Hacker News Reader

Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly I missed the author's name at the top, and read the whole article assuming it was written by a man. I was surprised at the end to discover the opposite.

View on HN

I missed the name too, but I took a guess it was a woman. I was with a Jewish friend today who'd mentioned that the jokes Sasha Cohen makes about Jews could only be made by a Jew or there'd be backlash.

I've had some decent discussions with feminists in the past, and their work on identity is really pretty interesting and valuable. But their numbers are totally screwed up - you know that "1/4th of all women have been raped" statistic? It's actually, "1/4th of women surveyed had sex that they wished they hadn't". I'll guess just as many men have had sex they wish they hadn't later.

I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is. Do they think it helps in legislation or funding or education? The health people do it with STDs (greatly exaggerated risks), the drug people do it hardcore (I don't do any intoxicants, but alcohol is way more deadly and dangerous than half the illegal stuff in the USA), racial issues, ethnic issues, gender issues, sexuality, immigration, labor, etc, etc. It seems like tremendously many causes want to exaggerate their positions as worse off than they are, or the effects of choosing the other side as much worse than they are.

I think that'd be tremendously damaging to credibility in the long run, but I guess not many people check up on the science they read in the paper or see on the news.

>I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is.

Yvain at LW has written a couple great posts on this exact topic, and the comments aren't too bad either:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7s/why_support_the_underdog/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/9b/help_help_im_being_oppressed/

Choice quote: "It's also why every time BBC or someone shows a clip about the region, they get complaints from people who thought it didn't make their chosen side seem weak enough!"

"I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is."

It's due to the fact that such groups by the nature of their lower status can't get through with their message. Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life accounts. The average plight of downtrodden peoples just gets overlooked. Compare the global hunger crisis to the swine flu scare. Nobody cares for all the food riots and tens of thousands dying of hunger daily etc. but people go crazy about a few flu deaths.

So basically you need something shocking to get attention, whether it's a statistic, story or whatever.

Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life accounts.

UTC was propaganda, not a real life account. Slaves were much too valuable to be treated in the way depicted in the book. Horrible treatment sure, but what's in the book makes no sense on a commercial/economic level.

"UTC" was literature ;-) based on real people. My sentence was a little misleading though: I meant that the other accounts were "real life".

You sound like a slavery supporter though. You should look up some history books. Slaves were treated like cattle or pets basically. House slaves were pets and plantation slaves were cattle.

Acknowledging that slaves had real economic value is in no way a declaration of support for slavery. The fact that you can make such a jump in logic is profoundly disturbing to me. Those sorts of conclusions take away from honest discussion.

I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat something you own better than what you merely rent.

(So an anarchonistic example is that a car you own will remain in better shape than one you rent. That's actually not such a terrible argument, though of course we'd reject it nowadays.)

That said, I don't personally know either way, and Wikipedia does mention that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is popularly seen as propaganda. (I personally haven't read the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were 'propaganda' in the sense that it was biased and promoted a political point of view. Apparently, before the Nazis, propaganda didn't have such bad connotations.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_si...

Exactly. This is the way slave holders in the south argued. You should read the actual book. It's very moving, one of the greatest American literary works. I read it in my first semester of American Studies.

You just argued that slavery wasn't that bad. In your opinion slaves were treated quite well because they had some monetary value, which is simply not true. You rewrite history in favor of slavery and then you accuse me of being dishonest? Not even fascists nowadays support slavery. This is more than disturbing. I simply can't believe how you can actually support slavery while the US has an African American president.

It's classic emotional appeal marketing and it works in the short term. In the long term it can undermine credibility, which in this case it has.

There was a bit of a backlash in Sweden for hype from feminists.

I'm enough on the fence that I voted you and the GP up. I do see where this is coming from.

A bit of the background:

Part of the local backlash was when a woman's house organization's boss stupidly came out as a heavy man hater during an interview. Now, some feminist arguments are exaggerated propaganda, but consider what kind of men she had interaction with daily... I can understand her opinion.

(A relative of mine has volunteered for a woman's house for a few decades and have some shocking stories. After those discussions, I realized how people e.g. can turn racist.)

When thinking about it, the backlash came when an opportunist tried to create a political party around feminism...

Before that, we saw politicians in established parties trying to ride that hype wagon.

A pity such an important field has so much sh-t. To paraphrase a Swedish expression: Where pathos go in, reason go out.

Edit: On consideration, if you don't have honesty you don't have anything. There are so many more ways to be completely wrong than close to correct, so any flirting with idealists will generally create more damage than the idealists can ever solve. I'll take a stand on zero-tolerance of dishonesty. (That said, don't paint all feminists with the same brush. It is not like they are flat Earthers all of them.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com