LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
About two months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.
Crocker’s Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
To the submittrs- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
Minimizing the Inferential Distance
One problem that I think exists in discussions about gender issues between men and women, is that the inferential distance is much greater than either group realizes. Women might assume that men know what experiences women might face, and so not explicitly mention specific examples. Men might assume they know what the women are talking about, but have never really heard specific examples. Or they might assume that these types of things only happened in the past, or not to the types of females in their in-group
So for the first post in this series, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to lower this inferential distance, by sharing specific examples of what it’s like as a smart/geeky female. When submitters didn’t know what to write, I directed them to this article, by Julia Wise (copied below), and told them to write their own stories. These are not related to LW culture specifically, but rather meant to explain where the women here are coming from. Warning: This article is a collection of anecdotes, NOT a logical argument. If you are not interested in anecdotes, don’t read it.
Copied from the original article (by a woman on LW) on Radiant Things:
It’s lunchtime in fourth grade. I am explaining to Leslie, who has no friends but me, why we should stick together. “We’re both rejects,” I tell her. She draws back, affronted. “We’re not rejects!” she says. I’m puzzled. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted to be normal.
…................
It’s the first week of eighth grade. In a lesson on prehistory, the teacher is trying and failing to pronounce “Australopithecus.” I blurt out the correct pronunciation (which my father taught me in early childhood because he thought it was fun to say). The boy next to me gives me a glare and begins looking for alliterative insults. “Fruity female” is the best he can manage. “Geek girl” seems more apt, but I don’t suggest it.
…..................
It’s lunchtime in seventh grade. I’m sitting next to my two best friends, Bridget and Christine, on one side of a cafeteria table. We have been obsessed with Star Wars for a year now, and the school’s two male Star Wars fans are seated opposite us. Under Greyson’s leadership, we are making up roleplaying characters. I begin describing my character, a space-traveling musician named Anya. “Why are your characters always girls?” Grayson complains. “Just because you’re girls doesn’t mean your characters have to be.”
“Your characters are always boys,” we retort. He’s right, though – female characters are an anomaly in the Star Wars universe. George Lucas (a boy) populated his trilogy with 97% male characters.
…................
It’s Bridget’s thirteenth birthday, and four of us are spending the night at her house. While her parents sleep, we are roleplaying that we have been captured by Imperials and are escaping a detention cell. This is not papers-and-dice roleplaying, but advanced make-believe with lots of pretend blaster battles and dodging behind furniture.
Christine and Cass, aspiring writers, use roleplaying as a way to test out plots in which they make daring raids and die nobly. Bridget, a future lawyer, and I, a future social worker, use it as a way to test out moral principles. Bridget has been trying to persuade us that the Empire is a legitimate government and we shouldn’t be trying to overthrow it at all. I’ve been trying to persuade Amy that shooting stormtroopers is wrong. They are having none of it.
We all like daring escapes, though, so we do plenty of that.
…...............
It’s two weeks after the Columbine shootings, and the local paper has run an editorial denouncing parents who raise “geeks and goths.” I write my first-ever letter to the editor, defending geeks as kids parents should be proud of. A girl sidles up to me at the lunch table. “I really liked your letter in the paper,” she mutters, and skitters away.
................
It’s tenth grade, and I can’t bring myself to tell the president of the chess club how desperately I love him. One day I go to chess club just to be near him. There is only one other girl there, and she’s really good at chess. I’m not, and I spend the meeting leaning silently on a wall because I can’t stand to lose to a boy. Anyway, I despise the girls who join robotics club to be near boys they like, and I don’t want to be one of them.
................
It’s eleventh grade, and we are gathered after school to play Dungeons and Dragons. (My father, who originally forbid me to play D&D because he had heard it would lead us to hack each other to pieces with axes, has relented.) Christine is Dungeonmaster, and she has recruited two feckless boys to play with us. One of them is in love with her.
(Nugent points out that D&D is essentially combat reworked for physically awkward people, a way of reducing battle to dice rolls and calculations. Christine has been trained by her uncle in the typical swords-and-sorcery style of play, but when she and I play the culture is different. All our adventures feature pauses for our characters to make tea and omelets.)
On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They’re going to starve if they don’t get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We’ve got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan.
“The farmers tell you their plow has rusted and doesn’t work,” the Dungeonmaster informs us from behind her screen.
I persist. “There’s got to be something we can use. I look around to see if there’s anything else pointy I can use as a plow.”
The Dungeonmaster considers. “There’s a metal gate,” she decides.
“Okay, I rig up some kind of harness and hitch it to the pony.”
“It’s rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you’re not supposed to be farming. You’re supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don’t have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.
…............................
I’m 25 and Jeff’s sister’s boyfriend is complaining that he never gets to play Magic: the Gathering because he doesn’t know anyone who plays. “You could play with Julia,” Jeff suggests.
“Very funny,” says Danner, rolling his eyes.
Jeff and I look at each other. I realize geeks no longer read me as a geek. I still love ideas, love alternate imaginings of how life could be, love being right, but now I care about seeming normal.
“...I wasn’t joking,” Jeff says.
“It’s okay,” I reassure Danner. “I used to play every day, but I’ve pretty much forgotten how.”
…............................
A’s Submission
My creepy/danger alert was much higher at a meeting with a high-status (read: supposedly utility-generating, which includes attractive in the sense of pleasing or exciting to look at, but mostly the utility is supposed to be from actions, like work or play) man who was supposed to be my boss for an internship.
The way he talked about the previous intern, a female, the sleazy way he looked while reminiscing and then had to smoke a cigarette, while in a meeting with me, my father (an employer who was abusive), and the internship program director, plus the fact that when I was walking towards the meeting room, the employees of the company, all men, stared at me and remarked, “It’s a girl,” well, I became so creeped out that I didn’t want to go back. It was hard, as a less articulate 16 year-old, to explain to the internship director all that stuff without sounding irrational. But not being able to explain my brain’s priors (incl. abuses that it had previously been too naïve/ignorant to warn against and prevent) wasn’t going to change them or decrease the avoidance-inducing fear and anxiety.
So after some awkward attempts to answer the internship director’s question of why I didn’t want to work there, I asked for a placement with a different company, which she couldn’t do, unfortunately.
B’s Submission
Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You *need* to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”
…................
Sixth grade year, I had absolutely no friends whatsoever. A boy I had a bit of a crush on asked me out on a dare. I told him “no,” and he walked back to his laughing friends.
…................
In college I joined the local SCA (medieval) group, and took up heavy weapons combat. The local (almost all-male) “stick jocks” were very supportive and happy to help. Many had even read “The Armored Rose” and so knew about female-specific issues and how to adapt what they were teaching to deal with things like a lower center of gravity, less muscle mass, a different grip, and ingrained cultural hang-ups. The guys were great. But there was one problem: There was no female-sized loaner armor.
See, armor is an expensive investment for a new hobby, and so local groups provide loaner armor for newbies, which generally consist of hand-me-downs from the more experienced fighters. We had a decent amount of new female fighters in our college groups, but without a pre-existing generation of female fighters (women hadn’t even been allowed to fight until the 80s) there wasn’t anything to hand down.
The only scar I ever got from heavy combat was armor bite from wearing much-too-large loaner armor. I eventually got my own kit, and (Happy Ending) the upcoming generation of our group always made sure to acquire loaner armor for BOTH genders.
…................
Because of a lack of options, and not really having anywhere else to go, I moved in with my boyfriend and got married at a rather young age (20 and 22, respectively). I had no clue how to be independent. One of the most empowering things I ever did was starting work as an exotic dancer. After years of thinking that I couldn’t support myself, it gave me the confidence that I could leave an unhappy marriage without ending up on the street (or more likely, mooching off friends and relatives). Another Happy Ending- Now I’m completely independent.
…................
Walking into the library. A man holds open the door for me. I smile and thank him as I walk through. He makes a sexual comment. I do the Look-Straight-Ahead-and-Walk-Quickly thing.
“Bitch,” he spits out.
It’s not the first of this kind of interaction in my life, and it most certainly won’t be the last (almost any time you are in an urban environment, without a male). But it hit harder than most because I had been expecting a polite interaction.
Relevant link: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/why-men-catcall/
…................
The next post will be on Group Attribution Error, and will come out when I get around to it. :P
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I’m not going to spend much effort in the comment section here because my activity will only empower the ideological dynamic at work. I refuse to engage in a losing strategy. Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn’t a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean. While I hold some right wing positions I’m not talking about mainstream Conservatism here but conservatism towards the LessWrong culture and ethos as I knew them. Even this comment is likely a mistake but I just can’t keep quiet on this because of internal anguish.
It is not the opening material that bother me so bitterly, since I found that it had interesting examples of experience to share. Gathering and posting it also seemed a good idea to me in my optimism some weeks ago. The comment section however… I disagreed about it being too nitpicky, but now I wonder if I was wrong. I think some are plain avoiding attacking the fundamental assumptions, in a way similar to how I’m about to briefly do, in order to avoid the gender drama LW is infamous for. If so the game is already over.
The personal experiences shared basically give examples of “privilege” and “microaggressions”. That is, relatively small but pervasive uncomfortable or inconvenient defaults and related status moves which one notices from time to time. People with low social awareness don’t see when they occur to them, so hearing them described explicitly they go “wow this is horrible, how X group suffers”. The voting shows systematic appreciation for a male posture of “protecting women”. This posture does little good for women, much like like signalling how much you hate child molesters does the opposite of helping child abuse victims.*
For nearly anyone not living hermit’s life experiences like these are common, but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our public attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering, but on the most viable political coalitions. And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features—not bugs—of how social apes work. Ah, but this kind of observation violates sacred norms that prevail in our society. Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I’ve read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I’ve asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it’s not obvious to me that it’s impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn’t identical to the same total ill effect.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I’m very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they’ve dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I’m aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.
I’ve got some sympathy for people who don’t want to shut down organizations merely because they’ve succeeded.
Stable organizations are hard to create, and people apt to have a lot of valuable social relationships in them.
Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.
Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I’m aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.
That’s a reasonable point—but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don’t have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
That’s probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan.
Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I’m not sure we’ve really hit that point that substantially.
Yes, fuel efficiency can be increased at the expanse of something else, e.g., cost, safety, etc.
I’m not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don’t have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I’d consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help—but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don’t seem to have that, either. Humans just aren’t automatically strategic.
My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail—it felt like being on the receiving end of “I can’t explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I’m going to keep attacking until I feel better”.
This does not mean they were totally in the wrong—one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers—abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
Are you saying that abuse victims have an obligation to coach their abusers in how not to be abusive?
I would say… yes, actually, insofar as they want that abuse to end while changing nothing else about the dynamic.
This sounds like “I wouldn’t use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur.” Would you agree with that restatement?
Fair enough, yes. My use of the word obligation tends to revolve strictly around the personal, so I can see why you’d prefer this version if you use the word in the more typical sense. (Sorry about the confusion. I tend towards egoism, and have a tendency to redefine words to fit the philosophy.)
That would only work if the abuser would prefer not to be abusive. (One characteristic of many abusive relationships is that the abuser gets angry regardless of what the victim actually does—there really isn’t any way to avoid making them mad and “triggering” more abuse.)
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
For the abused, the practical limit is not personal willingness, but financing and social stigma.
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn’t that people’s system I has ‘racist’ aliefs, it’s that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
Why do you believe that people’s prejudices are generally accurate?
Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.
They show that East Asian are smarter in average than White Americans, and I’m not sure that many people alieve that.
Any such statistic would also reflect any bias in the law-enforcement system. How do we know how many white people commit crimes but don’t get caught?
I do; am I mistaken to do so?
Asian-Americans also have lower crime rates than White Americans. Are you saying this is likely due to “bias in the law-enforcement system”?
Probably not; but IMO the criterion of mistakenness for aliefs (unlike for beliefs) is not being instrumentally useful (rather than not being epistemically accurate). If I’m trying to attract women, alieving that I’m unattractive would be a mistaken alief (though the linked article doesn’t use the word “alief”).
I’ve written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
Having good aliefs about criminality, for example, is instrumentally useful.
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don’t matter—where they’re considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven’t really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that’s what I’d consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of ‘skin dyes’ for aesthetic purposes.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense—white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
I don’t want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don’t think that’s possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn’t just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you’d need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons—it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
I don’t understand what you mean by “matter.” People don’t care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn’t seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
That depends on what you mean by “strongly.” I would tentatively posit that even if race isn’t strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don’t know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I’ve recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled “racism” is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don’t really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that’s really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Or would be if people weren’t actively rigging said information such that this is not the case. And that’s before getting into tail-effects.
Which really doesn’t happen these days. (It’s certainly much rarer than someone being beaten up for being white.)
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person’s race might tell you “I can get away with this”).
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
People are usually not “exactly correct” about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?
Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.
Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?
I’d bet on closer to a perfectly equal society, but it’s rather hard to do the experiment.
It’s certainly my (a) true rejection of “the problem is that [people] are updating correctly”. What did you expect I was rejecting?
I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it’d be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier’s assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.
I confess, I was sacrificing some precision for snark. I meant “the problem is that [people] are updating correctly, to the extant they are”.
Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much “racist” as what we have today. (I don’t have a high confidence in this number, I just though it would be fair to write my opinion if I am asking about yours.) So cca 30% of the racism can be explained by people updating incorrectly, but that still leaves the remaining 70% to be explained otherwise. Therefore focusing on the incorrect updates misses the greater part of the whole story.
Really? I’d estimate more like 120%.
Edit: especially consider affirmative action and the desperate impact doctrine.
I think that affirmative action hurts both ways. And it also keeps the feeling of resentment alive, which again hurts people.
As a simple example, in my country most people in IT are male. So on one hand you have the “prejudice” that women in general are not good with computers, but on the other hand, if you meet a female programmer, you know that she specifically is good enough. She passed the filter.
I imagine that in an alternative reality where IT companies would be legally required to have 50% female programmers, the “prejudice” would expand, and it would say that women programmers are not good with computers. A female programmer would have to work harder to pass the filter. Even participating in a successful project would not be enough, because others would think that the males in her team did most of the work, and she was there mostly for political reasons. To prove herself, she would have to win some programming competition (and tell everyone about it). But those who can do it, they have no problem finding a programming job in our world, too.
Affirmative action would work best if you could legislate it and make everyone forget that it exists. Perhaps legislating it and making taboo of discussing it openly, is a step in this direction. Still, if the differences in abilities are real, people will notice the result, even if they are not informed about the causes.
In the alternative reality where IT companies are legally required to have 50% women programmers, and the law is successfully kept secret from everyone except the HR departments, programmers would still notice the differences in their colleagues’ skills. Although… this knowledge would exist only among the programmers, because only they see it firsthand. You could still convince the public that what the programmers see is not real, that it is merely their sexism.
So now I think that social enginnerings of this kind are successful only if people are prevented from discussing them openly. Even a lie told with good intentions makes the truth forever your enemy. Of course that makes it difficult to evaluate whether the policy really helps or not.
I’d have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties.
My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.
Well two points:
1) There is a huge confounding factor, namely technological progress.
2) In general, labor intensive goods aren’t even produced in America anymore.
Who’s “focusing”? I would argue, if we take your numbers, that the incorrect 30% are disproportionately problematic compared to the remaining 70%, and that there are other, non-epistemic problems involved in racism. Eugine_Nier said that “the problem” is the 70%. That’s the disagreement that’s going on here. My claim is not that modern-day racism is on average a greater distortion of the facts than an inability to perceive race would be.
Taboo “perfectly equal society”.
Evidence? Also, are you including assault by the police in your comparison?
Look at crime statistics.
Sure, it doesn’t change its truth.
There are at least two confounding factors for the crime statistics. One is that the justice system is pretty sloppy, and more so for black men. Another is that even if your crime statistics are accurate, it’s hard to identify a criminal’s exact motives. Was a beating part of a robbery? Was it a simple attack initiated by one side, or was it a quarrel that escalated?
I don’t think this is a valuable response to being asked for evidence.
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I’d assign over 70% assuming he’s completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn’t as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I’ve noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn’t particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it’s strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I’ll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He’s way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers—the younger one’s father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he’s speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
I’d say that this is another very strong possibility.
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I’d expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
That is a necessary prerequisite, yes. As long as such an actual correlation is in place, it will be observed and will result in a perceived correlation.
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I’d be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
Citation?
Again, I suspect—though I’m not certain—that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.
It sounds like you’re using the word “correlation” to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; “correlation” just refers to certain kinds of association.
It’s trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you’re getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you’re asking for.
Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look “prettier”? I’m not sure that’s the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn’t matter.
I’m thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I’m thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he “really” black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
Dr. Seuss wrote about this.
Skin colour is a red herring. Race is was originally about rich people with empires and status justifying their success as inevitable and righteous, and still is about their descendants justifying living off the inheritance of empires (and off plundering the bounty of continents already in use by other people). Race-like oppressions can exist where there is no visible distinction (burakumin in Japan). “Where do your family come from?”. Colour blindness (dye or otherwise) without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
That’s one conclusion—but there’s a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.
In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven’t found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I’d be sorely tempted to use it.
That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.
Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don’t think it’s a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.
As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a “wierdtopia”. Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer suddenly transported to contemporary New York. Feminism is slowed by feminists dragging their feet. Anti-racism is slowed by anti-racists who shy away from how much wealth and resources and control of the future they’d have to give back.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
And as for weirdtopia, in some ways we’re already there. It took me three or four years to stop thinking that having gay marriage as a serious political issue wasn’t something out of 1950s satirical science fiction. I was never opposed to it, just surprised that it ever got on the agenda.
Uh.
This might be an outside context problem.
I see people talk about that plenty—I’ve been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They’re usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.
It could well be an outside view problem.
Also, we may be talking about somewhat different things—do the groups you mention talk about it as a goal, or do they ever talk about having succeeded, even for moderate periods of time?
Hey, sorry it took a while to reply.
The groups in question had it as just a basic matter of operating policy. It was often a balancing act, and it wasn’t without hiccups, but it worked pretty well. Example: A support group at which I facilitated for a while; the going approach was “safer space”: they knew they couldn’t ensure it was safe, full stop, for everybody in all situations—safety in this context being construed as “a buncha different people from a bunch of different backgrounds with varying experiences of oppression need to use this space, and they won’t always speak each other’s language about that, and we want to minimize the sense that this place is a hostile environment.”
It usually ran pretty smoothly. I can only recall one person who really ran afoul of it, and they did blatantly insult about half the group in the space of a couple minutes on their first visit, and escalated badly in response to people saying something about it.
No problem with the delay.
I can think of some reasons why what you saw was different from what I saw, and it’s pretty much that you had a self-chosen group which was meeting in person and had work the members wanted to get done.
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane’s “Door into...” series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn’t a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.
Let me put it this way—I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn’t even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) “biologically compatible as-is” or “biologically compatible with medical help” (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn’t assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn’t correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.
Summary for people who don’t have infinite amounts of time to waste (unlike me):
The political struggle between conservative and progressive ideology is essentially of religious character, evolving from the ancient conflict between Catholics and Protestants respectively; that conflict, the Catholics mostly lost.
Progressives in general are more or less unaware that they are upholding a religious doctrine.
Conservatives either have been or are incapable of being successful in convincing progressives of this fact, or alternatively, are themselves unaware of its essentially religious content.
Therefore, in engaging in political discourse, conservatives have already conceded the main point.
The proper course of action is to switch venues (e.g., refuse to participate in elections) or to convince Progressives that “while they may think they’re rebels, they’re actually loyal servants of a theocratic one-party state.”
For those seeking to undermine Progressives, shouldn’t you be trying to convince most everyone that Progressives are theocrats, and not just Progressives?
And I thought Moldbug said Progressives win because their politics empower the media, academia, and government, creating a positive feedback loop for Progressive opinions in those arenas.
Not being recognized as theocrats is an advantage they have against conservatives, but that advantage is not as decisive as having a positive feedback loop.
This is what I consider among his most important insights.
Probably yes, but I’m not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.
Think Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Not that confident of what? Something I said?
I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There’s a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world.
Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.
Not that confident the media/academia belief pump cycle is a greater advantage than the hidden nature of their theocracy.
If the hidden nature of the theocracy is the main problem, we’ll have to wait for a societal wide embrace of Stirner for relief. I’m not holding my breath on that one.
I had hoped that Hitchens might someday turn on his fellow “atheists”, and bring the fight to moral theocracies as he had to supernatural theocracies. Guess not.
Can you think of any moderately prominent person or group who might make the case, and might be listened? I can’t.
EDIT: On further review of Moldbug, he has a short series of Anti-Idealism blog posts that makes some of the same basic points that Stirner does. He even makes a similar point to what I have above about the New Atheists.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-atheists-believe-in-religion.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-planet-is-infested-with-pseudo.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealism-is-not-great.html
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/unlikely-appeal-of-nonidealism.html
If not for said belief pump, would “theocracy” necessarily even be a boo light?
In what way does the existence or non-existence of a belief pump bear on whether “theocracy” is a boo light?
Why do people believe “theocracy” to be bad? The proximate cause is that it’s what they’ve been taught.
If your brother tries to tell you why [your social theory is wrong], then do not debate him or set forth your own evidence; do not perform replicable experiments or examine history; but turn him in at once to the secret police.
Theocracy doesn’t exactly have a self-correction mechanism to avoid that problem.
