Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
And I happen to think that anyone who is trying to make me feel bad about things should be crushed like a bug and their attempts to control through shame disempowered to whatever extent it is convenient to do so.
(I also observe that most people with healthy boundaries will tend to be much more likely to avoid those who are predisposed to attempting to control through guilt or shame.)
You’re eating babies. The wide-eyed idealist points out that eating babies is bad and you are a bad and evil person who must mend his baby-eating ways. You tell the wide-eyed idealist that you refuse to interact with people who try to control you through shame. The wide-eyed idealist thinks for a minute, shrugs, and shoots you.
You tell the wide-eyed idealist that you refuse to interact with people who try to control you through shame. The wide-eyed idealist thinks for a minute, shrugs, and shoots you.
Did you just create a counterfactual which relies on making me act even more cluelessly naive and banal than the wide eyed idealist?
That’s as meaningless than it is presumptive and inappropriate.
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
Except for the sex-with-echidna part, this sounds vaguely like something that MixedNuts might do!
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
I feel that your most powerful point is that wide-eyed idealists are poor utility maximizers and poor rationalists.
The second strongest seems to be that a rationalist will (should, but as a rationalist, they do what they should) attempt better approaches, which seems to be quite close to one of wedrifid’s implied point in the grandparent. Was this your intended meaning?
Both of these are true, but I wasn’t talking to the wide-eyed idealist, I was talking to the baby-eater. If you grandstand about how a socially-approved and very mild punishment for doing bad things is Evil Boundary-violating Control, people who care about those bad things are less likely to let you alone than to switch to harsher punishments.
If you grandstand about how a socially-approved and very mild punishment for doing bad things is Evil Boundary-violating Control, people who care about those bad things are less likely to let you alone than to switch to harsher punishments.
Not necessarily. Wild-eyed idealists, being idealists, are markedly biased towards shaming folks for whatever it is that they consider “bad”. Shaming and guilt-tripping people is not even particularly hard for them, since their whole worldview is often based on these emotions; whereas applying harsher punishments may not even occur to them unless they are rather authoritarian, and it might even be completely infeasible. Thus, reacting assertively is entirely appropriate, at least in the likeliest case.
Which of course begs the question about why you were attacking that particular straw man.
The optimal approach for dealing with enemies who are presumed to have more power than you seems rather irrelevant. Unless the relevance you imply is that radical feminists with an obsession for shame based control already represent a powerful hostile force that we would be foolish to resist? In that case I would of course agree that my words to members of that group would be best served keeping them misinformed about the effectiveness of their strategy of enforcement. All else being equal it tends to be better to keep powerful enemies ineffective.
Okay, my point was that if you accept that people are going to try to control you, it’s rather silly to complain about that means. But apparently you classify all people who attempt to control you as enemies. I suppose that’s a consistent view, and compatible with civilization if you allow control to enforce an agreed-upon set of laws.
But it doesn’t seem to allow for progress. If someone discovers that marital rape is not okay, contrary to mainstream belief, what are they supposed to do? Publishing a paper entitled “Psychological effects of nonconsensual sex between spouses” would count as informing rather than controlling; it would also be vastly less effective than making marital rape illegal, portraying characters who rape their spouses as horrible monsters, and shaming rapists.
If someone tries to control me and I disagree with their position, my answer is not “By attempting to control me you have made yourself my enemy”, but “I don’t agree that bestiality is cruel to animals, so I will fight your attempts to make it unacceptable, but I don’t disapprove of these attempts on principle. For example, I agree with your subargument about indecent exposure, so Knuckles here and I are going to get a room”.
Publishing a paper entitled “Psychological effects of nonconsensual sex between spouses” would count as informing rather than controlling; it would also be vastly less effective than making marital rape illegal, portraying characters who rape their spouses as horrible monsters, and shaming rapists.
I don’t think this is evident enough to be affirmed without supporting evidence. There’s evidence that such laws and shame-guilt-tripping might be much less effective than publishing a good comprehensive paper.
Prime example: Videogame piracy. Strong IP laws. Massive attempts at guilt-trip and manipulation of mass populace. Observed effect: No measurable effect of the laws and anti-piracy measures, and a continued growth of piracy. The growth is most likely attributable to other causes.
On the flipside, dev companies that have announced that they won’t do anything against piracy have seen considerable advertisement boosts from it and have on average enjoyed much greater success thanks to this.
Okay, my point was that if you accept that people are going to try to control you, it’s rather silly to complain about that means.
Not only do I care about what means people use to control me, for any given person asserting that they don’t care what means people use to control them I would be confident in declaring them confused about their own preferences.
But apparently you classify all people who attempt to control you as enemies.
