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.
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.