But given that you’ve explicitly supported selectively reporting scientific research and hiding information that you think most of the population will interpret in a way counterproductive to your movement, it makes me think “well, wouldn’t she just say that anyway?”
Yes, probably. And likewise, you would probably say that anyway, and we can recurse down this rabbit hole indefinitely.
In reality, the media already selectively reports research and hides information. It reports research that is by and large acceptable, and hides information that isn’t. That’s why very unscientific things often get reported—they still meet different standards for social acceptability that are entirely related to the empirical truth of the reported finding.
If a scientist finds themselves in a field where nearly everything they do is propagated in such a way that it causes the oppression of more than half of humanity, they are either obligated to stop doing research in that field or do so secretly. This is why I said earlier (you may have not seen it) that even evolutionary psychology that is on the surface non-sexist should not be propagated. Doing so would legitimize other similar research that would then perpetuate patriarchy.
But this is certainly a convenient excuse for you, isn’t it?
This is why I have zero faith in the forum community on this website—no matter how many times they read “one argument against an army” or “substance screens off source,” they will continue to do those exact things whenever confronted with outgroup memes. Those arguments are soldiers, and they cannot be deployed against their homeland.
You could go read the textbook I linked to above, or read any study, or just mull on what you know about learning, conditioning, and gendered behavior (especially gendered behavior over time and in different communities). But I would bet money at nearly any odds that you won’t, because you’ve won here. You’ve developed a fully general counterargument to anything I can say from this point on.
Yes, probably. And likewise, you would probably say that anyway, and we can recurse down this rabbit hole indefinitely.
I have a history of having my mind changed by people I formerly disagreed with. I may not be perfectly debiased, but to the best of my ability I avoid looking for excuses not to change my mind.
In reality, the media already selectively reports research and hides information. It reports research that is by and large acceptable, and hides information that isn’t. That’s why very unscientific things often get reported—they still meet different standards for social acceptability that are entirely related to the empirical truth of the reported finding.
Which is why I largely ignore science reporting by news media.
If a scientist finds themselves in a field where nearly everything they do is propagated in such a way that it causes the oppression of more than half of humanity, they are either obligated to stop doing research in that field or do so secretly. This is why I said earlier (you may have not seen it) that even evolutionary psychology that is on the surface non-sexist should not be propagated. Doing so would legitimize other similar research that would then perpetuate patriarchy.
They do not know in advance what the results of their research will be (otherwise there would be no point in conducting it.) Certainly it’s problematic that some findings are more likely to be publicized than others, but if scientists cannot be trusted to make their findings available unless they support their ideology, then people will have to assume that the evidence supports that ideology less than the scientists say it does.
And if scientists refuse to research a field at all, because they claim it legitimizes findings that will be construed as sexist? People are going to conclude that the truth is sexist.
There are certainly cases where people are biased in ways that keep them from interpreting evidence appropriately. Indeed, this sort of thing happens on a routine basis. I don’t contest at all that there are lots and lots of people interpreting true scientific data in a sexist way, that really shouldn’t be interpreted in that way. But that doesn’t mean you can just hide the information and thereby solve the problem, because hiding the information looks even worse. I majored in Environmental Science, I’m familiar with how many people will seize on anything that looks remotely like evidence that climate change might not be happening and blow it dramatically out of proportion in the face of winds of evidence blowing heavily the other way. I understand the temptation to say “fuck, we can’t let people see this, they’ll take it entirely wrong” if you get a result that doesn’t support the hypothesis, even though statistically it’s inevitable that there will be some. But then when you look at the Climactic Research Unit email controversy, with the huge publicity and the very significant downward spike in how seriously the public took climate change for a long time afterwards, and see that’s really not a prudent way to respond to the issue at all.
You could go read the textbook I linked to above, or read any study, or just mull on what you know about learning, conditioning, and gendered behavior (especially gendered behavior over time and in different communities). But I would bet money at nearly any odds that you won’t, because you’ve won here. You’ve developed a fully general counterargument to anything I can say from this point on.
Please don’t assume that because I hold a different position from you that I haven’t learned or thought about the issue. I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying learning, conditioning, and gendered behavior. A significant proportion of my friends are not just feminists, but Feminists, people who treat it as a major facet of their identity, for whom it is a primary focus of their intellectual pursuits, and I read all the material they share with me. I am not assuming that you only disagree with me because you’ve taken a kneejerk stance and not given any time to contemplating reasons you could be wrong. If you default to assuming that about the people you hold discussions about these issues with, it’s no wonder if you come away from them thinking they’re unproductive.
Honestly, (speaking as a feminist, albeit not a radical feminist, who’s been frustrated by a lot of the male-rights-apologist sentiment on this website), I think this thread went amazingly well. Yes, people disagree with you. Some of those people are expressing outgroup hatred. Some of those people are (reasonably) honestly looking at your position and still disagreeing because *it’s a complicated position that requires them to read multiple books to even have a reasonable understanding of, and there are loads of other similarly complex positions that might possibly warrant their time.”
And ALL of those people are still responding in a manner way more productive than I’ve seen on every other forum that discusses radical feminism, except for actual feminist blogsites which are generally semi-closed communities.
You may have accidentally left off the folks that are pretty conversant with various varieties of radical feminism and still disagree with eridu’s take.
Some of those people are (reasonably) honestly looking at your position and still disagreeing because *it’s a complicated position that requires them to read multiple books to even have a reasonable understanding of, and there are loads of other similarly complex positions that might possibly warrant their time.”
Nothing the user in question said here seems remotely complicated.
I think the most damning indictment of LW throughout all of this has been the disregard for its own stated principles in favor of adhering to the ingroup.
Admittedly I was never called a feminazi, but that’s hardly the only way to be anti-feminist. The patriarchy isn’t the Republican Party, the patriarchy is all of society. Likewise, an unproductive response isn’t just “feminazi.”
Also, since when was being better than average the goal of LW? As rationalists, we don’t compete against each other, we compete against the universe.
Also, since when was being better than average the goal of LW? As rationalists, we don’t compete against each other, we compete against the universe.
Frankly, I don’t think an ideal response to your particular response would be dramatically different. Maybe your argument is 100% correct and LW folk would discover this upon a full examination of the facts, but we’re not starting from a place where that’s obviously true—we’re starting from a place of “you have made several assertions, and then demanded people read up on all the actual arguments on their own.” And it’s not clear that reading up on this is more important than reading up on, say:
The current leading arguments about how to address third world poverty
The current leading arguments about existential risk
The current leading arguments about other positions within the social-justice spectrum than radical feminism
Time is valuable. I agree with most of your positions, and frankly, had I not already been familiar with them, I would not have been persuaded by your rhetorical skills to give them higher priority than the above problems. You stated explicitly that you were here for fun, and I hope that’s true, because if you were arguing-to-persuade you should have chosen radically different tactics. LW is not “failing” to respond to a political point that isn’t even being argued seriously.
And I think you are simply wrong about your arguments regarding scientific research enabling patriarchy. (If you were actually arguing-to-persuade that position, you should have brought it up as a possibly correct instrumental action that is worth considering if you have feminist values, rather than a tactic that you are firmly in favor of. Because once you publicly reveal that endorsement, you lose all credibility when trying to make claims about reality)
Remember, this discussion started by discussing whether evolutionary psychology is sexist.
If LW were being honest with itself, I’d expect the discussion to stay there, rather than drifting to “is patriarchy real,” which is where it almost immediately went to. Here are a few other bullet points of what I’d expect to see:
An immediate halt to discussion as soon as I said “I don’t feel like I can summarize this well, but here is a potentially lengthy essay which can.” If the point of the discussion is for mutual information, at that point, I have nothing left to offer and can be ignored. If the point of the discussion is to score Internet points by expressing ingroup solidarity, it will continue.
A continual insistence on predicted experience in the real world, rather than thought-experiments devised to gain information about my own beliefs rather than the state of reality. If patriarchy exists, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks—what’s true is already so. If I am an uncredible loon, it changes nothing. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
The focus of discussion would stay on the original topic, rather than focusing more and more on whatever outgroup beliefs I may have. For example, in your comment, the original topic is a footnote at the end, and the main body is dedicated to lecturing me on how I have failed to appreciate the glorious rationalism of Less Wrong.
Frequently, arguments are based on stereotypes of feminism or what I might think rather than what I’ve explicitly stated. For example, I’ve said “patriarchy is a set of learned behaviors communicated through operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning” in almost every comment. I’ve had to repeat this because it’s nearly always been unacknowledged.
If I have a disagreement with one of my rationalist comrades in the real world, the argument immediately devolves into what predictions disagree, and then on what a satisfactory experiment would be. And then it’s over. On LW, it’s entirely the opposite—the argument immediately focuses on how strange it is that I believe that thing, there’s a brief stage during which people marvel at each other that I believe that thing, and finally, I’m chided for lowering the sanity waterline for believing that thing.
Your time is valuable, but if you can afford to comment on Internet websites, it isn’t that valuable.
Please consider addressing your comments to individuals rather than presuming the existence of a group consensus.
“LW” is composed of lots of different people — whose views on the subject range from considered feminism to considered anti-feminism; whose politics range from left to right and monarchist to republican to anarchist; whose levels of education range from “smart high-schooler” to “published researcher”; whose reasons for being here range from thinking it helps save the world, to shootin’ the shit.
This is arguably “excusable” and attributable to the inherent difficulty of thinking at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously—like thinking of the quarks, the molecules, the aerodynamics/thermodynamics and the newtonian motions of a paper airplane all at the same time without loss of coherence or losing any data.
It is easier to compute a social trend first, reason its causes, and then separately compute individual trends, reason their causes, and then link everything together.
Well, maybe. But a stream of comments also lacks many of the cues that in-person has to distinguish individuals.
For instance — with the exception of those LW-folks whom I’ve met in person — when I read LW comments I don’t imagine them being in distinct voices for each poster. Some online forums make individual personality more visible, for instance by having icons or colors associated with each individual. LW doesn’t. And I don’t suggest that we should. But to a newcomer, the absence of cues other than ① username, and ② writing style might contribute to a sense of greater consonance, harmony, or even uniformity. Add the usual outgroup homogeneity bias, and LW could look like a hivemind.
If this really bothers you, mentally substitute all instances of “LW” in my comments with “all the humans that have replied to my comments in this thread on this website.”
That was a beautifully structured bit of propaganda in your last sentence, though. “LW is composed of lots of different people”—that’s an applause light worthy of a keynote speech at a transhumanist conference.
Remember, this discussion started by discussing whether evolutionary psychology is sexist.
If LW were being honest with itself, I’d expect the discussion to stay there, rather than drifting to “is patriarchy real,” which is where it almost immediately went to.
It’s easy to see how that happened, since in your original comment you equated sexism with “perpetuating patriarchy”. At that point, the only options are (1) agreeing with you; (2) arguing that evolutionary psychology reduces patriarchy; or (3) denying that patriarchy exists.
EDIT: In other words, the topic you describe as “is patriarchy real” was the topic you brought up, whether you realized it or not.
It’s easy to see how that happened, since in your original comment you equated sexism with “perpetuating patriarchy”. At that point, the only options are (1) agreeing with you; (2) arguing that evolutionary psychiatry reduces patriarchy; or (3) denying that patriarchy exists.
Well, there’s also (2.5) arguing that evolutionary psychology neither contributes to nor reduces patriarchy.
I think that would be an uncharitable interpretation, since it would lead one to infer that Eridu regards such activities as, say, eating oranges or opening refrigerators as sexist, and even knowing that Eridu considers many things sexist that most people do not, I find that doubtful.
Well, I prefer to avoid getting too close to an object-level discussion of eridu’s views, but suffice it to say that I would want to check with eridu before making any such assumption about what he does not consider sexist.
In any event, my point was that eridu’s views on patriarchy are a crucial premise of his argument that ev psych is bad, so a discussion of them was inevitable.
I’ll reply to this comment by replying to a later comment (I hope you’ll excuse this, I can only post once every ten minutes now):
The word he used was “perpetuate”, rather than “contribute”; so leaving patriarchy invariant, so to speak, counts.
Patriarchy is an oppressive system that faces opposition at every turn. It only exists because humans continue to fuel it. Perpetuating or furthering patriarchy means contributing to it; being patriarchy-neutral is the same thing as reducing patriarchy (albeit in a smaller quantitative sense).
Earlier arguments were along the lines of “evolutionary psychology is patriarchy-neutral because evolutionary psychology is true and the truth has no politics,” but that line of argument ended rather quickly, being replaced with “feminism is bad.”
I’d like to point out also that replacing the harder issue of “does evolutionary psychology oppress women” with “are eridu’s feminist politics good” is a form of ad-hominem attack—“feminist politics” are a conceptual attribute of “eridu,” and they provide a nice proxy for “ur dumb,” which is what you would see on another site.
If you present a conclusion, and other people disagree with it, then if they’re doing things right, they must disagree with either your premises or the inferences you draw from those premises. If you identify your set of premises and the inferences relating to them from which you draw the conclusion that evolutionary psychology is sexist as “feminism,” then naturally if other people disagree with your conclusion then the discussion will fall back to the topic of feminism, which appears to me to be exactly what happened.
I disagree that the discussion here has ever taken the line that “feminism is bad,” although if you interpret your own faction of feminism as the only “real” feminism, and nobody else in the discussion is aligned with that faction, I can understand how it might seem that way.
I’d like to point out also that replacing the harder issue of “does evolutionary psychology oppress women” with “are eridu’s feminist politics good” is a form of ad-hominem attack—“feminist politics” are a conceptual attribute of “eridu,” and they provide a nice proxy for “ur dumb,” which is what you would see on another site.
Your politics are a set of ideas, and if we didn’t disagree with them then obviously we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place. You can identify any idea as a conceptual attribute of yourself, and thereby frame any disagreement with you as an an hominem, but this is in complete opposition to the goal of safeguarding productive discussion.
If you identify your set of premises and the inferences relating to them from which you draw the conclusion that evolutionary psychology is sexist as “feminism,” then naturally if other people disagree with your conclusion then the discussion will fall back to the topic of feminism, which appears to me to be exactly what happened.
But then the arguments I’d be responding to would be on the topic of evolutionary psychology, not on an unrelated topic of human relationships.
Making the statement “feminism is wrong about relationships, so it must be wrong about evolutionary psychology” (with the value of “feminism” in your post, which is probably accurate for most people who aren’t liberal feminists in this thread) is a common fallacy that the Sequences take some time to elucidate.
Your politics are a set of ideas, and if we didn’t disagree with them then obviously we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place.
This is a prediction that I think is falsified in the early stages of this thread, wherein the first comments were about whether scientists could be responsible for journalist’s sexist misreadings of their findings, and whether the findings of evolutionary psychology were misread.
After I posted a comment that outlined my political beliefs, the discussion turned to them at the exclusion of all else.
Making the statement “feminism is wrong about relationships, so it must be wrong about evolutionary psychology” (with the value of “feminism” in your post, which is probably accurate for most people who aren’t liberal feminists in this thread) is a common fallacy that the Sequences take some time to elucidate.
I would, instead, phrase the statement as follows:
1). eridu’s premises lead to incorrect conclusions about relationships. 2). eridu’s reasoning is valid. 3). Therefore, eridu’s premises must be unsound. 4). eridu applied valid reasoning to his premises to reach conclusions about evolutionary psychology. 5). Since his premises are unsound, we cannot say whether his conclusions about evolutionary psychology are correct, based on his reasoning alone.
This is a nice way to see it, but the question “Are heterosexual relationships *(sexist)” and the question “Is evolutionary psychology *(sexist)” can have different factual answers.
As such, getting me to field questions on unrelated aspects of feminism is little more than a way to apply the Worst Argument in the World to “feminism,” or a way to attempt to be anti-reductionist by asserting that “feminism” is a property of predictions, and all predictions that have that property are false.
Your time is valuable, but if you can afford to comment on Internet websites, it isn’t that valuable.
I avoided getting into it for a while, for that reason.
I have failed to appreciate the glorious rationalism of Less Wrong.
No, I was lecturing you on using bad rhetorical tactics. (Historically Less Wrong does pretty poorly when gender politics comes up. This was the best gender-politic discussion I’ve seen, which was particularly interesting.)
I admit this IS still pretty bad, but the opening comment wasn’t something that had much chance at all of producing a non-tribal discussion. I actually do like your opening warning (“please demonstrate your outgroup hatred with a downvote and move on”), but continuing to harp on that concept whenever anyone disagreed with you didn’t help anything.
I actually do like your opening warning (“please demonstrate your outgroup hatred with a downvote and move on”)
Actually I think that was the problem. The first response to that was met with “hivemind” and “so much for your vaunted rationality” and after you start seeing things like that there’s pretty much no chance any future discussion will be productive.
