Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics
Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking.
When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn’t ideal for me.
I didn’t like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn’t like the desperate, codependent ‘madness’ that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else’s sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture’s scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn’t fit my own goals very well.
I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren’t too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that...
Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too!
We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don’t automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren’t configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one’s life. That’s why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships.
Relationships Styles
When Minda had her first relationship with a woman, she found that the cultural scripts for heterosexual relationships didn’t work for a homosexual relationship style. For example, in heterosexual dating (in the USA) the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man’s lead, and that she shouldn’t initiate sex herself.
In the queer community, Minda quickly found that if she passively waited for a woman to hit on her, she’d be waiting all night! When she met her first girlfriend, Minda had to ask for the date. Minda writes:
On dates, I didn’t know if I should pay for the date or hold the door or what I was supposed to do! Each interaction required thought and negotiation that hadn’t been necessary before. And this was really kind of neat. We had the opportunity to create a relationship that worked for us and represented us as unique and individual human beings. And when it came to sexual interactions, I found it easy to ask for and engage in exactly what I wanted. And I have since brought these practices into my relationships with men.
But you don’t need to have an ‘alternative’ relationship in order to decide you want to set aside some cultural scripts and design a relationship style that works for you. You can choose relationship styles that work for you now.
With regard to which type(s) of romantic partner(s) you want, there are many possibilities.
No partners:
Asexuality. Asexuals don’t experience sexual attraction. They comprise perhaps 1% of the population,1 and include notables like Paul Erdos, Morrissey, and Janeane Garofalo. There is a network (AVEN) for asexuality awareness and acceptance.
Celibacy. Celibates feel sexual attraction, but abstain from sex. Some choose to abstain for medical, financial, psychological, or philosophical reasons. Others choose celibacy so they have more time to achieve other goals, as I (Luke) did for a time. Others are involuntarily celibate; perhaps they can’t find or attract suitable mates. This problem can often be solved by learning and practicing social skills.
One partner:
Monogamy. Having one sexual partner at a time is a standard cultural script, and may be over-used due to the status quo bias. Long-term monogamy should not be done on the pretense that attraction and arousal for one’s partner won’t fade. It will.2 Still, there may be many people for whom monogamy is optimal.
Many partners:
Singlehood. Singlehood can be a good way to get to know yourself and experience a variety of short-term partners. About 78% of college students have had at least one ‘one-night stand’, and most such encounters were preceded by alcohol or drug use.3 Indeed, many young people today no longer go on ‘dates’ to get to know a potential partner. Instead, they meet each other at a social event, ‘hook up’, and then go on dates (if the hookup went well).4
Friendship ‘with benefits’. Friends are often people you already enjoy and respect, and thus may also make excellent sexual partners. According to one study, 60% of undergraduates have been a ‘friend with benefits’ for someone at one time.5
Polyamory.6 In a polyamorous relationship, partners are clear about their freedom to pursue multiple partners. Couples communicate their boundaries and make agreements about what is and isn’t allowed. Polyamory often requires partners to de-program jealousy. In my experience, polyamory is much more common in the rationality community than in the general population.
Hugh points out that your limbic system may not agree (at least initially) with your cognitive choice of a relationship style. Some women say they want a long-term relationship but date ‘bad boys’ who are unlikely to become long-term mates. Someone may think they want polyamorous relationships but find it impossible to leave jealousy behind.7
The Science of Attraction
A key skillset required for having the relationships you want is that of building and maintaining attraction in potential mates.
Guys seeking girls may wonder: Why do girls say they want “nice guys” but date only “jerks”? Girls seeking rationalist guys are at an advantage because the gender ratio lies in their favor, but they still might wonder: What can I do to attract the best mates? Those seeking same-sex partners may wonder how attraction can differ from heterosexual norms.
How do you build and maintain attraction in others? A lot can be learned by trying different things and seeing what works. This is often better than polling people, because people’s verbal reports about what attracts them don’t always match their actual behavior.8
To get you started, the virtues of scholarship and empiricism will serve you well. Social psychology has a wealth of knowledge to offer on successful relationships.9 For example, here are some things that, according to the latest research, will tend to make people more attracted to you:
Proximity and familiarity. Study after study shows that we tend to like those who live near us, partly due to availability,10 and partly because repeated exposure to almost anything increases liking.11 A Taiwanese man once demonstrated the power of proximity and repeated exposure when he wrote over 700 letters to his girlfriend, urging her to marry him. She married the mail carrier.12
Similarity. We tend to like people who are similar to us.13 We like people with faces similar to our own.14 We are even more likely to marry someone with a similar-sounding name.15 Similarity makes attraction endure longer.16 Also, similar people are more likely to react to events the same way, thus reducing the odds of conflict.17
Physical attractiveness. Both men and women prefer good-looking mates.18 Partly, this is because the halo effect: we automatically assume that more attractive people are also healthier, happier, more sensitive, more successful, and more socially skilled (but not necessarily more honest or compassionate).19 Some of these assumptions are correct: Attractive and well-dressed people are more likely to impress employers and succeed occupationally.20 But isn’t beauty relative? Some standards of beauty vary from culture to culture, but many are universal.21 Men generally prefer women who exhibit signs of youth and fertility.22 Women generally prefer men who (1) display possession of abundant resources,23 (2) display high social status,24 (3) exhibit a ‘manly’ face (large jaw, thick eyebrows, visible beard stubble)25 and physique,26 and (4) are tall.27 Both genders generally prefer (1) agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion,28 (2) ‘average’ and symmetrical faces with features that are neither unusually small or large,29 (2) large smiles,30 (3) pupil dilation,31 and some other things (more on this later).
Liking others. Liking someone makes them more attracted to you.32
Arousing others. Whether aroused by fright, exercise, stand-up comedy, or erotica, we are more likely to be attracted to an attractive person when we are generally aroused than when we are not generally aroused.33 As David Myers writes, “Adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder.”34 This may explain why rollercoasters and horror movies are such a popular date night choice.
But this barely scratches the surface of attraction science. In a later post, we’ll examine how attraction works in more detail, and draw up a science-supported game plan for building attraction in others.
Attractiveness: Mean and Variance
Remember that increasing your average attractiveness (by appealing to more people) may not be an optimal strategy.
Marketers know that it’s often better to sacrifice broad appeal in order for a product to have very strong appeal to a niche market. The Appunto doesn’t appeal to most men, but it appeals strongly enough to some men that they are willing to pay the outrageous $200 price for it.
Similarly, you may have the best success in dating if you appeal very strongly to some people, even if this makes you less appealing to most people — that is, if you adopt a niche marketing strategy in the dating world.35
As long as you can find those few people who find you very attractive, it won’t matter (for dating) that most people aren’t attracted to you. And because one can switch between niche appeal and broad appeal using fashion and behavior, you can simply use clothing and behavior with mainstream appeal during the day (to have general appeal in professional environments) and use alternative clothing and behavior when you’re socializing (to have strong appeal to a small subset of people whom you’ve sought out).
To visualize this point, consider two attraction strategies. Both strategies employ phenomena that are (almost) universally attractive, but the blue strategy aims to maximize the frequency of somewhat positive responses while the red strategy aims to maximize the frequency of highly positive responses. The red strategy (e.g. using mainstream fashion) increases one’s mean attractiveness, while the blue strategy (e.g. using alternative fashion) increases one’s attractiveness variance. Hugh Ristik offers the following chart:
This goth guy and I (Luke) can illustrate this phenomenon. I aim for mainstream appeal; he wears goth clothing when socializing. My mainstream look turns off almost no one, and is attractive to most women, but doesn’t get that many strong reactions right away unless I employ other high-variance strategies.36 In contrast, I would bet the goth guy’s alternative look turns off many people and is less attractive to most women than my look is, but has a higher frequency of extremely positive reactions in women.
In one’s professional life, it may be better to have broad appeal. But in dating, the goal is to find people who find you extremely attractive. The goth guy sacrifices his mean attractiveness to increase his attractiveness variance (and thus the frequency of very positive responses), and this works well for him in the dating scene.
High-variance strategies like this are a good way to filter for people who are strongly attracted to you, and thus avoid wasting your time with potential mates who only feel lukewarm toward you.
Up next
In future posts we’ll develop an action plan for using the science of attraction to create successful romantic relationships. We’ll also explain how rationality helps with relationship maintenance37 and relationship satisfaction.
Previous post: The Power of Reinforcement
Notes
1 Bogaert (2004).
2 About half of romantic relationships of all types end within a few years (Sprecher 1994; Kirkpatrick & Davis 1994; Hill et al 1976), and even relationships that last exhibit diminishing attraction and arousal (Aron et al. 2006; Kurdek 2005; Miller et al. 2007). Note that even if attraction and arousal fades, romantic love can exist in long-term closed monogamy and it is associated with relationship satisfaction (Acevedo & Aron, 2009).
3 Paul et al. (2000); Grello et al. (2006).
4 Bogle (2008).
5 Bisson & Levine (2009).
6 Two introductory books on the theory and practice of polyamory are: Easton & Hardy (2009) and Taormino (2008).
7 See work on ‘conditional mating strategies’ aka ‘strategic pluralism’ (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).
8 Sprecher & Felmlee (2008); Eastwick & Finkel (2008). Likewise, there is a difference between what people publicly report as being the cause of a breakup, what they actually think caused a breakup, and what actually caused a breakup (Powell & Fine, 2009). Also see Inferring Our Desires.
9 For overviews of this research, see: Bradbury & Karney (2010); Miller & Perlman (2008); Vangelisti & Perlman (2006); Sprecher et al. (2008); Weiten et al. (2011), chs. 8-12. For a history of personal relationships research, see Perlman & Duck (2006).
10 Goodfriend (2009).
11 This is called the mere exposure effect. See Le (2009); Moreland & Zajonc (1982); Nuttin (1987); Zajonc (1968, 2001); Moreland & Beach (1992). The limits of this effect are explored in Bornstein (1989, 1999); Swap (1977).
12 Steinberg (1993).
13 Zajonc (1998); Devine (1995); Rosenbaum (1986); Surra et al. (2006); Morry (2007, 2009); Peplau & Fingerhut (2007); Ledbetter et al. (2007); Montoya et al. (2008); Simpson & Harris (1994).
14 DeBruine (2002, 2004); Bailenson et al. (2005).
15 Jones et al. (2004).
16 Byrne (1971); Ireland et al. (2011).
17 Gonzaga (2009). For an overview of the research on self-disclosure, see Greene et al. (2006).
18 Langlois et al. (2000); Walster et al. (1966); Feingold (1990); Woll (1986); Belot & Francesconi (2006); Finkel & Eastwick (2008); Neff (2009); Peretti & Abplanalp (2004); Buss et al. (2001); Fehr (2009); Lee et al. (2008); Reis et al. (1980). This is also true for homosexuals: Peplau & Spalding (2000). Even infants prefer attractive faces: Langlois et al. (1987); Langlois et al. (1990); Slater et al. (1998). Note that women report that the physical attractiveness is less important to their mate preferences than it actually is: Sprecher (1989).
19 Eagly et al. (1991); Feingold (1992a); Hatfield & Sprecher (1986); Smith et al. (1999); Dion et al. (1972).
20 Cash & Janda (1984); Langlois et al. (2000); Solomon (1987).
21 Cunningham et al. (1995); Cross & Cross (1971); Jackson (1992); Jones (1996); Thakerar & Iwawaki (1979).
22 Men certainly prefer youth (Buss 1989a; Kenrick & Keefe 1992; Kenrick et al. 1996; Ben Hamida et al. 1998). Signs of fertility that men prefer include clear and smooth skin (Sugiyama 2005; Singh & Bronstad 1997; Fink & Neave 2005; Fink et al. 2008; Ford & Beach 1951; Symons 1995), facial femininity (Cunningham 2009; Gangestad & Scheyd 2005; Schaefer et al. 2006; Rhodes 2006), long legs (Fielding et al. 2008; Sorokowski & Pawlowski 2008; Bertamini & Bennett 2009; Swami et al. 2006), and a low waist-to-hip ratio (Singh 1993, 2000; Singh & Young 1995; Jasienska et al. 2004; Singh & Randall 2007; Connolly et al 2000; Furnham et al 1997; Franzoi & Herzog 1987; Grabe & Samson 2010). Even men blind from birth prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio (Karremans et al. 2010).
23 Buss et al. (1990); Buss & Schmitt (1993); Khallad (2005); Gottschall et al. (2003); Gottschall et al. (2004); Kenrick et al. (1990); Gustavsson & Johnsson (2008); Wiederman (1993); Badahdah & Tiemann (2005); Marlowe (2004); Fisman et al. (2006); Asendorpf et al. (2010); Bokek-Cohen et al. (2007); Pettay et al. (2007); Goode (1996).
24 Feingold (1990, 1992b).
25 Cunningham (2009); Cunningham et al. (1990).
26 Singh (1995); Martins et al. (2007).
27 Lynn & Shurgot (1984); Ellis (1992); Gregor (1985); Kurzban & Weeden (2005); Swami & Furnham (2008). In contrast, men prefer women who are about 4.5 inches shorter than themselves: Gillis & Avis (1980).
28 Figueredo et al. (2006).
29 Langlois & Roggman (1990); Rhodes et al. (1999); Singh (1995); Thornhill & Gangestad (1994, 1999). We may have evolved to be attracted to symmetrical faces because they predict physical and mental health (Thornhill & Moller, 1997).
30 Cunningham (2009).
31 Cunningham (2009).
32 This is called reciprocal liking. See Curtis & Miller (1986); Aron et al (2006); Berscheid & Walster (1978); Smith & Caprariello (2009); Backman & Secord (1959).
33 Carducci et al. (1978); Dermer & Pszczynski (1978); White & Knight (1984); Dutton & Aron (1974).
34 Myers (2010), p. 710.
35 One example of a high-variance strategy for heterosexual men in the dating context is a bold opening line like “You look familiar. Have we had sex?” Most women will be turned off by such a line, but those who react positively are (by selection and/or by the confidence of the opening line) usually very attracted.
36 In business, this is often said as “not everyone is your customer”: 1, 2, 3.
37 For discussions of relationship maintenance in general, see: Ballard-Reisch & Wiegel (1999); Dinda & Baxter (1987); Haas & Stafford (1998).
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What?! Most asexuals experience romantic attraction. Some asexuals are aromantic, but that’s not the same thing.
Oops fixed thanks.
I should just have my own shortcut for that. OFT or something. :)
I find that claim bewildering because the partnered men I know aren’t jerks. It could be that I’m filtering for non-jerkness, but my tentative alternate theory is that the maybe the most conspicuously attractive women prefer jerks, and the men who resent the pattern aren’t noticing most women. Or possibly a preference for jerks really is common in “girls”—not children, but women below some level of maturity (age 25? 30? whatever it takes to get tired of being mistreated?), and some men are imprinted on what they saw in high school.
For those of you who believe that women prefer jerks, what sort of behavior do you actually mean? What proportion of women are you talking about? Is there academic research to back this up? What have you seen in your social circle?
This is a terrible debate and you should all feel bad for having it. Now let me join in.
The research on this topic is split into “completely useless” and “mostly useless”. In the former category we have studies that, with a straight face, purport to show that women like nice guys by asking women to self-report on their preferences. To illuminate just how silly this is, consider the mirror case of asking men “So, do you like witty charming girls with good personalities, or supermodels with big breasts?” When this was actually done, men rated “physical attractiveness” only their 22nd most important criterion for a mate—number one was “sincerity”, and number nineteen was “good manners”. And yet there are no websites where you can spend $9.95 per month to stream videos of well-mannered girls asking men to please pass the salad fork, and there are no spinster apartments full of broken-hearted supermodels who just didn’t have enough sincerity. So self-reports are right out.
Other-reports may be slightly less silly. Herold and Milhausen, 1999, found that 56% of university women believed that women in general were more likely to date jerks than nice guys. But although women may have less emotional investment in the issue than men, their opinions are still just opinions.
The few studies that earn the coveted accolade of “only mostly useless” are those that try to analyze actual behavior. Bogart and Fisher typify a group of studies that show that good predictors of a man’s number of sexual partners include disinhibitedness, high testosterone levels, “hypermasculinity”, “sensation seeking”, antisocial personality, and extraversion. Meston et al typify a separate group of studies on sex and the Big Five traits when she says that “agreeableness was the most consistent predictor of behavior...disagreeable men and women were more likely to have had sexual intercourse and with a greater number of partners than agreeable men and women. Nonvirgins of both sexes were more likely to be calculating, stubborn, and arrogant in their interpersonal behavior than virgins. Neuroticism predicted sexual experience in males only; timid, unassertive men were less sexually experienced than emotionally stable men...the above findings were all statistically significant at p<.01″
These studies certainly show that jerkishness is associated with high number of sexual partners, but they’re not quite a victory for the “nice guys finish last” camp for a couple of reasons. First, men seem to come off almost as bad as women do. Second, there’s no reason to think that any particular “nice” woman will like jerks; many of the findings could be explained by disagreeable men hooking up with disagreeable women, disagreeing with them about things (as they do) and then breaking up and hooking up with other disagreeable women, while the agreeable people form stable pair bonds. Boom—disagreeable people showing more sexual partners than agreeable people.
I find more interesting the literature about intelligence and sexual partners. In high-schoolers, each extra IQ point increases chance of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% by females. 87% of 19-year old US college students have had sex, yet only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex. There’s conflicting research about whether this reflects lower sex drive in these people or less sexual success; it’s probably a combination of both. See linked article for more information.
The basic summary of the research seems to be that smart, agreeable people complaining that they have less sex than their stupid, disagreeable counterparts are probably right, and that this phenomenon occurs both in men and women but is a little more common in men.
Moving from research to my own observations, I do think there are a lot of really kind, decent, shy, nerdy men who can’t find anyone who will love them because they radiate submissiveness and non-assertiveness, and women don’t find this attractive. Most women do find dominant, high-testosterone people attractive, and dominance and testosterone are risk factors for jerkishness, but not at all the same thing and women can’t be blamed for liking people with these admittedly attractive characteristics.
There are also a lot of really kind, decent, shy, nerdy women who can’t find anyone who will love them because they’re not very pretty. Men can’t be blamed for liking people they find attractive either, but this is also sad.
But although these two situations are both sad, at the risk of being preachy I will say one thing. When a girl is charming and kind but not so conventionally attractive, and men avoid her, and this makes her sad...well, imagine telling her that only ugly people would think that, and since she’s ugly she doesn’t deserve a man, and she probably just wants to use him for his money anyway because of course ugly women can’t genuinely want love in the same way anyone else would (...that would be unfair!) This would be somewhere between bullying and full on emotional abuse, the sort of thing that would earn you a special place in Hell.
Whereas when men make the same complaint, that they are nice and compassionate but not so good at projecting dominance, there is a very large contingent of people, getting quite a lot of respect and validation from the parts of society that should know better, who immediately leap out to do their best to make them feel miserable—to tell that they don’t deserve a relationship, that they’re probably creeps who are only in it for the sex and that if they were a real man they’d stop whining about being “entitled to sex”.
EDIT: But see qualification here
After talking to a couple of people about this, I should qualify/partially-retract the original comment.
Some people have suggested to me that the best metaphor a man can use to understand how women think about “nice guys” isn’t an ugly duckling woman who gets turned down by the men she likes, but a grossly obese woman who never showers or shaves her legs, and who goes around complaining loudly to everyone she knows that men are all vapid pigs who are only interested in looks.
I would find this person annoying, and although I hope I would be kind enough not to lash out against her in quite the terms I mentioned above, I would understand the motivations of someone who did, instead of having to classify him as having some sort of weird Martian brain design that makes him a moral monster.
The obesity metaphor is especially relevant. Since there are people out there who think becoming skinny is as easy as “just eat less food”, I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as “just talk to people and be more confident”.
For people who honestly believe those things, and there seem to be a lot of them, the obese woman and the socially awkward man would reduce to the case of the woman who never showered but constantly complained about how superficial men were to reject her over her smell—annoying and without any redeeming value.
That would seem to apply better if at least some (but not all) of the significant elements of gross obesity and bad hygiene were rewarded with approval and reinforced with verbal exhortations for a significant proportion of the woman’s lives. So basically the metaphor is a crock. Mind you the insult would quite possibly do the recipient good to hear anyway unless they happen to be the kind of person who will reject advice that is clearly wrong without first reconstructing what the advice should have been, minus the part that is obviously nonsense.
This is taking the unfortunate/entitled/nice/beta/shibboleth-of-your-choice males’ complaint too far at face value—i.e., that they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial.
People are really bad at measuring their own levels of altruism, which is hardly surprising. Those in this cluster of peoplespace are worse than average at reading social cues and others’ assessments of them, and are apt to interpret “nice” and its congnates as “particularly kind and proscial,” instead of what it usually means, which is “boring, but not actively offensive enough to merit an explicitly negative description.” (Consider what it usually means when you describe your mother’s watercolors or the like as “nice,” sans any emphatic phrasing.) Likewise, we halo bad predicates onto those whom we resent—“jerk” is the male equivalent of “slut,” in this sense.
What’s creepy about this group is precisely the entitled attitude on display—that they deserve to enjoy sexual relations with those on whom they crush merely for being around them and not actively offending, or indeed in some cases for doing what in other contexts would be rightly considered kind and prosocial. This transactional model of sex is, well, creepy, and quite evident if you’re specifically doing {actions that would otherwise be kind and prosocial} for unrequited loves and not people in general. The complaint is accurate in that yes, their being inoffensive and helpful isn’t getting them laid, but the conclusion—that if they were jerks they would get laid—reveals a fundamental confusion. (I also think the PUA types are 100% right when they say displaying confidence is key, but that it’s a bit confused to treat it as relating to dominance or women’s preferences specifically—if you think you suck, others will assume you’re right; this is the key to all sales work, and I’ve known a number of decent-looking women and gay men who aren’t getting laid due to a lack of self-confidence as well.)
I have sympathy for these young men in that having poor native social skills and low self-confidence sucks, and, hey, I’ve been there. But they’re not getting any approval for this, except when they meet up for affective death-spirals.
I used to believe this, but after doing some research, and further experience, I changed my mind.
First, the available research doesn’t show a disadvantage of altruism, agreeableness, and prosocial tendencies for men.
I used to experience agreeableness and altruism as disadvantages. Now I experience agreeableness as sometimes a big advantage, and sometimes a moderate disadvantage. Altruism is neutral, as long as I can suppress it to normal population levels (I have excessive altruistic tendencies).
Hypotheses that reconcile this data and anecdata:
Prosocial tendencies are orthogonal to attractiveness
Prosocial tendencies have a non-linear relationships to attractiveness (e.g. it’s good to be average, or maybe even a bit above average, but any higher or lower is a disadvantage
The relationship between prosocial tendencies and attractiveness is moderated by another variable. For instance, perhaps prosocial tendencies are an advantage for extraverted men, but a disadvantage for introverts
While some people who believe they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial have this attitude of entitlement, ascribing an entitlement mentality to that entire class of people is a hasty generalization. It is likely that people who believe they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial with a genuine entitlement attitude are very visible (far more visible than people in that class without that attitude), and this visibility may distort estimates of their prevalence due to the availability heuristic.
Furthermore, in this context perhaps you would agree that “entitlement” is political buzzword that has not been appropriately operationalized. In some hands, it is used as expansively and unrigorously as “nice” and “jerk.”
I suspect that while dark triad traits are desirable to women, they aren’t the only desirable traits. As you said, research shows that agreeableness and altruism also tend to be attractive, and conscientious and agreeable men tend to be better dancers, and thus more attractive. (quick google search) I suspect that there are multiple types of attractive men, or you can still possess all these traits.
Then again, it is important to know how the dark triad is measured to begin with. I am not sure if this is the actual test, but it looks legitimate. While saying disagree to all or most of the questions that measured lying and callousness, I still managed to score high on Machiavellianism and above average in Narcissism. (low on psychopathy) This also calls into question how “dark” some of these traits are, since outside of psychopathy, the other questions were related to self-esteem and a desire for influence, which isn’t inherently evil, and can still coincide with agreeable and prosocial personalities.
http://www.okcupid.com/tests/the-dark-triad-test-1
I said, which was given some implicit endorsement (I think):
It is doing no such thing. Make no mistake—I don’t conflate altruism with approval seeking niceness and I recommend “quit being a pussy” as a far more practical bite of self talk for people in the category you describe to use than the “women only like jerks” message; I’m clearly not rejecting the analogy because I’m supporting a sob story. No, what I am doing is rejecting one soldier that happens to be on the opposite extreme to the one above. Because it is a false analogy.
I don’t give any approval for this either, but I don’t do it out of judgement or blame. I don’t give approval or sympathy because that would be counterproductive to their own goals.
For what it’s worth, my reflex before reading a bunch of stuff here was closer to hearing “socially awkward man who can’t manage to attract women” was closer to thinking of various annoying men who have hung around me, who I find unattractive (sometimes at the skin-crawling level [1]), but who never cross a line to the point where I feel justified in telling them to go away. This can go on for years. It is no fun.
After reading these discussions, I conclude that my preconception was a case of availability bias (possibly amplified by a desire to not know how painful things are), and so I use a more abstract category.
[1] To repeat something from a previous discussion, this isn’t about being physically afraid. If I were, I’d be handling things differently. It also turned out to my surprise, that at least some men have never had the experience of that sort of revulsion. It seems to me that it’s not quite the same as not wanting to be around someone who just about everyone would think was overtly ugly, though women frequently agree (independently, I think) about some men being uncomfortable to be around.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are specific elements of body language or facial expression which cause that sort of revulsion, but I don’t know what they are.
My understanding is that it is an instinct intended to protect you from threats to your reproductive success, not threats to your survival. ie. I expect it to tend to encourage behaviors that will prevent pregnancy to losers more so than behaviors that prevent losers from killing you.
I don’t think people are highly optimized. Evolution aims for good enough, rather than best hypothetically possible, and when I say hypothetically possible, I mean hypotheses generated by people from a time when no one knows the limits of what’s evolutionarily possible.
I’ve had the skin crawl effect from men of varying status, though I admit the average status is on the low side.
Having a ‘repulsion/creepiness’ response to supplement an ‘attraction’ response seems like something to expect as an early, basic optimization. Something that would begin to be optimized before even bothering with things like human level intelligence.
Has anything like the repulsion response been seen in animals?
Something I don’t think I’ve seen discussed is that the men who set off the repulsion response seem to be pretty rare. I haven’t heard of the response being studied scientifically.
If PUA helps, it might not distinguish between men who have been ignored and men who have been actively avoided.
From what I understand of the philosophy a personal development program based on PUA would be expected and intended to reduce the amount that the guy is placed in the ‘ignored’ category while actually increasing the ‘actively avoided’ category. Because being ignored is useless (and ‘no fun’) while being actively avoided actually just saves time. Bell curves and blue and red charts apply.
There tends to be some lessons on how to reduce ‘creepiness’ in general because obviously being creepy in general is going to be a hindrance to the intended goals.
My brief searching for ‘creepiness research’ didn’t turn up much either. But to be honest I don’t really know where to look. :)
Thanks a lot! Your comment made something click for me.
The obvious conclusion from these premises: If you had the belief that “This could go on for years and is no fun” is a valid justification for telling someone to go away then your life would contain less ‘no fun’.
That works for the future. You have to somehow acquire that belief in the first place, and it seems like something that would be hard to learn any way but experience.
If you find something that works for the past please let me know. That would be awesome. Kind of like timer-turner hack for relationships. You wouldn’t have to guess which relationships would work, you would just automatically select a relationship that would work by virtue of all the counterfactual bad relationships being pre-empted by the techniques that work for the past!
Or, like with many life lessons, by having good friends, role models and mentors. They help you notice that you’re making a silly mistake when you’ve been making it for an order of weeks not an order of years!
Amusing, and yes, my phrasing was imprecise—I wasn’t intending tautology.
My objection was that 1) she probably has already made this transition herself, and 2) telling people that this transition needs to be made is not providing much information unless they understand how to recognize such relationships, and learning to distinguish what kinds of things suck for years from those that suck right now but get awesome later is necessarily going to take years unless we convey much additional information (assuming it is sufficiently stable between people to allow communication of that information to be meaningful).
I haven’t made the transition in all cases. wedrifid’s advice might be useful.
I probably need to figure out where I want the line to be. It’s also a complicating factor when I’m thinking “I’d enjoy this person’s company if there were less of it and I wasn’t feeling pressured”.
I hope not. I was trying to get as close as possible to a pure deduction from the quote so as to be almost entirely impersonal.
Understood. It wasn’t so much a complaint directed at you, as at anyone who wanted to add more details.
Edited to clarify: That is to say, the negativity of the complaint, such as it was, was directed at the situation; the communicative content of the complaint was directed at anyone, including you.
I haven’t experienced revulsion I would describe as ‘skin-crawling’, but I have experienced my scrotum shriveling up. This might be an idiom / physiological experience issue rather than a difference in life experience.
And it is that easy. Just like becoming an engineer is as easy as “getting a degree and being better at math”.
There’s a community of men how are in fact to find effective ways to be socially assertive in a way that’s attractive to women, it’s called PUA.
Becoming skinny is as easy as “just eat less food”—as someone once pointed out, were there many plump fellows among the Auschwitz inmates liberated by the Allies? The problem is that for some people just eating less food is itself not terribly easy.
There’s also the thing that while thermodynamics says you can’t stay fat and maintain a body temperature while taking in sufficiently few calories, there isn’t a law of physics that says your body must start losing fat in that situation instead of just getting very sick and eventually dying. The skinny people who walked out of Auschwitz didn’t include the people who had died of sickness during internment.
“there isn’t a law of physics” all right, but for evolutionary reasons I’d expect that for all except a non-sizeable fraction of people, the minimum weight below which they would die from starvation (or even the minimum weight below which they would stop being fertile) would be way below the maximum weight above which their obesity would turn potential sexual partners off. (And if this isn’t the case, that would mean that today’s fucked-up beauty standards—mostly due to the preponderance of very skinny models in the media IMO—are by far even more fucked up than I thought.)
Right, but more specifically, the annoying parts are their denial of the problem and reluctance to improve. We’d all be a lot more sympathetic otherwise.
On average people in that category get more than enough sympathy (mind you it probably varies a lot in degree and sincerity). More sympathy would tend to be a toxic influence from the perspective of trying to meet their unmet goals. Far better to empathize but show no sympathy whatsoever.
I think that category of people are considered low status on average, and thus, not met with much sympathy. Maybe they have a small circle of people enabling their bad habits, but I suspect the strongest force is rationalization.
The obvious strategy for this woman seems to be to look specifically for men who don’t care much about looks and hygiene. (Also, you’re a bad person for saying a woman who doesn’t shave her legs is gross.) Melissa McEwan is fat and doesn’t shave her legs (though as far as I know she has good hygiene), and that works out just fine because the people she’s interested in prefer, or at least don’t strongly disprefer, that.
On the other hand, those compassionate betas (at least those we hear complaining) seem to only pursue the (admittedly common) type of women who care strongly about status. There are obvious reasons for that (it correlates with being conventionally attractive), but it does seem like they’re shooting themselves in the foot. If people who prefer your type have to throw themselves at you before you notice them, you’re doing it wrong.
Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. wedrifid’s objection is true, but it wasn’t my main point. Is it because I’m telling people to hit on people who aren’t their first choice? Or is it the “how dare you want the same characteristics everyone wants” undertones? Or did I just plain miss Yvain’s point?
I voted you down for saying “Also, you’re a bad person for saying a woman who doesn’t shave her legs is gross” when I never said anything of the sort. Maybe you misunderstood the term “grossly obese” (which uses ‘gross’ in the sense of ‘large’)? I don’t know.
Even if I had said that, there would have to be a nicer way to correct it.
No, just the description that is intended to make people go “Ew, undateable” (obesity, poor hygiene), as opposed to “Aw, poor girl, those guys are so shallow” (ugly duckling).
But… but… how come I don’t get to say that, when you get to say “This is a terrible debate and you should all feel bad for having it.”? (Because you’re freaking Yvain. Also because you have some concept of tact.)
Again, where did I say that it was “gross”?
I said it would make it harder for the woman to get dates with men, but is that really in doubt? Do you need me to find statistics showing that (American) men in general rate women who don’t shave their legs as less attractive? And I was using it as an example of something that shouldn’t matter, but does.
You don’t get to say that because 90% of people who used it in the context you did would be using it seriously, and because accusing someone of being a bad person for being sexist is more of a trigger point than accusing someone of having a bad debate.
When you give a list of three attributes, people tend assume the salient features are common for all three or different for all three. The attributes you gave were obese, poor hygiene, and unshaved. Two of these, obese and poor hygiene, are problematic for reasons other than simple lack of social acceptance, and people thus feel more confident calling them “gross”—for which they were also primed by your use of the term in it’s other sense.
As I see it: no, you didn’t say it, but I completely understand why they heard it.
Uh. Okay. I guess I far underestimated the proportion of people who would seriously call you a bad person on LW. My bad.
For what it is worth I appreciated the tongue in cheek nature of your call and only object to the ‘being wrong about what what Yvain said’ part, not the ‘bad’ part. I can’t help you in finding an explanation on how you managed to get to −4. Perhaps you could edit that one part out and see if you get back up to 0? People often seem to approve of retraction-edits.
Oh, fine. Maybe I’m just oversensitive. Downvote revoked.
Because this is a terrible debate, and we should all feel bad for having it. (I say this, like Yvain did originally, as a moth who knows it is drawn to the flame.)
I would say you missed his point. The description was meant to be analogous to the sort of men who’re held up as having entitlement complexes. If she doesn’t meet many men’s preferences, her dating prospects are going to be slim, and she can try to seek out men whose preferences she meets, or try to change aspects of herself which will allow her to meet more men’s preferences, or, yes, she can complain about it and rail against men for having the preferences they have, but the last one is unproductive and insulting so it’s no wonder if people take a dim view of it.
Since the woman is being rejected by people whose preferences she doesn’t meet, and complaining about it, there is no “on the other hand” relative to the men who’re complaining about their lack of success with women whose preferences they don’t meet, they’re behaving in the same way. You seem to be arguing that the men are more socially blameworthy (because they are shooting themselves in the foot) for not engaging in the behavior which you say the obese woman should be engaging in. But in the context of the analogy, she isn’t doing those things.
Also, Yvain didn’t even come up with the analogy, it was related to him by people who didn’t think that his previous analogy (the ugly duckling woman being rejected by men) was appropriately descriptive. So saying something like “Also, you’re a bad person for saying a woman who doesn’t shave her legs is gross” sends a doubly negative signal, first for parsing his statement in a disingenuous way, and second for holding Yvain accountable for the opinions of other people he’s relating to us. Unless you were obviously joking, I would have downvoted for that alone, even if as you say it isn’t the main point, unless the rest of the comment was exceptional.
I think part of the situation is that both the very fat woman and the shy man feel rightly that they’re on the receiving end of a hostile conspiracy.
It isn’t just that people are spontaneously unattracted to them, it’s that there’s a lot of public material which portrays people like them (and perhaps especially in the case of the very fat woman) anyone who’s attracted to them as objects of mockery.
Thinking about the dominance thing.… there are heterosexual couples (actually, now that I think about it, the examples I know best are poly) where the woman is dominant.
If a man is temperamentally in the not-dominant to submissive range, would looking for a compatible dominant woman be a good strategy?
