Fake Charity Nerd Girl

Has there been a lot of research or speculation about if transgenderism shares the same roots as normal gendered behavior?

Consider your typical cisgender man. He’s going to do some typically masculine things, and if somebody calls him a girl, he’s going to take that as an insult and maybe punch them. If you force him to behave in girlish ways, he’s going to complain about being emasculated, and if you force him to be really girlish, like wear a dress and put ribbons in his hair or something, he’s going to freak out.

Now consider your typical transgender man. He’s also going to do some typically masculine things, and if somebody calls him a girl, he’s going to take that as an insult and maybe punch them. If you force him to behave in girlish ways, he’s going to complain about transphobia or something, and if you force him to be really girlish - again, he’s going to freak out.

Most people I hear talk about this act like these are two totally different things, where the first guy has sexist fragile toxic masculinity, and the second guy has some sort of deep commitment to having their identity respected. But the other possibility is just that the brain has some set point about how your gender must be perceived, and tries really hard to maintain that set point, and transgender people just have a set point not matching their birth gender - and so a much harder time maintaining the set point than everyone else.

Plausibly some people might have really extreme set points. Like if the normal range is from 100% masculine to 100% feminine, some (cis) men might be fixed at 200% masculine, and get really upset if anyone perceives them as less than maximally super manly. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of things like muscle dysmorphia, an anorexia-like condition where very muscular men constantly freak out that their muscles are too small, and keep weightlifting until they’re freakishly huge.

Is this a standard way of thinking about these things, or does someone have a consideration for why it might not be true?

I was thinking the other day about how I experience something that feels a lot like what trans people talk about when they talk about social dysphoria.

(obviously the big difference here is that my gender is respected way more than trans people’s, so this is not unpleasant for me and in fact barely rises to the level of consciously noticing it)

It mostly comes up when I’m in groups of all or mostly men, and I feel like I’m being treated the same as everyone else, and I feel this need to like, remind people of my gender? I might respond by wearing dresses and makeup, or baking cookies for everyone, or talking about what guys I think are hot, or suggesting we all compare digit ratios.

It’s quite responsive to what seems like too-simple solutions, like how half the time I mention something that’s a statistical correlate of my gender around @profhedonium he responds with “well, you’re a woman. so.”

the idea that Teen Vogue is more “serious” now that it has more articles about politics is a product of the devaluation of women’s aesthetic labor tbh

in retrospect given how many notes this got I’m astonished that zero of them were angry responses containing the word “intersectionality”

Don’t let anyone tell you that they’re more entitled to your land than you are just because the last genocides and conquests that their ancestors won happened earlier than the ones that your ancestors won.

This, but also: don’t let anyone tell you that just because winning land through genocide and conquest has been the norm throughout human history, it is good or okay.

I don’t think you should feel guilty because your ancestors committed genocide while being advanced enough to write down good records of it. I think you should remember the victims, and look forward to the day when genocide is just a thing that happens in history books.

Last week, all of us grad students had to go see a presentation by the university’s Title IX officer on “appropriate interactions with the undergrads.” Okay, whatever.

She posed a number of ostensibly open-ended scenarios to us. The one she asked me: “suppose an undergrad in your lab is crying. You ask her what’s wrong, and she says she doesn’t want to talk about it.” I said I’d respect that she doesn’t want to talk about it and leave her alone. Oops. Wrong answer.

My second guess, “uh…I tell her she can come to me if she decides she wants to talk about it?” was also incorrect.

I am supposed to report the distressed person to the proper authorities. The presentation was centered on reporting sexual assault, but the Title IX officer said that whatever might be wrong–bad grades, interpersonal drama–there are “resources to deal with that.” I (and a few other people) argued that it’s a violation of boundaries to pry and meddle into someone’s personal life, but the Title IX officer said that no, we were incorrect, someone might not be capable of making rational decisions and really, if we alerted the authorities, it would be better for everyone in the end.

I wanted to ask “so we agree that no means no when we’re talking about sex–why doesn’t no mean no when we’re talking about sharing feelings?”

This was under the guise of “creating a safe environment,” but how can anyone feel “safe” in an environment where any visible display of negative emotion must be reported to the Distressed Person Police? What does “safe” even mean?

wow this is kind of horrifying

I mean if crying in public sometimes is a sign of being incapable of making rational decisions … then I guess I have spent my entire life being incapable of making rational decisions?

(trying to imagine how the conversation would go if I were actually Reported to the Relevant Authorities for this … “sorry, I just remembered this really sad line from a Jennifer Egan story I read the other day”? “sorry, I just started thinking about assembling IKEA furniture”?)

(also this entire thing is totally discriminatory against people with estrogen dominant hormone systems)

I just left my husband alone with our two children for sixteen days. I was not worried about anything regarding the house, their food, or their wellbeing. I put all the appointments in the family calendar and my husband checked it and kept them. I literally did not worry about them. I missed them, and I was sad that they missed me, but I didn’t worry about them AT ALL. I need to impress upon you all that I missed their company, but was not worried for their welfare.

I also did no meal prep. I don’t even think I went shopping right before I left.

This is not about apples and oranges. This isn’t even about my husband. This is about the fact that this is apparently WEIRD.

Another mum at my daughter’s school is leaving for ten days. She’s taking her youngest (who is a very small baby) and leaving her husband with their two girls. She has been cooking for days preparing freezer meals. She’s panicking and deputizing her six year old to remind him how to make school lunches. AND I AM APPALLED.

A) He is definitely not helpless. (He’s a doctor or something.) What gendered bullshit. B) THAT LITTLE GIRL IS NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HER AND HER SISTER’S WELLBEING. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. C) Why is she married to this person and creating children with him if he’s this big of an idiot?

While she was laughingly recounting this, the other mums were nodding and smiling sympathetically, like oh yes, I too have my caveman at home!! Such managing required! I was the only one who was like “Dude, he’ll be fine. Literally. He will be fine.” I said it a lot. She was not convinced. She kept bringing up her older daughter. She’ll be like a little mum!

NO.

NO NO NO NO.

NO.

Straight women, don’t do this shit. It’s gross. Don’t infantilize your husbands and then expect your daughters to pick up the slack. So fucking gross. So. So. GROSS.

I am not actually sure what the big deal is? The only thing that looks like a real problem is that the six year old is being deputised to deal with shit, and the overtly gendered nature of how that’s being done.

But, ignoring gender for a moment - what’s wrong with division of labour? It’s efficient. It leads to brief periods of stress when the pair has to separate for a while, but that’s made up for by increased efficiency 90% of the time.

My mother cooks and deals with computers. My father does the shopping and fixing things around the house. That’s because those are what each party is better at - their comparative advantage - and everyone is better off when they play to their strengths.

