This is definitely not true. It’s also not a true statement about feminists.
Patriarchal bias isn’t biological, like most cognitive biases (though it’s obviously related).
Patriarchy is learned behavior. Men and women are rewarded for behaving in accordance with patriarchy, punished for deviating, and as children, have ample opportunity to both witness others being rewarded and punished, and are encouraged to identify with and model relevantly-gendered adults.
As such, patriarchal behavior patterns can be extinguished. The way this typically happens is by an individual reading some basic feminism, realizing that they agree with it, and starting to mentally punish themselves (with, say, guilt) whenever they notice they are behaving in a way that perpetuates the patriarchy.
Within patriarchal social contexts, it’s very hard to unlearn patriarchy, because while mentally conditioning yourself towards feminism, you’ll still be conditioned the opposite way towards patriarchy. Some people aren’t strong enough to do this, which is why some feminists consider them irrevocably broken. Of course, most feminists are unaware of the mechanisms of operant conditioning.
But, this means that if you air-dropped an arbitrary human into a feminist utopia, they would probably become a good feminist relatively quickly.
I don’t think I have the cognitive context necessary to predict that. It’s only useful as a construct, in this case to make the point that humans are patriarchal because humans conform, and society is patriarchal—implying that if the same humans were in an environment where conforming meant being feminists, they would conform to that.
Fair enough. I guess in the context of that “end of the world” thought experiment discussed above, I was trying to picture how the relationship of the American Het Male and American Het Female would be different if they had internalized radical feminism.
I am sort of trying to reconcile the radicalness of your critique of gender relations with the mundaneness of gender relations between, to take the obvious example, myself and my wife. Neither of us are free of sexist attitudes, and yet ridding ourselves of them doesn’t seem like so urgent a project as you are urging. It seems like maybe we’d rather just go for a walk by the river.
I’m not trying to be flippant, just trying to understand where the urgency is coming from. Is it mostly a question of trying to prevent severe social ills related to sexism, such as rape? Or do you think that on the level of personal relationships between ordinary people, a lot of horrible shit is going on?
Or do you think that on the level of personal relationships between ordinary people, a lot of horrible shit is going on?
During the early days of feminist reawakening in the 60s and 70s, the main thrust of feminist activism came from consciousness-raising groups, where women talked about their experiences.
This revealed to them (and to the world) that they had massive pluralistic ignorance about things like domestic violence, marital rape, housework, and other various things ranging from extreme to mundane.
That sort of pluralistic ignorance is still common today about a variety of other things (recall that the last state to outlaw marital rape did so in 1993), especially since the prevailing meme is not “feminists have no legitimate position” but rather “feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women.”
In LW terms, I think that the CEV of your wife and possibly you would lead to radical feminism, and a re-evaluation of your non-feminist past of at best mildly oppressive and at worst abusive and toxic.
Thanks for the reply. What I’m getting from you is the idea that there are probably some practices in our relationship (and those of couples in our reference class) that, although they look benign to us now, would after a certain amount of consciousness-raising come to be seen by us as toxic.
I consider this very plausible (and I can think of attitudes held by me in the past, about gender and other things, which seemed trivial but which I now regard as toxic).
I am really interested in moving from the abstract to the specific though. So seconding Bugmaster’s comment, I’m interested in concrete things that occur typically in the context of what you might call a moderately “liberal feminist” relationship which I ought to regard more seriously. Think back to the last time you spent time with a moderately liberal feminist, middle-to-upper-class couple. What sorts of things would you see to critique?
To contextualize a strongly liberal feminist/tumblr-feminist couple, I’d add maybe the following few things:
Compulsory political support of various institutions that exist on the backs of women to serve men, such as prostitution and pornography, with the implication of being “prudish” if she objects
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a “prude” or “sex-negative” or “anti-sex” if she objects
Compulsory individualist conceptions of gender (“gender is entirely based on identity,” “genderbread people” ala my original comment), and as a consequence, a return to individualist attributions of gendered success or failure, and a lack of emphasis on social problems as a cause for individual deficiencies
To contextualize it further, an undergrad psychology class would teach that there are three relationship types common to modern society: traditional, modern, and egalitarian. Traditional relationship types would be considered patriarchal by liberal feminists and are dominated by men. Modern relationship types have a senior-partner junior-partner dynamic, where nominally women have input but ultimately everything is decided by men. Egalitarian relationships are most common in non-heterosexual relationships, and have equally shared power and a much higher focus on friendship and companionship than either of the two previous types. I would guess that any liberal feminist heterosexual couple would fall firmly on the traditional side of a modern relationship type.
Thanks, your description of the spectrum of relationship types is quite clear. That said, I find it difficult to reconcile what I know of liberal feminism (which is, admittedly, not as much as a liberal feminist would) with your description of it (though I’m not sure what a “tumblr-feminist” is):
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a “prude” or “sex-negative” or “anti-sex” if she objects
Can you link to some examples ? Every liberal feminist I’ve ever seen always makes it a priority to combat the treatment of women as mere sex objects.
As I understand it, a liberal feminist would indeed characterize a woman who objects to sex in principle, and wants all men and women to stop having sex with each other, as “sex-negative”. At the same time, though, that same liberal feminist would defend any specific woman’s right to express her sexuality in whatever way she chooses, even if she chooses not to express it at all. IMO these two positions are entirely compatible.
Every liberal feminist I’ve ever seen always makes it a priority to combat the treatment of women as mere sex objects.
No, you’re confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
Liberal feminism has been historically pro-porn, pro-prostitution, and supportive of other various things that radical feminists think are objectifying and oppressive. The most liberal shade of liberal feminism is “empowerment” feminism, where doing things that are patriarchal are okay, because women are “empowered” now to… starve themselves and get breast implants.
In contrast, radical feminism has traditionally fought against porn, supported body-positivity and body acceptance over accepting patriarchal beauty norms under the guise of “empowerment,” and in general, is critical of desires as having causal origin within patriarchy, rather than being ontologically basic objects.
Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists—liberal feminists treat “desire” as a semantic stopsign, whereas radical feminists push through it, and unsurprisingly find patriarchy.
1st wave—Susan B. Anthony, Women’s Suffrage, “voluntary motherhood” (i.e. allow contraceptives for married couples, but sex is for married people only) ~1920s 2nd wave—de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, Andrea Dworkin, anti-pornography movement ~1960s 3rd wave—sex positivity feminism ~1990s
Each movement was a reaction to perceived shortfalls in the prior intellectual movement. You talk about things like 2nd wave was a reaction to 3rd wave.
I’m more sympathetic to Dworkin than the sex-positive folks, but there’s a lot more to the other side than you suggest. One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
I think that history is mostly orthogonal to our current topic. Even if eridu is wrong about history, he could still be right about all of his other claims.
One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
Indeed, and “sex positive” does not, IMO, immediately imply “want to make sex compulsory”. I am personally volleyball-positive, in that I wish everyone who’s interested in volleyball could enjoy doing so with other volleyball-lovers. But that doesn’t mean that I want to force everyone to play volleyball all the time, regardless of whether they feel like it or not.
I thought I had replied to this comment. Maybe it was deleted, maybe it was lost on my end.
Third-wave “feminism” is a mostly patriarchal reaction to second-wave feminism.
Second-wave feminists were primarily fighting things that third-wave “feminists” endorse, like pornorgraphy, sexualized violence, sexualization and objectification of women and girls, and other similar things. As such, second-wave was a reaction to the elements of patriarchy that third-wave feminism adopted.
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist “identity” conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
But you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types, and you certainly can’t be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy, which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive power (which is mostly the same in my opinion).
This probably isn’t a discussion we should have here, though.
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist “identity” conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
Of course, third-wave feminists say that it is your brand of radical feminism that is “harmful to feminist struggle”. I would love to see some long-term studies that provide some evidence one way or the other—but, as far as I understand, liberal feminists don’t have the funding, and radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause… so we’re kind of stuck in a “she said / she said” territory here.
But you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types...
There are several initiatives on the liberal feminist side that campaign for the promotion of a healthy female body image, in all media including porn (*). On the flip side, there is tons of porn out there that promotes any body type you can imagine, and possibly a few that you cannot.
and you certainly can’t be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy
Agreed.
which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive power (which is mostly the same in my opinion).
I don’t think that the only possible conditions are either a). “the patriarchy doesn’t exist”, or b). “the patriarchy’s control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies”.
(*) I’d google up some links, but something tells me I shouldn’t be doing that at work.
I don’t think that the only possible conditions are either a). “the patriarchy doesn’t exist”, or b). “the patriarchy’s control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies”.
Agreed. A useful line of questioning for eridu might be “How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?”
On the one hand I think it’s an excellent point the feminists make that implicit/explicit consent to sex is not the end of the story ethically, if the consent is seen to be coerced by external factors (e.g., “Our relationship depends on his sexual satisfaction, and he has made me financially dependent on our continued relationship”).
On the other hand, it’s going too far if we say that the ONLY ethically acceptable motivation for sex is one’s own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
one’s own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
Sure they can! Someone has wired up your pleasure center to respond to doing what they want you to do, even though that course of action is ultimately self-destructive for you.
(Fictional example: the tasp in various Niven stories.)
“How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?”
radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be.
Not quite. I disagree with Eridu’s position, but it doesn’t come down to a Moore’s paradox situation. Eridu’s position is that there are truths that cause harm within certain social contexts, and that in those social contexts (but not otherwise) those truths ought to be suppressed.
This is pretty plausible if you think of some thought experiments involving vulnerable groups. Suppose that you are a rationalist/consequentialist cop in 1930′s Germany, and you are investigating a case in which a banker, who was Jewish, embezzled some money from the Society for the Protection of Cute Puppies. Although ceteris paribus, your job is to expose the truth and bring criminals to justice, in this case it might be a very good idea to keep this out of the papers at all costs, because due to anti-semitic narratives society lacks the ability to process this information sanely.
Eridu claims that because of sexist narratives, society lacks the ability to process the claims of evo-psych sanely.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Are you sure you know how you would react...
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there’s hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can’t blame her.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.”
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes,
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff, 2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and 3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
Well, maybe not just any feminist, but eridu specifically did claim that, since the findings of evolutionary psychology are frequently misused to advance the patriarchy, no one should study evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, he feels that way about all research that deals with sex and/or gender, not just evolutionary psychology specifically.
There were anti-Semitic pamphlets that quoted studies of Jewish populations where blood type B was most frequent and Aryan populations where blood type A was, kept quiet about studies showing the reverse, and used that as proof that Aryans and Jews were different races that shouldn’t mingle and should be ranked relative to each other. If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
I don’t see what the difference is, in practice. In both cases, the person in question wants to ban research into blood types. One person wants to do it because he fears his position could be destroyed by the truth; the other one wants to do it because the research would give his opponents too much power. In both cases, though, the research is banned, and neither person knows whether his beliefs are true or not.
Are you still in the analogy here? There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism—we don’t have to fear a result that would support it. The problem is that some possible results (all possible results, really), while not evidence for “Aryans rule, Jews drool”, will be used to support this assertion. We expect that the costs of people being persuaded to hold false antisemitic beliefs outweigh the benefits of better responses to epidemics or whatever we’re hoping to get out of the research. Likewise, eridu believes that ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be (I agree), but is misused to support some harmful gender roles (I agree). He also believes that it’s not really possible to mitigate the misuse, and so the costs of people being persuaded to hold false sexist beliefs outweigh… figuring out how parental grief works or something.
What you appear to describe is… to stretch the analogy past its snapping point, someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful. While also being scared of the consequences of misuse.
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu’s position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism...
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general) ? Similarly, how does eridu know that “ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be” ? If by “should be” you mean something like the naturalistic fallacy, then I’d agree; however, it’s still possible that ev-psych can tell us something valuable about why our current gender roles are the way they are.
To use another analogy, optics and genetics tell me why my eyesight is bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to throw up my hands and say, “oh well, guess I’m almost blind then”. Instead, I’m going to use this knowledge to acquire some corrective lenses.
someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective ?
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general)?
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans. Looking at history, Jews are more likely than Aryans to create great work of art and make great discoveries, and it takes about equal digging to find an Aryan ancestor to any creative Jew than the reverse. In general, if I try to rank people from best to worst, I don’t find many ancestry-related clusters, which shows that ranking races from best to worst is not useful. Heredity research can tell me that intermarriage is not bad, but I can also observe that countries and cities with higher rates of intermarriage aren’t doing worse, haven’t lost their cultural identities, and, New York notwithstanding, promote equality rather than Jewish superiority.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them (and so what if it’s culture-dependent, we’re working from currently existing culture) with no need for the subtler, bare-bones models ev-psych gives us.
Similarly again, figuring out that your eyes converge too strongly and you need divergent lenses is useful, in a way that screens off the usefulness of genetics of nearsightedness.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective?
Because it’s a stupid analogy. Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans...
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”. As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in other cities, and exclaim, “Aha ! It’s all those evil Jews ! That proves it !”. Thus, you should avoid collecting any evidence at all, for fear of giving them too much ammunition. Yes, eridu singles out evo-psych specifically, but his reasons for doing so are not unique to evo-psych, AFAICT.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them
Right, but it’d be good to know which differences (if any) are the results of biology. To use my earlier analogy (hopefully without straining it to the breaking point), there are lots of illiterate people around; but some are illiterate because they’d never been taught to read, whereas others are illiterate because their eyes cannot focus on the page. It is really helpful to know which are which.
Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
My point is that, in order to have some sort of a justified belief in their remedy, they must have first studied various blood types, and blood disorders in general. Otherwise, they’d just be randomly transfusing blood into people for no good reason, thus (assuming they at least do so safely) wasting a bunch of resources and gaining little (though, admittedly, more than nothing) in return.
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”.
Hmm, what I think I’m saying is more like:
Do research in sociology, not biology. If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins, but don’t go digging for possible sources of differences that don’t reveal themselves.
Use the interocular trauma significance test. Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins...
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
That’s just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy (other than in specialized cases such as medical treatment, etc.). We’re not arguing over whether gender bias exists (I believe that it does) or whether we should adopt patriarchal policies (I believe that we should not).
Rather, the argument is over whether the very act of studying specific aspects of human biology and/or psychology constitutes an extremely harmful act and should immediately be stopped. I believe that it does not.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
This is why I think the distinction between gender and sex is so helpful. It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
Consider the taboo in modern society against female chest nudity. It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
Properly speaking, evo. psych has nothing to say about gender and gender-norms. Only sex and sex-norms. But society as a whole resists the distinct, and scientists rely on the halo effect to support that blurring of what should be relatively distinct concepts.
Someone more radical than I would like point out that the distinction is much fuzzier than I suggest. (Consider social pressure to perform surgery to “fix” intersex infants). (shrug). There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in social engineering before a precise resolution of that issue is really necessary.
It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. … Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
I don’t think I get what you mean by “sex differences” vs. “gender differences”; eridu claims he wants to eliminate gender, not sex. Can you explain your definitions ? You bring up the example below:
It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
I agree with you there, and this is a gender difference, but I’m not sure how your view on this contrasts with eridu’s. Surely eridu doesn’t want to eliminate secondary sexual characteristics… does he ?
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible—but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible...
As far as I can tell, so does he, which is why he wants to destroy gender altogether. Once he’s done, we won’t have “men” and “women” at all; we’d just have “people with sexual organs A” and “people with sexual organs B” (plus a small number of others with C, D, etc.). By analogy, today we (mostly) don’t have separate identities for different hair or eye colors; it’s just a meaningless biological quirk (again, mostly).
One problem with this goal is that if gender truly is dependent on sex to any meaningful extent, then the goal cannot be achieved through purely social means. This is one of the reasons why I believe that evo-psych specifically, and evolutionary biology in general, should not be banned, despite its possible negative consequences.
I should also mention that I am sympathetic to the goal; it’s not a bad idea. However, it would be an immense undertaking, and you don’t want to commit an immense amount of resources to a goal unless you can be reasonably sure it’s achievable at least in principle.
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn’t know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn’t know what to do or say to them. (I’m reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we’re on decent terms since then. I haven’t mentioned that reaction to the person, and they’ve since tranisitioned to a standard gender.)
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women, and was at a loss when I didn’t know which set to apply. I haven’t explored how the sets might be different, but maybe I should.
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women
Me too, but 1) the sets do overlap by a substantial amount, and 2) I think it’s more a case of potential sexual partners vs everyone else than of women vs men—with women I’m not sexually attracted to at all, I behave pretty much the same as if they were male (except for different cultural norms such as—in Italy—kissing them on the cheek instead of shaking hands, which I don’t consider any more relevant that the use of different pronouns). (Edited to replace ″romantic″ with ″sexual″ -- I’ve introspected myself and ISTM that the set of people with whom I’d use the first set of behaviours almost exactly coincide with the set of people with whom I’d want to have protected sex if they offered, and promised not to tell anybody and to try not to let that affect our future interactions in any way—which is a somewhat broader criterion than me being willing to have a monogamous romantic relationship with them.)
FWIW, I doubt I treat men I’m attracted to and women I’m attracted to the same way. Though introspection is a decidedly unreliable source of information about this sort of thing.
There’s much less commonality in how I treat people I’m not attracted to. Or at least less salient commonality. I really don’t know what to say about it. I mean, sure, there are women I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to… but there are also men I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to. Introspection fails to provide even unreliable hints on that question.
Also, the fact that there exist both men and women I’m not attracted to doesn’t make me particularly unique; I expect that’s true of everybody. So I wouldn’t have felt especially motivated to share that data point, even were it crisper. You had started out drawing the distinction between “potential sexual partner vs everyone else” and “women vs men,” though, so I thought the perspective of someone for whom “potential sexual partner” included both women and men (well, in principle, anyway; after 20 years of monogamy it’s somewhat theoretical) might be relevant.
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven’t been following this conversation, but it doesn’t seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
I guess you missed the part where people (not me personally, it was just made pretty clear) are downvoting everything in this thread in the hope that everyone would stop talking?
I’d considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it’s in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
“Gender should be removed from society” is not a particularly rare opinion—unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn’t involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
The path from here to there is wildly unclear. But history shows social changes as large as the one I advocate for have actually happened. So there’s that.
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
It follows directly that you stop trusting people who tell you “Don’t tell me if you hide any Jews, I don’t want to let anything slip in front of the SS”. Is that actually a conclusion you wish to endorse?
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about eridu. I’m far more sympathetic to second-wave than third-wave feminism. But I don’t think that being second-wave requires rejecting empiricism. (I suspect >90% of ev. psych results are wrong because of cultural bias, but that’s a separate assertion.)
So… what’s your position on trans people and non-binaries?
you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types
Mainstream porn has an incentive problem where it needs to appeal to a large audience or it won’t be profitable, but alt porn, especially by amateurs, can show varied body types. There are Tumblrs that do that—they’re reposting, not producing, so there’s still a bias toward conventionally attractive types, but they’re not judged differently.
Right, I know what tumblr.com is, but I still don’t know what a “tumblr-feminist” is.
No, you’re confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
I don’t think I am, that’s why I said “every liberal feminist...” above. My point was that, counter to what you said, liberal feminists would be strongly against “compulsory sexuality”, and definitely against objectification of women along any other property (including sex).
Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists—liberal feminists treat “desire” as a semantic stopsign, whereas radical feminists push through it, and unsurprisingly find patriarchy.
As far as I understand from talking with yourself and liberal feminists (and reading your respective reading materials), the fundamental split is due to a difference in primary goals, which gives rise to very different intermediate goals.
The primary goal of radical feminism is elimination of the patriarchy. To this end, they want to put a stop to all activities that promote the patriarchy, such as PiV sex, heterosexual relationships in general, etc.
The primary goal of liberal feminism is to maximize the capabilities of women to achieve their individual goals. Since the patriarchy stands in the way of most of these goals, liberal feminists want to see it eliminated; however, they would seek to do so in a way that does not result in a net reduction in the capability of women to achieve their goals.
Thus, a radical feminist would seek to eliminate all PiV sex (somehow), since doing so would advance the goal of eliminating the patriarchy. A liberal feminist, on the other hand, would work toward a society where women who enjoy PiV sex can have it, and women who do not enjoy it feel no social pressure to have it regardless.
To put it in a different way, radical feminism (as I understand it from talking with you) is essentialist, as opposed to liberal feminism.
First, that which eridu calls tumblr-feminism is probably what I would call “not feminism.” People who invoke The Rules or who think being sexually forward is taking control of their sexuality are seldom actual doing anything to reduce patriarchy. Popular culture may call Snooki a “strong female,” but she is not following a feminist program.
Second, I agree with you that eridu’s philosophy seems incredibly essentialist. I just want to note that I don’t think Dworkin is essentialist, although she can be read that way.
People who invoke The Rules or who think being sexually forward is taking control of their sexuality are seldom actual doing anything to reduce patriarchy.
Either of these can be considered assertive, albeit in very different ways. Surely, among the culture hacks that would make women better off (at negligible social cost), encouraging them to be more assertive in general should be near the top of the list.
Oh, I see. I thought for a moment that mitigating the widespread occurrence of hierarchies and power relationships in the real world (as probably happens when assertive behavior becomes more commonly expected in a given culture) would be somewhat more consequential than “reducing patriarchy”, whatever that means.
If you truly want to become stronger, and not just mine this thread for positive karma, you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself, rather than trying to extract information from me that I don’t fully have.
I can at least say that you’re very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists support compulsory sexuality in that the actions they take make it more probable), about the goals of liberal feminism (you’re talking specifically about a subset of liberal feminists called equality feminists, but liberal feminists in general don’t really recognize patriarchy, or at least almost never use that term or a strong analysis of gender as a social class), and about the reasons why radical feminists believe what they believe.
I will say this again: I cannot give you the answers to these questions. I am going to stop playing “feminist AMA” now and leave you to either educate yourself or be content with the fact that you might be oppressing people.
you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself
I did, believe it or not. My impression of “actual radical feminist women” has been largely negative; they seem to be more interested in winning battles than in acquiring true beliefs or solving any real-world problems. That’s probably why I find your views so fascinating, since you are actually willing (some of the time) to justify your claims.
I can at least say that you’re very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists support compulsory sexuality in that the actions they take make it more probable)...
