If you are a non-feminist heterosexual man, every relationship you have ever had with a woman has existed within a framework of social control.
As such, you have exerted that power and control over her, in ways you are not aware of, nearly constantly.
This power and control, in individually notable cases, is the hallmark of abusive relationships. Patriarchy normalizes this power and control, making every relationship abusive.
(This is only one example, and it might not apply to you since you might be a typical lesswrong foreveralone, or queer in some way, but it is a good example of the feminist-101 response you’re asking me for. In the future, just google it if you’re serious about wanting to learn, and if you just want to sarcastically express your outgroup hatred, save us both some time and just downvote me.)
You are using way to many fuzzy labels and dancing the rhetorical category shuffle far too vigorously. Taboo your words and explain why a relationship between a man and a woman is bad in the same sense that archetypal case of physical abuse is bad.
The fact that there is power and control is a red herring if everyone is happy with the arrangement and no one is getting their teeth punched out.
I’m surprised to see that feminist heterosexual men are implied to be able to escape the framework of social control. Either way I’ve always considered myself a feminist in ways that you probably find insufficient. For starters it seems to me that the more feminist the society the higher standard of living it roughly seems to have (e.g. Scandinavia better than rest of Northern Europe, which is better than Southern Europe, which is better than the Arab world, which is better than subSaharan Africa) -- so that’s a significant plus in favour of feminism, after all.
I’m not immediately dismissive to the idea of destroying gender, but I highly disbelieve that it’s completely a social concept. I think we’ll have to destroy it biologically if we actually want to see it destroyed.
For starters it seems to me that the more feminist the society the higher standard of living it roughly seems to have (e.g. Scandinavia better than rest of Northern Europe, which is better than Southern Europe, which is better than the Arab world, which is better than subSaharan Africa) -- so that’s a significant plus in favour of feminism, after all.
For starters it seems to me that the more feminist the society the higher standard of living it roughly seems to have (e.g. Scandinavia better than rest of Northern Europe, which is better than Southern Europe, which is better than the Arab world, which is better than subSaharan Africa) -- so that’s a significant plus in favour of feminism, after all.
And that’s if you didn’t forget C through Z which all also correlate with B to varying degrees, or A_a through A_z which all fall under A and better explain B than simply A. Or maybe it was a combination of A, D, F, G, and Z that caused B. And so on and so on. The difficulty of finding causation scales with the complexity of the system directly encompassing the cause, and that makes finding significant evidence for causation from correlations like those mentioned by ArisKatsaris very hard.
On a practical level, we have to use something to evaluate the worth of political and social beliefs/movements/structures, and pure logic alone doesn’t seem to work out okay regarding this.
Seeing whether they correlate in practice with healthy and prosperous populations seems a much better method of judgment.
As such, you have exerted that power and control over her
This is a weird use of “exert”, seeing as it is not based on any actions, choices or feelings on the man’s part, but is merely ascribed on the basis of him being “non-feminist” (by which standard?).
Any individual male may well be affected by a wide variety of biases that may impact his relationships with women in ways that he is not aware of, but you have not provided any detailed argument for this. Stereotyping and denying individual choice/agency do not an argument make.
The word control is being use idiosyncratically. In a certain sense, everyone exerts control over everyone in ways that are not examined self-reflexively. Consider the gym teacher’s expectations of the quality of your physical activity during gym class.
I assert that the idiosyncratic usage more accurately cuts the world at its joints. The current usage persists because certain segments of society benefit from the status quo and therefore ridicule suggestion to be more self-reflexive. Consider the standard mainstream responses to a post like “Buy your Utiles and Warm-Fuzzies Seperately.”
P.S. It doesn’t reflect well on advocates of social change when they don’t note their idiosyncratic definitions. I urge you to rise about it and Steel-Man your interlocutors.
The word control is being use idiosyncratically. In a certain sense, everyone exerts control over everyone in ways that are not examined self-reflexively.
The problem was not with the word “control”, but with the word “exert”. eridu claimed that, for example, I exert power and control over my wife, without any information other than that I am “non-feminist” (by eridu’s definition of “feminist”). This is strange, as I would not normally say that X exerts Y in the absence of any information about in what ways X might be exerting oneself.
It seems as though eridu is routinely overgeneralizing and denying differences between individuals. It’s effectively the same problem as gender discrimination, in a different context.
It seems as though eridu is routinely overgeneralizing and denying differences between individuals. It’s effectively the same problem as gender discrimination, in a different context.
Honestly, I can’t tell if eridu is poor at articulating a position I agree with or actually believes a position that I reject. He’s certainly treating arguments like soldiers (which is bad).
I think eridu’s suggested changes have low-hanging fruit that will obviate the need for more extreme changes. He is getting a lot more hostile feedback than his position deserves.
Honestly, I can’t tell if eridu is poor at articulating a position I agree with or actually believes a position that I reject. He’s certainly treating arguments like soldiers (which is bad).
Arguments are soldiers. Regardless of how ideal Bayesian AIs would treat arguments as non-soldiers, to humans, arguments are soldiers, and I care about humans.
But yes, if you don’t think that the day-to-day actions of men produce patriarchy in the same way four fingers, a thumb and a palm produce a hand, we disagree.
I agree that people act to reinforce social norms all the time, every day. But there are facts. If it turns out that men should not be primary care-givers of children because men, but not women, have a 5% chance of murderous rage when caring for children, society is morally justified in taking that fact into account.
