelmed by other feelings. This is bad because people’s instincts triggered by such heuristics still point in about the right direction to solving said bad stuff in society.
Since civilization is really screwed up on many levels lots of such alarms are going off in human brains and a good way to get political power is to harvest them. This solves the problem of right and might, as the responses that you call “unknwon knowns” are the strong nearly always winning force that advances advance “right”. The “might” that accompanies them and actually produces changes is just what you get when you unleash lots of humans on solving a problem.
Unleashing them via political means is thus mostly good.
Unleashing them via political means is thus mostly good.
Nah, I’d simply say that holding them back (via “political means”, yes, because all means of repression carry a political dimension due to the importance of their social function) is evil, really evil. The revolution/release itself is sometimes evil, always scary and usually involves violence. But that’s simply the kind of pent-up force that results from isolating, torturing and enslaving aspects of people’s selves.
This is bad because people’s instincts triggered by such heuristics still point in about the right direction to solving said bad stuff in society.
No no no. This is the basic new-left concept of negativity; we could listen to ourselves and understand how we are repressed, where we’re hurting, how it impacts our life—but we shouldn’t pretend that we know what to do! Trauma does not come wrapped with instructions on how to overcome it. State communism, in particular, has failed, and so has the alleviation of repression through unrestricted sexuality, and many other emancipatory projects too. Articulating the truth of our feelings is enormously important, but it can only tell us what’s broken; we can’t really see a path to a free, non-repressive and individuality-affirming society. (Or, rather, we might get a feeling as to where we’d want to go, but it’s not calibrated to the circumstances in any way, it’s only calibrated to our scream of pain! Good illustration: Zizek quoting Ayn Rand as to why money is good and abolishing markets led to disaster.)
Today’s Left can only offer palliatives, think hard, reflect, and act as a conservative force against political projects that rely on repression. Reasons for hope—Utopian hope—are few, but we must keep it alive. In particular, when in the links above you criticize me for supporting intervention in group conflict and identity politics, saying, essentially, that it’s better for anyone feeling oppressed to disarm and suffer quietly until the pain numbs them—and maybe there’ll be less social conflict overall then. There is an utilitarian logic to it; certain misery is better than certain misery plus group infighting.
Yet the logic of not giving up hope is, to me, different; if there’s a real honest chance to create a small segment of society, a small public space where people would really be able to exist, talk or think together, with radically less systemic oppression from each other and from the outside—say, LW in the example above, or a factory, or a classroom—then this is worth fighting for, and worth the usual risks.
And I don’t mean, like, formal enforced niceness, politeness, feminism police or such—I mean like what Zizek says about his atheist Christianity, a real love for the Other, under a shared universality that stops differences from being obstacles. A place and a circumstance where you wouldn’t just be “tolerated”, but accepted, and could accept yourself.
So for a really lame, rambling summary: the left-wing “positive” vision here is essentially an utopia of non-repression; we don’t have the remotest idea of how to get there; it’s oriented towards individuality but is best described in terms of community and brotherhood, not the individual; it is fundamentally possible, and there are gleans of it here and there in daily life, which are worth fighting for and cherishing; -
yet the opposition to what’s repressive and cruel and loathsome in current reality is more basic, and we ought to keep it up; if we give up, we might well lose what little we have under liberal capitalism; there are no promises in walking away from Omelas.
Thanks. I feel that LW’s political landscape really needs a hard-left current that would be up to our standards of reasoning&debate. There’s been a lot of thought and passion put into various left-of-liberalism philosophies in the last century, and the community needs to engage and grapple with them like it does with alt-right contrarianism, getting past inferential distances.
People have been crying out for more ideological diversity on LW and against our discourse being dominated by mainstream liberal/progressive thought. I can see them trying to add such diversity from the right, but when I’m going for a far-left perspective (often in direct opposition to the local “Weird-Right”), I feel rather alone and divorced-from-context here.
Yes, pretty easy in this case, actually. After coming to power, they picked up a few Weimar social programs (including the Autobahns!) and tripled the hype; they didn’t nationalize much anything except stolen Jewish property, and even that was in practice mostly given away as loot; they worked with the old officer caste despite its frequent disloyalty and purged the SA when the stormtroopers wanted in on the influence and status; they kept a basically peacetime consumer-oriented economy until 1943, long after all other great powers introduced total-war central control; despite the Anti-Semitic propaganda, they couldn’t manage to get enough popular participation during the Kristallnacht, and Hitler cancelled further planned pogroms in favor of silent and secret repression...
Lots of propaganda, lots of killing, not too much change in society’s structures compared to e.g. 1914.
[Nazis] worked with the old officer caste despite its frequent disloyalty
I don’t think the historical record supports this assertion. The Prussian / Imperial military was a parallel institution to the post-1848 civilian government—both loyal to the Kaiser, but otherwise unrelated. (No, this isn’t a stable setup).
A substantial amount of the German army’s political maneuvering in Weimar period was an attempt to maintain independence from civilian government oversight even after there wasn’t really any German state separate from the civilian leadership.
Once Hitler took power, he broke the Army’s independence (eg the destruction of Generals Blomberg and Fritsch). In short, the Nazis were the first civilian government to place the German military in a subordinate position. “Working with the old officer class” is terribly misleading.
You’re still talking in terms of classes that shouldn’t exist. I don’t care about blacks, or women, or white males between 30-50. I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences. I say this only to point out that your argument sounds like nesting dolls and some of us do bite the bullet and wish to unravel down to the base case.
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”—more cheap food and cars and iPads and UAVs and office blocks and hedge funds and mass-produced entertainment and generally all the stuff that we already manufacture? Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”?
explicit political power, implicit power should be made explicit wherever possible.
And yes, I’m specifically claiming that on net people like the latter three have a much larger negative impact than the positive impact of people like the former three.
Your use of the word overpriced and affluent leads me to believe you attach moral significance to parting idiots with their money for baubles. Why? The average wealthy person has a larger positive impact than the average non-wealthy first worlder. I prefer concentrated wealth in the hands of those whose values I share. I have values more likely aligned with that of a tech company CEO than a randomly selected first world person.
And yes, I’m specifically claiming that on net people like the latter three have a much larger negative impact than the positive impact of people like the former three.
...Then I don’t understand how your words are at all an objection to my description of emancipatory/socially radical politics. You do understand that, for example, MLK was a radically minded avowed socialist who led a partial social revolution in the US without either violence or “explicit political power”? If you don’t find yourself “horrified” by this, then we don’t seem to have a problem.
Your use of the word overpriced and affluent leads me to believe you attach moral significance to parting idiots with their money for baubles. Why?
It’s not nearly so narrow; I see no point in manufacturing tons of useless shiny stuff and pushing fake desires onto people to sell it so that the cycle can continue—and this wasteful nonsense is a mandatory imperative for 1st world capitalism. If we could agree on a different mechanism of distribution (not necessarily state planning), we could be using our industrial might to kickstart poor countries instead—while 1st world people could be working less, consuming less, wasting less, draining less resources, enjoying more leisure and giving more attention to the non-monetary things in society.
Example: why the hell do we buy personal cars for driving in cities? What good does it do us at all? And have we even considered the myriad costs? How is this not a ridiculous failure of the “pragmatic” capitalist mode of distribution AND its ideology?
I’ve read this conversation, and I literally don’t understand what you are talking about. I agree with you that left-of-mainstream views would be valuable in this community. But I think you and RomeoStevens are only talking past each other. That’s not really a victory for rationalism.
If you don’t find yourself “horrified” by this, then we don’t seem to have a problem.
Wait so unless I’m horrified by it 100% of the time my point gets thrown out? There’s no room for saying something has plusses and minuses and the minuses outweigh the plusses?
I see no point in manufacturing tons of useless shiny stuff and pushing fake desires onto people to sell it
Sorry but you don’t get to decide which preferences are real. You are angry that more resources aren’t devoted towards things you value, welcome to the club.
I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”? Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
What you do about any particular instance will obviously depend on the situation. Some things are worth speaking up about. Some things are worth making non-verbal indications that their joke is bombing. Some just deserve to be ignored. You don’t want to be this guy.
I don’t? If the expected social improvement exceeds my personal cost (taking into account my opportunity cost), why shouldn’t I act? Taking that xkcd to mean what you assert suggests you think all social advocacy is wasted.
More generally, the blogger I linked is complaining that the joke didn’t bomb and generally doesn’t bomb.
