There are non-obvious reasons why you should perhaps not be talking about this. I can’t tell you those reasons (for precisely the same reasons you should perhaps not be talking about this), but I can tell you it leads to slippery slopes of negative sum signaling games.
(I suppose what you’re implying is that the fact that we have to talk about it in the first place would imply that we actually do have more of a problem with creepiness than most organizations. Bad publicity, and all that.)
in which a LGBT woman, who is also an atheist, talks about a mistake the LGBT movement ignored in its early days that later came back to bite it, that the atheist community should learn from and avoid repeating.
Given the existence of a problem in SciFi, Atheist and other male dominated geek subcultures, it would be surprising if it wasn’t something that, sooner or later, appeared in this one too. Maybe discussing it is temporary bad publicity, but I think it should be considered an investment for the future. Some problems are best tackled early, before they become too ingrained in a culture’s tradition. The ‘missing stair’ phenomena.
Atheists need to work—now—on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.
And by now, I mean now. We need to start on this now, so we don’t get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.
What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.
The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community… and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we’re paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our community.
That makes it hard on everyone in the LGBT movement—women and men, of all races. It creates rifts that make our community weaker. And it has a seriously bad impact on our ability to make effective social change. For instance, the LGBT movement has a profoundly impaired ability to shift homophobic attitudes in the black communities… since those communities can claim, entirely fairly, that the gay community doesn’t care about black people, and hasn’t made an effort to deal with our racism.
We screwed this up. We still screw this up. We are paying for our screwups.
Atheists need to work—now—on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.
Atheism is not a movement, it’s a philosophical position, indifferent to what type of genital organs you have in your pants, what color they are and how you use them. I’d gladly prefer it stays this way, thank you.
Christina is talking about the atheist movement, not the set of all atheists (“atheist” is used there as a shorthand for “member of the movement;” maybe we need different words?). And if you’re talking about a movement, then a call to be more inclusive is not a non sequitur at all. A philosophy cannot be exclusive or inclusive, but of course a movement can.
Christina is talking about the atheist movement, not the set of all atheists (“atheist” is used there as a shorthand for “member of the movement;” maybe we need different words?).
Yes, I think it’s a very poor choice of words to conflate a philosophical position with a set of people publicly arguing for it (and for other things as well).
And I’m not even sure we can properly say that there is an atheist movement. There are a few prominent atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Myers, etc.), plus various bloggers, who speak at atheist conventions, but atheists as a whole are not organized, and they have a variety of positions on many relevant topics (religious tolerance, personal liberties, etc.)
In contrast, IIUC, the LGBT movement is more organized, and, while not universally representative, has more support among the queer people. I suppose that most queer people largely agree on issues such as sexual rights, adoption rights, family rights, etc.
After all, being queer refers to pattern of preferences and behaviors, while being an atheist refers to an epistemic state.
And if you’re talking about a movement, then a call to be more inclusive is not a non sequitur at all.
It’s not a non sequitur, but I don’t think it’s good advice. Intellectual honest discourse should be, IMHO, blind to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preferences, and other group differences (unless these happen to be the topic of the discourse, of course). Affirmative action has no place in it.
I suppose that most queer people largely agree on issue such as sexual rights, adoption rights, famility rights, etc. After all, being queer refers to pattern of preferences and behaviors, while being an atheist refers to an epistemic state.
I’m not sure the situations are all that different, except that “movement atheism” is younger. (I speak here mostly of the U.S., since it’s what I know.)
Queers, for example, are significantly divided on questions of family rights. There are those of us who endorse the existing legal structure around families, for example, and want that structure expanded to include us. And there are those of us who reject the existing legal structure around families altogether, and want it eliminated.
That said, that division isn’t terribly visible from a mainstream perspective; there’s a relatively coherent political platform that gets treated as “the” queer rights movement, and most people go along with that.
I think a lot of the formalization of queer activism comes from its alliance with political parties. Because the major political parties in the U.S. have taken differentiable stances on queer rights, queer activists have de facto allied themselves with the Blues and opposed the Greens. (This causes some difficulties for queer people whose political or economic ideologies naturally incline Green. There is in fact a Green queer movement, although it doesn’t get a lot of respect from your typical queer-on-the-street.)