This was the best gender-politic discussion I’ve seen, which was particularly interesting.
I’ve gotten pretty good at LW buzzwords, and since my comment got buried quickly it kept the set of people commenting on it confined to those who saw it and were drawn to the topic of feminism.
Wei_dai’s post about this has some great comments that range from mere denial of patriarchy to hard reactionary male supremacy.
continuing to harp on that concept whenever anyone disagreed with you didn’t help anything.
I confined discussion of that point to the comment subthread of someone commenting on only that line of text from my original post.
Or at least, I hope I did. I can’t keep track of context when I’m just replying to scores of comments.
Likewise, from below:
after you start seeing things like that there’s pretty much no chance any future discussion will be productive.
Commenting on one line of snark in my original comment was not productive in itself. Of course there was no chance future discussion would be productive. At that point, in that thread, the discussion was over style rather than substance.
A continual insistence on predicted experience in the real world, rather than thought-experiments devised to gain information about my own beliefs rather than the state of reality.
While I think your other points have some degree of validity, this one does not. How can we apply evidence to your hypotheses, if we don’t know what your hypotheses even are ? It is important to ensure that everyone understands your claims (without necessarily agreeing with them) before we can discuss them. You say that “if patriarchy exists, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks”, but we can’t determine whether it exists or not until we understand what you mean by the word “patriarchy”.
Furthermore, I believe that most people here believe that there does exist some systematic bias in our society that privileges men over women—though we may disagree about the degree of this bias as well as some other details. But the mere existence of this bias does not automatically render the rest of your points valid.
For example, here are some statements of yours that could turn out to be false even if your beliefs about the exact nature of patriarchy are true:
Eliminating gender is not only possible, but is also the best way to combat the patriarchy.
Operant conditioning through guilt is a supremely effective conversion tactic.
Scientists should suppress any conclusions that could lend support to the patriarchy, even if these conclusions accurately represent reality.
The user base of Less Wrong is incapable of engaging with you on a purely intellectual level.
Operant conditioning through guilt is a supremely effective conversion tactic.
It’s worth an NB that conversion is not the only valuable outcome of guilt. Even if an oppressor is not converted outright, guilt-tripping can still make him uncertain, less confident, and less effective at achieving his goals, and since he is an oppressor, this outcome is valuable in and of itself.
It’s worth an NB that conversion is not the only valuable outcome of guilt. Even if an oppressor is not converted outright, guilt-tripping can still make him uncertain, less confident, and less effective at achieving his goals, and since he is an oppressor, this outcome is valuable in and of itself.
Another valuable outcome is that instilling chronic, free-floating self-doubt into someone can convince them that oppression directed at them is deserved and proper—in fact, this happens to be a common feature in emotional abuse. It can also inspire them to do all sorts of things which are beneficial to the “movement”—not least of which is propagating the meme by guilt-tripping others.
This is a very “cool” sort of mindhacking—especially for people who happen to be high-functioning sociopaths who seek coercive power over others.
While I mostly agree on the denotational claims, this is erring somewhat close to implicitly accusing feminists of Dark Arts, and my warning lights flashed when I read this comment.
Perhaps the implied notion that guilt-tripping has very arguable expected results that can vary wildly should be spelled out more explicitly to ensure a higher level of clarity and minimize political mind-killing in the discussion.
this is erring somewhat close to implicitly accusing feminists of Dark Arts
Hmm, I don’t know, really. What I do know is that my comment was meant to overtly accuse those who would guilt-trip others based on transparently fallacious arguments (such as Fully General Counterarguments and Worst Arguments in The World) of being Dark-Arts-wielding emotional manipulators and abusers. Even if some self-described feminists get caught in this net, I think this says more about them than it does about anything else.
Oh, indeed. I hope you don’t take my comment as approval of that; “valuable” there meant “instrumentally valuable to someone.”
It was just a morally neutral observation of human nature. Like the observation that if a sample of a certain heavy metal is increased very suddenly, it will undergo an exothermic reaction with energy density significantly higher than most chemical reactions. Just an interesting fact.
On the other hand, attempting to guilt trip others can easily backfire. The example Eridu gave of a person feeling guilty about engaging in homophobic behaviors after their own brother has come out as gay does not necessarily generalize to cases of deliberate guilt tripping by others, which tends to create an adversarial reaction, and in terms of goals such as, say, getting people to donate to charity, doesn’t perform very well.
I think Goodhart’s Law (any measurement which is used to guide policy will become corrupt) might be in play.
The psychological changes which are needed to learn to treat people more carefully are fairly likely to be painful. Unfortunately, it can be a short jump from there to thinking that causing pain is likely to teach people to treat each other more carefully.
Goodheart’s Law? Sloppy associations about thing space? The fact that it’s much easier to cause pain than to usefully change people’s deep reflexes?
The true objection at the heart of those posts was “look at the stupid feminist,” and frequently, they were phrased as “Wow, you’re really crazy—so listen to this thought experiment, would you really say that patriarchy exists in this context? Because if so, holy crap, you’re dumb.”
This is using “feminism” as a proxy for “intelligence” and is other than that swap a fairly standard ad-hominem argument.
Operant conditioning through guilt is a supremely effective conversion tactic.
This is not a claim I ever made.
Furthermore, I believe that most people here believe that there does exist some systematic bias in our society that privileges men over women
I think this is false as a matter of simple fact. I’ll bet money on it.
I think this is false as a matter of simple fact. I’ll bet money on it.
I’d take that bet, for reasonable values of “privileges men over women”.
I might expect controversy if we were asking whether that bias is entirely unidirectional, whether “patriarchy” is an accurate or productive way of describing it, or how pervasive it is, but I’d expect the existence of systemic gender bias favoring men in certain domains to be challenged only by a minority of posters here. That’s really a fairly low bar, and while gender issues weren’t discussed on the last survey, correlations with the politics questions seem to favor it.
I’d be most comfortable betting that I could design a survey that, depending on the level of LW buzzwords, got participants to respond either that the patriarchy doesn’t exist or that it does.
But I also think that there’s a lot of male privilege that LWers deny exists.
PM me and I’ll give you an email address you can use to communicate with me about this.
But I also think that there’s a lot of male privilege that LWers deny exists.
Well, sure. Privilege—which I’ll call by that name here, though I really prefer the “blind spots” framing—is such a culture-bound thing that just about any natural group of people is going to be aware of a different subset. Given how my friends who’re into social justice tend to argue with each other, I suspect this is even true for subcultures that explicitly idealize identifying mechanisms of privilege that don’t apply to them directly.
Yes, if you somehow managed to come up with a canonical object-level list of how you believe male privilege manifests itself, I’d expect a large majority of LW to disagree with parts of it and be unaware of other parts. But that’d be true for my beliefs too, or Bugmaster’s, or Eliezer’s; the diffs would likely be smaller, since your views on gender are an outlier around here, but there would still be substantial diffs.
That’s all answering a different question than Bugmaster was asking, though.
This is using “feminism” as a proxy for “intelligence” and is other than that swap a fairly standard ad-hominem argument.
I disagree that asking you questions about your beliefs constitutes an insult. Your beliefs are (probably) wildly unusual as compared to those of the average Less Wrong member, and thus a simple label for them does not exist. For example, if you said, “I’m a deontologist”, we’d instantly know what you meant; but we don’t know what “I’m a radical feminist” means. Thus, all the questions.
This is not a claim I ever made.
My mistake. But then, what did you intend to accomplish with operant conditioning and/or guilt ?
I think this is false as a matter of simple fact. I’ll bet money on it. Would you like to co-design a survey on this?
Yes and no. “Yes”, because I would love to see the results of a competently designed survey on the topic. I have a very high degree of confidence in my claim, as I stated it (*), and thus it would be very valuable for me to be proven wrong. But also “No”, because I doubt I am competent enough to design such a survey, or any survey at all for that matter. That said, it still sounds like a fun exercise, so even if we can’t find someone more competent to design the survey, I’m in—with the appropriate adjustment of the confidence level in our survey’s results.
(*) Unless you interpret “our society” too narrowly. I meant something like “mainstream American culture” when I said it.
Scholarship is a virtue. “Radical feminist” is a term that has a very well-defined meaning and a large body of literature. Asking those questions to me instead of to Google, and above that, asking me the same questions other LW commenters have already asked, only serves to signal shock and outgroup-ness.
(*) Unless you interpret “our society” too narrowly. I meant something like “mainstream American culture” when I said it.
I meant “less wrong.” “Mainstream American culture” has too many women in it for ignorance of patriarchy to hold widely.
Designing surveys isn’t hard, operationalizing that particular question will be. PM me if you want me to give you an email address you can use to communicate with me about this.
“Most people on Less Wrong would agree that there exists a systemic bias in mainstream American culture, which privileges men over women”.
They do? I would have expected them to claim that there is a bias that privileges high status men over high status women and also biases that privilege medium-to-low status women over medium-to-low status men and nobody cares about the latter. Of course I’m not part of mainstream American culture so I can only make inferences based on knowing some small part of western culture and familiarity with how humans tend to behave.
I have a lot less confidence in the following claim, though I still think it’s more likely to be true than false:
“Most people on Less Wrong would agree that there exists a systemic bias on Less Wrong, which privileges men over women”.
Really? I would find that almost comically amusing if you are correct.
This is why I have zero faith in the forum community on this website—no matter how many times they read “one argument against an army” or “substance screens off source,” they will continue to do those exact things whenever confronted with outgroup memes. Those arguments are soldiers, and they cannot be deployed against their homeland.
I don’t know how receptive this community would be to radical feminist arguments argued politely and in good faith.
I mean, I could walk up to someone and say “hey, big-nose, if you pulled your head out of your arse and had more brain cells you’d realize that rabbits should have the right to vote”, and then use his hostile reaction as evidence of people’s irrational and knee-jerk hostility to rabbit rights.
A few months ago a white nationalist posted a video of his on race relations or something, insulted everybody in the comments, and then claimed that he was being oppressed for his politically incorrect views.
It’s impossible to have “good faith” as a rationalist. I have an accurate understanding of LW, and if voicing that understanding as a prediction and being slightly snarky about it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so be it.
But also, I think it’s false as a matter of simple fact to say that my only argument is the stupidity of LWers. That was an entirely tangential garnish of snark in my original post, and it wasn’t my decision to start focusing on it. It goes to show that the LW community isn’t capable of discussing things in these (or any other outgroup) spaces like calm and rational adults as discussed in the OP. They’ll use that as an applause light, but they won’t actually constrain their behavior.
Further, the best indicator of upvotes for my comments is the degree of buzzwords they use. I guess that white nationalist didn’t say “modeling” enough.
If you think that expressing this prediction (that LWers are essentially human) is somehow insulting, than perhaps you need to reconsider the degree to which you accept abstractions like honest criticism and crocker’s rules.
It’s impossible to have “good faith” as a rationalist. I have an accurate understanding of LW, and if voicing that understanding as a prediction and being slightly snarky about it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so be it.
Others here contest that your understanding is accurate. Please recognize that you cannot fairly expect us to take the assertion that you are right and we are wrong as given.
People occasionally come here and make criticisms of ideas accepted by the in-group here, and are heavily upvoted for bringing well-formulated criticisms to the table (the highest voted post on Less Wrong is an example,) and some posters such as XiXiDu have gotten most of their karma in this way.
On other occasions, people come here and argue, for instance, that we should all reject Bayesianism because Popper proved induction is impossible, or that mainstream physics is completely wrong and science should be about making descriptions of the world that make intuitive sense rather than making accurate predictions about reality. And they argue fiercely that their poor reception is proof of how bad we are at evaluating ideas that challenge in-group beliefs.
Now, maybe we are rejecting key arguments of yours because we’re too biased, and you are completely right about these matters and we are wrong (I do not think this is the case, of course, while you have made it clear that you think it is,) but if you just come out and say as much in those words, then it should be no surprise if people start pattern matching you as a crank rather than a valuable contributor of outside ideas.
If, as a rationalist, you want to win, (and you’ve said before that feminism is your thing to protect,) then engaging in self fulfilling prophesies about your own poor reception is a bad idea. Seriously, really really try not to do that, unless you’re not actually trying to encourage people to oppose patriarchy, and are just venting or trying to try.
People occasionally come here and make criticisms of ideas accepted by the in-group here, and are heavily upvoted for bringing well-formulated criticisms to the table (the highest voted post on Less Wrong is an example,) and some posters such as XiXiDu have gotten most of their karma in this way.
Please do not introduce new people-who-are-displaying-trollish-behavior to XiXiDu as a role model.
People occasionally come here and make criticisms of ideas accepted by the in-group here, and are heavily upvoted for bringing well-formulated criticisms to the table (the highest voted post on Less Wrong is an example,) and some posters such as XiXiDu have gotten most of their karma in this way.
These are always the equivalent of small quibbles within the meme pool that is already accepted, not arguing for something totally outside that set (like feminism, or leftist politics, or in general social-constructivist hypotheses rather than biological hypotheses.
then engaging in self fulfilling prophesies about your own poor reception is a bad idea.
No, because the expected utility of wasting time on less wrong is negative to begin with. I don’t think anything I say could convince anyone of feminist politics. The strategies I think will win in politics have nothing to do with comments on a message board.
No, because the expected utility of wasting time on less wrong is negative to begin with. I don’t think anything I say could convince anyone of feminist politics.
....Then why are you doing it?
I’ve been bothering to engage with you at all out of a (waning) unwillingness to write you off as an unreasonable person incapable of holding a conversation with people you disagree with that leads to any productive conclusions. You started this conversation professing a conviction that everyone else here was too biased and irrational to engage with you, and you would simply be jumped on without consideration, and you have by all appearances become even more entrenched in that position. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I started participating out of the belief that there was a fair chance you were a largely reasonable person who held some positions I disagreed with, and through civil discussion one or both of us could learn something and change our minds. I have become convinced that I was mistaken, so I’m not going to engage with you any more.
So why are you, who have professed to believe that this was pointless all along, still bothering?
Wei_Dai is mostly correct—I sometimes have downtime during the day, and I think it’s moderately better for me to spend two or five minutes composing a counter-argument about feminism on less wrong than it is for me to spend that time looking at funny pictures on Reddit.
LW is almost entirely men, and men get very prickly when confronted with the concept of gender privilege, so my probability of success was virtually zero from the start, and almost certainly that given that I’m unwilling to do the requisite amount of hand-holding that you really have to do to get men to admit that there might be a point to feminism.
This whole meta-line has been incredibly boring, I have to say.
I’m unwilling to do the requisite amount of hand-holding that you really have to do to get men to admit that there might be a point to feminism.
To be fair, your task is much more difficult, since you’re attempting to convert us men to radical feminism, specifically. Thus, you must overcome not only our innate desire to keep our privilege, but also the efforts of liberal feminists who explicitly deny some of your claims.
Speaking as a non-feminist (radical or otherwise) man, though, I must say that I find your description of your views to be clear and coherent, which is a lot more than I can say for other sources. Thus, even though you may never convert me personally, I think you do have a non-zero chance of converting others.
But also, I think it’s false as a matter of simple fact to say that my only argument is the stupidity of LWers. That was an entirely tangential garnish of snark in my original post, and it wasn’t my decision to start focusing on it.
I agree that it was tangential to your point (it was much less so for that white nationalist guy); but that kind of thing—snark, accusations against the community in general, angry-sounding tone, etc. - are probably the biggest cause of the downvoting and deletion of your posts.
I agree that in an ideal world we should be able to look beyond such superficial things as tone and snarky side comments, and just focus on the meat and bones of the argument—but as things are there are still very good reasons to discourage distracting insults, and try to keep the discussion civil, les the discussion degenerates into one where only insults are exchanged.
I don’t think Crocker’s rules are supposed to apply to everybody here or to the community in general. And I don’t think calling it “honest criticism” makes anything acceptable.
I know I’ve downvoted several of your posts, and it was never for any argument related to feminism (I was interested in reading up on stuff like the kyriarchy (however you spell that) or intersectionality), but for saying stupid things about the community or about how you were going to be downvoted.
They’ll use that as an applause light, but they won’t actually constrain their behavior.
FWIW I think that the majority of people arguing with you on these threads have stayed on topic, and attacked your argument rather than yourself—which is much more than I can say about pretty much any other Internet forum. Of course, I am admittedly biased, since I myself do not support your position.
That said, when you say or imply things like “the only possible reason you’d downvote me is to express out-group hatred, so go ahead, make my day”—as you did in one of your opening posts—you do make it very easy for people to dismiss you as a troll, and downvote you accordingly. This is, as you said, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and is thus not indicative of whether “the LW community is capable of discussing things like calm and rational adults”. Even calm and rational adults would gladly kick out a disruptive and belligerent troll.