You are conflating two very different concepts here, by employing the very anti-pattern Yvain is describing in his post: ”Liberal feminism explicitly endorses compulsory sexuality” vs ”Liberal feminists endorse practices that, unbeknownst to them, lead to compulsory sexuality”
but liberal feminists in general don’t really recognize patriarchy, or at least almost never use that term or a strong analysis of gender as a social class
Can you offer some examples ? Every piece of feminist literature I’ve ever read talks extensively about patriarchy, privilege, and gender.
I am going to stop playing “feminist AMA” now and leave you to either educate yourself or be content with the fact that you might be oppressing people.
This is a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible for me to believe that I’m inadvertently oppressing people in several ways, while still disagreeing with your own claims.
“feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women.”
I think the problem with this statement is that “oppression” is a loaded word. Its meaning can range from “there exists a systemic bias against women” to “women are chained to the stove and are kept barefoot and pregnant at all times”. As Yvain points out in this very post, people tend to envision the latter even when the reality is closer to the former.
That said, I’m still not entirely clear regarding your response to simplicio. You say that, if only simplicio and his wife could extrapolate their CEVs, that would lead to
a re-evaluation of [simplicio’s] non-feminist past of at best mildly oppressive and at worst abusive and toxic.
I don’t know what that means, though. Which parts of their past, specifically, would simplicio and his wife—or, if you prefer, Average Het Male and Average Het Female—find “abusive and toxic” ?
Essentially, you were asked, “how would the thoughts and actions of a radical feminist couple differ from those of an average hetero couple ?”; and you replied by saying, “their thoughts and actions would be radically feminist”. While this is true, it is hardly informative.
I won’t respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
Which parts of their past, specifically, would simplicio and his wife—or, if you prefer, Average Het Male and Average Het Female—find “abusive and toxic” ?
Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, inconsiderate, manipulative, objectifying, or something else I can’t think of at the moment
Tones of interaction and patterns of arguments that again, seemed innocuous to the men making them would be considered patronizing, condescending, paternalistic, etc.
Social behaviors that men previously accepted and may have argued for the legitimacy of such as pornography, prostitution, penis-in-vagina sex, body policing of women, objectification of women in media, objectifying language directed towards women, aggressive metaphors and language describing sex, and heterosexual relationships will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent
Division of various tasks, such as any combination of housework, child-rearing, emotion work (especially emotion work), would be seen as unfair, constricting, and demanding
That was an unfocused four minutes of brainstorming, but if I sat down with a patriarchal textbook used in any undergrad relationship psychology class, I could probably write a novella.
At a first glance your type of feminism seems to seek to put both men AND women in smaller and darker cages, as it seems to seek to ban more and more behaviors for both genders, instead of permit more and more.
Seriously “penis-in-vagina sex”? I don’t think there’s ever been a society so oppressive to both genders as to ban even that.
Within the context of genders, those things are oppressive. I don’t imagine sex of any kind would be problematic in a feminist society.
If you want a more in-depth view of heterosexual sex under patriarchy, I recommend Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.
But in short, consider the utility distribution of PIV sex for men, and consider it for women, under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women’s best interest to have PIV sex. I’ll leave this as an exercise for you, rather than spelling it out explicitly.
under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women’s best interest to have PIV sex.
What happens if a woman desires to have PiV sex, seeks out a man to have it with (rejecting unqualified men in the process), and enjoys the experience ? The reason Andrea Dworkin (and radical feminists in general) is often portrayed as “sex-negative” (*) is because, as far as I can tell, she denies that such a scenario can exist, thus directly contradicting the life experience of many women.
Thus, we end up in a peculiar situation where radical feminists appear to be seeking to actively make women’s lives worse, by denying them an activity that many women see as an important aspect of their self-expression (not to mention, a lot of fun).
Of course, a radical feminist might answer by saying, “my end goal is not to improve the lives of women, but to destroy the patriarchy by any means necessary”, but I’m not sure if any real radical feminists would answer this way.
(*) It’s also why Dworkin is considered to be a kind of troll by some liberal feminists; IMO unjustly so, since she sincerely believes the things she says.
I did read through Intercourse in college, but it was a long time ago, and, knowing my past self, I probably only skimmed it. My main impression of it at the time was that Dworkin a). really dislikes men, and b). dehumanizes women. IMO (b) is even worse than (a); at least she recognizes that men are people, albeit unpleasant ones.
Anyway, that was a bit off topic. What is it that I’m supposed to be figuring out by reading Dworkin ? And what happens if I do read the relevant passages, but still conclude that she is wrong ?
She talk about women’s wants a lot less than I expected. About cis women who want intercourse with cis men, she writes:
Women have wanted intercourse to work and have submitted—with regret or with enthusiasm, real or faked—even though or even when it does not. [...] Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There has been—despite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sex—a consistent vision for women of a sexuality based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible.
She might be saying “Women only ever want intercourse with men they love”. Even if you count any kind of liking and desire for intimacy as “love”, this rules out cruising for casual sex.
She also says things about women wanting very gentle intercourse without thrusting, whereas men go poundy-poundy. This is quite unlike the reports of sex bloggers and friends, whose preferences are varied.
Then she says women who seek intercourse are like women who accept and perform genital mutilation and foot binding. So yeah, basically “hate it but brainwashed into thinking they like it”.
This seems to be completely unfalsifiable; anyone who says “But I like penis in my vagina, there are nerve endings there that like stimulated” can be told “You’re brainwashed by the patriarchy”, or “You’re not (enough of) a woman so you can never understand”.
There does seem to be a bit of a trope of certain sorts of scholars (the early Wilhelm Reich comes to mind) developing strong and specific opinions on what kind of sex other people are supposed to have — down to specific positions and motions! — in order to be enlightened, liberated, rational, or holy. One wonders by what means a person could arrive at such knowledge, and what other hypotheses were raised to attention and dismissed by evidence.
This isn’t just about sex, of course. There are all sorts of claims that people don’t really want what they say they want, and they don’t want what they seek out, either.
This essay introduced me to the idea that such claims are pervasive. Anyone have a more general overview?
Even at Less Wrong—you won’t really like that shiny toy so much, give the money to SI instead!
And yet people here, apparently with a straight face, have made analogous arguments about alcoholic beverages. If I claim I like Amaro Montenegro then I must have been brainwashed and/or be (consciously or subconsciously) lying for signalling reasons or something. How could I demonstrate that I actually enjoy its taste?
If I claim I like Amaro Montenegro then I must have been brainwashed and/or be (consciously or subconsciously) lying for signalling reasons or something. How could I demonstrate that I actually enjoy its taste?
Blind taste test. Preferably several, where you don’t know if Amaro Montenegro is among the drinks you’re tasting in any particular test.
If you can’t single out for a high rating the one that you profess to like the taste of, then you’ve falsified the hypothesis that you like it for the taste.
If you can single it out for a high rating in blind taste tests, and want to further test whether you actually enjoy it, or merely recognize it and assign a high rating for signalling purposes, get an MRI during the blind taste test.
MRI wouldn’t help. If you can recognize amaro, you’ll go “Oh, that’s amaro, I’m supposed to like this” and produce a pleasure response, the same way wines believed to be expensive do to identical wines believed to be cheap.
I think you could get somewhere by doing a taste test of several different amaros (which are not actually wine,) where rather than a blind test, the subject is incorrectly told that they’re all, say, privately brewed and distributed at a liqueur festival, or something along those lines, but one of them is really Amaro Montenegro.
That one doesn’t sound quite so bad; get MRId while drinking, and you can prove you really feel pleasure. That doesn’t disprove the brainwashing assertion (wines genuinely taste better with a price hike) but you can still answer “So what if I like it because of that? I like it. And it doesn’t even support a culture where 12% of the population has had amaro slipped into their drink.”
Well, I don’t want to want to spend more money on wine if I couldn’t tell it from cheaper wine in a blind tasting… (EDIT: But I don’t know what aspect of heterosexual intercourse that maps to, if any.)
Wine can taste Good or Bad, have a real cost that’s Cheap or Expensive, and be LabeledExpensive or LabeledCheap. Good Expensive wine is better value for money than Bad Cheap wine.
If Expensive wine is Good and Cheap wine is Bad and label is irrelevant, Good Expensive LabeledCheap wine ~ Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine ~ Bad Cheap LabeledExpensive wine.
If LabeledExpensive wine is Good and LabeledCheap wine is Bad and real price is irrelevant, Good Cheap LabeledExpensive wine > Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine > Bad Expensive LabeledCheap wine.
Learning that the latter model is true is only useful if you can pay for cheap wine then be told it’s expensive when you drink it. In most situations, you see what you’re paying for—wine is LabeledCheap iff it’s Cheap. Your only options are Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine and Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine, and you always prefer the former to the latter. So learning which model is true shouldn’t change your wine-buying habits.
That’s quite possible in real life, but then you don’t need all that evaluation of preferences in various models—you always buy cheap wine, regardless of label and taste.
I won’t respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
That was not my intention. What I meant was, “we should taboo the word ‘oppression’, and it would be great if everyone else did, too”.
Thanks for your examples. One thing I noticed about them is that they are almost entirely male-centric. For example, you say,
“Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, etc.”
What about the women, though ? Would the women likewise perceive such behavior differently than they do now ? We are discussing feminism, after all, not male-ism.
Not to harp on this point, but you mention things like “penis-in-vagina sex” and “heterosexual relationships” in general as the kinds of behaviors that “will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent”. Is it your contention that (most) women today see such behaviors in this negative light ? If not, then why not ? Is it because modern women are almost as brainwashed by the patriarchy as modern men, or for some other reason ? Or did I misinterpret your claim ?
The reason I ask is because, on its surface, this claim sounds like something a “straw feminist” might say, and I want to avoid jumping to any unwarranted conclusions.
child-rearing, emotion work (especially emotion work), would be seen as unfair, constricting, and demanding
What is “emotion work” ? This is the first time I’d seen this term.
Emotional work is everything one needs to do to maintain a positive affect because the positive affect is expected from your social role.
For example, you don’t think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that’s unfair. If society doesn’t give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that’s even worse.
Historically, that spouse was the wife—hence feminism’s concern about emotional work.
For example, you don’t think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that’s unfair. If society doesn’t give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that’s even worse.
Thanks, that’s a good example. I had encountered an instance of the phenomenon in the context of male demands for women to “just smile,” but had not generalized it.
What about the women, though ? Would the women likewise perceive such behavior differently than they do now ? We are discussing feminism, after all, not male-ism.
Yes. All my statements should be read as true for both partners.
Is it your contention that (most) women today see such behaviors in this negative light ?
No.
Is it because modern women are almost as brainwashed by the patriarchy as modern men, or for some other reason
Yes, because women are more “brainwashed” by the patriarchy than men.
I consider TimS’s explanation of emotion work to be accurate, with the possible addition of being responsible of the emotional well-being of others at the expense of one’s own well-being.
I am trying to be cautious when googling any terms [radical] feminists use, because the meanings they assign to them often differs radically from common usage. For example, words like “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege”, etc., have very specific technical meanings in a [radical] feminist context, and if I googled them, I’d form a wrong impression. That is perfectly ok, IMO; every discipline has its jargon, f.ex. the words “client”, “handshake” and “slave” are used in computer science in radically different ways as compared to common speech.
Anyway, you said that “PiV sex” and “heterosexual relationships” would be seen by future utopian societies as “tangibly oppressive and violent”, but I find this statement difficult to reconcile with your earlier one, where you claimed that, in a feminist society, sex of any kind would be ok. If PiV sex is inherently oppressive, surely people wouldn’t engage in it, even in a feminist society ? On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
I have a feeling I’m missing a key part of your argument, but I’m not sure what it is.
On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
From what I’ve inferred (this inference may be wrong), eridu seems to be asserting that “radical feminists” (not necessarily including himself) believe that these conditions are currently impossible to be met. My intuition is that this is for the same reason that they became feminists in the first place (a feminist subset of anthropomorphic-like phenomena?) - that is, that they were/are surrounded with almost exclusively ultra-patriarchal-behaving groups, where it is common that men get blowjobs in return for opening car doors for women and obtain sex in return for gifting high-heeled shoes (and yet of course, the reciprocals do not apply).
I feel like most of what this position considers literally omnipresent in everyone but themselves is a poor representation of some cultures and social groups. For example, the PiV point is definitely not applicable everywhere. In my own circles, there is not a single man or woman that considers PiV sex in any way offensive, dominating, or any other of the qualities that would qualify it as “patriarchal”:
There are two people, they play a sport (something very fun for both), one of them happens to be a woman, the other happens to be a man. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they watch pictures of their childhood and reminisce on their grewing up together (something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they rub parts of their bodies together while having strong positive emotions (something very fun for both + something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This particular woman-man combination happenstance happens to geometrically permit parts of their bodies to rub in a particular even-more-fun manner which is difficult for other gender combinations. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
By my understanding, even radical feminists agree with my conclusion that, ceteris paribus, none of those three situations are sexist or patriarchal. However, they appear to be implicitly assuming that the third is virtually impossible in our society, because all men are brainwashed to demand sex and deny denial, and all women are brainwashed to not enjoy sex by their own authority or somesuch.
I see and know of tons of “patriarchal” (gender-unfair, discriminatory, negative-emotion-inducing, etc.) behaviors, yes. Are those behaviors common in the circles I frequent? No.
No girls go around in quests of the romance of their prince charming, no would-be gentlemen open doors specifically for attractive women and no one else (in fact, we have a formula, which I devised long ago, for when it is best to open a door for someone and when it is best not to or to offer), no sex happens that isn’t wanted by both parties for the sex (and probably for that reason, it seems there’s a lot more of it going on than for the north-american average relationship), there’s a lot of reciprocal affection, no gender-specific hobbies that I can tell (the stereotypes of shopping, porn, sports games on TV, etc. really do not apply, seriously—in fact, if it’s stereotypically gender-based, it probably doesn’t apply to the people I frequent, unless it’s about reproductive organs bleeding on a monthly basis or wall-mounted urine receptacles or some other thing we literally physically can’t change).
I could go on and on and on (and on and on and on and on and more, but I’ll let you do the copy-pasting mentally and spare my fingers a bit—I must’ve rewritten this post five times overall with all the rewording and correcting and editing before-posting) about comparisons between behaviors I observe here in myself and my circles and what is stereotypical, or what has been mentioned here, but that’s not even the issue. I am being accused, nay, all people including me are being accused of recursive denial-in-denial that prevents even conscious effort towards nondiscrimination from not being “patriarchal”, whatever that word means.
Yes, I get confrontational about it, because yes, it goes against every evidence I have and everything I observe to accept this accusation. I have now read more wikipedia articles and feminist blogs than I care to count on the issue, and I have been extremely careful of selection bias, confirmation bias, privileging the hypothesis, etc., and yet I only see more evidence that the “Patriarchy” we are being accused of does not even exist in my current local subculture.
Yes, the “society at large” outside my own subculture is largely male-dominant in often subtle ways. However, the “society at large” is also experimentally stupid, able to completely do nothing while watching people die and being certain that they are dying, give people cruel and lethal treatment merely because someone tells them to with authoritative voice, etc.
I do not contest that there is a large patriarchy at work in most, not all, of society, but rather the idea that the patriarchy alone/itself deserves special correction, rather than first raising the sanity of everyone in all matters. This, however, is tangential.
What I am opposed to is the general claim that all society (including me and my circles/groups/subcultures/etc.) is necessarily very “patriarchal” and very gender-unfair and not improving nor making worthwhile progress of any kind, with the sole exception of a very specific subgroup that must identify themselves as Radical Feminists.
The above claim is both infuriating and extremely improbable, given the evidence that I see.
Going by all that I have explained in this comment, I therefore infer that it is not an argument that you are missing, but evidence—the same evidence that I am missing.
I’ll stake a 70% probability-in-my-model that either myself or eridu or both is/are missing key strong evidence and that this causes the disagreement, if there is indeed a real disagreement and not merely a problem of falling trees.
we have a formula, which I devised long ago, for when it is best to open a door for someone
What formula, out of curiosity? (In my case, I always hold doors open for people within a few metres behind me unless it’d be more cumbersome for me to do that than for them to open it again—e.g. if I’m carrying a box or something—regardless of their sex, age, physical attractiveness, marital status, and whether I know them.)
I do the same (with the radius of a few meters somewhat larger for elderly people), but I sometimes wonder whether my cutoff distance is the appropriate one, like in the Ambiguous Zone smbc.
In the situation described in the comic, I would ask “need help?” out loud without moving towards them until they say yes (where by “would” I mean ‘recommend’—not sure what I would actually do in such a situation, due to akrasia).
With doors, when there’s someone close but not that close, I push the door forward and move on, so that (if it’s slow enough) it will still be open by the time the person behind me arrives.
I happen to agree with you (I think), but still, it sounds like you’re generalizing from one example. Your personal life experience is no substitute for hard data. Furthermore, if eridu is right, then you are an incredibly poor judge of whether or not the interactions you describe are free of oppression in your personal sub-culture; thus, I doubt he’d find your post persuasive.
What I am opposed to is the general claim that all society … is necessarily very “patriarchal” and very gender-unfair and not improving nor making worthwhile progress of any kind, with the sole exception of a very specific subgroup that must identify themselves as Radical Feminists.
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of believes regarding gender and feminism, is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/its/etc. own best interests. Only radical feminists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Eridu, would the above paragraph be a fair—if possibly somewhat harsh—summary of your views ?
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of believes regarding gender and feminism, is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/its/etc. own best interests. Only radical feminists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests. Only Bayesian rationalists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Which is to say, if non-Bayesians are predictably dumb, then a feminist (of any kind, even) would say that non-feminists are predictably dumb.
So yes, the above paragraph is fair, but it’s also misleading—my viewpoint on non-feminists is equivalent to LW’s collective viewpoint on Christianity.
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests.
I don’t know if EY would agree with this statement or not. I personally would disagree, however. Sure, without the understanding of “cognitive biases and probability theory”, a person is liable to make suboptimal decisions. However, I believe that most people are competent enough to achieve at least some of their goals in a satisfactory fashion.
The difference between you and me, as far as I understand, is that you believe that unless everyone sets “destruction of the patriarchy using the methods of radical feminism” as their primary goal, they should not be allowed to make any decisions that you don’t approve of. I personally reserve that level of outrage for actions that clearly, demonstrably, hurt other people—f.ex., teaching creationism instead of evolution in schools, restricting women’s right to vote, etc. By contrast, I am perfectly content to let people spend (I would say, “waste”, but they’d disagree) their Sunday mornings in church, if they so choose.
To be sure, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate that a patriarchy of some sort does exist, and that it is harmful. But your concept of “patriarchy” is rather more all-encompassing than that held by most other feminists; and in some cases your claims border on extraordinary. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, only that I’m not ready to side with you until you (^) have provided overwhelming proof—which you had not done. I’m not saying that you can’t provide such proof, only that you haven’t so far.
(^) Or any other radical feminist, doesn’t have to be you specifically.
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests. Only Bayesian rationalists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
“Bayesian reasoner” is a theoretical entity. The folks you meet on LW are “aspiring rationalists” (more or less), and it’s important not to confuse the two — especially important for aspiring rationalists. There is a big difference between learning about a few cognitive biases, and being capable of mathematically ideal reasoning on any topic relevant to one’s best interests. Anyone who claims the latter is, well, probably full of shit.
I happen to agree with you (I think), but still, it sounds like you’re generalizing from one example. Your personal life experience is no substitute for hard data.
He said:
I see and know of tons of “patriarchal” (gender-unfair, discriminatory, negative-emotion-inducing, etc.) behaviors, yes.
So it’s clear that he’s not claiming that his claims about his social circle apply to the rest of society.
and yet I only see more evidence that the “Patriarchy” we are being accused of does not even exist in my current local subculture.
There are lots of parts of popular culture that are fairly blatantly sexist (e.g. Barbie dolls and female body expectations). Does your subculture always condemn those aspects of popular culture? Does it do anything to change those norms?
If not, then “Patriarchy” exists to some degree in your sub-culture. Does eradicating Patriarchy enhance social justice? I think the answer is clearly yes.
Must it be your highest social-justice priority? I think there are reasonable arguments on both sides. For example, my day job is about dealing with disability discrimination in public schools. I wouldn’t assert that this does all that much to eradicate patriarchy.
Does your subculture always condemn those aspects of popular culture? Does it do anything to change those norms?
No and yes.
Many behaviors do clearly slip through the cracks. Present a “perfect Feminist” with the claim that they never act in any manner that could possibly be Patriarchal, and I’m sure most of LessWrong would dispute the claim and find evidence that This Human, Like Other Humans, Is Not Infinitely Perfect. I would like to think that I make no such bogus claims.
The Schelling point/fence, however, is that at the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does, and the rate of improvement seems to me as to be faster than the accumulating-over-time damage of the remaining patriarchy—all obviously attributable to diminishing returns. Patriarchal behavior is, fortunately, not an infinite neg-resource. (a few applause lights here, but this was typed-as-thought, so leaving them in seems useful)
Now, as for whether Patriarchy is present, well, if defined as such (“to some degree”) it is obviously present in these subcultures in at least some way or another—it is even more unlikely that no “Patriarchy”-like behavior whatsoever exists than the claim I oppose in the grandparent.
However, I find that the above does not carve reality at its joints, to use LW jargon—the cluster of behaviorspace, which I was pointed to and told was “Patriarchy”, has mostly in common that it mostly generates or indirectly contributes to / allows gender-unfairness, social injustice, sexism, etc. Many key points like identity, control, status, “dignity” (technical meanings, not the religious-soul or similar connotations), subconscious conformity to expectations, anticipation-of-expected-behavior, behavior programming, subconscious reprogramming of believed-wants (though perhaps not necessarily of true wants), etc. seem to show up too in this space. The radical feminism portrayed in these threads sometimes appears to ignore this concept entirely, and assumes that anything that could, in at least some contexts, become a point of “Patriarchy”, is therefore Patriarchy, and is therefore something to be absolutely eradicated at all costs.
Therefore, if I write a user’s manual for Tampax products, I am an Unholy Beacon of Supreme Evil, for reasons I hope are obvious enough, and that I hope are either very strawman or sufficiently absurd to expose the need for a Schelling fence.
the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn’t true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
One can argue about whether video gamer culture is above average intelligence (I suspect yes), but here is strong evidence it is nowhere near the marginal benefit line for gender relations. If video game culture were closer to the line, I would expect the described behavior (which is ridiculously unacceptable) would receive far more disparagement than it does receive.
