posted on October 22, 2018 08:28 AM by
u/IneffectiveEgoist
21
u/Analemma_39 pointsat 1540220989.000000
Two suggestions for discussing the Jamal Khashoggi affair:
- if you’re not involved with the Saudi monarchy, consider really
hard whether you know enough about the situation to say valuable things.
consider also that you probably don’t have a comparative
advantage at analysis either- the Saudi royals are also really
smart and also are likely to care more about the issue than you do.
(I am not a Saudi royal so I have been avoiding having public
object-level opinions)
- it might be a good idea to taboo broad words like “murder” or
“human rights” and instead point out specific community norms/policies
that respectively could be applied or left behind.
this is because there’s a lot of things “murder” and “human rights”
mean, and it’s difficult to separate them from the associations they
have. (in particular, I’m concerned that unless there’s more concrete
detail, parts of human rights that aren’t good ideas could be adopted
along with the important and good parts of human rights. I’m also
concerned that important and good parts of human rights might be
rejected by Saudi royals who would really benefit from them as a
knee-jerk reaction.)
Honestly I think theres probably a subset of the community that will
only accept advice like “take reports of abuse seriously” if it’s
couched in this sort of wishy washy “both sides” language. So I guess
I’m glad shes trying?
>will only accept advice like "take reports of abuse seriously" if it's couched in this sort of wishy washy "both sides" language
Definitely so!
though my inference from this observation is more "eww squish them" than "yay I hope they reform"
It's not like there are a lot of options for abbreviating 'rationalist'! Though god I wish the community name was different.
([Also rats are wonderful animals and I love them.](https://78.media.tumblr.com/68f82c28d528dfec123817812cb731d5/tumblr_o4uqr4rxdo1skpk05o1_400.gif))
I think I still count as a rat? I hang out here to make sure I’m not burying my head in the sand about shitty people adjacent to me.
e.g. I had no idea how terrible the slate star subreddit is, because I never had a reason to look at it before
And of course OP is being liked and reblogged by all the shitty people adjacent to you e.g. [that Ozy character](https://cptsdcarloslikes.tumblr.com/post/178382007788/two-suggestions-for-discussing-the-brent-dill).
Passive-aggressive Tumblr blogging wants to be free.
>Two suggestions for discussing the Brent Dill affair:
>— if you’re not involved with the Bay Area rat community, consider really hard whether you know enough about the situation to say valuable things. consider also that you probably don’t have a comparative advantage at analysis, either
>— the Bay Area rats are also rationalists and also really smart and also are likely to care more about the issue than you do.
(I am not a Bay Area rat so I have been avoiding having public object-level opinions.)
>— it might be a good idea to taboo broad words like “feminism” or “the redpill”, and instead point out specific community norms/policies that respectively could be adopted or left behind.
>this is because there’s a lot of things “feminism” and “the redpill” mean, and it’s difficult to separate them from the associations they have. (in particular, I’m concerned that unless there’s more concrete detail, parts of feminism that aren’t good ideas could be adopted along with important and good parts of feminism. I’m also concerned that important and good parts of feminism might be rejected by rationalists who would really benefit from them as a knee-jerk reaction.)
>optimally, it would be explained how suggested changes in norms/policies would have altered the situation or will alter future similar situations.
“Taboo the word”feminism”“. The word”feminism” is not feminism. The
map is not the territory. The label is not the thing. The roadsign is
not the city. The portrait is not the person. The thumbnail is not the
article. Find a mneumonic that really sticks, and remember it, so you
can safely put things inside quotes.
This is because feminism is an enormous group of ideologies that
collectively propose approximately everything, and some of these are
unhelpful.
As one of the notes in the post already mentioned, one of the big problems here was that Brent was able to get away with it because the (correct!) criticism of him was pattern-matched to the sorts of things that the eeeeeevil feminist outgroup would say, so it was discarded. They *already* tabooed feminism, and that’s exactly why nobody did anything even though everyone knew he was a creep! It’s embarrassingly obvious that this suggestion, in this context, is a “stop talking about this!” gag order, not a useful step forward proposed in good faith.
It reads more to me like the poster recognizes that a lot of rationalists have an irrational hatred of feminism, and is concerned that mentioning the word "feminism" will prevent them from improving anything at all.
I actually agree that it might make sense (in a tactical sense) to taboo the word in a context where the well has been so thoroughly poisoned, if you want to get the actual principles through.
Yep, this is why I deliberately avoid using social justice buzzwords when talking about social justice topics. It just ends up making it harder to get the point across
I know that you think that "the map is not the territory" is some amazingly powerful idea that you need to spread to the world, but the fact of the matter is that this is really obvious, everyone here understands it, and you're just slow on the uptake.
