A Rational Education

Is there any evidence that merely pursing yoga causes people to have better materialistic theories of mind? I am very skeptical that it leads to experiment!

I think you are saying that these are all good avenues to know thyself, but people compartmentalize so much that I think you really have to say that explicitly.

We're much better in this crowd at overcoming the surface manifestations of self-deception promoting processes than we are at resisting self-deception.

Yet another example of Goodhart's Law, no? How does one defend against that? If self-deception usually operates below our conscious radar, then you usually have to shine conscious attention on it in order to notice it, and I assume you have to be able to notice it in order to fight it. But if rewarding oneself for successfully focusing conscious attention on self-deception, over time, inevitably makes one aware primarily of only the surface manifestations of self-deception, then attempting to increase one's focus on self-deception is largely futile. I really don't know what to suggest, but I urgently want a strategy.

for instrumental rationality the optimal courses are dance, yoga, and above all acting.

Let's say acting is a useful dark art. What on earth does that have to do with yoga or dancing? Yoga tends to improve my posture and breathing and calm, but those aren't dark arts; those are purely defensive light arts. They make me less susceptible to stress and panic, but not necessarily better able to mislead or manipulate people. Dancing, on a very, very, very good day makes me more sexually attractive, but surely you're not suggesting that the key to epistemic rationality is to seduce one's ideological opponents on the dance floor? I'm more than a bit confused, here.

Also, there's little virtue in not using abilities you don't have on moral grounds

There's some virtue in not acquiring those abilities if you think there's no decent use for them.

Very seriously, those who relinquish the known dark arts will invent their own path to the abyss, a path without the protective guard-rails and warning signs worked out by billions of predecessors. We end up self-deceiving in unusual ways, but predictable ways for someone who has met enough rationalists.

Examples for both?

Do you find that all influential people use what rationalists would call Dark Arts? Do you think that there's such a thing as influence which tends to make people more clear-headed?

One predictable way I have seen many rationalists (including myself) deceive themselves is by flooding their working memory and confusing themselves. They do this via nitpicking, pursuing arguments and counter-arguments in a rabbit hole depth-first fashion and neglecting other shallower ones, using long and grammatically complex sentences, etc. There are many ways. All you have to do is to ensure that you max out your working memory, which then makes you less able to self-monitor for biases.

How do you counter this? Do note that arguments are not systematically distributed wrt. their complexity. So it's just best to stick to simple arguments which you can fully comprehend, and with some working memory capacity to spare.

I wouldn't say dancing, yoga or acting classes qualify for the 'dark arts' title. If I want to see the dark arts I'll study debating, law or PR.

Also, the main defense against dark arts IS dark arts.

What gets even more interesting is that the most powerful counters to dark arts are not dark arts but are what will usually be described as 'evil' (things like murder, for example).

And let's not forget that the Dark Arts were originally just "Battle Magic," a lot more practical and less ominous-sounding...

SarahC:

The thing is, "space alien" thought experiments are very hard to do, given that we're not space aliens,

That is undoubtedly true. I certainly don't claim that my views on these matters are entirely free of bias and emotional investment. However, a claim that I would be ready to defend is that there are particular conclusions that would be made, or at least considered plausible, by an ideal detached observer, but whose mere mention provokes virtually unanimous hostility from feminists. At least in principle, one doesn't have to be an ideal detached observer across the board to form correct judgments of this sort in particular cases.

and they have come out both ways -- read Joanna Russ for speculative, "alien's-eye" fiction about gender that comes out very feminist.

I am curious about this. Which particular works would you recommend?

The closest thing to a genuine "alien's-eye" view of gender and society would have to come from people who perceive both gender and society very differently: perhaps autistics or the transgendered or intersex. Even there it's shaky.

The transgendered or intersex have more reason to be biased, not less. The very core of their identity is at stake!

magfrump said:

In general, I shared this perspective (which I interpret as: skeptical of feminism, thinking of it as identity politics) before: (a) meeting feminist studies majors and (b) taking feminist studies classes.

