3 ms·

Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing. I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X peopl

by duxup 2y ago

Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing. I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again and eventually someone asked and their theory all but seemed to imply that nobody else could possibly have ... feelings and that lack of understanding made those people lesser and them greater. It seemed to come from some concept that their experience imparted some unique understanding that nobody else could have, and that just lead down a path that lead to zero empathy / understanding with anyone outside. Reddit encounters are always hard to understand IMO so I don't want to read too much into it, but that isolation that some people / groups feel seem to potentially lead to dark places very easily / quickly.

codr7 2y ago
I see it mainly as a reaction to a dysfunctional and abusive system/culture, and not necessarily a constructive one. Fix the world and these problems don't exist.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  >Fix the world and these problems don't exist. Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily adopted their styles of dress and other customs as a mark of "modernity". A sense of marginalisation (real or imagined) can certainly be a force that acts to reduce empathy and encourage violence, but it's by no means necessary.
  - skort 2y ago
    Okay, so maybe they still exist but maybe fewer people have a motive to seek violent solutions?
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      Isn't that implicit in what I wrote? Of course we should strive to make society just, and this will reduce the motive for violence -- the mistake is to believe that doing so will stop all violence. This might seem a small point, but it's not: Believing that it would stop all violence is a sign that you believe that (a) people are fundamentally good, and (b) have no agency -- that we just react inevitably and helplessly to conditions imposed on us by an external environment. Both of these beliefs are dangerously wrong.
  - rexpop 2y ago
    > Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain. This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential. "As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized," Freire says. In a sense, both parties are mutilated by the dynamic. So "the top of the social food chain" is not a clean sample of a fixed world. Sorry if I am talking past your point.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      The whole food chain is encapsulated in “the world” in this case. I don’t think your point stands.
      - rexpop 2y ago
        > I don’t think your point stands. Elaborate?
        dgfitz 2y ago
        > This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential. You described the human condition. This is “the world” we all live in today. Isolating the people at the top as somehow not part of “the world” doesn’t work.
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      If you consider the winners to also be "dehumanised" by their ongoing winning in cultural and financial terms, as this Freire apparently did, then sure. But they themselves -- the ongoing winners -- certainly did not, that being the reason for their actions in the first place. The other relevant opinion would be that of the "losers" -- the people oppressed by the winners. Did they feel that the winners were oppressing themselves? I'm certain they did not! I think Freire is either deluded, or deliberately conflating the notion of what a powerful party views as good for itself with some higher, ethically tinged notion of how we all ought to behave.
chroma 2y ago
This group formed in the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people. If marginalization were the main cause, it seems to me that the group would have been located somewhere else. I think it's more likely that these people had an underlying mental disorder that made them likely to engage in both violent behavior and trans identity. One big difference the Zizians have with the LessWrong community is that LW people believe that human minds cannot be rational enough to be absolute utilitarians, and therefore a certain kind of deontology is needed.[1] In contrast, the Zizians are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their views, which leads them to justify atrocities. In that way it seems similar to the psychology of jihadists. 1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  Or more of them live there because it's one of the most accepting environments on the planet, but still not accepting enough to prevent them from being a marginalized outgroup that is quite easy to radicalize by those that would accept them?
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    "Even the most accepting environment on the planet is still not accepting enough" is not a very flattering description of trans-identifying folks. In fact, I'd call it rather sobering at the very least. It suggests that the ongoing perceived marginalization of trans folks is a nearly unsolvable problem, that can't be addressed simply by advocating for "doing the right thing".
    - rexpop 2y ago
      Or, perhaps, we're very far from an adequate society.
      - EA-3167 2y ago
        That's probably true, but the larger issue is that we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better. The US has struggled for centuries with the question of how to better treat far more number minorities, such as black people... and women. At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we're seeing evidence of that now. There's also the reality that forget most of the US, most of the world isn't invested in this cause. This is not a universal cause, and while I personally think that's regrettable, it's also clearly just the way it is for now. Change, if it comes, will be far more gradual than some people are prepared to tolerate, and that assumes change continues in a sawtoothed manner in the right direction.
TMWNN 2y ago
>I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. The death of the author is a reasonable approach to reading a work. But what you said reminded me of the more delusional view in which a) the watcher/reader's approach is the only "correct" one, and b) anyone who disagrees is *EVIL*. An instance of this happened among Tumblrinas obsessed with the supposed homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson on BBC's Sherlock, and who were certain that the next episode of the show would reveal this to the world. Welp. <https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_post_after_the_latest_episode_of_sherlock/ https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_...>
- habinero 2y ago
  You can find all kinds of ridiculous people online, and they're all mostly harmless. I mean, every LLM post on HN gets people writing fanfic about how AI is developing human intelligence and other silly things. There's frankly no difference between the two groups -- they are equally silly -- except one is coded female and people like to shit on those hobbies more than male-coded AI fanfic.

