socialjusticemunchkin:
so this is what getting strawmanned by a High-Status Ingroup Person feels like
there goes my productivity for the rest of the week
I was even using the goddamn content warnings
and what happened to the idea that the truthfulness of even uncomfortable ideas may be dispassionately evaluated? or does it not apply when the uncomfortable idea is ~triggering~ to a High-Status Ingroup Person? but wouldn’t that mean that we’re censoring the possible truth of “sometimes nastiness may be the most effective way of achieving some goals, even when accounting for side effects” for the sake of ~political correctness~?
if this is some kind of a deliberately ironic slytherin trick to punish me for expressing ideas one finds possibly indirectly harmful, then I must congratulate on the cleverness; but if it isn’t, I’d like to note that claiming that I’m a threat to people’s physical safety is nasty and exactly the same thing High-Status Ingrop Person was supposedly against when I said it might’ve been utilitarianly positive in the Bailey affair
@jbeshir said: I think they’re inclined to read the worst into such things, having had bad experiences that make it important to them that a repeat experience/the same experience happening to others is clearly and solidly rejected. I think you’re okay and still a pretty high status ingroup person yourself.
I mean…yes, I definitely do get where they’re coming from, and I would be lying if I claimed that a part of my reaction wasn’t about “ohfuckohfuckohfuck I’ve miscommunicated and triggered or at least severely upset someone who doesn’t deserve such things”. But there’s a certain irony in how this mirrors the way this stuff works “out there”; people don’t communicate optimally, others react to it, the reactions further cross yet another barrier of communication registers and sans active pumping against entropy shit escalates. And thus people can end up being effectively nasty even without active intent to be so.
If I wanted, I totally could spin this into something extremely destructive and evil, but instead I’m going to assume absence of adversarial activity and try to be constructive and effective instead; there’s a reason I’m a munchkin, not a warrior.
It’s a matter of morality (albeit not such a strong test of morality itself as I’m surrounded by people who would totally see through deliberate escalation and very justifiably scorn me very hard as a consequence; and there’s something awesome in knowing that the ingroup is capable of sustaining such norms to a reasonable degree which gives me faith in humanity in general) because I care more about doing right than about being perceived as being right.
When I fuck up in communication, I want to fix it, not double down on it and conclude that others are evil and wrong and trying to censor ideas they don’t like and I’m a flawless saint of purity and justice and impartiality. PR and image are tools, not terminal values.
I suppose this kind of “treat the rest of the world as constant and yourself as the only variable” is uniquely slytherin secondary but it also makes a gigantic amount of sense and it explains why the bias method outputs slytherin secondary to me because I honestly can’t imagine how any other approach would be right. “Don’t whine at the uncaring void, figure out how the void works and hack it to output the results you want.”
And I suppose this illustrates one principle I consider really important. I don’t fault @slatestarscratchpad for reacting the way he did, because I know the reasons why (and even if I didn’t, I could try to guess that there probably is something behind it, which is my default assumption that I try to always maintain). And I don’t fault myself for being shaken at the reaction and reacting. And the instant I can collect myself I set out and fix what went wrong because that’s the right thing to do. And that’s the thing Bailey fucked up epically in.
If I continued things the way I see Bailey as having continued, doubling down on the thing that upsets people very badly, and writing a shitty book about it and portraying Scott and others in a very negative light and misrepresenting everything to push a terrible narrative, people would yell at me and be nasty to me and they would be totally right to do so. But instead I’m going to be a positive example, to show that there’s a better way of dealing with such things and that Bailey indeed screwed up horribly and failed at his duties. (I won’t lie and claim that the way I can spin this to “I’m like Bailey and you’re like James and I hope you sympathize with her position a bit more now, or at least understand why she did what she did” isn’t incredibly convenient and amusing.)
I find it really hard to believe Bailey didn’t have a situation where he could’ve noticed the effects of his claims and checked that maybe there is something substantial to people’s objections; if he really never noticed such a moment, perhaps he should’ve been studying ants instead of heavily marginalized humans who are hurt in many ways by the people around them, because the latter warrants a degree of sensitivity he and others of his kind seem constitutionally incapable of displaying.
And I guess that’s what my core argument is: Bailey didn’t treat people as people, and in doing so lost some of his own being-treated-as-person protections as well. And that’s the mistake I’m very much intending to avoid. And it has nothing to do with the scientific side of the ideas themselves, but instead everything to do with how they are handled.