FWIW I personally do not believe that you are the kind of troll who deserves an automatic downvote or ban, but I’m just some random user, so my opinion doesn’t carry any weight.
I think that the majority of people arguing with [eridu] on these threads have stayed on topic, and attacked [eridu’s] argument rather than [eridu]-- which is much more than I can say about pretty much any other Internet forum.
Agreed, and this is a major reason why I am much less concerned about threads like these on LW than Eliezer is.
FWIW I think that the majority of people arguing with you on these threads have stayed on topic, and attacked your argument rather than yourself—which is much more than I can say about pretty much any other Internet forum. Of course, I am admittedly biased, since I myself do not support your position.
I think this is incorrect.
The discussion I originally started was, in keeping with the main original post of this thread, “evolutionary psychology continues the oppression of women, and as such is sexist in any meaningful sense.”
Quickly, it devolved into “what are eridu’s feminist politics,” which is a proxy for “how stupid is eridu.” “Feminist politics” are a property of “eridu,” much like “intelligence” might be, and by focusing on that property of myself rather than on the arguments I was making.
A counterfactual world where the argument stayed on-topic would mean that we’d be talking about evolutionary psychology now.
Quickly, it devolved into “what are eridu’s feminist politics,” which is a proxy for “how stupid is eridu.”
Being wrong is not the same as being stupid.
A counterfactual world where the argument stayed on-topic would mean that we’d be talking about evolutionary psychology now.
It would’ve been impossible to understand your opposition to evolutionary psychology without first understanding your feminist politics.
That said, IMO the on-topic discussion was over when you made it clear that you value advancing your cause more than you value acquiring true beliefs and talking about them. The resulting loss of credibility made it very difficult (and, for some of your interlocutors, impossible) to engage you in rational conversation on the topic of whether evolutionary psychology is capable of producing true beliefs.
That said, I am personally fascinated by your stated goal of eliminating gender outright; I’ve never heard any feminist describe their goals so clearly. Thus I did learn something during these discussions, and I don’t consider them a waste.
That said, IMO the on-topic discussion was over when you made it clear that you value advancing your cause more than you value acquiring true beliefs and talking about them.
I think this is a misguided reading of what I’ve been saying.
I value advancing feminism more than I value publishing true facts. I don’t have any particular affiliation for the truth as an ideal, just as an instrument to obtain my goals (which I think is true for most LWers).
When those two things conflict, I favor not publishing, and advancing feminism.
I see this as virtually identical to EY’s and the SIAI’s stance on AGI research. Most outcomes of AGI research are hugely negative to them, so they oppose the research taking place. I actually never thought of the idea of censoring (by any means) the scientific process until reading EYs tracts on the flaws of the scientific method, and the various stories where EY decries teaching things to those who cannot understand them.
It would’ve been impossible to understand your opposition to evolutionary psychology without first understanding your feminist politics.
I had already operationalized what I considered to be the bad outcome; people just thought it was so outlandish that they started trying to talk about my political beliefs instead, which brings us to
Being wrong is not the same as being stupid.
A political belief is a preference between world-states. A preference can’t be false (I could lie about my preferences, but I do have some set of preferences, and I known of no way to say that a preference for apples over oranges could be “false” in some way).
At about the third level of comments in this thread (some may be deleted, but I seem to be able to access them—I could give you my account password or save the .json if you want), you can start to see people switching over from discussing whether evolutionary psychology as currently practiced leads to the oppression (in some way operationally defined in that thread) of women, to interrogating me as to what I believe. The most blatent examples of this are people posting unrelated hypotheticals and links to blog posts, asking me to comment on them.
Further, though what was probably my own failure of communication, people started getting entirely the wrong messages from my posts, including:
rational conversation on the topic of whether evolutionary psychology is capable of producing true beliefs.
I hoped that I had made this clear before, but apparently I haven’t:
Evolutionary psychology is capable of producing beliefs that highly correlate to reality
These true beliefs, propagated in patriarchal society, extend its lifespan
Thus, evolutionary psychology tends to support patriarchy
Thus evolutionary psychology is sexist.
Maybe too many LWers conflate “true” with “non-sexist”, but the truth of evolutionary psychology is never something I cared about.
I hoped that I had made this clear before, but apparently I haven’t:
Evolutionary psychology is capable of producing beliefs that highly correlate to reality
These true beliefs, propagated in patriarchal society, extend its lifespan
Thus, evolutionary psychology tends to support patriarchy
Thus evolutionary psychology is sexist.
Something that perhaps you have made clear in other postings I have not read, but not in this one, is what consequences for action you derive from those bullet points. Given your attitude to the truth as “just” as instrument, and thus not especially to be valued above other instruments, such as falsehood, I am guessing that the consequences you would derive would be along these lines:
Since these true beliefs, propagated in patriarchal society, extend its lifespan, they should not be propagated.
The questions that were asked, the answering of which resulted in these true beliefs, should not be asked.
Or if asked, false answers should be propagated instead, answers which, if believed, would tend to undermine patriarchy.
And since the actual investigation of these matters tends to result in true answers rather than false ones, actual investigation should not be performed, but instead, false answers should first be decided on and then investigations designed to lead to these false answers.
Truth and lies are worth nothing in themselves. Each is to be valued from case to case only according to whether it supports or undermines patriarchy.
But since the truth on these particular matters tends to support patriarchy, while lies can be crafted to point in any direction as easily as any other, so long as the patriarchy exists a concern with truth is itself supportive of patriarchy.
Only when we have achieved the feminist paradise can we safely seek the truth in all things. Until then, truth is lies and lies are truth.
Is that an accurate extrapolation of what you believe?
And since the actual investigation of these matters tends to result in true answers rather than false ones,
Patriarchal bias will reliably cause most of these investigations to return false results.
Further, false results that are more in line with existing patriarchal ideas will be propagated further than any true result.
This is true:
Only when we have achieved the feminist paradise can we safely seek the truth in all things. Until then, truth is lies and lies are truth.
But for the opposite reason you claim: “Truth” is a social process rather than an Aristotelian absolute, and under the social regime of patriarchy, “truth” will be mostly false, similarly to how in 1850, white supremacy was simply “truth.”
I see this as virtually identical to EY’s and the SIAI’s stance on AGI research.
I agree, which is why I think that both you and EY/SIAI are equally wrong. I believe that the utility of “publishing true facts”—and, by extension, learning which facts are true to begin with—greatly exceeds the utility of advancing any given cause (at least, in the long term). Without having accurate models at your disposal, you cannot effectively pursue your goals.
For example, consider quantum physics. Given its potential for unimaginable destruction, would you have supported suppressing all research in this area of physics, circa 1911 or so ?
you can start to see people switching over from discussing whether evolutionary psychology as currently practiced leads to the oppression (in some way operationally defined in that thread) of women, to interrogating me as to what I believe. The most blatent examples of this are people posting unrelated hypotheticals...
Guilty as charged. In my defence, though, I could not understand your beliefs about evolutionary psychology without understanding what you mean by “oppression of women”; and, more generally, without understanding your views on gender relations in general. As I said earlier, “oppression” is a word that can mean very different things to different people.
...Thus, evolutionary psychology tends to support patriarchy … Thus evolutionary psychology is sexist.
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand where you’d draw the line. For example, consider discrete mathematics. Its applications allow us to generate and distribute text, video, audio, and other media in increasingly more efficient ways. Much of this media—if not most of it—directly supports patriarchy in one way or another. Does this mean that discrete math is sexist ? My guess is that you’d answer “no” (I know I would), but I’m not sure why you would come to that conclusion, given your line of reasoning.
For example, consider quantum physics. Given its potential for unimaginable destruction, would you have supported suppressing all research in this area of physics, circa 1911 or so ?
I agree with EY on this, I believe—I think that the world would be a better place if Manhattan Project scientists, German scientists, and all other scientists had realized the destructive implications of fission research and kept the information required to make nuclear weapons secret.
My guess is that you’d answer “no” (I know I would), but I’m not sure why you would come to that conclusion, given your line of reasoning.
I’d say no, because most people don’t see discrete math as providing evidence as to why patriarchy is natural and therefore good.
But on the other hand, I’d say yes, because all of society is patriarchal, and so the destruction of patriarchy will affect all of society.
If you asked me whether the existing reality (composing textbooks, teachers, research journals, etc.) of discrete math is sexist, I’d certainly say yes, and point to the ways that women are systematically excluded from those social groups.
The fundamental thing that most LW commenters, including you, are getting, is that I don’t care about platonic abstractions of things like “truth” or “discrete mathematics.” I care about humans in the real world.
I think that the world would be a better place if Manhattan Project scientists, German scientists, and all other scientists had realized the destructive implications of fission research and kept the information required to make nuclear weapons secret.
Makes sense, but I disagree with both EY and yourself about this.
Yes, the world would be better off if we never invented nuclear weapons. However, the same exact knowledge that enables the construction of nuclear weapons also enabled the construction of all modern electronics, as well as this Internet itself (just to bring up a few examples). The utility of these applied technologies, as well as the potential utility of future technologies that will build upon sciences that themselves are built on top of modern physics, greatly outweighs the (admittedly huge) disutility of nuclear weapons.
One possible answer is, “well, in this case the scientists should’ve advanced their science in secret”, but I don’t believe that such a thing is possible, for a variety of reasons.
...I don’t care about platonic abstractions of things like “truth” or “discrete mathematics.” I care about humans in the real world.
Fair enough, but then, you have a case of conflicting goals. For example, do you believe that resources should be spent on studying discrete math, in its present form ? On the one hand, its potential applications are quite useful for improving the quality of life of all people, women included. On the other hand, a (possibly large) portion of every dollar and every hour you spend on studying discrete math will go toward reinforcing the patriarchal structures inherent in “textbooks, teachers, research journals, etc.”. So, should we study discrete math, or not ?
I don’t have any particular affiliation for the truth as an ideal, just as an instrument to obtain my goals
Then you undervalue the instrument. Truth, and knowing how to find it, is the instrument, above all others, which makes possible everything else that we do.
I disagree with the claim that the entire LW community, or even a majority of it, is incapable of discussing this subject rationally, and I also disagree with the claim that most LWers will assign karma to your posts based on buzzword content.
However, I find your other claims and the overall assessment of the situation minus the above to correlate rather strongly with what has experimentally actually happened so far in the discussion in the majority of what I observed.
It goes to show that the LW community isn’t capable of discussing things in these (or any other outgroup) spaces like calm and rational adults as discussed in the OP. They’ll use that as an applause light, but they won’t actually constrain their behavior.
Further, the best indicator of upvotes for my comments is the degree of buzzwords they use. I guess that white nationalist didn’t say “modeling” enough.
I agree with this part. LessWrong really really really likes its buzzwords. The most charitable interpretation that I can give is that there’s short inferential differences involved, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if it had to do with that “insight addiction” theory someone mentioned earlier in one of the discussion threads. In-group and out-group signalling is probably also related to this, because LessWrongers are human.
It’s probably this overuse of buzzwords which leads to the relatively widespread perception that LessWrongers are a groupthinking cult that worships Eliezer, so I think LessWrong should maybe start to move away from the buzzwords a bit.
I also agree that LessWrongers respond to criticism badly, and use tone arguments as an excuse too often, but I don’t really have anything to add to the discussion on that score; I just wanted to note my agreement.
I’ve been skimming some of the proposed literature, and I still don’t see any concrete examples of things I do that support patriarchy. Using language that reinforces male “possession” of the female body? Nope, and I’ve actually taught women how to avoid using this language. Behaving positively towards female behaviors that encourage females to submit to a particular view of how they should behave and dress in order to achieve anything? Nope, and I essentially don’t even like most of the standard models (the typical examples of high heels, make-up, large breasts, etc. not only aren’t things I encourage or reward, even subconsciously, but usually disgust me precisely because of the reason they’re still so common). There are a few other examples of these prominent “patriarchal” behaviors that I’ve learned about over time, but it’s been a long time already since I first learned about gender unfairness, and I started working towards fixing it in my own behavior since almost immediately afterwards. All examples which I know of are ether eliminated from my behavior, or are consistent with an optimal-resolution strategy that I expect to bring about the most effective results towards eliminating gender-unfairness.
I admit to using some unfair arguments and shifting the burden of proof, but the latter is only because I have no idea where to even begin working on resolving hypotheses if I am to accept the premise that I am too broken to figure out what’s broken. It feels, from the inside, like I have to figure out the best from a series of hypotheses while working from the axiom that no hypothesis can ever be tested and that all proofs I’ve ever learned are tautologically invalid. It feels like trying to evaluate the validity and usefulness of Occam’s Razor without being allowed to use Occam’s Razor.
I’m very interested in this discussion, but I believe there are very unfair generalizations being made, and those that are most visible to myself are those that are “against” me.
If I’m to be charged guilty of patriarchy by virtue of not devoting every moment of my life actively fighting against patriarchy, and charged guilty of motivated stopping by virtue of only doing everything I can as soon as I learn about it / how to reduce gender-unfair behavior in myself and those to which I have a high information transmission rating, and not more than that despite being one single person with other horrors of society to worry about, then...
I will plead guilty as charged, by virtue of being found guilty without trial based on prior assumption or privilege of the hypothesis. It doesn’t appear as though there exists any possible evidence that would shift the posteriors towards the existence of anyone not guilty. Phlogiston, in that case.
EDIT: I should probably note here, even though it’s been mentioned elsewhere, that nowhere in my behavior described in the first paragraph do I consider myself “feminist”. If I had to assign an identity label, I would say I am “strongly self-reinforcing in behaviors absent of direct gender-unfair consequences and absent of any such consequences were it reflectively applied to all members of a society”.
The term “feminist”, to me, implies specifically acting, campaigning, publicizing, etc. negatively unfair behavior towards women specifically, which is very incompatible with my own position, which promotes extremely fair behavior towards anything considered a homo sapiens and optimal strategies for reducing any unfair behavior by any member of the species towards any other member of the species. All of this filtered by what I attempt to turn into an optimal intrumentally-rational approach to choosing actions by their greatest expected utility.
In other words, I would be tempted to say that I’m merely a humanist, rather than a feminist.
Nope, and I’ve actually taught women how to avoid using this language.
What sort of language and tone have you used while doing so? Have you ensured that you did this in a way so as to be non-condescending and helpful, or were you being a man who explains things? Did you consider that there are harmful social consequences to a man “teaching” a woman anything about feminism? Did you at least feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable around this issue, knowing as a good feminist that you were in dangerous territory?
Nope, and I essentially don’t even like most of the standard models (the typical examples of high heels, make-up, large breasts, etc. not only aren’t things I encourage or reward, even subconsciously, but usually disgust me precisely because of the reason they’re still so common).
Do you recognize the value of any self-determination of women, or have you started engaging in reverse body policing?
My point in asking this questions isn’t to accuse you of doing these things, but to illustrate that unlearning patriarchy is a long process that will possibly never complete in your lifetime.
I have no idea where to even begin working on resolving hypotheses if I am to accept the premise that I am too broken to figure out what’s broken.
Well, then you’ll have to become stronger.
The fact that you still see things in terms of “gender unfairness” rather than patriarchy indicates to me that you’re more of a liberal than a radical, That’s one place to start.
It doesn’t appear as though there exists any possible evidence that would shift the posteriors towards the existence of anyone not guilty.
I’ve said explicitly the reverse multiple times during this discussion. Unlearning patriarchy is similar if not identical to the extinction of any other learned behavior pattern.
What sort of language and tone have you used while doing so? Have you ensured that you did this in a way so as to be non-condescending and helpful, or were you being a man who explains things? Did you consider that there are harmful social consequences to a man “teaching” a woman anything about feminism? Did you at least feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable around this issue, knowing as a good feminist that you were in dangerous territory?
To answer this in particular because I think they’re all valid points you probably have more experience with than I do, I used the same text with the women as I used with men to whom I taught the same thing, and it was done through an impersonal text-only chat interface, and no I did not “know as a good feminist” all that much because I was merely, in my mind, correcting a behavior reinforcing unfairness. I had not learned to think more than four steps of causality forward in counterfactuals, at the time, nor of how to compute recursive not-exclusively-self-reinforcing social trends.
No, I did not feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable about these things, because ceteris paribus, it is better to feel good about doing good things than to feel bad about doing good things. I also rarely feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable for pretty much anything.
Do you recognize the value of any self-determination of women, or have you started engaging in reverse body policing?
