Here's the thing. We're going to have to face politics and deal with it. There is no way a rationalist community can call itself such, if the first hint of polar controversy makes us commit ritual suicide, then declare the topic taboo forever.
Why is this such a big deal? There were instances of divisive or otherwise unthoughtful language on the site. Alicorn called our attention to them. We should improve and move on to discussing rationality topics, not fretting about mod cliques and calling for account deletions.
[notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]
I still don't think you understand what feminists mean by objectification. It's not the same thing as cognitive reductionism, which I think hardly anyone here would object to. I mean, yes, minds are causal systems made of parts embedded in the universal laws of physics and can be understood as such. Everyone knows that!---and given that everyone knows that, you should be able to deduce that whatever it is people really mean when they criticize this objectification-thing, it has to be something other than cognitive reductionism.
Let me explain what I understand by objectification. So, even though (as everyone here already knows) everything that exists, exists within physics, we still find it useful and necessary to distinguish structures within physics which we think are conscious and intelligent (whatever it is we refer to with those words), which we call minds or people, and structures that ...
The epistemic rationality of LessWrong is worth more than the gender ratio we have. A 95% male community that manages to overcome a whole host of problems in instrumental and epistemic rationality is worth more to the world than a 80% male community that is crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.
Like the politician said, if I can set the agenda it doesn't matter how anyone votes.
How about an 80% male community that manages to overcome a whole host of problems in instrumental and epistemic rationality, including the one we are looking straight at?
This is it. Right here, right now. Solve this problem.
I would also recommend that anyone who feels that they have played a particularly large part in the debate on either side do the same, for example PJeby.
I almost did that yesterday, but realized that there's no way I wouldn't be recognizable.
However, I will dispute your implication that I'm a "masculinist" - I'm merely against the idea that anyone has a "right" over the thoughts of others, or a right to not have their feelings hurt.... especially in a forum whose purpose is to help people get over their irrationality. Here, we should be talking about how to disconnect our buttons, rather than how to insist that other people stop pushing them.
You don't have to resort to accusations of politics or 'factions' to make sense of what's going on. I think there's honest disagreement, but it's hard to tell until people answer some basic questions:
For (1), I think it's a resounding "yes", since part of the reason for the existence of this site is to increase the number of rationalists in the world, so alienating potential members seems antithetical to that goal.
(2) is an empirical question. (Amongst philosophers, that tends to be the end of the discussion - feel free to pursue that)
In the case of (3), I can think of a few. There may be some points which can only be talked about using that sort of language, and I think in that case the importance of discussing things wins (on a case-by-case basis).
Also, it might be the case that it's unclear what constitutes this sort of language, or how to fix it, so it would be asking too much to expect people to change their wording. I don't think that is the case.
Any thoughts? Did I leave anything out?
There is simply no way of enforcing "sanity" standards about a political dispute that people physically fight over in the real world: we should be very clear about this. What disputes like this require is real-world mediation and negotiation skills which go far beyond Less Wrong's scope.
The best introduction to the topic I'm personally aware of is Bernard Crick's work In Defense of Politics, which is helpfully summarized on Wikipedia. Note that Crick describes politics as "an ethical dispute which has become public", and that ethical disputes are an inevitable consequence of goodness and morality standards. Accordingly, virtues like adaptability and compromise are of far higher merit than any platitude about "sanity" or "rationality".
I will delete my account and re-register under a different username. I would recommend that Alicorn do the same.
It would be fascinating to learn why you think I'm going to take this recommendation as anything but an attack on my project and the identity I have established here. I maintain a consistent identity under the same name everywhere on the Internet because I stand by the things I write and value the ability to build a reputation and a history over time.
I would also implore everyone to just not bring this issue up again. If someone uses language in a way that mildly annoys you (hint: they probably didn't do this on purpose)
That's an interesting "hint", since you deliberately pointed out a sentence as an instance of the objectification I've complained about earlier in your post. Interestingly, that sentence isn't an example of the objectification I've complained about, although I do think it is false.
crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.
This seems like an unduly dire prediction. What it looks like to me is there are three basic groups: people who actively support gender-neutrality (me, the "some lovely peop...
Your concern is fine but your suggested solutions amount to shooting off your arm to cure a bee-sting. The community seems to me nowhere near as polarized as you suggest.
I think this is twaddle.
If by "respond to the downvoting in kind" you mean something like "start downvoting articles from the Evil Feminists even when there's nothing in the articles themselves that would have made us downvote them if they'd been written by other people", then it's that that would be the first step to a "karma cartel" situation. (And "in kind" would be just plain dishonest.)
If by "respond to the downvoting in kind" you mean something like "start downvoting articles that we think have negative net contribution to the Less Wrong community because they encourage harmful attitudes", then you should be doing that and there's nothing cartel-like about it.
Furthermore, as a participant in some of these discussions, I have made a point of generally not downvoting comments I disagree with, nevermind other comments by the same people.
On the other hand, I've actually had roughly 80 unrelated comments of mine downvoted, and for various reasons suspect it was probably by someone who disagreed with me on precisely this topic of gender-related attitudes.