I suspect that if atheism becomes a differentiable Green/Blue issue we’ll see a similar pattern over the next thirty years. And it easily could… religious pluralism is increasingly becoming a differentiable Green/Blue issue in the US, which seems related.
I would tend to disagree, and if no one had ever argued about identity politics on the internet before, I would be very interested in continuing this discussion. But as it is… I’ll bow out here.
I would strongly prefer that the Lesswrong community, whatever that even is, does not get too closely entwined with the mainstream atheist community. Generally, it seems that shifting one’s message further to the left of the bell curve is lossy at best, dishonest at worst.
Meh. Is there any evidence that this sort of crude ingroup/outgroup bias (“treating [minority outgroups] as alien/objectified Others” and the like) is a significant problem in the rationalist community? My prior for this being an issue is quite low, given our emphasis on cognitive biases: the example of LGBT and other social groups is not directly relevant.
Added: My rough, anecdotal evidence is that ingroup favoritism has not been an issue at LW so far, at least if we define “ingroup” conventionally as white, cis-male folks. If anything, the rationalist community is remarkably less ingroup-focused than one would expect given its demographics and some of its beliefs.
I don’t have the data to answer that question, but the fact that we talk about cognitive bias a lot isn’t good evidence that average members of our community are exceptionally effective at dealing with any particular bias. Witness akrasia.
I think that’s fairly likely, but some degree of general improvement doesn’t necessarily imply exceptional skill relative to the general population if we have some reason to think that the base rates might be different. In this case, I think we might reasonably expect a community focused on amelioration of bias to attract people who see themselves as having trouble with one bias or another, and akrasia (and trouble with executive function more generally) seems to be one of the more commonly problematic issues within our demographic. We also have data saying that knowledge of bias doesn’t translate directly to reduction of bias, though we’re working on that.
Othering as per bogus’ post is a separate issue, one that we haven’t dealt much with directly, but at the very least I don’t think it’s obviously true that our constituents are unusually good at dealing with it. Geekdom’s pretty homogeneous.
There are non-obvious reasons why you should perhaps not be talking about this. I can’t tell you those reasons (for precisely the same reasons you should perhaps not be talking about this), but I can tell you it leads to slippery slopes of negative sum signaling games.
(I suppose what you’re implying is that the fact that we have to talk about it in the first place would imply that we actually do have more of a problem with creepiness than most organizations. Bad publicity, and all that.)
There’s a thought provoking video on YouTube:
What Atheists Can Learn from the LGBT Movement
in which a LGBT woman, who is also an atheist, talks about a mistake the LGBT movement ignored in its early days that later came back to bite it, that the atheist community should learn from and avoid repeating.
Given the existence of a problem in SciFi, Atheist and other male dominated geek subcultures, it would be surprising if it wasn’t something that, sooner or later, appeared in this one too. Maybe discussing it is temporary bad publicity, but I think it should be considered an investment for the future. Some problems are best tackled early, before they become too ingrained in a culture’s tradition. The ‘missing stair’ phenomena.
The video is an hour long. Summary?
Edit: I found a transcript of a shorter version of the talk.
Here’s a link to a related blog post she wrote.
The section I was thinking of was:
Atheists need to work—now—on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.
And by now, I mean now. We need to start on this now, so we don’t get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.
What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.
The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community… and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we’re paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our community.
That makes it hard on everyone in the LGBT movement—women and men, of all races. It creates rifts that make our community weaker. And it has a seriously bad impact on our ability to make effective social change. For instance, the LGBT movement has a profoundly impaired ability to shift homophobic attitudes in the black communities… since those communities can claim, entirely fairly, that the gay community doesn’t care about black people, and hasn’t made an effort to deal with our racism.
We screwed this up. We still screw this up. We are paying for our screwups.
Atheists have a chance to not do that.
Atheism is not a movement, it’s a philosophical position, indifferent to what type of genital organs you have in your pants, what color they are and how you use them. I’d gladly prefer it stays this way, thank you.
Christina is talking about the atheist movement, not the set of all atheists (“atheist” is used there as a shorthand for “member of the movement;” maybe we need different words?). And if you’re talking about a movement, then a call to be more inclusive is not a non sequitur at all. A philosophy cannot be exclusive or inclusive, but of course a movement can.