Fortunately, I noticed the counter-signaling and reverse policing issues long before I would have had opportunity to accidentally cause damage in that manner. My body-policing towards men and women is exactly identical, barring practical issues like bits of skin only happening in some place for one of the two genders exclusively and thus requiring different structural solutions in clothing. In my workplace, men are required to wear dress shirts and formal business black pants. Women have no such requirements, as long as they dress “acceptably for a business environment”. This is the kind of thing I denounce and find unfair. I don’t even know, nor care, which of the two genders is being disadvantaged the most in this case, I only need know that there is unfair treatment to conclude that it ought not to be so.
I’ve said explicitly the reverse multiple times during this discussion. Unlearning patriarchy is similar if not identical to the extinction of any other learned behavior pattern.
The reason I claimed there didn’t seem to be any exit is that you propose a long road towards eliminating patriarchy, but it doesn’t seem as though anyone who would follow this road and yet still disagree with you would be a valid counterexample. You seem to be establishing within the premise that anyone who doesn’t study Feminism is automatically a Patriarchist, and that anyone who does study Feminism will inevitably agree with you, become a Feminist, and relinquish all Patriachism—and that anyone who claims to have studied Feminism yet did not end up in that particular state simply must have done it wrong.
On a last note, no, I have no intention of becoming a radical. What is a radical, anyway? What will being “radical” change from my current behavior of “Do everything I possibly can to act in a manner which promotes fair treatment of all humans without influence of any bias or skewed model of valuation.”?
Or, to be blunt and confrontational: Are you asking me to subjugate all men that might possibly be likely to engage in any form of patriarchal behavior in the future? Is the requirement for fitting your definition of morality that women must be completely free, and any influence of any man to any woman is immoral, such that “people” influencing “other people” is okay, but not men influencing women?
I’d really like to see a truth table here, because on my truth table, anyone can influence anyone else, as long as there is no nefarious will at work and there is no long-term self-reinforcing behavior being programmed, and any filtering by any criterion, be it gender or race or otherwise, is something I perceive as less moral. Despite this, I will obviously act rationally and sacrifice one person over two others according to some criterion if practical math dictates that such is the optimal moral result of shutting up and multiplying. I do my utmost to avoid letting properties of my own mind (or indeed, of anything that is not inherently in what I estimate to be truly real) from affecting these calculations, so things like Woman.Sexiness or Woman.Attractiveness will never be considered barring Newcomblike problems forcing me to consider them.
Because, you see, in my model, you’re the one feeding the problem by insisting on feminism and reducing oppression of females in particular over all other possible forms of unfair treatments from some humans to other humans. Focusing on women specifically seems like it would only reinforce the idea of gender distinctions. I focus on all occurences, and it only happens that cases involving male-female differences are statistically more frequent than other cases, with skin color and religion-belief-associated statements (or lack thereof) coming in not too far behind.
Edit: I realize that the last paragraph is very accusatory, but it is meant as an illustrative parallel to the Tentacle Super-Happy Aliens in the Three Worlds Collide story. I don’t actually believe that you’re acting in a negative-expected-utility manner, nor that my behavior has clearly and verifiably better expected utility. It’s just an expression of where my arguments generally come from and why I don’t identify as a Feminist, but rather as a Humanist.
I used the same text with the women as I used with men
My body-policing towards men and women is exactly identical
your entire pre-edit last paragraph
I don’t identify as a Feminist, but rather as a Humanist.
Patriarchy exists in an objective sense. It is tangibly demonstrated in experiments. Its physical, material manifestation in reality is as a pattern of activation in the neurons of human brains.
Going all the way back to my original post, hierarchy creates division, division creates difference (and difference justifies hierarchy, but that’s tangential here).
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
This is a very typical failure mode of proto-feminist thought. It’s well covered in snarky blog posts, but I’m not aware of any good sources to fix it.
Since we’ve isolated the source of our disagreement, I suggest we stop arguing here, because I can’t really convey any novel information to you at this point.
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
Okay. I have no idea how this would happen, concretely. I have never seen any evidence of this. My prior towards this being true is extremely small.
The closest match I have is: If I act identically towards men and women, and some people are biased or uninformed, they might perceive my behavior differently or it might have different consequences depending on who the other person is. There might even be hardcoded brain differences in how a woman will perceive an action versus how a man would.
The above paragraph merely seems to imply that stupid people will privilege their own hypothesis whether I act differently towards them or not. This is not dependent on patriarchy, but merely a cognitive defect of the human brain in general. If your claim is on the basis of brain differences, then I believe myself justified in requesting evidence for this, because the standard extremist-feminist claim I’ve heard is that most difference in interpretation is not hardcoded, but rather cultural.
What is “male-socialized or women-socialized”, exactly? They sound like applause lights, and I have no idea what they could even mean on a technical level. It doesn’t even look like a hypothesis, only a mysterious “explanation”.
Suppose we were not in a particularly patriarchal society. Is treating everyone equally, regardless of gender or race or otherwise, still patriarchal? Surely not. If it is, then I am confused.
If some people perceive my behavior as being oppressive towards men but not women, or oppressive towards women but not men, despite being identical towards both, even when my behavior has no gender-conditionals implanted within it, then that is a property of their minds. The behavior is not inherently “patriarchal” or “oppressive” if it contains exactly zero conditionals that correlate with gender. This is obviously not the case, because the above is a mathematically-perfect representation of my ideal / attempted behavior.
Behaving differently towards men and towards women seems like exactly the kind of thing we want to avoid if we want to eliminate gender-unfairness. Unless your objective is to turn things around and make women dominant over men instead? Or make some other group dominant? Or create some other form of inequality?
A summarized, distilled, refined, purified version of my behavioral guidelines on this subject is basically:
I should act in the exact same manner towards everyone all the time, with no discriminatory conditionals that correlate with specific subsets of humans, and in the same convergent-coherent manner that I would act whether I were a man, a woman, any kind of transgender, an androgynous human, or any other form of humanlike mind that had these same goals.
I fully expect, with high probability, that living in a “patriarchal society” populated entirely with people applying these behaviors would be essentially no different than what I do not consider a “patriarchal society” and no different from a gender-fair society. It is also exactly the goal sought by not-female-domination-oriented feminism, to my knowledge.
If you have any specific evidence or reading material on the above-quoted claim you could point out, I’d be glad to read up on it.
Saying “we now know why we disagree” without having a chance to change my mind if I am wrong is insufficient for me. I must become stronger. I must not worship ignorance. I do not have sufficient evidence (not even remotely close) to assert that you are Most Definitely Wrong. Therefore my priors could be wrong.
While your last paragraph is admirable in itself, I can only see it as an applause light in the context of the adversarial nature of both your post and this discussion in general.
For one, if you truly wish to become stronger, read better radical feminists than me. I can no better educate you in radical feminism than you could educate a christian in rationalism.
Gender socialization is a process I’ve defined earlier, and that turns up huge amounts of google hits and a long Wikipedia page. The wikipedia page isn’t very good, but essentially, gender socialization is the process of being taught (via operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) gender.
Which brings us here:
There might even be hardcoded brain differences in how a woman will perceive an action versus how a man would.
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers.
There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization—of men and women learning to emit different behaviors, and respond in different ways to behaviors emitted by people of masculine or feminine expression.
If you emit some behavior B, that behavior is processed differently by different human minds. The automatic processes of association will produce drastically different responses in those minds depending on the distance between them.
To put it another way, I could say a sentence to you that you would (possibly) be completely nonchalant about, but would trigger someone with PTSD into a panic attack or flashback. The sentence has no PTSD-conditionality; as such, any triggering is an artifact of the listener’s mind, and the sentence is not inherently “triggering” or “oppressive.”
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
It is also exactly the goal sought by not-female-domination-oriented feminism, to my knowledge.
Well, liberal feminists that I disagree with would point out that the sentence “You certainly seem to have sex with lots of people” provokes very different reactions when you say it to men than when you say it to women. If you disbelieve me, try it out on your Facebook friends.
Suppose we were not in a particularly patriarchal society. Is treating everyone equally, regardless of gender or race or otherwise, still patriarchal?
A non-patriarchal society is one wherein the concept of gender is alien to those within it. “Treating everyone equally regardless of gender” implies that gender still exists, which to me implies that patriarchy still exists. You can refer back to the infographic at my top-level post in this thread for more on this.
I hope you don’t mind me jumping into this discussion; I find it fascinating.
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers. There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization...
Would the below statement be an accurate rephrasing of your views ?
“Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors.”
I think this is a reasonable claim—but how would you determine whether it’s true or not, without performing exactly the kind of biological research that you oppose ? Actually, I may be jumping ahead of myself. Assuming that you agree with my phrasing, do you think that it matters how likely it is to be true ?
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
I do not (unless, of course, you deliberately designed the sentence to be an effective basilisk, in which case I’d say you are behaving unethically). What am I missing ?
“Treating everyone equally regardless of gender” implies that gender still exists, which to me implies that patriarchy still exists.
I understand what you’re saying, but, technically speaking, the mere existence of gender does not imply patriarchy. It could imply matriarchy, instead. That’s a minor nitpick, though.
I do not (unless, of course, you deliberately designed the sentence to be an effective basilisk, in which case I’d say you are behaving unethically). What am I missing ?
ISTM that the issue is similar to that of the old injunction against yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater or the more recent one of yelling “BOMB!” while pointing at an abandoned bag in an airport. Sure, the words themselves do not inherently carry panic, mayhem, children trampled to death by mobs, etc. - just like no word inherently carries PTSD attacks in them—but it is still much preferable ceteris paribus not to have a behavior A when there are known expected negative consequences.
Think: “I know making dead baby jokes while that person is still traumatized by having their five (baby) children tortured to death in front of them will cause them incredibly grief, horror and pain, but it’s not my fault they’re like that and the words themselves don’t cause the pain, so it’s fine I can do whatever I want!”
As for your other questions, I’m also eager to see a response.
I see what you’re saying, and I agree, but I don’t think the scenarios are identical.
In both of your scenarios, the speakers know with an extremely high degree of certainty that their words will have a negative effect. That’s why I singled out “deliberately creating an effective basilisk” as an unethical activity.
In eridu’s scenario, however, this is not the case (unless I misunderstood him). His scenario is more like the following:
“I am going to talk about my trip to the zoo where I saw some rare monkeys. I understand that there must exist some people in the world who have been savaged by vicious monkeys, and might react negatively to my tale, but I’m going to narrate it anyway”.
If we are going to implement a hard rule saying, “don’t utter any sentence that could trigger anyone, under any circumstances”, then communication would become untenable.
In addition, from a strictly nitpicky philosophical point of view, I’d argue that sentences by themselves are not “triggering” or “oppressive”; they are just bit strings. It’s the interaction of a sentence with a particular human’s mind that could be potentially triggering. If no one in the world had ever been savaged by monkeys, my tale of monkeys at the zoo could not trigger anyone, which would imply that it is not inherently triggering.
“Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors.”
I agree with that for the most part.
how would you determine whether it’s true or not, without performing exactly the kind of biological research that you oppose?
I don’t think that would do it. If by “destroying patriarchy” you mean “destroying the systemic oppression of women by men”, then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn’t oppress each other (*) .
On the other hand, if your goal is to destroy gender altogether (which would, as a consequence, bring about the destruction of the patriarchy), then it would be very valuable for you to discover whether gender has biological underpinnings or not. If it does, then your goal is unachievable (at least, through purely social methods, transhumanism aside), and you’d end up wasting a lot of effort.
Prove to me that you’ve tried harder.
See my reply to DaFranker, below.
(*) Or perhaps the women would oppress the men, since the goal of “destroying patriarchy” doesn’t specify any specific outcome.
I don’t think that would do it. If by “destroying patriarchy” you mean “destroying the systemic oppression of women by men”, then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn’t oppress each other.
Well, if as a consequence of the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression being abolished, people no longer have gender identities, then you could be pretty sure after the fact that that hypothesis was right after all.
However, it seems to me that the approach of finding out whether gender identities are innate or learned by destroying patriarchy is question-begging, because the means by which the people advocating it intend to destroy the patriarchy presuppose that gender identities are learned.
Well, if as a consequence of the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression being abolished, people no longer have gender identities, then you could be pretty sure after the fact that that hypothesis was right after all.
Indeed.
However, it seems to me that the approach of finding out whether gender identities are innate or learned by destroying patriarchy is question-begging, because the means by which the people advocating it intend to destroy the patriarchy presuppose that gender identities are learned.
This is hardly unusual in the space of traditional rationality, and even in nontraditional rationality.
(...)
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
Yes. However, it’s fairly evident that the cost of a general policy against uttering potentially-damaging sentences for all cases is prohibitive; you pretty much by rule can’t exist if you’re absolutely not allowed to ever accidentally trigger a negative reaction. That’s hyperbole, though, but the key point is:
It’s all about quantities and how much whiter or blacker.
A super-general ultra-powerful general policy against possibly-patriarchal words or behaviors by adjusting for expected perceptions would not only carry a much higher cost-per-avoided-damage than other behaviors, but would also in most cases dramatically increase the risk of committing errors in judgment, on top of pretty much becoming your sole lifegoal and preventing you from ever doing any progress in any other topic of interest.
What’s more, the very policy is itself sexist, because it expects differences in minds and perceptions between genders. This expectation is not secret, so it would obviously have an effect on others’ behaviors.
Historically / experimentally, what have we seen happen when others know that X is expected of them?
They will either X, or -X in order to signal.
By placing Expectation X, you are focusing the behavior-space on X in particular, and discouraging escape from that zone. This is why I find the idea of behaving differently and having different expectations of different genders to be harmful. By placing my expectations and own behaviors in a wider X, and having the same X for all audiences, I believe myself to be actively contributing to the reduction of unfair discrimination.
Well, liberal feminists that I disagree with would point out that the sentence “You certainly seem to have sex with lots of people” provokes very different reactions when you say it to men than when you say it to women. If you disbelieve me, try it out on your Facebook friends.
I very much believe you. I have also seen experimental evidence of pretty much the same. I don’t really see how that is directly relevant, or what your underlying point is, though. A policy of identical behaviors and identical reaction expectations will, on pain of deliberately choosing to lower its expected total utility, take into account known evidence for realistically-expected behavior and expect its conjugate¹, so as to causally bring behaviors closer to the ideal expected identical behaviors.
Perhaps this is already what you are doing, perhaps this decision theory approach is wrong (I try to use TDT-like processes because, well, so far they work), or perhaps I’m confusing things or putting too many concepts together. The above does makes sense to me—the mathlike stuff works out and the anecdotal evidence supports—and is not a conclusion I arrived to trivially by Authority or some form of subculture programming, barring denial-of-denial problems.
Other than this, Bugmaster has made some interesting queries, which I’m also interested in.
(¹. I mean here in the algebra sense of “conjugates”, figuratively, as the behavior which is expected to multiply or add up with the current expected real behavior such that the resulting behavior after future corrections by the other party becomes 1, AKA gender-identical and otherwise calibrated as much as possible for utility-increasing future behavior. )
ETA: I’ve elaborated a bit more on general policies in more technical terms and with more standard LW jargon in this other comment.
There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization—of men and women learning to emit different behaviors, and respond in different ways to behaviors emitted by people of masculine or feminine expression.
I agree provided you don’t mean they are exclusively a result of gender socialization, and that (say) hormones don’t play any significant role.
I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
The trouble with this argument is that the feral condition is not the natural condition for humans, as philosophers once imagined it to be. A whole slew of development doesn’t work without the appropriate stimuli which are provided by all human societies, for instance exposure to language during the critical period.
The gold standard for demonstrating that something is due to socialization is to demonstrate difference among societies or social groups (subcultures, classes, etc.) — not to compare a healthy person to one that has been developmentally impaired, i.e. a feral child.
EDIT: To taboo “natural” — The feral condition is not the environment of evolutionary adaptation for the human mind, and we know about specific deficits that develop in feral children.
“Is not the natural condition” is not a counterargument of any sort to eridu’s claim:
*(I got this from Eridu’s profile. it is the right post: I clicked permalink and it bought me here)
Eridu:
“I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.”
“The feral condition is not the natural condition” is irrelevant. Eridu was using biological to mean non-socialised, not natural or normal. A critcism that could be made at this point is that lots (most? all surviving?) feral children are raised by some non-human mini-society in the form of a pack of animals so maybe in fact they are desocialised of their biological default gender by living in such a society. Or a gender neutral survivor personality supresses gender: maybe if you raised some kids in an empty room but gave them food so they didn’t have to scavenge the females would be more “feminine” and the males more masculine. Or (sorry I only meant to write the first but these other possibilities have occured to me as I go) femininity and masculinity are mostly only social anyway and their agenderedness is just a byproduct of their asocialness to humans.
Or that hormones are actually perfectly amenable to changes due to socialisation.
