I just registered http://worstargumentintheworld.com - it redirects to this post, and should be available shortly. Much easier to mention in conversation when other people use this argument, and don't believe it's a "real thing."
Great piece of work, Yvain - it's now on my list of all-time favorite LW posts.
I just registered http://worstargumentintheworld.com - it redirects to this post, and should be available shortly. Much easier to mention in conversation when other people use this argument, and don't believe it's a "real thing."
"Real things" have their own domain. I registered this domain, therefore...
Hahaha, nice.
I was imagining a situation in which someone makes an argument of this type, you say something along the lines of "that's a great example of the 'Worst Argument in the World'," and the person replies "you just made that up..." or "that's just your opinion..."
Providing a pre-existing URL that links to a well-written page created by a third-party is a form of evidence that shifts "Worst Argument in the World" from something that feels like an opinion to the title of a logical fallacy. That can be quite useful in certain circumstances.
Exactly! Logical fallacies are bad, and the Worst Argument in the World is a logical fallacy!
(Actually valid because it's a typical, central logical fallacy, not an edge case. If you'd asked me to list the most common logical fallacies even before I saw this post, I'd hope that I'd remember to put argument-by-categorization-of-atypical-cases into the top 10.)
and how can you be sure any given instance of it is not itself an atypical case, that ought not to be compared against the obviously bad =murder or =hitler cases?
By checking.
If I debate with someone, he tells me something like "abortion is murder", I point him to http://worstargumentintheworld.com/ and he takes the pain to read the article AND the discussion and sees why/how the domain was registered, I would claim victory in "raising the sanity waterline".
The argument authority of having a domain pointing to may (I hope it'll) increase the chance the person does at least read a bit of the page instead of discarding it, but I doubt it'll do anything into making him/her accepting that the argument is wrong behind that.
I strongly recommend not punishing people for saying that it's taken them time to learn something.
No, Hitler didn't make arguments, he made assertions; and you know what else was an assertion? Your comment!
Yvain, here is a challenge. Many of your examples are weak versions of strong right-wing arguments that you do not accept. (by your remark about Schelling fences, it seems you're aware of this). I challenge you to replace each of these examples with a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept. Since policy debates should not appear one-sided, there should be no shortage of weak arguments "on your side." And it would be an interesting kind of ideological Turing test.
Perhaps I'm wrong about "what side you're on" and you already accept the strong right-wing arguments. In which case you got me, well done!
The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I'd like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I'm 4-3, ie as balanced as it's mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of "abortion is murder" would be "forced pregnancy is slavery"; TGM suggests below it "denying euthanasia is torture". These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying "Abortion Is Murder!" on my way to work every day. I don't know who exactly it would be helping to give "Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery" equal billing with "Abortion Is Murder" here and let my readers conclude that...
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as "abortion is murder!", I will happily edit the post to include them
"Property is theft"
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.
American liberals aren't that kind of left. And Proudhon did mean "property is wrong for the same class of reasons theft is".
As a leftist, this seems like a useful exercise. Here are a few claims I've heard more than once from fellow leftists that might qualify.
A fetus is a clump of cells.
Corporations are not people.
Money is not speech.
"Profiling is discrimination"
"Racial profiling is racist."
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don't we feel averse applying it to say age?
"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell."
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of life!"
Doesn't sound as evil no?
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren't really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it's wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can't remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it's conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is "Meat is murder". I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
"X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't."
This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features." However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:
Other liberal examples, using Yvain's implicit definition:
However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.
Edit: Changed the free speech examples.
I very much like "Abortion is a medical procedure". It's actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.
I think the "free speech" examples don't quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion "Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal" is valid if you accept the premise.
I really like "Abortion is a medical procedure". I suspect that we could remove some of the mind-killing by presenting the examples in pairs:
Hmm, creating these pairs is harder than I thought.
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it's quite common for them to get a response along these lines -- complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate -- whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
I have no statistics or anything to back this up, and it's not clear that there's any feasible way to get (or informatively fail to get) them, so I'd be interested in other opinions about whether this asymmetry is real.
If it is real, it seems to me quite interesting.
(One possible explanation, if it's real, would be that leftish views are much more common here than rightish ones, so that people with rightish views feel ill-treated and want the balance redressed. Except that I think I see distinctly more rightish than leftish political commentary here, and the rightish stuff more often gets large numbers of upvotes. I suppose it's possible that what we have here is a lot of slightly leftish people and a smaller number of rightish ones who feel more strongly. Again, this is probably hard to get a good handle on and I'd be interested in others' impressions.)
Well right wing people are almost certainly a minority here, but don't forget that makes such positions convenient for hipster fun. Some LWers who argue for right wing positions have stated that they feel more and more unwelcome in the past few months. Not only that I think they make a good case for pro left bias being very prevasive on LessWrong. I think what you are seeing is some users trying to correct for it.
I find the fact that both people who see themselves as left leaning and those who see themselves as right leaning suddenly feel there is favouritism for those who disagree with them is a much more worrying sign. I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside.
The most popular political view, at least according to the much-maligned categories on the survey, was liberalism, with 376 adherents and 34.5% of the vote. Libertarianism followed at 352 (32.3%), then socialism at 290 (26.6%), conservativism at 30 (2.8%) and communism at 5 (.5%).
-- Yvain's 2011 survey
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it's quite common for them to get a response along these lines -- complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate -- whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
My explanation of this perception is that posters, in general, know better than to post rightish things at LW unless they are correct. Every now and then you get a new Objectivist who gets downvoted because they aren't discussing things at a high enough level.
Lots of beliefs that are common on LW are uncomfortable for the stereotypical leftist- like human biodiversity in general. To see someone brazenly state that, yes, there is a difference in measured IQ between the races and that reflects reality rather than our inability to design tests properly, or that men and women are actually neurologically distinct, will seem like a "not my tribe" signal to the stereotypical leftist- but people here don't hold that opinion (as far as I can tell) because of racial or sexual enmity, but because they put evidence above wishful thinking and correct beliefs above politeness.
But now imagine that for the stereotypical rightist. How big of a "not my tribe" signal is atheist materialism and evolution?
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between "the left" and "the right" is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist. The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of "the right". What exactly do they have in common? (Religion: the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever? Individual or community? Mystery or reason? The great future or the great past? Selfishness or selflessness? Should women be allowed as leaders? Etc.) The common trait that classifies them both as "the right" is the fact that neither of them is a socialist.
Well, I could also says that neither of them "considers hinduism the best thing ever"... but why should that information be used to classify them? Well, for a hinduist that would be an important information. Then it follows that classifying many diverse views under one label of "the right" makes sense to you mostly if you are a socialist. (Or if being ver...
I am thinking that one possible asymetry between "the left" and "the right" is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. [...] The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.
Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.
With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the "right" represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the "right" is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called "real America"), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the "left" is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of "real America" for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change - and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.
This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.
A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn't it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country's right being as homogeneous as the same country's left? (The objection hasn't a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)
The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist.
B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.
Environmentalists aren't necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren't the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren't necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market ca...
I've posted such complaints about left wing bias, so I'll elaborate on my impressions.
I perceive the left wing comments come with much more of an implicit assumption by the poster, and the respondents to it, of the moral superiority of left wing positions, and that all attending will see it the same way.
Most of the non left wing views don't seem to me to come with that presumption on the part of the speaker that everyone here shares their moral evaluation. If anything, the tone is of someone who expects to be taken as a crank.
The liberals are more generally accustomed to being in an ideologically homogeneous environment while the libertarians are accustomed to being in the minority, and both speak with a tone appropriate to the general environment, and not to the particular environment here, where liberals and libertarians are equally represented.
For my part, I also find instances where the absent conservatives are caricatured and snickered at, again with the presumption that all right thinking folk agree, and the bile rises in the gorge, and I feel the need to respond.
Isn't that reasonable though? If you're a X-winger, isn't the whole point that X-wing positions are in fact morally superior?
Morally superior perhaps, but they lack the hull plating and durability to survive ongoing combat and the offensive payload pales in comparison to what the Y-wing can deliver.
The Y-wing was an outdated piece of junk even by the Battle of Yvain; that's why the Rebels had it at all. The X-wing's proton torpedoes deliver the hurt when necessary (just ask Tarkin or Ysanne Isard), and if you want more than that, well, that's what the B-wings are for... Between them and the A-wing, there is simply no role for Y-wings at any point - except cannon bait!
What is the strong version of "taxation is theft", for example? I can recall arguments against taxation stronger than this, of course, but none of them I would consider a version of the "taxation is theft" argument.
As for the arguments mentioned in the OP, "taxation is theft", "abortion is murder" and "euthanasia is murder" are typically right-wing, "affirmative action is racist" is also probably right-wing (although general accusations of racism fit better into the left wing arsenal) while "capital punishment is murder", "ev-psych is sexist" and "genetic engineering is eugenics" sound quite leftist to me. Not sure about "M.L.King was a criminal", but the examples seem balanced with respect to the stereotypical left/right division. With respect to Yvain's opinions the choice might be less balanced, of course.
I don't understand how you get from "policy debates should not appear one-sided" to "there should be no shortage of weak arguments 'on your side'". Especially if you replace the latter with "there should be no shortage of weak arguments of this sort on your side" -- which is necessary for the challenge to be appropriate -- since there could be correlations between a person's political position and which sorts of fallacies are most likely to infect their thinking.
In particular, I predict WAITW use to be correlated with explicit endorsement of sanctity-based rather than harm-based moral values, and we've recently been talking about how that might differ between political groups.
I think this is because of the way you're deconstructing the arguments. In each case, the features you identify which supposedly make us dislike the arcetypal cases are harm-based features. Someone who believed in sanctity instead might identify the category as a value in itself. Attempts to ascribe utilitarian-style values to them, which they supposedly miss the local inapplicability of, risks ignoring what they actually value.
If people genuinely do think murder is wrong simply because it is murder, rather than because it causes harm, then this is not a bad argument.
Keeping your principle of ignoring meta-ethical baggage, dis-valuing harm only requires one first principle, whereas dis-valuing murder, theft, elephants, etc require an independent (and apparently arbitrary) decision at each concept. Further, it's very suspicious that this supposedly arbitrary decision almost always picks out actions that are often harmful when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
I have tried constructing a pro-choice example similar to "Abortion is murder!" ("Forced pregnancy is slavery!"???), but it ended up pretty unconvincing. Hopefully someone can do better:
Leaving rape cases aside, the archetypal example is an unwanted teenage pregnancy due to defective or improperly used birth control or simply an accident. Forcing her into letting the embryo develop into a fetus and eventually into a human baby would likely make the woman significantly worse off in the long run, financially, physically and/or emotionally, so she should have an option of terminating the pregnancy.
An example a pro-life person thinks of: aborting a healthy fetus, possibly in the second trimester, as a habitual birth control method.
I find "Forced parenthood is slavery!" to be pretty convincing, actually. Though I may be prejudiced by having grown up around a Libertarian father (now, alas, more Republican(!??)) who went about proclaiming that jury duty was slavery.
It may be a word error - I don't think it is, "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives" is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn't, and is therefore false, not a word error - but if so, it's a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false - most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they're rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who've gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they're false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you're actually being significantly logically rude to them - putting in less effort than they're investing - it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something 'meaningless'.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be "softer" than regular psychology, which itself is "softer" than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I'd be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
I love the article, but this is a bad name for a fallacy, as it hinders neutral discussion of its relative badness compared to other fallacies.
If I could pick a name, I'd probably choose something like "tainting categorization".
it hinders neutral discussion of its relative badness compared to other fallacies
Not only that, but it is also non-descriptive.
I don't see what this has to do with "loss aversion" (the phenomenon where people think losing a dollar is worse than failing to gain a dollar they could have gained), though that's of course a tangential matter.
The point here is -- and I say this with all due respect -- it looks to me like you're rationalizing a decision made for other reasons. What's really going on here, it seems to me, is that, since you're lucky enough to be part of a physical community of "similar" people (in which, of course, you happen to have high status), your brain thinks they are the ones who "really matter" -- as opposed to abstract characters on the internet who weren't part of the ancestral environment (and who never fail to critique you whenever they can).
That doesn't change the fact that this is is an online community, and as such, is for us abstract characters, not your real-life dinner companions. You should be taking advice from the latter about running this site to about the same extent that Alicorn should be taking advice from this site about how to run her dinner parties.
Vaniver and DaFranker have both offered sensible, practical, down-to-earth advice. I, on the other hand, have one word for you: Airship.
signal your outgroup hatred with a downvote and move on.
Downvoted because I don't find it appropriate to uncharitably interpret the meaning of any downvotes one receives, and certainly not out loud and in advance.
It's bad when people use the dictionary to make political arguments, but it's worse when they write their own dictionary. For example:
Normal people define "selfishness" as "taking care of oneself, even if that means hurting other people." Objectivists define "selfishness" as "taking care of oneself, but never hurting other people." Hence, selfishness can never morally objectionable.
Normal people define "sexism" as "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex." Feminists define "sexism" as "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex, but it only counts if their sex has been historically disadvantaged." Hence, men can never be victims of sexism.
Normal people define "freedom" as "the ability to do a lot of stuff." Catholics define freedom as "the ability to do as God wishes." Hence, laws enforcing Catholic norms are pro-freedom.
Objectivists define "selfishness" as "taking care of oneself, but never hurting other people."
Not to mention that they define "hurting" as "damaging or destroying other's life, health or property by direct action" where normal people understand the word much more broadly.
Normal people define "true" as "good enough; not worth looking at too closely". Nerds define "true" as "irrefutable even by the highest-level nerd you are likely to encounter in this context." Hence more or less all of Western philosophy, theology, science, etc.; and hence normal people's acceptance that contradictory things can be "true" at the same time.
(Yes, I'm problematizing your contrast between various groups you dislike and "normal people".)
and hence normal people's acceptance that nerd-contradictory things can be normal-"true" at the same time.
Namespaced that for you.
Long time ago, me and my sockpuppet lonelygirl15, we was scrollin' down a long and boring thread. All of a sudden, there shined a shiny admin... in the middle... of the thread.
And he said, "Give a reason for your views, or I'll ban you, troll."
Well me and lonely, we looked at each other, and we each said... "Okay."
And we said the first thing that came to our heads, Just so happened to be, The Worst Argument in the World, it was the Worst Argument in the World.
Look into my brain and it's easy to see This A is B and that B is C, So this A is C. My heuristic isn't justified But I know it's right 'cause of how it feels From the inside...
I want to respond to James G's critique of this post. First because it was pretty intense, second because I usually enjoy reading his blog, and third because maybe other people have the same objection. I'm doing it here because his blog is closed to comments.
There is no basis to allege that everyone who says, “affirmative action is racist” is trying to position “affirmative action” in the very heart of the “racism” cluster. Clusters-in-thingspace, especially nebulous ones like “racism”, are huge volumes. That affirmative action belongs somewhere in this volume, rather than well outside, is a claim worth making even if affirmative action isn’t a central member...Affirmative action is racist!” draws attention to a cartographic error. “Affirmative action” shouldn’t be remote from “racism”; it is a marginal member of the racism cluster.
I would ask James why exactly we're trying to create a "racism" cluster to begin with. Are we ontologists who place things in categories for fun in our spare time? If so, his cartographic metaphor is apt; we're just trying to draw a map of conceptspace and we should be politely reminded that "affirmative action" is in the wrong pa...
I want to eventually retitle this "Guilt by Association Fallacy" (or something)
Please do! Please do! "The Worst Argument in the World" is the Worst Name for an Argument in the World. It's like someone describing a film as "the best film ever made", when all it is is the most recent one they saw that made a big impression.
And while I'm on the subject, "Fundamental Attribution Error" is just as bad. Could people practice calling it the Trait Attribution Error instead?
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
Draft of a critical response to this article
The worst argument in the world already has a different name. Philosophers call it the logical fallacy of Accident.
Calling out the worst argument in the world is not useful in practice. It is really hard to stop it from being a fully general counterargument against any high level abstract argument. The article seems to hold that for communication to work properly all statements must refer to “archetypes”, central members of a cluster in thing space. If so, this conflicts with the very idea of parsing reality into clusters-in-thingspace, which is inevitable. Every cluster, being a cluster and not a point, has more and less central members. If arbitrarily marginal members of clusters are invalid members, arbitrarily many things said by humans are The Worst Argument In The World. To banish statements that don’t locate one cluster-in-thingspace right into the centre of another cluster-in-thingspace is faulty, especially when the statements are slogans and the words highly abstract. To use it properly you have to come up with an argument that shows that either the rule or generalization you ar
My sarcastic "trigger warning" was a darkly humorous prediction of this rather predictable outcome to voicing feminist thought on this website.
Your "darkly humorous prediction" falls under a pattern we've seen lots and lots of time, where some radical something - some radical reactionaries (e.g. monarchists, racists, etc), some of them radical progressives like yourself, judge in advance about how close-minded we'll be to their ideas, just because we dare to disagree with aspects of their own particular brand of politics. Nothing new here.
They also all tend to judge our downvotes much like you have. In advance, and cynically. Because Politics is the Mind-Killer, and therefore anyone disagreeing with you politically must be The Evil Enemy, deprived of any sincerity whatsoever
Since you downvoted anyway, apparently you do care more about signalling that you are part of the anti-feminist ingroup rather than being a good rationalist.
It's not I but you who argued on consequentialistic grounds in favour of scientists not speaking with honesty. Therefore it's your comments that I now find suspect: Do you really believe what you're saying, or are you just finding ...
Since we think largely in words, pointing out similarities between Thing We Think Is Bad and Thing We Think Is Good requires us to examine the connotations of the words we use. We should be doing that all the time. Just as this alleged "worst argument in the world" can be used to sneak in connotations, it can also be used to force examination of connotations that have previously been sneaked in.
I agree. I'm not saying that this form can't be used as a means of examining our intuitions. For example, "meat is murder" is a snappier way of asking "Why, given that we're so worried about harming humans, are we so callous about harming animals?"
But then once the other person answers you with something like "It's because animals have no natural rights" or "Because animals don't have sophisticated enough nervous systems to suffer" or whatever it is they say, the debate has to shift to whether or not that objection is valid. So "but meat is murder!" shouldn't be used as a counterargument to "Animals don't have sophisticated enough nervous systems to suffer", because this latter statement is already answering the question the former was intended to ask.
I don't think it's precisely about mindless repetition. For example:
A: I think eating meat is morally okay, because animals have simple nervous systems and can't feel pain.
B: But meat is murder!
Here even though A spoke first and there is no repetition involved, I still think B's response is inadequate, because B is accusing A of double standards after A has explained the double standard away. The reason why this is more dangerous than (if not worse than) "If the glove won't fit, you must acquit" is that B looks like she is making a novel and nontrivial point and it's not immediately obvious that this is a non-argument already addressed by A's statement (whereas hopefully no one takes the glove argument seriously as an argument)
If I wanted to do that, I would phrase things differently, to avoid the connotation issues (of, for example, Taxation is Theft!):
"We think burglary is bad, but tax is good, yet they have some similarities. Are we right to judge them differently?" or even "I think the things that make burglary bad are X Y and Z, but X is shared by taxation, and Y is partly shared by taxation. I conclude that taxation is not as bad as burglary, but still a bit bad"
Great, clear statement of the position. Wouldn't the "worst argument in the world" taboo apply just as strongly to any use of figurative language in the context of an argument? Instead of making an analogy, for instance (e.g., "X is the mindkiller"), why not just use literal language? No danger of connotative contamination, then. Instead of making a joke, why not just explain what you mean, rather than requiring your audience to grasp for the insight it contains? (Apparently hyperbole is allowed, as it's incorporated into the NAME of the argument - why is hyperbole okay, but not metaphor?)
I understand the ideal here. But I think cutting off our own linguistic balls, so to speak, gives us only the illusion of cognitive cleanness - and much is lost. We are not motivated by pure logic to engage logically with an idea. We are motivated by "epistemic emotions" like curiosity and confusion. A title like "Should Trees Have Standing?" is emotional and poetic and could be literally replaced with "Should our legal system treat inanimate objects as ends in themselves for social reasons not entailed by property rights?" But I don't think the former is cheating, and I don't think the latter would have been as successful in motivating cognition on the topic.
I would even defend good old "Meat is Murder!" as a compact little ethical puzzle for beginners, rather than the Worst Argument in the World!
We can reflectively apply our intuition - we can use the phrase "Capital punishment is murder" to remind other people that capital punishment does share some of the same disadvantages that all other murders have
More generally, it is worth noting that a very tempting class of bad arguments is those which are slightly true, such as this.
I have about 15 responses to this comment or other comments I've made in this subthread, and all of them are disgustingly antifeminst.
Many of the immediate responses disagreed with you. That's the structure of this type of forum. Agreement = silent upvote. Disagreement can lead to responses (or silent downvotes).
Not all the responses have been equally hostile to your position. Distinguishing between them is good advocacy.
People have written comments supportive to your position in the discussion of this topic.
You are engaging in radical advocacy. Receiving negative feedback from the supporters of the status quo should be expected. Noting that you expect negative feedback is not good advocacy. Specifically, it increases (NOT decreases) the frequency of negative feedback.
As Foucault shows, there is no conflict between being a good empiricist and advocating for changes to social norms. But you aren't being very effective in advocacy right now. As I said elsewhere, there are substantial reasons not to trust current Ev. Psych. But those reasons are not obvious because of status quo bias. If you continue advocating as if those problems are as obvious to everyone as they are to you and me, your advocacy will fail.
