An example that comes to mind is that a few years ago, my friend (17F) was riding with me (23) on the subway from Berkeley back to San Francisco late at night, and she asked if she could stay over at my place instead of getting off at her stop so she didn’t have to walk half an hour alone in the middle of the night back to her place. This struck me as a profound misunderstanding of base rates of assault by strangers, and an underestimate of the relative danger of some “some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups.”
Look I want people to trust me. But if I don’t earn that trust it feels like they’re being naiive, or devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency or something. I know it’s strictly good for me for people to think I am good and I really shouldn’t complain about it.
“some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups.”
I think what’s being gestured at is that Sinclair may or may not have been referring to
the base rate of this being a bad idea
the base rate of this bad idea conditioning on genders xyz
An example of the variety of ways of thinking about this: Many women (often cis) I’ve talked to, among those who have standing distrust or bad priors on cis men, are very liberal about extending woman-level trust to trans women. That doesn’t mean they’re maximally trusting, just that they’re not more trusting of a cis woman they’ve seen at like three meetups than they are of a trans woman they’ve seen at like three meetups.
But really one and two are quite different sorts of claims, that I don’t think people agree about how the conditioning changes the game. However, I get the sense (not from this comment, but combining it with upstream Sinclair comments) that Sinclair thinks the person would be making less of a mistake if she had asked the same couchsurf favor of a cis woman.
I don’t think that cis women are harmless either. On one hand, women that are abusers tend to be more manipulative and isolating wheras men that are abusers tend to be more physical. And mayyybe that’s a neurotype thing that correlates with bio sex rather than hormonal gender or a cultural thing that is a product of gendered upbringing rather than gendered adult life. And mayyybe that meaningfully affects in what scenarios one ought to be wary of cis women vs trans women.
Feels a bit like an irresponsible speculation though.
Not putting forth a strong argument here, just clarifying my position.
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to committing assault, or treating a correct prediction as discrediting because of the strength of your prior against the idea that a woman might accurately evaluate a man as unlikely to assault her.
This comment seems like it will degrade quality of discourse enough (while not providing that much value) that additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action (e.g. rate limiting, bans). There is real content in this comment, but I expect the way the point was made will degrade conversations more than the value it adds. I also think the downvotes and this warning are adequate response for now.
To elaborate more, the comment seems likely to degrade discourse for the following combination of reasons:
The point is locally invalid. Sinclair’s comment could be interpreted as saying more than just one of those two things, and in fact neither was the intended meaning (see this comment by Raemon that Sinclair endorsed). As I understand it, Sinclair’s comment was about the relative priors of actually getting assaulted by someone you recently met vs on the street, not priors about a person’s ability to evaluate someone else, and also didn’t do anything that meaningfully would count as “admitting assault”. At the very most one could say “said they are the kind of person who might commit assault”. The “either/or” is invalid.
On top of being wrong (not itself a major crime), this comment contains a bad rhetorical pattern. “Either <incriminating option you very likely didn’t mean> or <wrong interpretation of thing you said>” is not the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialog in my models. The pattern is something like “giving credibility to your mainline intention by juxtaposing it with something definitely not intended, and put your interlocutor on the defensive”. It seems much better to say something like “you probably mean X, but I think that’s wrong”. I don’t know whether you intended the effects of this rhetorical pattern, but I think independently of your intention, it had bad effects on the conversation.
I originally had a third bullet here discussing accusations and their effects, but after chatting with Habryka this seems trickier to get right. Habryka will leave thoughts in his own comments on that below.
(I have some sense that Zack, whose post this comment appears under, might have a different take on the comment/response. In this case, Zack didn’t have custom moderation guidelines set so I’m responding from approximately “mainline site mod philosophy”, but if they had, I’d have factored that into my response.)
As I understand it, Sinclair’s comment was about the relative priors of actually getting assaulted by someone you recently met vs on the street, not priors about a person’s ability to evaluate someone else, and also didn’t do anything that meaningfully would count as “admitting assault”.
I don’t normally say this, but you’re not passing Benquo’s ideological Turing test.
The reason I don’t normally say this is because it’s a high bar; I don’t think having a deep understanding of your interlocutor’s position should be a prerequisite for arguing with them. (We can hope that someone will learn something in ensuing discussion, even if the critic didn’t get everything exactly right in their initial comment.)
But you’re not just arguing with Benquo, you’re threatening to censor him. (I claim that “threatening to censor” is a reasonable paraphrase of “additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action”.) If moderators censor arguments that they don’t understand, then our collective discourse doesn’t get a chance to process those arguments, which is contrary to the site’s mission.
Zack didn’t have custom moderation guidelines set so I’m responding from approximately “mainline site mod philosophy” but if they had, I’d have factored that into my response
The moderation guidelines in my account settings are explicitly set to “Easy Going — I just delete obvious spam and trolling.” Is your claim that Benquo’s comments constitute “obvious spam and trolling”, or that I shouldn’t have interpreted that menu option literally? Or something else? (I’m not claiming that the two possibilities I named are necessarily exhaustive.)