So the thing about development is a non sequitur who’s only purpose I can think of seems to be imply that gender could be a “development” which is much like saying ADHD is/isn’t a disease.
Anyway then fuba cunningly redefines “due to socialisation” as “due to non-universal socialisation.” Or perhaps this is just what most people usually mean by “due to socialisation” but the literal words in this specific case can not just be substituted for their usual meaning because Eridu obviously meant by “socialisation”, socialisation, and not non-universal socialisation.
If gender creating stimuli are universal to all societies that necessarrilly imples that they come from society. If every human hates red, red is still not “objectively bad.” Similiarly, if every society socialises the vast majority of its members into being gendered that doesn’t make it inherent that humans are gendered.
The naturalistic fallacy is the implication that if it turns out that it really is a universal (as a fact about all the particular societies that exist or have existed) adopting a gender identity would constitude “development” in a way comparable to adoption of language.
Now Fuba doesn’t explicitly commit the naturalistic fallacy at any point but I don’t belive he’s just bringing up these facts at this point totally at random after starting his post with “the trouble with this post is that” and not trying to imply anything. The point of Fuba’s post seems to be that because feral children lack some development that all societies provide the stimuli for, gender is also a “development,” and that still doesn’t even contradict eridu. She merely claimed that gender is socialised, not that that is bad (in that specific post.) To actually disagree with Eridu’s post it requires also that universal socialisation people approve of is “development” and hence not due to socialisation. But a lot of “development” (e.g. language) is due to socialisation.
Sorry fuba. I’m naturally an asshole when I think I’m pointing out people’s mistakes and have the excuse that I am tired so I’m not going to try and fix that.
So I guess I was wrong. The argument seems to be that if gender is good and universal in societies that currently exist/have existed it is “development” and so not socialisation. Naturalistic fallacy doesn’t quite cover it. It’s also like that diseased thinking post. I don’t know the term for that.
Alternatively maybe it is just an appeal to process in some well respected area. In which case it is a misunderstanding because the process is designed to look for the meaning commonly substituted for “socialisation” (non-universal socialisation) and Eridu was talking about socialisation.
Presumably feral children would display gendered behavior in some respects if gender was hormonal—spatial manipulation is the first one I can think of. In general, the set of gendered behavior minus the set of behaviors that require intervention during a critical or sensitive period should be gendered in feral children.
What you say is in general true, and I don’t think that it would be hard to demonstrate difference in gender expectations across social groups.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
By itself it only proves that hormones are not sufficient and socialization is necessary, not that hormones are not necessary and socialization is sufficient.
IIRC many people born with ambiguous external genitalia, accidentally surgically assigned to the sex other than their gonadal one, and raised as the corresponding gender tend to become transgender (i.e. to identify with the gender corresponding to their gonadal sex rather than their assigned sex) by their late teens.
Also, by quickly glancing at the Wikipedia article ISTM that chemical castration does work—though to be sure I would have to see double-blind trials, which for obvious reasons would be problematic (to say the least) to perform.
Surely different gender roles are possible. Shouldn’t Gender still exists then implystill bad, rather than gender still exists imply patriarchy (tied to current gender roles no?) An equal and opposite (where possible) matriarchy (or some other -archy based on alien genders) would be about as bad, right?
FWIW, personally I think genders without any -archy at all (i.e., some behaviours are more typical of men than of women and vice versa, but neither men nor women are frowned upon when exhibiting behaviours typical of the other gender, and neither group is obviously worse off overall) wouldn’t be bad at all.
I meant from Eridu’s perspective. I was correcting what I saw as an internal flaw in Eridu’s claims not making a statement of my own values. (I assume this is how I was interpreted because of the downvotes, not because of your reply.Or are people actually objecting to the correction?)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender? You have to (not sure if next word is right word) essentialise the average difference in behaviour before it becomes gender or it’s just an average. And how is that not bad? The reason that, in the current world it’s so efficient to think this way (other than agreeing with your peers) is because of all the frowning and hitting and ostracisation, or just lowered respect suppressing the cases where the essentialism breaks down (and the opposite rewarding people for staying within bounds of the idea). When there’s no more societal level frowning the essentialisation isn’t bad (edit: well, worse than any other essentialisation) in principle but there’s going to be a lot more cases where it doesn’t apply so what do you need it for?
Isn’t the point of gender just judging people according to how similiar they are to that essentialised difference anyway though? I have trouble conceiving of a world where people don’t do this but they hold onto the concept (if the idea is even seperable from the idea that being a manly male or a feminine female is a good thing.)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender?
The human brain is quite good at naive Bayes classifiers. Look at Network 2 in http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/ but imagine that instead of “blegg/rube” the node in the middle read “man/woman” (and similar changes for the nodes in the periphery).
Yes, probably. And likewise, you would probably say that anyway, and we can recurse down this rabbit hole indefinitely.
In reality, the media already selectively reports research and hides information. It reports research that is by and large acceptable, and hides information that isn’t. That’s why very unscientific things often get reported—they still meet different standards for social acceptability that are entirely related to the empirical truth of the reported finding.
If a scientist finds themselves in a field where nearly everything they do is propagated in such a way that it causes the oppression of more than half of humanity, they are either obligated to stop doing research in that field or do so secretly. This is why I said earlier (you may have not seen it) that even evolutionary psychology that is on the surface non-sexist should not be propagated. Doing so would legitimize other similar research that would then perpetuate patriarchy.
But this is certainly a convenient excuse for you, isn’t it?
This is why I have zero faith in the forum community on this website—no matter how many times they read “one argument against an army” or “substance screens off source,” they will continue to do those exact things whenever confronted with outgroup memes. Those arguments are soldiers, and they cannot be deployed against their homeland.
You could go read the textbook I linked to above, or read any study, or just mull on what you know about learning, conditioning, and gendered behavior (especially gendered behavior over time and in different communities). But I would bet money at nearly any odds that you won’t, because you’ve won here. You’ve developed a fully general counterargument to anything I can say from this point on.
Congratulations.
I have a history of having my mind changed by people I formerly disagreed with. I may not be perfectly debiased, but to the best of my ability I avoid looking for excuses not to change my mind.
Which is why I largely ignore science reporting by news media.
They do not know in advance what the results of their research will be (otherwise there would be no point in conducting it.) Certainly it’s problematic that some findings are more likely to be publicized than others, but if scientists cannot be trusted to make their findings available unless they support their ideology, then people will have to assume that the evidence supports that ideology less than the scientists say it does.
And if scientists refuse to research a field at all, because they claim it legitimizes findings that will be construed as sexist? People are going to conclude that the truth is sexist.
There are certainly cases where people are biased in ways that keep them from interpreting evidence appropriately. Indeed, this sort of thing happens on a routine basis. I don’t contest at all that there are lots and lots of people interpreting true scientific data in a sexist way, that really shouldn’t be interpreted in that way. But that doesn’t mean you can just hide the information and thereby solve the problem, because hiding the information looks even worse. I majored in Environmental Science, I’m familiar with how many people will seize on anything that looks remotely like evidence that climate change might not be happening and blow it dramatically out of proportion in the face of winds of evidence blowing heavily the other way. I understand the temptation to say “fuck, we can’t let people see this, they’ll take it entirely wrong” if you get a result that doesn’t support the hypothesis, even though statistically it’s inevitable that there will be some. But then when you look at the Climactic Research Unit email controversy, with the huge publicity and the very significant downward spike in how seriously the public took climate change for a long time afterwards, and see that’s really not a prudent way to respond to the issue at all.
Please don’t assume that because I hold a different position from you that I haven’t learned or thought about the issue. I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying learning, conditioning, and gendered behavior. A significant proportion of my friends are not just feminists, but Feminists, people who treat it as a major facet of their identity, for whom it is a primary focus of their intellectual pursuits, and I read all the material they share with me. I am not assuming that you only disagree with me because you’ve taken a kneejerk stance and not given any time to contemplating reasons you could be wrong. If you default to assuming that about the people you hold discussions about these issues with, it’s no wonder if you come away from them thinking they’re unproductive.
Honestly, (speaking as a feminist, albeit not a radical feminist, who’s been frustrated by a lot of the male-rights-apologist sentiment on this website), I think this thread went amazingly well. Yes, people disagree with you. Some of those people are expressing outgroup hatred. Some of those people are (reasonably) honestly looking at your position and still disagreeing because *it’s a complicated position that requires them to read multiple books to even have a reasonable understanding of, and there are loads of other similarly complex positions that might possibly warrant their time.”
And ALL of those people are still responding in a manner way more productive than I’ve seen on every other forum that discusses radical feminism, except for actual feminist blogsites which are generally semi-closed communities.
You may have accidentally left off the folks that are pretty conversant with various varieties of radical feminism and still disagree with eridu’s take.
I was trying to avoid getting sucked into the argument and was keeping things brief. At this point I’ve failed in that regard.
Nothing the user in question said here seems remotely complicated.
I think the most damning indictment of LW throughout all of this has been the disregard for its own stated principles in favor of adhering to the ingroup.
Admittedly I was never called a feminazi, but that’s hardly the only way to be anti-feminist. The patriarchy isn’t the Republican Party, the patriarchy is all of society. Likewise, an unproductive response isn’t just “feminazi.”
Also, since when was being better than average the goal of LW? As rationalists, we don’t compete against each other, we compete against the universe.
Frankly, I don’t think an ideal response to your particular response would be dramatically different. Maybe your argument is 100% correct and LW folk would discover this upon a full examination of the facts, but we’re not starting from a place where that’s obviously true—we’re starting from a place of “you have made several assertions, and then demanded people read up on all the actual arguments on their own.” And it’s not clear that reading up on this is more important than reading up on, say:
The current leading arguments about how to address third world poverty
The current leading arguments about existential risk
The current leading arguments about other positions within the social-justice spectrum than radical feminism
Time is valuable. I agree with most of your positions, and frankly, had I not already been familiar with them, I would not have been persuaded by your rhetorical skills to give them higher priority than the above problems. You stated explicitly that you were here for fun, and I hope that’s true, because if you were arguing-to-persuade you should have chosen radically different tactics. LW is not “failing” to respond to a political point that isn’t even being argued seriously.
And I think you are simply wrong about your arguments regarding scientific research enabling patriarchy. (If you were actually arguing-to-persuade that position, you should have brought it up as a possibly correct instrumental action that is worth considering if you have feminist values, rather than a tactic that you are firmly in favor of. Because once you publicly reveal that endorsement, you lose all credibility when trying to make claims about reality)
Remember, this discussion started by discussing whether evolutionary psychology is sexist.
If LW were being honest with itself, I’d expect the discussion to stay there, rather than drifting to “is patriarchy real,” which is where it almost immediately went to. Here are a few other bullet points of what I’d expect to see:
An immediate halt to discussion as soon as I said “I don’t feel like I can summarize this well, but here is a potentially lengthy essay which can.” If the point of the discussion is for mutual information, at that point, I have nothing left to offer and can be ignored. If the point of the discussion is to score Internet points by expressing ingroup solidarity, it will continue.
A continual insistence on predicted experience in the real world, rather than thought-experiments devised to gain information about my own beliefs rather than the state of reality. If patriarchy exists, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks—what’s true is already so. If I am an uncredible loon, it changes nothing. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
The focus of discussion would stay on the original topic, rather than focusing more and more on whatever outgroup beliefs I may have. For example, in your comment, the original topic is a footnote at the end, and the main body is dedicated to lecturing me on how I have failed to appreciate the glorious rationalism of Less Wrong.
Frequently, arguments are based on stereotypes of feminism or what I might think rather than what I’ve explicitly stated. For example, I’ve said “patriarchy is a set of learned behaviors communicated through operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning” in almost every comment. I’ve had to repeat this because it’s nearly always been unacknowledged.
If I have a disagreement with one of my rationalist comrades in the real world, the argument immediately devolves into what predictions disagree, and then on what a satisfactory experiment would be. And then it’s over. On LW, it’s entirely the opposite—the argument immediately focuses on how strange it is that I believe that thing, there’s a brief stage during which people marvel at each other that I believe that thing, and finally, I’m chided for lowering the sanity waterline for believing that thing.
Your time is valuable, but if you can afford to comment on Internet websites, it isn’t that valuable.
Please consider addressing your comments to individuals rather than presuming the existence of a group consensus.
“LW” is composed of lots of different people — whose views on the subject range from considered feminism to considered anti-feminism; whose politics range from left to right and monarchist to republican to anarchist; whose levels of education range from “smart high-schooler” to “published researcher”; whose reasons for being here range from thinking it helps save the world, to shootin’ the shit.
That conflicts with eridu’s political philosophy. They are simply not a methodological individualist.
This is arguably “excusable” and attributable to the inherent difficulty of thinking at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously—like thinking of the quarks, the molecules, the aerodynamics/thermodynamics and the newtonian motions of a paper airplane all at the same time without loss of coherence or losing any data.
It is easier to compute a social trend first, reason its causes, and then separately compute individual trends, reason their causes, and then link everything together.
Well, maybe. But a stream of comments also lacks many of the cues that in-person has to distinguish individuals.
For instance — with the exception of those LW-folks whom I’ve met in person — when I read LW comments I don’t imagine them being in distinct voices for each poster. Some online forums make individual personality more visible, for instance by having icons or colors associated with each individual. LW doesn’t. And I don’t suggest that we should. But to a newcomer, the absence of cues other than ① username, and ② writing style might contribute to a sense of greater consonance, harmony, or even uniformity. Add the usual outgroup homogeneity bias, and LW could look like a hivemind.
You’re being needlessly pedantic.
If this really bothers you, mentally substitute all instances of “LW” in my comments with “all the humans that have replied to my comments in this thread on this website.”
That was a beautifully structured bit of propaganda in your last sentence, though. “LW is composed of lots of different people”—that’s an applause light worthy of a keynote speech at a transhumanist conference.
Yep … troll. Bye!
It’s easy to see how that happened, since in your original comment you equated sexism with “perpetuating patriarchy”. At that point, the only options are (1) agreeing with you; (2) arguing that evolutionary psychology reduces patriarchy; or (3) denying that patriarchy exists.
EDIT: In other words, the topic you describe as “is patriarchy real” was the topic you brought up, whether you realized it or not.
Well, there’s also (2.5) arguing that evolutionary psychology neither contributes to nor reduces patriarchy.
The word he used was “perpetuate”, rather than “contribute”; so leaving patriarchy invariant, so to speak, counts.
I think that would be an uncharitable interpretation, since it would lead one to infer that Eridu regards such activities as, say, eating oranges or opening refrigerators as sexist, and even knowing that Eridu considers many things sexist that most people do not, I find that doubtful.
Well, I prefer to avoid getting too close to an object-level discussion of eridu’s views, but suffice it to say that I would want to check with eridu before making any such assumption about what he does not consider sexist.
In any event, my point was that eridu’s views on patriarchy are a crucial premise of his argument that ev psych is bad, so a discussion of them was inevitable.
I’ll reply to this comment by replying to a later comment (I hope you’ll excuse this, I can only post once every ten minutes now):
Patriarchy is an oppressive system that faces opposition at every turn. It only exists because humans continue to fuel it. Perpetuating or furthering patriarchy means contributing to it; being patriarchy-neutral is the same thing as reducing patriarchy (albeit in a smaller quantitative sense).
Earlier arguments were along the lines of “evolutionary psychology is patriarchy-neutral because evolutionary psychology is true and the truth has no politics,” but that line of argument ended rather quickly, being replaced with “feminism is bad.”
I’d like to point out also that replacing the harder issue of “does evolutionary psychology oppress women” with “are eridu’s feminist politics good” is a form of ad-hominem attack—“feminist politics” are a conceptual attribute of “eridu,” and they provide a nice proxy for “ur dumb,” which is what you would see on another site.
If you present a conclusion, and other people disagree with it, then if they’re doing things right, they must disagree with either your premises or the inferences you draw from those premises. If you identify your set of premises and the inferences relating to them from which you draw the conclusion that evolutionary psychology is sexist as “feminism,” then naturally if other people disagree with your conclusion then the discussion will fall back to the topic of feminism, which appears to me to be exactly what happened.
I disagree that the discussion here has ever taken the line that “feminism is bad,” although if you interpret your own faction of feminism as the only “real” feminism, and nobody else in the discussion is aligned with that faction, I can understand how it might seem that way.
Your politics are a set of ideas, and if we didn’t disagree with them then obviously we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place. You can identify any idea as a conceptual attribute of yourself, and thereby frame any disagreement with you as an an hominem, but this is in complete opposition to the goal of safeguarding productive discussion.
But then the arguments I’d be responding to would be on the topic of evolutionary psychology, not on an unrelated topic of human relationships.