For a lot of people, one of the benefits of having a partner is the fact that you don’t have to be good at everything. Sometimes someone more skilled than you can step in for what you can’t handle, and you can do the same for them.

I feel like whenever I see posts like this they are criticizing men for being bad at Traditional Woman Things, but I still feel implicitly attacked as a woman who is bad at a lot of Traditional Man Things. I can’t carry heavy boxes, my response to seeing a spider is to yell for whoever is around to kill it, and I call my dad when I’m having problems with my computer or it’s April and I realize I haven’t done my taxes yet and want someone to do them for me.

And yes, I could become better at any of these things with effort. But I have a limited amount of time and effort and none of these things are my top priority. Is that problematic of me?

(I also kind of object to the OP because from a pretty young age, I was in charge of food for my family when my mom was away and my dad was home with us, and I loved it: the responsibility made me feel really cool and grown-up.)

(I agree wholeheartedly with the efficiency argument for division of labor, and would go even further: since most people are straight, the traditional division of labor between the two genders allows people to learn only half the skills needed for adult life from a young age before they know who they are going to marry, saving a lot of redundant investment in human capital.) 

apparently people think math competitions for girls are sexist because they “stigmatize girls as being less talented”

like, if you take away international girls’ math competitions, what will happen is that girls will mostly not qualify for international math competitions. but I’m sure they will feel very encouraged sitting at home, watching their male peers win medals, and knowing that we as a society have taken a firm stance on gender equality

What about girls who don’t qualify for the girls competition either? And children in general who love math but aren’t at the international level?

I was heavily involved in math competitions throughout my school years, and always deeply resented the special “for girls” sections. Because, yes, they do treat girls as lesser. I would go to a middle-school competition, and there would be the real first through tenth places, and then a “top sixth grader” prize, and a “top girl” prize. Even a middle-schooler can tell what that means: sixth graders aren’t as good at math because they’re younger, so they need a consolation prize, and girls aren’t as good at math so they need one too.

I am offended that people think I need to be pandered to. I resented, even as a child, that people thought I couldn’t do as well as any boy. If I can’t earn a medal honestly, I’d rather sit at home and study for next year.

Because next year, I will win.

Interesting. The “top girl” prizes never bothered me–honestly, I would always hand them out in my head anyway if the competition didn’t have one. I’d watch all the winners as they went up, note their gender, and if everyone ahead of me was a boy I’d come home and tell my parents “I was the top girl!” and they’d congratulate me and take me somewhere nice for dinner. So having an actual prize was just official recognition of that to me. I can see how it would seem like pandering, though.

But I’m not really attached to those. What I am attached to is all-girl math circles and math competitions, for partly I guess safe space reasons? Teenage boy math nerds are uh, great in their way, and I definitely had lots of fun over the years doing math stuff with them, but they can also be pretty arrogant and obnoxious and immature and also just different from me, like they were always talking about video games or whatever and had no interest in fashion or Jane Austen (my obsessions at the time). Not to mention being the only girl on a team full of guys is just kind of awkward. All-girl math spaces had no one throwing frisbees at each other, no one talking over each other or making fun of someone for not knowing a theorem, t-shirts that actually fit.

And I was one of the lucky ones–in freshman year I was the only girl on the math team, but by senior year the math team was actually like half girls and my school had articles written about how we were one of the best environments for girls in math in the country. I think one of the possible takeaways from Ellison and Swanson is that for girls to succeed in math it’s important for them to be surrounded by other girls who are into math, which is why I think arguing for the elimination of EGMO, CGMO, Math Prize for Girls, etc. in the name of feminism is counterproductive.

official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:

women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.

women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it. 

In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting. 

There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”

On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.

Also this just seems like a bad idea economically. Women are probably like 50% of Uber passengers but only 14% of drivers: it’s hard to imagine demand won’t be way higher than supply. Add in the fact that there’s no surge pricing (*eyeroll*), and it’s hard to imagine cars won’t be really expensive, have really long wait times, or both.

The enthusiasm for an all-female service ranged from “I would be all over it” to “HELL YES” [caps hers]. 

I have to wonder how this enthusiasm will hold up when they see the prices or have to wait half an hour for a car.

Also the fact that articles about this keep talking about the number of sexual assaults in Ubers and linking to “Who’s Driving You?” as a source which is literally a scare campaign funded by the taxi industry.

I’m always surprised at how scared other women seem to be of being assaulted by strangers. When I was talking about this to one of my friends she was like, “well yeah, I wouldn’t take an Uber alone with a male driver.” And I was like “??? I’ve probably done that like 30 times? How do you even get places?” (The worst thing that has ever happened to me while alone in an Uber was my driver telling me that I “look like a nerd.” This was not actually a bad thing and was in fact a great source of amusement.)

The 14% of drivers thing probably has much to do with how much women drivers are harassed by male customers. Plus don’t assume your experience matches what other women experience.

Sorry, definitely didn’t mean to imply all women have the same experiences or that women are never harassed or assaulted in Ubers! Just because I think it’s weird how scared other women are of strangers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong or irrational. (Also to be clear the correct response to someone who is irrationally scared of something is sympathy, not “haha you’re being silly.” Irrational fear is still unpleasant.)

And I kind of doubt women being harassed by passengers is the main thing driving that 14%? I mean, truck drivers don’t pick up passengers, and only 5% of truck drivers are women. Men drive more than women in general: they’re like 60% of drivers on the road. Maybe men just like driving because operating a steering wheel while looking around for other cars is similar to hunting on the savannah, which requires using weapons with one’s hands while looking for an animal to kill.

I was reading an article about students from a historically black college trying to find jobs in Silicon Valley, and noticed this quote:

When she finally visited [Silicon Valley] during college, it struck her as a startlingly homogeneous culture, made up of white and Asian people…

“There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley”

Are Asians not “people of color”? Now that I think about it, I’ve hardly ever heard it used that way. What comes to mind when you hear that phrase?

I think Asians are generally considered POC but people equivocate on this a bit when it’s convenient? Like Asians are underrepresented in Oscar nominations/wins, so they’re people of color when we’re talking about that, but overrepresented in Silicon Valley, so in that context they’re just kind of glossed over. (But I don’t think you’ll hear people outright say “Asians aren’t people of color” even in the latter case.)

(There’s an Asian woman who writes for my school newspaper (and refers to herself as a “woman of color.”) But in her column the other day she referred to “racism and white supremacy” as “those systems that empower and advantage white and light-skinned folks at the expense of Black, brown and Indigenous peoples.” So yeah I thought that was interesting.)