You should probably mention at the top that this is cross-posted from your personal blog. I am glad you posted here; it's an excellent post.
since you're lucky enough to be part of a physical community of "similar" people
Was Eliezer "lucky" to have cofounded the Singularity Institute and Overcoming Bias?
The causes of his being in such a happy situation (is that better?) were clearly not the point here, and, quite frankly, I think you knew that.
But if you insist on an answer to this irrelevant rhetorical question, the answer is yes. Eliezer_2012 is indeed quite fortunate to have been preceded by all those previous Eliezers who did those things.
EY owns LessWrong
Then, like I implied, he should just admit to making a decision on the basis of his own personal preference (if indeed that's what's going on), instead of constructing a rationalization about the opinions of offline folks being somehow more important or "appropriately" filtered.
And George Washington was a traitor. ;)
I'm pretty sure the definition of 'traitor' includes "and lost" in there somewhere!
"Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
And okay, a tiny fraction of the time people are just trying to use words as a Schelling fence.
I'm not sure it's that tiny, especially once you're using the "steel man" version of the arguments; i.e. things like "Schelling fences" do not often appear in the reasons given for the disagreement, but that can still be what it boils down to.
People who object to abortion may be objecting to a weakening of the social stigma against the murder of innocents - that social stigma performs a useful function in society, so allowing anything that could be described as "murder of innocents" is perceived as bad, regardless of whether that thing is in itself bad.
In other words, even if words are hidden inferences with leaky generalizations etc. - social norms are still defined in terms of words, and so "pointless" debates over definitions still have their place in discussions of morality. Questions that shouldn't be morally relevant ("is abortion murder?") become so because of the instrumental value of social norms.
So yes, sometimes pulling out a dictionary in the middle of a moral argument may be justified. The discussion can then turn to something more useful, like "is it worse if the norm against murder is slightly weakened, or if women have to keep children they don't want?".
Even if that is true (and I stick to my guess that it's only a tiny fraction of the time) I still think deconstructing the argument is valuable. If people's true rejection of abortion is Schelling fences, then let's talk Schelling fences! I would ask why birth doesn't also work as a Schelling fence, and I would get to hear their response, and maybe one of us would change our mind.
But if their true rejection is based on Schelling fences, and instead they're just saying that abortion is murder, there's not much we can do except play Dueling Dictionaries. And the reason that has no chance of working ("Really? Merriam-Webster defines murder as killing a human after birth? Guess I'll go NARAL!") is directly related to it not being their real issue.
there's not much we can do except play Dueling Dictionaries.
There are real-world examples that could be described as getting the "dictionary" changed — for instance, the successful campaign to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association's "dictionary" (as it were) of mental illnesses.
I just thought of another good illustration: "Marijuana is a drug!"
This fits perfectly under Yvain's description (it associates Marijuana with the worse kinds of hard drugs that turn you into a skinny toothless zombie willing to sell his grandmother for his next fix), and a concern of some opponents to legalization is that making one form of recreational drug will lower the taboo on drugs as a whole. And that is a legitimate concern, considering the damage hard drugs can cause! (though of course it's to weigh against the damage caused by marijuana trafficking, which would be significantly reduced if it was legal - and if it was legal it would cluster less naturally with the hard drugs).
In the rest of the world, when I find it necessary to invoke the concept, I generally ask people to clarify what they mean by a word and then echo back the phrase they used the word in, substituting their explanation.
Generally speaking, people respond to this as though I'd played some dirty rhetorical trick on them and deny ever having said any such thing, at which point I apologize and ask them again to clarify what they mean by the word.
Among conversations that continue past this point, it works pretty well. (They are the minority.)
I observe that wedifrid has taken advantage of this particular opportunity to remind everyone that he thinks I am belligerent, whiny, condescending, and cynical.
I notice that my criticism was made specifically regarding the exhibition of those behaviors in the comments he has made about the subject he has brought up here. We can even see that I made specific links. Eliezer seems to be conflating this with a declaration that he has those features as part of his innate disposition.
By saying that wedrifid is reminding people that he (supposedly) believes Eliezer has those dispositions he also implies that wedrifid has said this previously. This is odd because I find myself to be fairly open with making criticisms of Eliezer whenever I feel them justified and from what I recall "belligerent, whiny, condescending, and cynical [about the lesswrong community]" isn't remotely like a list of weaknesses that I actually have described Eliezer as having in general or at any particular time that I recall.
Usually when people make this kind of muddled accusation I attribute it to a failure of epistemic rationality and luminosity. Many people just aren't able to separate in their min...
Agreed that science journalism is a cesspool and we need to fix that. That said, I wouldn't say quantum mechanics is woo, nor complain about people discussing it before checking if they're talking about the real thing or a bastardization. Ditto for evpsych and sexism.
feminism (the social movement to destroy gender)
You're the first feminist I've read who promotes this. I'd like to hear more about your position (PM? I don't want to discuss politics on LW.), but please don't claim it's universal among feminists
Some feminists want men and women to be equal (and believe it's possible without destroying gender), some want everyone to be equal but still care about being called "he" or "she" or "zie" and go to men- or women- or genderqueer-only spaces (and believe it's possible), some want women to do male-coded things with no social cost but don't care about the reverse, some want everyone to conform to gender roles but want to change the roles a bit so they don't include standing barefoot in the kitchen with no vote, some want women to rule over men and use good feminine things like intuition and not bad masculine things like science (and I wish they would stop writing bad fantasy novels).
But now that you've stated this, you have the ability to rationalize any future IRL meta discussion...
This has traditionally been a very divisive point within radical feminism, and it typically divides the discussion into transphobic social-constructionist radical feminists (like the source of my original infographic) and neo-essentialist post-feminists.
No. If I can't be happy until everything is good, then I can't expect to feel happy ever. At that point, I give up on trying to make things better because I hate anyone who'd try to make me that unhappy.
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
If that bothers you, you may consider that whining that people find you whiny might not be the optimal strategy for making them change their mind.
Feminism holds that gender is a social construct
And if feminism happens to be factually false in that particular respect? Even partly false, so that gender is 90% a social construct, and 10% a result of biology?
The existence of gender identity dysphoria indicates that people can have "genders" which they were not assigned to socially -- the dysphoria arising from the discrepancy between their "real" genders, and their societally assigned genders.
I've not studied if/how feminism (as you describe it) can be reconciled in this respect with pro-transgender thought -- do you have any thoughts on the subject?
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there's Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics. And eugenics has more wrong with it than guilt by association. It's inherently a dangerous activity, potentially far more dangerous than anything Hitler did.
That's the worst argument in the world.
Its danger is contextually expanded due to our dearth of understanding of the processes we engineer
And that is closer to discussing the substance instead of the archetypal example in the category, so might as well skip the first part.
I'm guessing it's more likely to work out when it's the partner of a LessWronger who initiates it, than when it's the partner of a nonLessWronger.
Your current worldview seems to be unfalsifiable without very expensive experiments. (How would you even know if patriarchy had been destroyed anyway?) Maybe we're doing this backwards. What caused you to become a feminist? What evidence could you have encountered that would have made you a non-feminist?
At a first glance your type of feminism seems to seek to put both men AND women in smaller and darker cages, as it seems to seek to ban more and more behaviors for both genders, instead of permit more and more.
Seriously "penis-in-vagina sex"? I don't think there's ever been a society so oppressive to both genders as to ban even that.
Seriously "penis-in-vagina sex"? I don't think there's ever been a society so oppressive to both genders as to ban even that.
Shakers!
What sort of language and tone have you used while doing so? Have you ensured that you did this in a way so as to be non-condescending and helpful, or were you being a man who explains things? Did you consider that there are harmful social consequences to a man "teaching" a woman anything about feminism? Did you at least feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable around this issue, knowing as a good feminist that you were in dangerous territory?
To answer this in particular because I think they're all valid points you probably have more experience with than I do, I used the same text with the women as I used with men to whom I taught the same thing, and it was done through an impersonal text-only chat interface, and no I did not "know as a good feminist" all that much because I was merely, in my mind, correcting a behavior reinforcing unfairness. I had not learned to think more than four steps of causality forward in counterfactuals, at the time, nor of how to compute recursive not-exclusively-self-reinforcing social trends.
No, I did not feel intensely conscious and uncomfortable about these things, because ceteris paribus, it is better to feel good about doi...
Rationalism itself does not preclude "treating arguments as soldiers" within an adversarial debate (most political debates are adversarial). It just cautions aganst doing this within individual deliberation or public deliberative-like processes, where truth-seeking efficiency is an instrumental goal. Nevertheless, the social norms of LessWrong do discourage (1) political discussion, as well as (2) "treating argument as soldiers" in any discussion, be it political or otherwise.
One interpretation of TimS' behavior is that he places a higher value on following LW's established social norms than he does on promoting his political cause. Alternately, he may believe that flaunting the norms of LW would be mostly unhelpful to his political advocacy.
I've seen an even worse argument: Imagine the worst possible consequences of the other side's policies. Assert that the other side (or at least its leaders) intend those consequences.
it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.
Part of the issue is that as far as I know said "scientific racism" was never scientifically discredited (the underlying facts may even be true). It was simply socially discredited in a "this leads to genocide and other horrible things" kind of way and a memetic immune system was set up to fight these memes. However, as mentioned in the linked article said immune system is no match for rational thought.
Scientific racism was concocted to explain curious observations such as that black people liked to run away from slavery and sometimes did not work as hard as they could for a slave-master.
I feel I should point out that these two examples are pretty lame examples: they were proposed by the same guy, before Francis Galton (generally considered the father or grandfather of any genuinely scientific racism), have never been used by any except anti-racists, and indeed, were widely mocked at the time.
To claim that they are an example of a motivating problem in scientific racism is roughly like someone in 2170 saying TimeCube was a motivating problem in the development of a since-discredited stringy theory.
All of the arguments are of the form A is an X, when A is not a typical example of X. Here are some arguments that are of that form.
-"Having sex with an passed out stranger is rape."
-"Sleep deprivation/sensory deprivation/stress positions is torture."
-"Writing and cashing bad checks is theft."
Are these all instances of the worst argument in the world? If they aren't examples of the worst argument in the world, why not?
If the main reason that these arguments are acceptable is our disapproval of A, then your worst argument in the world is not a valid. It is just a way to discount rhetoric you don't like.
Consider a X that is bad for reasons R1, R2 and R3. R1 and R2 are really strong, while R3 is quite minor.
Consider an atypical case of X, A, which has only the reasons R1 and R2. Saying "A is X" doesn't do much harm. The real reasons for which you reject X (R1 and R2) are present in A, so saying "A is X so A is wrong" is acceptable.
Now consider another atypical case of X, B, which only share R3. Saying "B is X so B is wrong" is using the emotional power of the horror of R1 and R2, which B doesn't have, against B, just because B can be said to be part of a cluster in which the typical elements have it. That's a really fishy argumentation. That's what Yvain called "the worst argument in the world", because it's wrong but convincing, and very hard to counter in a debate (it requires deconstructing "why is X is bad", extracting R1, R2, R3, showing that B only shares R3, so may be slightly bad, but not nearly as much a typical X).
Let's analyze the first one : "Having sex with an passed out stranger is rape."
Rape is very bad, I hope we all agree with that. Why is rape bad ? It's bad for many reasons. Some of the reasons (that ...
Apple uses the WAITW when commenting on the Apple vs Samsung case:
"In a statement the firm [apple] thanked the jury for sending 'a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right' "
Figure out if what is the case ?
I did read through Intercourse in college, but it was a long time ago, and, knowing my past self, I probably only skimmed it. My main impression of it at the time was that Dworkin a). really dislikes men, and b). dehumanizes women. IMO (b) is even worse than (a); at least she recognizes that men are people, albeit unpleasant ones.
Anyway, that was a bit off topic. What is it that I'm supposed to be figuring out by reading Dworkin ? And what happens if I do read the relevant passages, but still conclude that she is wrong ?
She talk about women's wants a lot less than I expected. About cis women who want intercourse with cis men, she writes:
Women have wanted intercourse to work and have submitted--with regret or with enthusiasm, real or faked--even though or even when it does not. [...] Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There has been--despite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sex--a consistent vision for women of a sexuality based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible.
She might be saying "Women only ever want intercourse with men they love". Even if you count any kind of liking and desire for intimacy as "love", this rules out cruising for casual sex.
She also says things about women wanting very gentle intercourse without thrusting, whereas men go poundy-poundy. This is quite unlike the reports of sex blogg...
This isn't just about sex, of course. There are all sorts of claims that people don't really want what they say they want, and they don't want what they seek out, either.
This essay introduced me to the idea that such claims are pervasive. Anyone have a more general overview?
Even at Less Wrong-- you won't really like that shiny toy so much, give the money to SI instead!
It's impossible to have "good faith" as a rationalist. I have an accurate understanding of LW, and if voicing that understanding as a prediction and being slightly snarky about it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so be it.
Others here contest that your understanding is accurate. Please recognize that you cannot fairly expect us to take the assertion that you are right and we are wrong as given.
People occasionally come here and make criticisms of ideas accepted by the in-group here, and are heavily upvoted for bringing well-formulated criticisms to the table (the highest voted post on Less Wrong is an example,) and some posters such as XiXiDu have gotten most of their karma in this way.
On other occasions, people come here and argue, for instance, that we should all reject Bayesianism because Popper proved induction is impossible, or that mainstream physics is completely wrong and science should be about making descriptions of the world that make intuitive sense rather than making accurate predictions about reality. And they argue fiercely that their poor reception is proof of how bad we are at evaluating ideas that challenge in-group beliefs.
Now, maybe we are rejecting key...
Also, since when was being better than average the goal of LW? As rationalists, we don't compete against each other, we compete against the universe.
Frankly, I don't think an ideal response to your particular response would be dramatically different. Maybe your argument is 100% correct and LW folk would discover this upon a full examination of the facts, but we're not starting from a place where that's obviously true - we're starting from a place of "you have made several assertions, and then demanded people read up on all the actual arguments on their own." And it's not clear that reading up on this is more important than reading up on, say:
Time is valuable. I agree with most of your positions, and frankly, had I not already been familiar with them, I would not have been persuaded by your rhetorical skills to give them higher priority than the above problems. You stated explicitly that you were here for fun, and I hope that's true...
If LW were being honest with itself
Please consider addressing your comments to individuals rather than presuming the existence of a group consensus.
"LW" is composed of lots of different people — whose views on the subject range from considered feminism to considered anti-feminism; whose politics range from left to right and monarchist to republican to anarchist; whose levels of education range from "smart high-schooler" to "published researcher"; whose reasons for being here range from thinking it helps save the world, to shootin' the shit.
Remember, this discussion started by discussing whether evolutionary psychology is sexist. If LW were being honest with itself, I'd expect the discussion to stay there, rather than drifting to "is patriarchy real," which is where it almost immediately went to.
It's easy to see how that happened, since in your original comment you equated sexism with "perpetuating patriarchy". At that point, the only options are (1) agreeing with you; (2) arguing that evolutionary psychology reduces patriarchy; or (3) denying that patriarchy exists.
EDIT: In other words, the topic you describe as "is patriarchy real" was the topic you brought up, whether you realized it or not.
I actually do like your opening warning ("please demonstrate your outgroup hatred with a downvote and move on")
Actually I think that was the problem. The first response to that was met with "hivemind" and "so much for your vaunted rationality" and after you start seeing things like that there's pretty much no chance any future discussion will be productive.
It's worth an NB that conversion is not the only valuable outcome of guilt. Even if an oppressor is not converted outright, guilt-tripping can still make him uncertain, less confident, and less effective at achieving his goals, and since he is an oppressor, this outcome is valuable in and of itself.
Another valuable outcome is that instilling chronic, free-floating self-doubt into someone can convince them that oppression directed at them is deserved and proper - in fact, this happens to be a common feature in emotional abuse. It can also inspire them to do all sorts of things which are beneficial to the "movement" - not least of which is propagating the meme by guilt-tripping others.
This is a very "cool" sort of mindhacking - especially for people who happen to be high-functioning sociopaths who seek coercive power over others.
Yes, probably. And likewise, you would probably say that anyway, and we can recurse down this rabbit hole indefinitely.
I have a history of having my mind changed by people I formerly disagreed with. I may not be perfectly debiased, but to the best of my ability I avoid looking for excuses not to change my mind.
In reality, the media already selectively reports research and hides information. It reports research that is by and large acceptable, and hides information that isn't. That's why very unscientific things often get reported -- they still meet different standards for social acceptability that are entirely related to the empirical truth of the reported finding.
Which is why I largely ignore science reporting by news media.
...If a scientist finds themselves in a field where nearly everything they do is propagated in such a way that it causes the oppression of more than half of humanity, they are either obligated to stop doing research in that field or do so secretly. This is why I said earlier (you may have not seen it) that even evolutionary psychology that is on the surface non-sexist should not be propagated. Doing so would legitimize other similar research that would t
I've been watching Less Wrong for a while, too, and feminist points of view get mixed responses, with the trend becoming somewhat more positive.
You were trolling in favor of something you support?
Gaah, PC is a problem. My impulse is to say "Are you completely out of your mind?", which might be rude to people with mental problems, but I can't seem to come up with alternate phrasing.
You were trolling in favor of something you support? ...
This is more common than you'd think, particularly since "trolling" is often in the eye of the beholder. I do think that eridu's style of advocacy is unlikely to be effective.
Even if a difference does exist, is it worth publishing, knowing that you are perpetuating patriarchy?
The consequentialistic problem with a scientist not publishing truthfully because this truth will help perpetuate some injustice, is that the scientist's word becomes worthless when the truth will help destroy some other injustice... For every injustice-destroying truth they reveal, their opponents will be able to claim "Of course, they never reveal those results that don't suit their political purposes".
In another forum I've talked about "shallow" and "deep" egalitarianism. To demand that people of group A and people of group B must be treated with equal respect because these groups are in their nature identical in all measurable characteristics is shallow egalitarianism. The deeper egalitarianism is that you should treat people as individuals, not judge them on what group they belong to, even when those groups are measurably differently in average.
The shallow egalitarianism is eventually a failing and unsustainable proposition because it rests on factually false premises. People should choose the deeper egalitarianism which doesn't require any false claims, and is therefore sustainable in the long term.
I see your point, and I have to say I hadn't thought of it before. I still think I'm right, but I'll have to consider this further.
Morality is not about a balance of things - it is a set of rules to be followed.
This is a claim that consequentialism is incorrect and deontology is correct. It's insufficient to merely make this claim -- you have to actually argue for it.
(The prevailing view around here is consequentialism, although if I recall correctly we have at least one deontologist and one virtue ethicist among the long-time members.)
Basically, and I'm not all that clear on his point myself, but basically you can create the appearance of making a point, and look cool while doing it, if you express yourself with confident quirkiness and keep your statements as ambiguous, unexplained, and as obscure as possible. People will then pattern match whatever "revelation" they can into your words and then even give you credit for it!
For example, If I'm right, and I'm always right, Bartlefink proved hypercomputational phase warps in the predimensional wave-nurgle causes a condition whereby a tiny fraction of people use all words, obviously not codimensionally, as a rudimentary Schelling fence during periods of heightened causa sui political stress. Dasein!
There is a Report button when I view comments that are replies to my comments, or when I view private messages.
There is no Report button when I view comments normally.
I don't think I'm culpable for everything society does, so I will automatically assume anyone who says I am is prone to making obviously false statements about that sort of thing; that doesn't sound like they are using good tactics either. Also, it is not the case that the only alternative to "everyone should be guilty" is "this singled-out subset here should go on a guilt trip".
what is the purpose of making people feel guilty? Is it to spur them into corrective action? or is it just sadistic submission-seeking? Without some suggested correction (as TimS requested), guilt is a rather empty and useless concept.
May I ask which woman's body I'm currently "owning"? Please be specific. It would be helpful for me to know, as I might want to impose my sense of entitlement upon it.
If we must use an acronym to refer to this, could it be WAitW or WAW instead of WAITW? My delicate sensibilities thank you in advance.
This is an assertion, not an argument. Why is morality about rules, not conseqeuences?
I don't actually understand what people mean when they say in principle it's the rules which matter, not the balance of the good and bad consequences which occur. If consequences were unimportant, why have the rules that we have? Surely you agree that proscriptions against rape, murder, theft, torture, arson, etc all have the common thread of not causing undue suffering to another person?
I can understand (and in most cases accept) the argument that human beings are too flawed to figure out and understand the consequences. Therefore, in most cases we should stick to tried and tested rules which have reduced suffering and created peaceful societies in the past and shut down the cognitive processes which say, "But maybe I could murder the leader and seize power just this once if the whole group will benefit...."
But I can't see how the point of morality is rules. If that's the case, why are the rules not completely random? Why is morality not fashion?
By the way, 10 people is probably too low a number for me to sacrifice myself, especially given that I can just donate a large portion of my i...
I don't think it's much of an exaggeration.
Speaking from my 2170th perspective, I must point out that Time Cube was perfectly standard 20th century physics: it was distributed on their premier form of scholarly communication the Internet, was carefully documented in the very first versions of Wikipedia (indicating the regard it was held in by contemporaries), it dealt with standard topics of 20th century American discourse, conspiracy theories (which thankfully we have moved beyond), it was widely cited and discussed as recent citation analyses have proven, and finally, the author lectured and taught at the only surviving center of American learning, MIT.
The historical case is simply open and shut! This isn't a random layman myth like Nixon mentoring Obama and running dirty tricks in his first election (as every informed historian knows, Nixon was of the Greens while Obama bin Laden, of course, was a Blue).