If the expected social improvement exceeds my personal cost (taking into account my opportunity cost), why shouldn’t I act?
You have just defined the set of cases in which you should. Deciding when you are looking at such a case and what to do about it is the non-trivial part.
I was just saying that seeing something objectionable, and deciding whether and how to object to it, are two separate things. I do find “jokes” like the one in the original article objectionable, but if I was present at Rowdy telling this joke about the dog, I don’t know how best to tackle it, even having the leisure of taking as long as I want to consider the hypothetical, let alone face-to-face with about one second in real time to get my brain in gear. But that’s just me.
Or to put it another way, my short answer to your question:
So you endorse calling them on it, ceteris paribus?
Funny, but stand-up comics on stage usually don’t go out of their way to point out they’re just joking. (And even when they do, they don’t necessarily mean it.) Sometimes there’s not even an implicit understanding that a stand-up’s just joking.
This post about jokes and attitudes the provide cover for bad social actors really caught my interest. But the blogger’s position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
The point of the blog post is that jokes about certain gender and relationship stereotypes (men are idiots, women are the ball-and-chain) allow actual abusers slide by under the radar by asserting that they are joking whenever they are publically called out on inappropriate behavior. It really resonated with me—and to be frank, it seems aimed at the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
I object most to is what is left unsaid. For a faint second the author talks in gender balanced ways, then she drops it to spend the rest of the discussion showing how men do this thing wrong. The author could have used an additional anecdote about how women the equivalent, or a gender neutral anecdote, or an offhanded comment noting where women do it too.
But she didn’t.
Instead we’re left with the impression that unconscious oppression is something men perpetrate on women. It’s a similar trick to what she’s talking about in her post. Her post is still insightful regarding feminism, but it could have been more. Underneath the overt message I hear her saying that oppression and abuse is a male thing, and her responses in the comments reinforce that. Again, a very good post for feminism, but I had been hoping for humanism, and I left disappointed.
I thought she was saying it was a consent problem. The specific example involves a man, but I didn’t see her as saying that women can’t violate consent. In fact, her mocking of the January issue of Cosmo magazine includes calling out glamorizing of female-perpetrator identity theft.
More generally, can’t an advocate notice that the plurality or majority of the perpetrators of this type of problem are male, even while calling for a better social dynamic for both sexes? I don’t think the blogger would disagree.
I don’t think the majority of the people who do this are male. I can think of half a dozen occasions just over the holidays where this was done by a woman (and I can recall only one male counterexample). She probably sees it otherwise given her politics, but I’d say it’s equally split at best.
I do not expect her to make an equal opportunity blog post. However, you wanted to know why it’s met with hostility by some people. The post sends out hostility towards men in an unspoken way, so it is responded to in kind.
One reason gender politics is especially “mind-killing” is that the two least interesting/statistically significant/improbable positions (males are more THIS than females, females more THAT than males) also happen to be the two positions seen as the “strongest”.
You have high standards. (shrug).
It looks to me like Not-Your-True-Rejection, but it would look that way to Mindkilled-Me whether it were true or not. (shrug).
Thanks for articulating your reasoning.
I was in the past a regular reader of her blog, until an incident (inspired in large part by a rebuke authored by me, in point of fact) which is still referred to on other feminist blogs as evidence of her… unbalanced perspective, to put it politely. Holly is not a rationalist by any stretch of the imagination, and her blog is very “Our team versus their team.”
You mean this? Sorry—don’t agree with your position.
Potential downvoters—would you rather a long argument or a polite expression of disagreement that doesn’t spawn into a huge debate?
That title looks correct, but I do not visit her blog anymore as a rule—I was asked to leave, and I won’t violate that—so I’m not 100% certain. It wasn’t my position in the argument; the worst apparently came after I had left, when she started attacking random commenters. AFAIK my main role in the debacle was getting her riled up. My information on what happened after I left is secondhand, however, so I can’t point you at specific comments.
This may come back to haunt me re: prisoner’s dilemma but- I don’t respect rules that have vanishingly small chance of negative consequence if violated.
Surely she’s not monitoring IP addresses to call you out in public that you visited her blog when you said you didn’t? And even if she were- proxies! Google cache!
I’m an egoist, specifically of Objectivist bent; my rules exist and are followed for my sake, not hers. And I don’t stay where I’m not wanted; I can go where I am wanted, and it will be both a more productive use of my time, and more emotionally healthy for me.
I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here’s a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.
Also simple contrarianism, though that’s not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.
What are those?
More sympathetically, people might (well, I’m sure some people do) see avoiding stereotype-based jokes as a step towards there being things you can’t say, and prefer some additional risk of saying harmful things to moving in that direction (possibly down a slippery slope).
On the object level, it isn’t a success of rational discussion that assertions like “privilege is a social dynamic which exists” turn immediately to the defensive reaction you mentioned. Reversing the discrimination is an extreme remedy, and like all extreme remedies, it gets deserved push-back. But there’s no sustained discussion of middle ground positions.
Although I may be mindkiled about this, I think that I am open to discussion of less extreme ways of reducing the pernicious effects of the privilege social dynamic. But even if one thinks that this social dynamic is not pernicious, it booggles my mind that people don’t acknowledge the dynamic occurs.
I think a significant amount of that hostility isn’t necessarily denying the existence of privilege, but denying that it’s a useful way of framing problems.
I also suspect a lot of it is backlash from over-enthusiastic social justice advocates trying to shoehorn absolutely every social problem imaginable into a context of unilateral power dynamics.
It once was the case that privilege was seen as unilateral and one dimensional. I’m not sure this is the case anymore on the cutting edge of so-called privilege theory.
A black man in the United States might suffer from some effects of white-privilege (vs. white men) while benefiting from some aspects of speaking-English-privilege (vs. recent immigrants).
More generally, I’m not aware of any other framing analysis that is (1) acceptable to anti-feminists and (2) sufficiently nuanced to be useful. Hansonian status analysis is not really capable of providing insight into what we should do to solve the perceived problem—even if it is descriptively accurate (at a high level).
Speaking for myself, I find the privilege framework to be the one lacking in nuance or pragmatic application. I use the term “unilateral” because its core mechanic appears to be “person A has power person B doesn’t, and person B suffers as a result”. Coming from a game-theoretic perspective, which routinely deals with unexpected and perverse outcomes from agents being given different sets of choices, this seems crude in the extreme.
On the subject of multidimensionality, I’ve read up on intersectionality in good faith, and made an effort to engage with it, but it seems to boil down to multivariate analysis, only instead of using data, simply making stuff up.
So we have no agreed framework? That . . . kinda sucks.
Is there anything we can do about it?
What do you want out of a framework? What should it do, and why is agreement important?
I will quite happily construct a model to try and capture the behaviour of real-world social problems, drawing on a variety of methods and disciplines. I’m not sure I need agreement from any other party to do that. How well it describes or predicts real-world events is an empirical question.
When I see people talking about privilege, it generally isn’t because they want to go out and solve social problems, but because they want to show how sophisticated and moral and liberal they are, or to identify other sophisticated moral liberal people by engaging in exclusive dialogue with them. If that’s what such a framework is used for, I’m not entirely sure the absence of one is all that important.
I want analysis that tells me what to do to create the changes that I want in society. Not just imposed top-down, but deeply settled as part of how society works—on the level of “get a job” or “be polite.” The sort of thing “equal-pay-for-equal-work” aspires towards, but maybe hasn’t reached.
The privilege-framework says that the way to do that is to call out privilege when you see it. If someone makes the non-consent joke the blogger highlighted, say “Wow! That’s not right.” (Then change the topic, probably).
Do you think that response won’t work, isn’t worth the effort, is aimed at a non-problem, or other criticism?
Assuming the counter-parties share terminal values but are applying inconsistent interventions, at least one party is doing something that doesn’t help solve the problem, and may even be interfering with the good solution. Worst case scenario is that both parties are doing it wrong.
I have a lot of time for the sentiment in the blog post you linked to, but don’t think privilege is a necessary concept in order to appreciate it. I don’t even believe it’s the most obvious criticism of the behaviour in question.
By way of analogy, lets say Pat wanders around everywhere with a sword and Chris doesn’t wander around everywhere with a sword. If Pat stabs the defenceless Chris in the chest with a sword, you could frame this in the context of power dynamics, and bemoan how Pat has “sword privilege”, but this doesn’t really get to the core of the problem.
