Long* did Slate Star Codex and Thing of Things live in peace, each tending to their separate magesteria: Thing of Things gets race and gender, Slate Star Codex gets everything else.
But then! Slate Star Codex announced that its latest open thread would permit discussion of Hyde and Mertz (2009). And when we click through the link, what do we see?
“Gender, culture, and mathematics performance.”
This is an unprovoked invasion of Slate Star Codex onto Thing of Things territory! ThingofThingsians, will you stand for this? Will you watch as our cherished traditions fall to the barbarian Slate Star Codex hordes? Will you watch as our great provinces– creep-shaming, Nice Guys ™, reproductively viable worker ants, yes, even arguments in favor of genocide– one by one get annexed to SSC?
Or will you FIGHT?
(As befits a war council, this will be an unmoderated thread. Thing of Things totally endorses fighting in the War Room.)
(I can’t think of a way to tie this into the war theme but, yo, assholes, give Multi money. She’s a bisexual amab trans person in Russia and would like to be a bisexual amab trans person in Canada, a state of affairs beneficial to her and, more importantly, to my ability to not freak out every time I read news about LGBT people in Russia. Rescue ALL the ingroup members from their shitty life situations!)
*a term which here means “for like two months”
AMAB=male (assigned male at birth), for those who don’t spend much time on Tumblr.
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Preferred not knowing… the acronym on its own conjures lovely associations with the faerie queen of air and darkness.
;)
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I don’t want to let go of seeing AFAB as short for fabulous either.
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Hypocrite! You dare blame us for this?
As you say, the ancient law – “Thing of Things gets race and gender, Slate Star Codex gets everything else.”
But look at what you’ve done: People Are People Regardless Of Political Affiliation. You don’t count that as encroachment on SSC territory? Mental illness? Critiques of social programs? Attacking bad feminist statistics? IQ? At this point soon there will be nothing left for SSC! We seek merely to take back what is ours!
It is *so* on.
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The ancient law clearly refers only to Open Threads. It says nothing about small peacekeeping bases in IQ, Mental Illness, Bad Feminist Statistics, or Critiques of Social Programs.
And EVEN IF IT DIDN’T, Untitled? Thing of Things’ ancestors have ruled over the lands of Sad Nerds Easily Mistaken For MRAs By Asshole Feminists, Anti-Neckbeard Sentiment Is Fatphobic and Lookist and Anti-Semitic and Ableist And Generally Terrible, and UnitofCaring Is The Best for millennia! How dare you invade our sacred ancestral territory!
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Wait. Bad Feminist Statistics is ABOUT GENDER! And SSC has owned it for YEARS!
you treacherous BASTARDS!
Expect Really Terrible Puns to be paperclips by UFAIday.
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“The ancient law clearly refers only to Open Threads. It says nothing about small peacekeeping bases in IQ, Mental Illness, Bad Feminist Statistics, or Critiques of Social Programs…Will you watch as our cherished traditions fall to the barbarian Slate Star Codex hordes? Will you watch as our great provinces– creep-shaming, Nice Guys ™, reproductively viable worker ants – one by one get annexed to SSC?”
See, even by your own standards you admit you cross the line! Reproductively viable worker ants aren’t about race OR gender. They’re about ethics in gaming journalism!
But since I am merciful, this time only I will offer you a peace treaty.
I may discuss Mertz and Hyde this open thread. In return, you may discuss one (1) non-race-and-gender-related topic in your next open thread.
You get to call Unit Of Caring the best Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I can call her the best Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends.
SSC has an exclusive right to hold meetups in all of the New World west of a line 370 leagues from the Cape Verde Islands; ToT has an exclusive right to hold meetups in all of the New World east of that line.
We may each set the official religion of our own blog, not subject to the approval of the Pope.
All applicable colonies will be put under UN mandates until such time as they are ready for independence.
ToT gets the West Bank and Gaza Strip, SSC gets the Senkaku Islands.
Deal?
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“You get to call Unit Of Caring the best Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I can call her the best Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends.”
This one should clearly be subject to a referendum by the affected population, especially if it gets changed so there are some days one of you is not allowed to call her the best.
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I may be the only person amused by the fact that Scott proposed a demarcation between SSC and ToT based on the Treaty of Tordesillas (frequently also abbreviated ToT, especially by Europa Universalis players). But I was pretty dang amused.
Long live the SSC-ToT ToT!
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@movemycat: Nope, I grinned too. Ah, EU. Although I prefer Crusader Kings (the original, with the Deus Vult expansion; I ordered CK2 shortly after it came out, but keep not having enough time to play it long enough to figure out how not to suck).
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“But look at what you’ve done: People Are People Regardless Of Political Affiliation. You don’t count that as encroachment on SSC territory?”
Yes. We do not. fight well and we will grant you a dignified end!
“At this point soon there will be nothing left for SSC!”
You still have long meandering threads about God knows what. No one will take that from you. And you have no contender for compassionate analysis of the dating issues of intelligent men who are not “conventionally attractive.” That was a gem of human understanding, by the way.
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Elapsed time between this comment and Ozzy putting up a compassionate analysis of the dating issues of intelligent men who are not “conventionally attractive” — approximately 4 days.
This is less of a border skirmish and more of a spontaneous storming of the capital…
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I have a feeling that this war will be _unusually_ rife with double agents.
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It is our duty to top the Co-ordination Problems arc of HPMOR. Recruiting a sextuple^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H quintuple agent will be even trickier with only two armies, but we will manage.
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There could still be quintuple agents in the Rémy Marathe sense!
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Double? Not going far enough! (Quick, someone bring in another side. Or possibly three.)
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I already made an argument for genocide a number of posts ago.
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Crossposting from SSC because its gendery:
Let assume for the moment that the factors that make for differential maths performance are decided somewhere after birth and before the final years of high school. (The non-genetic explanation for the results Scott talks about)
What would those be, and what interventions could be made to change them?
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It’s hard to intervene when someone considers themself to be the sort of person that is “bad at math”. But if you could hack someone’s fascination lottery regarding “interest in mathematics”, that would be a start (virtually everyone that I know that is “good at math” just happened to spend more time thinking about math and actually doing math than everyone else).
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The highest-achieving girls seem to be concentrated in elite schools much more than the highest-achieving boys are. This suggests the potential causes:
1) girls are more compliant with authority
American schools tend to ignore the highest-achieving students in favor of the lowest-achieving ones. If studying math on your own, fighting with the school to get put in more advanced math classes, etc. are necessary for a certain level of achievement this will favor boys over girls. (And it wouldn’t be an issue at elite schools, where gifted students do get an appropriate level of education.) The obvious solution here is to actually teach high-achieving students stuff instead of making them sit in classes where they already know everything.
2) girls are more susceptible to peer pressure
Doing math may be more cool at elite schools than it is at most schools, meaning there’s no social stigma against doing math for fun, going to math camps, or joining the math team. Solution, maybe more testing and magnet schools to create environments where girls can feel free to be geeky? This could help the previous one too.
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This would probably qualify as related enough over at Scott’s place, but I’m not gonna risk it, I don’t think.
I’m interested in the factors underlying the reversed math gender gap in much of the Muslim world; my initial hypothesis of “only measuring smart girls because boo Muslims gender equality” doesn’t appear to be supported by the evidence. A commenter at Scott’s suggests that we in the West make math seem scary and hard and something that most people are bad at, while in Jordan everyone’s expected to (try to) be good at math, and girls who are good at it don’t get the chance to drop out because of social pressure. This is (a) actually pretty reminiscent of Leslie et al., and (b) a nice fit with my mom’s suspicion that girls start receiving particularly strong anti-STEM social pressures around the start of adolescence.
So if this story is true, one intervention that might work would be to restrict students’ freedom of choice regarding classes in high school. So if you’ve performed well in honors Chemistry, congratulations, you’re in AP Physics the next year, whether you like it or not. Get an A in trig? AP Calculus! Etc. This is tougher to seriously endorse than it is to argue detachedly for, though.
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Let us retaliate with “walks into a Starbucks” jokes…
Ozymandias walks into a Starbucks, gets a coffee, pours in some cream, and then stirs it with a fork because spoons are reserved for patrons with physical disabilities.
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A rationalist sjer walks into a Starbucks and orders a latte. A rationalist anti-sjer walks up to the counter and says “I’ll have the opposite of what they’re having.” The barista hands them a latte with slightly less milk.
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I would try and help if I had my own credit card and money, sorry. (not sarcastic)
(for the record, I’m 20 and as of yet unemployed and live with my family, which is why I don’t)
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> …yo, assholes, give Multi money. She’s a bisexual amab trans person in Russia and would like to be a bisexual amab trans person in Canada…
I don’t know who this Multi person is, but you had me at “person in Russia would like to be a person in Canada”.
Thaaaaat said though… I clicked the donation link, and apparently it requires me to enter my real name and email address, and even zip code. I would gladly donate some money to any person (*) who wanted to get out of Russia for any reason, but the price is a bit too high for me. If there was some way to donate anonymously, I’d do it… so… is there ?
(*) some restrictions apply, see offer for details, offer may not be valid in all universes, applicant must show proof of eggplant before applying
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EDIT: Oh, Multi == Multiheaded, somehow I missed that at first :-( Sorry.
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I used a fake name without any trouble, but you do need a credit card to donate. The description also says you can contact Multi individually, so you can just do that if you want to use bitcoin or something.
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Single-purpose email addresses + virtual credit card nubers (can be single use too, check with your bank). GoFundMe will let you be called Ano Nymous if you want.
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You can also check a box so that the GoFundMe organizer (I think Multi in this case?) is the only one who knows your identity, which is what I did. I realize that I’m running the risk of getting outed as a counterrevolutionary and sent to Saskatchewan in the event Multi turns all of North America into a grand Stalinist utopia, but I’m willing to take that risk.
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Multi is going to Canada first, though.
War. War never changes.
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I will support Matthias-senpai’s totalitarian regime in the USSA… if he agrees to purge my enemies first!
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Does anyone have a good name for being critical of Social Justice while supporting social justice? Like, I would probably identify as a feminist if people didn’t care so damn much about whether or not I identified as a feminist. Also, I want a term that demonstrates that I think men’s issues are important without associating myself with the manosphere.
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Well, I’d call myself a feminism-critical pro-mens-rights feminist.
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If you’re “pro-mens-rights”, you’ll probably be assumed by some people to be an MRA. Especially if you’re “feminism-critical”.
Still, it’s certainly accurate. Maybe we should be reclaiming these terms.
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Conveniently, I’m also pro- reclaiming “MRA” as a positive-to-neutral term :)
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I believe the word is “liberal”.
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Except that “liberal” means “blue tribe,” at least in the U.S.
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“Classical liberal”, maybe?
SJers are very critical of liberals (and have been since at least Bakunin), so I think this is a case of the word meaning different things to different people. Rush Limbaugh would probably use “liberal” interchangeably for anyone to the left of Attila the Hun.
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I still feel like that has broader political implications than what I’m shooting for.
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Best I’ve managed so far is “sex-pos lib-fem, believes men’s issues exist, mostly aggravated with everyone”. Compact it ain’t.
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This kind of a worldview used to be called “humanist”, but feminists have redefined this word to mean “evil outgroup”, so now I’m not sure whether a good alternative exists…
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Actual humanism is way, way older than Social Justice, so it would be weird to call it post-SJ (so to speak).
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Erm, what? Secular humanists and “I care about both genders equally” humanists are two separate groups. Feminists complain about the latter because they’re anti-feminist; they don’t care about the former. And it’s not feminists who redefined the term; it’s anti-feminists who want to contrast themselves from feminists because they think feminists only care about women.
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Arguing about which is older tends to obscure the ways in which these terms have evolved. “Humanism” meant something very different to Voltaire than it means to us — the original meaning was closer to what we would call “secularism”.
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@ Anonymous:
I think that “secular humanism” specifically is something like “humanism combined with atheist activism”. Without the “secular” modifier, the meaning of “humanism” is IMO closer to what wireheadwannabe meant.
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I’ve received some interesting remarks from self-id feminists for saying my positions in favor of feminism were consequences of my secular humanism. I think Anonymous is greatly exaggerating the degree of sophistication of standard Internet discourse on this point.
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“Humanism” without the “secular” in front of it means something like what LW calls “altruism”. It’s not necessarily an ideological commitment to egalitarianism in the same sense that calling yourself a liberal doesn’t necessarily mean that you believe global warming is real.
Many people on the Internet have recently been using “humanism” of one of a number of “not feminism” identities. The point of all of these is to claim they support equal rights but specifically not feminism, so in practice it’s an anti-feminist tactic. Naturally, feminists are not terribly happy about this kind of humanist.
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I think there’s a difference between supporting a set of rights (whatever they may be), while rejecting a particular group’s chosen set of tactics for enforcing or promoting these rights, as well as that group’s claims on your identity.
The “feminist” label carries all three meanings. A “feminist” (at least, on the Internet) is usually (though obviously not always) a person who cares about the rights of women; believes that these rights should be promoted by silencing offensive people / “punching up” / shaming nerds / etc.; and identifies as a member of the world-wide meta-organization known as “feminism” (thus embracing certain tropes, norms of behavior, etc).