Also, the “I’m happy for site moderators to help enforce my policy” box in my account settings is not checked. Is there a way to express that I’m actively unhappy with site moderators helping enforce my policy?
I want to be part of an intellectual community where people like Benquo and Said Achmiz have free speech. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but I’ve learned a lot from both of them, and therefore consider myself to have a selfish interest in both of them having the liberty to say what they’re actually thinking in the words that come naturally to them, rather than looking over their shoulder trying to guess what the mods will allow as the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialogue in their models. I continue to be disappointed with the censorious attitudes of the Less Wrong 2.0 team, which I consider deeply anti-intellectual.
There’s more I could say, but between this post and tomorrow’s, I’m already over my drama budget for Q3, so I think it’s better that I don’t continue this discussion at this time.
Meta: totally understand being over your drama budget. I’ll attempt to keep this reply plain and only as much as necessary.
To clarify the mod guidelines situation better (and I acknowledge this is likely has not been explained before):
I think this comment falls into a category we’d by default moderate against even for people who’ve set “easy going”. However, I’m okay with not moderating something in this class if people on your posts have been given adequate heads up (e.g. moderation guidelines) that you’ve got different guidelines that the site as a whole. In particular, I’d want them to know what you’re allowing that LW team wouldn’t, e.g. all of Said’s commenting. Benquo’s commenting). (If you do this, I can confirm that I think you’ve warned people adequately according to my model of you.)
I don’t promise that the LW mod team will never moderate comments on your posts, even if you do this, but we’ll have a much higher bar for intervening. (This is something like a person is allowed to set the rules on their private property up to a certain limit.) Benquo’s comment here and Said’s behavior are things I’m okay with you inviting on your own posts. We might still have to step in if someone is being egregiously threatening, though I half-suspect you don’t want that either.
I won’t respond to the ITT point now to avoid further drama, unless you’d like me to.
Untangling your second alternative into ordinary language: he judged that she was making a bad judgement that was only accurate in the instant case by accident. Well, yes, that seems to be exactly what Sinclair is saying.
If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
(Ok, not always. Of the people that know me well, I’m sure they trust me because they witness me be a good person. Actually, I think people 80% process this subconsciously purely off vibes, like they find me funny and amicable and not creepy. )
I guess my objection is that people’s priors are actually wrong. Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women. (Yes, it’s a bit unfair of me to refer to unverifiable claims. Also there’s some bias since my close social circle is mostly women. I am saying my position is not purely ideological but empirical.)
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
(But I get that people are reasoning off of base rates vibing off of stereotypes so maybe it’s strategic.)
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
The streets of SF can be pretty dangerous late at night, lots of homeless people high on drugs, and I’ve had friends mugged in SF. Depending on which streets they are, I could easily prefer to sleep in the house of some random rationalist I met at a Berkeley event than walk half an hour through some scary SF streets at midnight.
Your assessment implies that the 17 year-old woman wouldn’t have made the same request if she’d read your gender as being a man, and that seems possible, but I personally don’t think it’d be that surprising to hear the same story from a 23 year-old guy (instead of from you).
Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women.
If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
I think Ben’s point is that you don’t know that.
But insofar as this is what is going on, I suspect that one dynamic is roughly something like this: for their safety(?), women(?) don’t just want to directly evade threats, they also want to be seen as able to police threats. This is how someo receiving sexual info about you, or having certain sexual thoughts about you, are constructed as violations of you, as opposed to risk factors for future violations. For that, Schelling gender is what matters, which is why as your Schelling gender changes, you observe people acting differently towards you in a seemingly irrational way.
The way that they know is that they got to see the diff between how they were treated when they were presented as a man, and how they were treated when they presented as a woman?
As they say in the comment you’re responding to?
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
And definitely that’s not an ironclad inference: it’s possible in principle that people started treating Sinclair differently for reasons independent of their shift in gender-presentation. But that’s pretty implausible on the face of it.
Your comment assumes that gender presentation translates directly into perception of gender (or, even, perception of sex, which is the vastly more important variable here!), but there is no reason at all for that assumption; indeed, it is precisely what I am questioning in the grandparent!
What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn’t?
(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that’s what happened?
Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that’s what happened?)
She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
(which I think is still not quite enough to make it obvious he’s less dangerous than complete strangers on her way from the metro station back home unless she’s in a third-world country, but still)
I think there might be something important about pointing out “the way you’re handling the evidence here is weird”, but… this just seems false? (And, seems to me to be steering away from the actual most likely area of ‘what sort of things the commenter meant’ or, if the commenter is confused, ‘what sort of ways the commenter might be confused’)
(actually, I started writing this comment thinking you had a reasonable point just worded confusingly, but after thinking about it a bit I think your comment is just kinda ignoring the obvious point and making an unrelated point that doesn’t seem that relevant?)
