Sturgeon General’s Warning
Before saying “Group X is bad!”, remember Sturgeon’s Law - it applies to any sufficiently large group. It may easily be that the majority of a group is bad, but unless you think that of most groups, saying that one is bad implies that you think that it’s worse than the ones you don’t label that way - i.e. “Group X is bad” really means “Group X is especially bad”.
It’s likely that you consider yourself a member of a good group: other people are mistaken when they criticize your ideology - “I’m not like that, nor are my friends, nor any of the bloggers I read”, etc. This is in part because you’re familiar with your group and know how to filter out its bad parts. You don’t think your group is ~75% bad because you don’t see what the majority of the group says, you only see your carefully selected inner circle. Since it’s likely that you’ve become good at filtering, your opinion of your group is going to be higher than that of an outsider looking in, and because you filter automatically, without thinking about it, you may be confused as to why the outsider thinks worse of your group than you do. Because of Sturgeon’s Law, you’re likely to encounter the bad ideas of a group, and because you’re an outsider looking at another group, you experience outgroup homogeneity bias, leading you to think things like “My group is only ~5% bad, as opposed to these evil people who are ~100% bad”. Even if your group is better, your biases shrink your perception of your group’s ~75% bad to ~5%, and increase the other group’s ~90% to ~100%.
There are two alternative approaches that avoid this problem.
First, you can try to determine the essential features of the belief around which the group is centered. For example, a lot of feminists believe incorrect things, but a plausible core belief of feminism is “liberating people from gender norms”. Then even if a sizable majority of feminists say highly questionable things, you should only say that a lot of feminists have bad ideas despite the core being good, and not that feminism is bad in general.
Second, you can try to adjust for your biases to compare the composition of groups to determine which ones are better. A good group may still be ~75% comprised of people who say nonsense from time to time, but that still compares favorably to something like neoreaction, which is terrible ~100% of the time. If the concentration of a group’s members’ bad ideas is sufficiently high, you will encounter the bad ideas more often than the good ones - remember that outgroup homogeneity bias exists and don’t dismiss a group just because its more vocal members are frequently wrong. Meanwhile, remember that outsiders don’t know your group as well as you do, and try to think about what someone would think if they didn’t already agree with you and if they came across your group for the first time.
You know you’ve found a good group when you think “I only have significant disagreements with 75% of the people here, as opposed to 90% with the general population”. Before generalizing an ideological group that you’re not part of, remember the Sturgeon General’s Warning: “You are likely to have significant disagreements with over half of the members of a good group.”
P.S.: This post was inspired by this Scott Alexander comment, where a criticism that would be correct if directed at “many feminists” is incorrect because it’s directed at Feminism in general.