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #meanness cw · 19 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
so this is what getting strawmanned by a High-Status Ingroup Person feels like
there goes my productivity for the rest of the week
I was even using the goddamn content warnings
and what happened to the idea that the truthfulness of even uncomfortable ideas may be dispassionately evaluated? or does it not apply when the uncomfortable idea is ~triggering~ to a High-Status Ingroup Person? but wouldn’t that mean that we’re censoring the possible truth of “sometimes nastiness may be the most effective way of achieving some goals, even when accounting for side effects” for the sake of ~political correctness~?
if this is some kind of a deliberately ironic slytherin trick to punish me for expressing ideas one finds possibly indirectly harmful, then I must congratulate on the cleverness; but if it isn’t, I’d like to note that claiming that I’m a threat to people’s physical safety is nasty and exactly the same thing High-Status Ingrop Person was supposedly against when I said it might’ve been utilitarianly positive in the Bailey affair
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #uncharitable cw #meanness cw · 19 notes · .permalink
Some further notes on the discourse about meanness and Bailey:
- When your “scientific theory” ends up claiming that millions of unpopular low-status people are disgusting liars and filthy perverts, there’s a pretty damn good chance you’ve been biased in making it. Just saying.
- Just because you wrap your words as “scientific theory” doesn’t make it value-neutral. I have a “scientific theory” that Bailey is a massive shitlord and can present quite a bit of evidence for it. It’s a scientific theory, don’t be mean to me just for presenting it. And I’m not actually doing science, I’m just popularizing the obvious and universally accepted theory that “Bailey is an Epic Shitlord”, and thus if my evidence is shoddy and ethics questionable it doesn’t matter anyway.
- If you make sweeping generalizations of groups, don’t act surprised when the group reacts as if you had made the claim you sweepingly generalized, about every single individual of that group. Goes double with the above. If A = B and B = C then (A == C) = true, that’s just simple logic.
- The obvious solution is to maybe not make sweeping generalizations about groups. Especially if said sweeping generalizations are things people would get really upset about if you said them face-to-face.
- Especially if the sweeping generalization you’re making involves the claim that millions of people are lying about something pretty big.
- Or if you do, you better have some goddamn bulletproof evidence for the sweeping generalization you’re making and an ironclad explanation of alternative hypotheses and why you’ve discarded them. A good rule of thumb would be to make sweeping generalizations only if you believe your evidence could stand a libel court case (even when there is no actual grounds to actually sue you for libel; just think how comfortable you would be defending your case in court).
- Get the fucking hint: don’t make sweeping generalizations about specific groups if the generalization involves “everyone who says otherwise is just lying”, that’s just bad form. The truths you will miss that way are probably far less significant than the errors you will avoid.
- This applies in all directions. If you say “all men are scum”, don’t act surprised when a lot of people are justifiably very upset and hurt by it and react accordingly.
- As a general rule, maybe approximately don’t say things about groups that you wouldn’t say about individuals. Saying things about groups might be less personally targeting and thus less harmful, but it also inevitably targets people you aren’t thinking of (people who say “all men are scum” are usually thinking all men have the underlying state of psychological security which lets them shrug off such things, when a huge number of people actually don’t, at all) and is more fraught with risks.
- Niceness is a two-way street.
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #meanness cw · 41 notes · .permalink
Anonymous asked: I am confused by references to the "nasty activism and extremism" used against Michael Bailey, your suggestion that it may have been warranted under the circumstances, and your disclaimer that your argument does not justify "heaping abuse" against children for inconsequential offences. The specific "nasty activism and extremism" that you were saying "might be okay" was the heaping of abuse upon Michael Bailey's children (which was done because they were related to him).
James later fixed the part where she captioned Bailey’s children and replaced the pics with pictures of herself. The obviously correct thing would’ve been to use pictures of Bailey himself as a child. Alas, people are not always of sound judgment when their already weak position is attacked even further, in extremely disingenuous ways.
The “Bailey’s children can be categorized into two types: those that have been sodomized by Bailey, and those who haven’t” part was incredibly apropos for the context, and totally inappropriate too, and I don’t know if there would’ve been a way to do it without harming innocent people (it’s not the fault of Bailey’s children that they were born to such a PoS father).
But if there was a way to harm Bailey as much as those actions did, without harming the innocent children, I couldn’t bring myself to condemn it. However, the spillover effects James’ actions had on innocent people are condemnable.
TL;DR: In my opinion, what she did was shitty because it hurt people other than Bailey, not because it hurt Bailey. There are things that were done to Bailey himself which were shitty for being excessive even if they didn’t impact anyone else, but that one I wouldn’t consider one of them. It certainly wasn’t any worse than what Bailey himself had done.
2 weeks ago · tagged #meanness cw · 2 notes · .permalink
lovestwell:
nostalgebraist:
@lovestwell
There are a lot of little details here that we could go back and forth on forever. I don’t really want to continue arguing over these details.