I think it’s at least a coherent position that:
the likelihood of getting assaulted by a stranger on the street is quite low
the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone you recently met is also low (but, somewhat higher than the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone on the street)
In both cases it’s very unsurprising to not get assaulted, and it shouldn’t affect your baserate models very much. But if Alice wants someone she just met to accompany her home for safety, it’s a coherent position to think that, even if Bailey is quite confident they’re not going to assault Alice, they still thinks Alice is making a cognitive error in thinking that she is statistically more safe with someone in Bailey reference class.
(i.e. the error Bailey thinks Alice is making is not about how dangerous Bailey is, but about the relative danger between Bailey and A-Stranger-On-The-Street)
It’s possible that Bailey is ignoring channels of information that Alice has access to, and maybe Bailey should be attentive to that, but AFAICT there is nothing incoherent about the logic above. Or at least, you haven’t said anything to argue that the above logic isn’t sound, and it seems kinda nonsequitor-ish to bring up your alternate hypothesis without explaining why it’s not sound.
(I think an error Bailey / Sinclair might be making here is that it’s not just about risk of assault, it’s about risk of being harassed, and risk of harassment is actually pretty high even if risk of assault is low, and harassment a) does suck, b) happens noticeably less often when you’re in a group)
Yes, this is a good description of the point I was trying to make.
It’s possible I underestimate the suffering caused by being harassed since I think I don’t mind the milder forms of it (like being cat-called) as much as other people maybe. And more severe forms of harassment have not happened to me (yet?)
“why would you be afraid of walking at night? Doesn’t seem like bad things happen to me”
“I basically believe the narrative that women have more to worry about here than men, that thing are legitimately dangerous for women walking alone at night”
“I believe that, actually, violent crime at night is just quite rare, and I’ve heard [but not checked] that men are actually more likely to be violently attacked than women. And the ‘women have something to be scared about here that male-privilege obviates’ feels a bit off. And it feels impolitic to say, but, actually, it maybe is better for women to become more calibrated about their safety.”
“Women get harassed a lot more than men, and with each harassment instance one of the issues is that they have to model whether the harassment is likely to escalate to a violent conflict, which they’d probably be at a physical disadvantage in (and regardless, having to escalate to ‘be ready to fight’ is really scary). But, I still think people are overestimating this danger – most harassment doesn’t escalate to conflict. In Berkeley I have homeless people come up and yell at me a lot, and I feel an initial jolt of fear, but then try to shrug and move on, and I think this would be correct for women to do too.”
“Hmm, actually, some of the harassment I’m seeing / hearing about actually sounds pretty bad, somewhere in between catcalling and violent conflict, and I’m now not sure what to think about the base rates here.”
(The last update came from hearing from a female friend who described herself living in “a bad neighborhood”, and having a bunch of late-night safety habits that seemed excessive to me. But it turned out they had multiple instances of people following them to their house, masturbating ‘at them’ through their fence, and coming up to their front door and banging on it loudly, which were all more extreme than I had encountered before and updated me more towards a more legit Different Worlds hypothesis)
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to [some unspecified but grossly immoral act], or establishing a false dichotomy where the first option is both obviously false and socially unacceptable to admit to, and the second is the possible but not necessarily correct interpretation of the parent’s comment that you actually want them to admit to.
Anyways, there are of course coherent construals other than the two you presented, like “the prediction was miscalibrated given how much evidence she had, but it turned out fine because base rates on both sides are really quite low”.
ETA: I disendorse the posture (though not implied content) of the half of this comment.
The comment reported a trend of accurate appraisals characterized as mistakes, with an illustrative anecdote, not an isolated event. Other parts of the comment, like the bit about how not treating them as a likely assailant is “devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency” implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault. This is not ambiguous at all. It seems like on balance people think that politeness calls for pretending not to understand when someone says very overtly that they mean people ill, want to be perceived as violent and aggressive, etc, up until it’s time to scapegoat them.
Alternatively, agency implies the potential to transgress. Evaluating someone as not a threat to transgress is making a statement about the conjunction of their capabilities and motives, not motives alone, and someone might have an interest in protecting their reputation as capable, even at the cost of creating uncertainty about their good intent?
While I partially share your confusion about “implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault”, I thought Sinclair was talking mostly about “your risk of being seduced, being into it at the time, then regretting it later” and it would only relate to harassment or assault as a kind of tail case.
I think some high libido / high sexual agency people learn to consider seducing someone very effectively in ways that seem to go well but the person would not endorse at CEV a morally relevant failure mode, say 1% bad setting 100% at some rape outcome. Others of course say this is an unhinged symptom of scrupulosity disease and anyone who blames you for not being able to CEV someone against their stated preferences needs to be more reasonable. But clearly this distinction is an attack surface when we talk about asymmetries like power, age, status, money. You can construct scenarios where it seems worse than 1% bad!