There are many more submissive men than there are dominant women. On top of that, in the poly community I seem to have noticed a pattern where dominant women end up primaries with even more dominant men (with both taking more submissive people as secondaries, etc).
So the prospects for a submissive male can be slim.
Now that I think about it, I’ve been generally mostly following that strategy.
Thanks!
That meaning is very different to saying “grossly obese” in the same sentence as never showering or shaving her legs. At worst Yvain could be bad for saying that people who are very, very, overweight is gross—and even then it wouldn’t be somewhat of a distortion.
Writing simply ‘obese’ would be an underspecification. For example the only time I have ever qualified as officially ‘obese’ was when I was body building aggressively—which is an entirely different thing.
Relevant: the Dark Triad and short-term mating.
I suspect a large number of upvotes were purely for this line. I approve.
I agree as far as this goes. But remember that we don’t chiefly want to prevent people calling women ugly. We chiefly want to prevent this, because we think it increases actual rape. (The cited research does not establish this with any clarity, but it does establish that you left out another potential distorting factor.)
Would you actually feel surprised if you found out the belief that women only date jerks causally increases talk of rape fantasies, and that this increases rape? What about the belief that a simple and general method will allow guys to have sex with the women they desire?
I think the causation may be going the other way: it’s that men who are willing to rape are more likely to enjoy rape jokes, not that men who read rape jokes thereby become more willing to rape.
Another theory I’ve heard (although not one relevant to this particular study, except maybe in an ecological sense) is that rape jokes signal to predators that non-predatory men aren’t going to socially punish them.
Very plausible, similar things could be said of racist jokes.
I can’t think of a negative interpretation of blonde jokes though.
Do you mean negative interpretations in general, or that particular sort of negative interpretation?
I would think ill of someone who told blonde jokes, especially if they told a bunch of them. To my mind, anyone who gives a lot of time to blonde jokes is probably making themselves less able to see intelligence in blonde women. I haven’t tested this belief, I’m just going on plausibility.
Late response: I tend to believe in causation of the sort that Oligopsony mentions, because of Altemeyer’s research on Social Dominance Orientation and the oddly named Right-Wing Authoritarian scale. Though the conclusion involves two inferences that I personally haven’t seen anyone test.
Is the ‘we’ royal, referring to some specific group you are a part of or a normative presumption that I, and the people in some group of which I am a part all must have this attitude? Because for my part I am perfectly ok with being outraged at insulting women by calling them ugly for its own sake and not due to any belief in some complicated causal chain whereby talking about ugliness causes rape and the torture of puppies.
I would be somewhat skeptical, read the details of such a study closely and in particular look at the degree of the purported effect as well as the significance. I would be equally as surprised to find that belief that women only dated jerks reduced incidence of rape due to the other obvious causal chain (involving reducing sexual frustration by identifying and implementing those elements of ‘jerkiness’ that are effective).
Yvain seems to have deleted the strawman I responded to (which supports the theory that he erred due to writing a long comment). By “we” I mean people who object to the unproven assertion that women only like jerks. The great-grandparent claims that a “very large contingent” of us make shy men feel bad. Yvain uses the analogy of calling a woman ugly, and originally claimed that people felt like they couldn’t condemn one harm without committing the other.
Nobody on Earth literally thinks that way. Whatever Yvain observed likely stemmed from the desire to prevent rape. Though quite possibly some of it went too far or got tied up with other motives.
Ok. I don’t believe your claim about the way the world is but I think I understand what you are saying.
If you mean the quoted claim, does your previous misunderstanding cause you to update your belief in your own motive-grasping powers?
I don’t believe I said I misunderstood anything and looking back at what I have previously said doesn’t lead me to that conclusion either. I just didn’t see any point in being more confrontational than polite disagreement. (And I give myself a big burst of self-approval reward for my restraint.)
Based on other times I have noticed that I misunderstood something I expect that I would update rather significantly if such were the case. I hate making mistakes like that.
I don’t believe people pay money for those websites in hopes of mating with the videos.
That’s not quite analogous, given that what one complains about does have bearing on whether someone is actually “nice” and not so much bearing on whether someone is actually “ugly”.
I agree that it’s not perfectly analogous. Nevertheless, more times than I care to keep track of I have witnessed people lambasting men who complain about lack of relationship success because they pattern match to the Heartless Bitches International construct. They see the black hair and hide the ketchup.
Unfortunately I can’t provide sources at the moment (Luke probably can), but I have seen research both sociological and anthropological showing that women and female higher primates in general have a tendency to try to mate with multiple dominate highly masculine males, sometimes secretly, while they tend to have long term pairings with less dominate, less masculine males. The theory is that the genes of the more masculine men lead to more fecund offspring, while the parenting of the less masculine men leads to higher offspring survival. In society this works out to women dating more masculine men (and testosterone is of course linked to the aggressiveness and risk taking we associate with “bad boys”) prior to marriage, and then marrying less masculine men (nice guys). And if they cheat, they tend to cheat with “bad boys” and have their “nice guys” raise those kids.
EDIT: For pure anecdote, I am a nice guy (I think) who always complained about the “bad boy” thing, and now I am raising a step-daughter from my wife’s youthful short term relationship with a guy everyone would still call a “bad boy.” My wife is winning at natural selection! As is that jerk :(
If it makes you feel better all sorts of unpleasant people are currently winning at natural selection (no offence intended to any LWer with many children or your wife).
I have a hard time understanding how this would make anyone feel better.
Suffering is often ameliorated somewhat by knowing you are not alone in your situation.
It can also be made worse by knowing that the suffering is a direct and inevitable result of forces they cannot plausibly alter.
Awkward news from the world of science: Women with less-masculine husbands or boyfriends are more likely to lust after other men during the fertile part of their cycle than women partnered with butch guys.
That reminds me of that game that girls sometimes play “Given three choices of guys, which would you sleep with, date, or marry?”
Guys play it too.
The criteria are a little different, though.
I’ve played it in mixed groups, its generally about perceived personality features rather than subjective attractiveness.
I wouldn’t expect this to be a recipe for honesty.
I would expect this sort of game to have difficult honesty issues even when it is a single gender. For example, if some individual has a fetish that is in some way connected to one of the individuals (say for example a celebrity that frequently wears some sort of clothing, or only one of the three falls into a racial group they have a fetish for) how likely is it that someone is going to be honest about that motivation.
That said, I agree that mixed groups will likely have more severe honesty issues.
I’ve never treated the game as a data collection exercise. IT is more suited to social bonding and conversation stimulation.
For more statistically useful data okcupid has done studies, as have hotornot and its various imitators.
Why would you do that? Have you thought about killing the step-daughter or something of that nature? (People, please don’t reflexively downvote that suggestion.)
Wait… you mean it as a suggestion, not a query?
That made me laugh hysterically for no good reason. Oh, LW and wedrifid, how I missed ye.
No, I’m not literally suggesting murder. But it’s what most animals would do.
Reading this anecdote made me wonder if it would be possible for a group of rational “nice guys” to cooperate with each other, refusing relationships with and shunning women who had previously been involved with and fathered children by “bad boys” even though each one of them would have to sacrifice the benefit they would individually get from entering into such a relationship. The idea being to make having a later father care for a baby sired by a jerk not a viable strategy for women, thus incentivizing them away from that behavior.
(I also thought about what would happen if nice guys switched to a jerk strategy until they were ready to settle down and then switched back, since that mixed strategy appeared to dominate either pure strategy, but then I realized that that would reduce the number of childless women for guys to marry, thus leading to a tragedy of the commons.)
Roughly speaking you seem to be describing the norm for a lot of historical civilisations that I’m familiar with. The consequences for siring bastard children by bad boys is far lower now than it often has been.
The origins of the madonna/whore complex?
Seems most plausible to me.
I have had several friends who went to bars to meet women, and then were disappointed that the only women they met were the ones who enjoyed going to bars.
People think/do strange things.
An accurate analysis of this issue would require unpacking the cluster of traits implied by the word “jerk,” and then dividing them into several categories:
Traits that are indeed actively attractive to women, or some subset thereof.
Traits that are neutral per se, but have a positive correlation with others that are attractive, or negative correlation with others that are unattractive.
Traits that are unattractive, but easily overshadowed by other less obvious (or less mentionable) traits, which produces striking but misleading examples where it looks like the “jerk” traits are in fact the attractive ones.
This is further complicated by the fact that behaviors and attitudes seemingly identical to a side-observer (especially a male one) can in fact be perceived radically differently depending on subtle details, or even just on the context. This makes it easy to answer accurate observations with jeering and purported reductio ad absurdum in a rhetorically effective way.
This question further complicates the issue. Different types of above listed traits can elicit different reactions from various categories of women. However, even just to outline these categories clearly and explicitly, one must trample on various sensibilities one is expected to respect in polite society nowadays.
Here’s a couple more:
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people in their mating interaction during one-on-one interaction with a potential partner (e.g. initiation or receptiveness).
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people compete with others of their same gender
In sexual selection, there is a difference between intersexual choice, and intrasexual competition. “Women go for jerks” or “nice guys finish last” might not be a primarily a claim about the traits that women are attracted to; rather, it could be a claim about the traits necessary to initiate with women and compete with other men. All this stuff partially overlaps, but there are differences.
For example, pushing past competition on a crowded dance floor, dealing with competitors interrupting you, or making a physical advance on a potential mate may require a slightly different balance of traits (e.g. more assertiveness or even aggression) than what is necessary to attract mates.
Specifically, I would suggest that the male initiator script along with male-male competition jacks up the necessary amount of “jerk” traits beyond what women are actually attracted to. This hypothesis could help explain why people have trouble seeing eye-to-eye on this issue.
IOW the reason jerks are more successful might be that they cockblock other guys. It makes perfect sense to me and, in retrospect, I’m surprised that it took so long for someone to hypothesise this.
I wish you’d just spit out whatever unPC stuff you thinks going on, even if it was rot13′d or only PM’d to people who volunteered to read it out of curiosity.
Ditto, though I would phrase it differently.
Vlad_M says a number of things which are unintuitive to me, but without more details it’s hard for me to judge why the conflict exists.
In this case at least the potential for conflict should be quite obvious from what I wrote. What exactly do you find unintuitive in my above comment?
Doesn’t that imply that the claim “women claim to want nice guys, but prefer to date jerks” should be downrated in emphasis and considered factually suspect until an accurate jerk-model can be constructed, and we can simply go look for the actual prevalence of what we now agree are jerks and their success at attracting women, as opposed to nice guys?
Come to that, don’t we need a coherent nice-guy model as well? Or are they equivalent to a control; ie, “not jerks” = “nice guys?” And how useful does that render the resulting model?
I wish this kind of comment were more common.
A few bullet-points on what I see as the likely contributing factors to the “women prefer jerks” meme:
Romantic relationships often expose you to the worst of what people are capable of, and often end in unpleasant circumstances. If you ask someone about their most recent ex, they’ll probably have more nasty stories than nice ones to tell about them.
If the competition for the object of my affections is charming and confident, I’m going to say he’s manipulative and arrogant.
Making poor decisions about people you’re attracted to, and systematically overlooking your partner’s negative qualities, are well-established behaviour patterns in both sexes.
Romantic underdogs feel like they bend over backwards to be noticed by women, whereas romantically successful men seem by comparison to put in relatively little work to achieve the same goal. This perceived effort is conflated with caring or worthiness.
It strikes me that the nice-guy/jerk idiom has an analogue in the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. I was going to comment on how I’d never seen mention of this in any of the numerous feminist treatments of “nice guy syndrome” I’ve seen, but a cursory Google suggests it’s not a new idea.
Whatever age it takes to get past peak attractiveness and fertility.
Seems relevant.
I remember as an high school kid PUA seemed sensible. (I had a nerdy straight male friend into it, and no personal interest since if I wanted to get laid I could use boobies.) I mostly took home “People, especially women, dig confidence, and will chase rather than be chased. ‘Bitches ain’t shit’ is therefore a desirable mindset.”.
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious. Not because I’m supposed to want sex with hot women and nothing else, but because their idea of “hot women” isn’t hot at all. Why would I ever want that?
I get that liking androgyny and brains and being neutral to fat and small breasts are rather idiosyncratic traits. But what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn? That’s not a person. That’s what you get if you ask RealDoll’s research department for a toy that reconciles your horror of sluts with your hatred of prudes.
...also, the hot photo is supposed to be the one on the left, right?
That’s because it’s a “blue line” test. At the beginning, it explicitly points out it’s orienting on averages, and defining market value in terms of breadth of appeal. It doesn’t mean lots of people will like a high scorer, it means lots of people won’t rule out the high scorer.
In other words, the person who scores perfectly on this test will probably not be hideously offensive to anyone—which means they don’t get ruled out early in the selection process. But a low score just means they’re more likely to need a “red line” strategy, aiming at strong appeal to a narrower audience, at the cost of turning more people off. (i.e., emphasizing one’s supposed “defects” would attract people who like those qualities, while turning away more of those who don’t)
(Ugh. I can’t believe I’m defending that misogynist a*hole, but I don’t see anything wrong with the test itself, just the conclusions/connotations being drawn from it.)
An exaggeration of a real , very common type. The better the description fits the less common the type. Practically no one who reads this site would fall in that category (I think/hope) if only because boring people are boring.
Yes.
I will respect properly written articles on almost any subject. Not these.
One thing I demand from authors claiming to be supported by “science” is that they won’t make me stop thinking in mid read. The articles behind these links do not respect the reader’s opinion. Instead of making you think, they seek to shock, trump and convince. I’ve seen this style and these patterns before in articles about climate denial, xenophobia and religious fundamentalists. (Seriously, a lifestyle article is not a valid citation.)
I’m not saying the author has not done his fair share of reading. I’m saying he should stop waving the “this is science”-sign with one hand and be clubbing down his readers with the other.
The latter trait doesn’t seem all that closely linked to ‘science’. It is a quality of good authorship not science.
While it’s definitely interesting to point out the correlation between egg-bank and attractiveness, I have to say that my god but that site is chauvanistic! Apparently, after “hitting the wall” a woman is “sexually worthless” o_O I do not agree.
Hmmm—my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I’d like to know why.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the “sexually worthless” comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader… ?
After all, he didn’t say “Due to my own personal predilections, i find that a woman over the age of 40 is no longer at all sexually attractive for me”, but instead made his value judgment and considers it to be some kind of inherent value of the woman (ie value == 0) completely oblivious to the fact that other men (and possibly women) may have a different value-judgment of that woman.
I disagree with his assessment because her worth is not 0… just his own personal map-value for that woman.
I don’t take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I’ve never understood him as comparing women’s value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by “the sexual marketplace”. Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person… which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from… well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal—but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time… therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective—and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the “sexual appeal” rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can “get anybody”—that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them… but for anybody not an alpha male… (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
Her “value” on the marketplace is not zero.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like “being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don’t face a punishing gender ratio in that niche.”
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn’t an oversaturation of people like you that you’re competing with.
It’s not the content of what you said (though, given the topic we’re on, people are getting offended, this being one of the things LessWrong can’t really discuss without exploding and drawing battle lines) but the way in which you said it; your online habitus automatically marks you as an outsider. Lurk a bit more and you’ll get an idea of how to phrase things.
Thank you for responding. :)
Firstly—can you define “online habitus” in this context? the dictionary gives me “physical characteristics”, but I’m not sure exactly how that relates here, but I’ve taken a stab at it:
ie that it was the emotive content of my comment that was objected to. I’, surprised that the reaction against my personal expression of shock was disliked so much so that I was downvoted. Surely rational people are allowed to be offended too? :)
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
How should I have expressed my reaction in a way that would not have offended?
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than “it isn’t true”.
If someone tells me “Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans,” I don’t have to try and refute that by saying “that’s racist,” because I have available the refutation “that’s false”. When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that’s unpopular, and can’t say “that’s false,” I will have to say something else, such as “that’s racist”. Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:
1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect—they want to live in a society that respects their elders.
2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.
3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.
4.) Any number of other things.
You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone’s preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person’s core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.
That’s why people usually use other things to object with if they are available. I don’t object to a critic’s value judgement that an opinion is bad if spread, but the most convenient way for the critic to encourage me to disfavor the opinion is to convince me it is false. If the critic does something else, perhaps that is because the truth of the opinion is not contested.
Actually, my point is that an opinion = facts + preferences. First, you form a belief about the state of the world, and then you may assign a value to that state and decide on an action. Two people may have identical beliefs about a certain fact in the world, but may not assign identical value to that state. If this is the case, there is no point in trying to prove the fact being considered wrong. Sometimes it is the preferences themselves that differ. This can sometimes be resolved, but it does require thinking about the thought processes behind those preferences, and not just focusing on the facts we are assigning value to. Your last two sentences imply that opinions have a truth value. I am saying that they don’t. Only the facts that opinions are based on have a truth value.
Agreement on opinions requires not just agreement on facts, but also agreement on preferences. I feel a high degree of confidence that people’s preferences are not identical. Therefore, I suspect that agreeing on the facts alone rarely solves the problem. If we verify the fact that one person has one preference, and another person an opposing preference, the verification of that alone will not resolve their disagreement. The only approach is to try to understand the similarities and differences in the preferences involved, and see if anything can be worked out from there.
I only intended that in the sense that someone’s opinion may be based on a misconception. If someone in fact enjoys eating cheese, and thinks the moon is made of cheese, I’ll tend to just call his opinion that he would enjoy eating a piece of the moon “wrong”.
Disagreeing on facts is often sufficient to cause a problem.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion. If we don’t understand each other’s preferences, we can still negotiate, if poorly. But if we are trading items it helps to establish common understanding of what me giving you an apple and you giving me an orange even mean.
Certainly. As I said in my first post, you can have objections to a fact stated if you believe it is incorrect.
This is also true. Whether two people disagree only on the facts or only on preferences, the same amount of trouble can be had. Also if people disagree on both.
This is itself an opinion, so I cannot assign a truth value to it. The assignment of importance can only be done if preferences exist. For example, a preference may exist to gain benefit from a certain fact, but not necessarily to satisfy the preference of another person. Given such a preference, it would not, of course, be important to know what the other person’s preferences are. On the other hand, if a person wanted to satisfy another person’s preferences (or to go against them), then it would be very important. Are you saying that you generally prefer to discover facts about the world over facts about the preferences of other people, or that you think the statement you made is itself some fact about the world? If it is the first, then I assume you have more knowledge of your preferences than I do. If it is the second, then I think I have to disagree.
Practically speaking, I don’t think it ((ETA for clarity) doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve. If I’m trading you ice cream for flour, what we really need to nail down is that the ice cream has been in the freezer and not out in the sun, the flour is from wheat and isn’t dirt or cocaine, it’s not soaked in water etc. Then, we can negotiate a trade without knowing each other’s preferences.
In contrast, if we only know each other’s preferences, we won’t get very far. I will use the word “rectangle” (which in my language would refer to what you call “ice cream”) and offer you melted ice cream, etc.
Not logically so—there are possible minds whose only desire is to only know the other person’s opinions. I meant it as an assertion of what’s generally true in human interactions. Knowing the other person’s preferences is far less often necessary than knowing other facts, it’s never sufficient for a realistic human scenario I can think of. So as I intended it “less important” applies in a stronger sense than “I disapprove” since compared to the other type of knowledge those facts are less often necessary and less often sufficient.
Okay. You are telling me something about your preferences then.
And why is that? Why are those facts more important than, say, that the ice cream is bubblegum-flavored or blue-colored or sweetened with aspartame or made from coconut milk? Knowing the temperature of the ice cream or the composition of the flour is important only in the sense that there can be human preferences in this direction.
Your example is not about people negotiating without knowing each other’s preferences. Your example is about people negotiating with a few assumptions of the other person’s preferences. Here is an example of people negotiating without knowing the other person’s preferences:
Person A: Would you like some flour?
Person B: No. Would you like ice cream?
Person A: No. I have some fruit fly eggs here...
Person B: Not interested. Would you like a computer?
Person A: Why, yes. What do you have here? Never mind—I won’t buy anything over ten years old.
True. If we only know the other person’s preferences but not any relevant facts for achieving them, we cannot expect a mutually satisfying interaction. However, if we know the relevant facts for achieving various preferences, but not which of those preferences the other person has, the same is true.
True, but not what I’m discussing. I am discussing how to satisfy both people’s preferences in an interaction between two people.
Since you state this is not a logical assertion but generally true, I assume you mean to say that it is true in the world we live in but would not have to be true in all possible worlds. However, what I am saying is that this statement does not have a truth value in any logically possible world since it does not specify the preference the importance relates to. Using the word important in this way is like leaving off the ‘if’ condition in an ‘if’-‘then’ statement, but not leaving out the if as well. The ‘then’ condition has a truth value by itself, but the ‘if’-‘then’ statement can only be evaluated if both conditions can be evaluated.
And I disagree that it can. Less important to achieve what objective? The only way a statement of importance has meaning is to relate it to the goal it is meant to achieve. That goal is a preference.
You have been trying to argue that facts are important but that knowing another person’s preferences is not very important. But important for what purpose? One possibility is that you mean that knowing other facts is more important for the goal of achieving that person’s preferences than knowing that person’s preferences. Another is that you mean that knowing facts are more important for achieving your preferences than knowing what the other person’s preferences are (since you state you don’t consider goals humans generally want to achieve as important, it seems reasonable to assume this is also a possibility). In order to say whether your statement is true, I need to know the specific preferences involved. As you have stated it here, it has no truth value.
My position is that knowing a person’s preferences and the facts about how to achieve those preferences are both necessary, but by themselves insufficient, to achieve those preferences. I do not know which I find more tragic, the person who knows the goal but not the path to get there, or the person who knows perfectly all the paths, but not which one to take.
Should be read as “Practically speaking, I don’t think it (doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.”
English permitted me to exclude that clause and have the same wording as a phrase that conveys the exact opposite of my point. Sorry. I can imagine your confusion reading that and seeing me follow it with an example that illustrates a point opposite of how you read that.
But no, I am not saying anything about my preferences, but am describing a relationship between what people want and the world, the relationship is that in general knowing about preferences doesn’t help people achieve their goals, but knowing about states of the world does.
But I don’t need to know them if you do and we share knowledge about states of the world.
A very, very hazy idea of others’ preferences is sufficient, so improved knowledge beyond that isn’t too useful. Alternatively, with no idea of them, we can still trade by saying what we want and giving a preference ranking rather than trying to guess what the other wants.
I did not mean it is always true in this universe but not like that in other universes. Instead I meant it is almost always true in this universe. If you are in a situation in this world, such as a financial one or one in which you disagree over a joint action to take, it will almost always be better to get a unit of relevant information about consequences of actions than a unit of relevant information about the other person’s preferences, particularly if you can communicate half-decently or better. Also, for random genies or whatever with random amounts of information about each other and the world, they will each usually be better able to achieve their goals by knowing more about the world.
This depends heavily on an intuitive comparison of what “random relevant” information of a certain quantity looks like. That might not be intelligible, more likely a formal treatment of “relevant” would clash with intuition to settle this decisively as tru or false, but it wouldn’t fail to have a truth value.
We’re discussing the goals of other people. Each type might be equally tragic, but if you had the opportunity to give a random actual person (or random hypothetical being) more knowledge about their goal or knowledge about the world, pick the world and it’s not a close decision!
My view on this discussion is that I have been saying “pick the world” in such a case, and not only don’t I know what you would say to pick, you are saying “pick the world” isn’t truth apt (when it fulfills my desires to fulfill others’ desires, and those desires are best fulfilled by their getting the one type of knowledge and not the other, and that second “best” is according to their desires).
Upvoted for clarifying this point. This changes my interpretation of this sentence considerably, so perhaps I can now address your intended meaning. This statement does have a truth value (which I believe to be false). I disagree that knowing another human’s preferences is not important to achieving most of their goals (ie. their preferences). Since you make a weaker statement below (that they only need to vaguely know the other’s preferences), I assume you intend this statement to mean something more along the lines of needing very little preference information to achieve preferences than needing no preference information to achieve preferences (and it is probably not common for humans to have zero initial information about all relevant preferences anyway).
I disagree. If I want to buy something from you, I benefit from knowing the minimum amount of money you will sell it for. This is a preference that applies specifically to you. Indeed, other people may require more or less money than you would. It is, therefore, optimal for me to know specifically where the lower end of your preference range is. Knowing other facts about the world, such as what money looks like or how to use it, would not, by themselves, resolve this situation. Likewise, if you wish to sell me something, you must know how much money I am willing to pay for it. You must also know whether I am willing to pay for it at all.
If I were trading with someone, I might not be inclined to believe that they would always tell me the minimum they are willing to accept for something. Nor would I typically divulge such information about myself to them. Sure, you can trade by just asking someone what they want, but if they say they want your item for free, that’s not going to help if you want them to pay.
By the lack of truth value, I meant that it was not clarified what preference the word important referred to. If the preference referred to is explained, then the expanded sentence has a truth value. Perhaps this is like the other sentence, and you meant it to refer to satisfying the preferences of others. Also, the consequences of actions can only be assigned a value if the preferences are known. No preferences = No consequences.
Yes, these statements lead me to believe that you were stating something similar to your original sentence, and meant something like “There are a lot of facts more important for satisfying the preferences of the other person than understanding the other person’s opinion”. This seems incorrect to me. Also, I believe that you will find that all pieces of relevant information relate to one or more of the preferences involved. This relation is not mutually exclusive, since these pieces of relevant information could also relate to facts external to the person. Consider your example of the unfortunate cheese-loving person who believes the moon is made of cheese. This belief gives them both a false picture of the world and a false picture of their own cheese-related preferences. A belief that Saturn was made of salami would give them a false picture of the world, but not of those same cheese-related preferences.
It sounds like there is some misunderstanding of what I mean. Let me try to restate my position in a completely different way.
Preferences are, of course, facts. They could even be thought of as facts about the world, in the sense that they refer to a part of the world (ie. a person). This is true in the same way that the color orange is a fact about the world, assuming that you clarify that it refers to the color of, say, a carrot, and not the color of everything in the world. If you remove the carrot, you remove its orange-ness with it. If you remove the person, you remove their preference with them. Similarly, if you remove the preference involved, then you remove its importance with it. The importance is a property of the preference, just as the preference is a property of the person. This was why I was saying that the statement of importance (referring to a preference) had no truth value—because the preference it was important to was not stated. As such, I read it as ′ There are a lot of facts more important for x than understanding the other person’s opinion’. Since x was unknown to me, the statement could not be evaluated to true or false any more than saying ‘x is orange’ could. The revision I posted above (based on your earlier revision of your other sentence) can be evaluated as true or false.
My position is that one should know the preferences involved with great precision if one wishes to maximally satisfy those preferences, since this eliminates time establishing irrelevant facts (of which there is an infinite number). Furthermore, one needs to know about the people involved, since the preferences are a property of the people. Therefore, many of the facts about the preferences will also be facts about people. There may, in any given case, be more numerous facts about the world that are relevant to these preferences than facts about the person. Nevertheless, one unit of information about the person which relates to the preferences to be satisfied can easily eliminate over a million items of irrelevant information from the search space of information to be dealt with.
Here is an example: Two programmers have a disagreement about whether they should try to program a more intelligent AI. The first programmer writes a twenty page long email to the second programmer to assure them that the more intelligent AI will not be a threat to human civilization. This person employs all the facts at their disposal to explain this and their argument is airtight. The second programmer responds that they never thought that the improved program would be a threat to civilization—just that hiring the extra programmers required to improve it would cost too much money.
The less you understand a person, the less you can satisfy their preferences. Whether that decreased satisfaction is good enough for you depends on a number of factors, including the magnitude of the decrease (which may or may not vary widely for a given unit of preference information, depending on what it is), how much time you are willing to waste with irrelevant information, and your threshold for ‘good enough’.
You don’t think it’s acceptable to argue against things by saying various forms of “it has bad consequences”?
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it’s best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it’s better for me to say “P is false, and also has bad consequences” than to say “P has bad consequences.”
It’s perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than “I do not agree”, which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
Yep—this is a good point. I realise that my statement was ambiguous about how/why I disagreed. I left it up to the reader.
I did this, at the time, because I was quite angry at the things said on the website, and the way they were said. I was not in any fit state to argue my reasoning. I’ve since clarified in the followon comments… after sufficient time passed.
That wasn’t how I saw the context here, because of the statement “I do not agree”. Also, no consequences were enumerated. “I agree with the facts as stated, but think phrasing them this way has bad consequences,” is a fine way to argue against a presentation of ideas.
I am very suspicious of obscuring truth in the name of positive consequences, of applying only or mostly first-order idea utilitarianism.
First of all, let me say I didn’t downvote you. Or upvote you either.
Secondly, there’s some confusion of terminology here.
a) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared beliefs about the state of the world. (Epistemological agreement - (“is” statements)
b) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared beliefs about how the world should be. (Moral agreement—“ought” statements)
c) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared preferences. (Agreement in taste—“like” statements)
(a)s have objective truth value.
(c)s are subjective.
(b)s have people always debate about their objectivity/subjectivity thereof.
Now the three types aren’t always clearly distinct. If someone makes a statement about “attractiveness” it’s both a (c) statement about preferences, but it may also be a statement about what real-life people like on average—in which case it can be an (a) statement about the distribution of preferences in a population, which has a truth value.
So, if someone calls someone else “sexually worthless”, and you say you don’t agree—do you mean that you simply have different preferences—are you making a (c) statement? That you believe his statement factually false—you’re making an (a) statement about the distribution of attraction feelings towards such women in the real world?
Or do you mean that you consider it MORALLY WRONG for him to speak and behave in such a rude way?
If the last of these, then “I morally object to such an attitude” is obviously a clearer way of talking about your objection rather than “I do not agree” which is vague and imprecise.
It depends. Was the context marketplace value or value to the individual who most values that person sexually? Ifthe latter, it was the MPF. If the former (which it implicitly probably was there), then I don’t think marketplace valuations necessarily fail in that way.
They can still be wrong valuations.
I got the sense that he was actually using his personal valuation, and passing it off as a marketplace-valuation. His references to studies felt like he was trying to find facts to fit his own valuations. However—I’ll freely admit that I have not read his stuff widely. This is one of those websites where I decided it would not be a good idea for me to keep going as it simply continued to fuel my anger. It was more rational simply to stop reading.
This dosen’t deserve down votes. Roissy’s style (aesthetically pleasing but quite outrageous) and persona are hard to stomach (at first?).
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I’m a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It’s completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you’d read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW (“Remember, humans don’t operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost”) and social skills books (“Remember, humans don’t operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock”) sound as artificial when you’re not used to them?
Agreed. There’s a sense of futility in life there that doesn’t really have an upside, or even a non-downside
Forever.. Ok, probability one minus epsilon.
I see the “just jealous” claim as equivalent to A attempting to lower B’s status, and when B says they don’t like it, A says “you just don’t like having your status lowered, so your point should be ignored”.
You haven’t heard of Roissy before have you?
Nope.
He is pretty famous for his offensive and rude style.
I can see why. I also note he has ready-made fully-general counterarguments for any detractors… ie “any woman that objects to what I say is just old and jealous”
Not to take a stance on any of the wider issues, but that’s not fully general: if all the women who objected were young, for example, it would be false.
Yeah but… he gets to decide how old is “old”—and from what I an tell, his idea of “old” is pretty darn young. Those women who simply cannot be manipulated into the “old” category easily fall into the “jealous” category.
Just call them fat. If they’re skinny enough to disprove that, resort to calling them ugly.
The existance of an infinite sequence of arguments whose union is fully-general doesn’t mean that any given argument is.
Additionally, those counter-arguments aren’t fully general. If you admit of some objective (or inter-subjective, or whatever; collectively accessible) standard of attractiveness, all of these counterarguments would be falsified by a positive correlation between attractiveness and saying feminist things.
This isn’t to say that these counter-arguments aren’t a bad idea for other reasons; we probably want some way of getting information from ugly people, for example.
He is pretty well known around here, Robih Hanson at Overcoming Bias has him on his blogroll for exmaple.
No, not necessarily. He often just says her hamster is doing overtime.
Also his main argument is basically that “boners don’t lie”. A large enough fraction of men find a specific subset of women on average more sexually desirable than others that sexual desirability may as well be a objective criteria at least when comparing averages of groups like say 20 year old vs. 50 year old women or overweight vs. slim women.
Yes—“her hamster” is an interesting way of saying “women aren’t rational, they just rationalise everything away”.
it’s an unfalsifiable proposition. Have you had a look at the list of things that he says women say? Yep—they could indeed be rationalisations… or they could in fact be the truth… how can you tell the difference? well—you can’t. That’s because this, as I said, is a fully-general counterargument.
No matter what his (as he says) “screechy feminist kvetches” about… he can just say “that’s just a rationalisation” and not think any further or take it into account. he never has to update on anything a woman says to him ever. Also, i note that he seem to think that female rationalisation is a totally different species to male rationalisation… and doesn’t even mention instances of the latter.
As to “boners don’t lie”—this is demonstrably untrue any time somebody is turned on by a picture. There are no doubt objective criteria which have high correlation with the average male’s likely attraction to a woman. Studies into facial symmetry, smooth complexion etc etc have clearly shown this. yes, you can compare averages...
However—need I remind you of the alien stealing our sexy women aspect of the mind-projection fallacy? the woman is not sexy… the men are attracted to certain types of women.
You can definitely make a case to me that “the average 40 year old woman has a reduced likelihood of finding male sexual partners”… but that does not mean “sexual worth = zero”
I might also add that as yet I have never met a woman anywhere that could find literally zero partners anywhere. She may not be interested in the men that would be likely to have sex with her… but that is a different question. There is a vanishingly small percentage of women who would literally have zero “worth” on the open market. To lump in every 35YO (and older) women is to be particularly ignorant of sexual dynamics… it is this man mistaking his own preferences for reality.
Yes he is saying that. About as sound as the argument you characterised.
Thanks for letting me rant about it a bit :)
AWYC, but
I think you’re modus tollensing a modus ponens. Eliezer’s metaethical conclusion was that sexy is an objective criteria which does not mean “sexually attractive to aliens;” the word for that would be “kvy’ztar” or something.
I’m not sure that I am.
Are 9 year old girls “sexy” because some humans find them sexy? Or is “sexy” in the eye of the beholder here?
Sexy is a transistive verb attached to the person who considers the other person sexy, not to the subject of said attentions. It may so happen that there’s more than one person who finds a certain subject sexy—it’s still something that attaches to the group. What can be said about the subject is “she is symmetrical, unblemished, has large breasts and a low body fat percentage” and it so happens that a large number of men find that to be high on their sexiness-scale. There’s a cluster there that has been named “sexy”—but don’t forget that this cluster is in map-space, not territory-space.
I think we’re still in agreement. The reference post makes it clear that “sexy” is a different word for a bug-eyed monster, a normal heterosexual male, and a paedophile.
Firstly—I hadn’t read that article yet, thanks. Still making my way through the backlog.
Secondly—I don’t think we are in agreement on this. You are claiming that I was making a 1-place argument.
In fact I was pointing out that roissy seems to be under the incorrect impression that his 1-place, curryed algorithm is the algorithm for determining the “sexual worth” of a woman. In my (admittedly brief) time on his site, I didn’t see any reference to alternative algorithms for evaluating the sexual worth of women (based, say, on alternative preferences).