Is that a problem of theocracy per se? That’s a problem in a lot of systems. And there’s no reason one can’t in principle have a theocracy with robust free speech rights. It may well be that that hasn’t happened more because the ideas which are generally anti-theocratic are often clustered with ideas about open discourse. That said, it does seem plausible that a theocracy will be more likely to run into the sort of problems you discuss, purely because if one is thinking in religious terms, then the already high stakes involved in politics become even higher.
I’ve yet to hear an argument for free speech that didn’t lean heavily on the risk that any particular policy or belief might be erroneous. My impression is that theocracy is defined as government based on the principal that there are some (divinely revealed?) facts for which there is no risk of error.
If we were sure (risk of error epsilon) of some set of facts and could unambiguously determine whether an assertion conflicted with those facts, why would we tolerate opposition?
As Eliezer noted in the piece I cited, this is a problem of most political systems.
So I was in the process of replying saying that there was potentially an issue here of definitions, but thinking about this more, other definitions I can think of seem about equivalent. So, operating under that definition, one could have a theocracy where for example people said “there’s no risk of error, but the deity in charge likes free will a lot, to the point where as long as they aren’t in the process of actively resisting the divine government, they are free to damn themselves” or something equivalent.
If that’s really the dogma of this (extremely hypothetical) religion, why is it important that the government be religiously based?
Traditionally, religions wanted a slice (or more) of political power to (a) avoid persecution and (b) implement their preferred policies. If (a) is not already resolved, this religion is in no position to argue about what the nation would look like if it were in charge.
I agree. The extreme length which I needed to go to construct a religion which even might have some chance of this is a strong argument that theocracies just won’t act this way. I suppose they could have a commandment in their holy text “run the government”, but this is clearly an extreme stretch.
I personally think that theocracy is bad because it combines the worst features of a totalitarian dictatorship on the one hand, and uncritical thinking on the other. As such, it could potentially turn out much worse than even a run-of-the-mill totalitarian dictatorship; in the latter case, at least the dictator and his politburo have some sort of a real plan...
Which came first, that argument, or you believing that theocracy is bad?
Probably what came first were several examples of theocracies and other dictatorships in the real world; me realizing they were bad; then me looking for an explanation; which led to the conclusion above.
Probably, but the context of that particular quote was only about convincing progressives.
He might, but not here.
I don’t understand this (and don’t have the time to read Moldbug): if the whole struggle is essentially of religious character, then aren’t both sides upholding religious doctrines? So how does engaging with the progressives mean “conceding the main point”—aren’t the progressives likewise conceding the main point when engaging with the conservatives?
Maybe the intended meaning is that the progressives denounce conservatives for being religious, while actually being religious themselves? That would make some sense, but not all conservatives are actually basing their arguments in religion. After all, Konkvistador was talking about “conservatism on Less Wrong”, which certainly wouldn’t fit the bill.
The other things you say sound convincing, but this particular sentence sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy. There are lots of “features” built into humans, such as old age and Alzheimers, myopia, inability to multiply large numbers very quickly, etc. But humans have been working steadily over the ages to mitigate these weaknesses with technology, and thus I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.
I didn’t mean to say they are how things should work, merely how I think they do work, they are the unfortunate compromises we end up nearly always making. A feature need not be desirable in itself to be necessary or the best out of a bad set of options.
Up voted for pointing this out though, since I suspect others may have read it that way as well.
Yes, you are probably right about that. Still, “tricky” is not the same as “impossible”. Humans have made sweeping social changes before, after all; for example, outright slavery is considered to be immoral by a large proportion of humans currently living on Earth, which did not use to be the case in the past. Though, admittedly, such changes would probably be more difficult to effect than, say, the cure for Alzheimers...
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the ‘right technology’ does not currently exist, and isn’t likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope—you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
Exactly, this is why there haven’t been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that’s the word in my local Baron’s court.
You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
performs mitosis
You say there was what size bang?
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
You know what it’s like living with popularity contests Have you lived with a Baron?
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren’t representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time—it would surprise me if there wasn’t gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human “barons” with the space of all possible human “popularity contests” and decide which one is more “civilized” across multiple criteria.
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
This seems a straw man.He didn’t say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn’t make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world—if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user’s posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how “the PC hive mind” is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one’s “opponents” are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men’s Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
What is a “default” human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day—despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.
The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.
That would be more charitable, but less accurate. Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning, and built elaborate reform programs on the idea that they could eradicate everything from discrimination to selfishness through aggressive re-education efforts. I’m not inclined to let them sweep that bit of hubris under the rug, especially since the same groups are in many cases continuing to advocate for the same reform programs despite the fact that one of their key assumptions has been disproved.
I’ll certainly concede that we don’t currently know exactly what the landscape of human behavioral tendencies and constraints looks like, but this should be a motivation for reform advocates to be cautious rather than dismissing the concern. Blithely assuming that you can suppress an infinite variety of undesired behaviors with sufficient social pressure is a recipe for disaster—the end result is likely to be a long buildup of resentment and covert resistance, followed by a sudden revolution that replaces the reformer’s desired social order with a new regime that feels more psychologically comfortable to whatever faction manages to seize power.
That’s the special case of “every point in the state space”, isn’t it?
And I’m not even sure it’s true. Marxist ideology, for example, explicitly disclaims that sort of neuroplasticity: its big idea (oversimplifying like crazy here) is that people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups, and that this sort of group agency is stable enough to be exploited when promoted to conscious awareness. Far from implying a tabula rasa, it actually requires certain stable psychology.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
Isn’t the whole Marxist project based on the idea that you can bring about radical changes in human behavior by reorganizing society? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can only work if humans are so malleable that basic greed, laziness, selfishness and ambition can be eradicated through social programs.
It’s less about social conditioning and more about the extent to which people pursue group interests regardless of social conditioning. To people subscribing to Marxist ideas of class, behaviors which we might perceive as individualistic ambition in fact serve partly—even primarily—to further the interests of the social class in which an actor is embedded, unbeknownst to the actor; when a Marxist talks about capitalist greed, they’re not talking about the selfishness of individual capitalists, they’re accusing capitalists as a group of greed for the resources of other social groups. None of this requires any grand scheme of brainwashing (though social conditioning does come into play when we start talking about “false consciousness” and related ideas); it’s all seen as implicit in people’s native behavior.
It wouldn’t be too far wrong to describe Marxism as primarily a theory of group agency; originally it covered only coarse-grained economic classes, but modern descendants of Marxist ideology have extended it to cover other common interests as well. You’re probably more likely to encounter the latter these days.
I think we mean different things by ‘brainwashing’ and ‘social conditioning’, which is causing some terminology confusion. The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I call this an incorrect belief because more recent research in cognitive science reveals that there are strong constraints on what kinds of mental adaptations will actually happen in practice, and thus on what kinds of social organizations will actually be stable enough to survive for any great length of time.
For example, humans have an innate tendency to form ingroup / outgroup distinctions and to look down on members of their outgroup, which is one of the factors responsible for a lot of bigotry and racism. Society can tell people who to include in these groups with a high degree of success, and can encourage or discourage the abuse of outgroup members. But you can’t eliminate the underlying desire for an outgroup, and if you try you’ll get odd phenomena like people who violently hate their political opponents while honestly believing themselves to be paragons of love and tolerance.
Again, this is not to say that reforms are impossible. Rather, the point is that you can’t fix everything simultaneously, because every social change has unpredictable side effects that currently no one knows how to eliminate. This is one reason why grand social engineering projects almost always fail—because they carelessly pile up lots of big changes in a short period of time, and the accumulated side effects create so much social chaos that they get deposed and replaced with someone more psychologically comfortable.
I feel like I’m explaining this poorly. You can’t make arbitrary changes to behavior under the Marxist worldview by making social reforms. You can get people to further the interests of their social class more effectively by changing their perception of class, or get them to further the interests of other social classes by making them aware of common social goals, but to a Marxist this follows preexisting and fairly strict principles of how people relate to the class structure. To an orthodox Marxist, for example, improving social conditions by means of placing constraints on the behavior of socially dominant classes would be doomed to failure without a corresponding increase in the power of socially subordinate classes: other forms of exploitation would be found, and class relations would regress to the mean.
It’s not that you can do whatever you want by hacking society in a certain way; it’s that people’s psychology is organized in such a way as to lead to more equitable outcomes if you hack society in particular ways. And even describing this as “hacking” is a little misleading; Marx didn’t see any of it as a social project, more as the inevitable result of existing social forces. (Incidentally, this is a main point of divergence between orthodox Marxism and Leninism or Maoism, both of which aimed to produce Marxist revolutions “early”.)
This comment is interesting but needlessly long-winded.
In one sentence, did you mean something like “Status-based oppression and emotional violence will always exist and some group will always get the worst of it; therefore, we shouldn’t get worked up about the victims currently in the spotlight and shouldn’t waste community attention on their particular problems—but it’s impolite to just tell them to shut up and suffer quietly”?
If phrased like that, then yes, your post is already causing me a deep emotional disturbance.
(And you wonder why decent people don’t like reactionaries.)
Nope I take the argument further. You are about to experience more distress. What I’m saying is that we already ignore the suffering of those who suffer the most. What I’m saying is that magnitude or widespread nature of suffering has no strong consistent relation in itself to which group gets our public attention. I’m surprised you missed that.
I’m also saying that often the signalling and politics allegedly done to reduce the kind of “micro-suffering” of group X does nothing of the kind. At worst merely increasing their sensitivity to it making them miserable and resentful of other members of society, while propping up new structures of deprivilege for other groups. A clear utilitarian fail.
Having politics about such microaggression and privillige based suffering be acceptable means that the groups least capable of defending themselves with such politics will suffer at best just as much as before and simply have to pay the additional opportunity cost and at worst will suffer more. Having a taboo on such politics improves the position. It doesn’t seem obvious to me why should groups bad at politics be more deserving of suffering than groups good at politics? Why do you think the former are more numerous or more sensitive than the latter?
Recall that everyone is a member of many such classes and groups. Deep down this kind of attempt at justice in society is based on nothing more than might makes right powered by human intuitions based on sacredness and holier than thou signalling.
Probably true, and possibly a tautology.
However, I think it’s the same fallacy as judging societies only by how the lowest status people are treated. It’s ignoring what happens to a large proportion, perhaps the majority of people.
Also, if better treatment can be figured out for some groups, then perhaps the knowledge can be applied to other suffering when it gets noticed. Life with people isn’t entirely zero-sum.
If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person’s status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).
Even if life is solely a zero-sum game, it would still be possible to narrow the status differences. It’s one thing to have most people think you’re funny-looking, and another to be at risk of being killed on sight.
That is true, but narrowing the status differences would severely penalize anyone whose status is higher than the minimum (or possibly only those with above-average status, depending on the scale you’re using). If we measure quality of life solely in terms of status, then such an action would be undesirable.
Granted, if we include other measures in our calculation, then it all depends on what weights we place on each measure, status included.
It also depends on just how much narrowing we’re doing. I think that eliminating “able to literally get away with murder” wouldn’t be a great loss.
Is there a reason we might want to do this? It feels like your comments in this thread unjustifiably privilege this model.
Again, as far as I understand, Konkvistador believes that humans are driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status, and that this is in fact one of our terminal goals. If we assume that this is true, then I believe my comments are correct.
Is that actually true, though ? Are humans driven primarily by their desire to achieve a higher status (in addition to the desires directly related to physical survival, of course) ? I don’t know, but maybe Konkvistador has some evidence for the proposition—assuming, of course, that I’m not misinterpreting his viewpoint.
This needs to be considered separately as (1) a descriptive statement about actions (2) a descriptive statement about subjective experience (3) a normative statement about the utilitarian good. It seems much more accurate as (1) than (2) or (3), and I think Konkvistador means it as (1); meanwhile, statements about “quality of life” could mean (2) or (3) but not (1).
I don’t understand what (1) means, can you explain ?
The three interpretations I mean are:
(1) People’s behavior is accurately predicted by modeling them as status-maximizing agents.
(2) People’s subjective experience of well-being is accurately predicted by modeling it as proportional to status.
(3) A person is well-off, in the sense that an altruist should care about, in proportion to their status.
Is that clearer?
Yes, thank you. As far as I can tell, (1) and (2) are closest to the meaning I inferred. I understand that we can consider them separately, but IMO (2) implies (1).
If an agent seeks to maximize its sense of well-being (as it would reasonable to assume humans do), then we would expect the agent to take actions which it believes will achieve this effect. Its beliefs could be wrong, of course, but since the agent is descended from a long line of evolutionarily successful agents, we can expect it to be right a lot more often that it’s wrong.
Thus, if the agent’s sense of well-being can be accurately predicted as being proportional to its status (regardless of whether the agent itself is aware of this or not), then it would be reasonable to assume that the agent will take actions that, on average, lead to raising its status.
Consider this explanation, too.
...“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.” “Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said...
(-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Okay, so… you’re going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can’t for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
Meanwhile, you’d seemingly like to deny the practical use of identity politics as self-defense for the “mainstream” cases like gender-based aggression—all for the greater good. Such a proposition indeed feels cruel and morally corrupt to me.
That strikes me as a remarkably uncharitable reading, and in any case a false one—the suffering of undersocialized straight white dudes gets plenty of public attention, albeit much of it in “point and laugh” form (cf. Big Bang Theory).
The most marginalized groups on the planet, almost by definition, are the ones you’ve never heard of. Take Burkina Faso for example—small West African country, #181 of 187 in Human Development Index, and the only reason I know I’ve read about it before is that the Wikipedia link’s purple instead of blue in my browser. #187, the absolute bottom of the barrel, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: slightly better-known, but extremely underserved by Western media relative to the magnitude of all the bad shit going down there. The Second Congo War (1998 − 2003) was the single worst conflict by body count since World War II, but I couldn’t describe a single major news report on it that reached my ears.
And those are entire countries—if I wanted to dig up serious contemporary misery and oppression at the subculture level, I’m almost sure that the famous examples, while certainly terrible, wouldn’t be the worst I could find.
Eh no. I’m saying we ignore the groups who suffer the most. Under-socialized white males have weak counter-cultures working in their favour. But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.
That you can’t think of them is very weak evidence they aren’t there. May I remind you that if we where having this debate in the 1920s people might talk about women as such a group but not homosexuals. The thought wouldn’t even occur to them. Today you are shunned for questioning the thought.
I can give you many many examples but it will get me into trouble. One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.
This is, indeed, an excellent example of a place where the process has utterly failed to produce a humane and compassionate outcome.
As a white South African male, I think that if those are the sorts of articles that you’re relying on for a true idea of what goes on in this country, then you may be over-estimating it.
In short; South Africa is a country polarised into two groups, with all that that entails. Actually, there’s at least four groups (counting “foreigners” and the nearly extinct “Khoisan” as seperate groups), but two of those groups are loud enough to drown out all the others. For quite some time, one of those groups (those who were officially “white”) was dominant, despite the fact that said group was not numerically superior. However, one of the means of retaining said dominance was by providing substandard education to all other groups (along with pretty brutal repression, not being allowed to vote, and so on).
Then, in 1994, everyone was allowed to vote. There was a sudden and very predictable change of government without most of the negative effects of actual revolution (we had very good leadership at a critical time). The trouble now is that, in the eyes of far too many people, there are still two groups. If you listen to one side, then THEY robbed everyone during apartheid and refuse to help the people they once hurt; if you listen to the other side, then THEY are a bunch of violent, corrupt lunatics who will kill you as soon as you let your guard down for an instant. And both sides will gleefully report on any facts that appear to support their stance.
Disagree, since the sources used for articles like the lined one seem reliable.
If anything I in think in general Western reports let alone regular Western ideas about life in South Africa are likely to be underestimating white South African suffering. In addition I would argue there are gains in signalling games for well off white South Africans to downplay the suffering of their group.
I do agree South Africa in general has been rather lucky but there is potential for major problems because white South Africans are a market dominant minority.
We have a clear example of what could have and still some day might happen in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
I didn’t say that anything in the linked article was directly false—merely that the evidence is biased, having been picked out by one group, and therefore that it gives an overall false impression.
Consider, for example, from the article on farm murders:
I’m willing to believe that both of those statistics are correct, individually, but put together like that they present an incorrect impression. To obtain a correct impression, one needs to find the answer to this question: in 2001, what percentage of South African farmers were white?
Due to the aftereffects of Apartheid, I can say with extremely high probability that it’s higher than the 9.2% figure quoted; indeed, it would not surprise me to learn that it was more than 70% (which completely changes the significance of that first figure). Unfortunately, in a few minutes’ googling, I was unable to find any source for the figure in question (census data is supposed to be available, but not necessarily in an easily searched format).
As for BEE, it is (as I understand the original idea) an attempt to redress the “market dominant minority” problem without widespread suffering; yes, there is a certain amount of economic discrimination against me, but it’s not an impossible barrier to overcome. And it does continually reduce the potential for the major problems that you describe. (What it has become is in some cases different to what was intended—sometimes because of the greed of a few, the new “black elite” who have got rather rich by exploiting any loopholes they could find—sometimes because of poorly drafted legislation—but there are enough voices in parliament calling for the original idea to keep pulling it back on course). I suppose it could be seen as a sort of ‘social safety valve’, giving the less-dominant majority a way to achieve part of the market without pulling the whole market down and rebuilding it from scratch.
And I should add that there are people (I know of several) who would take every word of those articles and mutter darkly that “you don’t know the half of it”. I personally don’t always agree with them, but they are there (and may be suffering psychologically in ways that I hadn’t fully considered until now).
So, I’m not saying that there is no suffering. I’m just saying that I think that it might be over-presented in some places.
Yes, and Zimbabwe is very much in the public eye here. Enough people are looking at it, and comparing it to the current situation, that any attempt to start moving down that same path will be highlighted mercilessly, and shied away from (no-one wants to end up in Mugabe’s position, at least not as far as I can imagine). I’m not saying that we can’t end up in similar straits (though I consider it unlikely), but at the very least we’ll get there by a substantially different path.
On further reflection regarding the pedophile example:
How many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of homosexuality? sociopathy? schizophrenia? ADHD? autism?
Now, how many studies are you aware of that research the neurobiological origins of pedophilia?
Googling those terms found a few, though most of them seem pretty tentative right now.
Thanks!
Anecdote: I didn’t search as well as I should have because I had a weird emotional “what if some automated FBI filter flags me for googling ‘pedophilia’?” reaction—which also seems to be part of the problem.
I agree with your last paragraph.
So, literally an unknown unknown? This is a very empirical claim, and my prior on it is low. Unless such groups have unusual barriers placed against them socially and ideologically, you’d think that, over time, individuals in them would’ve made some effort to carve out a niche in identity politics.
I think you just aren’t getting it. Putting some effort towards carving a niche has bad returns for these groups. See paedophiles.
Because they lose the political battle their very efforts to organize along these lines are seen as more evidence at how dangerous and weird they are you instantly categorize them as deserving their fate.
Also to put it in familiar terms the false conspicuousness of members of the group experience may make such activism unthinkable for them. If there is no force that weakens or breaks down that memeplex the political war can’t get started.
And again! Why do you assume might makes right? Why do you assume that any group with a genuine grievance and suffering shall be victorious in the long run? What possible reason would you have for this in a non-caring non-Christian universe.
Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?
Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we’ve had over the past oh… 5 years?
That is the interpretation I made, as well, but perhaps I was mistaken ? I upvoted your comment primarily because I want Konkvistador to clarify whether this interpretation is correct.
I quite agree, and considered posting along these lines myself. Perhaps you were right to be oblique; I’d have been a lot more explicit.
In fact, I will. A large part of this isn’t just about forming viable political coalitions—which is perhaps benign—it’s about suppressing alternate coalitions. It’s about making it impossible for people with a different understanding of the world to co-ordinate. For example, the reason that men catcall women is, or should be, well known to everyone (see e.g. Berne)) but the discussion below consists of a strenuous wish to avoid the obvious explanation. And of course anyone who gives it will be the designated patsy and thereby validate the feelings of moral superiority the coalition has been endowing itself with.
It’s also about a wish to avoid responsibility, but that’s a post in its own right.
The solution, of course, is to form a higher status coalition against it. For instance:
“As an Arab and a Muslim, I feel the concept of feminism is an Orientalist dog-whistle. You only need to look down this thread to see the real targets are always the Otherized women wearing burkas—whose perspective is totally missing. The venom is just barely below the surface—a discussion of a boy asking a girl out quickly becomes a ritual condemnation of Afghan customs. Analysing a father’s advice quickly leads to back-slapping about how much Saudi Arabia “stinks”. Anyone who calls themselves a feminist is perpetuating white privilege and racism.”
Unfortunately, I fear that this troll has already been done.
EDIT: Edited to include links.
Has any other reader figured out yet what this obvious reason is supposed to be? I’m mystified.
I’m mystified, too. Furthermore, I bet there isn’t just one reason.
I suspect that statement was meant to be semantically equivalent to “the reason that men go to strip clubs is, or should be, well known to everyone”.
I’m confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?
Ok, a better way to phrase that would be “the reason that men like looking at naked women is, or should be, well known to everyone”.
Actually, that depends on what you mean by ‘known’.
Everyone knows that most men like looking at naked women, and many who don’t feel the attraction themselves can more or less understand it by extrapolation.
However, I don’t think much if anything is known about physiological basis (eyes to brain) for men liking to look at naked women.
Agreed. I suspect that Salemicus’s statement was meant to be interpreted in the same way.