Regardless, I think the idea that people (especially women) are sometimes defensive not about their boundaries being violated, but about their consent not being endorsed later explains a lot of human behavior (or at least, like, the society/culture I know).
For what it’s worth, I agree that the comment you’re responding to has some embedded claims which aren’t justified in text, but they’re not claims which are false by construction, and you haven’t presented any reason to believe that they’re false.
They imply irrationality via failure to investigate a confusion, so I thought it was within scope on a rationality improvement forum to point that out. Since there exists an alternative coherent construal I thought it was good practice to acknowledge that as well.
I read RobertM as apophatially saying that Benquo could be confessing to something with Benquo’s comment, and Benquo asking what Benquo is allegedly confessing to.
Yes. It seems like RobertM is trying to appeal to some idea about fair play, by saying that people shouldn’t make even disjunctive hypothetical accusations because they wouldn’t like it if someone did that to them. But it seems relevant to evaluating that fairness claim that some accusations are discernibly more justified than others, and in this case RobertM seems not to have been able to think of any plausible crimes to disjunctively accuse me of. I am perplexed as to how “true accusations are better than false ones and you can discover by thinking and investigating which statements are more likely to be true and which are more likely to be wrong” seems to have almost fallen out of the Overton window for some important subset of cases on less wrong dot com, but that seems to be where we are.
I read Robert as accusing you of attempting a rhetorical trick in which, by making a disjunctive accusation where one of the disjuncts is shocking[1] and grave, you algorithmically intend to intimidate people into accepting the other disjunct, which they would be less likely to do if you argued for it on its own merits rather than pairing it with the shocking disjunct. I don’t think you would be getting this pushback if you had said, “Maybe she’s a good judge of character; after all, every time she judges a man to be safe and is correct, that’s some amount of probabilistic evidence that she’s capable of making such distinctions rather than being tied to base rates.”
(I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here, and anticipate that you have reasons why the “Maybe she’s a good judge of character” alternative in fact omits important substantive criticisms you mean to make, but this comment still seems good to post, because I think your diagnosis of the relevant defect in site culture being a denial of “true accusations are better than false ones” is off-base.)
I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here,
I’m more objected to Benquo’s comment on grounds of it being false, or at least not engaging with what Sinclair obviously meant, than about tone. [edit: er, I guess I also think that giving a false dichotomy to make a point seem persuasive seems to fall under “deception” rather than tone and I don’t think you need to bring tone into the question to object to the comment].
I do think a pretty valuable I’ve gotten a lot from Benquo over the years has been reframings of things in ways that make me engage with something that my natural frame glossed over. But, in this case I think his implied point just… doesn’t seem logically valid and is kinda offtopic? Or at least he hasn’t made the case for it. (I think “maybe she’s a good judge of character?” is still missing the point of what Sinclair pretty obviously meant. If the base rates are low, the dice coming up negative isn’t a very interesting outcome in the first place and you shouldn’t be updating [edit] much [/edit] from a single instance)
(I separately think Robert’s comment wasn’t very good either, doesn’t quite check out even as a clever quip, and he probably should have resisted the urge to get partial credit for “not being clever”)
I am, to be clear, actively interested in Benquo engaging with the base rates question and explaining why his frame here is useful in spite of that background fact.
Yeah true, but I’d reword as “shouldn’t be updating much from a single instance”, and I think concretely it shouldn’t be enough of an update to substantially privilege hypotheses like “Sinclair is making some kind of cognitive error here”.
(My actual guess is that Benquo has a background frame/hypothesis like “People frequently underweight their own personal intuitions over statistics [or, vaguely assumed ‘statistics’ that they probably don’t even have a citation for and if they looked up the study it might not even say what they thought it said].” And, like, I totally think this might be true and relevant and worth having privileged anyway, but I don’t think Sinclair’s anecdote is evidence for or particularly illustrative of it)
Yes, that’s what the first half of my comment was intended to convey. I disendorse the way I communicated that (since it was both unclear and provocative).
I’m complying with Sinclair’s explicit preference to be treated as someone who might possibly do crimes, by not censoring the flow of credence from “people who don’t expect me to do crimes to them are making a mistake” to “I have done crimes to such people.” You are asking me to do exactly what Sinclair complained about and assume that they’re necessarily harmless, or to pretend to do this.
I think this is a class of situation where people prefer obfuscation: the preference is not for you to assume that the subject is harmless, but to take actions that merely imply that the subject might not be harmless without explicitly spelling out the “subject is harmful” disjunct, such that the message slips past a System 1 scapegoating circuit while System 2 can piece together what it needs to know. Implying something without stating it isn’t the same thing as pretending the opposite.
An example that comes to mind is that a few years ago, my friend (17F) was riding with me (23) on the subway from Berkeley back to San Francisco late at night, and she asked if she could stay over at my place instead of getting off at her stop so she didn’t have to walk half an hour alone in the middle of the night back to her place. This struck me as a profound misunderstanding of base rates of assault by strangers, and an underestimate of the relative danger of some “some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups.”