My understanding on how he sees women predicts that he would be quite surprised to find a man that honestly finds a woman to be attractive that he considers to not be attractive. ie he would be truly astonished to find that some men really and honestly find 40 YO old women perfectly good bedmates. ie he would find it hard to accept that other men used a different sexiness function than what he uses.
Of course my other understandings about him mean that I predict that if he found a man that claimed the above—roissy would think the man was not being honest and was simply “settling” for what he could get.
Freudian slip?
Heh, obviously.
Why did you link to Roissy rather than laying out his argument in more neutral terms?
The comment was clearly something user CharlieSheen picked up from Roissy.
Now, admittedly I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence in this area, but I’ve seen some, and I couldn’t name a single woman I know personally who has ever, in my presence or by report that I’ve heard, gone for a jerk.
Perhaps this behavior is less common among women who would rather have a 15% chance of $1,000,000 than a certainty of $500 (because most random women I’ve tested choose the certain $500, but every single woman in our community that I’ve asked, regardless of math level or wealth level or economic literacy or their performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test, takes the 15% chance of $1M.)
Or maybe “jerk” is being used in some sense other than what I associate it with, i.e., wearing motorcycle jackets, rather than not caring about who else you hurt.
I could name a fair number (in the “doesn’t care about hurting others” sense, not the “wears motorcycle jackets” sense,) but none of them have been girls or women I would want to date me instead.
I suspect that the perceived trend owes a lot to a horns effect that guys build up around other guys who’re dating girls they want to be dating.
Was this downvoted because someone is just downvoting every single comment on this subthread because they don’t like the idea of this topic being discussed here? Because I can’t see anything wrong in Desrtopa’s comment.
Whoa. A majority of people choose $500 in EV instead of $150,000?
That’s scary. Have you written about this before? If not, care to give us rough numbers of how many people you’ve talked to about it? That blows my mind that a majority of people wouldn’t get it when it’s so far apart.
Keep in mind that utility isn’t linear in money.
No, but I doubt it’s so non-linear for most people that it remotely justifies such a choice.
If someone e.g. urgently needs a life-saving surgery that requires 500$, then they may be justified to choose a certainty of $500 over a 15% probability of a million dollars. But outside such made-up scenarios, I very seriously doubt it.
Obviously, I agree. But let me ask: for what values of X would you choose X$ with 15% chance instead of 1,000,000,000$ with 100% chance?
A quite extreme, but still somewhat defensible theoretical assumption is that utility is logarithmic in money. I once heard Bernoulli already worked with this assumption, many hundred years before Neumann-Morgenstern, and it is probably not so silly to assume this near the power-law tail of the wealth distribution. Not that I think it means anything, but from this admittedly extreme starting point, we get that lg(500) = 2.7 is three times as useful as 0.15*lg(1000000) = 0.9.
That assumes someone who initially has $1, and in that case it’s certainly true. If on the other hand you initially have, say, $10k...
log(10.5k) - log(10k) ≈ 0.02
0.15 * (log(1.01M) - log(10k)) ≈ 0.3
The crossover point based on this system is $191. Less than that, and you do better with $500. More than that, and you’d try for the million.
That’s not quite right in practice either. Even if you took all my money, I’d still take the 15% chance at $1M and maybe sell a 15% chance of $5k for $500.
Or if that is somehow not allowed, then I’d run into a bit of debt until my next pay check. Even if I really was spending all the money I make and averaging $0, $500 is a mere blip in the noise, not a factor of infinity more money.
It makes more sense to look at the total money in over whatever time scale you plan for.
The present value of my expected future income stream from normal labor, plus my current estimated net worth is what I use when I do these calculations for myself as a business owner considering highly risky investments.
For most people with decent social capital (almost anyone middle class in a rich country), the minimum base number in typical situations should be something >200kUS$ even for those near bankruptcy.
Obviously, this does not cover non-typical situations involving extremely important time-sensitive opportunities requiring more cash than you can raise on short notice (such as the classic life-saving medical treatment required).
Yeah, the prospect of other incomes makes a big difference. I neglected to include a requirement that the initial amount, whichever value it takes, is as much as you can come up with before you’ll be needing money again.
Very true, thanks, I missed that. Obviously I am not an economist. Maybe Eliezer has only ever asked the question from people having less than 191 dollars.
Many people are in debt. If you are, then your net worth is less than $191.
Why would people downvote this? Isn’t it both correct and obvious? It also has fairly significant implication as to the extent of the applicability of the simplified model.
It depends on what is meant by “debt” and “net value”, and as those words are usually used, it is false.
If I borrow money to buy a house, the house being security for the loan, then I am “in debt” by the ordinary use of those words—I owe money to someone—yet if my net worth includes the house, it should still be positive (if the lender was prudent). If I borrow money, secured only against my expectation of future income, then again assuming a prudent lender, the present expected value of that future income will exceed the value of the loan. In that case, I am “in debt”, and my net worth will be positive or negative depending on whether expected future income is counted or not.
The more usual word for someone whose net worth is negative, measured by the whole of their debts and assets, is “bankrupt”.
To be precise, it’s “insolvent.” “Bankrupt” means that a particular kind of legal decision has been made about how the assets and liabilities of the insolvent party will be handled.
Also, there’s the issue of one of the more spectacular and shameless rhetorical scams of the modern age, in which certain kinds of insolvency get to be described as “illiquidity,” whereupon such insolvent parties get to claim a blank check on the rest of us to fix their problem.
To be more precise it is “balance sheet insolvency”. “Insolvent” also commonly refers to the inability to pay debts when they fall due (“cash flow insolvency’).
Grrr. Yes. I am not a fan! I’d be even more averse to the idea when the blank check was coming from me.
Frankly, I think this “cash flow insolvency” stuff is already in the territory of self-serving obscurantism. If you are balance-sheet solvent, you can always pay debts when they fall due by selling your assets or borrowing money against them. I don’t see any good reason why such a simple, clear-cut, and bullshit-free notion as “insolvency” should be complicated and obscured this way.
(Of course, here I assume that the goal is to arrive at an accurate understanding of reality, not to master the present language of finance and various related areas of economics, which has a lot of such self-serving obscurantism built in, often quite intentionally. I certainly agree that if one wants to speak this language like an insider, one should be careful to make such distinctions.)
I’m with you on keeping things simple and free of bullshit but I’ve got to say in this case it is the cash flow insolvency that is the core of the matter. Insolvency, if it is to be described in a simple one liner, is “is the inability of a person—an individual or a corporation—to pay all their debts as and when they fall due.”
Having negative net worth just isn’t a big deal so long as you can keep paying the payments on your loans, keep buying the stuff you need to run your business and keep paying the employees. In fact large business often merrily operate that way and everybody is happy. It becomes a problem when they can’t make the payments they are obliged to make—then they may be forced into liquidation (or bankruptcy depending on the naming convention in the jurisdiction.)
You are right. I have no problem if a business that is balance-sheet insolvent argues that it is still cash-flow solvent and should therefore be allowed to operate in hope of achieving balance-sheet solvency. (Of course, only as long as this doesn’t involve defrauding the long-term creditors by lying about how likely that actually is.) This basically means borrowing money against the optimistic possibilities opened by the uncertainty about the future. (Without such uncertainty, balance-sheet insolvency would imply a predictable future point of cash-flow insolvency, so allowing the business to operate normally would mean favoritism towards shorter-term creditors.)
What I do have a problem with, however, is claiming to be balance-sheet solvent while being cash-flow insolvent. There is simply no good reason to grant anyone that status in any circumstances. Either money can be readily borrowed against the positive net assets, or the accounting on which the claim about the positive net worth is based is fraudulent one way or another.
I actually have no problem with a business operating in a perpetual state of balance sheet insolvency. If the creditors are happy and getting the payments they desire, the employees are happy and the owners are happy then there just isn’t any issue. No expectation of, desire for or hope that that particular number to be positive is required. It just isn’t an important number.
It does seem like being balance sheet solvent but cash flow insolvent should be impossible in an efficient market with optimal laws in place. And I agree that usually a discrepancy here implies dubious accounting.
Of course things being this neat essentially requires the balance sheet assets to exactly track (or never fall below) the value at which a creditor would loan money based on that asset. Yet it becomes complicated when I, as a potential creditor, expect the business to fare poorly in the future. In that case the amount I would pay to purchase the asset is greater than the amount that I would loan because of the asset (unless I can get some sort of shifty deal where I am paid back first.) Since some assets are essentially the core of the business and cannot realistically be sold while still maintaining the business at all this puts them in a position that can legitimately be described as cash flow insolvent but balance flow solvent. This is a rather strong sign that is time to disband the company and sell the pieces!
This may be of interest here (it corrects this earlier analysis, which would really have been apropos here if it hadn’t been flawed).
In at least some jurisdictions, those are different.
And are thrown in a mix with liquidation, administration and various deals where they get official help wrangling their way out of some of their debts while being restricted or get partially nationalised or somesuch thing. Whatever rules the government has made up to forcefully remedy cash flow insolvency propblems.
That’s not the word either. Obviously simple ‘debt’ isn’t the word: someone with a million dollars in cash who owes his mate ten bucks for the meal the other night. But ‘bankrupt’ means a different thing again. If you have a $1m mortgage on a house and the property prices have fallen then the value of your assets may well have fallen below that needed to cover your debt but you still aren’t bankrupt. At least, not yet and not while you can keep up the payments. Unless your lawyers and accountants recommend it as an option.
I would have guessed the word for what Hugh was referring to would be “net debt” but that is a bit off too (since it doesn’t take into account long term assets, just liquid assets). Just plain “deficit net worth” is the simplest description I know of but it seems to be something that deserves a word of its own. Anyone know of one?
It is slang but the convention is “underwater”.
Ahh, thanks.
The math works out that he’s in contact with people with more than $191 - and that makes sense.
I meant the “random women” he was talking about.
Consider item g in the first chart on page 10 of “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making” by Shane Fredrick. In this study, 31% of subjects with low scores on a “cognitive reflection test” took the 15% chance of the million dollars, whereas 60% of high-scoring subjects did. The p-value was less than 0.0001.
I would suggest that it is very easy to concentrate on the 85% chance of getting nothing, and so ignore the difference in EV.
Indeed yeah. But we’re not talking $500 vs. $900, we’re talking orders of magnitude...
This is typical behavior in academic psych work (e.g. the Shane Frederick paper Eliezer pulled this from).
Jerkiness is in the eye of the beholder.
I have a suspicion that this “effect” is exaggerated by the stickiness of abusive relationships—once a woman, by ill luck or trickery, does fall into a relationship with a jerk, she may find it difficult, even difficult in the sense of “serious physical danger”, to shake permanently loose of it. The emotional reaction of “why would a woman go with that guy? he’s such a jerk” is ignorance of how abuse works and “because she likes jerks” is a hypothesis being privileged because it reduces the feeling of dissonance.
For what it’s worth, I can name one. She was a not-too-bright high school student, but her on again, off again boyfriend had definite sociopathic tendencies...
Well, that doesn’t surprise me but I don’t think it’s got that much to do with personality: I’d think that a person struggling to make ends meet would be a lot more likely to choose the sure $500 than a reasonably wealthy person, and I don’t think there are many of the former kind among people who have enough spare time to read LessWrong, whereas there are lots of them among random people in the streets (at least in 2011 -- there probably were fewer in the 1980s, and more in the 1930s).
As a substantial portion of the population doesn’t play the game of thought experiments very well, it would be worthwhile to ask a second, unrelated thought-experiment question. Anyone who says something like “But a fat man wouldn’t weigh enough to stop a trolley!” or “You can’t keep a violinist alive by connecting them to a person!” and also doesn’t ask something like “Can I have investors bet on whether or not I will receive the $1M?” is just stupid.
Well, it just didn’t occur to me that I could make such a bet.
(Or even, I might sell the lottery ticket with an auction: someone richer than me (who would assign roughly the same utility as me to $1M but much less utility than me to smaller amounts such as $500) might buy it for a lot more money.)
If it wouldn’t have seemed to you like a decisive refutation that a fat man might not be able stop a trolley, then you’re not stupid, and didn’t immediately think of auctioning off the ticket because you understand how these things are supposed to work.
Well, I sometimes do think about non-LPCW answers to hypothetical dilemmas (though I don’t say them aloud), but in this case I didn’t even think of it. (I feel like my inclination to come up with non-LPCW answers is a function of the scenario’s plausibility, but not a monotonic one.)
(Caveats: Small N, college-age subjects, and WEIRD) Believe it or not, someone actually tried to test the jerk theory empirically and found support for it
Hat tip: Eric Barker.
Another caveat is surrogate behavior—what’s tested is which photographs women chose, not which men.
It’s occurring to me that part of what annoys me about the “women prefer jerks” meme is the implication that women are distinctively irrational. There are men who chose women who mistreat them, sometimes one such woman after another, but I’ve never heard anyone say “men prefer bitches”.
Just on the notion level, but I’ve wondered whether some women (especially young women) choose bad news men for the same reason that some men (especially young men) ride motorcycles—risk and excitement. From what I’ve heard, one of the reasons women chose difficult men is the hope of being able to change them.
Another possibility is availability bias—the stereotype is the woman who spends years complaining about the awful men in her life to a patient male friend who’s wondering why she never chooses him. Women who are happy with their relationships aren’t going to do as nearly as much complaining about them, and probably aren’t going to be talking in comparable detail about how good the relationship is.
There, now you have. According to the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, it is currently ranked #560 overall in the Books category, #1 in Dating , #2 in Mate Seeking, and #4 in Love & Romance. Surely the idea isn’t unheard of.
Partially this is because men are less often the one whose preference is at the center of the relationship (the standard cultural trope is a man pursues a woman, attempting to make her prefer him) and so there is less scrutiny of men’s preference by both parties, and much more scrutiny of women’s preference by men (in order to understand better how to make a woman prefer him).
Partially this is also because male attraction is determined less strongly by personality, and the “bitch/jerk” adjective is about personality.
Isn’t there a stereotype whereby men prefer women who play by The Rules, which apparently consist of guidelines for emotional manipulation? That counts as bitchy in my book.
Also, can someone explain the “patient male friend” part of stereotype? I think it’s one of these cases:
Nice Guy never expresses interest; Woman assumes he’s happy with friendship, including his role as confidant. He wonders why she never chooses him… because he assumes telepathy on her part?
Nice Guy hits on Woman repeatedly despite constant rejections on her part. She keeps having him as a friend and telling him about her relationships… because she can’t get a male friend who’s genuinely happy with that?
Nice Guy expresses interest, gets rejected. He genuinely wants the friendship but doesn’t ask “please don’t tell me about your relationships while I’m carrying a torch for you”… because he doesn’t know how to do that without sinking the friendship as well?
Nice Guy expresses interest, gets rejected. He won’t be satisfied with the friendship but doesn’t walk away… because he hopes Woman will magically change her mind?
It occurs to me that a common factor might be that the two of them are both highly pessimistic about relationships—neither of them is looking for someone they can be happy with.
Woman seems to expect to be happy with her boyfriends (after all, she doesn’t date people she isn’t attracted to, whom she would be unhappy with). Nice Guy may or may not be looking for someone he can be happy with in parallel with pursuing Woman.
I may be too hard on her—I was doing the jump of assuming that if she really wanted to be happy, she’d be using more efficient selection methods, but that could be another of those bad advice schemas.
Actually, you’re missing the part where her selection method may well be optimal, given her goals. She gets excitement, sex, and drama from the “jerk” boyfriends, and companionship, emotional, and other kinds of support from her orbiter(s). (PUA terminology for guys who hang around a girl hoping she’ll realize he’s perfect and stop dating the jerks.)
This is such a common thing that it seems evolutionarily optimized. Enough orbiters occasionally luck out to make it a viable minority strategy for males, and the win for the females is obvious.
It’s only if you think idealistically (“far”) that you’d even be surprised by the frequency with which this occurs.
(Also, one thing that sometimes happens is that the orbiter, after getting his lucky moment, actually becomes more confident about expressing his interest in women and quits orbiting them. Everybody wins!)
It is all of those cases, except it is also stipulated that the description must be cast in a more positive light.
Really? That belief isn’t all that uncommon, and for reasons somewhat similar to the ‘jerk’ idea. Mind you the (overwhelmingly justified) belief that men are less picky than women when it comes to their mate selection makes such beliefs less emphasised.
I think the hypothesis would be that women choose men who are “jerks” partly because they are jerks, while men choose women who are “jerks” because they just don’t care so much about personality traits, and/or despite those women being jerks.
Examining this hypothesis would require an operationalization of “jerk.”
Wouldn’t it, though? I wish that would happen, and I wonder why at least a sketch of a definition hasn’t emerged yet.
Does this count? I think there are more too.
I’m almost certain that at least one has.
I saw a list of possible meanings somewhere in this discussion, but I don’t remember a follow-up of what particular people have in mind.
Does Chapter “You Just Ask Them” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman count as academic research? :-)
You got me reading that chapter.
From what I understand Dark triad traits have been shown to be sexually attractive.
Edit: Damn you gwern! :)
To quote another user, Scott H Young, “superficial would be the right word to describe most aphorisms, as being merely pointers to a more nuanced set of beliefs”. So I’m sure it just has to do with the fact that of the bundle of qualities aggregately known as “jerks”, some of those qualities are attractive. Check out the blog Hooking Up Smart for more nuanced stuff on the idea of nice men vs jerks.
Why does this debate always assume that the causal arrow points from being a jerk to sexual success? We know that power over others tends to make you a jerk. Sexual attractiveness is power. Thus, attractive jerks.
That is true. Pretty much every guy I know with a partners is quite decent,
Conversely however, the guys who score one hot chick after another, who don’t have a partner except in the sense that they have half a dozen partners, those guys are jerks, Max Tucker being the infamous example.
I know a guy who is a male model and a thoroughly decent, caring and loving guy, also financially quite well off and highly intelligent. People pay him money to put his face and body on their products. Women often try to pick him up on sight. But after they get to know him a bit, they don’t like him nearly so much. It does look to me that he is far too nice, and could profit from a fair bit of ruthless and cynical brutality towards women. I have put this to him, but he strenuously disagrees. He does not do that well with women, though if I had women hitting on me like he does, I know what I would do.
And while those partnered men are not jerks, they don’t live up to politically correct standards for not being a jerk. Stereotypical women’s work is largely done by their partner. So, yes, unlike Max Tucker, they are decent people, but our standards for a decent male person differs from that standard that one pretends to.
Does the male model have any women he’s spontaneously interested in, or is it all women who choose him more than him especially wanting them?
I don’t know the details of enough households to be sure of the housework distribution. I can think of two where the men definitely weren’t doing it. One ended in divorce (mostly for other reasons), the other seems to be stable. One household where I think it’s pretty equal, but I’m not sure. Statistics back up the idea that husbands typically do less housework than their wives.
He is heterosexual. I don’t know if his relationships started with him hitting on the girl or the girl hitting on him. I have seen quite a few hot chicks hit on him and he brushes them off, or pretends not to notice. With his girlfriends he acts excessively needy, and respectful, as if they are very important to him. I don’t act that needy, even though women never hit on me, and are frequently hitting on him.
I don’t see how he can actually be needy. Girls think he is candy when they first see him. But he acts needy, leaning in to his girlfriend rather than his girlfriend leaning into him. Needy body language, even though girls somehow appear whenever he is around.
It’s partly Luke’s fault (which was one of the reasons I downvoted the original post), but I wish you wouldn’t bring up hot-button topics that create drama, add little value to the site, and displace actual rationality-relevant content.
I’m hoping that people here have gotten enough stronger that my rather non-contentious handling of this subject doesn’t lead to a blow-up. So far, it hasn’t.
Trouble is, blow-ups are in fact the less bad failure mode in discussions of this sort. A much less bad one.
If it is indeed the case that, as you suggest, spelling out the truth on these topics requires breaking strong taboos, then there’s a third failure mode, where LessWrongers actually succeed at spelling out the taboo truth, and this causes the site to be pegged as a hate site and lose influence on the cold-button topics that actually matter.
If it’s a choice between 1) don’t talk about these issues and risk forgoing some minor novel insights on a topic that affects most people’s life decisions only very indirectly, 2) talk about these issues in an inoffensive way and risk creating a false consensus of the kind you describe, 3) talk about these issues in an offensive way and risk becoming a hate site (as well as presumably having more blowups), I really would much rather choose 1.
If you’re mistaken and we can be both non-taboo and accurate, then wanting to have the discussion becomes more reasonable. But many people don’t seem to think you’re mistaken, and I don’t understand why these people aren’t helping me root for option 1.
I remember we once had a disagreement about this, but in the meantime I have moved closer to your view.
Basically, the problem is that the idea of a general forum that attempts to apply no-holds-barred rational thinking to all sorts of sundry topics is unworkable. It will either lead to people questioning all kinds of high-status ideological beliefs and purveyors of official truth, thus giving the forum a wacky extremist reputation (and inevitably generating a lot of ugly quarrels in the process) -- or it will converge towards ersatz “rationality” that incorporates all the biases inherent to the contemporary respectable high-status beliefs and institutions as its integral part. What is needed to salvage the situation is a clear statement of what constitutes on-topic discussion, and ruthlessly principled policing of off-topic content no matter what positions it advocates.
Basically, it’s the ersatz rationality failure mode. People simply assume that the principal contemporary high-status beliefs and institutions are, if somewhat imperfect, still based on rational thinking to a sufficient degree that a rational discussion free of delusion and malice simply cannot result in any really terrible conclusions. So I do think most people think I’m mistaken. (Even if they see some validity in my concerns, they presumably believe that I’m exaggerating either the ugliness of reality or the ideological closed-mindedness and intolerance of the respectable opinion.)
I disagree, however, with your characterization of option (1) as “forgoing some minor novel insights on a topic that affects most people’s life decisions only very indirectly.” There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in terms of insight from applying unbiased thinking to issues where the respectable opinion is severely delusional. Also, any topic that is truly important for people’s life decisions, and where accurate knowledge is of high practical value, is highly likely to involve at least some issues where respectable platitudes and effective advice will be very remote from each other, and no-nonsense talk will be against the social norms.
I object to your use of “questioning” here, because it has become ambiguous. I suppose you mean “espousing low-status opinions as the result of questioning”.
Notice how and why nothing like this has been necessary for traditional politics. People post political manifestos and are often told both that the content is inappropriate because of its subject and that they have made specific severe errors of thought. I don’t remember a case in which the political poster kept pushing and ultimately only the first response was given, because it isn’t really true, it’s just that if content is political, the outside view is that it is flawed.
The point of the forum is to develop thinking techniques that are useful because they can be widely applicable. Apolitical examples are part of the training, but eventually one only cares about applying the system of thought when it reaches correct conclusions that otherwise would not have been reached, and it will inevitably deviate from what other systems would conclude.
Allow me to float an idea: post a disclaimer on the site that as a test and to prevent cultishness, one (or perhaps a few) deceptively wrong idea (wrong as unanimously agreed upon by a number of demonstrably masterful people) is advocated as if it were the mainstream opinion here, and aspiring rationalists are expected to reach the unpopular (here) opinion. The masters—most,but not all of them—argue for the popular (here) opinion that is low-status in society. Anyone who objects that an aspect of the site has a plurality of evilly inclined and majority of wrongly thinking people on a topic (say, PUA) can be told that that subject is suspected to be the (or one of the) ones on which the best thinkers not only disagree with the local majority opinion, but do so unanimously.
It goes without saying that...well, it really does go without saying, so I won’t say it.
College physics professor gives a weekly lecture. Toward the end of the first day, a student in the first row points out an elementary mistake in one of the equations. Prof congratulates the student, announces that every day there will be an error in the lecture. The midterm and final exams will consist of a list of lecture dates, and the only way to pass a given question is to point out the error in the corresponding day’s lecture.
Prof gets into progressively more complex subjects. Everybody takes good notes. After the final, that student from the front row visits the prof’s office, apologetically explains that nobody could figure out the mistake in the last lecture. Prof says “That’s alright, I can’t either.”
What’s scarier, the idea of a conceptual apparatus that attempts to apply no-holds-barred rational thinking to all sorts of sundry topics may to an extent be unworkable. If the deniers of high-status-falsehood-1 all started using some catchy phrase (of the sort that LW has lots of), and then the deniers of high-status-falsehood-2 started using that phrase too, both would start smelling like the other and seem crazier for it. (This is one of the considerations that make me not want to try getting around these restrictions with pseudonyms.) On the other hand, of course, there are a number of concepts to fall back on that basically can’t be corrupted because they’re used all the time by e.g. probability theorists obviously lacking any agenda.
When I said that, I was thinking of the “do women like nice guys or jerks” question specifically. I wouldn’t say politically-charged topics hardly affect people’s lives as a blanket statement, though I think it’s true in a great many cases. But your reading was the more natural one and I apologize for being unclear.
It’s really hard to actually know when the “respectable” opinion is severely delusional… and even if the consensus view is indeed totally wrong, most minority opinions are usually even wronger than that. Saying the Sun orbits the Earth is much less crazy that saying that the Sun orbits the Moon half the time and Mars the other half of the time.
See also.
I disagree. Of course, it’s hard to know this with consistent reliability across the board, but there are plenty of particular cases where this is perfectly clear. Many of these cases don’t even involve topics that are ideologically charged to such extremes that contrarian conclusions would be outright scandalous. (Though of course the purveyors of the respectable opinion and the officially accredited truth wouldn’t be pleased, and certainly wouldn’t be willing to accept the contrarian discourse as legitimate.)
To give a concrete example, it is clear that, say, mainstream economics falls into this latter category.
Just watch out that when you say “The experts on X are wrong; don’t believe them” that you aren’t telling people to sell nonapples. “Don’t believe in YHVH” doesn’t mean that you should go believe in Zenu.
I don’t mean rejecting the mainstream view in favor of some existing contrarian position—of which the majority are indeed unavoidably wrong, no matter what the merits of the mainstream view—but merely applying the very basic tools of common sense and rational thinking to see if the justification for the mainstream view can stand up to scrutiny. My point is that often the mainstream view fails as soon as it’s checked against the elementary laws of logic and the most basic and uncontroversial principles of sound epistemology. It really isn’t hard.
I have appreciated your non-contentious handling of these subjects, both here and elsewhere.
I have to second that. NancyLebovitz comes across as positively sane and relaxing to converse with (and read) - a valuable and somewhat rare trait in this subject area.
Blowups seem like they can be quite damaging even if they occur only a fraction of the time. Even without blowups, there’s still the waste of space and collective attention. As I see it, the recent comments page is to some extent a commons that a minority of LWers are tempted to spend on their pet topic, and that a majority of LWers would like to see spent on topics more directly related to the site’s theme, but the minority is here in the thread voting and the majority is not.
On the other hand, the vote numbers here are extreme enough that I find them surprising. Should I conclude that, as a community, we’ve decided to stop having on-topic and anti-mind-killing norms? Or is it the way I said it?
Obviously, mind-killingness is a joint property of an idea and a mind, and not the sole property of ideas.
This thread has gone well.
This fails to address the comment it’s replying to:
I’m not sure why you got so many downvotes—I’m not one of the people who supplied them.
Since “women prefer jerks” is something which is commonly believed but which may not have a lot of evidence supporting it (especially if ‘women’ isn’t quantified and ‘jerks’ isn’t defined), I don’t think it’s off-topic to discuss it.
What topics would you like to see more of?
That could describe anyone’s pet issue.
The math, psychology, philosophy, and economics of rationality, careful futurism, the singularity, existential risks, optimal philanthropy, strategies for rationalists and their organizations, considerations relevant to common life decisions that human biases cause to be ignored elsewhere or that benefit unusually from using our conceptual tools.
It seems to me that this topic falls squarely into the last category.
I disagree insofar as it’s not obvious what that phrase means. Assuming everyone who believes “it” actually has beliefs that provide predictions, it’s not obvious that those believers make common predictions.
I think the phrase stands in for widely varying sets of different actual beliefs, rather than either meaning just one sort of thing or usually being just emotive, but I don’t believe that too firmly.
Women are, on average, more attracted to men who are more selfish and aggressive than they are compliant and cooperative.
I’m surprised this comment was made and is so highly upvoted because it doesn’t meet your usual standards.
Specifically, the context is “it’s not obvious what that phrase means. Assuming everyone who believes “it” actually has beliefs that provide predictions, it’s not obvious that those believers make common predictions,” and you responded with a paraphrase that I believe is close to the truest meaning of the phrase. Some problems:
It’s not obvious what your comment’s function is. You probably meant to assert at least that this is a true and near truest interpretation of the phrase. The context is my assertion that people mean different things by the phrase, do you (also) mean to imply that people using it are generally using it accurately?
“On average” isn’t specific enough.
You missed saying the truer, deeper pattern behind the true statement, the {6, 6, 6, 6, 6, …}, though it isn’t something implied by the phrase. That deeper truth is that it is behaviors indicating high status that are attractive. Usually these are “selfish and aggressive”, not showing concern with others’ standards, but conspicuous vulnerability/non high-status behavior also shows high status by ignoring opportunities to display high status with selfishness and aggression. See e.g. John Mayer.
I, surprisingly enough, disagree. In the context of casual conversation the meaning is well enough understood. Normal people having conversations don’t use precise technical terms but they get along fine—and often wouldn’t even understand the formal and precise terminology very well anyway.
It just isn’t reasonable to dismiss “‘women prefer jerks’ is something which is commonly believed” as undefined.
Mind you I myself don’t particularly find the “women prefer jerks” belief to be all that useful (or even necessarily have an opinion on just how common the belief is). It just isn’t the most practical foundation on which to self-improve (even though it does work for some). Myself I recommend “quit being a pussy” alongside the kind of deeper insight that you allude to in “3.”
I still a not sure if you are asserting that the phrase “women prefer jerks” has a single, commonly understood meaning among everyone, or among men, or what.
Their understanding of formal terminology is barely relevant. If a someone says that their printer “is shit”, I want to know if they mean that it burns through ink cartridges, jams frequently, prints with low quality, or what. I am unsure as to what an informal phrasing means, specifically I am unsure about the extent to which it means the same thing to different people. I’m not blaming people for being informal, I’m questioning how much agreement there can be among the people around hundreds of thousands of water coolers in the world when such an imprecise phrase is used. That around any individual water cooler people communicate well enough is not in doubt.
It’s not being dismissed, it’s being partitioned according to my best estimation of what its speakers and listeners actually mean. There are probably different meanings because the phrase is not very specific.
Meta-statements about something like “the belief shared by people who believe this statement is true” are being dismissed.
If we must have these sorts of conversations could we while doing so please refrain from using terms for female genitalia as negative descriptors? Although the linked SMBC is amusing thist really doesn’t help keeping things calm or help the signal to noise ratio.
Eh? That term means “cat” to me.
EDIT: In fact, wedrifid’s meaning has a different etymology from either yours or mine.
Terms meaning cat have been slang for the female genitalia in more than one language, or so The Great Cat Massacre claims about “le chatte” in French, at any rate..
Huh. Interesting. I did not realize what the etymology of that word was. The fact that it is used almost exclusively to target males rather than females suggests that there’s been some etymological bleed over.
And at no niggardly pace, either.
While I don’t doubt that there has been some bleed over, I am not sure this is actually suggestive of it; typical gender roles would have “pampered” or “soft” also be seen as more negative when directed at a male, and I don’t think there is any related bleeding going on there.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of the origins of, well, any of the various usages for that word.
I prefer to avoid them, for approximately this reason.
Objecting to the use of unsophisticated terms is one thing—it would be pointless to argue with that. But if you are moving to a claim about “signal to noise ratio” then you are simply wrong. The signal there is extremely important.
FWIW, I have it on good authority that he was a neighborhood bully when he was little.
I think the comment is being upvoted in the context of it being a translation of the claim, not in the context of it being an assertion that the claim is true.
Or disagree that it is off-topic or mind-killing.
Why would anyone so disagree? If this topic isn’t off-topic and mind-killing, is there any topic that is?
I don’t find “do women dig jerks?” particularly mind-killing, or at least, not here (much less than the ethics of PUA, political parties, elections, welfare, taxes, Occupy Wall Street, race and intelligence, Israel and Palestine …); I don’t have strong opinions on the issue, and hearing someone speak on that topic doesn’t allow me to categorize them into a clearly-defined group.
I can’t clearly see any “sides” on the issue (two possible sides are of course “women are stupid and dig jerks so I hate them” and “anybody who criticizes women is stupid”, but I’m not seeing either of those here, the sides are more “it’s complicated” and “it’s not that simple”).
There’s no “that” for it to be either that simple or not that simple.
(Implicit modifier A) women (implicit modifier B) dig (whatever that means exactly) jerks (whatever that means exactly).
Modifier A can be “all”, or “most”, or “the most attractive ones”, or whatever.
Modifier B can be “most days of the week”, “most years of their lives”, or whatever.
“Dig” can mean “prefer ceteris paribus”, “will only have one night stands with”, “will stay with them even if the guy hits them”, “strongly prefer at all times”, “prefer for all types of relationships”, or whatever.
“Jerks” can mean “people who are more assertive than average”, “people who try and make them feel bad about themselves”, “people who have killed a man”, “people who wear motorcycle jackets”, “people who frequently brag”, or whatever.
“Women dig jerks” provides an opportunity to construct an obviously (or not obviously) true or false meaning to something other people say, depending on how right or wrong one wants them to be. It allows room to always easily be able to interpret an interlocutor’s words to mean that they are innately evil or hopelessly misguided.
That said, people actually do disagree on the substance of the issue.
I would say yes. I mean, it’s clearly on topic relative the main post, and if instrumental rationality is going to be one of the focuses of the site, then “on topic” for top level posts is necessarily going to be pretty broad.
As for mind-killing, there are certainly topics I think it’s harder to hold a productive conversation on.
I think a comment can be off-topic even though it’s on-topic relative to the main post and the main post is itself on-topic. I’m also worried that people are using too broad a definition of “instrumental rationality”.
Indeed I’ve been pleasantly surprised by this so far.
This comment might not be popular on a quick knee-jerk level, but it’s worth getting out there for accuracy.
Under “Many partners” you’ve got Singlehood, Friendship ‘with benefits’, Polyamory.
You’re missing one of the most common historical kinds of relationships—monogamous commitment from woman to man, man taking care of multiple households in a committed way.
The first Tokugawa Shogun, for instance -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu#Ieyasu_as_a_person
16 children with 11 wives and concubines.
King Ts’ao Ts’ao of Wei -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Cao#Family
Muhammad -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad#Wives_and_children
It’s not a Western tradition. The West has a strong romantic/platonic love ideal, that moves into monogamy under Christianity, and some non-monogamy later built on some mix of liberalism, enlightenment values, and humanism.
But still, it’s been a very common family/dating/relationship through history. It still persists, though it doesn’t get much media coverage.
Current Sheik of Dubai -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Rashid_Al_Maktoum#Personal_life_and_education
Current Prime Minister of Italy -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#Sexual_scandals
Honest question: has this ever been common? All the cases you list are “king” of their time and place.
I thought you were going to point out that adultery was the classical way of having multiple partners...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/?single_page=true
Well, there is woman shortage in China, so...
By this much, in case anyone else is interested in checking.
Chinese census data is notoriously unreliable.
I can believe that. The World Factbook has different figures, but they are in the same direction. I don’t know where they get their data from, though.
Sorry, I shouldn’t have just stated a claim without some evidence.