So today I was talking to someone who works in admissions for an economics PhD program. The way they do admissions is that they go through every folder and give it a numerical score that’s as objective as possible, based on grades, GRE scores, quality of recommendations, undergrad research, etc. Then they go through all the folders, looking at the scores, and decide who to admit.

In the second step they always practice explicit affirmative action in favor of women; the score required to get in as a woman is significantly lower than the score required to get in as a man. And yet, consistently their female students do better on average than their male students.

I thought that was really interesting.

I don’t suppose anyone took those scores and tried to figure out a system that would better predict how well people do? It seems likely that some of those criteria are anti-correlated with success.

Yeah, economics PhD admissions seems like kind of a hard problem. Of course one thing you want is people who will do well in classes, and that’s easy–just get smart people from top schools with good grades and stuff.

But the main thing you want is people who will be good at research, and that’s not as correlated with all the obvious things, and they haven’t found a really good predictor. It seems like success in research involves a lot of intangible factors–broad range of knowledge and interests? curiosity about the world around you? creativity? ability to work in a self-directed way?–that are hard to measure from reading a folder about a college senior.

The one thing they do know is that, conditional on having 99th percentile GRE scores or whatever, these intangible factors seem to be positively correlated with being female.

So today I was talking to someone who works in admissions for an economics PhD program. The way they do admissions is that they go through every folder and give it a numerical score that’s as objective as possible, based on grades, GRE scores, quality of recommendations, undergrad research, etc. Then they go through all the folders, looking at the scores, and decide who to admit.

In the second step they always practice explicit affirmative action in favor of women; the score required to get in as a woman is significantly lower than the score required to get in as a man. And yet, consistently their female students do better on average than their male students.

I thought that was really interesting.

Why don’t they bias things even more in favor of women? This seems like the sensible response.

That’s what they have been doing recently–every year they lower the score cutoff for women a bit and every year it still happens. The guy I talked to was like “… yeah we’ll probably make it even lower this year.”

(They have the opposite problem with Asians: they currently have a higher score cutoff and still consistently do worse than the white students. In this case the obvious solution–discriminate against Asians even more–feels a bit ickier.)

I feel like the extent to which women’s magazines have embraced feminism is kind of bizarre. Like, I can’t decide if they’re being stupid and don’t realize they’re helping a force that wants to destroy them and everything they stand for, or being smart, and they realize they can ride the bourgeoisification of the left and ultimately make the current wave of feminism into just another set of impossible standards for women to live up to?

(always look hot, Lean In, and purge your problematic thoughts)

Like I was reading Glamour in a waiting room yesterday and they mentioned that if you’re wearing sexy underwear only because your boyfriend wants you to that is Not Feminist and Bad … in the middle of a magazine that is 90% advice on how to look hotter and attract men … I remember Cosmo had an article a while ago on why shaving your legs is giving in to the patriarchy and I just

Anyway whenever I read one of those magazines these days I just think of Reductress. Fun Weekend Getaways to Fill the 48-Hour Abortion Waiting Period!

To be fair, that was Cosmo’s shtick in the seventies too, so it’s returning to its roots

idk I sort of like it? I mean, it’s absurd but on the other hand bisexuals exist in Cosmoland now

Yeah it’s definitely a good thing that Cosmo realizes lesbian and bi women exist, but when Cosmo isn’t being hilariously terrible it can get kind of boring and I sort of miss all of the advice along the lines of “Q: I fantasize about kissing girls a lot, what should I do? A: Don’t worry, it’s a totally normal fantasy for a straight girl to have! It probably just means you want your boyfriend to be more sensual and spend more time on foreplay.”

I also feel like they’re devoting more time to Serious Issues like articles about sexism and constant exhortations to be more confident and speak up at work and … I know I should be more confident and speak up at work! Constant reminders are not going to help! If I wanted to spend this time improving my chances of professional success I would be doing work right now, I bought this magazine because I wanted to find out what the Seven Things He Might Be Thinking About When He Doesn’t Text You Back are

so I get emails from my college Women in CS organization

last week their event was “practice Dropbox interview questions while decorating cupcakes”

this week it’s “get networking tips from software engineers at Pinterest while making mason jar terrariums”

and I’m … not against these events they actually sound pretty fun … they just seem like things that would happen in Silicon Valley and not real life?

I really appreciate that you draw the distinction between SV and reality. Because over here, “while making mason jar terrariums” sounds … just … I don’t even … Ok.

actually when I said Silicon Valley I was thinking of the TV show and totally did not realize it would sound like I was referring to the geographical location, but I stand by the distinction nonetheless

Who Social Justice Warriors used to be:

Luigi Taparelli who coined the term Social Justice in the 1840s trying to get the Catholic Church to help poor people instead of hording all their money.

Mary Harris Jones labeling herself a Social Justice Activist while protecting the working people by using her political power and organization skills to stop the striking Industrial Workers from being slaughtered by the Pinkertons.

Louis Brandeis calling for more Social Justice in his attempt to bring world peace while helping create the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI.

Martin Luther King leading the Civil Rights Movement and writing an essay about the need for Social Justice in society in relations to the War in Vietnam.

Who Social Justice Warriors are now:

White women in their 20s working at buzzfeed making news articles on that complain about how air conditioners are sexist. And people on tumblr who threaten to kill or Dox anyone that has a different opinion then them. 

I am so confused that anti-SJ has decided the air conditioner article is Quintessential SJ. The article argues that most office buildings are over air-conditioned in the summer, and suggests approximately eight reasons: humidity control, badly placed thermostats, air conditioning units designed for full occupancy when buildings are usually at less than full occupancy, offices built in times when buildings were mostly lit with incandescent bulbs (which produce a ton of heat), systems with so much overcapacity that they don’t run well on low settings, better sealing and insulation that mean the AC has to run on full blast to get sufficient air circulation.

And ‘most managers are men who wear a suit and probably prefer the colder temperatures’.

Mentioning, as one of eight hypotheses about why office buildings are too cold, that most managers are men who wear suits, is apparently Where SJ Went Off The Ledge?

Guys, in the last week I have seen SJ blogs argue that Emmett Till had it coming because he catcalled a woman, that the Holocaust was justified because Hitler was trying to prevent the creation of colonial power Israel, that it was okay to use slurs about disabled people against abled people because if they weren’t disabled they couldn’t be oppressed by them, and that the only reason to like history is because you are racist.

You have better targets.

they might be referring to like this vox dot com article which pretty much does say explicitly that air conditioners are sexist

but yes, anti-SJ holding this up as an example of the terribleness of SJ is crazy! this is probably one of the best things SJ is doing! as a Woman in STEM I have never faced any setbacks due to microaggressions that I can recall but I have spent years in freezing cold workplaces and classrooms, shivering while wearing my warmest fleece sweatshirts. I actually told an HR person at my job this summer that I thought air conditioning was the #1 issue faced by women in the workforce today (she seemed skeptical).

also, the environment

My working definition of creepy, most typical case: a man who interacts with a woman in a way she doesn’t want that doesn’t fit in another category. This seems a decent extensional map, though if you’re using a different one we’d be talking apst each other and I’m willing to switch.