But if a scientist reported that finding as an experimental result, they’re failed to be properly empirical (given all the other evidence that exists for this question).
You’re failing to be a good rationalist, because you’re putting some ideal form of “rationalism” over winning in your political struggle. If you have a goal you wish to accomplish, and you choose not to because that would “treat arguments as soldiers,” your self-image as the sort of Bayesian monk EY depicts has conflicted with your struggle, and you’ve become your own enemy.
Rationalism itself does not preclude “treating arguments as soldiers” within an adversarial debate (most political debates are adversarial). It just cautions aganst doing this within individual deliberation or public deliberative-like processes, where truth-seeking efficiency is an instrumental goal. Nevertheless, the social norms of LessWrong do discourage (1) political discussion, as well as (2) “treating argument as soldiers” in any discussion, be it political or otherwise.
One interpretation of TimS’ behavior is that he places a higher value on following LW’s established social norms than he does on promoting his political cause. Alternately, he may believe that flaunting the norms of LW would be mostly unhelpful to his political advocacy.
The following links represent the as-yet-best summary of the sources of my beliefs on this matter. I think they can make a better argument than I can in this comment.
To put it another way, men are conditioned (as in operant conditioning) to emit certain behavior patterns, and womyn are conditioned to respond to those behavior patterns in a certain way.
As such, the expression of learned behavior in men is the day-to-day perpetuation of patriarchy. The fact that no man wakes up thinking “Today I’m going to perpetuate the patriarchy” doesn’t change that.
Further, the fundamental concept of social psychology is that individual choice barely exists, and agency is a superpower.
Nice. It seems that we no longer have a wholly unfalsifiable and meaningless argument. You are now resorting to the old trope that “we” are fully rational and conscious individuals who use reason to actualize ourselves and achieve our moral values, whereas “they” are mindless sheeple whose individual potential is neutralized by force, coercion or pervasive social pressure. I suppose that this counts as progress, in a way.
You failed to answer the question. You claimed that some men, and ArisKatsaris in particular, own women’s bodies. ArisKatsaris was asking which woman’s body he or she owns, since he or she was not aware of this fact and would like to make use of his or her property.
That was also neither a helpful answer to the original question, nor a meaningful response to my comment.
Note: If you use a lmgtfy link, then you’re being a jerk. It might be acceptable in the context where someone asks a question that is directly answerable by Google, like “What is a dictionary?” (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define:dictionary) because you’re legitimately teaching the person a useful skill, albeit in a snarky fashion. But either way, it is rude, and jerkitude is not the appropriate sort of discourse for this site.
I wasn’t planning on making the full pluge into sex-radical feminsm, but yes, in general all heterosexual relationships are patriarchal and while I wouldn’t use the term abusive, I would certain say coercive or anti-feminst.
in general all heterosexual relationships are patriarchal...coercive or anti-feminst.
Comments—The Worst Argument in the World
Can you taboo some of those terms? I can’t tell what you are saying. Are you saying that hetero relationships usually have the man taking the “captain” role? (I agree with that). Are you saying that’s bad when you call it “coercive and antifeminist”? Can you explain that, because it’s not obvious.
Using an idiosyncratic (and better) definition of coercive:
All sex is coercive.
All employment is coercive.
There’s nothing better about feminist men having sex with women, women having sex with women, or men having sex with men. There’s an element of coercion in all of it. It is a respectable position to say that sex and rape are differences in degree, not differences in kind.
None of that justifies saying that “sex is bad” any more than it justifies saying the “employment is bad.” Applying a guilt trip on men without concrete steps on what they can do to improve is counter-productive from an advocacy perspective.
In other words, if you can’t distinguish between coercive and abusive, you aren’t paying attention.
what is the purpose of making people feel guilty? Is it to spur them into corrective action? or is it just sadistic submission-seeking? Without some suggested correction (as TimS requested), guilt is a rather empty and useless concept.
No. If I can’t be happy until everything is good, then I can’t expect to feel happy ever. At that point, I give up on trying to make things better because I hate anyone who’d try to make me that unhappy.
I would endorse “never feel guilty because it never helps”—but we really are causal factors in the way our society is shaped, even if we aren’t proximate causes of everything.
Because everyone is culpable, it is bad tactics to single out a subset for the guilt trip—assuming one’s goal is to change the wrong society is committing.
I don’t think I’m culpable for everything society does, so I will automatically assume anyone who says I am is prone to making obviously false statements about that sort of thing; that doesn’t sound like they are using good tactics either. Also, it is not the case that the only alternative to “everyone should be guilty” is “this singled-out subset here should go on a guilt trip”.
Some of this is a disguised argument about the word “culpable.” For basically everyone, there’s always something more one could do to solve problem X. I don’t claim that is a particularly insightful or compelling statement.
I think guilt trips are often (basically always) a tactical mistake. But this is particularly true when one’s selection criteria for who to shame suggests that one is being disingenuous. Or that one picked the target first and the complaint second.
I honestly think that I want transformations just as radical as eridu in the area of social norms and gender. It turns out that I just have different terminal values. For the benefit of bystanders (such as yourself), I’m trying to make it clear that the degree of desired transformation is not determinative of the intended destination.
I think this whole guilt business is useless. Heroic responsibility seems the correct way to deal with things.
“What are you going to do about it? That’s the only question you get to answer.”
If I look upon the world and see oppression and see that it is bad, I should see what I can do to make that situation better, see if it’s an easier line of utility-creating than other plans, and then go about doing it.