Calling out Pat’s sword privilege doesn’t offer any explanation as to why Pat has the sword, or why Pat was motivated to stab Chris. It provides us with a narrative for establishing blame and victimhood, but it doesn’t actually tell us anything about the underlying situation or how to remedy it, at any level.
Ultimately, I think that a lot of ordinary social injustice arises because no one speaks out loud “Don’t do that.” Essentially, unwillingness to discuss social rules.
Saying “Parental Abuse is Wrong” is a useless Applause Light for most people.
Saying “It is not normal to be afraid of your parents, and not normal to be unhappy whenever you’re at home” is more likely to be effective at creating good change.
In case it isn’t clear, I agree that calling out sword-privilege is only worthwhile if it reduces similar sword-privilege-abuse in the future. It’s an empirical question whether (1) calling out privilege reduces abuse or (2) explaining why Pat has the sword is helpful to anything (figuring out what the abuse is, how to response effectively, or anything else). I suspect yes for both. But even if the answer to (2) is no, that doesn’t demonstrate the answer to (1) is no.
Does it not seem odd to you to view the case of an unarmed person being stabbed by an armed assailant as an issue of social justice by default?
This is perhaps an unfair question, because I placed it in that context to begin with, but one of the things that’s so maddening about the whole subject is how (for want of a better term) privilege is so privileged as an explanatory mechanism. There are certainly circumstances where it has merit, but it seems a ridiculous weapon of choice in circumstances where more appropriate explanatory mechanisms exist.
Perhaps? :)
I choose not to fight your hypothetical and you get upvotes for closing the trap. Not a big deal, but not cool.
I’m interested in hearing about them, and using them to figure out how to be more effective in figuring out what social changes are better for my terminal values and causing those changes.
Edit: Also, let’s not forget that there are high status locals who deny that the problem we are talking about even exists.
It wasn’t intended as a trap. Part of the point of the hypothetical was that “sword-privilege” is a bit of a silly idea, and not an obvious go-to choice for reasoning about people stabbing other people. I genuinely didn’t expect you to put up a defence for it.
As for explanatory mechanisms, I tend to favour explanations from economics and systems-based sciences, as they have a rich catalogue of unusual behaviour patterns that arise from interacting parties being given different choices. I’m generally quite cautious in their application, though, because it doesn’t take much for an elegant and aesthetically-pleasing model to be subtly wrong.
Fair enough. As you noted, the risk with any analytical framework is that it intentionally or unintentionally becomes a single variable analysis—and thus useless. My sense is that economics applied to social interactions is particularly at risk for this type of problem—leading either to Marxism or blogosphere ev. psych.
Ah, I see. You were trying to change the topic—and I missed it.
I certainly agree that privilege is a terrible framework for analyzing actual swords-in-unarmed-people situations. But that wasn’t the topic and I didn’t want to talk about those situations—so I assumed you were making a somewhat hostile metaphor and choose not to call you on the hostility in order to keep engaging in the conversation. Talk about long inferential distance. :)
I think I’m going to start explicitly stating my discussion goals in advance. If it doesn’t keep me on topic, it will at least keep me honest.
EDIT: WTF, copypaste. I meant to quote this bit:
Be careful not to confuse “Online SJ-oriented callout culture” with “the idea of power gradiants and institutionalized privilege as a tool for analyzing complex social and cultural phenomena.”
This raises a problem I’ve seen in other forms.… is it fair to ask how an idea works out in practice?
Absolutely, but it’s not necessarily as simple as patternmatching to “claims label” and “is visible and obvious to me personally.” Especially when you’re dealing with stuff like religion, ideology, culture or politics, it can be hard to make any really meaningful statements that generalize usefully.
How does socialism work out in practice? It’s tempting for some folks to point to the USSR, but that’s just because it’s a big obvious thing with the word “Socialism” prominently emblazoned on it. The EU is pretty darn relevant there as well.
When most Westerners think “Islam”, they don’t think “polyandric, matrifocal, highly-educated pluralists comfortable with secularism” either, but the Minangkabau people outnumber al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban combined. Those latter have a lot more to do with the first things that spring to mind when Westerners hear the word “Islam” though.
What I’m saying is, “How does this work out in practice” is terribly vulnerable to the availability bias.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think socialism (State Communism) and socialism (western Europe—I’m not sure what the best name is for democracies with strong safety nets) are the same thing—they have extremely different practices and trajectories. I think this supports your point that you need to actually know something before you try to address the question of how an idea works out in practice.
If it’s any consolation, I don’t just wonder that sort of thing for social justice. I’ve thought how Atlas Shrugged, a novel which is an extended attack on crony capitalism, has led to people who support corporations in general.
Now that I think about it, Rand’s “concrete bound mentality” (grabbing on to a specific and not necessarily relevant example—she’s against it) is a special case of availability bias.
Social democracy.
nod But they both draw from a common wellspring of thought, and are influenced by many of the same formative works (having since developed themselves in greatly different directions). They’re both socialism, in the same sense that a platypus (lays eggs, sweats milk, senses electricity, has simple teeth) and a human (gives live birth to well-developed offspring, has dedicated milk glands, no electroception at all, complex teeth) are both mammals: it’s a fact of their origins. They’ve simply diverged substantially—but this divergence isn’t so great that it’s meaningless to speak of them as both forms of mammal (has hair, endothermic metabolism, produces milk, three middle ear bones, has neocortex, is of amniote clade—the critical bit is that these commonalities are not coincidental, they are not convergent traits).
If I’m doing something analytically wrong here, please feel free to give specifics. Crocker’s Rule: I promise not to withdraw or lash out simply because I’m defensive about your criticism—I’m saying this to you, not the world.
PS. I don’t understand the relevance of the quoted text.
PPS. “SJ-oriented callout culture” --> SJ = ?
SJ = abbreviation for “social justice.”
The discussion here appears to be talking about “privilege” in a way that looks, from the outside of the conversation, like the use of the term “privilege” by both participants is based on attempting to reverse-engineer its theoretical structure from the way it’s used online by social justice activists.
The idea of “privilege”, as an academic notion within critical theories, does not boil down to “the thing that when you see it, you should call it out.” Exploring and unpacking the idea may or may not come with exhortations to any particular course of action; this is especially so in the case of texts where the idea is being formulated, criticized, elaborated upon or revisited. That isn’t even necessarily implied.
On the other hand it’s very common to the use of the term by a certain subset of online activists, and it seems like for a lot of LWers group is their first or primary exposure to the idea. The result is akin to talking about socialism in general, by modelling it in terms of the Red Guard youth movement during China’s Cultural Revolution.
Here was my attempt at a brief articulation, early in this conversation. I’m trying not to just reverse engineer from social justice blogging. But if I screwed things up, I’m open to suggestion.
I agree that privilege isn’t inherently unjust. It just turns out that certain kinds of privilege are antithetical to my terminal values—and calling out appears to be the best response.
Yes—I suspect this causal story is the reason why my original complaint—that LW is bad at this type of social engineering theory—is true.
Well, I didn’t say that (I’m not aware offhand of a plausible instance of the thing the term refers to that doesn’t strike me as undesirable/wrong insofar as Jandila’s morality function ouputs wrong).
From the bit you linked:
Your wording makes me wince a little but I’m not sure if I can unpack why here (something about the implied model of intellectual discourse). In any case, you are quite correct that a simplistic analysis of the idea is not the best that critical theory has to offer, although LW doesn’t have many people in the cluster (it’s more than a matter of just reading a couple texts).
Yes, the core problem is that LW lacks this population—and doesn’t seem to care.
Maybe it’s a relic of fact that most of my contact with “soft” academics is legal academia.
Legal issues go from non-existent to unsettled to settled. Tenure lies in writing only about unsettled. Cutting edge legal theories are a thing, even for practicing lawyers (I’ve even got one I’m waiting for the right case to test). Then the caselaw thickens—and your theory is now settled practice or Timecube level crazy.
In short, sorry for making you wince. Well, sorta sorry. :)
nod It’s pretty synonymous with stuff like the Sokal affair to them.
That does go rather a long way toward explaining it, yeah. I come at it from anthropology and linguistics, with a side order each of biology and semiotics, so my go-to ideas about “the progression of theories and the state of the art in this field” are...substantially harder to capture, but basically it looks a bit like evolution in language or biology with a generous dose of lateral transfer a la art.