The important thing to me is that being creepy is bad. You are causing an interaction someone doesn’t want, this is a priori bad. I believe that there are women who are unhappy because men who are unattractive interacted with them in a way that they would have appreciated had the man been attractive. That’s OK. People are allowed to have preferences. Just because I could be non-creepy doing X if I was attractive, doesn’t mean that I should feel it is acceptable for me to do X. Attractiveness is not morally different from generic social skills. It is objectionable for people to make others feel bad, regardless of where that comes from. Yes, this means that if you’re unattractive, you’re obligated to be more cautious in your social life.

[snip]

The other important thing to note about your definition is that it’s asymmetric. Unwanted interactions are taken to be morally weighty, but unwanted non-interactions are neglected, and in fact are more or less required. There is no moral reason for this. (There is, of course, a social or in some sense “political” reason, which is that attractive people make the rules.) I believe the SSC post “Radicalizing the Romanceless” addressed this.

[snip]

I never said that unwanted non-interactions don’t matter. I didn’t focus on them, because I was discussing unwanted interactions, but I agree that they matter. I liked Radicalizing the Romanceless.

The thing is, it’s good signaling for women to complain about unwanted interactions and bad signaling to complain about unwanted non-interactions, so we probably way overweight the badness of unwanted interactions just based on availability heuristic from complaints we’ve heard.

I’d prefer the marginal guy to hit on me and it’s hard to say that in a way that doesn’t sound low-status. Girls complain in private that guys never ask them out, and then in public join in the general whining about “Ugh, creepy guys hitting on on me, so exhausting.”

Things which are signs society devalues friendship:
1. It is considered normal to move a long distance for the sake of family or romantic partners. It is not considered normal to move a long distance for the sake of friends.

2. You can get compassionate leave from work to care for a sick partner or family member but not for a friend (even if the friend lives with you.) There is sometimes an exception if you are a Registered Carer.
3. People will commiserate you far more over a break up than over the end of a friendship.

4. The whole “men and women can’t be friends” nonsense.

But I don’t think slash fiction is a sign society devalues friendship. I think slash fiction is a sign that a small, not especially powerful section of society values Representation and/or Hot Boys Kissing (probably more of the latter tbh, otherwise there would be more femslash and more poc-centric fanfiction.) Nobody is saying “Steve has to kiss Bucky because nobody cares that much about measley old FRIENDS. They’re saying” “Steve has to kiss Bucky because Bisexual Steve Rogers is important for Social Justice” and/or “Steve has to kiss Bucky because fap fap fap”

Idk, I think slash might be part of a larger picture in which society devalues friendship. My roommate (also straight) and I have a pretty close relationship, and I’ve had people (both guys and girls, both straight and not) tell me that they ship the two of us. I think that’s pretty clearly motivated not by desire for Representation or Hot Girls Kissing but by this sense that platonic relationships are inherently less interesting/complex/high-stakes/intimate than sexual relationships.

Maybe that’s not exactly the same thing as slash but like, I do think a lot of people I know have this tendency to respond “I ship it” to any relationship between characters or real people they find interesting, even if I think it’s more interesting when viewed as a friendship.

on the one hand, I hate posts that are like ‘women who aren’t feminists are just selfish people, since they don’t personally benefit from feminism then the suffering of others just doesn’t matter to them’

hate them

because the reason a lot of women don’t identify with feminism is because feminists have royally fucked up intersectionality along an axis they care about (other people have written about this far more eloquently than I could) - because they see the priorities of feminism as being for white women, or abled women, or wealthy women. in other words it’s the exact opposite of ‘just because I don’t personally benefit, I don’t care’. it’s ‘you aren’t addressing the very real suffering that I see in the world and want to change’.

on the other hand, a lot of the women I know who aren’t feminists, it is because we haven’t experienced any of the things that tend to be described as the universal experience of womanhood. I haven’t ever been catcalled. or talked over. or dismissed because of my gender. or told I can’t succeed in a STEM field. or been told not to enforce my boundaries. or been pressured to date a boy I wasn’t interested in. I’ve never felt in danger in the company of men. And that’s a result of class privilege and liberal-upbringing privilege and not-dating-men privilege (seriously! it reduces your rate of intimate partner violence by a lot!) and probably also a consequence of my neurology, since I seem to have totally failed to internalize basically all ‘female socialization’.

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I actually became a lot more sympathetic toward feminism after reading and thinking about Generalizing from One Example (Scott Alexander: making people more sympathetic toward feminism since 2009!) because I realized that maybe all the women who said things like “it was hurtful to me when [guy] made [sexist joke]” or “when [guy] made [factual statement about biological gender differences] it made me feel really uncomfortable and excluded from [space]” weren’t just pretending to be offended for attention or something

which is sort of similar to the way feminists use “lived experience,” I think: when someone says they’ve experienced something it’s a good idea to take a stance of epistemic humility since they always know more about their experience than you do, and maybe they’re lying or mistaken but that shouldn’t be your first assumption

except in practice your lived experience often gets ignored if it doesn’t fit with the narrative and you end up with e.g. #yesallwomen

Since everyone is sharing their feminism-and-scrupulosity stories, I figured I’d add mine to the pile.  My problems were comparatively mild, and I’m mostly over them now, so this is not a plea for sympathy, just another voice in the chorus speaking out against this stuff.

After reading feminist writings like “Schrodinger’s Rapist”, I too became afraid of talking to female strangers, for fear of hurting them.  Let me be clear: I’m straight and female, so this had nothing to do with sexual attraction.  I think it just had to do with being socially awkward, and believing that any social mistake I made might traumatize someone.

I mean, feminism isn’t the only thing responsible for my scrupulosity.  The scrupulosity began back in sophomore year of college, when I first started to get a grasp on social skills.  As I became more aware of nonverbal communication and social norms, I started to realize that a lot of what I said and did was making people uncomfortable.  Often when I talked, I was interrupting people or going on long monologues.  I was stepping on people’s voices the way an awkward dancer steps on people’s toes.  So anyway, I stopped talking nearly as much, and deliberately tried to cultivate shyness as a virtue.

I also spent a lot of time on an IRC channel that explicitly encouraged scrupulosity with an oft-repeated motto “doing things is evil”.  So that definitely has a lot to do with my problems.