Look I want people to trust me. But if I don’t earn that trust it feels like they’re being naiive, or devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency or something. I know it’s strictly good for me for people to think I am good and I really shouldn’t complain about it.
I think what’s being gestured at is that Sinclair may or may not have been referring to
the base rate of this being a bad idea
the base rate of this bad idea conditioning on genders xyz
An example of the variety of ways of thinking about this: Many women (often cis) I’ve talked to, among those who have standing distrust or bad priors on cis men, are very liberal about extending woman-level trust to trans women. That doesn’t mean they’re maximally trusting, just that they’re not more trusting of a cis woman they’ve seen at like three meetups than they are of a trans woman they’ve seen at like three meetups.
But really one and two are quite different sorts of claims, that I don’t think people agree about how the conditioning changes the game. However, I get the sense (not from this comment, but combining it with upstream Sinclair comments) that Sinclair thinks the person would be making less of a mistake if she had asked the same couchsurf favor of a cis woman.
I don’t think that cis women are harmless either. On one hand, women that are abusers tend to be more manipulative and isolating wheras men that are abusers tend to be more physical. And mayyybe that’s a neurotype thing that correlates with bio sex rather than hormonal gender or a cultural thing that is a product of gendered upbringing rather than gendered adult life. And mayyybe that meaningfully affects in what scenarios one ought to be wary of cis women vs trans women.
Feels a bit like an irresponsible speculation though.
Not putting forth a strong argument here, just clarifying my position.
https://www.theonion.com/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock-1819583529 https://www.theonion.com/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wearing-this-business-suit-iron-1819584239
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to committing assault, or treating a correct prediction as discrediting because of the strength of your prior against the idea that a woman might accurately evaluate a man as unlikely to assault her.
This comment seems like it will degrade quality of discourse enough (while not providing that much value) that additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action (e.g. rate limiting, bans). There is real content in this comment, but I expect the way the point was made will degrade conversations more than the value it adds. I also think the downvotes and this warning are adequate response for now.
To elaborate more, the comment seems likely to degrade discourse for the following combination of reasons:
The point is locally invalid. Sinclair’s comment could be interpreted as saying more than just one of those two things, and in fact neither was the intended meaning (see this comment by Raemon that Sinclair endorsed). As I understand it, Sinclair’s comment was about the relative priors of actually getting assaulted by someone you recently met vs on the street, not priors about a person’s ability to evaluate someone else, and also didn’t do anything that meaningfully would count as “admitting assault”. At the very most one could say “said they are the kind of person who might commit assault”. The “either/or” is invalid.
On top of being wrong (not itself a major crime), this comment contains a bad rhetorical pattern. “Either <incriminating option you very likely didn’t mean> or <wrong interpretation of thing you said>” is not the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialog in my models. The pattern is something like “giving credibility to your mainline intention by juxtaposing it with something definitely not intended, and put your interlocutor on the defensive”. It seems much better to say something like “you probably mean X, but I think that’s wrong”. I don’t know whether you intended the effects of this rhetorical pattern, but I think independently of your intention, it had bad effects on the conversation.
I originally had a third bullet here discussing accusations and their effects, but after chatting with Habryka this seems trickier to get right. Habryka will leave thoughts in his own comments on that below.
(I have some sense that Zack, whose post this comment appears under, might have a different take on the comment/response. In this case, Zack didn’t have custom moderation guidelines set so I’m responding from approximately “mainline site mod philosophy”, but if they had, I’d have factored that into my response.)
I don’t normally say this, but you’re not passing Benquo’s ideological Turing test.
The reason I don’t normally say this is because it’s a high bar; I don’t think having a deep understanding of your interlocutor’s position should be a prerequisite for arguing with them. (We can hope that someone will learn something in ensuing discussion, even if the critic didn’t get everything exactly right in their initial comment.)
But you’re not just arguing with Benquo, you’re threatening to censor him. (I claim that “threatening to censor” is a reasonable paraphrase of “additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action”.) If moderators censor arguments that they don’t understand, then our collective discourse doesn’t get a chance to process those arguments, which is contrary to the site’s mission.
The moderation guidelines in my account settings are explicitly set to “Easy Going — I just delete obvious spam and trolling.” Is your claim that Benquo’s comments constitute “obvious spam and trolling”, or that I shouldn’t have interpreted that menu option literally? Or something else? (I’m not claiming that the two possibilities I named are necessarily exhaustive.)
Also, the “I’m happy for site moderators to help enforce my policy” box in my account settings is not checked. Is there a way to express that I’m actively unhappy with site moderators helping enforce my policy?
I want to be part of an intellectual community where people like Benquo and Said Achmiz have free speech. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but I’ve learned a lot from both of them, and therefore consider myself to have a selfish interest in both of them having the liberty to say what they’re actually thinking in the words that come naturally to them, rather than looking over their shoulder trying to guess what the mods will allow as the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialogue in their models. I continue to be disappointed with the censorious attitudes of the Less Wrong 2.0 team, which I consider deeply anti-intellectual.