Here are some examples of semi-obvious statistical manipulation happening in the Chinese census data. I don’t necessarily agree with all of their conclusions (e.g., they assume that the One Child Policy applies to everyone), but there are enough signs of tampering for my taste.
Interesting. If the sex ratio at birth is that high but the sex ratio among the population is that close to 1, what becomes of those extra males who are born?
In most countries, there are more women than men, because women live longer. (Some evidence: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UKDemographics-Age.svg )
Possible additional hypotheses: the reason there are more men born than women is because of selective abortions. If the selection pressure for having males is stronger in rural areas/ among the poor (where economics factors make it substantially better to have sons than daughters), and the poor have a higher mortality rate, then you would expect to see an evening-out. (It may be difficult to find good data on this, but I haven’t tried)
You may also find that men are more likely to emigrate, and if China has net emigration, then that would reduce the number of men overall. (There are other possibilities that rely on emigration, obviously. This seems possibly the most likely. Some research would probably be able to verify this)
I am told this relationship style (polygynous with multiple households) is common in Latin America, and I do know several males there who have engaged in it. These males are middle-class—doctors and the like. Polygyny also occurs in other Western cultures, although more covertly, in the form of the prestigious man and his “bit on the side” (who is usually non-reproductive, monogamous and hoping to oust the current alpha female—in the absence of contraception this would probably end up with multiple households). So I’m inclined to think it happens whenever there are massive power inequalities both between males (such that a woman is better off with a fraction of the resources of a wealthy man than with all the resources of a poor man) - and between males and females (such that wealthy men are better off “collecting” multiple poor women than marrying one wealthy one).
It’s probably hard to answer that accurately. I’ve read arguments about how commonplace polygamy and harems were and they usually go like this:
a) Old sources rarely take interest in the lives of common men, but we know that society tolerated multiple wifes and households in extraordinary people.
b) Household requires wealth. More households require more wealth.
c) Common men could support one household at most, if any.
d) Monogamy was de-facto standard (for economic reasons).
Hope this helps.
I’ve heard that absolute rulers liked to keep everyone else down, to cement their own position. This often involved limiting the number of wives other men could have, and limiting how closely they could marry (oftentimes the emperor would ban cousin marriage for everyone else, but then marry his own cousins and sisters, to prevent having to lose anything by way of dowry).
I don’t think it’s ever been common in that it was practiced by commoners. The ratio of men to women has always been such that most men can only have at most one wife. But there have been cultures such as the Aztecs and Egyptians where polygamy was practiced among the nobility.
I don’t think “taking care” is always the best description, especially in the case of Berlusconi, for example.
I quite liked the post, I only have one niggle:
“For example, in heterosexual dating the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man’s lead, and that she shouldn’t initiate sex herself.”
this is an extremely US-centric view of dating culture.
In Aus, women do not expect men to pay for dates, and while the bias is still weighted towards the men being more likely to ask woman out or to initiate sexual advancement… it’s not the expectation.
It’s only one data point, but most of my BFs I pursued, rather than the other way around—and most of my girl-friends have similar stories.
Fixed, thanks.
Just wanted to say—I’m impressed by your dedication to improving your writing style—both in the amount of reference-reading you’re doing to fuel your topics, and in how much you’re willing to take on board the feedback from the community.
For the record, this post is not an instance of my attempts to improve my writing style. I wrote this post months ago.
Luke, I think you’e being pursued by a Sheila.
The Aussie accent is the sexiest.
LOL—no pursuit involved, just honest admiration. Still—can’t deny being a sheila. :)
I would like to propose that any post immediately become locked once its number of comments reaches 1337.
Having read every single one of the 1337 comments, I have concluded that there is nothing to be gained from any further comments that might be added, and that the above solution should be applied immediately so as not to waste anyone else’s time or karma.
On December 7th, your prediction was falsified.
Wow.
The greater the value of your comment, the greater benefit there has been from allowing more than 1337 comments on posts.
But seriously, I don’t think the risk of this discussion being continued in an unrelated, peaceful post is worth it.
Loved the link, especially this part:
I can read that almost as fast as I can read normal text. Or, at least, I can read it faster than I can read normal text out loud. Our pattern recognition is incredible!
So basically this series will try to do this but systematically avoid any PUA references and trying to find ways to find some relevance to a few extra groups of people (besides heterosexual males) in order to avoid mind killing?
Your comment sounds like a complaint. Is it?
Partially yes. Some PUA concepts are really neatly formulated, a fraction of LWers are familiar with them and at the end of the day the original synthesis was done by the PUA community, having a bottom line partially written by X, then searching for academic papers to help write up stuff to fill the void once X is cut out is an easy way to stumble rationality-wise once or twice along the way, and thus is bad practice, but mostly I was just curious.
Generally I think avoiding mindkillers is a good thing for the community in my mind, and the comment section of this discussion is better than I expected, so perhaps the comment is coming of harsher than intended.
It was mean more in a “oh I see what you did there, am I right?” way.
I think your comment was quite appropriate. Even under the best imaginable scenario, these articles and their follow-up discussions will suffer from at least two problems.
First, there is the conspicuous omission of any references to the PUA elephant in the room. The body of insight developed by this particular sort of people, whatever its faults, is of supreme practical importance for anyone who wants to formulate practical advice in this area. Without referencing it explicitly, one can either ignore it altogether and thus inevitably talk nonsense, or pretend to speak based solely on official academic literature, which is disingenuous and unfair in its failure to attribute credit (and also misleading for those who would like to pursue their own research in the matter). It’s as if someone wanted to talk about electronics but insisted that the only legitimate references should be from pure academic quantum theory, and the nuts-and-bolts work of tech entrepreneurs and industry engineers is forbidden and unmentionable.
Second, really good practical advice in this area simply cannot be inoffensive. To take a clear and obvious example, one absolutely essential sort of knowledge is what kinds of people are likely to lead to various sorts of trouble if you entangle yourself with them. In principle, this is an exercise in assigning conditional probabilities that should be greatly attractive to the LW folks fond of Bayesianism. Yet since in our culture the discussion (let alone practical use) of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people is considered immoral, discussing these things while remaining within the contemporary inoffensive bounds is as if one wanted to discuss sexual techniques while respecting the prudery norms of 17th century puritanism. (Also, on a more mundane level, LW is still far from the standards of rationality that would make people who recognize themselves in some of these conditional probabilities refrain from destroying the discourse by crying offense, and various others not to try boosting their staus by joining them in solidarity, or even complaining preemptively on their behalf.) There are of course many other important aspects of the topic where one faces similar problems.
On the whole, the article is based on the premise that an accurate and no-nonsense analysis of the topic will result in something that sounds not just inoffensive, but actually strongly in line with various fashionable and high-status norms and ideals of the broader society. This premise however is flawed, and those who believe that this has in fact been accomplished should apply the powerful debiasing heuristic that says that when a seemingly rational discussion of some deeply problematic and controversial topic sounds pleasant and reassuring, there’s probably something fishy going on. There is simply no way to approach this topic without ending up with something that’s either offensive to the mainstream sensibilities and apt to upset certain sorts of people, or disingenuous and inaccurate to a significant degree.
And this was the reason why, I didn’t expect a direct response to the original question, from any of the authors. But as well as your opinions stated here resonate with my own, I feel I do need to play the devil’s (who is a thoroughly socialized chap) advocate:
People still realized when sex was talked about. And some information was distributed in this way.
While obviously this is not necessarily a stable situation, besides the euphemism treadmill people do eventually shorten the useful inference gaps. Indeed I would argue that cycles form around these sorts of things, perhaps 19th century Victorian society with its anomalous attitude to discussing sexuality is an example of such a spiral and I think in the 20th century there are also to be found potential examples of such spirals in some places.
Generally some information is better than no information and I would say that for all intents and purposes mainstream advice on dating and relations between the sexes is more or less no information. Now I would say that what would be welcomed is a clear acknowledgement of what occurred and what the situation is. While it would be scandalous for a Victorian gentleman or lady to write up a article offering advice on sexuality, and commenting that the original was modified to preserve decency, it would not be scandalous to note that certain things can not be discussed due to decency.
I maintain that to write up such a series of articles and have a discussion such as it is here, would be a net gain and even would not mislead greatly as long as it was clearly and transparently acknowledged that certain things can not be said due to “decency”. Obviously anyone interested in additional this could simply check the archives, or discreetly PM the author of the article for “indecent” advice.
We even have a passable candidate that could serve as the euphemism for the word or rather phrase that is the modern equivalent of the indecent: mindkilling.
But to not clearly acknowledge the situation will lead only to a false consensus emerging, and arguably to a certain extent it already has! That this be addressed is especially important because of the constant stream of new arrivals, who often have no experience whatsoever in thinking critically of such matters. I would argue that if that is the only kind of debate possible we should rather taboo the subject as a whole for a period of twelve months or more, not speaking of it rather than risking increasing irrationality on LessWrong. Before people flinch away from such a situation, this obviously goes for all the “sides” involved, please consider that we basically have exactly this kind of situation when it comes to politics!
Not only is sex and its associated status games as important to our monkey brains as politics, arguably in modern Western society sex is politics.
Actually, I’d say there’s a whole lot of strongly misleading information, and the situation is much worse than in most other areas of life. For example, in the conventional wisdom about job hunting there is certainly a lot of trite and suboptimal information, and truly great advice is always a matter of insider information to which few people are privy—but there is nothing like, say, the respectable opinion telling you that it’s best to show up for the job interview drunk and puke on the interviewer’s desk. Whereas in dating and inter-sex relations in general, a lot of the respectable opinion, if taken at face value, advises equivalently bad acts of self-sabotage.
Now, a body of advice whose quality is a mixed bag may be on the net either good or bad. If you’re given ten tips about driving, nine of which will make you a somewhat better driver but one of which will vastly increase your probability of getting killed in an accident, we’d probably agree that the “some information is better than no information” conclusion doesn’t apply. However, if the tenth one merely increases your parking fines slightly, it may well be the case.
So, what about the quality of advice that will be produced by a LW discussion on these topics operating under such constraints of respectability, where disreputable sources of accurate information are tabooed, a pretense must be maintained that the discourse is grounded in officially accredited scholarship and other high-status sources of information, and—most important of all—the entire discourse and its bottom line must produce a narrative that is in line with the respectable, high-status views of humanity and society? I am not at all optimistic, especially having seen what has been produced so far!
Yes, I think this is an important issue even aside from the question of the quality of the generated advice. The whole tone of these supposedly successful LW discussions about dating, relationships, and related topics assumes that the relevant high-status ideological views and official scholarship are a product of genuine free-thinking and rationality, so that a truly rational debate about these matters simply cannot lead to anything that respectable and accredited people would frown on. (And, by extension, that people who purportedly try to break the happy death spirals and draw the discourse closer to reality must be dishonest and delusional, and are thus obnoxiously stirring up bad blood without good reason.) This represents delusional wishful thinking of a sort that would be seen as unacceptable on LW if practiced about many other topics.
In the past people have obviously retrospectively looked for academic sources to support PUA ideas. It’s instrumentally fine, just a bad habit. Also, it is easy to hint at what is unsaid by saying it would be offensive, and hinting at exactly how offensive it would or wouldn’t be. Imagine a map of the world where every feature north of 35 degrees latitude was only described (Canada? Way north, I can’t put that on the map, it’s not even close! Korea? Look, that’s just not the sort of thing that can be boldly painted on the map. I’ll sketch a rough outline in pencil, OK?) Such a map would not be misleading.
The reason that convention is difficult to use here is that the taking of offense all goes one way. If one says “Because it is mind-killing, I will not speak of the temporal order, quantity, and relative amount of coercion involved in all property dispossessions in the Middle East since 1800,” one does not thereby share much about one’s opinion.
If one says “Because it is mind killing, I will not discuss the relationship between sexual attractiveness and time for men and women,” it may be that one believes that they are the same, or that there isn’t a steep fall for anyone, or whatever, and merely doesn’t want to provoke people into speaking of a counterargument. But usually not.
Only one side takes offense regarding this issue, so to say that one’s opinions are offensive, and especially the degree to which they are, is to reveal them. People are neither motivated to, nor good at, using the same language for “I will not share my opinion because people will take offense,” and “I will not share my opinion because the way some people discuss the topic is offensive.” In both cases, people take the opportunity to signal and communicate rather than maintain an ambiguous neutral convention to end conversations.
“Mindkilling” refers to the idea that it is particularly hard (although not impossible) for humans to discuss politically or ideologically controversial subjects without succumbing to bias. The implicit prohibition on “mindkilling” political discussion seems to have worked well here in creating a very civilised discussion forum.
On the other hand, you would redefine mindkilling as dissent from the ideological mainstream. This is unwise, because this merely priviliges a certain view of things at the expense of truth-seeking—it enshrines bias, since the ideological mainstream (American?) view of all things cannot be considered true or rational by definition.
To merely acknowledge that “indecency” (dissent) is forbidden, so caveat lector does little to counteract the inherent bias of the arrangement, since people are still going to read articles on a rationality forum expecting them to be essentially accurate, which they will not be to the extent that the dissenting view of things is the only fully accurate view. In other words this acknowledgement is hardly going to cancel out the persuasive force of a biased article unless the caveat is written in massive bold letters at the top of every such article “This Is Not True”, which is clearly unsatisfactory.
In other words the choices are:
1) Allow no discussion of ideologically controversial matters (to minimise mindkilling, but limit the scope of the forum)
2) Your solution, i.e. permit only the mainstream view (also minimising the possibility of mindkilling arguments, but legitimising bias)
3) Anything goes (possibly degrading the civility and in the long term the rationality of the forum)
Since the prohibitions are in fact only implicit, luckily there is no need to actually make a choice and some kind of uneasy equilibrium between 2 and 3 can exist (in which dissent is allowed, but is only encouraged in small and perhaps euphemistic doses). But I think this clarifies the point Vladimir_M is making.
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
I haven’t been downvoting for this phenomenon so far, but I’m going to start doing so if it keeps happening.
To whoever is upvoting this, it seems like you must be taking one of the following positions:
It is safe to post any view on LessWrong. Doing so will not get you in trouble, or cause blowups.
It is unsafe to post certain views on LessWrong, but if you hold such a view, you are morally obliged to argue for it and suffer the punishment (possibly at the hands of me or my allies).
It is unsafe to post certain views on LessWrong, and you are allowed not to argue for them, but you are not allowed to suggest that this unsafety has any sort of distorting effect on the resulting discussion.
Could you guys clarify?
I upvoted Prismatic, and I’m taking this position: 4. It may or may not be safe to post certain views on Less Wrong, but whatever they are, I precommit that I will not be part of a blowup over them. If your views are justified, I will update on them, and if they are not, I will calmly state my objections, but I will not punish you for dissent. If other people punish you unfairly for dissent, I will punish them. I would rather you post your dissenting views than hide them, and I will support you for doing so.
If enough of Less Wrong takes this position, eventually position 1. will be correct. I hope to bring about this state of affairs.
I always appreciate when someone else comes along and explains my position better than I did, so thanks.
That looks like option 2 minus the parenthetical. “These punishments are most regrettable, and maybe one day in a utopian future they will have stopped existing, but in the mean time stick your neck out and be punished or I’m going to complain at you.”
Isn’t is possible that Prismattic’s comment could be receiving so many upvotes because other people also find comments of the sort described irritating and are embracing the opportunity to signal that irritation? Like Prismattic, I don’t generally downvote comments on this basis alone. But I’m definitely tired of seeing the types of comments described, especially in those instances when, at least to my eyes, the commenters seem to be affecting a certain world-weary sorrow and wisdom while hinting at the profound truths that could be freely discussed but for -alas!- the terrible tyranny of modern social norms. But because the commenters are hiding the exact substance of their own views, there’s no basis on which to judge whether these views are, as Prismattic suggests, actually more correct than the mainstream view, or perhaps equally or even more wrong in some different direction.
If what’s suggested is “You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore I win the debate”, I agree that’s unreasonable. If what’s suggested is “You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore no real debate has taken place”, I think that’s far more reasonable.
Why not publish the “unsafe” arguments under a pseudonym (or an alternate pseudonym if your main identity is already a pseudonym)?
To do so consistently and stay safe, you’d need to take the unusual or otherwise identifiable parts of your set of concepts, favorite examples, verbal quirks, patterns of reasoning, and so on, and split everything into two: one part for use under your true identity, and one part for pseudonymous use. Even then, each of your novel ideas could taint each of your other novel ideas. There would also still be the harm to LessWrong’s reputation as a whole. And what would it accomplish? It’s notoriously hard to get people to change their minds on these topics, even here, and if you do there’s no clear causal path from that to better long-term future outcomes. I’d rather just collectively give up.
I do wonder why Luke puts so much effort into writing about romantic relationships, given all the other things on his to do list. Perhaps he wants to demonstrate that rationality has big concrete, immediate benefits, as a way to help expand our community?
I think that’s unlikely, unless someone who wants to see it happen makes a big push for it (e.g., get Eliezer to declare it a rule, or write a really convincing top-level post arguing for it and build the necessary consensus). My suggestion was made under the assumption of the current status quo.
I second this question.
Trying to put words to my own intuitions on the matter, I would stipulate a modified 3:
It may be unsafe (in terms of image/status/etc—I would certainly expect and hope not physically) to express certain views, particularly those sufficiently far from both societal mainstream and LW mainstream, and particularly those that touch too heavily on mind-killing topics.
It is reasonably within norms to acknowledge this, particularly with an eye to reducing its effect.
What is decidedly a violation of norms, I think, is to do so in a self-serving manner.
“Norms forbid honest discussion of my pet issue X, therefor X” is obviously flawed.
“Norms forbid discussion of my pet issue X, and I have strong evidence for X but can’t share it because of those norms, so just trust me that X” amounts to the same thing, in terms of what kinds of discussions are possible. It is also, to some degree, inconsistent—it is unlikely that we forbid evidence for a proposition while allowing discussion otherwise implying/assuming it.
I am also interested in a clarification.
Perhaps my view is one of 1-3, but I’m finding it difficult to categorize it:
It is ill-advised to discuss certain topics on LessWrong; if they are discussed anyway, the following choices are in the decreasing order of preference: a) not join the discussion; b) state your view clearly and be prepared to defend it; c) hint at your view but refuse to explain it or cite evidence for it, claiming that’ll violate a social norm.
b) is much better than c), but a) is much better than b).
It’s the same attitude that I think already exists on LW for politics (strongly influenced by the mind-killer post).
Yes, why should the heretic have the right to remain silent! If he speaks truth the good doctors of the holy mother church will surely update their theological arguments accordingly and if not, well why is he risking his immortal soul by relying only on his feeble and fallible mind?
We’re not discussing anyone’s right to remain silent. The objection is to a heretic’s tendency to announce himself as a heretic without mentioning any doctrinal specifics, then run away giggling.
So you prefer the situation in which a dubious mainstream view remains entirely unchallenged to a situation where a doubter, instead of remaining silent, states that it is likely wrong but that spelling out an explicit argument why it is so would violate social norms? As far as I see, the information made available in the second case is a proper superset of the information available in the former. So how can this constitute “obscurantism” in any reasonable sense of the term?
I’d prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of “politically correct” as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
Do you upvote people that do?
I have mostly grown tired of making comments where I mention a contrarian position. I get asked to explain myself; it sometimes leads to an argument, and I put a lot of work into comments that often end up at negative karma. I suspect those threads add to LW, but the feedback I’m getting is that they don’t.
I’ll understand if you refuse, but… would you mind terribly saving me the work of searching for an example of what you’re talking about? Cause, see, if I’m right about what you’re referring to (something I’m not sure of, hence the question) I generally do upvote things like that.
Also I’ve only been here, like, two months, so if you have some kind of reputation I’m not aware of it.
The most recent example would be my comment that everyone becoming bisexual might lead to a net social loss, although the karma scores have gone up since that discussion happened (and so maybe I just need to wait before updating on the karma of contrarian comments).
I spent way too long looking through other comments I’ve made, and only really came across this example. I suspect this was misapplying discontent caused by other arguments. I had already noticed a while back that when I made a sloppy comment it would often get downvoted, although I would be able to make up the karma by explaining myself downthread. The only other significant example I can think of was in a thread about infanticide where I accidentally implied that I could be for the criminalization of abortion, and that comment got kicked down to −3 karma, with +1 karma from my following comments. (It’s hard to decide how that whole thread contributes to this question, because the person who said “well, I can’t say this many places, but I’m in favor of infanticide” got upvoted to 41 karma. That suggests to me their position isn’t contrarian locally, but I suspect it is contrarian globally.)
In general, it’s been observed that a comment on a controversial topic will be downvoted heavily in a quick flurry but then usually recovers; high-quality such comments tend to end up significantly positive.
And now I have seen it observed by someone who isn’t me. Good to hear external confirmation! :)
Careful—if you’ve stated it out loud, the observation noted above might be your own.
By the way, +1 for noting the tension between “Is that your true rejection” and “Policy debates should not appear one-sided”.
It sounds, then, as though you should be talking to the people punishing norm violations, not to the people responding rationally to such punishment.
Who is punishing? (In the context of Lesswrong)
Lowered karma. Rebuke. Deletion of posts. We might have some form of banning. Might want to check the wiki.
Also the punishment (mainly in the form of lowered status and tarnished reputation) that would be foisted upon LW as an institution by the broader society if it were to become a welcoming environment for various kinds of views that aren’t very respectable.
Also: Being habitually mentioned in the same breath with outrageous positions that one has taken in the past. Having such words applied to one as cause people they are repeatedly applied to to be shunned.
What I’m really displeased about is that we are so casually dismissed as troublemakers, arguing in bad faith or tarred with negative characteristics.
Look at our profiles. Look at our comments. You will find many very active and well received posters who you would otherwise consider an asset to the community. And then consider how massively up voted some comments expressing such sentiments are! There are many more who never voice it but share chunks of this proposed map of reality.
Yes many on LessWrong are knee jerk contrarians, but please consider just how large a fraction of reasonable, polite, intelligent, sceptical LW contributors have basically thrown out certain popular overly optimistic ideas out of their model of the world, because the ideas in question just don’t pay rent and and are useful for signalling only. I dare say many, found the departure from some of those ideas more painful and difficult than admitting to themselves that the religion of their childhood was false.
I know I did.
Update accordingly.
Aren’t we already?
There are different degrees of severity. Being perceived as weird in a nerdy way is low-status, but it’s nothing compared to being perceived as harboring fundamentally evil views. Most notably, the former sort of low status isn’t infectious; you can associate with weird nerdy people without any consequence for the other aspects of your life. Not so when it comes to associating with the latter sort of people.
My question wasn’t what tools of punishment are available, but whether there is actually a substantial amount of such punishment occurring merely for taking non-mainstream views.
Downvoted for invoking the name of the magic in vain, risking summoning its counterpart twin demon to devour us when you had no just cause! None I say!
What should I have said instead? “Incentive-followingly”? Maybe the fashion pendulum has swung too far toward not using the word.
“Calmly”, “by punishing the punishment”, “to the substance of the matter regardless of punishment”.
People punishing norm violations aren’t the villains of their own narratives, they think they’re responding rationally.
My purpose in using the word was not to contrast good us to bad them, but rather to emphasize that the action Prismattic disagrees with (that of withholding one’s opinion) is a move forced by an incentive that needn’t itself have been set (and shouldn’t have been set if Prismattic is right that opinion withholding is bad), and so it’s more reasonable for Prismattic to complain to the incentive setters than to the incentive followers. Does that make sense?
The “people aren’t villains of their own narratives” line always struck me as a little glib. Villains believe they’re not villains, but does that mean they falsely believe they’re some particular thing that truly is not a villain, or does it merely mean they correctly believe they’re some particular thing that they falsely believe is not a villain (fail to label as villainous)? In my intuition these are two different things and the saying uses the plausibility of the disjunction of the two things to suggest only the first thing. Clearly villains usually gain some sort of satisfaction from their role in the world, perhaps even moral satisfaction, but that’s not the same thing as there having been a good-faith effort to be a hero. I don’t know, I may just be confused here.
Anyway, what matters is who’s a villain in God’s narrative (in the atheist sense of God). :)
I disagree with this, at least it’s not at all obvious.
It means that at least on LW, they would also describe their behavior as rational (in certain contexts where reason is seen as an enemy, not everyone would be claiming the title “rational”).
Clever.
Which does not necessarily mean we should change the way we treat them. They can tell themselves whatever story they like. And by punishing them appropriately they will either change their behavior or, perhaps most importantly, those witnessing the punishment will avoid the behavior that visibly invokes community disapproval.
“Straightforwardly,” perhaps, or “shortsightedly” if you want to speak ill of them.
This does not answer my question. You claim that a situation in which information X and Y is made available constitutes “obscurantism” relative to the situation where only information X is provided. Now you say that you would prefer that not just X and Y, but also information Z be provided. That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t explain why (X and Y) is worse than just (X), if (X and Y and Z) is better than just (X and Y). What is this definition of “obscurantism,” according to which the level of obscurantism can rise with the amount of information about one’s beliefs that one makes available?
I still consider myself relatively new here, only been around for a year—but in that year I haven’t seen any actual fact presented in LessWrong that’s enflamed spirits one tenth as much as the obscure half-hints by trolls like sam and his “I can’t say things, because you politically correct morons will downvote me into oblivion, but be sure that my arguments would be crushing, if I was allowed to make them, which I’m not, therefore I’m not making them” style of debate.
The “obscurantism” that Prismatic is talking about isn’t yet as bad as that, but it has that same flavour, to a lesser degree. This sort of thing is… annoying—hinting at evidence, but refusing to provide it—and blaming this obscurity at the hypothetical actions by people who haven’t actually done them yet.
If the issue is e.g. whether science seems to indicate that the statistical distribution of physical and intellectual characteristic isn’t identical across racially-defined subgroups of the human race, or across genders, or across whatever, then it can be discussed politely, if the participants actually seek a polite discussion, instead of just finding the most insulting way possible to talk about them. And if the participants are willing to use words like “average” and “median” and “distribution” and things like that, instead of using phrases that are associated with the worst metaphorical Neanderthals that exist in the modern world.
What I think enflames things far far worse is when people imply that you are incapable of discussing topics, but nonetheless hint at them. If the topic can’t be discussed, then don’t discuss it or hint at it at all. If it can be discussed, then discuss it plainly, clearly, politely; not trollishly or deliberately offensively or carelessly offensively. Take a single minute to see if you can impart the same (or more) information in a less offensive mannere.g. “Is there a causal connection between the absence of Y chromosome and average levels of mathematical aptitude”? may need a couple seconds more to write, but it’ll probably lead to a better discussion than “Why and how do women suck at math”?
You are presenting the situation as if such hints were coming out of the blue in discussions of unrelated topics. In reality, however, I have seen (or given) such hints only in situations where a problematic topic has already been opened and discussed by others. In such situations, the commenter giving the hint is faced with a very unpleasant choice, where each option has very serious downsides. It seems to me that the optimal choice in some situations is to announce clearly that the topic is in fact deeply problematic, and there is no way to have a no-holds-barred rational discussion about it that wouldn’t offend some sensibilities. (And thus even if it doesn’t break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
At the very least, this can have the beneficial effect of lowering people’s confidence in the biased conclusions of the existing discussion, thus making their beliefs more accurate, even in a purely reactive way. However, you seem to deny that this choice could ever be optimal. Yet I really don’t see how you can write off the possibility that both alternatives—either staying silent or expressing controversial opinions about highly charged issues openly—can sometimes lead to worse results by some reasonable measure.
You also seem to think that merely phrasing your opinion in polite, detached, and intellectual-sounding terms is enough to avoid the dangers of bad signaling inherent to certain topics. I think this is mistaken. It might lead to the topic in question being discussed rationally on LW—and in fact, this will likely happen on LW unless the topic is gender-related and if it manages to elicit interest—but it definitely won’t escape censure by the outside world.
This.
I really really don’t want such discussion to be very prominent, because they attract the wrong contrarian cluster. But I don’t want LW loosing ground rationality wise with debates that are based on some silly premises, especially ones that are continually reinforced by new arrivals and happy death spirals!
Attracting the wrong people, and alienating some of the “right” people is a bigger concern to me than the reputation of the site as a whole (though that counts too). Another concern is that hot-button issues might eat up the conversations and get too important (they are not issues I care that much about debating here).
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
I agree with this. But I wish to emphasise:
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis—and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
Could you give some examples? I don’t like the thought of my brain being happy-death-spiralled without my noticing. I promise to upvote your comment even if it makes me angry.
(Eh, he’s been inactive for the last three months anyway.)
Which is I think the current situation when it comes to criticism of say democracy.
Actually, general criticism of democracy isn’t such a big problem. It can make you look wacky and eccentric, but it’s unlikely to get you categorized among the truly evil people who must be consistently fought and ostracized by all decent persons. There are even some respectable academic and scholarly ways to trash democracy, most notably the public choice theory.
Criticisms of democracy are really dangerous only when they touch (directly or by clear implication) on some of the central great taboos. Of course, respectable scholars who take aim at democracy would never dare touch any of these with a ten foot pole, which necessarily takes most teeth out of their criticism.
I think criticism of democracy goes over less well if you have something specific that you want to replace it with.
That is true, but you get into truly dangerous territory once you drop the implicit assumption that your criticism applies to democracy in all places and times, and start analyzing what exactly correlates with it functioning better or worse.
I expect it depends on what distinctions you’re using for what corelates with how democracies do. For example, claiming that there’s an optimal size for democracies that’s smaller than a lot of existing countries could get contentious, but I don’t think it would blow up as hard as what I suspect you’re thinking of.
Yes, of course, my above characterization was imprecise in this regard.
As a potshot, let’s just fucking spell it out: genetics, and “Race” in particularly.
Sam dosen’t do that. Sam trolls by stating his opinions fully. He then refuses to provide evidence.
Race differences have already been explicitly discussed with little problem, if not prominently so, do a search. Gender, sexuality and sexual norms are the great unPC problem of LessWrong.
Dishonest generalization, find two posters in addition to Sam who do this. I will wait.
Now contrast this to the average (even average anon double log in account) pro-hereditarian LW-er who brings up such points. There are far more Quirrells than Sams here, and Sams get heavily downvoted except on the rare occasions they make more reasonable posts (though the particular poster has probably burned out some people’s patience and will get downvoted no matter what he says because he has consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to adapt to our norms).
This is quickly devolving into the worst kind of politicking one finds on otherwise intelligent forums.
But it is other people who keep dragging them up and discussing them. Politely stating that you disagree and they are wrong, getting then heavily up voted (which indicates a significant if far from majority fraction of LWers agree with the comment) is surely better than not interrupting what you see as a happy death spiral?
Have we been visiting the same forum? I have often up-voted your responses to Sam0345′s posts, indeed you nearly always successfully rebuke him. But I think your extensive interactions with him may be leading you to mistake an individual for a group.
I’ve decided to bow out of this thread—as I’ve not significantly studied either PUA, nor cared to read about previous PUA-related threads in LessWrong, I can barely understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps you’ve noticed a real problem that I haven’t, exactly because you’re focusing on different type of threads than I do.
The thing I had in mind was things like e.g. the guy who repeatedly and deliberately kept using the diminutive word “girls” to refer to female rationalists but “men” to refer to the male counterparts. This by itself—when I perceived he intended to belittle women in this fashion, or at least didn’t give a damn about not insulting them—prevented any meaningful discussion of the actual argument he was engaged in, (whether a male-only meetup would be useful or detrimental for the purposes of LessWrong).
He really shouldn’t have done that.
OB and early LW consistently blew up whenever PUA and related issues where discussed.
I provide ample evidence, which you guys vote into oblivion when you don’t like it:
Examples:
What is the race of the overwhelming majority of people who make race hate attacks, people who physically attack people merely for being of race different from their own?
Who had greater freedom of speech: Modern novelists and scriptwriters, or Elizabethan novelists and playwrights?
I provided plenty of evidence, and if you claim I did not, will provide it all over again, to be voted into oblivion all over again.
Modern novelists and scriptwriters do.
You never provided a single piece of evidence that Elizabethan novelists and playwrights had greater freedom of speech. It was a completely unsubstantiated claim—and a ludicrous one given how well known the political restriction in free speech were at the time. You also completely refused to acknowledge all the detailed pieces of data for specifics bits of censorship or political pressure in Shakespeare that I provided.
Since you never acknowledge anything we say, nor ever provide any evidence to support the claims we actually dispute, and keep making further ludicrous claims instead, you’re properly considered a troll.
EDIT TO ADD:
That depends on whether we’re discussing your nation or mine. Racial hate attacks are most definitely a white thing in Greece. Or Libya. I’m guessing in America it’s the other way around, corresponding to higher black crime statistics in general (whether hate crime or otherwise).
Are attacks by police and the justice system which seem likely to be racially based included under race hate attacks?
And when I provide evidence that I provide evidence, you also vote that into oblivion
I appreciate your point here, but you could have chosen a better example. Those two questions have the same capacity for offensiveness. They have the same content and are compatible with the same presuppositions and connotations. They just use different language.
Now perhaps there are people who, upon seeing “women suck at math”, read “boo women!”, and upon seeing words like “causal” and “Y chromosome”, think about causes and effects. So if you’re talking to one of those people, you’ll want to use the fancier language. But not everyone is like that.
I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my mathematician colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it, without gratuitously offending people.
I am really curious how you can demonstrate equivalence between a question that follows the pattern “Why is (X) the case?” and a question that follows the pattern “Is (Y) the case?”—even if (Y) is arguably equivalent to (X), only phrased in more polite language.
As far as I see, the first one asks for the explanation of something that is presumed to be an established fact, while the second one expresses uncertainty about whether (arguably) the same fact is true. How on Earth can these two be said to have “the same content” and be “compatible with the same presuppositions”?
However, you are quite right that these two questions have the same potential for offensiveness, in that outside a few quirky places like LW, neither the polite phrasing nor the expression of uncertainty will get you off the hook, contrary to what Aris Katsaris seems to believe.
Ah, I see, you’re right; the content of the two questions are different. I noticed there was a substantial difference in language, and assumed that was the point of the example.
Surely that’s a hyperbole. Now, I know lots of people would be offended by both questions, but I doubt most people would be equally offended by both, and plenty of people would be offended by one but not the other. As a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I am down to discuss the first question, but the second one makes me want to slap you.
(Of course, by declaring myself a woman who doesn’t suck at math, I have already proven my own nonexistence, so my opinion can, no doubt, safely be ignored.;) )
Is it ok to threaten (or declare the desire to do) physical violence upon someone if you don’t get your way simply because you are a woman? Careful which stereotypes you support. You don’t usually get “heh. Female violence is harmless and cute!” without a whole lot of paternalism bundled in.
Slaps, generally, are relatively harmless. Unfulfilled desires to slap, even more so.
On the other hand, hasn’t there been some discussion of the idea that you have to believe something, however briefly, to understand it?
Even though expressing a desire to slap has no macro bodily effect [1], it still has an emotional effect which is going to affect how a conversation goes, however slightly. [2]
[1] Tentative phrasing used to respect the idea that everything is physical, including thoughts and emotions, but that some things affect people physically more than others.
[2] I believe that “just ignore it” leaves out that ignoring things is work.
If I said something to offend you over the internet, and you said it made you feel like hitting me, I would think it was no big thing, especially if you went on to explicitly clarify that you would never actually hit me. I would not perceive it as a serious threat in any case.