Likewise, the “MRA” label carries all three meanings. An “MRA” (again, on the internet, #notallmras, etc.) is a person who cares about the rights of men; believes that these rights should be enforced by… I don’t know, insulting women a lot and maybe “going your own way”; and who identifies as a member of the “MRA” subculture, thus embracing certain tropes, etc.
If you are someone who believes that women have rights, but that bullying people is rarely, if ever, the best way of achieving these rights; then other feminists (on the Internet, at least) will probably reject you. Similarly, if you believe that men have rights, but that fighting the feminist oppression to the death is not the best way to achieve these rights; then MRAs will most likely reject you.
Unfortunately, both of these organizations — and, in fact, most other activist organizations — have spent a lot of effort on deliberately conflating the concepts of “a person who does not agree with our methods” and “a hateful person who disagrees with our goals, which are obviously noble and pure”. There’s nothing surprising about this; this is how activist organizations work. This makes things difficult for people-previously-known-as-humanists, but there’s nothing anyone can really do about it (until the Singularity hits, I suppose).
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“If you are someone who believes that women have rights, but that bullying people is rarely, if ever, the best way of achieving these rights; then other feminists (on the Internet, at least) will probably reject you.” [citation needed]
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@ozymandias: At least half of the Google results for “tone policing,” particularly when taking into account how that phrase tends to get used in practice? Or the denunciation of people who are being casually libeled showing up and going “hey, what’s your justification for that statement?” as “sea lioning” or even “harassment?”
(Team Sea Lion for life!)
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Most feminist and most MRA communities have accepted terrible norms. Such lovely concepts as concern trolling, sea lioning, not all me/women. tone policing, mansplaining, hamstering (ok this is more common in redpill) and white-knighting are all entrenched. The first 3 are common in both communities while the others are mostly used in only one (though mras are using tone policing more).
This is a shocking amount of super-weapons to shut down dissent. I do not think MRAs/feminists will actually disown you if you are reasonable and fair. But I do think that people who are very intellectually fair and honest are non-central examples of committed MRAs/feminists. The discourse norms are too terrible in those communities. Also if you are reasonable and prominent you will probably face a decent amount of drama from within your community.
Though I strongly oppose people harshly insulting MRAs/feminists. Lots of awesome people identify as one or both labels. And its not ok to insult those people.
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@ozy:
In addition to what the others said, I’d like to add that several prominent Internet feminists recently announced that they are in favor of doxxing. By this I do not mean, “they proposed a policy that, when taken to its logical conclusion, will lead to doxxing”, but rather, “yes, they literally said that they love doxxing people and so should you”. Of course, doxxing is only ok if you do it to the bad people, not the good ones…
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Yes — turning things around like this may not be exactly fair, but, Ozy, I don’t suppose you’d be willing to provide examples of feminist places that don’t have terrible norms of discourse, aren’t out to pattern-match any dissenters to an enemy, and also aren’t run by you? (Or, better yet, aren’t run by someone from the LW diaspora?)
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I think the accepted term is “filthy traitor”, or whatever they’re calling Freddie deBoer this week…
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One thing Scott doesn’t mention in his post on gender and housework is that even when men do make a decision to be clean and tidy, they tend to go for solutions such as owning as little as possible, living in small places with open floorplans, buying only things that do not get dirty easily, optimizing furniture placement for practicality once and then never moving it again, shaving their heads, and other solutions which sacrifice extravagance for simplicity and ease of maintenance. The most obvious example of this is the military, but you can also find similar approaches in e.g. the minimalist movement, or the way Barack Obama wears only blue and grey suits. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is utterly anathema to the female mind (we’re talking about the gender that invented retail therapy here, not to mention their preference for large suburban houses, or their tendency to redecorate those houses at the drop of a hat). In the absence of any sort of hierarchy or separation of spheres of influences (i.e. the ideal progressive marriage), this leads to much conflict and misery.
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From that thread:
I feel like differences-in-preferences don’t get nearly enough discussion. What surprised me is Scott’s view that the trend goes towards feminists assuming women’s preferences.
I see this example (assume women’s standards for housework are correct) as bucking the trend where feminists take men’s preferences as given.
The career selection debate goes the opposite direction. Men break towards (+work / – life) tradeoffs. Women go the other way. And everyone implicitly assumes that this is to men’s benefit.
Unfortunately, I’m getting stuck when I’m looking for more examples. Do people think there’s actually a trend of implicitly privileging one gender’s preferences over the other?
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Casual sex? That’s somewhere I’ve seen a lot of feminists assume that male preferences are the “right ones.”
“It’s much more sweeping and strange, though, to argue that in the name of female empowerment, male attitudes toward sex should be treated as comprehensively normative and healthy, female attitudes should be treated as self-deceived and borderline pathological, and that women should reshape and renovate their own desires about sex and relationships to conform to what men already want.”–Ross Douthat
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To be fair, discussions of objectification and compulsory sexuality imply that Stereotypical Men should reshape their viewpoints as well.
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Except, there are a lot of women who DO want casual sex but don’t for contingent reasons (fear of safety, fear their partner will be selfish, slut shaming from friends and relatives, etc.).
Also, though you didn’t link to it, I remember that Douthat post and it pissed me off because he basically is bemoaning how women are pressured to conform to (what Douthat says are) male preferences and then says… men should be pressured to conform to (what Douthat says are) women’s preferences. Completely hypocritical!
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@LTP: yes absolutely, and it’s important to support those women! I just don’t like the assumption that those are the only reasons women might not want to have casual sex. Like I have feminist friends who say things like “I’m not really sure if I want to have sex with him . . . but that’s probably just my internalized slut-shaming talking! I mean why not, sex is fun right?” and that attitude worries me.
And I think it makes sense to conform to the preferences of whoever wants sex less, on the principle that having sex you don’t want is worse than not having sex you do want.
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Women are converting to historically male norms of sexual behavior because those norms make sense in a world of female reproductive autonomy. It used to be a lot less adaptive for women to have casual sex with strangers.
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“And I think it makes sense to conform to the preferences of whoever wants sex less, on the principle that having sex you don’t want is worse than not having sex you do want.”
Really? I wouldn’t say this is always true. Being socially pressured into a committed relationship where your sexual needs won’t be met which will make you miserable doesn’t sound good at all.
Given how we still live in an overwhelming sex negative culture, I”m fine if feminism maybe goes a bit too far in encouraging female promiscuity.
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@worldoptimization: And I think it makes sense to conform to the preferences of whoever wants sex less, on the principle that having sex you don’t want is worse than not having sex you do want.
This seems wildly inaccurate to me*. In a past relationship, I was the lower libido partner, and it was definitely the case that I at some points had sex that I didn’t want, and my girlfriend at other points didn’t have sex that she wanted, and the latter sometimes seriously hurt her emotionally, while the former was . . . a bit physically uncomfortable (since that was generally the motivation behind not wanting sex, whether it was due to exhaustion, jaw problems, or wrist problems), and perhaps a bit annoying to have to choose between it and her feeling hurt. And that was all.
To be honest, I’m rather baffled by other people’s accounts of non-injurious, consensual sex that made them feel awful. I’m confident they’re not lying, of course, but it’s quite mystifying to me, along with people talking about being “ready” or “not yet ready” for sex, whether as teenagers or in a new relationship.
*As regards consensual undesired sex, of course, and as a blanket statement. Obviously, there can be particular cases where
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I remember a while back, when the feminist blogosphere was still becoming a thing and Obsidian Wings was srs bsns instead of a creepy ghost town, there was this long argument between feminists and… everyone else… over exactly this issue. A couple feminists writers were throwing some serious insults at men collectively over the whole “sharing housework” thing. The trendy feminist position at the time was to insist that only a perfect tit-for-tat arrangement where all chores were shared at a chore-by-chore 50/5/ level could be feminist, because any other arrangement was vulnerable to the men using their warlock-like privilege powers to welch.
One of the common responses from men reading this was to concede dishes and laundry as necessities, but point out that a lot of housework was a matter of personal preference, and they didn’t care if it got done more than once in a blue moon. So maybe the solution was doing less housework overall, instead of insisting that men do more of it?
I am not kidding, the following is the honest to goodness, non straw man version of the response- Feminists insisted that the men in question didn’t actually have a lower preference for frequency of vacuuming, bathroom cleaning, dusting, etc, or a higher tolerance for dust, bathroom wear and tear, etc.
The men insisted that yes, really, they had. And uniformly offered up as data points the fact that when they were single, they barely bothered with any of these things because they just didn’t care.
This, too, is the honest to goodness response- the feminists insisted that this wasn’t because the men were satisfied with the state of their living spaces. Instead, the men disliked cleaning because it was “women’s work,” and therefore disvalued. The men were just as unhappy with their clean apartments as women would have been, but were willing to stew in them rather than lower themselves to clean like a mere woman.
Literally, the vision they outlined of how they saw men- a bunch of grumpy dudes sitting in apartments looking at underwear balled up in the corner and thinking, “I hate that that’s there! But no, I’m not going to PICK IT UP MYSELF! If only there were a woman here to do it for me! Sadly, it must remain.”
Seriously, this was how the debate went down. Blew my mind. People I’d previously respected were going in for this lunacy. One of the first warning signs I had that I needed to stop being feminism-curious and run for the hills.
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I find your unqualified generalization distasteful, but the issue you describe is something I experience. Your jump to ‘much conflict and misery’ is hasty, though. We just kinda eyeball a compromise in the middle, and it works okay. My partner is reasonable and understands that I’d prefer to keep things easier and dirtier, but I do get some benefit from the clean and complicated home we have, so I do more work than I’d do to maintain a home of my own design but less than half of that required to keep the place I have clean. There’s some annoyance sometimes, but not ‘much conflict and misery’ by any means. (Admittedly, we’re highly atypical people).
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In my ideal progressive non-marriage, we both
own as little as possible,
live in a small place with an open floor plan,
buy things that don’t get dirty easily,
optimize furniture placement for practicality,
don’t engage in “retail therapy” (whatever that is), and
don’t redecorate anything, ever.
Unfortunately, my partner prefers long hair on women, so I can’t quite conform to your masculine ideal.
However, when either of us wants/needs some chore done, the other one lends a hand, rather than complaining that “it’s not that dirty yet” or whatever.
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I’m not seeing it. The barracks aesthetic is highly artificial, and it’s adopted specifically to (a) build discipline and uniformity in recruits, (b) give soldiers something to do during the often-large gaps in their schedule where they aren’t shooting at anything or training for same, and (c) enforce functionality in often-extremely-crowded field conditions. The more extreme forms of minimalism (“own only 100 objects”) are tiny lifestyle cults and pretty much irrelevant outside of weird social contexts like Silicon Valley or the rationalist community. And the Obama thing (like the similar Steve Jobs thing) is mainly about branding.
I do think guys in the West tend to have more ascetic aesthetics than women, on the whole, and might be more tolerant of mess on average (though every girlfriend I’ve had, bar one, has been far messier than me). But that’s as far as I’d go.
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I’m not convinced that tidiness is a female trait. Being responsible for household maintenance is a traditionally female *responsibility*, and that’s plenty to explain “women clean house more than men.” Boys tend not to be taught domestic/housekeeping skills as much as girls.
Male=minimalist, female=ornamented is obviously a historically contingent divide (think about fashion century by century and you’ll find lots of counterexamples). Of course, just because something is historically/culturally local doesn’t mean it’s not *real*. I enjoy ornament, I have since childhood; liking pretty things feels both like “the real me” and “essentially feminine.” The feeling of “essentialness” has nothing to do with whether something is biological or cultural. It’s just a matter of congruence — does it take a conscious effort to maintain or is it deeply embedded into your psyche?
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>this leads to much conflict and misery
Or maybe don’t be such a fucking pansy drama queen faggot and treat your partner like a human being capable of self-awareness and rational behavior – and demand the same reasonable and benign attitude in return?
Why the fuck are you fucking faggots who are all ostensibly in favour of loyalty and strict rules and discipline and self-discipline and making sacrifices for the good of the commonwealth… so fucking afraid of the slightest motherfucking hitch in a relationship? Where are your ovaries and/or balls? Why are you so fucking pathetic, you cowardly fucking idiot shit-lick nerds?
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rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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Having An Episode. Sorry, folks. Sorry Jamie.
The point still stands. Even given the premise, this is a shockingly timid, fearful and un-heroic outlook.
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Faggot here: if my fainting couch isn’t properly dusted daily, my next dramatic swooning will be interrupted by asthmatic coughing.
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Look who the hell is talking.
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You’re supposed to be my superior in virtue and strength of character, are you not?
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Actual disagreements often don’t feel from the inside like differences between two self-aware and rational beings. In my experience, cleanliness is one of the things that usually doesn’t. If you want things cleaner than the other person does, you’re a freak with OCD who should go see a psychiatrist; if the other person wants things cleaner than you do, you’re a disgusting pig who should go learn some discipline.