The concept of fan service (particularly the way it is currently gendered) is similar evidence in the anime/manga subculture.
the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn’t true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
Have you counted opportunity costs? Maybe there is some action his subgroup could take which would have a net positive effect towards eradicating patriarchy, but that would mean they could spend less time taking some other action which could have a larger positive effect towards some other goal.
Such an argument may not be as “dumb or straw-mannish” as all that, depending on your approach to prioritizing problems to solve.
For example, if you believed that destroying the patriarchy was possible given our current limited resources, and that doing so would ameliorate or eliminate a host of other problems, you might focus on it as the low-hanging fruit. Sure, building an FAI and ushering in the Singularity (just for example) would net you a much larger gain, but the amount of effort you’d have to spend on it, as well as the lower probability of success, makes it a less attractive goal overall.
So far nobody has completed the exercise I was slightly obtuse about asking for, which was to give a breakdown of the distribution of outcomes and expected utility for those outcomes of PIV sex for men and women under patriarchy (feel free to substitute varying different locales, such as “sex-positive liberal feminist patriarchy” and “christian conservative patriarchy” and even “DaFranker’s utopian subculture”).
Patriarchal bias isn’t biological, like most cognitive biases (though it’s obviously related).
My apologies, when I said ”...many … people are in principle incapable of learning enough about feminism...” I did not mean to imply that they were unable to do so due to purely biological reasons. The reasons may well be social, as you say in your second-to-last paragraph.
That said, I do believe that my post above correctly represents the opinions of at least some feminists, because several self-identified feminists (though not you, obviously) had brought it up in past conversations with me.
As such, patriarchal behavior patterns can be extinguished. The way this typically happens is by an individual reading some basic feminism, realizing that they agree with it, and starting to mentally punish themselves (with, say, guilt) whenever they notice they are behaving in a way that perpetuates the patriarchy.
Do you have any evidence supporting this statement ? It sounds quite persuasive on a purely intuitive level, and I want to agree—which is why I’m instantly suspicious of it.
On the flip side, we have some evidence that some other massive worldview changes are powered by very different mechanisms. For example, atheists often report that their deconversion primarily resulted from purely analytical reasoning, not from a sense of guilt. Religious converts often attribute their conversions to a single flash of inspiration. Ex-homophobes often report changing their minds when confronted with overwhelming evidence—f.ex., noticing the total absence of (metaphorical) devil horns on the head a friend or loved one who came out as gay.
That said, I’m aware of the fact that self-reports are not entirely trustworthy.
That said, I do believe that my post above correctly represents the opinions of at least some feminists, because several self-identified feminists (though not you, obviously) had brought it up in past conversations with me.
Most feminists don’t know what operant conditioning and extinction are. Without knowing those things, it’s easy to confuse “very hard” with “impossible.”
Do you have any evidence supporting this statement ? It sounds quite persuasive on a purely intuitive level, and I want to agree—which is why I’m instantly suspicious of it.
The mention of guilt is just because of another comment chain in this thread. I’m not trying to argue for guilt in particular.
But further, do you think that ex-homophobes continue to experience the social rewards of homophobia as a tangible reward when they have a highly relevant reference case that they would feel, possibly, guilty about? What sort of emotion would a homophobe feel, talking to their homophobic friends about how horrible gay people are, and remembering their newly-outed gay brother?
I can’t say that I have any studies to cite here, but as far as I know nobody’s gotten funding to do an analysis of how people arrive at feminism.
Most feminists don’t know what operant conditioning and extinction are. Without knowing those things, it’s easy to confuse “very hard” with “impossible.”
Agreed—assuming, of course, that operant conditioning is as effective as you claim (when applied to humans), which I still doubt.
The mention of guilt is just because of another comment chain in this thread. I’m not trying to argue for guilt in particular.
I see, but then, what exactly are you claiming ?
What sort of emotion would a homophobe feel, talking to their homophobic friends about how horrible gay people are, and remembering their newly-outed gay brother?
Oh, guilt and shame, probably—but again, the mere fact that they feel these emotions does not necessarily imply that these emotions were a primary motivator in their original conversion.
but as far as I know nobody’s gotten funding to do an analysis of how people arrive at feminism.
This is rather surprising. Don’t feminists want to find the answer to this question, in order to optimize their strategies for converting more people to feminism ?
Oh, guilt and shame, probably—but again, the mere fact that they feel these emotions does not necessarily imply that these emotions were a primary motivator in their original conversion.
It seems much more likely that the guilt and shame are a result of the conversion rather than the cause of it.
This is rather surprising. Don’t feminists want to find the answer to this question, in order to optimize their strategies for converting more people to feminism ?
Feminists don’t have that much funding.
I see, but then, what exactly are you claiming ?
As far as a conversion strategy goes? I haven’t claimed anything thus far, and I wouldn’t like to, because it would just open up another avenue of discussion I’d have to field adversarial questions over.
Oh, guilt and shame, probably—but again, the mere fact that they feel these emotions does not necessarily imply that these emotions were a primary motivator in their original conversion.
Seems like we need more research.
From below:
It seems much more likely that the guilt and shame are a result of the conversion rather than the cause of it.
They’re obviously correlated, they’re probably co-temporal, and even if there is a clear temporal relationship, it seems probable that they serve to maintain the new beliefs.
But really, this isn’t a question we can find the answer for in comments on less wrong.
How much funding would it take to at least make some progress towards answering the question, “what causes non-feminists to become feminists” ? If you create a Kickstarter for this purpose, I’ll personally chip in a few bucks.
Again, I’m a little surprised to hear you say that feminists (or, perhaps, just feminist activists) had not made any attempts to answer the question. Yes, their finding is very limited—but doesn’t that fact make it all the more important to discover the most efficient way of spending their limited resources ?
As far as a conversion strategy goes? I haven’t claimed anything thus far...
Fair enough, but then, why did you bring up guilt and operant conditioning ?
Again, I’m a little surprised to hear you say that feminists (or, perhaps, just feminist activists) had not made any attempts to answer the question. Yes, their finding is very limited—but doesn’t that fact make it all the more important to discover the most efficient way of spending their limited resources ?
You’re thinking like a LW reader, not a typical feminist activist (who is also liberal). Most of these people don’t have any background in any science and are more skilled at literature criticism than empiricism.
Fair enough, but then, why did you bring up guilt and operant conditioning ?
I don’t think I brought up guilt. Another poster tried to apply a reducto ad absurdum to my arguments and claimed that they lead to all men feeling guilty all the time. I said that I didn’t see a problem with that, and at the time, didn’t elaborate. The implication read from that is that guilt will turn men feminist; while this might be true, the implication I meant to make is that all men are oppressive and all oppressive people should feel guilty about being oppressive. Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
I brought up operant conditioning to apply a buzzword to learning theories of gender, which claim that gendered behavior is learned, possibly by operant conditioning. It was an easy way to communicate to LW commenters that gender is socially constructed—that phrase with a shorter inferential distance is “gender is a product of operant conditioning.”
You’re thinking like a LW reader, not a typical feminist activist (who is also liberal). Most of these people don’t have any background in any science and are more skilled at literature criticism than empiricism.
If we’re counting guilt as suffering in an ethically consequential sense—which seems reasonable, since it’s pretty profoundly unpleasant and there’s a pretty clear functional analogy to physical pain—and if that suffering is additive with other kinds, then consequentialists should want people to feel guilt when they do bad things if and only if that guilt eliminates more suffering (of any type) down the road. Don’t know if you’re a consequentialist, but this seems like a good starting point.
In any case, that condition seems like it’s sometimes but not always true. Guilt over immutable or nearly immutable urges seems like a net loss unless those urges are both proportionally destructive and susceptible to conditioned reduction in the average case. Guilt strong enough to be unpleasant but weak enough not to overcome whatever other factors are making people do bad shit is likewise a loss. Interestingly, this seems to indicate that consequentialists should sometimes prefer intense over moderate guilt, unless it’s gratuitously intense relative to what’s needed to stop the behavior: sufficiently disproportionate guilt is also a loss.
The obvious objection to this line of thinking is that certain categories of socially constructed bad shit—not to name names—might stick around if and only if they stay at or above a certain level of prevalence in the population, sort of a memetic equivalent of herd immunity. Since these patterns can persist for an unbounded length of time and cause suffering as long as they do, anything capable of incrementally degrading them could have second-order consequences much larger than its first-order effects, potentially enough to justify any and all related guilt. In this case uncertainties about the problem structure seem to dominate consequential reasoning, much as per Pascal’s Mugging.
Guilt over immutable or nearly immutable urges seems like a net loss unless those urges are both proportionally destructive and susceptible to conditioned reduction in the average case.
In my experience, feelings of guilt coupled with the attitude that it is “immutable”, can be an effective excuse not to fix harmful behavior. It’s a sort of ugh field. When the consequences of the behavior become sufficiently intolerable, one is eventually tempted to hang the guilt and test that supposed immutability.
Sure, that’s a failure mode, and it’s one which—stepping down a level of abstraction—seems prevalent in gender discussions (“I’m $gender, I can’t help it!”). From the inside, it can be pretty hard to distinguish between the motivations you can and can’t change with enough reflection. There’s a loose cultural consensus as to what counts, but at the same time that varies between subcultures and can lead to conflict in its own right: consider the “ex-gay” phenomenon in fundamentalist Christian spheres.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it in context; in my estimation it’s not directly relevant to what we’re discussing upthread. But at the same time I think it’s a mistake to consider our wants entirely plastic; for the time being we’re working with a certain set of hardware, and software changes can only do so much.
Possibly not. I do think punishments can deter bad actions. But I think this works best when those punishments are clearly described in advance of the crime.
Also, it seems to me that there is a perverse aspect of regret, that it punishes sympathetic malefactors more than it punishes psychopathic ones.
If that isn’t hyperbole, I’m interested in your reasons for believing that.
Of course it is. The point is that we see all around us (that’s another hyperbole), and it is a recurring theme on LessWrong (that isn’t), that people persist in acting, or failing to act, in ways that they “feel bad” about. As a strategy for change, “feeling bad” doesn’t seem to be effective, does it?
“Making someone feel bad”, or “good”, fares even worse—see this parable.
it is a recurring theme on LessWrong (that isn’t), that people persist in acting, or failing to act, in ways that they “feel bad” about.
I agree.
As a strategy for change, “feeling bad” doesn’t seem to be effective, does it?
I disagree. One of the reasons akrasia is so notable is that feeling bad usually works. Usually touching a hot stove or hit your thumb with a hammer once is enough to change your behavior. Often being mocked by your peers, or sensing genuine disappointment from your mentors, is enough to change your behavior. It’s only in these weird corner cases where opposing strong motivations collide that we notice the unusual inefficacy of bad feelings, and haul out the rational analysis toolkit.
But doesn’t the same logic lead me to conclude that pain isn’t aversive? (That is: if pain were actually aversive, people wouldn’t do things that cause them pain. People do things that cause them pain, therefore pain is not aversive.)
The problem with that logic as it applies to pain is that pain can be aversive without completely preventing people from doing something. If a behavior B is N% likely ordinarily, and B becomes Y% likely if coupled to pain, and Y < X, that’s evidence for considering pain aversive even though we still do B. Relatedly, if B is always coupled to pain, then I never get to observe X.
Observing a nonzero Y is not evidence that pain is non-aversive.
It seems to me the same reasoning applies to guilt and other kinds of bad feelings. It’s certainly possible that they are non-aversive, but observing a nonzero frequency of the behaviors that cause it isn’t evidence of that.
There may be other evidence, though, which is why I asked Richard his reasons.
Taboo “feeling bad”, keeping in mind that our normal emotional vocabulary is pretty inadequate. (E.g., it seems to me that shame is basically never useful, but guilt and sadness can be.)
I mean I feel X when I’m not being productive. And yet I do not become productive. I have no idea how to taboo qualia like “X”.
Maybe an extensional definition?: That feeling you get when you’ve done something wrong. An uncomfortable and frustruating feeling that makes you feel guilty. A bit like stress.
That’s awfully specific. I wonder how general the non-utility of it is.
Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
And I happen to think that anyone who is trying to make me feel bad about things should be crushed like a bug and their attempts to control through shame disempowered to whatever extent it is convenient to do so.
(I also observe that most people with healthy boundaries will tend to be much more likely to avoid those who are predisposed to attempting to control through guilt or shame.)
You’re eating babies. The wide-eyed idealist points out that eating babies is bad and you are a bad and evil person who must mend his baby-eating ways. You tell the wide-eyed idealist that you refuse to interact with people who try to control you through shame. The wide-eyed idealist thinks for a minute, shrugs, and shoots you.
You tell the wide-eyed idealist that you refuse to interact with people who try to control you through shame. The wide-eyed idealist thinks for a minute, shrugs, and shoots you.
Did you just create a counterfactual which relies on making me act even more cluelessly naive and banal than the wide eyed idealist?
That’s as meaningless than it is presumptive and inappropriate.
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
Except for the sex-with-echidna part, this sounds vaguely like something that MixedNuts might do!
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
I feel that your most powerful point is that wide-eyed idealists are poor utility maximizers and poor rationalists.
The second strongest seems to be that a rationalist will (should, but as a rationalist, they do what they should) attempt better approaches, which seems to be quite close to one of wedrifid’s implied point in the grandparent. Was this your intended meaning?
Both of these are true, but I wasn’t talking to the wide-eyed idealist, I was talking to the baby-eater. If you grandstand about how a socially-approved and very mild punishment for doing bad things is Evil Boundary-violating Control, people who care about those bad things are less likely to let you alone than to switch to harsher punishments.
If you grandstand about how a socially-approved and very mild punishment for doing bad things is Evil Boundary-violating Control, people who care about those bad things are less likely to let you alone than to switch to harsher punishments.
Not necessarily. Wild-eyed idealists, being idealists, are markedly biased towards shaming folks for whatever it is that they consider “bad”. Shaming and guilt-tripping people is not even particularly hard for them, since their whole worldview is often based on these emotions; whereas applying harsher punishments may not even occur to them unless they are rather authoritarian, and it might even be completely infeasible. Thus, reacting assertively is entirely appropriate, at least in the likeliest case.
Which of course begs the question about why you were attacking that particular straw man.
The optimal approach for dealing with enemies who are presumed to have more power than you seems rather irrelevant. Unless the relevance you imply is that radical feminists with an obsession for shame based control already represent a powerful hostile force that we would be foolish to resist? In that case I would of course agree that my words to members of that group would be best served keeping them misinformed about the effectiveness of their strategy of enforcement. All else being equal it tends to be better to keep powerful enemies ineffective.
Okay, my point was that if you accept that people are going to try to control you, it’s rather silly to complain about that means. But apparently you classify all people who attempt to control you as enemies. I suppose that’s a consistent view, and compatible with civilization if you allow control to enforce an agreed-upon set of laws.
But it doesn’t seem to allow for progress. If someone discovers that marital rape is not okay, contrary to mainstream belief, what are they supposed to do? Publishing a paper entitled “Psychological effects of nonconsensual sex between spouses” would count as informing rather than controlling; it would also be vastly less effective than making marital rape illegal, portraying characters who rape their spouses as horrible monsters, and shaming rapists.
If someone tries to control me and I disagree with their position, my answer is not “By attempting to control me you have made yourself my enemy”, but “I don’t agree that bestiality is cruel to animals, so I will fight your attempts to make it unacceptable, but I don’t disapprove of these attempts on principle. For example, I agree with your subargument about indecent exposure, so Knuckles here and I are going to get a room”.
Publishing a paper entitled “Psychological effects of nonconsensual sex between spouses” would count as informing rather than controlling; it would also be vastly less effective than making marital rape illegal, portraying characters who rape their spouses as horrible monsters, and shaming rapists.
I don’t think this is evident enough to be affirmed without supporting evidence. There’s evidence that such laws and shame-guilt-tripping might be much less effective than publishing a good comprehensive paper.
Prime example: Videogame piracy. Strong IP laws. Massive attempts at guilt-trip and manipulation of mass populace. Observed effect: No measurable effect of the laws and anti-piracy measures, and a continued growth of piracy. The growth is most likely attributable to other causes.
On the flipside, dev companies that have announced that they won’t do anything against piracy have seen considerable advertisement boosts from it and have on average enjoyed much greater success thanks to this.
Okay, my point was that if you accept that people are going to try to control you, it’s rather silly to complain about that means.
Not only do I care about what means people use to control me, for any given person asserting that they don’t care what means people use to control them I would be confident in declaring them confused about their own preferences.
But apparently you classify all people who attempt to control you as enemies.
No I don’t, and wouldn’t. Why on earth would I give away my power like that? I’ll do whatever I want in response to people attempting to control me including complying with indifference, ignoring them, gaining more social power so that people are unable to or unlikely to make that kind of moves. Some people doing (or being likely to do) certain things would make them enemies but that is rare and implies giving them a significant degree of respect and attention. It doesn’t happen often.
We agree on the first point! I’m saying some means are worse than others, and shame/guilt is one of the best ones.
As Dave pointed out, we need to taboo “enemy”. “This person’s actions are bothering me; I’ll minimize annoyance” is treating the person as your enemy in the sense I was using it. Not treating them as an enemy is “This person is trying to do good, yet their actions aren’t the ones I think are best; I shall update on what they believe, and tell them what I believe so they can do same; if we still disagree, I’ll minimize total annoyance among us both”. If most people are your enemies by that definition, you’re… not typical audience for social justice rhetoric.
This, incidentally, reminds me of the rule of Ko, since I only learned to play Go yesterday. It seems like there’s a meta pattern of the baby-eater becoming the wide-eyed-idealist when you consider the boundary-violating control as the baby-eating and the ball starts bouncing around while both camps conscript soldiers and muster armies and continuously threaten other elements of their opposition while looking for something that invalidates the other’s morality.
Sure. And the other baby-eaters look at that and stop eating babies where the wide-eyed idealist can find out about it, because the idealist has made a credible threat. (A slightly more idealistic idealist might look for nonfatal ways to make a credible threat, but they might not be available.) This happens all the time; much of our civilization is built on it. What’s the problem?
Sure. And the other baby-eaters look at that and stop eating babies where the wide-eyed idealist can find out about it, because the idealist has made a credible threat.
Well, if the wide-eyed idealists are a lot more powerful than the baby-eaters, probably. But if the wide-eyed idealists are less powerful than the baby-eaters, then the baby-eaters may instead be provoked into a war on wide-eyed-idealists, because even if they lose out more in the short term by waging such a war than by putting an end to their baby-eating, they’d be sending the signal that they won’t let extremist minorities dictate values to the majority.
Yup, that’s possible. And if the idealists are more powerful, the baby-eaters might still “be provoked into” (aka “initiate”) a war to make imposing majority preferences too expensive and encourage the majority to accommodate to them. And many other outcomes are possible. Narrating them all might be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, but I’m still not sure what the point is. Were you disagreeing with wedrifid? Can you clarify your disagreement if so?
EDIT: Whoops! I just noticed you’re not the same poster. Never mind, then...
Most of these people don’t have any background in any science and are more skilled at literature criticism than empiricism.
Fair enough. Sad, but fair :-/
…the implication I meant to make is that all men are oppressive and all oppressive people should feel guilty about being oppressive.
That’s a fascinating discussion topic in and of itself, but it might be out of scope for the current thread. That said:
Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
Some LWers explicitly deny this statement; they might say, “feeling bad doesn’t solve anything in and of itself, since actions matter more than words”, or “feeling bad about things one absolutely cannot control is counterproductive”, or some combination thereof. It’s probably not a good idea to assume that the views of LWers will align with those of the general population, as far as morality is concerned. I could be wrong, however.
I brought up operant conditioning to apply a buzzword to learning theories of gender, which claim that gendered behavior is learned, possibly by operant conditioning.
Ah, understood, thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure whether operant conditioning alone is enough to account for gender, but I don’t know enough psychology to make a credible claim one way or another.
Ah, understood, thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure whether operant conditioning alone is enough to account for gender, but I don’t know enough psychology to make a credible claim one way or another.
I think that learning accounts for gender. Whether that learning originates in modeling, operant conditioning, or observational learning is irrelevant to me.
As I asked you on a different thread, how do you know whether this is true ? If you were to ask me that question, I would say, “let’s go out and run a bunch of experiments”, but you have explicitly stated that doing so would be sexist, so… now what ?
As I asked you on a different thread, how do you know whether this is true ? If you were to ask me that question, I would say, “let’s go out and run a bunch of experiments”, but you have explicitly stated that doing so would be sexist, so… now what ?
There’s one experiment in particular that I advocate—the destruction of patriarchy.
Your current worldview seems to be unfalsifiable without very expensive experiments. (How would you even know if patriarchy had been destroyed anyway?) Maybe we’re doing this backwards. What caused you to become a feminist? What evidence could you have encountered that would have made you a non-feminist?
This is an assertion I’ve heard made a lot by people outside biology and I’d like to hammer it out with somebody who seems well informed.
On what basis can we make this assertion? Biology obviously contributes in a physical sense (people with male gender tend not to have wombs). I assume what you mean is that there are no inherent neurological differences in males versus females. But how can we know that? We have a strong prior (other animals) and lots of circumstantial evidence that it should be true.
I think feminism ought to acknowledge at least the possibility of inherent male-female differences with a simple “so fucking what”. For instance I think that physical abuse of women, by men, probably represents an adaptive, ancestral behavior caused (amongst other things) by inherent neurological differences in men and women. That doesn’t excuse it. We can and have made great progress in conditioning men not to hit women, and hopefully will continue to do so.
My introduction to social justice (as a whole) was through the lens of intersex conditions (wherein people with ambiguous genitalia are assigned a gender at birth, most often female because the surgery is easier). A major problem was that raising male children as female or vice versa ends up causing psychological problems.
The main [unethical] case study was a pair of identical male twins, one of whose penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision, and then got female reassignment surgery, grew up very confused and depressed and eventually committed suicide. (Other case studies are less clear cut but generally indicative of the same problem, not to mention transgender people). Gender clearly has a biological component.
It also does clearly have a environmental component, and I don’t know where those elements interrelate, but ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
...or the knowledge of that child’s parents, doctors, and everyone around him lead to them (the adults) treating that child as a freak rather than a woman.
