Let’s charitably assume that the father is just making an empirical statement, to shorten the list.
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.
Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch. What’s sex? Well…
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.
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.)
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!
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.
Why should a child have a predefined role or script?
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!
People also instinctively appear to see men and women as two different kinds of people.
•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!
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.
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).
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]”.
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...?
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.
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.
Do you think that classifying statements on such topics as “offensive” is the appropriate conclusion?
I was about to ask you to taboo “offensive”, but you say...
I do not, but perhaps we are operating under different notions of “offensive”.
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”.
fixing the listener’s deficiencies (intelligence, sanity, mental development, etc.)
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.)
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”.
Fair enough, but it’s not obvious that the mere fact of someone being offended is something I (or “we”) should care about.
[W]hether 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”.
As for fixing the listener’s deficiencies...
You mean in principle or in practice?
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.
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.
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...?
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.
Speaking as a woman of LessWrong, when I was 16, I was insufficiently sane and insufficiently mentally developed.
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! :)
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.
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:
BUT, I am not a hypothetical, so you can interact with me and learn what my actual response would be.
and this
Emotions have consequences, but consequences can be POSITIVE too! :)
and I certainly support this
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.
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.
Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from.
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”.
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.
Man, except for the ‘I could do better’ part (I can’t), I tell my kid this all the time.
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)
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.
But my whole point was that if it’s an empirical statement, then we shouldn’t be offended by it.
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.
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.
The flip side of that is building an environment where people clearly differentiate normative claims from empirical ones.
Sounds great to me—let’s do it.
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.
Let’s just agree to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
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 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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
These are food for thought indeed. My thoughts on some of them, intended as ruminations and not refutations:
“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.)
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).
“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.)
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.
“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.)
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?
“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.)
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.
“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.)
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.
“If he dresses effeminately like that, he’s going to get bullied.” (Ditto; also, status quo bias.)
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.
“A black man will never hold the highest office in this country.” (Self-fulfilling prophesy; failure to acknowledge shittiness of (purported) empirical situation.)
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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?
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.
...one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.
Oh yes, certainly. Refusing to notice ingroup/outgroup differences is just the opposite failure mode.
There’s something wrong with your assessment (of the revealing clothing --> sexual assault case) 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.
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.
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.
Yes, in my experience this is very common in muggle society.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Would you have similar objections if I advised you to lock your house to reduce theft?
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
“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.)
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.
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.
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.
My point is that once you add UDT to consequentialism it becomes very similar to deontology.
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.
For example, Kant’s Categorical Imperative can be thought of as a special case of UDT.
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.
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.
“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.)
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.
“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.)
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.
“If he dresses effeminately like that, he’s going to get bullied.”
Aside from the issues you’ve raised, it also implies that there’s nothing to be done, not even martial arts school.
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.
All I can say in response is that I think such laws are quite wrong.
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.
Truth should be an absolute defense.
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?
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.
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.
an inherently offensive truth is something of whose existence I’ve yet to be convinced.
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.
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”.
I don’t dispute the empirical issue (though differences between American and British law here shouldn’t be overlooked),
Fair enough.
but I don’t think I’m convinced on the normative front, though your examples have made me less certain of my stance.
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.
You are pointing to the unique and quite narrow exception to the truth defense that was introduced in 1974.
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.
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;
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.
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!
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.
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.
in general the blame for cheating seems like it should be assigned to the cheater, not the person he/she is cheating with.
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)...
… but this thread is probably fast approaching an entirely too tangential state relative to the main post.
if someone shouted the multiplication tables at the top of their lungs in a public space for an hour,
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?
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.
And a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!
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 a reliable way to change social norms is to teach new social norms to the next generation!
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?
It seems that many people on this site would elevate empirical facts (what is) into normative rules (what ought to be).
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.
But my whole point was that if it’s an empirical statement, then we shouldn’t be offended by it.
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.
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)”.
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.
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).
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?