Along the way I might consider the strategy of allocating guilt between myself and other people, but doing that, I really ought to understand that guilt is being used instrumentally to get people to do things, and is otherwise not interesting.
(this is more directed at the whole guilt discussion than specifically your comment)
Your response explains why you would want everyone to feel guilty rather than a subgroup, but does not adequately explain why you would want everyone to feel guilty rather than no one. I do infer from your response that you believe that feelings of guilt will help to change the wrong society is committing more than their absence.
I would ask what you mean by culpable that does not have the same problems as guilt. (I guess you mean responsibility in some sense?)
But instead, since you bring up that this may need more tabooing, can you explain what you think you and other people who seek to do good things should do about some bad thing happening, and why that’s the best approach?
To kick it off, I hold that [guilt, responsibility, culpability, etc] are features of a badly flawed social/moral protocol that may not be applicable or optimal in this (or any) case. I think moral agents like me and you and anyone else who cares should go back to first principles and derive the correct behavior, which may or may not be [guilt, etc].
The process I (and other instances of the moral process that I represent) should use goes like this: Observe bad things, notice that fixing bad things is a good way to do a good thing, look for my specific leverage in this case, which might be:
ceasing some antisocial behaviour or doing some direct object level intervenion
attempting to spread awareness of the problem to my other instances
attempting to inspire prosocial behavior by hacking the guilt system in humans (as you are doing)
attempting to create more instances of myself by spreading this go-back-to-first-principles idea (as I am doing here)
something else
Whatever Is best out of that, I should evaluate against other interventions in other areas (like getting back to work at making money to donate to SI) to see if it is the easiest way to produce utility. Then I should do whatever is the best.
This process is best because it derives directly from first principles of decision theory, which are known to work quite well.
What do you think of that? If you are in fact doing intervention #3, as you seem to be, you could be a bit more conscious of it and open about it being consequentialist-instrumental and not deontological.
To answer the question I think I can answer—The way to change social norms is to perform the social norm you would like instead, in violation of the established norms.
This requires very sophisticated understanding of what the current norms are. If you partially violate a norm, that can sometimes strengthen the norm. Sometimes, apparently unrelated norms reinforce each other. Sometimes, the norm is just too strong and you end up being rejected from the community.
I’m confused about how you create a moral system with a concept of responsibility, but I suffer from the obvious bias that my moral system has “responsibility” as a foundational concept.
To answer the question I think I can answer—The way to change social norms is to perform the social norm you would like instead, in violation of the established norms.
So #1 on my list. OK.
This requires very sophisticated understanding of what the current norms are. If you partially violate a norm, that can sometimes strengthen the norm. Sometimes, apparently unrelated norms reinforce each other. Sometimes, the norm is just too strong and you end up being rejected from the community.
This is scary. Have any advice for how to model the situation correctly such that I don’t do something counterproductive?
I’m confused about how you create a moral system with[out] a concept of responsibility, but I suffer from the obvious bias that my moral system has “responsibility” as a foundational concept.
I must say I am just as baffled by you. I guess you could say I subscribe to the consequentialist heroic responsibility idea that all instances of myself are ultimately “responsible” for everything that goes on in the universe, in the sense that there is nothing that is “not my responsibility”. Then the interesting question is “where can I do the most good for the things I am responsible for?”, not “what am I responsible for?”
I think having responsibility as fundamental creates a problem where you sometimes mark yourself as “not responsible” for something you could do a lot to fix, or mark yourself as “responsible” for something you can’t affect.
creates a problem where you sometimes mark yourself as “not responsible” for something you could do a lot to fix
I agree that this is fundamentally what is occurring with most society-level injustices. Not sure why you think this is more likely a problem for my ethical structure than yours. Mostly likely the misunderstanding is on my end.
Can all deontologists be dutch booked? Then it means something other than what I’m thinking of. (unless I’m confused. I haven’t though this thru)
Not all consequentialists choose torture either. (in duck specks I assume). Pretty sure all utilitarians do tho.
The way I’m using those words is essentially consequentialism=expected utility maximization with a utility function that does not prescribe specific behaviours or thought patterns. and deontologism=holding some non-EU set of ethical/behavioural rules as fundamental (usally stuff like “moral duty to do X in Y situation” and whatnot)
As far as I can tell, everyone who thinks suffering is additive is obligated to choose torture. Only if one denies that suffering can always be compared in an additive way is one free to reject torture and choose specks.
That means one’s evaluations of degree of suffering inherently have a discontinuity somewhere. Thus, one is vulnerable to being dutch-booked/money-pumped by a sufficiently powerful and cruel adversary.
If this discussion about the possible additive nature of suffering/utility is alien to one’s moral reasoning, one might be able to escape the dilemma.
I’m not sure I understand why you use the word “discontinuity” here. In mathematical language, it’s easy to have a continuous function of perpetually-rising value that never reaches a certain value—just put an asymptote.
If instances of dust specks are being counted in this manner, it’s pretty easy to have the asymptote always be inferior to the torture-time.
...but I’m probably misunderstanding part of the discussion, on second thought.
Let me get this right. Currently, if I’m following this correctly, I’m being told that I ought to feel guilty for controlling women, despite the verifiable (and falsifiable, I think) belief I hold that it is a fact that I have never behaved in the alleged patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious manners towards women which I am being accused of in higher parent comments, and that I have always done my best not to behave in such a manner and to behave in an optimal-expected-happiness manner that values happiness equally for all members of a relationship?
