What is missing from rationality?

Thanks for giving additional context. I think you are correct that we have a difference of opinion. Personally, I would be absolutely thrilled to see a discussion on LessWrong of how poker, art valuation, or trading card gaming relate to rationality. Would these subjects not interest you, or is your worry that discussion of them would get too far off-topic to a degree that is bad?

I suppose delving very deep into those subjects could also feel off-topic to me if the connection to rationality was lost, yet I would be comfortable with whatever level of depth people more knowledgeable than me on those subject felt was necessary to elucidate the links to rationality. (And if other people were making truth-claims about the content of those disciplines, and those people often displayed bias or misunderstanding in either a laudatory or critical direction, I would be comfortable seeing those truth-claims evaluated. Even if debate about the merits or nature of a subjects gets away from the direct relationship of that subject to rationality, that debate itself may demonstrate applications of rationality to a controversial subject, which I like to see.)

Your mileage may vary, but I find that I learn in a "hands on" way, and attempting to apply rationality to a practical problem helps me attain a more abstract understanding. See the notion of Contract to Expand, where sometimes solving a specific sub-problem can be helpful for solving a larger, more general problem.

I would consider any subculture or discipline with a "sufficiently active truth-seeking element" to be excellent LessWrong fodder, as long as the discussion (a) was connected to rationality, or (b) addressed the nature of the subcultures and disciplines so that readers can know how they work well enough to evaluate their potential relationship to rationality (particularly if there is disagreement on that nature or relationship). Anyone else have feelings either way?

That is indeed a good question that I don't know the answer to. Though it has been my impression that some of the ideas in NLP are parasitic on mainstream psychology. For example, "anchoring" seems related to classical conditioning.

And this is where differing perceptions are probably causing issues. I haven't seen any posts here from anyone who is anything nearing the worst advocates, but then I've hung around places where these topics are discussed much more confrontationally. I've seen nothing I deem worthy of censorship from the advocates, even the 'worst', but I have seen examples of what I view as completely unacceptable over-reaction, revulsion and guilt tripping from a small but vocal minority who claim offense.

I am very unsympathetic by nature to people who claim the right to block any conversation that they personally find offensive. My natural reaction to such people is to become more offensive, which while it has some merit from a game-theoretic standpoint is generally not conducive to social decorum so I make an effort to restrain such impulses. So for me, those people are the ones who cause revulsion, and we as a community need to deny them the spotlight when they act up until they learn better. Otherwise the community comes off as not being a rationalist community, and aspiring rationalists who might be interested walk away. So far people who share your perceptions seem to carry the support of the majority but I think there is a significant minority that share my perceptions.

If we are still having this discussion could you link to a couple examples of the posts that you object to so much? I'm trying to figure out whether I missed something, or how similar my perceptions are to yours.

It seems to be very hard to motivate people to work on things without building in a group identity, and the group identity is us vs. them. Or have I spent too much time reading people who work that way, and there are alternatives I haven't seen?

Well, humans seem to be wired that way, so anyone you've met who works differently has done so deliberately and is very strange.

Feminists too often mistake the complex, dynamic and context-dependent way status/power actually works for an oversimplified "patriarchy" where men as a class oppress women as a class.

That sounds like 'radical feminism', and it's not so much a mistake of the 'feminism' as it is of the 'radical'. Marx did the same thing with class.

Well, my sense is that the simple view is (a) what the radicals hold and (b) what those who don't get into the theory end up believing. It's kind of like how the Catholic church itself doesn't think God is necessary for morality but this view is common among evangelicals and unstudied Catholics.

Feminists actually have a lot of complex, dynamic, and context-dependent reasons for focusing on sexism against women, ranging from being a radical feminist,

Being a radical feminist isn't really a reason for doing something, what are the reasons for being a radical feminist? Anyway, my understanding of the radfem position is that there is no such thing as sexism against men, so yes, they're not going to be paying a lot of attention to sexism against men.

to thinking sexism against women is the bigger problem that needs to be dealt with, to thinking that's what 'feminism' is about by definition and someone else should have the job of being sensitive to sexism against men.

These reasons I'm pretty much fine with (and mostly agree with), which is why the problem isn't that they aren't good at noticing sexism against men but that they're aren't good at noticing sexism and take themselves to be giving a universal and unbiased perspective on gender issues. Feminism has problems being both the major vehicle for gender egalitarianism and the major vehicle for empowering women. The contradictions here were extremely minimal when feminism started out, but of course the more success feminism has the more this contradiction will come into play.

This has been internally considered a big problem for a long time, and now remains a problem only if you look at Western, white, upper middle class feminist institutions specifically.

I agree that it has been a problem internally. And maybe I need to make this more clear: I basically have one foot in the camp and one foot outside it, so some (maybe even most) of my criticisms are things that feminists have said themselves. I'm not sure I know what you mean by "remains a problem only if you look at ...". I don't think there are many feminist institutions that identify themselves as Western, white and upper middle class. If you mean the institutions that are made up of mostly Western, white and upper class women then I suppose I agree with you except that these are the best funded, most influential and, for the rest of the culture, defining institutions for feminism. My experience reading non-white, poor and non-Western women on this subject suggests they still perceive many of the same problems that spurred the initial intersectionality critique.

Indeed. There are a lot of crazies out there. But I'd make the same case for just about any 'movement'.

I think my original comment made it clear why I think feminism is particularly problematic in this regard but if it didn't let me know and I'll clarify.

I think there is a parallel to the complaints about the PUA discussions here. I've often seen feminist ideas presented in a tone of hostility and misandry and embedded in a whole heap of background assumptions and beliefs that I do not share. I can read some of the same ideas from someone like Kerry Howley and appreciate that they are actually quite reasonable and compatible with my own views because I am not immediately on the defensive and looking for disagreement.

