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.
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!