Do I Offend?
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
> What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school would wait to publicly accuse him not just 30 yrs, but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote?[0]
And then the author claims that the poll is "neutral"? However, there are biased ways of asking questions.[1] A poll about the Kavanaugh hearing could also ask "What fraction of rapists are convicted?" and that would carry a different political meaning.
[0]: https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1041743505507405824?r...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss#/media/File:Stimmzet...
If you read his pieces, it’s clear that his focus is on Bayesian probability and reasoning in general.
That question is interesting, because you can certainly read it as a leading question.
But you can also just take it at face value. One answer might be that the fraction is likely to be close to 100%, since there is a good chance that the population is just one, and we know that she actually did.
What fraction of people can tell the difference between a Bayesian economist asking a question with an uninituitive answer, and someone with a ‘falsified’ agenda to push?
Ignoring the overwhelming political entanglement and resulting bias (which is obviously a huge issue for the poll's integrity), there is no reason to believe the respondents have a well-informed understanding of the dynamics of when and why women report sexual assault.
I mean, based on available evidence, the answer is clearly ~100%. And the same if you replace "nominee for Supreme Court" with "huge and hugely contentious notoriety". Also, if it occurred ~30 years ago, I suspect that most victims would have pretty much forgotten about it. Until they got reminded by seeing him in the news.
In particular, I never knew the name of the guy who pulled a knife, while we were flirting, and threatened to rape me. Also, I don't remember the name of the woman who attempted suicide. After I got tired of waiting for a sexual relationship, and found someone else. With whom, by the way, I visited her in hospital, until she was discharged. And I never knew the name of the guy who beat the shit out of me in a park, after I'd insulted him.
I could go on. But the point is that most people arguably don't keep grudges for decades. And yes, maybe it's just that I'm a guy. And maybe rape is just so much worse that victims do keep grudges for decades.
Also, I admit that the "based on available evidence" argument is iffy. Because we only know about cases that involve notorious perpetrators. Maybe one could use FOIA to get relevant aggregate data from police. It'd be a decent thesis topic, perhaps.
Honestly that sounds like at least a local maximum (and given law enforcement for sexual assault 30 years ago, possibly a global maximum) in terms of "When is the best time to make this accusation in order to maximize the harm to the person who hurt me?", particularly if you know that there isn't enough evidence to get a conviction.
Frankly, it does sound here like he is (at best) uninformed about the emotional experience of sexual assault survivors (irrelevant to the specific case of Dr. Ford), or at worst a partisan hack.
He should spend less time publicly digging into the motivations of those he has "offended" and more time introspecting on whether he is actually in fact a being of pure logic who can perceive all from a position completely uninfluenced by his personal history and experience.
She stated that she was pretty emotionally torn up because of that attempt for many years after the event. I'm not sure how an attempted rape is irrelevant to her emotional well being. an attempted mugging is nearly as emotionally draining as a successful one I'd wager... there is still a violation in trust there.
Like it or not, you can't just transparently "ask a question" on Twitter. Even Robin admits in the original post to not being transparent about his motives when conducting twitter polls. Add in the fact that 95% of everything on Twitter is already posturing or naked assertions and it's not surprising that people reacted badly.
The priors for a given tweet being a good-faith effort at discourse are very very poor, and his tone/style was doing him no favors.
But I am still curious what you think the motivations of the people he offended actually are? What do you think they are trying to do?
If you read the question with an open mind, I think any bias it has is up for debate.
I personally think the answer is probably a high percentage, given the power dynamics and also what happened with Anita Hill.
And then "would wait to publicly accuse him not just [after?] 30 yrs" So I thought, "How many nominees for Supreme Court are in high school? If I'm going to publicly accuse a nominee for Supreme Court for assaulting me in high school (assuming we were both in high school at the time), don't I have to wait 30 years? Otherwise I'll never know they were a nominee for the Supreme Court." -- which is a weird way of thinking about it. This word "wait" is particularly problematic. You can't know a priori that the attacker will be a nominee for the Supreme Court, so you can't really wait to accuse them on that basis. The best you can really say is "After not accusing their attacker for 30 years, would they accuse them after they were nominated to the supreme court?" (which might be an interesting question to ask)
The last part "but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote" didn't make grammatical sense to me. Granted I know nothing about the original context of the question, but presumably the hearing and vote are related to the appointment of the nominee. So I suppose the question the author wanted to ask is, would the accuser wait until after the hearings, but before the vote? However, this is really compressing the options. There are really 5 potential times to accuse the attacker: some time after the attack but before the nomination, between the nomination and the vote, after the vote, and never. Surely a much better question to ask would be "Which of these potential timings seems more likely to occur to you".