I share wedrifid's opinion on feminism and feminist studies. Yet I have also taken feminist studies classes, and my experiences also overlap with yours, though I had significant experience with feminism prior to taking those classes which undoubtedly colored my judgment. I will briefly outline the development of my views around gender politics:

• As a teenager, I started out with feminist intuitions, believing that feminism could do no wrong.

• I got into pickup, and I read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell. My experience as a shy, romantically-challenged, gender non-conforming young man, combined with Farrell's book and the arguments of the pickup and seduction community, led to a perspective on gender politics that became increasingly different from feminism. Feminists emphasized the oppression of women and "male privilege." I could see these phenomena, but I also say phenomena that looked pretty clearly like male oppression and "female privilege," which feminists didn't seem to talk about.

• I read more books, such as Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson and Young, and Heterophobia by Daphne Patai. I started discussing feminism on the internet, yet my interactions with feminists on blogs taught me very fast that many feminists have trouble defending certain ideas in feminism, and have a low tolerance for criticism of their ideas. My agreement with a larger segment of feminist positions didn't matter; unless I accepted certain concepts (e.g. "male privilege") and embedded assumptions, I was treated like an outgroup member, regardless of how civil or reasonable I tried to be.

• I came to believe that ideological and biased thinking was highly prevalent in feminism. Yet I found that many critiques of feminism, were also biased and wrong. For example, the Men's Rights Movement criticizes feminism in many areas, yet it also sometime replicates some of the errors of feminism, such as playing fast and loose with the facts to support ideological positions. I started a blog on feminism with a couple other people to have a critical, but fair evaluation of the movement: FeministCritics.org.

In college, I took several feminist studies courses. Although I had a lot of negative experiences with feminism prior to these courses, I tried to counteract my biases. I tried really hard to like feminism.

My experience with feminism in real life was much more positive than my experience with feminists on the internet. I had a lot of fun, and made several new friends. I got one B+, and several As, in these courses (these grades serve as evidence that I understand a lot of the basics of feminist theory). I voiced a lot of agreement with certain feminist positions, and I also managed to raise a few objections to feminist ideas in classes and in papers. Most of these objections were heard and treated respectfully, though I did not try to insist on them in a way that would take up lots of class time. I did get one D on a paper in one class, where the professor didn't seem to understand my objection to some ideas in the reading, and said that I had "failed to engage with the reading" (I toed the party-line better in subsequent assignments, and got an A in the class). Other papers I wrote were on the similarities between misogyny and misandry, and the seduction community. I recently posted one of my old feminist studies papers that I got on A on to my blog.

Feminists I encountered in real life seemed a lot more open to new ideas. Perhaps real life led to less polarized communication than the internet. Also, feminists who are motivated to talk about it on the internet may be more convinced by it and treat it more as an ideology. "Real life" feminists seemed a lot more open to considering notions-that-should-be-compatible-with-feminist-theory-but-are-treated-as-politically-incorrect, like the oppression of men, sexism towards men, and female privilege; they haven't yet learned that these things aren't supposed to exist, according to academic feminism. (Though I did have a brief disagreement with another student during a feminist studies class who claimed that women are oppressed, but that bad stuff that happens to men does not qualify as "oppression.") I also found that some feminist students were open to hearing about men's experiences and perspectives, and consider them evidence of problems in society, just as feminism treats women's experiences as evidence of problems in society.

Even though I had a better experience with "real life feminists" in women's studies than with "internet feminists," my conceptual criticisms of feminism weren't alleviated by experiences in feminist studies, and some were intensified. I've read several books which criticize women's studies and academic feminism, such as Professing Feminism by Daphe Patai, the aforementioned Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson and Young, Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Bricmont (an excellent rationality text), and Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt. My experiences with feminist studies weren't quite as bad as what they describe, but there was definitely overlap. Here are a couple examples that stand out in my memory:

• On the first day of Feminist Studies 101, the professor handed out the syllabus, and said that this class would proceed from the assumption that (1) women are oppressed in society, and (2) this oppression is unjust and should be remedied. Here's how the syllabus put it:

This course embarks from a few key feminist assumptions: women’s and men’s lives are thoroughly gendered, gendered dynamics of power and inequality are reproduced in and through other forms of difference (class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, religion, disability and so on), and such social inequality is unjust.