This isn’t that surprising, given that the two options are:
1) One person is constantly viscerally disgusted by the shared living environment.
2) The other person is constantly set up to lose power struggles. (Even if self-modification is possible and easy in this case, it’s still losing a power struggle, and it may even feel like that from the inside.)
And in either case, it’s a reminder that, no matter what, you’re completely alone in the world and the only reason you can deal with aliens whose preferences are usually completely different from yours in ways that will sometimes appear totally insane is a combination of social convention and the fact that you don’t really have to deal with most people enough to notice that everyone else is fundamentally different.
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@nydwracu: To be fair, sometimes it appears to be:
1a) One person constant experiences social anxiety upon observing the environment, due to having internalized the meme that its current state reflects poorly on her (or, far more rarely, him), and will result in everyone looking down and disliking her if they ever learn about it.
This probably slightly more solvable.
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Many points to Nydwracu for engaging with the logical argument in that episode.
What value does social convention provide in resolving this dispute? Insofar as its value is as a Schelling point to head off argument, wouldn’t splitting chores 50/50 work just as well?
Also, I still think you’re overstating the magnitude of this problem. It’s perfectly viable to just eyeball a compromise where the partner with the higher cleanliness preference does somewhere between 50 and 100 percent of housework. I know because I’ve done it, and it doesn’t cause that much conflict.
Analogous situations happen in economics. What happens is nations argue of the exact compromise via the political process, and what they come up with probably isn’t perfect, but if the members generally like being one country they shrug and deal with it.
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>Rescue ALL the ingroup members from their shitty life situations!
AMEN!
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Does that include persuading trans people in Russia who believe that everything is pretty much OK that actually their situation is rather shitty, and they would be better off elsewhere?
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No? If your situation is not shitty then clearly you do not need to be rescued.
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@Ozy
I have a Russian friend who works for a human rights organization over there, and from what he tells me, if you’re queer and your life doesn’t look shitty to you, you’ve got your fingers shoved so far into your ears they could puncture your brain. Said friend – a trans man – helped smuggle a gay man out of the country because he’s being hunted by the government after protesting Sochi, and I’m inclined to take his word here.
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Do keep in mind that “human rights organization” often means “on the side of Washington”. I didn’t hear anything about gays in Russia until just after it was reported that the Russian government cracked down on foreign-backed NGOs. And for “foreign-backed NGOs” you should read “organizations funded by Washington dedicated to the subversion of Russia”, which sounds over-the-top but really isn’t that uncommon a strategy in general*. Replace “subversion” with “weakening or turning” if it helps.
* Remember those Moscow-backed Commie front groups from the days of the USSR?
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Surely the first blow was the invasion of the meme that must not be named. I propose that Ozy’s army take one of Ozy’s memes and try to resolve every SSD discussion by applying it. Any suggestions?
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Hi, I’m over here from Scott’s page. Even though this subject isn’t directed toward race or gender, it struck me as close enough in spirit to err on the side of caution and come here for it. I bet this has been discussed to death, but it’s new to me. I’ve never seen “trigger warnings” until observing lots of them on Slatestarcodex. And they bother me. I was wondering whether someone might be willing to engage me on it. I promise I’m a sincere inquirer and not spoiling for an argument.
It seems to me that the basic case for trigger warnings is probably something like this: “Most people are fine reading depictions of sensitive subjects, but there are some people who can experience real trauma from being exposed to such discussions; for instance, it could cause some people to re-live seriously traumatic episodes from their pasts, causing extreme suffering, and conceivably even causing some to lapse into periods of prolonged psychological distress. We’re not asking to censor discussions of these topics — just have the courtesy to affix a brief note so that these people can avoid suffering needless serious suffering. It’s so easy that it’s virtually costless to do. What on earth could be the problem with that?”
And when you put it like that, it certainly has some force to it. Indeed, the very reasonableness of the request is part of what seems a bit insidious to me. It seems to me that individual precautionary measures requiring tiny changes in behavior by everyone for the benefit of a few almost always seem trivially easy to live with in isolation. How hard is it to tag on a trigger warning if you’re going to talk about a subject that could cause someone emotional turmoil? It’s trivially easy for you to do and could spare real and serious harm to someone else. A no-brainer! But the logic of this line of reasoning really does strike me as leading to potentially large costs to society when considered in their aggregate, and especially considering that each precautionary measure, once adopted, becomes the psychological baseline from which subsequent precautionary measures will inevitably be proposed. I’m trying to think of a reductio here. To be honest, when I was a kid a few decades ago, the idea of needing to put tags on emotionally fraught topics would have been overwhelmingly viewed as a reductio ad absurdum in itself, but it can no longer be viewed as such since times have changed. Suppose that in 20 years trigger warnings have become socially normalized, such that you need to include them on pain of being viewed as a jerk. Imagine — I don’t know — that the next thing is that there are some people on diets who will not be able to adhere to their diets if they read discussions referring to food. Should we feel obligated to tag mentions of food with special warnings? Of course, this harm isn’t as great as someone requiring a trigger warning to avoid severe mental anguish, but there might well be some people whose health could be greatly affected by being tempted off a diet, and whose eating habits would really spiral out of control, with the ultimate result of years of lost life, enormous physical suffering from avoidable disease, etc. Surely it would be trivially easy for all of us to make sure we tag writings that discuss food. Persuaded? What about, after that, the next trivially easy request, e.g., that people who are offended by having to read liberal political views should be warned by flagging writings containing liberal ideas (and, of course, conservative ones for another audience)? And these only go to precautionary measures with respect to writings per se. There are undoubtedly whole universes of other sorts of precautionary measures that can be taken in other areas that will certainly spare some people real suffering, and where the particular precautionary activity would carry a very small cost to those engaging in it. It’s easy to make up examples. While each measure is very minor in itself, they could greatly impair our lives in the aggregate after a certain point.
This isn’t just an abstract slippery slope concern. While it may not be visible to younger readers, those, say, in their 40s or older can attest to the profound societal changes that we have experienced with respect to precautionary conduct. When I was a kid, the idea of wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle would have seemed absurd. People would have stared. I’m not saying that that particular change in society is for the worse — some precautions are certainly worth taking where the harm avoided is great enough. But there is no question that the logic of precaution has changed life significantly in recent years already, and I think this fact alone warrants serious discussion and reflection before starting in on applying this logic to the written word — an area which on its face would seem to be the very last place these sorts of principles would be likely to intrude.
By now, you probably think I’m overdoing it with this long message. Maybe so. But it is at least sincere. Thanks for your time!
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Context is key, and often not talked about at all in the trigger warning discussions.
I tag food on tumblr because I have few enough people reading me that I checked if they had specific triggers. I would not have thought to do it otherwise (food is awesome, cooking is great, join me, I make cookies). For public discourse to a general audience, I would not feel obligated to warn about that, but I have to stick to other restrictive norms. Frankly at this point I see the push for trigger warnings as an evolution of civil discourse norms more than anything else.
(and are civil discourse norms extremely context dependent!)
There will be outliers and extremists, much more visible today that they would have been 40 years ago, and there is risk for polarization of the debate (and staying stuck where we are I assume).
I read someone (can’t remember who) on my tumblr feed a couple days ago writing that this debate would soon be over because of semantic web (i.e., that it should be possible to have the trigger warnings generated from the content of what you are about to access). I am not sure I agree, both for practical reasons and because of the possible extension to meatspace (push in university lectures for example).
Also because I think it is not worthless to face ones fears, and because I worry that trigger warnings will be used to avoid everything making people uncomfortable rather than limited to things that are distressful, I’d like to have trigger warning existing in practice, but not without constant discussions and debates about implementation.
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Thank you. I take several points from this.
1. I infer, although you are too polite to say straight out, that there really is a lot of debate on this issue already, in which case my points are almost certainly retreads of well-worn arguments. Sorry about that — as I said it’s all new to me.
2. Sorry for inadvertently using a real example of current usage as a reductio. I didn’t mean to trivialize anyone’s issues with food or anything else. That said, a part of me finds it telling that an example that I assumed would be 20 years away at best would have already come into use. I honestly expected the response to that analogy to be the opposite — that it was too far-fetched to be worth bothering with.
3. I take your point that context is relevant. I would have no problem, for instance, using food-related warnings of your writing is targeted mostly to, say, bullemics or something. My concern is really over use in writing directed to general audiences, such as Scott’s web page. I don’t know how tumblr works so I can’t opine on how that site fits in in my opinion.
Thanks again for sharing thoughts on this.
CT
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1. I do not feel you retread old arguments, and even if that was the case holding lack of knowledge against someone is a bad idea (everyone should teach/mentor in their domain of competence once in a while to have a reality check). I would not say there is a lot of debate in the sense of exchange of ideas. There are a few people advancing arguments different from “you are a weakling if you want trigger warnings” or “you are an insensitive asshole if you oppose trigger warnings”. Philip Wythe may be a good starting point to arguments for (although I often disagree on details).
2. (from your post I may have to watch my tone, I did not try to be confrontational at all)
In the case you presented, I made an effort because someone communicated clearly that they would like for this type of content to be tagged. I do not expect tw: food to become automatic for polite discourse in the future, except when interacting with someone who has stated this (and I can choose not to interact with them if I decide that their demands are more than what I am willing to do), or (again) in very specific contexts.
3. We already auto-censor our writing towards general audience (and one will always catch some flak because you can’t please everyone). Wielded in another way, you could think of using trigger/content warnings to extend the range of topics you can write about publicly without offending.
I kind of like the list of trigger warnings suggested by the geekfeminism wikia for general purposes (not the part about the in person events, too close to their anti-harassment policy problems, but that’s another debate).
Some experts of trauma suggest that trigger warnings in general are a bad idea (sometimes long-term and at the scale of the population). The wikipedia page on trauma triggers quotes some. Some disagree, and I have no clue what’s the correct stance, but this discussion is essentially around the trauma part and healing this trauma, while trigger warning are used for more than this currently.
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Thank you. This is very helpful.
CT
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I would like to add that although I have no triggers or traumatic past, I appreciate certain trigger warnings. Somethings I would rather not read until I am in the mood for them. “trigger warning: graphic violence and rape descriptions”? Yikes, Not just before bedtime. That one can wait for tomorrow.
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This story from my home state exemplifies why I strongly sympathize with Scott Alexander when he says he’s more afraid of the left than the right: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_27401430/community-leaders-march-justice-after-teen-girl-was
I think the recent spate of police shootings has bee atrocious, people are right to be mad and demand reform. Yet, in this case, a girl rams a police officer with a stolen car, and it shot dead in self-defense by the cops, and there are SJ activists protesting this as if this was Ferguson 2.0. You gotta be kidding me.
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Ah! Typos, revised:
“I think the recent spate of police shootings has been atrocious, people are right to be mad and demand reform. Yet, in this case, a girl rams a police officer with a stolen car, and is shot dead in self-defense by the cops, and there are SJ activists protesting this as if this was Ferguson 2.0. You gotta be kidding me.
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I think what you’re missing is the fact that, (especially) in the light of the recent spate of police shootings, the activists no longer believe the police can be trusted to describe the incident accurately, or to use lethal force only when justified. So even if it may have been justified in a particular incident, activists have good reason to be skeptical in general.
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I think what you’re missing is the fact that, in the light of the recent spate of false accusations by the progressive media, anyone who remembers how all the cases Benjamin Crump has been involved with turned out (Ferguson, Marco McMillian, Trayvon Martin) can no longer believe that the media can be trusted to describe the incident accurately. So even if it may not have been justified in a particular incident, the activists have been so consistently wrong that there’s no reason to trust them or think their heuristics aren’t totally deluded.
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I remain mystified that reactionaries think the Travon Martin case is a good one to keep on their list of media failures, considering that Zimmerman has gotten in trouble for domestic violence and road rage incidents like 4 times since then.
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Frankly, I trust neither the media nor the cops. This leads to a great deal of uncertainty, which is regrettable, but probably a good thing, insofar as it’s fairly accurate.
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I remain mystified that progressives think they can use rhetorical moves like that to imply that disagreement with the prog narrative around Trayvon Martin is limited to a tiny internet fringe.
I also remain mystified that the people who keep pointing at societal mistreatment to explain misbehavior in general don’t think that someone who was called out as the Most Evil Person In The World all over the international media for more than a year would end up getting in trouble a lot.
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SJ internet argument suggestion: instead of saying “check your privilege,” say “you’re committing the typical mind fallacy.”
My arguments for this suggestion:
1) It accomplishes all of the useful analytical work that “check your privilege” does in most conversations. Sometimes, you need to tell somebody that their argument or policy proposal neglects aspects of members of different social groups’ experiences. Telling them that they’re assuming that everybody else shares their experiences does just that.
2) “Privileged” is a term of abuse in ordinary English– it implies a Kennedy or Bush-like level of unearned active social advantage and life-ease, and usually also a certain degree of moral failure caused by that ease. Unsurprisingly, people tend to get really angry when you call them that– which is why using “check your privilege” with a person unfamiliar with the terminology basically never seems to be productive. So, using different terms would probably lead to better conversations.
