Privilege for Rationalists: Things To Try

Privilege, in the social justice sense of the word, is an extremely broad concept. In this post, what I want to do is to draw out specific sub-elements of the concept of privilege that are particularly relevant to rationalists -- or, more broadly, to people who care deeply about seeking the truth by listening to a wide range of ideas, whether those people feel themselves to be "rationalists" or not.

I have two main purposes, here. The first is to draw more people into the habit of using those elements of the concept of privilege that they feel are relevant to them. I'd like to isolate useful ideas that people can employ without needing to buy wholesale into everything that "privilege" has come to mean. My second purpose is to enable more efficient steelmanning by people who have found themselves in an argument with someone who is accusing them of privilege. Not all privilege accusations are good argumentation in themselves, but the scrupulous debater who wishes to check, very carefully, whether their opponent might have a point should (I hope) at least be able to quickly run through some of the things I list below, in order to check whether they might apply to the situation at hand.

This post is deliberately constructed to lead you down the rabbit hole, as it were. I'm going to start with the most neutral, individualist formulation I know, and develop more controversial and/or societally-based arguments as I go along. At some point, you may find yourself thinking "Nope, this is where I get off the train." If so, that is fine. I'm not advocating anything here that I don't find convincing, myself, but nor do I expect everyone to be as convinced by these things as I am.

A. Reasoning From Insufficiently General Personal Experience

Let's start with the familiar notion of an argumentative fallacy. Consider the following arguments:

• The police have always treated me well as long as I follow instructions. So if they police treated this person badly, they must not have followed instructions.
• I am rarely disturbed by anything strangers say to me when I am out walking. People who complain about street harassment are obviously over-reacting.
• My social circle functions fine without belief in God. People who say religion is essential to the society where they live do not know what they are talking about.

The common thread, here, is one of people placing undue weight on their own experiences. This is a really common thing for people to do. It's basically where the typical mind fallacy comes from. Privilege, though, is more like the typical life fallacy. Most people are basically like me, right? Their experiences mostly mirror mine? Well, no, not always. This is obvious in the abstract, but obscure in the specific. It's just so natural to fill in the gaps in whatever story you are being told with whatever you think is most likely, and your sense of what is likely is frequently going to be based on your own experience, because what else would you use?

Because this argumentative fallacy emerges out of an ordinary element of human information processing, it's common in everyday life, even when no sort of debate is taking place. For example, my husband once remarked to me on the awkwardness of, say, being on a train, and seeing something interesting in the pattern of a woman's skirt, and then realising that you are staring and having to just carefully not look anywhere near that person for the rest of the train ride.

I shrugged. "I generally just say 'nice skirt' and then it's all fine," I told him.

He had to actually point out to me that this wasn't an option for him. It doesn't come across the same way if you're not female. This was obvious, once he had pointed it out! I didn't see it, because it's normal to assume that people mostly experience things the way that you do, and most people need a reason to stop doing this; I am no exception. Absent other information, I will interpolate my own experiences into the stories people tell me about themselves, even in cases where this is wildly inappropriate.

This is the fallacy of Reasoning From Insufficiently General Personal Experience. We all do it. Best to be aware of it, and to memorise a few of the most common ways that your experience might differ from others, but you're never going to get rid of it completely. Might as well just thank people when they point out that, oops, there you go again.

B. The Insufficiently General Social Circle

Being overly confident in the generality of your own experience can be a problem, but it's generally a fixable one. Other people are different to you, fair enough. Not hard to understand, once it's pointed out.

Far worse are the problems that arise when the Insufficiently General Personal Experience in question is not just yours. You and everyone you know has a driver's license! Everybody has a driver's license! Requiring a driver's license in order to vote is just not that difficult! Look, we'll even put in a few extra ID options for those weirdos who never bothered to learn or are, like, I guess, blind or something? But how many of those people can there be? I have no idea what those people could even be like. Surely it can't be that hard for them to sort this out.