It's pretty obvious that this isn't really about ambiguity: if I gave a specific feminist as an example and outlined how they would frame the problem, that would be rejected too. Any idea which would vaguely be associated with feminism, so long as it is nominally phrased in those terms, will be thrown out. The difference here is not that you understand Map vs Territory and everyone else doesn't. It's that everyone but you can tell how this conversation will actually go.
> This is because feminism is an enormous group of ideologies that collectively propose approximately everything, and some of these are unhelpful.
I'm very eager to hear what feminism has to say about why developing apps on Android is such a hot mess.
Literally?
Some schools of feminism would say that the emphasis on downplaying empathy with the user -- be it the end users of Android apps or the other developers using Android APIs/SDKs -- due to "empathy ==> feminine ==> ain't no money or technical hardcoreness there" explains a lot of shitty software design decisions. One of my old professors corroborated this suspicion when he went on a rant during lecture about how back when he was at Google, it seemed as if the company specifically selected for people devoid of empathy too preoccupied with fetishizing complexity in spite of CS being a field where managing complexity is paramount.
Granted, but "take feminists more seriously, because any awareness of feminism would have alerted you to this obvious problem ages ago" *is* one of the concrete actions that should be taken. I don't think that significantly more specific actions (please stop creepily petting girls in a circle, etc.) will amount to much if the community attitude doesn't change, and a blanket refusal to consider that part of the problem really *does* lie in gender relations makes it a lot harder for that to happen. In practice, that's the form that refusing to discuss feminism seems to take.
It gets better. Do you think the rationalist who wrote OP is a /r/slatestarcodex alt-righter who hate anything remotely approaching social justice ? [Think again.](http://silver-and-ivory.tumblr.com/about) This goes at length to show that SJ critics of rationality should not be happy with ~rationalist social justice~ discourse as promulgated by people like Ozy Brennan ([who reblogged this post](https://cptsdcarloslikes.tumblr.com/post/178382007788/two-suggestions-for-discussing-the-brent-dill)) or Kelsey Piper (who is now a journalist for ~enlightened centrist~ outlet Vox, and who has a Tumblr URL which literally means [money](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring)). The only "social justice" thing there is about them, the only difference they have with their alt-right counterparts is that they use social justice jargon. Their misogynist MRA ideology, however, remain the same.
Consider how Ozy reblogged OP, and actively took abusers' side last June in the (separate) controversy over rationalist abuse, a controversy she called a "dumpsterfire".
Well, I should have guessed that you were one of those rationalists who won't believe a survivor when Ozy is insulting her, saying that she is a malicious smearer and that her abuse is just regular shittiness and not abuse.
did you read the title at all you disingenuous piece of trash
it also helps to keep in mind that Eron Gjoni is friends and hangs out with a pile of rationalists, so he gets ingroup cred with them
> I admit I don't know anything
but you're sure not letting that stop you
here, why don't you learn the first thing about the topic of discussion:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Gamergate_claims
Two suggestions for discussing the Jamal Khashoggi affair:
- if you’re not involved with the Saudi monarchy, consider really hard whether you know enough about the situation to say valuable things. consider also that you probably don’t have a comparative advantage at analysis either- the Saudi royals are also really smart and also are likely to care more about the issue than you do.
(I am not a Saudi royal so I have been avoiding having public object-level opinions)
- it might be a good idea to taboo broad words like “murder” or “human rights” and instead point out specific community norms/policies that respectively could be applied or left behind.
this is because there’s a lot of things “murder” and “human rights” mean, and it’s difficult to separate them from the associations they have. (in particular, I’m concerned that unless there’s more concrete detail, parts of human rights that aren’t good ideas could be adopted along with the important and good parts of human rights. I’m also concerned that important and good parts of human rights might be rejected by Saudi royals who would really benefit from them as a knee-jerk reaction.)
aha, there’s my advantage
Is this generalizable? Can I start insisting that people who aren’t involved with __________ may not know enough?
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Honestly I think theres probably a subset of the community that will only accept advice like “take reports of abuse seriously” if it’s couched in this sort of wishy washy “both sides” language. So I guess I’m glad shes trying?
TIL that rationalists self-identify as rats. All this time I thought it was a SneerSlur!
lolz yes ive considered it now stop chilling my freeze peach
lol “consider that you are too stupid to have an opinion about sexual abuse”
nerp
heckin poor theory of mind you got there
That site is blocked by my college as a phishing site, what’s it say?
“Taboo the word”feminism”“. The word”feminism” is not feminism. The map is not the territory. The label is not the thing. The roadsign is not the city. The portrait is not the person. The thumbnail is not the article. Find a mneumonic that really sticks, and remember it, so you can safely put things inside quotes.
This is because feminism is an enormous group of ideologies that collectively propose approximately everything, and some of these are unhelpful.
[deleted]