Here's a few on libertarianism/feminism:

Libertarian Feminism versus Monarchist Anarchism

Feminism and Libertarianism Again

Does the Word Feminism Mean Anything

And on reproductive/sexual issues:

Notes on My Life Sentence of Buried Self-Negation

Trying Really Hard to Get Upset About Pornography

Might There Be a Connection Between Slut Shaming and Slut Jailing

The Myth of the Migrant

This might be interesting-- it's an analysis of the similarities between feminist descriptions of the patriarchy and libertarian descriptions of the state

Thanks for the link, it's an interesting article. I don't find much to take issue with there - I generally agree with their analysis. Unfortunately I see little evidence of any progress towards reconciliation.

I find the focus on radicalism as a common trait interesting. I see parallels with coverage of the financial crisis where I basically agree with much of the analysis of people like Matt Taibbi or Simon Johnson and James Kwak on the root causes of the financial crisis but have a rather different idea of what needs to be done to fix the problem. The ideas of a feminist-libertarian alliance and a left-libertarian alliance have many commonalities.

Apologies for the delay - this is not a field in which i have particular knowledge, and so it took me some time to track down an appropriate reference (h/t Jezebel blogger Anna North): Janet S. Hyde and Janet E. Mertz, "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance", PNAS, vol. 106 no. 22, June 2, 2009 8801-8807, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0901265106.

Using contemporary data from the U.S. and other nations, we address 3 questions: Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist in the general population? Do gender differences exist among the mathematically talented? Do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent? In regard to the first question, contemporary data indicate that girls in the U.S. have reached parity with boys in mathematics performance, a pattern that is found in some other nations as well. Focusing on the second question, studies find more males than females scoring above the 95th or 99th percentile, but this gender gap has significantly narrowed over time in the U.S. and is not found among some ethnic groups and in some nations. Furthermore, data from several studies indicate that greater male variability with respect to mathematics is not ubiquitous. Rather, its presence correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes. Responding to the third question, we document the existence of females who possess profound mathematical talent. Finally, we review mounting evidence that both the magnitude of mean math gender differences and the frequency of identification of gifted and profoundly gifted females significantly correlate with sociocultural factors, including measures of gender equality across nations.

Intelligence is a vague, multi-faceted word. Whenever intelligence is mentioned in a comparative or quantitative way, care should be taken to indicate exactly which dimension of intelligence is being measured. Since the dimensions of intelligence probably aren't well parametrized, it would be sufficient to indicate the particular test that was being used. Otherwise, the biases that sneak in are less traceable. In experimental science, it is a really good norm they've established to always include the detailed context and methodology of the experiment, so current researchers can estimate and predict biases and figure out 'what went wrong' when they get a different result under different conditions.

For example, if it was a standard IQ test that determined the variance in male intelligence, I have an understanding of the biases in those tests, and if it was comparing income, I have an understanding of the biases there. When it comes to experimental studies in social science and psychology, I always weight their result low compared to my own observations of a lifetime, because if I've observed anything, I've observed that things are complex, and I know we haven't developed tools to handle this complexity.

Yes, but there's no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws. Incidentally, the ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there's an implicit "and therefore the argument is wrong" attached to it. That's more due to general human convention. Consider for example if one said to someone "you're a drunk idiot who couldn't factor a 2 digit integer given a caculator and your statement X is correct." That would be an ad hominem abusive but wouldn't in any way be an ad hominem in a logically rude fashion. So this seems to miss the point at two levels.

If you want people to believe your claims, you're going about it the wrong way. Everyone would have believed the Wright brothers had built a successful heavier-than-air plane* if they just brought it to DC and buzzed the Mall, but that's not what they did.

* No lie, I actually have this photograph as my desktop right now.

I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above.

Ok. There may be a minor miscomunication here. When I made my comment about why you were downvoted on some of your comments regarding 9/11 I was talking about the general history of comments not this specific comment. This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.

Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you (although a click glance through doesn't find the relevant comments) but eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. This is especially the case in extreme situations. (I'm actually surprised there isn't something in any of the sequences specifically devoted to this issue.) See This article for a short discussion of many of the issues in the context of criminal trials. Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression. Downvoting a comment doesn't suppress anything in the sense that we normally use that term for (destroying evidence, refusing to publish results you don't like etc.) . It simply sends a signal to the LessWrong readers that reading the statement is not likely to do anything useful and so that they will be less likely to click through to read the remarks. And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.

To move to the flight example, flying didn't occur during a crisis situation. People were not claiming that the Wright Brothers flew once briefly during an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or the middle of a pitched firefight. They demonstrated it repeatedly to different people. So such evidence is in fact the more reliable sort of eye witness evidence. The evidence is not by itself at all convincing of flight (magicians can do some pretty neat stuff and even there's also the issue of the reliability of the witnesses), but it would make me stand up and take notice. That's a very different claim then that a single or even a large group of eyewitnesses reported hearing something which isn't even necessarily inconsistent with the standard hypothesis.

Edit: Also regarding the ad hominem issue. I think you should reread RobinZ linked remark about what an ad hominem is. Explaining to someone why their comments were historically downvoted isn't an ad hominem. It may make one feel uncomfortable, it may come across as condescending or patronizing. It may be deeply damaging to one's ego. But that's not an ad hominem attack. In this particular case, the response was an attempt at explaining why your comments have been downvoted. Interpreting that as an ad hominem attack requires some degree of abuse of the term "ad hominem."