There’s more I could say, but between this post and tomorrow’s, I’m already over my drama budget for Q3, so I think it’s better that I don’t continue this discussion at this time.
Meta: totally understand being over your drama budget. I’ll attempt to keep this reply plain and only as much as necessary.
To clarify the mod guidelines situation better (and I acknowledge this is likely has not been explained before):
I think this comment falls into a category we’d by default moderate against even for people who’ve set “easy going”. However, I’m okay with not moderating something in this class if people on your posts have been given adequate heads up (e.g. moderation guidelines) that you’ve got different guidelines that the site as a whole. In particular, I’d want them to know what you’re allowing that LW team wouldn’t, e.g. all of Said’s commenting. Benquo’s commenting). (If you do this, I can confirm that I think you’ve warned people adequately according to my model of you.)
I don’t promise that the LW mod team will never moderate comments on your posts, even if you do this, but we’ll have a much higher bar for intervening. (This is something like a person is allowed to set the rules on their private property up to a certain limit.) Benquo’s comment here and Said’s behavior are things I’m okay with you inviting on your own posts. We might still have to step in if someone is being egregiously threatening, though I half-suspect you don’t want that either.
I won’t respond to the ITT point now to avoid further drama, unless you’d like me to.
lol no to the former
Untangling your second alternative into ordinary language: he judged that she was making a bad judgement that was only accurate in the instant case by accident. Well, yes, that seems to be exactly what Sinclair is saying.
If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
(Ok, not always. Of the people that know me well, I’m sure they trust me because they witness me be a good person. Actually, I think people 80% process this subconsciously purely off vibes, like they find me funny and amicable and not creepy. )
I guess my objection is that people’s priors are actually wrong. Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women. (Yes, it’s a bit unfair of me to refer to unverifiable claims. Also there’s some bias since my close social circle is mostly women. I am saying my position is not purely ideological but empirical.)
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
(But I get that people are
reasoning off of base ratesvibing off of stereotypes so maybe it’s strategic.)The streets of SF can be pretty dangerous late at night, lots of homeless people high on drugs, and I’ve had friends mugged in SF. Depending on which streets they are, I could easily prefer to sleep in the house of some random rationalist I met at a Berkeley event than walk half an hour through some scary SF streets at midnight.
Your assessment implies that the 17 year-old woman wouldn’t have made the same request if she’d read your gender as being a man, and that seems possible, but I personally don’t think it’d be that surprising to hear the same story from a 23 year-old guy (instead of from you).
If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.
I think Ben’s point is that you don’t know that.
But insofar as this is what is going on, I suspect that one dynamic is roughly something like this: for their safety(?), women(?) don’t just want to directly evade threats, they also want to be seen as able to police threats. This is how someo receiving sexual info about you, or having certain sexual thoughts about you, are constructed as violations of you, as opposed to risk factors for future violations. For that, Schelling gender is what matters, which is why as your Schelling gender changes, you observe people acting differently towards you in a seemingly irrational way.
(Note that I’m being coy about something here)
How do you know?
Did these women say that they perceive you as harmless because you’re a woman?
Perhaps they simply perceive you as a harmless man.
(And maybe that’s what upsets you about this whole thing?)
The way that they know is that they got to see the diff between how they were treated when they were presented as a man, and how they were treated when they presented as a woman?
As they say in the comment you’re responding to?
And definitely that’s not an ironclad inference: it’s possible in principle that people started treating Sinclair differently for reasons independent of their shift in gender-presentation. But that’s pretty implausible on the face of it.
Your comment assumes that gender presentation translates directly into perception of gender (or, even, perception of sex, which is the vastly more important variable here!), but there is no reason at all for that assumption; indeed, it is precisely what I am questioning in the grandparent!
Sinclair:
Yourself:
I think you’re on a frolic of your own here.
.
What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn’t?
(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that’s what happened? Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that’s what happened?)
Examples of info she might have had:
She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
e.g. his demeanor, and the way other people at the meetups who’ve known him for longer than she has treat him
(which I think is still not quite enough to make it obvious he’s less dangerous than complete strangers on her way from the metro station back home unless she’s in a third-world country, but still)
the story is intentionally vague to not leak personal info
but yes, I did think and continue to think that she enjoyed spending time with me.
How likely do you think the first half of your disjunction is to be true?
Not very, but it’s the only coherent construal.
I think there might be something important about pointing out “the way you’re handling the evidence here is weird”, but… this just seems false? (And, seems to me to be steering away from the actual most likely area of ‘what sort of things the commenter meant’ or, if the commenter is confused, ‘what sort of ways the commenter might be confused’)
(actually, I started writing this comment thinking you had a reasonable point just worded confusingly, but after thinking about it a bit I think your comment is just kinda ignoring the obvious point and making an unrelated point that doesn’t seem that relevant?)