I think the point is that feminism tends to assume that it’s for some kind of sinister toxic masculinity sex thing?
I made quite a few substantive points about the discussion in that comment. Why don’t we talk about those? Unfortunately almost all the replies has been about this side-issue, which I have already stated I am not going to discuss.
I realize that I’m being lazy, but is there a way you can summarize this reason ? I have not read the book, and I fear I may not have the time to do so.
Let me guess (I read the book years ago).
Humans, in any situation, invent something to do, simply because “doing nothing” is not an option. A stupid social interaction is usually preferable to no social interaction. On the other hand, an intimate interaction increases the risk of being hurt, so with strangers people prefer rituals. Ritual provides some small social interaction at almost zero risk.
If I understand it correctly, Salemicus suggests that catcalling is simply a ritual. It is more than nothing. It is less than a personalized message. It is what other people (of the same social group) in the same situation would do.
Why exactly this ritual instead of something else? Dunno. Tradition. You usually don’t invent rituals, you inherit them from your ancestors. Somewhere in the past, there was some reason. Maybe a good reason, maybe a random incident. Doesn’t matter today. This is the ritual we have. This is what we do when we want to do something, but not something personal.
As I already stated in the original post—no!
Besides, you don’t need to read the book to know the reason. It’s the obvious reason. I simply referred to that book because it explains the entire social dynamic around it.
It is not “obvious” to me. I am a man, and I’ve never had the desire to catcall; from my perspective, catcalling is something cartoon characters do.
Your comments on this thread seem to be evidence that there is no such “obvious” reason, and that you are in fact pretending that such an “obvious” reason exists, as some sort of status play, or perhaps for didactic reasons. Do you agree that this is the reasonable conclusion that readers of this thread should reach? If not, why not?
It is also possible that he’s operating here under an illusion of transparency.
Honestly, I’m curious too—I can think of several candidate reasons, but nothing blindingly obvious.
If you’re concerned about looking like a patsy, or about possible retributive behavior from being un-PC or perhaps excessively PC, there’s nothing stopping you from spinning up a throwaway account and using that. I’d say sockpuppetry is acceptable in that case.
It’s not even obvious to me that only one of several reasons is right (i.e., I suspect there are several different reasons each of which explain a sizeable fraction, but not the near-totality, of cases of catcalling).
Are you sure you’re not generalizing from one example? Just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean it must be obvious to everybody, especially on a website with average AQ in the high twenties. Hanlon’s razor, guys.
Can you explain how what you are implying has anything to do with with Third Wave Feminism? Because I’m not seeing it.
One of the key third-wave critiques is that second-wave feminism was only ever really about middle-class white women. Obviously, an actual third-wave feminist wouldn’t have concluded that feminism is about white privilege; they’d have said we need to change the direction of feminism to make it more inclusive of “diverse perspectives” or some such.
I was joking when I implied they were trolling feminism, but if a group of saboteurs had gone undercover to make the movement irrelevant, I don’t think they could have done any better.
Regarding my own comment, I was not condemning afghan customs in the context of their treatment of women, but in their treatment of thievery and other such crimes (I was specifically thinking of the process of escalating blood feuds that often result from that process).
“If It Weren’t For Him”? “Rapo”? “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch”?
None of the above.
It’s too long since I read the book to recall all of the Games in detail, and the list on the book’s home page (linked from the Wiki article) doesn’t seem to have this game, but no matter: Berne did not claim to be presenting an exhaustive taxonomy and encouraged his readers to discover more Games.
I recommend the book. I think it’s essential reading for anyone confused (as so many LWers profess to be, and there’s a Game right there) about aspects of social life that are not usually explicitly described. (The reasons why people don’t talk about them form yet more Games.) Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them. Once you have this, what is going on with catcalling will be transparent.
The theoretical background of the book, Transactional Analysis, you can take or leave; it gives Berne a conceptual vocabulary to talk about Games, but one need not make any ontological commitment to TA, to make use of the book.
Here’s Kurt Vonnegut’s review, from 1965.
I bought & read a copy of Games People Play some years ago. (But thanks for the recommendation.) Although I’ve read the book, “the” reason why men catcall remains opaque to me. I can think of multiple reasons, and multiple ways to describe catcalling as a Game, so merely pointing at the book tells me nothing new.
By the principle of charity, I figured Salemicus had something more usefully specific in mind. So I looked at the table of contents, guessed at some Games they might have been thinking of, and put them out there as a starting point. I wasn’t about to reread the whole book just to try making Salemicus’s comment click.
[Belated edit to fix that dangling modifier.]
“Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them.”
From Berne: “Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him.”
So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female’s (albeit negative) attention.
Speaking of which, a tweet by Sister Y I liked a lot:
“the men are competing amongst themselves to see who can loudestly inform the lady that she is a viable rape target”
That’s a solid dig at people who perform a particular kind of behavior that one deprecates. But it just isn’t true!
That sounds wildly inaccurate. I think that the most violent and threatening catcalling happens with only one man
I’m not sure I grasp at all what you’re referring to by those “dynamics”. The nitpicking? The pointing at small things rather than the fundamental assumption(s)? (if so, what’s the perceived fundamental assumption(s) and which are the small things? Is the fundamental assumption the claim “Women have a larger inferential distance to LW because difference in life experiences”?)
I disagree on this, ISTM that many of those are displaying things substantially different, such as “helping people in general” or “protecting people being harassed”.
That whole paragraph rings very true, and deserves upvotes IMO, contingent of me having any idea what “dynamics” you’re pointing at.
How could we test this?
(Also, this issue might be address somewhat via shorter paragraphs)
You seem to be using jargon I am unfamiliar with. Are you saying that sexism is merely one a way to increase one’s status, indistinguishable from other status plays?
Among other things.
A normal person living life will receive micro aggressions with some regularity, but views these aggressions through a lens shaped by current political thinking. Thus, those aggressions which are aligned with political perspectives on the evilness of sexism will have greater salience than those which are just random aggressive events. Even if the probability of receiving a micro aggression is equal for both men and women, only those which are towards women and seem to be caused by their sex will be elevated to the level of explicit political discourse.
Consider the D&D example given in this post. The DM saying “no, you’re playing my game wrong” is easy to interpret as a micro aggression, but to gamers (especially ones who’ve sat at both sides of the table) it’s seen as part of gaming, and someone who gets upset about it probably shouldn’t be at the table (in part because they can probably find a DM more suited to their interests). This particular example is being discussed publicly because a poster thought it was an example of sexism; if someone had posted a similar anecdote on the site outside of the context of LW Women it would not be seen as anywhere near as relevant.
Please consider just how strongly the likelyhood of such microaggressions is inversely correlated with a person’s conformity to any given implicit norm! That’s why I find it more than purple prose to refer to the victims of oppression as “the weak”; by not conforming, they simply start in a much much weaker position than someone who reasonably fits within the norms. The current beneficiaries of identity politics- like transfolk—certainly have the field tilted against them, and talking to them of “equal opportunity” or “equality before the law” is outright cruel; you’ve got to privilege those worst off to end up with a remotely fair outcome. (Which leads to the problem of incentives, which leads me to questioning capitalism and meritocracy altogether, but that’s another story.)
So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out. A rock that’s thrown downwards at someone hurts much more—and is easier to hit with—than the same rock thrown back up with equal force! The fact that a few people might try to profit politically from redefining “up” and “down” doesn’t make the objective social circumstances less real.
(Sorry if this all sounds like banal platitudes.)
And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression?
To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?
I think people are somewhat more likely to complain when they’re hurt.
True, there are other things that arguably have a bigger impact, e.g., whether they’ll be punished for complaining, whether their complaint is likely to change anything. For example, frequency human rights complaints against governments tends to be inversely proportional to how bad that government actually is at human rights.
I’d expect a maximum somewhere in the middle of the range for internally generated complaints.
The countries and regions which are best at human rights get few or no complaints. The countries and regions which are bad but not horrendous get the most complaints. The countries which have a strong pattern of punishing complainers get a few complaints. The most vicious countries get no complaints.
That’s just for internally generated complaints. Outsiders may be saying that conditions are very bad in the worst countries.
I think your underestimating how many complaints get generated in countries with good human rights that would be considered frivolous by an international standard, e.g., arguing that refusing to subsidize condoms constitutes a “war on women”.
[citation needed]
It is not particularly controversial to note that nations concerned about human rights focus their advocacy / attention / pressure on countries that care somewhat about human rights themselves. (i.e. the US pressures Turkey about human rights problems, not North Korea).
That said, I don’t think that was Eugine_Nier’s point. I suspect that I disagree with his intended assertion (denotatively if not connotatively).
(I think this was intended as an observation of high noise levels, not a moral judgement of sexism generally.)
So … don’t trust anecdotal evidence, basically.
Yeah. We overestimate their importance.
The purpose of this, if I understood correctly, was to increase empathy with and understanding of the emotions of women in these situations. It’s less evidence than neurohacking.
If you neurohack, presumably you want to move yourself towards more correspondence with reality.
Correspondence with reality is a subgoal of many other goals, but it is not the only purpose neurohacking can serve. The claustrophobe knows they are perfectly safe in small spaces; they still want to leave them.
EDIT: A better example, courtesy of NancyLebovitz.
That depends on what you mean by ‘know’. It’s one thing to know something on a verbal level, and another to have your whole nervous system believe it.
Do you think Alicorn’s polyhacking would be a better example? I don’t really know that many good examples of neurohacking.
I think so, but it’s been a while since I’ve read it. Her work on being happier would definitely qualify.
I’ve seen claims that cognitive psychology has the effect of calming the over-excitable part of the brain in people with OCD.
Excellent, thanks.
Or you simply want to propagate something that seems important throughout your belief network (e.g. a moral injunction against too-convenient dubious actions), or move your values towards reflective equilibrium.
Please be specific. In the post I had already quickly explained a few terms like “microaggression” and used relevant links. I assume familiarity with some terms like “signalling” because they are standard on LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
I’m not sure what it is about your post that I’m missing, since I thought I knew what all those terms meant (except microaggression, and WP says my guess was basically right). Maybe you’re using terms in ways I’m not used to, or maybe I’m just confused as to what your overall point is. MugaSofer’s question seems like a good distillation of mine, so I’m hoping you’ll answer it.
I summarized what appeared to be the point of your comment; since I am unfamiliar with terms used, I thought it better to check if I had misunderstood.
I’m curious if you buy into Moldbug’s narration about Catholic v. Protestant as being an overarching framework for liberal v. conservative issues.
Frankly, the idea of conservativism always failing seems to be more an issue of what ideas survive: If a change or proposal goes through, then we think of it as liberal/progressive. Changes to society which get rolled back become more or less forgotten and don’t come up in how we think of it. Alcohol prohibition would be one example, where excepting a very tiny group the issue has simply fallen out of contemporary political discourse.
I think you are mixing up different issues. Certainly conservatives manage to roll back some stuff, but that is not relevant to:
MM claims that all net changes are originated on the progressive side, which is a well-defined side with centuries of coherence. Do you claim that there are net changes that originated on the conservative side and were written into the history of liberals? Prohibition is certainly not an example of this. Do you even claim that there are any net changes originated by conservatives? Or do you disagree that there are two clear sides, and it is anachronistic to identify the parties of successful changes in different eras? Prohibition certainly shows that there is not complete identify of proposed changes across time, but that is hardly evidence of discontinuity. If you dispute continuity, what are two such parties that you think do should not be identified?
I don’t think there are two clear sides at all, and yes the anachronism issue is a problem also. Moreover, in so far as there’s almost anything like two clear sides, a lot of changes have come from what is commonly identified as the conservative end. For example, over the last seventy years in the US in many ways we moved more in the direction of free markets, a conservative ideal. One example is how it used to be outright illegal in the US to own gold bullion where now there’s a thriving market.
If the problem of identifying two sides is not just continuity, what is an example of its difficulty at a single point in time?
Owning gold bullion seems to me a poor example. First, it was rolled back in 45 years, longer than prohibition, but not very long. Second, it was only a means to the end of devaluing the dollar. When Nixon moved entirely off of the gold standard, it became irrelevant. Nixon moving completely off of the gold standard might qualify as a non-progressive doing something, though.
In general, rolling back FDR’s policies is not a net change.
MM would probably say that conservatives don’t have ideals. They talk in terms of ideals because they don’t know how else to fight progressives who have ideals. Or because they have been infected with progressive ideologies. I believe that free trade and the free market are Whig ideas. Certainly they were in the 19th century, though if you trace them to the French, they no longer fit in the Tory/Whig divide.
Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.
This should be taught in schools.
Instead of what? There are a finite number of school hours; from what other subject would you take the hours to cover this? Ideally everything would be taught in schools, but there are constraints.
(This question isn’t entirely rhetorical, and I would not be surprised to hear a good answer. Schools are far from optimal.)
English classes are usually designed to teach skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing. There is no particular need for the subject matter to be historical literature, and discussions of topics like this would fit right in.
In fact, some English teachers try to do just that, by selecting literature with the appropriate subject matter.
I suspect that this subject matter would do a better job at teaching reading comprehension and critical thinking than covering historical literature would anyway, at least if the students have already done analysis of historical literature in some previous semester.
In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just “they were easy for me”; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such “supplementary” material.
In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what’s happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math.
Of course, actually implementing any of these—especially good teachers—would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.
Massive ongoing discrimination that affects half the species and that could be, if not necessarily remedied, at least dragged into the open and ridiculed, surely deserves universal lessons.
The reason this doesn’t happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum: racists and sexists are the board, the concerned parents, the local news editor, the elected representatives and the voters.
I’d say that anti-racism was very much part of the curriculum at my schools. It wasn’t until college that it got past “racism is bad, read these books about growing up discriminated against,” and reached the point of “these are some of the ongoing issues regarding race relations today on which there is actual public disagreement, here are some sources to inform your position on them,” but I did have one class which covered racial issues in this way (among other issues) which was a required course.
I don’t know to what extent my education was atypical, only that the schools I attended up to high school were pretty good as far as public schools go.
That’s too simplistic IMO… I think it’s more a desire to avoid “politicizing education”, and people not making sufficiently convincing arguments in favour of its inclusion, rather than just terrible people having power.
You hear “sexists” and think terrible people, I think ordinary people. Giving a higher salary offer to Mike Smith and judging his work better than Mary Smith. Picking “someone like us” for promotion the board, so you end up with single digit female representation at CEO level. Having to do orchestra auditions behind a screen, or you won’t hire any women. Catcalling or saying “smile luv” on the street, and then calling her a bitch when she won’t respond. Taking “no” as “keep asking”. Bothering her in Starbucks when she’s trying to read. Having a dress code that requires a shower and a suit from guys, but an hour’s makeup and high heels from women. Interrupting her and ignoring her in meetings. Treating women as a “special interest group”. Getting angry about “political correctness” and “man hating feminists” when somebody tries to start a women’s studies class.
Sexism saturates this culture. It feels normal. It’s accepted by men and laughed off by women who don’t want to be the party pooper. If you are not female and have not been following feminism, your inferential distance may be large indeed.
True. Sexism is frickin pervasive, and that is the underlying problem.
Though it’s only pointless quibbling at this point, I still think your previous comment was too simplistic—if nothing else, it doesn’t have any of the depth of this, and, though it is perfectly consistent with the view “most people, even good people, have sexist tendencies due to our culture”, it appears to be coming from a less well-developed view, which is why it has been downvoted. This again may be a question of inferential distance, which thus demonstrates itself to be a very useful concept.
I think it’s not. Basically, I think what I called “racists and sexists” are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in “male headship under God”, or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don’t even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA “political correctness gone mad”). Feminism that isn’t about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither anodyne nor cap-in-hand provokes them. And they react, often in ways that look like incidental decisions, to exclude the threat. Such as, here, by marginalizing equality for half the species into an academic backwater.
I can’t figure out which part this is refering to.
Also: I’m pretty sure I agree with what you’ve been saying in these posts, including this one. (Has that come across clearly? I’m curious.) I also may have been strawmanning you (thanks MugaSofer for pointing this out), which is an interesting combination.
That refers to “I still think your previous comment was too simplistic”.
The thought behind it was not too simplistic, but I think its presentation in that comment was, largely due to leaving out this background information; I think this is why it was downvoted, and is also what left it open to strawmanning (sigh sexist language).
I think it comes from the fact that a genderless figurine looks male to our eyes—you can see it doesn’t have breasts, and any other pieces of anatomy it’s missing are either routinely stylized away or covered up.
Also, waist-to-hip ratio—it would be harder to make a scarecrow with wider hips than the waist.
I agreed with everything you said but this line. Could you clarify it please?
Hmm. My attempt at answering this: The “incidental decisions” is about such actions as choosing male candidates over female candidates with identical qualifications, ignoring women`s contributions at meetings and then agreeing strongly when a man later says the exact same thing, and so on. As for “excluding the threat”, maybe it refers to perceptions of women as being less skilled, rather than having the cognitive dissonance involved in admitting you’re picking the man because he is male.
So subconscious bias, then? “Excluding the threat” makes it sound deliberate and disingenuous.
In my interpretation, yes, subconscious bias, and avoiding the issue or finding various non-answers when it is raised to conscious attention.
I habitually define racism and sexism to exclude such bias, which seems to have led me astray in this case
The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.
Ah, OK. I was confused by the anthropomorphism there.
Just because something is ordinary doesn’t mean it’s not terrible. :-)
YMMV, in my experience anti-racism is, in fact, on the curriculum (I’m Irish) and most people don’t see themselves as belonging to the group “sexists” which must be defended (am I strawmanning you here?)
People don’t see their attitudes as anything but “normal” because being a sexist or a racist doesn’t feel like villainy, doesn’t even feel like a moral choice, it just feels like facts.
Oh, yes. Always. I’m just not sure how many people both hold sexist beliefs and allow them to impact the curriculum. Again, I’m Irish, so i may be worse wherever you are.
Yep. They don’t see themselves as sexist, but they are. That makes it more difficult to effect change.
… I have to admit, I was implicitly defining “sexist” as someone who holds sexist beliefs, not someone who is unconsciously biased. Hell, most people in our society are subconsciously biased against black people, but since we know this to be a bias we will try to work against this if we realize it.
According to the Implicit Association Test, I’m strongly subconsciously biased in favour of black people (though given the particular set of stimuli they used, I think the test only actually shows that I’m biased in favour of broad noses).
No, it’s not just that. When in this TED talk the guy said “Vultures are being poisoned because humans …”, some part of my brain expected to see white people, and when the slide showed black people that part of my brain thought “Wait… so black people do nasty stuff too? o.O”. Likewise, when I read stories about humans causing extensive damage to the environment, I don’t get the same gut feeling of indignation when it’s non-Europeans doing that (e.g. the Māori exterminating moa or the tragedy of the commons on Easter Island) as I feel when Europeans do that.
It is—obscurely, and too late, and to those who already know.
It’s called Women’s Studies (though it’s about more that women’s experiences).
And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.
I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. A lot of Women’s Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women’s experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.
From my wife:
I learned many interesting and useful things from my Women’s Studies class, and am glad I decided to try it out. However, I became a pariah when I questioned the professor’s account of sexism in biology textbooks. “Eggs are portrayed as passive, while sperm compete to reach them.” In my experience, textbooks say what actually happens in the reproductive system, with no sexism to be found. She stuck to her guns. It was unfortunate that she used that example, because there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications.
And back to me:
Just thought it would be useful to provide an example of a questionable claim. She says other people in the class hated her for pointing it out.
Like what? Just curious.
Here is a chapter from a book about feminism and evolutionary biology. Many pages are missing but you can get the general picture. Examples from the chapter:
Marzluff and Balda sought an “alpha male” in a flock of pinyon jays. The males rarely fight, so they tempted them with treats and considered instead glances from male birds as dominant displays and birds looking in the air as submissive displays. (This is actually plausible, since apparently the “dominant” males would get to eat the treat after doing this.)
About bird fighting, they wrote, “In late winter and early spring. . . birds become aggressive towards other flock members. Mated females seem especially testy. Their hormones surge as the breeding season approaches giving them the avian equivalent of PMS which we call PBS (pre-breeding syndrome)!”
The obvious alternative explanation is that dominance hierarchies may have been more fierce among females and that they instead should have been looking for an alpha female that determines hierarchies among the men.
That one is a bit old. There’s a 2010 book of theirs on pinyon jays but I couldn’t tell if it kept the same interpretation. So for something from the 90s the author points out that Birkhead’s work on magpies shows a similar gender bias. Female magpies can store sperm for later use, and “cheating” is common. Birkhead focuses almost entirely on males nest-hopping for extra mates, and treats female cheating as a curious anomaly: “Interestingly, some [female] magpies. . . appear to seek extra-male matings.” When you actually examine the data, “some” is not quite as accurate as “most.”
There are other examples in the chapter. Some are better than others.
See this article on Sarah Hrdy.
Agreed.
To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women’s Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women’s Studies on these grounds.
However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.
I think a better statement of our position, is that we think it’s currently so full of BS and anti-epistomology that it’s better to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch.
I read an introduction to women’s studies textbook and it was all inside baseball commentary. It was not like reading this. At all. It was a survey of all the different fields that Women’s Studies engages with, but it did not teach this, it assumed it. This is consistent with some male acquaintances experience of some such courses as hostile to them. Also, Hugo Schwyzer is a dick.