Whenever I debated feminists online, couldn't defend their foundational terms and assumptions, and would resort to saying "go take Feminism 101." So I did... yet, the premises of feminist thought were really explained and justified there either, but rather assumed.

• I saw denials of biology several times. In a couple classes, I heard the claim that not just gender, but sex (i.e. division into male and female) and sexual orientation were socially constructed. The notion that sex is a social construction can only be created by a lot of sleight of hand that I won't get into right now (but see this critique of Anne Fausto-Sterling).

As for sexual orientation being socially constructed, I have a funny story. The queer professor in my masculinity and feminist theory class claimed that sexual orientation is "socially constructed." A student objected, saying something like "well, I'm queer, and I've heard a lot of queer people say that they feel like they are born that way... isn't biology a factor?" The professor brushed off this objection and maintained that homosexuality is socially-constructed, marginalizing the experience of this student, many queer people, not to mention a lot of scientific research and queer history. During the break in the class period, the student thanked the professor and walked out of the class never to return, but not before I befriended her at the water fountain and told her she was my hero.

...continued

Looking forward to your post, magfrump! As a person who doubts that most social scientists have the inclination and ability to practice their craft from an ideologically-neutral vantage point, I am always interested in projects that attempt to correct the biases of scientists. Feminist theory sometimes holds itself out as such a project, but, as you point out, some feminist rhetoric simply comes off as anti-science, and not as "anti-scientism." Thus, I eagerly await your identification of some parts of feminist theory that do not share this flaw.

I should add that I would never recommend anyone attend feminism classes until they have developed the psychological maturity required to resist threat of shaming as a dominant factor in forming their beliefs about reality.

Expanding on my earlier suggestion that it is best to form an understanding of evolutionary psychology before immersing oneself in to feminist studies, I suggest that the critical indicator of whether you are ready to extract the most insight from the "Feminism and Science" subject is when you are able to explain the evolutionary psychological reasons why there is no male counterpart for the 'feminist' movement. If you will, why there is a "her" but neither a "him" nor an "er".

I mentioned that I have done previous studies in education. As one would expect in a postgraduate teaching degree there was a disproportionate number of Arts graduates among my peers, including not a few feminism majors. (What else does an Arts degree with one of the non practical majors qualify you for?) In my experience I was able to get along well with that subset who a) had left behind the raw idealism of a first year student and b) appreciated the fact that I had the same pride in my own masculine identity that they had in their femininity. In such cases I was able to have sometimes heated but always respectful and informative conversations on their course related ideas.

I think the problem is not with feminism, but with noisy feminists: the ones that you hear about the most are often highly irrational. My source of info in this is largely Blank Slate by Pinker.

It's a type of availability bias where the biased person is largely not at fault. Pinker did point to quite a few feminists of very apparently sound mind.

I'll allow any definition of 'reality' in most cases. But when you say "carving reality at it's joints" you are engaging with a specific concept, one that you cannot merely redefine away. This difference is exactly the sort of thing that studying linguistics can help one understand. It's the difference between "just my point of view" and "wrong".

But note that being a good researcher does not automatically translate to also being a good teacher. I'd put less emphasis on how many citations they have and more on how good they are at actually teaching.

To find out how good someone is at teaching, you can use a resource like http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ (if you live in the right country, which I don't) or simply ask around.

:) I was hoping a gentle jest would extract more free advice out of you.

I'd appreciate this. I've got a family member on a lot of pain meds.

Personally, I learn faster studying on my own than by listening to 90% of lectures.

Listening? Who said anything about listening? Lectures are just a way to schedule times for independent study, keep tabs on any critical announcements and complete assignments for unrelated subjects as necessary.