But reading online feminism definitely didn’t help.  Like, before I started reading this stuff, I used to get really worried that all my social mistakes were the worst thing ever.  But without the influence of feminism/SJ, I could always calmly remind myself that no, in the grand scheme of things, my little social mistakes were no big deal.  Usually, they’d just make people mildly uncomfortable for a few minutes, and then everyone would forget about it.  And every social mistake was a learning experience for me, a necessary part of levelling up in social skills.  So I shouldn’t stress too much about the error, and in fact, I should be happy that I had learned something.  As I told myself, there’s no way to learn social skills except by repeatedly screwing up.

But then I read articles like “Schrodinger’s Rapist”, which say pretty much the opposite thing from what I just wrote.  They say that if you make a social error, it could cause serious harm to someone.  It won’t just make them feel mildly uncomfortable; it will make them feel like their lives are threatened.  Or it could trigger a really painful episode of PTSD, which could put the person into a terrible state for weeks on end, and make their recovery that much more difficult.  (I’m a straight female, so I really don’t understand how I internalized the whole Schrodinger’s Rapist thing.  I have a lot in common with straight nerdy guys, so maybe I just assume that all messages directed to them apply to me too?  Who knows.)

Anyway, as a socially awkward person, I became afraid of talking to people.  Particularly strangers who were women, but I also just grew nervous about ever talking to anyone.  What if I accidentally said something racist or ableist or offensive to some minority?  That would cause serious harm and be the worst thing in the world!

The saner social justice people (e.g. Captain Awkward) will say that everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and if someone calls you “ableist”, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, just that you need to pay more attention to what you’re saying and try to fix it.  But it’s hard to internalize that more forgiving perspective, when words like “ableist” are hurled like weapons by Tumblr activists, and everyone emphasizes how much damage improper behavior can cause.  It’s much easier to start worrying that everything you say will be flawed, and the only way to avoid hurting people is to never speak at all.

Interestingly, though, social justice hasn’t made me kinder to oppressed minorities.  It’s just made me hide in places where sensitive people don’t hang out.  I breathe a sigh of relief every time someone makes a racist joke or mocks social justice, because it means I’m in a safe space, where no one is going to be deeply damaged just by me speaking my opinion.

I am mostly over these scrupulosity issues now.  I still feel very nervous in SJ spaces, and nervous about speaking my true opinions publicly.  But I’m not afraid of talking to strangers anymore.  Why?  Because a few months ago, I was walking outside my office, and I ran into someone I knew.  I was feeling very introverted and didn’t feel like conversing right then, but this person was socially oblivious and ignored all my signals that I didn’t want to talk.  Also, it seemed like he really wanted someone to talk to, and was getting a lot out of the conversation.  So I just sighed internally and listened to him for another 15 minutes.  It was mildly annoying, but no big deal.  And then I realized: this was exactly the sort of thing that I’d been afraid of doing to people for so many months.  But someone just did it to me, and it was really no big deal!  So if I inflicted that same amount of discomfort on people occasionally, it would probably be no big deal either.

So if you’re also suffering from these scrupulosity issues, and are afraid of making people uncomfortable with your social awkwardness, I will tell you: it’s probably not a big deal.  Go ahead and make social mistakes and learn from them.  Your chances of traumatizing someone are exceedingly low.  And being made to feel uncomfortable is far from the worst thing that can happen to someone.  (I mean, still don’t approach women in dark alleyways.  But if it’s broad daylight, and you’re in a public place, then seriously, don’t worry about it.)

“Interestingly, though, social justice hasn’t made me kinder to oppressed minorities.  It’s just made me hide in places where sensitive people don’t hang out.  I breathe a sigh of relief every time someone makes a racist joke or mocks social justice, because it means I’m in a safe space, where no one is going to be deeply damaged just by me speaking my opinion." 

yep same

I think a lot of SJ messages are harmful to people with social anxiety/fear of offending people (even straight women–like wow I’m sure if I were a straight man this issue would be so many times worse). Yesterday a woman at a party congratulated me on being a woman in computer science, then asked if I’ve been following the articles on women in CS lately and said with an eyeroll that people were "bringing back Pinker, suggesting that women just don’t want to study CS or something.” I responded with a smile and a “Mhm, I know right?” Like really, brain? Not only would it be good to share my opinion on important issues I know a lot about, my anxiety about this stuff just makes it hard to converse with people about things that aren’t superficial.

So I’ve been realizing recently that it’s important to be able to talk about things even when they might offend people (“So, why did you decide to become vegetarian?”), and it’s something I want to work on this year.

Guy on the train, yelling into his phone: “No, I do NOT like being with you. It’s like dating the Jezebel comments section.”

[So the old “Less Wrong and possibly Slate Star Codex are evil for associating with people to the right of me!” argument is making the rounds again. Last time it was doing that I wrote an angry blog post about it, but I decided on reflection not to post it because it would only make things worse. Luckily I saved it, and now the same argument is back, and now I’m on Tumblr, where making things worse is an accepted part of the culture. So (with the caveat that all uses of the word “recently” refer to “as of several months ago”) I guess I will throw it out there.]

Someone recently used the ask box on Ozy’s blog to say that:

The LessWrong community does more to make reactionaries feel at home than literally any other not explicitly reactionary community I’ve ever seen. Does this not bother you, or at least make you reluctant to feel community/fellowship with many of these people? I don’t doubt there are often good intentions about free intellectual inquiry, but functionally excluding anyone who doesn’t want to hang out with reactionaries is going to give a rather… demographically skewed view of ideal reasoning.

Ozy gave one response I thought was relatively tepid - there aren’t that many reactionaries - and then a somewhat stronger response:

And… for me, personally, I feel much safer around a community that is absurdly tolerant of intellectual diversity. I’m contrarian as fuck and I get depressive fits when people are mad at me, you know? Bad combination. So I really prioritize “ability to be contrarian without people yelling at me,” and unfortunately that means I have to put up with people also not yelling at the people whose views I think are stupid or evil.

As usual, Ozy speaks for me also.

There was recently a very similar debate in the reactionary community. Justine Tunney, a transwoman, has become interested in neoreactionary ideas and is hanging around the periphery of the community - whether just inside or just outside the periphery is not quite clear.

Mike Anissimov, who is possibly the closest thing to a leader neoreaction has got, has demanding everyone exclude her. It’s unclear whether because she’s a transwoman or because she’s associated with some leftist ideas or because of other things, but it quickly became interpreted as being about how transpeople aren’t allowed in the movement or people in the movement shouldn’t associate with transpeople.

