Comments on: Open Thread 6: Open Renewal

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 19:25:27 +0000

The topic of sex differences in online harassment has come up several times. Here is a Pew survey (or pdf) of self-reported harassment, which breaks things down by sex.

Note the interaction between sex and age. Youth predicts harassment, but much more so for women than for men. Women are 50% more likely to be stalked and men are 50% more likely to receive physical threats, but if we restrict to young people, women are 4x as likely to be stalked and men are 10% more likely to receive physical threats.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 17:00:25 +0000

The version of this comment that made sense was eaten by the spam filter.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 16:36:57 +0000

Hey, people obsessively following the changing tagline (not me — I just stumbled on this), did Scott remove the exclamation point in the past day? 1 2

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By: megazver

megazver — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 10:35:00 +0000

James Nicoll does this as tiers in his Patreon.

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By: megazver

megazver — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 21:57:07 +0000

I’ve spent the last several days reading through your archives and I am nowhere near done but I’d like to second the call for a Patreon. I consider it a flexible subscription platform rather than donations and I strongly feel this is the ideal way to monetize this blog.

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By: Troy

Troy — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 21:16:17 +0000

It’s possible that you’re using ‘realism’ in a stronger sense than me, but I still think that you’re not accurately representing my position in your most recent post. I don’t think that our theories are merely empirically adequate; I think that some of them are probably true. By ‘true’ I do mean that they correspond to the world, but I don’t mean that they contain the most primitive concepts. So I disagree with you that, for example, the statements made with Ptolemaic cosmology are true in my sense of ‘true.’ Some might be true, of course — e.g., predictions about where the heavenly bodies will be in the sky in a month — but the crucial ones, like “the sun revolves around the Earth,” are false. As far as I can see, such a claim is false even if the concepts “the Earth” and “the sun” carve nature at its joints, and the claim that the Earth revolves around the sun is true even if those concepts do not carve nature at its joints — e.g., because some form of reductionism from the macro-level to the micro-level is true so that the only fundamental things are physical simples.

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By: Troy

Troy — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 21:02:23 +0000

Apologies for not replying; been on vacation.

Acquaintance with what?External objects?Your own sense?

Tricky question, but I’m inclined to broadly agree with Bertrand Russell about the kinds of things with which we are acquainted — properties, ourselves, our experiences, etc.

All concepts … including invisibility, inconceivability, paradoxicality…etc.?

I’m inclined to say so, in the sense that these concepts are derivative of ones we get directly through acquaintance (e.g., visibility) — so that these come through acquaintance indirectly.

Grue: different probabilities judged how? If you want to say that the grue theory is less probable because it is more complex, then you are running on an unscientifically subjective notion of probability.

Here I disagree. As I said above, I hold to a logical conception of probability. It’s not scientific in that it’s not empirical, but the same is true for logical entailment, which is no less objective for that.

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By: Sniffnoy

Sniffnoy — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 08:56:35 +0000

I suddenly remembered what the “dark matter universe” bits of “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” reminded me of: Adam Cadre’s review of “The City and The City”. (It seems I’m bad at remembering this sort of insight, seeing as I remember thinking of the whole Blue Tribe/Red Tribe dark-matter-universe sort of thing in terms of Ul Qoma and Beszel quite a while ago, and seem to have entirely forgotten about it until now.)

I was going to post this in the “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” comments but those are closed.

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By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 05:30:43 +0000

Please move this to an appropriate thread rather than destroying it if it doesn’t belong here; it was interesting.

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By: k, so, queso

k, so, queso — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 04:19:19 +0000

Today I saw someone post an article about a study that found that men felt bad when their female SOs did well (e.g., in their careers), although they didn’t consciously admit it during the study. Link: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/30/study_men_secretly_feel_terrible_when_the_women_they_love_succeed/)

The interesting part to me (besides being male and experiencing the opposite effect in my own personal life) was that all the associated comments were along the lines of “Well sure, if you only study douchebags!” and “The real men don’t do this!” There were other problems with the study, but I thought it was an interesting reaction for commenters to assume that the people they studied must have been uniquely awful as the best explanation for the results.

I know there are many interpretations of this reaction, but it made me realize that tumblr-style crusaders and naive folks who assume intentions are good enough may be making the same category of mistake in their outlooks on life.

Let’s say you start with two beliefs:
1) Most people are decent.
2) You’d have to be a jerk to be sexist.

I would guess that these are two very common beliefs and frequently held simultaneously. Under the just world hypothesis, this is sort of what you’d arrive at. Now let’s say that, in the course of your further education, you encounter a third belief:

3) Most people are kinda sexist.

This creates some obvious cognitive dissonance: you can’t consistently hold all three beliefs at once. I think in the “average folks” scenario, people reject belief 3), and continue believing people are generally decent and if you’re not a jerk, you’re not sexist. Meanwhile, in the “tumblr” scenario, people reject belief 1), and believe that the world is an oppressive nightmare full of evil mutants, for whom ignorance is no excuse. I think that 2) is the most likely to be false, given things like association tests, involuntary exposure to existing culture, etc., and it also seems like the most useful in getting people to realize that they too can be unconsciously sexist without being evil. It seems to generalize to unfair bias in general. Does anyone see any interesting properties/flaws of this model?

(Apologies if this qualifies as “gender on the open thread”, feel free to remove it)

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