3) It allows you to make more parsimonious arguments in favor of positions, and allows you to build consensus around issues more easily. Using “check your privilege” implies a whole bunch of arguments about the general structure of society. I believe that a lot of these arguments are true, and that it would be good to spread them more widely. However, people often don’t need to believe the grand structural narrative to agree that a particular issue needs action. Framing the problem more parsimoniously will keep the argument about the issue at the object level, and prevent it from getting derailed by general arguments about say, whether feminism is right in the abstract, and probably make coming to consensus and talking about solutions easier.
Thoughts?
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It’s a good idea, for situations where “check your privilege” is actually (kinda*) appropriate. And will never be implemented, because the sort of people who are most enthusiastic about yelling “check your privilege” are dead set against being forced to only do so when it’s actually appropriate.
*I don’t really believe in the existence of “privilege” as SJ types typically conceive it.
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Or because they’ve never even heard of “typical mind fallacy”? Or because “priviledge” is already an established concept in their subculture, while invoking “typical mind fallacy” would require either a page of explanation or an appeal to Eliezer’s (dubious) authority? Or perhaps because the concept they mean is more “typical life” than “typical mind”?
Oh no, sorry. It’s because they’re evil, of course.
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I didn’t say that there weren’t any other reasons it won’t be implemented. “Typical life” actually struck me as somewhat more suitable in theory, but in practice, isn’t that sort of a subcase? What’s relevant here about one’s life is (usually) how it affects the circuitry in one’s mind that assesses the characteristics of a particular situation.
FWIW, I don’t recognize Eliezer’s authority (and have never read anything by him that related to typical mind fallacies), and haven’t read a page of explanation, so unless I’ve been using it wrong myself (and maybe I have), it doesn’t seem like a terribly difficult concept to grasp.
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The issue is that “typical mind fallacy” is much harder to apply. In alot of cases typical mind fallacy harms both sides of an argument. For example you could argue that a woman who experienced alot of discrimination in tech and is now crusading to remove sexism in tech is unfairly extrapolating her experiences. It also of course could be used to get a white male to realize not everyone experiences “jokes” the same way as him.
Also the value of personal experience is central to SJ discourse. Thinking about the typical mind fallacy makes you wonder if impressions from a study with n=1 (your life) are really that useful. I personally think that being female or male or bi-sexual is not really that helpful in understanding the average experience of being female/male/bi. Unless you look at a wide sample you have no way of knowing if your experiences are typical and if you have the large scale data your own experiences are less relevant. I do think group member is useful in that it increases compassion. People tend to be much more compassionate toward groups they themselves belong to. And compassion for a group tends to increase the quality of one’s understanding (Though one can go too far here, see X-nationalists).
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Resolved: “People are experts on their own lives” is a really stupid statement even before we get to the implicit “unless they’re oppressors, in which case oppressed people understand them better than they understand themselves” bit*.
Which is also really stupid. I particularly love the couple times I been accused of “mansplaining” when a feminist woman put forth a theory of why-men-do-X and I said “actually, I do X, and it’s not for that reason at all, it’s because Y, and I suspect that the same is true of a lot of men.”
(Resolved: The term “mansplaining” is too thoroughly motte-and-baileyed to be saved, and has been since it was introduced._
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@osberend, I’m also highly suspicious of the idea that being in an oppressed class gives you special knowledge of your oppressors. It seems more likely to me that among the many other unfair advantages of more powerful groups, they tend to be epistemically advantaged as well. The oppressed have a good reason to be paranoid about the intentions of the oppressors; trusting them and making a mistake is very costly, so it’s safest to assume the worst. On the other hand, oppressors have the option of being objective, since their privileged position protects them from the need for paranoia. While most of them don’t take it (people being generally irrational), enough of them do enough of the time that on average they probably come closer to an accurate understanding of what’s going on.
The theories about pornography you get from some radical feminists strike me as a particularly bad example of what you’re talking about, and seem to fit the pattern well. Even sex-positive feminists sometimes come up with some pretty crazy theories in that area, though of course they’re not nearly as bad.
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FWIW, I’m a designated oppressor, but I don’t think I have any special knowledge about my group; nor do I think it would be reasonable for me to presume that my experience is entirely typical. If I wanted to know something about the lives of straight white men, I wouldn’t be looking deep inside myself, I’d be looking at some statistics.
On a somewhat separate note, though:
> The oppressed have a good reason to be paranoid about the intentions of the oppressors…
One impression I get when reading social justice narratives (and I admit that this impression is biased, given that I am an oppressor) is that they tend to incite paranoia to levels that (again, in my oppressive opinion) is hard to justify. For example, if you are a woman, then, from a certain feminist perspective, literally every man out there is out to get you in some highly specific way. Your very life and liberty are in constant danger, not merely from some abstract socioeconomic trend such as “the Patriarchy”, but specifically from this guy, yes, this guy right here. And that one. And the other one over there, etc.
If my impression is accurate, then IMO this level of paranoia does more harm than good — because it’s not healthy to live one’s life in constant terror. On the other hand, if that level of paranoia really is justified, then why are we merely talking about “social justice” and stuff ? Why aren’t oppressed groups arming themselves and forming highly isolated gated communities, free from any oppressive invaders ?
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@Bugmaster — you’re reading the wrong stuff. The stuff you mention exists. It is unhealthy. But you likely are drawn to it for not-so-nice reasons.
If I want to know what conservatives think, should I go read Breitbart and say, “Yep, they’re all terrible.”
Stop doing that.
######
@Protagoras
On whether the oppressed know their oppressors better or the other way: I think I know waaaaaaaay more about how cis culture operates than the average cis person knows about trans stuff. Like, waaaaaaaaaaaay waaaaaaaaaay waaaaaaaaaay more. Like, not even close. To a laughable degree.
I think black folks in general know the broad structure of white culture better than the reverse. Less so these days, as more whites directly consume black culture than in the past. But still. How many blacks end up consuming media by-and-for whites? How often does the reverse occur? And yes, minorities have *cause* to be a bit paranoid, but the majority has *cause* to be smug and dismissive.
This is likely as true for other minority cultures as well.
I am suspicious of any claims to “objectivity.” Especially since the *actual content* of the debate is who gets to build the utility function. The person with no skin in the game can be smugly “objective,” but they are as likely to be clumsy and hurtful. Learning the full contours of an issue is hard work. A person with skin in the game will do this by necessity. They wear the scars on their body. A person on the outside can easily pretend to have done this, but have they really? How does one decide?
I think gender is different, by the way, as men and women are not really separate cultures, and heterosexuality leads them to interact in ways rather different from majority-minority interactions. So while I think this epistemological difference is true on most social justice axes, it is probably less true for gender.
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Veronica:
I think you’re describing minority versus majority culture, not oppressed versus oppressor culture. I think that if you looked at extremely small subcultures which were both elite and had moderate interaction with the mainstream, said elites would have more knowledge of cultural mainstreams than non-elites would have of minority culture; I bet that billionaires know more about football than non-billionaires know about yachting.
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> you’re reading the wrong stuff. The stuff you mention exists. It is unhealthy. But you likely are drawn to it for not-so-nice reasons.
In my case, those reasons inevitably are, “someone in some forum comment told me to go read that stuff, in order to make myself a better person”; or simply “someone said this stuff in their own comment”. I have no way of knowing a priori which members of the SJ community are considered “healthy”, I have to take what people say at face value.
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> I think gender is different, by the way, as men and women are not really separate cultures…
I think it depends on what you mean by “gender”. I’ve recently read The Self-Made Man (on recommendation by someone on this blog, no less), and I believe it presents one opposing data point.
As you probably know, the author is a woman who poses as a man in order to find out how men think. In the process, she was (as far as I can tell) repeatedly shocked to find out that men actually do have emotions; actually do experience feelings of love and loss (as opposed to mere lust); and that men’s lives are not free of problems (many of which are unique to men).
In other words, the author belonged to a culture that viewed men as barely more than beasts, and finding out that they are human came as a surprise. If that’s not “separate”, I don’t know what is.
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@Bugmaster
Wasn’t she also surprised to learn that straight women prefer actual men to lesbians in drag?
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That author also wrote this. Needless to say, I won’t be paying much attention to her insights on gender.
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I really don’t like the rhetoric of “look at this horrible thing X person wrote, we should all therefore not care about X’s thoughts on anything.” Very few authors haven’t written something terrible or do not hold a damaging opinion on some issue. Even if the idiotic opinion is related to gender it does not mean a person’s other views on gender can be safely ignored.
Yes you can ignore Jim Doland but one should have a high standard of evidence before they can conclude someone’s insights are clearly tainted. I have seen this technique used to ignore lots of reasonable people.
Also you can go read my posts in the last couple threads. I am not exactly a “moderate” on trans issues. So yes I really hate the article veronica linked to.
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Things exist by degrees. Sure, I can disagree with one thing a person says but find value in another. But there are lines past which I lose any respect at all. That article passed that line and ran for miles more.
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@veronica: Simply from an epistemological point of view, the fact that she wrote a really stupid Thing A five years before she Thing B, having spent a year and half in between having experiences which she states greatly changed her views . . . does not seem to say very much about the quality or insightfulness of Thing B.
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Crossposting from SSC, which I hope is okay (it seems like there’s a large overlap in readership, but probably not 100%?). If not, please let me know and/or feel free to delete this comment.
Does anyone here have experience with/comments on “voice dialogue” therapy? I can’t find any information about it that seems likely to be reliable and/or unbiased.
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I need some help with charitable interpretation. Here’s what appears to be the gist of Larry Summers’ controversial diversity speech (direct quote from the transcript):
My issue is this: why would he “like nothing better than to be proved wrong”? If his explanation turns out to be 100% right, that’s wonderful news! Everyone simply chooses a job with their preferred work-life balance, and top-level positions are held by the most talented people, most of whom happen to be men.
Thus far, I’ve come up with two interpretations of this remark:
A. “I know you silly egalitarians hate the facts and don’t listen to opponents, so I’ll pretend I’m on your side, as I understand it.”
B. “Everything I said is just code for ‘women are lazier and dumber than men’, and I would actually like to be proved wrong on that.”
However, neither of those paints a very nice picture of Mr Summers as a person. (I mean the hypothesized weaselly tactics here, not the hypothesized beliefs.)
So, any other suggestions? Please?
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C. “I would prefer to see more women in STEM, for various reasons, but not at the cost of admitting or hiring candidates who are less driven and/or less capable. If that’s not a possible thing, then that would be unfortunate.”
D. “No matter how hard I try to be precise about what I mean, some of you in the audience are going to interpret it as code for ‘women are lazier and dumber than men,’ [which is, of course, true] so I’m going to put in some sort of a disclaimer to try to at least avoid being accused of gleefully proclaiming that women are lazier and dumber than men.”
(C) matches with my own attitude on a variety of vaguely-related subjects: I like [characteristic*] women. I’d like to be surrounded by more of them. But not if that means being surrounded by more kinda-sorta [characteristic] women at the expense of solidly [characteristic] men. If the fraction of people who genuinely have (or can readily cultivate) a solid level of [characteristic] who are women is well under 50%, that’s a bit unfortunate.
As for (D) . . . well, look at what happened. Even under an uncharitable reading, he was talking about a difference in averages and fractions. And yet all sorts of women popped out of the woodwork to loudly react as if he had said that they personally were inadequate (along with a fair number of men supporting them). Clearly there is a set of “egalitarians” (axiomatics in the categorization below) who won’t listen to opponents, and will take whatever they say in a way that has little to do with its actual content. I don’t think that this style of defensiveness is a good response to that, but I think it’s understandable.
On (A), I think you’re loading the language a bit by using the term “egalitarians,” which seems to me to be very fertile ground for equivocation on issues like this. I’d propose a fourfold categorization:
1. Axiomatic egalitarianism is the belief that men and women, or the population of different socially defined racial groups, must have the same distribution of “innate”** intelligence, capacity (at every task), hard-workingness, etc., and that any apparent deviation from this obvious truth is a sign of bias in assessment or definition.
2. Empirical egalitarianism is the belief that men and women, or the population of different socially defined racial groups, do in fact have the same distribution of “innate” intelligence, capacity (at all or virtually all important tasks, at least), hard-workingness, etc., and that any apparent deviation from this established truth is a sign of bias in assessment.
3. Collectivist egalitarianism is the belief that men and women, or the population of different socially defined racial groups, should be “treated the same” at a group level, e.g. that a woman whose mathematical ability is at the 95th percentile of the distribution of such ability among women should have an equal opportunity to become a professional mathematician as a man whose ability is at the 95th percentile of the distribution of such ability among men.
4. Collectivist egalitarianism is the belief that men and women, or the population of different socially defined racial groups, should be “treated the same” at an individual level, e.g. that a woman whose mathematical ability is X, whose willingness to work long hours is Y, and so forth, should have the same opportunity to become a professional mathematician as a man whose mathematical ability is X, whose willingness to work long hours is Y, and so forth, i.e. a man who is the same as her in all relevant respects apart from his sex itself.