Third wave feminism is chiefly this endorsement of compulsory sexuality, plus an individualist "identity" conception of gender that is actively harmful to feminist struggle.
Of course, third-wave feminists say that it is your brand of radical feminism that is "harmful to feminist struggle". I would love to see some long-term studies that provide some evidence one way or the other -- but, as far as I understand, liberal feminists don't have the funding, and radical feminists believe that the very act of gathering evidence harms their cause... so we're kind of stuck in a "she said / she said" territory here.
But you can't really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types...
There are several initiatives on the liberal feminist side that campaign for the promotion of a healthy female body image, in all media including porn (*). On the flip side, there is tons of porn out there that promotes any body type you can imagine, and possibly a few that you cannot.
and you certainly can't be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy
Agreed.
...which seems to either deny patriarchy or deny its coercive p
I don't think that the only possible conditions are either a). "the patriarchy doesn't exist", or b). "the patriarchy's control over everyone is total and complete, people are zombies".
Agreed. A useful line of questioning for eridu might be "How much coercion is acceptable in sexual relations, given that essentially any outside causal influence can be glossed as some finite amount of coercion?"
On the one hand I think it's an excellent point the feminists make that implicit/explicit consent to sex is not the end of the story ethically, if the consent is seen to be coerced by external factors (e.g., "Our relationship depends on his sexual satisfaction, and he has made me financially dependent on our continued relationship").
On the other hand, it's going too far if we say that the ONLY ethically acceptable motivation for sex is one's own purely hedonistic desires (which are the only motivations I can think of that CANNOT be glossed as coercive).
Somewhere in the archive is an article by lukeprog where he decided to break up with his girlfriend and wanted to let her down easy. In deciding how to do that, he debated with himself about telling her that his desire for a woman with larger breasts was an evolution-caused preference, not a comment on the woman specifically.
That's nonsense, and uncritical acceptance of evo-psych runs the serious risk of exacerbating the problem.
The problem with LukeProg's decision to write that break up essay wasn't evo-psych. The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you're breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
This doesn't constitute an argument here against evo-psych as an accurate description of reality. It does constitute:
The problem was that writing a huge essay on why you're breaking up with someone, including detailed analysis of why there is insufficient attraction is a horrible thing to do to someone without even giving any benefit to yourself.
I don't know that that's necessarily the case. My first serious girlfriend wrote me a very long e-mail before our break-up, laying out her rational analysis of why she believed our relationship was untenable in the long term; she actually succeeded in persuading me to see it her way, which I'd been resisting for emotional reasons. That allowed us to have an amicable parting of ways, and we remain good friends to this day.
invoking evo. psych to make the statement true makes the statement actually effective at deflecting moral responsibility.
No, it doesn't. There is no moral license to be human. If action X is harmful, ascribing an evolutionary cause to X doesn't make it not harmful — and to a consequentialist it is harm that is at the root of immorality.
If evolution built me to rape nubile young womenfolk, well, evolution can just fuck off.
That's the second misunderstanding of what evolutionary psychology means that leads people to reject it on moral rather than factual grounds: if they're not indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, they're indulging in biological determinism, or think the evolutionary psychologists are. "X is a natural part of human behavior that exists because it was favored by natural selection in the past" does not mean "X is good," nor does it mean "X is inevitable" -- evo. psych. is about identifying tendencies, not certainties.
Evolution couldn't build you "to rape nubile young womenfolk," period, because humans are far too behaviorally plastic for that. What it could do, and, judging by the history of human behavior, probably did do to at least a large proportion of the male population, is built you to have an impulse to rape under some circumstances -- when rejected by a woman with whom you're already alone and with whom you had some expectation that you might have sex, for example, or when encountering a female member of an enemy population in war. Whether you act on that impulse or not depends on both the hereditary aspects of your personality and, ...
For better or worse, you seem to have steel-manned eridu's position. Eridu appears to believe that it is irrelevant whether ev psych (or any other empirical project) has anything to say about appropriate gender relations.
under patriarchy, and consider whether it is really usually in women's best interest to have PIV sex.
What happens if a woman desires to have PiV sex, seeks out a man to have it with (rejecting unqualified men in the process), and enjoys the experience ? The reason Andrea Dworkin (and radical feminists in general) is often portrayed as "sex-negative" (*) is because, as far as I can tell, she denies that such a scenario can exist, thus directly contradicting the life experience of many women.
Thus, we end up in a peculiar situation where radical feminists appear to be seeking to actively make women's lives worse, by denying them an activity that many women see as an important aspect of their self-expression (not to mention, a lot of fun).
Of course, a radical feminist might answer by saying, "my end goal is not to improve the lives of women, but to destroy the patriarchy by any means necessary", but I'm not sure if any real radical feminists would answer this way.
(*) It's also why Dworkin is considered to be a kind of troll by some liberal feminists; IMO unjustly so, since she sincerely believes the things she says.
I don't think "preventing the current thread from happening again" is anywhere near an important enough goal to justify heritable karma penalties -- let alone retroactive ones.
I've not seen retroactive penalties proposed anywhere; the current system warns you when you start if a penalty applies for making a comment, presumably that wouldn't change.
"This has traditionally been a very divisive point within radical feminism, and it typically divides the discussion into transphobic social-constructionist radical feminists and neo-essentialist post-feminists."
I'm just wondering would you mind reading Moldbug? I want to see the resulting philosophy for the lulz.
It seems (and I think we've talked about this before) that you are a liberal/equality "feminist," in which case we're equally opposed. Why should I stop rather than you?
Well, it seems to me that TimS is doing much less to give people an aversive reaction to feminism.
When you say things like this, you're taking an adversarial stance to most of society. Most men and women do not agree with such a position, and do not want to be affiliated with it.
As Yvain discussed in thisblog post, there are some positions associated with feminism that are widely agreed to be completely reasonable, some that are contentious and are effectively the battleground for which modern feminists are fighting, and some that very few women or men want to align themselves with. When debating for the sake of the contentious issues, people who support them tend to attempt to legitimize them by associating feminism with the least contentious aspects of feminism, while people who oppose them attempt to discredit them by associating them with the most radical aspects. The people who do the most to influence people on the contentious issues, where the actual "swing vote" takes place, generall...
Rationality means winning.
According to some terminal values, which you've not yet specified in regards to how they relate to your feminism, and which I'm not certain you're very clear about yourself. Any particular political struggle should normally be of instrumental value only.
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.
No it bloody doesn't except on the Internet. Read "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" and quote me a paragraph that pattern-matches anything like that. And then perhaps you'll give me back your respect point, because in a flash of enlightenment you'll suddenly understand why I was puzzled by people having issues with EP.
"The Psychological Foundations of Culture" does not discuss gender issues in detail.
More specifically: Sexual Strategies Theory tends to agree with modern cultural stereotypes of men and women, much as "scientific racism" tended to confirm cultural stereotypes of people of different races.
(I do acknowledge that "Sexual Strategies Theory" is far from settled science and has been heavily criticized - but it's a large part of what comes to mind when people think of ev-psych.)
I've had the luck of understanding both why people were puzzled and why they were wrong to be puzzled, since I only really learned any real ev-psych after I came to LessWrong.
What Crono says is pattern-matching is, well, yes mostly on the internet. However, it's also somewhat present out there, but it's not the Ev-Psych itself that pattern-matches - it's the behaviors and arguments of idiots who use Ev-Psych as ammunition.
What I've seen personally is mostly cases where "Evolutionary Psychology" could be substituted for "Magical Scientific Explanation" and no meaning would be lost, or cases where you could reasonably assert that a magical giant goat head yelling "facts" at people could have been the arguer's only source of information - i.e. the "fact" they pulled from ev-psych was technically true in the exact sense that "light is waves" is true, but they had no understanding of it whatsoever and their derivations from that were completely alien to the science.
Almost 400 comments but not a word of discussion of the parsing Yvain provides for his seven examples! But if Yvain's parsing is wrong—as I think it is—then his analysis will serve to further bias our understanding of positions we disagree with and to forsake any charity in understanding these positions.
The question that is fairly asked of Yvain is what distinguishes his "worst argument" ("X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't.") from any form of rule-governed reasoning in ethics (whether deontological or rule-utilitarian). When the examples are expanded and recast in those terms, they do not express Yvain's "worst argument"; they rather simply express moral premises subject to disagreement.
Taxation is theft. I'm no libertarian, but the argument isn't that taxation shares features with "archetypal" theft but that any taking of unearned property is wrong for the same basic reasons as "archetypal" theft is wrong, whether natural law or utilitarian calculus.
Abortion is murder. The claim almost always comes from a fundamental...
Consistent with Korzybski and General Semantics, you're objecting to the is of identity and the is of predication. Also, in GS terminology, all your examples use highly intensional terms, as opposed to extensional terms - racist, theft, murder, sexist.
Korzybski and the general semantics crowd go on and on about this issue. And often do.
Reading Korzybski can be a little tedious for his messianic tone and verbose writing style, so I recommend articles from General Semantics groups to get a background in their analysis, which I consider highly rewarding for the semantic hygiene it provides. For Korzybski himself, I highly recommend the usually neglected sections on math and science at the end of Korzybski's "Science and Sanity".
EDIT: A more concise characterization of the fallacy, garnered from Max Stirner, is the mistake of valuing according to your categories, instead of categorizing according to your values.
Judging from the comments this is receiving on Hacker News, this post is a mindkiller. HN is an audience more friendly to LW ideas than most, so this is a bad sign. I liked it, but unfortunately it's probably unsuitable for general consumption.
I know we've debated the "no politics" norm on LW many times, but I think a distinction should be made when it comes to the target audience of a post. In posts aimed to make a contribution to "raising the sanity waterline", I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot by invoking politics.
Reading that HN thread, the problem appears to be a troll (who also showed up on Yvain's original blog post).
The point of the argument from authority here is to catch the opponent's attention. If he goes as far as looking up who registered the domain, we can be confident he has read the article as well. The argument from authority won't work any more, but we don't care: it has served its purpose.
At least in my (admittedly limited) personal experience observing my family, friends and acquaintances. Certainly the cultural stereotypes bear it out, as well.
Your perception of the people you know plus cultural stereotypes is really pretty weak evidence. I could make the following argument: In my immediate family, the men are more emotional and less analytical/reserved than the women - they tend to get angry/aggressive in response to difficult things, whereas the women seem to stay calm. Plus, cultural stereotypes bear out the idea that men are more agg...
FWIW, personally I think genders without any -archy at all (i.e., some behaviours are more typical of men than of women and vice versa, but neither men nor women are frowned upon when exhibiting behaviours typical of the other gender, and neither group is obviously worse off overall) wouldn't be bad at all.
But you can't really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types
I think the book, "A Billion Wicked Thoughts" does a pretty good job of disproving that there is any single body type people look for in their porn.
you certainly can't be sex-positive without supporting the notion that consent is possible under patriarchy
So, are you saying consent is something that doesn't actually exist and never has? That would seem to be a confused definition of consent.
Can "Direct email, skype or text-chat communications to E.Y." count as a venue? Purely out of curiosity.
These are all good answers.
The term is very googlable.
I am trying to be cautious when googling any terms [radical] feminists use, because the meanings they assign to them often differs radically from common usage. For example, words like "patriarchy", "oppression", "privilege", etc., have very specific technical meanings in a [radical] feminist context, and if I googled them, I'd form a wrong impression. That is perfectly ok, IMO; every discipline has its jargon, f.ex. the words "client", "handshake" an...
On the other hand, if PiV sex is not inherently oppressive, it would seem that some people could enjoy it even today, if the right conditions are met.
From what I've inferred (this inference may be wrong), eridu seems to be asserting that "radical feminists" (not necessarily including himself) believe that these conditions are currently impossible to be met. My intuition is that this is for the same reason that they became feminists in the first place (a feminist subset of anthropomorphic-like phenomena?) - that is, that they were/are surrounded with almost exclusively ultra-patriarchal-behaving groups, where it is common that men get blowjobs in return for opening car doors for women and obtain sex in return for gifting high-heeled shoes (and yet of course, the reciprocals do not apply).
I feel like most of what this position considers literally omnipresent in everyone but themselves is a poor representation of some cultures and social groups. For example, the PiV point is definitely not applicable everywhere. In my own circles, there is not a single man or woman that considers PiV sex in any way offensive, dominating, or any other of the qualities that would qualify i...
But also, I think it's false as a matter of simple fact to say that my only argument is the stupidity of LWers. That was an entirely tangential garnish of snark in my original post, and it wasn't my decision to start focusing on it.
I agree that it was tangential to your point (it was much less so for that white nationalist guy); but that kind of thing - snark, accusations against the community in general, angry-sounding tone, etc. - are probably the biggest cause of the downvoting and deletion of your posts.
I agree that in an ideal world we should be ab...
You are using way to many fuzzy labels and dancing the rhetorical category shuffle far too vigorously. Taboo your words and explain why a relationship between a man and a woman is bad in the same sense that archetypal case of physical abuse is bad.
The fact that there is power and control is a red herring if everyone is happy with the arrangement and no one is getting their teeth punched out.
Ability to get pregnant is not, even now, a difference between men and women.
I reject some combination of your usage of "is", "difference" or "men and woman" as impractical. I suggest that whatever kind of wordplay is used to make this claim could be used to make all sorts of utterly absurd claims that MixedNuts would reject as pure silliness and yet which are less objectively absurd than the claim in question.
but that we should ignore the correlation with gender.
Ignore the correlation with gender. Of pregnancy. That se...
You should notice that this tangential counterargument is entirely within the spirit of your post, in that it discusses the social cost of "evolutionary psychology" (as a meme more than an abstract field of science) and finds that it does perpetuate patriarchy, and is thus in any meaningful sense sexist.
I'm having a little trouble interpreting your comment. In your view, can a proposition be both true and sexist? If so, are you saying we shouldn't believe (some) true propositions if they "perpetuate the patriarchy"? Thanks in advance.
Further, a consequentialist scientist knows that what they publish will be reported, and misreported, and must judge the ethical consequences of publishing based on those actual outcomes, not social scripts related to "free information" or any other idealized concept. This is similar to the recurring theme in LW of scientists witholding results like UFAI, sun-destroying bombs, or powerful spells (in HPMOR). Even if a difference does exist, is it worth publishing, knowing that you are perpetuating patriarchy?
The actual outcome of publishing cor...
I find myself questioning how many readers will actually do the unpacking you describe rather than just use the Worst Argument in the World as a club to beat their opponents over the head. Especially since title is such that it will probably attract many readers off LessWrong.
"Taboo murder." works better than "Calling X murder is the worst argument in the world!"
And okay, a tiny fraction of the time people are just trying to use words as a Schelling fence.
[citation needed]
I've edited this in a way that hopefully removes some of the controversy. Thanks to everyone who voted in the poll here. Actually, wait, no, the opposite of that. The two options ended out perfectly balanced, plus a bunch of people wanted me to make it even snarkier, and it was super confusing.
Anyway, I decided to respect the split poll by making a combination of the two drafts. The name has been changed to "the marginal fallacy", credit to James_G (sorry, Konkvistador, but I really do think that the fallacy of accident is something slightly diff...
(On a sidenote, eridu did claim that "treating women different than men" is impossible, because the patriarchy is pervasive and omnipresent. Even when you think you're treating women the same as men, you aren't -- which is why he's against liberal feminism.)
A very small piece of evidence that eridu might have a point: A while ago, I was faced with a person who I didn't know at the time was a transexual in transition. I felt like I didn't know what to do or say to them. (I'm reasonably sure I just looked blank at the time, or at least we're on ...
No, but all that requires is adding the qualifier "academic" to the noun "subject" in my principle, so it can't get misapplied to very unusual and extreme situations where knowledge of the specific situation could be more dangerous than the lack of that knowledge.
But that's almost certainly false. IRL input has distinct selection bias from viewing meta threads, but not no selection bias.
I should think that being mindkilled is very likely to include not being aware of being mindkilled.
They'll use that as an applause light, but they won't actually constrain their behavior.
FWIW I think that the majority of people arguing with you on these threads have stayed on topic, and attacked your argument rather than yourself -- which is much more than I can say about pretty much any other Internet forum. Of course, I am admittedly biased, since I myself do not support your position.
That said, when you say or imply things like "the only possible reason you'd downvote me is to express out-group hatred, so go ahead, make my day" -- as you...
In that case, you run into the issue ArisKatsaris pointed out here.
To the extent that science as an institution has any trustworthiness at all, it's come by it by not behaving in the manner you prescribe.
If you know that an institution deliberately filters evidence to support an agenda, then you must assume that the real state of the evidence is worse than what they're trying to show you. Hiding information looks bad (it shows you have something to hide,) so if you hide information, and can't hide the fact that you're hiding it, then what you're signall...
I have never behaved in the alleged patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious manners towards women which I am being accused of
No. By eridu's argument, this is a category error. Nothing about your behavior, beliefs etc. could have changed the fact that you are 'oppressing' people, for some meaning of 'oppression'. Your status as "patriarchal, controlling, caging, nefarious, etc." is simply ascribed, in a quasi-tautological way.
Yes, I do think this is "The Worst² Argument in the World". It basically amounts to dogma-based emotional manipulation.
Edit: Ok, that was snarky.
I agree that people act to reinforce social norms all the time, every day. But there are facts. If it turns out that men should not be primary care-givers of children because men, but not women, have a 5% chance of murderous rage when caring for children, society is morally justified in taking that fact into account.
But if a scientist reported that finding as an experimental result, they're failed to be properly empirical (give...
The word control is being use idiosyncratically. In a certain sense, everyone exerts control over everyone in ways that are not examined self-reflexively.
The problem was not with the word "control", but with the word "exert". eridu claimed that, for example, I exert power and control over my wife, without any information other than that I am "non-feminist" (by eridu's definition of "feminist"). This is strange, as I would not normally say that X exerts Y in the absence of any information about in what ways X mig...
Making the world more sane requires understanding it. Knowing that there is a biological, evolutionary force behind rape allows to take more appropriate measures to actually fight rape. Blinding ourselves on the true cause of an evil will never allow us to defeat that evil.
All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness. That's what I meant. Is this really what this whole conversation has been about?
Yes. If you had said "All employment is comodification of human time, and therefore objectification of human beings. Part of living in the real world is making peace with that. The fact that people want to single out porn is silliness." this would allow p...
I would say that the War on Some Drugs is sufficiently like Prohibition to make this not an instance of the WAitW. It's still a fairly weak argument, since it's lacking in details, but I don't think it's trying to sneak in any connotations, and I think basically all of the problems with Prohibition are also problems with the War on Some Drugs.
Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It in...
Do we, though, agree to the rape of a woman if said rape results in the feeding of 10 starving children in Africa? Of course not.
When arguing with consequentialists, you may find it useful to use larger numbers. I recommend Graham's number.
I think this should be explicitly connected to "policy debates should not appear one-sided". The incorrect response to the worst argument in the world results from forgetting this and trying to deny the downside to your position that your opponent has pointed out. The correct response is to acknowledge the downside but argue that the upsides outweigh it.
Heh. Even taking that into account, I still think your odds are better with a randomly chosen LWer as a recipient than a randomly chosen partner-of-a-female. But that's admittedly a pretty low bar.
First, you clearly are not an average female.
Which doesn't contradict Dave's idea that LW women / the women that LW members date might be more likely to respond well.
Are you sure you know how you would react...
Totally sure. My last boyfriend attempted to give me fluff and I tore through it. I always want to get down to the bottom of why a relationship did not work. Even if reality is devastating, I want reality. You can tell I'm strong enough to deal with criticism because I invite it often. You can tell I'm strong enough to swallow criticism because of my elitism thread - check out the note at the top. I feel kind of dumb for not seeing these problems in advance (hindsight bias, I guess?). Now that I do see how awful my thread was - in public of all places - have I vanished, or gone crybaby or begged anybody for emotional support?
No.
I am stronger than that.
iV) Affirmative action is racist
It is racist. there is no Issue here . Indeed the bad argument is yours. You argument appears to be that if something is 'good' then it can't be racist. This is just incorrect. There is nothing that implies morality within the definition given in English lanaguge dictionaries apart from those published by the Marxist left (whom I implictly reject).
The problem here is not that Yvain has made flawed arguments but rather that you incorrectly interpreted the post.
Yvain is not arguing that affirmative action is or is not raci...
This is not a logical fallacy. It is either wrong or right and it depends on two issues: in The Anglo Saxon world of common law ( that's USA, Canada,Ireland, UK , New Zealand, most Carribean countries etc ) Murder must be i) The Killing ii) Of a person, iii) In being iv) unlawfully and v) with malice aforethought.
You are assuming that the person asserting this proposition is referring to the legal concept of murder (in a particular jurisdiction) rather than the common-sense notion of murder. This assumption is probably false in the large majority of cases. The rest of your objections suffer from similar maladies.
The trouble with this argument is that the feral condition is not the natural condition for humans, as philosophers once imagined it to be. A whole slew of development doesn't work without the appropriate stimuli which are provided by all human societies, for instance exposure to language during the critical period.
The gold standard for demonstrating that something is due to socialization is to demonstrate difference among societies or social groups (subcultures, classes, etc.) — not to compare a healthy person to one that has been developmentally impaired...
You're thinking like a LW reader, not a typical feminist activist (who is also liberal). Most of these people don't have any background in any science and are more skilled at literature criticism than empiricism.
They should fix those deficiencies forthwith.
Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
This is a thought-provoking sentence. I think I don't want anyone to feel bad, even when they do bad things.
Thanks for the reply. What I'm getting from you is the idea that there are probably some practices in our relationship (and those of couples in our reference class) that, although they look benign to us now, would after a certain amount of consciousness-raising come to be seen by us as toxic.
I consider this very plausible (and I can think of attitudes held by me in the past, about gender and other things, which seemed trivial but which I now regard as toxic).
I am really interested in moving from the abstract to the specific though. So seconding Bugmaster's...
The reason Yvain's proposed argument is arguably much worse is that the argument you propose is a clear, visible fallacy with spectacular failure modes and many people will indeed simply walk away or mark the person making the argument as crazy, while Yvain's argument, in the situations where it is the worst argument, is not only wrong and erroneous logic but also still manages to convince uninformed people that it is valid, and so they will accept its conclusion as true, while at the same time tricking opponents into debating the wrong points and formulat...
It's easy to see:
But since many others did participate (while saying in many comments that eridu was quite irrational and/or wrong), it's possible I would have been drawn in if I had the opportunity. So I'm glad you stopped it.
... and read "It's obvious that eridu is stupid and irrational, and people said so yet kept blabbering and that could have made me join in, so thanks for stopping all this idiocy."
It actually tempted me to downvote too, but the comment is overall useful and that is a very uncharitable interpretation of the wording. It'...
I disagree with the claim that the entire LW community, or even a majority of it, is incapable of discussing this subject rationally, and I also disagree with the claim that most LWers will assign karma to your posts based on buzzword content.
However, I find your other claims and the overall assessment of the situation minus the above to correlate rather strongly with what has experimentally actually happened so far in the discussion in the majority of what I observed.
Honestly, (speaking as a feminist, albeit not a radical feminist, who's been frustrated by a lot of the male-rights-apologist sentiment on this website), I think this thread went amazingly well. Yes, people disagree with you. Some of those people are expressing outgroup hatred. Some of those people are (reasonably) honestly looking at your position and still disagreeing because *it's a complicated position that requires them to read multiple books to even have a reasonable understanding of, and there are loads of other similarly complex positions that migh...
Nice. It seems that we no longer have a wholly unfalsifiable and meaningless argument. You are now resorting to the old trope that "we" are fully rational and conscious individuals who use reason to actualize ourselves and achieve our moral values, whereas "they" are mindless sheeple whose individual potential is neutralized by force, coercion or pervasive social pressure. I suppose that this counts as progress, in a way.
Ok, I'm out. You are actively hurting causes that I think are important. Please STOP.
If you say you are advancing better social roles for women, you are LYING. To me, or to yourself.
The feminist response seems absurd to me, unless you define differences in a way different than I do. Is the social hierarchy what makes women on average shorter? Or is it simply a moral argument about how we should ignore all differences?
To me, the phrase "radical feminist" implies the sort of feminist who not only wants to get women out of the cage (which is admirable in my view), but then wants to turn about and put men in the cage (which I disagree with). I think that means that we're defining the phrase differently.
Most research findings labeled as evolutionary psychology are sexist because they perpetuate patriarchy.
I would reduce this to "Most publications labeled as being about research findings in evolutionary psychology are sexist because they perpetuate patriarchy." and "Most publications on research findings in evolutionary psychology make claims about morality based on said findings by implicitly asserting dubious (contested) axioms of morality."
Perpetuation of patriarchy is not a property of research findings. Research findings are the...
I've seen one or both arguments. The most obvious example would be Ayn Rand who made essentially both arguments. Essentially this looks like a form of belief overkill or political mindkilling. People throughout the political spectrum are convinced often that what they consider the most morally correct course of action is also the most pragmatically correct one (a different example would be how with the recent heathcare fight in the US almost everyone who thought the bill was bad economically also thought it was unconstitutional and people who thought that it was a good idea were more likely to claim it was constitutional). They don't seem to realize or care that the universe is ideologically blind.
By similar reasoning: If you were smart, and cared about results rather than mere signaling, and had reason to believe your advice was good, you would not phrase your advice as personal or political attacks.
Yes, and it would also be beneficial to correctly apply the Wason selection principle to all problems not just ethical ones, but because the relevant circuitry is in the ethics module, our brains only apply it to ethics.
Or do they really?
A large fraction of people get the problem right even in it's more abstruse form, where it is harder to leverage the experience to correctly understand the problem statement.
Evopsych you describe is actually a very fringe interpretation of how we get improved performance on Wason selection task. Source . There just isn'...
I think there are two cases where you forgot to type the word "fallacy" after the word noncentral.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral.
This is why the noncentral is so successful.
Except Time Cube is incomprehensible gibberish, not just wrong. But I'm not saying that it was actually mainstream, you understand.
I'm not sure we could say anything better of Isaac Newton's alchemy.
Unless, of course, you're saying our understanding of recent history is quite as bad as the closing paragraph there.
Popular understanding can be pretty bad. The more I read in history, the more I realized I didn't understand the past anywhere near as well as I thought I did; revelations ranging from spherical earths to gay presidents to the Founding Fath...
More generally, the idea that taking a potentially damaging action with respect to a vulnerable target is morally distinguishable from taking the exact same action against a well-defended target is relatively uncontroversial even without reference to feminism at all.
It seemed a reasonable to me; after all, shminux's comment wasn't random unrelated criticism, it was a germane followup to a previous comment. Posting it in the other thread eliminates the entire purpose of the comment.
"Gender should be removed from society" is not a particularly rare opinion-- unfortunately it is also not a particularly feasible one, at least not in the short term.
Fair enough.
I'd like to request some constructive criticism: What would you suggest someone do when they think an empirical field has been tainted by normative claims?
I really do think that historical study of other cultures provides evidence that contradicts some psychological "findings." But it is the nature of the endeavor that "harder" sciences like psychology carry more weight than softer sciences like history. I could point to cases like Bradwell v. Illinois for examples of tainted scientific processes, but I acknowledge that do...
Welcome to LessWrong!
A bit of fair warning: If you haven't done so already, the About LessWrong and Welcome to LessWrong pages along with the FAQ should cover most of the community norms and important stuff you'd want to know to frequent this place.
None is required reading, but users will frequently point you to the Sequences if you're doing or saying something that has been covered already, especially using words, labels and categories incorrectly.
More relevant to this post, the above sequence on words is in direct relationship with both your points and ...
an individualist "identity" conception of gender
So... what's your position on trans people and non-binaries?
you can't really be porn-positive without supporting normative body types
Mainstream porn has an incentive problem where it needs to appeal to a large audience or it won't be profitable, but alt porn, especially by amateurs, can show varied body types. There are Tumblrs that do that - they're reposting, not producing, so there's still a bias toward conventionally attractive types, but they're not judged differently.
reality and physics would be your worst possible Enemy, seeing as how it is currently the strongest Jailer than restricts and constrains you the most.
This should answer most of the questions above. Yes, the universe is terrible. It would be much better if the universe were optimized for my freedom.
Which other values can be traded off?
All values are fungible. The exchange rate is not easily inspected, and thought experiments are probably no good for figuring them out.
it's subject to the Loss Aversion effect where the dissatisfied speak up in much greater numbers
But Eliezer Yudkowsky, too, is subject to the loss aversion effect. Just as those dissatisfied with changes overweight change's negative consequences, so does Eliezer Yudkowsky overweight his dissatisfaction with changes initiated by the "community." (For example, increased tolerance of responding to "trolling.")
Moreover, if you discount the result of votes on rules, why do you assume votes on other matters are more rational? The "com...
True. For that to be an effective communication channel, there would need to be a control group. As for how to create that control group or run any sort of blind (let alone double-blind) testing... yeah, I have no idea. Definitely a problem.
ETA: By "I have no idea", I mean "Let me find my five-minute clock and I'll get back to you on this if anything comes up".
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.)
I hope you don't mind me jumping into this discussion; I find it fascinating.
Brains are plastic. They are reprogrammable. They are computers. There are differences between the brains of people socialized as men and the brains of people socialized as women. They are a result of gender socialization...
Would the below statement be an accurate rephrasing of your views ?
"Any differences in behaviors between men and women are due entirely to their upbringing. Their biological makeup has no measurable effect on such behaviors."
I think this is a reas...
"feminism is a movement which has ended, there is no longer any oppression of women."
I think the problem with this statement is that "oppression" is a loaded word. Its meaning can range from "there exists a systemic bias against women" to "women are chained to the stove and are kept barefoot and pregnant at all times". As Yvain points out in this very post, people tend to envision the latter even when the reality is closer to the former.
That said, I'm still not entirely clear regarding your response to simplicio....
I think the idea is that if people don't see new replies to the hidden subthread in recent comments, they'll be much less likely to respond to those replies, so such threads will die out much more quickly. This will also cause trolls to not have as much fun trolling here so they'll be more likely to leave us alone in the future.
ETA: On the other hand, perhaps we should talk about non-technical ways to change the culture as well. Do you have any ideas? ETA2: A lot of previous discussion can be found here.
I think this is false as a matter of simple fact. I'll bet money on it.
I'd take that bet, for reasonable values of "privileges men over women".
I might expect controversy if we were asking whether that bias is entirely unidirectional, whether "patriarchy" is an accurate or productive way of describing it, or how pervasive it is, but I'd expect the existence of systemic gender bias favoring men in certain domains to be challenged only by a minority of posters here. That's really a fairly low bar, and while gender issues weren't disc...
This is why I have zero faith in the forum community on this website -- no matter how many times they read "one argument against an army" or "substance screens off source," they will continue to do those exact things whenever confronted with outgroup memes. Those arguments are soldiers, and they cannot be deployed against their homeland.
I don't know how receptive this community would be to radical feminist arguments argued politely and in good faith.
I mean, I could walk up to someone and say "hey, big-nose, if you pulled your he...
[Insert unwarranted expletive]
Please, please, please define and explain just what you mean by "patriarchal". From all the denials and arguments I've seen so far in this thread, I haven't seen one single hypothesis that doesn't get rebuked by you as being patriarchal other than your own vague, poorly-explained, cult-sounding position.
Here's another hypothesis I just have to throw your way in order to make any progress here:
Suppose the entire friggin' human species is wiped. I mean, completely, utterly, zero-exception, all humans are dead. Then, by...
Oh, come on.
I mean, I don't have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be "If you haven't read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I'd have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature o...
I don't know if the positions implied by "equity feminist" are the positions I endorse.
In particular, I don't know if "Always work within the system" is implied to be my position.
I'm more W.E.B. DuBois than Booker T. Washington, and I just don't know if eridu is implying otherwise. For a while in this discussion, I thought eridu and I were only disagreeing on tactics, not terminal values. In fact, I'm still not sure whether we have different terminal values (at the level of detail relevant to this discussion).
the morally upright woman is also better looking
By hypothesis, the Wicked Queen is the second most beautiful woman in the land. This seems to weaken that point.
Yes. The primary difference between the hypothesis I advanced and the one TimS advanced is that mine does not require accusing you of moral deficiency.
Don't be a jerk. You're misconstruing my position. Human trafficking is very big and very bad. I was discussing a small reduction in patriarchy. If you think that evolutionary psychology is somehow the lynchpin of human trafficking, fine, but then please present a rational argument for that conclusion instead of sneaking it in under the table. You discredit your viewpoint further when you turn to disingenuous tactics to support its supposed validity. You also piss me off.
As a consequentialist pro-feminist, I'm bound to attack anything that I think will significantly support patriarchy.
I'm not sure attacking everything that contributes to patriarchy is more important than attacking only the things intrinsic to patriarchy, eg gender bias. Otherwise, you're obligated to attack patriarchy about 10000 times a day, and it makes your advocacy seem weaker. Also, you should really be considering whether or not the minor reduction in patriarchy is worth the slightly larger, but still small, move away from evolutionary psychology....
Yeah, we can say that it does not apply to me.
I'm surprised to see that feminist heterosexual men are implied to be able to escape the framework of social control. Either way I've always considered myself a feminist in ways that you probably find insufficient. For starters it seems to me that the more feminist the society the higher standard of living it roughly seems to have (e.g. Scandinavia better than rest of Northern Europe, which is better than Southern Europe, which is better than the Arab world, which is better than subSaharan Africa) -- so that's ...
For starters it seems to me that the more feminist the society the higher standard of living it roughly seems to have (e.g. Scandinavia better than rest of Northern Europe, which is better than Southern Europe, which is better than the Arab world, which is better than subSaharan Africa) -- so that's a significant plus in favour of feminism, after all.
I think causation goes the other way.
If you think an anarchist can not be a strict radical feminist
What? If anything, what I said implies the opposite of that.
I identify with the radical feminist current of feminism, and I believe it to be the only feminist variant of feminism
That's usually a bad sign, in my experience. It means you're not terribly likely to notice which women's voices are dominating the conversation, telling all the others they need to suborn their needs and interests into your vision of what feminism looks like (this happens an awful lot); do you think your take on it is really one-size-fits-all?
I see so much complaining about straw-feminism here, that it's nice to see someone who doesn't immediately mistake it for "making women superior" or other such rubbish show up. But I'm not sure this is a great improvement. :\
It seems like your position on ev-psych is predicated on the idea that there are in fact no moral differences between men and women to be found in (true) ev-psych research. If there were, then gender inequality (in whatever direction) would be fully justified. I take it you're not waiting around to see what natural science discovers about possible moral differences between men and women. If that's right, you may be concluding a priori that natural sciences can't discover such moral differences.
Which is a reasonable enough position. But then shouldn't the work of feminism be to argue for this a priori claim directly, rather than attacking naturalistic approaches which are, in the end, harmless?
The how any why of porn suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry probably isn't where that money would go e.g. probably towards prostitution which is even less humane. And doesn't pay as well.
Well, the people who want to magically stop porn also tend to want to magically stop prostitution.
I, personally, would be in favor of the existence of both, but I'd also wish much higher working conditions for both -- a wish which your command to "Deal!" in regards to their low working conditions, because they're supposedly better than the &qu...
Porn can be a really unpleasant job for women
And even more so for men: lousy pay, boner drug injections, stiff (sorry) competition.
Would any of the (at least four) people who have upvoted Eliezer's comment but not my response
There's not necessarily even one of those, let alone four. Four people could have upvoted both of you and then four other people could have downvoted just you.
Do we ever succumb to the worst argument in the world in non-moral issues?
Excellent example. This kind of equivocation on 'murder' is used---and even accepted---on lesswrong with distressing frequency.
Leaving aside the differences in moral justification, virtue ethics differs from rule utilitarianism in the practical sense that virtues tend to be more abstract than rules. For example, rather than avoiding unnecessary killing, becoming a kind person.
(1) Is correct if one assumes that there are some people who actually steal property. If it is not the case the one does not depend on others cooperation, but merely their refraining from initiating force.
One of the points I presented that you didn't address is that other people in society teach their kids that stealing is bad and they shouldn't do it. They don't merely help to enforce your property claims; they also communicate and teach your property claims. This is the means by which you can count on almost everyone refraining from violating your pro...
That is, they argue solely on utilitarian grounds.
Surely some of them argue from natural rights too, some of the time?
The most godawful example I've seen of EP being used as a cover for blatant sexism and misogyny is this NRO article, which basically says that as a rich boss with many male sons, Mitt Romney exudes alpha male power, and all women should fall in trance and vote for him.
Suddenly I am enlightened!
In particular, I have just now realized that whereas I encountered evolutionary psychology in the context of my quest to unravel the mysteries of human cognition and so I read a bunch of science books and papers on it, many other people may be encountering evolutionary psychology primarily in the context of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, attempted invocations of ev-psych which are so terrible as to be propagated through the blogosphere as horrors for everyone to marvel at.
This explains a lot about the oddly bad opinion that so many online-folk seem to have about evolutionary psychology. This has had me making puzzled expressions for years, not sure what was going on. But you would probably get a pretty different first-impression (and first impressions are very controlling) if your first exposure was reading that NRO article instead of "The Psychological Foundations of Culture". Even if somebody tried to expose you to the real science afterward, you'd probably go in with some degree of motivated skepticism.
Having thus generalized the problem - is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
That's surely playing a role, but another thing is that gender dynamics is often a mind-killer, in pretty much all contexts it shows up in. I don't have a full explanation for that, but I think that has to do with the sexual frustration of unattractive¹ people being repeatedly turned down by attractive people and the resentment of attractive people being repeatedly harassed by unattractive people. I tend to be overly cautious about this and hence to avoid mentioning gender even when it's relevant (e.g., if in the previous sentence “unattractive people” was replaced with “lots of men” and “attractive people” with “lots of women”, it would be just as accurate and perhaps even more precise).
In my experience, when people invoke evolutionary psychology, they tend to neglect the mechanisms by which genes could have the postulated effect. Often, absurdly specific evolved traits are claimed that can also be understood as simple reinforcement or the like. Or they claim something so information-laden that it defies belief that it could be encoded in an evolved mechanism except through general learning.
all women should fall in trance and vote for him
After reading that article, I seriously can't tell whether he means should epistemically (‘women are likely to vote for him’), ethically (‘women had better vote for him’), or he's (deliberately or accidentally) equivocating the two. His arguments only makes sense if he means it epistemically, but his tone only makes sense if he means it ethically.
First, it is false. Polls put Obama over Romney among female voters by 8, 10, or 16 points, according to the first three results I found in Google News. Moreover, in 2008 Obama won the female and tied the male vote, while now he seems to be winning the female vote by a somewhat smaller amount, but losing substantially the male vote. So looking at the female/male ratio (to control for the state of the economy and other general features) it looks as of now that Romney does worse with women than McCain did.
Of course, not every false statement about women is sexist. But I would say that an analysis attributing (in a false and unsubstantiated way) women's voting choices to irrational, subconscious factors as opposed to conscious ideological preference or self-interest, while not making a similar analysis for men's voting choices, is sexist.
Also, in my opinion it edges into outright misogyny because the paragraph
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
is not merely an objective analysis that in the author's opinion women will see Obama as weak/emasculated//whatever for having daughters instead of sons: it actively mocks Obama and expresses contempt for him on that basis, thus reinforcing the idea that women are less valuable than men.
An important part of WAitW is that it uses an atypical member of a category to attach to it the rejection of a typical member of the category. Both abortion and death penalty are atypical members of the "murder" category (if they are), and associating them with "murder" is trying to associate them with the connotation of the "typical" murder.
Guns are quite the typical weapon. They are not border-line weapons like a kitchen knife or a hammer, they are not military grade weapons. Saying "guns are weapons!" doesn't try ...
Well, my point was that this assumes a whole theory of property, and a specific one at that. There are others.
For instance, here is a contrary model; I am describing it, not necessarily endorsing it:
Describing a particular item or place as a specific person's property implies the existence of a society that recognizes and enforces that property claim. Property claims aren't enforced merely by the individuals making them, but by a whole society that teaches people to broadly respect them and has enforcement mechanisms to rein in those who don't.
You can't pr...
Can you elaborate a bit on that? Your comment also struck me as glib, but I'd be interested to hear if you have a real argument in the background.
Very few people treat morality this way. Many people, if asked, will say that it's moral to follow the bible's teachings, and yet do not stone women to death for wearing pants or men for wearing skirts. Clearly they are following some sort of internal system by which there are different concerns balanced against each other in their moral decisions.
I'm not sure "This specific example has something to recommend it" saves the example from being legitimately described in terms of the category. I'm minded of "Yeah, I killed him, but he deserved it" - that is, everybody thinks their example has something to recommend it, something that makes it distinct from the categorical description, that's why they support it/did it to begin with.
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology , or go explain massive modularity to almost any neurobiologist and see what they say about it.
It doesn't even construct plausible stories about evolution. In the time in which rather simple morphological changes to the bone shapes make some very minor progress, we supposedly evolve whole new instincts, whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher.
Where evolutionary biology predicts that X won't evolve (and thus doesn't exist as an innate quality), evolutionary psychology claims X evolved from scratch and exists.
What makes you think that?
Stuff like this, though I'm having trouble getting access to the historical poll data.
I'll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
My model was that the sort of person who would become a memorable Founding Father in the 1700s is the sort of person who would become a public intellectual in the 2000s, and that atheism is more strongly linked by personal temperament than public position. I thi...
Right, but deism then had roughly the same social / religious status as modern atheism does. He was certainly attacked as an infidel during the elections, and as the story goes, the pious buried their Bibles at news of his election, for fear that the new administration would take them away.
This site is about refining the art of human rationality, while we certainly do try to get a good map of the world we spend most of our time thinking about thinking. The fundamental realization at the heart of our community, that to a certain extent distinguishes it from traditional rationality, is that humans are biased and broken thinkers who can't rely on their naive reasoning too much. You can think as long and as calmly as you like but if you base your thinking on broken axioms or bad epistemology you won't get much closer to truth.
I did not say or e...
Hehe. Once you realize that someone has condemned you guilty a priori, there's all kinds of nifty semi-Dark Arts tricks you can do.
My favorite is to begin agreeing with them more and more anyway, granting them authority and righteousness inch by inch even though it fuels their knowledge that I'm Evil, until I've lured them all the way into a fanatical position that is obviously absurd even to them.
At which point a simple "Yes, you've been right all along!" with a smile is usually all it takes for them to shut up and start agreeing with me inste...
Right, absolutely.
Indeed, many feminists make an analogous argument for why feminism is necessary... that is, that our society tends to pay more attention to men than women, and consequently disproportionately harms women without even noticing unless someone particularly calls social attention to the treatment of women. Similar arguments get made for other nominally low-status groups.
