(15:45) But the main thing is they’re just giving this overwhelmingly skewed view of the world. And what’s the skew exactly? The obvious one, which I will definitely defend, is an overwhelming left-wing view of the world. Basically, the woke Western view is what you get out of almost all media. Even if you’re reading media in other countries, it’s quite common: the journalists in those other countries are the most Westernised, in the sense of they are part of the woke cult. So there’s that. That’s the one that people complain about the most, and I think those complaints are reasonable. But long before anyone was using the word “woke,” there’s just a bunch of other big problems with the news. The negativity bias: bad, bad, bad, sad, sad, sad, angry, angry, angry.
This wasn’t in the context of civil rights or feminism being discussed, and I couldn’t find any other instances where that was the case. Rob doesn’t comment on the “woke” bit here one way or another, and doesn’t laugh during these paragraphs. So unless there’s an example I missed, I think this characterization is incorrect.
posts on LessWrong talking about foetus’s sentience without mentioning ONCE reproductive rights
This is probably an example of decoupling vs contextualizing norms clashing, but I don’t think I see anything wrong here. Whether or not a fetus is sentient is a question about the world with some correct answer. Reproductive rights also concern fetuses, but don’t have any direct bearing on the factual question; they also tend to provoke heated discussion. So separating out the scientific question and discussing it on its own seems fine.
It is certainly my own fault for not immediately noting down when this happened; might have been an EA-adjacent media.
As for the reproductive rights I disagree. They provoke heated discussion specifically because this is highly important to those it directly concerns, women, because they are the one losing control over their lives if these rights are suppressed. If men were the ones directly affecting, e.g. losing control over their own body and lives, this would be much more mentioned here, but since EA is 70% male, it is not. Raising questions about foetus sentience is fine, but writing these posts without even a mention of reproductive rights hints towards using this thinking to legitimate what is currently happening with RoeVsWade.
It’s a classic EA thing: EAs that are not concerned at all by the topic (reproductive rights, poverty) talk about what to do on a topic without taking into account the perspective of those who actually deal with these issues. And here it was exactly that: a man who had the luxury to raise these questions because his life and body will never suffer of potential consequences of this post.
The results of this post is that talent, i.e. many women, is pushed away, because who wants to stay in a movement that doesn’t care at all about your opinions for things that concern you directly?
Two more nitpicky points:
A google search turned up one instance of a guest discussing wokeness, which was Bryan Caplan discussing why not to read the news:
This wasn’t in the context of civil rights or feminism being discussed, and I couldn’t find any other instances where that was the case. Rob doesn’t comment on the “woke” bit here one way or another, and doesn’t laugh during these paragraphs. So unless there’s an example I missed, I think this characterization is incorrect.
This is probably an example of decoupling vs contextualizing norms clashing, but I don’t think I see anything wrong here. Whether or not a fetus is sentient is a question about the world with some correct answer. Reproductive rights also concern fetuses, but don’t have any direct bearing on the factual question; they also tend to provoke heated discussion. So separating out the scientific question and discussing it on its own seems fine.
It is certainly my own fault for not immediately noting down when this happened; might have been an EA-adjacent media.
As for the reproductive rights I disagree. They provoke heated discussion specifically because this is highly important to those it directly concerns, women, because they are the one losing control over their lives if these rights are suppressed. If men were the ones directly affecting, e.g. losing control over their own body and lives, this would be much more mentioned here, but since EA is 70% male, it is not. Raising questions about foetus sentience is fine, but writing these posts without even a mention of reproductive rights hints towards using this thinking to legitimate what is currently happening with RoeVsWade.
It’s a classic EA thing: EAs that are not concerned at all by the topic (reproductive rights, poverty) talk about what to do on a topic without taking into account the perspective of those who actually deal with these issues. And here it was exactly that: a man who had the luxury to raise these questions because his life and body will never suffer of potential consequences of this post.
The results of this post is that talent, i.e. many women, is pushed away, because who wants to stay in a movement that doesn’t care at all about your opinions for things that concern you directly?
Men and women in the US have only recently (post 2020) started to differ by more than a small margin in their opinions on abortion for what it’s worth: https://news.gallup.com/poll/506759/broader-support-abortion-rights-continues-post-dobbs.aspx
Though that is certainly compatible with women caring more about the opinions on abortion they do hold.