If you said something like that in real life, in full public view with many onlookers, I might depending on your body language be slightly more concerned, but I would probably just raise an eyebrow and imply that you were being a creep. If I said the same to you, I wouldn’t look as ridiculous, since most likely you’re bigger and stronger than me, but I doubt it would win anyone over either.
If you actually physically attacked me, I would do my best to see that criminal charges were brought, and I would not physically attack anyone myself if I were unwilling to defend my actions in court. That last scenario is so far from what actually happened here that it really seems like a red herring, though.
Really? My instincts anticipate a significant negative response if I said I wanted to hit someone around here. On the order of a substantial faux pas not a personal security risk. But to be honest I haven’t exactly calibrated that intuition all that much. Because I just don’t go around saying I want to hit people.
If another data point helps, I basically agree with you… if someone told me that what I’d said made them want to hit me, I’d consider it rude, possibly funny (depending on context), and not significantly changing my estimate that they would actually hit me.
What sort of thing would change your estimate of whether someone would actually hit you?
Hitting me.
Hitting others.
Demonstrating poor impulse control in general.
Physically intimidating me (e.g., looming up in my personal space).
In general, someone using their words increases my estimate that they will continue using their words.
That’s uncalled-for. I am not asking either question. It’s okay if you’re offended by one but not the other.
Again, I care about this because I want to be able to talk about why so few of my colleagues are female, and why they feel so weird about it, and what can be done about it — without gratuitously offending people.
What, exactly, is uncalled-for? The “makes me want to slap you” part? It does. I thought that might be useful information for you to have. I will not actually slap you, even if by some improbable circumstance I ever have the opportunity.
Golly, it’s too bad some people take things so personally!
On a tangential note, if a man said to a woman that he wanted to slap her as a reaction to some offensive statement she made, would you consider it acceptable?
Mind you, I have no problem in principle with social norms that set different boundaries for the behavior of men and women. (In particular, if someone wants men’s threats of violence to women, even humorous and hyperbolic ones, to be judged more harshly than vice versa, I certainly find it a defensible position.) I just find it funny to see egalitarians who profess principled opposition to such norms caught in inconsistencies, like for example here, where very few (if any) of them would react to your statement with the same visceral horror and outrage as if the sexes were reversed.
I don’t know who you’re talking about, but it isn’t me. My husband sometimes jokes about beating me. I laugh.
I’m glad to hear that the two of you share a sense of humor, but the relevant comparison would be how you’d feel if a strange man mentioned slapping you in response to something you said, whether in the context of a public debate such as here or elsewhere. I would be surprised if you would be willing to take that nonchalantly. And even if you are an exception in this regard, there is no denying that the usual standards of discourse are highly asymmetric here, since there is no way that a similar statement by a man to a woman would not have caused firestorms of outrage.
Now, as I explained, I have no problem with this standard in principle. I am not expressing any condemnation of your words or attitudes. I am just using this opportunity to highlight the apparent contradiction with the general principle held by the contemporary respectable opinion that sex-asymmetric social norms are morally dubious, or worse—and not because I wish to score a petty rhetorical point, but because I believe that if adequately considered, it would open some very important and general questions.
I don’t consider this to be established, for one thing. For another, what I said hasn’t exactly passed without comment, so I’m not very sympathetic right now to the idea that women get a free pass.
But though I think your example is weak, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that double standards in both directions continue to flourish. I’m not sure why that’s relevant here, or why people think they have to be so shady about saying this kind of thing on LW. It all seems sort of melodramatic to me; I live in the southern US, and there’s probably no disreputable idea you’d dare hint at that I don’t hear proudly trumpeted by many of my neighbors, and nobody seems to beat them up or fire them for it.
(On the other hand, if you gesture towards disreputable ideas, but don’t state your position clearly or provide evidence, I’m liable to pattern-match you to rednecks. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’m human, and it’ll probably happen. Consider this!)
I think VM is quite open about the fact that his secret beliefs are low status. I’ve been wondering for a while, but I haven’t been able to think of examples of ideas so reviled that they warrant secrecy besides “redneck ideas.” I think it’s interesting that you similarly lack examples. Maybe this is the only source of reviled beliefs, or maybe it’s a US blind-spot.
Well, beliefs don’t even need to be in the “reviled” category for one to conclude that it might be prudent not to express them openly. One might simply conclude that they’re apt to break down the discourse, as has indeed happened on LW many times with statements that might be controversial, but fall short of “reviled” in the broader society.
Also, I think you’re applying some popular but grossly inaccurate heuristics here. I can easily think of several beliefs that: (1) are squarely in the “reviled” category in today’s respectable discourse in Western societies, (2) have been held by a large number of people historically, or are still held by a large number of people worldwide, and (3) are practically nonexistent, or exceptionally rare, among the segment of the U.S. population that can be labeled “rednecks” by any reasonable definition. (For beliefs that make sense only given some cultural background, I mean “exceptionally” relative to other local cultures that provide this background.)
In any case, think about the following. For any human society in history about which you have some reasonably accurate picture, except the present Western ones, you’ll probably be able to think of some beliefs that are true, or at least defensible enough that one shouldn’t be considered as malicious or delusional for holding them, but also unacceptable in that society. (So that even if expressing them is not outright dangerous, it would face blind hostility and no chance of rational consideration.) Either there are such beliefs in the modern Western societies too, or there is something outstandingly unique and exceptional about these societies that makes such cases impossible. But what could this be?
Let’s link to it again: Paul Grahm’s What You Can’t Say.
“Redneck ideas” is certainly an oversimplification, but I am not sure it is such a grossly inaccurate one. The ideology behind bad treatment of women and minorities in parts of the third world also comes in for Western opprobrium, and might be likewise reviled by or at least of little consequence to rednecks depending on the instance. But it does not seem like an entirely different category—what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
In a separate category one has cruelty toward animals (which probably coincidentally I also associate with redneck stereotypes), and cruelty toward children. I can’t think of any other categories of reviled ideas.
I see what you’re getting at but I don’t know enough to judge. Certainly there have been many famous superstitions and manias in history, but I worry that my models of them have been too much influenced by certain parts of modern culture. (It occurs to me I have never read an account of the Salem trials that was written in the two hundred fifty years between them and the Miller play.) As to what might be exceptional about modern society, it contains huge numbers of people who are not bored by ideas and who have some basic equipment, such as literacy, for analyzing them. This might be of some consequence when thinking about the content and enforcement of the rules for respectable discourse, now and then.
Looking from the outside it seems to me “Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional and don’t have any extenuating circumstances (at least ones modern society would find acceptable) for being so.
That’s an improvement on Sewing Machine’s claim, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Groups despise other groups. “Rednecks” form a group, it’s predictably despised by another group. The low status are despised by the high status. Rednecks are low status, they’re despised by SWPLs, who are high status. The term “redneck” refers to the condition of their neck, which is a way of referring to their occupation and therefore to their station in life. Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors, likely to be looked down on by caucasians who work indoors. Probably rural, likely to be looked down on by the urban (who are urbane, sophisticated, in contrast to the rednecks who are rustic, unsophisticated).
People love to look down on other people. It’s a pastime. It’s a way to magnify one’s own feeling of having high status. There’s a site called “people of walmart” which is devoted to the pastime of looking down on other people. A lot of humor, possibly most humor, is devoted to ridiculing a group to which one does not belong. It’s always easy to come up with rationalizations for the contempt after the fact.
Personally I prefer the humor of self-ridicule. I assume that the SWPL site is self-ridicule of high status whites. I also assume that Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck” routine is self-ridicule of rednecks. In contrast, “people of walmart” is not self-ridicule.
High Status: Unemployed and unemployable MFA (Master of Fine Arts) who is unfortunately in between arts grants and low paid teaching jobs at the moment, and has been for some considerable time.
Lower Status: Artist who makes decent money by selling reproductions of his art to the despised bourgeoisie, but has no MFA, never gets grants, and never holds a job in academia, in part because the pay is low, but mostly because they would not hire such an inferior and low status person anyway.
Lowest Status: Wealthy farmer, who was a farmer’s son, and makes lots of money by feeding thousands of people, his neck turning red in the process as he works outdoors.
Farmers who own a lot of land, and their sons (though strangely not their daughters) also “rednecks”, and hated and despised accordingly. They are discriminated against in university admissions. Are they poor and dysfunctional?
The hatred of rednecks is a less extreme form of the “Occupy Wall Street” demands for jobs in the virtue and cultural uplift industries. The ruling class thinks that producing value is low status, and producing value by working outside is really low status, regardless of income.
Just as an unemployed and severely dysfunctional Occupy Wall Street protestor, who has a Masters in Fine Arts and is therefore a genuine official artist, despises the mere peddler of kitsch, despite the fact that no one would pay for the MFA’s “art” with their own money, and right now his grant has run out, the lesser artist, though his status is inferior due to the fact that he got his money merely from members of la bourgeoisie buying his art, rather than grants, his status is nonetheless superior to that of the even wealthier farmer’s son, whose work is largely done outdoors, and whose neck is therefore red.
Redneck has had connotations beyond “someone who works outside”, “someone who does farm work”, or even “someone who is white and does farm work” for some time.
Yet strangely, the MFA at “Occupy Wall Street” whose grant ran out long ago, and whose teaching job is extreme low pay, would not consider a better paid job that involved working out of doors.
Indeed, he is reluctant even to consider jobs outside the virtue industry.
How is this a response to anything I said? Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”? But then, your last sentence seems to contradict that. They value working in their field, just like anyone else. Maybe they value it too highly, in the face of economic reality. Maybe there are other, additional pressures that are leading their decisions. Maybe they are turning their noses up at some specific jobs because they seem too “redneck” but you haven’t shown evidence of it. But this isn’t even the point I was making.
While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “redneck” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage. Or, for that matter, an inverse with an MFA. Blue collar work—particularly non-manufacturing blue collar work—is a feature of the stereotype, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine category membership.
This is not to say that I think the stereotype to be a useful generalization.
You clearly understand the reasons why sam’s post was irrelevant gibberish. So why did you respond to it?
Personal edification.
Fixed it for you.
Wow, you really love that negative karma, don’t you?
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity. If we wish to pick these apart into Jew(S), Jew(R), and Jew(E), then that would be an antiquated but reasonably accurate description of Jew(S).
There is no corresponding Redneck(R) or Redneck(E). There is a redneck as the term was originally used—Redneck(O), let’s say.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
An attempt to reclaim it is not necessarily unreasonable, but it should be explicit. Attempting to do it implicitly is inviting confusion of the nature that originally caused me to comment.
You should now see the mismatch of your FTFY—Jew(S) is not at all the most prevalent usage of Jew.
There are nonetheless still occasions when I would recommend someone interpret “Jew” as Jew(S); if, as I recall observing in Junior high, one person asks to borrow money, is refused, and responds “You Jew!”, clearly interpreting that as Jew(R) or Jew(E) would be absurd—doubly so when you are aware that the refuser is neither.
I would say there is at least one more. Jewishness is as much a cultural association as a religious one, and there are plenty of people who identify as Jewish culturally, but not religiously.
Oh, absolutely.
When someone calls a penny pincher a Jew, that is not an alternate meaning for Jew, but a metaphor, like calling an overweight woman a whale. Jew means Jew by race or religion, and Redneck means someone who does a low status job, or whose ancestors did a low status job.
Yet oddly, an Master of Fine arts can never be a redneck, however poor and socially conservative he may be, even though MFAs are infamous for being poor and dysfunctional. Nor can a slush pile reader be a redneck, even though slush pile readers earn the smell of an oil rag..
Just as Jew means Jew by race or religion, not a penny pincher, redneck means a person who works in a low status job—no matter how highly paid that job may be.
And similarly, “racist” merely means person of low status, or insufficient status for the role he attempts to perform. Thus that rednecks are “racist” merely means that certain jobs are low status.
Chris Rock claimed to redefine nigga as not meaning a black man, but merely meaning a black man that fits the stereotype—and then he said that when he withdrew money from the teller machine, he looked behind him for niggas. Actual usage of the term “redneck” is similarly revealing.
Indeed, Chris Rock’s famous rant about niggas begins and ends with punch lines that falsify his claim to redefinition, probably deliberately, as the falsification, combined with the claim, is comical.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
When a group of people is stereotyped, this does not create a new meaning of the name of the group. Let’s review what a stereotype is. Using the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary, their definition of “stereotype” is:
False fixed ideas (beliefs) about group G are not new definitions for the name of the group G. G is not split into two, G(O) and G(S). The false fixed belief is a belief about G(O). The stereotype concerns the (original) group, it does not create a new group.
Imagine if it were otherwise! Imagine if, every time some false belief about some thing T popped into your head, then T split into two, T(O) and T(S). For one thing, you would never again have a false belief, because rather than being a false belief about T(O), your belief would actually be a definition for a new thing T(S) about which it was true.
To put it more briefly, a stereotype is an idea, a belief, about something. A belief can be true or false. In contrast, a definition or meaning is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. So to call a stereotype a meaning is to commit a simple category mistake.
Your whole argument is stated in terms of this category mistake, so to salvage it you would need to toss it and start from scratch.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings. This doesn’t mean that anyone would have the guts (or possibly lack of good sense—that lack might be equivalent to guts) to produce such a dictionary.
A concept might be in many people’s minds, and yet be inaccurate. A dictionary might note that while listing the concept.
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Merriam Webster and the other good descriptivist dictionaries do include meanings that match particular stereotypes when they are common meanings, which they rarely but occasionally are.
But importantly, it is only particular stereotypes of a given thing that become meanings—it has to be this way, in order to avoid confusion. For example, the verb “to jew” (which you can look up in any sufficiently comprehensive dictionary) has a meaning which matches a particular stereotype of Jews. That particular stereotype is not “the” stereotype of Jews, because to say it was “the” stereotype would be to imply that there is only one stereotype, and there are many stereotypes of Jews.
Also importantly, meanings corresponding to stereotypes are not automatically generated whenever stereotypes arise. It has to be this way, because it’s common that many stereotypes of a given thing arise, and if a meaning were automatically generated for each stereotype, then it would be difficult to tell, among all the stereotypes, which stereotype was meant when the word was used. Nor does a meaning automatically arise that includes all stereotypes together, as we know from the example of the verb “to jew”. Rather, on occasion, certain stereotypes are adopted as meanings. It doesn’t automatically happen, and it ought not blithely be assumed to have happened.
Here’s another pair of examples. Similarly to the verb “to jew”, there is also the verb “to dog”, which corresponds to one particular stereotype about dogs. And the verb “to wolf” (as in to wolf down) corresponds to another particular stereotype about wolves (and, as it happens, about their close relatives the dogs). Had linguistic history taken a different turn, the verbs “to dog” and “to wolf” might have had entirely different meanings, or might not have existed at all.
I seem to recall an Italian dictionary which did give something like “a miser” as one of the definition of ebreo, though with the annotation fig. before it. :-)
(Wait… by produce you meant “exhibit” not “manufacture”, right?)
Indeed. in case there has been any confusion, I did not argue otherwise. I wrote: “Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors.” Note my use of the word “originally”. This acknowledges that the term “redneck” has evolved since then. I was speculating about its origin.
It may well be—to speculate further—that the term “red neck” originally arose in the South, possibly applied by the Southern upper, indoors-dwelling (or otherwise sun-protected) classes to the Southern lower, outdoors-laboring classes.
This point does not take away from my argument as far as I can tell. Certainly I was aware of it, hence I used the word “originally”.
I’m pretty sure we’re talking past each other here. I think my usage of stereotype was actually reasonably correct, consider for instance:
from the wikipedia page on Archetype
But it is probably better to simply taboo it:
I contend that people do, in fact, make reference to these models in communication without necessarily adopting the belief that the model is valid.
This is not to say that I think they should do so; there is legitimate concern about propagating false beliefs when the models are commonly believed, and about bleeding over of associations when they are not.
To your mind, does it fix things if you read “model of a stereotypical X” for “stereotype”? That is closer to how I intended it.
It fixes part of it but I don’t think you capture what’s really going on. To use a fresh aspect of the concept of the redneck, as Nancy points out “redneck” has a regional component. MW’s definition of “redneck” for example, is: “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”. That’s an aspect of what you would call Redneck(O). So when you write:
you’re claiming that when people use the term, they predominantly do not use it to mean “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”, but rather, the stereotypes which we have been discussing, which were introduced by Sewing Machine, namely:
and elaborated or modified by konkvistador:
So here we have three stereotypes about rednecks: bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional. These are the stereotypes that were introduced, and that were given as reasons for rednecks being despised. I offered a quite different, and conflicting, theory as to why rednecks are despised, and I claimed that these stereotypes are in fact not reasons, but rationalizations, excuses, for the contempt so often and so publicly and so gleefully expressed about rednecks.
You’ve offered a new theory of the concept of the “redneck”, distinct from that of Sewing Machine and Konkvistador (the negative stereotypes on their expressed view do not constitute the concept, but are merely associated with the category). Your new theory amounts to an almost perfect excuse for the contempt. According to you, when people use the term, they predominantly mean Redneck(S). In context, then, what your statement amounts to, is the statement that when people use the term “redneck”, they mean “someone who is bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional”. If it were true, this would excuse the contempt shown to rednecks, maybe not the “poor” part, but “bigoted” certainly and “dysfunctional” probably. So when people say, “rednecks are bigots” and “rednecks are dysfunctional”, on your view of it, they are merely stating tautologies, i.e., “bigots are bigots” and “dysfunctional people are dysfunctional.”
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
In fact, the comedian Chris Rock did take something like your approach to a similar issue. He has a monolog in which he takes a common derogatory term for a whole group and redefines it (for the duration of his monolog) as referring only to those members to whom common negative stereotypes apply, and not to all members of the group. This is certainly not how it is normally used, and if you don’t belong to the group yourself, you would be well advised not to start using this term on the theory that it refers only to those members who satisfy the negative stereotypes. Chris Rock’s monolog, from wikiquote:
Someone who is not black would be well advised to avoid saying:
If we were to apply your theory of “redneck” to “nigga”, then the above statement would be an empty tautology, since it would mean essentially, “black people who break into your house, break into your house.” This is indeed what this means in the context of Chris Rock’s monolog. But it’s not what it would mean in everyday language. It is no empty tautology.
Same applies to “redneck”. Redneck means what the dictionary says it means (yes, the dictionary can be wrong, but in this case it’s not). You might be able to cook up a comedy monolog in which “redneck” means “bigoted person”, but it’s not what it means in everyday English. Someone tweaked me for referring to a dictionary—if MW agrees with me, I must be right. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I do think that dictionaries are usually very good evidence about what words mean.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern of people in an out-group attacking the members of their own group who most resembled the negative stereotype. I’ve heard of (but not heard directly) Jews complaining about “kikes”.
I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. The question isn’t what he did or did not invent. The question is, what is the everyday, common meaning. I brought up Chris Rock to illustrate what it would be like if dlthomas’s analysis of “redneck” applied to “nigga”. Everybody would all the time be talking the way that Chris Rock talks in his monolog without any negative consequences since they would not be implying anything about blacks in general. But clearly, that is not the case. Furthermore, Chris Rock explains his own meaning early in his monolog where he contrasts “black people” with “niggas”, which demonstrates that he does not expect his audience to apply that meaning as a default. Evidently, then, Chris Rock’s meaning is not the default common, everyday meaning of “nigga”.
As with your earlier response, I wonder whether there was some miscommunication, since you brought up a point that I don’t recall denying explicitly or implicitly.
I’m not sure about miscommunication—I may be trying to read too fast, and doing some pattern-matching.
The Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in didn’t do this… we mostly ignored the Jewish stereotypes in the larger culture altogether. But the queer community I attached myself to as a late adolescent did have something like this.
I’ve never heard of anything like that in my jewish community either. Though honestly I’ve almost never heard the term “kike” actually used before. Even anti-semites just use the word Jew as far as I know.
If you hear from a member of group X that group X says Y, it is usually true.
If you hear that group X says Y, from those who do not like group X, it often true.
If you hear that those who don’t like group X say Y, from those who don’t like those who don’t like group X, it is seldom true.
That is a ridiculously Platonic view of language. These aren’t categories that apply entirely or not at all—applicability of words is gradual. If someone fits every connotation of “redneck” except “racist”, people will apply the label to them and they clearly do not deserve the portion of the contempt associated with the label on the basis of it’s containing the connotation of “racist”. Typically, showing contempt or praise to groups whose membership is not strict is messy enough to be a bad idea.
Well, if Messrs. Merriam and Webster are on your side, you can’t be wrong!
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
The word “redneck” has nothing to do with MFA’s employment choices, or the Ivy League’s selection criteria
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist for exactly the same reason as Herman Cain is supposedly an Uncle Tom—it has absolutely nothing to do with the political views of Cain or the redneck. Rather, Cain lacks the requisite ruling elite credentials.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands. How about an inverse who is a slush pile reader? Could he be a redneck? I don’t think so, even though slush pile readers are apt to be low paid.
You are probably correct that people would feel comfortable calling a guy who works in a garage a redneck if he had the demonized redneck attitudes, but they would consider it joking or ironic to call a bookkeeper a redneck no matter what his attitudes, and there is no way they are going to call an MFA a redneck, except ironically, regardless of what that MFA’s tastes and political attitudes are, and regardless of how infrequent and small the MFA’s grants are.
Indeed, I use MFA as an example, because MFAs are notoriously starving, while looking down their noses at those who succeed in doing grubby inferior jobs at decent pay.
Neither Herman Cain (to say the very least) nor the modal tea party member are uneducated or work in low-status jobs.
An interesting claim. I don’t know enough of the socio-linguistic history to really comment. I still don’t really think it was a reasonable response to my original comment. You had seemed to be using “redneck” to mean farmers, generally; I still maintain that this is an unrealistic representation of what people typically use the phrase to mean, and will likely lead to misunderstanding in both directions.
There are unquestionably social groups wherein academia is accorded the highest status, yes. People value status, yes. Undoubtedly, some people with an MFA belong to some of those social groups, and this factored in to their decision. I have no data either way to support typicality or atypicality of MFA’s in particular. I have basically no experience with Occupy Wall Street. From my limited direct observation of Occupy Oakland, however, this does not seem terribly representative of the protesters there.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact. Nonetheless, it is certainly the case that knowledge work is accorded higher status in many circles.
“Redneck” is low status in my mind because it is associated with the puerile humor of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry The Cable Guy. Jobs involving a lot of manual labor are not inherently low status in my mind—that stuff needs doing too, and plumbers have saved more lives than doctors. I wouldn’t do it because I have a job that pays well that I find interesting.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because the term is associated predominately with the American south which has, in recent history, harbored a higher level of racism (particularly that directed toward blacks) than other regions. Yes, this is a stereotype—it doesn’t even necessarily represent the typical individual from the region—but it’s stereotypes we are discussing.
Yes. As I said, blue collar work is a feature of the stereotype, and so an examples with that attribute are going to seem to fit better than examples without.
I don’t see any reason a slush pile reader wouldn’t be labeled a redneck, if he spent his off hours drinking cheap beer and making racist jokes while listening to country music and working on his truck. Unless he instead got the label “hipster”—which seems to also be low status, but I expect would be precluded by the country music.
It is conceivable that a part of this is just a regional difference in how liberally the term is applied—around here, there aren’t very many white farm workers.
Once again, my favorite and much repeated citation, favorite because it reveals the same pathology as “Occupy Wall Street” and “Joe the puppeteer” reveals, but provides statistics rather than mere anecdote:‘”Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”’
Interesting. It would seem to be literally true, then, that “the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers.” I am not sure, however, whether the normative weight you give it is appropriate.
“The Ivy League discriminates” is trivially true—that’s what their admission’s board is for. The question is whether particular discrimination is justified. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate, if that is what is going on. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers on the grounds that they are associated with farming and we don’t like that is obviously inappropriate. If the examination of the ROTC, 4-H, etc, officership and awards controlled well for other factors, then this would be evidence of the latter, and should be fixed.
I could see it simply being a correlation, however—people who take officership in these organizations or earn awards there probably have some interest and time invested there, and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board is looking for; being that they are not an agricultural school, it makes sense that they prioritize other things. And if the student has a genuine interest in farming and wishes to pursue it further, they will probably benefit much more from attending UC Davis, Michigan State, or Texas A&M than they would from attending Harvard, Yale, or Brown.
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
I was ambiguous—i don’t know whether it confused you. If there are farmers that would get less out of it and vice-versa, then they should be discriminated against exactly like anyone else who would get less out of it and vice-versa. I did not intend to assert that this is true of farmers universally, and whether it is true statistically more often than reference populations is an open question as far as I can tell.
If you want a potential reason this could be the case, I gave one previously—someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
“Seems obvious” leaves much room for bias. As I said—if it is “simple snobbery”, it should be addressed. It is obvious that this is possible—it is not obvious that some other explanation is impossible, or even unlikely. I have no direct experience of Ivy League admissions, and limited second- or third-hand knowledge.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
What then is your explanation for discrimination against ROTC members.
Your reading is very strange:
The article states: Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
Emphasis added
UC Berkeley was originally an agriculture school and still maintains an ag department (now under the name of Agricultural and Resource Economics, but that’s common to several schools better known for their ag programs). Stanford’s got one, too. I’m on the wrong coast to know much about the Ivy League, unfortunately.
Ahhh! That’s where the name redneck comes from. I hadn’t even thought about it enough to wonder.
Reactionary elitism, for one (almost by definition not a redneck attitude).
This seems crazily optimistic — literacy and intellectualism, however widespread, don’t do much to protect people from holding ideological taboos.
The term for racist—and anyone that is less enlightened than the wonderful ruling class—is “racist”
“redneck” literally means white guy who works outdoors, unlike their masters who work in offices, and when I see people use the term, it is clear that whatever they say they mean, that is what they do mean. For example: the discrimination of Ivy League universities against the sons of farmers. Does the Ivy League have reason to believe that the sons of farmers are more racist than others?
Cannibalism. Incest. Human sacrifice. Bestiality.
Any open supporter of any of the above would probably do well to hide it (at least if they’re using their real-life name), but I wouldn’t call any of the above “redneck ideas” (by which I understand you to mean racism/sexism/homophobia/etc)
I don’t have any objection to bestiality. Having sex with animals seems like a less harmful thing to do to an animal than killing it and eating it. I also don’t object to other people who are consenting adults ignoring taboos regarding incest so long as they ensure that negative reproductive outcomes are avoided. For that matter cannibalism is fine by me as long as murder isn’t involved (although I suggest avoiding the brain). Human sacrifice is a big no no though!
If we’re just talking about what I have defensible objections to, I agree with most of this, except that I would also say that human sacrifice is fine as long as everyone involved consents (1).
That said, I nevertheless find the notion of human sacrifice deeply disturbing and I’m confident that my opinion of someone who participated in it would change significantly for the worse if I found out.
I also find most forms of cannibalism disturbing in much the same way, though not quite as extremely, and I can imagine fringe cases that might not disturb me much. The same is true for many forms of bestiality, though it’s much easier to come up with cases that don’t disturb me. (Unsurprisingly, a lot depends on how much I anthropomorphize the animal in question.)
Incest—again, assuming consent (1) -- doesn’t bug me much at all.
== (1) Admittedly, what counts as consent is not a simple question; I am assuming unambiguous examples of the category here.
I notice that this is something that I have instrumental reasons to support. Anybody who considers cryonics to be a rite of ‘nerd religion’ should thereby consider the early, voluntary preservation of someone with Alzheimers a ritual human sacrifice meant to purify them for the afterlife.
Legalize human sacrifice!
Fair point.
A related observation is that, since cryonics can (as you note) be framed as a ‘nerd religion’ form of human sacrifice, social norms opposing human sacrifice can be framed as opposing cryonics as well. It follows that if you support cryonics, you might do well to work against those norms, all else being equal.
I suppose something similar is true of Christian Scientists other sects that reject medical care, whose practices can similarly be framed as a form of human sacrifice. Also people who perform or receive abortions, I guess. We could all band together to form the Coalition to Support Things that Can be Thought of as Resembling Human Sacrifice (Including Of Course Human Sacrifice Itself).
Well, OK, maybe we should have a catchier name.
Also, there should be a convenient term to describe the social process whereby entirely unrelated groups come to share a common cause created entirely by the fact that they are classified similarly by a powerful third party.
Good idea!
I submit “social reification” in the mild hope that someone will improve on it.
I thought the word was “politics.”
A lot of things are ‘politics’. More specific names are also handy.
I think khafra’s comment was intended more for snark than for a serious submission.
“Bootleggers and baptists” is a related concept.
Hell, just legalize suicide. :P
If you commit suicide it’s not like you’re going to jail.
Besides, the policy against suicide attempts is usually psychological treatment not jailtime or something.
Although assisting suicide seems to be a felony in most states in the US according to wikipedia.
Of course for the majority of people wikipedia page itself is all the assistance they would require.
My discovery of the day: Suicide by locking yourself in the garage with the car on just aint what it used to be. Apparently it was once painless and only minimally unpleasant due to the large amount of carbon monoxide produced. These days, however, we have more efficient engines and catalytic converters. This means you need an awful lot of exhaust fumes to get enough carbon monoxide to kill you—and exhaust fumes still aren’t pleasant.
Evidently it is better to use a barbeque (charcoal burner) than a car if you really want to off yourself with CO.
(nods) My dad once attempted and failed to kill himself by the former method and reported something similar.
I don’t much care if suicide is illegal just so long as those that are enabling the suicider aren’t vulnerable to punishment for obvious reasons. Well, unless our legal system is expected to last as is until after recovery from cryopreservation is implemented. That’d be awkward.
Oh, and make autopsies (that include the head) illegal across the board.
I’d support this more confidently if I believed that the legal mechanisms distinguishing “enabling suicide” from “murder” would align well with my own intuitions about the distinction.
This seems like a bad idea as long as most people aren’t getting cryonicly preserved. A lot of what we’ve learned about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s as well as other forms of brain damage comes from autopsies and we’re still learning. Similarly, in some cases the brain will be severely damaged by the form of death (such as say many cases of blunt trauma) and in some of those cases (such as murder investigations) autopsies may be necessary.
A better version might be to have strong rules about no head autopsy when the next of kin so request or when the person is signed up for some form of preservation such as cryonics or plasiticization.
I would require that explicit consent be granted by the patient in a will or, if the will does not mention the subject, then require the consent from the next of kin as opposed to requiring the next of kin to actively request that no head-destruction be done. Because cops aren’t going to make it easy for next of kin to hinder their investigation by making such a request but they are almost always going to get permission that is required so that they don’t face criminal charges.
(I don’t have any particular objection to donation of one’s body or brain to science for them to do as they please.)
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d consider that a sacrifice as such, even if I strain myself to view it through a religious frame. Ritual sacrifice seems to cluster around giving up something physical and valuable in order to sanctify some external object or concept; essentially costly signaling of devotion. There’s no external sanctification going on here, and I’m not sure how valuable I’d consider continued life under those circumstances; early cryopreservation seems more like sokushinbutsu or something similar. “Mortification of the flesh” is probably the closest Christian analogy, although it’s not a perfect one.
Giving up the immediate prospect of a conventional life, before and during the process of the disease setting in, to demonstrate faith in future technological developments?
I’d assign a high probability (about 80%) that a random person consenting to being sacrificed would not do so if they knew more, thought faster, and were more the person they wished they were.
But clearly the person they wished they were is someone who has been sacrificed!
A relationships thread on a rationality site has become a discussion of human sacrifice? :-)
We’re anticipating the post where he talks about compromise.
So the objection, if based off this prediction, would be one of paternalism? ie. You think you know better about what they ‘really’ want than they do? (Not that I’m saying you don’t.)
Well, not that alone; but also the fact that sacrifice (as I understand it, at least) is irreversible, so someone who doesn’t want to be sacrificed right now can change their mind, but not vice versa.
What about a sacrifice which takes place incrementally over a period of years?
Like what?
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?363769-nMage-the-other-99-999-Leaves&p=11220674#post11220674
Also, human sacrifice is creepy!
I think that’s enormously underconfident. That said, I’m also not sure why it matters.
There’s no way that consent could ever be simple or unambiguous here. Wanting to die might be a temporary state of mind, while death is a very permanent effect. The victim would have to be completely unable to change his/her mind ever in his/her life.
I don’t think if a friend asks you to kill him, you should do it. No, clearly your friend needs mental help, and hopefully his suicidal urges are temporary.
I agree with you that consent is not simple… indeed, I said as much in the first place.
That said, I do believe that situations can arise where the expected value to a person of their death (1) is greater than the expected value of the other alternatives available to them. If I understood you, you disagree that such situations can arise, and therefore you believe that in all cases where a person thinks they’re in such a situation they are necessarily mistaken—either they’re wrong about the facts, or they have the wrong values, or both—and therefore it’s better if they’re made to choose some other alternative.
Did I understand you right?
==
(1) For conventional understandings of death. I acknowledge that many people on this site consider, for example, having my brain removed from my skull and cryogenically preserved to not be an example of death, because the potential for reconstituting me still exists. Personally, I’m inclined to still call that death, while allowing for the possibility of technologically mediated resurrection. That said, that’s ultimately a disagreement about words, and not terribly important, as long as we’re clear on what we’re talking about.
I think people often misjudge situations, especially in relation to ending their own life. And consent in case of permanent damage is probably not sufficient to say anything about morals. If their death actually did have higher value than other options then I suppose it is just a tragic situation.
I agree with you that people often misjudge situations. I don’t agree that this is especially true about ending their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
I don’t object to using “tragic” to describe cases where someone’s death has higher value than their other options. That said, some examples of that seem far more tragic to me than others. Also, it cuts the other way too. For example, when my grandfather suffered a stroke, nobody expected him to recover, and both he and his loved ones preferred him dead rather than continuing to live bedridden, frequently delirious, and in constant pain. The law prevented us from killing him, though. I consider every day of his life after that point far more tragic than his eventual death.
I agree that knowledge about consent is not always sufficient to make a moral judgment.
I think if we switch from talking about expected-value judgements to moral judgements, we will have to back up a very long way before we can keep making progress, since I’m not sure we have a shared understanding about what a moral judgement even is.
I have experienced a Cartesian-demon-like urge to rationalise “I should kill myself”. While similar dispositions exist in e.g. anosognosics, I expect situations that cause them are rare.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant to say that if their death had higher value then I would agree that it would be the better decision. It is tragic that there are no positive solutions, and only negative ones.
Consider the situations where people consider suicide. They often are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable. Sometimes there is a euphoric response when people decide that everything will be over soon. Obviously, I can’t think of any statistics or anything, so I guess we just have to disagree.
I’m content to disagree, but I’m not sure we even do.
Certainly I agree with you that people often misjudge the decision to end their own lives, often for the reasons you cite.
What I’m saying is that, for example, people who are depressed, desperate, and mentally unstable also make decisions about whether to get out of bed, whether to go to work, whether to take their medication, whether to talk to friends about what’s going on in their lives, whether to take psychoactive drugs, whether to get more sleep, whether to exercise regularly, whether to punch their neighbor in the head, whether to buy revolvers, and on and on and on.
I don’t believe that such people are any more reliable when making those decisions than they are when making the decision to end their own lives. People misjudge all kinds of situations.