Sorry about the long complicated sentence, I’m having a hard time expressing this in simpler ways.
I have never behaved in the alleged patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious manners towards women which I am being accused of
No. By eridu’s argument, this is a category error. Nothing about your behavior, beliefs etc. could have changed the fact that you are ‘oppressing’ people, for some meaning of ‘oppression’. Your status as “patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious, etc.” is simply ascribed, in a quasi-tautological way.
Yes, I do think this is “The Worst² Argument in the World”. It basically amounts to dogma-based emotional manipulation.
Well… a slightly more charitable way to represent eridu’s argument, IMO, would be something like this:
“I believe that you are sincere in your belief that you have never engaged in these nefarious behaviors which you’d just enumerated. Nonetheless, you do engage in many such behaviors, not because you are some mustachio-twirling villain, but because you see such behaviors as normal or even beneficial. You say that you have always done your best to avoid such actions, and I believe you, but your best simply isn’t good enough”.
Keeping in mind that my accusations and eridu’s would differ—it is always the case that you could do more. As I said, this is not a particularly interesting or compelling argument.
Almost all social behaviors reinforce the social norms to some extent. Sort of like Eliezer’s discussion of wearing the clown suit (which I can’t find just this moment).
No, TimS is asserting that you, and the rest of the humans, should feel guilty for living in a society where bad things systematically happen to people. This is at least in part because feeling guilty will motivate you to transform society into one in which those things don’t happen.
Also, gender might be relevant somehow—I’m slightly unclear on that part.
I think that is a fake justification for feeling guilt. I very much doubt that search setting out to find the optimal way to mobilize humanity against oppression would spit out “make everyone feel guilty”, when that also happens to be the output of the badly flawed moral feelings system.
Yes, I’m highly doubtful on the value of guilt trips as a tactical tool. I’m have this vague meta (and therefore mostly pointless) discussion about my frustrations about eridu’s tactics and goals—and the rest of y’all are taking me seriously on the object level.
Ceteris paribus, it is better to not feel guilty and to do better whenever you find a better way to do things, than to feel guilty and do better whenever you find a better way to do things, IMO. By that logic, I can in good conscience never feel guilty about the world I live in despite correcting for scope insensitivity, and thus still survive and not break down in a fit of guilt overload that would lead to suicide despite aware knowledge of all the horrible stuff that happens all the time.
the verifiable (and falsifiable, I think) belief I hold that it is a fact that I have never behaved in the alleged patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious manners towards women which I am being accused of in higher parent comments, and that I have always done my best not to behave in such a manner and to behave in an optimal-expected-happiness manner that values happiness equally for all members of a relationship?
If you haven’t read a lot of radical feminism and gone through a long process of unlearning patriarchy, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates the patriarchy. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of feminism (even liberal feminism will work for this, I suggest starting with bell hooks and building up to some Dworkin) and reflect on your past behavior.
And yes, if you perpetuate the patriarchy, you should feel guilty. I might get to explain why later, but I’m getting downvoted so often that I can only respond once every few minutes, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I do, it’ll be higher in this thread.
If you haven’t read a lot of biblical literature and gone through a long process of unlearning your Fallen and sinful nature, and accepting Jesus as your Lord and savior, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates sin in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the Bible (even modern translations of the Bible will work for this, I suggest starting with the Gospel of John and building up to some Letters from Paul) and reflect on your past behavior.
And yes, if you perpetuate sinfulness, you should feel guilty. I might get to explain why later, but I’m getting downvoted so often that I can only respond once every few minutes, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I do, it’ll be higher in this thread.
I mean, I don’t have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be “If you haven’t read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature on heuristics and biases (even frequentism will work for this....”
This sort of superficial pattern-matching proves nothing. It really is true that most people who don’t put effort into improving beyond the cultural baseline are most likely perpetuating the irrational biases of their culture, even if they think they’re thinking perfectly clearly; the fact that it pattern-matches your bit about the Bible doesn’t change that.
No, the bit that pattern-matches is that “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege” and the like have no consistent definition, just like “sinfulness”. Also, rationalists don’t try to guilt-trip you into overcoming your biases and becoming more rational (unless you count some of the efficient-charity advocacy as akin to guilt-tripping). It really is a pseudo-religious argument.
(nods) If your comment had been clearer about your objection being to the ill-defined nature of key terms and to the use of guilt as a means of manipulating behavior, I would not have reacted as I did. But that was far from clear.
Mmm. I sympathize, but I don’t think this is likely to be very helpful; as this blog post by Yvain mentions, the Courtier’s Reply is a lot less obviously fallacious than it might naively seem. That is, it’s generally unlikely to convince anyone that’s not unusually vulnerable to an argument from authority, but there are situations where it’s appropriate too.
I’m not sure what Yvain’s proposed solution might indicate in this context, though. It seems likely to me that estimations of who’s being “smart and rational” here are so closely bound to political tribalism that reading works on gender by people you already admire would tend to reinforce existing beliefs more than it’d lead them to converge; there aren’t many well-respected writers on gender, on any side of the issue, who’re greatly accomplished in other fields. With the possible exception of evolutionary psychology, and as others have mentioned there are good reasons to doubt its prescriptions here.
If you are a non-feminist heterosexual man, every relationship you have ever had with a woman has existed within a framework of social control.
As such, you have exerted that power and control over her, in ways you are not aware of, nearly constantly.