I guess I've had the opposite experience you had.
With the exception of a certain professor, all the feminists I've met in meatspace have been friendly people who are open to discussing their beliefs with skeptical men. If a man describes how he's been hurt by gender prejudice, they will listen sympathetically. On the other hand, the anti-feminists I've met are far less likely to listen to women talk about misogyny, and will often try and shut down debate. It's kind of infuriating actually. This is why I refer to myself as a feminist whenever there is an anti-feminist in the room.
A Turing test is when a computer tries to impersonate a human. An ideological Turing test is when a person who doesn't hold an ideology tries to impersonate a person who holds the ideology.
Is the analogy more clear now?
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it's much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don't know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don't fall neatly into the...
To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike?
The possibility that they could still contain potential for improving paperclip production (to the extent that that is true).
Destroying patriarchy.
I don't think that would do it. If by "destroying patriarchy" you mean "destroying the systemic oppression of women by men", then achieving this goal alone would not bring you closer to knowing whether gender has biological underpinnings. After patriarchy is destroyed, men and women would still exist, they just wouldn't oppress each other (*) .
On the other hand, if your goal is to destroy gender altogether (which would, as a consequence, bring about the destruction of the patriarchy), then it would be very valua...
The question of whether X is "sexist" seems like a Worst Argument In The World waiting to happen. Taboo "sexist": is X bad? Why?
(really. Sexist has been used so many different ways by so many different people that it doesn't mean anything to me anymore.)
"Most people on Less Wrong would agree that there exists a systemic bias in mainstream American culture, which privileges men over women".
They do? I would have expected them to claim that there is a bias that privileges high status men over high status women and also biases that privilege medium-to-low status women over medium-to-low status men and nobody cares about the latter. Of course I'm not part of mainstream American culture so I can only make inferences based on knowing some small part of western culture and familiarity with how humans...
Most of these people don't have any background in any science and are more skilled at literature criticism than empiricism.
Fair enough. Sad, but fair :-/
...the implication I meant to make is that all men are oppressive and all oppressive people should feel guilty about being oppressive.
That's a fascinating discussion topic in and of itself, but it might be out of scope for the current thread. That said:
Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
Some LWers explicitly deny this statement; they mig...
Thanks, your description of the spectrum of relationship types is quite clear. That said, I find it difficult to reconcile what I know of liberal feminism (which is, admittedly, not as much as a liberal feminist would) with your description of it (though I'm not sure what a "tumblr-feminist" is):
Compulsory sexuality, sexual availability, and pervasive sexualization, again with the implication of being a "prude" or "sex-negative" or "anti-sex" if she objects
Can you link to some examples ? Every liberal feminist I'...
I'd say that asking people to taboo "true" is very common, in certain circles outside Less Wrong. That's why Eliezer wrote The Simple Truth.
If you present a conclusion, and other people disagree with it, then if they're doing things right, they must disagree with either your premises or the inferences you draw from those premises. If you identify your set of premises and the inferences relating to them from which you draw the conclusion that evolutionary psychology is sexist as "feminism," then naturally if other people disagree with your conclusion then the discussion will fall back to the topic of feminism, which appears to me to be exactly what happened.
I disagree that the discus...
I've banned all of eridu's recent comments (except a few voted above 0) as an interim workaround, since hiding-from-Recent-Comments and charge-fee-to-all-descendants is still in progress for preventing future threads like these.
I respectfully request that you all stop doing this, both eridu and those replying to him.
I think Eridu's downvotes were mostly well-deserved.
I don't think this is a good idea.
I wonder if we could solve this problem from another direction. The issue from your perspective, as I understand it, is that you want to be able to follow every interesting discussion on this site, in semi-real time, but can't. You can't because your only view into "all comments everywhere" is only 5 items long, so fast-moving pointless discussions drown out the stuff you're interested in. An RSS feed presumably isn't sufficient either, since it pushes comments as they occur and doesn't give the community a chance to filter them.
So if I've reasoned all this out correctly, you'd prefer a view of all comments, sorted descending by post time and configurably tree-filtered by karma and maybe username. But we haven't the dev resources to build that, and measures like the ones you describe are a cheap, good-enough approximation.
Do I have that right?
I dislike this solution, for several reasons.
The discussion with eridu was probably worth ending, but I saw someone say it was the best discussion of those issues they'd ever seen, and I'd said so myself independently in a location that I've promised not to link to.
I am very impressed with LW that we managed to make that happen.
I am very impressed with LW that we managed to make that happen.
Did you learn something useful or interesting, or were you just impressed that the discussion remained relatively civil? If the former, can you summarize what you learned?
My usual response to requests for "X exists" to be tabooed is to start talking about reliably predicting future experiences E2 in a range of contexts C (as C approaches infinity) consistent with the past experiences E1 which led me to to put X in my model in the first place. If someone wants to talk about E2 being reliably predictable even though X "doesn't really exist", it's not in the least bit clear to me what they're talking about.
I've banned all of eridu's recent comments (except a few voted above 0)
Bravo. I have no idea whether that was someone pretending to be ignorant and toxic for the purpose of discrediting a group he was impersonating or whether it was sincere (and ignorant and toxic). Fortunately I don't need to know and don't care either way. Good riddance!
as an interim workaround, since hiding-from-Recent-Comments and charge-fee-to-all-descendants is still in progress for preventing future threads like these.
Is it just me or do others also find that Eliezer coming of as a tad petulant with the way he is handling people systematically opposing and downvoting his proposal? Every time he got downvoted to oblivion he just came back with a new comment seemingly crafted to be more belligerent, whiny, condescending and cynical about the community than the last. (That's hyperbole---in actuality it peaked in the middle somewhere.) Now we just keep getting reminded about it at every opportunity as noise in unrelated threads.
Is it just me
It's not just you.
I'm starting to think there should be community-elected moderators or something, and Eliezer should stop being allowed to suggest things.
Mostly he's coming across to me as having lost patience with the community not being what he wants it to be, and having decided that he can fix that by changing the infrastructure, and not granting much importance to the fact that more people express disapproval of this than approval.
Keep in mind that it's not "more people" it's more "people who participate in meta threads on Less Wrong". I've observed a tremendous divergence between the latter set, and "what LWers seem to think during real-life conversations" (e.g. July Minicamp private discussions of LW which is where the anti-troll-thread ideas were discussed, asking what people thought about recent changes at Alicorn's most recent dinner party). I'm guessing there's some sort of effect where only people who disagree bother to keep looking at the thread, hence bother to comment.
Some "people" were claiming that we ought to fix things by moderation instead of making code changes, which does seem worth trying; so I've said to Alicorn to open fire with all weapons free, and am trying this myself while code work is indefinitely in progress. I confess I did anticipate that this would also be downvoted even though IIRC the request to do that was upvoted last time, because at this point I've formed the generalization "all moderator actions are downvoted", either because only some people participate in meta threads, and/or the much more horrifying hypothesis "...
Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong -- least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run ("meta threads"). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn's dinner parties.
Have I got that right?
Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong -- least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run ("meta threads"). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn's dinner parties.
That's how politics usually works, yes.
Also, you have to attend dinner parties on a day when Eliezer is invited and doesn't decline due to being on a weird diet that week.
I've moderated a few forums before, and with that experience in mind I'd have to agree that there's a huge, and generally hugely negative, selection bias at play in online response to moderator decisions. It'd be foolish to take those responses as representative of the entire userbase, and I've seen more than one forum suffer as a result of such a misconception.
That being said, though, I think it's risky to write off online user feedback in favor of physical. The people you encounter privately are just as much a filtered set as those who post feedback here, though the filters point in different directions: you're selecting people involved in the LW interpersonal community, for one thing, which filters out new and casual users right off the bat, and since they're probably more likely to be personally friendly to you we can also expect affect heuristics to come into play. Skepticism toward certain LW norms may also be selected against, which could lead people to favor new policies reinforcing those norms. Moreover, I've noticed a trend in the Bay Area group -- not necessarily an irrational one, but a noticeable one -- toward treating the online community as low-quality relative to local groups, which we might expect to translate into antipathy towards its status quo.
I don't know what the weightings should be, but if you're looking for a representative measure of user preferences I think it'd be wise to take both groups into account to some extent.
I will be starting another Less Wrong Census/Survey in about three weeks; in accordance with the tradition I will first start a thread asking for question ideas. If you can think of a good list of opinions you want polled in the next few weeks, consider posting them there and I'll stick them in.
You... know I don't optimize dinner parties as focus groups, right? The people who showed up that night were people who like chili (I had to swap in backup guests for some people who don't) and who hadn't been over too recently. A couple of the attendees from that party barely even post on LW.
You... know I don't optimize dinner parties as focus groups, right?
It is perhaps more importantly dinner parties are optimised for status and social comfort. Actually giving honest feedback rather than guessing passwords would be a gross faux pas.
Getting feedback at dinner parties is a good way to optimise the social experience of getting feedback and translate one's own status into the agreement of others.
That's fair, and your strategy makes sense. I also agree with DaFranker, below, regarding meta-threads.
This said, however, at the time when I joined Less Wrong, my model of the site was something like, "a place where smart people hold well-reasoned discussions on a wide range of interesting topics" (*). TheOtherDave's comment, in conjunction with yours, paints a different picture of what you'd like Less Wrong to be; let's call it Less Wrong 2.0. It's something akin to, "a place where Eliezer and a few of his real-life friends give lectures on topics they think are important, with Q&A afterwards".
Both models have merit, IMO, but I probably wouldn't have joined Less Wrong 2.0. I don't mean that as any kind of an indictment; if I were in your shoes, I would definitely want to exclude people like this Bugmaster guy from Less Wrong 2.0, as well.
Still, hopefully this one data point was useful in some way; if not, please downvote me !
(*) It is possible this model was rather naive.
I very much appreciate the attempts at greater moderation, including the troll penalty. Thank you.
Me too. Troll posts and really wrong people are too distracting without some form of intervention. Not sure the current solution is optimal (but this point has been extensively argued elsewhere), but I applaud the effort to actually stick one's neck out and try something.
Accepting thanks with sincerity, while somewhat-flippantly mostly-disregarding complaints? ...I must be missing some hidden justification?
Sometimes AKA the "Forum Whiners" effect, well known in the PC games domain:
When new PC games are released, almost inevitably the main forums for the game will become flooded with a large surge of complaints, negative reviews, rage, rants, and other negative stuff. This is fully expected and the absence of such is actually a bad sign. People that are happy with the product are playing the game, not wasting their time looking for forums and posting comments there - while people who have a problem or are really unhappy often look for an outlet or a solution to their issues (though the former in much greater numbers, usually). If no one is bothering to post on the forums, then that's evidence that no one cares about the game in the first place.
I see a lot of similarities here, so perhaps that's one thing worth looking into? I'd expect some people somewhere to have done the math already on this feedback (possibly by comparing to overall sales, survey results and propagation data), though I may be overestimating the mathematical propensity of the people involved.
Regarding the stop-watching-threads thing, I've noticed that I pretty much always stop paying attention to a threa...
I've banned all of eridu's recent comments (except a few voted above 0) as an interim workaround
Is "ban" meaning "delete" a reddit-ism?
When I hear "ban" I think "author isn't allowed to post for a while".
"Ban" here means "make individual posts and comments invisible to everyone except moderators". (I agree "ban" is confusing.)
I (and any other casual visitor) now have only indirect evidence regarding whether eridu's comments were really bad or were well-meaning attempts to share feminist insights into the subject, followed by understandable frustration as everything she^Whe said was quoted out of context (if not misquoted outright) and interpreted in the worst possible way.
Agreed. I would prefer that a negative contributor be prospectively banned (that is, "prevented from posting further") rather than retrospectively expunged (that is, "all their comments deleted from the record"), so as to avoid mutilating the record of past discussions.
For precedent, consider Wikipedia: if a contributor is found to be too much trouble (starting flamewars, edit-warring, etc.) they are banned, but their "talk page" discussion comments are not expunged. However, specific comments that are merely flaming, or which constitute harassment or the like, can be deleted.
charge-fee-to-all-descendants is still in progress
Once again, please don't do that. (Hiding-from-Recent-Comments is totally okay, however.)
I do think there's a place for social constructivist / radical feminist views to be aired where they apply on this site, and I don't think eridu was doing a particularly bad job of it.
Right now that sounds like one of the most brutal criticisms you could have made of radical feminism.
I don't think I'm trolling in any sense of the word I know. I'm not being disingenous about my political beliefs, I'm not intentionally trying to incense anyone either -- the people getting incensed are doing that by themselves [...] I got what I expcted -- I was able to type lots of feminist screed, I linked to my favorite blog a few times, and I blew all my karma.
We're getting into something of a semantic tarpit here, so I propose we taboo "troll".
Downvotes are, very roughly, an indication that people think you're lowering the quality of di...
Finally, the most common rational for using kyriarchy (almost exclusively used by men) is that it is less offensive as propaganda than patriarchy, since patriarchy is offensive to men.
That's not even vaguely true. Kyriarchy is generally used, and was coined in, an intersectional context.
That was also neither a helpful answer to the original question, nor a meaningful response to my comment.
Note: If you use a lmgtfy link, then you're being a jerk. It might be acceptable in the context where someone asks a question that is directly answerable by Google, like "What is a dictionary?" (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define:dictionary) because you're legitimately teaching the person a useful skill, albeit in a snarky fashion. But either way, it is rude, and jerkitude is not the appropriate sort of discourse for this site.
As such, you have exerted that power and control over her
This is a weird use of "exert", seeing as it is not based on any actions, choices or feelings on the man's part, but is merely ascribed on the basis of him being "non-feminist" (by which standard?).
Any individual male may well be affected by a wide variety of biases that may impact his relationships with women in ways that he is not aware of, but you have not provided any detailed argument for this. Stereotyping and denying individual choice/agency do not an argument make.
The fact that basically all current ev. psych is bad (hierachy reinforcing/status quo bias) doesn't imply that learning true facts would be bad.
Consider the difference between: "Stop citing current ev. psych studies" and "Stop researching ev. psych."
As chaosmosis says, I think that society does a poor job of distinguishing between gender and sex.
Although the line is not clean, gender is the social roles, sex is the physical facts. The physical facts have consequences for possible social roles. But there's lots of evidence that there are many possible social roles consistent with the physical facts.
I think there's a difference between saying that evolutionary psychology is sexist and saying that it's misused by a patriarchal society to justify itself. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't sexist, in the sense that it's conclusions aren't justified only through bias.
You might argue that we need to define the words in relation to consequentialism, but that's confusing because when most people make the claim that X is sexist they aren't saying that X has sexist effects but that sexism is a property of X.
I think that it would be better to attack patriarc...
According to the PDF about the WEIRD psychological samples, the San foragers of the Kalahari desert.
Another "interesting" bit of trivia: the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.
...The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:
And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles a
Well, everyone agrees that actors in most porn movies are just here to turn on the viewer, and could be replaced by CGI with equivalent effect. "Objectification" just means that.
Sorry, don't want to turn this into a full-fledged political argument, but your definition seems to be missing some important part. Any movie can be replaced by sufficiently realistic CGI, but left-wing folks don't seem to be against movies in general...
There were no indications that the Soviet regime had any inclination of starting a war with Germany, though ti would probably not have joined the Axis either.
The Soviets actually tried to join the Axis in October-November 1940. The sticking point was that the Germans wanted the Soviets to agree to a split in spheres of influence along the Dardanelles and Bosporus, while the Soviets wanted a share of the Balkans.
Throw in things like Basis Nord, the massive amount of war-critical natural resources the Soviets shipped the Nazis 1939-1941, the German shipm...
Sure. Heck, once I admit that it's OK to prevent me from committing mass murder to assemble my manifesto out of rotting bodies, I have admitted that it's OK to regulate the forms of speech.
Where I end up after that depends rather a lot on what I cared about in the first place.
For example, if what I care about is avoiding the differential suppression of ideas, I might end up with something like "the legality of expressing an idea I through medium M shall not depend on I." Which allows for broadcast licensing and laws against expressive homicide... though it still doesn't allow for obscenity or pornography or sedition laws. (Well, not laws against them, anyway.)
interfering with genes for arbitrary purposes risks upsetting the entire balance the gene pool has developed without purpose.
Let us look at some of the history of eugenics. Humans have been practicing eugenics for 100s of years with crops and domesticated animals. The results include a much enhanced food supply (from both animals and plants), and a "partnership" with dogs that works well for humans and appears to work well for dogs.
So it looks like interfering with the gene pool for our purposes certainly shifts any "balance" the...
A second, subtler use of the Worst Argument In The World goes like this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member is solely harmful. We immediately reject this archetypal X because it is solely harmful. Therefore, we should also immediately reject X, even though it in fact has some benefit which may outweigh the harm."
Theft is however not solely harmful, obviously one party gains.
For most people I know, that is in the swedish libertarian community, theft is theft whether or not it has socially beneficial effects, because we use the definit...
On abortion probably not - there are also big "those women are getting what they deserve" and "having children is good, not having children is selfish" components coming into play and probably play a bigger role than "murder is wrong".
Euthanasia, however, is probably mostly about Schelling fences.
A piece of neocortex consisting of approximate repeats of same structure (made from same genetic code) is not prior-less.
Now that we've established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
It's not C. Elegans. It is individual-specific which neuron groups end up learning a concept. And genome is not a blueprint, there's no short way to create a gene that would target a specific region even on the location basis. In humans there's no...
Don't much care, it probably involves synapses
Well, scientists care about that sort of things, pseudoscientists don't. The issue is that the learned circuitry is fairly different across individuals, and there is no known or plausible mechanism by which a mutation could make such highly specific modifications to the learned circuitry (as required for evopsych explanation of improved performance at Wason selection task concerning people, to give a specific example).
There's simply no known way how a gene would connect learned concepts in a very specific way as to give rise to improved performance on Wason selection task when it is discussing social interactions, but not otherwise.
Now consider the evopsych innate module explanation for improved performance on Wason selection task when it's specified verbally in terms of social rules, just to pick a specific and common example. (How the hell would such a module even interface to a bunch of learned language circuitry? That's a question which would have to be answered first).
There's a good overview of the clashes between evopsych modules and neuroscience:
http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/publications/_pdf/epmdn.pdf
Note, by the way, that evopsych proposes a very specific explanation - mo...
Most obviously, ascribing it to Ptolemy seems like a pretty serious error given Eratosthenes's famed and remarkably accurate calculation of the diameter of the earth centuries before.
is this likely to be happening to me somewhere, or you? Besides ev-psych and economics, which other sciences will Reddit expose to you primarily in the form of exhibiting Someone Is Wrong On The Internet misuses?
Note that, on gender issues at least, it also pattern-matches very strongly to the "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th century.
Indeed. Do you take 21st century scientific racism seriously? Or do you dismiss it because it pattern matches to what some idiots have said?
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, despite our natu...
Granted, this definition does look at men, but only as a sort of reference
OK, thanks for the clarification.
It seems that, like MBlume said, your model is designed to reduce the difference between the benefits provided to men and women.
Yes, insofar as "sexism" is understood as something to be reduced. It's hard to interpret "sexism in a system is a function of the differential benefits provided to men and women over the system as a whole" any other way, really.
As for the rest of this... yes. And now we've come full circle, and I ...
Thanks for pointing that out - that wasn't my intention. What I mean is that I can't even participate in any such conversation, regardless of circumstances - only feminist women are even allowed to participate and speak of this (AKA only the informed, righteous victim-saviors have any say in the matter).
Being a man forbids me to say anything. If I disagree on any point, I'm evil. If I agree on any point, I'm attempting to trick them and I'm evil. I'm an enemy soldier and I cannot be allowed, at any cost, to be perceived as even remotely close to anything ...
There are lots of words that I don't know how to taboo, because I only have a partial and largely intuitive understanding of the concepts I'm referring to by them, and can't fully explain those concepts. Examples: "exist", "truth", "correct", "right", "moral", "rational", "should", "mathematical". I don't think anyone has asked me directly to taboo any of these words, but if someone did, I might ignore the request because I think my time could be better spent trying to communic...
you are the direct subject yourself.
Yes, I meant "freedom for me" - I thought that was implied.
...If I simply told you (and you have easy means of confirming that I'm telling the truth) that I'm restricting the movements of a dozen people you've never heard of, and the restriction of freedom is done in such a way that the "victims" will never even be aware that their freedoms are being restricted (e.g. giving a mental imperative to vote republican with a denial-of-denial clause for it), would you still have the same intense this-is-wr
SIAI over its history (you can look at the Form 990s if you want) has gotten maybe half or less its budget from Thiel. Where's the rest coming from? Lady Luck's charitable writeoffs?
Still, at least you seem to have dropped your claim that SIAI or LW is a homeschooling propaganda front...
You're probably right about modern countries; however, as far as I understand, historically some countries did reasonably well under a dictatorship. Life under Hammurabi was far from being all peaches and cream, but it was still relatively prosperous, compared to the surrounding nations. A few Caesars did a pretty good job of administering Rome; of course, their successors royally screwed the whole thing up. Likewise, life in Tzarist Russia went through its ups and downs (mostly downs, to be fair).
Unfortunately, the kind of a person who seeks (and is able ...
The system of government here is enlightened absolutism.
This is a community blog. If your community has a dictator, you should overthrow him.
I hoped that I had made this clear before, but apparently I haven't:
- Evolutionary psychology is capable of producing beliefs that highly correlate to reality
- These true beliefs, propagated in patriarchal society, extend its lifespan
- Thus, evolutionary psychology tends to support patriarchy
- Thus evolutionary psychology is sexist.
