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.
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.