This power and control, in individually notable cases, is the hallmark of abusive relationships. Patriarchy normalizes this power and control, making every relationship abusive.
(This is only one example, and it might not apply to you since you might be a typical lesswrong foreveralone, or queer in some way, but it is a good example of the feminist-101 response you’re asking me for. In the future, just google it if you’re serious about wanting to learn, and if you just want to sarcastically express your outgroup hatred, save us both some time and just downvote me.)
You are using way to many fuzzy labels and dancing the rhetorical category shuffle far too vigorously. Taboo your words and explain why a relationship between a man and a woman is bad in the same sense that archetypal case of physical abuse is bad.
The fact that there is power and control is a red herring if everyone is happy with the arrangement and no one is getting their teeth punched out.
Yeah, we can say that it does not apply to me.
I’m surprised to see that feminist heterosexual men are implied to be able to escape the framework of social control. Either way I’ve always considered myself a feminist in ways that you probably find insufficient. For starters it seems to me that the more feminist the society the higher standard of living it roughly seems to have (e.g. Scandinavia better than rest of Northern Europe, which is better than Southern Europe, which is better than the Arab world, which is better than subSaharan Africa) -- so that’s a significant plus in favour of feminism, after all.
I’m not immediately dismissive to the idea of destroying gender, but I highly disbelieve that it’s completely a social concept. I think we’ll have to destroy it biologically if we actually want to see it destroyed.
I think causation goes the other way.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Correlation is significant evidence for causation.
It simply doesn’t prove causation.
Alas, “imply” is used to mean both things.
Yeah, but it’s as strong evidence for A causing B as for B causing A.
And that’s if you didn’t forget C through Z which all also correlate with B to varying degrees, or A_a through A_z which all fall under A and better explain B than simply A. Or maybe it was a combination of A, D, F, G, and Z that caused B. And so on and so on. The difficulty of finding causation scales with the complexity of the system directly encompassing the cause, and that makes finding significant evidence for causation from correlations like those mentioned by ArisKatsaris very hard.
On a practical level, we have to use something to evaluate the worth of political and social beliefs/movements/structures, and pure logic alone doesn’t seem to work out okay regarding this.
Seeing whether they correlate in practice with healthy and prosperous populations seems a much better method of judgment.
Okay, let me be more explicit: how do you know that feminism leads to higher standards of living rather than the other way round?
I actually think that both contribute to each other.
Macroeconomics?
This is a better treatment of the issue: https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/
In general, feminist heterosexual men cannot escape the framework of social control.
And yes, if you have relationships with women and are a man, it does apply to you given what you’ve said in this conversation.
This is a weird use of “exert”, seeing as it is not based on any actions, choices or feelings on the man’s part, but is merely ascribed on the basis of him being “non-feminist” (by which standard?).
Any individual male may well be affected by a wide variety of biases that may impact his relationships with women in ways that he is not aware of, but you have not provided any detailed argument for this. Stereotyping and denying individual choice/agency do not an argument make.
The word control is being use idiosyncratically. In a certain sense, everyone exerts control over everyone in ways that are not examined self-reflexively. Consider the gym teacher’s expectations of the quality of your physical activity during gym class.
I assert that the idiosyncratic usage more accurately cuts the world at its joints. The current usage persists because certain segments of society benefit from the status quo and therefore ridicule suggestion to be more self-reflexive. Consider the standard mainstream responses to a post like “Buy your Utiles and Warm-Fuzzies Seperately.”
P.S. It doesn’t reflect well on advocates of social change when they don’t note their idiosyncratic definitions. I urge you to rise about it and Steel-Man your interlocutors.
The problem was not with the word “control”, but with the word “exert”. eridu claimed that, for example, I exert power and control over my wife, without any information other than that I am “non-feminist” (by eridu’s definition of “feminist”). This is strange, as I would not normally say that X exerts Y in the absence of any information about in what ways X might be exerting oneself.
It seems as though eridu is routinely overgeneralizing and denying differences between individuals. It’s effectively the same problem as gender discrimination, in a different context.
Honestly, I can’t tell if eridu is poor at articulating a position I agree with or actually believes a position that I reject. He’s certainly treating arguments like soldiers (which is bad).
I think eridu’s suggested changes have low-hanging fruit that will obviate the need for more extreme changes. He is getting a lot more hostile feedback than his position deserves.
Arguments are soldiers. Regardless of how ideal Bayesian AIs would treat arguments as non-soldiers, to humans, arguments are soldiers, and I care about humans.
But yes, if you don’t think that the day-to-day actions of men produce patriarchy in the same way four fingers, a thumb and a palm produce a hand, we disagree.
Treat arguments as soldiers
Claim to be a good empiricist
Be internally consistent.
Pick two.
Edit: Ok, that was snarky.
I agree that people act to reinforce social norms all the time, every day. But there are facts. If it turns out that men should not be primary care-givers of children because men, but not women, have a 5% chance of murderous rage when caring for children, society is morally justified in taking that fact into account.
But if a scientist reported that finding as an experimental result, they’re failed to be properly empirical (given all the other evidence that exists for this question).
You’re failing to be a good rationalist, because you’re putting some ideal form of “rationalism” over winning in your political struggle. If you have a goal you wish to accomplish, and you choose not to because that would “treat arguments as soldiers,” your self-image as the sort of Bayesian monk EY depicts has conflicted with your struggle, and you’ve become your own enemy.