This question is so badly written that I have a really hard time believing that it was written by someone who makes their living doing statistical analysis about people's perceptions. I've read the author's comment on it, but if they are defending this question (and I'm not 100% sure that they are), then I don't really think I need to look at their larger corpus. I think I can happily conclude that if they are not just trying to be a shit disturber then they are incredibly incompetent. I'm not sure which of the two labels they would rather be stuck with.
Great analysis of (the absurdity of) that poll question. I was just commenting that it is possible for a question to be biased, so to I really appreciate this detailed breakdown of it, particularly of that seemingly innocuous word "wait".
I would have phrased the question more like: "How many fewer reports of assault would be filled if nominated political candidates would be protected from accusations in media during the limited period of an election? 0, 0.1%, 1%?"
Expanding questions could then follow up to identify how the democratic process would benefit or suffer from having candidates be accused or accuse each other of illegal behavior, and if the public would find it informative or disinformative to read about it in the media. Further exploration could ask if it would be relevant whether the case ends up in the legal system after the election, or if it is enough that an accusation exists to make it relevant in the election process.
Those question would have been interesting to see, both after the 2016 election and the Kavanaugh nomination.
I love this example of bad faith complaining.
There's something grotesque about adults doing this in internet comments. Like watching a grown man wear a diaper.
> Then the first might start to quietly hum, which we might decide is okay. Then first might hum more loudly and triumphantly
The humming child scores low on the scale of interpersonal justice.
Framing the offended child’s suffering as bad faith is, in a Wittgensteinian sense, to misunderstand their use of language. They aren’t playing the language game of the observer passing judgement.
The observer is failing to steel-man the position of the aggrieved and instead chooses to focus on an apparent and ostensible fault.
Is humming a "transgression"? Music is typically considered entertainment. Why can't the other child put on head phones, hum a different song, or look out the window?
It's exactly this phenomenon that OP is addressing. A fairly common behavior (humming to oneself) is portrayed as a "transgression" and you go so far as to say it is unjust, just because somebody else happens to not like it.
You've thrown the authors framing, that certain actions are inherently annoying and unacceptable (singing loudly in a small space) while others are generally acceptable (humming softly to oneself) out the window.
In a library, humming is a violation of the conventions of the space.
In a music practice room, it is perfectly fine.
In a car, the convention is ambiguous and dependent on the passengers.
This is precisely why it is necessary to come to agreement on what is okay to do in the space.
Again: The humming child was initially singing. So, to view the humming in isolation is to dismiss the fact that this is an iterative negotiation.
> Then the first might start to quietly hum, which we might decide is okay.
You've thrown the agreement on what is okay out the window because somebody is offended.
> Then the first might start to quietly hum, which we might decide is okay. Then first might hum more loudly and triumphantly
Why can't the humming kid not hum normally, instead of "more loudly and triumphantly"?
> A fairly common behavior (humming to oneself) is portrayed as a "transgression"
No, you portray deliberate annoying of someone else as humming to oneself.
> You've thrown the authors framing, that certain actions are inherently annoying and unacceptable (singing loudly in a small space) while others are generally acceptable (humming softly to oneself) out the window.
Because that's a "general" framing that is used to replace the actual context of the actual situation and the actual meaning of these actions.
The hummer acts in bad faith by following the letter, not the spirit of the law and humming "loudly and triumphantly" in as annoying a manner as possible.
The hummee acts in bad faith by victim-playing — overstating the harm caused by the hummer and making a "dramatic display of suffering"
The offended child's suffering is not bad faith, but the display is.
I don't think this is bad faith: bad faith entails a sort of inauthenticity, while the children in this analogy are both authentic in their desires. They might be exaggerating for rhetorical purposes, but neither is acting in bad faith in the way that the term is normally used.
An interesting analogy, but the only thing it captures for me is Hanson's abuse of a philosophical term of art.
But I think there are a few reasons why this mindset fails in real world application.
Firstly, the various social justice movements we see in western societies are all groups that aren’t straight white men. And while one might say that shouldn’t matter in a logical discussion, the fact is that the life experiences of these maligned groups are outside the realm of experience of the author, and of other straight white men. Rational debate depends on high quality data, and that data is not immediately available unless you live it. So unless you actively inquire and try to get a deep understanding of what these groups go through, you’re going to be debating or discussing something you don’t know a lot about, relatively.