Making the statement “feminism is wrong about relationships, so it must be wrong about evolutionary psychology” (with the value of “feminism” in your post, which is probably accurate for most people who aren’t liberal feminists in this thread) is a common fallacy that the Sequences take some time to elucidate.
This is a prediction that I think is falsified in the early stages of this thread, wherein the first comments were about whether scientists could be responsible for journalist’s sexist misreadings of their findings, and whether the findings of evolutionary psychology were misread.
After I posted a comment that outlined my political beliefs, the discussion turned to them at the exclusion of all else.
I would, instead, phrase the statement as follows:
1). eridu’s premises lead to incorrect conclusions about relationships.
2). eridu’s reasoning is valid.
3). Therefore, eridu’s premises must be unsound.
4). eridu applied valid reasoning to his premises to reach conclusions about evolutionary psychology.
5). Since his premises are unsound, we cannot say whether his conclusions about evolutionary psychology are correct, based on his reasoning alone.
This is a nice way to see it, but the question “Are heterosexual relationships *(sexist)” and the question “Is evolutionary psychology *(sexist)” can have different factual answers.
As such, getting me to field questions on unrelated aspects of feminism is little more than a way to apply the Worst Argument in the World to “feminism,” or a way to attempt to be anti-reductionist by asserting that “feminism” is a property of predictions, and all predictions that have that property are false.
The question of whether X is “sexist” seems like a Worst Argument In The World waiting to happen. Taboo “sexist”: is X bad? Why?
(really. Sexist has been used so many different ways by so many different people that it doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.)
That was the intent of my “dereferencing” of the word sexist above, but I guess that was too idiosyncratic.
I avoided getting into it for a while, for that reason.
No, I was lecturing you on using bad rhetorical tactics. (Historically Less Wrong does pretty poorly when gender politics comes up. This was the best gender-politic discussion I’ve seen, which was particularly interesting.)
I admit this IS still pretty bad, but the opening comment wasn’t something that had much chance at all of producing a non-tribal discussion. I actually do like your opening warning (“please demonstrate your outgroup hatred with a downvote and move on”), but continuing to harp on that concept whenever anyone disagreed with you didn’t help anything.
Actually I think that was the problem. The first response to that was met with “hivemind” and “so much for your vaunted rationality” and after you start seeing things like that there’s pretty much no chance any future discussion will be productive.
I’ve gotten pretty good at LW buzzwords, and since my comment got buried quickly it kept the set of people commenting on it confined to those who saw it and were drawn to the topic of feminism.
Wei_dai’s post about this has some great comments that range from mere denial of patriarchy to hard reactionary male supremacy.
I confined discussion of that point to the comment subthread of someone commenting on only that line of text from my original post.
Or at least, I hope I did. I can’t keep track of context when I’m just replying to scores of comments.
Likewise, from below:
Commenting on one line of snark in my original comment was not productive in itself. Of course there was no chance future discussion would be productive. At that point, in that thread, the discussion was over style rather than substance.
While I think your other points have some degree of validity, this one does not. How can we apply evidence to your hypotheses, if we don’t know what your hypotheses even are ? It is important to ensure that everyone understands your claims (without necessarily agreeing with them) before we can discuss them. You say that “if patriarchy exists, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks”, but we can’t determine whether it exists or not until we understand what you mean by the word “patriarchy”.
Furthermore, I believe that most people here believe that there does exist some systematic bias in our society that privileges men over women—though we may disagree about the degree of this bias as well as some other details. But the mere existence of this bias does not automatically render the rest of your points valid.
For example, here are some statements of yours that could turn out to be false even if your beliefs about the exact nature of patriarchy are true:
Eliminating gender is not only possible, but is also the best way to combat the patriarchy.
Operant conditioning through guilt is a supremely effective conversion tactic.
Scientists should suppress any conclusions that could lend support to the patriarchy, even if these conclusions accurately represent reality.
The user base of Less Wrong is incapable of engaging with you on a purely intellectual level.
It’s worth an NB that conversion is not the only valuable outcome of guilt. Even if an oppressor is not converted outright, guilt-tripping can still make him uncertain, less confident, and less effective at achieving his goals, and since he is an oppressor, this outcome is valuable in and of itself.
Another valuable outcome is that instilling chronic, free-floating self-doubt into someone can convince them that oppression directed at them is deserved and proper—in fact, this happens to be a common feature in emotional abuse. It can also inspire them to do all sorts of things which are beneficial to the “movement”—not least of which is propagating the meme by guilt-tripping others.
This is a very “cool” sort of mindhacking—especially for people who happen to be high-functioning sociopaths who seek coercive power over others.
While I mostly agree on the denotational claims, this is erring somewhat close to implicitly accusing feminists of Dark Arts, and my warning lights flashed when I read this comment.
Perhaps the implied notion that guilt-tripping has very arguable expected results that can vary wildly should be spelled out more explicitly to ensure a higher level of clarity and minimize political mind-killing in the discussion.
Hmm, I don’t know, really. What I do know is that my comment was meant to overtly accuse those who would guilt-trip others based on transparently fallacious arguments (such as Fully General Counterarguments and Worst Arguments in The World) of being Dark-Arts-wielding emotional manipulators and abusers. Even if some self-described feminists get caught in this net, I think this says more about them than it does about anything else.
Oh, indeed. I hope you don’t take my comment as approval of that; “valuable” there meant “instrumentally valuable to someone.”
It was just a morally neutral observation of human nature. Like the observation that if a sample of a certain heavy metal is increased very suddenly, it will undergo an exothermic reaction with energy density significantly higher than most chemical reactions. Just an interesting fact.
On the other hand, attempting to guilt trip others can easily backfire. The example Eridu gave of a person feeling guilty about engaging in homophobic behaviors after their own brother has come out as gay does not necessarily generalize to cases of deliberate guilt tripping by others, which tends to create an adversarial reaction, and in terms of goals such as, say, getting people to donate to charity, doesn’t perform very well.
I think Goodhart’s Law (any measurement which is used to guide policy will become corrupt) might be in play.
The psychological changes which are needed to learn to treat people more carefully are fairly likely to be painful. Unfortunately, it can be a short jump from there to thinking that causing pain is likely to teach people to treat each other more carefully.
Goodheart’s Law? Sloppy associations about thing space? The fact that it’s much easier to cause pain than to usefully change people’s deep reflexes?
The true objection at the heart of those posts was “look at the stupid feminist,” and frequently, they were phrased as “Wow, you’re really crazy—so listen to this thought experiment, would you really say that patriarchy exists in this context? Because if so, holy crap, you’re dumb.”
This is using “feminism” as a proxy for “intelligence” and is other than that swap a fairly standard ad-hominem argument.
This is not a claim I ever made.
I think this is false as a matter of simple fact. I’ll bet money on it.
Would you like to co-design a survey on this?
I’d take that bet, for reasonable values of “privileges men over women”.
I might expect controversy if we were asking whether that bias is entirely unidirectional, whether “patriarchy” is an accurate or productive way of describing it, or how pervasive it is, but I’d expect the existence of systemic gender bias favoring men in certain domains to be challenged only by a minority of posters here. That’s really a fairly low bar, and while gender issues weren’t discussed on the last survey, correlations with the politics questions seem to favor it.
I’d be most comfortable betting that I could design a survey that, depending on the level of LW buzzwords, got participants to respond either that the patriarchy doesn’t exist or that it does.
But I also think that there’s a lot of male privilege that LWers deny exists.
PM me and I’ll give you an email address you can use to communicate with me about this.
Well, sure. Privilege—which I’ll call by that name here, though I really prefer the “blind spots” framing—is such a culture-bound thing that just about any natural group of people is going to be aware of a different subset. Given how my friends who’re into social justice tend to argue with each other, I suspect this is even true for subcultures that explicitly idealize identifying mechanisms of privilege that don’t apply to them directly.
Yes, if you somehow managed to come up with a canonical object-level list of how you believe male privilege manifests itself, I’d expect a large majority of LW to disagree with parts of it and be unaware of other parts. But that’d be true for my beliefs too, or Bugmaster’s, or Eliezer’s; the diffs would likely be smaller, since your views on gender are an outlier around here, but there would still be substantial diffs.
That’s all answering a different question than Bugmaster was asking, though.
I disagree that asking you questions about your beliefs constitutes an insult. Your beliefs are (probably) wildly unusual as compared to those of the average Less Wrong member, and thus a simple label for them does not exist. For example, if you said, “I’m a deontologist”, we’d instantly know what you meant; but we don’t know what “I’m a radical feminist” means. Thus, all the questions.
My mistake. But then, what did you intend to accomplish with operant conditioning and/or guilt ?
Yes and no. “Yes”, because I would love to see the results of a competently designed survey on the topic. I have a very high degree of confidence in my claim, as I stated it (*), and thus it would be very valuable for me to be proven wrong. But also “No”, because I doubt I am competent enough to design such a survey, or any survey at all for that matter. That said, it still sounds like a fun exercise, so even if we can’t find someone more competent to design the survey, I’m in—with the appropriate adjustment of the confidence level in our survey’s results.
(*) Unless you interpret “our society” too narrowly. I meant something like “mainstream American culture” when I said it.
Scholarship is a virtue. “Radical feminist” is a term that has a very well-defined meaning and a large body of literature. Asking those questions to me instead of to Google, and above that, asking me the same questions other LW commenters have already asked, only serves to signal shock and outgroup-ness.
I meant “less wrong.” “Mainstream American culture” has too many women in it for ignorance of patriarchy to hold widely.
Designing surveys isn’t hard, operationalizing that particular question will be. PM me if you want me to give you an email address you can use to communicate with me about this.
I already did, but I wanted to clarify my claim, just for the record. I claim that,
“Most people on Less Wrong would agree that there exists a systemic bias in mainstream American culture, which privileges men over women”.
I have a lot less confidence in the following claim, though I still think it’s more likely to be true than false:
“Most people on Less Wrong would agree that there exists a systemic bias on Less Wrong, which privileges men over women”.
I think that both these claims are worthy of testing.
They do? I would have expected them to claim that there is a bias that privileges high status men over high status women and also biases that privilege medium-to-low status women over medium-to-low status men and nobody cares about the latter. Of course I’m not part of mainstream American culture so I can only make inferences based on knowing some small part of western culture and familiarity with how humans tend to behave.
Really? I would find that almost comically amusing if you are correct.
All the more reason to run that survey ! We won’t get anywhere by guessing.
… would have been fantastic!
I don’t know how receptive this community would be to radical feminist arguments argued politely and in good faith.
I mean, I could walk up to someone and say “hey, big-nose, if you pulled your head out of your arse and had more brain cells you’d realize that rabbits should have the right to vote”, and then use his hostile reaction as evidence of people’s irrational and knee-jerk hostility to rabbit rights.
A few months ago a white nationalist posted a video of his on race relations or something, insulted everybody in the comments, and then claimed that he was being oppressed for his politically incorrect views.
It’s impossible to have “good faith” as a rationalist. I have an accurate understanding of LW, and if voicing that understanding as a prediction and being slightly snarky about it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so be it.
But also, I think it’s false as a matter of simple fact to say that my only argument is the stupidity of LWers. That was an entirely tangential garnish of snark in my original post, and it wasn’t my decision to start focusing on it. It goes to show that the LW community isn’t capable of discussing things in these (or any other outgroup) spaces like calm and rational adults as discussed in the OP. They’ll use that as an applause light, but they won’t actually constrain their behavior.
Further, the best indicator of upvotes for my comments is the degree of buzzwords they use. I guess that white nationalist didn’t say “modeling” enough.
If you think that expressing this prediction (that LWers are essentially human) is somehow insulting, than perhaps you need to reconsider the degree to which you accept abstractions like honest criticism and crocker’s rules.
Others here contest that your understanding is accurate. Please recognize that you cannot fairly expect us to take the assertion that you are right and we are wrong as given.
People occasionally come here and make criticisms of ideas accepted by the in-group here, and are heavily upvoted for bringing well-formulated criticisms to the table (the highest voted post on Less Wrong is an example,) and some posters such as XiXiDu have gotten most of their karma in this way.
On other occasions, people come here and argue, for instance, that we should all reject Bayesianism because Popper proved induction is impossible, or that mainstream physics is completely wrong and science should be about making descriptions of the world that make intuitive sense rather than making accurate predictions about reality. And they argue fiercely that their poor reception is proof of how bad we are at evaluating ideas that challenge in-group beliefs.
Now, maybe we are rejecting key arguments of yours because we’re too biased, and you are completely right about these matters and we are wrong (I do not think this is the case, of course, while you have made it clear that you think it is,) but if you just come out and say as much in those words, then it should be no surprise if people start pattern matching you as a crank rather than a valuable contributor of outside ideas.
If, as a rationalist, you want to win, (and you’ve said before that feminism is your thing to protect,) then engaging in self fulfilling prophesies about your own poor reception is a bad idea. Seriously, really really try not to do that, unless you’re not actually trying to encourage people to oppose patriarchy, and are just venting or trying to try.
Please do not introduce new people-who-are-displaying-trollish-behavior to XiXiDu as a role model.
These are always the equivalent of small quibbles within the meme pool that is already accepted, not arguing for something totally outside that set (like feminism, or leftist politics, or in general social-constructivist hypotheses rather than biological hypotheses.
No, because the expected utility of wasting time on less wrong is negative to begin with. I don’t think anything I say could convince anyone of feminist politics. The strategies I think will win in politics have nothing to do with comments on a message board.
....Then why are you doing it?
I’ve been bothering to engage with you at all out of a (waning) unwillingness to write you off as an unreasonable person incapable of holding a conversation with people you disagree with that leads to any productive conclusions. You started this conversation professing a conviction that everyone else here was too biased and irrational to engage with you, and you would simply be jumped on without consideration, and you have by all appearances become even more entrenched in that position. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I started participating out of the belief that there was a fair chance you were a largely reasonable person who held some positions I disagreed with, and through civil discussion one or both of us could learn something and change our minds. I have become convinced that I was mistaken, so I’m not going to engage with you any more.
So why are you, who have professed to believe that this was pointless all along, still bothering?
In one of the comments Eliezer banned, which you can still see here, eridu said:
Wei_Dai is mostly correct—I sometimes have downtime during the day, and I think it’s moderately better for me to spend two or five minutes composing a counter-argument about feminism on less wrong than it is for me to spend that time looking at funny pictures on Reddit.
LW is almost entirely men, and men get very prickly when confronted with the concept of gender privilege, so my probability of success was virtually zero from the start, and almost certainly that given that I’m unwilling to do the requisite amount of hand-holding that you really have to do to get men to admit that there might be a point to feminism.
This whole meta-line has been incredibly boring, I have to say.
To be fair, your task is much more difficult, since you’re attempting to convert us men to radical feminism, specifically. Thus, you must overcome not only our innate desire to keep our privilege, but also the efforts of liberal feminists who explicitly deny some of your claims.
Speaking as a non-feminist (radical or otherwise) man, though, I must say that I find your description of your views to be clear and coherent, which is a lot more than I can say for other sources. Thus, even though you may never convert me personally, I think you do have a non-zero chance of converting others.
I agree that it was tangential to your point (it was much less so for that white nationalist guy); but that kind of thing—snark, accusations against the community in general, angry-sounding tone, etc. - are probably the biggest cause of the downvoting and deletion of your posts.
I agree that in an ideal world we should be able to look beyond such superficial things as tone and snarky side comments, and just focus on the meat and bones of the argument—but as things are there are still very good reasons to discourage distracting insults, and try to keep the discussion civil, les the discussion degenerates into one where only insults are exchanged.
I don’t think Crocker’s rules are supposed to apply to everybody here or to the community in general. And I don’t think calling it “honest criticism” makes anything acceptable.
I know I’ve downvoted several of your posts, and it was never for any argument related to feminism (I was interested in reading up on stuff like the kyriarchy (however you spell that) or intersectionality), but for saying stupid things about the community or about how you were going to be downvoted.
If I attached a prediction to it predictionbook-style, would you upvote, downvote, or be neutral?
My posts have been deleted? Interesting.
Mostly. They no longer appear in the threads in which you made them, but are still visible in your user history.
FWIW I think that the majority of people arguing with you on these threads have stayed on topic, and attacked your argument rather than yourself—which is much more than I can say about pretty much any other Internet forum. Of course, I am admittedly biased, since I myself do not support your position.
That said, when you say or imply things like “the only possible reason you’d downvote me is to express out-group hatred, so go ahead, make my day”—as you did in one of your opening posts—you do make it very easy for people to dismiss you as a troll, and downvote you accordingly. This is, as you said, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and is thus not indicative of whether “the LW community is capable of discussing things like calm and rational adults”. Even calm and rational adults would gladly kick out a disruptive and belligerent troll.