We suck at these decisions, but the consequences tend to be significantly more severe. Good defaults before the unstability starts also help; for example, “go to work” is much more likely to be on the radar at all than “punch someone out of the blue”.
But to address your point: yup, there are specific bugs that are triggered solely by considering suicide. Though how you’d measure their frequency I don’t know.
I agree that the consequences of an incorrect decision about dying are severe compared to most of the other decisions we make.
I agree that there are specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering suicide. There are also specific bugs that are differentially triggered by considering all kinds of other things.
I agree that existing predispositions to explicitly consider/not consider certain decisions, and to decide them in particular ways, affect how we make those decisions.
And that’s where we disagree. I don’t think suicidal people are just as reliable in their decision-making as others.
I recommend that you take a break from this thread, go think about something else for a while, come back to what I said, and see if you still believe I’m making a claim about comparisons between two groups of people.
If you do, then I agree that we should end this discussion here.
When I was in a similar circumstance I had to try very hard to stop myself from making puns on DoubleReed.
That didn’t even occur to me. (hat-tip)
Oh snap.
Oh I see what you’re saying.
I don’t know. I mentioned before there is a euphoric response to having things finally end in peace. This is why so many people can believe in something like the rapture. It’s not a frightening thought. They get caught up in the idea that everything will be all right. Suicide sounds like it would trigger that appeal as well, so I’m still inclined to disagree.
I’m glad you’re now seeing what I said. It makes useful discussion much easier.
I share your belief that such an anticipation of relief might be triggered by contemplating suicide. That has certainly been my experience, at least.
I infer (though not very confidently) that you believe such anticipation is a more powerful motivator than various other feelings such people have that cause them to make unreliable decisions in other contexts. If you do in fact believe that, then yes, we disagree.
The meaning of this ‘consent’ term seems to be drifting closer and closer to ‘whatever it takes for the action to be considered morally right’.
How so?
Obviously permanent and long-term effects have more issues with consent. I don’t see how that’s particularly wishy-washy.
Edit: If anything I’m declaring a harsh limit on how far consent goes. It is insufficient for certain moral situations.
Er… what about pets? Not all animals we kill and eat, you know...
Which would be the relevant comparison if ‘bestiality’ meant the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts.
What have I ever done to you?!
Comparison? It wasn’t a comparison. It was a clarification. Having sex with pets is also bestiality.
You’re against it? Why? You’re just sounding arbitrary.
The main issue with bestiality is the notion of consent (similar to pedophilia). So far we really don’t have any good solutions to the issue of consent, and that is why I would argue that we have a flat ban on it.
By “that we have” do you mean “that we do have” or “that we should have?” I think it would difficult to claim that existing bans on bestiality are really based on the idea of consent, which they predate. (Note that e.g. “rape” (of humans) refers to something conceptually quite different than it did back in the bad old days.)
Can you clarify this? I don’t understand your point on rape. Even in the old days, I’m pretty sure rape implied not-consent...
Is the idea of consent really that modern?
Deuteronomy:
Note also the shockingly late dates at which marital rape has been criminalized (where it has.) As best I can tell none predate 1922, and most were much later.
Indeed, in the US the last state was North Carolina in 1993, and even still it tends to be a lesser offense (assault, battery, or spousal abuse). wikipedia.
Of course, my wife and I tend to call shenanigans on the concept. Thought experiment:
At least in the case of male->female rape, it’s easy to accuse someone of rape once they’ve had sex with you, it’s a very serious charge, and courts tend to side with the alleged victim. So someone who didn’t want their life ruined (jail time, permanent sex offender registry, etc.) would do well to make certain sure they can establish that consent was given. Various methods would work to some degree—signed documents, video tapes, witnesses, the presence of a government official...
As ridiculous as it would seem to get all of those things together for the recording of consent for sex, it so happens we actually do have an institution that incorporates all of those things—marriage. We actually have a tradition that involves getting the entirety of both families together, in front of a government official, with signed government documents, usually on videotape, where both parties agree (often speaking directly to their respective deities) that they will do certain things with each other, traditionally understood to prominently include sex. A bit over the top, but sometimes you have to do crazy things to avoid litigation.
Except now, even going through all that is insufficient to establish consent. It’s a world gone mad.
Compared to other crimes, rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
Quick sanity check: According to RAINN (disclosure: citing an organization I’ve supported), 58% chance of a conviction for rape. A questionable Wikipedia article claims that the conviction rate for crimes in general is “84% in Texas, 82% in California, 72% in New York, 67% in North Carolina, and 59% in Florida.” (as of 2000). Thus, it seems plausible that rape is extremely difficult to prove in court.
For clarity, the RAINN stats are rape-specific and the Wikipedia stats are for all crimes, right?
Crime-specific conviction rates seem to be hard to find. A 1997 DoJ press release claims 87% conviction rates for all crimes in federal court (a skewed sample, though) and 86% for violent crime, but doesn’t break it down further. The situation could plausibly have changed in the last fourteen years due to changes in culture or forensic science.
Statistics from the California DoJ (pages 49-50; PDF file) suggest that around 67% of felony arrests (not trials) in the state result in conviction, and that that rate has slowly been increasing since the Seventies (when the number was around 45%).
Yes. Editing.
I was waiting for someone to cry foul on empirical grounds. I was arguing from popular perception. Do you have a source?
Good question.
I tried looking up statistics, but it seems like my Google-Fu has failed. I found numbers for federal court, but most of what it says is that the vast majority of federal indictments are resolved with guilty pleas, and there don’t seem to be very many rape trials in federal court.
Trying to break down the numbers further:
According to the numbers given, In 2005 there were 3065 jury convictions and 430 jury acquittals in federal court, making a total of 3,495 federal jury trials and a conviction rate of 88%. Under the “sexual abuse” category, there were 24 jury trials that ended in a conviction and 8 that ended in an acquittal. The sample size is small, but it gives a conviction rate of 75%.
Which tells me… basically nothing, because the sample size is very small, most rape cases would be prosecuted in state courts rather than federal courts, and cases that actually go to trial are unusual anyway because both the prosecution and the defense have to prefer a trial to the alternatives of not taking the case to court at all or pleading guilty.
Sigh...
Actually, the traditional part of the wedding vows (in America, at least, and I assume other English-speaking countries) referring to sexual obligation—“serve”—faded into disuse well before spousal rape became criminalized, and in any event a key feature of sexual consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time.
There are of course enforcement problems which may complicate cases where there’s no other physical abuse, but pertaining to my original point, at least, I’d contend that most late moderns would agree that spousal rape is both logically coherent and evil, because it meets the “consent” conception of rape, whereas most earlier peoples would not, operating as they were from a property crime framework.
There are certainly those who would dispute claims 1 and 3. (And obviously, in doing so, use a broader definition of “easy” which includes cultural norms and foreseeable consequences.)
Edit: that goes double for marital rape.
To clarify: do you and your wife believe that the presumption of consent that marriage entails is sufficient to overcome any potential evidence of rape, or merely that it is sufficient to raise the bar significantly?
If the latter, I agree; if the former, I disagree. Your comment seems to suggest the former, but you may simply be indulging in entertaining hyperbole.
Thought experiment: suppose I accuse person X of nonconsensually forcing sex on me, and X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so, and medical experts testify that I show medical signs of forcible sex with X, and my prior history seems to a jury of my peers inconsistent with having consented to forcible sex, would you generally consider that sufficient evidence to justify the claim that X raped me? Does that evaluation change if X is my husband?
Yes, I’d generally consider “X shamefacedly admits that they in fact did so” or everything else severally (weakly) sufficient to justify that claim.
My presumption above is that ‘nonconsentual sex’ and ‘marriage’ are inconsistent. If X is your spouse, then X was asserting something inconsistent in X’s shamefaced admission, and you were in your accusation. If you want to withdraw your consent, then get a divorce.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Well, even if marriage was a contract to say “I want to have sex with you” it’s a little ridiculous for it to say “I want to have sex with you whenever you want.”
Is it? Here I thought that was the point.
No, that’s called sex slavery. Maybe that’s what marriage used to be, but it isn’t anymore.
Wives aren’t obligated to always be in the mood for sex (this could easily be gender swapped by the way). That is not their purpose.
It’s even more ridiculous when you consider that sex is physically exhausting (for both genders). It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone to do something like that whenever you want.
Not unless sex slaves are able to divorce you and take most of your stuff if you piss them off.
The ability to terminate a contract at will means that the other party can coerce you to the extent that you value the continuation of the contract more than they do. Calling a marriage contract with a rather unusual “always willing to have sex” clause sex slavery is a massive insult to sex slaves.
Within the limits of how efficiently of how divorce is set up in the contract, effectively the contract in question is actually equivalent to “have sex with me enough or the relationship is over”. Basically that is how relationships work implicitly anyway. You just aren’t supposed to talk about it that overtly (because that almost never works.) Basically the arrangement sounds a whole lot worse than it is because we aren’t used to thinking about relationships in terms that fully account for all our game theoretic options.
Modulo the time that it takes to implement contract termination, I suppose. That is, the situation where my husband gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I say “I’m terminating our marriage!” (at which point he no longer does) is different from the situation where he gets to have sex with me whenever he wants unless I have previously spent some non-zero amount of time obtaining a divorce decree. In the latter case, my husband can coerce me regardless of our relative valuation of the contract.
It’s also worth noting that, even if we posit that the marriage contract (M1) implies an obligation for sex on demand, it also involves enough other clauses as well that it is easy to imagine a second kind of contract, M2, that was almost indistinguishable from M1 except that it did not include such an obligation. One could imagine a culture that started out with a cultural norm of M1 for marriages, and later came to develop a cultural norm for M2 instead.
If that culture were truly foolish, it might even allow/encourage couples to sign a marriage contract without actually specifying what obligations it entailed… or, even more absurdly, having the contractual obligations vary as the couple moved around the country, or as time went by, based on changes in local or federal law. In such an absurd scenario, it’s entirely possible that some people would think they’d signed an M1 contract while others—perhaps even their spouses—thought they’d signed an M2 contract. There might even be no discernible fact of the matter.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to stop expecting my intuitions about contracts to apply to it cleanly.
When a contractual relationship gets that implicitly defined by cultural norms and social expectations and historical remnants, and gets embedded in a culture with conflicting norms and expectations, it becomes a very non-prototypical example of a contractual relationship, and it’s perhaps best to avoid getting entangled in that kind of contractual relationship. (Unless you are somehow sure that the contract is in your favor.)
Mind you in my experience actually telling a girlfriend that in the general case getting married seems to be a terrible idea meets with mixed results. Something to do with wanting to play dress-ups with white dresses and so forth. :P
Whether it’s best for me to avoid getting entangled in it depends entirely on the potential benefits of that contractual relationship, the potential costs, and the likelihood of those benefits and costs. (This includes both costs/benefits to me and costs/benefits to my partner, insofar as my partner’s state is valuable.)
Personally, I judge my condition after getting entangled in such a relationship superior to my state prior to having done so. I strongly suspect my husband does the same.
I’ve heard that in Italy wives were legally required to have sex with their husbands whenever they wanted (and husbands to economically maintain wives) until not-so-long ago (the early 20th century IIRC), so I wouldn’t be very surprised if that were still the case in at least one country.
Okay, let’s go ahead and make that correction then, since I find gender distasteful:
I think my earlier assertion was that they’d given consent to have sex, regardless of whether they’re in the mood for it. But assuming that distinction doesn’t run very deep, what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
And how is it slavery if it is entirely voluntary and can be opted-out of?
ETA: (responding to edits)
That’s crazy—people expect their spouses to lots of exhausting things for them on demand; cook dinner, do the laundry, work a day job, take out the garbage, help move furniture… it doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
Cold comfort for someone getting repeatedly forced to have sex while they wait for the divorce to be finalized.
It was my understanding that most divorce proceedings encourage separation early on in the process.
In some states, it is mandatory to have a period of separation prior to divorce, and having sex with your spouse will reset the timer.
All right, slavery is too strong.
Oh? How far does this go? Can you demand any kind of sex from them? What if you are physically exhausted? What if it becomes really painful (and not in a good way)? Nothing matters? Nope, you already gave consent. I have the document. Can’t backtrack now!
Hell, if that’s what marriage entails, then I think a lot fewer people would ever get married. I certainly wouldn’t want to. And I do want to have sex all the time. But I also want the ability to say no.
No, I mean like physically exhausting. Like running and stuff like that. It makes you sweat, raises heartrate. It becomes painful after certain periods of time.
I can’t conceive of that situation for myself. My wife and I wrote our own vows, and they roughly summed up to “I will try my hardest to do whatever you want me to do, and be whoever you want me to be, for eternity.” I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone who I didn’t feel that way about, or who didn’t feel that way about me. Though I can hardly imagine wanting to marry anyone other than my wife, so maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
Note that the premise here requires elaboration. thomblake may be stating that he would not say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and instead would say something like “having sex right now would cause me to be late for work” or “having sex right now would be painful for me” (notice the lack of a ‘no’). His wife could either retract the request or not, and if she doesn’t he has precommitted to accepting whatever consequences come from having sex with her then.
That is, the root question is whether or not there should be a spousal sex veto, and it sounds like thomblake thinks that, for his relationship at least, there shouldn’t be.
Indeed. And it’s nicely symmetric with the demands of monogamy. I could totally see those in less-monogamous situations going without that stipulation, but it’s downright inhumane to simultaneously demand “You can’t have sex with anyone but me” and “You can’t have sex with me”.
While this seems to be egregiously overstating the case, I think it’s an important point made explicit that has thus-far (as far as I can tell) been unaddressed.
If I’ve understood you correctly, you consider “You can’t have sex with me right now” a subset of “You can’t have sex with me” for purposes of that statement… yes?
If so, your understanding of “inhumane” is very different from mine.
Indeed—thus “simultaneously”. “You can’t have sex with anyone but me except when I don’t want to” is much more reasonable, if one wants to be that way.
Understood, but your understanding of “inhumane” is still very different from mine. “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me” doesn’t strike me as an inhumane thing to say to one’s partner.
Possibly. Looking up the word, “without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel” pretty much matches my meaning.
Fair enough. In that case, we seem to actually disagree about the properties of saying “You can’t have sex with anyone right this minute, including me.”
At least, I believe it’s possible to say that while continuing to possess compassion for misery and suffering (1) and without being cruel, and if I’ve understood you correctly you don’t believe that’s possible. This surprises me, but I’ll take your word for it.
(1) EDIT: Insofar as I possess compassion for misery and suffering as a baseline, anyway. I won’t defend the assertion that I do, should anyone be inclined to challenge it, merely point out that if I don’t then everything I do is inhumane and it’s weird to single out this example.
Yes, that’s probably right. It seems it has to come down to either:
You don’t think not having sex constitutes misery/suffering, or
You don’t think withholding something that would alleviate misery/suffering from a loved one is cruel / lacking compassion
I’d think that the expected duration of the refusal matters. From my point of view, a refusal for an evening is (barring extraordinary circumstances) a fairly minor restriction. From my point of view a refusal for a decade would count as cruel. (barring extraordinary circumstances I’d expect it to terminate most marriages).
Or maybe 3. He thinks that having sex when one doesn’t want to constitutes misery/suffering that outweighs the misery/suffering of not having sex.
For the record: I think this is often true, but largely irrelevant to my current exchange with thomblake.
That implies 2, or else is irrelevant to the claim that it is inhumane.
ETA: For reference, I also think 3 is often true, for some reasonable methods of “weighing”.
It certainly isn’t #2.
f you are unwilling to grant that the distinction between “not having sex right this minute” and “not having sex ever” matters in this context, and act accordingly, then I’ll agree with #1 and drop out of the discussion here.
I think more typically tension arises from points on the spectrum between these extremes.
Absolutely agreed.
Fair enough.
It would seem a little cruel to just come out with it apropos of nothing. But there are certainly times where saying it wouldn’t be at all cruel. Like, for example, if your monogamous partner asks you “Should I have sex with you or go have sex with Alice?”
I certainly had in mind a situation more like the latter than the former.
That said… if my husband said that to me, say, while he was dropping me off at work, I would probably (after some confusion) ask him if he thought it likely that I would have had sex with someone else that minute had he not mentioned that.
If he said he did, my primary emotional reaction would be concerned bewilderment… it would imply that we were suffering from a relationship disconnect the scope of which I needed much more data to reliably estimate. If he said he didn’t, I would probably smile and say “Well, all right then” and go to work, and my primary emotional reaction would be amused puzzlement.
In neither case would I be inclined to think of it as cruel. (In the second case, I suppose I would ultimately file it as “it was probably funnier in his head”)
Having an overwhelmingly low prior for your husband saying something like this for reasons that are cruel certainly helps!
Yeah, fair enough. If someone says something like this apropos of nothing, that’s (significant but not overwhelming) evidence in favor of cruelty, which is the important question; I agree with you. (I was distracted by the entertainment value of my example.)
These aren’t similar statements, in that while monogamy demands fidelity 24⁄7, refusing sex should generally be a temporary.
However, in a situation where the latter is permanent, then I agree that we have a problem.
I see no reason it should be so black and white.
If someone says, “I will have sex with you once every 20 years,” that seems to fall closer to permanent given typical sex drives (and life spans) while strictly speaking being temporary, no?
On the other hand, of course, “hang on 10 seconds” is basically nothing like a permanent refusal.
Agreed, “temporary” is more usefully applied in this case as fuzzy property, and in particular should as you say be considered in the context of the sex drives of the people involved.
Ignoring morals and legality for a moment, this sounds logistically infeasible. The reason I brought up the fact that sex is physically exhausting, is sometimes it really is difficult (and painful) to have sex. Life can get in the way. Women have periods. People take vacations and business trips. People get sick. This sounds more straining on a relationship than anything. Does monogamy drop when such things occur? Maybe it could work if both people have low sex drives.
Right, and I’m saying that it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position, and if you find yourself in that position and object to it, then you should get a divorce, not cry rape.
Because it is rape?
I mean, you do realize they will almost always get a divorce if they file rape charges...
You miss the point thomblake is making entirely. In counterfactual in question it is not rape. Because there is consent—formal, legal and certified consent. For it to be rape that consent would need to be withdrawn—which is what thomblake said you do.
You can say people don’t have the right to enter into a contract where they have given consent to have sex until they decide they don’t want to continue in the contract. You can argue that such contracts are bad and should be illegal (like they are now). But if someone is, in fact, operating within such a contract then just isn’t rape. So they don’t say “No! Don’t rape me!” they say “I divorce you!”. Then the former partner has to stop or it is rape. Because these are grown ups who understand the contracts they have entered into and know how to make choices within that framework.
Is it “they” or “you”?
Missed one. They.
That’s precisely begging the question.
Yes, I should hope so. Though I think the better solution is to say “oops, I guess I didn’t really mean to be in that arrangement” and obtain a divorce as soon as possible.
Though clearly there are different ideas at play here about just what the arrangement entailed in the first place.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
It does not make sense to be in a situation where you agreed publicly to X, and then were confused and surprised enough when X happened that you felt the need to press charges for what is considered one of the worst crimes in existence. I could see noting that a misunderstanding had occurred, even being angry if you thought you were misled deliberately, and opting out of the arrangement, but that seems to go way too far.
It’s possible. I thought we already established that we were talking about different possible arrangements and there’s not much more to say about it, but maybe I’m missing something important.
Probably the correct solution is to discuss with a potential spouse precisely what you are each agreeing to.
Agreed. Though the bottleneck here is finding a way to stipulate that sort of thing in a way that is agreeable to say in front of your grandmother.
And as long as “marital rape” is a concept that’s allowed to exist, there’s little you can do to eliminate its risk. Though I suppose the folly there is marrying someone you can’t trust.
I don’t know that the entire contract needs to be public. If you are worried about someone playing fast and loose with that, you probably shouldn’t be marrying them. If you still want to, you could recite the SHA hash or something.
Brilliant! I am totally using this for private contracts in the future. Is that done already?
I think I’ll prefer ECDSA for my documents. Elliptic Curves are so much sexier.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
Yes, that’s the scenario I was imagining. The hashed part presumably could be arbitrarily verbose and specific, thus rendering it indecipherable.
And need not be limited to sexuality; handling of finances is a common source of strife and may not be any business of many in the audience, for instance.
It’s the gist of any digital signature algorithm.
As for using it in a wedding? I’ve never been to such a ceremony, certainly...
But you already signed the contract. Like what if it happens before you get divorced?
Ridiculous? This seems to actually be rather similar to what wedrifid is describing (correct me if I’m wrong).
It’s ridiculous to assume that it must mean the latter when we generally take it to mean the former (although even then, not always). I am not sure it is ridiculous to allow both options, but confusing the two is harmful.
Okay, agreed.
Indeed. I was clarifying, more than correcting. I think the perspective you introduced (or made explicit, if that’s what wedrifid was thinking) is interesting and relevant to the discussion.
What is the intended message of the Deuteronomy quote? It seems to imply that rape implies non-consent. In this case the relevance of the rape is that the betrothed rape victim is excused from punishment for the crime of adultery.
Right, consent is relevant insofar as it determines whether the maiden is complicit in the harm to her fiance. But it’s not a determinant of whether harm was done, or even the severity of it. If you have sex with another man’s wife or fiance, you die. If she’s not betrothed then the pottery barn rule kicks in and you make restitution to her owner. If there’s contested ownership (e.g., if she’s your slave but someone else’s fiancee) you pay a fine (Leviticus 19:20-22.)
In all cases the person whose consentH^H^H^H^H^H injury matters is not that of the woman; it’s that of the man who owns her.
That’s certainly not the case in the passage quoted here. In fact in no place in the passage is the fiance, husband or father even able to give consent. These particular rules apply even if for some reason the fiance or husband said “go for your life, she’s yours for the taking”. The only consent that is mentioned at all is the consent of the betrothed damsel, the giving of which will get her killed alongside her lover—it is male consent that does not happen to matter at all.
The issues you have with sexism in these collections of religious text seem to be overshadowing what this passage has to say about rape. (And those issues may be valid and important in their own right as independent subjects!)
You’re right, consent was the wrong word to use in that context. I was being sloppy and meant that the men in question were the wronged party.
That does seem likely to be the reason there were such strict laws against adultery. Robin Hanson explores why adultery (and so cuckoldry) is a more significant issue for males.
The relevant comparison would be vandalism or theft.
Yes.
In many traditional cultures marital rape is/was not considered as rape.
(also, even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape)
Which seems ridiculous to me. And that isn’t an objection with respect to people should being punished for what is called statuary rape. It is an objection to the crime against language!
Won’t somebody think of the statues?!
I know, the poor statues already get enough unwelcome deposits from seagulls and pigeons. They certainly don’t deserve any more!
I’d say it falls naturally out of the construction of consent, actually. Looks pretty different from a consequential perspective, but from a deontological one the only relevant problems show up around the consent-capable/consent-incapable border, or relate to what to do when both partners are considered incapable—none of which is much of a surprise if you’re using a consent criterion. I’m pretty sure there’s similar strangeness in contract law.
There’s some more or less analogous stuff going on in the earlier property-crime construction, too.
If I’m not mistaken statutory rape is based on the age of consent. The law is claiming that the people do not have the right to consent to such acts, much in the same way that children many times do not understand what is happening in cases of pedophilia.
Specific laws and ages of consent have problems and flaws, of course. But when you say “even with consent,” that is what people are disagreeing about. Do they really have consent?
Not True consent. Because we want to call the sex ‘rape’ and rape is forcing someone to have sex with you without consent. So what they did when they said “I want you baby. #$%# me now.” then tore of the clothes of the ‘rapist’ and forced them down on the bed couldn’t have been consent. Consent in this context must mean “whatever it takes for me to not call the act rape”.
Repeated disclaimer: This isn’t a claim about morality or what punishment is appropriate for any given sexual act. It’s about word use!
Why is consent required for sex but not for killing and eating?
I’d say that since animals (that are plausibly appropriate to eat) don’t have long-term goals, it’s not a harm to them that they die, while it is a harm to them that they be mistreated while living. But whether or not this is right it’s clearly just a post-hoc rationalization of the fact that I/DoubleReed/most people think it’s super duper gross.
If that was really the reason, people would express more outrage and disgust over the idea of factory farming than over the idea of bestiality (I suspect zoophiliacs would also argue that they treat their animals very well and that the animals enjoy it—I don’t doubt some enjoy it more than what factory-farmed animals go through).
So yes, I think that that, and consent, are post-hoc rationalizations, and are not remotely related to the true reasons we find bestiality super duper gross.
You know, I agree that at first my ideas were post-hoc, but that could just be where it started.
The fact is that the old adage “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you” is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent. It immediately rules out sadomasochism and rape issues. There are still issues of course (usually in terms of irreversible or serious harm).
On the contrary rape is exactly the example I bring up to reject that adage as a moral absurdity.
I don’t go and tear a girl’s clothes off and do to her just because I’d like it if she tore off my clothes and did to me!
That would be rape. And rape is bad. Therefore following the adage would make me bad.
Did you somehow miss the “when you factor in ideas of consent” part?
The thing is I would like to have her do it without my consent. Along the lines of of “Three Worlds Collide” morality (as it applies to me and by those in the set I consider to be the pool of potential mates and without any interest in being free to do such things myself to others). That would be seriously awesome. Much more exciting!
Wait… are we talking about the old adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or the new adage that doesn’t appear when googling for it, “Do unto others as they would have them do unto you”. I was assuming the former whereas the latter is actually kind of awesome. It’s kind of like pre-emptive tit for tat. If people want to kill you then you are morally obliged to kill them.
And you are not the only party in the engagement. Therefore it is not consensual. That does not defeat what I am saying. It’s not like first part overrides the second part or something.
Anyway, this is getting way off topic.
That is not what he said. He said, “If I did not consent and she did, I would still want her to do it.” Your objection does not apply to this, but others clearly do...
Edited to add: He may be conflating “consent” and “voiced consent”?
More like the idea of precommitting to consent, really. After all, what is “I would really like it if someone did X to me” if not giving consent? This seems to make the other person less ‘rapist’ and more ‘bungee jump assistant’ (the person whose job it is to push you off if you have second thoughts).
Not quite. There is a difference between “I would really like it if someone did X to me” and “I might dislike it if someone did X to me without my consent but would like to be in the state where people may do X to me without my consent”. The latter is included here. The benefit isn’t necessarily the act itself.
Hmm. Provided there are lots of different ’bungee jump assistants” and some of them don’t make you bungee jump, they force you to do chores instead (bad sex or sex when you really aren’t in the mood). And you are allowed to fight them off if you want to with the expectation that you on average have a physical advantage in the confrontation. :)
Reminds me of the idea of designated, legally-sanctioned areas where anyone in the area can use violent force against anyone else in the area without fear of prosecution for such, but which develop a social equilibrium with very little nonconsensual violence because people mostly go there to enjoy the polite-with-undetones-of-danger ambiance.
I believe I would call this “still consent”, provided the draw of the situation was the fact of the situation including such acts.
The more you elaborate, the more I find myself intrigued by the idea.
Are they allowed to use roofies or tasers?
This would be the one of the other objections I was alluding to, yes.
I understand. What I mean is:
Is it something I would like them to do to me? Yes or No.
Do all parties involved consent that this is what they want to do? Yes or No.
The first question doesn’t override the second question. Both parts has to say yes. If the you don’t care about consent, that only affects the first question.
FYI: Could have been but wasn’t.
OK, I begin to understand how you are including consent into the moral principle. It seems like it puts most of the moral work into the “Don’t do things to people without their consent” part but that is at least safer than actually following the adage itself and does rule out any problem which includes “things are done to people without their consent.” This leaves only those inefficiencies that, well, fall short of the extremes of brutal, unwelcome violations.
Yeah, the currently established rules of consent are really for the purposes of safety—to prevent tragedies borne out of miscommunication, to prevent plausible excuses from either party.
It’s an excellent rule, but it’s not the absolutely fundamental point, the goal unto itself—the real goal is to prevent the physical and emotional suffering associated with undesired violations of one’s person.
In a hypothetical world where true preferences could be determined and established without a hint of potential miscommunication or the possibility of denial-after-the-fact (e.g. by the electronic monitoring and recording of thoughts), the situation could well be different and the issue of consent might drop away to be replaced by the concept of ascertained shared preferences—atleast in persons mature enough, well-informed enough, and in a stable enough mental state to be able to evaluate said desires/preferences in a sane manner.
Yea, the major issues I’ve seen are when consent is ambiguous, like pedophilia/bestiality, but also with long term damage. After all, if something is permanent, then they may not want it later. It is impossible to give “eternal consent” as far as I’ve seen and that is where there are serious moral ambiguities. Like if someone asked you to kill him. That has a permanent effect of a hopefully temporary state of mind.
Uhm… did you miss “is actually quite a good rule when you factor in ideas of consent.”
If the girl consents to that, then there is no rape and it is not bad.
I was referring to pets in that statement.
Clearly, we don’t care about animals’ consent when we kill and eat them. So I guess we can have sex with them all we want. Kind of an odd train of thought, I admit...
Huh? No I don’t. I didn’t even mention pets until you did. Your replies in this conversation all seem non sequitur.
Although the meaning is already unambiguous if you reread the part in your third “[...]” it should be even more clear.
I am against having sex with ALL animals (ie. a number of sex acts upon animals that is as at least as large as the number of animals) because I can multiply. This isn’t a terribly important point so I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it if was going to make DoubleReed so confused. It is only relevant in as much as it was part of an explanation of why the Err… didn’t make any sense in the context.
I get it. I just think that if someone were to perhaps not understand the torture v. dust specks reference their post would make perfect sense, and would not be a non sequitur. (Though it would be more clear if “I’m against it” were quoted between “also bestiality” and “You’re against it?”)
Also, I wish you would stop using such hurtful terms as “pervert”. I highly doubt I’ll make my way through all the sponges in the next hundred years anyway.
They would have to also not understand the part that is plain logic and even then requires “would seem to make perfect sense to them” since sincere misunderstanding doesn’t make things logically follow.
I know, the problem being that it you presented it with an “Er...” as though somehow it made my comment about bestiality incorrect… which it wouldn’t unless bestiality involved having sex with any or all animals… which it doesn’t.
Following along on your tangent for curiosity’s sake I note that I have killed and eaten my pets. They happen to have been sheep, cows, a goat and some roosters (that we raised by hand). They tend to get fairly obnoxious at a certain age. Especially the roosters, given that the mating habit of that species is basically rape.
This is what you said:
But you DO have objections to bestiality. Just not all cases of it.
Having sex with any nonhuman animal is bestiality. That’s literally what it is.
No I don’t. I have no idea why you are saying that.
Which is why I am still rejecting the relevance of pets. Since bestiality only requires that a person have sex with one animal even if someone declared or assumed sex with pets was forbidden (which you seemed to) it still wouldn’t be a rejection of bestiality. Because it does not require that you have or desire to have sex with all animals including pets.
I’m really confused.
1) You said you had no objections to bestiality. 2) I bring up pets. 3) You say that you are against that. Therefore, (3) is a clarification of (1).
This is not a meaningful direction for debate. Let me clear things up for both of you.
He meant: “I have no objection to acts just because the label ‘bestiality’ can be applied.”
You took him to mean: “I have no objection to any acts to which the label ‘bestiality’ can be applied.”
Thank you.
No, he specifically said:
In other words, he’s against an alternative, nonstandard definition of bestiality, which is not the same thing as the kind of bestiality for which he has no objections.
The allusion to torture vs. dust and his emphasis of standard bestiality “only requir[ing] that a person have sex with one animal” suggests that he is against this sort of serial bestiality because the numbers involved become large.
No, I said I’m against “the quest to have sex with ALL animals. I’m against that. Kind of like a ‘torture vs dust specks’ for perverts”. I said that because that would be what required for your mention of pets as a reason to reject or ‘clarify’ my earlier declaration of non-objection to be valid.
The issue of consent is probably how I’d choose to justify my objection to bestiality on the basis of rights. The concept of rights is among the highest-status deontological ethics in the world today, so may have the best chance of convincing others.
But I think my true objection may be just that I feel it horribly demeans the humans involved, lowering them to the status of (lesser) animals.
Also: pedophilia; the Idea that the Chinese government system (technocratic dictatorship) is better (in terms of outcomes) than the US Government system.
“Sex between adults and young teenagers, as long as there is no obvious coercion involved, is not nearly as harmful as generally supposed” is definitely something that you can’t say—and the fact that you can’t say it has been demonstrated experimentally.
To clarify terminology here, pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is a different word, which is escaping me at the moment, for a sexual preference for adolescents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebephilia depending on which stage of adolescence you’re talking about.
I’ve no disagreement with your comment Atelos, but—why do those words exist?
Is there a cluster of human minds in thingspace that have “sexual preference of adults for mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19”? Do they share any other properties in common?
Eliezer on the subject of words that should not exist:
Eliezer also suggests a reason why someone might coin such a word: in order to sneak in connotations. Also note that 15-25 and 18-21 are typically given as the prime age ranges of female physical attractiveness by Roissy and his commenters (although since these are arbitrary cut-offs, there’s no need to give them a name). The 15-19 age range of “ephebophilia” cuts across this age range seemingly at random.
The same goes for hebephilia, attraction to 11-14 year-olds. There is no discontinuity in the characteristics of a typical human between 14 and 15 years of age, and I don’t see why hebephiles should form a compact cluster in thingspace either.
On the other hand paedophilia does seem a valid word, because attraction to pre-pubescents seems qualititatively different from attraction to fertile human beings (there are evolutionary considerations at play, and there are great physical changes in a short space of time during puberty). Properties shared in common by paedophiles are presumably qualitative differences in “brain wiring” in comparison to humans of typical sexuality.
Interestingly, Robin Hanson misuses the word pedophile in this post. The regular conflation of attraction to young fertile humans and attraction to prepubescent children in this way is another strange definitional phenomenon that calls for explanation.
There are people with a sexual preference for people from the age of their birth right up to and even past the age of their death. Since there are many such people it is easier to have words that give a ballpark to their sexual preference than to say “someone with a specific sexual preference for humans between the ages of X and Y” every single time.
The sexual preference for people of a given age is more than enough to make the word relevant. That detail is predictive of all sorts of things. Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with. The terms are defined in terms of physical development rather than age and are as good a division as you can expect for a process of transition which is gradual yet clearly does represent a change. There really is a place for a word (ephebophilia) that means “not particularly sexually attracted to adults but definitely sexually attracted to people that have only recently reached the stage where they are obviously reproductively viable”.
(With the caveat that it is stupid to use the same word for the preference for males and females at this stage. Both groups are more similar to adults of their sex than they are to each other!)
Or, in this case, the opposite. In most cases injecting the word ephebophile into a context will expunge connotations rather than introducing them. In the case of a sexually active ephobophile using the word ensures that all “people who have sex with those who are under the age at which it is legally permissible to have sex with them” aren’t lumped in together. Because they aren’t @#@%ing pedophiles and because while both practices are illegal they have entirely different moral connotations. For that matter the active practice of the various illegal chronophilias also have different practical implications. Counter-intuitively (unless you think about it) in the case of rape I seem to recall that a rape of a girl that is sexually mature does greater psychological damage on average than than the rape of a younger girl (probably something Robin Hanson cited).
The obvious explanation: People don’t know the word ephebophile so they get all confused and use pedophile instead. Rah ‘Ephebophilia’!