The other issue is that these discussions inherently aren’t rational and detached from emotion. To the maligned group, this topic is something they live with every day, and often times have had to endure extreme emotional trauma. When someone says to them, “let’s just discuss this rationally”, they rightly often feel very frustrated.
If we want to have honest, good faith discussions on the topic of social equality, the only solution is for people to earnestly and honestly inform themselves of the life experiences of the social groups for whom equality has remained out of reach.
Also note that I’m not trying to target straight white men (I’m a straight white man too). I think this has more to do with power dynamics. I’m sure countries like India and China have their own particular historical class of power that is the target of their own social movements.
While I agree with every word you wrote, I don't know how you can maintain hope in this. Just weeks ago, there was an HN thread, where between the article and comments there were dozens of stories of women suffering harassment. And yet still, multiple people here commented to the effect, "No real women in my life tell me about this stuff, the rest must be hysterical." I'm paraphrasing, but it's not an unfair characterization.
I see it in the same light as folks that have a completely 100% incorrect understanding of "[institutional] privilege" and are already at a weird level of anger by time they enter any conversation about it. They seem to be unable or unwilling to entertain, let alone accept, evidence contrary to their closely held beliefs (and there's evidence to back it up).
Meanwhile, the groups that get frustrated at continual, constant marginalization from those with their heads in the clouds, or try to advocate for causes and less ignorance, are given three-letter acronym labels which are used to deride and derail.
And within 5 minutes this reply is swinging +/-4 votes with no replies. How absolutely utterly depressing.
As much as the internet is supposed to connect us, subjects like these can be very divisive because the internet tends remove the human element from the discussion. We're much more likely to go on a political rant on Facebook than we ever would directly to our family, for instance.
This subject requires real human connection. It requires understanding our fellow citizens and understanding what they go through.
As a personal anecdote, I also used to be homophobic and very ignorant of racism in America. I feel awful about some of the things I've said. But then I began working for a company out in San Francisco, and a few of my coworkers were gay, and a couple people were going through sex reassignment. I became friends with them, and they shared numerous stories that really helped me see how uninformed I'd been. Obviously this is my personal experience, but I'm hopeful that as more and more people feel safe to come out, that the people around them will have similar experiences as me.
I have faith that the next generation will be wiser and less prejudiced.
Now if only climate change could wait...
Unfortunately we are running against a shot clock right now and we can’t simply wait for the next generation to pick up the bill.
At the same time though, it's ridiculous to expect people to be robots devoid of emotion and expect them to dispassionately participate discussion of a topic that deeply affects them, especially when they may have very real trauma related to said issue.
Another issue, I think, is media coverage. I think we often conflate the coverage of the subject with the subject itself. How the media covers Black Lives Matter, for instance, is distinct from the actual movement. Often times the coverage encourages a "Walk on eggshells" mentality that doesn't necessarily reflect how members of the movement actually feel.
It's just something to keep in mind that they aren't necessarily the same thing. How many times has the media botched a report related to technology, for instance?
I don't need to do that when I can simply check out e.g. the discussion in company Slack channels, where real members of these movements are causing people to really walk on eggshells.
Note that I wouldn't really put BLM as an example of a social movement that has gone too far in stifling discussion. It is probably a good example though of media coverage being bad for a momevement. From what I could tell, the media tended to most highlight instances of killings by police that weren't obviously bad, to drum up controversy (e.g. focusing on the Michael Brown shooting), discrediting BLM in the process.
Why are you treating all "straight white men" as if they had identical life experiences? Do you suppose that the author's "realm of experience" could tell us anything useful about the lives of e.g. poor whites in Appalachia, or in poor parts of the Midwest that are now ravaged by the opioid epidemic? What's the point of bringing up this ascribed group identity, other than as a clear indication of bias (negatively-valenced homogeneity)?
And the notion that "rational discussion" should be avoided simply because some people might feel frustrated by it seems especially unhelpful: plenty of people, even very prominent people, feel "frustrated" by rational discussion of climate change, does this mean that it's morally wrong to discuss the best way of saving our way of life on this planet in the face of an urgent threat to it? Obviously not. But our stance on such issues as possible racism or sexism is also quite important, on its own terms - so it should be just as amenable to rational discussion.