by duxup 2y ago

codr7 2y ago

I see it mainly as a reaction to a dysfunctional and abusive system/culture, and not necessarily a constructive one. Fix the world and these problems don't exist.

akoboldfrying 2y ago
>Fix the world and these problems don't exist. Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily adopted their styles of dress and other customs as a mark of "modernity". A sense of marginalisation (real or imagined) can certainly be a force that acts to reduce empathy and encourage violence, but it's by no means necessary.
- skort 2y ago
  Okay, so maybe they still exist but maybe fewer people have a motive to seek violent solutions?
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    Isn't that implicit in what I wrote? Of course we should strive to make society just, and this will reduce the motive for violence -- the mistake is to believe that doing so will stop all violence. This might seem a small point, but it's not: Believing that it would stop all violence is a sign that you believe that (a) people are fundamentally good, and (b) have no agency -- that we just react inevitably and helplessly to conditions imposed on us by an external environment. Both of these beliefs are dangerously wrong.
- rexpop 2y ago
  > Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain. This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential. "As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized," Freire says. In a sense, both parties are mutilated by the dynamic. So "the top of the social food chain" is not a clean sample of a fixed world. Sorry if I am talking past your point.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    The whole food chain is encapsulated in “the world” in this case. I don’t think your point stands.
    - rexpop 2y ago
      > I don’t think your point stands. Elaborate?
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        > This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential. You described the human condition. This is “the world” we all live in today. Isolating the people at the top as somehow not part of “the world” doesn’t work.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    If you consider the winners to also be "dehumanised" by their ongoing winning in cultural and financial terms, as this Freire apparently did, then sure. But they themselves -- the ongoing winners -- certainly did not, that being the reason for their actions in the first place. The other relevant opinion would be that of the "losers" -- the people oppressed by the winners. Did they feel that the winners were oppressing themselves? I'm certain they did not! I think Freire is either deluded, or deliberately conflating the notion of what a powerful party views as good for itself with some higher, ethically tinged notion of how we all ought to behave.

chroma 2y ago

This group formed in the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people. If marginalization were the main cause, it seems to me that the group would have been located somewhere else. I think it's more likely that these people had an underlying mental disorder that made them likely to engage in both violent behavior and trans identity. One big difference the Zizians have with the LessWrong community is that LW people believe that human minds cannot be rational enough to be absolute utilitarians, and therefore a certain kind of deontology is needed.[1] In contrast, the Zizians are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their views, which leads them to justify atrocities. In that way it seems similar to the psychology of jihadists. 1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...

DangitBobby 2y ago
Or more of them live there because it's one of the most accepting environments on the planet, but still not accepting enough to prevent them from being a marginalized outgroup that is quite easy to radicalize by those that would accept them?
- zozbot234 2y ago
  "Even the most accepting environment on the planet is still not accepting enough" is not a very flattering description of trans-identifying folks. In fact, I'd call it rather sobering at the very least. It suggests that the ongoing perceived marginalization of trans folks is a nearly unsolvable problem, that can't be addressed simply by advocating for "doing the right thing".
  - rexpop 2y ago
    Or, perhaps, we're very far from an adequate society.
    - EA-3167 2y ago
      That's probably true, but the larger issue is that we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better. The US has struggled for centuries with the question of how to better treat far more number minorities, such as black people... and women. At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we're seeing evidence of that now. There's also the reality that forget most of the US, most of the world isn't invested in this cause. This is not a universal cause, and while I personally think that's regrettable, it's also clearly just the way it is for now. Change, if it comes, will be far more gradual than some people are prepared to tolerate, and that assumes change continues in a sawtoothed manner in the right direction.

TMWNN 2y ago

>I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. The death of the author is a reasonable approach to reading a work. But what you said reminded me of the more delusional view in which a) the watcher/reader's approach is the only "correct" one, and b) anyone who disagrees is *EVIL*. An instance of this happened among Tumblrinas obsessed with the supposed homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson on BBC's Sherlock, and who were certain that the next episode of the show would reveal this to the world. Welp. <https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_post_after_the_latest_episode_of_sherlock/ https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_...>

habinero 2y ago
You can find all kinds of ridiculous people online, and they're all mostly harmless. I mean, every LLM post on HN gets people writing fanfic about how AI is developing human intelligence and other silly things. There's frankly no difference between the two groups -- they are equally silly -- except one is coded female and people like to shit on those hobbies more than male-coded AI fanfic.