No I don’t, and wouldn’t. Why on earth would I give away my power like that? I’ll do whatever I want in response to people attempting to control me including complying with indifference, ignoring them, gaining more social power so that people are unable to or unlikely to make that kind of moves. Some people doing (or being likely to do) certain things would make them enemies but that is rare and implies giving them a significant degree of respect and attention. It doesn’t happen often.
We agree on the first point! I’m saying some means are worse than others, and shame/guilt is one of the best ones.
As Dave pointed out, we need to taboo “enemy”. “This person’s actions are bothering me; I’ll minimize annoyance” is treating the person as your enemy in the sense I was using it. Not treating them as an enemy is “This person is trying to do good, yet their actions aren’t the ones I think are best; I shall update on what they believe, and tell them what I believe so they can do same; if we still disagree, I’ll minimize total annoyance among us both”. If most people are your enemies by that definition, you’re… not typical audience for social justice rhetoric.
This, incidentally, reminds me of the rule of Ko, since I only learned to play Go yesterday. It seems like there’s a meta pattern of the baby-eater becoming the wide-eyed-idealist when you consider the boundary-violating control as the baby-eating and the ball starts bouncing around while both camps conscript soldiers and muster armies and continuously threaten other elements of their opposition while looking for something that invalidates the other’s morality.
Sure. And the other baby-eaters look at that and stop eating babies where the wide-eyed idealist can find out about it, because the idealist has made a credible threat. (A slightly more idealistic idealist might look for nonfatal ways to make a credible threat, but they might not be available.) This happens all the time; much of our civilization is built on it. What’s the problem?
Sure. And the other baby-eaters look at that and stop eating babies where the wide-eyed idealist can find out about it, because the idealist has made a credible threat.
Well, if the wide-eyed idealists are a lot more powerful than the baby-eaters, probably. But if the wide-eyed idealists are less powerful than the baby-eaters, then the baby-eaters may instead be provoked into a war on wide-eyed-idealists, because even if they lose out more in the short term by waging such a war than by putting an end to their baby-eating, they’d be sending the signal that they won’t let extremist minorities dictate values to the majority.
Yup, that’s possible. And if the idealists are more powerful, the baby-eaters might still “be provoked into” (aka “initiate”) a war to make imposing majority preferences too expensive and encourage the majority to accommodate to them. And many other outcomes are possible. Narrating them all might be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, but I’m still not sure what the point is. Were you disagreeing with wedrifid? Can you clarify your disagreement if so?
EDIT: Whoops! I just noticed you’re not the same poster. Never mind, then...
And I happen to think that anyone who is trying to make me feel bad about things should be crushed like a bug and their attempts to control through shame disempowered to whatever extent it is convenient to do so.
(I also observe that most people with healthy boundaries will tend to be much more likely to avoid those who are predisposed to attempting to control through guilt or shame.)
You’re eating babies. The wide-eyed idealist points out that eating babies is bad and you are a bad and evil person who must mend his baby-eating ways. You tell the wide-eyed idealist that you refuse to interact with people who try to control you through shame. The wide-eyed idealist thinks for a minute, shrugs, and shoots you.
Did you just create a counterfactual which relies on making me act even more cluelessly naive and banal than the wide eyed idealist?
That’s as meaningless than it is presumptive and inappropriate.
Now, for the next counterfactual let’s arbitrarily decide that MixedNuts is walking around naked having sex with an echidna while shouting “The World Is Flat!”.
Except for the sex-with-echidna part, this sounds vaguely like something that MixedNuts might do!
Rule 34, man. Rule 34. :-)
You have several decent points there, granted.
I feel that your most powerful point is that wide-eyed idealists are poor utility maximizers and poor rationalists.
The second strongest seems to be that a rationalist will (should, but as a rationalist, they do what they should) attempt better approaches, which seems to be quite close to one of wedrifid’s implied point in the grandparent. Was this your intended meaning?
Both of these are true, but I wasn’t talking to the wide-eyed idealist, I was talking to the baby-eater. If you grandstand about how a socially-approved and very mild punishment for doing bad things is Evil Boundary-violating Control, people who care about those bad things are less likely to let you alone than to switch to harsher punishments.
Not necessarily. Wild-eyed idealists, being idealists, are markedly biased towards shaming folks for whatever it is that they consider “bad”. Shaming and guilt-tripping people is not even particularly hard for them, since their whole worldview is often based on these emotions; whereas applying harsher punishments may not even occur to them unless they are rather authoritarian, and it might even be completely infeasible. Thus, reacting assertively is entirely appropriate, at least in the likeliest case.
