brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

To be totally clear, I’m not saying that every moral concern in the present is unimportant because of how bad things used to be.  Stuff still matters.  I’m just saying that if we try to import any cultural elements from the past, we’d better be sure we’re not dragging an O(1) monstrosity out of the depths along with the change we actually want.  (Conservatism about conservatism: be careful when going backwards!)

Very few people want to “import from the past”; the contingent you argue with about that is really small. Most people are saying “That thing you are doing in the name of Positive-Affect Term Like ‘Equality’ is insane and causing nothing but destruction. Stop doing that.” 

Telling people who wrap themselves in positive-affect terms like ‘equality’ to stop doing insane and destructive things is not ‘going backwards’; to believe it is is to buy into the shit they shovel that makes them so destructive to begin with. Screaming about “cultural appropriation” is not on a continuum of nor is it a natural outgrowth of efforts to end racism by sane people, and stopping one does not oppose the other. 

We obviously have really different views and I don’t want to start a big thing about this; thankfully, I also don’t think this gap matters much for what I’m saying.

There really are people who want to import from the past – every old person who thinks things were better in the good old days, every person who romanticizes a particular historical time and place, everyone who has a hunch that modernity was a mistake.

What I’m saying is that the kind of issues you’re talking about consist of changing our position inside a little ball of radius ɛ which is way awesome for our objective function compared to every other place in the search space we’ve been.  We can argue about where in the ball we should be, but if we start saying things like “hey what if we just shift parameter x_122 back to what it was 200 years ago” we should remember that that would take us out of the ball and every time we’ve been out of the ball it has sucked horribly compared to being in the ball.

If you think the SJWs have gone too far, this argument has nothing to say to you, and we pass invisibly by one another; if you start talking about how rosy 1915 looks to you compared to 2015, even if only in certain respects, this argument warns you that going outside our nice ball of radius ɛ is very risky.

(via brazenautomaton)