Yes, only when they are exactly that - rational, and emotionally detached. All conversations on sensitive subjects fall into 3 categories:
* Facts+logic vs facts+logic
* Facts+logic vs feelings
* Feelings vs feelings
HN is a rare place on the internet where one can frequently see "Facts+logic vs facts+logic" conversations even on sensitive topics. The vast majority of conversations on the internet about sensitive topics end up being "feelings vs feelings".
The problem with "feelings vs feelings" is that by design it's never about fact finding or truth. It's always about friend-foe identification. Any person who starts a conversation from the "feelings" position views the conversation as a way to categorize the other person as either a "friend" or a "foe".
At one point he reflects on the “high water mark of political correctness during the early 1990s.” Really funny to read that in 2018. Whether you are a liberal or not, everyone would agree that political correctness has grown tremendously since then. Wherher it was for good or bad depends on your politics. In any case, very interesting to consider.
This essay was very good. Thanks.
I read this quote as "pay attention when someone stops making rational arguments because it means they don't have any rational arguments".
If you aren't paying attention you'll miss the switch between what is reasonable and what is emotionally manipulative.
Yes, that's part of society stopping with it.
Short attention spans, fake outrage, and lazy arguments are the fundamental problems of contemporary discourse. But Robin Hanson has consistently been one of the best role models of what high-quality discourse should look like.
He just goes: "Some people say I'm an offensive bad person, which is pushing a political and moral agenda, with my own biases, but I swear, I am pure facts and logic, and my reasoning is always neutral, and so I hope we can all move along and allow me to continue my logical rhetoric."
I was hoping for some facts, counterfacts, examples, logical reasoning, I don't know, some more concrete demonstration of his good faith, neutrality, and display of unbiased methodology. Instead I just got a plea to believe his words.
Did I miss something?
The only thing I can imagine that will have any effect if some potential employer misguidedly taking twitter rumors for facts. Is that a thing?
If she wasn’t in PR and didn’t log in to Twitter she wouldn’t have any problems.
So my question is whether you can get serious problem from twitter if you’re not in PR?
The author would benefit from some time spent investigating from a humanistic perspective.
In particular, his investigation of the responses to A Star is Born, seems to be helpful and informative towards the humanistic perspective.
Having said that, I have come to the conclusion that we all offend, we all exclude, we all decide what kind of people we want to associate with and what kind we want nothing to do with. Then we argue about who is right and where those boundaries "should" be drawn.
Some people draw those boundaries along racial lines or religious lines or other fairly arbitrary categories for deciding who is the "right" kind of person and who is the "wrong" kind of person. Boundaries drawn that way tend to have a lot of downside to them.
But it's simpler and easier than trying to figure out who is actually respectful, honorable, kind and decent. That's a much harder question to answer in a meaningful way and we often need to decide if we trust someone to some degree under circumstances where, no, we can't reasonably determine the answers to such questions. So it's really common for people to come up with some shorthand method for sorting the presumed good apples from the presumed bad apples so we can try to get through the damn day without wondering if the guy bagging our groceries is really a serial killer.
I don't think it's actually good policy to use such rubrics. I think the world needs to sort out some better methodology for coping with social realities in a world of 7 billion people when our brains evolved to cope with little tribes and villages of about 150 people.
But I have come to believe that we all, to some degree or another, tend to promote rules with our own self interest in mind. So I no longer feel like, clearly, X is morally superior to Y!
Just because I'm a big believer in X and I spent years thinking about it doesn't mean it really is morally superior in some big picture sense. Those folks who believe in Y may have spent just as much time thinking about it and may feel just as strongly as I do and we may both be wrong. We may both simply be promoting something that happens to work for us as individuals while dressing it up in moral language because that works better for getting buy-in than admitting "It works for me, so I want it that way to enhance my life."
I'm a woman. Hacker News was perhaps as much as 98 percent male when I joined under a different handle more than nine years ago. I feel like it has become more welcoming of women over the years. I feel like I have played some role in that change.
I think the guys here tolerate me as well as they do because I don't take some sort of strident moral ("Feminazi") position that I have some kind of right to be here. I am mindful of the fact that there is something of value here and that thing was mostly built by men. I'm aware that change is a potential threat to the value that exists and accommodating my presence -- what with me being some loud-mouthed brassy broad who never managed to learn my "place" in the world and who, for whatever reason, grew up with the idea that my voice was as acceptable as any guy's voice, never mind that this is apparently not what most people on the planet seem to learn -- de facto involves change. I've worked at trying hard to figure out how to make that work in a way that doesn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak.