And what was amazing was how nearly everyone in the entire movement - which, remember, is about how all existing conservatives aren’t conservative enough - told Mike to go fly a kite. From the relevant comments thread at Xenosystems:

I’d say the transsexualism issue is more complex than this discussion is allowing for. How does it rank in the hierarchy of social conservative abominations? It’s an attempt to re-order a disordered nature, isn’t it? Even if it’s a solution conservatives don’t naturally warm to, it’s not being driven by an attempt to perversely deepen chaos. Nature can be screwed up. There are hermaphrodites. I’m assuming the right is unwilling to embrace crude social constructivist accounts of same-sex preference. It’s not as if everything would be really simple, if only people would behave themselves. As a parent, I sympathize (strongly) with the desire to shield kids from profound bio-social deviations. On the other hand, being spitefully offensive to people who are trying to navigate intrinsically messed-up situations seems considerably less than fully civilized. Intersectionalism and pomo cis-critique are, of course, expressions of leftist vileness. There’s some distance between these cultural attitudes and a cautious tolerance for people in difficult places.

And:

Transsexualism is a problem insofar as it’s being (ab)used for political reasons. It’s a somewhat rare (1 in 10000) condition that may be caused the brain incorrectly thinking it’s suppose to have a female body. It seems that the brain structure has slight differences, and a new study has shown that TS people who feel to be in the wrong respond to pheromones in the way of their experienced sex, beginning in early puberty. Hopefully, someone is going to replicate that finding. [Others say it is caused by] the idea of having a female body being a turn-on. This might or might not be due to sexual fetishism, as straight women apparently are often turned on by their own bodies. Or so it’s claimed. IMO, allowing the odd unfortunate who genuinely has the condition to choose elective surgery doesn’t seem like much of a social ill. Also funny note: not all conservatives are anti-transsexual. Iranian Mullahs are okay with gender reassignment.

Meanwhile, Ozy helpfully informs me that one of the feminist blogs ze reads has taken to consistently calling female-to-male transexuals “shrimp-dicks” because all the previous insults they thought up for them weren’t misgendering enough.

So the first thing I would have said to the person in Ozy’s ask box is that there are good and bad people in every political movement, even by my own early-21st-century-liberal-weighted definition of “good people”.

But even more interesting to me was what happened when the debate backed up from being about transsexuals per se to being about how Tunney was a leftist with many counter-reactionary opinions. From the same source:

Anissimov maybe wants to drive us all insane, and soon enough it might actually happen. Apparently people who talk to leftists without explicitly trying to convert them or kill them (preferably) are leftists themselves. ALWAYS. I am not sure what this logical fallacy is called, but I am pretty sure it is one. (actually I am not sure there is even any logic in this one)

And:

Surface traits can be forced, and enforcing surface conformity will just send the deceptive to the top. It’s better to let each contribute as he can, so long as he contributes toward the goal/ideal and not some hypothetical or tangential goal. Tunney is intelligent and inquisitive. She contributes quite a bit to discussion and publicizing the neoreaction/dark enlightenment/new right/traditionalist (NDNT) sector. Let her play, let libertarians come by, be open to everyone but the instant they deviate from goals, make it clear that this is “something else.”

And from Xenosystems administrator and arch-neoreactionary philosopher extraordinaire Nick Land, what I consider the debate-winning point:

Neoreaction should engage in vigorous intellectual interchange with anything and anybody that can sharpen its thoughts. Any group that would have excluded Alan Turing, for instance, on grounds of social purity (or any other) is intrinsically stupid. That one Turing is worth many million social conservative ditto heads is not even seriously in question from my PoV. It’s not impossible that one could work with groups that proceed from different assumptions, but it would definitely be in the mode of tactical alliance than any kind of deeper communal solidarity. When the definitive split comes, if I end up confederated with the people [Mike Anissimov] has anathematized, I think I’ll be doing pretty well. The constituency would be based on post-libertarians, working their way ever further right, in a direction they are confident leads away from fascism, rather than towards it. This is what NRx is about.

Conservative Catholic reactionary blogger Nick Steves (more or less) concluded the issue by announcing an Official Neoreactionary Position, of which the three relevant points were:

1. Talking to, being friends with, showing normal human kindness to a disordered person is not tantamount to: a) approving all the free choices that person has made; or b) favoring social and/or legal norms that support the person’s disorder; or c) joining them in their organization (should it exist); or d) inviting them into your organization (should it exist)

2. If someone wants to purge someone else then show up with an Institution and your name at the top of it, and then there’ll be something to talk about. Until then, all future such attempts to purge are moot, null, damaging, extremely embarrassing, and in very poor taste. This shall be construed as the Official Neoreactionary Position.

3. I shall be the judge of who I can have a drink with. This should henceforth be construed as the Official Neoreactionary Position on this matter.

This was then officially endorsed by James Donald, whom as readers of this blog know is baaaaaaaasically the Antichrist and dislikes gays, transsexuals, socialists, liberals, and minorities more than anyone else you will ever meet.

So the second thing I would have said to the person in Ozy’s ask box is that if you think that people should be judged for interacting with intelligent, reasonable individuals who happen to hold a political position which you consider objectionable, you are less tolerant than James Donald.

Do you ever just sort of die inside because if you were a fictional character, fandom would chalk up all your weaknesses and faults and blunders to misogyny on the authors’ part

[snip]

[snip]

ugh yes….you want exactly the same cultural shifts i want…

and i appreciate that you’re being epistemically humble about the value you give to humility—hella meta

but i don’t think that valuing overconfidence is a chesterton’s fence? maybe? i can come up with a believable reason we might overvalue overconfidence: we start out with a world where some people are overconfident in their beliefs, some people are underconfident, it all averages out to basically correct confidence. some people start taking into account the confidence that believers have in a belief, and it helps them determine the truth, it’s a good heuristic. but since being believed gives you social status, as the heuristic spreads, overconfident people do better than underconfident people in situations where social status has more effects than truth, or in situations where social status is easier to see than the truth. bam, the overconfidence fence is built.

also, like, at this point i’ve seen several studies saying that humility has better economic consequences than overconfidence even if it gives you less status (you can see the list of papers in this link, i thought they were good but i don’t know much about statistics), at least when it comes to investing.

idk  how useful this is, this is basically just me being like “if there’s one thing i’m SURE of it’s EPISTEMiC HUMILITY!!!”

Haha I did not even intend the meta-ness.

And I like your story of the overconfidence fence. Your link to the papers is broken though :(

oops! here you go. there’s actually a list of papers at the bottom, the article itself is a summary

[snip]

I think I’m pretty good at epistemic humility but according to my mom and Sheryl Sandberg I should probably stop being good at it so I can like succeed in the workforce.