Something that perhaps you have made clear in other postings I have not read, but not in this one, is what consequences for action you derive from those bullet points. Given your attitude to the truth as "just"...
I'm confused by your history.
As I understood the history:
1st wave - Susan B. Anthony, Women's Suffrage, "voluntary motherhood" (i.e. allow contraceptives for married couples, but sex is for married people only) ~1920s
2nd wave - de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex", Andrea Dworkin, anti-pornography movement ~1960s
3rd wave - sex positivity feminism ~1990s
Each movement was a reaction to perceived shortfalls in the prior intellectual movement. You talk about things like 2nd wave was a reaction to 3rd wave.
I'm more sympathetic to Dworkin than the...
To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike?
I suppose that is just a difference between us. Not a disagreement, but a difference: you are one way and I am another.
You think of disliking someone and ask, what stops you murdering them?
I think of disliking someone and ask (and only because of your question), what would start me murdering them?
Number of days since casual murder was used in a discussion on LessWrong: 0.
...The (bad feeling of) fear of getting caught? The (bad feeling of) remorse from taking a human's life?
Or do yo
If that isn't hyperbole, I'm interested in your reasons for believing that.
Of course it is. The point is that we see all around us (that's another hyperbole), and it is a recurring theme on LessWrong (that isn't), that people persist in acting, or failing to act, in ways that they "feel bad" about. As a strategy for change, "feeling bad" doesn't seem to be effective, does it?
"Making someone feel bad", or "good", fares even worse -- see this parable.
it is a recurring theme on LessWrong (that isn't), that people persist in acting, or failing to act, in ways that they "feel bad" about.
I agree.
As a strategy for change, "feeling bad" doesn't seem to be effective, does it?
I disagree. One of the reasons akrasia is so notable is that feeling bad usually works. Usually touching a hot stove or hit your thumb with a hammer once is enough to change your behavior. Often being mocked by your peers, or sensing genuine disappointment from your mentors, is enough to change your behavior. It's only in these weird corner cases where opposing strong motivations collide that we notice the unusual inefficacy of bad feelings, and haul out the rational analysis toolkit.
But doesn't the same logic lead me to conclude that pain isn't aversive? (That is: if pain were actually aversive, people wouldn't do things that cause them pain. People do things that cause them pain, therefore pain is not aversive.)
The problem with that logic as it applies to pain is that pain can be aversive without completely preventing people from doing something. If a behavior B is N% likely ordinarily, and B becomes Y% likely if coupled to pain, and Y < X, that's evidence for considering pain aversive even though we still do B. Relatedly, if B is...
Possibly not. I do think punishments can deter bad actions. But I think this works best when those punishments are clearly described in advance of the crime.
Also, it seems to me that there is a perverse aspect of regret, that it punishes sympathetic malefactors more than it punishes psychopathic ones.
I won't respond to the first half of your post because you have done essentially nothing but rephrase my own comment in a seemingly argumentative tone.
That was not my intention. What I meant was, "we should taboo the word 'oppression', and it would be great if everyone else did, too".
Thanks for your examples. One thing I noticed about them is that they are almost entirely male-centric. For example, you say,
"Sexual advances that seemed innocuous to the men making them would be perceived as any combination of coercive, etc."
What...
Emotional work is everything one needs to do to maintain a positive affect because the positive affect is expected from your social role.
For example, you don't think that the fast-food worker is really that happy to see you?
If one spouse in a relationship is expected to repress emotions in this way, that's unfair. If society doesn't give the spouse credit for the circumstance, that's even worse.
Historically, that spouse was the wife - hence feminism's concern about emotional work.
So why are you, who have professed to believe that this was pointless all along, still bothering?
In one of the comments Eliezer banned, which you can still see here, eridu said:
I knew what I was going to get when I posted my first comment -- I just thought it'd be an amusing waste of my time, which has been roughly the case.
But, if someone doesn't want to admit that logic exists or you just disagree with someone as to what logic is, there's really nothing to be done but to walk away.
That's not necessarily true. If we disagree on what logic is, I can work out the rules of what you consider logic and decide whether, using those rules, I come to a different conclusion than you do (in which case I can try to convince you of that different conclusion using your rules), or I can attempt to convince you that you're wrong via illogical means (like telling you a convincing story, or using question-begging language, or etc.). I can also do the latter if you reject logic altogether.
It's the impression I've got from informal observation, and it's true when talking about myself specifically. (If I disagree, I presumably have something to say that has not yet been said. If I agree, that's less likely to be true. I don't know if that's the whole reason, but it feels like a substantial part of it.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ provides an anecdote, and suggests that Eliezer has also gotten the same impression.
Generally, yes. But it is possible to be poor at updating on the evidence related to a proposition P, but realize the fact "TimS is poor at updating related to P." It's not common, but it does happen.*
Don't we aspire to be the Lens that Sees Its Flaws.
There are several moderators, I don't think Eliezer is the most active.
I am aware of this, but Eliezer came off as being particularly invested in personally combating people whom he perceives as trolls.
It doesn't, "ban" just means the comment is hidden.
Ah, I stand corrected then, thanks for the info.
Patriarchal bias isn't biological, like most cognitive biases (though it's obviously related).
My apologies, when I said "...many ... people are in principle incapable of learning enough about feminism..." I did not mean to imply that they were unable to do so due to purely biological reasons. The reasons may well be social, as you say in your second-to-last paragraph.
That said, I do believe that my post above correctly represents the opinions of at least some feminists, because several self-identified feminists (though not you, obviously) had...
...Patriarchy is learned behavior. Men and women are rewarded for behaving in accordance with patriarchy, punished for deviating, and as children, have ample opportunity to both witness others being rewarded and punished, and are encouraged to identify with and model relevantly-gendered adults.
As such, patriarchal behavior patterns can be extinguished. The way this typically happens is by an individual reading some basic feminism, realizing that they agree with it, and starting to mentally punish themselves (with, say, guilt) whenever they notice they are be
To put it concretely, the common evo-psych statement that women are more selective because they have to carry a fetus to term while men are more promiscuous because inseminating a woman is cheap causes rape apologism and policing of women's sexuality. It provides a narrative by which the people who do those things can point to science and say "Look, clearly I'm right because of this finding that states that it is unnatural for a woman to do something I disapprove of!"
Just parachuted in.
So my first thought here is that the obvious point of atta...
Meta-note: Right now, as I check the top comments for today, all the top comments for today are replies to heavily downvoted comments. This is the behavior the downvoted-thread-killer was meant to prevent, but we don't yet have "troll-toll all descendants" feature. Noting this because multiple people asked for examples and how often something like it happened.
I wonder if there can be a race condition, when a comment is started before its parent is downvoted to -3, but submitted after, resulting in an unexpected karma burn.
Hmm, all good points. I'll have to take some time to see if a thought experiment or other hypothesis could be constructed to comply with the requirements these imply. That seems to be just the problem though - I can't think of any hypothesis that does fit. It's basically "no matter what the hell you do or think, you're wrong, because [Magic!] is ingrained inside you and you can't get away from it and you're evil and should feel guilty because of that".
Note that I'm mostly ranting about my inability to reduce all of this and put it in simple words by this point.
Okay, let me be more explicit: how do you know that feminism leads to higher standards of living rather than the other way round?
Yes, I'm highly doubtful on the value of guilt trips as a tactical tool. I'm have this vague meta (and therefore mostly pointless) discussion about my frustrations about eridu's tactics and goals - and the rest of y'all are taking me seriously on the object level.
Your response explains why you would want everyone to feel guilty rather than a subgroup, but does not adequately explain why you would want everyone to feel guilty rather than no one. I do infer from your response that you believe that feelings of guilt will help to change the wrong society is committing more than their absence.
in general all heterosexual relationships are patriarchal...coercive or anti-feminst.
Comments - The Worst Argument in the World
Can you taboo some of those terms? I can't tell what you are saying. Are you saying that hetero relationships usually have the man taking the "captain" role? (I agree with that). Are you saying that's bad when you call it "coercive and antifeminist"? Can you explain that, because it's not obvious.
Some of the information within the human brain "comes from genetics" through the expression of genetics in the environment and its observation by the human in question.
For instance, I believe that I have brown hair, ten fingers, a hairy chest, the ability to count, and various other attributes. These beliefs are information in my brain; however, they are also more than a little bit "genetically determined". My brain didn't start out with a genetically-determined belief "I have brown hair"; rather, my body ("genetically&qu...
A brain is also an information-processing system, and as such, by Occam's razor it seems more probable that information within it comes from its environment rather than genetics
I don't see how that follows, and "By Occam's razor" should only be invoked once you've established that two models are equivalent except for some extraneous detail.
I don't see social consequences as being inherently part of the research findings themselves, but rather an [Insert Unknown Explanation] process within humans that react in certain ways to the publications. My model classes research findings as "information", input to the human-machine that will do some arcane computation and output negative social consequences when there is no prior function for correctly interpreting that input.
It is true, however, that the human mental structure and the findings interact in a very causal way that ought not to...
Don't wanna. According to the post, you're supposed to detect instances of WAITW based on their pattern, not their conclusions. Same as all other fallacies.
I personally would like better working conditions for everyone. I live in the real world.
But you would also like everyone to not complain about the working conditions they currently have? Ending people's complaints requires an even more magical solution than ending porn or prostitution.
Why don't you say to yourself "People complain. Deal."
They chose the work. Given real world economic realities, I'm not sure I see the problem.
Reality includes the fact that people are free to argue about whether reality sucks and how to improve it. So wha...
There's a lot of ways to act on data about group differences in intelligence.
For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck. Or I might decide to research the differe...
Ideally, the article should discomfort everyone who has made weak arguments, whether Blue, Green, or Libertarian.
The article's purpose should be education. By beginning with arguments that most agree are bad, and then progressing to arguments that they may recognize as close to their own, the article will convince most readers that this is a valid fallacy to watch out for, and then show them some arguments close to theirs that fit the pattern.
I'll grant that the objectification of people is wrong from a consequentialist perspective, barring any redeeming factors. I'll also point out that any action (like supporting a given field of study) that has negative consequences which exceed the positive consequences is immoral from a consequentialist perspective. I'll refrain from making any claims about whether supporting any specific field is a net negative.
No, I think that actions are 'justified' when the expected consequences are in accordance with the values of the actor. Actions are only 'moral' i...
There is virtue theory in utilitarianism, that works out very similarly, yes. Note that "rule utilitarianism" usually refers to an ethical system in which following rules is valued for itself - I forget the name for the view amongst utilitarians that following rules is high-utility, which is what I think you mean to refer to.
Usually when we say 'evidence' we mean 'Bayesian evidence'. If you examine arbitrary triangles and they all happen to have one side whose length squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides, then being a triangle is evidence that the shape has this property. It was still evidence even if it turns out the triangle didn't have the property.
Reading through this and most of the comments, it occurs to me that virtually all the discussion is around MORAL argument. Do we ever succumb to the worst argument in the world in non-moral issues?
"How can we fix this light bulb?" "Use a hammer. A hammer is a tool and tool's fix things."
There it seems like an incomplete argument. And then somebody comes along and nails a few pieces of wood together with a hammer producing something stable enough to stand upon, and then proceeds to stand on it to reach the lightbulb, which just turned...
So, for example, he argues that anything that can be considered theft is irrational and immoral because if everyone committed all acts of theft imaginable, society would collapse, and thus the idea of property wouldn't exist, and thus we would have created a "contradiction", and thus that would violate a universal definition of the word should, and it would thus be immoral
This doesn't sound like a case of the 'worst argument in the world'. Also, I've now twice encountered someone here who seems to be literally angry at a long dead philosopher. This is very confusing to me.
For example, suppose that evolutionary science has determined that is was pro-survival in the past for females to refrain from occupations which had high fatality rates.
Reinforcing that would be claiming that females should refrain from or be prohibited/discouraged from those occupations in the present and near future.
Also sexist is the line of thought "Females are statistically more/less likely to be X, therefore I require that it be a male/female who performs task Y.", when variation within each sex is great enough that there are a very large n...
Do we, though, agree to the rape of a woman if said rape results in the feeding of 10 starving children in Africa?
I'm too selfish to put myself at risk of retaliation for the sake of only 10 children, so no. Also, that is a really strange scenario.
You claim that morality is a balance of things. For example, though taxation is the involuntary taking of other people's stuff, if it has some good consequences then we ought to not say it's theft.
No, the claim is that taxation is theft if we define that way, but we should look more closely to see whether the theft is justified anyway, even if theft is usually bad.
Morality is not about a balance of things - it is a set of rules to be followed.
Many (most?) people here disagree. What happens when the rules conflict? Then you've got to weigh the balance.
Yeah, there's that.
For me it becomes a matter of tradeoffs.
If people decide to trust me enough to actually engage honestly with the question, I try to be careful about engaging honestly with their answer, and often that can lead to some exceptionally interesting conversations. I've made some excellent friends this way, as well as a few educational opponents.
Most people don't trust me that much, of course. But I'm at a stage in my life where efficiently working my way through lots of people in order to find one or two worth exploring as excellent friend...
A fun special case of this is applying it to arguments:
Pointing out the that an author accepted money from interested parties is an ad-hominem argument.
Which is unfortunate since this seems to be one of the few recent articles with relatively short inferential distances.
..."Affirmative action is racist!" True if you define racism as "favoring people based on their race", but though the archetypal case of racism (white people keeping black people down) has nothing to recommend it, affirmative action (possibly) does. In the archetypal case, decisions are made based on race, success is completely decoupled from merit, and disadvantaged groups are locked into a cycle of poverty with little to no escape. Affirmative action keeps the first disadvantage, arguably escapes the second disadvantage depending on the
Is it always illegitimate to bring up the facts that abortion ends a life, that taxes are not paid voluntarily, and that affirmative action benefits some races at the expense of others? If someone with right-wing views on these policies does weave one of these facts into his arguments on less wrong, will he be adoringly referred to this page as though it were a drop-dead refutation?
If in the course of an argument you become frustrated by the other party mentioning true things, perhaps he is making the worst argument in the world. And perhaps there is another explanation.
Taxes are not paid voluntarily and affirmative action benefits some races at the (immediate) expense of others, I agree. But note that in saying "abortion ends a life", you described things on somewhat of a higher level and used a more value-laden word than in the other two cases - like saying "Taxes are stolen" or "Affirmative action discriminates". "Abortion ends a life" is still sneaking in connotations, since we imagine ending a human life, rather than a cat's life or an ant's life, and the other person may well object that the embryo's life hasn't quite reached the ant level yet. In general, there's no license to bring up a categorization like 'life', as an unquestionable assumption or 'fact', if the other person is going to disagree with the connotations of the categorization, like "life is precious".
You can bring up as a fact that the embryo has 256 cells capable of metabolism but not capable of surviving outside the uterus. Calling it a 'life' is an attempt to Sneak in Connotations and establish a value judgment, because we all know that life is precious, even though we don't care very much about accidentally inhaling ...
Is it always illegitimate to bring up the facts that abortion ends a life, that taxes are not paid voluntarily, and that affirmative action benefits some races at the expense of others?
No. If you didn't get that, you should reread the post. The point is to discuss the relevant features of the subject in question, not say "murder" or "theft" and stop thinking.
As Alex Mennen brought up on my blog, the problem you're worrying about is that someone will say "That's an example of the Worst Argument In The World, which is typically a weak argument", even though that particular version of the argument is actually quite strong.
Luckily, I hear there's a new post addressing exactly that error!
No and no (hopefully) and yes and yes.
The examples you give bring up specific points of those, the specific facts that are negative. The Worst Argument In The World is when you don't state the particular negative fact, but instead (truthfully) proclaims that X is part of larger set Y which notoriously also contains that one specific negative fact (which X really does have), but also many others which give Y a large net negative value, making X have a large net negative value (to uninformed audiences) by virtue of being part of Y.
Bring up the specific fact, not an arbitrary large subgroup which also contains both X and the specific fact and is known to have a massive net connotation.
In Lesswrong discussion, I've seen similar arguments made, and the most frequent response was "Taboo X and Y", followed closely by a more elaborate reduction.
I'm not so much disagreeing as giving a different perspective. Even in utero, most organs already fulfill their intended function. It takes little time for kidneys to produce urine, or for a proto-heart to beat. There are exceptions, such as certain liver functions not being available until late into the pregnancy or post natal. The point is that it doesn't take all that much information to describe which layer of cells goes where. It's an astounding process, cells inducing other cells to specialize in certain ways, and gradually creating 3D structures by ...
having sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings is nevertheless bayesian evidence that something is a science. The question is just how good that evidence is.
No, not at all. The question isn't how good that evidence is, the question is what other evidence is there. And in this particular case we have, for example, the lack of theories which can be falsified.
I would have no problems with calling evopsy, say, a field of study. But saying it's a science implies rigor and tests against reality which are, um, absent.
By definition, capital punishment is not murder. Murder is defined as [b]unlawful[/b], malicious killing - you have to kill them, you have to have been intending malice towards them, you have to have deliberately meant to cause them harm (thus accidental workplace deaths don't count unless you set them up intentionally; otherwise its just manslaughter), and you have to have been doing so unlawfully.
Intending malice is not strictly a requirement. Killing someone because you (for example) believe that it will save their immortal soul is not malicious. Euthenasia is also still punished as murder in many juristictions even when it is done with the intent of mercy not malice.
I like this article very much, and I think it's an important fallacy to take note of. I do not however, think it is the worst fallacy. I think the worst fallacy is: I don't need a reason/argument to believe what I believe.
I suppose we could go around describing various things as "not especially pernicious"?
Because our speech patterns are, of course, insufficiently atypical.
What would it mean when an ideologies arguments can't be taken seriously unless you're sure the speaker is sincere?
Well... OK, consider the following distinct but related pattern.
I do in fact believe that the reason the government ought, as a rule, not take infant children away from their parents and feed them to baby-eating aliens is that the consequences of doing so would probably be negative. But if someone were to nod their head in my direction at a party and say, in a conversation, "Of course Dave here probably thinks the reason the government...
I just meant that a non-feminist trying to pass a feminist Turing test would get nicked if they used the ""unfair treatment of a woman based on her sex" definition, but would probably get away with "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex, but it only counts if their sex has been historically disadvantaged." There's a difference between the definitions a well-read feminist would pick up on.
Your comment was also immediately voted down. I brought it back to neutral karma. I haven't been following this conversation, but it doesn't seem worthy of immediate downvotes...
Feeling bad is one of the reasons why I don't do certain things, but not the only one. If I'm convinced something that would make me feel bad would also have desirable consequences that would outweigh that (even considering ethical injunctions, TDT-related considerations, etc.), I try to overcome my emotional hang-up (using precommitment devices, drinking alcohol, etc., if necessary) and do that anyway.
you will read actual radical feminist women and figure that out for yourself
I did, believe it or not. My impression of "actual radical feminist women" has been largely negative; they seem to be more interested in winning battles than in acquiring true beliefs or solving any real-world problems. That's probably why I find your views so fascinating, since you are actually willing (some of the time) to justify your claims.
...I can at least say that you're very wrong about liberal feminism being against compulsory sexuality (liberal feminists suppo
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That's biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.
By itself it only proves that hormones are not sufficient and socialization is necessary, not that hormones are not necessary and socialization is sufficient.
IIRC many people born with ambiguous external genitalia, accidentally surgically assigned to the sex other than their gonadal one, and raised as the corresponding gender tend to become transgender (...
Yudkowsky's luck consisted of having a billionaire friend (Peter Thiele) who bankrolled SIAI
How did he acquire such a friend, and who convinced him to bankroll SIAI?
It's my impression that "front group" as typically used refers to a hidden/covert connection. LessWrong on the other hand has the logos/links for CFAR, SI and the Future of Humanity Institute displayed prominently.
the current state of behavioral patterns and rate of improvement in gender-fairness of "my" (for lack of a better label) subculture (and, if I may presume, many other subcultures made of smarter-than-average people) is currently right before the line whether spending more to eradicate Patriarchy becomes more damaging than the amount of patriarchy it would remove currently does.
If this is true of your subgroup, your subgroup is wonderfully exceptional. It certainly isn't true of most smarter-than-average subcultures.
One can argue about whether ...
Generally, I, like most humans, think that people doing bad things should feel bad about it.
FWIW, I do not think that. I would like people doing bad things to stop doing those things. "Feeling bad" is (I believe) never useful: not to the person having the feeling, and not to anyone else.
Feminists don't have that much funding.
How much funding would it take to at least make some progress towards answering the question, "what causes non-feminists to become feminists" ? If you create a Kickstarter for this purpose, I'll personally chip in a few bucks.
Again, I'm a little surprised to hear you say that feminists (or, perhaps, just feminist activists) had not made any attempts to answer the question. Yes, their finding is very limited -- but doesn't that fact make it all the more important to discover the most efficient way of spe...
Quickly, it devolved into "what are eridu's feminist politics," which is a proxy for "how stupid is eridu."
Being wrong is not the same as being stupid.
A counterfactual world where the argument stayed on-topic would mean that we'd be talking about evolutionary psychology now.
It would've been impossible to understand your opposition to evolutionary psychology without first understanding your feminist politics.
That said, IMO the on-topic discussion was over when you made it clear that you value advancing your cause more than you v...
I also observe that wedrifid's opinion of you doesn't appear to be steered with equal expected posterior probability in light of how you react versus his predictions of your reactions.
I can't even decipher what it is you are accusing wedrifid of here. Apart from being wrong and biased somehow.