Your account of Dreger’s perspective, although internally coherent, feels like it’s reading a lot into the book I just read that wasn’t actually there. The line you’re drawing is (I take it) between scientists “doing their thing” with potentially harmful results down the line, and scientists using actively unethical methods. But I don’t remember Dreger ever drawing that distinction explicitly. This is not me being coy or “perversely charitable” or something; I just don’t remember that being the thrust of the book I read.
(It is also not something I would naturally read in, because it doesn’t fit the facts as I see them. Michael Bailey is in fact a scientific researcher, but the campaign to ruin his reputation was in response to a popular book he wrote which meant to illustrate a theory he didn’t himself develop – and the theory itself was developed by Ray Blanchard in a clinic [the Clarke Institute, or “Jurassic Clarke”] that has a reputation for clinical horror stories. So what Bailey actually did is sort of analogous to some colleague of Maria New writing a popular book in which they interview some cherry-picked children who received prenatal dex talking about how great the results are. Would the author of that book be “just a scientist doing their thing”?)
But in particular I want to reply to your concluding paragraph, because it seems to get at some core friction here:
(and if you do believe that - if you do think that someone writing an article in support of autogynephilia, for instance, is “causing indirect harm”, and thereby qualifies as “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, to quote @socialjusticemunchkin - then your repeated insistence on discussing the object level, the actual truth of autogynephilia and other such theories - remains that much mind-boggling to me).
I don’t understand this, so I apologize if I’m getting it wrong. What I think you are saying is “you and Promethea believe that mere discussions among scientists of whether certain theories are wrong or right can be inherently harmful and deserve public shaming and nastiness, in which case you must be willing to give up the whole endeavor of scientifically adjudicating the truth or falsehood of those theories.”
I certainly don’t believe that. I believe (like Dreger) that activism, and society in general, needs the free discussion of scientific ideas. But I also think that not every statement by someone with a scientific professorship counts as a defense-worthy part of this free discussion. At a certain point – as when someone writes a book for a general audience containing no new scientific content – they are acting simply as citizens, not as participants in the protected sphere of scientific discourse. No idea should be inherently anathema in the academy, but no one spends all their time in the academy.
If a chemistry professor (after work) tells someone (not a colleague) that they should mix bleach and ammonia when they get home to make a super-great cleaning product – “trust me, I’m a chemistry professor” – they are not advancing an unorthodox scientific hypothesis in some way we ought to protect and celebrate.
You’re drawing a distinction between science and everything else that I don’t subscribe to, and which I did not intentionally ascribe to you either (whether Dreger subscribes to it or not I’m not sure). Your write “Activism, and the society in general, needs the free discussion of [scientific] ideas” and “No idea should be inherently anathema [in the academy]”, but from where I stand, both these statements improve when the bracketed parts are removed. I don’t know how to make a principled defense of the bracketed parts but not the whole; any such attempt falls victim to the volatility of the boundary.
Look; my position as far as I can see is very simple; Yudkowsky’s “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never.” pretty much covers it. Someone who’s making a genuine attempt to understand the world and/or explain their ideas to others is covered. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing a peer-reviewed article or a blog post on a personal blog: they do not deserve to be doxed, fired, subjected to an angry activist mob, etc. Now it so happens that scientists are much more likely to be engaged in trying to understand the world than people in general; and it so happens that “bullets” applied to explicitly scientific discourse have the greater potential to fuck with gaining more and better knowledge. And I think since Dreger is especially worried about that (as am I), she focuses on activists hindering scientists. But it doesn’t mean that “argument gets bullet” is virtuous w.r.t. a blogger or a popular book writer. I don’t know what Dreger thinks on that, but I sure don’t think so.
(of course, this also means that the onus is on me to distinguish between Bailey, whose book is protected by this principle, and New, whose actions aren’t. But to me, the difference between them is clear, as I tried to explain in my previous post)
Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc. would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.
I’m not sure what *your* position is, but based on the above - and I’m sorry if I’m misinterpreting you - there’s a genuine difference; following @socialjusticemunchkin, you believe that “nasty extremism” is in fact justified in cases where someone argues for a position you believe to be “indirectly harmful” in a major way. Is that a correct summary of your view? Do you, in fact, agree with and justify the actions of Andrea James et al against Bailey described in Dreger’s book (given that Bailey was merely writing a popular book with no new science, which removes him from the “protected sphere” in your words)? In case you do, how much farther would you be willing to go, and in case you don’t, what kind of nasty, directly harmful activism *do* you support against people who express “indirectly harmful” ideas?
Okay, so I’ll step in to defend my own words. “Bad argument gets counterargument” works very well when discussing things in a relatively equal position, with adequate restraint on all sides. I don’t believe there is any single idea that should be verboten to express and discuss. Yes, this includes autogynephilia; jewish world domination; HBD; whether islam is inherently connected to terrorism, violence and anti-modernity; whether women are Just Worse than men, etc.