Rationalism itself does not preclude “treating arguments as soldiers” within an adversarial debate (most political debates are adversarial). It just cautions aganst doing this within individual deliberation or public deliberative-like processes, where truth-seeking efficiency is an instrumental goal. Nevertheless, the social norms of LessWrong do discourage (1) political discussion, as well as (2) “treating argument as soldiers” in any discussion, be it political or otherwise.
One interpretation of TimS’ behavior is that he places a higher value on following LW’s established social norms than he does on promoting his political cause. Alternately, he may believe that flaunting the norms of LW would be mostly unhelpful to his political advocacy.
The following links represent the as-yet-best summary of the sources of my beliefs on this matter. I think they can make a better argument than I can in this comment.
https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/ https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/under-duress-agency-power-and-consent-part-one-no/ https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/under-duress-agency-power-and-consent-part-two-yes/
To put it another way, men are conditioned (as in operant conditioning) to emit certain behavior patterns, and womyn are conditioned to respond to those behavior patterns in a certain way.
As such, the expression of learned behavior in men is the day-to-day perpetuation of patriarchy. The fact that no man wakes up thinking “Today I’m going to perpetuate the patriarchy” doesn’t change that.
Further, the fundamental concept of social psychology is that individual choice barely exists, and agency is a superpower.
Nice. It seems that we no longer have a wholly unfalsifiable and meaningless argument. You are now resorting to the old trope that “we” are fully rational and conscious individuals who use reason to actualize ourselves and achieve our moral values, whereas “they” are mindless sheeple whose individual potential is neutralized by force, coercion or pervasive social pressure. I suppose that this counts as progress, in a way.
You failed to answer the question. You claimed that some men, and ArisKatsaris in particular, own women’s bodies. ArisKatsaris was asking which woman’s body he or she owns, since he or she was not aware of this fact and would like to make use of his or her property.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=body+policing
That was also neither a helpful answer to the original question, nor a meaningful response to my comment.
Note: If you use a lmgtfy link, then you’re being a jerk. It might be acceptable in the context where someone asks a question that is directly answerable by Google, like “What is a dictionary?” (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define:dictionary) because you’re legitimately teaching the person a useful skill, albeit in a snarky fashion. But either way, it is rude, and jerkitude is not the appropriate sort of discourse for this site.
Notice how the sentence is still true even with the bold words removed.
Not being allowed to talk about and challenge this control is one hallmark of abusive relationships.
I wasn’t planning on making the full pluge into sex-radical feminsm, but yes, in general all heterosexual relationships are patriarchal and while I wouldn’t use the term abusive, I would certain say coercive or anti-feminst.
Can you taboo some of those terms? I can’t tell what you are saying. Are you saying that hetero relationships usually have the man taking the “captain” role? (I agree with that). Are you saying that’s bad when you call it “coercive and antifeminist”? Can you explain that, because it’s not obvious.
Using an idiosyncratic (and better) definition of coercive:
All sex is coercive.
All employment is coercive.
There’s nothing better about feminist men having sex with women, women having sex with women, or men having sex with men. There’s an element of coercion in all of it. It is a respectable position to say that sex and rape are differences in degree, not differences in kind.
None of that justifies saying that “sex is bad” any more than it justifies saying the “employment is bad.” Applying a guilt trip on men without concrete steps on what they can do to improve is counter-productive from an advocacy perspective.
In other words, if you can’t distinguish between coercive and abusive, you aren’t paying attention.
https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/under-duress-agency-power-and-consent-part-one-no/
https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/under-duress-agency-power-and-consent-part-two-yes/
https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/
Applying a guilt trip on men is almost always good from a feminist perspective. Why should men not feel guilty?
what is the purpose of making people feel guilty? Is it to spur them into corrective action? or is it just sadistic submission-seeking? Without some suggested correction (as TimS requested), guilt is a rather empty and useless concept.
Based on the comments below, I think the better word might be “culpable.” Original comment preserved for thread continuity.
All people should feel guilt when their society oppress some of its members.
No. If I can’t be happy until everything is good, then I can’t expect to feel happy ever. At that point, I give up on trying to make things better because I hate anyone who’d try to make me that unhappy.
I would endorse “never feel guilty because it never helps”—but we really are causal factors in the way our society is shaped, even if we aren’t proximate causes of everything.
Huh? Why? That doesn’t sound helpful.
Because everyone is culpable, it is bad tactics to single out a subset for the guilt trip—assuming one’s goal is to change the wrong society is committing.
I don’t think I’m culpable for everything society does, so I will automatically assume anyone who says I am is prone to making obviously false statements about that sort of thing; that doesn’t sound like they are using good tactics either. Also, it is not the case that the only alternative to “everyone should be guilty” is “this singled-out subset here should go on a guilt trip”.
Some of this is a disguised argument about the word “culpable.” For basically everyone, there’s always something more one could do to solve problem X. I don’t claim that is a particularly insightful or compelling statement.
I think guilt trips are often (basically always) a tactical mistake. But this is particularly true when one’s selection criteria for who to shame suggests that one is being disingenuous. Or that one picked the target first and the complaint second.
I honestly think that I want transformations just as radical as eridu in the area of social norms and gender. It turns out that I just have different terminal values. For the benefit of bystanders (such as yourself), I’m trying to make it clear that the degree of desired transformation is not determinative of the intended destination.
I think this whole guilt business is useless. Heroic responsibility seems the correct way to deal with things.