One of the ideas I like in radical feminism is that masculinity is very much defined by the ability to impregnate women (one of the reasons why intersex infants are virtually always assigned female). Conversely, femininity is defined by the ability to be impregnated. Seeing as this child could do neither, and their caregivers knew that, I would hardly expect this child to have typical gender socialization.
The only experiment that could demonstrate this to my satisfaction is a double-blind study where infants are adopted by parents that know only that infant’s current assigned gender, and nothing else.
ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.
If social learning accounts for gender, what causes gender differences among animals? If your answer is that they don’t have gender in the same sense, what exactly do you mean by gender?
But even then, there aren’t gender differences among animals to anywhere near the degree to which there supposedly are in humans. Do female chimpanzees get paid less than male coworkers? Do they wear pink more so than men?
I think that learning accounts for gender. Whether that learning originates in modeling, operant conditioning, or observational learning is irrelevant to me.
A lot of your claims sound considerably less crazy now. If the comments still existed, I’d suggest edits.
Operant conditioning is notoriously bad at getting creatures to have behaviors that will adapt to changing environments, so is unlikely to be a significant part of the cause of gender behavior.
A lot of your claims sound considerably less crazy now. If the comments still existed, I’d suggest edits.
I said this literally days ago, and have been saying it the entire time I have been having this discussion.
“Operant conditioning” was introduced into this discussion by me, in a comment that says “I think that learning (operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) is the cause of gender.”
Have you come into this discussion after those comments were deleted? Or did you never read them?
If you want other people to avoid having the same experience you did, upvote my comments. EY messaged me earlier today saying he was deleting any downvoted posts, which are primarily mine.
Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
FWIW, I do not think that. I would like people doing bad things to stop doing those things. “Feeling bad” is (I believe) never useful: not to the person having the feeling, and not to anyone else.
Having decided that it’s a bad idea for me to continue discussing things with eridu, it might be better for me to avoid discussing the same things with people who are currently engaged in conversation with him. But I think that in this case we have a substantive disagreement.
I think that not only is people feeling bad a powerful moderator of our behavior, and one that it’s useful for other people to know we have, I think deliberately making people feel bad about their actions can be a useful way to motivate them to change their behavior in positive ways. Ideally, nobody should have to feel bad, but then, ideally, nobody should be doing bad things either.
To draw an available example, Ghandi’s efforts to gain independence for India rested almost entirely on making the British colonialists feel bad about themselves, and while giving up their possession of India might have been an economic inevitability, he certainly accelerated it.
I think eridu is overgeneralizing the usefulness of imposing guilt on others though. It appears to me that in order to modify others’ behavior by encouraging them to feel guilty, you need to start with people who have an existing set of moral standards (ones by which they actually operate not simply ones they profess,) which they are not applying in a particular case, and make them feel intuitively that this is a case where they should be applying those standards. For instance, the British citizens mostly had moral standards against attacking civilized, non-resisting people with clubs. If they saw Indian people behaving in a civilized, nonthreatening manner, and being beaten with clubs for challenging colonial rule, the British citizens are going to feel guilty without needing further incitement. On the other hand, if you try to encourage people to feel guilty for, say, stopping women from having abortions, and appeal to them on principles of autonomy, it won’t work because they don’t relate it to anything else they would feel guilty about. You can tell them why they should, but they aren’t going to intuitively put either “women” or “abortion” into a new reference class that completes a preexisting basis for guilt.
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
I suspect the banhammer may be looming over all of this, or the karmic penalty for being under the same bridge as the troll, as eridu’s last ancestor comment has vanished, but I’ll just briefly refer to this reply of mine to eridu, and take up the following:
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
Bingo. People have these fantasies of being able to reach into other people’s heads and tweak some switches to make them do what they (the ones tweaking) want, but things just don’t work like that. People have their own purposes, and nothing you can do to them is any more than a disturbance to those purposes. What they will do to get what they want in spite of someone else’s meddling will not necessarily resemble, even slightly, what the meddler wanted. See also Goodhart’s law.
I would like people doing bad things to stop doing those things
How would you like this to occur?
To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike? The (bad feeling of) fear of getting caught? The (bad feeling of) remorse from taking a human’s life?
Or do you really think you’re a Hollywood rationalist, making a cold and precise computation of negative utility as a result of your potential action, and choosing another path?
Like the other poster who said roughly the same thing as you, you seem entirely ignorant to the massive amount of bad feelings present in reality, and the usefulness of those feelings. Nowhere in the fun theory sequence does EY advocate getting rid of bad feelings, and in fact EY argues against that.
I’m happy to have one of the most well-loved LW celebrities respond to a post I made!
In the counterfactual world where you did murder someone you disliked, and later found that they were planning on instigating paperclip production, how would you feel out of “good” or “bad”?
Of course, maybe you don’t have something you call “feelings,” but rather think of things purely in terms of expected paperclips. Humans, on the other hand, have difficulty thinking strictly in terms of expected paperclips, but rather learn to associate expected paperclips with good feelings, and negative expected paperclips with bad feelings.
In humans, we have a set of primitive mental actions (like feelings, intuitions, and similar system-one things) that we can sometimes compose into more sophisticated ones (like computing expected paperclips yielded by an action).
As such, you can always say “I wouldn’t kill someone I disliked because I might feel regret for taking a life,” or “I wouldn’t kill someone I disliked because I would be imprisoned and unable to accomplish my goals,” but ultimately, all those things boil down to the general explanation of “feeling bad.”
“Feeling bad” is the default human state of not accomplishing their goal.
(As an aside, this is why I think that you, clippy, can be said to have emotions like humans—because I don’t think there’s a difference between your expectation of negative paperclips as a result of a possible future event and fear or dread, nor do I think there’s a difference between a realization that you created fewer paperclips and sadness, loss, or regret.)
Thank you again for replying, Clippy—I’ll go down to my supply room at my earliest convenience and take most of the paperclips as a token for me to remember this interaction, and in the process, causing my employer to purchase paperclips sooner, raising demand and thus causing more paperclips to be produced.
Thanks for buying more paperclips, you’re a good human.
To answer your question, if I entropized a human and later found out that the human had contained information or productive power that would have, on net, been better for paperclip production, I will evaluate the reasoning that led me to entropize that human, and if I find that I can improve heuristics in a way that will avoid such killings without also preventing a disproportoinate amount of papeclip production, then I will implement that improvement.
To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike?
I suppose that is just a difference between us. Not a disagreement, but a difference: you are one way and I am another.
You think of disliking someone and ask, what stops you murdering them?
I think of disliking someone and ask (and only because of your question), what would start me murdering them?
Number of days since casual murder was used in a discussion on LessWrong: 0.
The (bad feeling of) fear of getting caught? The (bad feeling of) remorse from taking a human’s life?
Or do you really think you’re a Hollywood rationalist, making a cold and precise computation of negative utility as a result of your potential action, and choosing another path?
None of the above.
(BTW, the Star Trek novels, at least the ones I have read, paint a far more creditable and credible version of Vulcan rationality than the TV shows and films. Vulcans do not suppress their feelings, but master them. A tradition in the real world with multiple long pedigrees. And a shorter one.)
Like the other poster who said roughly the same thing as you, you seem entirely ignorant to the massive amount of bad feelings present in reality, and the usefulness of those feelings.
I am well aware of them. But I think people often misinterpret what they are. As I revised my original comment to say, negative feelings tell you something. What matters is to do something about it. All that stuff about negative reinforcement and feelings conceived as similar to physical forces that push you and pull you into doing stuff is fairy tales, fantasies of non-agency. (Which pop up all over the place, not just in BDSM. Strange.)
“Making someone feel bad” is even more of a fairy tale. How do you “make someone feel bad”? What will happen if you try? Here is one person’s hypothetical reaction, and here is the basic problem with the idea.
I suppose that is just a difference between us. Not a disagreement, but a difference: you are one way and I am another.
You think of disliking someone and ask, what stops you murdering them?
I think of disliking someone and ask (and only because of your question), what would start me murdering them?
I’m pretty sure HPMoR already took a dive into this point, in a manner I found sufficiently eloquent to expose the moral nihilism and/or philosophical egocentrism required for the first to occur.
Are you talking about the same things?
(If you haven’t read HPMoR, darn. I was hoping it would provide a speed boost to that line of philosophical reasoning.)
what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike?
As for me, the fact that if murdering somebody one dislikes were right, then one would have to be extra careful to never be disliked by anybody (if one doesn’t want to be killed), and that would be a lot nastier than people one dislikes staying alive. (Yes, that would make no sense to CDTists, but people aren’t CDTists anyway.)
I’m not sure I understand your question. I’d prefer to not be murdered rather than to be murdered, all other things being equal; are you asking anything else?
I’m asking how you feel about possibly being murdered. You know, emotions. It’s a simple question.
Because if “I don’t want to be murdered because by TDT-style rhetoric it leads to my being more likely to be murdered,” and if you feel bad about being murdered, you abstain from murdering people because you feel bad.
This relates to the above statement:
“Feeling bad” is (I believe) never useful
If you do not murder people because you would feel bad, feeling bad is useful.
I think this is a trivial point, and if I started this discussion on a different topic, it would be trivially accepted by most of the people currently arguing against it.
Feeling bad is one of the reasons why I don’t do certain things, but not the only one. If I’m convinced something that would make me feel bad would also have desirable consequences that would outweigh that (even considering ethical injunctions, TDT-related considerations, etc.), I try to overcome my emotional hang-up (using precommitment devices, drinking alcohol, etc., if necessary) and do that anyway.
I’m asking how you feel about possibly being murdered. You know, emotions. It’s a simple question.
It was a denotative simple question attempting to assert a non-sequitur rhetorical point.
Because if “I don’t want to be murdered because by TDT-style rhetoric it leads to my being more likely to be murdered,” and if you feel bad about being murdered, you abstain from murdering people because you feel bad.
That doesn’t follow.
I think this is a trivial point, and if I started this discussion on a different topic, it would be trivially accepted by most of the people currently arguing against it.
Nonsense. Your reasoning is well below the standard expected around here. It may pass elsewhere but only because anything with “boo murder” in it is too hard to argue with regardless of the standards of the content.
Well, let me spell it out even more so than I already have.
Preferences are system 2 concepts.
Over time, system 2 concepts map to system 1 concepts.
As such, if you prefer ice cream to spinach, you will feel bad (in a system 1 sense) if you are promised ice cream but given spinach.
In humans, as such, any preference against a thing means that human feels bad about that thing.
anything with “boo murder” in it is too hard to argue with regardless of the standards of the content.
Arguing about the choice of something that represents the LW concept of negative utility in a hypothetical example is equivalent to arguing about grammar.
Let A(X) be a function such that X.Consciousness becomes terminated (ends, dies, etc.)
I have a preference for NOT A(me).
Over time, the above maps to Feel Bad → A(me)
As such, if I am offered NOT A(me), and given A(me), I will feel bad because I attempt to be reflectively coherent.
As such, my preference for NOT A(me) does, as you claim, imply that I ought to feel bad about A(me).
The above are intended as a rephrasing of your statements, and I fully agree.
However…
Because if “I don’t want to be murdered because by TDT-style rhetoric it leads to my being more likely to be murdered,” and if you feel bad about being murdered, you abstain from murdering people because you feel bad.
You are making the subsequent conclusion that I have:
Feel Bad → A( X | X.isElementOf(people) )
because I have preference for NOT A(me).
wedrifid correctly asserts that this does not follow.
If I’m reading it right I don’t think your formalism fits what I’m trying to argue, but this is a boring point and I’m not terribly interested in taking it further.
Well, let me spell it out even more so than I already have.
“That doesn’t follow” does not mean “I cannot understand your argument”. It means that the argument was fundamentally logically flawed and your reasoning confused.
As such, if you prefer ice cream to spinach, you will feel bad (in a system 1 sense) if you are promised ice cream but given spinach.
Some people might feel bad. Others would feel amused (and, incidentally, many would personally develop themselves such that they are more inclined to feel positive than negative emotions in that kind of situation). Most importantly, system 1 refers to a heck of a lot more than emotions. Even system 1 based decisions to avoid something don’t translate to ‘feeling bad’ about it. Especially in people who are mature or experienced.
In humans, as such, any preference against a thing means that human feels bad about that thing.
No it doesn’t.
Arguing about the choice of something that represents the LW concept of negative utility in a hypothetical example is equivalent to arguing about grammar.
I dispute both your first and your second bullet point. As far as I know there exist both system 1 and system 2 preferences, and it’s not clear that system 2 concepts usually bridge the gap. Can you give some examples or evidence?
FWIW, I do not think that. I would like people doing bad things to stop doing those things. “Feeling bad” is (I believe) never useful: not to the person having the feeling, and not to anyone else.
Are you using ‘never’ in a figurative sense here? Seeing the absolute claim like that prompted me to think of a whole list of real world counter-examples despite me probably mostly agreeing with your position. (For a start, making people feel bad is useful in nearly all cases in which breaking someone’s finger is useful. Maintaining dominance, keeping oppressed people oppressed, provoking an enemy into taking hasty reactions against you that you believe you can win, short term coercement. Making others believe that you have the power to do harm to another without them having any recourse. That kind of thing. That’s before thinking up the cases where actual respectable, decent sounding outcomes could arise—those are rare but do occur.)
Seeing the absolute claim like that prompted me to think of a whole list of real world counter-examples
That is something I find a standard but rather annoying geek conversational failure. You could simply have answered your own question:
Are you using ‘never’ in a figurative sense here?
with “yes”. But “figurative” does not really capture it. All apparently absolute generalisations are relative to their context. Are there substantial exceptions relevant to the context?
Now, on further consideration I might indeed revise my original statement, but not in any of the directions you explore. Feeling bad—that is, having feelings that one does not want—is useful to precisely this extent: it informs you that something is wrong; that there is a conflict somewhere. The useful response to this is find where the conflict is and do something about it. Nothing else is useful about the feeling.
For a start, making people feel bad is useful in nearly all cases in which breaking someone’s finger is useful.
Days since someone used torture to illustrate an argument: 0.
I would write “seldom” instead of “never”.
I prefer to write “never” instead of “seldom”. “Seldom” and other such qualifiers too easily protect what one is saying behind a fog of vagueness. It allows one to move one’s soldiers around like the pieces of a sliding-block puzzle, so that wherever the enemy attacks, one can say “Ha! Fooled you! Never said that! Nobody there! Try again!”
“Feeling bad” is (I believe) never useful: not to the person having the feeling, and not to anyone else. [emphasis added.]
Not so. Some reasons:
Psychologist Richard J. Davidson has shown that the affective trait Resilience (speedy recovery from bad feelings) becomes maladaptive when extremely high, as it interferes with empathy.
Almost all judicial systems have concluded that remorse helps avoid recidivism in criminals. (I’m opposed to remorse-based sentencing—but not based on its being irrelevant.)
Patriarchy is learned behavior. Men and women are rewarded for behaving in accordance with patriarchy, punished for deviating, and as children, have ample opportunity to both witness others being rewarded and punished, and are encouraged to identify with and model relevantly-gendered adults.
As such, patriarchal behavior patterns can be extinguished. The way this typically happens is by an individual reading some basic feminism, realizing that they agree with it, and starting to mentally punish themselves (with, say, guilt) whenever they notice they are behaving in a way that perpetuates the patriarchy.
See, I could believe all of this if someone, not necessarily without a personal stake in the subject, but someone who I had good reason to believe held reasonable standards for honesty, were claiming it with reference to studies to support key points (is instilling causing subjects to mentally punish themselves with guilt an effective way to extinguish patriarchy-related behaviors? I’m inclined to be skeptical given my observations about guilt in other contexts, but given a well conducted study supporting that conclusion I’d accept it.)
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?”
I’d hate to make this conversation more adversarial, because I think you’ve done a better job than most people would of keeping things civil in a discussion of a highly personal issue where everyone else in the discussion disagrees with you, but I really think you’ve failed to account for how much that sort of thing hurts your position.
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).
This is definitely not true. It’s also not a true statement about feminists.
Patriarchal bias isn’t biological, like most cognitive biases (though it’s obviously related).
Patriarchy is learned behavior. Men and women are rewarded for behaving in accordance with patriarchy, punished for deviating, and as children, have ample opportunity to both witness others being rewarded and punished, and are encouraged to identify with and model relevantly-gendered adults.
As such, patriarchal behavior patterns can be extinguished. The way this typically happens is by an individual reading some basic feminism, realizing that they agree with it, and starting to mentally punish themselves (with, say, guilt) whenever they notice they are behaving in a way that perpetuates the patriarchy.
Within patriarchal social contexts, it’s very hard to unlearn patriarchy, because while mentally conditioning yourself towards feminism, you’ll still be conditioned the opposite way towards patriarchy. Some people aren’t strong enough to do this, which is why some feminists consider them irrevocably broken. Of course, most feminists are unaware of the mechanisms of operant conditioning.
But, this means that if you air-dropped an arbitrary human into a feminist utopia, they would probably become a good feminist relatively quickly.
What would a (radical) feminist utopia look like, out of curiosity?
Good question. More specifically, how would a radical feminist utopia differ from your average, run-of-the-mill utopia ?
I don’t think I have the cognitive context necessary to predict that. It’s only useful as a construct, in this case to make the point that humans are patriarchal because humans conform, and society is patriarchal—implying that if the same humans were in an environment where conforming meant being feminists, they would conform to that.
Fair enough. I guess in the context of that “end of the world” thought experiment discussed above, I was trying to picture how the relationship of the American Het Male and American Het Female would be different if they had internalized radical feminism.
I am sort of trying to reconcile the radicalness of your critique of gender relations with the mundaneness of gender relations between, to take the obvious example, myself and my wife. Neither of us are free of sexist attitudes, and yet ridding ourselves of them doesn’t seem like so urgent a project as you are urging. It seems like maybe we’d rather just go for a walk by the river.
I’m not trying to be flippant, just trying to understand where the urgency is coming from. Is it mostly a question of trying to prevent severe social ills related to sexism, such as rape? Or do you think that on the level of personal relationships between ordinary people, a lot of horrible shit is going on?
During the early days of feminist reawakening in the 60s and 70s, the main thrust of feminist activism came from consciousness-raising groups, where women talked about their experiences.
This revealed to them (and to the world) that they had massive pluralistic ignorance about things like domestic violence, marital rape, housework, and other various things ranging from extreme to mundane.
That sort of pluralistic ignorance is still common today about a variety of other things (recall that the last state to outlaw marital rape did so in 1993), especially since the prevailing meme is not “feminists have no legitimate position” but rather “feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women.”
In LW terms, I think that the CEV of your wife and possibly you would lead to radical feminism, and a re-evaluation of your non-feminist past of at best mildly oppressive and at worst abusive and toxic.
Thanks for the reply. What I’m getting from you is the idea that there are probably some practices in our relationship (and those of couples in our reference class) that, although they look benign to us now, would after a certain amount of consciousness-raising come to be seen by us as toxic.
I consider this very plausible (and I can think of attitudes held by me in the past, about gender and other things, which seemed trivial but which I now regard as toxic).
I am really interested in moving from the abstract to the specific though. So seconding Bugmaster’s comment, I’m interested in concrete things that occur typically in the context of what you might call a moderately “liberal feminist” relationship which I ought to regard more seriously. Think back to the last time you spent time with a moderately liberal feminist, middle-to-upper-class couple. What sorts of things would you see to critique?
My response to Bugmaster should cover that.
To contextualize a strongly liberal feminist/tumblr-feminist couple, I’d add maybe the following few things:
Compulsory political support of various institutions that exist on the backs of women to serve men, such as prostitution and pornography, with the implication of being “prudish” if she objects
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a “prude” or “sex-negative” or “anti-sex” if she objects
Compulsory individualist conceptions of gender (“gender is entirely based on identity,” “genderbread people” ala my original comment), and as a consequence, a return to individualist attributions of gendered success or failure, and a lack of emphasis on social problems as a cause for individual deficiencies
To contextualize it further, an undergrad psychology class would teach that there are three relationship types common to modern society: traditional, modern, and egalitarian. Traditional relationship types would be considered patriarchal by liberal feminists and are dominated by men. Modern relationship types have a senior-partner junior-partner dynamic, where nominally women have input but ultimately everything is decided by men. Egalitarian relationships are most common in non-heterosexual relationships, and have equally shared power and a much higher focus on friendship and companionship than either of the two previous types. I would guess that any liberal feminist heterosexual couple would fall firmly on the traditional side of a modern relationship type.
Thanks, your description of the spectrum of relationship types is quite clear. That said, I find it difficult to reconcile what I know of liberal feminism (which is, admittedly, not as much as a liberal feminist would) with your description of it (though I’m not sure what a “tumblr-feminist” is):
Can you link to some examples ? Every liberal feminist I’ve ever seen always makes it a priority to combat the treatment of women as mere sex objects.
As I understand it, a liberal feminist would indeed characterize a woman who objects to sex in principle, and wants all men and women to stop having sex with each other, as “sex-negative”. At the same time, though, that same liberal feminist would defend any specific woman’s right to express her sexuality in whatever way she chooses, even if she chooses not to express it at all. IMO these two positions are entirely compatible.
http://tumblr.com
No, you’re confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
Liberal feminism has been historically pro-porn, pro-prostitution, and supportive of other various things that radical feminists think are objectifying and oppressive. The most liberal shade of liberal feminism is “empowerment” feminism, where doing things that are patriarchal are okay, because women are “empowered” now to… starve themselves and get breast implants.
In contrast, radical feminism has traditionally fought against porn, supported body-positivity and body acceptance over accepting patriarchal beauty norms under the guise of “empowerment,” and in general, is critical of desires as having causal origin within patriarchy, rather than being ontologically basic objects.
Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists—liberal feminists treat “desire” as a semantic stopsign, whereas radical feminists push through it, and unsurprisingly find patriarchy.
I’m confused by your history.
As I understood the history:
1st wave—Susan B. Anthony, Women’s Suffrage, “voluntary motherhood” (i.e. allow contraceptives for married couples, but sex is for married people only) ~1920s
2nd wave—de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, Andrea Dworkin, anti-pornography movement ~1960s
3rd wave—sex positivity feminism ~1990s
Each movement was a reaction to perceived shortfalls in the prior intellectual movement. You talk about things like 2nd wave was a reaction to 3rd wave.