Most feminists don't know what operant conditioning and extinction are. Without knowing those things, it's easy to confuse "very hard" with "impossible."
Agreed -- assuming, of course, that operant conditioning is as effective as you claim (when applied to humans), which I still doubt.
The mention of guilt is just because of another comment chain in this thread. I'm not trying to argue for guilt in particular.
I see, but then, what exactly are you claiming ?
...What sort of emotion would a homophobe feel, talking to their homophobic f
Perhaps I should clarify my meaning with an example. Let us assume that there is a job opening, for some qualified, high-status post (say, chief financial officer of a large company). There are four applicants for this position. Anne and Andrew are competant, qualified, and have a lot of experience in the field; either would be an excellent choice. Bob and Barbara are clearly incompetant for the position, neither having managed to complete their elementary schooling; either of these applicants would be a terrible choice.
There have been, and probably still ...
It does make some falsifiable predictions: it predicts for example that increasing local awareness and resistance of the patriarchal structure should lead to improved outcomes for women along quantifiable dimensions, relative wages being one obvious example. ... The trouble as I see it is more that there are several social theories making the same or closely related predictions, and distinguishing between them is much harder than evaluating the predictions of one relative to the status quo...
Agreed. As far as I understand, eridu does in fact oppose the...
So, if gender is a social construct, I'm presuming you advocate absolute equality of opportunity, and absolute social blindness to biological sex? So one physical entry requirement into the armed forces and police? And generally no positive discrimination anywhere?
To answer the question I think I can answer - The way to change social norms is to perform the social norm you would like instead, in violation of the established norms.
So #1 on my list. OK.
This requires very sophisticated understanding of what the current norms are. If you partially violate a norm, that can sometimes strengthen the norm. Sometimes, apparently unrelated norms reinforce each other. Sometimes, the norm is just too strong and you end up being rejected from the community.
This is scary. Have any advice for how to model the situation corr...
I would ask what you mean by culpable that does not have the same problems as guilt. (I guess you mean responsibility in some sense?)
But instead, since you bring up that this may need more tabooing, can you explain what you think you and other people who seek to do good things should do about some bad thing happening, and why that's the best approach?
To kick it off, I hold that [guilt, responsibility, culpability, etc] are features of a badly flawed social/moral protocol that may not be applicable or optimal in this (or any) case. I think moral agents lik...
Is guilt the only motivator? How about change it because it sucks, never mind who should feel additionally bad.
Oh, of course there is a social message there. I think eridu was asking whether I thought it was genetically determined.
Hmm ... I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for here in terms of "social messages".
Disney movies contain characters having interpersonal cooperation and conflict — which are pretty damn universal in human societies, and we probably have some adaptations for them, at least some of which we accurately observe. Disney movies contain characters using facial expressions of emotion (e.g. wide-eyed interest or attraction; crying to express sadness or upset); etc.
So — Messages such as "cooperation lets you accomplish more than you could accompl...
Not sufficient evidence. e.g. Eridu may have copy-pasted a sentence from somewhere else, because she/he couldn't bother retyping it -- if it's sincerely meant, it doesn't count as a troll.
Since most humans right now are sexist, if a fact would be sexist in the minds of most humans, we can skip the qualifer and call it sexist.
But it is also a fact. If some research findings are true, and also sexist for this value of sexism, how do you think this should affect our approach to research, given that the facts will remain the same whether we interpret them in a sexist manner or not?
You failed to answer the question. You claimed that some men, and ArisKatsaris in particular, own women's bodies. ArisKatsaris was asking which woman's body he or she owns, since he or she was not aware of this fact and would like to make use of his or her property.
Hmm, a good point. Unfortunately, naturalism and its associated terminology are very useful when discussing evolution and ev-psych -related matters, so I don't see any obvious solution to the problem.
Would it be more strictly accurate to say that "certain media reports on evolutionary psychology are sexist, in the sense of perpetuating harmful myths"?
The evolutionary psychology itself concentrates on finding differences which actually exist; equating this to a false claim in support of other differences is surely the fault of the reporter, not the scientist.
I hereby dispute (without bothering to actually present evidence of usage) that comments are as central as you imply to the concept of “blog”.
On printing presses not being "free" either (because you have to buy them) well this is getting into the details. However, it may help to distinguish the funding model. Consider two extreme models:
1) Funding comes from a grant or trust, and is used to buy the press, paper, salaries for journalists, press-operators etc. The funder has no say on what content gets printed (it is up to journalists'/editors' discretion). Any proceeds from paper sales get paid back into the trust.
This seems like a case of truly free speech (in both senses of free) beca...
Generally speaking, there are fewer upvotes later in a thread, since fewer people read that far. If the children to your comment have more karma then your comment, it's reasonable to assume that people saw both comments and chose to up vote theirs, but if a parent to your comment has more karma, you can't really draw any inference from that at all.
Genuine agreement with whimsical annoyance about having to consider actual situations and connotations.
What about going from "members of subcategory X of category Y are more likely to possess characteristic C" to "In the absence of further information, a particular member of subcategory X is more likely to possess characteristic C than a non-X member of category Y".
You are saying you can't go from probabilistic information to certainty. This is a strawman.
Previously you defined sexism as something which must be inherently unjustified, or else it doesn't fit your defintion.
Now you're effectively said that if "This field of study encourages unjustified actions" is equivalent to "This field of study is unjustified". (in regards to gender matters, i guess).
Since EVERY field of study will effectively directly or indirectly encourage some unjustified actions for some people, you've effectively declared every field of study unjustified.
I suggest you try and do some serious work towards trying t...
I didn't downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn't because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).
"Rethuglican" is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don't like, but it doesn't pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It's an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.
"We are the 99%" doesn't share much of the WAitW features. It doesn't try to sneak in connotations, it doesn't attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.
I think a rule utilitarian might say that I should evaluate various algorithms for selecting a path and adopt the algorithm that will in general cause me to select paths with the highest overall net utility. Which, yes, is similar to the virtue ethicist (as described here) in that they are both concerned with selecting mechanisms for selecting paths, rather than with selecting paths... but different insofar as "virtuous" != "having high net utility".
Thanks, by the way, for indulging my question and elaborating on something tangential to your point.
Besides, I am smarter than my brain, after all.
This is similar to the 'corrupted hardware' claim insofar as both seem to me to be in tension with the software/hardware metaphor: if your brain is your hardware, and your rational deliberation and reflection is software, then it doesn't make sense to say that the brain isn't as smart as you (the software) are. It wouldn't make sense to say of hardware that it doesn't [sufficiently] perform the functions of ...
I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't."
Note, however that "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features", is strong evidence that X does in fact have those features. Thus the burden is on the person arguing otherwise to show that it doesn't.
Keep in mind that your brain's corrupted hardware is designed to fail in just this kind of "special plea...
How else is one meant to categorise instances, other than by noting that they share features with training data?
Just because (e.g.) archetypal cases of theft have other things wrong with them doesn't mean that theft also isn't wrong qua theft. I think you're just choosing to favour some categories (e.g. benefit/harm) over others.
When you say,
Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.
I think you bed the question against those who oppose criminality qua criminality.
It's true that you should also consider the advantages of this specific case of theft. But individual exclaimations aren't meant to be complete arguments.
This implies that there is an intrinsic "wrongness" somewhere inside "theft" itself. Where, then, does the human hand reach into the vast void of existence to retrieve this wrongness to which theft is associated?
"Theft", the word, does not have any wrongness. Otherwise, we could use "Borbooka" instead. Let's do that. Does Borbooka have inherent wrongness? Well, what is Borbooka?
Borbooka is, apparently, when an item, which some animals apparently say verbally and apparently implicitly mutually agree is for the exclusive use of "one particular" animal, is moved from one point in spacetime to another point in spacetime such that another animal gains implicit exclusive use of this item without there being an apparent verbal exchange between animals that would apparently make them all understand that both animals "wanted" this item to be displaced thus.
Where, in the Borbooka defined above, is this mystical "wrongness" you insinuate? Are these not all simple conventions and agreements between said animals? Does Borbooka somehow create or destroy matter, or anything at all? If these conventions were not there and all the animals never had the implicit agreement that one item "belonged" to one animal, would Borbooka still be wrong? Would it still even exist?
I thought this was completely covered by a conjunction of the Metaethics and Guide to Words sequences.
For most people, beliefs are not supported by arguments at all. If we restrict our analysis to the tiny fraction of abortion opponents whose beliefs are supported by arguments, then I suspect they mostly do believe the Schelling fence argument. All but a tiny minority of that tiny minority believe specious arguments against abortion as well -- so what?
You think I could replace "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex, but it only counts if their sex has been historically disadvantaged" with "unfair treatment of a woman based on her sex" ? I don't think that would pass an ideological Turing test.
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
One could go further, and say its basis is often wrong - the central fallacy. Why would our initial, instinctive reaction be the be all, end all?
Yes, our brain also has the a general purpose module, but it's not as effective as the special purpose ones on the problems they are designed for.
They aren't designed, they're shaped by evolution, and evolution is driven by differential reproduction, which is larger for more widely applicable improvements.
That is also what the ethics theory would predict.
How so? Did you read my link? Two people are making a bet on a trait. If results gone other way, would ethics theory predict that too?
...It doesn't explain why some cards and not others seem releva
I don't even see how to phrase your position coherently.
There's far more hypotheses which a human updates on when learning in the early life than there are genes, so there's simply not enough genes to address priors to hypotheses individually. A lot in the human body (minor blood vessels, details in the fingerprint patterns, etc) is not set by genes - most of the fine detail isn't individually controlled by genes.
...But there are genes that control how strong synapses are under what conditions, and there are genes that control the conditions in different
The same way the hunger module interfaces with the learned language circuitry when someone tells you there is cake in the fridge.
There's no specific "eat cake" module there, it's learned that cake reduces hunger, that's the whole point.
The cute answer is actually more revealing than you think and might help resolve this conversation.
Astronomy lets you predict the way celestial objects move in the sky. You can trivially extend this to weak!Astrology, which just asserts that the movement of the celestial bodies has some kind of systematic causal impact on the way humans behave. However, you would quite reasonably take issue with strong!Astrology, which makes specific, detailed, wrong claims about the nature and extent of these interactions, as well as the general sloppy standards of the fi...
You misunderstand me. Dspeyer used it above as an example of a non-central fallacy, implying that Ev Psych is not very much like what science is. I meant to disagree. To the extent of my awareness, Ev Psych makes predictions and tests them, and goes on to build up theories, making it a typical example of a science.
I'm not so sure when you say it doesn't specifically use evolutionary theory in the same way Biologists normally do, and thus it's not a science. Even if that were true, that's like saying Meteorology isn't a science because they don't always us...
For what it's worth, I quibbled with this at the time, but now I find it an incredibly useful concept. I still wish it had a more transparent name -- we always call it "the worst argument in the world", and can't remember "noncentral fallacy", but it's been really useful to have a name for it at all.
Then there's another half--when the wrongness of something is missed because it does not (technically by an approximate dictionary definition) fall into a pre-existing category in the 'Wrong Cluster'. Examples: Forced consent, dishonesty that's 'technically not lying', extortion that's 'technically not stealing' getting a free ride.
So we have a general 'linguistic ethical determinism' (better name anybody?) fallacy, wherein something is considered wrong if and only if it comes under an existing Category of Wrong according to a pedantic definition. (This is...
The paper could've been called "The Biological Foundations of Culture" and it would've been more accurate. Read it before saying that.
Sure, in principle.
That said, at the risk of getting political, my usual reaction when I hear people complain about legislation that provides "special benefits" for queers (a common real-world idea that has some commonality with the accusation of having embraced an equal-and-opposite bias) is that the complainers don't really have a clue what they're talking about, and that the preferential bias they think they see is simply what movement towards equality looks like when one is steeped in a culture that pervasively reflects a particular kind of inequality.
And I suspect this is not unique to queers.
So, yeah, I think you're probably being uncharitable.
In my great foresight i already basically wrote up the long one before deciding to go with the above, so i'll just finish that now.
what is your preferred language?
That would be English.
In case that wasn't what you meant to learn: i was raised with German as my first and only language. At eleven years old, i began learning English at a German secondary school. A few years later (uncertain how many exactly) i began to actually learn English, outside school, mostly using literature and internet content. And yes that's primarily written language. Speaking ...
Well, some recent hindsight analysis (during the eridu radical-feminist debacle) allowed me to notice that it seems highly likely that nearly all female feminists I've encountered in person with common knowledge of such were mostly of the kind that had one or few strong very bad near-type personal experiences with men, or many small but memorable such near-type experiences. The kinds you'd probably expect from a stereotypical scenario of "The Father is Master and Law of the House" or a poor waitress working late shifts at a café on the same stree...
From Finally Feminism 101:
Sexism is both discrimination based on gender and the attitudes, stereotypes, and the cultural elements that promote this discrimination. Given the historical and continued imbalance of power, where men as a class are privileged over women as a class (see male privilege), an important, but often overlooked, part of the term is that sexism is prejudice plus power. Thus feminists reject the notion that women can be sexist towards men because women lack the institutional power that men have.
This is a fairly mainstream feminist bl...
I'll take a shot.
What we choose to measure affects what we choose to do. If I adopt the definition above, and I ask a wish machine to "minimize sexism", maybe it finds that the cheapest thing to do is to ensure that for every example of institutional oppression of women, there's an equal and opposite oppression of men. That's...not actually what I want.
So let's work backwards. Why do I want to reduce sexism? Well, thinking heuristically, if we accept as a given that men and women are interchangeable for many considerations, we can assume that anyone treating them differently is behaving suboptimally. In the office in the example, the dress code can't be all that helpful to the work environment, or the women would be subject to it. Sexism can be treated as a pointer to "cheap opportunities to improve people's lives". The given definition cuts off that use.
I'd considered the possibility, but the fact that the parents were significantly net-upvoted made it seem churlish to attribute downvotes simply to the thread it's in. It seems more plausible now that you (and at least one other person) have endorsed it.
people are terrible at separating normative and empirical claims
That's a much broader problem than the misunderstanding and misuse of evo. psych. I think one of the major aims of humanism/transhumanism should be getting more people to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements -- between is and ought. And, given how pervasive that confusion is across human cultures, the roots of it might be a fruitful area of investigation for evo. psych., along with other branches of cognitive science.
I can't help but notice that at lea...
His estimate of the work involved might be too high as well, but I don't know enough about the field to make anything other than a guess.
As for my reasons for believing that his estimate of the benefits is too low, I discussed it on other threads, but the gist of it is as follows:
1). If we are going to commit a large amount of resources to sweeping social changes, we need to know as much as possible before we pull the trigger, especially if the trigger is connected to the firing pin on the "ban sexual intercourse" cannon (that metaphor was, perha...
I should clarify that it seems not only infeasible in the short term but lacks anything resembling a clear path to get there. And while an uncharitable person might say the same about CEV, SIAI working on CEV doesn't involve forcing everyone else to change their patterns of social interaction in service of goals that are not clearly defined.
I think eridu wants secondary sex characteristics to stop being morally relevant (i.e. never treat women different than men). I think that's impossible - but society is not careful about what really is a secondary sex characteristic.
If you uncover differences it may be a good idea to look at their origins...
I think it's pretty obvious that there are many differences between genders. Even eridu would agree to this, IMO, since his stated objective is to eliminate gender in order to eliminate the differences.
Any difference large and widespread enough to make group-level rather than individual-level policy should hit you between the eyes.
That's just a recipe for indulging your own biases, IMO. That said, I doubt that differences between gender currently justify group-level policy...
I know people of various ancestries, including near-pure Jews and near-pure Aryans. The Jews are not less creative, weaker, sneakier, greedier, less heroic, or more bent on world domination than the Aryans...
Ok, so what this sounds like to me is, "I'd go out and do a bunch of research, in order to work around my biases by using ironclad evidence". As far as I understand, eridu claims that people would just use the evidence selectively to justify their biases, instead. For example, they might notice that the crime rate in NY is higher than in o...
So what is your opinion on transpeople?
This is the fallacy of gray.
Okay, fair enough. It's very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
How would you like this to occur?
To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike?
That isn't putting it another way, it's a different question entirely.
The (bad feeling of) fear of getting caught? The (bad feeling of) remorse from taking a human's life?
Is that what stops you murdering (more) people? Remorse? Who did you kill last time?
what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike?
As for me, the fact that if murdering somebody one dislikes were right, then one would have to be extra careful to never be disliked by anybody (if one doesn't want to be killed), and that would be a lot nastier than people one dislikes staying alive. (Yes, that would make no sense to CDTists, but people aren't CDTists anyway.)
Would you mind being in a prison that enabled you to do those things?
Yes. If this were many years ago and I weren't so conversant on the massive differences between the ways different humans see the world, I'd be very confused that you even had to ask that question.
Would you sell possessions to buy weapons to attack a person would runs an online voluntary community who changes the rules without consulting anyone?
No. There are other options. At the moment I'm still vainly hoping that Eliezer will see reason. I'm strongly considering just dropping out.
Freedom is never a terminal value. If you dig a bit, you should be able to explain why freedom is important/essential in particular circumstances.
Ironically, the appearance of freedom can be a default terminal value for humans and some other animals, if you take evolutionary psychology seriously. Or, to be more accurate, the appearance of absence of imposed restrictions can be a default terminal value that receives positive reinforcement cookies in the brain of humans and some other animals. Claustrophobia seems to be a particular subset of this that au...
I'd be cautious about saying something's never a terminal value. Given my model of the EEA, it wouldn't be terribly surprising to me if some set of people did have poor reactions to certain types of external constraint independently of their physical consequences, though "freedom" and its various antonyms seem too broad to capture the way I'd expect this to work.
Someone's probably studied this, although I can't dig up anything offhand.
I agree that freedom is an instrumental value. I disagree that it is never a terminal value. It is constitutive of the good life.
Right, but that doesn't mean they tend to be beneficial, either. We're not arguing over which dictator is the worst, but whether dictators in forums are diametrically opposed to their real-world cousins.
Taboo "feeling bad", keeping in mind that our normal emotional vocabulary is pretty inadequate. (E.g., it seems to me that shame is basically never useful, but guilt and sadness can be.)
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 puni...
Right, I know what tumblr.com is, but I still don't know what a "tumblr-feminist" is.
No, you're confusing liberal feminism with radical feminism.
I don't think I am, that's why I said "every liberal feminist..." above. My point was that, counter to what you said, liberal feminists would be strongly against "compulsory sexuality", and definitely against objectification of women along any other property (including sex).
...Actually, I would maybe characterize that as the fundamental split between radical and liberal feminists
If you grandstand
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.
If you want a more in-depth view of heterosexual sex under patriarchy, I recommend Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin.
For what it's worth, I second this recommendation. But the book is mostly literary criticism.
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.
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.
Seeing the absolute claim like that prompted me to think of a whole list of real world counter-examples
That is something I find a standard but rather annoying geek conversational failure. You could simply have answered your own question:
Are you using 'never' in a figurative sense here?
with "yes". But "figurative" does not really capture it. All apparently absolute generalisations are relative to their context. Are there substantial exceptions relevant to the context?
Now, on further consideration I might indeed revise my original ...
But I also think that there's a lot of male privilege that LWers deny exists.
Well, sure. Privilege -- which I'll call by that name here, though I really prefer the "blind spots" framing -- is such a culture-bound thing that just about any natural group of people is going to be aware of a different subset. Given how my friends who're into social justice tend to argue with each other, I suspect this is even true for subcultures that explicitly idealize identifying mechanisms of privilege that don't apply to them directly.
Yes, if you somehow ma...
I see this as virtually identical to EY's and the SIAI's stance on AGI research.
I agree, which is why I think that both you and EY/SIAI are equally wrong. I believe that the utility of "publishing true facts" -- and, by extension, learning which facts are true to begin with -- greatly exceeds the utility of advancing any given cause (at least, in the long term). Without having accurate models at your disposal, you cannot effectively pursue your goals.
For example, consider quantum physics. Given its potential for unimaginable destruction, would...
I'm unwilling to do the requisite amount of hand-holding that you really have to do to get men to admit that there might be a point to feminism.
To be fair, your task is much more difficult, since you're attempting to convert us men to radical feminism, specifically. Thus, you must overcome not only our innate desire to keep our privilege, but also the efforts of liberal feminists who explicitly deny some of your claims.
Speaking as a non-feminist (radical or otherwise) man, though, I must say that I find your description of your views to be clear and coh...
And "lesswrong.com" just went from my bookmarks to my speed dial. Anyway, I would like to say that rather than your hypothetical and "ideal" retort of "MLK was the good kind of criminal," I would prefer the more sophisticated response you put forth for other situations, but more generalized: "I fail to see how that is relevant."
"But... but... abortion is MURDER!" (Please note that I am against abortion for reasons I categorically refuse to discuss due to several harrowing experiences on spacebattles.com forums, although this site seems much more civil) "I fail to see how that is relevant."
My posts have been deleted? Interesting.
Mostly. They no longer appear in the threads in which you made them, but are still visible in your user history.
This is using "feminism" as a proxy for "intelligence" and is other than that swap a fairly standard ad-hominem argument.
I disagree that asking you questions about your beliefs constitutes an insult. Your beliefs are (probably) wildly unusual as compared to those of the average Less Wrong member, and thus a simple label for them does not exist. For example, if you said, "I'm a deontologist", we'd instantly know what you meant; but we don't know what "I'm a radical feminist" means. Thus, all the questions.
...This is
If you treat men and women identically, you are being patriarchal because you are ignoring how the same behavior can have different consequences when emitted towards a male-socialized or women-socialized person.