Laying my cards on the table: I think (1) is batshit insane. I think (2) is undoubtedly wrong about at least a few characteristics, with respect to sex, and there are a whole crapton of characteristics, with respect to sex and race, where it could easily be right or wrong. I am 100% opposed to (3), and this is one of the major positions that leads me to oppose SJ, which seems to me to be broadly committed to (3) as a major goal. I am 100% supportive of (4).
And for that reason, it really bothers me when SJ types invoke “egalitarianism,” since it seems to me that they’re doing a bit of ugly equivocation, wherein any position that violates (1) and/or (3) will be attacked as “anti-egalitarian,” which will be painted as evil, because who could oppose (4)?
*Intelligent, analytical, geeky, tabletop-RPG obsessed, etc. Choose as relevent for colleagues, members of geeky social circles generally, tabletop RPG folks (and OSR folks within that group) more specifically, beer geeks and homebrewers, ect.
**Where “innate” certainly includes genetic predispositions, but might also include epigenetics and even (when politically convenient) the effects of childhood environment.
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This is my position.
With the caveat that the human population is *big* and you can usually find enough women who genuinely have [characteristic*] that programs to promote “Women With [Characteristic*]” are beneficial. I’m a big fan of all-female groups.
You can very easily position yourself as pro-woman without ever diluting the quality of your community. You just have to be very slightly disingenuous. (i.e. starting a “Women with [Characteristic*]” outreach program and actively promoting women in your community, while being aware that there will probably always be a gender ratio and not *seriously* trying to change that fact.) Nobody will notice. Seriously, nobody at all will notice if you don’t call attention to it.
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Except for all the people who will shout about how your field is only x% female, and so obviously, there must be a ton of discrimination in it. Or the people who will yell at you for opposing changing norms in your field to make it “woman friendly,” and claim that you’re trying to keep women out, even though you’re doing major outreach efforts yourself (cf. SJWs who hate Zak S).
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Is anyone — ANYONE — checking empirically to see whether “women in math” or “women who code” groups empirically change the gender composition of the industry? Is anybody holding the founders of such groups *accountable* for the gender composition of the industry?
If the government starts interpreting Title IX to imply gender quotas at universities, ok, I’ll grant that people are being forced to sacrifice meritocracy for gender equality, and I’ll go public as a woman in a technical field and saying “this will destroy American science.”
But mostly what I see happening is that if you make noises that sound superficially anti-feminist (like “there isn’t that much sex discrimination in my field”) you’ll get called sexist. That’s unfair, and wrong, but it’s entirely mediated by what you say in public. If you say “there should be more women in my field” and only make the efforts in that direction that are *harmless* to meritocracy, nobody will notice that you’re not a party-line SJW.
(Paul Graham *almost* succeeded at this. He does lots of promoting women entrepreneurs. He got tarred and feathered because he said “hey feminists, you’re wrong, actually I do promote women entrepreneurs” and they stopped listening at “you’re wrong” — if you tell feminists they’re wrong, you get read as sexist. If you were cynical and literally never told them they’re wrong, but made modest harmless pro-women efforts and said pro-women platitudes like everyone else, you would not get in trouble. Most people who promote “women in tech” or whatever are *not* literally optimizing for gender equality. They’re not *optimizing*, period.)
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You also get attacked if you defend workplace or conference norms and culture and/or end products that are perceived as “hostile to women.”
I mean, for fuck’s sake, Adria Richards got a dude booted from PyCon for joking about big dongles and “forking.” A dude who landed a probe on a comet got internet-lynched for wearing a shirt a friend made for him to a press conference. Zak S (in RPGs, which are not STEM, but the feminist attacks are similar) has been horribly slandered as a misogynist (and transphobe, homophobe, and racist, because while we’re lying about people being The Enemy, why not go all out) partially for defending sexy and/or disturbing art and concepts in RPGs, but partly also for daring to publicly exist as the DM for a roleplaying group composed mostly or entirely of porn stars. Other people have been targeted simply for defending those people, or others like them. And all of this shit gets justified (in addition to standard SJW “it offended a woman and had to do with gender, and is therefore automatically sexist” bullshit) on the basis that obviously there must be a ton of sexism in the field, or otherwise, why would there be so few women!?
And yeah, sure, this is all doing things in public, kinda. But so fucking what? Not doing things that will anger feminists publicly (a) is really fucking difficult for some people, particularly those who are autistic or autism-adjacent, and (b) is just a repulsive and vicious thing to attempt. Not to defend oneself when attacked? Or others? Or their work? To guard one’s tongue at every moment, caring more strongly about how others might react to an innocent remark than about one’s own liberty? How fucking low!
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This charming discussion is turning me back towards some SJ hard-line anticapitalism.
Sarah, even if things like affirmative action, etc really are objectively harmful, they are an important constraint on runaway optimization.
If everything is done to promote meritocracy, and “merit” correlates too strongly with certain group traits… then the meritocrats will INEVITABLY rule as god-kings, while justifying contempt towards and the dehumanization and humiliation and oppression of the groups where merit-traits are underrepresented. This must not be allowed to happen. NO cost too high.
I’d much rather see women “destroy” American Science then have American Science help grind women down. Because no amount of wealth creation is of much use when it serves as a daily reminder to the world of how useless and pathetic and miserable one is.
Society already strongly dislikes women. It hates stupid people. It hates disabled people. It hates people, actually “productive”/value-adding or not, who cannot command a living wage. Do you want the elite to become ever more perfect and gain ever more leverage? This and more will be an inevitable outcome! Nobody respects weakness! Nobody *tolerates* weakness!
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Speaking as someone who hopes American Science advances quickly enough to keep me alive and maybe get us to other planets someday, I’m going to have to strongly oppose you “destroying” it based on your crank socio-economic theories and faulty understanding of how this country works.
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You wouldn’t find freedom and equality on another planet if you support the hegemony of a small elite caste at home.
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I read it as a standard, automatic genuflection to the “blank slate” ideal. Liberals tend to assume that a blank human nature is more easily optimizable than a nonblank one, even when discussing data that clearly imply the opposite.
Particularly within academia, such reflexive hedges amount to nothing more than a rhetorical tic.
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A major point in favor of neoreaction as a forum for the discussion of ideas, from my limited observation, is that they are willing to acknowledge that there is such a thing as human nature.
A major point against neoreaction as an actual movement (again, from limited observation) is that their consensus regarding that nature is grossly inaccurate. But I still think it’s more virtuous to at least have the discussion than to dismiss the entire matter out of hand.
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I’m not Larry Summers (obviously), but I imagine his motivation is something like this:
1.) “I’m a cultural blue triber, so I have a cherished belief that all groups are equal in ability.
2.) One of the great blue tribe causes is to increase the proportion of women at higher levels of STEM etc, which the blue tribe thinks is down to discrimination etc. Because of 1.) I am naturally inclined to support them.
3.) However, there is some scientific evidence showing that 1.) is false and that therefore I know that the efforts of my natural allies in 2.) are misguided and their policies will impose costs that I am unwilling to bite the bullet over. This obviously causes me some cognitive dissonance.
4.) Therefore, I would be very glad for 3.) to be proven wrong, so that my beliefs will remain intact, and my allies in 2.) can achieve their aims without trading off some of my other values such as academic excellence in STEM etc.”
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My interpretation is that he meant what he said in the last clause – that Summers is a hard core meritocrat, and if he’s wrong, then the problem could be solved in a way that increases both meritocracy and equity, which he would see as a good.
Steelmanning a bit:
A. It’s unfortunate that we have an abnormal distribution, especially in STEM. That abnormal distribution makes the areas seem unwelcoming to the underrepresented groups and leaves them disportionately without role models and mentors. It leads to resentment and mistrust. And if it is because we are leaving talented people out because our biases, then we are leaving productivity on the table – if we hired the most talented but overlooked Fredonians in places of the least talented but overestimated Sylviians, we would have a more productive faculty.
B. If I (Summers) am right in my hypothesis that the distribution is a result of disproportionate preferences and/or different variability of talent, then the problem does not have what I (Summers) see as a productive solution – we can try to force people to make choices they do not prefer (requiring or incenting Sylvanians to work less than they want to or Fredonians to work more), or we can hire people with less merit, reducing productivity, or we can keep with the status quo, engendering resentment and leaving out role models, etc.
C. On the other hand, if I’m wrong in my hypothesis, then the problem is solveable – once we develop better tools to recognize the overlooked but more meritorious Freedonians and/or correct mistaken biases on the part of the decision makers, we will improve the meritocracy, making the group simultaneosly more productive, more equitable, and resolving a social tension. Win win win!
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Nita you responded to my post on SSC about my own IQ. I wish that the following is false “one’s ability in mathematics and to a lesser but signifigant extent programming is determined by intrinsic factors such as genes and randomness in embryo development.” But I do think its true. My belief in that statement causes me much pain. Interacting with people who are very smart has a non-trivial risk of me being depressed for a couple days. I do not shy away from smart people (my best friend is much more intelligent than me and we interact quite alot) but my beleif in the importance of innate ability causes me alot of sorrow.
I really wish I was wrong about innate cognitive ability mattering. But that does not mean I am disposed favorably toward the “intelligence is a myth” or “IQ doesn’t matter” people. These people regularly insult and mis-interpret me online and irl for saying what I honestly think is true. They seem to think I get to chose what potions I think are more likely. I don’t.
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“A. “I know you silly egalitarians hate the facts and don’t listen to opponents, so I’ll pretend I’m on your side, as I understand it.”
What do you think being on the “egalitarian” side means with respect to innate differences in cognitive skills between men and women? There are two interpretations that comes to mind:
1 – An egalitarian believes that a word where men and women have the same distribution of cognitive skill is better than a world where men and women differ in cognitive skills.
2- An egalitarian is someone who is fairly sure that men and women have the same distribution of cognitive skills on average.
Larry Summers is claiming he is an egalitarian* by definition 1. But he is not an egalitarian* by definition 2. The loosely defined group of people who strongly opposed Summers were mostly egalitarians by BOTH definitions 1 and 2. And some people seem to think 1 and 2 go together. But I see no reason why 1 and 2 should be a package deal.
*egalitarian with respect to this particular issue of the
**I personally do not have an opinion on the issue of group differences in the distribution of cognitive skills. I am pretty sure intelligence measures are useful. But I do not know why some groups do better than others. It could be genetic or it could be non-shared environment (i.e. everything except genetics and parenting). Also useful =/= decisive.
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Thanks, everyone!
With your help, I’ve managed to construct a sufficiently plausible image of not-horrible Larry Summers in my mind. And I even came up with a charitable idea of my own while reading your comments.
When I first encountered Summers’ speech, I didn’t have a problem with the variance argument (and I still don’t). The two things that bothered me the most were the aforementioned turns of phrase which seemed like dishonest tactics, and his claims that women don’t “want” to do “intense work”:
But now I’m thinking, what if he was using “want” in the “revealed preferences” way — i.e., this is the option people choose, therefore it’s what they want? I wasn’t familiar with this usage back when I first read the transcript, but it seems popular among economists.
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Some people appear to have a terminal preference for an equal distribution of ability/interest in STEM among genders and/or races, even if they acknowledge that at present this is not the case. For example, Scott Alexander once made a comment which implied that a situation in which women were underrepresented at chemistry conferences for no other reason than because women were biologically less interested in chemistry was somehow a problem in need of a solution. I can only imagine what these people would do if given access to advanced genetic engineering technology.
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Don’t try to interpret it literally — it’s more along the lines of a plea to not be pattern-matched to the evil oppressors who believe transparent bullshit because they love evil and oppression because of a statement that the ‘transparent bullshit’ may not be false.
Needless to say, it didn’t work. That sort of thing never does.
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Even assuming interpretation A, as uncharitable and full of loaded language as it may be, is the correct one… was he wrong? why does this make him a horrible person?
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Minor grammatical nitpicking that could get an answer here. I like the use of “they” as non-gendered pronoun. I suppose one should write “they does” when they is used in the singular, but read mostly “they do” (the same people write “zie does” usually when they use of variety of non-gendered pronouns).
Common mistake because they is associated with the plural on a subconscious level, or implicit convention I’m not aware of?
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I consciously say “they do,” and it consistently strikes me as a bit weird, but less weird than saying “they does.” Just a datum.
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The same as “you”– it’s “you are”, not “you is”, even with a singular “you.”
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Singular they inherits “do” from plural they rather than “does” from singular he/she/it, just like singular you inherits “are” from plural you rather than “art” from singular thou.
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Thanks, that makes sense to me now.