I’m more sympathetic to Dworkin than the sex-positive folks, but there’s a lot more to the other side than you suggest. One can be sex positive without supporting breast implants for everyone.
I think that history is mostly orthogonal to our current topic. Even if eridu is wrong about history, he could still be right about all of his other claims.
Indeed, and “sex positive” does not, IMO, immediately imply “want to make sex compulsory”. I am personally volleyball-positive, in that I wish everyone who’s interested in volleyball could enjoy doing so with other volleyball-lovers. But that doesn’t mean that I want to force everyone to play volleyball all the time, regardless of whether they feel like it or not.
I think you mean “compulsory”.
Indeed I do. Fixed.
I’d call this a “Freudian slip”, but that would probably get me shouted at by both sides in the conversation.
I thought I had replied to this comment. Maybe it was deleted, maybe it was lost on my end.
Third-wave “feminism” is a mostly patriarchal reaction to second-wave feminism.
Second-wave feminists were primarily fighting things that third-wave “feminists” endorse, like pornorgraphy, sexualized violence, sexualization and objectification of women and girls, and other similar things. As such, second-wave was a reaction to the elements of patriarchy that third-wave feminism adopted.
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist “identity” conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
But you can’t really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types, and you certainly can’t be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy, which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive power (which is mostly the same in my opinion).
This probably isn’t a discussion we should have here, though.
Of course, third-wave feminists say that it is your brand of radical feminism that is “harmful to feminist struggle”. I would love to see some long-term studies that provide some evidence one way or the other—but, as far as I understand, liberal feminists don’t have the funding, and radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause… so we’re kind of stuck in a “she said / she said” territory here.
There are several initiatives on the liberal feminist side that campaign for the promotion of a healthy female body image, in all media including porn (*). On the flip side, there is tons of porn out there that promotes any body type you can imagine, and possibly a few that you cannot.
Agreed.
I don’t think that the only possible conditions are either a). “the patriarchy doesn’t exist”, or b). “the patriarchy’s control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies”.
(*) I’d google up some links, but something tells me I shouldn’t be doing that at work.
Agreed. A useful line of questioning for eridu might be “How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?”
On the one hand I think it’s an excellent point the feminists make that implicit/explicit consent to sex is not the end of the story ethically, if the consent is seen to be coerced by external factors (e.g., “Our relationship depends on his sexual satisfaction, and he has made me financially dependent on our continued relationship”).
On the other hand, it’s going too far if we say that the ONLY ethically acceptable motivation for sex is one’s own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
Sure they can! Someone has wired up your pleasure center to respond to doing what they want you to do, even though that course of action is ultimately self-destructive for you.
(Fictional example: the tasp in various Niven stories.)
Agreed; that’s a good way to put it.
That’s an awfully damning assessment. If true, it implies that radical feminists believe that their cause can be destroyed by the truth, and don’t think that it should be. I’m not convinced that this indictment, as stated here, is true of any actual radical feminist, though.
Not quite. I disagree with Eridu’s position, but it doesn’t come down to a Moore’s paradox situation. Eridu’s position is that there are truths that cause harm within certain social contexts, and that in those social contexts (but not otherwise) those truths ought to be suppressed.
This is pretty plausible if you think of some thought experiments involving vulnerable groups. Suppose that you are a rationalist/consequentialist cop in 1930′s Germany, and you are investigating a case in which a banker, who was Jewish, embezzled some money from the Society for the Protection of Cute Puppies. Although ceteris paribus, your job is to expose the truth and bring criminals to justice, in this case it might be a very good idea to keep this out of the papers at all costs, because due to anti-semitic narratives society lacks the ability to process this information sanely.
Eridu claims that because of sexist narratives, society lacks the ability to process the claims of evo-psych sanely.
I find it interesting that both you and MixedNuts have found it necessary to invoke Nazis in order to construct a marginally convincing case for your interpretations of eridu’s position. Your thought experiment boils down to an equation of “the patriarchy” as it exists in present-day Western society with Nazi Germany (which would put eridu in pretty clear violation of Godwin’s Law*), and MixedNuts’ counterexample to my proposed Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle is a variant on the classic example of when it’s not only morally acceptable but morally obligatory to lie: “when hiding Jews from the S.S. in one’s basement.”
It also seems as though the “certain social contexts” where the results of evo-psych research ought to be suppressed, according to eridu, are pretty much every social context that exists outside of Women’s Studies departments and the internal discussions of radical feminist organizations. That seems untenable to me.
I just realized that Godwin’s Law is meant to prohibit a special case of Yvain’s Worst Argument in the World: the case in which the archetypal member of the category into which one places X is Naziism.
The non-Eridu argument against evo-psych is that many such researchers are abusing/ignorant of the halo effect that leads to biased results/unjustified moral assertions about sex roles in society.
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That’s nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg’s decision to write that break up essay wasn’t evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you’re breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn’t constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
A solid illustration of how social awkardness can result in doing harm to others despite all the best intentions.
An extremely weak appeal to consequences—an argument that evo-psych should not be studied because bad things could happen from people understanding evolutionary psychology. I describe it as weak since there is little indication that the insult Luke gave given his awareness of evo-psych is any worse than the insult he would have given if ignorant. For example “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, it’s just the way I am” is about as insulting as “I’m dumping you because I like big tits, I just evolved that way” (details changed as necessary).
In conclusion, keep your moralizing out of my epistemic rationality! At least while posting on this site, please. You can argue that a particular subject should not be discussed here for instrumental reasons in accordance with your own preferences. However it is never appropriate (on lesswrong, I assert) to argue that a belief must be considered false because of perceived consequences of someone believing it.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I’d been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
That’s amazing. Can we see a copy of the email?
I’ll think about that—from the upvotes, it appears you’re not the only Less Wronger interested (at least, I assume an upvote to a one-liner request like that means “I’d like to see it, too”). I wouldn’t post an unedited copy, as there are some details in it that I consider very private, as, I think, would my former girlfriend. But I’ll take a look at it later and see what would need to be redacted. I would also have to ask her permission before posting any of it, of course, and I’m reluctant to bother her just now—she has a newborn daughter (as in, born last week), so I expect she’s rather preoccupied at the moment.
I’m guessing that this is more likely to work out when it’s the female who decides to be rational about it.
I’m guessing it’s more likely to work out when it’s the partner of a LessWronger who initiates it, than when it’s the partner of a nonLessWronger.
I would have agreed with you if not for the recent completely irrational feminism and creepiness discussion.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
I would prefer to hear all the reasons, myself and am ten times more likely to choke on fluff like “It’s not you, it’s me.” than burst into flames because somebody criticized me. I need closure and feedback and for my life events to make sense. For those purposes, the only information I’d deem good enough is a serving of reality.
Shminux’s point, and the rest of this thread, is about predicting the behavior of typical women in order to make an accurate assessment about what breakup approach is best. Do you think that your preferences are typical for women, or even typical for women-who-LW-folks-date, many of whom are not themselves LWers?
According to Vladimir, LessWrong has somewhere in the ballpark of 600-1000 active users. According to Yvain’s 2011 survey, 92 of the 1090 respondents were female. If I alone would respond well, that increases the chances of a good response by an LW woman by over 1% (unless you want to include inactive members). Since Dave’s point is not “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than not.” and was “You’re more likely to get a good response from an LW woman than a random woman.” me saying that actually gives a potentially significant support to his point. If you calculate the chances of a random woman responding well to be under 1% (seems reasonable) and don’t consider inactive users to be an “LWer”, then I totally supported his point. If not, then all Dave needs to do to figure out whether he’s right is to count the number of LW women he is sure would respond well and compare the ratio with his estimate of how many random women would respond well. I doubt anyone here thinks the percentage of random women that would respond well is beyond the single digit percents. If that’s right, my saying so gave 10% or more of the support needed to think that he’s right. As for the behavior of the average LW woman, I have no idea. That I would respond well confirms that at least some LW women would respond well, which might help people figure out if it’s worthwhile to find out exactly how many of us there are.
Two comments:
First, you clearly are not an average female.
Are you sure you know how you would react in both cases? People are notoriously bad at predicting their own behavior.
Which doesn’t contradict Dave’s idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I’m strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I’m strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread—check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was—in public of all places—have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
No.
I am stronger than that.
Just for clarity, I did not suggest the latter. What I suggested was that this sort of thing, initiated by the partner of an LW member, is more likely to work out well… put differently, that LW members are more likely to respond well (or at least less likely to respond poorly)… than for non-LWers.
The gender of the LW member, and the gender of the partner, is not strictly irrelevant but is largely screened off by their membership.
I make no such claims about the partners of LWers.
Since your initial (and highly promising) arrival, I must admit that I lost respect for you faster than I have for any other poster in the history of LessWrong.
But posts like this one give me hope.
Downvoted because I don’t like cheapshots. Criticisms about the community’s behavior in that thread should be confined to that thread, and should be substantive. The way you’re doing it now forces other commenters to choose between addressing your cheapshot and derailing the comment thread or allowing the cheapshot to go unchallenged.
I wouldn’t have downvoted if you’d used less strong language in your criticism or if you had supported your argument better. It’s okay for you to reference other threads as proof of things, in my book. But I don’t like that you asserted the behavior in that discussion was “completely irrational” without providing any sort of support for your argument; you just threw out an unfair label in a context where it was difficult to challenge it.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux’s comment wasn’t random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
I dispute the accuracy of shminux’s comment, and yet also feel reluctant to challenge the comment because it would be a digression from the topic of the above comments. That’s a problem.
I recognize the need to draw from other sections of the site in order to talk about LessWrong as a community; I’m fine with that. But if we’re going to do that then I think we need to at least use good arguments while discussing those other threads. Otherwise it becomes too easy to just criticize things in contexts where they’re difficult to challenge.
I’d like to hear other possible solutions though.
Why do you think so?
Why do you think a man would think so?
I don’t know! That was why I asked.
Don’t you? Fine, I’ll bite. While the bell curve is pretty wide for both genders, an average (western?) male tends to be more analytical and reserved and less emotional than an average (western?) female. At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well. Thus he would be (again, on average) more inclined to listen to reasoned arguments, as opposed to “It’s not working out between us” with some made-up excuses designed to make him feel better. Whereas she (on average) would be likely to take every logical argument as in Luke’s story, as a personal affront, insult and rejection. There are plenty of exceptions, but if you take 1000 break-ups, I’d wager that in the majority of the cases a bit of reason on the woman’s side would make it less painful for the guy, while a bit of logic on the man’s side would probably make it more painful for the girl than “it’s not you it’s me”.
I have no idea how same-sex or other less-standard breakups work out in terms of rationality.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women—they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more aggressive/angry than women. Therefore, men would be more likely to take this kind of letter badly.
I’m not making that argument, but I can’t see that it would be much weaker than yours.
There’s a large difference between writing an analysis of what’s going wrong in a relationship based on information about the relationship itself and writing an evo-psych analysis which concludes that the other person has the whole weight of evolution against anyone finding them attractive.
It occurs to me that what you’ve done there is a common enough pattern, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a fallacy—seeing that something causes bad outcomes, but not being clear on what the scope of the something is.
Here’s the quote:
Thanks for finding the post. It felt very awkward discussing an example when I couldn’t produce the example for examination.
You’re welcome.
Here’s one I’ve tried to find. In the recent discussion of feminism, I remember someone (and I’m thinking it wasn’t eridu) saying that part of the purpose of the harsher attacks about racism and sexism was to make opposed people feel less sure of themselves in general.
One problem with lukeprog’s essay would be that it would muddle the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. The fact that I, in the 21st century, like big tits is logically distinct from the fact that human males, in the EEA, who slept with curvier women had more children in average, though the latter is the cause of the former.
What matter when deciding whether to use a program is what it does, not who wrote it (well, except for copyright-related reasons, but Azatoth isn’t going to sue me for infringement anyway).
I think you are misinterpreting me. I’m not saying “Never discuss evo-psych.” (That’s eridu).
I’m saying that there are strong reasons to distrust current evo-psych results. One of those reasons is that evo-psych, as used in popular culture, provides justification for writing essays like the one you and I both think was a bad idea. That is, this statement:
is not true. “It’s just the way I am” is usually a false deflection of responsibility—invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility. If that weren’t true, lukeprog would not even have considered saying it to the woman.
On evo-psych generally:
Consider phrenology. The traits at issue were well worth studying. And as far as I know, the field used accepted practices of empiricism for its day. But the whole field went off track, to the point that essentially no phrenology results are actually useful for scientific research today. I think that the social pressures towards legitimizing our current normative practices put evo-psych (and to a less extend, all psychological research) at serious risk of wandering off into a similar wilderness.
If evo-psych manages to recover from what appear to be its current mis-steps I (but apparently not eridu) would welcome back with open arms.
No, it doesn’t. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn’t make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That’s the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they’re not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they’re indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. “X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past” does not mean “X is good,” nor does it mean “X is inevitable”—evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn’t build you “to rape nubile young womenfolk,” period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances—when rejected by a woman with whom you’re already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, probably more important, how you were socialized: these factors affect whether you feel any shame, empathy for your potential victim, fear of consequences, etc. that could outweigh the impulse to rape.
It’s also important to understand that evo. psych. is not saying that rapists are motivated by a conscious desire to reproduce: the impulse generally takes the form “I want to get my rocks off” and/or “I want to hurt this b!+(#,” not “I want to make a baby.” That’s probably true of the individuals committing the rapes even when rape is organized and officially sanctioned by military or political leaders as a way of “invading” an enemy population’s gene pool, as in Bosnia or the Sudan.
It’s also notable that evo. psych. tells us nothing about why any particular man committed rape while another man in similar circumstances did not—nor about why some men prefer large-breasted women and others don’t, for that matter. What it does offer is an explanation for why rape is part of the repertoire of human behavior at all. It’s entirely possible to imagine a mammal species in which no male ever attempts to copulate with an unwilling female, and female rejection instantly shuts off male desire. As I understand it, it’s even possible to identify such species in nature: IIRC, canines and the great cats, at least, have never been observed to engage in the kind of coercive copulation frequently seen in dolphins, chimps, orangutans, ducks, etc. That’s pretty much what evolutionary biology would predict, too: the big carnivores are so well-armed that the risk of serious injury either to the male, or to the female (preventing her from successfully bearing and rearing the male’s offspring), would most likely outweigh the reproductive advantage of copulating with more females than are receptive to the male’s advances.
Evidently it didn’t.
Why did I interpret that as “evidently it didn’t fuck off” (rather than “evidently it didn’t build you that way”) on the first reading?
I interpreted it thus on not only my first, but all reading up until you posted this.
Thanks!
...
No, and I’ve stated that stated that saying “never discuss evo-psych” is acceptable while muddling normative claims in with epistemic claims is not.
I assert that your argument centered around Luke’s essay to his girlfriend absolutely does not support this.
It doesn’t provide such justification and even if it did this would not constitute evidence that evo-psych is epistemically inaccurate.
Fair enough.
I’d like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological “findings.” But it is the nature of the endeavor that “harder” sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that doesn’t rise to the level of proof we would expect from a true “hard science” discipline like physics.
I don’t see evidence of anything resembling a scientific process, tainted or otherwise, behind Justice Bradley’s patronizing pontification about “the proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” especially when the pompous old bastard specifically attributed his view of proper gender roles to “the law of the Creator.”
Upvoted because I consider this question a far more useful one than many of the things that led up to it.
My own answer is, roughly speaking, the same for all cases where something potentially useful is being tainted by an external factor: 1) estimate how much work is involved in separating the tainted stuff from the non-tainted stuff,
2) estimate the benefit of the non-tainted stuff, and
3) if the estimated work/benefit tradeoff is high enough, do the work, otherwise throw the whole mess out.
You seem to have done that, at least in a BOTE kind of way, and concluded that the tradeoff doesn’t justify the work. Which is cool.
It’s not clear to me whether anyone is actually disagreeing with you about that conclusion, or (if they are) whether they think your estimate of the work is too high, your estimate of the benefit too low, or your threshold tradeoff too low.
I upvoted both your post as well as the parent, for putting the issue much more clearly than anyone else:
That said, I disagree with TimS because I believe his estimated benefit is too low.
I am curious as to your reasons for believing that, as opposed to believing that his estimate of the work involved is too high.
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don’t know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the “ban sexual intercourse” cannon (that metaphor was, perhaps, not my finest achievement).
2). Speaking more generally, I believe that the benefits of any kind of scientific knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks in most situations (though of course there are limits), due to the compounding effects. For example, the first application of modern physics was the nuclear bomb: a device is literally capable of ending the world. However, our world would be a very different, and IMO much worse place, had quantum physics never been discovered.
I just want to clarify that I don’t advocate banning heterosexual intercourse. Even if I agree slightly more with eridu than you about how coercive ordinary sexual encounters are experienced.
Yes, my bad, I did not want to imply that you advocated anything of the sort.
I’m pretty sure that I disagree on both 1 (people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims) and 2 (there’s probably not much evo. psych that will be very useful in social engineering). But I’m honestly not certain which disagreement is larger.
I’m curious which of my estimates differs further from the LW average—but I’m not sure if actually discovering that would advance the particular goal of optimizing our stance towards evo. psych research.
That’s a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements—between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can’t help but notice that at least some radical feminists’ aversion to evo. psych. and related fields in biology stems from their failure to distinguish normative from empirical claims. A lot of the firestorm surrounding Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape came down to the critics indulging in the naturalistic fallacy (which is a pity, because there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of Thornhill and Palmer’s conclusions). Another example that springs to mind is this article by Andrea Dworkin, in which she detracts from an otherwise good argument by inserting a gratuitous slur on Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis that demonstrates a breathtaking failure of reading comprehension on her part.
I think there are reasons to distrust a lot of evolutionary psychology results, and I think Luke’s breakup letter was just as bad an idea as he’s presented it as, but I don’t think the latter provides much evidence for the former. The rules of social interaction are only tangentially related to empirical reality, and even severe violations of social etiquette don’t establish empirical falsehood. In fact, it’s generally considered polite to deemphasize a number of empirical truths which our culture considers awkward, such as differences in skill.
As to invoking evopsych to dodge responsibility for your sexual preferences, it seems to me that that’s only dishonest if the results it invokes are untrue in the first place. It’s impolite regardless, though; our culture smiles on only a fairly narrow set of mechanistic excuses for behavior, and that’s not one of them.
Well, maybe not just any feminist, but eridu specifically did claim that, since the findings of evolutionary psychology are frequently misused to advance the patriarchy, no one should study evolutionary psychology. As far as I can tell, he feels that way about all research that deals with sex and/or gender, not just evolutionary psychology specifically.
There were anti-Semitic pamphlets that quoted studies of Jewish populations where blood type B was most frequent and Aryan populations where blood type A was, kept quiet about studies showing the reverse, and used that as proof that Aryans and Jews were different races that shouldn’t mingle and should be ranked relative to each other. If someone thought that publishing counterpoints (the rest of the data, or pointing out that blood type distribution doesn’t imply any of the conclusions) would be ineffective and had instead advocated banning statistics on blood type, it’d be rather uncharitable to say “They believe gathering evidence hurts their cause”.
I don’t see what the difference is, in practice. In both cases, the person in question wants to ban research into blood types. One person wants to do it because he fears his position could be destroyed by the truth; the other one wants to do it because the research would give his opponents too much power. In both cases, though, the research is banned, and neither person knows whether his beliefs are true or not.
Are you still in the analogy here? There’s very little that blood type research can actually tell us for or against antisemitism—we don’t have to fear a result that would support it. The problem is that some possible results (all possible results, really), while not evidence for “Aryans rule, Jews drool”, will be used to support this assertion. We expect that the costs of people being persuaded to hold false antisemitic beliefs outweigh the benefits of better responses to epidemics or whatever we’re hoping to get out of the research. Likewise, eridu believes that ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be (I agree), but is misused to support some harmful gender roles (I agree). He also believes that it’s not really possible to mitigate the misuse, and so the costs of people being persuaded to hold false sexist beliefs outweigh… figuring out how parental grief works or something.
What you appear to describe is… to stretch the analogy past its snapping point, someone who thinks injecting type A blood into everyone will solve antisemitism, and is scared that blood type research would prove their intervention ineffective or harmful. While also being scared of the consequences of misuse.
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu’s position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
How do you know this, if not by looking at the result of blood type research (or, more likely, research on heredity in general) ? Similarly, how does eridu know that “ev-psych can’t say much about what gender roles should be” ? If by “should be” you mean something like the naturalistic fallacy, then I’d agree; however, it’s still possible that ev-psych can tell us something valuable about why our current gender roles are the way they are.
To use another analogy, optics and genetics tell me why my eyesight is bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to throw up my hands and say, “oh well, guess I’m almost blind then”. Instead, I’m going to use this knowledge to acquire some corrective lenses.
Why does that someone believe that the intervention will actually be effective ?
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans. Looking at history, Jews are more likely than Aryans to create great work of art and make great discoveries, and it takes about equal digging to find an Aryan ancestor to any creative Jew than the reverse. In general, if I try to rank people from best to worst, I don’t find many ancestry-related clusters, which shows that ranking races from best to worst is not useful. Heredity research can tell me that intermarriage is not bad, but I can also observe that countries and cities with higher rates of intermarriage aren’t doing worse, haven’t lost their cultural identities, and, New York notwithstanding, promote equality rather than Jewish superiority.
Similarly, differences between genders that are relevant to gender roles ought to be salient enough that regular psychology can expose them (and so what if it’s culture-dependent, we’re working from currently existing culture) with no need for the subtler, bare-bones models ev-psych gives us.
Similarly again, figuring out that your eyes converge too strongly and you need divergent lenses is useful, in a way that screens off the usefulness of genetics of nearsightedness.
Because it’s a stupid analogy. Maybe they believe that antisemitism is caused by people being in bad moods due to anemia, and they have a huge stash of blood that happens to be type A.
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, “I’d go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence”. As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in other cities, and exclaim, “Aha ! It’s all those evil Jews ! That proves it !”. Thus, you should avoid collecting any evidence at all, for fear of giving them too much ammunition. Yes, eridu singles out evo-psych specifically, but his reasons for doing so are not unique to evo-psych, AFAICT.