A law graduate friend of mean feels compelled to add: “Or both.”
No worries, nothing like upsetting.
On a different topic:
Is there any discussion in this literature about whether this cluster of theory necessarily implies an anti-realist metaethical position? My own metaethical theories have mostly been driven by the implications of these types of social theories—but it wouldn’t surprise me if my conclusions in that regard were unsophisticated and suspect.
I generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.
That is, if I endorse the privilege framework because I believe it effectively motivates right action according to my values better than the alternatives, then one option is to embrace it and act accordingly. If my belief is correct, one consequence of that will be that I am more reliably motivated to act rightly by my values. If I also talk about my actions and my motivations for those actions, I will provide evidence of that to others, thereby encouraging them to also embrace the privilege framework (at least, insofar as they share my values, and possibly even if they don’t).
In the meantime, they won’t, and (as you say) we won’t be perfectly efficient. Hysteresis is like that.
The advantage of hysteresis is that if it turns out I’m wrong and the privilege framework doesn’t optimally motivate right action, there’s a greater chance of collecting evidence of that truth before we’ve collectively invested too much in a suboptimal practice.
Given how often we’re wrong about stuff, that seems like a worthwhile advantage to preserve.
I could probably word that more succinctly as “Practice beats proselytizing.”
Whatever happened to the corresponding-to-reality aspect?
It didn’t seem directly relevant to TimS’s comment.
That said, it would be a remarkable coincidence if a framework reliably motivated right action without corresponding to reality.
Depends, how are you judging which action is “right”, do you have any way to judge independent of the framework?
A lot of religions motivate a lot of right actions. They motivate even more if you let a religion judge the rightness of the action it motivates.
Agreed that if the only metric for right action is whether the action is motivated by my framework, then it’s not a coincidence at all that my framework motivates right action.
It’s also true that if I know of no metric at all for right action, then I can’t know whether a framework reliably motivates it.
That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Some of my motive is reducing inferential distance. Some of the response to daenerys’ recent post on female experiences was essentially “I didn’t realize that type of harm was occurring.” Ideally, having a useful framework will help others notice those types of harms more easily.
Also, I think there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy inherent in some anti-feminist frameworks. To use a totally different example, I expect most Republicans in the US House of Representatives hate Alinsky, but they sure seem to have learned his lesson that procedural rules benefit the status quo—and therefore, those who oppose the status quo have less reason to respect them.
I’d generalize the point more broadly to say that jokes are a good way to get things you otherwise can’t say past the radar.
That’s the opposite of the point being made in the post, not a generalization of it.
At least, if I’ve understood you correctly — you’re saying that when people make jokes about coercive/irresponsible men and passive-aggressive/nagging women, they are expressing a universal truth that society refuses to hear stated. To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as “All relationships are abusive”.
The post TimS links to asserts, rather, that these jokes represent a blurring of distinctions that society fails to recognize. There actually do exist relationships that are more consensual and ones that are more abusive — the distinction — but insofar as everyone pretends that all men are coercive and all women passive-aggressive, they blur this distinction.
Moreover, blurring this distinction provides cover for the actual abusers by making the good relationships out to be just as bad as the abusive ones. If everyone is required to talk about their relationships in nonconsensual/abusive terms, then the people in consensual relationships cannot distinguish themselves as such. Hence, the post: “Even though Rowdy’s brother-in-law wasn’t really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn’t want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would.”
It’s a little like Soviet-era “moral equivalence” arguments, or more generally the tu quoque fallacy, when tu don’t actually do quoque!
There’s a lot of truth in stereotypes. Not all women nag, but more do than men. Not all men are irresponsible, but more are than women. Since it’s very difficult to make statements like that seriously in modern society—usually, you can only say it either anonymously or in groups of close friends whom you trust to not take it personally—a lot of people embed it in comedy, where the filters are lower, and where there’s more reason for it to come up in the first place than just expressing bias.
It’s not a harmless practice, of course, but it does provide a useful safety valve sometimes.
I seriously doubt that most people who make up jokes or stereotypes truly have enough data on hand to reasonably support even a generalization of this nature.
Stereotypes are largely consensus-based, which gives them a larger data pool than any individual would have. If a comedian starts making jokes about the foibles of a large group, and most people haven’t experienced those same foibles, they’re not going to find it funny. Now, smaller groups can get a lot nastier treatment, both because there’s less evidence to contradict a stereotype, and because they can turn into the token butt of jokes(Newfies being the stereotypical example where I’m from—nobody actually believes the jokes, but everybody makes them just because they’re the group you make dumb-people jokes about). But “women” is a far too common group to get much in the way of false stereotypes, for example.
At this point, I should also point out the dangers of stereotypes that are true only because culture forces them to be. For example, saying that women needed protection in the 19th century was basically true, but it was largely true because we didn’t let women protect themselves. Feedback loops are a real danger.
I think you are discounting effects such as confirmation bias, which lead us to notice what we expect and can easily label while leading us to ignore information that contradicts our beliefs. If 99 out of 100 women don’t nag and 95 out of 100 men don’t nag, given a stereotype that women nag, I would expect people think of the one woman they know that nags, rather than the 5 men they know that do the same.
Frankly, without data to support the claim that:
I would find the claim highly suspect, given even a rudimentary understanding of our psychological framework.
It’s a system seriously prone to false positives, of course. But I think the odds of a true stereotype getting established are sufficiently higher than the odds of a false one getting established that it still counts as positive evidence.
What are you envisioning this “safety valve” averting?
Groupthink.
Edit: Per discussion below, I should clarify that I’m referring to a particular think that a particular group engages in(“political correctness”), not the psychological phenomenon in general.
Ah, I see what you mean. Thanks for explaining.
And, sure, if nobody can seriously express the sentiment that women nag more than men do, or that men are more irresponsible than women, then being able to humorously express the sentiment that all women nag and all men are irresponsible is, as you say, a useful way of averting groupthink. It’s not good, but it’s better than nothing.
I’m not nearly as confident as you sound that the premise is true, but I agree that the conclusion follows from it.
If people are making a large number of similar jokes, then that’s another sort of group think.
(nods)
It’s sometimes helpful to draw a distinction between “lots of people do X” and “nobody is allowed to do Y.”
The groupthink Alsadius is positing is the latter; it involves nobody being allowed to express certain sentiments. As I said, I don’t see where he’s getting his confidence that this is true, as I don’t see much compelling evidence for it, but accepting it as a hypothetical I agree that the “safety valve” theory he’s talking about follows from it.
The groupthink you’re positing is the former and suggests different tactics.
FWIW, I don’t think it is true—you don’t have far to go to find a claim that, say, women are crazy, or black people steal, or half a dozen other terribly politically incorrect things(true ones and false ones). But a big part of the reason is because we have these unofficial lines of communication. Good luck finding official data on things like racial crime stats—self-censorship has basically destroyed that. Chris Rock is all we’re left with.
huh?
Huh, it seems it’s not as bad as I’ve thought. I’ve heard a lot of debate over the years about police forces not collecting the data, but I suppose that’s not true everywhere. Good to know.
Oh.
So, OK, if you don’t think it’s true that the use of stereotypes in humor is a safety valve to avert groupthink, I’m not exactly sure why you said that when I asked, but I’m happy to drop that line of discussion.
Now you seem to be saying that the use of stereotypes in humor is a safety valve to avert censorship… do you actually think that?
It’s a way of saying things that aren’t supposed to be said. Whether the level of “supposed to” is a bit of moral outrage(like it is today), or a gulag(like it was in the Soviet Union), people use jokes to get around barriers. That serves the function of evading censorship sometimes, as well as the function of undermining certain kinds of groupthink to a certain extent. It’s not perfect, but it serves a role.
And now we’ve switched from talking about the value of stereotypes in humor to the value of humor more generally. I agree with your statements about the value of humor more generally, and am otherwise tapping out here.
I tend to think of stereotypes as a comedic aid, at least the sort that can easily be discussed here. I think that’s why the conversation has shifted. I will admit that I sort of lost the plot, though.
The stereotypes I actually use to guess at people’s traits tend to be embedded in details of how people dress, talk, and act—I’ve successfully pegged people’s personalities pretty closely from nothing more than the glasses they wear before—but that’s not the sort of thing you can discuss very easily on a text board.