Which of course begs the question about why you were attacking that particular straw man.
The optimal approach for dealing with enemies who are presumed to have more power than you seems rather irrelevant. Unless the relevance you imply is that radical feminists with an obsession for shame based control already represent a powerful hostile force that we would be foolish to resist? In that case I would of course agree that my words to members of that group would be best served keeping them misinformed about the effectiveness of their strategy of enforcement. All else being equal it tends to be better to keep powerful enemies ineffective.
Okay, my point was that if you accept that people are going to try to control you, it’s rather silly to complain about that means. But apparently you classify all people who attempt to control you as enemies. I suppose that’s a consistent view, and compatible with civilization if you allow control to enforce an agreed-upon set of laws.
But it doesn’t seem to allow for progress. If someone discovers that marital rape is not okay, contrary to mainstream belief, what are they supposed to do? Publishing a paper entitled “Psychological effects of nonconsensual sex between spouses” would count as informing rather than controlling; it would also be vastly less effective than making marital rape illegal, portraying characters who rape their spouses as horrible monsters, and shaming rapists.
If someone tries to control me and I disagree with their position, my answer is not “By attempting to control me you have made yourself my enemy”, but “I don’t agree that bestiality is cruel to animals, so I will fight your attempts to make it unacceptable, but I don’t disapprove of these attempts on principle. For example, I agree with your subargument about indecent exposure, so Knuckles here and I are going to get a room”.
I don’t think this is evident enough to be affirmed without supporting evidence. There’s evidence that such laws and shame-guilt-tripping might be much less effective than publishing a good comprehensive paper.
Prime example: Videogame piracy. Strong IP laws. Massive attempts at guilt-trip and manipulation of mass populace. Observed effect: No measurable effect of the laws and anti-piracy measures, and a continued growth of piracy. The growth is most likely attributable to other causes.
On the flipside, dev companies that have announced that they won’t do anything against piracy have seen considerable advertisement boosts from it and have on average enjoyed much greater success thanks to this.
Not only do I care about what means people use to control me, for any given person asserting that they don’t care what means people use to control them I would be confident in declaring them confused about their own preferences.
No I don’t, and wouldn’t. Why on earth would I give away my power like that? I’ll do whatever I want in response to people attempting to control me including complying with indifference, ignoring them, gaining more social power so that people are unable to or unlikely to make that kind of moves. Some people doing (or being likely to do) certain things would make them enemies but that is rare and implies giving them a significant degree of respect and attention. It doesn’t happen often.
We agree on the first point! I’m saying some means are worse than others, and shame/guilt is one of the best ones.
As Dave pointed out, we need to taboo “enemy”. “This person’s actions are bothering me; I’ll minimize annoyance” is treating the person as your enemy in the sense I was using it. Not treating them as an enemy is “This person is trying to do good, yet their actions aren’t the ones I think are best; I shall update on what they believe, and tell them what I believe so they can do same; if we still disagree, I’ll minimize total annoyance among us both”. If most people are your enemies by that definition, you’re… not typical audience for social justice rhetoric.
Can you taboo “enemy”? I’m not at all convinced it means the same thing throughout this exchange.
Ah, yes. Thanks for making this clear.
This, incidentally, reminds me of the rule of Ko, since I only learned to play Go yesterday. It seems like there’s a meta pattern of the baby-eater becoming the wide-eyed-idealist when you consider the boundary-violating control as the baby-eating and the ball starts bouncing around while both camps conscript soldiers and muster armies and continuously threaten other elements of their opposition while looking for something that invalidates the other’s morality.
Sure. And the other baby-eaters look at that and stop eating babies where the wide-eyed idealist can find out about it, because the idealist has made a credible threat. (A slightly more idealistic idealist might look for nonfatal ways to make a credible threat, but they might not be available.) This happens all the time; much of our civilization is built on it. What’s the problem?
Well, if the wide-eyed idealists are a lot more powerful than the baby-eaters, probably. But if the wide-eyed idealists are less powerful than the baby-eaters, then the baby-eaters may instead be provoked into a war on wide-eyed-idealists, because even if they lose out more in the short term by waging such a war than by putting an end to their baby-eating, they’d be sending the signal that they won’t let extremist minorities dictate values to the majority.
Yup, that’s possible. And if the idealists are more powerful, the baby-eaters might still “be provoked into” (aka “initiate”) a war to make imposing majority preferences too expensive and encourage the majority to accommodate to them. And many other outcomes are possible. Narrating them all might be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, but I’m still not sure what the point is. Were you disagreeing with wedrifid? Can you clarify your disagreement if so?
EDIT: Whoops! I just noticed you’re not the same poster. Never mind, then...