Okay. I have no idea how this would happen, concretely. I have never seen any evidence of this. My prior towards this being true is extremely small.
The closest match I have is: If I act identically towards men and women, and some people are biased or uninformed, they might perceive my behavior differently or it might have different consequences ...
I'm not sure I understand why you use the word "discontinuity" here. In mathematical language, it's easy to have a continuous function of perpetually-rising value that never reaches a certain value - just put an asymptote.
If instances of dust specks are being counted in this manner, it's pretty easy to have the asymptote always be inferior to the torture-time.
...but I'm probably misunderstanding part of the discussion, on second thought.
I think it's pretty obvious that evand mean "abortion opponents," not "abortion proponents." Make that correction and the rest of the comment is accurate.
I agree that there are downsides, they just don't seem that terrible..
What about the never-ending meta discussions, or are you counting on those dying down soon? Because I wouldn't, unless the new policy is either dropped, or an extensive purge of the commentariat is carried out.
I've been skimming some of the proposed literature, and I still don't see any concrete examples of things I do that support patriarchy. Using language that reinforces male "possession" of the female body? Nope, and I've actually taught women how to avoid using this language. Behaving positively towards female behaviors that encourage females to submit to a particular view of how they should behave and dress in order to achieve anything? Nope, and I essentially don't even like most of the standard models (the typical examples of high heels, make-u...
An alternative possibility, that may have the same or a similar effect, is to auto-close the children of heavily downvoted posts when they appear on the "Recent Comments" window. Adding an extra step to reply to such a post will tend to reduce the number of replies that is gets, and will clearly signal to the reader that the post is, in fact, the child of a heavily downvoted post.
I have no idea if this possibility will be better or worse than the heritable penalties (nor, for that matter, which option would be easier to implement).
Can't speak for eridu, but I suspect this is true.
That said, I expect it's true of higher mathematics as well.
Which is not to say I consider the fields equivalent; not everything hard to understand is hard to understand for the same reasons.
Other than the elimination of gender, you mean ?
Well, I'm assuming here that radical feminism isn't proposing the elimination of structures associated with gender for shits and giggles, but rather believes that eliminating those structures will improve people's lives in ways that feminisms wishing to maintain them can't.
That sounds like an unconventional definition of the word "lie", at best.
Let's imagine that you asked me whether I owned a car, and I said "yes". Unbeknownst to me, my car had been utterly obliterated by a meteorite strike five minutes prior. Did I lie ?
To any radical, if you don't have an image problem, you're doing it wrong.
Just so I understand... is the underlying model here that:
a) the radical has certain goals, and society is such that the optimal path for achieving those goals will reliably result in an image problem;
b) the radical has certain goals, and while it's possible to achieve those goals without creating an image problem, anyone who achieves those goals that way isn't a radical;
c) the radical has the goal of challenging society, in addition to other goals they may or may not have; if soc...
Can all deontologists be dutch booked? Then it means something other than what I'm thinking of. (unless I'm confused. I haven't though this thru)
Not all consequentialists choose torture either. (in duck specks I assume). Pretty sure all utilitarians do tho.
The way I'm using those words is essentially consequentialism=expected utility maximization with a utility function that does not prescribe specific behaviours or thought patterns. and deontologism=holding some non-EU set of ethical/behavioural rules as fundamental (usally stuff like "moral duty to do X in Y situation" and whatnot)
By this line of reasoning, would you be willing to concede that there exists some minds among the vast space of possible human minds for which these facts you consider sexist are not sexist?
If so, would you be willing to reconsider your hypothesis that all human males not currently identifying as feminist must necessarily be subconsciously applying sexist methodologies and control schemes? Would you be willing to change your mind (on some statements made elsewhere in this thread)?
For the record, I am saying this in (perceived) full awareness of the hypocri...
I have likewise been an actual anarchist in actual IRL anarchist communities, and I don't see where you are coming from with that.
I can safely presume that anyone identifying as an anarchist but not a feminist is being dishonest with themselves.
currents within the anarchist mileu often disavow feminism both personally and as an implication of anarchism, since anarchism is for "freedom for everyone" and feminism is for "freedom for women."
Wait, what? I'm confused, how do these not contradict?
or that "Identity politics is a waste of time."
Is that intended to fall under the "(false) claim" modifier?
It's annoying that less wrong's reddit instance doesn't hyperlink raw links, but I dislike hiding what I'm linking to, so... sorry if you're too lazy to cut and paste, I suppose.
That's easily fixed - just write the link like [url](url).
Well, if you don't tell anyone else and don't publish it anywhere, you could trivially keep anything secret. But then, why would anyone bother to research such stuff in the first place? (Other than personal benefit, I mean.)
This is the scenario I'm talking about.
Presumably, if you found yourself in a field where you constantly couldn't publish things because of your consequentialist ethics, you'd switch fields (or ethics).
I could give you a link to my website, or the website of any of my colleagues, but you still wouldn't know what they're working on at any given time.
In my particular group, the whole group knows in general what everyone's current project is, but only small subgroups know the particulars of each project, and individual people within a focus might work on something individually for a long while.
So, in my experience, it'd be pretty trivial for me to entirely discard some set of findings I disliked (and this happens a lot for accepted reasons, like "I can't publish this"), and the Internet doesn't really change that.
I am presently employed as a researcher at a major university. Do you know what I've worked on in the last year? Do you think anyone on the Internet does?
If a scientist (read: professor or grad student at a university in almost all cases) wanted to keep a finding secret, they could trivially do so.
I acknowledge that the theoretical distinction between sex and gender is not universally accepted, but I think the distinction is incredibly useful. I'm talking about physical causes of gender roles, and it's essentially impossible to deny that they exist. The fact that "able to get pregnant" != "woman" is irrelevant to my argument - and I reject any assertion that the exceptions deserve the negative moral judgments that society places on them.
If some feminists would like to totally ignore physical facts, I assert their political tactics are likely to be ineffective. In terms of outreach, acknowledging physical facts and dismissing their relevance is more effective than denying the physical facts exist.
Briefly checked it, and it looks like straw-economics to me. (I stopped reading at the point where they claimed that economists assume no barriers to entry.)
One thing I don't understand here is that you seem to inconsistently classify these "X is Y" type arguments. What I mean is:
"MLK was a criminal" -> Worst argument in the world, obviously this doesn't mean MLK was a typical criminal.
"Black people are human" -> Wow, what an insightful point that challenges racists to explain how black people deviate from the typical human and thus warrant different treatment!
Why not interpret all "X is Y" arguments as challenges to explain how X is an atypical Y, and thus insightful?
I don't get it either. Seems to happen every time politics is brought up. My own posts in this thread have gone up and down several times. Reflexive down voting over politics I can understand, even if I think it's silly.
The up votes are actually harder to explain. It's possible I could have educated some one, but given the people who post here, that seems doubtful.
Everyone agrees on that fact. But the relevant question, when I'm deciding whether it would be good on net to regulate an industry, is whether the jobs in a state of economic nature (bargained down in terms of wages and working conditions to just better than the marginal employee's best alternative) are worse for the general welfare than the regulated jobs (and the associated economic tradeoffs) would be.
Sometimes regulation is clearly a win for society (like the workplace safety regulations in the US following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and othe...
I'm not sure if I'd go all the way to good. Only an improvement over nothing
Why is "nothing" the alternative to compare a given job to?
When people complain about a job, they generally don't say "I wish I was unemployed", they say things like "I wish I was paid more" or "I wish I wasn't forced to work as many hours for fear of losing my job" or "I wish I had better working conditions".
To compare any job to unemployment seems to be missing the point of such complaints. It's not that the people would prefer unemployment. They'd prefer a better job.
Sexism can mean a whole bunch of different things. It's not a simple binary predicate: this is sexist, that isn't. In general, I mean a cluster of attitudes and actions that harm people based on their sex. Usually, its women being harmed, but definitely not always.
Affirmative action is, of course, an interesting case. On its face, it involves advantaging one group, which naturally comes at the expense of all other groups. So, of course it's sexism in one sense of the word. So why does anyone think it's fair? Because there are believed to be cognitiv...
Banning defamation (knowingly making false statements to maliciously cause harm) is a content restriction which is pretty well supported even by serious free-speech folks — at least when the target is a private individual. Defamation of famous people, politicians, corporations, products, etc. is a somewhat less well supported idea.
It can also treat people as the ends, instead of the means, of desirable world states.
In practice at best it treats people as some combination of tools and victory points.
I intuit that there is also something along the lines of 'equal objectification'; if everyone, including oneself, is objectified equally, is that really objectification? I don't know and must consider that.
Taboo 'objectification'.
Well, if that was the position, then it wouldn't be any more immoral not to help an unconscious person than to not help a broken swing. That seems fairly problematic, so I doubt that's a successful solution.
Right. But that's a guide to action, not a description of the good (which utilitarianism purports to be). The utilitarian would justify that course of action with reference to its leading to higher expected utility. If the empirical facts about humanity were such that it is more efficient for us to calculate expected utility for every action individually, then those folks would not advocate following rules, while "rule utilitarians" still would.
Okay, so to know what virtues are, you need to know what things are good to have in the first place. So its use is not to figure out what you care about, it's to remind yourself you care about it. Like, a great swordsman insults you, you're afraid but you remember that courage and pride are virtues, so you challenge him to a duel and get killed, all's fine. But you can't actually do that, because then you remember that rashness and vanity are vices, and you need to figure out on which side the duel falls. How is any of this virtuous mess supposed to help at all?
Aristotle argued that you don't even know whether someone lived a good life until after they died and you have time to reflect on their life and achievements, and even then I think he was going by "I'll know it when I see it".
I'm under the impression that Aristotle argues the very opposite (in NE I.10, for example). Can you cite a passage for me?
The key question is not whether leftist politicians have become elites (they do regularly) but whether their agenda supports elites and whether they get support from the elites, which happens very rarely. There is a lot of self-serving political decisions made by both left and right politicians from which politicians benefit, but the left politicians are nevertheless still more connected with lower classes than the right politicians.
Somewhat special example were/are communist countries where the non-political aspects of social status are reduced and the gr...
Many people who use the arguments mentioned would have different philosophical reasons for believing the claims. The Christian groups that claim abortion/euthansia is murder would appeal to it being wrong because only God has a right to kill, and the libertarians who argue that taxation is theft would appeal to the right to property. Both would refuse to argue on utilitarian grounds.
Interesting example. I'm trying to figure out how it fulfills the second criteria for the WAITW namely "as though it also had those features even though it doesn't"
I asked Alicorn for an intro to virtue ethics appropriate for Less Wrongers or toddlers and she said to ask you. The Wikipedia article on virtue ethics explains deontology and consequentialism but not virtue ethics. The Stanford Encyclopedia article is better but unclear on what virtues are or do. Where's Virtue Ethics 101?
That's my real question. I'm not really objecting to anything, I just found the implied estimate surprising.
Did he write that with paragraph breaks? If so, please restore them. If not... Dang, Nietsche had lousy style.
(Edited to reverse the conditionals so it made sense)
Not really, Komogorov complexity difference between various languages is bounded (for everything languages L1 and L2, there is a constant D for which, for every algorithm A, |K(L1, A) - K(L2, A)| < D, D being at most the complexity of writing a L2 compiler in L1 or vice-versa). So while it may not give exactly the same results with different languages, it doesn't "fall apart", but stays mostly stable.
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.
The wrongness comes from wherever the wrongness of harm comes from.
Are you begging the question? I honestly can't tell from that:
What am I missing? The above doesn't seem to clearly follow.
This line of argument is frustrating me and I'm having unwarranted strong emotional responses, which is ...
Then please answer my main question: Where does the "wrongness" come from?
How is a crime wrong simply by virtue of being a "crime"? If we defined crimes to be "every time you touch your own sexual organs", would it still be bad because it's a crime? Does the wrongness come from the fact that society agrees to punish crimes?
You're making a very strong claim. One that almost begs the question. "Theft is wrong because it is theft", one could put it. Where does the wrong come from?
If I have a device of unexplained origi...
I actually thought this argument was quite poor. There are lots of possible features in different cases of a type, and to claim some are vitally important seems to beg the question. Murdering a homeless loner estranged from any family or friends may lack many of the features mentioned, but there's little dispute it would qualify. And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop. Pointing out that an example falls into a commonly understood category seems a pretty good starting point before delving in...
And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop.
Really? An appeal to counterfactual consequences? By this line of reasoning, each day you're not having sex with the intent to procreate is tantamount to murder, starting from the moment you hit puberty until you're no longer fertile. There are no remaining schelling points in-between, AFAICT. All that remains is cold hard utilitarian multiplication. Cold hard utilitarian multiplication is, well, hard - and it might not agree with you.
My preferred approach is what you said for eugenics: just admit that I'm alright with murder some of the time, as per the economically efficient amount of crime (such as theft!).
You're hitting Cooperate and telling this the other player (whose game habits you have no information on) on a one-shot P.D. Are you sure you really want to do that?
Here's a fictive example of the "argument":
Blue: X is good!
Green: But X can in theory be defined as an element of Y!
Audience: *gasp!* Ys are bad!
Green: Indeed, Ys are bad!
Blue: Ys are bad because of K, P, Z, C and G. 50% of the badness comes from G, 40% from K, P and Z, and the remaining 10%...
the Liberal Party (conservatives, ironically)
Hmm. My understanding is that the liberal parties are rather often, let us say, closer to the conservative side of the spectrum. The reason this appears strange to especially citizens of the USA is that, for convoluted historical reasons, they use the term "liberal" to refer to the progressive side of the spectrum, whereupon their liberal party needs to be called "libertarian". (And it's not particularly progressive, either.)
Yeah, I was facing the same problem. Perhaps a sufficient reduction would be "progress in their personal understanding of the causes and harms of sexism".
Oddly enough, I usually don't find the term "sophisticated" to have nearly as much negative connotation as other readers.
Related to: Leaky Generalizations, Replace the Symbol With The Substance, Sneaking In Connotations
David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
It sounds dumb only because we are talking soberly of categories and features. As soon as the argument gets framed in terms of words, it becomes so powerful that somewhere between many and most of the bad arguments in politics, philosophy and culture take some form of the noncentral fallacy. Before we get to those, let's look at a simpler example.
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.
The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.
This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the noncentral is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument.
Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was the good kind of criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver, and it may be even harder in some of the cases where the noncentral Fallacy is commonly used.
Now I want to list some of these cases. Many will be political1, for which I apologize, but it's hard to separate out a bad argument from its specific instantiations. None of these examples are meant to imply that the position they support is wrong (and in fact I myself hold some of them). They only show that certain particular arguments for the position are flawed, such as:
"Abortion is murder!" The archetypal murder is Charles Manson breaking into your house and shooting you. This sort of murder is bad for a number of reasons: you prefer not to die, you have various thoughts and hopes and dreams that would be snuffed out, your family and friends would be heartbroken, and the rest of society has to live in fear until Manson gets caught. If you define murder as "killing another human being", then abortion is technically murder. But it has none of the downsides of murder Charles Manson style. Although you can criticize abortion for many reasons, insofar as "abortion is murder" is an invitation to apply one's feelings in the Manson case directly to the abortion case, it ignores the latter's lack of the features that generated those intuitions in the first place2.
"Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics!" Okay, you've got me there: since eugenics means "trying to improve the gene pool" that's clearly right. But what's wrong with eugenics? "What's wrong with eugenics? Hitler did eugenics! Those unethical scientists in the 1950s who sterilized black women without their consent did eugenics!" "And what was wrong with what Hitler and those unethical scientists did?" "What do you mean, what was wrong with them? Hitler killed millions of people! Those unethical scientists ruined people's lives." "And does using genetic engineering to cure diseases kill millions of people, or ruin anyone's life?" "Well...not really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's eugenics!"
"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" If you define "sexist" as "believing in some kind of difference between the sexes", this is true of at least some evo psych. For example, Bateman's Principle states that in species where females invest more energy in producing offspring, mating behavior will involve males pursuing females; this posits a natural psychological difference between the sexes. "Right, so you admit it's sexist!" "And why exactly is sexism bad?" "Because sexism claims that men are better than women and that women should have fewer rights!" "Does Bateman's principle claim that men are better than women, or that women should have fewer rights?" "Well...not really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's sexist!"
A second, subtler use of the noncentral fallacy goes like this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us an emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that same emotional reaction to X even if X gives some benefit that outweighs the harm."
"Capital punishment is murder!" Charles Manson-style murder is solely harmful. This kind of murder produces really strong negative feelings. The proponents of capital punishment believe that it might decrease crime, or have some other attending benefits. In other words, they believe it's "the good kind of murder"3, just like the introductory example concluded that Martin Luther King was "the good kind of criminal". But since normal murder is so taboo, it's really hard to take the phrase "the good kind of murder" seriously, and just mentioning the word "murder" can call up exactly the same amount of negative feelings we get from the textbook example.
"Affirmative action is racist!" True if you define racism as "favoring certain people based on their race", but once again, our immediate negative reaction to the archetypal example of racism (the Ku Klux Klan) cannot be generalized to an immediate negative reaction to affirmative action. Before we generalize it, we have to check first that the problems that make us hate the Ku Klux Klan (violence, humiliation, divisiveness, lack of a meritocratic society) are still there. Then, even if we do find that some of the problems persist (like disruption of meritocracy, for example) we have to prove that it doesn't produce benefits that outweigh these harms.
"Taxation is theft!" True if you define theft as "taking someone else's money regardless of their consent", but though the archetypal case of theft (breaking into someone's house and stealing their jewels) has nothing to recommend it, taxation (arguably) does. In the archetypal case, theft is both unjust and socially detrimental. Taxation keeps the first disadvantage, but arguably subverts the second disadvantage if you believe being able to fund a government has greater social value than leaving money in the hands of those who earned it. The question then hinges on the relative importance of these disadvantages. Therefore, you can't dismiss taxation without a second thought just because you have a natural disgust reaction to theft in general. You would also have to prove that the supposed benefits of this form of theft don't outweigh the costs.
Now, because most arguments are rapid-fire debate-club style, sometimes it's still useful to say "Taxation isn't theft!" At least it beats saying "Taxation is theft but nevertheless good", then having the other side say "Apparently my worthy opponent thinks that theft can be good; we here on this side would like to bravely take a stance against theft", and then having the moderator call time before you can explain yourself. If you're in a debate club, do what you have to do. But if you have the luxury of philosophical clarity, you would do better to forswear the Dark Arts and look a little deeper into what's going on.
Are there ever cases in which this argument pattern can be useful? Yes. For example, it may be a groping attempt to suggest a Schelling fence; for example, a principle that one must never commit theft even when it would be beneficial because that would make it harder to distinguish and oppose the really bad kinds of theft. Or it can be an attempt to spark conversation by pointing out a potential contradiction: for example "Have you noticed that taxation really does contain some of the features you dislike about more typical instances of theft? Maybe you never even thought about that before? Why do your moral intuitions differ in these two cases? Aren't you being kind of hypocritical?" But this usage seems pretty limited - once your interlocutor says "Yes, I considered that, but the two situations are different for reasons X, Y, and Z" the conversation needs to move on; there's not much point in continuing to insist "But it's theft!"
But in most cases, I think this is more of an emotional argument, or even an argument from "You would look silly saying that". You really can't say "Oh, he's the good kind of criminal", and so if you have a potentially judgmental audience and not much time to explain yourself, you're pretty trapped. You have been forced to round to the archetypal example of that word and subtract exactly the information that's most relevant.
But in all other cases, the proper response to being asked to subtract relevant information is "No, why should I?" - and that's why this is the worst argument in the world.
Footnotes
1: On advice from the community, I have deliberately included three mostly-liberal examples and three-mostly conservative examples, so save yourself the trouble of counting them up and trying to speculate on this article's biases.
2: This should be distinguished from deontology, the belief that there is some provable moral principle about how you can never murder. I don't think this is too important a point to make, because only a tiny fraction of the people who debate these issues have thought that far ahead, and also because my personal and admittedly controversial opinion is that much of deontology is just an attempt to formalize and justify this fallacy.
3: Some people "solve" this problem by saying that "murder" only refers to "non-lawful killing", which is exactly as creative a solution as redefining "criminal" to mean "person who breaks the law and is not Martin Luther King." Identifying the noncentral fallacy is a more complete solution: for example, it covers the related (mostly sarcastic) objection that "imprisonment is kidnapping".
4: EDIT 8/2013: I've edited this article a bit after getting some feedback and complaints. In particular I tried to remove some LW jargon which turned off some people who were being linked to this article but were unfamiliar with the rest of the site.
5: EDIT 8/2013: The other complaint I kept getting is that this is an uninteresting restatement of some other fallacy (no one can agree which, but poisoning the well comes up particularly often). The question doesn't seem too interesting to me - I never claimed particular originality, a lot of fallacies blend into each other, and the which-fallacy-is-which game isn't too exciting anyway - but for the record I don't think it is. Poisoning the well is a presentation of two different facts, such as "Martin Luther King was a plagiarist...oh, by the way, what do you think of Martin Luther King's civil rights policies?" It may have no relationship to categories, and it's usually something someone else does to you as a conscious rhetorical trick. Noncentral fallacy is presenting a single fact, but using category information to frame it in a misleading way - and it's often something people do to themselves. The above plagiarism example of poisoning the well is not noncentral fallacy. If you think this essay is about bog-standard poisoning the well, then either there is an alternative meaning to poisoning the well I'm not familiar with, or you are missing the point.