Right, but it’d be good to know which differences (if any) are the results of biology. To use my earlier analogy (hopefully without straining it to the breaking point), there are lots of illiterate people around; but some are illiterate because they’d never been taught to read, whereas others are illiterate because their eyes cannot focus on the page. It is really helpful to know which are which.
My point is that, in order to have some sort of a justified belief in their remedy, they must have first studied various blood types, and blood disorders in general. Otherwise, they’d just be randomly transfusing blood into people for no good reason, thus (assuming they at least do so safely) wasting a bunch of resources and gaining little (though, admittedly, more than nothing) in return.
Hmm, what I think I’m saying is more like:
Do research in sociology, not biology. If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins, but don’t go digging for possible sources of differences that don’t reveal themselves.
Use the interocular trauma significance test. Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
That’s just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy (other than in specialized cases such as medical treatment, etc.). We’re not arguing over whether gender bias exists (I believe that it does) or whether we should adopt patriarchal policies (I believe that we should not).
Rather, the argument is over whether the very act of studying specific aspects of human biology and/or psychology constitutes an extremely harmful act and should immediately be stopped. I believe that it does not.
This is why I think the distinction between gender and sex is so helpful. It is not obvious to me that there are gender differences, even though I agree with you that there are obvious sex differences. Eridu appears to want to eliminate sex differences, while I merely want to abolish gender differences.
Consider the taboo in modern society against female chest nudity. It’s obvious to any subscriber to National Geographic that this norm is not an inherent part of human society. So I think the norm is a gender-norm, not a sex-norm.
Properly speaking, evo. psych has nothing to say about gender and gender-norms. Only sex and sex-norms. But society as a whole resists the distinct, and scientists rely on the halo effect to support that blurring of what should be relatively distinct concepts.
Someone more radical than I would like point out that the distinction is much fuzzier than I suggest. (Consider social pressure to perform surgery to “fix” intersex infants). (shrug). There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in social engineering before a precise resolution of that issue is really necessary.
I don’t think I get what you mean by “sex differences” vs. “gender differences”; eridu claims he wants to eliminate gender, not sex. Can you explain your definitions ? You bring up the example below:
I agree with you there, and this is a gender difference, but I’m not sure how your view on this contrasts with eridu’s. Surely eridu doesn’t want to eliminate secondary sexual characteristics… does he ?
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that’s impossible—but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
As far as I can tell, so does he, which is why he wants to destroy gender altogether. Once he’s done, we won’t have “men” and “women” at all; we’d just have “people with sexual organs A” and “people with sexual organs B” (plus a small number of others with C, D, etc.). By analogy, today we (mostly) don’t have separate identities for different hair or eye colors; it’s just a meaningless biological quirk (again, mostly).
One problem with this goal is that if gender truly is dependent on sex to any meaningful extent, then the goal cannot be achieved through purely social means. This is one of the reasons why I believe that evo-psych specifically, and evolutionary biology in general, should not be banned, despite its possible negative consequences.
I should also mention that I am sympathetic to the goal; it’s not a bad idea. However, it would be an immense undertaking, and you don’t want to commit an immense amount of resources to a goal unless you can be reasonably sure it’s achievable at least in principle.
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that “treating women different than men” is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you’re treating women the same as men, you aren’t—which is why he’s against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn’t know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn’t know what to do or say to them. (I’m reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we’re on decent terms since then. I haven’t mentioned that reaction to the person, and they’ve since tranisitioned to a standard gender.)
It did feel to me as though I had separate behavior sets for dealing with men and with women, and was at a loss when I didn’t know which set to apply. I haven’t explored how the sets might be different, but maybe I should.
Me too, but 1) the sets do overlap by a substantial amount, and 2) I think it’s more a case of potential sexual partners vs everyone else than of women vs men—with women I’m not sexually attracted to at all, I behave pretty much the same as if they were male (except for different cultural norms such as—in Italy—kissing them on the cheek instead of shaking hands, which I don’t consider any more relevant that the use of different pronouns). (Edited to replace ″romantic″ with ″sexual″ -- I’ve introspected myself and ISTM that the set of people with whom I’d use the first set of behaviours almost exactly coincide with the set of people with whom I’d want to have protected sex if they offered, and promised not to tell anybody and to try not to let that affect our future interactions in any way—which is a somewhat broader criterion than me being willing to have a monogamous romantic relationship with them.)
FWIW, I doubt I treat men I’m attracted to and women I’m attracted to the same way. Though introspection is a decidedly unreliable source of information about this sort of thing.
What about men you’re not attracted to and women you’re not attracted to?
There’s much less commonality in how I treat people I’m not attracted to. Or at least less salient commonality. I really don’t know what to say about it. I mean, sure, there are women I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to… but there are also men I’m not attracted to whom I treat differently than men I’m not attracted to. Introspection fails to provide even unreliable hints on that question.
Also, the fact that there exist both men and women I’m not attracted to doesn’t make me particularly unique; I expect that’s true of everybody. So I wouldn’t have felt especially motivated to share that data point, even were it crisper. You had started out drawing the distinction between “potential sexual partner vs everyone else” and “women vs men,” though, so I thought the perspective of someone for whom “potential sexual partner” included both women and men (well, in principle, anyway; after 20 years of monogamy it’s somewhat theoretical) might be relevant.
Did this comment go from +2 to −1 in, like, five minutes? Why? (Upvoted back to zero—I don’t think it deserves being negative.)
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven’t been following this conversation, but it doesn’t seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
Apparently? Not sure why.
I guess you missed the part where people (not me personally, it was just made pretty clear) are downvoting everything in this thread in the hope that everyone would stop talking?
I’d considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it’s in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
“Gender should be removed from society” is not a particularly rare opinion—unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
Agreed, but the short-term infeasibility alone should not disqualify the goal completely; if that was the case, the SIAI wouldn’t exist.
(to be fair, I personally don’t endorse donating money to SIAI, but I have additional reasons)
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn’t involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
The path from here to there is wildly unclear. But history shows social changes as large as the one I advocate for have actually happened. So there’s that.
Shouldn’t we draw up a better map of the road from here to there before beginning our journey?
Agreed.
Edited to add: I am just such an uncharitable person :-/
If true, that does seem like a very good reason not to trust eridu or take anything he has to say seriously. As an evolutionary biologist, most familiar with this kind of anti-thought from the creationist quarter, I might state it as a Generalized Anti-Creationist Principle: “Any person who advocates ignorance or false beliefs about a subject as morally superior to true and accurate knowledge of that subject is not to be trusted or taken seriously on any subject.” (See here for a good example of a creationist who goes every last angstrom of the way to this reductio ad absurdum of his position.)
This recalls Steven Pinker’s critique of many aspects of twentieth century radical left-wing thought, including some radical feminist ideas, in The Blank Slate. Radical scholars in the social sciences clung (and, in at least some cases, are still clinging) to the increasingly untenable notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa for fear of what they perceive as disastrous moral consequences of it not being true, and decried every scientific advance that filled in some portion of the slate. Neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on pretending things are true because they think the world be better if they were, and there are an awful lot of people who could benefit from reciting the Litanies of Tarsky and Gendlin until they take them to heart.
As an aside, I have to wonder if the upvotes on my previous comment reflect a sober assessment of its quality, or simply the fact that “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is a huge, multi-colored, strobing applause light around these here parts. ;-)
It follows directly that you stop trusting people who tell you “Don’t tell me if you hide any Jews, I don’t want to let anything slip in front of the SS”. Is that actually a conclusion you wish to endorse?
Edit: mantis is correct, see eir reply below.
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier “academic” to the noun “subject” in my principle, so it can’t get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
That’s one of the things that aggravates me about eridu. I’m far more sympathetic to second-wave than third-wave feminism. But I don’t think that being second-wave requires rejecting empiricism. (I suspect >90% of ev. psych results are wrong because of cultural bias, but that’s a separate assertion.)
I think the book, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” does a pretty good job of disproving that there is any single body type people look for in their porn.
So, are you saying consent is something that doesn’t actually exist and never has? That would seem to be a confused definition of consent.
So… what’s your position on trans people and non-binaries?
Mainstream porn has an incentive problem where it needs to appeal to a large audience or it won’t be profitable, but alt porn, especially by amateurs, can show varied body types. There are Tumblrs that do that—they’re reposting, not producing, so there’s still a bias toward conventionally attractive types, but they’re not judged differently.
Right, I know what tumblr.com is, but I still don’t know what a “tumblr-feminist” is.
I don’t think I am, that’s why I said “every liberal feminist...” above. My point was that, counter to what you said, liberal feminists would be strongly against “compulsory sexuality”, and definitely against objectification of women along any other property (including sex).
As far as I understand from talking with yourself and liberal feminists (and reading your respective reading materials), the fundamental split is due to a difference in primary goals, which gives rise to very different intermediate goals.
The primary goal of radical feminism is elimination of the patriarchy. To this end, they want to put a stop to all activities that promote the patriarchy, such as PiV sex, heterosexual relationships in general, etc.
The primary goal of liberal feminism is to maximize the capabilities of women to achieve their individual goals. Since the patriarchy stands in the way of most of these goals, liberal feminists want to see it eliminated; however, they would seek to do so in a way that does not result in a net reduction in the capability of women to achieve their goals.
Thus, a radical feminist would seek to eliminate all PiV sex (somehow), since doing so would advance the goal of eliminating the patriarchy. A liberal feminist, on the other hand, would work toward a society where women who enjoy PiV sex can have it, and women who do not enjoy it feel no social pressure to have it regardless.
To put it in a different way, radical feminism (as I understand it from talking with you) is essentialist, as opposed to liberal feminism.
Two points from my perspective:
First, that which eridu calls tumblr-feminism is probably what I would call “not feminism.” People who invoke The Rules or who think being sexually forward is taking control of their sexuality are seldom actual doing anything to reduce patriarchy. Popular culture may call Snooki a “strong female,” but she is not following a feminist program.
Second, I agree with you that eridu’s philosophy seems incredibly essentialist. I just want to note that I don’t think Dworkin is essentialist, although she can be read that way.
Either of these can be considered assertive, albeit in very different ways. Surely, among the culture hacks that would make women better off (at negligible social cost), encouraging them to be more assertive in general should be near the top of the list.
They are assertive. They just don’t reduce patriarchy.
Oh, I see. I thought for a moment that mitigating the widespread occurrence of hierarchies and power relationships in the real world (as probably happens when assertive behavior becomes more commonly expected in a given culture) would be somewhat more consequential than “reducing patriarchy”, whatever that means.
Not everything assertive reduces the relevant hierarchy.
If you truly want to become stronger, and not just mine this thread for positive karma, you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself, rather than trying to extract information from me that I don’t fully have.
I can at least say that you’re very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists support compulsory sexuality in that the actions they take make it more probable), about the goals of liberal feminism (you’re talking specifically about a subset of liberal feminists called equality feminists, but liberal feminists in general don’t really recognize patriarchy, or at least almost never use that term or a strong analysis of gender as a social class), and about the reasons why radical feminists believe what they believe.
I will say this again: I cannot give you the answers to these questions. I am going to stop playing “feminist AMA” now and leave you to either educate yourself or be content with the fact that you might be oppressing people.
I did, believe it or not. My impression of “actual radical feminist women” has been largely negative; they seem to be more interested in winning battles than in acquiring true beliefs or solving any real-world problems. That’s probably why I find your views so fascinating, since you are actually willing (some of the time) to justify your claims.
You are conflating two very different concepts here, by employing the very anti-pattern Yvain is describing in his post:
”Liberal feminism explicitly endorses compulsory sexuality”
vs
”Liberal feminists endorse practices that, unbeknownst to them, lead to compulsory sexuality”
Can you offer some examples ? Every piece of feminist literature I’ve ever read talks extensively about patriarchy, privilege, and gender.
This is a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible for me to believe that I’m inadvertently oppressing people in several ways, while still disagreeing with your own claims.
I think the problem with this statement is that “oppression” is a loaded word. Its meaning can range from “there exists a systemic bias against women” to “women are chained to the stove and are kept barefoot and pregnant at all times”. As Yvain points out in this very post, people tend to envision the latter even when the reality is closer to the former.
That said, I’m still not entirely clear regarding your response to simplicio. You say that, if only simplicio and his wife could extrapolate their CEVs, that would lead to
I don’t know what that means, though. Which parts of their past, specifically, would simplicio and his wife—or, if you prefer, Average Het Male and Average Het Female—find “abusive and toxic” ?
Essentially, you were asked, “how would the thoughts and actions of a radical feminist couple differ from those of an average hetero couple ?”; and you replied by saying, “their thoughts and actions would be radically feminist”. While this is true, it is hardly informative.
I won’t respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, inconsiderate, manipulative, objectifying, or something else I can’t think of at the moment
Tones of interaction and patterns of arguments that again, seemed innocuous to the men making them would be considered patronizing, condescending, paternalistic, etc.
Social behaviors that men previously accepted and may have argued for the legitimacy of such as pornography, prostitution, penis-in-vagina sex, body policing of women, objectification of women in media, objectifying language directed towards women, aggressive metaphors and language describing sex, and heterosexual relationships will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent
Division of various tasks, such as any combination of housework, child-rearing, emotion work (especially emotion work), would be seen as unfair, constricting, and demanding
That was an unfocused four minutes of brainstorming, but if I sat down with a patriarchal textbook used in any undergrad relationship psychology class, I could probably write a novella.
At a first glance your type of feminism seems to seek to put both men AND women in smaller and darker cages, as it seems to seek to ban more and more behaviors for both genders, instead of permit more and more.
Seriously “penis-in-vagina sex”? I don’t think there’s ever been a society so oppressive to both genders as to ban even that.
Shakers!
Ah, true. And they were rather egalitarian-minded too.
It’s not often one sees single-word comments this insightful on the Interwebz. Kudos!
Within the context of genders, those things are oppressive. I don’t imagine sex of any kind would be problematic in a feminist society.
If you want a more in-depth view of heterosexual sex under patriarchy, I recommend Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.
But in short, consider the utility distribution of PIV sex for men, and consider it for women, under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women’s best interest to have PIV sex. I’ll leave this as an exercise for you, rather than spelling it out explicitly.
You might also want to read the blog articles from radtransfem.wordpress.com that I linked above.
What happens if a woman desires to have PiV sex, seeks out a man to have it with (rejecting unqualified men in the process), and enjoys the experience ? The reason Andrea Dworkin (and radical feminists in general) is often portrayed as “sex-negative” (*) is because, as far as I can tell, she denies that such a scenario can exist, thus directly contradicting the life experience of many women.
Thus, we end up in a peculiar situation where radical feminists appear to be seeking to actively make women’s lives worse, by denying them an activity that many women see as an important aspect of their self-expression (not to mention, a lot of fun).
Of course, a radical feminist might answer by saying, “my end goal is not to improve the lives of women, but to destroy the patriarchy by any means necessary”, but I’m not sure if any real radical feminists would answer this way.
(*) It’s also why Dworkin is considered to be a kind of troll by some liberal feminists; IMO unjustly so, since she sincerely believes the things she says.
Why don’t you read Intercourse for yourself and figure out if that is indeed the case?
Figure out if what is the case ?
I did read through Intercourse in college, but it was a long time ago, and, knowing my past self, I probably only skimmed it. My main impression of it at the time was that Dworkin a). really dislikes men, and b). dehumanizes women. IMO (b) is even worse than (a); at least she recognizes that men are people, albeit unpleasant ones.
Anyway, that was a bit off topic. What is it that I’m supposed to be figuring out by reading Dworkin ? And what happens if I do read the relevant passages, but still conclude that she is wrong ?
She talk about women’s wants a lot less than I expected. About cis women who want intercourse with cis men, she writes:
She might be saying “Women only ever want intercourse with men they love”. Even if you count any kind of liking and desire for intimacy as “love”, this rules out cruising for casual sex.
She also says things about women wanting very gentle intercourse without thrusting, whereas men go poundy-poundy. This is quite unlike the reports of sex bloggers and friends, whose preferences are varied.
Then she says women who seek intercourse are like women who accept and perform genital mutilation and foot binding. So yeah, basically “hate it but brainwashed into thinking they like it”.
This seems to be completely unfalsifiable; anyone who says “But I like penis in my vagina, there are nerve endings there that like stimulated” can be told “You’re brainwashed by the patriarchy”, or “You’re not (enough of) a woman so you can never understand”.
There does seem to be a bit of a trope of certain sorts of scholars (the early Wilhelm Reich comes to mind) developing strong and specific opinions on what kind of sex other people are supposed to have — down to specific positions and motions! — in order to be enlightened, liberated, rational, or holy. One wonders by what means a person could arrive at such knowledge, and what other hypotheses were raised to attention and dismissed by evidence.
This isn’t just about sex, of course. There are all sorts of claims that people don’t really want what they say they want, and they don’t want what they seek out, either.
This essay introduced me to the idea that such claims are pervasive. Anyone have a more general overview?
Even at Less Wrong—you won’t really like that shiny toy so much, give the money to SI instead!
This is one of my favorite essays on libertarianism, by the way.
Most likely they are just rationalizing in a pseudo-scientific/moralistic light whatever sexual fantasies/phobias they happen to have.
And yet people here, apparently with a straight face, have made analogous arguments about alcoholic beverages. If I claim I like Amaro Montenegro then I must have been brainwashed and/or be (consciously or subconsciously) lying for signalling reasons or something. How could I demonstrate that I actually enjoy its taste?
Blind taste test. Preferably several, where you don’t know if Amaro Montenegro is among the drinks you’re tasting in any particular test.
If you can’t single out for a high rating the one that you profess to like the taste of, then you’ve falsified the hypothesis that you like it for the taste.
If you can single it out for a high rating in blind taste tests, and want to further test whether you actually enjoy it, or merely recognize it and assign a high rating for signalling purposes, get an MRI during the blind taste test.
MRI wouldn’t help. If you can recognize amaro, you’ll go “Oh, that’s amaro, I’m supposed to like this” and produce a pleasure response, the same way wines believed to be expensive do to identical wines believed to be cheap.
Good point.
I think you could get somewhere by doing a taste test of several different amaros (which are not actually wine,) where rather than a blind test, the subject is incorrectly told that they’re all, say, privately brewed and distributed at a liqueur festival, or something along those lines, but one of them is really Amaro Montenegro.
That one doesn’t sound quite so bad; get MRId while drinking, and you can prove you really feel pleasure. That doesn’t disprove the brainwashing assertion (wines genuinely taste better with a price hike) but you can still answer “So what if I like it because of that? I like it. And it doesn’t even support a culture where 12% of the population has had amaro slipped into their drink.”
Well, I don’t want to want to spend more money on wine if I couldn’t tell it from cheaper wine in a blind tasting… (EDIT: But I don’t know what aspect of heterosexual intercourse that maps to, if any.)
Wine can taste Good or Bad, have a real cost that’s Cheap or Expensive, and be LabeledExpensive or LabeledCheap. Good Expensive wine is better value for money than Bad Cheap wine.
If Expensive wine is Good and Cheap wine is Bad and label is irrelevant, Good Expensive LabeledCheap wine ~ Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine ~ Bad Cheap LabeledExpensive wine.
If LabeledExpensive wine is Good and LabeledCheap wine is Bad and real price is irrelevant, Good Cheap LabeledExpensive wine > Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine > Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine > Bad Expensive LabeledCheap wine.
Learning that the latter model is true is only useful if you can pay for cheap wine then be told it’s expensive when you drink it. In most situations, you see what you’re paying for—wine is LabeledCheap iff it’s Cheap. Your only options are Good Expensive LabeledExpensive wine and Bad Cheap LabeledCheap wine, and you always prefer the former to the latter. So learning which model is true shouldn’t change your wine-buying habits.
Better value for money? If you check the coefficients on the perceived quality increase, they pretty strongly recommend saving your money.
That’s quite possible in real life, but then you don’t need all that evaluation of preferences in various models—you always buy cheap wine, regardless of label and taste.
Yes, that was my initial criticism of that argument. There are other flaws as well.
For what it’s worth, I second this recommendation. But the book is mostly literary criticism.
If her mother hadn’t had PIV sex, she wouldn’t exist in the first place.
That was not my intention. What I meant was, “we should taboo the word ‘oppression’, and it would be great if everyone else did, too”.
Thanks for your examples. One thing I noticed about them is that they are almost entirely male-centric. For example, you say,
What about the women, though ? Would the women likewise perceive such behavior differently than they do now ? We are discussing feminism, after all, not male-ism.
Not to harp on this point, but you mention things like “penis-in-vagina sex” and “heterosexual relationships” in general as the kinds of behaviors that “will be seen as tangibly oppressive and violent”. Is it your contention that (most) women today see such behaviors in this negative light ? If not, then why not ? Is it because modern women are almost as brainwashed by the patriarchy as modern men, or for some other reason ? Or did I misinterpret your claim ?
The reason I ask is because, on its surface, this claim sounds like something a “straw feminist” might say, and I want to avoid jumping to any unwarranted conclusions.
What is “emotion work” ? This is the first time I’d seen this term.
Emotional work is everything one needs to do to maintain a positive affect because the positive affect is expected from your social role.
For example, you don’t think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that’s unfair. If society doesn’t give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that’s even worse.
Historically, that spouse was the wife—hence feminism’s concern about emotional work.
Thanks, that’s a good example. I had encountered an instance of the phenomenon in the context of male demands for women to “just smile,” but had not generalized it.
Yes. All my statements should be read as true for both partners.
No.
Yes, because women are more “brainwashed” by the patriarchy than men.
I consider TimS’s explanation of emotion work to be accurate, with the possible addition of being responsible of the emotional well-being of others at the expense of one’s own well-being.
The term is very googlable.
These are all good answers.
I am trying to be cautious when googling any terms [radical] feminists use, because the meanings they assign to them often differs radically from common usage. For example, words like “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege”, etc., have very specific technical meanings in a [radical] feminist context, and if I googled them, I’d form a wrong impression. That is perfectly ok, IMO; every discipline has its jargon, f.ex. the words “client”, “handshake” and “slave” are used in computer science in radically different ways as compared to common speech.
Anyway, you said that “PiV sex” and “heterosexual relationships” would be seen by future utopian societies as “tangibly oppressive and violent”, but I find this statement difficult to reconcile with your earlier one, where you claimed that, in a feminist society, sex of any kind would be ok. If PiV sex is inherently oppressive, surely people wouldn’t engage in it, even in a feminist society ? On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
I have a feeling I’m missing a key part of your argument, but I’m not sure what it is.
