LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance

Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.

Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I'm aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.

I'm thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was - and the problem is more solved than it was.

Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don't have rivers catching on fire obviously.)

there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say "you figure out how not to piss me off"-- abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.

I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers - abuse in self-defense is still abuse.

Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.

I don't want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don't think that's possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.

What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?

I'm thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I'm thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he "really" black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.

without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.

That's one conclusion - but there's a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.

In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven't found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I'd be sorely tempted to use it.

That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.

Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don't think it's a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.

I was thinking of something smaller-- I don't see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.

Uh.

This might be an outside context problem.

I see people talk about that plenty -- I've been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They're usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.

Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane's "Door into..." series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn't a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.

Let me put it this way - I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn't even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) "biologically compatible as-is" or "biologically compatible with medical help" (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn't assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn't correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.

Probably yes, but I'm not that confident. Some strategies to weaken the loop if it is understood probably do exist and are probably similar to those of fighting the influence of a particular religion in society.

Not that confident of what? Something I said?

I agree that the positive feedback loop can weaken. I think it already has. There's a lot more media outside the official channels, and higher education is in the midst of a huge bubble. Maybe government too, with the unsustainable government debt levels throughout the western world.

Will the debt holders basically take control of governments and force them to run their tax farming businesses more efficiently? The IMF has been doing that to countries for years. That seems a more likely future than a Moldbug restoration.

Exactly, this is why there haven't been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that's the word in my local Baron's court.

What is a "default" human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day -- despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.

Social reformers often don't seem to understand that pushing a society far away from 'default' human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope...

The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.

If you see life solely (or even merely primarily) in terms of status, as I believe Konkvistador does, then it is indeed a zero-sum game, since a person's status is a relative ranking, and not an absolute measure (as contrasted with, say, top running speed).

That strikes me as a remarkably uncharitable reading, and in any case a false one -- the suffering of undersocialized straight white dudes gets plenty of public attention, albeit much of it in "point and laugh" form (cf. Big Bang Theory).

The most marginalized groups on the planet, almost by definition, are the ones you've never heard of. Take Burkina Faso for example -- small West African country, #181 of 187 in Human Development Index, and the only reason I know I've read about it before is that the Wikipedia link's purple instead of blue in my browser. #187, the absolute bottom of the barrel, is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: slightly better-known, but extremely underserved by Western media relative to the magnitude of all the bad shit going down there. The Second Congo War (1998 - 2003) was the single worst conflict by body count since World War II, but I couldn't describe a single major news report on it that reached my ears.

And those are entire countries -- if I wanted to dig up serious contemporary misery and oppression at the subculture level, I'm almost sure that the famous examples, while certainly terrible, wouldn't be the worst I could find.

Okay, so... you're going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most?

Eh no. I'm saying we ignore the groups who suffer the most. Under-socialized white males have weak counter-cultures working in their favour. But generally I think you underestimate how much suffering say white people experience in places like South Africa what with the racially motivated farm murders and economic discrimination against them.

Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can't for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.

That you can't think of them is very weak evidence they aren't there. May I remind you that if we where having this debate in the 1920s people might talk about women as such a group but not homosexuals. The thought wouldn't even occur to them. Today you are shunned for questioning the thought.

I can give you many many examples but it will get me into trouble. One controversial example: Paedophiles who want to avoid having sex with children. Our society is not optimized to help them with that humanely at all. And it is the very social changes that we have experienced in the sexual marketplace of the past 50 years done supposedly to reduce suffering that have intensified pure hatred and paranoia towards them.

Okay, so... you're going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can't for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.

Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?

Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we've had over the past oh... 5 years?

I'm confused. Are you suggesting that catcalling is a strategy for seeing naked women?

It is not "obvious" to me. I am a man, and I've never had the desire to catcall; from my perspective, catcalling is something cartoon characters do.

Your comments on this thread seem to be evidence that there is no such "obvious" reason, and that you are in fact pretending that such an "obvious" reason exists, as some sort of status play, or perhaps for didactic reasons. Do you agree that this is the reasonable conclusion that readers of this thread should reach? If not, why not?

Honestly, I'm curious too -- I can think of several candidate reasons, but nothing blindingly obvious.

