Yep. In the marketplace of ideas, some ideas are not playing fair—they reward their users in ways beyond “having a good model of the world”, for example by increasing their status. We should place an extra burden of proof on those ideas.
I like Jacob’s articles. They are nicely written, contain interesting insights, and I generally like reading about sex. But I don’t think they pass the extra burden of proof. -- What I wish would happen here, is that each article would get a skeptical opposition. But yes, the social incentives are set in such way that the debate would reward Jacob and punish his opponents. Which may be a reason why the debate doesn’t happen.
I don’t mind also posting criticism on your object-level claims if I’ll get approval from mods to go to very uncomfortable places.
Perhaps if you post the criticism somewhere else, and only post a link here, that would protect LW from the status hit of “hosting objectionable content”. Yes it is hypocritical, but there is a difference when a third party quotes something as “this was written on LW” or “this was linked from LW”. (I am not a moderator, I am just trying to consider their incentives.)
For me, a useful intuition pump is to imagine the same debate, only replacing sexual marketplace with money. Because the (liberal part of?) society has opposing intuitions here: losers at the sexual marketplace should be laughed at and shunned (unless they are a sexual minority, then the rules are different), losers at the financial marketplace should be empathised with and defended. (Kicking the homeless does not get the same reaction from the crowd as kicking the incels.) Then the analogical article would be something like: “Hey, my name is Donald Trump, and I want to tell you that becoming rich is actually quite easy. Most importantly, you need to be a nice and friendly person, and the first step towards that is overcoming your bitterness from your (frankly, mostly self-inflicted) poverty.” Even if this came with many good insights on the financial markets, it probably wouldn’t be received well. -- Then of course many people reject this analogy (no analogy is ever perfect), because the lack of sex does not kill you, and the lack of money could. (They would probably still feel bad about a world where each poor person gets exactly as much money as they need to literally survive, but not a cent more.)
The first step towards a high-quality criticism would be to extract the list of statements that Jacob seems to be making, and ideally check that he approves of this interpretation. Then, post the arguments to the contrary. (I am too lazy to actually do this, I am just expressing my preferences about what I’d like to read.)
Now some object-level objections:
Compare this picture (source) with this one. In the first case, Jacob explains (in my opinion correctly) how a small initial imbalance on the dating market (in the specific subculture, in favor of men) can translate into huge disparity of power. In the second case, where the imbalance is in favor of women, Jacob just ignores the huge difference in the gray part of the graph, and concludes that “overall the differences are just not that big” (referring only to relative differences between the non-gray parts of the graph, of course).
So, when an imbalance makes it difficult for some women to find a partner, “I find this genuinely sad. I strongly believe that relationships are preferable to aloneness.” But when an imbalance makes if difficult for some men, that is not even worth noticing. -- I assume that Jacob really has a blind spot here, not that he did it on purpose. But that’s exactly the meta point, that pointing out a bias, even on a rationalist website, carries a status penalty (“why is Viliam spending his time caring about incels? does this mean he is...?”).
Similarly both sexes have a preference for men to be more proactive in flirting and escalating to sex, and there’s also enough variance to allow shy guys and assertive gals to find each other.
Well, this assumes that (1) there are at least as many assertive gals as the shy guys, and that (2) the assertive gals will use their assertivity on the shy guys, as opposed to just any guys they like. Hypothetically, each of these statements could be true; I just don’t see any evidence, so this reduces to a just-world assumption.
Yep. In the marketplace of ideas, some ideas are not playing fair—they reward their users in ways beyond “having a good model of the world”, for example by increasing their status. We should place an extra burden of proof on those ideas.
I like Jacob’s articles. They are nicely written, contain interesting insights, and I generally like reading about sex. But I don’t think they pass the extra burden of proof. -- What I wish would happen here, is that each article would get a skeptical opposition. But yes, the social incentives are set in such way that the debate would reward Jacob and punish his opponents. Which may be a reason why the debate doesn’t happen.
Perhaps if you post the criticism somewhere else, and only post a link here, that would protect LW from the status hit of “hosting objectionable content”. Yes it is hypocritical, but there is a difference when a third party quotes something as “this was written on LW” or “this was linked from LW”. (I am not a moderator, I am just trying to consider their incentives.)
For me, a useful intuition pump is to imagine the same debate, only replacing sexual marketplace with money. Because the (liberal part of?) society has opposing intuitions here: losers at the sexual marketplace should be laughed at and shunned (unless they are a sexual minority, then the rules are different), losers at the financial marketplace should be empathised with and defended. (Kicking the homeless does not get the same reaction from the crowd as kicking the incels.) Then the analogical article would be something like: “Hey, my name is Donald Trump, and I want to tell you that becoming rich is actually quite easy. Most importantly, you need to be a nice and friendly person, and the first step towards that is overcoming your bitterness from your (frankly, mostly self-inflicted) poverty.” Even if this came with many good insights on the financial markets, it probably wouldn’t be received well. -- Then of course many people reject this analogy (no analogy is ever perfect), because the lack of sex does not kill you, and the lack of money could. (They would probably still feel bad about a world where each poor person gets exactly as much money as they need to literally survive, but not a cent more.)
The first step towards a high-quality criticism would be to extract the list of statements that Jacob seems to be making, and ideally check that he approves of this interpretation. Then, post the arguments to the contrary. (I am too lazy to actually do this, I am just expressing my preferences about what I’d like to read.)
Now some object-level objections:
Compare this picture (source) with this one. In the first case, Jacob explains (in my opinion correctly) how a small initial imbalance on the dating market (in the specific subculture, in favor of men) can translate into huge disparity of power. In the second case, where the imbalance is in favor of women, Jacob just ignores the huge difference in the gray part of the graph, and concludes that “overall the differences are just not that big” (referring only to relative differences between the non-gray parts of the graph, of course).
So, when an imbalance makes it difficult for some women to find a partner, “I find this genuinely sad. I strongly believe that relationships are preferable to aloneness.” But when an imbalance makes if difficult for some men, that is not even worth noticing. -- I assume that Jacob really has a blind spot here, not that he did it on purpose. But that’s exactly the meta point, that pointing out a bias, even on a rationalist website, carries a status penalty (“why is Viliam spending his time caring about incels? does this mean he is...?”).
Well, this assumes that (1) there are at least as many assertive gals as the shy guys, and that (2) the assertive gals will use their assertivity on the shy guys, as opposed to just any guys they like. Hypothetically, each of these statements could be true; I just don’t see any evidence, so this reduces to a just-world assumption.