I feel like my favorite way (okay this is like a giant cultural shift so it’s not exactly a solution) to get more women in high-status positions would be to value aggression less and humility more in hiring/promoting decisions. Except I’m not really sure if this valuing of overconfidence is actually rational for reasons I don’t understand?

ugh yes….you want exactly the same cultural shifts i want…

and i appreciate that you’re being epistemically humble about the value you give to humility—hella meta

but i don’t think that valuing overconfidence is a chesterton’s fence? maybe? i can come up with a believable reason we might overvalue overconfidence: we start out with a world where some people are overconfident in their beliefs, some people are underconfident, it all averages out to basically correct confidence. some people start taking into account the confidence that believers have in a belief, and it helps them determine the truth, it’s a good heuristic. but since being believed gives you social status, as the heuristic spreads, overconfident people do better than underconfident people in situations where social status has more effects than truth, or in situations where social status is easier to see than the truth. bam, the overconfidence fence is built.

also, like, at this point i’ve seen several studies saying that humility has better economic consequences than overconfidence even if it gives you less status (you can see the list of papers in this link, i thought they were good but i don’t know much about statistics), at least when it comes to investing.

idk  how useful this is, this is basically just me being like “if there’s one thing i’m SURE of it’s EPISTEMiC HUMILITY!!!”

Haha I did not even intend the meta-ness.

And I like your story of the overconfidence fence. Your link to the papers is broken though :(

also, when i do that thing i was just talking about—think about what i said, realize that i’m not sure of it, and offer a qualification—

the motive is rationality/a respect for the truth

but i can tell it sometimes comes across as feminine signalling, like apologizing a lot (something i also do)—qualifying your sentences whether with uncertainty or apology, is super ladylike.

so. two things.

women are frequently told to stop qualifying themselves so much (remember that pantene commercial?). and honestly the apologies can probably go but saying out loud when you’re not sure of something is awesome and good, men should pick it up.*

also, people act like rationality and truth-seeking is something that men are just naturally more interested in…

but (i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again)

men (whether because of genetics or hormones or socialization or whatever) tend to be more into the argumentative, statistical, i’m-sure-i’m-right side of truth seeking, and that kind of fact-bravado is frequently interpreted as rationality

but women are socialized/gened/hormoned into being pretty damn good at epistemic humility and belief updating, which (except in the less wrong community) doesn’t get as much social respect, and isn’t seen as part of rationality

basically….femininity and rationality aren’t opposed, but their connections are lower status than connections between masculinity and rationality……why do you think that is…………………………………………………….

*for instance, see this article, which talks about how feminine-coded uncertainty can actually give better outcomes in male-coded fields, even though that feminine uncertainty is low-status

I think I’m pretty good at epistemic humility but according to my mom and Sheryl Sandberg I should probably stop being good at it so I can like succeed in the workforce.

I feel like my favorite way (okay this is like a giant cultural shift so it’s not exactly a solution) to get more women in high-status positions would be to value aggression less and humility more in hiring/promoting decisions. Except I’m not really sure if this valuing of overconfidence is actually rational for reasons I don’t understand?

[snip]

yeah, that’s a very fair point. I think most criticism of art for being sexist is unhelpful, I’ve also seen the particular examples you point to and I feel mostly the same way about them, and it’s not really what I have in mind with ‘put pressure on content creators’.

Like, the reason Marvel hasn’t had a Black Widow movie is not that no one has a powerful and meaningful message that would center around her as a character. The reason they haven’t had a black protagonist isn’t because there aren’t any compelling stories to tell with that premise. It’s because those wouldn’t sell. And so if people are concerned with representation, I think it’s a productive exercise to make a lot of noise about how well those things would sell, because that puts the incentives in place for that story to get told in the first place.

Or, like, I know some authors who’ve wanted to include a trans character but they’re cis and have no idea how to write a trans person without accidentally writing a horrible misrepresentation of the trans experience. So trans people who write up tips and resources for cis people writing trans characters are contributing to representation without policing anyone’s art.

‘representation’ advocacy which takes the form of yelling at existing authors for the works they’ve created is the worst, and unfortunately also the easiest, variety.

Cool we’re in agreement then. I support offering authors productive suggestions and making noise about your willingness to watch things.

Although I also feel like people will write what they know, and people who aren’t members of marginalized groups are probably less qualified to represent the experiences of people who are, and so if people want representation for their groups their best bet is to make it themselves.

Something that inevitably comes up in conversations about female character representation is the fact, that, given two minor characters with only bit parts in a work, the male minor character is likelier to acquire an enthusiastic fanbase while the female character gets ignored.

Or if there are shallow, badly-written male and female characters, fans will often contentedly ret-con the male character to build someone more interesting, while saying ‘I don’t care about [female character], she’s shallow and badly-written’. 

Both of these are things that happen; in the statistical aggregate, you can pick up a pronounced tendency to develop male characters more. Some of the reason is certainly internalized misogyny. 

But lately I’ve seen people claim that the only conceivable reason this happens is internalized misogyny. Posts have circulated saying things like ‘okay, if you want you can go around adoring male characters while saying you just don’t find female characters interesting. But at least be honest that your reason is internalized misogyny.’

And, wow, no. “In the statistical aggregate, fandom focuses on male characters probably because of our sexist society” is completely true. ‘You, personally, random fan who happens to care a lot about a male character, need to admit that it’s because of internalized misogyny’ is not only way out of line but also false.

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I love all of this except the very end, which I’m not sure about. I realize that “putting the pressure to do better where it belongs – on content creators and the media” is a Thing among feminists. But it’s always bothered me.

Maybe there are other ways to apply the aforementioned pressure, but when I hear that phrase I mostly think of people on the internet complaining about how [insert show/book/artist here] is sexist. Complaining that a political opinion piece or something like that is sexist is entirely reasonable: someone has an opinion, and you disagree with them. But political criticism of art bothers me because I feel like the implied message is “it is Morally Wrong for this art to exist in its current form.” It’s inherently not about adding to the marketplace of ideas, but about silencing.

I’ve heard a fair number of accusations of sexism or general problematicness about many things that I like, and not only that I like but that I identify with and that I think capture in some way the experience of being female for me (the HBO show Girls, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Taylor Swift, and terrible historical romance novels, to name four). And I worry about a future where people dilute the art that they want to make, or don’t make it at all, because they’re afraid of criticism.

I feel like art is one of the superpowers of the human race. Like, someone can have a complex internal experience and convey it to someone on the other side of the world. I think that’s really cool and it’s really improved my life in a lot of ways and I get scared when people start policing it.

They say that “Confronting triggers, not avoiding them, is the best way to overcome PTSD”. They point out that “exposure therapy” is the best treatment for trauma survivors, including rape victims. And that this involves reliving the trauma and exposing yourself to traumatic stimuli, exactly what trigger warnings are intended to prevent. All this is true. But I feel like they are missing a very important point.

