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From the other side, this sounds like you are calibrated such that anything that isn’t prefaced by, interspersed with, and concluded by preemptive concessions strikes you as unreasonable. I’d say Scott is pretty much the opposite of combative.

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As to your other question, let me first address that final comment just to get it out of the way. You should honestly expect internet feminism to have a larger reaction to gamers than Rotherham, and not for any pernicious reason, but purely human, even reasonable, ones. First of all, the whole gamer thing recently all happened online, in plain sight of everyone. The internet is where internet feminism lives. It’s as if you saw something horrible happening right now inside of your house, right in front of you. Not only that, there simply isn’t anything internet feminism can even do about Rotherham. It’s in Britain, a distant country for most people online, and most of the action there is happening in the physical world, where the internet can’t do much with any effectiveness. The gamers mess recently, however, all happened online, in places where internet feminism can effectively use what muscle it has. What happened in Rotherham is much, much worse than the gamers mess. Is it any wonder, though, that people are going to focus on the thing happening right in front of them that they can actually try to do something about, instead of something far away they can’t help with at all?

Now, to talk about the actual question you had! Well, one thing is that I do not believe the problem is as bad or wide-spread as it is commonly represented here. I do believe it is a real problem that feminism faces today, but I also believe it is not as bad as you paint it, where the Crocodiles have pretty much taken over. But I could be mistaken about that, and you have a clearer view from the outside than I do from the inside. So let’s assume you are correct about how bad it is! I still don’t really agree with your reading of the situation, and it has to do with who the ‘Crocodiles’ are.

I don’t think it’s a separate group of people within feminists just using feminism as an excuse to punch down at people, anymore than I think there’s a bunch of people in the manosphere using the manosphere as an excuse to punch down at people. There probably are people like that who exist, but I honestly think they are so few as to be negligible. There are just easier ways to hurt people if that’s your goal.

Some of the people punching are just damaged people. They’ve been hurt, and they’re just flailing out at what they perceive as their attackers. Some of the people believe that this is a genuine method to help their side. They’re hurting those who would oppose them and hold them back, and that’s how you win a fight, right? (I know that’s not right, I’m just trying to express what I believe their opinion would be.) Some people are just mimicking what they see others do in the hopes of gaining success or helping. Some people don’t see themselves as punching down at all, they see themselves as fighting the power. I’m sure there are more categories, but these are the ones coming to mind right now.

The methods of dealing with people like these are very different than the methods for dealing with people who just like to punch down.

I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your post for two days, I was busy and didn’t have time to write respond (it takes me a long time to express myself the way I like. I’ve spent over an hour on this comment already, for example). It was probably for the better, anyways. It gave me time to calm down. Scott’s posts on feminism are always so combative that I get riled up and defensive, and that’s never a good state to attempt communicating in. I can see that in my earlier posts, in fact. I was honest, but really too emphatic about what I believed, and it came across judgmental and overconfident.

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First, regarding opinions. Opinions and valuations/preferences are not the same thing, and I perhaps picked a poor example of an opinion. My original example was better – you’d get more of what you want if you defect, but you can still have the opinion that you shouldn’t defect. This would mean that your opinions and your preferences are separate. It doesn’t mean that you prefer not to defect, it means you’d be acting contrary to your preferences, because you’d get more of what you want if you defect. Getting more of what you want is a preference, not an opinion – that’s what the terms mean, at least as I’m using them.

But I feel compelled to point out that I totally called this in my second comment. “Morality doesn’t mean doing whatever you want, it means doing what you ACTUALLY REALLY TRULY want!”

I never disputed this. I was just more specific what “ACTUALLY REALLY TRULY want” means.

Nothing real is persistent (or every moment is a self-contained eternity, I suppose, depending on how you choose to view time). When we speak as if it were otherwise, we’re making use of a linguistic convention that doesn’t capture how the world actually is. People can get by in their day-to-day lives without noticing, mostly, because this sort of mistake only causes problems at the margins. Like here, for example.

Or for something to be the same thing as itself later doesn’t require it to be physically identical in both times. For example, if I spill a bucket of paint on a table, it’s the same table, even though it’s physically different now – not because I make the mistaken assumption that it’s physically identical, but because that’s not a prerequisite for it being the same. I admit that concept of persistence as we use it is difficult to formulate, but it refers to real configurations and effects. This includes personal identity – I (a singular entity) am the same person I was at age 13 from a personal identity perspective, even though physically I am very different, and that’s real, though it’s an abstraction. I think this is somewhat of a Typical Mind thing – I suspect that some people feel more personal continuity than others, though I’m not sure.

Allocating “equal” budgets requires prior knowledge and comparison of the utility functions in question, but interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible.

