I think it is largely due to the fact that a woman tried to share her personal experience and a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men decided to comment in not the very kind way. Calling someone who is talking about her very unpleasant experience a ‘bigot’ and seeing only comments about polyamory in a situation where women are made feel uncomfortable is plane sad to be diplomatic.
There were a lot of comments from a lot of women and men about a wide variety of topics brought up in the post. I strongly disagree that there were “only comments about polyamory” from “a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men”.
Would you mind pointing out where did I say “only comments” as opposed to “a lot of people”? Thank you! The point is that it’s not ok to silence and downvote women who share their personal experiences, it does not matter if a man or a woman does the silencing. And yes, making it all about monogamy vs polyamory is a distractor from the larger issue as well.
Would you mind pointing out where did I say “only comments”
Here:
The point is that it’s not ok to silence and downvote women who share their personal experiences
There’s a difference between silencing a woman for sharing her personal experience and disagreeing with object-level suggestions. What gave you the impression that she was being silenced?
For example, one comment said:
”I feel a little conflicted, because on the one hand I want to respect and make space for you reporting your own experience. On the other hand, you are actually making concrete suggestions that I don’t agree with—suggestions that would make my life, as a woman in EA, worse. So I don’t know how to respond.”
Every time I’ve seen someone make this same point on the forum about Emile Torres’ use of the “white supremacy” label they get net downvoted. A bit off topic, and I hesitate to bring it up because it’s not clear who specifically is implicated in inconsistency here, but I do notice a bias in the voting on comments like this in the different contexts that I think is worth pointing out. For my own part I guess I think the distinction matters denotationally at least but comes with costs in misleading connotation that usually makes it better to phrase things differently.
A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. “bigoted” and “bigot”, there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people.
(Posted under an anonymous account because I don’t want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)
I looked back at the specific instances I remembered of this, and they weren’t quite how I remembered. There were more instances that I don’t remember specific enough information about to find again, which makes linking to a source for my impression hard, but given how I misremembered the instances I could check up on specifically, I’m more generally suspicious of how well grounded my impression actually was. I still think a tendency of this sort exists to some extent, but I’m tentatively unendorsing my original comment.
I have detailed subject matter knowledge here (responding to “very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face”) and I thought the comments on poly were inappropriate and, only in so far as bigotted means “a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group”, bigoted. I did not say that because I did not want to be unkind but I was very unimpressed.
I think it is largely due to the fact that a woman tried to share her personal experience and a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men decided to comment in not the very kind way. Calling someone who is talking about her very unpleasant experience a ‘bigot’ and seeing only comments about polyamory in a situation where women are made feel uncomfortable is plane sad to be diplomatic.
There were a lot of comments from a lot of women and men about a wide variety of topics brought up in the post. I strongly disagree that there were “only comments about polyamory” from “a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men”.
Would you mind pointing out where did I say “only comments” as opposed to “a lot of people”? Thank you! The point is that it’s not ok to silence and downvote women who share their personal experiences, it does not matter if a man or a woman does the silencing. And yes, making it all about monogamy vs polyamory is a distractor from the larger issue as well.
Here:
There’s a difference between silencing a woman for sharing her personal experience and disagreeing with object-level suggestions. What gave you the impression that she was being silenced?
For example, one comment said:
”I feel a little conflicted, because on the one hand I want to respect and make space for you reporting your own experience. On the other hand, you are actually making concrete suggestions that I don’t agree with—suggestions that would make my life, as a woman in EA, worse. So I don’t know how to respond.”
(Monica, who wrote the comment, objects to conflation of calling a post bigoted and calling an individual a bigot)
The term ‘bigot’ is so vague and so loaded that I think it should be used with a lot of caution if used at all.
The comment on question referred to the post as “bigoted”, not the author as a “bigot”
Every time I’ve seen someone make this same point on the forum about Emile Torres’ use of the “white supremacy” label they get net downvoted. A bit off topic, and I hesitate to bring it up because it’s not clear who specifically is implicated in inconsistency here, but I do notice a bias in the voting on comments like this in the different contexts that I think is worth pointing out. For my own part I guess I think the distinction matters denotationally at least but comes with costs in misleading connotation that usually makes it better to phrase things differently.
A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. “bigoted” and “bigot”, there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people.
(Posted under an anonymous account because I don’t want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)
FYI, pretty sure Torres uses ‘they’: https://twitter.com/xriskology
Link?
I looked back at the specific instances I remembered of this, and they weren’t quite how I remembered. There were more instances that I don’t remember specific enough information about to find again, which makes linking to a source for my impression hard, but given how I misremembered the instances I could check up on specifically, I’m more generally suspicious of how well grounded my impression actually was. I still think a tendency of this sort exists to some extent, but I’m tentatively unendorsing my original comment.
That’s really impressive, love seeing people update their beliefs in real time
I have detailed subject matter knowledge here (responding to “very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face”) and I thought the comments on poly were inappropriate and, only in so far as bigotted means “a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group”, bigoted. I did not say that because I did not want to be unkind but I was very unimpressed.