For stereotypes specifically, I think the only dangerous thing that they really avert is excessive political correctness. Insisting that people be perfectly blind to observable characteristics of others is a silly position to take, and stereotypes are sort of an implicit summary of the evidence attached to an observable characteristic. Actual data is preferable, when it’s available, but for some of the soft attributes it’s not. “Groupthink” was a bit of a snarky way of phrasing it, and not a particularly accurate one. I’m not speaking about groupthink in general, I’m speaking about a particular kind that happens to be present in some parts of modern society.
I agree that insisting that people be perfectly blind to observable characteristics of others is a silly position to take, and I can see where using stereotypes in humor stands in opposition to that position, and therefore provides some (though not necessarily net) positive value.
Yes, it’s amazing how easy it is to dismiss opposing arguments when you start by “grossly oversimplifying” them into something clearly false.
I didn’t think I was dismissing an opposing argument; rather, pointing out that the article TimS linked to was making the opposite of the claim that you stated as a generalization of its point: not “these jokes express unstated general truths” but rather “these jokes express false generalizations … and thereby leave significant distinctions unstated and, indeed, more difficult to state.”
This is true regardless of whether the “things you can’t say” are true. Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It’s a death spiral. All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you’re wrong.
There are no red pills, only blue pills with red sugar coatings.
Not quite. The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
Nevertheless, I agree that the joke is no substitute for an argument. It’s necessary to get society to the point where it’s possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.
Nonsense. All it takes is that the audience want to believe it. Experience is not truth; a large part of people’s “experience” is their own beliefs. This is just the same death spiral again. If they laugh, that proves I’m right; if they boo, that proves I’m right.
The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Heck, a large part of people’s “experience” is fiction.
For instance: By the age of fifteen, if there are no doctors and nobody chronically ill in your immediate family, you’ve likely spent more time watching and reading fiction about doctors and medicine than you’ve spent discussing medicine with actual doctors. So your ideas of what doctors do are going to be based more directly on fiction than reality. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of common false beliefs promulgated by medical fiction. (Warning, TVTropes.)
For that matter, I suspect many fifteen-year-olds have heard more lawyer jokes than they have heard sentences spoken by an actual lawyer other than a politician. (Though one can hope they’ve taken more of an impression from Atticus Finch than from kill-all-the-lawyers jokes.)
(And yet, many fifteen-year-olds decide to become doctors … and lawyers … and other professions whose reputation and habits they have learned about chiefly through fiction, jokes, and stories rather than through observation.)
For that matter, the claim that “the joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience” implies that the erstwhile popularity of jokes about Poles being stupid and impractical was good evidence that Poles actually were stupid and impractical.
Ceteris paribus yes.
This seems like heresy to me from a Bayesian perspective.
Note the difference in meaning between the two italicized phrases?
What did I say that could reasonably be interpreted this way?
(Edit: thinking about it, I think I see how you got that impression: Laughter is evidence that you’re right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you’re onto something. Indifference, or a non-extreme negative reaction is thus evidence that you’re wrong.)
Seriously, could you at least try not to straw-man my position?
Consider “proves” replaced by “is evidence in favour of”. It doesn’t change my point.
That’s the other half of the pattern—which you obligingly go on to complete:
Did you read the sentence I wrote after that one?
Yes. The whole argument’s a crock.
Consider “proves” replaced by “is evidence in favour of”. It doesn’t change my point.
That’s the other half of the pattern—which you obligingly go on to complete:
Consider “proves” replaced by “is evidence in favour of”. It doesn’t change my point.
That’s the other half of the pattern—which you obligingly go on to complete:
Maybe it’s just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I don’t think you should call an idea a death spiral. It is vulnerable in the way you say, but that doesn’t reflect on the idea, it just means we humans have to be really careful with it.
We do have a whole sequence on how to deal with such ideas. None of the advice is “don’t believe it”.
Again, we have plenty of material on LW for conserving expected evidence and watching for biases.
If you are arguing that things you can’t say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses, I recommend that you spend your time convincing them to study rationality instead of convincing them to believe things for reasons other than truth.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists. Eugene had explicitly generalized to other taboo issues anyway.
There are idiots who say such things, but there are also a lot of really interesting ideas (in the sense that they are important and debateable) that don’t get discussed enough because people punish anyone who brings them up. Censorship of whole topics doesn’t really seem like a good way to handle a few vile idiots.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it’s worth noting in the case of these “red pill” ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers). This apparent difference in the power of the arguments can confuse naive open-minded people (like myself a few days ago). Please consider this when responding to dumb ideas.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
This is a good point. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I’ve been having a crisis of faith on quite a few of those “red pill” ideas recently and I’m sure this will be useful next time I think about any of it.
That said, it seems to me that the standard cult attractor advice and conservation of expected evidence is sufficient to diffuse this effect. Do you think so, too? Or do you think we are not good enough at it such that we have to add extra caution? Or something else?
Basically what do you recommend for a well-sequenced LWer to do to entangle their beliefs with reality on these sorts of issues?
Huh. I wonder why. I don’t really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet? I guess then we would see the opposite on PUA forums; mostly average idiots who can’t handle the is-ought distinction, and a few intelligent mainstreamers coming in and poking holes in people’s tripe (I also might expect a few more troll raids from mainstreamers than there are troll raids from PUA to mainstreamer areas, though this could easily be confounded by other factors)
That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...
I did notice (since you sent me there looking for it) that it was callous and condescending and such (even for cracked). I also noticed that I don’t usually notice that kind of stuff outside LW and other “intellectual areas”. If you hadn’t pointed it out, I would have just filtered the crusty crap and kept the good advice at it’s core. I guess it’s a habit I picked up from 4chan.
I’ve got a better one. I summed up the whole thing with “Just Do It!”. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article. Here’s why:
I run into pieces of genuine good advice all the time, on LW and elsewhere, and I’ve noticed that I can’t really learn or take advice from just a summary of it. Summaries of ideas works really well to precipitate concepts that you already have all the support for, and to convey dry facts, but not for advice and experience. See moral truth in fiction for an analogous argument. As an example, When I read truly a part of you, I was like “yeah that’s cool”, it wasn’t until later that I figured the idea out for myself and realized “holy crap someone already told me this.”
So with that said, even if you can boil down the essential idea of an article to a single sentence, it may still have substantial value as something that creates the experience required for you to actually get the idea. I think that cracked article works like this. It’s a simple idea (not even 6 simple ideas), but all the added inflammatory crust create an experience the actually communicates the idea, instead of just saying it.
I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it’s exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn’t get the point across.
I will throw in that the “come on aren’t you man enough to hear the truth?” thing is toxic as a rhetorical device, as it can make otherwise worthless stuff more compelling. (because if you don’t even read this then you are weak).
Like cracked.com and 4chan? Sensibleness is not the filter for popularity on the internet.
Different people respond to different forms. Some are suckers for a man in a white coat intoning “studies have shown”. Some will lap up Deep Wisdom from anyone in Tibetan robes. Some will believe anyone who shouts at them loudly enough. (Makes for some interesting dynamics on PUA and NLP forums, where assertion is alpha, but both agreement and disagreement are beta.)
It’s more that you can write the same content with a completely different 99%, with many completely different 99%s. Ayn Rand, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Feynman could have written the same content, in different ways. How does one determine whether one is responding to the clothing of the message, rather than the content? The red pill idea is particularly attractive to anyone who thinks they’re smarter than those around them. And look where we are, LessWrong, where “contrarian” is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.
Skilful means, as the Buddhists put it. But of those who think they learned something from that article, how many would have learned whatever message the writer might have expressed in the same style?
Can you link to an example of someone using it as a compliment? I don’t think this is actually the case. It’s simply much less of an insult here than it is in most “skeptic” communities.
Yes:
Yes (a self-description rather than a compliment to someone else, but clearly intended to be read as a worthy attribute):
Here is someone excusing themselves for not being contrarian:
In the first link you quoted me describing Moldbug, I should clarify it was used as a put down. I’ve said quite explicitly in other posts that I strongly agree with Hanson on contrarianism.
In the second link the person continues:
The third is a good example but it is in an article talking about how weird LessWrong is for its love of contrarianism.
I’ll take your word for your intentions, but the article itself gives me no impression that it was intended anything other than seriously.