I’ve made a number of comments on this post that were addressing specific, somewhat-tangential issues, and though I think those are important too, I just want to echo cata here:
Thank you for this post, daenerys, and for collecting these anecdotes. I think it’s quite valuable and look forward to subsequent posts in the series.
When you say “experiences like these” … experiences of sexism? Experiences narrated by women? Experiences of Dungeons and Dragons?
Experiences in which women describe things that I don’t ever experience or witness (e.g. catcalls, poor treatment based on gender, personal harassment) or in which women perceive something in light of their gender in a way that I don’t (e.g. predominance of males in art, male-centric language, safety in public spaces.)
You really had no experience/empathy with sexism? Huh. Maybe this is more useful than I thought.
I certainly had much less empathy a few years ago, prior to paying attention to these kind of posts. I wasn’t aware how common the former kind of experience was, and I didn’t notice (and still don’t) a lot of the latter kind.
For me, this post is not doing any favors for the “women’s experiences are fundamentally different” camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, “Why are your characters always girls?” is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.
I’d guess these mostly work as stories of “growing up geeky”.
The only ones that didn’t resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I’ve never stopped appearing like a geek) and the “Star wars characters are mostly male”, which does seem worth mentioning.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.
For those that don’t want to do a google search, MLP:FiM = My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (I had to look it up)
Is this one of those kid shows that adults watch these days? A show that a decent fraction of male LW readers know enough about to “ruminate on”?
I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination (‘nerdy’ references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There’s a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff.
There’s been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there’s a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or “bronies”, as some style themselves.
Yup. Try watching a few episodes, it’s pretty good.
Start at the beginning. Don’t throw the dice with the more recent stuff.
Updating usefulness of the abbreviation. My initial consideration was whether I should just abbreviate it MLP, since of course people would know I was referring to Friendship is Magic. It gets enough references around here I figured it was in the popular consciousness.
In my opinion, it’s not an exceptionally good show. Though from what I’ve read so far, Fallout:Equestria is awesome.
Find better friends!
I have never heard of Fallout:Equestria, but I started laughing out loud as soon as I read the title. Is this the authoritative source for the story ?
War. War never changes...
Not sure about definitive, but it seems to be complete.
F:E is surprisingly, serious, gritty, and well-written. It’s also longer than War and Peace.
First, share your respective definitions of “better” with regard to friends.
Not exhaustive, but “friends for which liking awesome things is not a handicap” is a good start.
Also, look for friends who are at least happy for your sake if you’re enthusiastic about something non-harmful.
Couldn’t have said it any better.
Solution make friends read it.
By the way, Friendship is Science in Chapter 64 of HPMoR is a reference to Friendship is Magic.
I’m not entirely convinced by this argument.
To spell it out for those who don’t know the shows, anime series that have a mostly female cast doing more or less random stuff and have a significant male audience are a thing. There’s also the type of anime series that has a mostly male cast and is aimed at a female audience.
Not to mention Serial Experiments Lain (I am not providing a link due to spoilers).
All of these are examples of anime, though. An average person doesn’t watch anime, so maybe it would disturb him more to encounter MLP (which, after all, is heavily influenced by anime).
Never checked the numbers, but always felt that shoujo and josei manga and anime were way more widespread and likely to be successful than equivalent male-oriented counterparts (though the top ones in popularity are, of course, shounen stuff).
Er… what if it still doesn’t seem disturbing after rumination?
Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil.
Er, I don’t seem to be finding this very disturbing either.
(Admittedly, I haven’t actually watched the show, only read fanfiction based on it.)
Yes. There are certain very common tropes whose gender-reversed version offends me (thereby making me realize that the original version is fucked up too), but almost all characters in a work of fiction being the same gender isn’t one of those.
Examples: 1) When a woman posts some mysandrist generalization about “all men” on her Facebook wall, I am deeply offended¹ -- so I can guess how women feel when a man posts some mysogynist generalization about “all women”, which happens more often IME. 2) The latest episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which na nggenpgvir znyr ynjlre gevrf gb jva n ynjfhvg ol syvegvat jvgu gur whebef, jub ner nyy srznyr, kind-of bothered me (though I’m not sure I endorse that feeling) because it reminded me of the gender-reversed version, which is a very common trope and offends me. But sometimes is the asymmetry itself that bothers me: when a woman posts pictures of sexy men in underwear on their Facebook wall, I’m not directly offended by that (I occasionally do the gender-reversed version of that myself), but I am bothered by the fact that no-one seems to flinch whereas when a man posts pictures of sexy women in underwear on their Facebook wall (which happens much more often IME) plenty of people boo that.²
The one time I actually complained about that, though, the person who had written that status told me that I was obviously not the kind of guy she was talking about so I shouldn’t be offended. Since that time, I just entirely ignore any mysandristic or mysogynistic generalization I read.
When I post a picture of a sexy woman in underwear on my Facebook wall and a woman complains about that, I dig their Facebook wall until I find a picture of a sexy man in underwear and jokingly complain about that. She usually gives me an obviously jocular excuse for why she posted it.
Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.
People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that… as a joke, but it hadn’t occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what’s funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson’s paradox. Or something like that.) I’m thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don’t; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn’t correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they’re ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they’re ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I’m very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia—that’s myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can’t remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.)
Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it’s more common. Maybe I’m not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don’t see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn’t be if they only saw them a couple times a month.
Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn’t mean I am wrong”, i.e. it could still be that each of several causes plays a substantial role. What I’ve observed so far seems compatible with a model where that indignation is caused by:
a cached thought that erotica is undignified, originating from earlier, pruder times, most prevalent among religious/traditionalist/low-Openness people because that’s the kind of people who hold onto cached thoughts from long ago; ISTM that this affects pictures of females more often than pictures of males (but I might be wrong about that). Often played for laughs;
people who think they are ugly getting envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier than they think they are. According to you it’s more common among females, which seems plausible enough to me (though it’s not like males talk to me that often about whether or not they think they’re sexy, so I dunno); and
annoyance of people seeing something they’re not interested in (e.g. sexy pictures of females, in the case of straight females or gay males) popping onto their news feed over and over again. Also happens with other stuff, e.g. football or gossip about celebrities.
Speaking only for myself, I’ve had a bit of a fight to calm down about my appearance—I’m 59 and apparently more or less look it. It’s been work (pretty successful recently) to not feel like a failure because I don’t look like I’m 30. From what I can gather, this isn’t uncommon among women, and frequently in stronger form.
Your frequency argument is relevant, but needs a bit more causality added—the reason the pictures are so common is presumably because they’re what’s preferred.
See also my edit to the parent, if you haven’t.
I don’t get it… Preferred by whom? Of course straight males would prefer to look at females and vice versa...
“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people’s dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let’s tell our gym-going friends that it’s cold on Facebook too”, it’s been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males.
EDIT: I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let’s see how many flames I’ll get. (For all I’m concerned, if you’re the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people’s dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)
To be fair, this scenario probably should bother you, because it amounts to hacking a critically important social system through the use of the Dark Arts. The gender of the participants is, IMO, less important than the realization of how easily our social infrastructure can be exploited.
It does bother me in Real Life, what I’m not sure of is whether it should bother me in fiction.
I don’t actually watch How I Met Your Mother, but I’ve been assuming that the fictional situation you described was plausible enough to have a good chance of occurring in real life—though it’s possible I was wrong.
People getting their way to the unfair detriment of others through arse-licking does happen a lot where I am, and not always in sexualized ways. (And it’s not the “sexualized ways” part that bothers me,¹ it’s the “unfair detriment of others” part.)
Ten hours before writing the grandparent, I was getting free beer and free cake after dancing with a group of women (none of whom I had ever met until a few hours prior) and letting them take my shirt off. And I can see no good reason to feel bad about that, at least in the situation I was in.
Picture that situation gender-swapped.
Hmm… Yeah; my intuition says the people involved would be frowned upon a lot more in that case. But then again, before the first time I did something like that, my intuition had said I would be frowned upon a lot more than actually happened; so I don’t trust it so much anymore, IOW I’m not sure I should have updated my intuition about the male stripper case but not also that about the female stripper case in the same direction. (When someone does something that makes me update my model of humans, it usually doesn’t occur to me to only update my model of their gender and not that of the other gender—but in situations like this one there are potential confounders aplenty.)
… in a world where men get pregnant?
Really, I’m impressed it took this long for someone to point out one of the fundamental problems of the gender-swap test.
Yep — human reproduction is not an equal deal for the participants. In the most basic sense possible, it is not fair. Nobody promised humanity that our alien-god-given bodies would perfectly implement the rules of morality that we might later derive — such as reciprocity; or for that matter not using another person merely as a means to your ends.
This bug has been acknowledged many times before, and various technical and social workarounds have been proposed and deployed. The underlying bug still needs work, though it may not be fully fixed before humans are ported to a new platform.
To play Feminist’s Advocate for a moment:
Some feminists argue that gender reversal is not a valid technique, since there is a huge power differential between men and women. Thus, when a man says “all women are X”, he is implicitly wielding his power in order to dehumanize women even further and reinforce his privilege—which is what makes the action sexist, and therefore exceptionally offensive. When a woman says “all men are X”, her statement may be technically wrong, but it is not sexist, because the woman does not wield any power, due to being a woman. Thus, her statement is only mildly offensive at worst.
I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing.
Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent.
They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.
Agreed; I’m not a terribly good Feminist’s Advocate. That said, I believe they’d disagree with this statement:
I’ve seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that:
a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and
b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.
I might agree, provided they’re talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men—this guy doesn’t sound “used to his privilege” to me.
And if they’re talking about group averages, I can’t see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she’s an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5′) and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6′2″).
Yes, indeed. That’s the whole source of the disagreement once all the confusions and bad arguments are shaved off.
However, IME they (nearly always, only exception I’ve ever seen was on LW) make the opposite claim on the basis of their own experiences, perceptions of power balance, limited (often cherry-picked) data, and/or personal moral intuitions.
From what little (read: I suspect much more than a typical student who has taken a college course in Feminism or Cultural Studies and goes on to join the feminist movement in some way) social science and serious-psychology I’ve read and understood, it seems that most multiviewpoint analyses and calculations (I’ve seen the term ‘intersectional analysis’ thrown around, but AFAICT it’s basically just computing multiple subjective judgments of power in a combined utilitarian fashion) end up with much higher variation and fluctuation in both nominal agent power and psychologically perceived power balance than the above feminists would even consider plausible.
What I’ve read also seemed to indicate a very important (though not incredibly strong, but enough to be a turning point) correlation between the “normalcy” of an individual and how much those feminist claims will apply to them—IIRC, an IQ more than a standard deviation above the norm is enough to bring the “subconscious advantage” and “landed privileges” difference to statistically insignificant levels of correlation with gender. Other forms of abnormality presumably have similar effects (LBGT, for instance), though I only have anecdotal data there.
Admittedly, I don’t have much more to show either in terms of hard evidence and clear numbers, but I’d largely attribute this to my poor memory. The difference is that I’ve argued for many positions and many claims, a good portion of which were similar to those feminist arguments given in support of the claim that the subconscious domination and privilege conditioning is almost always applicable… and I’ve changed my mind upon realizing that I was wrong many times. When I talk to these feminists, I often quickly realize that they have never changed their mind on this subject.
Given that I’ve read more balanced samples of evidence than it seems most of them have, and that I’ve noticed I was wrong and changed my mind much more than them, I’m very strongly inclined to believe that my beliefs are… well, Less Wrong.
Also, you’re a pretty good Feminist’s Advocate as far as people not devoting their entire life to the cause usually go, IME. And now I’m exhausted for doing so much beisu-ryuu belief-questioning. Whew. Not as productive in terms of belief updating and propagation as I’d hoped, but at least it was good mental exercise.
Yes, just because I can play Feminist’s Advocate, doesn’t mean I actually agree with them :-) That said, I’ve never taken a feminism course, nor am I a sociologist, so my opinion probably doesn’t carry much weight. These kinds of debates can’t be conclusively resolved with words alone; it’s a job not for words, but for numbers.
I haven’t studied those issues, but what you say is more or less what I have inferred from my experience in meatspace.
Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But… $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey—with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway—found that
people who frown upon sexually promiscuous women, but not upon sexually promiscuous men,
people who frown upon sexually promiscuous men, but not upon sexually promiscuous women,
people who do both, and
people who do neither
comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that’s not obviously wrong.)
Really? IME that finding does seem wrong. I’ve seen females slut shamed way more than males. People often disapprove of both, but when it is a female they seem to disapprove more and are more compelled to speak up about it.
If a male sleeps around, he might be seen as a jerk who uses women, or as undesirable for a partner...but he wouldn’t be considered weak, dirty, or lacking in self respect.
Caveat—IME it’s mostly women doing the shaming, so if your friends are mostly male you might not see this trend.
When someone fills out their opinions explicitly in a survey, the double standard is thrown into their face. Only 10% of people would admit to having a double standard.
Imagine that survey was about racism. I bet only about 5% of people would admit to having racist sentiments on a survey, but experiments which did not involve explicit stating of values (like resume studies) find that people often hold prejudices that they claim not to hold.
I can’t recall the topic ever coming up with my friends (more or less equal number of males and females) in the last couple years, so I don’t know for sure about them. (From what little I can infer indirectly, the difference between the average male and the average female is less than differences within each gender, or between the average practising Catholic and the average atheist/agnostic/etc.) The friends I usually hang around with in high school (almost exclusively female, and almost exclusively non-religious) did seem to laugh at the promiscuous guy we knew slightly more good-heartedly than they did at the promiscuous girl we knew (though neither was anywhere near outright ostracised), but there were other differences between the two confusing the issue.
What experiments? (Googling “resume studies” doesn’t seem to turn up anything relevant—“resume” is used as a verb in most of those results.) Anyway, I’m not sure we should care about prejudices people don’t want to have (and sometimes aren’t even fully aware of having), as per Yvain’s “Real Preferences” post. (They might be consciously lying, but who does that on anonymous surveys?)
Resume studies:
Some researcher sent identical resumes with different names to apply for similar positions. Some resumes had names that code as white in the US, while other resumes had names that coded as black. The rate of interviews scheduled was substantially different based on the apparent ethnicity of the applicant. Summary.
Okay. That also answers the “I’m not sure we should care about prejudices people don’t want to have” thing—such a discrimination is Bad whether or not the interviewers are consciously aware of it, and whether or not they endorse it.
Totally off topic, sorry. How did you do footnotes? I’m so jealous.
I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it’s AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (
1.,2.etc.).If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it’s disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.
Of course, it’s possible to miss one of those elements of the chain—not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.
But then, it’s also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don’t feel uncomfortable themselves.
I agree with Eliezer, though. I’m a man, and I don’t find the lack of fully realized male characters in MLP particularly disturbing (*). I think it would be unreasonable to demand every work of fiction to forgo the use of stock characters. MLP is a show about female ponies and their female pony overlords (“overladies” ?), and that’s already about 7 characters right there, so it’s reasonable that the rest would end up as stock archetypes. There’s only so much attention to go around.
(*) Though I only watched the first season plus the s02 pilot, so I could be missing something.
To be fair, Discord probably isn’t anything. It has a male voice purely for convenience. In reality, it would probably sound like The Many (warning: link contains System Shock 2 spoilers).
THEN YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
Seriously, though, considering the large numbers of male fans who aren’t bothered by this, character seems to be a bigger consideration than gender. Which is strange, since we all know that no woman could enjoy a show with an all-male cast …
I’m totally lost here. There must be irony in your post, but where?
This was ironic—a lot of shows have predominantly-male casts, yet women are somehow able to enjoy mass media.
That’s not to say i doesn’t cause problems, of course, but the empathy gap is not so large as to estroy viewing pleasure.
Same here.
Mmm. Part of the issue here is that the male characters tend to be aspirational stereotypes. When I’m thinking of leaving work early, or I’m bothered by something petty, I ask myself, “What would Big Mac do?” and I smile and keep working. Shining Armor and Fancy Pants are both less relevant for my life at present, but are still good examples.
Perhaps it’s significant that I’m focusing only on the stallions and not on the colts- Snips, Snails, and Pip have gotten comparable airtime and lines, and the first two are stereotypical schoolboys (named after the famous rhyme)- but the primary female characters seem to be the adults, not the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and so it seems fair to do the same for the primary male characters.
For most fictional characters that are female stereotypes, it’s not as clear that they’re aspirational. I’m not sure what “What Would Princess Leia Do?” would look like, but from my first guess it doesn’t appear to be a very useful guide to life.
I’m afraid I easily skipped my chance to be disturbed by this, with any amount of rumination.
When I watched several episodes, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of characters are female, which seemed strange. Then I got interested enough to read some interviews with Lauren Faust and found how she grew up with three brothers and no sisters and had to watch boys’ shows which were mostly about boys. Then I remembered some shows which are full of boys, realized that I took that for granted and understood that making a good show for girls about girls, for a change, makes sense and it didn’t bother me anymore.
What bothers me a bit is the recognition of the fact that I couldn’t accept how some of the cast are actually female. “Wait, so Applejack is a girl? And Rainbow Dash? And Scootaloo? I can’t believe it. Does it make me a male chauvinist?” Of course, I want to count myself as a male chauvinist no more than the other guy, so my unability to accept the whole spectrum of female gender roles that Lauren Faust presents us in the show bothers me. Of course, I deeply respect her for being able to think up and defend such diverse female role models for a girls’ show that I still have trouble accepting.
Not sure whether we think about the same thing, but to me it seems that inventing many diverse female characters is actually very easy, under one condition… you don’t fill all the roles with male characters first.
As an example, imagine that a male author is going to write a story or a movie with the typical fantasy settings. First step, he designs a party, and his planning might go like this:
“So, we need a warrior guy, a strong one with a hammer or an axe. But we could also have one guy shooting arrows; let’s make him an elf. And of course a wizard, a guy who will shoot fireballs at enemies. That’s it, basicly. Oops… I guess I should add some women too. So, there will also be a woman. No, that’s not enough. Let’s have two women; let’s call them Woman#1 and Woman#2. Now I wish I could find some meaningful way to make them differ from each other...”
The problem is not that there is not enough place in fantasy setting to have two different female characters. The problem is that the author already assigned the male gender to all the archetypes he knew, and then there was no archetype left for women. The outcome would be completely different if the author started like this:
“So, we will have a strong warrior girl, with a hammer or an axe. Also a girl shooting arrows; let’s make her an elf. And of course also a wizard girl who will shoot fireballs at enemies.”
This is exactly the same shallow character party design algorithm as in the previous example… but suddenly, it has enough space for different female characters. (A better author would certainly invent better characters than this, but the idea is that you can think about N meaningful characters, and then it is your choice whether you make them male or female.)
Reframing your post: “male” is so overwhelmingly default of a choice that people have to make conscious effort to remember that there is a choice, and choose otherwise. “Unless otherwise specified, an agent is a gender-normative male” seems to be a cognitive bias, but possibly a bias that we inherit from culture instead of from biological instinct.
Minus the catcalling, too, I assume?
Unwanted female attention toward men exists, but is certainly less threatening, less pervasive, and more socially acceptable.
More socially acceptable is part of the problem—a man who says he didn’t want advances from/sex with a woman who’s at least reasonably attractive will mostly be told he doesn’t appreciate his good luck.
I don’t know quite how relevant and which way the causal arrows are pointing, but this seems to add up somehow with the fact that on average women get more dates and more mates than men, explained by the phenomenon that fewer men date and mate way more women. It also seems to clash up weird with the social notion that women should be more selective of their partners while men should go for whatever’s hottest or, failing that, available. (terminology intentionally representative of what I perceive to be social norm)
I’m a male LWer with an infant daughter. I’d like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists—and she was delighted some were women. “I like the girl dinosaur scientist!” And then she came out with “When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist.” I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. “Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?” It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: “What would mummy think?” So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
(yeah, bragging about my kid again. You’ll cope.)
This isn’t a how-to, but I thought you might find these articles cute:
Linky- Story of how parents of toddler boys keep their kids from playing rought with the author’s toddler girl, because “you have to be gentle with girls”.
Linky- Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.
Linky- Video- A What Would You Do? episode, where you see how people in a costume store react when a little boy (actor) wants to dress as a princess, and a little girl (actress) wants to dress as Spiderman for Halloween
I can see the point the author is trying to make in the story about having to be gentle with girls, but I think I’d be conflicted about it if I had a son. Later in life there are severe social and legal consequences for a man that is too rough with women and I’d hate to set my kid up for failure.
I realize there is a difference between “playing rough” and abuse but there can be grey areas at the border. There are many situations were I would physically subdue a man (both playful and serious) but not a woman, partly for fear of causing harm but mainly because of the social blowback and potential for getting arrested.
I might be overly sensitive to this line of thinking because I have a military background, but I think teaching a son that he should behave as if girls and boys are the same physically is sub-optimal (in terms of setting him up for success and long-term hapiness).
It’s actually kind of remarkable how gender-neutral Link is in The Wind Waker, the game he reprogrammed. The storyline, the dialogue, even Link’s sound effects work equally well for all major genders.
We’re into holiday season again, so here’s a link to a post I made a year ago, that includes, among other things, NOT always commenting on “How cute” all your little nieces (and nephews) are.
How To Talk To Children- A Holiday Guide
I remember this post well, thanks for reminding me. I’ve already been conditioning myself to focus on the right things by complimenting the hard work that goes into her lifting her head or briefly controlling her hands, even though she doesn’t have any idea what I’m saying yet.