Yes, I think it’s a very poor choice of words to conflate a philosophical position with a set of people publicly arguing for it (and for other things as well).
And I’m not even sure we can properly say that there is an atheist movement. There are a few prominent atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Myers, etc.), plus various bloggers, who speak at atheist conventions, but atheists as a whole are not organized, and they have a variety of positions on many relevant topics (religious tolerance, personal liberties, etc.)
In contrast, IIUC, the LGBT movement is more organized, and, while not universally representative, has more support among the queer people. I suppose that most queer people largely agree on issues such as sexual rights, adoption rights, family rights, etc. After all, being queer refers to pattern of preferences and behaviors, while being an atheist refers to an epistemic state.
It’s not a non sequitur, but I don’t think it’s good advice. Intellectual honest discourse should be, IMHO, blind to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preferences, and other group differences (unless these happen to be the topic of the discourse, of course). Affirmative action has no place in it.
I’m not sure the situations are all that different, except that “movement atheism” is younger. (I speak here mostly of the U.S., since it’s what I know.)
Queers, for example, are significantly divided on questions of family rights. There are those of us who endorse the existing legal structure around families, for example, and want that structure expanded to include us. And there are those of us who reject the existing legal structure around families altogether, and want it eliminated.
That said, that division isn’t terribly visible from a mainstream perspective; there’s a relatively coherent political platform that gets treated as “the” queer rights movement, and most people go along with that.
I think a lot of the formalization of queer activism comes from its alliance with political parties. Because the major political parties in the U.S. have taken differentiable stances on queer rights, queer activists have de facto allied themselves with the Blues and opposed the Greens. (This causes some difficulties for queer people whose political or economic ideologies naturally incline Green. There is in fact a Green queer movement, although it doesn’t get a lot of respect from your typical queer-on-the-street.)
I suspect that if atheism becomes a differentiable Green/Blue issue we’ll see a similar pattern over the next thirty years. And it easily could… religious pluralism is increasingly becoming a differentiable Green/Blue issue in the US, which seems related.
I would tend to disagree, and if no one had ever argued about identity politics on the internet before, I would be very interested in continuing this discussion. But as it is… I’ll bow out here.
I would strongly prefer that the Lesswrong community, whatever that even is, does not get too closely entwined with the mainstream atheist community. Generally, it seems that shifting one’s message further to the left of the bell curve is lossy at best, dishonest at worst.
Meh. Is there any evidence that this sort of crude ingroup/outgroup bias (“treating [minority outgroups] as alien/objectified Others” and the like) is a significant problem in the rationalist community? My prior for this being an issue is quite low, given our emphasis on cognitive biases: the example of LGBT and other social groups is not directly relevant.
Added: My rough, anecdotal evidence is that ingroup favoritism has not been an issue at LW so far, at least if we define “ingroup” conventionally as white, cis-male folks. If anything, the rationalist community is remarkably less ingroup-focused than one would expect given its demographics and some of its beliefs.
I don’t have the data to answer that question, but the fact that we talk about cognitive bias a lot isn’t good evidence that average members of our community are exceptionally effective at dealing with any particular bias. Witness akrasia.
I know I have considerably less of an akrasia problem now, in no small part due to reading things from here and from hacker news (ycombinator).
I think it’s fair to say average members of the community are better at recognizing bias in theselves. I’m not sure about dealing with it.
I think that’s fairly likely, but some degree of general improvement doesn’t necessarily imply exceptional skill relative to the general population if we have some reason to think that the base rates might be different. In this case, I think we might reasonably expect a community focused on amelioration of bias to attract people who see themselves as having trouble with one bias or another, and akrasia (and trouble with executive function more generally) seems to be one of the more commonly problematic issues within our demographic. We also have data saying that knowledge of bias doesn’t translate directly to reduction of bias, though we’re working on that.
Othering as per bogus’ post is a separate issue, one that we haven’t dealt much with directly, but at the very least I don’t think it’s obviously true that our constituents are unusually good at dealing with it. Geekdom’s pretty homogeneous.
I think you shouldn’t have made this comment, for decision-theoretic reasons.