If you're concerned about looking like a patsy, or about possible retributive behavior from being un-PC or perhaps excessively PC, there's nothing stopping you from spinning up a throwaway account and using that. I'd say sockpuppetry is acceptable in that case.

I bought & read a copy of Games People Play some years ago. (But thanks for the recommendation.) Although I've read the book, "the" reason why men catcall remains opaque to me. I can think of multiple reasons, and multiple ways to describe catcalling as a Game, so merely pointing at the book tells me nothing new.

By the principle of charity, I figured Salemicus had something more usefully specific in mind. So I looked at the table of contents, guessed at some Games they might have been thinking of, and put them out there as a starting point. I wasn't about to reread the whole book just to try making Salemicus's comment click.

[Belated edit to fix that dangling modifier.]

"Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them."

From Berne: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him."

So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female's (albeit negative) attention.

So it would be unfair of you to view all consequences of similar microaggressions as morally equal and cancelling each other out.

And what is your grounds for believing that the groups whose victimhood from acts of microaggressions it is currently politically fashionable to emphasize are at all correlated with the people who are actually more likely to be on the receiving end of microaggression?

To see why this is highly unlikely it helps to make an outside view: if I randomly picked some culture from human history, how strong do you think this correlation would be? What makes you think the currant culture is any different?

(I think this was intended as an observation of high noise levels, not a moral judgement of sexism generally.)

Yeah. We overestimate their importance.

If the problem of identifying two sides is not just continuity, what is an example of its difficulty at a single point in time?

Owning gold bullion seems to me a poor example. First, it was rolled back in 45 years, longer than prohibition, but not very long. Second, it was only a means to the end of devaluing the dollar. When Nixon moved entirely off of the gold standard, it became irrelevant. Nixon moving completely off of the gold standard might qualify as a non-progressive doing something, though.

In general, rolling back FDR's policies is not a net change.

MM would probably say that conservatives don't have ideals. They talk in terms of ideals because they don't know how else to fight progressives who have ideals. Or because they have been infected with progressive ideologies. I believe that free trade and the free market are Whig ideas. Certainly they were in the 19th century, though if you trace them to the French, they no longer fit in the Tory/Whig divide.

I suspect that this subject matter would do a better job at teaching reading comprehension and critical thinking than covering historical literature would anyway, at least if the students have already done analysis of historical literature in some previous semester.

The reason this doesn't happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum

I'd say that anti-racism was very much part of the curriculum at my schools. It wasn't until college that it got past "racism is bad, read these books about growing up discriminated against," and reached the point of "these are some of the ongoing issues regarding race relations today on which there is actual public disagreement, here are some sources to inform your position on them," but I did have one class which covered racial issues in this way (among other issues) which was a required course.

I don't know to what extent my education was atypical, only that the schools I attended up to high school were pretty good as far as public schools go.

That's too simplistic IMO... I think it's more a desire to avoid "politicizing education", and people not making sufficiently convincing arguments in favour of its inclusion, rather than just terrible people having power.

YMMV, in my experience anti-racism is, in fact, on the curriculum (I'm Irish) and most people don't see themselves as belonging to the group "sexists" which must be defended (am I strawmanning you here?)

From my wife:

I learned many interesting and useful things from my Women's Studies class, and am glad I decided to try it out. However, I became a pariah when I questioned the professor's account of sexism in biology textbooks. "Eggs are portrayed as passive, while sperm compete to reach them." In my experience, textbooks say what actually happens in the reproductive system, with no sexism to be found. She stuck to her guns. It was unfortunate that she used that example, because there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications.

And back to me:

Just thought it would be useful to provide an example of a questionable claim. She says other people in the class hated her for pointing it out.

Agreed.

To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women's Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women's Studies on these grounds.

However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.

I certainly had much less empathy a few years ago, prior to paying attention to these kind of posts. I wasn't aware how common the former kind of experience was, and I didn't notice (and still don't) a lot of the latter kind.

Not sure about definitive, but it seems to be complete.

F:E is surprisingly, serious, gritty, and well-written. It's also longer than War and Peace.

Not exhaustive, but "friends for which liking awesome things is not a handicap" is a good start.

