BANNED USER: By request
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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
Banned by: @netstack
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
I’m not arguing that the author isn’t woke. I’m arguing that the author never says “exercise is bad, don’t do it”, which is what you claimed, and which is not true.
If you think the rest of the article lets you similarly argue that the wokes have lost their minds, then you are welcome to use those other parts in your original post.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
It is untrue because there are no progressives here…
If what you meant to say was “advocate for white people”, “donate to white nationalist organizations”, or “advocate against affirmative action”, you could have said that.
From my perspective it seems like you chose a deliberately milquetoast word to make people seem crazy for not liking white nationalists.
Somebody on the Internet says "please don't call me X". Then people who don't like him start calling him X. This event has nothing to do with whether X is a "slur" -- I could be dogpiled after asking not to be called bald or a gamer and that wouldn't makes those words a slur, since "gamer" or "bald" are not normally used to insult people.
If your primary exposure to the word "cis" is that somebody is trying to insult you, then I suspect you've primarily been exposed to the worst actors of the progressive movement (and/or people who are just trying to trigger you specifically). I know multiple people who walked in the BLM protests and it's implausible to me that any of them would use "cis" or "straight" as insults (if nothing else, remember that most progressives are cis and straight).
(I won't comment on whether "cis" is usually used as an insult on Twitter, since I haven't had the misfortune of wading into culture war topics on Twitter).
I don't think "forcing 99% of the population to use a qualifier" is a good description of the culture-waring here -- it feels pretty post-hoc, since if the change was going in the opposite direction, we'd see the same amount of pushback. Suppose Americans had been using "cis women" for the last 100 years and progressives started complaining that they should just say "woman" to refer to biological women so that transwomen aren't constantly reminded that they're not cis. I'm skeptical that conservatives would be happily on board.
I think the much simpler explanation is that there are two enemy tribes who disagree on a topic and Tribe A wants to change language related to that topic. That change could be 100% innocuous and Tribe B is still gonna fight against it.
There are surely details specific to the "cis woman" debate that are relevant (e.g. some people have strong opinions on concrete policy changes like "who is allowed in a woman's shelter"), but I really don't think "you're not thinking of me as normal" is significant driver of conservative pushback.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Looking at actual legal policy passed by politicians, the principle piece of legislation seems to be the PROTECT Act, which, among many other things
Prohibits computer-generated child pornography when "(B) such visual depiction is a computer image or computer-generated image that is, or appears virtually indistinguishable from that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct"; (as amended by 1466A for Section 2256(8)(B) of title 18, United States Code).
Okay fine, but that act includes lots of other provisions. Fine, how about the previous Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996? I literally cannot find a record of a vote (if that sounds impossible, please, somebody show me up). I can, however, find the court case that ruled it unconstitutional.
The majority had 3 Republican justices (Kennedy, Stevens, Souter), and 2 Democrat (Ginsburg, Breyer), and one concurrence (Thomas (R)).
I find these examples more convincing than your vibes and lived experience, so I'll reiterate: being against virtual child pornography sees bipartisan support.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Advocating for race-conscious policies so that racial groups with lower crime rates don't need to deal with the consequences of living in a high-crime environment seems like an extremely narrowly scoped argument. Should men between the ages of 15 and 25 be excluded from low-crime neighborhoods too?
Focusing on race, rather than gender, income, age, or (heck), criminality seems rather odd -- where's the post advocating for banning all felons from your city?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.
Producing heat in a place dedicated to productive political discussions is a bad idea.
It’s doesn’t matter what I think. “The group of people who don’t like gay people” is a valid set of people to talk about. Referencing that group is allowed, and people are welcome to argue how large it is.
Referencing that group in a deliberately inflammatory way should not be allowed.
I’m sure there are awkward edge cases you can catch me up with, but the existence of edge cases doesn’t justify ignoring the non-edge cases.
“Tranny” exists as an inflammatory way to say “transgender person”. It is not an edge case and not defensible.
The people who use it are using it to demonstrate their disdain for transpeople which is not “writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion”.
When avoiding a derogatory term makes discussion more difficult you will have a leg to stand on. “Tranny” doesn’t, yet you insist on sheltering under free speech.
So I ask: how is this specific usage of Free Speech (allowing people to say “tranny”) helping us achieve our terminal value?
All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.
Yes, it takes judgement to decide what speech to allow. But here’s a simple heuristic:
If a word drives some people away and is unnecessary for communicating ideas, then modding its usage helps one aspect of the foundation and doesn’t hurt the other.
“Tranny” drives away certain perspectives and makes no ideas easier to communicate. So how is allowing it helping achieve the foundation?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
OP claimed
only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.
Is this wrong?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
This doesn’t address OP’s primary complaint, which is lack of evidence.
In a society where everyone was raised from birth to be vegan it’d be equally obvious a chicken is worth more than 0.1% of a human and anyone who said otherwise would be considered morally abhorrent.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.
A heck of a lot has changed between 1960 and 2023 and ascribing every social failure to "the sexual revolution" requires either a lot of work or a lot of caveats.
Blaming computers/phones/porn and the accompanying incessant optimizations designed to steal our attention away from all other aspects of life seem far more responsible to me for your first three points.
I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.
I assumed one of you had seen it, but, given your policy of not banning people for saying mean things about politicians, chose not to ban a comment that was merely insulting a politician.
