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I'm not gonna do a good job at explaining this, because it's far from my subject area, but the problem is that your demand for "the relevant part" asks for blun
by RodericDay 11y ago
I'm not gonna do a good job at explaining this, because it's far from my subject area, but the problem is that your demand for "the relevant part" asks for blunt evidence of a subtle phenomenon.
When we talk about politics, context matters. Someone like Yudkowsky doesn't believe stupidly racist things, like a KKK member or turn-of-century politician, or even modern anti-immigration people. Bond's targeting something much more subtle.
The point is that here you have a man who naively keeps trying to push the dialogue "beyond race" ("forget race"), in a forum where if you scroll down to the comment section, you'll see Jeff H. with 5 upvotes defending Watson's racist remarks, with Epiphany at 0 upvotes talking about the cultural reasons why IQ tests fail.
It's about the framework, and what it allows, and about what allows the people championing it to be naive or indifferent about what it allows. Someone discussing coldly and clinically the pros and cons of rape isn't a rapist, but there's something else about someone who can have discussion coldly and clinically. Some people take pride in their level-headedness about tough topics, others would take it as a signal of their lack of empathy with the victims, and the signal this sends to people who do feel passionately about it.
And so Yudkowsky will discuss race in this goofy aloof kind of way- "maybe black people are intellectually inferior, let's talk about it, does it even matter in the end?", and some people will believe that this is the right kind of coolness to produce neat solutions, and others will believe it robs the steam off of the emotional connection that would engage people in political action for change.
You have to suss this kind of thing out, and if you plain don't want to believe me that there's something enabling towards racism and sexism and other various supremacist ideologies in the LessWrong ecosystem, you don't really have to.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoYou have to suss this kind of thing out, and if you plain don't want to believe me that there's something enabling towards racism and sexism and other various supremacist ideologies in the LessWrong ecosystem, you don't really have to. There is definitely something enabling about it. A lot of modern politics wants you to NOT believe black people are stupid criminals. Yudkowsky would almost certainly endorse "if black people are stupid criminals I want to believe black people are stupid criminals, if black people are not stupid criminals I want to believe they are not stupid criminals". (This is the litany of tarski, which he endorses, applied to a specific case.) One could certainly view this as "enabling" supremacist views under the circumstances that reality supports them. Is a fair summary of your critique that Yudkowsky is rationally and unemotionally reasoning about problems which are normally addressed via appeals to emotion, and this subverts emotional appeals to the masses to take certain actions? I've read your post several times, and this is the most charitable takeaway I can come up with. But this sounds insane so I feel like I must be misunderstanding something.
- RodericDay 11y agoSomeone who feels injustice, but hasn't had the time or resources to codify it into a calm rational treatise is said to be speaking from emotion. Someone who merely experiences base greed, but is able to justify it to themselves as righteous and deliberate and socially beneficial with a bunch of babble, is considered rational. And so, the idea that the rigid set of discursive boundaries that LessWrongians impose upon themselves may favor a political outcome (the status quo) seems ridiculous to you, because you use "rational" as a compliment and "emotional" as an insult.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoCan you find me an influential LessWrongian who describes making emotional decisions based on greed as "rational"? Based on my reading, a profit seeker obeying his gut and losing money is irrational. In contrast, a social justice type observing that assortative mating causes inequality and therefore attempting to reduce educated women's marriage choices is rational. But maybe you've read more than me, and can figure out what I missed? And so, the idea that the rigid set of discursive boundaries that LessWrongians impose upon themselves may favor a political outcome (the status quo)... This is a completely new critique of the Less Wrong crowd. The normal critique, and the specific one you cited, claim that Less Wrong is too far from the status quo and concerns itself with things like the singularity. Adding to my confusion is that in the very post you criticize, Yudkowsky explicitly advocates fixing intelligence deficits with "sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech". How is fixing every person with an IQ < 150 using nanotechnology remotely preserving the status quo? (Note also that Yudkowsky is explicitly advocating that if genius isn't uniformly distributed, as social justice types claim to believe, we should explicitly change the world to make it so.)
- RodericDay 11y agoI can't seem to post a reply, so I'll wrap it up here. I'm criticizing an ecosystem. Yudkowsky-types noodle with weird hypotheticals, others with elitist views get validation. Fantasizing of fixing our current issues with futuristic tech, using it as a yard-stick to criticize ie: a collective black identity from forming a political block, is not explicitly pro-status quo but ends up being so in practice.
- XFrequentist 11y agoI think your premises are mistaken on several fronts, I'm annoyed by your (mis)characterizations of LW and Eliezer, and I disagree strongly with your conclusion... but your comment helped me actually understand this position for the first time, so thank you for articulating it.