From what I’ve inferred (this inference may be wrong), eridu seems to be asserting that “radical feminists” (not necessarily including himself) believe that these conditions are currently impossible to be met. My intuition is that this is for the same reason that they became feminists in the first place (a feminist subset of anthropomorphic-like phenomena?) - that is, that they were/are surrounded with almost exclusively ultra-patriarchal-behaving groups, where it is common that men get blowjobs in return for opening car doors for women and obtain sex in return for gifting high-heeled shoes (and yet of course, the reciprocals do not apply).
I feel like most of what this position considers literally omnipresent in everyone but themselves is a poor representation of some cultures and social groups. For example, the PiV point is definitely not applicable everywhere. In my own circles, there is not a single man or woman that considers PiV sex in any way offensive, dominating, or any other of the qualities that would qualify it as “patriarchal”:
There are two people, they play a sport (something very fun for both), one of them happens to be a woman, the other happens to be a man. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they watch pictures of their childhood and reminisce on their grewing up together (something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
There are two people, they rub parts of their bodies together while having strong positive emotions (something very fun for both + something very personal and intimate for both), one of them happens to be a man, the other happens to be a woman. This particular woman-man combination happenstance happens to geometrically permit parts of their bodies to rub in a particular even-more-fun manner which is difficult for other gender combinations. This is not sexist or patriarchal, ceteris paribus.
By my understanding, even radical feminists agree with my conclusion that, ceteris paribus, none of those three situations are sexist or patriarchal. However, they appear to be implicitly assuming that the third is virtually impossible in our society, because all men are brainwashed to demand sex and deny denial, and all women are brainwashed to not enjoy sex by their own authority or somesuch.
I see and know of tons of “patriarchal” (gender-unfair, discriminatory, negative-emotion-inducing, etc.) behaviors, yes. Are those behaviors common in the circles I frequent? No.
No girls go around in quests of the romance of their prince charming, no would-be gentlemen open doors specifically for attractive women and no one else (in fact, we have a formula, which I devised long ago, for when it is best to open a door for someone and when it is best not to or to offer), no sex happens that isn’t wanted by both parties for the sex (and probably for that reason, it seems there’s a lot more of it going on than for the north-american average relationship), there’s a lot of reciprocal affection, no gender-specific hobbies that I can tell (the stereotypes of shopping, porn, sports games on TV, etc. really do not apply, seriously—in fact, if it’s stereotypically gender-based, it probably doesn’t apply to the people I frequent, unless it’s about reproductive organs bleeding on a monthly basis or wall-mounted urine receptacles or some other thing we literally physically can’t change).
I could go on and on and on (and on and on and on and on and more, but I’ll let you do the copy-pasting mentally and spare my fingers a bit—I must’ve rewritten this post five times overall with all the rewording and correcting and editing before-posting) about comparisons between behaviors I observe here in myself and my circles and what is stereotypical, or what has been mentioned here, but that’s not even the issue. I am being accused, nay, all people including me are being accused of recursive denial-in-denial that prevents even conscious effort towards nondiscrimination from not being “patriarchal”, whatever that word means.
Yes, I get confrontational about it, because yes, it goes against every evidence I have and everything I observe to accept this accusation. I have now read more wikipedia articles and feminist blogs than I care to count on the issue, and I have been extremely careful of selection bias, confirmation bias, privileging the hypothesis, etc., and yet I only see more evidence that the “Patriarchy” we are being accused of does not even exist in my current local subculture.
Yes, the “society at large” outside my own subculture is largely male-dominant in often subtle ways. However, the “society at large” is also experimentally stupid, able to completely do nothing while watching people die and being certain that they are dying, give people cruel and lethal treatment merely because someone tells them to with authoritative voice, etc.
I do not contest that there is a large patriarchy at work in most, not all, of society, but rather the idea that the patriarchy alone/itself deserves special correction, rather than first raising the sanity of everyone in all matters. This, however, is tangential.
What I am opposed to is the general claim that all society (including me and my circles/groups/subcultures/etc.) is necessarily very “patriarchal” and very gender-unfair and not improving nor making worthwhile progress of any kind, with the sole exception of a very specific subgroup that must identify themselves as Radical Feminists.
The above claim is both infuriating and extremely improbable, given the evidence that I see.
Going by all that I have explained in this comment, I therefore infer that it is not an argument that you are missing, but evidence—the same evidence that I am missing.
I’ll stake a 70% probability-in-my-model that either myself or eridu or both is/are missing key strong evidence and that this causes the disagreement, if there is indeed a real disagreement and not merely a problem of falling trees.
What formula, out of curiosity? (In my case, I always hold doors open for people within a few metres behind me unless it’d be more cumbersome for me to do that than for them to open it again—e.g. if I’m carrying a box or something—regardless of their sex, age, physical attractiveness, marital status, and whether I know them.)
I do the same (with the radius of a few meters somewhat larger for elderly people), but I sometimes wonder whether my cutoff distance is the appropriate one, like in the Ambiguous Zone smbc.
In the situation described in the comic, I would ask “need help?” out loud without moving towards them until they say yes (where by “would” I mean ‘recommend’—not sure what I would actually do in such a situation, due to akrasia).
With doors, when there’s someone close but not that close, I push the door forward and move on, so that (if it’s slow enough) it will still be open by the time the person behind me arrives.
I sorta prefer a closed door to a door swinging toward my face.
I happen to agree with you (I think), but still, it sounds like you’re generalizing from one example. Your personal life experience is no substitute for hard data. Furthermore, if eridu is right, then you are an incredibly poor judge of whether or not the interactions you describe are free of oppression in your personal sub-culture; thus, I doubt he’d find your post persuasive.
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of believes regarding gender and feminism, is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/its/etc. own best interests. Only radical feminists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Eridu, would the above paragraph be a fair—if possibly somewhat harsh—summary of your views ?
As far as I understand, EY believes that anyone who does not subscribe to his very specific set of beliefs regarding cognitive bias and probability theory is simply not competent enough to judge what is in his/her/their best interests. Only Bayesian rationalists are competent enough to make those kinds of decisions.
Which is to say, if non-Bayesians are predictably dumb, then a feminist (of any kind, even) would say that non-feminists are predictably dumb.
So yes, the above paragraph is fair, but it’s also misleading—my viewpoint on non-feminists is equivalent to LW’s collective viewpoint on Christianity.
I don’t know if EY would agree with this statement or not. I personally would disagree, however. Sure, without the understanding of “cognitive biases and probability theory”, a person is liable to make suboptimal decisions. However, I believe that most people are competent enough to achieve at least some of their goals in a satisfactory fashion.
The difference between you and me, as far as I understand, is that you believe that unless everyone sets “destruction of the patriarchy using the methods of radical feminism” as their primary goal, they should not be allowed to make any decisions that you don’t approve of. I personally reserve that level of outrage for actions that clearly, demonstrably, hurt other people—f.ex., teaching creationism instead of evolution in schools, restricting women’s right to vote, etc. By contrast, I am perfectly content to let people spend (I would say, “waste”, but they’d disagree) their Sunday mornings in church, if they so choose.
To be sure, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate that a patriarchy of some sort does exist, and that it is harmful. But your concept of “patriarchy” is rather more all-encompassing than that held by most other feminists; and in some cases your claims border on extraordinary. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, only that I’m not ready to side with you until you (^) have provided overwhelming proof—which you had not done. I’m not saying that you can’t provide such proof, only that you haven’t so far.
(^) Or any other radical feminist, doesn’t have to be you specifically.
“Bayesian reasoner” is a theoretical entity. The folks you meet on LW are “aspiring rationalists” (more or less), and it’s important not to confuse the two — especially important for aspiring rationalists. There is a big difference between learning about a few cognitive biases, and being capable of mathematically ideal reasoning on any topic relevant to one’s best interests. Anyone who claims the latter is, well, probably full of shit.
He said:
So it’s clear that he’s not claiming that his claims about his social circle apply to the rest of society.
There are lots of parts of popular culture that are fairly blatantly sexist (e.g. Barbie dolls and female body expectations). Does your subculture always condemn those aspects of popular culture? Does it do anything to change those norms?
If not, then “Patriarchy” exists to some degree in your sub-culture. Does eradicating Patriarchy enhance social justice? I think the answer is clearly yes.
Must it be your highest social-justice priority? I think there are reasonable arguments on both sides. For example, my day job is about dealing with disability discrimination in public schools. I wouldn’t assert that this does all that much to eradicate patriarchy.
No and yes.
Many behaviors do clearly slip through the cracks. Present a “perfect Feminist” with the claim that they never act in any manner that could possibly be Patriarchal, and I’m sure most of LessWrong would dispute the claim and find evidence that This Human, Like Other Humans, Is Not Infinitely Perfect. I would like to think that I make no such bogus claims.
The Schelling point/fence, however, is that at the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of “my” (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does, and the rate of improvement seems to me as to be faster than the accumulating-over-time damage of the remaining patriarchy—all obviously attributable to diminishing returns. Patriarchal behavior is, fortunately, not an infinite neg-resource. (a few applause lights here, but this was typed-as-thought, so leaving them in seems useful)
Now, as for whether Patriarchy is present, well, if defined as such (“to some degree”) it is obviously present in these subcultures in at least some way or another—it is even more unlikely that no “Patriarchy”-like behavior whatsoever exists than the claim I oppose in the grandparent.
However, I find that the above does not carve reality at its joints, to use LW jargon—the cluster of behaviorspace, which I was pointed to and told was “Patriarchy”, has mostly in common that it mostly generates or indirectly contributes to / allows gender-unfairness, social injustice, sexism, etc. Many key points like identity, control, status, “dignity” (technical meanings, not the religious-soul or similar connotations), subconscious conformity to expectations, anticipation-of-expected-behavior, behavior programming, subconscious reprogramming of believed-wants (though perhaps not necessarily of true wants), etc. seem to show up too in this space. The radical feminism portrayed in these threads sometimes appears to ignore this concept entirely, and assumes that anything that could, in at least some contexts, become a point of “Patriarchy”, is therefore Patriarchy, and is therefore something to be absolutely eradicated at all costs.
Therefore, if I write a user’s manual for Tampax products, I am an Unholy Beacon of Supreme Evil, for reasons I hope are obvious enough, and that I hope are either very strawman or sufficiently absurd to expose the need for a Schelling fence.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn’t true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
One can argue about whether video gamer culture is above average intelligence (I suspect yes), but here is strong evidence it is nowhere near the marginal benefit line for gender relations. If video game culture were closer to the line, I would expect the described behavior (which is ridiculously unacceptable) would receive far more disparagement than it does receive.
The concept of fan service (particularly the way it is currently gendered) is similar evidence in the anime/manga subculture.
Have you counted opportunity costs? Maybe there is some action his subgroup could take which would have a net positive effect towards eradicating patriarchy, but that would mean they could spend less time taking some other action which could have a larger positive effect towards some other goal.
(This assumes that patriarchy is not the only problem in the world (nor the only problem worth trying to solve). I don’t expect anyone to disagree with that, but I’m afraid to “underestimate the universality of the law that there is no argument so dumb or straw-mannish that someone somewhere has not made it”.)
Such an argument may not be as “dumb or straw-mannish” as all that, depending on your approach to prioritizing problems to solve.
For example, if you believed that destroying the patriarchy was possible given our current limited resources, and that doing so would ameliorate or eliminate a host of other problems, you might focus on it as the low-hanging fruit. Sure, building an FAI and ushering in the Singularity (just for example) would net you a much larger gain, but the amount of effort you’d have to spend on it, as well as the lower probability of success, makes it a less attractive goal overall.
Yes.
That’s why I quoted that part of DaFranker’s post as opposed to some other part.
I explicitly mention marginal benefit in my first substantive example.
The post DaFranker is responding to concludes with the point that improving society need not include any activity directed at patriarchy.
I’m well aware of the concepts of opportunity cost, cost-benefit analysis, and diminishing returns.
Do you live on a commune or something?
So far nobody has completed the exercise I was slightly obtuse about asking for, which was to give a breakdown of the distribution of outcomes and expected utility for those outcomes of PIV sex for men and women under patriarchy (feel free to substitute varying different locales, such as “sex-positive liberal feminist patriarchy” and “christian conservative patriarchy” and even “DaFranker’s utopian subculture”).
(70% seems low.)
My apologies, when I said ”...many … people are in principle incapable of learning enough about feminism...” I did not mean to imply that they were unable to do so due to purely biological reasons. The reasons may well be social, as you say in your second-to-last paragraph.
That said, I do believe that my post above correctly represents the opinions of at least some feminists, because several self-identified feminists (though not you, obviously) had brought it up in past conversations with me.
Do you have any evidence supporting this statement ? It sounds quite persuasive on a purely intuitive level, and I want to agree—which is why I’m instantly suspicious of it.
On the flip side, we have some evidence that some other massive worldview changes are powered by very different mechanisms. For example, atheists often report that their deconversion primarily resulted from purely analytical reasoning, not from a sense of guilt. Religious converts often attribute their conversions to a single flash of inspiration. Ex-homophobes often report changing their minds when confronted with overwhelming evidence—f.ex., noticing the total absence of (metaphorical) devil horns on the head a friend or loved one who came out as gay.
That said, I’m aware of the fact that self-reports are not entirely trustworthy.
Most feminists don’t know what operant conditioning and extinction are. Without knowing those things, it’s easy to confuse “very hard” with “impossible.”
The mention of guilt is just because of another comment chain in this thread. I’m not trying to argue for guilt in particular.
But further, do you think that ex-homophobes continue to experience the social rewards of homophobia as a tangible reward when they have a highly relevant reference case that they would feel, possibly, guilty about? What sort of emotion would a homophobe feel, talking to their homophobic friends about how horrible gay people are, and remembering their newly-outed gay brother?
I can’t say that I have any studies to cite here, but as far as I know nobody’s gotten funding to do an analysis of how people arrive at feminism.
Agreed—assuming, of course, that operant conditioning is as effective as you claim (when applied to humans), which I still doubt.
I see, but then, what exactly are you claiming ?
Oh, guilt and shame, probably—but again, the mere fact that they feel these emotions does not necessarily imply that these emotions were a primary motivator in their original conversion.
This is rather surprising. Don’t feminists want to find the answer to this question, in order to optimize their strategies for converting more people to feminism ?
It seems much more likely that the guilt and shame are a result of the conversion rather than the cause of it.
Feminists don’t have that much funding.
As far as a conversion strategy goes? I haven’t claimed anything thus far, and I wouldn’t like to, because it would just open up another avenue of discussion I’d have to field adversarial questions over.
Seems like we need more research.
From below:
They’re obviously correlated, they’re probably co-temporal, and even if there is a clear temporal relationship, it seems probable that they serve to maintain the new beliefs.
But really, this isn’t a question we can find the answer for in comments on less wrong.
How much funding would it take to at least make some progress towards answering the question, “what causes non-feminists to become feminists” ? If you create a Kickstarter for this purpose, I’ll personally chip in a few bucks.
Again, I’m a little surprised to hear you say that feminists (or, perhaps, just feminist activists) had not made any attempts to answer the question. Yes, their finding is very limited—but doesn’t that fact make it all the more important to discover the most efficient way of spending their limited resources ?
Fair enough, but then, why did you bring up guilt and operant conditioning ?
You’re thinking like a LW reader, not a typical feminist activist (who is also liberal). Most of these people don’t have any background in any science and are more skilled at literature criticism than empiricism.
I don’t think I brought up guilt. Another poster tried to apply a reducto ad absurdum to my arguments and claimed that they lead to all men feeling guilty all the time. I said that I didn’t see a problem with that, and at the time, didn’t elaborate. The implication read from that is that guilt will turn men feminist; while this might be true, the implication I meant to make is that all men are oppressive and all oppressive people should feel guilty about being oppressive. Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
I brought up operant conditioning to apply a buzzword to learning theories of gender, which claim that gendered behavior is learned, possibly by operant conditioning. It was an easy way to communicate to LW commenters that gender is socially constructed—that phrase with a shorter inferential distance is “gender is a product of operant conditioning.”
They should fix those deficiencies forthwith.
Obviously I agree, but I’m only one feminist, and I can only do so much.
This is a thought-provoking sentence. I think I don’t want anyone to feel bad, even when they do bad things.
As for me, I’d say it depends on whether them feeling bad makes them stop doing bad things.
If we’re counting guilt as suffering in an ethically consequential sense—which seems reasonable, since it’s pretty profoundly unpleasant and there’s a pretty clear functional analogy to physical pain—and if that suffering is additive with other kinds, then consequentialists should want people to feel guilt when they do bad things if and only if that guilt eliminates more suffering (of any type) down the road. Don’t know if you’re a consequentialist, but this seems like a good starting point.
In any case, that condition seems like it’s sometimes but not always true. Guilt over immutable or nearly immutable urges seems like a net loss unless those urges are both proportionally destructive and susceptible to conditioned reduction in the average case. Guilt strong enough to be unpleasant but weak enough not to overcome whatever other factors are making people do bad shit is likewise a loss. Interestingly, this seems to indicate that consequentialists should sometimes prefer intense over moderate guilt, unless it’s gratuitously intense relative to what’s needed to stop the behavior: sufficiently disproportionate guilt is also a loss.
The obvious objection to this line of thinking is that certain categories of socially constructed bad shit—not to name names—might stick around if and only if they stay at or above a certain level of prevalence in the population, sort of a memetic equivalent of herd immunity. Since these patterns can persist for an unbounded length of time and cause suffering as long as they do, anything capable of incrementally degrading them could have second-order consequences much larger than its first-order effects, potentially enough to justify any and all related guilt. In this case uncertainties about the problem structure seem to dominate consequential reasoning, much as per Pascal’s Mugging.
In my experience, feelings of guilt coupled with the attitude that it is “immutable”, can be an effective excuse not to fix harmful behavior. It’s a sort of ugh field. When the consequences of the behavior become sufficiently intolerable, one is eventually tempted to hang the guilt and test that supposed immutability.
Sure, that’s a failure mode, and it’s one which—stepping down a level of abstraction—seems prevalent in gender discussions (“I’m $gender, I can’t help it!”). From the inside, it can be pretty hard to distinguish between the motivations you can and can’t change with enough reflection. There’s a loose cultural consensus as to what counts, but at the same time that varies between subcultures and can lead to conflict in its own right: consider the “ex-gay” phenomenon in fundamentalist Christian spheres.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it in context; in my estimation it’s not directly relevant to what we’re discussing upthread. But at the same time I think it’s a mistake to consider our wants entirely plastic; for the time being we’re working with a certain set of hardware, and software changes can only do so much.
Interesting. Does that remain true if you believe that feeling bad when they do bad things makes people less likely to do bad things?
Possibly not. I do think punishments can deter bad actions. But I think this works best when those punishments are clearly described in advance of the crime.
Also, it seems to me that there is a perverse aspect of regret, that it punishes sympathetic malefactors more than it punishes psychopathic ones.
Agreed on both counts.
If feeling bad when they did bad things made people less likely to do bad things, there would be no such thing as akrasia.
Huh. If that isn’t hyperbole, I’m interested in your reasons for believing that.
Of course it is. The point is that we see all around us (that’s another hyperbole), and it is a recurring theme on LessWrong (that isn’t), that people persist in acting, or failing to act, in ways that they “feel bad” about. As a strategy for change, “feeling bad” doesn’t seem to be effective, does it?
“Making someone feel bad”, or “good”, fares even worse—see this parable.
I agree.
I disagree. One of the reasons akrasia is so notable is that feeling bad usually works. Usually touching a hot stove or hit your thumb with a hammer once is enough to change your behavior. Often being mocked by your peers, or sensing genuine disappointment from your mentors, is enough to change your behavior. It’s only in these weird corner cases where opposing strong motivations collide that we notice the unusual inefficacy of bad feelings, and haul out the rational analysis toolkit.
If feeling bad was actually motivational, all of us who currently feel bad about our (present tense) actions would not have such problems.
But doesn’t the same logic lead me to conclude that pain isn’t aversive? (That is: if pain were actually aversive, people wouldn’t do things that cause them pain. People do things that cause them pain, therefore pain is not aversive.)
The problem with that logic as it applies to pain is that pain can be aversive without completely preventing people from doing something. If a behavior B is N% likely ordinarily, and B becomes Y% likely if coupled to pain, and Y < X, that’s evidence for considering pain aversive even though we still do B. Relatedly, if B is always coupled to pain, then I never get to observe X.
Observing a nonzero Y is not evidence that pain is non-aversive.
It seems to me the same reasoning applies to guilt and other kinds of bad feelings. It’s certainly possible that they are non-aversive, but observing a nonzero frequency of the behaviors that cause it isn’t evidence of that.
There may be other evidence, though, which is why I asked Richard his reasons.
Taboo “feeling bad”, keeping in mind that our normal emotional vocabulary is pretty inadequate. (E.g., it seems to me that shame is basically never useful, but guilt and sadness can be.)
Thanks for the taboo request.
I mean I feel X when I’m not being productive. And yet I do not become productive. I have no idea how to taboo qualia like “X”.
Maybe an extensional definition?: That feeling you get when you’ve done something wrong. An uncomfortable and frustruating feeling that makes you feel guilty. A bit like stress.
That’s awfully specific. I wonder how general the non-utility of it is.
And I happen to think that anyone who is trying to make me feel bad about things should be crushed like a bug and their attempts to control through shame disempowered to whatever extent it is convenient to do so.
(I also observe that most people with healthy boundaries will tend to be much more likely to avoid those who are predisposed to attempting to control through guilt or shame.)
You’re eating babies. The wide-eyed idealist points out that eating babies is bad and you are a bad and evil person who must mend his baby-eating ways. You tell the wide-eyed idealist that you refuse to interact with people who try to control you through shame. The wide-eyed idealist thinks for a minute, shrugs, and shoots you.
Did you just create a counterfactual which relies on making me act even more cluelessly naive and banal than the wide eyed idealist?
That’s as meaningless than it is presumptive and inappropriate.
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
Except for the sex-with-echidna part, this sounds vaguely like something that MixedNuts might do!
Rule 34, man. Rule 34. :-)
You have several decent points there, granted.
I feel that your most powerful point is that wide-eyed idealists are poor utility maximizers and poor rationalists.