It’s frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren’t completely pink.
Aren’t babies kind of shaped alike? Surely there exist inoffensive onesies in pastel green or whatever, even if they are not officially intended for girls.
They exist, but it’s like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.
On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.
When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I’m committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. “Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?” There don’t seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it’s when you start saying that male-is-default or ‘people can be nerds but girls have to be girls’ that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called “females”; but I refer to another subgroup, “males”, about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them “women” and “males” but that’s because if you say “men”, males assume you’re talking about people.)
Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) “Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications.” Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
It’s less the colors available to the kid and more the way the outside world responds to the kid in those colors, I think.
I’ve seen there be much more color variation among boys clothes, yes, but more importantly, a toddler wearing pink is gendered by others as female, and talked to as if female, and all other colors are generally talked to as if male. Occasionally yellow is gendered female too.
I’ve seen complaints about how much harder it is to find non-gendered clothing than it used to be.
I think the solution on clothes is that when the child is old enough to have opinions about how they want to dress, follow their lead.
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits—have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
You don’t need to eradicate pink. Just reducing it to a reasonable level won’t spur any ‘Did you wish I was a boy’ ideas.
Mine loves pink. We make sure to let her interest in non-pink things run free too (dinosaurs, space, trains, etc).
Learn to sew!
You can do a lot just topstitching appliques (great way to make superhero onesies).
Don’t take your parenting approach from ideology, because it’s not optimized for being a reflection of reality. (Extreme example here)
I’m coming from the perspective of a daughter who was and is pretty gender non-conforming, so my advice may not be useful generally, but I hope it helps anyway.
I think other commenters have talked about not saying “Girls do this” and “Girls don’t do that”, and an important aspect of that is to not be inherently dismissive of feminine/masculine attributes as whole. If she ends up being the only geek-ish type girl she knows, it becomes easy to dismiss the “feminine” interests of her peers as lesser compared to her own. So, expose her to media with significant female characters, but not just those who resemble her or share her interests. Actually, come to think of it, expose her to real women with varied interests, to avoid the whole categorising thing as much as possible.
Regarding clothes,which is an area in which I have frustrated both my parents very much, follow her lead where possible from young. If you have an occasion where a dress is required because of formality but she’s clearly upset/angry at wearing a dress, see if there’s an appropriate alternative. Whatever the outcome, don’t make it feel like it’s her fault for being uncomfortable in dresses. Also, children can change rather quickly, so remember that both the little girl who loves MLP and the little girl who loves Star Wars may not stay that way when they grow up.
I’d just like to add that I sincerely respect you for choosing to ask for this advice at all, since most parents never bother.
To clarify: you want to avoid to gender-stereotype your child? Specific advice for starters: the LGBT/Queer-scene tries to do some of that, so draw on their resources:
Wikipage with LGBT/Queer childbooks Maybe get in contact with your local queer/LGBT-scene? With 2 minutes of googling I found http://www.queerparents.org/. Good luck!
I want to avoid harm and let my daughter have the happiest possible life. If avoiding gender-stereotyping her will accomplish those things, then I want to do that. Thanks for the resources!
I’m also somewhat interested (if all goes according to plan, I have 50% chances of having an infant daughter too in the next couple of years; I already have a son).
I am, however, not particularly interested in avoiding gender stereotypes for my children like some in this subthread seem to advocate; sure there are some gender stereotypes I want to avoid (women should shut up and be stay-at-home wives etc.), but I don’t see anything wrong with the idea that men and women are different in our society, and have different social roles, etc. I’d probably be more likely to discourage my son from crying, and my daughter from swearing or hitting.
Of course, I won’t freak out if my son wants to play with dolls or my daughter wants to play with guns or if they turn out to be gay or transsexual or even heavens forbid Christian.
I do however want to correct any biases I might have about how women perceive things in society, so am looking forward to the next posts in this sequence.
The pill.
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don’t assume it matches their body, and even after then don’t police it. Any sentence that begins with a paraphrase of “girls do” (talk politely, their homework,...) or “girls don’t” (wear spiderman suits, climb trees,...) is nearly certainly sexist, wrong, and harmful. Learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.
I’ll disagree with that one—it seems such an assumption is more than 99.9% likely to be true; and we assume less likely things all the time. Being aware of transsexuality and of the problems transfolk deal with should be enough until you have particular reasons to believe your child may identify with a different gender.
I think 99.5% is probably a reasonable upper bound on how confident you should be (with 0.5% of that being a Gettier case). Physical intersexuality of various sorts has an incident of about 1%, I have read, and in the absence of studies on the subject I’m inclined to deploy an ignorance prior about the mature gender identification of a random intersexed person. Garden-variety transfolk only cut this probability from there.
Even if instead of 99.9% Emile had said 95%, he would still have a point.
I’d think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality, so I’m not sure that’s relevant in this thread’s context; physically ambiguous sex would certainly be a reason to be cautious about assuming gender! I’m having a hell of a time finding consistent prevalence data for psychological transsexuality, though; estimates seem to vary from 1 in 21000 to around one in 500 (taking the low estimate in the latter because it seems to be running on MtF numbers, which appear to skew a bit higher).
This is not reliably true. I have a friend who is a genetic chimera (fraternal twins, fused early enough in development to turn into one basically normal-shaped person). She was considered anatomically male and normal at birth and well past, and didn’t find out she had female organs too until her twenties, when they finally did an ultrasound to track down her irregular abdominal cramping, then did genetic tests to explain why there was a uterus in there. This gave her a relatively socially acceptable excuse to assume a female social role.
I don’t mean to trivialize any problems she may have gone through but at least on a first reading that sounds awesome.
I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t but it still sounds that way.
Yay! Someone high-status said it so I don’t have to!
I generally try to use probability when interacting with people. I know they are not as likely to jump of a bridge as to cross it. Amazingly it seems to help me have good relations with them. Incredible I know. I hear statistical reasoning about humans is evil though so maybe I shouldn’t be sharing this advice.
I never did get why that is though.
In certain cases, it’s evil (i.e. there should be an ethical injunction against it) because, due to corrupted mindware, certain people tend to overdo it (e.g., if they know that black people have a lower average IQ than white people, they’ll consider a black person significantly stupider than a white person in the same situation even though the evidence race provides about intelligence is likely almost completely screened off by information about what they say, wear, and do).
That’s not even the worst possibility—a racist may resent black people who are smarter than they “ought” to be.
One might argue that that’s not even a version of “statistical reasoning” corrupted by cognitive biases, that’s just being an asshole.
One might, but it’s plausible that being an asshole and having thinking that’s corrupted by emotional habits are entangled.
I’d say “It’s complicated.” Sometimes making someone less biased will make them more of a asshole.
BTW, I’m curious how Cognitive Reflection Test scores correlate with Big Five personality traits. I’d guess cbfvgvir pbeeryngvba jvgu Bcraarff naq Pbafpvragvbhfarff naq artngvir pbeeryngvba jvgu Arhebgvpvfz, ohg V unir ab vqrn nobhg Rkgebirefvba naq Nterrnoyrarff.
“Being an asshole” is a description of effects, not causes. In this case, the person’s assholy behavior might result from being insecure and angry, scapegoating other races for their insecurity and anger, having false beliefs about them, and responding to confusion with denial rather than doubt.
Are the specific examples that JulianMorrison gave things that are statistically true about girls versus boys. Is it statistically true that girls don’t climb trees? (I’m a girl, and tree climbing is awesome!)
Also, there’s a difference between what you’re talking about (using probability to predict behaviour when you know nothing else about others) and ways to raise children, since parents in part determine the future behaviour of their children. Even if it is statistically true, right now, that girls don’t wear Spider-Man suits as often as boys, and get upset rather than angry, I don’t think those states are the ideal world states. Treating your children like these stereotypes are true might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
Note that there are some examples that I think would be true. I do think that, on average, girls are more likely to get upset than angry when in a situation of conflict. But not always: I get upset more often, my brother gets angry, my sister gets angry, my dad gets upset. I do think that the average boy, if given a Barbie, is more likely to re-enact battles with it than dress it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good parenting strategy to yell at your son because he’s an outlier who likes to dress Barbies. (From a purely predictive view, you could probably make a boy happier by giving him something other than a Barbie for his birthday, but that’s if you’re not the parent and your actions aren’t influencing his future preferences.)
This is what I was criticizing:
I also disagree with the first paragraph. If I have a daughter someday, I’m not going to treat her as gender-neutral-it’s too much work and probably wouldn’t work. I guess I just think that the examples in the second group aren’t “gender identity” examples. At most they’re gender stereotypes. I will treat my daughter as a girl, unless she tells me not to, but I’ll happily climb trees with her, I wouldn’t tell her to be polite because “girls are polite” (boys should be too!) and I won’t encourage or expect her to be upset rather than angry.
BTW, by “assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry” I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: “pink brain blue brain” by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google “baby Storm” for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)
Ohh. Oops. Not how I interpreted it. Your original meaning is much less likely to be a true-ish stereotype than my interpretation.
What’s your distinction between upset and angry?
When in a situation of conflict: Upset: assume you’re the one in the wrong, blame yourself, not try to defend yourself, cry. (Or some but not all of these elements.) Angry: Assume you’re right, blame the other person, argue back, yell. Or some but not all of these elements.
Obviously it depends on context. Some people have a very strong tendency to get upset, whereas others will sometimes be upset and sometimes be angry. I’m pretty strongly skewed towards getting upset; I don’t like the experience of anger; but in a conflict with family members, I will frequently behave more angrily than upset.
Apply Bayes to making decisions in real life, in ways that the cool people don’t? That idea will never fly on LessWrong!
There’s not as much reason to pay attention to statistical reasoning when we have insight into causal mechanisms. Particularly when our knowledge of the causal mechanisms suggests that the statistical results are very susceptible to misleading interpretations.
Incidentally we have essentially perfect insight into the causal mechanisms of what makes a number prime, and yet this sort of reasoning is spectacularly successful:
I dislike this emphasis on gender identity. I haven’t seen enough non-anecdotal evidence of this to be >0.8 confident, but my model predicts that this strategy wouldn’t achieve all that much, and has much more risk of being damaging (due to biases and two-steps-removed complications) than a strategy of behaving as non-sexist as possible (and ‘teaching’ this to the child, but that is most effective by example during childhood AFAIK).
What added benefit comes from not assuming it matches their body, if you’re not enforcing stereotypes?
You have an implicit assumption: that there are actions that you can take which assume that gender identity matches body, that do not enforce stereotypes and which cannot be co-opted to enforce stereotypes.
There is strong evidence to suggest that that is not true, within the current social landscape.
Referring to them by gendered pronouns, basically.
They might be full blown trans, whether the kind that’s so intense it forces people to transition despite all the grief they get, or the kinds that are less intense or more messy (and probably loads more common, like bisexual is more common than gay).
They might want to pick and mix their gender presentation or have a non-traditional way of expressing their identity. Like being a “tomboy” or a boy who likes dresses.
They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.
How does treating a child as genderless help if they prove to be transexual?
Surely this is covered by “not enforcing stereotypes”?
I don’t follow.
“Until the child tells you their gender identity”, I said—you wait in a state of openness to all alternatives, and they tell you. A child is not cis until proven trans. It’s “no data”. They will say.
Yes, ultimately, this is not enforcing stereotypes. But that phrase primes you for vastly underestimating the scope of what you need to do. Like, it primes you to think in terms of “offer Jane a dinosaur as well as a Barbie” rather than “do not assume that Cody would prefer jeans rather than a skirt”.
Children raised to assume they have control of their gender presentation and the right to assert their gender identity, will not be inclined to make assumptions about, or tease and ostracise, other people’s gender.
I asked how it helps. When I meet someone who appears male, I assume they identify as male, and if they don’t then they tell me so. If I treated everyone I met as of indeterminate gender … I would be ignoring people’s established gender far more than accommodating people’s insecurities. Besides, I’m going to have to name the kid at some point.
Giving your boy a skirt is implicitly teaching him that wearing one does not signal gender. I may personally be fine with them wearing underpants on their head, but I don’t teach them to go to school like that.
I’m still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.
Solving this type of problem is one reason that I advocate differentiating gender and biological sex. Once that distinction is made, I think many of these problems are analytically clearer.
FWIW, I think JulianMorrison is using “gender” when “sex” is meant in at least some of the comments.
When somebody’s born, they don’t identify as a gender. By the time they reach talking infancy, they do and will tell you. They will probably want to adopt gendered clothing and behaviours. Those might, or might not match their anatomy. If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity. If you aren’t being pushy about any of this, they will find their own level. I am not proposing “never permit them a gender”, I am proposing “never assign them a gender, coercively”.
Unfortunately with strangers, I have less evidence about their genders than I might like. That is because people don’t feel very free to express cross-gender presentation, and in fact it takes such an immense crushing need that people dare the taunts, for them to even be visible. So there are lots of tans women walking around looking like men, and there are lots of trans men walking around looking like women. And it is because of dismissive attitudes like yours about the skirt, which easily translate into ridicule and ostracism. A boy in skirt is not like a boy with underpants on his head, he’s like a girl in jeans. That used to be scandalous. But we accepted it more readily, because dressing “like a girl” is seen as degrading while dressing “like a man” was seen as upgrading.
You are strawmanning “ignoring the biological gender” (and building upon an assumption that isn’t true; biology isn’t gender, it isn’t even oversimplified binary sex—but that’s a story for another day). I am not suggesting “ignoring” it, I am suggesting “not treating it as the thing that determines gender”.
Once, yes, and it was once possible for women to dress “as men” and be assumed to be “effeminate” men. (Google “sweet polly oliver”.) However, for various reasons this is no longer the case, whereas it is still so for men.
Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you. (Obviously much of the trappings we assign to gender can and should be ignored.)
EDIT:
I think you misspelled “transsexual” there,
So break it.
The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like “intersex of the brain”. But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as “male or female” doesn’t determine their gender identity. Bear in mind I say social categorization here, because society looks at some things (penis length, particularly) and not at others (brains, particularly) about the body to put people into categories.
And no, I meant cross-gendered in the specific sense of “person socially assigned gender A in clothes socially assigned gender B”.
BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is “not your fault” so you can’t be “blamed” for it. This doesn’t affect the rightness of the cause, only the ease of implementing it in the face of religious (sin focused) transphobia.
Ok, so you admit your movement is willing to lie, BS and corrupt social science for “the greater good”. Given that, why should I believe any of the empirical claims your movement makes?
So, this is the sort of thing that’s true for almost any advocacy group: They will present the evidence that helps them and not present the evidence that doesn’t. That means that for any political advocacy or organization you need to look at the evidence with that in mind and judge it carefully and accordingly. This makes the groups under discussion no different than any other similar group.
There is a difference between selectively presenting true evidence (or at least evidence they believe to be true) and telling things you know to be false.
Valid point in this context. I’m not sure if Julian was claiming to present things that are known to be false, although the wording of the comment certainly could be interpreted that way.
Wasn’t he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?
Well, there’s the connotative issue involved. But my point is that he seems to be making a strange adjustment here: Making a radical adjustment to one group when it should apply to all political groups. Moreover, the comment struck me (and it is possible that I’ve misinterpreted it here) as essentially dismissing any claims made rather than doing what one should actually do in such contexts- carefully examine the claims, and look for omitted evidence.
We’re willing to do any damn thing that saves the actual people that are hurting.
If this upsets you, I will enjoy schadenfreude.
The interesting question is what measures will pay off best in the long run.
Actually lying about the science might blow up later. On the other hand, saying that we don’t know what causes gender dysmorphia, but it begins very young, is not a matter of choice, and gets relieved by living as the gender that feels right to the dysmorphic person—and living in that way is not harmful-- is harder to say forcefully than to say “born that way”.
Yeah, if I’m talking to someone from who I can assume rationality, I’ll say all that (and that the sexist gender beliefs and patriarchal power structures that prevent trans people just flipping across in high school like it was a mere incidental fact, like hair colour, should be destroyed anyway for over-determined reasons). But I have no intention to give truth to enemies. Enemy is defined as: a person whose unshakeable beliefs harm the people I care about. If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.
Be cautious. Be extremely cautious.
How do you tell whether someone has unshakable beliefs?
Once your cause has embraced the dark arts how can you be sure what you’re doing is actually saving people from hurting? Are you sure the evidence for this belief, or the evidence that convinced you to join that cause in the first place wasn’t just another ‘pious lie’?
We’re willing to do any damn thing to find a sense of closure, of vindication. We don’t actually care to reduce evil, since we’re subconsciously quite aware that it would require us to take unacceptable measures.
To enforce a ruthless order and violate the sanctity of the individual, to disarm the weak and make them submit to their fate. Many here have been hinting darkly at this for a long time.
The reactionaries are completely correct in their bleak worldview. There is no deliverance. Good intentions are a self-righteous delusion, in a sense. Suffering can only be minimized by monstrous and inhuman policies. Someone will always scream and scream behind locks, walls and chains, behind a facade of normality. Finding happiness in slavery is the best that most people can count on.
...For fuck’s sake, donate to SIAI.
I think the former paragraphs here presume that politics is the domain of deluded do-gooders, rather than people (including those at the bottom of the heap) fighting self-consciously for their interests (or the interests of a broader alliance, TDT and all that.) It doesn’t strike me as hypocrisy to throw one’s enemies into the gulag, or to decieve them in warfare, even as you attempt to avoid the gulag and see through deceptions yourself.
Once again, I support the right to wear underpants on your head but I wouldn’t teach my kids it’s socially acceptable.
It shows up on brainscans.
How is the second sentence at all evidence against the first?
… because you don’t, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology. Certain structures in transsexuals’ brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.
Become a taxi driver and grow your hippocampus. The boundary between what you can change and what you can’t is not as clear as you seem to think.
Do we know what these structures do?
As I have said elsewhere, there is a sliding scale involved. This is decidedly towards the “unchosen” end, and considering that transsexuals report having changed their lifestyle as a result of preexisting problems, it seems reasonable to call this one for the “nature” side.
Besides this? No.
You have some control over it. Everything you do and every thought you have affects your neurophysiology. How much control you have over it is an interesting question, which can’t be answered simply by pointing to differences on brain scans.
There’s a sliding scale. At one end, we have things like frontal lobes. At the other, we have imagination. This is the kind of structure that doesn’t alter without external stimuli, and even then it’s bloody hard.
If you take physicalism seriously, every experience can be expected to show up eventually, on sufficiently advanced brain scans. That has no bearing on what is a choice and what is not. Choices and non-choices will both have physical correlates.
Autism is a choice!
Then you are perpetuating cissexism.
And no it doesn’t, there are brain areas that are statistically different in the small population of trans brains donated to science, but there is no brain scan for trans and it would be useless anyway, because if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says “nope” it’s the scan that’s wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.
… how so?
The fact that we cannot currently diagnose gender dysphoria [EDIT: in a living subject] with a brain scan does not change the fact that it is caused by a neurological disorder, and as such is biological, not a choice.
Are you saying that cisgendered people should be eligible for gender reassignment surgery and so on, or that any brain-scan based test will be imperfect?
I am saying that a trans person can only be diagnosed by saying “I experience myself as [fill in the blank]” because that unspoken, personal experience is what trans is. Not the brain stuff. That may be what trans is caused by. It’s like having a sore toe, that can be caused by a dropped hammer or kicking the door, but the essence of sore toeness can’t be determined by testing for hammers and a negative test for a dropped hammer would not disprove it, the essence of sore toeness is the ouch.
I’m pretty sure that the ouch is merely evidence that someone is experiencing pain. We’re perilously close to arguing definitions here, though. If someone developed such a scan and there were a lot of trans people coming up as cis that would be warning sign, but it is not impossible (merely unlikely) that there are “trans” people who have more in common with cis people than “real” trans people.
EDIT: it may help to consider autism here.
FURTHER EDIT: dammit, stupid karma toll cutting off my discussions.
If someone developed such a scan, and it labeled a bunch of trans-identified people as cis, then IMO that would be good evidence for the proposition that the scanner is buggy.
“I experience myself as a beetle in a box.”
That’s not how Crocker’s Rules work; they’re supposed to be declared by the listener, who thereby takes responsibility for any hurt feelings caused by the content. You can’t declare Crocker’s rules on behalf of others.
That’s why I called it Crocker’s Warning and not Crocker’s Rules. I am implying that by reading the content you are agreeing to Crocker’s Rules. It’s just a way of saying that the submitters were told not to hold back, and if you want it sugar-coated, you shouldn’t read it.
Upon consideration, I think I have pinpointed what bothers me about the bit in the post about Crocker’s Rules. It’s the imposition on the reader, not just of potentially offensive content, but also of a waiver of the right to object to the content as being offensive.
That is, I don’t object to this part:
Fine and well. A good warning.
But this part seems to suggest that by reading this, I’m waiving my right to say, e.g., “Wait a bit, this isn’t just impolite, this is offensive! This reads like an insult!” It seems like the warning is saying: “If you find this offensive, too bad. By reading this, you’re agreeing to shut up and take it” — and I don’t think that prefacing your post with that is conducive to good discussion, not at all.
Note: I don’t actually think any of the anecdotes in this post are offensive.
Me neither. I think the post needs a more specific set of ground rules, something like “the anonymous submitters are putting themselves out on the line here, and in order to have the most honest and useful discussion, they were told not to hold back for politeness...but they’ll probably be reading all your comments and replies, so in order to encourage future honest and useful discussions, please don’t respond angrily or rudely, since that will discourage submitters in the future from being honest.” Which isn’t quite in the spirit of Crocker’s Rules. (I don’t know if ‘Crocker’s Warning’ is a concept that has actually been elaborated...is it?)