It's also worth noting that we've been explicitly encouraged to downvote comments we think contribute negatively to LW, and much of what Alicorn complained about falls firmly in my category of "thoughtlessly rude behavior that lowers the quality of the discussion".
No, downvoting should solely be a measure of the degree of accuracy and relevance of a comment to settling the empirical question at hand.
I don't think most people think that's what downvotes are for. But that's been discussed at great length.
Specifically, I'm under the impression downvote means 'I want to see fewer comments like this' at its basis, and any other analysis of what it means proceeds from that and our community standards.
ETA: FWIW, Eliezer has agreed
At some point we really do have to enforce community norms to prevent the level of discourse from deteriorating. Antisocial and obnoxious behavior are perfectly valid reasons to downvote a comment, I have a hard time believing you really think they aren't, and I'm reasonably confident that most of LW is okay with the idea, judging by other comments I've seen receive downvotes (not to pick on him, but Annoyance has gotten some of this) for no obvious reason other than tone.
The issues are where to draw the lines, and how to handle it when the community is sharply divded on what constitutes "polite, respectful discussion". Frankly, the main person I see drawing "us vs. them" lines here is you.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Two rationalists fail to agree, so you're going to:
A) discuss until some sort of synthesis is found (this statement needs some qualifiers, which you, my charitable reader, may insert to your liking)
or
B) not talk about it (and delete your identities for good measure!)
Hmm, that's a tough one. (and I ommitted C/D, the other side is stupid/evil!)
Additionally, this post seems rather disingenuous coming from a participant (I gather; I don't/haven't read every comment, and don't really pay any attention to usernames) in the...
I didn't see what Alicorn said in her post as a start or continuation of politicization in here. I saw it as an observation of possible biases.
I agree with you on the issue that those camps are unneccessary and harmful, but I think that excluding this topic from rationalistic discussion would do more harm than good. As you say, modelling general human female as a mechanical system is standard in both thinking and in language. Why is it so? Must it be so? Is the same true with generic human male? Is there any value in making such generalizations of either s...
Heh. Feel free to do what you think is right, but I for one won't blame Alicorn or the others if they decide to maintain their identity on this site. I don't even see how deleting your account is going to help the community.
Give it a couple of days, and people are going to move on. They'll remember that feminists (male and female) made some complaints about gender sensitivity and probably forget that after awhile, since its not a major topic and we'd all probably prefer to talk and think about other things.
I don't see a mod clique forming. The wors...
Cliques form when you don't separate people and their ideas. Political struggle forms when you make value claims("It's unethical to talk about people as if they were objects". Even better since people are objects in almost every meaning of the word) that you want everyone else to accept and follow.
Take these two out, and I see no problem about talking gender issues. Talk about how it might be irrational to not take into account some aspect of people(instead of "objectifying is bad"), and focus on arguments, not on who's making them. Bas...
20% women would be a big change. But this is an ultra-nerd topic - so I don't see it happening.
I agree with your assessment of the problem and would also like to help. If Alicorn succeeds in forming a mod clique, the site will be much worse off. But we mustn't form cliques of our own to counter, because that would lead to the same outcome. Tragedy of the commons.
It seems that LessWrong has a nascent political problem brewing. Firstly, let me re-iterate why politics is bad for our rationality:
People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!
Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue.
Politics is especially bad for the community if people begin to form political factions within the community. Specifically, if LessWrong starts to polarize along a "feminist/masculinist" fault-line, then every subsequent debate will become a proxy war for the crusade between the masculinist jerks and the femenazis.
Alicorn has contributed in several ways to the emerging politicization of LessWrong. She has started name-calling against the other side ("Jerkitude" "disincentivize being piggish"), started to attempt to form a political band of feminist allies ("So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support,"), implicitly asked these new allies to downvote anyone who disagrees with her position ("There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems"), and asks her faction to begin enforcing her ideas, specifically by criticising, ostracizing or downvoting anyone who engages in a perfectly standard use of langage and thought: modeling the generic human female as a mechanical system and using that model to make predictions about reality. She has billed this effort as a moral crusade ("unethical"). I am sure she isn't doing this on purpose: like all humans, her brain is hard-wired to see any argument as a moral crusade where she is objectively right, and to seek allies within the tribe to move against and oppress the enemy. [notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]
We should expend extreme effort to nip this problem in the bud. As part of this effort, I will delete my account and re-register under a different username. I would recommend that Alicorn do the same. I would also recommend that anyone who feels that they have played a particularly large part in the debate on either side do the same, for example PJeby. That way, when we talk to each other next in a comment thread, we won't be treating the interaction as a proxy war in the great feminist/masculinist crusade, because we will be anonymous again.
I would also implore everyone to just not bring this issue up again. If someone uses language in a way that mildly annoys you (hint: they probably didn't do this on purpose), rather than precipitating a major community feud over it, just ignore it. The epistemic rationality of LessWrong is worth more than the gender ratio we have. A 95% male community that manages to overcome a whole host of problems in instrumental and epistemic rationality is worth more to the world than a 80% male community that is crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.