I think it’s at least a coherent position that:
the likelihood of getting assaulted by a stranger on the street is quite low
the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone you recently met is also low (but, somewhat higher than the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone on the street)
In both cases it’s very unsurprising to not get assaulted, and it shouldn’t affect your baserate models very much. But if Alice wants someone she just met to accompany her home for safety, it’s a coherent position to think that, even if Bailey is quite confident they’re not going to assault Alice, they still thinks Alice is making a cognitive error in thinking that she is statistically more safe with someone in Bailey reference class.
(i.e. the error Bailey thinks Alice is making is not about how dangerous Bailey is, but about the relative danger between Bailey and A-Stranger-On-The-Street)
It’s possible that Bailey is ignoring channels of information that Alice has access to, and maybe Bailey should be attentive to that, but AFAICT there is nothing incoherent about the logic above. Or at least, you haven’t said anything to argue that the above logic isn’t sound, and it seems kinda nonsequitor-ish to bring up your alternate hypothesis without explaining why it’s not sound.
(I think an error Bailey / Sinclair might be making here is that it’s not just about risk of assault, it’s about risk of being harassed, and risk of harassment is actually pretty high even if risk of assault is low, and harassment a) does suck, b) happens noticeably less often when you’re in a group)
Yes, this is a good description of the point I was trying to make.
It’s possible I underestimate the suffering caused by being harassed since I think I don’t mind the milder forms of it (like being cat-called) as much as other people maybe. And more severe forms of harassment have not happened to me (yet?)
I’ve gone through a few phases of beliefs here:
“why would you be afraid of walking at night? Doesn’t seem like bad things happen to me”
“I basically believe the narrative that women have more to worry about here than men, that thing are legitimately dangerous for women walking alone at night”
“I believe that, actually, violent crime at night is just quite rare, and I’ve heard [but not checked] that men are actually more likely to be violently attacked than women. And the ‘women have something to be scared about here that male-privilege obviates’ feels a bit off. And it feels impolitic to say, but, actually, it maybe is better for women to become more calibrated about their safety.”
“Women get harassed a lot more than men, and with each harassment instance one of the issues is that they have to model whether the harassment is likely to escalate to a violent conflict, which they’d probably be at a physical disadvantage in (and regardless, having to escalate to ‘be ready to fight’ is really scary). But, I still think people are overestimating this danger – most harassment doesn’t escalate to conflict. In Berkeley I have homeless people come up and yell at me a lot, and I feel an initial jolt of fear, but then try to shrug and move on, and I think this would be correct for women to do too.”
“Hmm, actually, some of the harassment I’m seeing / hearing about actually sounds pretty bad, somewhere in between catcalling and violent conflict, and I’m now not sure what to think about the base rates here.”
(The last update came from hearing from a female friend who described herself living in “a bad neighborhood”, and having a bunch of late-night safety habits that seemed excessive to me. But it turned out they had multiple instances of people following them to their house, masturbating ‘at them’ through their fence, and coming up to their front door and banging on it loudly, which were all more extreme than I had encountered before and updated me more towards a more legit Different Worlds hypothesis)
If I was being clever, I might say:Anyways, there are of course coherent construals other than the two you presented, like “the prediction was miscalibrated given how much evidence she had, but it turned out fine because base rates on both sides are really quite low”.
ETA: I disendorse the posture (though not implied content) of the half of this comment.
The comment reported a trend of accurate appraisals characterized as mistakes, with an illustrative anecdote, not an isolated event. Other parts of the comment, like the bit about how not treating them as a likely assailant is “devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency” implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault. This is not ambiguous at all. It seems like on balance people think that politeness calls for pretending not to understand when someone says very overtly that they mean people ill, want to be perceived as violent and aggressive, etc, up until it’s time to scapegoat them.
Alternatively, agency implies the potential to transgress. Evaluating someone as not a threat to transgress is making a statement about the conjunction of their capabilities and motives, not motives alone, and someone might have an interest in protecting their reputation as capable, even at the cost of creating uncertainty about their good intent?
Wouldn’t that imply more upside than downside in staying over?
While I partially share your confusion about “implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault”, I thought Sinclair was talking mostly about “your risk of being seduced, being into it at the time, then regretting it later” and it would only relate to harassment or assault as a kind of tail case.
I think some high libido / high sexual agency people learn to consider seducing someone very effectively in ways that seem to go well but the person would not endorse at CEV a morally relevant failure mode, say 1% bad setting 100% at some rape outcome. Others of course say this is an unhinged symptom of scrupulosity disease and anyone who blames you for not being able to CEV someone against their stated preferences needs to be more reasonable. But clearly this distinction is an attack surface when we talk about asymmetries like power, age, status, money. You can construct scenarios where it seems worse than 1% bad!
Regardless, I think the idea that people (especially women) are sometimes defensive not about their boundaries being violated, but about their consent not being endorsed later explains a lot of human behavior (or at least, like, the society/culture I know).