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Am I the only one who thought of this comic when reading the intro to this open thread?
http://imgur.com/nH19nlA
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http://skepchick.org/2014/12/why-im-okay-with-doxing/
The above article was alluded to in earlier comments here. This is Rebecca Watson explicitly endorsing doxxing. I tried to find threads on feminist/SJ communities about Rebecca’s pro doxxing stance but I did not easily find many. However I did find these: thread:http://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstGamerGate/comments/2tarye/the_story_of_gerelt_or_why_rebecca_watsons_why_im/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstGamerGate/comments/2pb64m/gamerghazi_upvoted_a_post_that_linked_to_rebecca/
——
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheismplus/comments/2p4imi/why_im_okay_with_doxing/
—–
http://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2p9nyu/why_im_okay_with_doxing_rebecca_watson_argues/
So “Agaisntgamergate” subreddit seems to mostly disagree with upholding the anti-doxxing norm. Though its not uiversal. Atheism plus also the top voted comment was anti-doxxing. Though again things the norm is not universally held. However gamerghazi is, by my estimation, pro doxxing.
Do people have sources on how other SJ/feminist spaces reacted?
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Yeah, I mentioned this little gem in the subject about “Is drunk sex rape?”. Notice also the very ambivalent attitude towards physical violence in the article.
High-visibility a-GG members have openly doxed and help spread doxxes, and suffered no consequences from social media platform for it.
PZ Myers doxed a M.D. (real name, place of employment) in a blog post for a crass joke on a forum he claims not to read. The Skepchicks twitter account helped spread it, Rebecca Watson RTed the tweet with the info. The timing of Watson’s article could be seen as a defense of this episode. The “horde” on Myers’s blog was delighted, very little dissent in the comments. Not linking, the name and name of the employer are still there. Very easy to find.
Ophelia Benson approved publicly.
Amy Davis Roth approved publicly.
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Moar links!
The joke (according to one side) / libel (according to the other) in question:
And here’s the joke (or not?) being used by Matt Cavanaugh to draw some serious conclusions about Myers:
http://skeptischism.com/atheismneat/2014/10/06/pz-myers-glass-house/
thirqual’s summary, albeit informative, makes it sound like Myers found and published this person’s real name while she was still trying to remain pseudonymous.
After a quick investigation, here’s what seems to have happened, way back in 2013:
1. Ophelia Benson addressed “Skep tickle” by her first name a few times.
Here is some of her motivation: http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/05/why-a-nym/
It’s unclear whether she actively snooped for the name, or simply remembered it from a time when “Skep tickle” still used it along with her nicknames.
2. Tim Skellett wrote up a post accusing Benson of trying to sneakily out “Skep tickle”:
http://heathen-hub.com/blog.php?b=1712
3. “Skep tickle” commented on the post, pre-emptively revealing her full name, occupation and home town.
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That article attackign PZ myers was really lame. I don’t like PZ but that was over the line imo. (even though PZ himself goes over the line).
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There we reach the problem of definition of a dox: the spreading of personal information, in what circumstances?
1) does it have to be information not already publicly available on the Net, or is it the centralizing the relevant info and giving it a lot of visibility?
2) does it have to be with the intent to cause damage to the target? (i.e., can you accidentally dox?)
I see a difference between saying “my name is X, I work in this field” in the comments of a blog post, and a tweet saying “the harasser Y real name is X and works for company Z” from an account with >15k followers.
Matt Cavanaugh’s article is exactly what I’d like not to see. Much too close to what PZ Myers writes.
See Michael Nugent’s blog for more charitable views on PZ Myers.
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@thirqual:
1) No. Of course it is still doxxing is the info was already available somewhere.
2) No. You can accidentally doxx someone imo. And you should be careful no to do this.
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@thirqual
Thanks for the link. That is, indeed, a respectable article. It convinced me that in addition to being a self-righteous jerk, Myers is also self-serving and has only a vague idea of appropriate behaviour. (I can’t say I was very surprised.)
But the author’s point seems to be that all of Myers’ behaviour, and by extension all behaviour on that level, should be considered perfectly OK?
The book review is the only one that is completely unobjectionable.
Matt Taylor made a wrong choice once, by accident. That doesn’t make either Myers’ or his opponents’ usual choices any better.
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Shamelessly hijacking Stargirl’s idea (sorry, Your Highness) — let’s talk about doxxing.
In particular, I’d like to hear your thoughts on these three questions:
1. Doxing between anons/pseuds vs doxing of pseuds by real-name users — is there a difference?
2. Can doxing ever be justified? Is it analogous to punching?
3. What IS doxing, exactly? Does it count if the doxee has revealed their name while posting under the same pseudonym elsewhere?
My views at the moment:
1. Doxing of one anon by another clearly gives the doxer an unfair advantage – they keep their anonymity while stealing the victim’s. On the other hand, when the doxer is already using their real name, and the anon has abused this, doxing merely levels the playing field. So, it seems like doxing between anons is more objectionable.
2. I disagree with Watson’s opinion that Aldrin was right to punch the conspiracy guy. However, sometimes punching and even killing is OK, and I don’t see why doxing should be treated differently.
3. I’m not sure. Can anyone propose a definition?
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Oops, forgot the inspiration link: http://skepchick.org/2014/12/why-im-okay-with-doxing/
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And here’s a real-life example. A GamerGate working group found the real life identity of a prolific anti-Sarkeesian troll: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2j2gun/identity_of_one_of_anita_sarkeesians_harassers/
To their delight, the troll’s motivation turned out to be either monetary or just weird, not grounded in gamer culture.
So, what is this? Good doxing, bad doxing, not doxing?
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That sounds like Gamergate “doxxed” a false flag Gamergate supporter, which isn’t really the same as doxing an opponent. For one thing, trying to hurt your supporters has its own inherent limitations which prevent it from being done too indiscriminately. For another, if someone claims to be connected to you, doxxing them is self-defense to the extent that it proves they are not really connected to you.
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I think the world will be better off without doxxing, with the exception of exposing sock puppets commenting on their own work.
1) Everybody thinks they’re justified. For example, my understanding is Watson doxxed person A for stating (in what looked to me like a joke) that person B had some medical symptoms for which an STD was one of many risk factors. My personal feeling is that’s setting the bar awfully low, if you will dox for tasteless but true medical observations.
2) I’m a debate idealist, and think that the endless war model of conversation (a) is not likely to lead to truth over time; and (b) doesn’t leave things better off.
3) But I guess a revolutionary would make the opposite case.
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Related (very distantly) to socks commenting on their own work: I think it’s justified to dox someone (in the sense of linking real name to pseduonyms and/or pseudonyms to each other, not of providing their address, etc.) if:
1. They have angered people within a well-defined community under one identity,
2. They have created products that members of that community might other wise buy under another identity, and
3. The purpose of the doxing is to say “hey X is actually Y, who is an asshole; don’t buy their shit.”
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Related in a different way: I think it’s totally reasonable to dox someone who has been using multiple identities to give you shit, even if you throw in some additional identities as well.
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I think it was okay to dox ViolentAcrz. I do not think it was okay for Cathy Brennan to dox that one teen trans girl she was fighting with. I think it was wrong for Fox News to publish the name and address of a young trans women in Arizona who was being bullied by a Christian Right group. I think it is wrong to publish bank account information and SS numbers and stuff. I think it is wrong to publish the addresses of Internet personalities when clearly they will then fear for their lives. I think it was okay to dox that one lady in SciFi fandom who was bullying the crap out of other people under multiple identities and sock puppets. I think it would be okay to dox anyone sending death or rape threats to others, at least if they are adults. (In the case of children and teens, I think we should notify the authorities.)
I’m torn about Gallus Mag. Personally I’m marginally okay with her being doxxed, insofar as she was loathsome and horrible and certainly eager to hurt trans women. I like that we know who she is face-to-face so that we can protect queer spaces from her. Furthermore, the idea that we should not dox TERFs cuz they will then dox us is not even laughable. They dox us eagerly and often. They have whole websites set up just to dox us. For some of them, it’s literally their hobby.
On the other hand, I don’t think she was as bad as ViolentAcrz or that one terrible SciFi woman. She was an online bully, but I found her easy to ignore. Furthermore, I’m not actually sure if she directly contributed to the doxxing of trans women. (I’ve heard people claim that she did, but I wonder if they aren’t just lumping her in with Brennan, which would be unfair. In any event, I’ll change my mind fast if someone shows that she was doxxing us. If so, fuck her. Turnabout is fair play.)
I’m not sure if I can form a *principled* difference between these things. On the other hand, I don’t think real life morality works that way.
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> I’m not sure if I can form a *principled* difference between these things. On the other hand, I don’t think real life morality works that way.
I fear that, unless you build up some sort of a model or a principle that guides your behavior with respect to doxxing, then essentially you will just end up doxxing anyone whom you personally dislike. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, as long as you personally only dislike people who are objectively terrible; unfortunately, by normalizing doxxing, you are also enabling other people to use it — and other people may not be as discerning as you.
Personally, I think that “doxxing is never ok except as self-defence against real death threats” is a good compromise. Yes, this means that the awful SciFi lady, the evil GamerGater, and even that Neo-Nazi would go un-doxxed. But this also means that you will go undoxxed, and so will your friends and loved ones. It’s a tradeoff, but we already made that same tradeoff with respect to murder and assault, and it seems to work well (regardless of what Rebecca Watson and the Pope think), so there’s reason to believe it should work here, too.
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A world where ViolentAcrz can operate risk-free is not acceptable. I’d rather accept widespread doxxing.
Keep in mind, it is impossible to defend him, as he thought it was fine to steal the images of unsuspecting women and repost them without their knowledge. He had already tossed aside any reasonable principle of privacy. Why should he get any?
What happens to Sarkeesian is fundamentally different. Her identity is known. Her career is visible. When she acts, there is no question about who to hold accountable. For her, doxxing is, “Here is her address so you can murder her.”
Likewise doxxing queer teens is not okay, and obviously not okay.
So saying “no principle” does not mean that there are no boundaries at all. The object level still exists and we can still look at it.
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> A world where ViolentAcrz can operate risk-free is not acceptable. I’d rather accept widespread doxxing.
A world with widespread doxxing is a world where there’s a high probability of your own name, home address, and place of employment, being published for everyone to see. The same applies to your friends, colleagues, loved ones, tribe members, and in fact everyone else in the world. Is this really a price you’re willing to pay for destroying ViolentAcrz (who is, I will grant you, a terrible person) ?
> Likewise doxxing queer teens is not okay, and obviously not okay.
This is obvious to you. It is obvious to me. But right now, at this very moment, there are people on the Internet saying, “A world where trans people like veronica d can operate risk-free to corrupt our impressionable teens with their trans propaganda is not acceptable”. And there are more of them than there are of you.
This is why I am against the normalization of doxxing. Or punching people in the face for insulting someone’s mother. Or for stabbing anyone whose political views I find offensive. And so on.
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@VeronicaD
This is cliche but let us all remember George W. Bush was elected twice. Alot of people share GWBs cultural values. You really want to shift the norm to “doxx bad people.” Cause GWB fans have an interesting opinion of who is a bad person. Remember the consensus in a sizeable minority of the country is that trans-activists killed Leelah Alcorn by spreading pro-trans messages.
Besides “everyone knows” lesswrong is a racist. sexist doomsday sex cult. Surely some people are going to decide its ok to doxx people for posting too much on lesswrong. Admittedly alot of lesswrong people are already public. But not everyone is.
I am back to: If doxxing becomes common we are all fucked.
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As a side note- assuming the woman in SciFi fandom being referred to is Requires Hate/Winterfox, she was never doxxed in the way that I think the term usually implies. Her real-life identity is still unknown- what happened was that Benjanun Sriduangkaew, the name and persona she was using for her published work, was revealed to be the same person as the Requires Hate persona, along with a number of other online identities she’d had in the past. “Benjanun Sriduangkaew”, though, is a pseudonym itself, and it’s probably not a coincidence what the initials are there. No one seems to know her real name or location, and there’s still a bit of doubt as to whether or not her background is even what she says it is. (I’m pretty sure that it is, personally, but there are a few little discrepancies around it.)
I think it was a very good thing that the information came out- the revelations about her stopped one of the most extensive and far-reaching campaigns of bullying and abuse I’ve ever seen. (I largely gave up on my dreams of getting published in the SF/F field because of her- not just from the fear of being targeted by her, but because she was enthusiastically praised and supported by a large part of the SF/F community while she was doing her thing, and I didn’t, and don’t, want to be part of a community that embraced someone like her as a champion of social justice.) In that particular case, though, I don’t think there’s a contradiction between being glad that she was exposed and opposing doxxing in general, since no truly personal information was ever revealed about her, nor was it necessary to stop her from doing what she was doing. I personally agree with those who say that doxxing should not be seen as an acceptable action as a general rule, for many reasons already discussed in this thread. RH is a monster, and I don’t have any qualms about applying the word “evil” to her, but there are certain things that are not okay and which don’t become okay even if they happen to an evil person. Doxxing may be a comparatively mild example of those, but it’s still basically in that category, IMO- it might have been arguably justifiable if there truly had been no other way of stopping her, but that wasn’t the case. If it had been, I think it still would have been a regrettable, harmful thing, even if it was ultimately the best option available. Normalizing doxxing as a tactic, IMO, is something that will benefit abusers and bullies far more often than it would stop them.
