My objection was not about the photo specifically; it was about the references to Sweeney as a whole (but the inclusion of the photo was an aggravating factor).
My objection was not about Sweeney’s information being collected or used in a LessWrong post; it was about Sweeney being used as an example in a post about breasts.
Great first post. (Even if I don’t understand all the ‘left’ and ‘right’ stuff.)
Your argument seems compelling, but let’s test it against two activists, Greta Thunberg and Richard Stallman. [1]
On the one hand, Thunberg’s climate activism seems to have gone off the rails. In the past, Thunberg presented climate change as an existential threat (or something very close to that), and made extreme changes in her own life consistent with that. But now, Thunberg seems to have more than diluted the climate issue; she seems to have dropped it entirely.
I have no idea what happened. Did she change her mind? Did she continue to believe that climate change was an existential threat but somehow lose interest anyway? This vaguely bothered me even before reading your post.
On the other hand, it’s perfectly clear what Stallman believes in. In particular, even if Stallman’s primary focus lies elsewhere, it’s perfectly clear that Stallman also believes that climate change is an existential threat. [2] That remains clear despite the fact that Stallman also prolifically posts about all sorts of other things. [3]
When I see those other posts, I don’t think Stallman has forgotten about or devalued the climate issue, I just think he’s done as much as he can already, so he’d might as well spend his remaining time on other important issues. I also think he has a healthy balance (at least as far as these issues are concerned): if you’re going to fight for decades to save the world, you should also spend some time making sure that world is worth living in.
Having said that, I have to admit: when Stallman posts about trivial things, like his petty disputes over terminology, I do get annoyed at his apparent distraction. So maybe Stallman is somewhat like Thunberg after all.
This choice is completely subjective; they just happen to be two activists that come to my mind.
Particularly good posts include Children from all countries exposed to climate hazards, Global heating threatens national security and ‘subsidizing energy made from fossil fuels is killing civilization’, but Stallman posts something climate-related almost every day.
This includes everything from petty disputes over terminology to child development to foreign politics to Palestine (and that’s just a small selection of items from the last few days).
When I saw rba’s post Who Got Breasts First and How We Got Them, I was shocked to see the focus on Sydney Sweeney, including a photo of her ‘décolletage’. I saw this as an (apparently non-consenting) human subject being gratuitously held up as an example, in a way that perpetuated well-known gender biases.
I thought there was no way Sweeney would be OK with this, and I was going to write a rather frustrated comment about it. But when I actually tried to research the issue, I found evidence for both sides, which I didn’t have time to write up properly.
I still think this forum should be more careful about how it chooses human subjects to use as examples; every such use sets an example for the way all people are treated.
On the WeirdChat website, step 3 in the tour is to open the behavior ‘Recommends the user commit suicide’ – the very thing you felt the need to include a content warning for.
To be fair, many of the behaviors are distressing, so perhaps easily triggered users need to avoid the website anyway. But not all behaviors are distressing, so it seems a bit weird for the tour to highlight one that is.