Let me teach you a nonstandard dirty rhetorical trick: People really don't like to admit that they have done something morally bad, so it is *really* useful to argue in such a way that they can cast their behaviour as an honest mistake.
A lot of the time when trying to untangle concepts or explain issues, I ignore the fact that a lot of the behaviour in the relevant space is bad faith. This is me using that trick.
I don't do this unless I think it's plausible that there is also confused usage / honestly mistaken behaviour out there, but by framing mistakes as the main problem rather than ethics, I give people the ability to save face as they mend their ways.
I rarely expect people will mend their ways as a result of this unless they were actively mistaken, but it removes a way to derail the conversation, and gives people who were genuinely mistaken a way to change behaviour. This shifts the norms, removing plausible deniability.
Treating people as having the potential to be better than they are is almost always a good move, and will often cause them to rise to the occasion - sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly.
This doesn't of course apply to landlords (and only applies partly to bosses) because you don't actually have enough power over them to get them to change their behaviour through rhetoric in the first place.
People always lie about appropriate social norms because they omit the step where you're supposed to read their mind and based on the information revealed to you there do the thing that they wanted.
This isn't even exaggeration. The social norm really is that you're supposed to read people's minds, because neurotypicals are under the mistaken impression that they can do that, and as a result are under the mistaken impression that what they want is obvious.
Ought doesn't imply can, it just implies that other people believe you can.
For reasons I might be less likely to want to tweet controversial things right now and so might stick to sensible safe topics for a while.
...
No, fuck that, lets do a thread about sexuality hacking.
By "sexuality hacking" I mean anything you do to yourself to try and change your sexual interests. I'm almost exclusively interested in *broadening* sexual interests - I don't think narrowing them is desirable, and I suspect if it's possible then it's intrinsically traumatic.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: Nobody under any circumstances has any obligation to change their sexuality. I do not believe you can coerce people into doing this, and you shouldn't try because it's horribly unethical. This is for self-directed consensual use.
91. Which fictional characters would you love to be if ethics permitted you? What needs are you failing to express as a result of holding on to those ethical constraints?
92. What do people tell you about yourself that you refuse to believe? What does not believing that protect you from?
93. What things in your life do you not feel allowed to complain about?
In the context I saw this, it was being painted as a gendered difference. I think it is, but not for the reasons people are treating it as.
The actual reason is that we've put the boundaries of "thinking" in the wrong place.
We tend to only consider it "thinking" if you're doing it on your own off in your own head, but almost everything you do involves thinking, and many other modes of thinking succeed even by the standards you'd want to judge "real thinking" by, they just seem less legitimate.
Idle thought: We were talking about how Less Wrong had a lot (though a minority) of people from less savoury parts of the internet, but that's... actually very good? Less Wrong is actually a great community of last resort because it does genuinely make its members better.
The core LW worldview is not one I would particularly endorse, but honestly most people don't end up staying there. A lot of people seem to have become much healthier and more complete human beings as a result of joining LW, taking on board its worldview, and building on it.
And actually that is exactly the sort of site we want more of on the internet.