When I first joined HN, I was more inclined than I am these days to feel self-righteous about trying to stand up for myself. I still am willing to take a stand, but I am much less inclined to feel self-righteous about it.
I'm just a human trying to make my life work. I'm angry, as most anyone would be, about the ways in which I feel that arbitrary categories, such as my gender, have undermined and seem to continue to undermine those efforts.
I am a big believer in win-win solutions.
If other people help me make my life work, then that's one less person who needs food stamps and other forms of welfare. We pay for those people who don't succeed. Whether they are in prison or standing in line at a soup kitchen, someone else is paying for them because they can't manage to support themselves.
But I'm also aware that not all solutions are win-win solutions. Plenty of them are just redefining the split without growing the proverbial pie. So it is generally reasonable to be somewhat leery of people advocating for changes that would lead to them having more pie, because it is possible that they are just trying to change the rules to get a bigger slice for themselves at the expense of other people.
The things that have happened to me really stick in my craw precisely because I'm not looking for a handout. I've consistently tried to figure out how to develop an earned income of my own. Perhaps people have trouble seeing the distinction there. Perhaps all they hear is that I want a better life and they assume I'm asking for a larger slice of the pie rather than asking for the means to bake more pie for myself.
I'm not very good at writing in some kind of "professional" detached third-person fashion. I've gotten a lot of feedback over the years that I'm doing it wrong to speak from firsthand experience and to speak from a first person point of view based on my life experience. For a long time, I worked at improving on that. At this point, I'm sort of inclined to feel like such accusations are really just intended to silence me, not to tell me "There are better methods for communicating than what you are doing and please get a clue, you silly person, you."
So the above is testimony as to the problem space as I best understand it, not me whining about my life and asking for advice. If you give me advice about how I'm just doing it wrong or you want to tell me that talking about my life is inherently bad and wrong and unwelcome when it seems fine for other people to talk about their lives, I'm planning to just ignore such replies.
Happy to engage people about anything of actual substance concerning, say, how the world draws various boundaries, etc.
It's fascinating.
I'm sure this lament is as old as time - someone probably has Yeats beat by a few millennia.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (date: controversial, but definitely BC)
The decision of remaining neutral is a moral choice in itself.
--Joseph Weizenbaum
Kant
But I do suggest this as a really interesting read:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapo...
> I try to offend the anti-vaxers, the pedophile priests, the corrupt politicians, I try to offend anyone who hold ideas or behaviors that clearly shouldn't be part of society,
> By that logic plenty of people are justified in offending gays, transgender, immigrants, etc.
Being offensive doesn't require justification, it's always OK; that's what free speech means. If you are not free to offend, you quite simply are not free. Gays, transgenders, and immigrants, and all other people might need to remind themselves the simple things children learn, words are not violence and can simply be ignored. If you're not mature enough to ignore a loudmouth trying to offend you, you are the one with the problem; you are not mature. As they say, prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_New_Year's_E...
Humans are social animals, they don't like being mocked, and when enough people make fun of a particular position, people will avoid taking that position.
People who mock each other rarely see each other as peers in the first place, anyway. How often have you seen a BLM activist change their views on police brutality after being mocked? I have witnessed exactly zero instances of this occurring. Same for, say, climate change skeptics. This is because they do not see the people being mocked as peers, and thus do not care about the opinion of those mocking them. This is why mocking is usually self defeating. By resorting to mockery, the people you're trying to influence no longer see you as a peer, and thus it drastically limits what influence you initially had on their views.
You claim that, "when enough people make fun of a particular position, people will avoid taking that position" but I have never witnessed this occur. I have not once witnessed an instance in which a person changed their views after being mocked for them. How many times have you adopted a view you previously opposed because you were mocked? Do people mocking gays or immigrants people make you feel compelled to adopt their views on LGBT issues or border policy, for example? If not, why do you seem to believe that your mockery will be any different in its success (or lack thereof)?
On the contrary, I have witnessed countless people take a defensive stance after being mocked for their views, and entrenching themselves even further into whatever views prompted the mockery. Not only that, it frequently makes people reluctant to take part in advancing the views of the one carrying out the mockery. In fact, this is occurring right now in this comment thread: witnessing you proudly stating that you carry out childish behavior in support of certain views is making me more reluctant to voice support of said views, even though I do agree with them, as I do not want to be associated with people such as yourself that take pride in their mockery.
But if the goal is just to troll some emotional reaction, and not change anything, what is the point?
Mockery is quite useful to onlookers.