Criticisms of LessWrong

While they have been, there is an entire field of philo from the 80s and 90s when i was in school, called "feminist ethics" that was NOT about feminism, but about bringing the stereotypical "female" view to philo. As that was the last time i've really read any modern philo, its' the term I'm stuck with.

Ah, so it was multiculturalist guff.

It was, and is, it's own thing. It was an is an attempt to balance the mind with the body. Which is important, I think. [1]

To me, what they are writing about cached thoughts is NOT priming. They are making an entire motif of something different. I've written it twice, adn lost it twice. But someday, some where, sometime... (ah, west side story).

No, i'll have my criticism up probably today or at latest, tomorrow. I honest to god took a picture of my frozen screen so i could just retype it, intead of rethink it.

5 more days till new computer arrives!!!!!!!!!!!

It seems fine to me -- not written like a technical psych paper of course but good enough. I guess I'll wait to see what you have to say. And now I've crossed two totally different threads of the conversation.

There's a difference between inclusion of women and just inverting sexist tropes, and this seems to smack of the latter to some degree to me considering that a number of the figures listed were also known to peddle myths about the Lost Eden of Feminism. And that's little more than Afrocentrism for women.

No, it's really quite different from that. I spent 3 or 4 year fighting the Golden Age for Women myth, with profs teaching Challace and the Blade.

This is really talking from very academic philo points of view, about the fact that for most of philo's history, the only way to look at ethics, the only *valued way* anyhow, was to use the mind. rationality. Kant and his great moral imperative.

Feminist ethics talks about starting with emotion, heart as a philo concept; looking at relationships and communication before title and talent. And as we were talking about in another thread, recognizing that what seems rational is often just a gut level instinct that is then "propped up" as rational. Because our minds far more often than not, leap to conclusions and then justify.

Most of the work that wasn't about specific women's issues, wound up in articles about health care, medical ethics in general, client based legal ethics (vs., law based legal ethics), as well as standard issues like abortion. The most famous abortion essay, that I can't now remember who wrote it, though i should know that like my own name, about the "man who wakes up with another human attached to him for life support" came directly out of this school of thought.

Ah, this chestnut.

Gimbutas has been more fashionable to cite these days than Chalice and the Blade, in my experience. I don't know how widespread such pseudo-scholarship is, but this sort of thing makes me skeptical of stuff coming out of women's studies departments when it crosses onto my "turf," i.e. cognitive science/psych and history (and OTOH, I am skeptical of sexist pseudo-psychology as you know). The pseudo-feminist Courage to Heal was probably one of the most dangerous books published "for" women in the past few decades.

I still don't see why this is specifically "feminist" ethics. Ethical philosophers going under the catch-all terms of "sentimentalists" and "moral skeptics" are nothing new. It sounds like your philosophy dep't was stuck in a positivist time warp. Even in the intro course, we did way more than Kant.

Remember, Neb, you are going to school in teh 2000's. I was going to school in the 1980s. The idea that there was any value to women, to their contributions in scholarship made me write as TS Lastname for my entire career. Why was this "feminist ethics?" cause it wasn't being address by anyone else. Cause it was a stance women were taking to make contributions. Cause the style of thought that women felt they were contributing was largely unnoticed. So you make a movement, and hope other people jump on board. I can assume the movement has grown up far beyond "feminist ethics", but that's what I was schooled in. Where I "run to mamma" as it were.

The funny thing I see, as an "old" lady, is watching the views from teh 80s be so radically different from today's writers, women or men. When Challace and Blade came out, you were not allowed to critize it, or you were "attacking women" or some such. I thought the whole "there was once this golden age where women ruled in peace and harmony" was bunk. It didn't match what we knew about the myths; it didn't match anthropology; it didn't match human nature (women are just as bitchy and controlling and war like as men in companies where they are on top). I wrote several undergraduate papers that attacked such things, only to get blasted by the grad students grading me. bleah.

But it's changing, fast. actually listening to your subject, and not objectifying him or her or "it" in the case of religion has changed everything. But all that took your academic ancestors lots of battles against idiots to get to. :-)

Sometimes young whippersnappers need things to be womynsplained to them, as it were. I don't know anyone who takes stuff like Chalice and the Blade seriously these days, outside of the sooper seekrit feminazi indoctrination camps of course.

Oh, and if you think trashing Chalice and the Blade is bad, try Courage to Heal. You're obviously just a shill for NAMBLA.

I don't think anyone does take it seriously now, no. Once someone actually had the balls to say "just cause we are pro women, doesn't mean we have to be STUPID about it", the gloves got taken off, and that whole movement was shown for what it was.

Courage to heal was one of the single most offensive books i have ever read skimmed. She's back with the "let's all be victims, it's easier that way" mentality. I mean, at least Dwarkin explained why everything in society was rape and how that changes, and makes it a challenge to change the world, not a right to say "I must have been raped, which explains why I am the way I am". And she has no real distinction between "I might be depressed" and I have real mental illness including clinical depression.

I take it back, it wasn't the most offensive. That right belongs to the chick from teh 80's who said that you thought yourself sick, and that if you accepted and loved various parts of yourself, you would get well. Gay men had AIDS, according to her, because they hated their sexual organs or some such. sighs......

It was also based on zero actual research, and recycled forgeries. Now that's scholarship.

Speaking of which, do we have an article on the goddess/ancient matriarchy nonsense? Neopaganism kind of touches on that, but it could be its own article.

oh, yes. we do indeed need that. :-) Cause it is quite different from neopaganism in its own way, especially with all the "research" nonsense.

As fascinating as this is, I really have to point out that I read that as "Dawkins" and did the absolute mother of all double takes.

I do that all the time. Dawkins wrote about rape???

Not that I'm aware of directly, but elevatorgate and all that.