There’s a sense in which interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible and a sense in which they aren’t. For example, if your friend Xerxes loves strawberries and your friend Ygnacio is indifferent to them, you know that Xerxes would get more utility from you giving them a strawberry than Ygnacio would. But also, allocating equal budgets doesn’t require prior knowledge – take away everything they have and give them both $100, and see what they do.

Anyway, this is my last word for now.

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If people aren’t individually willing to spend their own money on the poor (unit of caring), they are not going to be politically willing to enact successful policies to end poverty, either.

Says who?

Charitable giving is very close to a classic tragedy of the commons situation.

If we can model preferences as:

Other people donate money and I don’t > Everyone, including me donates money > Nobody donates money > I donate money and nobody else does

then imposing taxes and using the money to reduce poverty – the “everyone donates money” option – works better than letting everyone decide independently that since they’re better off if they don’t donate, they won’t.

Which is why sometimes it’s actually easier to do things through politics than by spending (your own) money.

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I think you’re using the word “opinion” in a non-standard way. Opinions are necessarily subjective judgments, while preferences are objective. If I say “Apples are good”, that is an opinion (if interpreted literally), if I say “I like apples more than pears”, that is a fact and a preference.

It is only a fact if the statement is true, and the statement is only true if you have actually made the subjective judgment (/formed the opinion) that you like apples more than pears.

Your claim, then, is that preferences are facts about opinions. I hope you’ll note that this in no way contradicts the following statements:

“If you prefer the outcomes that happen when you defect, that means your opinion is that you will get more of what you want if you defect.”

“If your opinion is that defection is Bad (without much deeper reasoning), or if you find defection aesthetically unappealing, that means you prefer not to defect.”

If you think defecting is evil, that is an opinion, if you get more of what you want if you defect, that is a fact.

If you think you’ll get more of what you want if you defect, that is an opinion, if defecting strikes you as evil, that is a fact.

If my opinion is that defection is Bad, but I’d get more of what I want if I defected, then my opinion and my preferences diverge. I still prefer to defect because I get more of what I want when I defect; if X gets me more of what I want than Y, and I know that, then that means I prefer X to Y. But my opinions can diverge from that.

lol randroids (sorry)

But I feel compelled to point out that I totally called this in my second comment. “Morality doesn’t mean doing whatever you want, it means doing what you ACTUALLY REALLY TRULY want!”

There are plenty of other possible positions. Of course I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist and a physicalist. But consciousness and identity are reducible abstractions. There’s no necessary contradiction between that and them being persistent and real.

Nothing real is persistent (or every moment is a self-contained eternity, I suppose, depending on how you choose to view time). When we speak as if it were otherwise, we’re making use of a linguistic convention that doesn’t capture how the world actually is. People can get by in their day-to-day lives without noticing, mostly, because this sort of mistake only causes problems at the margins. Like here, for example.

When I talk about my consciousness, I’m referring to it – it’s a real thing, though that doesn’t mean it’s irreducible, non-physical, or something like the Christian concept of a soul. Just because it’s not ontologically basic doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist – and things changing with time is no barrier to it existing, either.

blacktrance at age 13 is not the same as blacktrance at age 21 is not the same as blacktrance at age 35. Just because all of these entities are referred to as blacktrance does not mean that they are all the same. In fact, they are different.

It’s even worse than that, though. Because what we’re calling “blacktrance at age X” isn’t even a singular entity. “It” is actually a bunch of different algorithms running simultaneously in parallel on what we sometimes lazily call a “single” piece of hardware (but which actually has properties that make calling “it” a pair seem pretty sensible).

Thus, the concept of what “you” or “I” “actuallyreallytruly want” is not even coherent, let alone quantifiable.

Then you may be thinking of utility in the utilitarian sense, which is somewhat different from utility in the decision-theoretic sense, which is what I had been talking about. In terms that avoid direct comparisons of utility, this could mean something like “C is willing to give up more for A than D is willing to give up for B”, e.g. if you gave them equal budgets, C would pay more for A than B would pay for D.

Allocating “equal” budgets requires prior knowledge and comparison of the utility functions in question, but interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible.

Or, possibly, it could mean something like “The Kaldor-Hicks improvement from C getting A and D not getting B is, according to both C’s and D’s preferences, greater than the Kaldor-Hicks improvement from C not getting A and D getting B.”

lol, don’t even get me started on Kaldor-Hicks

Anyway, it’s like I said to start – some rationalists y’all are!

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[Scott says: This comment thread is now hopelessly broken. Everything is appearing in the wrong place, crazy people are showing up and going on rants, and for some reason I can’t even post in it and am reduced to editing other people’s comments to get heard. I am interpreting this as God’s way of telling me to close this comment thread. Thread is now closed.]

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