People get envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier that they ((possibly incorrectly) think they) are? I had thought of that... as a joke, but it hadn't occurred to me to take that seriously. (Wait, why does my brain think that what's funny cannot be plausible? It must be that, since if an idea is neither funny nor plausible I forget it shortly after hearing/thinking it, within the pool of ideas I do remember, being funny does negatively correlate with being plausible due to Berkson's paradox. Or something like that.) I'm thinking of how to test for this. (If this were right, women who think are ugly would object to such pictures more often than those who don't; also, objecting to such pictures wouldn't correlate much with religiosity, unless for some reason religious people are more likely to think they're ugly. Neither of these seems to be the case IME, but the sample size is small, I cannot always be sure whether someone thinks they're ugly, etc.) I do have a feeling that if I thought I was much uglier than I actually think I am, seeing pictures of half-naked sexy men would bother me much more, but I'm very bad at guessing what my feelings would be in counterfactual situations. (Hey, I do know a version of me with something like body dysmorphia -- that's myself from two years ago! Unfortunately, I can't remember any specific instance of seeing such a picture back then, and also I have changed in lots of other ways too so even if I could there would still be huge confounders.)

Another hypothesis is that one version is more offensive than the gender-reversed version because it's more common. Maybe I'm not bothered by pictures of sexy men because I don't see them that often, but I would get fed of them if I saw them several times a day; and maybe certain women are annoyed by pictures of sexy women because they see them all the time, but they wouldn't be if they only saw them a couple times a month.

Edit: OTOH, “just because you are right doesn't mean I am wrong”, i.e. it could still be that each of several causes plays a substantial role. What I've observed so far seems compatible with a model where that indignation is caused by:

1. a cached thought that erotica is undignified, originating from earlier, pruder times, most prevalent among religious/traditionalist/low-Openness people because that's the kind of people who hold onto cached thoughts from long ago; ISTM that this affects pictures of females more often than pictures of males (but I might be wrong about that). Often played for laughs;
2. people who think they are ugly getting envious when they see a picture of someone much sexier than they think they are. According to you it's more common among females, which seems plausible enough to me (though it's not like males talk to me that often about whether or not they think they're sexy, so I dunno); and
3. annoyance of people seeing something they're not interested in (e.g. sexy pictures of females, in the case of straight females or gay males) popping onto their news feed over and over again. Also happens with other stuff, e.g. football or gossip about celebrities.

Hypothesis: Body dysmorphia for men is only starting to become a serious problem. Wait a generation or so.

“A generation” might be an overestimation. A few hours ago, a Facebook page in Italian about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth” published a status “let's tell our gym-going friends that it's cold on Facebook too”, it's been liked by 81 people so far a sizeable fraction of whom are male, someone (using a gender-neutral pseudonym, but with a male cartoon character as profile picture) commented complaining about an “exponential” increase of pictures and videos of people in underwear, and that comment has been liked by 6 people so far of whom 4 males.

EDIT: I commented “Envy?”, and my profile picture is bare-chested. Let's see how many flames I'll get. (For all I'm concerned, if you're the kind of person who resents cynicism, you do not subscribe a page about “destroying other people's dreams by exposing the objective truth”.)

It does bother me in Real Life, what I'm not sure of is whether it should bother me in fiction.

I would argue that most proponents of this argument do not grok much of mathematics, or at least are inappropriately compartmentalizing.

Sum total differences as single absolute numbers over wide populations are poorly suited to context-sensitive power valuations (judged in terms of available game-theoretic actions and the expected utility results) in individual situations like those statements or the examples in the grandparent.

They may have a point in that when there exists and expected power differential the (A set / B set) reversal technique is not valid, but their actual arguments usually break down when there are four armed women and two hungry men on an otherwise-deserted island with only one line of communication with the outside world (controlled by the women) given a typical patriarchal society in the outside world. Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.

Sometimes, when mentally gender-reversing a situation in my mind, some part of my brain pops up and says, “But... $stereotype_about_men, whereas $stereotype_about_women!”. I try to ignore it because the stereotypes are often wrong. (E.g. the slut-shaming one: IIRC, a survey --with WEIRD sample, but people I interact with are also usually WEIRD anyway-- found that

1. people who frown upon sexually promiscuous women, but not upon sexually promiscuous men,
2. people who frown upon sexually promiscuous men, but not upon sexually promiscuous women,
3. people who do both, and
4. people who do neither

comprise more or less 10%, 10%, 40% and 40% of the population respectively, and IME that's not obviously wrong.)