The situation where your experience suggests one thing as most likely, but your friend's experience suggests something else, is not so bad. Your friend can, hopefully, call you on your false assumption. You are likely to listen to your friend. They may even be able to fill you in on enough details for you to understand exactly what is going on.

On the other hand, when the only people who don't share your experience in this instance are not your friends, there are a wide variety of new problems that arise. The first and most obvious is that it's quite possible that no-one will ever call you on the false assumption that you are making. There will simply be no-one to tell you otherwise. A second problem that can happen is that, even when somebody does call you on your false assumption, all your friends will tell you that the person calling you on it is clearly wrong. They share your false assumption, and will back you up on it.

A third problem is that the difference in question may not seem simple, normal and understandable. On the contrary, the idea that someone might not share this part of your experience might already be enough to push them outside the circle of people you can easily empathise with. This can be a problem on an emotional level, where you instinctively double down on your error on grounds that if someone doesn't share something so basic to your experience, how could they possibly be worth your time? It can also be a problem in a more detached sort of way, where you find that changing that element of the picture in your mind leads to a new picture that just doesn't make sense.

Sometimes, even when you know that your social circle is insufficiently general, it can be hard to know where to go from there. Consider, for example, Charles Murray's How Thick Is Your Bubble? quiz. This was included in his 2012 book Coming Apart, which I confess I have not read, but the quiz was everywhere in the media coverage. At its heart, the argument this quiz is making comes across, to me, as a straightforward privilege argument: "Look at all these people whose experiences you and your social circle do not share! This probably means that there are a lot of important things that you do not understand about them." Makes sense. Good privilege argument. No controversy so far, on my end. Now what?

People have a lot of different answers to the now what. At the extreme end, I've seen people basically follow this up with "So you should immediately implement my political goals without asking further questions, because you obviously could not possibly understand things well enough to contradict me." This is impractical, not least because it is very, very easy to completely fail to understand two different groups of people who want contradictory things, and obviously you cannot simply defer to them both. Fortunately, you have other options.

At minimum, you can quietly note the gap in your knowledge, and fill it when/if the opportunity arises. I think you should always do at least this much. In theory, noting the gap in your knowledge should stop you from rudely interrupting people who try to tell you about it, which may make filling the gap a little easier than it would otherwise be.

If you want to go further, you can actively seek out more information. Read a book written from the perspective you're trying to understand, or a blog post, or an article. Learn some surrounding context rather than focusing on a single issue. The aim here is not, of course, to understand everyone in the world so well that you will never misunderstand anybody ever again. That's blatantly impossible. But even a little additional context can transform "This change to the picture makes no sense, how would that even work?" with "Okay, if they're saying this, then that probably has a bit to do with this other thing, which might make sense if I also include this." It's not that you stop making mistakes, it's that you can stop being completely lost.

C. Not Everyone is Participating In The Debate On The Same Terms

If you're reading this, then you may know I'm a feminist. If you know I'm a feminist, you may also have noticed that I've left an obvious question open.Most people have some women within the circle of people that they know. How is it possible, then, for the systemic, social type of privilege fallacy to arise when men try to understand women? If almost nobody has an insufficiently general social circle, in this regard, does that mean that the individualist type of Reasoning From Insufficiently General Personal Experience is the only potential problem, here?

The composition of your social circle isn't the only thing that can distort the range of viewpoints you hear. Other things that can have this effect include:

