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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Side note: Dawkins was right, elevatorgate - and this shit too - is pure first world problems and had we listened to him and taken that route - the route you describe as truth telling - the woke would be a lot less powerful. And yet you still act like he was in the wrong for being an asshole. It feels like you are being the kind of quokka who would advise against going to the cops, but instead of covering for creepy losers you are covering for manipulative cunts.

Nobody said Dawkins wasn't right. He's a smart guy, he's right often enough. He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11. IMO a Dawkins approach hurts more than it helps, because it makes people angry and double down rather than actually thinking about the topic. But whether or not that's correct, he was most definitely in the wrong for being an asshole. But that doesn't mean his claims weren't correct - the people he was mocking were also in the wrong.

He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11.

I think @Fruck is looking at this from today's perspective with "SJWs" having the whip hand and making more and more deranged claims. So the assholishness of people like Dawkins and Amazing Atheist seem less important.

But they were assholes at the time and it mattered. There's "good" assholes - i.e. anally nitpicking expert types who don't care to "read the room" which is good. But there's also the "asshole"' in the more colloquial sense. Atheism had both, sometimes in the same person.

I recall AmazingAtheist engaging with Anita Sarkeesian before she was (in)famous and, instead of just "destroying her with facts and logic", going on a tangent about how she was broken because she was fidgeting. Even then, it seemed a bit fucked to me.

It's also worth remembering that Watson was actually relatively toned down compared to the absurd SA claims being made today, and the reaction was OTT and mocking. Watch the video, it's actually a relatively offhand thing and there was context; she stated that she had spoken about not liking this sort of thing in the conference which adds a point in her favor.

... All of you except for the one man who didn't really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel, because, at the bar later that night — actually at four in the morning, we were at the hotel bar, four a.m. I said I've had enough guys, I'm exhausted, going to bed, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more, would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don't do that. I don't really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I, don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I've finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualise me in that manner.

This wasn't a general puritanical thing like today. Nor did she try to humiliate him by naming like the recent video of a woman getting mad at a gym "creep" for staring. She explicitly says she had made her preferences clear here.

Then people like Dawkins jumped on it in an assholish way and this led to the other side responding (I can see how this was seen as male nerd rage and entitlement) and it became way bigger than it ever should have been.

It may not have been a general puritanical thing, and my memory is fuzzy when it comes to the precise ordering of 201x socjus scandals, but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with. Scott wrote his meditations on livejournal in ~2012, and the elevator incident became the type specimen of "If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".

And despite being warned about the dangers of superweapon-builders, here we are. Confined to an obscure internet forum because it turns out that superweapons are pretty powerful.

but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with

I've seen others making similar claims in this thread and I think it reverses cause and effect. That brand of atheism was pushed by mainly urban, educated, cosmopolitan, secular humanist types, i.e. already progressive. If it represents anything it's just that they were more likely to be subject to those ideas earlier than the rest of us, they didn't spawn it.

"If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".

I think there is a clear difference here: Watson didn't publicly humiliate the man or claim she was abused and she had allegedly made it clear beforehand that she didn't like being approached that way. Basically, she did say no.

She did publicly humiliate him; she just didn't name him.

Sometimes you can't tell the truth nicely. Sometimes people won't hear the truth if you are nice about it, and I also think that there are times only an asshole can see the truth. A lie can circle the globe before the truth gets its pants on sometimes, and a forceful personality is required to shock people out of complacency.

I think you get a healthier society with smart and honest assholes than with smart and polite manipulators. This kind of Manipulative behaviour is almost always nicer than turning the be a dick dial up, but it is always worse for your community.

To put it another way, when you set the truth aside for propriety you give control to whoever defines propriety. That's how you get purity spirals and sociopaths. Maybe there was a way for Dawkins to make his point without being a dick. I would like to think that's true, even though it feels naive to me these days. But that isn't what happened, atheists had a choice between honest assholes and polite manipulation - they chose manipulation and reaped the rewards. I hope EA don't make the same mistake.

Edit: added the words "This kind of" in front of manipulative behaviour until I can think of the term I should have used in the first place to describe the behaviour I mean.

Maybe there was a way for Dawkins to make his point without being a dick.

Is it objectively worse to undergo FGM than to be groped? Yes. Does that mean being groped is okay? No. And that's where Dawkins was being a petty little bitch: "oh boo hoo worse things happen at sea". He was motivated by wanting to protect his in-group: atheists (men, mostly, because that's the majority). Nasty old religion has all the sex scandals, not clean shiny new atheism.

For him to go "Dear Muslima" was particularly hypocritical, because on another day he'd be attacking Islam, including burqas. Wearing a burqa is objectively less bad than undergoing FGM too, Richard.

Lol you are probably right about him wanting atheism to be clean, I bet that annoyed the shit out of him. But I think you missed the point of the Muslima letter - it was a dig at Islam as much as it was at Watson, maybe moreso. I think Dawkins genuinely does feel bad for women living under Islamic rule, patronising as it might be.

I think you get a healthier society with smart and honest assholes than with smart and polite manipulators. Manipulative behaviour is almost always nicer than turning the be a dick dial up, but it is always worse for your community.

I think the opposite actually. The fact that tighter packed societies (Japan, UK) tend to have much more indirect polite rules to avoid being direct might indicate that when people are in closer proximity fake politeness is an adaptive behavior for society. If truthful asshole behavior causes your society to fragment then polite manipulation is probably preferable.

In other words we can only put up with lots of other human beings when we are dishonest about how we feel about each other. I think that fits how people perceive truthful assholes in general.