Alicorn’s post about identity theft, , being linguistically forced into someone else’s movement, and other things.

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Yay I’m annoyed by #yesallwomen for the same reason, I’m glad I’m not the only one. I wish people wouldn’t use my supposed experiences of oppression to support their political arguments.

Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.

I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.

But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.

That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.

I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.

Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.

Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.

I wonder if the not being offended thing has more to do with Scott’s latest post about identifying with different ingroups? I used to think I was difficult to offend because attacking many of my identities (sexuality, religious, national, political) did not offend me. It turns out I’m average difficulty to offend, I just draw the lines of my tribe in strange places.

(I think the argument against cultural appropriation is, more or less, that lots of people are in fact offended by it, often not just because their national/cultural/racial identity is important to them but because there’s a history of the people who think it’s unimportant being people who do horrifically shitty things to them. So if people say that a particular behavior is appropriative and they are offended, continuing to do it signals not caring that you’ve hurt them.

I present this argument with the caveat that I see people who are not members of an affected group being indignant on behalf of those who are pretty often and I think obligations to stop doing things that make one group of people offended on behalf of another are not sustainable at all.)

Hmm, the first suggestion is interesting. Now that I think about it, I can think of times I’ve been slightly offended at people insulting nerds/math majors/whatever. Not offended enough to ask them to stop or write angry blog posts about it or anything, though.

And to add yet another Slate Star Codex reference to this thread, okay, I get cultural appropriation being bad in the way it’s bad to show pictures of salmon to British people. Even if I don’t understand why my actions are making people upset, I should stop unless I think the importance of what I’m doing outweighs their suffering.

Yeah, I’m certainly also on board with the don’t-show-british-people-salmon¹ idea of appropriation that goes something along the lines of: Value: Don’t harm people without reason; Observation: appropriation makes people unhappy; Conclusion: don’t appropriate. But I very much see this as a special case of my fallback “don’t be an asshole” moral value², and when that’s all I have I’m usually suspicious that I’m not understanding everything.

While I wouldn’t say that the above is the only thing I have in my understanding of appropriation, it probably is the only thing I have that I really understand³. I have heard additional arguments about the problems of appropriation, and I could probably regurgitate them and say some rote answers about how it’s bad, and it’s pretty clear it is bad under the above argument of “I see people end up hurt from it” … but I feel like I don’t really understand it yet. This example really felt like something that would provide some additional insight, but I haven’t found it⁴.

This is what frustrates me… People don’t like Sansa because she is feminine. It annoys me that people only like the feminine characters when they act like male characters. And they always go on about feminism. Like, you’re rooting for the people who look like boys, who act like boys, who fight like boys. Root for the girls who wear dresses and are intellectually very strong.

Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.

I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.

But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.

That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.

I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.

Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.

Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.

I wonder if the not being offended thing has more to do with Scott’s latest post about identifying with different ingroups? I used to think I was difficult to offend because attacking many of my identities (sexuality, religious, national, political) did not offend me. It turns out I’m average difficulty to offend, I just draw the lines of my tribe in strange places.

(I think the argument against cultural appropriation is, more or less, that lots of people are in fact offended by it, often not just because their national/cultural/racial identity is important to them but because there’s a history of the people who think it’s unimportant being people who do horrifically shitty things to them. So if people say that a particular behavior is appropriative and they are offended, continuing to do it signals not caring that you’ve hurt them.

I present this argument with the caveat that I see people who are not members of an affected group being indignant on behalf of those who are pretty often and I think obligations to stop doing things that make one group of people offended on behalf of another are not sustainable at all.)

Hmm, the first suggestion is interesting. Now that I think about it, I can think of times I’ve been slightly offended at people insulting nerds/math majors/whatever. Not offended enough to ask them to stop or write angry blog posts about it or anything, though.

And to add yet another Slate Star Codex reference to this thread, okay, I get cultural appropriation being bad in the way it’s bad to show pictures of salmon to British people. Even if I don’t understand why my actions are making people upset, I should stop unless I think the importance of what I’m doing outweighs their suffering.

[…]

I really like these points on steelmanning. I guess generally I feel like there are two goals you might have in reading articles like this:

1) decide if there are good reasons to agree with the author’s point (i.e. self-driving cars are ethically problematic)

2) understand the author’s worldview (i.e. killing people in the trolley problem is bad)

These are both good goals and you have to read the article in different ways for each. Steelmanning is aimed at the first, not the second.

And the first is more practical to do in the short term. For instance, like 90% of what we read in my philosophy class is super deontological. If I had to read all of it as deontological, I guess there’s some small chance I’d come to understand their value system better and convert to deontology at some point. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t be able to believe anything they said, whereas by steelmanning them as consequentialist I can find some parts that make sense in my belief system.

worldoptimization has a good point. I think there are usually good reasons to agree with the author’s point, and good reasons not to; the question is of which outweigh the other.

I am not sure you have to read the article differently; however, since the second goal tends to support the first in many ways. Rather, it helps to understand the author’s worldview when reading ANYTHING because it will give us greater understanding and help keep our minds open, especially if the article discusses ideas that contradict our own.

See, a thing that’s interesting for this is that I’m pretty sure Jim’s objection to steelmanning is a result of his objection to Scott’s post about why people oppose homosexuality [content warning: neoreactionary], which is actually an objection to #1. Scott is saying, “Look, this particular dumb argument makes perfect sense if you just assume some people think such-and-such and other people are using arguments as soldiers” and Jim finds that totally offensive because he doesn’t think such-and-such at all. 

So I think we’re steelmanning Jim’s opposition to steelmanning.

Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.

I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.

But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.

That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.

I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.

Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.

Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.

People who say things like “my body, my choice” and “same-sex marriage is about being able to marry whomever you love” usually don’t mean anything like what the slogans say. For example, no one who consistently believes in bodily autonomy could oppose organ markets or support the War on Drugs. If someone thinks that same-sex marriage is good because it lets people marry whom they want, they should also support the legalization of polygamy and consanguineous marriage. Seeing as support for organ markets and polygamy is much lower than the number of people who say the words - and the active opposition to these policy changes by pro-choicers and same-sex marriage supporters - it suggests to me that support for legal abortion and same-sex marriage comes not from the stated principles but from the desire to treat those who benefit from the policies as in-groups. “My body, my choice” doesn’t mean “my body, my choice”, it means “Women should be treated as an in-group”. “Consenting adults should be free to marry whomever they love” doesn’t mean that people should actually be able to marry the person they love, it means “LGB people should be treated as an in-group”.

This is a bit frustrating to me because I believe in the literal meaning of these slogans. Rick Santorum once said that the arguments for same-sex marriage apply to the legalization of polygamy as well. They do. This is a feature, not a bug.