But the difference happens somewhere along the very vague and ill-defined boundary of academia and politics. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that some ideas need to be handled with more caution than others, because the discussion doesn’t happen in a vacuum and carelessly discussing those ideas may have dangerous spill-over effects. It’s one thing to investigate even controversial ideas, and completely another to write shitty books seeking to popularize them with bad evidence. (Just like people should study syntetic biology, but it would be very irresponsible to publicize a simple how-to guide on creating an undefeatable pandemic that would kill everyone, in a cave with just a box of scraps!) (This is actually the main point I’d like to push: would you consider it not okay to ever attack scientists who disseminate their knowledge in a harmful and irresponsible way? Because if you consider it okay to even nastily disincentivize publishing “The Nihilist’s Cookbook: 50 ways of wiping out the human race from your own garage”, then we already know what you are and are just haggling over the price.)
I’d compare the situation with Bailey to someone pushing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the popular discourse about antisemitism. Even if some parts of the claims were correct, it’s nonetheless complete politics, not honest truthseeking. (In fact, Bailey himself has defended his book on the basis that it’s politics, not science, and thus not subject to the institutional restraints of science.) And if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t shed a single tear if the writers of the Protocols got the Bailey treatment.
Thus, to take an example, even though I happen to have a strong aversion to anti-Semites for many reasons, including personal ones, if you were to write a post trying to argue in good faith that Jews run the world, the thought of trying to dox you, get you fired, falsely accuse you of various kinds of misconduct etc. would be extremely repugnant to me. I’m quite content with never having done anything like that, throughout a very long internet life of blogging that included many intense flame wars.
And I think there’s a big difference in this. Writing a blog post is one thing, writing a really popular book and being very influential is another.
Throughout the affair, Bailey had acted in a way which reflected the standard exploitative attitudes cis researchers have traditionally had towards trans people (and trans women in particular). Bailey wrote a book which got its popularity mostly from matching people’s biases rather than from being correct, and trans people are in a very bad position to defend ourselves from it. Some of its components were pure dark arts, such as “anyone who claims they aren’t an autogynephile is lying, and their claims can thus be disregarded” which very conveniently poisons the well so that people who want to ignore contrary evidence have a fully general counterargument ready.
I don’t know the exact specifics, but a lot of what the trans activists have done seems to be basically tit-for-tatting Bailey. I won’t claim there haven’t been genuine abusive overreaches but eg. the part where Andrea James juxtaposed pictures of Bailey’s children with sexually explicit captions taken from, or based on, his very own book is nothing worse than what Bailey himself had done. The only difference was that it was targeted personally instead of generally, and I find it ridiculous that it’d be somehow okay to express such attitudes towards groups but not individuals because groups are ultimately simply aggregations of individuals.
(The obvious solution is to be nice to everyone.)
And a big part of it is the relative positions of the participants. If trans women were not so thoroughly marginalized (especially back in the time the book was written), the danger of seeking to popularize such ideas would be much smaller. One of the basic ways marginalization operates is by treating people as members of groups, not as individuals, and thus when the group one is grouped into is attacked, it’s completely rational (in the “evolutionary tribal game theory” sense) to attack back to defend oneself. Even Yudkowsky has written about his frustration with journalists writing hack jobs and getting away with abusing their power like that, and when you add a bunch of biases and sociocultural status to it, shit gets really ugly really fast.
Or as I’ve said: I’d be a lot more tolerant about people expressing ideas if their ideas didn’t hurt me and my people, but since we don’t live in a libertarian utopia, when Bailey acts like a politician he shouldn’t be surprised if he gets treated like a politician. (And while it’s a totally irrelevant ad hominem, I find it ironically appropriate that Dreger is a bioethicist.)
Yes, I would love to have a society of niceness, community and civilization, but I don’t live there and I don’t blame people who reacted to Bailey with nastiness because I know where they are coming from and I know that the best cure for that nastiness is not to shun people who lash out from pain but to take away the pain. I used to be one of those nasty activists, and while I’ve updated my own methods to be more productive and effective and less likely to hurt innocents, I do consider myself a person who has some actual insight to why people act like that and what can actually be done about it. People are clockwork, if you want them to do/not do something you need to take the clockwork into account instead of whining impotently at the uncaring void.
And before you think I’m some kind of a PC spoilsport who doesn’t want to discuss uncomfortable ideas, let me express some of mine below the cut:
Keep reading
2 weeks ago · tagged #this is totally the sj equivalent of the reynolds pamphlet right? #transmisogyny cw #racism cw #meanness cw · 54 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink