I wonder whether Fifty Shades of Grey could be an example of exceptionally successful marketing. People buy it because they were told by media that it is hugely popular (so they are curious, and don’t want to seem ignorant), and when they find out they don’t like it, they go: “Well, if everyone else likes it, I better shut up or I will seem like a prude or worse” (the zeitgeist discourages saying anything negative about other people’s sexuality, especially when it’s weird). Anyway...
The problem with revealed preferences is that it kinda assumes that in any internal conflict, the side that won was the Truth, and the side that lost was Fake all along. Which assumes that people never make mistakes (or that they truly want to make exactly those mistakes they made), and that willpower is just a synonym for hypocrisy—unless the willpower happens to prevail, in which case it turns out it was the true will all along (and if your first attempts failed but later you succeeded, that means you truly wanted to fail first and succeed later, duh).
And the usual mistake when discussing nature and evolution is ignoring the evolutionary-cognitive boundary, plus the fact that our environment differs from the one we are adapted for. Thus “in ancient past, X provided a reproductive advantage, on average” becomes “X provides an advantage (now and always)” becomes “you want X, and I am not listening to your lies, you hypocrite!”. And it’s hard to argue otherwise, when there is in fact a part of you that somehow pushes you towards X. But if we follow the same logic, then the True Will of humanity is to eat sugar, become fat, get diabetes, and die; because that’s what keeps happening when we give it a chance. (So if the superhuman AI happens kill us, it just fulfilled our desires faster. Actually, the fact that we have built the AI that killed us, already makes our extinction our revealed preference.)
I see two big differences between our ancient evolutionary past and current civilization, with regard to the current topic:
1) Before agriculture, we spent all time together in tribes; today we live in families, often atomic ones. That means the connection between “who do you have sex with” and “who do you spend most time with” is relatively recent. Obviously, spending more time with an abusive asshole is a bad idea. But when the whole group lives together, having sex with someone doesn’t mean spending more (non-sexual) time with them. Each member of the tribe is within reach of the fist of the alpha male, whether they have sex with him or not. Women used to choose which man’s genes they want for their children, and that was the whole story. (And yes, it makes sense to choose a stronger one over a weaker one, and a winner over a loser.) This evolutionary calculation did not include the danger of spending a lot of time with him alone.
2) The ancient environment also put limits on the male aggression. The alphas often didn’t win as individuals, but as coalitions. They had to beat challengers into submission, but when not challenged, they often acted as keepers of peace and justice. Being an asshole to everyone meant that the three or four guys you hurt recently will gang up against you, beat you, and probably kill you to protect themselves against possible revenge. To keep the throne, you needed allies. Ironically, it is the civilized society that allows some individuals to be assholes against everyone and survive. Many annoying people live only because no one considers it worth risking prison for killing them. In the past, being an asshole and remaining alive would be powerful counter-signaling. Today, pretty much any loser can do it, and many do. Of course it messes up our instincts.
anti-feminists often jump to believing that women are more attracted to men who are violent to them.
Then they are deeply ignorant of women’s literature: the proper archetype is the guy who is violent to everyone else, but is mysteriously tamed by the charms of the heroine, i.e. Beauty and the Beast.
The women who date “bad guys” don’t do it because they have a preference for being punched in the face. They do it because they have a fantasy where they (and they alone) will not get punched in the face. Which would actually make sense in a sufficiently ancient past, but makes much less sense in the recent millennia. Well, evolution sometimes updates slowly. (He who wants to throw a stone, first tell me how much sugar and salt did you eat this week. You realize that shit is killing you slowly, don’t you?) Instead of a preference, this is more like a cognitive bias. From inside, the idea “he will punch everyone else, but not me, because he will love me” seems like a perfect reflection of reality. (And if he already punched her, that does not falsify the hypothesis. “Sometimes true love requires a lot of time, patience, and sacrifice. It will all turn out well at the end.” Read the Harlequin novel where the man first hurts the heroine, but then he falls in love with her and deeply regrets it. Which one? A random choice will probably be the right one.)
The abuse isn’t being read as wish-fulfillment, but as verisimilitude. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author and many of the fans have been in abusive relationships or grew up in abusive households. (...) Maybe abused people really do have a higher risk of seeking out a repetition of the harm they experienced and were taught to believe was normal.
Anecdote time: I met a woman who complained about how all her boyfriends were alcohol addicts. Yet, after breaking up, she was soon dating another one. When I tried to talk some reason into her, she told me that actually all men are alcohol addicts, only some of them are honest about it, and others are in denial; and those in denial are actually much worse. -- To me it seemed obvious how such belief is false and self-harming, but of course trying to argue otherwise would have merely put me in the “in denial” category.
I can imagine how having similar beliefs about male aggressiveness could arise as a consequence of abusive childhood (as a defense mechanism against admitting that your father just happened to be an exceptional asshole), and could be further reinforced by seeking out aggressive partners, because the non-aggressive ones are perceived as somehow weird or fake. -- And perhaps together with the Beauty and the Beast fantasy, this could result in a model where all men are aggressive and only true love can tame them. (Plus there are the Nice Guys who are too pathetic to be aggressive openly, but luckily our mindreading skills allow us to see that deep inside they are even worse.)
It probably doesn’t help that the idea about all men being violent and evil is… zeitgeist-compatible.
It’s not that women want men to hurt them. It’s that men hurt women a lot.
Yep. Connotational sidenote: there is a difference between “men hurt women a lot” and “many men hurt women”. It is possible that a disproportionally large amount of hurting comes from a small minority of men. (Pointing towards statistics about psychopaths having above average amounts of sexual partners, etc.)
Summary:
I agree with most of your article, I just believe it could be simultaneously true that (1) women who were previously abused, especially in their childhood, may seek out abusive partners because they perceive such behavior as “normal”; which does not excuse the next abuser, and the “revealed preference” answer is bullshit, because the woman is acting on her incorrect model of the world, and the friendly thing to do would be trying to fix that model instead of exploiting it; and (2) women in general have a systematic bias towards perceiving violent men as more attractive, and less dangerous than they actually are, because of evolutionary reasons which actually may not apply to our current environment. In my model, the “sane” women can use their reason to overcome the temptation and realize that the extra excitement is not worth getting punched in the face regularly (similarly how men attracted towards pathological women can decide to “not stick their dick in crazy”), but there are reasons that can make a woman either underestimate the danger or take it as inevitable, in which case dating the violent guy seems like a good choice.
If I understand it correctly, you used the former to explain away the latter, and that seems wrong to me. (I still approve bringing attention to the former.)
I am sympathetic to the general thrust of your comment, and I agree with many of your specific points. But I think you let your rhetoric get away from you in a couple of places, and I think those places are important to get right. For instance:
He who wants to throw a stone, first tell me how much sugar and salt did you eat this week. You realize that shit is killing you slowly, don’t you?
Everything is killing me slowly.
Too much salt is killing me slowly. But too little salt would also kill me slowly. So would too little sugar. Or was it too little fat? Or was that last week’s consensus, and this week’s discredited lie perpetrated by a corrupt and untrustworthy academy, distorted by perverse incentives? Too little sunlight will be the end of me (Vitamin D!); but then again, I also shouldn’t spend too much time in the sun (skin cancer!). Red meat is literally the devil, and alcohol is terrible even in small amounts, but look at those people over there
who spend their lives eating nothing but red meat and washing it down with red wine, and live into the triple-digit ages!
The point is, optimal nutrition is not obvious (if for no other reason but that the effects of individual genetic variation are so great and vary so widely). The outside view shows that basically anything we are, currently, given as the “established view” in nutrition, could in fact be total nonsense.
What you seem to be saying, in this aside, is something like “we are all sinners, i.e. we are all slaves to our evolutionary past; we all make terrible mistakes, by doing things that obviously no longer make any sense, in today’s world; let us therefore not judge any among us, for erring thus”.
But that’s not true. Some of us don’t make the obvious mistakes. (We might do things that turn out to be mistakes, but that’s a very different matter!) And so we are entirely justified in “throwing stones”—in judging those people who do make the obvious mistakes—people who do things that are manifestly self-destructive in the modern world.
This has serious implications for what the optimal strategy is.
If your view is right, then there seem to be two tiers of people:
The sinners (i.e., basically all of us), who are all trying to do what makes sense, and yet look: she dates bad guys, he eats too much sugar…
The saints (i.e., people who have managed to overcome their biases and do the right thing)—but becoming a saint is difficult, and perhaps it’s not clear how to do it, and in the meantime we’re basically all still sinners.
If my view is right, then there are three tiers of people:
Idiots.
Normal people who are capable of exercising common sense, and so avoid the obvious mistakes (such as “date that guy even though he beat his last five girlfriends regularly”, or “eat Domino’s pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day”), but do not have any kind of privileged access to the truth of tricky subjects like “What Is The True Nutrition”.
(hypothetical) Unusually competent / intelligent / rational people, who can figure out the right thing to do basically all the time (certainly at a rate much greater than genpop). (Do such people exist? Well, we’d all like to become one of them, and perhaps that’s what we’re trying to do here at Less Wrong…)
On the latter view, you can get pretty darn far just by not being an idiot and exercising common sense, and generally applying the strategy of “do what seems to make sense, upon a reasonable amount of reflection”. On the former view, that doesn’t seem to get you very far, and you have to have Exceptional Rationality Techniques™ to get anywhere.
It seems to me that figuring out which of these views is closer to reality is rather important.
I wonder whether Fifty Shades of Grey could be an example of exceptionally successful marketing. People buy it because they were told by media that it is hugely popular (so they are curious, and don’t want to seem ignorant), and when they find out they don’t like it, they go: “Well, if everyone else likes it, I better shut up or I will seem like a prude or worse” (the zeitgeist discourages saying anything negative about other people’s sexuality, especially when it’s weird). Anyway...
The problem with revealed preferences is that it kinda assumes that in any internal conflict, the side that won was the Truth, and the side that lost was Fake all along. Which assumes that people never make mistakes (or that they truly want to make exactly those mistakes they made), and that willpower is just a synonym for hypocrisy—unless the willpower happens to prevail, in which case it turns out it was the true will all along (and if your first attempts failed but later you succeeded, that means you truly wanted to fail first and succeed later, duh).
And the usual mistake when discussing nature and evolution is ignoring the evolutionary-cognitive boundary, plus the fact that our environment differs from the one we are adapted for. Thus “in ancient past, X provided a reproductive advantage, on average” becomes “X provides an advantage (now and always)” becomes “you want X, and I am not listening to your lies, you hypocrite!”. And it’s hard to argue otherwise, when there is in fact a part of you that somehow pushes you towards X. But if we follow the same logic, then the True Will of humanity is to eat sugar, become fat, get diabetes, and die; because that’s what keeps happening when we give it a chance. (So if the superhuman AI happens kill us, it just fulfilled our desires faster. Actually, the fact that we have built the AI that killed us, already makes our extinction our revealed preference.)
I see two big differences between our ancient evolutionary past and current civilization, with regard to the current topic:
1) Before agriculture, we spent all time together in tribes; today we live in families, often atomic ones. That means the connection between “who do you have sex with” and “who do you spend most time with” is relatively recent. Obviously, spending more time with an abusive asshole is a bad idea. But when the whole group lives together, having sex with someone doesn’t mean spending more (non-sexual) time with them. Each member of the tribe is within reach of the fist of the alpha male, whether they have sex with him or not. Women used to choose which man’s genes they want for their children, and that was the whole story. (And yes, it makes sense to choose a stronger one over a weaker one, and a winner over a loser.) This evolutionary calculation did not include the danger of spending a lot of time with him alone.
2) The ancient environment also put limits on the male aggression. The alphas often didn’t win as individuals, but as coalitions. They had to beat challengers into submission, but when not challenged, they often acted as keepers of peace and justice. Being an asshole to everyone meant that the three or four guys you hurt recently will gang up against you, beat you, and probably kill you to protect themselves against possible revenge. To keep the throne, you needed allies. Ironically, it is the civilized society that allows some individuals to be assholes against everyone and survive. Many annoying people live only because no one considers it worth risking prison for killing them. In the past, being an asshole and remaining alive would be powerful counter-signaling. Today, pretty much any loser can do it, and many do. Of course it messes up our instincts.
Then they are deeply ignorant of women’s literature: the proper archetype is the guy who is violent to everyone else, but is mysteriously tamed by the charms of the heroine, i.e. Beauty and the Beast.
The women who date “bad guys” don’t do it because they have a preference for being punched in the face. They do it because they have a fantasy where they (and they alone) will not get punched in the face. Which would actually make sense in a sufficiently ancient past, but makes much less sense in the recent millennia. Well, evolution sometimes updates slowly. (He who wants to throw a stone, first tell me how much sugar and salt did you eat this week. You realize that shit is killing you slowly, don’t you?) Instead of a preference, this is more like a cognitive bias. From inside, the idea “he will punch everyone else, but not me, because he will love me” seems like a perfect reflection of reality. (And if he already punched her, that does not falsify the hypothesis. “Sometimes true love requires a lot of time, patience, and sacrifice. It will all turn out well at the end.” Read the Harlequin novel where the man first hurts the heroine, but then he falls in love with her and deeply regrets it. Which one? A random choice will probably be the right one.)
Anecdote time: I met a woman who complained about how all her boyfriends were alcohol addicts. Yet, after breaking up, she was soon dating another one. When I tried to talk some reason into her, she told me that actually all men are alcohol addicts, only some of them are honest about it, and others are in denial; and those in denial are actually much worse. -- To me it seemed obvious how such belief is false and self-harming, but of course trying to argue otherwise would have merely put me in the “in denial” category.
I can imagine how having similar beliefs about male aggressiveness could arise as a consequence of abusive childhood (as a defense mechanism against admitting that your father just happened to be an exceptional asshole), and could be further reinforced by seeking out aggressive partners, because the non-aggressive ones are perceived as somehow weird or fake. -- And perhaps together with the Beauty and the Beast fantasy, this could result in a model where all men are aggressive and only true love can tame them. (Plus there are the Nice Guys who are too pathetic to be aggressive openly, but luckily our mindreading skills allow us to see that deep inside they are even worse.)
It probably doesn’t help that the idea about all men being violent and evil is… zeitgeist-compatible.
Yep. Connotational sidenote: there is a difference between “men hurt women a lot” and “many men hurt women”. It is possible that a disproportionally large amount of hurting comes from a small minority of men. (Pointing towards statistics about psychopaths having above average amounts of sexual partners, etc.)
Summary:
I agree with most of your article, I just believe it could be simultaneously true that (1) women who were previously abused, especially in their childhood, may seek out abusive partners because they perceive such behavior as “normal”; which does not excuse the next abuser, and the “revealed preference” answer is bullshit, because the woman is acting on her incorrect model of the world, and the friendly thing to do would be trying to fix that model instead of exploiting it; and (2) women in general have a systematic bias towards perceiving violent men as more attractive, and less dangerous than they actually are, because of evolutionary reasons which actually may not apply to our current environment. In my model, the “sane” women can use their reason to overcome the temptation and realize that the extra excitement is not worth getting punched in the face regularly (similarly how men attracted towards pathological women can decide to “not stick their dick in crazy”), but there are reasons that can make a woman either underestimate the danger or take it as inevitable, in which case dating the violent guy seems like a good choice.
If I understand it correctly, you used the former to explain away the latter, and that seems wrong to me. (I still approve bringing attention to the former.)
I am sympathetic to the general thrust of your comment, and I agree with many of your specific points. But I think you let your rhetoric get away from you in a couple of places, and I think those places are important to get right. For instance:
Everything is killing me slowly.
Too much salt is killing me slowly. But too little salt would also kill me slowly. So would too little sugar. Or was it too little fat? Or was that last week’s consensus, and this week’s discredited lie perpetrated by a corrupt and untrustworthy academy, distorted by perverse incentives? Too little sunlight will be the end of me (Vitamin D!); but then again, I also shouldn’t spend too much time in the sun (skin cancer!). Red meat is literally the devil, and alcohol is terrible even in small amounts, but look at those people over there who spend their lives eating nothing but red meat and washing it down with red wine, and live into the triple-digit ages!
The point is, optimal nutrition is not obvious (if for no other reason but that the effects of individual genetic variation are so great and vary so widely). The outside view shows that basically anything we are, currently, given as the “established view” in nutrition, could in fact be total nonsense.
What you seem to be saying, in this aside, is something like “we are all sinners, i.e. we are all slaves to our evolutionary past; we all make terrible mistakes, by doing things that obviously no longer make any sense, in today’s world; let us therefore not judge any among us, for erring thus”.
But that’s not true. Some of us don’t make the obvious mistakes. (We might do things that turn out to be mistakes, but that’s a very different matter!) And so we are entirely justified in “throwing stones”—in judging those people who do make the obvious mistakes—people who do things that are manifestly self-destructive in the modern world.
This has serious implications for what the optimal strategy is.
If your view is right, then there seem to be two tiers of people:
The sinners (i.e., basically all of us), who are all trying to do what makes sense, and yet look: she dates bad guys, he eats too much sugar…
The saints (i.e., people who have managed to overcome their biases and do the right thing)—but becoming a saint is difficult, and perhaps it’s not clear how to do it, and in the meantime we’re basically all still sinners.
If my view is right, then there are three tiers of people:
Idiots.
Normal people who are capable of exercising common sense, and so avoid the obvious mistakes (such as “date that guy even though he beat his last five girlfriends regularly”, or “eat Domino’s pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day”), but do not have any kind of privileged access to the truth of tricky subjects like “What Is The True Nutrition”.
(hypothetical) Unusually competent / intelligent / rational people, who can figure out the right thing to do basically all the time (certainly at a rate much greater than genpop). (Do such people exist? Well, we’d all like to become one of them, and perhaps that’s what we’re trying to do here at Less Wrong…)
On the latter view, you can get pretty darn far just by not being an idiot and exercising common sense, and generally applying the strategy of “do what seems to make sense, upon a reasonable amount of reflection”. On the former view, that doesn’t seem to get you very far, and you have to have Exceptional Rationality Techniques™ to get anywhere.
It seems to me that figuring out which of these views is closer to reality is rather important.