I use Unicode characters for superscript numerals (on an Italian keyboard under Ubuntu it's AltGr-1 and AltGr-2), four hyphens for the horizontal rule, and regular Markdown for lists (1., 2. etc.).

Which is strange, since we all know that no woman could enjoy a show with an all-male cast ...

This was ironic - a lot of shows have predominantly-male casts, yet women are somehow able to enjoy mass media.

That's not to say i doesn't cause problems, of course, but the empathy gap is not so large as to estroy viewing pleasure.

More socially acceptable is part of the problem-- a man who says he didn't want advances from/sex with a woman who's at least reasonable attractive will mostly be told he doesn't appreciate his good luck.

I don't know quite how relevant and which way the causal arrows are pointing, but this seems to add up somehow with the fact that on average women get more dates and more mates than men, explained by the phenomenon that fewer men date and mate way more women. It also seems to clash up weird with the social notion that women should be more selective of their partners while men should go for whatever's hottest or, failing that, available. (terminology intentionally representative of what I perceive to be social norm)

They exist, but it's like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.

On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.

When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I'm committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. "Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?" There don't seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.

Even if instead of 99.9% Emile had said 95%, he would still have a point.

I'd think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality, so I'm not sure that's relevant in this thread's context; physically ambiguous sex would certainly be a reason to be cautious about assuming gender! I'm having a hell of a time finding consistent prevalence data for psychological transsexuality, though; estimates seem to vary from 1 in 21000 to around one in 500 (taking the low estimate in the latter because it seems to be running on MtF numbers, which appear to skew a bit higher).

That's not even the worst possibility-- a racist may resent black people who are smarter than they "ought" to be.

This is what I was criticizing:

Until the child tells you their gender identity, don't assume it matches their body

learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.

BTW, by "assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry" I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: "pink brain blue brain" by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google "baby Storm" for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)

What's your distinction between upset and angry?

There's not as much reason to pay attention to statistical reasoning when we have insight into causal mechanisms. Particularly when our knowledge of the causal mechanisms suggests that the statistical results are very susceptible to misleading interpretations.

Incidentally we have essentially perfect insight into the causal mechanisms of what makes a number prime, and yet this sort of reasoning is spectacularly successful:

Cramer's random model of the primes asserts, roughly speaking, that the primes behave as if every large integer n had an independent probability of 1 / log(n) of being prime (as predicted by the prime number theorem).

Referring to them by gendered pronouns, basically.

1. How does treating a child as genderless help if they prove to be transexual?

2. Surely this is covered by "not enforcing stereotypes"?

3. I don't follow.

These ground rules seem reasonable.

In general when people say "I want to tell you something, but you have to promise not to get angry/offended/etc.", my response is along the lines of:

"I can't and won't promise that. I do promise that I will make an effort to temper any knee-jerk reaction I might have, and to give thought to your words and to my response before I say anything. I try to do this in all of my interactions with people whom I respect, but in this case I promise to make a special effort."

And if that's not good enough... well, then it seems my interlocutor doesn't care that much about telling me whatever it is they wish to tell me.

Notice how I DON'T AT ALL say the types of ultimatums you seem to think I said.

I think the confusion comes from your use of the phrase "Crocker's Rules" in the explanation (the word "Crocker" shows up twice; I'm referring to the second time). If what you meant was "these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post," then you should have just said that.

As it is, the warning seems incoherent, because you refer to a known concept (Crocker's Rules) incorrectly. When I first read it, the impression I got was that we could respond to the anonymous anecdotes without any consideration for politeness, which seemed really bizarre.

It was especially bizarre because, for this post at least, there doesn't seem to be anything about LW in particular. There's just a reasonable explanation of inferential distance and anecdotes about people being mistreated in their day to day lives to lower that distance.

I thought that my last examples were, respectively, a fair paraphrasing of social consequences for not respecting the warning and a fair desugaring of your original statment when "Crocker's rules" is tabooed. However, this is not the first time I have been accused of putting words into others' mouths, so I will provisionally accept that I have acted rudely.

I am sorry that I misrepresented your position, and misrepresented it to your disadvantage. My prior comment is retracted.

(not disagreeing, but note that I'm not saying the statement isn't problematic, merely saying that some objections are better than others)

Your mom and I just had sex on the living room couch. What's sex? Well...