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But Veronica is not operating risk-free. She isn’t truly anonymous. So the only “punishment” she’s advocating for people like ViolentAcrez is bringing them to the level of vulnerability she’s currently living with.
From a “mutually assured destruction” point of view, it seems that there would be less sadistic trolling on the net if everyone was equally vulnerable. What do you think?
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Nita:
But as I said below, everybody is not equally vulnerable. A very common piece of fallout from a doxxing is that the victim’s employer gets harassed by a lot of angry Internet activists.
This has little effect on a media person whose political views are well-known and align with their employer’s. It also has little effect on a tenured academic; a system is in place designed specifically to make them difficult to fire for having public views. It has little effect on the very wealthy, who would be able to live comfortably even after being fired.
However, it does have a very serious effect on working people. Becoming even temporarily unemployable due to being known as a liability may mean losing one’s home, ability to care for one’s family (if applicable) and entire livelihood.
If I got doxxed, for example, and several thousand angry activists started sending hate mail to my place of employment, I would get fired and my life would be in ruins – in my own case the risk is compounded by the fact that, being rather obviously disabled, I am a hard sell at job interviews.
In other words, when people like PZ Myers and Rebecca Watson are promoting the use of doxxing, it seems less like mutually assured destruction and more like advocating the use of a biological weapon that they just happen to have partial immunity to.
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Well first, I don’t really like to argue about meta-ethics, since I think meta-ethics is mostly bullshit, words without reference. But in any case, you all are saying, “Shouldn’t we have a social norm against doxxing,” and I guess that would be nice. But we don’t and won’t and so what is the point?
I mean that seriously. Go over to 4chan and get uniform agreement that no one will dox.
On wait!
The trolls left 4chan for 8chan cuz they didn’t like 4chan’s onerous rules. Think about that.
You ain’t getting a norm against doxxing. Nor are we getting a norm against creepshots nor revenge porn nor swatting and so on and so on. The -chan trolls really do talk about how to encourage weird kids to kill themselves. I’m not sure to what degree they act on this shit, but I bet it ain’t zero.
But your energy goes to protecting ViolentAcrz? Fuck that.
Doxxing sucks a lot of the time. Other times it is *literally perfectly wonderful*. Doxxing a shitbag like ViolentAcrz was a fine thing. Doxxing Sarkeesian is a terrible thing.
“But Veronica,” you say, “If doxxing is normalized the right wing Christians might dox you.”
Of course they will. I mean, I’m not really on their radar, but sooner or later that might happen. What we say here will affect that not at all. They don’t care what we say nor our norms. They have their own norms and they like them.
The TERFs will continue to dox trans women regardless of the behavior of trans women. The only way to stop them is to literally disappear.
Anonymity is important, but it is not a terminal value. Some people need anonymity, such as young queer kids. Others abuse anonymity, such as the -chan trolls. (And of course some people are both.)
Some say, “If we could agree on norms the conflict would stop,” but we cannot, cuz they will not. Plus *no-doxxing* is not the only important norm. Plenty of other norms would be needed to make the Internet a safe place.
I’m not the type to bring a knife to a gunfight.
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@Veronica D
Perhaps doxxing should be limited to targetting doxxers and others who engage in some clearly definable behavior like death threats?
Then trans-doxxing TERFs and death-threatening -chan trolls can still be doxxed, while some ordinary schlub at a tech conference is not fired for making a joke about forking repositories?
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Obviously, bringing a knife to a gunfight would be suicidally idiotic, but:
1) Bringing a gun to a knife fight turns all future knife fights into gunfights, and
2) Bringing guns or knives to discussions turns discussions into either fights or hostage situations.
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@cypher — Well regarding the dude at the tech conference, we could also have employers who were not jackasses. Also, we could *learn from that lesson*. I think Richards showed poor judgment in that episode, but the men were not showing good judgment either. But the man’s employer was in my view the worst offender.
That was not a good reason to fire a person. Certainly Richards didn’t think so. I don’t really know anyone who did. (I mean, I’m sure they *exist*, but not really that much.) The employer claimed that they had other reasons to let the man go, but I’m skeptical. I suspect that was a backpedal after criticism.
Richard’s employer was DDOSed after the story broke. They fired her. It was fucked up all around.
But yeah, I hope we can limit the “posting pictures of random sexist dudes” thing. It doesn’t help. But also folks should limit their sexual innuendos in public.
Richards should have quietly alerted the conference organizers, who should have quietly asked the men to tone it down. Really, that was such an avoidable shitstorm.
####
Look, I’m not exactly pro-doxxing here. It’s more that I’m anti-simplistic-ethical-bright-lines, cuz I don’t think the world works that way, and I don’t think such things are practical, except maybe for the most extreme things, like no torture. I don’t think doxxing is like torture. Ticking bombs are far fetched. ViolentAcrz is commonplace.
I mean, I’m sure you can invent a scenario where doxxing is basically torture for someone. But I can invent such scenarios for just about anything.
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Re: Doxxing…
The Zoe Post was accused (wrongly I believe, but let it stand) of being a Doxx attempt. If doxxing is acceptable against bad people, and Quinn is accused of being a bad person, then the Zoe Post was a good thing, right?
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How was the zoe Post doxxing? Zoe’s identity was not a secret. He didn’t link her IRL identity to any online identities I can think of.
On Zoe Post:
If you are going to publicly accuse someone of abuse then its better to post evidence if you have it. Eron’s post seemed to me like he was trying to substantiate his very severe allegations. The issue of Zoe vs Eron hinges on whether the abuse really occurred or whether Eron made things up or distorted the facts. Abusers claiming to be abused is not exactly rare.
I mostly side with Eron as he actually posted pretty convincing evidence. But its possible Zoe was innocent and Eron was the real abuser.
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My understanding is that Doxxing is bad because it exposes people to harassment, and that writing the post was wrong because it exposed Quinn to harassment, regardless of whether it gave her personal information out directly. I could be wrong; it’s been a weird few months, and I may have lost the script somewhere along the way.
The main point is, the last several months have all been about how awful and evil and unacceptable doxxing is, and it’s a rule I’ve happily lived by. Only now it turns out that Doxxing isn’t actually that bad. Since Watson made that post, I’ve been trying to figure out how it doesn’t entirely justify the ants in everything they’ve been accused of, much less actually done.
With enemies like Watson and Chu, who needs friends?
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Honestly, I don’t have a problem with “The Zoe Post.” The man was treated very badly, and he has every right to speak out. People have a right to read his post and judge accordingly.
If a woman wrote a similar post about a man, how would this play out?
But the story does not end there. Nor was Gjoni the only player in this little drama. The trolls who jumped on the issue and went after Quinn are unbearably shitty people who deserve boundless contempt. Even if we can sympathize with Gjoni, that does not mean Quinn “had it coming.”
So there are few questions: was the *scale* of the abuse foreseeable? Should that have dissuaded Gjoni? How much did he cooperate with the trolls in abusing his ex? On and on. Questions like those.
Honestly, I don’t feel like digging through 348325798327598237498749823749 pages of chat logs and such, nor reading the obviously bogus propaganda each side puts out, but it looks to me like he fucked up bad going on the chans and the chats. Which sucks for him, cuz I think he had a right to be upset with her. But he did cooperate with the trolls. He got in bed with some of the worst, and it turned out awful for pretty much everyone. Nor could he drop the issue even as it ballooned into something much bigger than him, as it turned into vast criminal abuse. He kept at it, which is why I think the restraining order is probably justified.
Which, sucks for him and sucks for her and I feel more sadness than anger.
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It is good to know that victims of long-term abuse have a “right to be upset” with their abusers.
It is also good to know that victims have the responsibility to carefully weigh the impact of their revelation on their abusers. Apparently, if the effect of being outed as an abuser might be too serious, the victim should at least consider keeping silent. That was not my understanding of the usual Social Justice position, but I consider myself corrected.
“If a woman wrote a similar post about a man, how would this play out?”
Chris Brown. Fuck, Paul Christoforo. We’re not exactly short on examples. Further, this argument ignores the Listen and Believe narrative which was all the rage right at the time this whole thing went down. I guess we should just listen to the RIGHT victims, right?
“Honestly, I don’t feel like digging through 348325798327598237498749823749 pages of chat logs and such nor reading the obviously bogus propaganda each side puts out, but it looks to me like he fucked up bad going on the chans and the chats. ”
I am having a hard time reading this sentence as anything other than “the issue is really complicated, so I’m just going to assume my tribe is right”.
Never mind that Gjoni DID, in fact, anticipate that his revelation might lead to harassment. Never mind that he claims that he went to the chats and Chans in a futile attempt to defuse the exact sort of harassment campaign that ended up happening, and that he has repeatedly and publicly condemned the harassment. Never mind that, from what I’ve seen, the evidence backs his story. Never mind that Quinn herself has a history of organizing online harassment campaigns. Never mind that severe online harassment is an irreducible result of a cute boy having a photograph taken of him go viral or a company engaging in hilariously bad customer service, much less being outed as an abuser and then using censorship on Reddit, 4chan and Youtube in an attempt to cover it up. Never mind the persistent and ongoing “criminal harassment” against numerous people who’ve speak up in favor of Gjoni or the Ants, which doesn’t matter because they “have it coming” in a way that Quinn somehow does not.
Never mind that the *very article this thread is discussing* is a justification for enabling harassment against people who “have it coming”, and that you have stated in this very thread that you agree with this premise.
None of that really matters.
What matters is, you are basically okay with an outcome where the victim is reduced to an unemployable pariah, and the abuser is treated as a folk hero and their behavior is subsidized to the tune of five figures a month in *donations*. And the system under which this outcome is achieved, you call Social Justice.
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My model of the “anti-doxxing” norm is that its a “Geneva convention.” Both sides do not want the other side to doxx. So both sides are willing to restrict their own use of doxxing. Even in cases where the doxxing seems VERY justified like Violent Acrez.
If the anti-doxxing norm breaks we are all screwed imo. So I am very concerned that some people are pro-doxxing.
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However, some people are more screwed than others.
Being doxxed obviously has nasty psychological ramifications for everybody (loss of privacy, being sent threatening snailmail, etc.). However, one common result of being doxxed is that the victim’s employer gets harassed.
If you are currently working in a position where your political views are publicly known and align with your employer’s (eg. if you are a media personality), then this is not likely to have any harmful consequences – in fact, being doxxed might even be useful for media personalities, because they can then spin a story with a clear underdog vs. vicious lynch mob narrative. Some modern social media personalities are essentially self-employed, making their living through Patreon and Kickstarter (eg. Anita Sarkeesian), making the threat of employer harassment nonexistent for them.
If you are a tenured academic, you are virtually impossible to fire. There may be other ramifications (students boycotting your lectures), but there is an entire system set up specifically to make sure that you do not get fired for having public opinions.
If you are a working grunt… Well, then you are most certainly screwed, because then you risk losing your livelihood if your employer gets harassed enough that you get viewed as a liability. Given the horrendous state of the job market in most of the modern West, becoming not only unemployed but unemployable – even if only temporarily – is a serious concern. It might mean you lose your home and your ability to support your family (if you have one). In much of Europe, the wave of austerity politics has been extremely harsh on the unemployed, so many people are understandably very afraid of losing their jobs.
In other words, a pro-doxxing culture disproportionately hits the working class. To stay in the war analogy, it is similar to a biological superweapon, except that some people (some of whom are conspicuously in favour of using it) have a considerably higher immunity to it.
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1. No.
2. If you dox someone, you lose the protection of anti-doxxing norms, and people can dox you without losing that same protection. This is basically the old Germanic concept of the outlaw; it’s also the Absolutist strategy in SIPD. It works pretty well if enough people buy into it.
3. Still counts. It also counts for the media to draw attention to a random person on Twitter who uses their real name. Unfortunately, societal repercussions against media assholes who do that aren’t really possible, since it’s part of their job description. For those cases, bring back dueling or something.
The only reason I don’t think it would be a good idea to consider those media assholes complete outlaws is that there isn’t anywhere near enough societal consensus for that to work. There’s probably nothing that can be done about it at all, unless it’s possible to get libel laws strengthened in just the right ways.
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I’m a programmer. The recent outing of Shanley Kane as a maybe-neo-nazi and a definitely-abuser is super interesting to me. I think it’s crazy that a person who is clearly terrible was lionized so much in the community because she backed up her horrible behavior by making feminist statements. I think it’s a black mark on the programming community that we had to wait for an outsider to link her to notorious troll weev before we were willing to call her toxic behavior toxic. It’s crazy that her former partner didn’t feel like she could even speak out against her until after she’d taken that hit.
I don’t understand why my community was so stupid as to fall for this.
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Because many people are stupid, and when you try to fight the stupidity, you get attacked as a misogynist. So other people, who are not stupid but are cowardly, shut up. And people who are neither stupid nor cowardly get fired, or moved to low-publicity positions.