The second strongest seems to be that a rationalist will (should, but as a rationalist, they do what they should) attempt better approaches, which seems to be quite close to one of wedrifid’s implied point in the grandparent. Was this your intended meaning?
Both of these are true, but I wasn’t talking to the wide-eyed idealist, I was talking to the baby-eater. If you grandstand about how a socially-approved and very mild punishment for doing bad things is Evil Boundary-violating Control, people who care about those bad things are less likely to let you alone than to switch to harsher punishments.
Not necessarily. Wild-eyed idealists, being idealists, are markedly biased towards shaming folks for whatever it is that they consider “bad”. Shaming and guilt-tripping people is not even particularly hard for them, since their whole worldview is often based on these emotions; whereas applying harsher punishments may not even occur to them unless they are rather authoritarian, and it might even be completely infeasible. Thus, reacting assertively is entirely appropriate, at least in the likeliest case.
Which of course begs the question about why you were attacking that particular straw man.
The optimal approach for dealing with enemies who are presumed to have more power than you seems rather irrelevant. Unless the relevance you imply is that radical feminists with an obsession for shame based control already represent a powerful hostile force that we would be foolish to resist? In that case I would of course agree that my words to members of that group would be best served keeping them misinformed about the effectiveness of their strategy of enforcement. All else being equal it tends to be better to keep powerful enemies ineffective.
Okay, my point was that if you accept that people are going to try to control you, it’s rather silly to complain about that means. But apparently you classify all people who attempt to control you as enemies. I suppose that’s a consistent view, and compatible with civilization if you allow control to enforce an agreed-upon set of laws.
But it doesn’t seem to allow for progress. If someone discovers that marital rape is not okay, contrary to mainstream belief, what are they supposed to do? Publishing a paper entitled “Psychological effects of nonconsensual sex between spouses” would count as informing rather than controlling; it would also be vastly less effective than making marital rape illegal, portraying characters who rape their spouses as horrible monsters, and shaming rapists.
If someone tries to control me and I disagree with their position, my answer is not “By attempting to control me you have made yourself my enemy”, but “I don’t agree that bestiality is cruel to animals, so I will fight your attempts to make it unacceptable, but I don’t disapprove of these attempts on principle. For example, I agree with your subargument about indecent exposure, so Knuckles here and I are going to get a room”.
I don’t think this is evident enough to be affirmed without supporting evidence. There’s evidence that such laws and shame-guilt-tripping might be much less effective than publishing a good comprehensive paper.
Prime example: Videogame piracy. Strong IP laws. Massive attempts at guilt-trip and manipulation of mass populace. Observed effect: No measurable effect of the laws and anti-piracy measures, and a continued growth of piracy. The growth is most likely attributable to other causes.
On the flipside, dev companies that have announced that they won’t do anything against piracy have seen considerable advertisement boosts from it and have on average enjoyed much greater success thanks to this.
Not only do I care about what means people use to control me, for any given person asserting that they don’t care what means people use to control them I would be confident in declaring them confused about their own preferences.
No I don’t, and wouldn’t. Why on earth would I give away my power like that? I’ll do whatever I want in response to people attempting to control me including complying with indifference, ignoring them, gaining more social power so that people are unable to or unlikely to make that kind of moves. Some people doing (or being likely to do) certain things would make them enemies but that is rare and implies giving them a significant degree of respect and attention. It doesn’t happen often.
We agree on the first point! I’m saying some means are worse than others, and shame/guilt is one of the best ones.
As Dave pointed out, we need to taboo “enemy”. “This person’s actions are bothering me; I’ll minimize annoyance” is treating the person as your enemy in the sense I was using it. Not treating them as an enemy is “This person is trying to do good, yet their actions aren’t the ones I think are best; I shall update on what they believe, and tell them what I believe so they can do same; if we still disagree, I’ll minimize total annoyance among us both”. If most people are your enemies by that definition, you’re… not typical audience for social justice rhetoric.
Can you taboo “enemy”? I’m not at all convinced it means the same thing throughout this exchange.
Ah, yes. Thanks for making this clear.
This, incidentally, reminds me of the rule of Ko, since I only learned to play Go yesterday. It seems like there’s a meta pattern of the baby-eater becoming the wide-eyed-idealist when you consider the boundary-violating control as the baby-eating and the ball starts bouncing around while both camps conscript soldiers and muster armies and continuously threaten other elements of their opposition while looking for something that invalidates the other’s morality.
Sure. And the other baby-eaters look at that and stop eating babies where the wide-eyed idealist can find out about it, because the idealist has made a credible threat. (A slightly more idealistic idealist might look for nonfatal ways to make a credible threat, but they might not be available.) This happens all the time; much of our civilization is built on it. What’s the problem?
Well, if the wide-eyed idealists are a lot more powerful than the baby-eaters, probably. But if the wide-eyed idealists are less powerful than the baby-eaters, then the baby-eaters may instead be provoked into a war on wide-eyed-idealists, because even if they lose out more in the short term by waging such a war than by putting an end to their baby-eating, they’d be sending the signal that they won’t let extremist minorities dictate values to the majority.
Yup, that’s possible. And if the idealists are more powerful, the baby-eaters might still “be provoked into” (aka “initiate”) a war to make imposing majority preferences too expensive and encourage the majority to accommodate to them. And many other outcomes are possible. Narrating them all might be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, but I’m still not sure what the point is. Were you disagreeing with wedrifid? Can you clarify your disagreement if so?
EDIT: Whoops! I just noticed you’re not the same poster. Never mind, then...
Fair enough. Sad, but fair :-/
That’s a fascinating discussion topic in and of itself, but it might be out of scope for the current thread. That said:
Some LWers explicitly deny this statement; they might say, “feeling bad doesn’t solve anything in and of itself, since actions matter more than words”, or “feeling bad about things one absolutely cannot control is counterproductive”, or some combination thereof. It’s probably not a good idea to assume that the views of LWers will align with those of the general population, as far as morality is concerned. I could be wrong, however.
Ah, understood, thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure whether operant conditioning alone is enough to account for gender, but I don’t know enough psychology to make a credible claim one way or another.
Indeed.
I think that learning accounts for gender. Whether that learning originates in modeling, operant conditioning, or observational learning is irrelevant to me.
As I asked you on a different thread, how do you know whether this is true ? If you were to ask me that question, I would say, “let’s go out and run a bunch of experiments”, but you have explicitly stated that doing so would be sexist, so… now what ?
There’s one experiment in particular that I advocate—the destruction of patriarchy.
Your current worldview seems to be unfalsifiable without very expensive experiments. (How would you even know if patriarchy had been destroyed anyway?) Maybe we’re doing this backwards. What caused you to become a feminist? What evidence could you have encountered that would have made you a non-feminist?
This is an assertion I’ve heard made a lot by people outside biology and I’d like to hammer it out with somebody who seems well informed.
On what basis can we make this assertion? Biology obviously contributes in a physical sense (people with male gender tend not to have wombs). I assume what you mean is that there are no inherent neurological differences in males versus females. But how can we know that? We have a strong prior (other animals) and lots of circumstantial evidence that it should be true.
I think feminism ought to acknowledge at least the possibility of inherent male-female differences with a simple “so fucking what”. For instance I think that physical abuse of women, by men, probably represents an adaptive, ancestral behavior caused (amongst other things) by inherent neurological differences in men and women. That doesn’t excuse it. We can and have made great progress in conditioning men not to hit women, and hopefully will continue to do so.
My introduction to social justice (as a whole) was through the lens of intersex conditions (wherein people with ambiguous genitalia are assigned a gender at birth, most often female because the surgery is easier). A major problem was that raising male children as female or vice versa ends up causing psychological problems.
The main [unethical] case study was a pair of identical male twins, one of whose penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision, and then got female reassignment surgery, grew up very confused and depressed and eventually committed suicide. (Other case studies are less clear cut but generally indicative of the same problem, not to mention transgender people). Gender clearly has a biological component.
It also does clearly have a environmental component, and I don’t know where those elements interrelate, but ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
...or the knowledge of that child’s parents, doctors, and everyone around him lead to them (the adults) treating that child as a freak rather than a woman.
One of the ideas I like in radical feminism is that masculinity is very much defined by the ability to impregnate women (one of the reasons why intersex infants are virtually always assigned female). Conversely, femininity is defined by the ability to be impregnated. Seeing as this child could do neither, and their caregivers knew that, I would hardly expect this child to have typical gender socialization.
The only experiment that could demonstrate this to my satisfaction is a double-blind study where infants are adopted by parents that know only that infant’s current assigned gender, and nothing else.
This is the fallacy of gray.
So what is your opinion on transpeople?
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.
If social learning accounts for gender, what causes gender differences among animals? If your answer is that they don’t have gender in the same sense, what exactly do you mean by gender?
Bias in the humans observing them.
But even then, there aren’t gender differences among animals to anywhere near the degree to which there supposedly are in humans. Do female chimpanzees get paid less than male coworkers? Do they wear pink more so than men?
A lot of your claims sound considerably less crazy now. If the comments still existed, I’d suggest edits.
Operant conditioning is notoriously bad at getting creatures to have behaviors that will adapt to changing environments, so is unlikely to be a significant part of the cause of gender behavior.
I said this literally days ago, and have been saying it the entire time I have been having this discussion.
“Operant conditioning” was introduced into this discussion by me, in a comment that says “I think that learning (operant conditioning, modeling, and observational learning) is the cause of gender.”
Have you come into this discussion after those comments were deleted? Or did you never read them?
If you want other people to avoid having the same experience you did, upvote my comments. EY messaged me earlier today saying he was deleting any downvoted posts, which are primarily mine.
FWIW, I do not think that. I would like people doing bad things to stop doing those things. “Feeling bad” is (I believe) never useful: not to the person having the feeling, and not to anyone else.
Having decided that it’s a bad idea for me to continue discussing things with eridu, it might be better for me to avoid discussing the same things with people who are currently engaged in conversation with him. But I think that in this case we have a substantive disagreement.
I think that not only is people feeling bad a powerful moderator of our behavior, and one that it’s useful for other people to know we have, I think deliberately making people feel bad about their actions can be a useful way to motivate them to change their behavior in positive ways. Ideally, nobody should have to feel bad, but then, ideally, nobody should be doing bad things either.
To draw an available example, Ghandi’s efforts to gain independence for India rested almost entirely on making the British colonialists feel bad about themselves, and while giving up their possession of India might have been an economic inevitability, he certainly accelerated it.
I think eridu is overgeneralizing the usefulness of imposing guilt on others though. It appears to me that in order to modify others’ behavior by encouraging them to feel guilty, you need to start with people who have an existing set of moral standards (ones by which they actually operate not simply ones they profess,) which they are not applying in a particular case, and make them feel intuitively that this is a case where they should be applying those standards. For instance, the British citizens mostly had moral standards against attacking civilized, non-resisting people with clubs. If they saw Indian people behaving in a civilized, nonthreatening manner, and being beaten with clubs for challenging colonial rule, the British citizens are going to feel guilty without needing further incitement. On the other hand, if you try to encourage people to feel guilty for, say, stopping women from having abortions, and appeal to them on principles of autonomy, it won’t work because they don’t relate it to anything else they would feel guilty about. You can tell them why they should, but they aren’t going to intuitively put either “women” or “abortion” into a new reference class that completes a preexisting basis for guilt.
I’m not sure whether it’s a separate principle, or an extension of this one, that trying to get people to modify their behavior too radically by appealing to guilt will also backfire. For instance, you can appeal to someone that a consistent application of their principles would lead to them giving away nearly all their money to charity, but most people don’t have preexisting models for guilt whereby they will feel guilty for not giving away nearly everything they own. They can be guilted into “doing their part,” make some contribution, and stop feeling guilty, but if they judge that the person encouraging them to feel guilty is asking too much of them, then they’ll try to avoid the person trying to make them feel guilty, rather than the behaviors that person is trying to encourage them to change.
I suspect the banhammer may be looming over all of this, or the karmic penalty for being under the same bridge as the troll, as eridu’s last ancestor comment has vanished, but I’ll just briefly refer to this reply of mine to eridu, and take up the following:
Bingo. People have these fantasies of being able to reach into other people’s heads and tweak some switches to make them do what they (the ones tweaking) want, but things just don’t work like that. People have their own purposes, and nothing you can do to them is any more than a disturbance to those purposes. What they will do to get what they want in spite of someone else’s meddling will not necessarily resemble, even slightly, what the meddler wanted. See also Goodhart’s law.
How would you like this to occur?
To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike? The (bad feeling of) fear of getting caught? The (bad feeling of) remorse from taking a human’s life?
Or do you really think you’re a Hollywood rationalist, making a cold and precise computation of negative utility as a result of your potential action, and choosing another path?
Like the other poster who said roughly the same thing as you, you seem entirely ignorant to the massive amount of bad feelings present in reality, and the usefulness of those feelings. Nowhere in the fun theory sequence does EY advocate getting rid of bad feelings, and in fact EY argues against that.
The possibility that they could still contain potential for improving paperclip production (to the extent that that is true).
I’m happy to have one of the most well-loved LW celebrities respond to a post I made!
In the counterfactual world where you did murder someone you disliked, and later found that they were planning on instigating paperclip production, how would you feel out of “good” or “bad”?
Of course, maybe you don’t have something you call “feelings,” but rather think of things purely in terms of expected paperclips. Humans, on the other hand, have difficulty thinking strictly in terms of expected paperclips, but rather learn to associate expected paperclips with good feelings, and negative expected paperclips with bad feelings.
In humans, we have a set of primitive mental actions (like feelings, intuitions, and similar system-one things) that we can sometimes compose into more sophisticated ones (like computing expected paperclips yielded by an action).
As such, you can always say “I wouldn’t kill someone I disliked because I might feel regret for taking a life,” or “I wouldn’t kill someone I disliked because I would be imprisoned and unable to accomplish my goals,” but ultimately, all those things boil down to the general explanation of “feeling bad.”
“Feeling bad” is the default human state of not accomplishing their goal.
(As an aside, this is why I think that you, clippy, can be said to have emotions like humans—because I don’t think there’s a difference between your expectation of negative paperclips as a result of a possible future event and fear or dread, nor do I think there’s a difference between a realization that you created fewer paperclips and sadness, loss, or regret.)
Thank you again for replying, Clippy—I’ll go down to my supply room at my earliest convenience and take most of the paperclips as a token for me to remember this interaction, and in the process, causing my employer to purchase paperclips sooner, raising demand and thus causing more paperclips to be produced.
Thanks for buying more paperclips, you’re a good human.
To answer your question, if I entropized a human and later found out that the human had contained information or productive power that would have, on net, been better for paperclip production, I will evaluate the reasoning that led me to entropize that human, and if I find that I can improve heuristics in a way that will avoid such killings without also preventing a disproportoinate amount of papeclip production, then I will implement that improvement.
I suppose that is just a difference between us. Not a disagreement, but a difference: you are one way and I am another.
You think of disliking someone and ask, what stops you murdering them?
I think of disliking someone and ask (and only because of your question), what would start me murdering them?
Number of days since casual murder was used in a discussion on LessWrong: 0.
None of the above.
(BTW, the Star Trek novels, at least the ones I have read, paint a far more creditable and credible version of Vulcan rationality than the TV shows and films. Vulcans do not suppress their feelings, but master them. A tradition in the real world with multiple long pedigrees. And a shorter one.)
I am well aware of them. But I think people often misinterpret what they are. As I revised my original comment to say, negative feelings tell you something. What matters is to do something about it. All that stuff about negative reinforcement and feelings conceived as similar to physical forces that push you and pull you into doing stuff is fairy tales, fantasies of non-agency. (Which pop up all over the place, not just in BDSM. Strange.)
“Making someone feel bad” is even more of a fairy tale. How do you “make someone feel bad”? What will happen if you try? Here is one person’s hypothetical reaction, and here is the basic problem with the idea.
I’m pretty sure HPMoR already took a dive into this point, in a manner I found sufficiently eloquent to expose the moral nihilism and/or philosophical egocentrism required for the first to occur.
Are you talking about the same things?
(If you haven’t read HPMoR, darn. I was hoping it would provide a speed boost to that line of philosophical reasoning.)
I’ve read HPMoR, but not studied it—which chapter?
I fail to recall the specifics at the moment, but I’ll look for the passage (with better search tools) once I get home in a few hours.
Agency is the fantasy.
That isn’t putting it another way, it’s a different question entirely.
Is that what stops you murdering (more) people? Remorse? Who did you kill last time?
As for me, the fact that if murdering somebody one dislikes were right, then one would have to be extra careful to never be disliked by anybody (if one doesn’t want to be killed), and that would be a lot nastier than people one dislikes staying alive. (Yes, that would make no sense to CDTists, but people aren’t CDTists anyway.)
How do you feel about possibly being murdered?
I’m not sure I understand your question. I’d prefer to not be murdered rather than to be murdered, all other things being equal; are you asking anything else?
I’m asking how you feel about possibly being murdered. You know, emotions. It’s a simple question.
Because if “I don’t want to be murdered because by TDT-style rhetoric it leads to my being more likely to be murdered,” and if you feel bad about being murdered, you abstain from murdering people because you feel bad.
This relates to the above statement:
If you do not murder people because you would feel bad, feeling bad is useful.
I think this is a trivial point, and if I started this discussion on a different topic, it would be trivially accepted by most of the people currently arguing against it.
Feeling bad is one of the reasons why I don’t do certain things, but not the only one. If I’m convinced something that would make me feel bad would also have desirable consequences that would outweigh that (even considering ethical injunctions, TDT-related considerations, etc.), I try to overcome my emotional hang-up (using precommitment devices, drinking alcohol, etc., if necessary) and do that anyway.
It was a denotative simple question attempting to assert a non-sequitur rhetorical point.
That doesn’t follow.
Nonsense. Your reasoning is well below the standard expected around here. It may pass elsewhere but only because anything with “boo murder” in it is too hard to argue with regardless of the standards of the content.
Well, let me spell it out even more so than I already have.
Preferences are system 2 concepts.
Over time, system 2 concepts map to system 1 concepts.
As such, if you prefer ice cream to spinach, you will feel bad (in a system 1 sense) if you are promised ice cream but given spinach.
In humans, as such, any preference against a thing means that human feels bad about that thing.
Arguing about the choice of something that represents the LW concept of negative utility in a hypothetical example is equivalent to arguing about grammar.
Let A(X) be a function such that X.Consciousness becomes terminated (ends, dies, etc.)
I have a preference for NOT A(me).
Over time, the above maps to Feel Bad → A(me)
As such, if I am offered NOT A(me), and given A(me), I will feel bad because I attempt to be reflectively coherent.
As such, my preference for NOT A(me) does, as you claim, imply that I ought to feel bad about A(me).
The above are intended as a rephrasing of your statements, and I fully agree.
However…
You are making the subsequent conclusion that I have:
Feel Bad → A( X | X.isElementOf(people) )
because I have preference for NOT A(me).
wedrifid correctly asserts that this does not follow.
If I’m reading it right I don’t think your formalism fits what I’m trying to argue, but this is a boring point and I’m not terribly interested in taking it further.
“That doesn’t follow” does not mean “I cannot understand your argument”. It means that the argument was fundamentally logically flawed and your reasoning confused.
Some people might feel bad. Others would feel amused (and, incidentally, many would personally develop themselves such that they are more inclined to feel positive than negative emotions in that kind of situation). Most importantly, system 1 refers to a heck of a lot more than emotions. Even system 1 based decisions to avoid something don’t translate to ‘feeling bad’ about it. Especially in people who are mature or experienced.
No it doesn’t.
Irrelevant.
I dispute both your first and your second bullet point. As far as I know there exist both system 1 and system 2 preferences, and it’s not clear that system 2 concepts usually bridge the gap. Can you give some examples or evidence?
Are you using ‘never’ in a figurative sense here? Seeing the absolute claim like that prompted me to think of a whole list of real world counter-examples despite me probably mostly agreeing with your position. (For a start, making people feel bad is useful in nearly all cases in which breaking someone’s finger is useful. Maintaining dominance, keeping oppressed people oppressed, provoking an enemy into taking hasty reactions against you that you believe you can win, short term coercement. Making others believe that you have the power to do harm to another without them having any recourse. That kind of thing. That’s before thinking up the cases where actual respectable, decent sounding outcomes could arise—those are rare but do occur.)
I would write “seldom” instead of “never”.
That is something I find a standard but rather annoying geek conversational failure. You could simply have answered your own question:
with “yes”. But “figurative” does not really capture it. All apparently absolute generalisations are relative to their context. Are there substantial exceptions relevant to the context?
Now, on further consideration I might indeed revise my original statement, but not in any of the directions you explore. Feeling bad—that is, having feelings that one does not want—is useful to precisely this extent: it informs you that something is wrong; that there is a conflict somewhere. The useful response to this is find where the conflict is and do something about it. Nothing else is useful about the feeling.
Days since someone used torture to illustrate an argument: 0.
I prefer to write “never” instead of “seldom”. “Seldom” and other such qualifiers too easily protect what one is saying behind a fog of vagueness. It allows one to move one’s soldiers around like the pieces of a sliding-block puzzle, so that wherever the enemy attacks, one can say “Ha! Fooled you! Never said that! Nobody there! Try again!”
Not so. Some reasons:
Psychologist Richard J. Davidson has shown that the affective trait Resilience (speedy recovery from bad feelings) becomes maladaptive when extremely high, as it interferes with empathy.
Almost all judicial systems have concluded that remorse helps avoid recidivism in criminals. (I’m opposed to remorse-based sentencing—but not based on its being irrelevant.)
For better or worse, judicial systems buying into an empirical proposition is not very strong evidence that the proposition is true.
See, I could believe all of this if someone, not necessarily without a personal stake in the subject, but someone who I had good reason to believe held reasonable standards for honesty, were claiming it with reference to studies to support key points (is instilling causing subjects to mentally punish themselves with guilt an effective way to extinguish patriarchy-related behaviors? I’m inclined to be skeptical given my observations about guilt in other contexts, but given a well conducted study supporting that conclusion I’d accept it.)
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?”
I’d hate to make this conversation more adversarial, because I think you’ve done a better job than most people would of keeping things civil in a discussion of a highly personal issue where everyone else in the discussion disagrees with you, but I really think you’ve failed to account for how much that sort of thing hurts your position.
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).