Why? I was under the impression that not telling children about sex was usually the result of an emotional hangup on the part of the parents and/or a culturally cached thought that originally arose from the “sex is dirty” meme from the medieval/early modern Christianity memeplex (possibly both things reinforcing one another), rather than a rational expectation that the child would be worse off if they knew about sex based on any kind of actual evidence. Am I wrong? (How common is that taboo among non-European-derived cultures?)

•Let's learn about the history of torture! Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from. Or poverty!

I don't think this example is in the same class as the other ones...as in, there's a certain age at which I would think that it is a good idea to tell your child, at the very least, that torture/factory farming/poverty exist. Preferably in a "let's think of something small that you could do about nasty situation XYZ" format. I wouldn't recommend telling 4-year-olds about these things-they aren't at an age to understand them-but 10-11 year olds is a different story. To do otherwise is to raise children to unconsciously ignore these issues, as most adults do. These issues exist.

Even if it the cooking and cleaning statement were epistemically true, it is not instrumentally rational to tell this to your child if your goal is to have her grow into an independent adult who can support herself, and does not feel bound by the "traditional" gender roles (which are falling out of favor anyway).

Indeed. But why suppose those goals? I would value my daughter's happiness above her being independent and untraditional, in part because the former seems absolute while the latter two seem relational. When there are conflicting goals, all we can discuss are the empirical results of polices, and it's not clear to me that this is a case where accomplishing goals and speaking the truth conflict.

All of those examples are cases of the hearer being insufficiently intelligent, insufficiently sane, or insufficiently mentally developed, and thus not equipped to hear truth-statements without taking unreasonable offense. Into which of those categories do you think the women on LW fall...? I'm going to guess "none of the above". But that leaves you with an absence of examples that actually support your point.

Also: the empirical statement "making this statement will probably lead to this-and-such bad outcome for me" is not equivalent to the value judgment "this statement is offensive [to this-and-such part of my audience]".

When epistemic rationality is counter to instrumental rationality

See also Bostrom (2011).

Or how about I tell you about factory farming and where your hamburger came from.

As a vegetarian, I am obligated to point out that you shouldn't have to hide torture from your kids because there shouldn't be torture. How would you like it if it turned out that your car was secretly powered by a forsaken child, but the government covered it up because it might make you depressed? You wouldn't thank them for protecting your mental health, you would condemn them for allowing a horrible injustice to continue by suppressing the populace's natural horror.

Ahem.

You're absolutely right, concealing lovecraftian mindbreaking knowledge is a good thing, because duh. Thank you for pointing this out, it's easy to forget "what we should say" is not the same as "what we should believe".

No, that's a horrid drawing. I can't tell at all what it is. I could do better in 5 seconds. I will probably throw it away as soon as you forget about it.

Man, except for the 'I could do better' part (I can't), I tell my kid this all the time.

I completely accept that the father's statement was framed poorly and that he should have been more tactful and diplomatic, but that seems like a relatively minor misdemeanor and is also unrelated to the points raised in your original comment.

I am going to stand by my basic claim that rationalists should try to build an environment where people can make statements about their perceptions of reality without fear of social repercussions.

The slander/libel case seems instructive: truth is an absolute defense against the accusation of slander or libel; it's the falsehood of a slanderous statement that harms.

Shouting the times-tables is a problem because of the delivery mechanism, not the content. Shouting anything at the top of your lungs for an hour in a public space is harmful to bystanders, and as you said, "offensive" is not what is wrong here.

"I fucked your mom", if true, is only potentially offensive for something like the following reasons:

• Swearing in polite company is frowned upon; "I had sex with your mother" is qualitatively different despite having the same content.
• It's an implication of promiscuity (or low selectiveness of sexual partners) on the part of the target's mother, and our society's views on sexuality derogate promiscuity, turning this empirical statement into an insult. Arguably, this is a problem with society's views on sexuality ("slut shaming"), rather than the fact that informing someone about their sexual encounters with that person's mother is inherently offensive.

In short, I don't think I buy your claim that "Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive." At least, I'd like to see it supported better before I consider it. This isn't simply contrarianism; I think that the ability and right to say true things regardless of whether someone finds those truths unpleasant is extremely important, and social norms to the contrary should not be adopted or perpetuated lightly.