Confining the discussion to females (which seems sensible given that the terms ephebophilia, paedophilia etc. seem to be most often used in the context of male attraction to females) the age range 15-19 is rather close to the widely agreed-upon (by men) 5-year age range of females in their physical prime of roughly 18-22. 15-year olds have been reproductively viable for about 4 years on average. 19-year-old women are about as attractive as they’ll ever be!
I struggle to imagine when someone would really want to use this word ephebophilia. “He’s an ephebophile; I bet he wants to have sex with that cute 19-year-old” – absurd. There’s just too much overlap between ephebophilia and normal male sexuality for it to be a useful predictor.
Even if the girl in quesiton is 15, it seems that the extent to which an older man might target her as a mate in today’s society depends more on how up-tight, how scrupulous or how socialised he is – whether he prefers slightly younger (by 3 years) women than the average man would generally be difficult to tell from outside, and being “normal” in this regard doesn’t preclude attraction to a 15-year-old any more than it does attraction to a 25-year-old in any case.
There are words like “creeper” and “pervert” that might be used to describe the type of person who appears to pay undue attention to younger teenage girls. This seems to exhaust the social utility of having a word for someone who prefers slightly younger women than does the average man. Note that this concept is also highly contingent; plenty of human societies would consider overt sexual attraction to young teenage girls, insofar as sexual attraction is acceptable in general, to be unremarkable (as Hanson’s piece points out).
Ephebophilia therefore appears to be useful, if at all, as a scientific term only. And in that case, where is the evidence that ephebophiles form a meaningful category? Why not have special words for adults who are attracted to 22-25 year-olds in particular (equally unusual), and so forth? Why name a specific age range at all, rather than having a general word for “prefers fertile women, but of unusually young age”, if not just to lend the term a bogus scientific air?
By way of analogy, it’s useful to have a concept of “short” men. On the other hand if some group of scientists started inventing various words like “shortman” (1.5m-1.6m) and “veryshortman” (1.4m-1.5m) I would question the usefulness of these terms. I would also wonder why there are not similarly specific terms “tallman” and “verytallman”. On the other hand achondroplasia dwarfism is a term that cleaves reality at its joints. (NB: no offense intended by this analogy, which implies no similarity beyond the use of words to refer to variations in some characteristic of humans).
In most cases that’s probably true, but the more discriminating question might be why this confusion exists so widely. After all it’s quite a severe accusation.
Have you read the wikipedia article behind the link? Apart from giving examples of where the word is actually useful it also makes clear that your example would be a misunderstanding. Being attracted to cute 19 year old girls—or even cute 15 year old girls—isn’t the point. It is being attracted to young adolescent girls to the exclusion of or with strong dominance over any attraction to adults. So a prediction that would be somewhat more reasonable to make would be that the ephebophiliac would be less attracted to a 23 year old supermodel than to a fairly average 15 year old girl.
fat. veryfat. obese. Reference class tennis. I reject the argument by analogy.
If you actually did wonder that back through the analogy you would probably look at the third sentence of the wikipedia article and follow the link.
If a matter of sexual preference is significant enough that it ensures that someone will never be able to legally satisfy his (or her) preferences anywhere within our entire culture then it is @#%@ well worth a word too.
The point is about arbitrary “scientific” gradings pulled out of thin air. Short, very short, diminutive—they are vague context-dependent categorisations that are suitable given the continuous nature and contingent relevance of the variation in question. This is not comparable to rigid, highly specific classifications like my putative “veryshortman”, which is how I would characterise words like ephebophilia. There should be a good reason for the existence of such a term, and that reason is not apparent.
The other problem with the specificity of “ephebophilia” is also that it overlaps with the typical 5-year window in which an average male would find a female most physically attractive. Therefore it can’t even be justified on the grounds that the psychologists are binning males into continuous but arbitrarily demarcated categories of “normal”, “ephebophile” and “hebephile”.
You said: “Most crudely it is a prediction of which people the chronophile in question will try to have sex with”. I pointed out that this alleged use to which the word might be put is redundant, since 15-19 year-old women are among the most attractive to men in any case. Generally the large majority of heterosexual men would want to have sex, if the conditions were right, with an attractive girl of this age, particularly a 19-year-old!
I went on to point out that if we look at the other extreme (15-year-olds) scrupulousness and other character traits probably play a bigger role than ephebophilia in assessing the likelihood of a man attempting to mate with a girl of that age, in this society.
That sounds about as reasonable, given the definition of ephebophile, as suggesting that an average man would be more attracted to a plain 18-year-old than to a 27-year-old supermodel. I.e. unreasonable, unless I missed the part where it is defined as exlusive attraction to 15-19 year-olds (in which case I would ask for some evidence that such people even exist).
I did so already, and noticed that teleiophilia and gerontophilia are not specified by age range. If ephebophilia and hebephilia were likewise merged into a word that meant “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical” (I agree with you that having the same word for female-male and male-female attraction is also foolish) then I would admit the legitimacy of that word. It is the pretense to specificity, or having idenitified some actual clusters in thingspace that I object to.
Such a word could be the word meaning “particularly attracted to fertile females of a significantly younger age range than is typical”. No need to pretend that there is clustering into the groups “sexually normal men”, “ephebophiles” and “hebephiles” rather than a continuum.
I don’t see why another word apart from pederasty is needed for that.
The only example of ‘ephobophilia’ which was mentioned on the wikipedia page was using it by preference over ‘homosexual’ for describing common behaviour of adult males in various historical cultures. Paedophilia… I would have put that one as an even split with perhaps the most notorious sterotypical applications being with respect to male attraction to young boys (eg. ‘priests’).
I’d say it depends on the man’s age, too. A 22-year-old man wanting sex with a 16-year-old girl would sound a lot less remarkable than a 70-year-old man wanting the same, to me. And, while most men prefer younger women, it’s not like the typical man prefers women between 18 and 22 no matter how old he is—see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/.
That link demonstrates the opposite of what you claim, as far as I can see. The writer is advocating the idea that men should target older women, because they’ll face less competition.
I’m sure the 70-year-old, given the opportunity to be transported into a younger attractive body with his mind in-tact, would be just as keen on the 16-year-old as the 22-year-old is. You are probably trying to imagine a 70-year-old hitting on a 16-year-old, which would indeed be remarkable but is beside the point.
The median 23-year-old man sets 18 years as the least possible age for a match, whereas the median 48-year-old man sets 32 years for the same. This effect is much smaller if you see who people write messages to, but it’s still there (see the red in the bottom right corner of the relevant graph).
Imagine asking a lot of men of different ages if, all other things being equal, they’d prefer a 16-year-old woman (assuming the men are from somewhere the age of consent is less than that—tweak if necessary) or a 26-year-old one. Do you really believe that many more men from any given age range would choose the former? (Heck, I would choose the latter, and I’m 24.)
I suspect that the difference between messaging behavior and the minimum age setting is related to the fact that those settings are publicly available. That adds a signaling component to the game, and for 48-year-old straight males I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the dominant one: I don’t have any actual data here, but it seems likely that a middle-aged man setting the age of consent as his threshold sends a clear “dirty old man” signal that a 32yo threshold wouldn’t. Not a signal that a hypothetical dirty old man wants to send, I think; meanwhile, you can send messages to whoever you like, and large-scale messaging preferences are opaque to everyone but password holders. Actually, messaging someone below your nominal age limit might send a weak positive signal: “I like you enough to make an exception”.
The smaller of the effects discussed is probably genuine, though.
okCupid data. Of interest is the third graph.
Fascinating. Following those links I just discovered I’m a teleiophile. Also a gynephile but I probably could have guessed that one myself.
I’m somewhat nonplussed with having the word ephebophilia refer to a preference for either females of approximately 14-16 or for males of an equivalent level of development (so slightly older). Unless for some reason people with one preference have a particularly high chance of also having the other preference. Because by this age it is an entirely different kind of preference so if you are going to go to all the trouble of making up names for various categories you may as well have “likes young men” different to “likes young women”. Having just one word for pedophilia and perhaps hebophilia makes somewhat more sense given the much smaller difference between sexes at the younger ages.
It’s very bad to have a single word that many people will interpret as “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with, and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma”, and many other people interpret as “raping particularly vulnerable people”.
No disagreement on that, though I suspect that even if everybody understood the first meaning, it would still be reviled.
(I know a (non-practicing) pedophile who attempted to “reclaim the word” by outing himself and distancing himself from child molesters. It—unsurprisingly—still didn’t go well for him).
This guy is a hero. Okay, not a very effective hero, but still.
Heroism in the classical sense (as I understand it) means being great, and has little if anything to do with being good or getting good results.
Unsurprisingly indeed. Still, somebody has to be first, and I admire his willingness to do so.
Which word is this?
Isn’t it perfectly clear which one MixedNuts means?
Err… no? That’s why I asked. Could you write the word please?
Oh, wait. I read “can’t” literally. As opposed to “it is illegal to”. The meaning was entirely changed.
What person would it be physically impossible to have sex with? Though, that depends on what qualifies as “real sex” vs. what is merely foreplay/Xth base/etc., which is a whole other issue.
Then again, it occurs to me that the “can’t” in the original sentence might refer to a situation that applies more specifically to the subject rather than the object: that is, if A wants to have sex with B and C and D, but A is unfortunately trapped inside a giant transparent hamster ball, with B-Z all on the outside looking in.
You would achieve the same effect if A were attracted to people trapped inside giant transparent hamster balls. Now we just need a single word for this kind of attraction.
Ahaptophilia? (Attraction to people whom you cannot touch)
Pushing Daisies had both its protagonists suffer from this.
Yes, I was primed to think in terms of the subject—and the kind of subject that people are inclined to shame. That is, pathetic people. As in, “pathetic people who can’t get laid”.
To translate into the language of physical impossibility would, I suppose, require observing that humans are not black boxes that can freely do anything within the realms of human possibility. Going against instinct and indoctrination really is hard and for the kind of people I was primed to think about (pathetic people) they just couldn’t. Because being proactively vile and evil requires initiative and the ability to overcome inhibitions so most people in that hypothetical category couldn’t have sex with the people they wanted to (due to their pathetic nature).
It seemed entirely plausible to me that there was a jargon term for “being attracted to people you can’t have sex with [because you’re a pathetic loser], and having to live with a lot of fear and shame and stigma” that people also used as an indicator that the subject is more likely to be a rapist. That is exactly the kind of prejudice that humans tend to enjoy engaging in. What surprised me was that I wasn’t familiar with the jargon in question. My confusion is now resolved.
I’ve heard of people getting crushes on historical figures. I don’t know if there are people with a strong preference for famous dead people.
This opinion is widely held by many active participants in mainstream US culture. “Reviled” should be replaced with “reviled by ___” in order for this conversation to be precise.
I downvoted this for mindkilling. I often see this view attributed to members of tribe USleft by members of tribe USright, but I’ve rarely encountered members of tribe USleft actually taking this position.
I was going to raise a similar objection, then observed that his claim was that people who believe this are typically “lefty types,” not that “lefty types” typically believe this. The former might even be true, for all I know. (Though I can’t quite see why anyone should care.)
I know exactly one person who has expressed an opinion even remotely like this; he is an ethnically Chinese American who identified as a Republican for most of his life but changed that identification in the last decade or so. I wouldn’t call him a “lefty type” personally, but Vaniver might. Then again, I suspect he only expresses this opinion to screw with people in the first place. In any case, one case isn’t much to draw on.
That said, I certainly agree that specifying who’s doing the reviling usefully increases precision.
While I’m here, I will note that eliminating the comma between “types” and “who” would make the sentence noticeably less wrong.
I have deleted the relevant section. I went to a liberal university for undergrad and I got the sense that most of my classmates and professors held that position, and I often see comments to that effect on the xkcd forums (where the typical person is progressive and technocratic), but as I know more USleft types than USright types (and the USright types I know are typically libertarians, and thus anti-technocrats) and have rarely asked people about it directly, I can see that my experience may not be sufficient to identify the types of people who hold that opinion.
Are you including anti-democracy in “that position”? I wouldn’t be surprised to see people in the US mainstream endorsing what amounts to technocracy; I would be very surprised to see many people endorsing Chinese levels of political freedom. I’m fairly sure that this is both the main thing that Emile meant when he was thinking of what you can’t say, and the first property of “the Chinese government system” that would come to mind for most Americans and came to mind for the other commenters here.
Consider someone who wants judicial fiat to impose some policy they approve of- like, say, gay marriage. Is that anti-democracy? That’s the extent to which I’m including anti-democracy in that position.
The desire for a progressive regulatory state is conditioned on the idea that some people know what should be done better than others, which is an inherently anti-democratic notion; democratic opposition to things in the people’s best interest is an obstacle to be overcome not an objection to be heard out.
That said, I think most of the people I know would at least complain if they had to move to a Singapore-style “democracy” (well-run but lacking rights like free speech). People have inconsistent political preferences all the time.
A number of people I know take overpopulation and environmental threats very seriously. Many of them approve of the results of China’s multiple-child tax, though many of them complain about the implementation and the limitation on freedom. I don’t remember any of them acknowledging that the only way to get Chinese levels of results was with Chinese levels of political freedom, but I’m sure at least one made that connection.
Ah. The first thing that comes to mind for me, when comparing the Chinese government and the American government, is that the Chinese government is comprised of engineers and the American government is comprised of lawyers, and I suspect that is true for most people who would hold some version of that opinion.
That’s not necessarily a win for China.
Engineers may not be a great pool to select political authority figures from, but I have to say that lawyers strike me as an even worse option.
Hm. I appear to have lost 3 karma for agreeing that the offending text should not be part of my comment. Anyone have an explanation?
No idea—I revoked my downvote from the grandparent after you changed it.
Edit: On further reflection, I suspect you are getting dinged for positing a technocratic-democratic dichotomy. It is possible to be a technocrat and a small-d democrat. A more accurate opposition would be technocratic-populist, which is not the same thing.
He’s not exactly left (and not exactly right or centrist or...), but Scott Adams seems to take this tack. I am not sure just how much it is genuine, and how much it is “dance, monkeys, dance”.
I briefly read that as a colon...
It sounds to me like you picked ideas that were maximally superficially offensive under the constraint that at least one person might defend them, rather than ideas that were maximally defensible under the constraint that they were offensive.
Focusing on the ideas that are held by people stupid enough to blurt them out leaves you vulnerable to a selection effect. If there were classes of political ideas such that anyone rational enough to believe them was also rational enough not to tell, how would you know?
Was the latter what was desired? Then I could mention ideas like eugenics, weighting voting power by IQ, banning theism in general or monotheism in particular, panopticon cities (or other means for global surveillance).
I don’t support the last two, but I bet I could make some good arguments about them. The first two I’d probably actually approve of, depending on the specific implementation.
But are these ideas really so offensive that it’d be dangerous for people to reveal them? I don’t think so.
Right now the maximally defensible political idea that I’d not feel very safe to discuss in Greece is that my country should recognize the Republic of Macedonia under that name. I don’t think that idea is offensive to anyone here, even though it’s synonymous with treason in Greece.
Science fiction is useful in allowing people to describe political ideas but maintain plausible deniability.
Building Weirdtopia may be a relevant thread, though it’d be wrong for people to think that I actually support the weird ideas I mentioned there.
I’ll come out and say I have no problem with cannibalism if the individual being cannibalized consented to it before they died. (Otherwise one is using property from their estate without permission and that’s theft.) An argument can be made that in societies without abundant food, a cannibalism taboo is more useful, but that obviously doesn’t apply today.
Incest I have more mixed views on, but assuming one is talking about adult siblings who are consenting and not going to have children, I don’t see an issue, even though I personally find it disgusting. Parent-offspring incest even when they are both adults isn’t ok because it is extremely difficult to remove the power-imbalance issues.
In practice, difficult to tell when an animal is consenting. But if we could confirm consent then I’d be ok with it. But, my view here isn’t really fully consistent in that by this logic I should be worried about ducks not consenting to each other (a very large fraction of duck sex is rape). Regardless, whether or not I find it disgusting, consenting individuals should be allowed to do it.
Willing victim, sure why not? If we think it is ok for a Jehovah Witness to refuse blood transfusions or an Orthodox Jew to refuse a heart transplant, why not allow active sacrifice? In this case it might even have positive results. As Ellie Arroway observed, celibate clergy could help reduce inherited predispositions to fanaticism, and this might have a similar selective effect.
Cannibalism comes with some very nasty disease-transmission issues.
It’s possible to be consistent about considering duck-on-duck rape bad and still assigning a relatively low priority to preventing it, compared to other societal problems, or more personal objectives.
I wouldn’t call any of the above “ideas” at all. You are listing outlawed practices, not tabooed beliefs. True, “support for incest” is an idea, but if there is a covert ideology behind it it is not nearly as extensive and widespread as the ideology behind e.g. sexism.
Aw, no mention of Necrophilia? It’s even a victimless crime!
Lifeist! (There are credible reasons why dead people can be considered victims—even if I don’t happen to share them as values.)
Well, that’s one way to pay the rent while you’re in cryonic suspension.
Regardless of whether dead people can be considered victims or not, it’s still really, really upsetting to a lot of living people. Whether it ought to be upsetting is another matter, but it is.
I don’t see why not. If we consider the corpses of dead relatives to have reverted to just objects then necrophilarizing means having sex with our stuff. I would still find that somewhat upsetting!
Necrophilandering, not “necrophilarizing”.
(Note to self: don’t have sex with any of wedrifid’s stuff.)
Feel free to buy it off me if you are really want to. It’s a territorial thing, not a moral judgement! :P
Yeah, no redneck would be caught dead marryin’ his sister. Nosirree!
If you have statistics about sibling incest being prominent to “rednecks” in a significantly higher degree than other populations, let me know. If not, I don’t approve of unsubstantiated stereotyping.
That’s absolutely hilarious. I suppose you have a file of peer-reviewed studies showing that racism, sexism and homophobia are significantly more prominent in redneck populations, then? Oh wait, you can’t, because “redneck” isn’t an acknowledged sociological distinction. It’s a stereotype. Anyone who gestures toward vaguely “redneck ideas” should not be surprised when incest comes up. The fact that you did not know this makes me assume that you, unlike me, are not from the Appalachians.
I’ve heard the jokes about cousin incest, and even made an initial reply to your pre-edited post, saying that cousin marriage didn’t count as incest for most of Western civilization and still doesn’t count as such in many non-Western countries—when you edited your post to refer specifically to sibling marriage, I deleted that answer which no longer applied.
You can click my name and see I’m from Athens, Greece, no need to assume anything.
Wikipedia tells me that “redneck” is a term that refers to rural southern whites and then got connotations of all-around bigotry. But if you want data about these topics, here’s the map that shows South was the last to repeal antimiscegenetion laws, here are maps for estimated same-sex marriage opposition, here is which states didn’t ratify the Equal Rights Amendment
To forestall objections, I understand these maps don’t specifically condemn redneck population. “redneck” wasn’t my own choice of words, but I didn’t feel the need to object to its correlation with established Southern trends.
I’ve not been able to locate incest statistics by state though.
Perhaps I exaggerated a little too far for the sake of the joke, then.
I actually didn’t know this, interestingly.
I did that a lot for a while, but it seemed like hardly anyone put anything there so I eventually stopped bothering. Also, I’m surprised (and a bit disturbed) that someone in Greece knows anything about ‘rednecks’, so nevermind.
I guess I must be a redneck then!
I knew all this already, and am not disputing it. That’s not the point.
Look: there is a difference between “green-eyed black-haired ideas” and “wiggin ideas”.
They seem not to exist; apparently the best indicators would be some unreported fraction of general child abuse, but no leads on what the fraction might be.
I know the jokes about cousin marriages—but frankly such didn’t even count as incest in most Western societies until relatively recently, and it still doesn’t count as such in some non-Western societies.
From now on I shall assume Vladimir is a NAMBLA member who tends a small shrine to Pol Pot, regardless of the evidence.
So, p(Vladimir is a NAMBLA member who tends a small shrine to Pol Pot) = 1, as far as you’re concerned?
Uh oh… I must quickly decide that you are not a truth-seeking agent, lest I be forced by Aumann to agree!
Whenever I see people say things like this, I always imagine Old Man Aumann standing behind them with a gun.
That’s more or less what I was going for, yes.
I almost said “great minds think alike” before I realized that might be taken as a restatement of AAT.
Old Man Aumann says: Great minds think alike… or else.
Ah, the hipster’s genocidal tyrant.
Haha, I think you’re displaying some serious prejudice (in multiple directions) by thinking that I’m supposed to mind this so badly.
“Prejudice” may not be the mot juste. If I filled one pickup truck with rednecks, and another with members of my own family, I’m not sure you’d be able to tell the difference. Hell, a few people would probably have to go in both trucks.
It wasn’t so much that I expected you to be viscerally horrified by the association with low-SES rural Southern whites, as that being pattern-matched to rednecks has what I thought were obvious drawbacks. Just for one: this being Less Wrong, I’m pretty confident you don’t think zygotes have souls. No doubt there are many other, less obviously incongruent beliefs in the redneck belief cluster you wouldn’t remotely endorse.
Not being American or part of the Anglosphere or Western European derived culture I read this as:
Noticed you assumed I’m a Yankee, considered challenging you to a duel, decided with this crowd it probably wouldn’t go over.
Ah sorry, then it was just classism! :)
I think the crowd would love the idea. But I’m biased.
There’s a certain subset of mostly Western, white men, largely middle-class rather than extremely wealthy or poor, who see the existence of civil rights activism on behalf of various minorities and the fact that it has succeeded in making it somewhat more costly to signal prejudice socially in polite company, and quite a bit moreso to do so openly in an institutional capacity, and conclude that this therefore means that it is now beyond the pale to do anything other than adhere to rigid standards of political correctness for the sake of controlling thought.
These are people, by and large, who in coming of age and seeking to support themselves, didn’t break through all their barriers to self-actualization or realize their wildest dreams of success, but managed to get some kind of payoff for their effort in terms of making ends meet (even if it’s difficult and provides no insulation from suffering or strife in their lives), and certainly don’t feel like they directly benefitted from any unethical practices or prejudices (even passively-conferred ones common in society). Since humans tend to model the emotions of others from their own baseline, they find it difficult to believe that anyone could genuinely have it that much worse, and conclude that activist groups of women and minorities are out to demonize them and censor them. They find it difficult to conceive that anybody else’s life, at least in their own cultural sphere, could really be that bad, unless the person had just failed on merits, and wanted to blame someone else or hijack the fruits of their own effort out of laziness.
Then, in an environment dominated numerically by similar people, they find it similarly plausible to think that if they voice a belief that is uncharitable towards, or does not reflect well upon, some social minority or other, they will be...well, it’s not clear what. Censored? Hunted down and sued? I’m not sure what they’re really afraid of, but they’re angry about the idea that it might happen to them.
The rhetorical sleight of hand here is that “prejudice” is used with an ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, this word is used for any application of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, which are deemed to be immoral according to a certain ideological view. On the other hand, it is supposed to refer to the use of conditional probabilities about people that are inaccurate due to biases caused by ignorance or malice. Now, it is logically possible that the latter category just happens to subsume the former—but the real world, of course, is never so convenient.
And if the latter category does not subsume the former, as it clearly does not, then approving of penalties (of whatever sort) for expressing beliefs in the former category means that you approve of penalties for expressing at least some true beliefs. Even if you can make a good case for that, it requires much more than dismissing them as “prejudice” with all the ambiguity and rhetorical trickery that this term introduces—and no matter how good a case you have, “controlling thought” will be a completely accurate description for what you advocate. (And for the record, I am completely open to the idea that some ways of controlling thought may be beneficial by some reasonable criteria, or even necessary for the functioning of human society. But if we’re going to advocate this view on a forum like this, let’s call it what it is.)
Note also that even without any idealistic pursuit of truth for its own sake, it is a non-trivial question what the practical consequences will be of suppressing the expression and use of certain correct beliefs about conditional probabilities. Wrong probabilities lead to wrong decisions, from the pettiest personal ones, up to and including decisions about grand projects by the government and other powerful institutions that are based on theories that assume these probabilities. On LW, of all places, the importance of this point should be clear.
I apologize for the confusion—you seem to think that my using the noun constitutes an attempt to bill some unspecified set of statements and ideas as examples of the first thing you listed.
What I’m actually doing, just so you can read my post accurately, is saying that prejudice is a thing (as per your second definition which you apparently thought I was being sneaky about), that it exists (I presume this at least is uncontentious to you?), and that in general it’s a true statement it’s now more costly to signal certain forms of that openly, according to prevailing social mores.
In other words, if you have no objection to the assertion: “An employer in the US these days cannot generally refuse a job applicant by openly referring to the applicant’s race as a disqualifying factor, without expecting some form of social reprisal”, then you now understand what I meant when I used the word prejudice in that sentence.
So, just to be sure I’m absolutely clear, since this is apparently confusing:
When I say
I mean that it is now more difficult to signal certain forms of prejudice (not specific as to what particular things constitute prejudice; pick an example you find unobjectionable) casually or irrespective of one’s audience, without garnering some social risk.
You are still obscuring the issue. Yes, of course that people frequently hold prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice, and that some categories of such beliefs (though by no means all) have become more costly to signal in recent history. The question, however, is whether there are also some true beliefs, or uncertain beliefs that may turn out to be true given the present state of knowledge, that are also costly to express (or even just to signal indirectly) nowadays. Would you really assert that the answer to that question is no?
And if your answer to that question is yes, then what basis do you have for asserting that “a broader social pattern into which [you] see [my] behavior falling” consists of people who are unhappy because they find it costly to express prejudiced beliefs that are biased due to ignorance or malice?
I would not.
I am doubting your claim that your beliefs are really so beyond the pale to the social mores of your peers here, that you’d be unfairly suppressed and/or censored, or otherwise hurt “the cause” of LW any moreso than you might be saying what you already do freely.
I could be wrong about that, but I also have different estimates of the real, net social cost to signalling something unpopular, especially for someone who consistently signal-boosts in your observed patterns in this environment.
I would be unsurprised to learn you believe that IQ represents general intelligence and that it is primarily genetic, and that all personality traits are ultimately genetic or inconsequential in the scheme of things, and that they are linked to race, and that this could get people upset at you if you just said it at random at a party.
I would be very surprised if it got you successfully sued, persecuted in a tangible way, or indeed anything worse than flamed on the internet for voicing this openly. Or arrested, or fired from your job, or targeted by a group like Anonymous for ongoing harassment...
However, based on what you’ve said about your reasons for not revealing some subset of your beliefs here, you appear to fear consequences considerably more significant than just someone being mad at something you said on the internet, and this seems...disproportionate, incorrect, biased—a skewed misunderstanding of the reality of your likely risks and costs.
What do you think happened to Stephanie Grace—don’t you think a private email sent to a few friends has affected her career prospects ? James Watson and Lawrence Summers also got lynched for their opinions.
I don’t think anybody risks getting sued or arrested, but they can have their careers harmed.
(vilified)
You know what “lynch” actually means, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching
James Watson, Lawrence Summers and Stephanie Grace did not get lynched for their opinions.
As to what actually happened to Stephanie Grace:
She spoke an opinion that sounds pretty calm and not hateful, but certainly controversial, that is frequently interpreted as far more loaded with those things due to historical associations.
She also evidently posed the discussion as though it were a matter of some legitimate scientific consensus, relatively unobjectionable from a theoretical standpoint.
This despite the fact that the statistical significance of IQ heritability and its mechanisms of inheritance are still matters of significant debate and little consensus has emerged as yet—let alone the degree to which IQ represents “General intelligence” in fact (to say nothing of the ongoing difficulties of defining that term), the ongoing Flynn Effect (still not adequately explained), the substantial effects of postnatal nutrition (protein supplementation even in the children of the rural poor producing significant increases; longer breastfeeding periods improve scores, exposure to prenatal drug use or environmental pollutants can significantly impact them negatively) and environmental stimulation on the development of the brain and its results for IQ scores, the dearth of actual replicated studies showing genetic mechanisms for IQ, the difficulty of determining whether a difference is innate versus not...this stuff is still up in the air.
Basically the strong push to interpret these IQ differences along race lines as principally genetic is massively overstated next to the evidence favoring that claim—to treat the question as a matter of simple fact whose implications might need to be discussed more soberly is to so blatantly favor the hypothesis that it speaks poorly of her critical thinking and levels of information about this.
It’s not that it’s impossible that there are signficant gaps clustering around race (indeed, it seems pretty straightforward and established that this is the case); it’s also not that it’s impossible this is primarily a genetic thing (although there’s little evidence to bolster that claim so strongly that it should be the default assumption, let alone the null hypothesis, and much evidence that conflicts with it). It’s that hyper-focusing on this particular fact and this particular attempt to account for it, usually in the same breath as public policy discussions, is often a great big indicator of what that person perceives as the implications.
In other words, a charitable assumption is that Stephanie Grace is guilty only of ignorant or uncritical reasoning about the topic, staggeringly bad timing and social signalling, and even worse spin control. But there are lots of venues—like LessWrong itself, where the idea that IQ is general intelligence and the gap is genetic and all other interpretations are PC revisionist hogwash gets so much traction that I find it difficult to believe Vladimir_M, who is posting anonymously, will suffer consequences more unpleasant than a lengthy argument he doesn’t want to have with somebody who does not agree with him. Indeed, he has already said the same things openly, and no jackbooted thugs, no PC police, no lynch mobs have extracted reprisal against him.
How on Earth do you come up with this stuff?
First you misrepresent the statements of this woman, whose name I don’t even want to mention in such an ugly context in a public discussion. Rather than claiming that the problematic beliefs are a matter of consensus, she expressed a mere lack of certainty that the opposite is the case, and this takes only a few seconds to check by googling. Making incorrect attributions to people in public on such a sensitive topic and under their real names is, at best, callously irresponsible.
Then you go on and say that I have “said the same things openly,” thus dragging me into this controversy, about which I have said nothing at all in this thread—and about which I have never written anything here, to the best of my recollection, that would make this characterization correct under any reasonable interpretation. That this nonsense has been upvoted has lowered my opinion of LW more than probably anything else I ever saw here before.
And then people wonder why I may be reluctant to speak openly on controversial matters.
Yes, “lynch” is hyperbole, probably unnecessary (“vilified” seems a bit weak. You might want to tell off these websites for incorrect use of the term “lynching”).
You spend a lot of time addressing the issue of Race and IQ; I am mostly concerned of how Stephanie Grace was treated for what was a quite reasonable private email. In an ancestor comment you wrote:
To me, it’s very clear “what”: what happened to Stephanie Grace. It’s unlikely, but a small chance of having your career ruined is not a risk most people are willing to take. Those chances increase if one of the people involved becomes somewhat famous, or if some well meaning anti-racist (or other) activist takes interest in the discussion. Nobody wants a Google search of their name return a hate page on the first page of results.
What surprises me the most is that you find this unclear, that you don’t understand how that can be a concern for somebody.
Some people she didn’t know said she was a bad person, and then her life went on. She got the job she was intending to get, and hardly anyone will remember the ‘scandal’.
Recent story mentioning her
Interesting, thanks; I had briefly googled for that kind of info but hadn’t found any. She is probably somewhat helped by having a pretty common name and surname, but I’m still updating my estimate of “negative consequences for being target of a hate campaign” downwards a bit.
So basically she pulled a Galileo.
Well, without the threatened torture, house arrest and other problems. On the other hand, she was treated the way she was without trying publish her views and or trying to spread them to the general public. Overall, a Galileo comparison doesn’t work very well.
Is a word missing there? ‘scandal’?
Whoops, I screwed up the formatting, fixed, thanks.
Ahh, it’s annoying that messed up links just fail to show anything at all. Especially when typing in what is in the imperfectly formatted link (ie. missing http://) into the browser sometimes would work just fine!
I was trying to unpack what she actually did—she didn’t just say something unpopular and get burned for it, she said something seriously, massively unwarranted in a sensitive situation where people decided they didn’t like it, and furthermore something that for many people is rather close to a hot-button issue. It is difficult nigh unto impossible to signal effectively in that situation, and even if it shouldn’t be the case that just saying something brings on associations to other, otherwise-unrelated situations, people signalling what she did and how she did it frequently have some really nasty agendas for doing so.
She’s been vilified for it, yes—I’m not downplaying that, but you’re downplaying the actual situation.
Because frankly? Stephanie Grace was a law school student at Harvard University, a high-profile institution, and it seems to be a whole lot more focused on when people do this in situations like that, than when some random person off the street, or in an internet forum, or whatever, just says There are so many venues in which the cost of signalling that is minimal, and this rather-homogenous website in which Vladimir_M is a fairly typical member seems like one of them.
How does your original description not cover the Stephanie Grace case?
It’s clear to me that Stephanie Grace should have been aware that even if in her environment people think like her, voicing a belief that doesn’t reflect well upon blacks is dangerous. No, she won’t be censored or sued, but her prospects will take a sharp turn downwards. She should have been afraid, and maybe angry about what might happen to her if she dared speak honestly, even in a private email.
And yet, you seem to think that she had nothing to be afraid of, and that her being afraid or angry would have been kind of silly and stupid on her behalf (or at least, that’s the impression I get from the way you write).
(Note that I’m not saying this is the main reason sensitive topics should be avoided on LessWrong. There are better reasons to avoid those topics.)
As far as anonymity goes Vladimir_M isn’t really really up there. Enough comments to earn 7k karma gives away rather a lot of information. And I wasn’t aware Vladimir_M was a pseudonym.
Writing stuff you don’t want associated with you on the internet is a terrible idea.
No—that’s what the blogger linked to in the grandparent did.
It’s often a good idea to point directly to statements people have made. This is particularly true when the claim is about “LessWrong itself”. If an idea is common, one can surely find multiple people espousing or assuming it, and if the idea is part of the LW consensus, that would be reflected in comments to the cited sources.
Ooh, here we go, I found one.
EDIT: If the meaning isn’t clear I was just reassuring lessdazed that lesswrong does, in fact, have examples of people accepting that prior to any observations of any race we should expect there to be some degree of genetically based IQ difference between races or genetically related populations. Since it was links to examples that were requested not examples themselves I fulfilled the technicality with a wry self-reference. This was not intended to offend anyone or suggest anything about anything anyone had said beyond answering lessdazed’s request.
I’m not sure that phrased that way that Jandila necessarily will disagree with you that much.
I’m curious which of the following statements you agree with and which Jandila agrees with:
It is likely that there are genes in the human gene pool which effectively code for tendencies in IQ and are not fixed throughout all humans, and where the non-fixed versions aren’t things that lead to what is normally classed as mental retardation or something similar.
It is likely that some of those genes either through causal historical issues, or random drift and founder effects are distributed through different human populations in different ways, where populations in question include various groups often classified as “ethnic” or “racial” groups.
There are groups in society which have been historically mistreated and may still be mistreated. This can lead to environmental impacts on IQ. Similarly, different cultures have different norms about learning, test-taking and child-raising that can with a decent probability impact IQ.
I suspect that both of you will agree on all three of those points. I suspect more disagreement is really occurring on how 2 and 3 interact implicitly. In particular, Jandila believes that the environmental issues likely swamp any genetic effect. Moreover, there’s an apparent disagreement in whether IQ is an effective proxy for the general notion of “intelligence”.
I’m also going to use this to interject from minor factual issue that may be relevant: In multiple cultures where there is a minority that has been historically persecuted, the minority does not do as well on many forms of tests. One example that will likely be not mindkilling for most English speakers are the Ainu in Japan. Why this pattern exists is a distinct issue but this data point does seem to be relevant.