I think that conflating politeness and manipulativeness is not reasonable. Also, are the UK and Japan distinguished from demographically comparable countries by greater dishonesty? I'd say they have excelled by being somewhat more capable of engaging object-level truth, while many others have fallen into forms of mysticism, self-delusion, indulgence, corruption and goodharting.

There is a subtle mechanism here: these societies have regimented culture, rigid protocols for polite interaction, yes, and for preventing and deescalating conflicts, but that allows to break the bad news without relying on extreme overpowering stimuli. Kind of what we have here.

(Alternatively, those are just societies with many survivors of a true aristocratic class).

But that's not necessarily the global optimum. The closest thing to a nation of truth-telling assholes that we have is probably Israel. And New York. Both are even denser than the UK and Japan, and even more successful.

Bonus: https://twitter.com/Ghostof_Atticus/status/1591559230695538688

I think that conflating politeness and manipulativeness is not reasonable.

I think I'd agree with Fruck above, polite standard of behaviours are essentially deceptions we all (more or less) agree to. I don't call Bob an annoying loud ass and he doesn't call me a sanctimonious pencil pusher. Those may allow us to more carefully engage with difficult subjects because we aren't pissed off at each others existence all the time, so our white lies and deceptions may also facilitate truth discussion, but not by being a truthful asshole as mentioned.

I think it's likely that the most successful classes in say New York are probably more likely to be more polite/deceptive in this way than the least. And looking at some of biggest drivers of violence in US cities currently, it seems to be driven by a very direct insult/response culture. Israel I am less familiar with but given their own specific circumstances may not be all that representative.

I think I'd agree with Fruck above, polite standard of behaviours are essentially deceptions we all (more or less) agree to. I don't call Bob an annoying loud ass and he doesn't call me a sanctimonious pencil pusher. Those may allow us to more carefully engage with difficult subjects because we aren't pissed off at each others existence all the time, so our white lies and deceptions may also facilitate truth discussion, but not by being a truthful asshole as mentioned.

I like how you started but I strongly disagree with how you ended that paragraph. Politeness may be better for harmony, and sometimes productivity, and sometimes capability, but it doesn't help truth telling, the only times I think it might are when the situation is so dire that lives are currently at stake, and I hope it isn't consensus building to say the stakes aren't that high in these situations.

The first thing that I feel like maybe has been forgotten in all this is that politeness is deceptive. It is not to be trusted. We rely on it as a society, but trusting it is madness, it is designed to betray. I think a lot of people know that instinctively, even if they don't think about it consciously - which is why they push so hard to add their values to it. Using pronouns is 'just being a decent person' and so on.

Furthermore, it is specifically politeness which is facilitating grifters around the world, in the exact way it is being used against the EA community here. Because there is no polite way to object to a sociopath currently bringing all of her knowledge about human behaviour and social mores to bear against you. There is only submission, because she knows exactly which buttons to push to get her way, she knows how to frame her story for maximum sympathy, she knows who to take it to for favourable coverage, and she knows that her targets may as well be drinking baby seal blood the way society currently looks at them.

What happens after you politely respond with something like "yeah look I understand your concerns, but our community is made up of weird scrupulosity afflicted autists trying to paperclip happiness, and we don't want our soul drained and dessicated until we are yet another bland cookie cutter corporate tax dodge"? If you aren't just ignored, you will be shamed into submission, because by being polite you have already admitted that you can be shamed into submission. Sorry folks, being an effective altruist is now asshole behaviour.

I think grifters can exploit any social norm. For example it may be politeness being exploited in the EA community, because the social norm is something like I know when I am politely deceptive it is for the greater good therefore when Sue does it she must also be doing the same thing. If Sue is a bad faith actor she can exploit this.

However in our direct and honest society, the typical minding will be, I know I tell the blunt truth therefore Sue must also be doing the same thing. In a society where everyone tells the truth a lying grifter will also be able to prosper in other words, because if everyone tells the truth, defenses against lying will be even worse.

You can't stop grifters exploiting social norms. They have done it in every society no matter how polite or how truthful. In every conceivable arrangement from communism to capitalism to evangelical churches to atheist movements and beyond. Barbarian tribes had grifters, the Roman Empire had grifters, Victorian England had grifters.

It's not deceptive politeness that enables that, it's people being willing to exploit social norms, whatever they might be. Removing politeness norms and replacing it with something else means grifters have to use different tactics but the result will be the same I think.

I 100% agree. I don't want to do away with politeness, but I also don't want to do away with honest assholes. I think of them like canaries in coal mines, a community's last line of defence. It can lead to false positives if they get too paranoid/belligerent, and it can also be gamed by the manipulative. It's a lot harder to game than politeness though - for a bunch of reasons, but primarily because it is so much more confrontational. We need some people like Dawkins and Diogenes and Jesus, or we will be milled by grifts.

Politeness allowing truthful discussions can only last so long as the rules of politeness are mutually agreed on.

And, somewhat tautologically, on the rules of politeness allowing truthful discussion. If there is a rule of politeness which says some true fact may not be mentioned or even recognizably hinted at, you can't have truthful discussions which involve that fact. That once the rule is broken the polite people will tell you "Oh, you can say that, you just have to say it in the right way" does not mean the polite people are telling the truth when they make that claim.

Ah damn, yeah you are right, I got carried away by the rhetoric there. Politeness is necessary for a functional society and it is also essentially deceptive manipulation everyone agrees to, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not all manipulative behaviour is worse for a community than being an honest asshole. There is a term I should have used instead to refer to the manipulative behaviour I mean, but for the life of me I can't think of it right now. Shit, this is going to drive me mad.

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