For what it’s worth, I agree that the comment you’re responding to has some embedded claims which aren’t justified in text, but they’re not claims which are false by construction, and you haven’t presented any reason to believe that they’re false.
They imply irrationality via failure to investigate a confusion, so I thought it was within scope on a rationality improvement forum to point that out. Since there exists an alternative coherent construal I thought it was good practice to acknowledge that as well.
Which unspecified but grossly immoral act did the plain text of my comment seem like it implied a confession of?
“Committing assault”?
wait, how does Benquo’s text imply that Benquo is confessing to committing assault?
It implied a confession by Sinclair to committing assault (sorry for the ambiguity here).
I read RobertM as apophatially saying that Benquo could be confessing to something with Benquo’s comment, and Benquo asking what Benquo is allegedly confessing to.
Yes. It seems like RobertM is trying to appeal to some idea about fair play, by saying that people shouldn’t make even disjunctive hypothetical accusations because they wouldn’t like it if someone did that to them. But it seems relevant to evaluating that fairness claim that some accusations are discernibly more justified than others, and in this case RobertM seems not to have been able to think of any plausible crimes to disjunctively accuse me of. I am perplexed as to how “true accusations are better than false ones and you can discover by thinking and investigating which statements are more likely to be true and which are more likely to be wrong” seems to have almost fallen out of the Overton window for some important subset of cases on less wrong dot com, but that seems to be where we are.
I read Robert as accusing you of attempting a rhetorical trick in which, by making a disjunctive accusation where one of the disjuncts is shocking[1] and grave, you algorithmically intend to intimidate people into accepting the other disjunct, which they would be less likely to do if you argued for it on its own merits rather than pairing it with the shocking disjunct. I don’t think you would be getting this pushback if you had said, “Maybe she’s a good judge of character; after all, every time she judges a man to be safe and is correct, that’s some amount of probabilistic evidence that she’s capable of making such distinctions rather than being tied to base rates.”
(I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here, and anticipate that you have reasons why the “Maybe she’s a good judge of character” alternative in fact omits important substantive criticisms you mean to make, but this comment still seems good to post, because I think your diagnosis of the relevant defect in site culture being a denial of “true accusations are better than false ones” is off-base.)
Anecdotally, I felt a jolt of fear when I first saw your comment without knowing to whom it was addressed.
I’m more objected to Benquo’s comment on grounds of it being false, or at least not engaging with what Sinclair obviously meant, than about tone. [edit: er, I guess I also think that giving a false dichotomy to make a point seem persuasive seems to fall under “deception” rather than tone and I don’t think you need to bring tone into the question to object to the comment].
I do think a pretty valuable I’ve gotten a lot from Benquo over the years has been reframings of things in ways that make me engage with something that my natural frame glossed over. But, in this case I think his implied point just… doesn’t seem logically valid and is kinda offtopic? Or at least he hasn’t made the case for it. (I think “maybe she’s a good judge of character?” is still missing the point of what Sinclair pretty obviously meant. If the base rates are low, the dice coming up negative isn’t a very interesting outcome in the first place and you shouldn’t be updating [edit] much [/edit] from a single instance)
(I separately think Robert’s comment wasn’t very good either, doesn’t quite check out even as a clever quip, and he probably should have resisted the urge to get partial credit for “not being clever”)
I am, to be clear, actively interested in Benquo engaging with the base rates question and explaining why his frame here is useful in spite of that background fact.
Quantitatively small updates are still updates!
Yeah true, but I’d reword as “shouldn’t be updating much from a single instance”, and I think concretely it shouldn’t be enough of an update to substantially privilege hypotheses like “Sinclair is making some kind of cognitive error here”.
(My actual guess is that Benquo has a background frame/hypothesis like “People frequently underweight their own personal intuitions over statistics [or, vaguely assumed ‘statistics’ that they probably don’t even have a citation for and if they looked up the study it might not even say what they thought it said].” And, like, I totally think this might be true and relevant and worth having privileged anyway, but I don’t think Sinclair’s anecdote is evidence for or particularly illustrative of it)
Yes, that’s what the first half of my comment was intended to convey. I disendorse the way I communicated that (since it was both unclear and provocative).
I’m complying with Sinclair’s explicit preference to be treated as someone who might possibly do crimes, by not censoring the flow of credence from “people who don’t expect me to do crimes to them are making a mistake” to “I have done crimes to such people.” You are asking me to do exactly what Sinclair complained about and assume that they’re necessarily harmless, or to pretend to do this.
I think this is a class of situation where people prefer obfuscation: the preference is not for you to assume that the subject is harmless, but to take actions that merely imply that the subject might not be harmless without explicitly spelling out the “subject is harmful” disjunct, such that the message slips past a System 1 scapegoating circuit while System 2 can piece together what it needs to know. Implying something without stating it isn’t the same thing as pretending the opposite.