I did mean “and most of all contrarian” quite seriously, I just didn’t expect readers to take that as good. It was meant as a warning since I think Moldbug would be a better thinker if he was less contrarian but I’ll update on you reading of it when using the term in the future.
This apparent misunderstanding on second thought isn’t surprising since this community is self-selected for the kind of people who like enjoy contrarian arguments. Weird out there (not saying incorrect) beliefs such as buying cryonics being a good idea otherwise wouldn’t be popular here.
In addition to this if you visit a site where examples of human cognitive failure are investigate every day and individual debasing techniques discussed, but little ephasis is given on how to build communities that have good epistemology or avoid the biases one seems likely to find the story of “lone genius exposes establishment consensus as nonsense” more plausible than otherwise.
For what it’s worth, I agree that this poster is at least as characteristic of the meme cluster we’re talking about as its more polite/locally celebrated/refined advocates. What’s worse, I suspect that it’s the locally celebrated “red-pill” contrarians who are shrinking from the conclusions of many of their (anti-egalitarian, etc) memes and that this poster just logically extrapolates the “red-pill” premises to produce his alarming view of gender, “deviancy”, etc.
Another far more famous example is Theodore Beale/Vox Day… and a few other bloggers whom I’d rather not link to.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill merchant.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill merchant.
I’m expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I’m not talking about the things you can’t say, but about the idea of things you can’t say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men’s rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: “ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them”, “to give is to receive”, etc., and in other places it would be. There’s not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not—it’s cracked.com, that’s the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for “red pill” turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about “mainstream responders” is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill merchant.
Whoa, damn, you mean to say you recanted? That’s cool, I guess. Now join me in my meta-meta-meta-contrarian ivory tower; you’re smarter and more diligent than me. Although less interested in politics, I guess.
I’ve sort of gone back on one specific piece of evidence, which was that contrarians on some issues tend to have much stronger arguments, and therefor are probably right.
Yvain explained that quite well by noting that believers of popular belief have no incentive to seriously engage contrarians, lest they “legitimize” them or appear like they were taking them seriously. It is much more individually beneficial to point and laugh.
An extension of that, though is that you can get signalling absurdity arms-races that cause the mainstream position to become as absurd as possible. (see for example, Australia banning small-breast porn and most of the world banning drawn loli porn because “can’t let those damn pedos get off”).
Yvain ignored the implications for mainstream belief quality (at least as far as I could tell). But it seems pretty damning to me.
That’s what the quoted comment was referring to.
I’m unsure where I stand relative to you, Konkvistador, Moldbug, etc in all this. I’m still mostly Universalist in morality (universal brotherhood fuck yeah, let’s tear apart and rebuild the universe if it disagrees, etc), but pretty much reject all of its factual claims about literal equality, effectiveness of collective governance, etc. If you like, we could talk in more detail about this. (I would like that; I’m interested in your view, but haven’t had a chance to figure it out).
Don’t know why you think I’m smarter or more diligent, but you’re right that I think politics is a waste of time (except to root out political crud that you didn’t know you had, which is what I’ve been doing recently).
Lulz. Thank you for inviting me.
Good luck with that.
This seems a straw man.
Or their biases, or their culturally-acquired beliefs...
I think you may have quoted the wrong thing here?
Yes. Had that happen over on the other one too. Thanks for pointing it out.
I’ve been thinking of making a new political slogan aimed at the “thoughtcrime” crowd: “What you need is red ink, not red pills!” Meaning that there really aren’t horrible truths about society that are hidden from the ignorant masses but revealed to the brave and sufficiently cynical few; most people (even the “average” ones) do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in, but cannot articulate and communicate it, so on some topics only a scrambled message of discontent and anger can be heard.
Meh.
Elaborate please.
(Sorry for getting into tribal matters, but this is explicitly about tribalism:)
In particular, a long time ago I asked you and your alt-right associates: why do they think liberals are so adamantly in denial about the possiblity of racial differences in intelligence. All the alt-right/reactionary commenters everywhere seem to think that it’s clear-cut: liberals hate Truth in all its forms, and “elite” liberals especially hate it, and they simply want to speed the collapse of decent society with such anti-Truth policies.
I tentatively suggested, however, 1) that there are no real contradictions between the ideology of modern liberalism/progressivism (as it is preached and written), and, say, the average Jew having higher IQ than the average European having higher IQ than average black people—and 2) that the semi-official ban on the topic in liberal academia exists because of complicated self-image and methodology issues going back to the Enlightenment era, and because of sincere, well-intentioned fear of resurgent racist oppression.
So, essentially, nobody is deliberately spreading lies, deliberately concealing truths, making up stories about a dragon in the garage, etc. Instead we have a complex, silent carpet brawl around the meta question on the proper relation of the normative and the descriptive in politics—e.g. given how much we value moral equality, should we try to justify it with facts/axioms about our environment, or with a deontological, non-disprovable position? - where neither side is even psychologically able to state the issue. That’s how hard sufficient levels of reflection are.
How’d you say? (And btw, do you think that my meltdown about all this meta crap qualifies as evidence? I realize that my thinking is… not very close to “standard” liberal or right-wing thought, but might there be similar psychological tension generated in their long-standing conflicts?)
“Me and my allies.”
I refuse to frame a debate in such terms for obvious reasons and am despondent you have chosen them. Honestly I think you are being mind-killed about this and are pattern matching my positions to ones I just don’t hold.
You are completely correct. This was indeed indefensible and inexcusable of me, and pretty much a direct spit upon your goodwill. I was frustrated by my inability to “get even” with an opposing group that has long trumpeted its honesty and accused my views of hypocrisy. I let this primitive emotion get the better of me.
Such little things are what shits up the whole discourse. I understand and agree. I’m sorry.
Up voted. I hope you know you have no more hard feelings from me on this.
No. On the topic you mentioned they quite obviously are.
For someone who’s done as much well-known and controversial stuff in his life as Gould, you’re really going to have to narrow it down for me. I’m not sufficiently familiar with this debate to know what you’re referring to.
See discussion related to Gould’s book Mismeasure of Man in this thread.
To address the average racial IQ thing, I think that a big part of the left’s dislike of it is cognitive dissonance, in a similar fashion to the right’s reflexive denial of climate change. They’re facts that tend to get used in ways that they find repulsive, and it’s easier to deny the fact than it is to make a claim of “It’s true, but let’s not worry too much about it”. In both cases, deniers tend to deny even when questioned in private in my experience(and I’m using friends as my reference group here, so I assume they’d fess up to it being tactical if it was). In both cases, there seems to be a more intellectual strain(which I’m a part of in both cases) that actually does make the “It’s real, but who cares?” argument.
(Hopefully that illustrative parallel doesn’t turn into an AGW flame war...)
This is, simply put, the usual rallying cry of hatred: the claim that the Enemy knows the truth but denies it; knows the good and hates it, deliberately works to corrupt it; etc. — see, e.g., Torquemada or Luther regarding Jews, Kramer and Sprenger regarding “witches”, Lenin regarding kulaks; Pol Pot regarding intellectuals; and so on. It’s not a factual claim based on evidence; it is a form of dark cheerleading.
(It is also not specific to a particular ideology or political faction — left, right, “Third Way”, secular, religious. It is, however, a common precursor to the dark times when adherents of an ideology decide to stop arguing and start killing.)
No.
Humans are neither smart or sane enough to be likely do what they want to do with the information available to them. As a whole we have a only minuscule chance of ordering matter in the next few million years in a way likeable to our values.
We are playing in a universe set to difficulty setting without an eye for human ability. Normal people can’t even predict the weather for a few days in advanced, and our entire civilization can’t in principle do so for more than a few weeks, yet here we are arguing about things like the economy or a culture or governments made up of millions of human brains and algorithms running on computers that can predict the weather for several days.
You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for—but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren’t needed so much—say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace—and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.
Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of “unknown knowns” about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them—all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds—and that consciously interpreting and articulating these “unknown knowns” can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.
We have no reason to trust human intuitions for societies orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number. They are feedback as to how individual humans are going to end up feeling in any society and that is important since humans are presumably what we care about but there is very little sense in giving much weight to such heuristics as usable maps for political action or institution reform.
The fact that people have lot of “unknown knowns” in no way implies that they don’t have many “unknown unknowns”.
People frequently tend to think the know more than they actually do. When it comes to knowledge people are frequently overconfident.
Why do you think religious conservatives are so adamant about abortion or contraception?