These ground rules seem reasonable.
In general when people say “I want to tell you something, but you have to promise not to get angry/offended/etc.”, my response is along the lines of:
“I can’t and won’t promise that. I do promise that I will make an effort to temper any knee-jerk reaction I might have, and to give thought to your words and to my response before I say anything. I try to do this in all of my interactions with people whom I respect, but in this case I promise to make a special effort.”
And if that’s not good enough… well, then it seems my interlocutor doesn’t care that much about telling me whatever it is they wish to tell me.
Neat, can I put one of those on my comments feed?
“You can speak to me candidly and I won’t throw a fit” is a concession. “I’m about to speak candidly” is a warning. “I’m about to speak candidly, and that might upset you, but you have to be nice when you respond anyway, and if you’re not going to be nice, then I don’t want to play with you” is an ultimatum. “I’m about to speak candidly, so you’re going to agree to not throw a fit” is an ultimatum with extra squick factor.
You might want to try reading what I actually wrote, instead of putting words in my mouth.
What you think I said:
These are not at all what I said. Your own definition of a warning (“I’m about to speak candidly’) is pretty much exactly what I said (with the addendum that I added in the grandparent “so if you don’t want to hear candidness, don’t read it.”)
So let’s look exactly at what I said:
Notice how I DON’T AT ALL say the types of ultimatums you seem to think I said.
I am tapping out of the Crocker’s Warning discussion, because I feel like it has fallen to logical rudeness
I think the confusion comes from your use of the phrase “Crocker’s Rules” in the explanation (the word “Crocker” shows up twice; I’m referring to the second time). If what you meant was “these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post,” then you should have just said that.
As it is, the warning seems incoherent, because you refer to a known concept (Crocker’s Rules) incorrectly. When I first read it, the impression I got was that we could respond to the anonymous anecdotes without any consideration for politeness, which seemed really bizarre.
It was especially bizarre because, for this post at least, there doesn’t seem to be anything about LW in particular. There’s just a reasonable explanation of inferential distance and anecdotes about people being mistreated in their day to day lives to lower that distance.
Thank you. I think that this comment is the most constructive criticism on the topic, and have edited my post to include your wording.
You’re welcome! Glad I could help.
I thought that my last examples were, respectively, a fair paraphrasing of social consequences for not respecting the warning and a fair desugaring of your original statment when “Crocker’s rules” is tabooed. However, this is not the first time I have been accused of putting words into others’ mouths, so I will provisionally accept that I have acted rudely.
I am sorry that I misrepresented your position, and misrepresented it to your disadvantage. My prior comment is retracted.
Suppose a hypothetical LW user wanted to say something very racist, or bigoted against some other group.Would it suffice for her to avoid censure for her to preface her comments with such a warning?
Suppose someone posted a comment that implied kicking puppies was good. Responses that only made that premise explicit would be unhelpful and probably hostile. Daenerys’ warning might be sufficient to ward of those responses. But substantive engagement with the argument—including criticism—would be welcome and normal in this community.
I think the concept is that content is included from trusting volunteers who were told to expect Crocker’s Rules in the audience, and if you’re not willing to abide by that trust, you shouldn’t read.
If true, that (telling the volunteers to expect Crocker’s Rules in the audience) seems at worst disingenuous and at best unwarranted. Taken literally, it translates to:
“I promise that the audience which will read your writings will consist entirely of people who don’t get offended by anything you say, up to and including things almost universally considered to be directly and personally insulting.” (Because that’s what Crocker’s Rules are, yes?)
And in general I don’t think that “I have things to say, but I’m only going to say them to people who promise not to be offended by anything I say” is in the spirit of Crocker’s Rules. I also don’t think that it’s a good attitude to take, period.
ETA (from http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Crocker’s_rules):
In this case, I feel like we can (and should) impose Crocker’s rules on these posts.
So it sounds like the content can’t be posted under Crocker’s rules, because it’s unreasonable to unilaterally exempt oneself from all ordinary social norms of politeness, even when people (sort of) have the option not to read; and the content can’t be posted not under Crocker’s rules, because the authors were promised that if it were posted, it would be under Crocker’s rules. Maybe that means that if we’re serious about upholding norms, it means daenerys has torpedoed her own project by making a promise she couldn’t keep.
I assume most people find this statement offensive and objectionable. If you are such a person, can you provide a rational justification for your response? It seems to me that the father is simply making a set of empirical claims about reality, and so at worst the statement is just inaccurate.
Also, imagine a father telling his son “You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you.” Is this statement similarly objectionable? If so, why?
There’s a few parts. Let’s charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.
He assumes that his daughter needs to achieve the prerequisites of marriage—that she needs to get married. (And that it’s his job to prepare her for this, even if only informationally.)
He assumes she’s going to marry a man.
He describes her future marriage in terms of the wants of her hypothetical husband, as opposed to hers (compare something like, “You need to be able to dump guys over long-term dealbreakers without dating them for years, or how will you find a man you want to marry?”)
He is wrong as a statement of fact, because there exist men who would marry a woman who doesn’t clean and cook—and this isn’t just a harmless falsehood (compare the implausible “you need to wear cunning knitted hats and eat parsley, or what man would want to marry you?”), but one that draws attention to evaluating his daughter’s value in terms of her domestic skills—a pattern that is reinforced elsewhere, while cunning knitted hats and parsley are not.
Some of those objections disappear if you treat the father’s advice as a heuristic and not an absolute rule—something like “being able to cook and keep a house clean increases your chances of finding a desirable long-term partner”; especially objection 2 (I would expect a woman would also prefer a partner who can cook and keep a house clean, all else being equal) and 4 (even if some men are perfectly okay with a wife that can’t cook, I would expect that all else being equal being able to cook still makes one a more desirable partner).
“There are exceptions to that rule” is close to a fully general counterargument, because there are exception to pretty much any rule (outside the hard sciences), and I’m a bit annoyed when such an exceptions is used to triumphantly “refute” an argument (for example “once there was this guy who would have died if he had been wearing a seat belt!”).
I do agree that the statement is sneaking in some iffy connotations like “your value as a woman is who you marry” and “you don’t pick a husband, you get picked”, and even if knowing how to cook does make increase the chances one ends up in a happy long-term relationship, other traits probably have more bang for the buck.
If you interpret the father’s statement as “all else being equal, being a better cook is good” and you completely divorce it from a historical and cultural context, it is indeed not really problematic. But given that we are, in fact, talking culture here, I do not think that this is the interpretation most likely to increase your insight.
(not disagreeing, but note that I’m not saying the statement isn’t problematic, merely saying that some objections are better than others)
But my whole point was that if it’s an empirical statement, then we shouldn’t be offended by it. That position seems fundamental to the whole rationalist project—a minor corollary of the Litany of Tarski is “If X is true, I want people to tell me that X is true [1]”. X can be “the sky is blue” or “women who can cook and clean have better marriage prospects”, it really shouldn’t matter.
Think about the precedent you are setting when you get offended by an empirical statement. First of all, you are attacking the messenger—the fact that potential suitors will evaluate a woman in part based on her domestic skills is perhaps deplorable, but it’s hardly the father’s fault. Second, you are giving your allies an incentive to hide potentially important social information from you, since you have established the fact that you will sometimes get angry at them for telling you things.
[1] A better statement of this idea would be “If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)”. The people who advocate the minority positions (i.e. iconoclasts) are actually crucial to forming a well-calibrated picture of the world—without them you will become disastrously overconfident. You should take a moment today to thank your friendly neighborhood iconoclast.
When epistemic rationality is counter to instrumental rationality
Epistemic rationality is about knowing the truth. Instrumental rationality is about meeting your goals.
The general case is that the more truth you know, the better you are at meeting your goals (and so instrumental and epistemic rationality are heavily tied to each other), however there exist rare occurrences where this is not the case.
More importantly, there are many times when SPEAKING the truth is counter to your goals.
For an absurd example: Say you are in a room full of angry convicts with knives. It probably is counter to your goal of staying alive and healthy to start proclaiming TRUE but insulting statements.
More realistically, raising children is one example where, if your goal is to raise happy, sane, well-adjusted adults, there are many statements that should NOT be spoken, no matter how true they are.
Examples:
No, that’s a horrid drawing. I can’t tell at all what it is. I could do better in 5 seconds. I will probably throw it away as soon as you forget about it.
Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch. What’s sex? Well…
Let’s learn about the history of torture! Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from. Or poverty! (if said to a preschooler)
Even if it the cooking and cleaning statement were epistemically true, it is not instrumentally rational to tell this to your child if your goal is to have her grow into an independent adult who can support herself, and does not feel bound by the “traditional” gender roles (which are falling out of favor anyway).
Likewise, if you value having a higher percentage of women on this site, it is not instrumentally rational to make statements such as “You only got upvoted because you’re a girl”, or ” girls aren’t as attractive as girls,” EVEN IF you believe that said statements are true.
I highly value truth. But a prime reason I value it is because it allows me to meet my goals. When speaking the truth is harmful to my goals, it is wise to hold my tongue.
Why? I was under the impression that not telling children about sex was usually the result of an emotional hangup on the part of the parents and/or a culturally cached thought that originally arose from the “sex is dirty” meme from the medieval/early modern Christianity memeplex (possibly both things reinforcing one another), rather than a rational expectation that the child would be worse off if they knew about sex based on any kind of actual evidence. Am I wrong? (How common is that taboo among non-European-derived cultures?)
Telling children how sex works is important. You can do this when they ask about it or when they reach some level of sophistication that will let them understand the explanation you’re ready to give. Telling anyone—especially your child—that you just had sex on the couch is a poor choice (outside of some plausible dynamics that consenting unrelated adults could set up). It’s none of their business, and a psychologically typical child won’t want it to be their business or will be embarrassed to have so wanted when they get older.
I looked up ‘sex’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
How old were you? Did it tell you anything that seemed useful, anything that in fact turned out to be useful? (Did you have a Britannica at home?)
Okay. For some reason I had focused on the “What’s sex? Well...” (and assumed the dots stood for a truthful answer) rather than the “Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch” part. (I’m reminded of parents customarily making shit up when asked what condoms are or how children are born—even just saying “I’ll tell you when you’re older” would make more sense IMO.)
Sorry, that was partially my bad. The purpose of the “What’s sex?” part was to illustrate that this was a younger child. (In my mind these were all preschoolers in the examples). I didn’t consider that people might read that to mean that I don’t think sex should be discussed truthfully with children. I do! But at a certain age, and in the right context (NOT in the context of parents discussing their own sexcapades.)
Why? Can you justify this without appealing to the traditions about sex and gender that you’ve just been arguing against?
IMO:
Traditions or not, the role of a child doesn’t “by default” include any script for interaction, even as an unwilling observer, with the parents’ sex life. A child simply wouldn’t be sure how to process and break down something they see or hear from it.
People instinctively appear to see familial and sexual intimacy as two separate kinds of bonds, and the mind-screw that comes with mixing them might be one of the reasons for having incest fantasies. Such a mind-screw could easily be discomforting/unpleasant in everyday contexts!
Why should a child have a predefined role or script?
People also instinctively appear to see men and women as two different kinds of people.
I don’t think this example is in the same class as the other ones...as in, there’s a certain age at which I would think that it is a good idea to tell your child, at the very least, that torture/factory farming/poverty exist. Preferably in a “let’s think of something small that you could do about nasty situation XYZ” format. I wouldn’t recommend telling 4-year-olds about these things-they aren’t at an age to understand them-but 10-11 year olds is a different story. To do otherwise is to raise children to unconsciously ignore these issues, as most adults do. These issues exist.
In my mind, the examples were for preschoolish age children, but now that you mention it, I see that I didn’t include anything specifying age in the grandparent. I’ll edit to say so.
Indeed. But why suppose those goals? I would value my daughter’s happiness above her being independent and untraditional, in part because the former seems absolute while the latter two seem relational. When there are conflicting goals, all we can discuss are the empirical results of polices, and it’s not clear to me that this is a case where accomplishing goals and speaking the truth conflict.
All of those examples are cases of the hearer being insufficiently intelligent, insufficiently sane, or insufficiently mentally developed, and thus not equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense. Into which of those categories do you think the women on LW fall...? I’m going to guess “none of the above”. But that leaves you with an absence of examples that actually support your point.
Also: the empirical statement “making this statement will probably lead to this-and-such bad outcome for me” is not equivalent to the value judgment “this statement is offensive [to this-and-such part of my audience]”.
Back at the top of this thread, what is discussed is “A father tells his daughter X. Some here may find that objectionable.”—what would be obejctionable wouldn’t be X, but the fact that a father tells his daughter X.
Daenerys’s examples are analogous to X—things that may not be particularly offensive as truth statements, but that one still may not want to tell small children.
(I think in this subthread some don’t pay enough attention to the differences between “what’s okay for discussion on LW” and “what’s okay for a father-daughter discussion”)
Hmmm, a fair point. I took the people objecting to said statement as saying that it’s offensive/objectionable in general, or offensive/objectionable to them specifically, rather than saying “maybe so, but perhaps not something you should say to your kid”. If my interpretation was incorrent, I apologize.
IME certain topics are so mind-killing that few people are sufficiently intelligent, sane and mentally developed for them—even on LW.
Likely so. Do you think that classifying statements on such topics as “offensive” is the appropriate conclusion? I do not, but perhaps we are operating under different notions of “offensive”. It seems to me that if the problem with a statement is solved by fixing the listener’s deficiencies (intelligence, sanity, mental development, etc.), then “offensive” is not really the issue at hand.
I was about to ask you to taboo “offensive”, but you say...
Well, “X is offensive” is not something I’d normally say—I’d specify who is offended (e.g. “I’m offended by X”, or “X might offend [class of people]”), even though sometimes “[class of people]” is as generic as “someone”.
You mean in principle or in practice? How would you go about making a community sane enough that the follow-up to posts such as this or this or this could be actually be written without mind-killing people too much? In principle I think it’s possible, but doing that in a pre-Singularity world would likely be so hard that the game wouldn’t be worth the candle.
(EDIT: I’m no longer sure about what I wrote the last paragraph—the people at The Good Men Project appear to be extremely sane and hardly mind-killed at all despite their subject matter.)
Fair enough, but it’s not obvious that the mere fact of someone being offended is something I (or “we”) should care about.
I noted here that
As for fixing the listener’s deficiencies...
Well, here’s the thing. Let’s say I say something to someone, or a group of someones, that this person(s) finds offensive. Let’s say it’s the case that in principle, the situation would be fixed (that is, the offense obviated) by suitably “fixing” the listener, but in practice this is not feasible.
The question still remains: did I do anything wrong? If so, what?
Well, I might plausibly be guilty of not knowing my audience. That’s an important skill to have and use. Some people, though, seem to behave as though any instance of a speaker saying something that is offensive to anyone who (by intent or otherwise) hears it, constitutes a horrible crime on the part of the speaker, and not only is inherently terrible, but reveals personal evil.
And my response is: no, if this offense would not have happened but for the listener’s stupidity or insanity, then all that’s happened here is that the speaker might have to exercise more caution on what to say to whom. We should not throw our social approval behind the listener’s offense (which is what we seem to mean in practice when we label utterances as “offensive”). We should not demand groveling public apologies, excoriate the speaker for being a terrible person, demand that he/she never say such things again, kick him out of our club, demand that policies be put in place to prevent such horrible things from being said ever again, etc. etc.
Because there’s always going to be someone who is sufficiently stupid or insane to be offended by virtually anything. And when that “anything” happens to be the truth, then by socially approving the offense taken, we create an environment where the truth (even if it’s only a specific subset of the truth) is less likely to be spoken. That is a great loss.
I’m not sure I agree—Yvain in “Offense versus harm minimization” seems to have a good point.
Having read the linked post… much as I usually love and agree with Yvain’s writing, no, I really don’t think he has a good point. Several good reasons to reject almost everything Yvain says there are extensively pointed out in the comments to that post.
Speaking as a woman of LessWrong, when I was 16, I was insufficiently sane and insufficiently mentally developed. If you go back to 14 and assuming my journals aren’t a practical joke I played on myself, I’d say I was also insufficiently intelligent/rational.
It’s key to remember the context here: these things are often said to children and adolescents.
So was I. I don’t think we disagree that when speaking to children, adolescents, and other people who aren’t equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense, we should suitably modify our statements.
But the original question was whether we (here at Less Wrong) — who are more or less sane, intelligent, and mentally developed — ought to take offense, or even whether we should consider the statements to be “offensive” in the sense of saying that any offense taken to them is justified. In other words, which of these scenarios is closer to what should be going on:
Father: You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?
LW Observer, looking on from the sidelines: What an offensive statement! I am offended.
or
Father: You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?
LW Observer, looking on from the sidelines: That statement is probably poorly suited to its intended audience.
The thing about offense is that it’s an emotional reaction, and one that prompts us to certain sorts of behaviors toward the person or group who caused the offense. We should be careful to be offended by those things that we actually think should prompt us to the resulting behaviors. I happen to think that there are very few kinds of actions or statements that deserve the sort of response that we see to “offensive” things these days, certainly much fewer than actually get such a response. This suggests that we should get offended at fewer things. Emotions have consequences.
Edit: How the heck do I put in a line break...? Is there an equivalent to
here?
I would say 75-95% of all white, male, fathers in the United States currently have at least some gender biases that they will pass down to their kids.
I would say that people who phrase things in that way are likely to either be “very cool person who will happily take to correcting and clarify their meaning” or else “actually trying to pass down gender biases (whether due to ignorance or active sexism)”. The cool people are more likely to phrase it in a way that signals “I am a cool person”, and thus avoid phrasing that are prone to give people offense, but obviously no one has a perfect map of what is currently offensive.
Therefor, given this statement, and given that “bias spreader” is the more common group, and given that the “bias spreader” is more likely to say this, I can, with fairly high confidence (call it 95%?) say that if I get offended, I am getting offended at someone who is spreading a gender bias that I strongly disagree with.
The other 5% of the time, as long as I don’t go in guns blazing, I’m unlikely to seriously offend the other person.
Therefor, I can fairly safely act as though the person is spreading a gender bias. Since they are a hypothetical person, I obviously can’t investigate them further to confirm this, but I CAN model the group of people who say offensive things, and conclude that it is perfectly rational and reasonable to treat them as though they were saying offensive things.
NOW, there’s still the open question: given that I am offended, what should I do? You believe my emotions prescribe a specific set of actions, and I’d bet you can even do the same priors I just did to demonstrate that 95% of all people who cry “that’s offensive” do something stupid.
BUT, I am not a hypothetical, so you can interact with me and learn what my actual response would be.
Which, as it turns out, boils down to “I’m offended. If I think speaking up will help, I will.” If both of them already understood it in the non-offensive context, then I have good evidence that in the future I can interpret both of them as cool, savvy people who are just taking a slightly awkward linguistic shortcut. If one or both of them was stuck in the offensive context, it can help to break them out—if nothing else, it at least makes it clear that there’s other viewpoints out there, and I’ll often make it clear I’m someone they can talk to in private or right now if they want to learn more about my perspective.
SO… I’m not sure why I’d want to get offended less frequently, given my actual reaction. Emotions have consequences, but consequences can be POSITIVE too! :)
And here’s the minor quibble:
Why specify “white”? Your statement is probably true, but there appears to be an implication that it doesn’t apply to the non-white population. That has not been my experience (if you construe “white” to mean “as opposed to black/Asian/Hispanic/etc., my experience is by observation and word of mouth; “white” could also be interpreted as more like “WASP”, in which case my contrary experience is also personal).
Sorry that wasn’t clear—I specified white because I feel I’m ignorant on POC families and lack the necessary data to do an extrapolation with anywhere near the same confidence :)
I more or less agree with what you said, especially this:
and this
and I certainly support this
And in general I am a big fan of actually having conversations with people, and clarifying each other’s viewpoints; not barging ahead and drawing strong conclusions and acting on them on the basis of the only evidence you’ve gotten so far, but trying to get more evidence, especially when it’s easy to do so. So in that, I think, we are in agreement.
I have a minor quibble which I’ll address in another reply, but for now I’d like to say that I am not a big fan of the “bias spreader” vs. “cool person” dichotomy. I get the impression from your comment that you didn’t, exactly, mean to suggest that everyone who has any sort of a gender bias is necessary a bad person… but that is an all-too-common meme these days; and I disagree with it.
Basically, if we allow that biases can be largely or even entirely unconscious, it seems slightly absurd to suggest that “bias spreader” and “cool person” don’t overlap. Like, maybe the guy in the hypothetical didn’t just pick a poor turn of phrase, maybe he actually has unconscious gender biases… but it doesn’t follow that being offended is the reasonable response.
The question is this: is this a person who would, upon full consideration, prefer not to have biases and unjustified prejudices? Or is he ok with being biased? It seems to me that many more “bias spreaders” fall into the first category than the second. And taking offense does not seem like the optimal way to rectify the situation (that is, to fix this person’s biases, which is what they themselves would want).
Then again, it seems that you, personally, react to taking offense in a calmer and more reasonable way than do many other people, which is great. I think (based on what you’ve said) what you refer to as “being offended” is a lot closer to my scenario #2 than it is to how most people react to “offensive” things, so again, I do not think we actually have a great deal of disagreement here.