FWIW I personally do not believe that you are the kind of troll who deserves an automatic downvote or ban, but I’m just some random user, so my opinion doesn’t carry any weight.
Agreed, and this is a major reason why I am much less concerned about threads like these on LW than Eliezer is.
I think this is incorrect.
The discussion I originally started was, in keeping with the main original post of this thread, “evolutionary psychology continues the oppression of women, and as such is sexist in any meaningful sense.”
Quickly, it devolved into “what are eridu’s feminist politics,” which is a proxy for “how stupid is eridu.” “Feminist politics” are a property of “eridu,” much like “intelligence” might be, and by focusing on that property of myself rather than on the arguments I was making.
A counterfactual world where the argument stayed on-topic would mean that we’d be talking about evolutionary psychology now.
Being wrong is not the same as being stupid.
It would’ve been impossible to understand your opposition to evolutionary psychology without first understanding your feminist politics.
That said, IMO the on-topic discussion was over when you made it clear that you value advancing your cause more than you value acquiring true beliefs and talking about them. The resulting loss of credibility made it very difficult (and, for some of your interlocutors, impossible) to engage you in rational conversation on the topic of whether evolutionary psychology is capable of producing true beliefs.
That said, I am personally fascinated by your stated goal of eliminating gender outright; I’ve never heard any feminist describe their goals so clearly. Thus I did learn something during these discussions, and I don’t consider them a waste.
I think this is a misguided reading of what I’ve been saying.
I value advancing feminism more than I value publishing true facts. I don’t have any particular affiliation for the truth as an ideal, just as an instrument to obtain my goals (which I think is true for most LWers).
When those two things conflict, I favor not publishing, and advancing feminism.
I see this as virtually identical to EY’s and the SIAI’s stance on AGI research. Most outcomes of AGI research are hugely negative to them, so they oppose the research taking place. I actually never thought of the idea of censoring (by any means) the scientific process until reading EYs tracts on the flaws of the scientific method, and the various stories where EY decries teaching things to those who cannot understand them.
I had already operationalized what I considered to be the bad outcome; people just thought it was so outlandish that they started trying to talk about my political beliefs instead, which brings us to
A political belief is a preference between world-states. A preference can’t be false (I could lie about my preferences, but I do have some set of preferences, and I known of no way to say that a preference for apples over oranges could be “false” in some way).
At about the third level of comments in this thread (some may be deleted, but I seem to be able to access them—I could give you my account password or save the .json if you want), you can start to see people switching over from discussing whether evolutionary psychology as currently practiced leads to the oppression (in some way operationally defined in that thread) of women, to interrogating me as to what I believe. The most blatent examples of this are people posting unrelated hypotheticals and links to blog posts, asking me to comment on them.
Further, though what was probably my own failure of communication, people started getting entirely the wrong messages from my posts, including:
I hoped that I had made this clear before, but apparently I haven’t:
Evolutionary psychology is capable of producing beliefs that highly correlate to reality
These true beliefs, propagated in patriarchal society, extend its lifespan
Thus, evolutionary psychology tends to support patriarchy
Thus evolutionary psychology is sexist.
Maybe too many LWers conflate “true” with “non-sexist”, but the truth of evolutionary psychology is never something I cared about.
Something that perhaps you have made clear in other postings I have not read, but not in this one, is what consequences for action you derive from those bullet points. Given your attitude to the truth as “just” as instrument, and thus not especially to be valued above other instruments, such as falsehood, I am guessing that the consequences you would derive would be along these lines:
Since these true beliefs, propagated in patriarchal society, extend its lifespan, they should not be propagated.
The questions that were asked, the answering of which resulted in these true beliefs, should not be asked.
Or if asked, false answers should be propagated instead, answers which, if believed, would tend to undermine patriarchy.
And since the actual investigation of these matters tends to result in true answers rather than false ones, actual investigation should not be performed, but instead, false answers should first be decided on and then investigations designed to lead to these false answers.
Truth and lies are worth nothing in themselves. Each is to be valued from case to case only according to whether it supports or undermines patriarchy.
But since the truth on these particular matters tends to support patriarchy, while lies can be crafted to point in any direction as easily as any other, so long as the patriarchy exists a concern with truth is itself supportive of patriarchy.
Only when we have achieved the feminist paradise can we safely seek the truth in all things. Until then, truth is lies and lies are truth.
Is that an accurate extrapolation of what you believe?
No. It breaks down here:
Patriarchal bias will reliably cause most of these investigations to return false results.
Further, false results that are more in line with existing patriarchal ideas will be propagated further than any true result.
This is true:
But for the opposite reason you claim: “Truth” is a social process rather than an Aristotelian absolute, and under the social regime of patriarchy, “truth” will be mostly false, similarly to how in 1850, white supremacy was simply “truth.”
I agree, which is why I think that both you and EY/SIAI are equally wrong. I believe that the utility of “publishing true facts”—and, by extension, learning which facts are true to begin with—greatly exceeds the utility of advancing any given cause (at least, in the long term). Without having accurate models at your disposal, you cannot effectively pursue your goals.
For example, consider quantum physics. Given its potential for unimaginable destruction, would you have supported suppressing all research in this area of physics, circa 1911 or so ?
Guilty as charged. In my defence, though, I could not understand your beliefs about evolutionary psychology without understanding what you mean by “oppression of women”; and, more generally, without understanding your views on gender relations in general. As I said earlier, “oppression” is a word that can mean very different things to different people.
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand where you’d draw the line. For example, consider discrete mathematics. Its applications allow us to generate and distribute text, video, audio, and other media in increasingly more efficient ways. Much of this media—if not most of it—directly supports patriarchy in one way or another. Does this mean that discrete math is sexist ? My guess is that you’d answer “no” (I know I would), but I’m not sure why you would come to that conclusion, given your line of reasoning.
I agree with EY on this, I believe—I think that the world would be a better place if Manhattan Project scientists, German scientists, and all other scientists had realized the destructive implications of fission research and kept the information required to make nuclear weapons secret.
I’d say no, because most people don’t see discrete math as providing evidence as to why patriarchy is natural and therefore good.
But on the other hand, I’d say yes, because all of society is patriarchal, and so the destruction of patriarchy will affect all of society.
If you asked me whether the existing reality (composing textbooks, teachers, research journals, etc.) of discrete math is sexist, I’d certainly say yes, and point to the ways that women are systematically excluded from those social groups.
The fundamental thing that most LW commenters, including you, are getting, is that I don’t care about platonic abstractions of things like “truth” or “discrete mathematics.” I care about humans in the real world.
Makes sense, but I disagree with both EY and yourself about this.
Yes, the world would be better off if we never invented nuclear weapons. However, the same exact knowledge that enables the construction of nuclear weapons also enabled the construction of all modern electronics, as well as this Internet itself (just to bring up a few examples). The utility of these applied technologies, as well as the potential utility of future technologies that will build upon sciences that themselves are built on top of modern physics, greatly outweighs the (admittedly huge) disutility of nuclear weapons.
One possible answer is, “well, in this case the scientists should’ve advanced their science in secret”, but I don’t believe that such a thing is possible, for a variety of reasons.
Fair enough, but then, you have a case of conflicting goals. For example, do you believe that resources should be spent on studying discrete math, in its present form ? On the one hand, its potential applications are quite useful for improving the quality of life of all people, women included. On the other hand, a (possibly large) portion of every dollar and every hour you spend on studying discrete math will go toward reinforcing the patriarchal structures inherent in “textbooks, teachers, research journals, etc.”. So, should we study discrete math, or not ?
Then you undervalue the instrument. Truth, and knowing how to find it, is the instrument, above all others, which makes possible everything else that we do.
Is there anything you would not do to obtain some truth?
If so, you value that thing more than you value that truth.
I disagree with the claim that the entire LW community, or even a majority of it, is incapable of discussing this subject rationally, and I also disagree with the claim that most LWers will assign karma to your posts based on buzzword content.
However, I find your other claims and the overall assessment of the situation minus the above to correlate rather strongly with what has experimentally actually happened so far in the discussion in the majority of what I observed.
I agree with this part. LessWrong really really really likes its buzzwords. The most charitable interpretation that I can give is that there’s short inferential differences involved, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if it had to do with that “insight addiction” theory someone mentioned earlier in one of the discussion threads. In-group and out-group signalling is probably also related to this, because LessWrongers are human.
It’s probably this overuse of buzzwords which leads to the relatively widespread perception that LessWrongers are a groupthinking cult that worships Eliezer, so I think LessWrong should maybe start to move away from the buzzwords a bit.
I also agree that LessWrongers respond to criticism badly, and use tone arguments as an excuse too often, but I don’t really have anything to add to the discussion on that score; I just wanted to note my agreement.
I’ve been skimming some of the proposed literature, and I still don’t see any concrete examples of things I do that support patriarchy. Using language that reinforces male “possession” of the female body? Nope, and I’ve actually taught women how to avoid using this language. Behaving positively towards female behaviors that encourage females to submit to a particular view of how they should behave and dress in order to achieve anything? Nope, and I essentially don’t even like most of the standard models (the typical examples of high heels, make-up, large breasts, etc. not only aren’t things I encourage or reward, even subconsciously, but usually disgust me precisely because of the reason they’re still so common). There are a few other examples of these prominent “patriarchal” behaviors that I’ve learned about over time, but it’s been a long time already since I first learned about gender unfairness, and I started working towards fixing it in my own behavior since almost immediately afterwards. All examples which I know of are ether eliminated from my behavior, or are consistent with an optimal-resolution strategy that I expect to bring about the most effective results towards eliminating gender-unfairness.
I admit to using some unfair arguments and shifting the burden of proof, but the latter is only because I have no idea where to even begin working on resolving hypotheses if I am to accept the premise that I am too broken to figure out what’s broken. It feels, from the inside, like I have to figure out the best from a series of hypotheses while working from the axiom that no hypothesis can ever be tested and that all proofs I’ve ever learned are tautologically invalid. It feels like trying to evaluate the validity and usefulness of Occam’s Razor without being allowed to use Occam’s Razor.
I’m very interested in this discussion, but I believe there are very unfair generalizations being made, and those that are most visible to myself are those that are “against” me.
If I’m to be charged guilty of patriarchy by virtue of not devoting every moment of my life actively fighting against patriarchy, and charged guilty of motivated stopping by virtue of only doing everything I can as soon as I learn about it / how to reduce gender-unfair behavior in myself and those to which I have a high information transmission rating, and not more than that despite being one single person with other horrors of society to worry about, then...
I will plead guilty as charged, by virtue of being found guilty without trial based on prior assumption or privilege of the hypothesis. It doesn’t appear as though there exists any possible evidence that would shift the posteriors towards the existence of anyone not guilty. Phlogiston, in that case.
EDIT: I should probably note here, even though it’s been mentioned elsewhere, that nowhere in my behavior described in the first paragraph do I consider myself “feminist”. If I had to assign an identity label, I would say I am “strongly self-reinforcing in behaviors absent of direct gender-unfair consequences and absent of any such consequences were it reflectively applied to all members of a society”.
The term “feminist”, to me, implies specifically acting, campaigning, publicizing, etc. negatively unfair behavior towards women specifically, which is very incompatible with my own position, which promotes extremely fair behavior towards anything considered a homo sapiens and optimal strategies for reducing any unfair behavior by any member of the species towards any other member of the species. All of this filtered by what I attempt to turn into an optimal intrumentally-rational approach to choosing actions by their greatest expected utility.
In other words, I would be tempted to say that I’m merely a humanist, rather than a feminist.
What sort of language and tone have you used while doing so? Have you ensured that you did this in a way so as to be non-condescending and helpful, or were you being a man who explains things? Did you consider that there are harmful social consequences to a man “teaching” a woman anything about feminism? Did you at least feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable around this issue, knowing as a good feminist that you were in dangerous territory?
Do you recognize the value of any self-determination of women, or have you started engaging in reverse body policing?
My point in asking this questions isn’t to accuse you of doing these things, but to illustrate that unlearning patriarchy is a long process that will possibly never complete in your lifetime.
Well, then you’ll have to become stronger.
The fact that you still see things in terms of “gender unfairness” rather than patriarchy indicates to me that you’re more of a liberal than a radical, That’s one place to start.
I’ve said explicitly the reverse multiple times during this discussion. Unlearning patriarchy is similar if not identical to the extinction of any other learned behavior pattern.
To answer this in particular because I think they’re all valid points you probably have more experience with than I do, I used the same text with the women as I used with men to whom I taught the same thing, and it was done through an impersonal text-only chat interface, and no I did not “know as a good feminist” all that much because I was merely, in my mind, correcting a behavior reinforcing unfairness. I had not learned to think more than four steps of causality forward in counterfactuals, at the time, nor of how to compute recursive not-exclusively-self-reinforcing social trends.
No, I did not feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable about these things, because ceteris paribus, it is better to feel good about doing good things than to feel bad about doing good things. I also rarely feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable for pretty much anything.
Fortunately, I noticed the counter-signaling and reverse policing issues long before I would have had opportunity to accidentally cause damage in that manner. My body-policing towards men and women is exactly identical, barring practical issues like bits of skin only happening in some place for one of the two genders exclusively and thus requiring different structural solutions in clothing. In my workplace, men are required to wear dress shirts and formal business black pants. Women have no such requirements, as long as they dress “acceptably for a business environment”. This is the kind of thing I denounce and find unfair. I don’t even know, nor care, which of the two genders is being disadvantaged the most in this case, I only need know that there is unfair treatment to conclude that it ought not to be so.
The reason I claimed there didn’t seem to be any exit is that you propose a long road towards eliminating patriarchy, but it doesn’t seem as though anyone who would follow this road and yet still disagree with you would be a valid counterexample. You seem to be establishing within the premise that anyone who doesn’t study Feminism is automatically a Patriarchist, and that anyone who does study Feminism will inevitably agree with you, become a Feminist, and relinquish all Patriachism—and that anyone who claims to have studied Feminism yet did not end up in that particular state simply must have done it wrong.
On a last note, no, I have no intention of becoming a radical. What is a radical, anyway? What will being “radical” change from my current behavior of “Do everything I possibly can to act in a manner which promotes fair treatment of all humans without influence of any bias or skewed model of valuation.”?
Or, to be blunt and confrontational: Are you asking me to subjugate all men that might possibly be likely to engage in any form of patriarchal behavior in the future? Is the requirement for fitting your definition of morality that women must be completely free, and any influence of any man to any woman is immoral, such that “people” influencing “other people” is okay, but not men influencing women?
I’d really like to see a truth table here, because on my truth table, anyone can influence anyone else, as long as there is no nefarious will at work and there is no long-term self-reinforcing behavior being programmed, and any filtering by any criterion, be it gender or race or otherwise, is something I perceive as less moral. Despite this, I will obviously act rationally and sacrifice one person over two others according to some criterion if practical math dictates that such is the optimal moral result of shutting up and multiplying. I do my utmost to avoid letting properties of my own mind (or indeed, of anything that is not inherently in what I estimate to be truly real) from affecting these calculations, so things like Woman.Sexiness or Woman.Attractiveness will never be considered barring Newcomblike problems forcing me to consider them.
Because, you see, in my model, you’re the one feeding the problem by insisting on feminism and reducing oppression of females in particular over all other possible forms of unfair treatments from some humans to other humans. Focusing on women specifically seems like it would only reinforce the idea of gender distinctions. I focus on all occurences, and it only happens that cases involving male-female differences are statistically more frequent than other cases, with skin color and religion-belief-associated statements (or lack thereof) coming in not too far behind.
Edit: I realize that the last paragraph is very accusatory, but it is meant as an illustrative parallel to the Tentacle Super-Happy Aliens in the Three Worlds Collide story. I don’t actually believe that you’re acting in a negative-expected-utility manner, nor that my behavior has clearly and verifiably better expected utility. It’s just an expression of where my arguments generally come from and why I don’t identify as a Feminist, but rather as a Humanist.
Patriarchy exists in an objective sense. It is tangibly demonstrated in experiments. Its physical, material manifestation in reality is as a pattern of activation in the neurons of human brains.
Going all the way back to my original post, hierarchy creates division, division creates difference (and difference justifies hierarchy, but that’s tangential here).
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
This is a very typical failure mode of proto-feminist thought. It’s well covered in snarky blog posts, but I’m not aware of any good sources to fix it.
Since we’ve isolated the source of our disagreement, I suggest we stop arguing here, because I can’t really convey any novel information to you at this point.
Okay. I have no idea how this would happen, concretely. I have never seen any evidence of this. My prior towards this being true is extremely small.
