Communication is a two-way road (to a first approximation). You have chosen a particularly poor way to word this sentence. It is, except in the most pedantic sense, incorrect. Likewise, I would not say “women shouldn’t have the right to vote” if I meant that I opposed democratic government in general, and if I did say this it would be my fault if I were ‘misinterpreted’.
TorqueDrifter
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn’t make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world—if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user’s posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how “the PC hive mind” is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one’s “opponents” are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men’s Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
My understanding is that Stable Time Loops work differently: basically, the universe progresses in such a way that any and all time traveling makes sense and is consistent with the observed past. Under the above model, you will never witness another copy of yourself traveling from the future, though you might witness another copy of yourself traveling from an alternate past future that will now never have been. With STL, you can totally witness a copy of yourself traveling from the future, and you will definitely happen to travel back in time to then and do whatever they did. That’s my understanding, at least.
You said “not so long ago, African-Americans were treated unfairly”. The implication is that this is not currently the case. If you believe that, then you are quite misinformed, and while I wouldn’t say you should avoid discussing race, you should probably avoid telling people anything about it.
Exactly, this is why there haven’t been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that’s the word in my local Baron’s court.
Tangentially, and specifically because I followed the link from LessWrong, this jumped out at me:
“Haitians have a culture of tending not to admit they’re wrong[.]”
(Pretend that this sentence is a list of reasonable caveats about what to conclude from that.)
The show is actually fairly popular amongst the male internet nerd demographic. The original creator, Lauren Faust, was a well-liked animator beforehand, and something about it just caught the popular imagination (‘nerdy’ references, characters and animation, well-timed slanderous editorials, etc.). There’s a huge fandom that constantly produces ludicrous streams of stuff.
There’s been some discussion of it on LW, and I expect there’s a not-insignificant population of fans here. Or “bronies”, as some style themselves.
Yes, I read that when you posted it in the great-grandparent. You seem to start addressing the point in the first sentence-plus-a-few-words, but the rest is an unexplained digression. What you wrote strongly implies that African-Americans are no longer treated unfairly, and this seems like the most reasonable interpretation of your words. Regardless of what your other points in the post may or may not be, I suggest you either reword the sentence to reflect your intent (or, if it already reflected your intent, take the advice of AndrewHickey and myself and become more informed on racial issues before commenting on them further).
I don’t know of any such data. I’d imagine that there’s less of a psychological barrier to engaging in traditionally “gendered” interests for most transgendered people (that is, if you think a lot about gender being a social construct, you’re probably going to care less about a cultural distinction between “tv shows for boys” and “tv shows for girls”). Beyond that I can’t really speculate.
Edit: here’s me continuing to speculate anyway. A transgendered person is more likely than a cisgendered person to have significant periods of their life in which they are perceived as having different genders, and therefore is likely to be more fully exposed to cultural expectations for each.
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!
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person’s race might tell you “I can get away with this”).
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
my name is used fairly often
This seems like an important detail.
“I could rape you right now, and there’s nothing you could do about it.”
Tumblr urls are formed like this:
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that’s really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
You say there was what size bang?
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
They don’t appear to be ON the user page. Apparently it doesn’t (entirely)!
Probably: controversy → lots of comments. If you think that, for example, feminism should be trivial or trivially dismissed, then controversy indicates a problem.
Under this theory, it seems (with low statistical confidence of course) that LW-interest is perhaps correlated with biological sex rather than gender identity, or perhaps with assigned-gender-during-childhood. Which is kind of interesting.