I can only be grateful at what must be the best possible outcome for me. Moderation certainly seems less insane than my past conversations with mods has made it seem. It kind of seems like the real disagreement wasn’t with banning such comments, it was whether to ban them as “boo outgroup” or “uncharitable/unkind”. I will only be reporting such comments as “boo outgroup” going forward.
(Though to be clear, is “Trump is a venal fascist clown” a violation of the “boo outgroup” rule?)
Fortunately I’m not particularly interested in arguing for a specific rule, since fundamentally the reason these comments are harmful is they make productive and diverse discussion more difficult.
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Hyperbole is bad
2yr ago
If there is blatant culture warring in this thread that isn't being modded, that's a mod problem.
2. TIME article from disillusioned women in EA making questionable claims of sexual assault (to which the CEO of Open Phil replied, not the organization itself, as you suggest)
I didn't really see much of a difference, but I guess I can see how some people could.
1. The widespread admonishment of Nick Bostrom among EAs after his comment on factual group differences was leaked
5. Highlights two cause areas (global dysgenic trends and the power laws of crime) that are ignored by EA as taboo.
A social taboo against talking about HBD is not feminization. It was the de facto state of society well before the rise of modern feminism and woke culture. Take a random sample of men at the gym or in an MMO and start talking about how Black people are genetically inferior and let me know how it goes. HBD is not something all men secretly believe and want to talk about (if not for those pesky women!).
Though while we're on the topic, imo the general state of HBD has been the same since at least 2013 (when I started reading about it) -- basically: "Some of EAs believe in HBD and some EAs are uncomfortable with talking about it, and some EAs support strong social norms against talking about it", which should already seem strikingly different from how its talked about in the normal population.
3. Open Phil making donations towards criminal justice causes without any evidential basis for their effectiveness
Open Philanthropy's funding for criminal justice reform has been significant since at least 2016, went down in 2020 (when George Floyd died), and then separated from OpenPhil in 2021 because they weren't as effective as global health.
As we wrote in 2019, we think the top global aid charities recommended by GiveWell (which we used to be part of and remain closely affiliated with) present an opportunity to give away large amounts of money at higher cost-effectiveness than we can achieve in many programs, including CJR, that seek to benefit citizens of wealthy countries. Accordingly we’re shifting the focus of future grantmaking from our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio (which CJR has been part of) further towards the types of opportunities outlined in that post — specifically, efforts to improve and save the lives of people internationally (including things like distributing insecticide-treated bednets to prevent the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fighting air pollution in South Asia).
-- OpenPhil
Those don't seem like the actions of an ideologically compromised organization.
4. A highly upvoted post on the EA forum titled “I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.” This post then goes on to critique EA for placing too much emphasis on rationality and not enough on emotion.
I'll admit I missed this (my mistake for posting while at the gym). While I don't think "highly upvoted post on a forum" is great evidence (or I'd prove that EA is okay with Bostrom), it should certainly qualify to be included in a "summary of evidence".
even Economics, which promises much when it comes to explanatory power, comes up sorely lacking
What do you mean by this? What do you want from the field of economics?
Our understanding of economics is enormously better than it was 80 years ago. In my opinion what makes Economics respectable is that, of all the social sciences, they're the ones who bother to create models (or, at least, ones that are more complicated than linear regression), and then go through the work of trying to see if those models match reality. If they fail, it's mostly because systems with many humans are really complicated -- they're hard to model, hard to experiment on, and it's hard to measure what we care about (but it seems really unfair to blame Economists' intelligence/motivation/personal failings for that).
I'd go so far as to say that Economics majors care more about well-defined modeling than most STEM majors.
You replied to my comment less than 24 hours after the top level comment was made, so I’m skeptical “we caught it too late” is a genuine factor here.
Moreover, OP had not defended the claim at the time, but if that plays a role, maybe “be willing to defend your controversial claims if somebody asks for it” would be a more accurate articulation of the way this rule is actually enforced?
As it stands, if you mod him before 24 hours he never has the chance to defend himself, if you mod him after 24 hours then it’s too late.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Yes, I read your edit before I made my comment. I'm asking what value you see in that comment -- why a warning would not have been merited if it had been made several levels deeper, despite the fact that it violates several rules and exists solely to complain bitterly about how terrible the author's outgroup is.
The amount of charity/humility on TheMotte is certainly far lower than it was when /r/slatestarcodex was created. In the long run we're getting the outgroup engagement that we deserve (none).
Sure, then the mods can remove the hot-take rule and be honest about that fact that proactive defense of claims is nice, but that they won’t/can’t enforce it.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
IMO the right lens here is that American waiters have the valuable "capital" of living in America -- where there are high-earning consumers willing to pay for their labor.
In contrast, there's nothing more valuable about unionized workers compared to non-unionized workers (except their ability to rent seek).
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Hyperbole is bad
2yr ago
why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers
This is the first time I've heard this claim. Is there empirical evidence to support this?
Those rules already exist.
Be Kind… To a lesser but non-zero extent, this also applies to third parties. You shouldn't just go and attack people that you think are bad, you should be kind to them, even if you think they're mean, even if you think they're bad.
Or
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Or
To have a discussion on some point of disagreement it is necessary that both parties be willing to say what they believe and why, not merely that they disagree with the other party. Sarcasm and mockery make it very easy to express that you disagree with someone without explaining why, or what contrary claim you actually endorse, and you can't grow a discussion from those grounds.
Or
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
Does every statement need a citation? No, but we need some standards to prevent literal for-it’s-own-sake mockery.
I don't understand how this is even borderline. Where is the light / analysis / value that's overriding the negatives?
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