• Some things are really hard to talk about. You probably know someone who is a survivor of child sexual abuse of some sort. You may not know that they are a survivor of child sexual abuse, however. Even if you do know this, they still may not call you on it if you make some sort of privileged assumption that someone who had endured sexual abuse as a child would be less likely to make. That would involve disagreeing with you on a subject that is likely to be highly emotional for them. This can be understandably hard.
• Some types of difference are stigmatized. A disabled person may not want to highlight the things they cannot do, for fear that people might react with pity or disgust. Instead, they may put up with problems that your false assumptions inadvertently cause for them, in exchange for being treated more normally by you.
• Relatedly, people who have less social power than you may not have the social standing to correct false assumptions that you make about what their lives are like. Women may have learned that seeming angry in any way will make people take them less seriously. Black people may have learned that expressing disagreement can cause them to be seen as angry or rebellious even when they are perfectly calm. They may choose not to speak up for these reasons. Or, they may in fact speak up, and you and the rest of your social circle may in fact dismiss them for precisely these reasons.
• Sometimes, the people who have historically been privileged just got there first, and wrote all the books, and that can seem like it settles it. The picture has been drawn, and everybody knows it looks like this. (What do you mean, that picture is wrong in places? That can't be right. Somebody would have said.) This can lead to a self-reinforcing silence. Anyone who speaks up will be attacked by people who have got used to the status quo. Better not to say anything.

By now, this might seem like a pretty broad taxonomy of privileged ignorance and the things that can drive it. I confess I'm quite proud of how much I've been able to include. But I promised to take you down a rabbit hole, and that really does mean that, if I can, I ought to keep going until logic itself starts moving in curves. 

D. The Same Terms Don't Affect Everyone In The Debate Equally

So far, it seems to me that everything I've said fits quite nicely into a fairly standard rationalist viewpoint. Include these potential blind spots into your understanding of the world, and make filling them part of your rationalist project. That's all.

That's not all. Here's the thing. Rationality is biased. To be clear, I don't mean that the ideal, perfect form of reasoning to which rationality might theoretically aspire is biased. I mean that rationality, as we understand it, is biased. The tried, tested heuristics of good reasoning by which rationalists try to operate have privilege built into their very core.

After all, how the heck did it take us this long to see how utterly, utterly common it is to reason from insufficiently general personal experience? Why wasn't this codified earlier? Why wasn't there a word for it? How did we end up in this situation? Somebody says "privilege" and a few decades later a whole freaking reef of concepts have grown onto this one word, finally this one, solid word, that has to carry so much with such variety because there's nothing else we can use to refer to all of these weird and wonderful and, yes, really common phenomena that couldn't be seen because they couldn't be said!

What else don't we see? What else don't we say? Emotion, that's what. "Emotional" arguments are traditionally excluded from rational discussion for perfectly good reasons, such as the fact that some types of emotion can indeed make it harder to listen to people you disagree with. Unfortunately, however, if you want to reason about human beings, you do have to have some emotional data about the sorts of feelings that people feel under particular circumstances. If direct emotional expression is disallowed, where does this emotional data come from? From personal experience, that's where. Insufficiently general personal experience, most of the time. And here we are.

That's not even getting into the more superficial constructs around rationality. Like, say, the fact that we construct things around the idea of a 'debate' at all, instead of something more like a discussion. Does everything have to be based on a conflict model? It seems to me that we could use some more co-operative models of rationality -- not to supplant the conflict models entirely, just to expand on them. There are plenty of careful thinkers out there who don't like conflict much. Frankly, looking at the state of the internet, we could stand to include them a bit more.

Yes, folks, I am all-out suggesting that we take rationality apart.

Yes, I know this has costs.

The problem is, we're already paying those costs. The problems I've pointed out, here? They're well known, along with plenty more like them, and right now people are using those problems as reasons why they shouldn't listen to people they disagree with, why they shouldn't bother trying to convince anyone, why rationality is useless and a sham.

They are not entirely wrong. That's the problem. We can lament the demise of enlightenment values all we want, we can decry "illiberalism" all we want, but if we really want to shore up our position, we've got to get better foundations than we have now. We've got to figure out precisely what it is we need to keep from that earlier model, and find new ways to get those things that take critiques of rationality into account.

Well, that's my current project, anyway. It's pretty fun! But if this journey has long since taken you beyond the realms where you would ever want to live, then I hope you at least enjoyed the ride. Thanks for reading.