That was lazy writing on my part, and I apologize for it. It seems like we are pretty much on the same page :)
Put two space characters at the end of the line. Though it’s usually better to just put a blank line in-between and live with the paragraph spacing.
See also Bostrom (2011).
As a vegetarian, I am obligated to point out that you shouldn’t have to hide torture from your kids because there shouldn’t be torture. How would you like it if it turned out that your car was secretly powered by a forsaken child, but the government covered it up because it might make you depressed? You wouldn’t thank them for protecting your mental health, you would condemn them for allowing a horrible injustice to continue by suppressing the populace’s natural horror.
Ahem.
You’re absolutely right, concealing lovecraftian mindbreaking knowledge is a good thing, because duh. Thank you for pointing this out, it’s easy to forget “what we should say” is not the same as “what we should believe”.
Man, except for the ‘I could do better’ part (I can’t), I tell my kid this all the time.
That’s harsh! Do you have a particular reason to do that?
(I’m genuinely curious; my personal inclination wouldn’t be to do that, though of course it is true of my kid’s current drawings, he’s two years old)
Praise means more when it has to be earned.
Especially for little kids, you don’t want to make praise too hard to get.
Exactly. “What is it? I think I see it! I bet you can do even better next time!” is far less discouraging than “that’s horrible, I can’t even tell what it is!”
Assuming that your goal is to construct a well-functioning mind, that is. (Which I hope is the goal of everyone who decides to make a child)
It’s a tricky balance. I don’t agree with Esar’s strategy, but I can see the logic behind it and was trying to share that understanding with Emile.
Well, the kid I’m talking about is 8, so he can handle criticism better than a preschooler. To my credit, he is an awesome artist.
An empirical statement, even a true one, can place undue emphasis on a particular fact. There’s a hundred things in the same reference class that the father could have said; this particular one isn’t being picked out because it is more true than the others, but because it conforms to gender stereotypes.
Yes, well… I don’t agree with your point!
Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive. Virtually any claim can be made in an inappropriate way even if it’s not intrinsically problematic (if someone shouted the multiplication tables at the top of their lungs in a public space for an hour, I might not use the word “offended” to describe my reaction, but I would sure want it to stop). Some claims can be made in a normal tone of voice during a conversation between consenting conversational partners and still be offensive. Many insults are empirical in nature. Slander/libel is generally empirical, although it’s false if it can be described by those words. “I fucked your mom” is a claim about reality, true or false though it may be in any given instance; most people will be offended by it and they aren’t wrong.
The particular statement under evaluation here is problematic for the reasons I outlined. Even if the statement is true and its content is appropriate—even if we assume that the man’s daughter wants to grow up and marry a man and is perhaps actively soliciting advice about how to appeal to a wider pool of suitors—then he owed it to her to be gentler, less judgmental, and less endorsing of the stereotypical pattern about which he was trying to communicate information. Maybe “Well, a whole lot of men value domestic ability in a prospective wife—cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing.” Same information, less harmful baggage.
I completely accept that the father’s statement was framed poorly and that he should have been more tactful and diplomatic, but that seems like a relatively minor misdemeanor and is also unrelated to the points raised in your original comment.
I am going to stand by my basic claim that rationalists should try to build an environment where people can make statements about their perceptions of reality without fear of social repercussions.
The flip side of that is building an environment where people clearly differentiate normative claims from empirical ones. The father (I would guess intentionally) failed to do this, which is a moral failing on his part—he seems to be trying to guide his daughter into a traditional gender role, not disinterestedly providing her anthropological facts about her (assumed) future dating pool. When doing the latter, he should use more objective language and also explicitly state his moral position on the status quo.
As to making empirical statements without the fear of social disapproval, I don’t think that’s possible. All statements are speech acts—affecting our emotions and values—and empirical statements are no different. Trying to build a community that is tone-deaf to the implications of a technically true empirical statement like “Jews are apes” is not a particularly desirable goal. If you want to transmit empirical truths with a potentially nasty social undertone, there is no shortcut but to try your best to disavow the undertone.
Sounds great to me—let’s do it.
Let’s just agree to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I am typing. I am also eating Thanksgiving leftovers. I think my puppy is cute. His name is Gryffin. He is 12 years old. My tank top is grey. I just created a discussion group for the Coursera course on critical thinking. These are all truthful statements. I hope you see the issue with what you are saying that I am trying to illustrate here. I am running out of truthful things to say. My boyfriend is awesome. He asked me to type that. Then he said “No, don’t put that! It negates the social capital!.. Meh, go fuck yourself.” My hairbrush is pink.
I reserve the right to publicly spurn insults, nagging, implicit normative claims, misleading innuendoes, and outright falsehoods, whether or not they’re presented as statements about someone’s perceptions of reality.
Avoiding the environment in question is fine. Would you work to disrupt it’s formation or use?
Are you saying you would prefer that insults, nagging, implicit normative claims, misleading innuendos, and outright falsehoods presented as statements about someone’s perceptions of reality be accepted in the environment in question (specifically, lesswrong)?
In the sense of downvoting or calling out people who insult, nag, etc.? Sure.
The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense against the accusation of slander or libel; it’s the falsehood of a slanderous statement that harms.
Shouting the times-tables is a problem because of the delivery mechanism, not the content. Shouting anything at the top of your lungs for an hour in a public space is harmful to bystanders, and as you said, “offensive” is not what is wrong here.
“I fucked your mom”, if true, is only potentially offensive for something like the following reasons:
Swearing in polite company is frowned upon; “I had sex with your mother” is qualitatively different despite having the same content.
It’s an implication of promiscuity (or low selectiveness of sexual partners) on the part of the target’s mother, and our society’s views on sexuality derogate promiscuity, turning this empirical statement into an insult. Arguably, this is a problem with society’s views on sexuality (“slut shaming”), rather than the fact that informing someone about their sexual encounters with that person’s mother is inherently offensive.
In short, I don’t think I buy your claim that “Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive.” At least, I’d like to see it supported better before I consider it. This isn’t simply contrarianism; I think that the ability and right to say true things regardless of whether someone finds those truths unpleasant is extremely important, and social norms to the contrary should not be adopted or perpetuated lightly.
Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.
“Your husband’s corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?” (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don’t want to think about.)
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are twenty police case files on convicted child murderers, all of them Albanian just like the defendant, without any statistical context.” (Facts presented in a tendentious manner.)
“Just thought it might be interesting for you to know that women tend to do about 10% worse on this test than men. Anyway, you may turn your papers over now—good luck!” (Self-fulfilling prophesies.)
“You’re the only asian in our office.” “Did you notice how you’re the only asian in our office?” “Maybe you didn’t realize you’re the only asian in our office.” (Drawing attention to & thereby amplifying the salience of an ingroup/outgroup distinction.)
“All I’m saying is that girls who wear revealing clothing are singling themselves out for attention from predators!” (Placing blame for a moral harm on a blameless causal link leading to the harm.)
“If he dresses effeminately like that, he’s going to get bullied.” (Ditto; also, status quo bias.)
“A black man will never hold the highest office in this country.” (Self-fulfilling prophesy; failure to acknowledge shittiness of (purported) empirical situation.)
Not lightly, no. But as I was saying to Daniel_Burfoot above, there is just no avoiding the fact that statements, including statements of truth, are speech-acts. They will affect interlocutors’ probability distributions AND their various non-propositional states (emotions, values, mood, self-worth, goals, social comfort level, future actions, sexual confidence, prejudices). Inconvenient as human mind-design is, it’s really hard to suppress that aspect of it.
But there is a big asymmetry here—you (the speaker) know what you mean, so if it really needs to be said, take an extra second to formulate it in the way that has the least perlocutionary disutility.
These are food for thought indeed. My thoughts on some of them, intended as ruminations and not refutations:
I’m not sure what I think about this one. I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).
Exploitation of cognitive biases in the audience. Certainly an unethical and underhanded tactic, but note that its effectiveness depends on insufficient sanity in the listeners. Granted, however, that the bar for “sufficient sanity” is relatively high in such matters.
This one is interesting. A tangential thought: have there been studies to determine the power of stereotype threat to affect people who are aware of stereotype threat?
I think I’d have to agree that harping on such a fact would be annoying, at best. I do want to note that one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.
There’s something wrong with your assessment here and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Intuitively it feels like the category of “blame” is being abused, but I have to think more about this one.
The problem here, I think, is that some people use “X is going to happen” with the additional meaning of “X should happen”, often without realizing it; in other words they have the unconscious belief that what does happen is what should happen. Such people often have substantial difficulty even understanding replies like “Yes, X will happen, but it’s not right for X to happen”; they perceive such replies as incoherent. The quoted statement can well be true, and if said by someone who is clear on the distinction between “is” and “ought”, is not, imo, offensive.
See above. Also, there’s a difference between “A black man will never hold the highest office in this country, and therefore I will not vote for Barack Obama” and “A black man will never hold the highest office in this country; this is an empirical prediction I am making, which might be right or wrong, and is separate from what I think the world should be like.”
If I think X will happen (or not happen), it’s important (imo) that I have the ability and right to make that empirical prediction, unimpeded by social norms against offense. If people who are afflicted with status quo bias, or other failures of reasoning, fail to distinguish between “is” and “ought” and in consequence take my prediction to have some sort of normative content — well, it may be flippant to say “that’s their problem”, but the situation definitely falls into the “audience is insufficiently intelligent/sane” category. Saying “this statement is offensive” in such a case is not only wrong, it’s detrimental to open discourse.
I happen to be reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate right now, and he comments on that well-known failing of twentieth-century social sciences, the notion that “we must not even consider empirical claims of inequality in people’s abilities, because that will lead to discrimination”. Aside from the chilling effect this has on, you know, scientific inquiry, there’s also an ethical problem:
If you think that pointing out differences in ability will lead to discrimination, then you must think that it’s not possible to treat people with equal fairness unless they are the same along all relevant dimensions. That’s a fairly clear ethical failing. In other words, if your objection to “some people are less intelligent than other people” is “but then the less intelligent people will be discriminated against!”, you clearly think that it’s not possible to treat people fairly regardless of their intelligence… and if that’s the case, then that is the problem we should be opposing. We shouldn’t say “No no, all people are the same!” We should say, “Yes, people are different. No, that’s not an excuse to treat some people worse.”
Agreed. I just think that branding certain sorts of statements as “offensive” is entirely the wrong way to go about treating this issue with the care it deserves, because of the detrimental effects that approach has on free discourse.
Agreed, and I think this is a special case of the illusion of transparency.
(P.S. Today I learned the word “perlocutionary”. Thank you.)
As an aside, I almost forgot a really good example of the phenomenon of “harmful facts,” which is that the suicide rate in a region goes up whenever a suicide is reported on the news. Indeed, death rates in general go up whenever a suicide is reported, because many suicides are not recognized as such (e.g., somebody steers into oncoming traffic).
For this reason, police tend to hush suicides up (at least, they did in my old hometown & I think it’s widespread).
Maybe, although I strongly suspect religious people alieve that their relatives are gone (otherwise, as others have noted, a funeral would be more like a going-away party).
Good question. Wikipedia turns up this link, which would seem to say “Yes.” So happily, the corrective for this contextually harmful empirical statement is a contextually helpful empirical statement.
Oh yes, certainly. Refusing to notice ingroup/outgroup differences is just the opposite failure mode.
I am still philosophically confused about this issue, although I have been thinking about it for a while. You are probably objecting to the fact that ex hypothesi, less revealing clothing leads to fewer sexual assaults, so why wouldn’t we follow that advice—yes? As I say, I don’t have a full account of that. All I wanted to draw attention to is the ethical questionable-ness of making such a statement without any acknowledgement that one is asking potential victims to change their (blameless) behaviour in order to avoid (blameworthy) assault from others. Compounding the issue is the suspicion that statements like this ALSO tend to be a form of whitewashed slut-shaming.
Yes, in my experience this is very common in muggle society.
Right. The rubric that I try to use in such situations is essentially a consequentialist one. Roughly speaking, the idea is that you should try to predict how your statements might be misinterpreted by a (possibly silly) audience, and if the expected harm of the misinterpretation is significant as compared to the potential benefit of your statement, then reformulate/be silent/narrow your audience/educate your audience about why they shouldn’t misinterpret you. I sympathize, believe me! It’s incredibly annoying to be read uncharitably. But if you know how to prevent an uncharitable/harmful reading, and don’t as a matter of principle because the audience should know better… I think the LW term for that would be “living in the should-universe.”
As it happens, I broadly agree about the term “offensive,” which is an incredibly censorious and abuse-prone word. I think we should try to give better fault assessments than that—and happily, on LW most people usually do.
Would you have similar objections if I advised you to lock your house to reduce theft?
Doesn’t that depend on the context of the advice?
If the context is that you (or others) are telling me that it wasn’t the thief’s fault that they stole my TV, or that the fact that my house was unlocked is evidence that I consented to the taking of my TV, that context may make the advice seem part and parcel of the blame-shifting.
For that matter, the reason to lock your house may well be to avoid being low-hanging fruit — IOW, someone else’s TV gets stolen, not yours; theft is not actually reduced, just shifted around. There’s no guarantee that everyone locking their house would reduce theft. The thieves learn to pick locks and everyone’s costs are higher — but now a person who doesn’t pay that cost is stigmatized as too foolish to protect themselves.
As an old boss of mine used to say, “locks are to keep your friends out.” They work against casual intruders, not committed ones.
That also depends. An insurance company would be well within its rights to charge you a higher premium if you refused to lock your house.
Right — but an insurance company would do that even if it didn’t reduce theft overall, but merely shifted theft away from their insured customers onto others. It could even be negative-sum thanks to the cost of locks. If we actually want to reduce theft overall, shifting it around doesn’t suffice.
The whole point is that this is a strawman.
(Not sure what the point of the rest is—clarification please?)
It’s not. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have never encountered it.
That is, no-one here is arguing for that position. I am well aware that there are people out there who hold all sorts of unjustifiable beliefs, but conflating then with my reasonable claims is logically rude.
One counter-example: In Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God (an account of how Bible study eventually led a Catholic to become an atheist) , she says that accepting that there is no afterlife led to her having to mourn all her relatives again.
Perhaps there is something between verbal belief and gut-level alief.
Alternative hypothesis: some religious people are mourning the fact that they will never be able to interact with the person again, not the fact that the person’s mind has been irrevocably destroyed.
What moral theory are you using in the parenthetical comment? For example, according to naive utilitarianism it makes no sense to divide causal links leading to harm into “blameless” and “blameworthy”.
Right, because naive utilitarianism sees ‘blame’ as more or less a category error, since utilitarianism is fundamentally just an action criterion. My own moral system is a bit of a hodgepodge, which I have sometimes called Ethical Pluralism.
As I say to Said below, I don’t have a full theory of blame and causality, although I think about it most every day. But I do think that there is something wrong/incomplete/unbalanced about blaming somebody for being part of a causal chain leading to a bad outcome, even if they are knowingly a part of that chain. For example, Doctor Evil credibly commits to light a school on fire if you don’t give him $10 million. I would consider refusal to pay up in this situation as non-blameworthy, even though it causally leads to a bunch of dead schoolchildren.
You may want to look at various decision theories particularly updateless decision theory and its variants.
The difference between the Dr. Evil example and the revealing clothing example is that if everyone precomits to not negotiating with hostage takers, Dr. Evil wouldn’t even bother with his threat; whereas a precomitment to ignore the presence of sexual predators when deciding what to wear won’t discourage them. The clothing example is in fact similar to the locked house example, I mentioned here.
Yes. I think that all deontological or virtue-ethics rules that actually make sense are actually approximations to rule consequentialism when it’d be too computationally expensive to compute from scratch and/or fudge factors to compensate for systematic errors introduced by our corrupted hardware.
Game theory issues I mentioned (e.g., UDT, the other big one being Schelling points) are not quite the same thing as having bad approximations. Since it’s impossible to have a good approximation of another agent of comparable power, even in principal.
I didn’t mean the approximations are bad. I meant that the ‘fundamental’ morality is rule (i.e. UDT) consequentialism, and the only reason we have to use other stuff is that we don’t have unlimited computational power, much like we use aerodynamics to study airplanes because it’s unfeasible to use quantum field theory for that.
My point is that once you add UDT to consequentialism it becomes very similar to deontology. For example, Kant’s Categorical Imperative can be thought of as a special case of UDT.
UDT doesn’t need to be added to consequentialism, or the reverse. UDT is already based on consequentialist assumptions and any reasonably advanced way of thinking about consequences will result in a decision theory along those lines.
It is only people’s muddled intuitions about UDT and similar reflexive decision theories that makes it seem to them that they are remotely deontological. Particularly those inclined to use UDT as an “excuse” to cooperate when they just want that to be the right thing to do for other reasons.
Better yet, it can be thought of as just not UDT at all.
Why?
You tell me. It’s not my confusion.
From what I infer, people who think deontologically already seem to reason “The most effective decision to make as evaluated by UDT is Cooperate in this situation in which CDT picks Defect. This feels all moral to me. UDT must be on my side. I claim UDT is deontological because we agree regarding this particular issue.” This leads to people saying “Using UDT/TDT reasoning...” in places where UDT doesn’t reason in any such way.
UDT is “deontological” if and only if that deontological system consists of or is equivalent to the rule “It is an ethical duty to behave like a consequentialist implementing UDT”. ie. It just isn’t.
Rather what distinction are you drawing between UDT/TDT-like decision theories and Kant’s CI?
I count rule consequentialism as a flavour of consequentialism, not as a flavour of deontology.
I agree, but I’d argue that UDT is more than standard rule consequentialism.
I’d put it as TDT, UDT etc. being attempts to formalize rule consequentialism rigorously enough for an AI.
I got away with a mild version of that one—A friend’s mother had just died, and I said “This is a world where people die”, and it went over well. However, my friend had been doing meditation seriously for a while.
I actually got hit with a version of that—right before I started college there was an assembly where they handed out papers with correlations between SATS, high school average, and success in college. I had a bad combination with my SATS much better than my GPA. I can remember thinking “Then I might as well give up.”
That wasn’t a sensible thought, but it wasn’t sensible for them to give out those papers without saying something like “and here’s counselling” or “high SAT/low GPA means you need to develop better work habits” or some such.
Aside from the issues you’ve raised, it also implies that there’s nothing to be done, not even martial arts school.
Not in my jurisdiction. Here, accurately reporting the details of spent criminal convictions with demonstrably malicious intent can be defamatory. Innuendoes can be too, even if the explicit statements (or images) involved are basically accurate.
Ah yes, thank you for mentioning this; I’d heard that such things are the case in British law, but had forgotten. A quick googling informs me that certain recent court rulings may have undermined truth as an absolute defense in the United States as well.
All I can say in response is that I think such laws are quite wrong. Truth should be an absolute defense. It is my opinion that most situations where making the truth known harms someone, are cases that highlight some systemic or widespread injustice, rather than cases of the truth being inherently harmful.
I can think of at least one major exception: matters related to privacy. That is quite a different thing, however, from something being offensive… an inherently offensive truth is something of whose existence I’ve yet to be convinced.
But now we’ve moved from the original empirical claim I disputed (“The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense”) to a normative one. Sticking with the empirical for a moment, I think the way our libel law is actually designed is instructive: it acknowledges that someone can build misleading and/or normative implications into words or images which, taken literally, are wholly, objectively true.
Maybe I’m burning my Rationalist Conspiracy membership card here, but I don’t agree. Suppose a plumber visits a brothel merely to fix the pipes, but gets photographed by a journalist as they go in & out of the building. If a newspaper used the photographs as part of an exposé of the brothel, giving the pictures a technically truthful caption like “one visitor to the brothel coming and going”, should the plumber lose a libel case because the article & pictures are true, despite the misleading implication that the plumber patronized the brothel?
Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the law could allow for this with an explicit public interest defence, instead of making truth an absolute defence, which has risks of its own. For example, I could write a newspaper article which truthfully reports slanders uttered by others, without rebutting them or acknowledging their unreliability. I don’t think I should have “well, I was accurately reporting that slander” as a defence. Nor is it an adequate basis for dismissing someone who’s offended by the slander.
Well, there’s not an inherently offensive anything. Offence is one of those two-place things. But leaving it at that feels like an evasion of Alicorn’s broader point. If I walk up to a guy on the street and say, “you’re a wanker”, that’s more likely true than not. Even if true, though, I’d say they’re entitled to a little offence.
[Edited 26⁄11 because “pictrues” isn’t a word.]
You raise some interesting points about slander/libel. I don’t dispute the empirical issue (though differences between American and British law here shouldn’t be overlooked), but I don’t think I’m convinced on the normative front, though your examples have made me less certain of my stance.
As for your last point: whether we as a society agree that the target is entitled to take offense seems like the straightforward operationalization of implementing the two-place function of offense as a one-place function. So when I say “I don’t think X should be considered offensive”, I’m not making any sort of claim about whether any particular person will in fact take offense; the claim I am making is something along the lines of “we should not consider offense taken at X to be justified, and we should not care about said offense, or modify our behavior (i.e. stop saying X) on the basis of said offense”.
Fair enough.
That’s all I can realistically hope for on a wide-ranging normative issue like this.
Your one-place operationalization of offence sounds reasonable, as does your unpacking of what you mean by “I don’t think X should be considered offensive”. (Although even with your definition, I still think there exists X such that X is both true & offensive.)