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Well, I mean, I have less than zero respect for weev, so when your main enemies are Brietbart and *that guy*, well everyone should step back and take a deep breath. Personally I find Shanley needlessly divisive, which doesn’t mean I think she is always wrong. She is a person constitutionally unable to “play the game,” so she made her own game and got good at it, and it’s kind of a crappy game that won’t work in the long run. But is she a neo-nazi? Probably not. I mean, seriously!
In any event, she is hardly more of a loudmouth than Linus or RMS. She’s a bomb thrower, but the software world is full of men who are bomb throwers and who yet are lionized. After all, people still listen to weev, and he is literally a monster.
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She wrote a post about “women’s collaboration in tech industry sexism” that used the word “white” 38 times, every one of them hostilely, despite the post not being about race. Whatever her actual views, she’s scum.
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What about the careful hiding of rape and IPV? Or the erasure of the work from associates?
Hardly more of a loudmouth than Linus or RMS? Seriously?
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@thirqual: Your first link is broken.
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Trying again The Charnel House
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I trust weev about as far as I can throw him. If she hadn’t confirmed the relationship, I would have thought it was a lie. The abuse of her co-founder, however, seems much more likely.
At the same level as Linus and RMS? Well, she seems to actively seek out conflict. Linus doesn’t really; He’s an asshole, but mostly confines his assholery to the LKML. I think the problem of toxic leaders in OSS is a big issue, but you can avoid Linus by not working on the Kernel, while Shanley would target anyone she can set her sights on. RMS seems more likely to seek out conflict, but his responses are overwhelmingly principled and generic (“People who promote proprietary software are giving away their rights.”) Like, You’d have to cross Linus and RMS to get someone who seeks out conflict, then makes nasty personal attacks.
I’m mostly concerned that people are supporting a bully and an abuser. I mean, it’s not like Shanley is offering a unique service. There are lots of sources for that kind of feminist analysis that aren’t abusive bullies. I guess the same could be said for Linus, too.
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Linus Torvalds is probably pursuing the same management strategy as Jack Tramiel. Jack Tramiel’s management strategy worked until Commodore got too big for him to manage, but Linux isn’t Commodore and it doesn’t have to worry about that.
Shanley, on the other hand, is obviously the sort of person who will latch onto whatever will give her the largest license to be vile. If the Breitbart-and-weev types are better at noticing those sorts of people than you are, that’s your problem, not theirs.
And they are. How many obviously abusive personalities were there in the Something Awful commie diaspora? How many of them were noticed and purged before fifteen separate accounts of abuse came out? As far as I know, none — even though it was obvious. And even after those accounts came out, some people still defended them because “at least they kept the bad people out” — as if ideological nonconformity is worse than literally being a serial rapist.
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Given that it spawned both 4chan (and the other chans by extensions) and at least a decent chunk of the online Social Justice Movement, it’s really impressive how much evil Something Awful is responsible for, isn’t it?
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This sums up my primary concern better than I ever managed.
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Nydwracu: I agree, although in the interests of fairness I should note that – unlike the maggotmaster/monetizeyourcat type – Shanley has at least said some smart things a few times.
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You can’t understand it just looking at programming alone. It’s part of a trend. In tech, recall (or read up on) the Donglegate, the Node.js gender pronoun fiasco, the Brendan Eich story. In wider online context: Racefail, Atheism+, the Convention CoC movement, the Shirtstorm, and many many more.
It’s the same story over and over and over again. In SF fandom, the Requires Hate scandal only blew up because people documented that she was *abusing WoC writers and fans even more than white ones*; before that became known, she had strong support despite being arguably more abusive and toxic than Shanley Kane.
You’re smack in the middle of a strong social trend that started going strong around 2008, and the programming community is caught up in it along with the rest.
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Brendan Eich is a bit more complicated, in my view. He did an abhorrent thing, and people wanted him to be punished for it. Whether that punishment was commensurate with the offence or not can be debated, and some people’s attempts to frame the issue in terms of whether LGBT people would be “safe” working under him was stupid, but the basic principle seems fine to me.
I’m also a bit conflicted about the Code of Conduct folks—I think codes of conduct are good in principle, but it’s pretty clear that the people pushing hardest for them want them to be massively overbroad.
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On Convention Codes of Conduct, it’s pretty clear that this is a proxy for political alignment. Look at how much hate people get if they choose the “wrong” CoC, or if they say “CoCs are not enough.”
Adopting the Geek Feminism/Ada Initiative CoC for your conference is rapidly becoming an economic necessity. If you don’t, you’ll be smeared and people will not attend.
Maybe early adopters were trying to show off their Feminist allegiance, but it’s almost a non-signal now.
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Are you ruling out the notion that codes of conduct may materially help women and minorities who attend tech conferences? That this is more than signaling?
Certainly I want such codes in place for conferences and such. Should I not?
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Personally, I was pretty unimpressed by the entire “harassment-policy-gate” when it first happened. As far as I could tell, it went down like this:
1). Some women got harassed and/or sexually assaulted at a conference,
2). These women, and their supporters, raised a huge media storm, describing such harassment as endemic,
3). In response, the conference organizers updated their code of conduct and harassment policies.
How is that an adequate response ? People are getting sexually assaulted at your conference, and your solution is to edit a Word document and paste in a bunch of shibboleths ? That doesn’t solve anything !
Now, if they updated the policy in addition to hiring more (female) security guards, or handing out free tazers to women, or banning men from the conference, or pretty much anything else, then I’d understand. I may not agree with their solutions, but at least I’d respect them a little for trying to actually solve the issue, as opposed to just covering their asses for the legal department.
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@Bugmaster
Here’s what a code of conduct can do:
1. Declaring a common standard of behaviour.
Although folks like Thunderf00t claim that “everyone” already has the same beliefs on what’s acceptable, IME it is simply not true.
In addition to telling people what not to do, it also defines what kind of stuff is OK to report.
2. Informing potential attendees that the organizers want everyone to feel safe and welcome.
Since assholish behaviour is status-raising in some communities, this seems necessary — and I’m saying this as a naturally assholish person.
3. Giving attendees a concrete plan of action to use in case things go wrong.
It’s all nice and good to agree that bad behaviour should be addressed, and of course any decent organizers will do everything they can etc. etc. … But when someone’s still reeling from the adrenaline rush and numb with disbelief, what exactly should they do?
Here’s what handing out tazers can do:
– turn misunderstandings into violent confrontations;
– make victims reluctant to do anything (because the only thing they can do seems disproportionate) until it’s too late;
– create a risk of conference attendees being killed for a minor crime or misunderstanding.
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Replying to Veronica:
The Code of Conduct is the public facing side of a process; The back end is something like an Incident Response Policy. (This lines up with Nita’s #3.) In, say 2010, a conference having a Code of Conduct was a strong indicator that they had a functioning Incident Response Policy, and that if something went wrong, you could get help. Now, in 2015, a Code of Conduct is a moderate indicator that the conference organizer fears blowback from twitter feminists, and only a weak indicator of a proper Incident Response Policy.
Basically, the public push for Codes of Conduct has caused people to put up paper codes with no policies behind them. Bad money drives out good.
Conferences should have a proper Incident Response Policy; Attendees won’t really know if they do have one unless something bad happens.
(Plus, I feel like I need to reiterate the point about people getting blowback for adopting the “wrong” CoC. There’s definitely some tribal affiliation going on here.
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Informing potential attendees that the organizers want everyone to feel safe and welcome.
If they really want this (and I don’t think most of them do), they’re delusional. No community can ever be a safe space for everyone.
So at one level, demanding an explicit code of conduct is cool: It establishes who a particular space is meant to be safe for. At the same time, demanding that everyone adopt the same policy (or slight variants on it) is massively fucked: It amounts to trying to make every space safe for your in-group, and no space safe for people whose needs conflict with theirs.
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“In SF fandom, the Requires Hate scandal only blew up because people documented that she was *abusing WoC writers and fans even more than white ones*; before that became known, she had strong support despite being arguably more abusive and toxic than Shanley Kane.”
I don’t think this is correct.
The Requires Hate scandal blew up because a well-known up-and-coming SF writer, who had cultivated a likable persona, was outed as definitely being RH (and other abusive net identities), after a great deal of argument within SF circles over whether or not she was RH. These arguments sometimes turned into bitter flamewars.
This was going on for months before Laura Mixon published her report in November 2014, which was the first time (afaik) that RH’s habit of targeting WoC writers was documented.
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Ampersand: I’m not sure we disagree on what happened. BS was outed as RH quite some time before Laura Mixon’s post. There were some muted discussions of this, but certainly it didn’t “blow up” in any appreciable public form. As one of the victims wrote, “Without the cover of the Mixon report, I literally never would have said anything in public – before that came out, everyone I ever saw protest their bullying by RH was instantly painted as a terrible person who deserved everything they got. That even happened when third parties spoke.” This reaction seemed typical.
The one thing that was new and previously unknown in Mixon’s report was how much RH was targeting WoC writers. Just how much this mattered to many participants and legitimized the “attack” on RH came out again and again in comments and many parallel discussions. The impression that I formed was that many, many well-meaning participants in SF fandom weren’t willing to condemn RH as long as they thought she was a WoC “punching up” by attacking primarily white writers, *even knowing well the extent and nature of her abuse*.
(I note with disappointment that Mixon’s report is gone from her site).
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Ampersand: I re-checked and I was wrong: there *was* a lot of public debate in October, prior to Laura Mixon’s post (e.g. 500 comments on James Nicoll’s LJ). The story blew up before that post put a special emphasis on how RH was targetting WoC writers. Thanks for correcting me.
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In mainstream culture, swearing at people at the drop of a hat is a red flag. Decent people don’t do that.
But in tech culture, swearing is no big deal. In fact, it’s good — it shows that you’re a no-nonsense pro who tells it like it is, so different from the mealy-mouthed insincere suits. Plenty of people believe that the Linux kernel wouldn’t be as good as it is if Linus didn’t degrade the hapless authors of bad code in various creative ways.
Similarly, many members of the social justice movement have a certain amount of respect of righteous anger and revolutionary spirit. Justice is important and injustice is soul-crushing, so we can’t blame people for getting a little carried away in their passion, right?
Thus, a toxic person can go unnoticed a lot longer in the intersection of tech and SJ cultures than in the mainstream society.
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I feel that mainstream *US corporate* culture may be more accurate for general swearing (at people, that’s another story).
I’ve tried to look for the frequency of Linus’s violent outbursts (they tend to be systematically reported on /. and a couple of other places, my impression was about twice a year or so) to compare to the stream of abuse coming from, say, RequireHate or Shanley Kane. Best I have found is this which has the advantage of sourcing everything (I liked the debate with Sarah Sharp at the time, both going from swearing at each other to pastries suggestions to swearing again). You can make your own opinion.
In the SJ and adjacent movements? the problem of trashing is older than the Internet.
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Relevant to this discussion: the last article by Fredrik deBoer (about this Jon Chait piece which is getting torn to shreds, the urge to deny that political correctness is, like, a thing, and observations in the wild — a.k.a. among activists and in universities) I don’t know what to do, you guys
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Idk about Linus. If one considers the people who work on the Linux kernel “working for Linus” then I am not really sure I can criticize him. I am no of “bosses” yelling at people. But he could counter argue that his attitude is needed and the work that gets done is pretty high quality. Given the importance of fixing bugs and issues a “nice” attitude wouldn’t work. IF a “non-yelling” attitude really wouldn’t work then I cannot blame him. And I have no real way to argue that yelling isn’t needed. Yes I read the social psychology tff on “Worker” productive and independence and respect. But this does not sufficient convince me that I am willing to call out Linus. Maybe if I knew more about Linux politics and history I would have an opinion. But I really do not know enough.
I should not I have supervised people. And I have taught college classes. In all cases I was among the least authoritarian of the people with my job description. I have never yelled at anyone who was a subordinate to me in any way. I just don’t have confidence my methods are actually better than Linus’s.
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@stargirlprincess: My basic attitude on Linus is that he built a community, he’s running it how he sees fit, and short of his physically attacking people, that is entirely his right, no matter how he does it. If people don’t like it, they can build their own community. In fact, since the Linux kernal is FOSS, they can even do it using all the work that Linus’s community has done to date.
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Secondly, people often excuse, defend or deny bad behaviour by anyone whose work they like.
Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old kid when he was 43, and he had plenty of enthusiastic supporters while he was dodging the law for more than 30 years.
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Thoughts on this tumblr post about IQ. It raises some important issues with IQ.
http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/post/109694753213/hey-i-read-your-iq-stuff-post-and-i-think-i
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Where’s Your Dog is the #blindproblems blog I would want to write if I wanted to write a #blindproblems blog.
Statistically speaking, I don’t get out much, so I don’t experience as much of the bullcrap. In spite of this, I feel like the vast majority of the posts capture the problems accurately, passionately, and without the toxicity I found when I went looking on Tumblr and narrowly escaped the Dementors.
This is not the sort of thing I would normally do, because normally most #blindproblems are negligible (or were when I was in the nice bubble of the education system) for me and I would rather bring attention to my aspects I care about rather than those I put up with. But, eh, the past few years have left me with nothing to do but complain, so WYD is unexpectedly welcome.
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