I think you haven’t understood the exact question. Opposition to abortion or contraception are policies; racial differences in intelligence are an entirely external fact which should only affect policy after you filter it through the lens of your ethics. A better analogy would be confronting a Catholic with a claim that allowing abortion would make for much less poverty and death in the 3rd world. And even then, a liberal confronted with race differences in intelligence would not be similarly pressured to allow e.g. apartheid, if there is an explicit and sufficiently high value for moral equality between the races in the liberal mindset, and this moral equality demands some sort of practical egalitarianism!
What I claim in this particular example is that, since the secularization of progressivism/liberalism around the Enlightenment—and its pragmatist/utilitarian posturing—it has been having trouble deriving moral equality from first principles here, and deep down there’s awareness of that. So liberals desperately try to derive an egalitarian “ought” from an inconvenient “is”—even though nobody’s forcing them to!
It wasn’t exactly analogous, but it wasn’t meant as such. If I wanted to do that I would have brought up Creationism among Protestant Americans.
I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is. There obviously are good secular conservative arguments in favour of religious thinking guiding how our society develops though.
Throughout the 19th century, there have been leftist thinkers—from moderate and “respectable” ones to hardcore radicals—who either had no problem acknowledging differences in average intelligence, or were even outright racists/white supremacists. E.g., I’ve read that many American abolitionists either acted xenophobic towards actual black people when they met them, believed that blacks can never match whites in ability or achievement, etc. Yet their moral and religious opposition to slavery—all men are created in God’s image, and ought to be treated as such—covered the immorality of one race subjugating another. So… eh, it’s contradictory and messy. But ultimately egalitarianism, like all moral emotions, need not be chained to any particular empirical belief.
This seems like an ok model to describe what his happening.
It is not at all obvious to me that any other hypothesis is needed to explain Gould. Why, he practically says that he kept telling himself “human equality is a contingent fact of history” until he believed it.
But Jared Diamond does appear to me to be deliberately concealing truths, because he is fairly careful not to outright lie (and because he used to be into human biodiversity).
I said meh because meh was what I meant. I feel a very strong moralizing dimension to the post and the link that just left me shaking my head. A kind of projection of internal life to a universe, assuming it that runs on stories.
I’m used to being at least intrigued by your posts, that one proved an exception.
Perhaps this is happening in the system as a whole, but I wouldn’t call this a silent brawl if none of the involved know what the fight is about. And since you posit such a complex explanation…
Show me the evidence!
Lets begin with this. Do you take this argument seriously? Or is it just armament? I refuse to think you don’t have any clue as to how utterly devastating this argument is when applied to the left in the 20th century.
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Okay, this joke’s totally on you! Dick (and some earlier Gnostics) essentially made the very same suggestion on metaphysical knowledge that I entertain here about social knowledge; it’s an unknown known that most people already happen to possess, but which must be brought to the forefront of consciousness via a revelation event he called “Anamnesis”.
Actually you are right, here I was doing the pattern matching.
I think this is because how I see Gnostic like beliefs working out in the world. Humans being social will tend to share them and such movements spiritual or otherwise consist in a large part of an enlightened guru with special gnosis telling you what you have “forgotten” and must learn relearn.
I would like an answer to the tribal question I posed. Do you see how this argument applies to leftism?
That leftists were wrong to force their propaganda, clever and logically superior as it might appear, upon the masses who wisely stuck to conservatism since forever and understood conservative wisdom on a gut level? Yeah, yeah, you’d say that it’s just as bad or worse than the modern “thoughtcrime” currents I mentioned—but I think there is a significant difference.
For the last 200 years, lots of revolutionary/populist left-wing movements, even non-Marxist ones (incl. ultimately triumphant ones like 1st/2nd-wave feminism or abolitionism), have been using variations on class consciousness as a theoretical foundation for their agitation and rabble-rousing. And at least their official descriptions of “consciousness-raising” have been much like what I mean—and what I assume Zizek means—by “articulating the unknown knowns”.
Of course, reality is messy and politics fucks shit up, but ultimately I feel that the idea of consciousness-raising is not a clever trick, a deception of the masses who know better but are led astray. In the right hands it can serve as social psychoanalysis of sorts, to resolve deep-seated exploitation and oppression by dragging them from the collective unconscious into the light. A good example is how Western countries are practically at the end of homophobia. It was first systematically opposed by the Left’s critical theory and Freudo-Marxism; now it’s vanishing even on the right. Of course, there have been failures, which naturally resound louder—such as the reckless politics of “national liberation” leading to rivers of blood and zero liberty in the decolonized countries.
But here, before you say: “Aha, so you admit that this radical meddling is irresponsible and unaccountable!”, I’d ask you to consider, what if the masses have always had a desire for emancipation, what if the ideas of left intellectuals could never have been so transformative without a mute but powerful demand for them?
Every revolution has a fundamentally real reason! It might not even be a “good” reason—see the “men’s rights movement” and their politics of bitterness—but a revolutionary trend cannot be kicked off with simply propaganda, mass psychosis or shallow moral fashion! This reason can stay deep and strong under a calm surface, dormant for ages. Slaves did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position in America; women did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position before feminism. This fundamental psychosocial reality of oppression is what the oft-derided Marxist Historical Materialism is clear-headed about, and what can lead a right-wing thinker to denial (e.g. Moldbug on the Russian revolution) or biting bullets (e.g. Chesterton on the French one).
And, like Gramsci said, the oppressed masses can and do generate their own intellectuals who are driven to become a voice for the voiceless—by their origins, not by whim or ethical abstractions. Who taught racial equality or feminism to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave (who must’ve simply got a jackpot in the genetic lottery)? Evil power-hungry Northern abolitionists?
No, it must be the same process by which a black PUA-practicing guy commenting on a men’s issues blog can realize how his struggle is very similar to that of women, despite all the public hostility between feminists and PUAs. When he articulates the prejudice and oppression that have been a personal concern in his life, he can’t help but notice that other groups face very similar oppression. Grassroots leftism!
P.S.: Konkvistador asked if Nazism could count as a catastrophic and evil consequence of this sort of thing. The communist terror in China could, I think—but not Nazism. The Nazis killed and enslaved people under a wholly illusory cover of fighting an arbitrary Other. Their violence was not directed at the real social system.
A more compelling example of a social revolution causing catastrophic evil things would be the Red Terror and the Cultural Revolution in China. It was indeed mostly driven from below with encouragement from Mao; it was a part of sweeping systemic changes; it concluded decades of chaos and strife, and centuries of misery and exploitation; this still doesn’t justify an orgy of slaughter and cannibalism. I don’t know in what way to talk about it.
Overall this post has left me of mixed feelings. I liked it because it is exensive and gives insight into your chain of reasoning, making much of it explicit. I dislike it strongly because I don’t see any evidence that you have updated on the arguments I mad in our previous discussions here, here and here, which I think more or less defeat a crucial part of your reasoning here.
I’ll try to rephrase your argument to make sure I’m not failing at interpreting it:
Heuristics people evolved to deal with other humans are useful at detecting bad stuff happening in our social environment. Such feelings of distress can be repressed by socialization or overwhelmed by other feelings. This is bad because people’s instincts triggered by such heuristics still point in about the right direction to solving said bad stuff in society.
Since civilization is really screwed up on many levels lots of such alarms are going off in human brains and a good way to get political power is to harvest them. This solves the problem of right and might, as the responses that you call “unknwon knowns” are the strong nearly always winning force that advances advance “right”. The “might” that accompanies them and actually produces changes is just what you get when you unleash lots of humans on solving a problem.
Unleashing them via political means is thus mostly good.
Nah, I’d simply say that holding them back (via “political means”, yes, because all means of repression carry a political dimension due to the importance of their social function) is evil, really evil. The revolution/release itself is sometimes evil, always scary and usually involves violence. But that’s simply the kind of pent-up force that results from isolating, torturing and enslaving aspects of people’s selves.
No no no. This is the basic new-left concept of negativity; we could listen to ourselves and understand how we are repressed, where we’re hurting, how it impacts our life—but we shouldn’t pretend that we know what to do! Trauma does not come wrapped with instructions on how to overcome it. State communism, in particular, has failed, and so has the alleviation of repression through unrestricted sexuality, and many other emancipatory projects too. Articulating the truth of our feelings is enormously important, but it can only tell us what’s broken; we can’t really see a path to a free, non-repressive and individuality-affirming society.
(Or, rather, we might get a feeling as to where we’d want to go, but it’s not calibrated to the circumstances in any way, it’s only calibrated to our scream of pain! Good illustration: Zizek quoting Ayn Rand as to why money is good and abolishing markets led to disaster.)
Today’s Left can only offer palliatives, think hard, reflect, and act as a conservative force against political projects that rely on repression. Reasons for hope—Utopian hope—are few, but we must keep it alive. In particular, when in the links above you criticize me for supporting intervention in group conflict and identity politics, saying, essentially, that it’s better for anyone feeling oppressed to disarm and suffer quietly until the pain numbs them—and maybe there’ll be less social conflict overall then. There is an utilitarian logic to it; certain misery is better than certain misery plus group infighting.
Yet the logic of not giving up hope is, to me, different; if there’s a real honest chance to create a small segment of society, a small public space where people would really be able to exist, talk or think together, with radically less systemic oppression from each other and from the outside—say, LW in the example above, or a factory, or a classroom—then this is worth fighting for, and worth the usual risks.
And I don’t mean, like, formal enforced niceness, politeness, feminism police or such—I mean like what Zizek says about his atheist Christianity, a real love for the Other, under a shared universality that stops differences from being obstacles. A place and a circumstance where you wouldn’t just be “tolerated”, but accepted, and could accept yourself.
So for a really lame, rambling summary: the left-wing “positive” vision here is essentially an utopia of non-repression; we don’t have the remotest idea of how to get there; it’s oriented towards individuality but is best described in terms of community and brotherhood, not the individual; it is fundamentally possible, and there are gleans of it here and there in daily life, which are worth fighting for and cherishing; -
yet the opposition to what’s repressive and cruel and loathsome in current reality is more basic, and we ought to keep it up; if we give up, we might well lose what little we have under liberal capitalism; there are no promises in walking away from Omelas.
This may the most Marxian post I’ve ever given a thumbs-up to. Coherent analysis, even if I disagree with some of the claims.
Thanks. I feel that LW’s political landscape really needs a hard-left current that would be up to our standards of reasoning&debate. There’s been a lot of thought and passion put into various left-of-liberalism philosophies in the last century, and the community needs to engage and grapple with them like it does with alt-right contrarianism, getting past inferential distances.
People have been crying out for more ideological diversity on LW and against our discourse being dominated by mainstream liberal/progressive thought. I can see them trying to add such diversity from the right, but when I’m going for a far-left perspective (often in direct opposition to the local “Weird-Right”), I feel rather alone and divorced-from-context here.
How convenient that this is so easy to tell apart.
Yes, pretty easy in this case, actually. After coming to power, they picked up a few Weimar social programs (including the Autobahns!) and tripled the hype;
they didn’t nationalize much anything except stolen Jewish property, and even that was in practice mostly given away as loot;
they worked with the old officer caste despite its frequent disloyalty and purged the SA when the stormtroopers wanted in on the influence and status;
they kept a basically peacetime consumer-oriented economy until 1943, long after all other great powers introduced total-war central control;
despite the Anti-Semitic propaganda, they couldn’t manage to get enough popular participation during the Kristallnacht, and Hitler cancelled further planned pogroms in favor of silent and secret repression...
Lots of propaganda, lots of killing, not too much change in society’s structures compared to e.g. 1914.
I don’t think the historical record supports this assertion. The Prussian / Imperial military was a parallel institution to the post-1848 civilian government—both loyal to the Kaiser, but otherwise unrelated. (No, this isn’t a stable setup).
A substantial amount of the German army’s political maneuvering in Weimar period was an attempt to maintain independence from civilian government oversight even after there wasn’t really any German state separate from the civilian leadership.
Once Hitler took power, he broke the Army’s independence (eg the destruction of Generals Blomberg and Fritsch). In short, the Nazis were the first civilian government to place the German military in a subordinate position. “Working with the old officer class” is terribly misleading.
You’re still talking in terms of classes that shouldn’t exist. I don’t care about blacks, or women, or white males between 30-50. I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences. I say this only to point out that your argument sounds like nesting dolls and some of us do bite the bullet and wish to unravel down to the base case.
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”—more cheap food and cars and iPads and UAVs and office blocks and hedge funds and mass-produced entertainment and generally all the stuff that we already manufacture?
Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
explicit political power, implicit power should be made explicit wherever possible.
And yes, I’m specifically claiming that on net people like the latter three have a much larger negative impact than the positive impact of people like the former three.
Your use of the word overpriced and affluent leads me to believe you attach moral significance to parting idiots with their money for baubles. Why? The average wealthy person has a larger positive impact than the average non-wealthy first worlder. I prefer concentrated wealth in the hands of those whose values I share. I have values more likely aligned with that of a tech company CEO than a randomly selected first world person.
...Then I don’t understand how your words are at all an objection to my description of emancipatory/socially radical politics. You do understand that, for example, MLK was a radically minded avowed socialist who led a partial social revolution in the US without either violence or “explicit political power”? If you don’t find yourself “horrified” by this, then we don’t seem to have a problem.
It’s not nearly so narrow; I see no point in manufacturing tons of useless shiny stuff and pushing fake desires onto people to sell it so that the cycle can continue—and this wasteful nonsense is a mandatory imperative for 1st world capitalism. If we could agree on a different mechanism of distribution (not necessarily state planning), we could be using our industrial might to kickstart poor countries instead—while 1st world people could be working less, consuming less, wasting less, draining less resources, enjoying more leisure and giving more attention to the non-monetary things in society.
Example: why the hell do we buy personal cars for driving in cities? What good does it do us at all? And have we even considered the myriad costs? How is this not a ridiculous failure of the “pragmatic” capitalist mode of distribution AND its ideology?
Multi,
I’ve read this conversation, and I literally don’t understand what you are talking about. I agree with you that left-of-mainstream views would be valuable in this community. But I think you and RomeoStevens are only talking past each other. That’s not really a victory for rationalism.
Wait so unless I’m horrified by it 100% of the time my point gets thrown out? There’s no room for saying something has plusses and minuses and the minuses outweigh the plusses?
Sorry but you don’t get to decide which preferences are real. You are angry that more resources aren’t devoted towards things you value, welcome to the club.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”?
Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
It is certainly an attractor people here would find themselves vulnerable to given the support for contrarian positions like cryonics.
As a rule of thumb, I assume that anyone claiming to be only joking is lying. They are saying exactly what they think while pretending not to.
So you endorse calling them on it, ceteris paribus?
What you do about any particular instance will obviously depend on the situation. Some things are worth speaking up about. Some things are worth making non-verbal indications that their joke is bombing. Some just deserve to be ignored. You don’t want to be this guy.
I don’t? If the expected social improvement exceeds my personal cost (taking into account my opportunity cost), why shouldn’t I act? Taking that xkcd to mean what you assert suggests you think all social advocacy is wasted.
More generally, the blogger I linked is complaining that the joke didn’t bomb and generally doesn’t bomb.
You have just defined the set of cases in which you should. Deciding when you are looking at such a case and what to do about it is the non-trivial part.
I’ve all but explicitly been asserting that this is a time to act.
You seem to agree there is a problem (Jokes are statements of true belief / in vino veritas), yet you seem to disagree that taking action is a good idea.
I obviously misunderstand your position in some way.
I was just saying that seeing something objectionable, and deciding whether and how to object to it, are two separate things. I do find “jokes” like the one in the original article objectionable, but if I was present at Rowdy telling this joke about the dog, I don’t know how best to tackle it, even having the leisure of taking as long as I want to consider the hypothetical, let alone face-to-face with about one second in real time to get my brain in gear. But that’s just me.
Or to put it another way, my short answer to your question:
is “yes”.
You must be real fun at comedy clubs.
A comedy club must be one of the least likely places to find me, even if I lived in a more cosmopolitan place than I do.
Funny, but stand-up comics on stage usually don’t go out of their way to point out they’re just joking. (And even when they do, they don’t necessarily mean it.) Sometimes there’s not even an implicit understanding that a stand-up’s just joking.
A comedy club must be one of the least likely places to find me, even if I lived in a more cosmopolitan place than I do.
A comedy club must be one of the least likely places to find me, even if I lived in a more cosmopolitan place than I do.
A comedy club must be one of the least likely places to find me, even if I lived in a more cosmopolitan place than I do.