The closest match I have is: If I act identically towards men and women, and some people are biased or uninformed, they might perceive my behavior differently or it might have different consequences depending on who the other person is. There might even be hardcoded brain differences in how a woman will perceive an action versus how a man would.
The above paragraph merely seems to imply that stupid people will privilege their own hypothesis whether I act differently towards them or not. This is not dependent on patriarchy, but merely a cognitive defect of the human brain in general. If your claim is on the basis of brain differences, then I believe myself justified in requesting evidence for this, because the standard extremist-feminist claim I’ve heard is that most difference in interpretation is not hardcoded, but rather cultural.
What is “male-socialized or women-socialized”, exactly? They sound like applause lights, and I have no idea what they could even mean on a technical level. It doesn’t even look like a hypothesis, only a mysterious “explanation”.
Suppose we were not in a particularly patriarchal society. Is treating everyone equally, regardless of gender or race or otherwise, still patriarchal? Surely not. If it is, then I am confused.
If some people perceive my behavior as being oppressive towards men but not women, or oppressive towards women but not men, despite being identical towards both, even when my behavior has no gender-conditionals implanted within it, then that is a property of their minds. The behavior is not inherently “patriarchal” or “oppressive” if it contains exactly zero conditionals that correlate with gender. This is obviously not the case, because the above is a mathematically-perfect representation of my ideal / attempted behavior.
Behaving differently towards men and towards women seems like exactly the kind of thing we want to avoid if we want to eliminate gender-unfairness. Unless your objective is to turn things around and make women dominant over men instead? Or make some other group dominant? Or create some other form of inequality?
A summarized, distilled, refined, purified version of my behavioral guidelines on this subject is basically:
I should act in the exact same manner towards everyone all the time, with no discriminatory conditionals that correlate with specific subsets of humans, and in the same convergent-coherent manner that I would act whether I were a man, a woman, any kind of transgender, an androgynous human, or any other form of humanlike mind that had these same goals.
I fully expect, with high probability, that living in a “patriarchal society” populated entirely with people applying these behaviors would be essentially no different than what I do not consider a “patriarchal society” and no different from a gender-fair society. It is also exactly the goal sought by not-female-domination-oriented feminism, to my knowledge.
If you have any specific evidence or reading material on the above-quoted claim you could point out, I’d be glad to read up on it.
Saying “we now know why we disagree” without having a chance to change my mind if I am wrong is insufficient for me. I must become stronger. I must not worship ignorance. I do not have sufficient evidence (not even remotely close) to assert that you are Most Definitely Wrong. Therefore my priors could be wrong.
While your last paragraph is admirable in itself, I can only see it as an applause light in the context of the adversarial nature of both your post and this discussion in general.
For one, if you truly wish to become stronger, read better radical feminists than me. I can no better educate you in radical feminism than you could educate a christian in rationalism.
Gender socialization is a process I’ve defined earlier, and that turns up huge amounts of google hits and a long Wikipedia page. The wikipedia page isn’t very good, but essentially, gender socialization is the process of being taught (via operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) gender.
Which brings us here:
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers.
There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization—of men and women learning to emit different behaviors, and respond in different ways to behaviors emitted by people of masculine or feminine expression.
If you emit some behavior B, that behavior is processed differently by different human minds. The automatic processes of association will produce drastically different responses in those minds depending on the distance between them.
To put it another way, I could say a sentence to you that you would (possibly) be completely nonchalant about, but would trigger someone with PTSD into a panic attack or flashback. The sentence has no PTSD-conditionality; as such, any triggering is an artifact of the listener’s mind, and the sentence is not inherently “triggering” or “oppressive.”
Do you see the problem in the above scenario?
Well, liberal feminists that I disagree with would point out that the sentence “You certainly seem to have sex with lots of people” provokes very different reactions when you say it to men than when you say it to women. If you disbelieve me, try it out on your Facebook friends.
A non-patriarchal society is one wherein the concept of gender is alien to those within it. “Treating everyone equally regardless of gender” implies that gender still exists, which to me implies that patriarchy still exists. You can refer back to the infographic at my top-level post in this thread for more on this.
I hope you don’t mind me jumping into this discussion; I find it fascinating.
Would the below statement be an accurate rephrasing of your views ?
“Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors.”
I think this is a reasonable claim—but how would you determine whether it’s true or not, without performing exactly the kind of biological research that you oppose ? Actually, I may be jumping ahead of myself. Assuming that you agree with my phrasing, do you think that it matters how likely it is to be true ?
I do not (unless, of course, you deliberately designed the sentence to be an effective basilisk, in which case I’d say you are behaving unethically). What am I missing ?
I understand what you’re saying, but, technically speaking, the mere existence of gender does not imply patriarchy. It could imply matriarchy, instead. That’s a minor nitpick, though.
(Edit: formatting)
ISTM that the issue is similar to that of the old injunction against yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater or the more recent one of yelling “BOMB!” while pointing at an abandoned bag in an airport. Sure, the words themselves do not inherently carry panic, mayhem, children trampled to death by mobs, etc. - just like no word inherently carries PTSD attacks in them—but it is still much preferable ceteris paribus not to have a behavior A when there are known expected negative consequences.
Think: “I know making dead baby jokes while that person is still traumatized by having their five (baby) children tortured to death in front of them will cause them incredibly grief, horror and pain, but it’s not my fault they’re like that and the words themselves don’t cause the pain, so it’s fine I can do whatever I want!”
As for your other questions, I’m also eager to see a response.
I see what you’re saying, and I agree, but I don’t think the scenarios are identical.
In both of your scenarios, the speakers know with an extremely high degree of certainty that their words will have a negative effect. That’s why I singled out “deliberately creating an effective basilisk” as an unethical activity.
In eridu’s scenario, however, this is not the case (unless I misunderstood him). His scenario is more like the following:
“I am going to talk about my trip to the zoo where I saw some rare monkeys. I understand that there must exist some people in the world who have been savaged by vicious monkeys, and might react negatively to my tale, but I’m going to narrate it anyway”.
If we are going to implement a hard rule saying, “don’t utter any sentence that could trigger anyone, under any circumstances”, then communication would become untenable.
In addition, from a strictly nitpicky philosophical point of view, I’d argue that sentences by themselves are not “triggering” or “oppressive”; they are just bit strings. It’s the interaction of a sentence with a particular human’s mind that could be potentially triggering. If no one in the world had ever been savaged by monkeys, my tale of monkeys at the zoo could not trigger anyone, which would imply that it is not inherently triggering.
I agree with that for the most part.
Destroying patriarchy.
Prove to me that you’ve tried harder.
I don’t think that would do it. If by “destroying patriarchy” you mean “destroying the systemic oppression of women by men”, then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn’t oppress each other (*) .
On the other hand, if your goal is to destroy gender altogether (which would, as a consequence, bring about the destruction of the patriarchy), then it would be very valuable for you to discover whether gender has biological underpinnings or not. If it does, then your goal is unachievable (at least, through purely social methods, transhumanism aside), and you’d end up wasting a lot of effort.
See my reply to DaFranker, below.
(*) Or perhaps the women would oppress the men, since the goal of “destroying patriarchy” doesn’t specify any specific outcome.
Well, if as a consequence of the mechanisms that perpetuate oppression being abolished, people no longer have gender identities, then you could be pretty sure after the fact that that hypothesis was right after all.
However, it seems to me that the approach of finding out whether gender identities are innate or learned by destroying patriarchy is question-begging, because the means by which the people advocating it intend to destroy the patriarchy presuppose that gender identities are learned.
Indeed.
This is hardly unusual in the space of traditional rationality, and even in nontraditional rationality.
Yes. However, it’s fairly evident that the cost of a general policy against uttering potentially-damaging sentences for all cases is prohibitive; you pretty much by rule can’t exist if you’re absolutely not allowed to ever accidentally trigger a negative reaction. That’s hyperbole, though, but the key point is:
It’s all about quantities and how much whiter or blacker.
A super-general ultra-powerful general policy against possibly-patriarchal words or behaviors by adjusting for expected perceptions would not only carry a much higher cost-per-avoided-damage than other behaviors, but would also in most cases dramatically increase the risk of committing errors in judgment, on top of pretty much becoming your sole lifegoal and preventing you from ever doing any progress in any other topic of interest.
What’s more, the very policy is itself sexist, because it expects differences in minds and perceptions between genders. This expectation is not secret, so it would obviously have an effect on others’ behaviors.
Historically / experimentally, what have we seen happen when others know that X is expected of them?
They will either X, or -X in order to signal.
By placing Expectation X, you are focusing the behavior-space on X in particular, and discouraging escape from that zone. This is why I find the idea of behaving differently and having different expectations of different genders to be harmful. By placing my expectations and own behaviors in a wider X, and having the same X for all audiences, I believe myself to be actively contributing to the reduction of unfair discrimination.
I very much believe you. I have also seen experimental evidence of pretty much the same. I don’t really see how that is directly relevant, or what your underlying point is, though. A policy of identical behaviors and identical reaction expectations will, on pain of deliberately choosing to lower its expected total utility, take into account known evidence for realistically-expected behavior and expect its conjugate¹, so as to causally bring behaviors closer to the ideal expected identical behaviors.
Perhaps this is already what you are doing, perhaps this decision theory approach is wrong (I try to use TDT-like processes because, well, so far they work), or perhaps I’m confusing things or putting too many concepts together. The above does makes sense to me—the mathlike stuff works out and the anecdotal evidence supports—and is not a conclusion I arrived to trivially by Authority or some form of subculture programming, barring denial-of-denial problems.
Other than this, Bugmaster has made some interesting queries, which I’m also interested in.
(¹. I mean here in the algebra sense of “conjugates”, figuratively, as the behavior which is expected to multiply or add up with the current expected real behavior such that the resulting behavior after future corrections by the other party becomes 1, AKA gender-identical and otherwise calibrated as much as possible for utility-increasing future behavior. )
ETA: I’ve elaborated a bit more on general policies in more technical terms and with more standard LW jargon in this other comment.
I agree provided you don’t mean they are exclusively a result of gender socialization, and that (say) hormones don’t play any significant role.
I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
The trouble with this argument is that the feral condition is not the natural condition for humans, as philosophers once imagined it to be. A whole slew of development doesn’t work without the appropriate stimuli which are provided by all human societies, for instance exposure to language during the critical period.
The gold standard for demonstrating that something is due to socialization is to demonstrate difference among societies or social groups (subcultures, classes, etc.) — not to compare a healthy person to one that has been developmentally impaired, i.e. a feral child.
EDIT: To taboo “natural” — The feral condition is not the environment of evolutionary adaptation for the human mind, and we know about specific deficits that develop in feral children.
This is still 100% naturalistic fallacy. Or appeal to nature if you don’t feel that it is a fallacy in this case.
Can you explain a little further? I don’t follow.
“Is not the natural condition” is not a counterargument of any sort to eridu’s claim:
*(I got this from Eridu’s profile. it is the right post: I clicked permalink and it bought me here)
Eridu: “I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.”
“The feral condition is not the natural condition” is irrelevant. Eridu was using biological to mean non-socialised, not natural or normal. A critcism that could be made at this point is that lots (most? all surviving?) feral children are raised by some non-human mini-society in the form of a pack of animals so maybe in fact they are desocialised of their biological default gender by living in such a society. Or a gender neutral survivor personality supresses gender: maybe if you raised some kids in an empty room but gave them food so they didn’t have to scavenge the females would be more “feminine” and the males more masculine. Or (sorry I only meant to write the first but these other possibilities have occured to me as I go) femininity and masculinity are mostly only social anyway and their agenderedness is just a byproduct of their asocialness to humans.
Or that hormones are actually perfectly amenable to changes due to socialisation.
So the thing about development is a non sequitur who’s only purpose I can think of seems to be imply that gender could be a “development” which is much like saying ADHD is/isn’t a disease.
Anyway then fuba cunningly redefines “due to socialisation” as “due to non-universal socialisation.” Or perhaps this is just what most people usually mean by “due to socialisation” but the literal words in this specific case can not just be substituted for their usual meaning because Eridu obviously meant by “socialisation”, socialisation, and not non-universal socialisation.
If gender creating stimuli are universal to all societies that necessarrilly imples that they come from society. If every human hates red, red is still not “objectively bad.” Similiarly, if every society socialises the vast majority of its members into being gendered that doesn’t make it inherent that humans are gendered.
The naturalistic fallacy is the implication that if it turns out that it really is a universal (as a fact about all the particular societies that exist or have existed) adopting a gender identity would constitude “development” in a way comparable to adoption of language.
Now Fuba doesn’t explicitly commit the naturalistic fallacy at any point but I don’t belive he’s just bringing up these facts at this point totally at random after starting his post with “the trouble with this post is that” and not trying to imply anything. The point of Fuba’s post seems to be that because feral children lack some development that all societies provide the stimuli for, gender is also a “development,” and that still doesn’t even contradict eridu. She merely claimed that gender is socialised, not that that is bad (in that specific post.) To actually disagree with Eridu’s post it requires also that universal socialisation people approve of is “development” and hence not due to socialisation. But a lot of “development” (e.g. language) is due to socialisation.
Sorry fuba. I’m naturally an asshole when I think I’m pointing out people’s mistakes and have the excuse that I am tired so I’m not going to try and fix that.
So I guess I was wrong. The argument seems to be that if gender is good and universal in societies that currently exist/have existed it is “development” and so not socialisation. Naturalistic fallacy doesn’t quite cover it. It’s also like that diseased thinking post. I don’t know the term for that.
Alternatively maybe it is just an appeal to process in some well respected area. In which case it is a misunderstanding because the process is designed to look for the meaning commonly substituted for “socialisation” (non-universal socialisation) and Eridu was talking about socialisation.
Presumably feral children would display gendered behavior in some respects if gender was hormonal—spatial manipulation is the first one I can think of. In general, the set of gendered behavior minus the set of behaviors that require intervention during a critical or sensitive period should be gendered in feral children.
What you say is in general true, and I don’t think that it would be hard to demonstrate difference in gender expectations across social groups.
By itself it only proves that hormones are not sufficient and socialization is necessary, not that hormones are not necessary and socialization is sufficient.
IIRC many people born with ambiguous external genitalia, accidentally surgically assigned to the sex other than their gonadal one, and raised as the corresponding gender tend to become transgender (i.e. to identify with the gender corresponding to their gonadal sex rather than their assigned sex) by their late teens.
Also, by quickly glancing at the Wikipedia article ISTM that chemical castration does work—though to be sure I would have to see double-blind trials, which for obvious reasons would be problematic (to say the least) to perform.
I’m afraid I’ve never met a feral child. And I would not expect children to have as much socialization as an adult.
I don’t suppose anyone has ever dropped a bunch of babies on the woods and seen what sort of society they develop 25 years later...
I rather quiet one, I’d imagine.
Assuming they survived (with an artificially plentiful supply of rabbits and chickens).
Ah. Well, that’s quite an assumption.
Hm.
Beats me.
Surely different gender roles are possible. Shouldn’t Gender still exists then implystill bad, rather than gender still exists imply patriarchy (tied to current gender roles no?) An equal and opposite (where possible) matriarchy (or some other -archy based on alien genders) would be about as bad, right?
FWIW, personally I think genders without any -archy at all (i.e., some behaviours are more typical of men than of women and vice versa, but neither men nor women are frowned upon when exhibiting behaviours typical of the other gender, and neither group is obviously worse off overall) wouldn’t be bad at all.
I meant from Eridu’s perspective. I was correcting what I saw as an internal flaw in Eridu’s claims not making a statement of my own values. (I assume this is how I was interpreted because of the downvotes, not because of your reply.Or are people actually objecting to the correction?)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender? You have to (not sure if next word is right word) essentialise the average difference in behaviour before it becomes gender or it’s just an average. And how is that not bad? The reason that, in the current world it’s so efficient to think this way (other than agreeing with your peers) is because of all the frowning and hitting and ostracisation, or just lowered respect suppressing the cases where the essentialism breaks down (and the opposite rewarding people for staying within bounds of the idea). When there’s no more societal level frowning the essentialisation isn’t bad (edit: well, worse than any other essentialisation) in principle but there’s going to be a lot more cases where it doesn’t apply so what do you need it for?
Isn’t the point of gender just judging people according to how similiar they are to that essentialised difference anyway though? I have trouble conceiving of a world where people don’t do this but they hold onto the concept (if the idea is even seperable from the idea that being a manly male or a feminine female is a good thing.)
The human brain is quite good at naive Bayes classifiers. Look at Network 2 in http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/ but imagine that instead of “blegg/rube” the node in the middle read “man/woman” (and similar changes for the nodes in the periphery).