“What are you going to do about it? That’s the only question you get to answer.”
If I look upon the world and see oppression and see that it is bad, I should see what I can do to make that situation better, see if it’s an easier line of utility-creating than other plans, and then go about doing it.
Along the way I might consider the strategy of allocating guilt between myself and other people, but doing that, I really ought to understand that guilt is being used instrumentally to get people to do things, and is otherwise not interesting.
(this is more directed at the whole guilt discussion than specifically your comment)
Your response explains why you would want everyone to feel guilty rather than a subgroup, but does not adequately explain why you would want everyone to feel guilty rather than no one. I do infer from your response that you believe that feelings of guilt will help to change the wrong society is committing more than their absence.
Sure, for some meaning of “guilt.” If members of society don’t think the current structure is wrong, why change it?
Is guilt the only motivator? How about change it because it sucks, never mind who should feel additionally bad.
I suppose culpable is a better word than guilt. I think we’ve having a definitional dispute that is obscuring what we actually disagree about.
I would ask what you mean by culpable that does not have the same problems as guilt. (I guess you mean responsibility in some sense?)
But instead, since you bring up that this may need more tabooing, can you explain what you think you and other people who seek to do good things should do about some bad thing happening, and why that’s the best approach?
To kick it off, I hold that [guilt, responsibility, culpability, etc] are features of a badly flawed social/moral protocol that may not be applicable or optimal in this (or any) case. I think moral agents like me and you and anyone else who cares should go back to first principles and derive the correct behavior, which may or may not be [guilt, etc].
The process I (and other instances of the moral process that I represent) should use goes like this: Observe bad things, notice that fixing bad things is a good way to do a good thing, look for my specific leverage in this case, which might be:
ceasing some antisocial behaviour or doing some direct object level intervenion
attempting to spread awareness of the problem to my other instances
attempting to inspire prosocial behavior by hacking the guilt system in humans (as you are doing)
attempting to create more instances of myself by spreading this go-back-to-first-principles idea (as I am doing here)
something else
Whatever Is best out of that, I should evaluate against other interventions in other areas (like getting back to work at making money to donate to SI) to see if it is the easiest way to produce utility. Then I should do whatever is the best.
This process is best because it derives directly from first principles of decision theory, which are known to work quite well.
What do you think of that? If you are in fact doing intervention #3, as you seem to be, you could be a bit more conscious of it and open about it being consequentialist-instrumental and not deontological.
To answer the question I think I can answer—The way to change social norms is to perform the social norm you would like instead, in violation of the established norms.
This requires very sophisticated understanding of what the current norms are. If you partially violate a norm, that can sometimes strengthen the norm. Sometimes, apparently unrelated norms reinforce each other. Sometimes, the norm is just too strong and you end up being rejected from the community.
I’m confused about how you create a moral system with a concept of responsibility, but I suffer from the obvious bias that my moral system has “responsibility” as a foundational concept.
So #1 on my list. OK.
This is scary. Have any advice for how to model the situation correctly such that I don’t do something counterproductive?
I must say I am just as baffled by you. I guess you could say I subscribe to the consequentialist heroic responsibility idea that all instances of myself are ultimately “responsible” for everything that goes on in the universe, in the sense that there is nothing that is “not my responsibility”. Then the interesting question is “where can I do the most good for the things I am responsible for?”, not “what am I responsible for?”
I think having responsibility as fundamental creates a problem where you sometimes mark yourself as “not responsible” for something you could do a lot to fix, or mark yourself as “responsible” for something you can’t affect.
I agree that this is fundamentally what is occurring with most society-level injustices. Not sure why you think this is more likely a problem for my ethical structure than yours. Mostly likely the misunderstanding is on my end.
I don’t know what your ethical structure is, except very vaguely.
I think my heroic consequentialism ethics have no exploits like that, and that any system that disagrees will have such problems.
Is this a reference to the “All deontologists can be dutch-booked, all consequentialists choose torture” issue?
Can all deontologists be dutch booked? Then it means something other than what I’m thinking of. (unless I’m confused. I haven’t though this thru)
Not all consequentialists choose torture either. (in duck specks I assume). Pretty sure all utilitarians do tho.
The way I’m using those words is essentially consequentialism=expected utility maximization with a utility function that does not prescribe specific behaviours or thought patterns. and deontologism=holding some non-EU set of ethical/behavioural rules as fundamental (usally stuff like “moral duty to do X in Y situation” and whatnot)
As far as I can tell, everyone who thinks suffering is additive is obligated to choose torture. Only if one denies that suffering can always be compared in an additive way is one free to reject torture and choose specks.
That means one’s evaluations of degree of suffering inherently have a discontinuity somewhere. Thus, one is vulnerable to being dutch-booked/money-pumped by a sufficiently powerful and cruel adversary.
If this discussion about the possible additive nature of suffering/utility is alien to one’s moral reasoning, one might be able to escape the dilemma.
I’m not sure I understand why you use the word “discontinuity” here. In mathematical language, it’s easy to have a continuous function of perpetually-rising value that never reaches a certain value—just put an asymptote.
If instances of dust specks are being counted in this manner, it’s pretty easy to have the asymptote always be inferior to the torture-time.
...but I’m probably misunderstanding part of the discussion, on second thought.
This post makes the point in more detail.
No, your answer is roughly what I was getting at. There is no reason a utility function has to be additive in human suffering.
