I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

by tullianus • 11 years ago

46 9 11 years ago

ggchappell• 11 years ago

Fantasic article! Lots of interesting thoughts.

Rather lengthy, though, isn't it? I feel that, lurking somewhere in this enormous stream-of-consciousness essay, there is a post about 1/2 the length that could become a truly classic blog post.

jqm• 11 years ago

well, you could do what I did and only read half of it....

saurik• 11 years ago

I enjoyed the first half. Near the end, when he started talking about LessWrong (he had done it earlier, but I didn't know "LW" was an acronym) it became clear he was misrepresenting himself as blue and was in fact grey: a lot of people who are grey assume they are related to red, and so when you go to find grey you pick apart red, but that viewpoint also shares a lot with blue, which is why his earlier attempt to fix the political skew in the user surveys, a strategy that only seemed to try to recount reds, failed to discover what I would personally assume, which is that the website has very few actual blues.

He also started railing on specific behaviors in the second half, behaviors he was doing himself in the article, something he thankfully noticed and commented on, but then did not defend, other than to use the same excuses he said were flawed earlier: failing to realize the audience of people who read this website are also mostly grey; the only people reading his articles who are blue are people who got linked to the blog for the first time, or (as in my case), got tricked by a compelling hook. (I read this article due to the comment here by someone about "that's not how dark matter worked", and then stayed as I was excited to read an article that sounded sort of grey but was supposedly written by a blue.)

Maybe humorously, I believe the persistent issues he seems to have with people "misinterpreting" him are actually coming from this same source: people who are blue occasionally read his comments for various reasons, realize he's grey, and then complain about various things he's saying by using words like "feminist" as short-hand for blue. In practice, all of my friends who are grey run into the same issues with the things that they say, and honestly it has been harder and harder for me to keep arguing with them as opposed to just giving up and reinforcing my bubble (which I really don't want to do: I even have tried to notice the dumb things I do that turn off reds and have attempted to fix those).

The only real "point" made in the later part of the article is to try to claim red and blue are equivalently dumb (a very grey thing to do ;P) by drawing an analogy from party dynamics to religious persecution. However, despite claiming earlier that he understood that absolute effect is not a good proxy for whether something is a problem or not (when he said he understood racism was worse than partyism), he somehow managed to entirely ignore that he found in his own terminology an objective moral advantage for blue vs. red: that blue only hated red, while red (by his own admittance one paragraph earlier) was causing collateral damage to people who weren't even in the silly color battle.

So yeah: while I am concerned that this article's terminology actually will reinforce a core problem rather than helping in any way (I didn't have a good way to talk about grey before other than "LessWrongers", which I realize is as useless as calling reds "white men"), I am having some fun using these words, and am finding it useful to try to divorce my mental categorizations of people from random incorrect labels, and thereby recommend others read at least the first half. Whether you read the second half or not is less interesting unless you need a concrete example of the problem and love the idea of seeing situations like this "go meta". It is probably the case that jqm's strategy was actually the correct one here, and I doubt shortening the post (I actually liked its verbosity) would fix the internal issues.

Trombone122• 11 years ago

Yeah, and also 5/6-ths of it is this very long construction and then criticism of some imagined social groups. He could have skipped the entire definition of blue and red groups except for naming them and the piece would not loose any of its solidity.

But I guess for the final point to have any punch, you do however need quite a bit of the uninteresting middle. Certainly that seems to be his conclusion, since he left so much of it in.

Trombone122• 11 years ago

That is not how dark matter works at all!! Its sole defining property is that it is really crappy at interacting with things! Its not going to form planets! GAH!!! <rant/>

DougMerritt2• 11 years ago

Traditional anthropological ingroups and outgroups are defined by "random" characteristics: ethnicity, language, religion, dress, etc.

Many previous well-known essays and studies have pointed out that the primary difference between Blue and Red is that they perceive ethics (not just ingroup traditions/taboos/etc. and folkways) differently.

In the modern day, if not the past, we can tolerate outgroups that have different taboos (eating shellfish), have different mandatory standards of politeness (bowing, formal versus informal address to seniors and strangers), etc.

In the modern day we have narrowed down the set of things where it is acceptable to take the high moral ground on differences.

It's no longer ok to hate (or even disapprove) on the basis of differences in ethnicity, language, religion, etc.

But there are still other morals; for most Reds it's acceptable to disapprove various things that have become unacceptable to disapprove to Blues, and both parties regard the other side as immoral on those points.

I fault the current article for not taking into account those past essays and studies.

convexfunction• 11 years ago

Whether or not a thing falls under the domain of "morality" is a function of many arguments--it depends on the thing itself, as well as who, where, and when you are.

Do you really think that historically, people who hated their outgroup had the thought "outgroup is bad because they have slightly different folkways and speak another language" in their heads? It always gets cast as an issue of morality. Always. You identify the outgroup by their folkways and language (we're no different there), but it always get rationalized as some irreconcilable difference in something that's extremely important ("morality").

DougMerritt2• 11 years ago

You are in violent agreement with what I said. I rewrote it several times before posting to make sure that I didn't fall into that trap.

I basically said that the number of things considered acceptable to be moral about has decreased, and that the current set is different between Blues and Reds.

always gets cast as an issue of morality. Always.

That is a laughable overstatement. There are always some people who are happy to hate without any rationalization for it.

You're merely talking about the times that people stop and rationalize it.

I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)

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