I think that’s a misleading statement. You are pointing to the unique and quite narrow exception to the truth defense that was introduced in 1974. When people say that British libel law is tough, what they mean is not the written law, which is essentially the same as, say, American law, but the interpretation of the law; in particular, it is much harder to prove truth.
I pointed to two classes of exception: the spent convictions exception (which is certainly narrow, but an exception nonetheless), and the more general class of exceptions for defamatory implications too.
I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. SaidAchmiz & I weren’t doing a comparative study of libel law. SaidAchmiz, as far as I know, was just using “slander/libel” (without having a specific country’s laws in mind) as an off-the-cuff example of truth being an absolute defence in the real world. I said that this wasn’t true where I happen to be, leading into my bigger point that something being literally true oughtn’t be a universal justification for saying it.
I didn’t read SaidAchmiz as making a point about British libel law being written/interpreted stringently. I was attacking the empirical claim that truth is an absolute defence in libel cases, and the normative claim that truth being an absolute defence in libel cases is “instructive” about truthhood being a universal defence against criticism in everyday life or on LW.
I ignored your comment about innuendo because it is simply not an exception.
?
“I could rape you right now, and there’s nothing you could do about it.”
Interesting example. My intuition here is that while this is phrased as a statement, the implication is that of a threat. That does not seem to be the case for the other examples in this thread.
Question: is the main problem with “I could rape you right now” that it’s offensive, or that it’s threatening, i.e. that it makes the hearer feel unsafe in the presence of the speaker?
So, then, I guess I provisionally agree that a factual statement minus any sort of opinion, implication, social role, etc., including the fact that it was stated instead of nothing or instead of other statements, is probably not offensive. This is a pretty weak claim, though!
I’d rather there existed no such thing as slut shaming in my society, but in most situations I would still be pissed off if someone had sex with you while in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else without their knowledge and consent, in particular if said someone else is someone I know e.g. my father.
I’m having a bit of trouble parsing your comment. Are you saying that if Bob had sex with your mother, you’d be pissed off at Bob, because this would mean that your mother has cheated on your father with Bob...? Fair enough, I suppose, though it seems to me that Bob in this situation isn’t the one who’s broken any promises/agreements; in general the blame for cheating seems like it should be assigned to the cheater, not the person he/she is cheating with.
… but this thread is probably fast approaching an entirely too tangential state relative to the main post.
Yes, it’d be my mother I’d mainly be pissed off at; but if Bob was aware she was married (and in that hypothetical he definitely is aware she’s my mother—though he might have found that out later)...
Agreed.
The image that formed in my mind was hilarious—probably because my brain found it extremely implausible that somebody could do that for an hour straight without being made to stop in real life, so it thought about a comedy movie instead. The image that would work for me is imagining that someone engraved the Dirac equation on my car using a nail.
So.… your claim is that anyone discussing potentially unpleasant or offensive topics with a woman should take special care to be extra gentle in their delivery, include lots of sympathy and understanding, that sort of thing?
‘Extra’, of course, being in comparison to what they’d say when having a similar discussion with a man?
Gee, what happened to that whole equality thing?
Generalize that to “if you’re discussing a topic with people likely to perceive themselves as victimized by factors related to that topic, it behooves you to be careful with your presentation” and it looks a lot less sexist.
That sounds imminently reasonable, and it might even have worked before the rise of victimization politics. But as anyone who has seriously tried to have this type of discussion before should know, these days it’s self-defeating. Almost all of the women who find a statement like the one mentioned offensive will be equally offended no matter how gently you phrase your observations, because it isn’t your tone that they object to. Rather, any instance of a male disagreeing with the prevailing world view on gender relations is automatically considered offensive. So if you seriously try to adopt a policy of causing no offense, you’ll quickly discover that the only way to do so is to remain silent.
I don’t, BTW, claim that this is a gender-specific issue. Anyone who is a member of an allegedly privileged group is likely to encounter the same problem discussing a politically charged issue with members of an allegedly oppressed group. The mere fact that you’re accused of being an ‘oppressor’ is enough to render anything you say offensive to those who consider themselves victims, and the only escape is to abjectly surrender and go around castigating yourself for whatever crimes you’ve been accused of.
So given this catch-22, my response is to tell the perpetually offended to grow up. Other people are entitled to disagree with you, they are entitled to express their opinions, and you do not have the right to shut them up by throwing a fit about it. If you find yourself unable to cope with frank, occasionally abrasive discussion you’re free to avoid it in any number of ways. But demanding that everyone else censor themselves to avoid offending your delicate sensibilities is not acceptable in a free society.
This claim does not appear in the post you responded to. There is in fact no gendered language except with reference to a previously-established example (and a brief additional example in which the genders of the interlocutors are not stated).
The truth is not immutable. It seems that many people on this site would elevate empirical facts (what is) into normative rules (what ought to be). Clearly, if X is just the Way Things Are, then there’s no use fighting it; a good rationalist learns to accept that X is true, and work with that knowledge instead of ignoring its reality. (X could be anything from atheism to “black people statistically commit more crimes” to “most men refuse to marry a woman who can’t cook”.)
But just because something is empirically true now doesn’t mean it has to be true forever. This is especially the case with social norms. Feminists aren’t trying to say “men really don’t care about a woman’s cooking skills, and fathers who tell their daughters this are wrong”. They’re not denying that the world is this way, they’re just denying that it ought to be this way. And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!
Be aware that when you speak a truth such as “Men only marry women who can cook”, you are not just acknowledging a fact but perpetuating it. You are not just an objective scientific observer of a fact, but a subjective participant in that fact.
Er, not necessarily. Local maxima can be dangerous to venture away from.
Suppose that it’d be safer for everybody to drive on the right side of the road than for everybody to drive on the left side (as a consequence of most people being right-handed), and you’re living in a country where it’s customary to drive on the left side. You wouldn’t teach your children to drive on the right side, would you?
And would you teach those new social norms as something that is or something that ought to be? Also, if different people have different opinions on what ought to be, what is / ought to be the algorithm for selecting the “correct” one?
Clearly we need to establish vast “people farms” that will indoctrinate children into our glorious Utopia.
… hmm, that sounds like a worryingly good idea.
I don’t think this is the case. In fact, most criticism of the original statement centres around the fact that it was insufficiently clear whether it was empirical or normative.
A cursory search reveals at least two relevant posts: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality and SotW: Check Consequentialism
Nonetheless, people should indeed pick their battles, and fight those unpalatable truths they think most worth fighting.
I’m going to sidestep the talk of “offense” because I think it’s sufficient to talk about whether a statement is morally right or wrong (“offensive” seems to be “morally wrong” with some extra baggage).
Two cases in which I might judge an empirical statement as morally wrong:
1) the statement is false, and yes, saying false things is usually considered morally wrong
2) the statement is true, but is used in a context where it will have negative repercussions—for example, telling your kid a huge amount of factually true statistics that cast a bad light upon a group you don’t like (blacks, jews, women, etc.), or teaching a madman how to make explosives, etc.
In this case we’re talking about the value a statement not in the abstract, but as life advice given from a father to his daughter. The important part isn’t as much the truth of that particular piece of advice, but of what it allows us to infer about the general quality of the life advice given.
Er… if p(anthropogenic global warning is occurring | all publicly available evidence) is 85%, I’m not sure what I want is 85% of the people to tell me anthropogenic global warning is occurring and 15% of the people to tell me it’s not.
Why not?
Of course, the best proportion would be 100% of people telling me that p(the_warming)=85%; but if we limit the outside opinions to simple yes/no statements, then having 85% telling ‘yes’ and 15% telling ‘no’ seems to be far more informative than 100% of people telling ‘yes’ - as that would lead me to very wrongly assume that p(the_warming) is the same as p(2+2=4).
Why?
.
Both messages are only about the past/current state of things and leave no room for “The old model stinks, and I hope your generation will continue changing it.”
I prepared for adulthood/marriage on the old model, and it did not serve me well. It was like getting a job only to find that my typewriter skills weren’t needed. Early on we had a series of dinnertime arguments that boiled down to: “Have some more food.” “No, thanks, I’m done.” “I cooked you this Good Food because I am a Good Wife! Why can’t you appreciate the work I put into being good at this? Eat the damn food!”
As an extra anecdote, my wife says she prepared on the old model, and that it did serve her well (or at least, she doesn’t regret).
I can see two perspectives:
A) The “traditional” model is good advice for a majority of the population, but is useless or harmful for a minority, in which case situations (like yours) where the advice failed may not be enough evidence that the advice was bad.
B) The “traditional” model may have been useful in the past, but society has changed too much (we live in large cities and know few of our neighbors; there’s less physical work, a single earner can not usually support a family any more, many house tasks have been automated or outsourced), that the “traditional” model is about as useful as career advice from the 1920s.
I expect it’s a mix of both, with the second effect probably being a bit stronger.
Good cooking skills provide a lot of utility for all members of the family. The costs of cooking are mostly the time spent cooking and the time spent learning cooking. The benefits of good cooking are pleasant experiences of eating tasty food, better health because of using more healthy ingredients, and saving some money (depends on cost of cook’s time, and the size of family).
The traditional heuristic reduces the total costs of learning cooking by assigning the task to one gender. Also, in the context of traditional society, it is the gender with less income from work, therefore the opportunity costs of learning cooking are smaller.
On the other hand, contemporary society increases the opportunity costs for women, and also provides relatively cheap cooked food (probably still not as good as a good cook can make at home, but the difference is getting smaller). Also the costs of learning cooking are smaller because of available semiproducts and internet recipes; you can get mediocre results with trivial costs.
My (male) opinion is that the best solution today would be for everyone to learn some basic cooking (pasta, rice, soup...), at least the trivial recipes of form “put all ingredients together and cook for n minutes”. After three experiments with each of them you learn to avoid the basic mistakes (too much salt, undercooking, overcooking) and get some basic confidence. From that point later: if you need to cook, cook; if you don’t need to cook, at least do it once in a few months to preserve the skill. You have passed the psychological barrier, the rest is mostly about experience.
Perhaps one problem here is expecting too much too soon. A beginner cook may feel pressed to provide results on expert level. (An advice to the expert cooks: you are really not helping by providing thousand little unsolicited information. Inferential distances, et cetera.) This is why many people learn cooking when they are alone, cooking only for themselves. Also: Learning basic cooking is not a precommitment to get to the expert level. There is nothing wrong with mediocre cooking skills, they already give lot of utility; and if you later change your mind about this, you can complete your learning later.
Agreed. I myself am slightly ahead of the “put all ingredients together and cook for n minutes” level, and planning to move forward.
This might be why my grandma gets very annoyed when I don’t eat all of the food she cooks.
Are statements about the current state of affairs in general objectionable? If I tell my child not to be openly homosexual in Saudi Arabia, is this bad advice, even though the current Saudi Arabian model stinks and I hope their generation will continue changing it?
The issue is that language is often imprecise, and so people often make a descriptive statement which has normative connotations. Thus, when making that sort of thing it is important to be clear not just descriptively what is happening but normatively what one thinks about it.
It depends on how close things are to changing (or whether they have already changed). “You need to learn to cook and keep house” was more practical advice in the 1930s than in the 1980s. “Don’t be openly gay” is practical advice in Saudi Arabia but probably not in New York.
Whenever possible, separate the normative from the objective, and consider costs as well as benefits. For example, “if you’re considering being openly homosexual in Saudi Arabia, remember that however much more personally fulfilling a life it is, statistically and legally speaking, it’s also going to be quite a bit shorter.”
Hmm, I’d eat the food. Not just to show appreciation, but to keep up the good husband/good wife roleplay. The traditional model makes a lot of sense to me, as long as both parties buy into it.
I think the sexism isn’t telling that to your daughter—it’s not also telling that to your son.
ISTM that, until a few generations ago, people traditionally lived with their parents until they got married (in their early twenties, sometimes even in their late teens), and lived with their spouses thereafter. The husband traditionally had a full-time job, and the wife stayed home and was in charge of the housework (incl. cooking). Therefore, a man never actually needed to know how to do housework, because he would always live with a woman (his mother until he married, then his wife) who would do that for him. (Conversely, a woman never actually needed to work, because she would always live with a man (her father until she married, then her husband) who would bring home the bacon for her.) So, within the traditional gender roles, a male would never need to be told those words Julia Wise heard from her father.
Nowadays, instead, people (of either gender) who complete high school typically rent an apartment with roommates (often all of the same gender) in order to attend university, may (or may not) get married in their late twenties (sometimes even in their early thirties or later), and when they do, often both spouses have a job, so neither has the time/stamina/willingness to do all of the housework and they share it. So people of either gender will have to know how to do housework starting from college age. There is still a cliché that men can’t cook, but it’s mostly repeated tongue-in-cheek and hardly anybody seems to actually really believe it. (I’m talking about Italy—YMMV.)
When my dad told me “I’ve heard that $bank is hiring—why don’t you apply there?”, I said “I’m not interested—I’m going to start a PhD next year; if my ambition had been to work in a bank I wouldn’t be studying physics” and he said “but it would be one of the best [i.e., highest-paying] jobs one could get!”, I kind-of freaked out—and he hadn’t even mentioned marriage!
(OTOH, when my mother told me the one about keeping a clean house (with “what woman” instead of “what man”), I just thought ‘Well, I hope not all women are as obsessed with cleanliness as you’ and IIRC said nothing in particular and smiled (i.e., pretended to think she was joking). So, in my case, it’s the one about jobs that felt more objectionable. YMMV.)
Her father had the goal of her learning how to cook. Cooking is a valuable skill and it makes sense for parents to want their children to learn valuable skills.
He could have simply said: “You need to learn how to cook”.
If you want to persuade someone it’s better to say “You need to learn how to cook, because it helps you to achieve important goal X” than to just say “You need to learn how to cook”. A dad that thinks that getting married is one of the goals of his daughter will use the example.
If you tell a guy to learn cooking it sense to frame the reason differently.
Take Tim Ferriss in his new book “The 4-Hour Chef” with targets geeks:
There no sexism inherent in giving a girl different reasons than a boy.
There most definitely is. The sexism is not generated by giving a girl different reasons than a boy, but it is absolutely inherent in the entire process that causes one to give a girl different reasons than a boy.
True: There is no sexism inherent in giving child A different reasons from child B.
Possibly true: There is no sexism inherent in giving particular-girl-Alice different reasons from particular-boy-Bob.
False: There is no sexism inherent in giving girls-in-general different reasons from boys-in-general.
The problem is that your statement has definitional ambiguity. Reframing to make it clear which specific case you’re talking about will help cool down this debate.
Sexism has the same problem, as a word, that racism has. Is it believing in a contextually significant difference between groups OR is is believing that one group is universally superior to another OR is it actively working to support or harm an individual based on group affiliation? Examples of the latter are used to make the word have revulsion which is then used to discredit those who hold the former.
Those may be correllated, but are not identical positions.
Absolutely not. But this is why I keep using terms like “poisoning the discourse”. Questions about contextually significant differences between groups are valid and important directions of inquiry, but people have deliberately decided (for political reasons) to so conflate them with actively supporting or harming individuals based on group affiliation that it’s impossible to have a scientific discussion without feeding a bunch of people who aren’t qualified to interpret the data.
Because we don’t have anything like HPMOR’s “Bayesian Conspiracy”, we need to be sensitive to the fact that certain factual conjectures cause damage when released into the wild. And because I don’t know how rational you(collective) are, I need to make sure that you(collective) understand the social weight of certain conjectures before I’m willing to bandy them about. And unfortunately, responding with “but it seems factually true to me!” seems to be missing the point of the communication, which is “you are tugging on the end of a fact-string that is connected to a really nasty bit of primate pack-behavior, can we please tug more gently on it?”. (I acknowledge that many people have responded with “but look how gently I’m already tugging”; I’ve attempted to respond with “seriously dudes, you need to tug even more gently than that.”)
This is a seriously recursive process, so almost all of the facts have to be evaluated in terms of the correlative matrix they operate within, instead of their mere correspondence-with-personally-available-evidence. All of these facts shape the process by which we gather evidence about them.
But the whole point of the process is to force anyone with an unpopular opinion to tug more and more gently, until finally they cease to tug at all. Then the PC hive mind can move the goalposts forward a bit, and start silencing a more moderate group of critics, and then another, and another, until ultimately the keepers of the received wisdom can say or do anything they like and no one dares to question them.
So no, I’ll continue on with my ironclad opposition to such transparent ploys. Anyone who whines about how their delicate sensibilities can’t stand an open, honest discussion of the facts of an issue has given up the right to have anyone care what they think.
That is emphatically not the “point” of the process. That may be a consequence of the process, but it is not the point of it—and if it does happen to be a consequence of the process, it’s clear that you can be relied on to say so and we’ll negotiate a new equilibrium.
That… doesn’t appear to be what actually happens. Are there “PC hive minds”? definitely. But right now, they most assuredly don’t have the level of power that the old-guard conservatives do. Once they become the dominant force against rationality, if they don’t evolve into milder strains in response to evolutionary pressure on their own, then it makes sense to start fighting them too. But right now, I have a seriously hard time seeing them as worse than what they’re fighting.
(Who knows—maybe that makes me part of the PC hive mind myself? It would be good to get a solid argument for that, if it were the case; I’d rather not fall into a loyalty trap if I can avoid it).
I don’t want to death-spiral into a discussion of politics, so I’ll refrain from naming specific groups. But in most Western nations there are large, well-funded political activist groups that have consciously, explicitly adopting the tactic of aggressively claiming offense in order to silence their political opponents. While the members of such groups might be honestly dedicated to advancing some social cause, the leaders who encourage this behavior are professional politicians who are more likely to be motivated by issues of personal power and prestige.
So I’ll certainly concede that many individuals may feel genuinely offended in various cases, but I stand by my claim that most of the political organizations they belong to encourage constant claims of offense as a cynical power play.
If you don’t believe the ratcheting effect actually happens, I invite you to compare any random selection of political tracts from the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. You’ll find that on many issues the terms of the debate have shifted to the point where opinions that were seriously discussed in the 1950s are now considered not just wrong but criminal offenses. This may seem like a good thing if you happen to agree with the opinion that’s currently be ascendant, but in most cases the change was not a result of one side marshaling superior evidence for their beliefs. Instead it’s all emotion and political gamesmanship, supplemented by naked censorship whenever one side manages to get a large enough majority.
You know, it sounds like you’re claiming that the fact that certain behaviors—generally accepted to be harmful—are no longer considered acceptable as proof of a conspiracy cynically piggybacking on this change to impose (self?)censorship , furthering some unspecified agenda. This feels like a strawman of your actual beliefs; could you explain what you meant?
I don’t see a good reason to believe that’s true—or at least, whether “conservatives” hold power is strongly function of what place you’re talking about, and of what you mean by “power”. Remember, not everybody here lives in the US like I assume you do (I live in France, as a first approximation it looks like you’re all crazy over there).
The impression I get is that both liberals and conservatives enjoy whining about how they are oppressed by their all-powerful opponents, and if you add the right caveats (what kind of oppression and where), they might both be right.
In this thread, I’ve seen some distasteful justifications of “lying for the Greater Good” (or even just to defend “people in my coalition”), and in one (heavily downvoted) case, someone claiming they’d rather see the world destroyed rather than seeing it continue to exist with the current value systems … all of that under the flag of feminism or LGBT advocacy. That has done very little to convince me that the biggest threats are from “old guard conservatives”. It may be the case in some crapholes in Alabama, but probably not among the bright and educated.
You might be interested in a book called Racial Paranoia. It argues that since overt racism is publicly unacceptable in the US, people are focusing on tinier and tinier clues about who they can trust, resulting in a paranoid style which is actually a rational response to weird conditions.
That sounds like a stretch. While public racism is unacceptable, acting in ways consistent with racial prejudice usually goes without comment as long as plausible deniability exists.
I don’t disagree with the substance of your comment, but I’m not sure that public racism is as widely unacceptable as you’d like to think:
http://i.imgur.com/vcYuy.png
The text was too small for me to read easily in your link, so I just sampled it.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by public—my handy example is that Trent Lott’s political career was destroyed (severely damaged?) because he made a racist comment.
ETA: And even his comment was mild compared to what people say when prejudice is considered the default.
Hard to tell from this. Facebook and Twitter exist in an odd kind of limbo where they’re treated as somewhere between public and private depending on how wide someone’s network is, how sensitive their life is to dumb crap they might say online, and how aware they are of online privacy issues, so the stuff that crosses your feed isn’t necessarily representative of what the people behind it might stand behind in a more traditional environment.
Then there’s contextual issues. The linked image clearly isn’t a conversation, or even a time slice of a hashtag somebody’s following—it’s out of chronological order and any replies aren’t shown, so it doesn’t tell us much about how representative this is of opinion in general or about how people usually respond to opinions like these, both of which are important when trying to gauge public acceptability.
I think such paranoia is in play in politics and sometimes online, where most or all of what you know about someone is what they say.
That’s a plausible hypothesis—I do get the impression that overt racism is slightly more acceptable in France, and definitely more acceptable in China.
I also noticed that Americans tend to have a perspective on Arab Immigrants in France that seems weird and could be explained by the fact that they suppose “French”-Arab relationships are like the White-Black relationship in the US (or at least, that was one hypothesis I had at the time after some weird conversations).
The interesting question isn’t just who has the worst fringe (let alone who has the worst fringe that’s shown up here), it’s who’s likely to get enough political power to do significant damage.