Let me get this right. Currently, if I’m following this correctly, I’m being told that I ought to feel guilty for controlling women, despite the verifiable (and falsifiable, I think) belief I hold that it is a fact that I have never behaved in the alleged patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious manners towards women which I am being accused of in higher parent comments, and that I have always done my best not to behave in such a manner and to behave in an optimal-expected-happiness manner that values happiness equally for all members of a relationship?
Sorry about the long complicated sentence, I’m having a hard time expressing this in simpler ways.
No. By eridu’s argument, this is a category error. Nothing about your behavior, beliefs etc. could have changed the fact that you are ‘oppressing’ people, for some meaning of ‘oppression’. Your status as “patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious, etc.” is simply ascribed, in a quasi-tautological way.
Yes, I do think this is “The Worst² Argument in the World”. It basically amounts to dogma-based emotional manipulation.
Well… a slightly more charitable way to represent eridu’s argument, IMO, would be something like this:
“I believe that you are sincere in your belief that you have never engaged in these nefarious behaviors which you’d just enumerated. Nonetheless, you do engage in many such behaviors, not because you are some mustachio-twirling villain, but because you see such behaviors as normal or even beneficial. You say that you have always done your best to avoid such actions, and I believe you, but your best simply isn’t good enough”.
Ah, thanks!
Keeping in mind that my accusations and eridu’s would differ—it is always the case that you could do more. As I said, this is not a particularly interesting or compelling argument.
Almost all social behaviors reinforce the social norms to some extent. Sort of like Eliezer’s discussion of wearing the clown suit (which I can’t find just this moment).
No, TimS is asserting that you, and the rest of the humans, should feel guilty for living in a society where bad things systematically happen to people. This is at least in part because feeling guilty will motivate you to transform society into one in which those things don’t happen.
Also, gender might be relevant somehow—I’m slightly unclear on that part.
I think that is a fake justification for feeling guilt. I very much doubt that search setting out to find the optimal way to mobilize humanity against oppression would spit out “make everyone feel guilty”, when that also happens to be the output of the badly flawed moral feelings system.
Yes, I’m highly doubtful on the value of guilt trips as a tactical tool. I’m have this vague meta (and therefore mostly pointless) discussion about my frustrations about eridu’s tactics and goals—and the rest of y’all are taking me seriously on the object level.
This makes things a lot clearer. I agree.
Ceteris paribus, it is better to not feel guilty and to do better whenever you find a better way to do things, than to feel guilty and do better whenever you find a better way to do things, IMO. By that logic, I can in good conscience never feel guilty about the world I live in despite correcting for scope insensitivity, and thus still survive and not break down in a fit of guilt overload that would lead to suicide despite aware knowledge of all the horrible stuff that happens all the time.
Oh, sorry.
Indeed
Gender was just the original topic. This discussion about guilt/culpability is about social change generally.
If you haven’t read a lot of radical feminism and gone through a long process of unlearning patriarchy, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates the patriarchy. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of feminism (even liberal feminism will work for this, I suggest starting with bell hooks and building up to some Dworkin) and reflect on your past behavior.
And yes, if you perpetuate the patriarchy, you should feel guilty. I might get to explain why later, but I’m getting downvoted so often that I can only respond once every few minutes, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I do, it’ll be higher in this thread.
If you haven’t read a lot of biblical literature and gone through a long process of unlearning your Fallen and sinful nature, and accepting Jesus as your Lord and savior, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates sin in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the Bible (even modern translations of the Bible will work for this, I suggest starting with the Gospel of John and building up to some Letters from Paul) and reflect on your past behavior.
And yes, if you perpetuate sinfulness, you should feel guilty. I might get to explain why later, but I’m getting downvoted so often that I can only respond once every few minutes, so you’ll have to bear with me. If I do, it’ll be higher in this thread.
Oh, come on.
I mean, I don’t have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be “If you haven’t read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature on heuristics and biases (even frequentism will work for this....”
This sort of superficial pattern-matching proves nothing. It really is true that most people who don’t put effort into improving beyond the cultural baseline are most likely perpetuating the irrational biases of their culture, even if they think they’re thinking perfectly clearly; the fact that it pattern-matches your bit about the Bible doesn’t change that.
No, the bit that pattern-matches is that “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege” and the like have no consistent definition, just like “sinfulness”. Also, rationalists don’t try to guilt-trip you into overcoming your biases and becoming more rational (unless you count some of the efficient-charity advocacy as akin to guilt-tripping). It really is a pseudo-religious argument.
(nods) If your comment had been clearer about your objection being to the ill-defined nature of key terms and to the use of guilt as a means of manipulating behavior, I would not have reacted as I did. But that was far from clear.
Many of my friends and family remain Christians. On their behalf I claim offense.
Mmm. I sympathize, but I don’t think this is likely to be very helpful; as this blog post by Yvain mentions, the Courtier’s Reply is a lot less obviously fallacious than it might naively seem. That is, it’s generally unlikely to convince anyone that’s not unusually vulnerable to an argument from authority, but there are situations where it’s appropriate too.
I’m not sure what Yvain’s proposed solution might indicate in this context, though. It seems likely to me that estimations of who’s being “smart and rational” here are so closely bound to political tribalism that reading works on gender by people you already admire would tend to reinforce existing beliefs more than it’d lead them to converge; there aren’t many well-respected writers on gender, on any side of the issue, who’re greatly accomplished in other fields. With the possible exception of evolutionary psychology, and as others have mentioned there are good reasons to doubt its prescriptions here.