I disagree on the word ‘the’. It’s a surprisingly big deal—for me at least. It may be a disagreement that is significantly influenced by mere careless presentation of ideas but then I think details of communication are what Jandila’s comment was most criticized for by others too.
I haven’t looked closely with what Jandila has said beyond that which is quoted by lessdazed. I’m not especially interested in Stephanie Grace. I did follow the ‘Lynching’ link and learned all sorts of things about various forms of vigilante social sanction. Then some interesting facts about bitumen and pine tar (via the association with feathers).
Sorry, which use of “the” are you referring to?
see
Ah yes, that makes sense. I get the feeling that a lot of the arguments occurring here are over view clusters rather than actual views. No one for example has stated explicitly that the “racial group X” has more or less genetic intelligence in this thread, but given the discussion in the thread about Stephanie Grace and others it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that that’s only marginally below the surface.
I’ve been told Jews are smarter on average than most races. But I was told that by Jews so it is conceivable that self serving bias could apply. I mention this because if what the pop-theory suggested was accurate (not something I would particularly support) it would be a case where environmental pressures and all sorts of discrimination of a specific group of people actually increased relative IQ.
Tangent: The data is actually about Ashkenazic Jews only. The result is consistent across a wide range of tests, including not just IQ but also Wonderlic and others. It is deeply unclear if this is due to environmental, genetic or other effects. There’s also been some suggestion that the Ashkenazic population for some reason has a lot of outliers that are what is actually causing the result. There’s a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners who fit in that category. However, it is important to note that Ashkenazic Jews are one of the most widely studied groups in the world when it comes to genetics and so far no alleles that seem to have to do with intelligence have been discovered in the population.
I think that, for many centuries, the Ashkenazi environment rewarded establishing a rigid social structure that studies and followed strict rules (preventing assimilation), but selected very strongly for individuals that could step outside the status quo at the right time. I can see how that would lead to Nobel prize winners.
Given the time scale involved, it doesn’t seem like genetic selection could change more than how well you integrate successful memes. Some anecdotes from my own genealogy about relevant selection pressures:
Marriages were usually arranged by parents to get the best possible match. My great, great grandfather was wealthy for the village they were in. When he needed a husband for his daughter, he asked around for the most promising yeshiva student, and gave him a ten year stipend to continue study for marrying her (apparently the standard was more like 2 years).
When Poland got jumped, my grandparents ended up on the Soviet side of the line. My grandmother went back to the Nazi side twice to try to convince her friends and family that they had a better chance of surviving with the Soviets, but they didn’t want to leave the cities to go somewhere unknown. They were all trapped in the Ghetto system, and liquidated within four years.
My grandfather escaped the soviets twice—the first time, he noticed that his transport train was picking up stowaways who would jump off around curves (turned out they were farmers who lived near the tracks but not a station), and he just pretended to be one of them while everyone else stayed on the train to Siberia. The second time he drank all night with the guards, and convinced them that they would never get in trouble for letting him go to find his wife. Shortly after his third capture, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and all the Poles were released to go fight the Germans. He always said that you need an escape plan for everything in life, and refused to enter any room with only one exit.
Your grandfather sounds like a badass.
He emigrated to Israel in 1948 with a wife, two kids, and no money. He worked as a day laborer, claiming various construction skills to whoever pulled up and asked. One time he claimed he was a plumber in the old country, and spent two days installing an outdoor toilet. He finally saved up enough to buy a small grocery, so that he could run his own business. He walked out back after buying the place to find—the outhouse he had built years before.
He was definitely a badass, but the cancer was pretty far along by the time I knew him and I didn’t speak Hebrew.
That does not seem to me a very plausible suggestion. Outliers could explain the Nobel prizes, but would not affect the mean, which is measured to be different. It is conceivable that some non-gaussian distribution would explain both, but larger populations that have been studied in more detail exhibit bell curves, or at least thin tails (ie, not affecting the mean).
This fact alone leads me to think that the most parsimonious explanation is just that Ashkenazi Jews have a cultural tradition of scholarship, whereas public-school culture in the English-speaking world is often starkly anti-intellectual. If we’ve turned over the genetic rock and had a good look under it without finding anything interesting, we should update to think it more likely that the explanation is under a different rock.
Confused. Your link seems to go to this post itself.
In fact it goes specifically to the comment itself. And the comment itself contains an example of that which is required in such a link. Fancy that. ;)
Technically impressive. Unamusing given the serious nature of what is being discussed and the fairly obnoxious way this apparently expresses a point in a passive-aggressive way that is on the passive enough side that it isn’t fully clear what the point is. This damages the signal to noise ratio.
(ETA: Ah, you made the comment in two edits so you’d know the comments permanent link. Clever.)
(ETA: In case it isn’t clear, the more controversial an issue the more reason to try not to be a dick if the conversation has a remote chance of being productive.)
Passive aggressive? Obnoxious? WHAT? I gave an example of the kind requested so that whatever conversation may be taking place wouldn’t be derailed by “Where are your links?” demands. It gives confirmation that people (or, technically, at least one person) understands basic probability and how to form priors. ie. There are differences in traits between different populations, IQ is a trait.
Downvoted—yes, obnoxious, because you could have just said “this comment here”, but you sought to amuse yourself by providing a link that leads back to itself and thus obfuscating, and when tensions are high, amusing yourself and not communicating clearly sends all the wrong signals that you are disrespecting the other person.
A contrary view: I’m broadly in favor of people amusing themselves.
The implied point seems to be some sort of claim that the type of statement had not been made in the thread up to that point. Rather than asserting that explicitly or even just upvoting lessdazed’s remark you made it harder for people to wade through this conversation.
Most humans will generally not be very good evaluators of whether their comments contribute well to signal/noise issues. So the assertion that they are inappropriate isn’t that helpful. Although the fact that your earlier comment where I did make that remark is currently at +2 tentatively suggests that more people than not disagree with my assessment in that context. In that context, it does strongly look like you were using inflammatory language whether or not you realized that it would be so.
It isn’t personal. Until you pointed it out I didn’t even remember that my other comment in the context of the SMBC cartoon was to you. I suppose it could have been occurring in some sort of back of my mind, but I don’t think so. Also, I don’t think there’s anything that passive aggressive about those sorts of remarks, I’d consider my comments to be missing the “passive” bit and being pretty aggressive statements of noting when things are not helpful for rational discussion here.
But if you want even more blunt I can do so: You are coming across as a dick. Your earlier “pussy” remark made you come across as a sexist dick. When one is having a conversation about a controversial issue involving sex and gender issues it is generally a good idea to not come across as a sexist dick because it will a) emotionally inflame people who don’t agree with you and make them less likely to listen to you and b) turn away from Less Wrong people who might otherwise be interested in seeing what Less Wrong is about.
In general, calm interaction is better than hot interaction. Explicitly stated points are better than implicit and vague points. Polite statements are better than uncivil statements. I’ve been repeatedly tempted to go through most of this thread and just downvote everyone for making Less Wrong resemble the areas of the internet I try to avoid. It is very clear that the issues being touched on here are mindkillers for many people, and that the karma scores involved reflect to a large extent which mindkilled tribalistic groups happen to have more people around here not in any substantial way a reflection of the arguments (except to a very weak level). None of these are good things. You are, along with other people, acting in a way that makes these problems more, not less extreme. None of this is good if one is trying to actually have rational dialogue.
It just occurred to me now and I don’t believe I missed the irony when reading the first time. I don’t want to imply I consider this to be particularly offensive (well, except the part where you called me a dick) but do you realize that you called me a dick both earlier (about something unrelated) and also here because I used a word for genitalia as a negative descriptor?
Yes, I did realize that. (Although note that I didn’t say you are a dick, I said you were coming across as a dick. These aren’t the same thing.) Two issues guided that word choice: First, it was an attempt (possibly a poor one) to speak in a language closer to the sort you were using so the point might come across better. Second, in this particular context, the relevant point is that in a highly male environment you were using a negative term for the genitalia of the other gender. That said, neither of these were probably very good arguments. While one could potentially argue that in our society “dick” is more gender neutral as an negative term than “pussy”, that argument seems to be more of a rationalization than a genuinely useful argument. I suspect that there may have also been some degree of priming occurring given that I had earlier today had a conversation with a female homo sapiens who expressed disinterest in Less Wrong because it “looked like a sausage-fest” (and also apparently that this thread as well as some of the other relationship related threads were “creepy”). Some amount of Phil Plait’s speech was also floating around. But even that is an explanation more than a good reason. So I’ll just say that I was aware of what I was doing, made a conscious decision to do so, but in retrospect had poor reasons for doing it.
Given that wedrifid said this less than a day ago:
That’s priming.
Rule 1 was incomplete. Judgments that things are of equal value are obviously suspect as well.
It should also mention that judgement about whether something is subject to to Rule 1 interpretation should be particularly suspect. Recursive inclusiveness is implicit. For this reason It is also a charge nearly impossible to defend oneself from directly.
If “pussy” is a sexist slur, isn’t “dick”, also?
It should be, but compared to women, most men are relatively less offended at the slur. Double standards; go figure.
That wasn’t the point at all, as far as I can tell. The point seemed to be that wedrifid was volunteering to be a representative of the point of view in question (while engaging in some nonverbal humor of the sort that is only possible in online forums).
Did you forget to update on the new information that was provided?
EDIT: I seem to have missed this.
Yes, I think reasonable individuals can read the statement differently. I suspect that my reading was on the more negative end of the spectrum, and I do have to wonder what primed me to think of it, and I don’t have a good explanation for that. That said, it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable interpretation. It seems that the difficulty of reading what other humans mean in a text medium is really quite difficult. While this is a known fact, I apparently don’t compensate for it as well as I should. That said, I suspect that I am very likely not the only person who read the comment in the way I read it.
No. I did update, but see elsewhere in this subthread where I discussed the relevance of that remark.
I downvoted that comment for confusing levels, not for inappropriate language. Maybe other downvotes are attributable to that problem with it. Maybe upvotes are in spite of the language. Hard to tell.
That’s a good point. I’m making a bad assumption that other humans will focus on the same issues in a comment that I will especially when it is long and contains a variety of different points.
Note: JoshuaZ must have caught the comment before I removed the part replying to ‘signal to noise’ (and the second two quotes are selected from that part). While I would stand by everything I said there would accomplish anything useful. I did not wish to edit the history of the conversation to distort the flow or to leave the parent making no sense—more to prevent the conversation altogether.
I had hoped the reply to you by komponisto would have resolved that feeling for you. It came with a wikipedia link!
Komponisto’s comment there and the ensuing discussion was etymologically fascinating. I doubt the vast majority of readers were already aware of the relevant etymology (indeed, you were unaware of the etymology). Remember, rationalists should win. If something has a connotation that is likely to be extremely distracting and trigger strong emotional reactions, then using the excuse that a sufficiently intelligent, educated and rational reader would not have that reaction is not helpful.
I think, incidentally, that one of the issues that may be occurring in our disagreement of how your remarks contributed to the signal/noise is what constitutes signal and noise. In particular, it is possible that I’m using a broader notion of what information is being conveyed in some sense, so I consider emotional triggers to be noise even if they aren’t denotatively part of a message.
Reasonable expressions of genuine confusion should not be downvoted.
Jandila said:
That was describing the measured gap in which certain race clusters are measured at higher IQs than others.
wedrifid said:
This is a point that I have made several times, but that does not qualify as a counterexample because it is not the claim that is supposedly consensus on LW.
One of the straw men in Jandila’s argument was that the specific measured gaps in IQ scores among racial groups was caused primarily by genetics (that is reading charitably, for a very plausible interpretation is that the supposed belief is that it is exclusively caused by genetics, which is just silly). As you claim not to know “which groups are higher than other groups,” you did not find an example supporting the argument.
I agree with your point entirely and hope my comment is not taken as support of whatever Jandila is saying. I meant only to give a prototypical example of what people (including myself) do actually say on the subject. As you no doubt picked up I was careful to avoid what would be an absurd claim—that genetics was the only factor and even the merely controversial claims about which way such genetic factors would be an influence.
I unequivocally affirm the use of my testimony about what credible lesswrongians have tended to say now or in the past as evidence in support of your argument. :)
Tangent: I’m actually not sure which way the intelligence difference would go between Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens. Michael Vassar actually boasts that he may have saved the world by convincing a genetic biologist to stop trying to go all “Jurassic Park” on Neanderthal DNA. After all they are an apex predator that have comparable intelligence to us and could plausibly be more intelligent in some aspects.
I’ve said the same.
Or which group would have more deviation from its mean.
I applaud you on your sanity.
That’s probably a more interesting question—and perhaps even harder to filter out from environmental influences.
Actually, randomized controlled studies show that breastfeeding has no effect on IQ. More generally, decades of RCT have failed to demonstrate a causal basis of any of breastfeeding’s correlates.
Really? Not even immune system response? This ‘colostrum’ stuff is a scam?
Sorry, maybe I implied more studies than there have been. My impression is that the RCTs have been very focused, a terrible waste of randomization. If you find an RCT addressing the immune system, tell me about it.
None spring to mind. The closest I have explored to the subject is the effectiveness of supplementing with bovine colostrum on adult humans. The limited effectiveness I saw there can’t exactly be considered a surprise of the same order.
I may get down-voted for saying this but, I can’t help but feel this is politicking-inspired misrepresentation.
I agree with much of this analysis but I don’t think that Vladimir_M has (as far as I can tell) made any substantive comments in the direction you imply.
I have made comments about this topic on LW on several occasions, but the part about me “ha[ving] said the same things openly,” the “same things” referring to the views characterized in the last paragraph of the same post, is pure confabulation. (In fact, I’d find it surprising if this relatively new commenter is even aware of what I wrote about the topic in the past, since I don’t remember mentioning it in quite a while.)
Moreover, the claim about “hyper-focusing” is particularly absurd, given that nobody mentioned this concrete topic at all, until Jandila brought it up and attributed it to me in bizarre fashion, clearly striving to bring this topic into focus. This attribution started with the statement “I would be unsurprised to learn you believe ”—and after a few comments, in which I made no specific mention of , it morphed into “[V.M.] has already said the same things [referring to a caricatured version of ] openly.” Surely it is not unreasonable to demand higher standards of discourse than that—and here, of all places?
But even aside from all that, the analysis is full of various other more or less subtle misleading claims and rhetorical tricks. Unless the standards on LW have really deteriorated, finding these should be a fairly simple exercise for the reader.
Reading this thread I’m somewhat dispirited to feel that you indeed may be right in most of your points with regard to the failings on the community.
One can feel the McCarthaynist undertones of the discourse. Meta discussions seem to have been skilfully misdirected and subverted into what is for nearly all intents and purposes political and ideological warfare, where guilty until proven innocent reigns as the norm.
(Excuse me, I see this is redundant)
Do you think Grace deserved what happened to her?
For example, just to lower my Karma even further, could it be that the fact that old fashioned standards of credit worthiness had disparate impact on certain races and neighborhoods, not be a sign that those standards were “racist”, but rather a sign that certain races and neighborhoods, were, on average, no damned good.
Could it be that the prohibition against certain thoughts has cost the American taxpayer over a trillion dollars, about ten thousand dollars per tax payer.
The evidence for this proposition is overwhelming, but no one is allowed to discuss it.
I’d like to see your math on that point.
While I think that political and regulatory decision making as to which loans were risky and which were not is guaranteed to lead to disaster even in the absence of affirmative action, affirmative action is particularly deadly, because a financial system requires truth and that lies be punished, whereas affirmative action requires lies and that truth be punished, so when affirmative action meets finance, it is like matter and antimatter.
When official truth meets finance, the financial system is likely to implode. When the official truths of affirmative action meet finance, the financial system is guaranteed to implode.
And it did.
I don’t think there is any connection between affirmative action and the recent “financial crises”. If you do, you may have been mindkilled by your dislike of affirmative action. Maybe this idea sounded ridiculous at first, but you flinched away from betraying an ally, and now you actually believe it?
You are in denial. Search Trulia.com for foreclosure sales, for suburbs for which you know the racial distribution.
If we look at where the defaults were, they were where the Hispanics were, and to a lesser extent, where the blacks were.. In the first year of the crisis lily white suburbs had less than one percent as many defaults as suburbs with a significant black or Hispanic population.
Why, did the banks lower the their lending standards? There were a pile of government papers telling them that lending standards were racist, since they had disparate impact. Beverly Hills Bank failed to lower its standards, and was condemned as “Substantially non compliant with the CRA”, which is to say, “racist”.
The gap between Hispanics and whites was extreme in the first year or so of the crisis, because most Hispanics never made a single payment, while whites took a while to get into trouble. So today the ratio is about twenty to one, while shortly after the crisis it was about one hundred to one. But the ratio is still extreme and glaringly obvious, though not quite as extreme and glaringly obvious as it was in 2008-2009
Gilroy (Hispanic) Palo Alto (White and North East Asian)
...
...
From Wikipedia, but still in accord with what I’ve read elsewhere, and there are plenty of cites for you to check in their Community Reinvestment Act article.
Besides that, even if the bad loans were made because of ‘affirmative action’ that doesn’t make the crisis the fault of affirmative action, just as if I loan my hypothetical shifty brother-in-law $100 that I don’t expect back in order to keep peace with my equally hypothetical wife, it wouldn’t be my wife’s fault if I don’t have rent money at the end of the month because I was budgeting as if I would get that money back.
Do you think fault is other than a social construct?
I give the CRA as an example of official truth deviating wildly from the truth that anyone can see, and you respond that official truth must be true because official sources say it is true?
They were government and academic studies, therefore report official reality, not observable reality, not the reality accessible to the senses, but the reality generated by official consensus.
And this is exactly my original point: That on politically sensitive issues, government and academic official truth violently and ludicrously contradicts the truth that everyone can plainly see, and no one dares mention.
Any article that speaks of CRA loans, is a transparent lie:
For starters, there is no such category as “CRA loans”. All loans are subject to the CRA, just as affirmative action affects every student. When regulators examined banks for compliance with the CRA during the events that caused the crisis (2000 to 2005), they did not mention any special subset of loans as “CRA loans”, nor any category of loans as being more CRA than another. The category “CRA loans” did not exist in the minds of bankers or regulators when they issued papers on the compliance of particular banks, or was too insignificant to mention.
Hence any study that makes an assertion about “CRA loans” is transparently lying.
To speak of “CRA loans” is to imply that even after 2000, when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, the CRA was just a tiny tiny little thing, which is a transparent lie. If one lie, all lies. CRA dominated the banks, as “Diversity” dominates academic admissions.
Where are the “CRA loans” in this report, which report resulted in acts of compliance that sent the eminently solvent and well run Beverly Hills Bank broke?
In the case of Beverly Hills Bank, I am sure that Wikipedia, academia, and government, can say that not a single “CRA loan” failed, since there is no indication that Beverley Hills bank ever made a single loan in the official category “CRA”, if such a category still existed at the time, but they were nonetheless driven into bankruptcy by the CRA.
Please go away. You’ve earned yourself −262 Karma points in the last 30 days; you should take the hint.
(Relevant post.)
And how did I earn −262 points:
By citing facts that are evidence for forbidden truths, and mentioning issues that others dance around.
Further comments by you may be deleted without warning or notice. Please leave Less Wrong.
By giving us no reason to think that you’re capable of non-motivated cognition.
You don’t necessarily need to leave. You are not incapable of non-motivated cognition.
Regardless of the accuracy of your claims, you are obviously not being effective here.
Rationalists should win: if you are not convincing people and want to then the fact that you believe you have an excuse is irrelevant. Ultimately what matters is whether you are accomplishing your goals.
Having certain topics discussed too openly on Lesswrong could result in several unfortunate things happening.
It could make certain potential rationalists be deterred from participating in the community.
It could attract the attention of certain contrarians who are less-than-rational and, for various reasons, should not necessarily be considered potential rationalists.
Most importantly, from the standpoint of the Singularity Institute (or, at least, what I think is its standpoint), it could increase the probability of human extinction by harming the SI’s reputation.
Mm, those reasons do make some sense.
I think as far as 1 goes, it seems to me like that’s already happening—I know a few people not on this site (who discovered it independently of myself, none of whom know each other), and many more I’ve encountered about online, who explicitly view LW as essentially compromised by 2, hence they have no interest in being here. YMMV how much those people are reachable or desireable, of course, but it’s difficult for me to disagree with their basic perception that this place is already full of contrarian-cluster types who’re intellectuals but still quite biased.
I also wonder about signalling now, re: “less-than-rational”—given what I understand of rationality as it’s described and the reasons humans don’t tend to display that trait most of the time, it seems like it’s only asymptotically-reachable—you can reduce the frequency of incorrect decisions and amend certain biases in short or long-term ways, but you probably can’t get rid of it altogether. Who here is truly “rational?” Even Eliezer Yudkowsky still has his own biases—the most you can hope for is, well, “less wrong”, and that is work to achieve.
So assuming (big assumption here!) that I understand the about rationality and how LW views it, and why it’s desireable and how much realistically a human being can self-optimize for that trait, it seems like “less than rational” should probably be avoided. Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all going to be until such time as we come up with some kind of game-breaking thing that allows a person to really just run rationality full-time if that’s what they want?
I’m not sure I understood you correctly.
You seem to be suggesting that, since the community already falls short of its stated goal, there’s no particular reason to avoid a practice that makes that goal less likely.
Confirm?
Deny.
I am suggesting two things, somewhat seperate:
First, that “we might draw people less-than-rational, and that’s undesireable” seems to suggest, in a Sapir-Whorf kinda way, that the utterers consider themselves to be rational, rather than rationality being a thing which is valuable to increase in oneself, and that this suggests to me a degree of reflective incoherence on the part of those whose mental model can be described that way, which is at conflict with the goal of being less wrong.
Second, that members of this community should probably not give themselves too much credit for rationality or presume that any given proficiency in the methods of rationality has adequately compensated for their biases—at any given point it is still overwhelmingly likely that their cognition is affected by some unnoticed, unaddressed and significant bias, which may not be obvious to other members of this largely-homogenous community. This also amounts to reflective incoherence.
Corollary: That this state of affairs is obvious to an unknown but possibly significant number of people who might be supportive of the community’s aggregate goals and methods, but who are put off by the perception of such missed blind spots; that is, not everyone who looks at LW and rejects it is rejecting rationality, or unsuited for it, or just incapable of learning it—and nobody here, even the seasoned and highly-upvoted contributors, is without bias.
“Less than rational” isn’t the phrase I’d use; as you say, rationality really shouldn’t be understood as a discrete state but as an asymptotic goal, and even then it’s probably preferable to speak in terms of individual biases or cognitive skills as appropriate. But J_Taylor’s second point doesn’t lose much of its force if you cast it in terms of individuals seeking company in their specific contrarian beliefs, for whom this whole “rationality” business might be little more than a group-identifying label or a justifying habit of thought. Granted, it might eventually be possible to bring such a demographic around to actual truth-seeking, but it’ll take more work than debiasing someone who’s already posting in good faith—and this site isn’t so large or so stable that it can afford to spend a lot of time dragging people out of self-constructed ideological labyrinths in which they’re quite comfortable.
It’s a particularly nasty problem, though: ideology looks like common sense from the inside, and so it’s hard to tell to what extent the site culture’s already corrupted by arational ideas that’ve just happened to achieve local hegemony. I’d like to say that a careful and fearless examination of any beliefs that look like common sense to us should turn up the major problems, but frankly I don’t think we’re there yet—and an outside view, unfortunately, isn’t necessarily going to be helpful. There’s plenty of motivated cognition out there, too.
Nornagest defended the point better than I probably could. Nonetheless, I would like to clarify that “less-than-rational” was myself being slightly too euphemistic. I meant to say that some contrarians are contrarians due to highly problematic reasons. Some of them should not even be considered contrarians, but merely individuals who retain the beliefs of tribes which are not respected within mainstream intellectual culture. These individuals, due to opportunity costs if nothing else, should probably not be considered potential rationalists at this time.
nods My assertion that some nontrivial number of such people are already visible contributors here still remains.
Gotcha—thanks for clarifying.
For the record, I agree with your last two paragraphs. I might agree with your first suggestion as well.… I agree that “rational” constantly runs the risk of becoming a mere tribal marker used to enforce in-group/out-group boundaries and thus detached from any actual improvement in decision-making skills, and that different people here succumb to that temptation to different degrees at different times.
I’m less confident about the idea that being concerned about the quality of people attracted to the site, or endorsing decisions on the basis of such concern, is particularly reliable evidence that the speaker is succumbing to that temptation… but I’m no longer confident you’re even suggesting that.
Oh, I was just chiming in about how Vladimir_M claims that his positions are too unacceptable to be voiced publicly (even though, presumably, he believes they are true), when given what details I know or have inferred about him it seems more likely that his estimate of the cost of signalling is overstated (and what censure or punishment apart from reproving comments by people who disagree on the internet he expects to suffer is unclear to me). I was trying to explain a broader social pattern into which I see his behavior falling, to the person who’d expressed skepticism about his concerns.
For someone who wields the word “prejudice” as derogatory, you tend to assume an awful lot about people whom you don’t know at all except for a few paragraphs of their writing about impersonal and abstract topics.
I’m not “wielding” the word prejudice; it’s not a weapon. Also, in the above case I’m very specifically referring to prejudice as a phenomenon, and it being something less acceptable to signal—not saying that anything I don’t like qualifies as prejudice. I’m using a specific noun with a pretty basic definition—not suggesting that any particular set of statements is a case example.
It is a weapon. It is routinely and regularly used to destroy people’s lives, work, and careers.
Trent Lott’s Senate career was destroyed because he praised Strom Thurmond. I’m not saying that sort of thing happens often, but it’s not nothing.
I wish more people would extrapolate from their own vulnerability to insults to the idea that people in general are vulnerable to insults, but this doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
You forgot cis-hetero.
Obligatory XKCD explaining how hypothetical situations work.
How would you defend it?
Most effectively by insulting the masculinity of any male who disagrees with you. I’ve actually seen this done. It was almost comical in the degree it went to.
I’m not interested in debating this particular issue, but clearly a reasonable argument could be made based on the disparities in physical strength.
What makes the broader context interesting, however, is that issues like these demonstrate that principled egalitarianism is not a viable Schelling point for basing social norms. This however clearly leads to some very problematic questions.
It is far from “clear” to me that such an argument would be reasonable.
If I chose to defend such a position, I’d defend it by arguing it’s more dangerous to indirectly encourage the physically-stronger group to exert violence on the physically-weaker group than vice-versa. The words “on average” to be inserted as appropriate in the preceding sentence.
Still, I’d rather discourage violence altogether.
I think you probably should have used the conditional: “would make me want to slap you”.
Probably, but then I would have missed out on the surreal experience of getting jumped all over for admitting that I am offended by a statement that was intended as an example of something offensive, in a thread about how impossible it is to have a conversation about these things without getting jumped all over. It’s been great so far!
It’s hard not to take something personally when the pronoun in the direct object is “you”.
Same capacity for offensiveness, perhaps—in that some overly defensive people will surely choose to feel attacked (“be offended”) just as much by either question. But same average offensiveness? I seriously doubt it.
Signalling is important. “Offensiveness” functions by signalling you an enemy. If you signal strongly enough that your question is about a desire to understand neurobiological causes of a statistical phenomenon, not about an attempt to attack groups of people, fewer people will feel attacked.
Now some people will surely argue that people just “ought grow tougher skins” instead. But that’s an “ought”-argument, and I’m referring to an “is”-question, which choice of words and sentences leads to a better discussion.
Those questions are not remotely equivalent. I suppose as a second order implication, if you assume that the average man is not very good at math, you could also assume that the average women is really not very good at math, but obviously both the male and female distributions have people above their respective means. In any case, “Why and how do women suck at math” sounds to me like “Why do all women suck at math,” not like “Why does the average woman suck at math,” even if the latter question was based on an accurate presupposition.
The distinction between gratuitously offending people, and inadvertently offending people, does not seem to be widely noticed, whether on Less Wrong or other places. Less Wrong has established implicit rules for what may be said, so there is a narrow class of things that can be said on Less Wrong without getting into trouble, that cannot be said elsewhere without getting into trouble, but that class is narrow and subject to change, so narrow, twisty, complex, and obscure, that I do not find it interesting, though Vladimir does seem to find it interesting.
To participate in consensus building on Occupy Wall Street, you need an Ivy League Education in political correctness. Less Wrong is not nearly as bad as that, but Less Wrongers that tread near forbidden topics as Vladimir does, are developing more expertise in what is permissible thought, and what means are permissible to express them, than they are developing expertise in forbidden topics.
When I speak plainly, you do downvote them into oblivion, and you are unable to respond to them rationally or coherently
For the purposes of anyone reading: When someone makes a list of two dozen supposed “rules”, then they must also offer a method to prioritize between them—or their claims become unfalsifiable and “not even wrong”, since by cherrypicking rules, one can then explain anything.
E.g. sam says people are not allowed to “criticize blacks, women, homosexuals”—and yet at other times he accuses people of only being allowed to praise Romney (a white man), but attack Cain (a black man) and Palin (a woman). To explain this he can apply a different rule about “left-wing Republicans”—but does this rule always supercede or not? Nobody knows, so the claim is unfalsifiable.
People often bash Paris Hilton—though she’s both a parasite, and female as well. This would falsify two of sam’s supposed rules, but he can use a different rule (about being allowed to bash whites) to explain this away as well.
Things like “no enemies on the left, no friends to the right” are likewise unfalsifiable since someone can arbitrarily label people like Gaddafi’s Libya or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda or even Fidel Castro’s Cuba “right-wing” if one wants to.
Compare and contrast with the actually excellent response by lessdazed who provided just two rules, clearly prioritized, and which yet explain a far vaster list of taboo subjects more precisely and comprehensively that sam’s list does, by connecting them all back to the core issue of egalitarianism. That ruleset has predictive capacity, because that ruleset could be falsified, if it were false.
They explain less, to the extent that the rules contradict each other. It is unlikely that they explain nothing—in fact they would probably have to be explicitly contrived for that purpose.
Upvote for pedantry
What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that “I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I’m not going to share it, because most people can’t handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion.”
cf. Wikipedia
That’s not necessarily the claim (explicit or implied). It can also be that even if the information were to be handled in a non-mind-killing fashion, the resulting conclusions would be beyond the pale of what is acceptable under the current social norms.
As for the definition of obscurantism you gave, this is definitely not obscurantism under (1), since it withholds less information to the public than if one remains completely silent. As for (2), it doesn’t involve abstruseness, deliberate or not, since the claim is in fact very simple (as e.g. spelled out above). The most you can say is that it involves deliberate vagueness, but even there, the purpose of the vagueness is not to mislead, confuse, or perform some rhetorical legerdemain, but merely to hand out a limited but perfectly clear piece of information.
It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well… disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
A non-archived mailing list, I think, to greatly reduce the potential cost of adding new members.
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I’ve been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.
Everything? I don’t believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.
Yes, of course, it’s not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.
I agree with you completely regarding privacy. If you feel that you must absolutely prevent some piece of information from leaking out into the world for all to see, you must treat every communication medium—and the Internet specifically—as insecure. The world is littered with dead political careers of people who did not heed this warning.
That said though (to paraphrase the old adage), are we rationalists or are we mice ? If you hold some beliefs that can get you burned at the stake (figuratively speaking… hopefully...), then isn’t it all the more important to determine if these beliefs are true ? And how are you going to do that all by yourself, with no one to critique your ideas and to expose your biases ?
This is just a quibble because I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but the traffic could conceivably be archived in its encrypted state for decryption later.
Yes, I theoretically have to consider how good people from the distant future who particularly want to know what I said now are at playing with large primes. Because there is always the possibility that a man in the middle is saving the encrypted data stream just in case it becomes possible to decipher in the future.
Do you mean in users’ inboxes, or something else?
Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don’t think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.
The Wayback Machine?
Edit: Or not.
Not relevant to email, or even an access-controlled site.
Oh. Oops. (I don’t know much about that sort of thing, obviously.)
Honest question: why was this downvoted?
(I downvoted because I saw the comment as decreasing the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio: as Nick noted, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t archive private pages or emails, and is therefore not relevant.)
I support this proposal and would like to join the mailing list if one becomes available. But why do you think a mailing list would fare better than a website? Because of restricted access?
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
Is 1100 enough karma? I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
Yes, that’s another way in which it just doesn’t look like a good idea. When you’re organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you’re doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I’m glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
Coming out and saying what exactly?
Is this a joke? I don’t know what exactly. That’s the point.
OK, then to phrase it in purely grammatical terms, what exactly is the antecedent of the pronoun “it” in your question above?
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. (“Offends” in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it’s smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
Well, it’s fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I’m not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was not alone in that interpretation (I see you’ve already responded to one of those comments as well).
In that case, I’m somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.
The trouble is, I really don’t see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don’t want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I’d hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.
Redheads? Now I’m curious what kinds of traits X you’re talking about.
To take a prominent example, it’s impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman’s sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it’s usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of “prejudice” and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).
On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.
Perhaps if you started by sharing your dataset first (with names changed to protect the guilty, etc.), then the conclusions you drew from it, and only afterwards the advice you would give to a younger version of yourself?
So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you’re willing, I’d like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won’t personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?
Well, it’s a topic for a whole book, not a brief comment buried deep in a vast old thread. But for some concrete examples, see e.g. the comments I left in this subthread.
So basically, if a guy tries to have a long-term relationship with a girl who’s had a lot of partners, he better study Game or there’s a good chance she’ll get bored, because she’s used to very attractive guys? That makes sense; I wouldn’t think of that as very controversial. Of course, that ignores that some women actually do also make an effort to work on their long-term relationship skills and find ways to deal with periods where their partners seem less attractive.
I didn’t see anything about looks in that subthread; does something similar apply to dating someone very good-looking?
By “looks” I didn’t mean the level of attractiveness, but more generally, all clues available from people’s appearance. Clearly, this is going to lead to strife once people start recognizing themselves, or someone they care about, in the criteria under discussion. (This may in fact be due to understandable annoyance on part of someone who represents an actual statistical exception, but again, this makes it no less a barrier to rational discussion.)
Re: relationships with women who’ve had a lot of partners, the problem is that for a typical man, the extreme skew of the male attractiveness distribution and the asymmetry of the male-female mating strategies mean that even with some dedication to studying and practice of game, he’ll likely end up in an unfavorable position. But again, talking about this stuff in plainer and more concrete ways is hard to do without crossing the bounds that have repeatedly shown to be a trigger of discourse breakdown on LW.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
Re: looks, are we talking the “blonde = ditzy, glasses = geeky” level of stereotype? Or are you talking about the way someone’s mood, shyness, introversion, and so forth can be read from body language? Or something as straightforward as someone wearing a lot of makeup spent a lot of time on her appearance, and thus probably wants attention/cares what people think of her a lot?
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
One idea: we’ve had a thread on LW where people post their online dating profiles for feedback. I think it’d be an interesting game to post pictures of people, either ours or other random pictures, and see what kind of guesses we come up with about them based on clues from their appearance.
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
That depends on what exactly you’re aiming for. Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand. Clearly, you shouldn’t worry too much if it’s really just a throwaway relationship that will soon end one way or another. (Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation, and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
In fact, the situation has gotten significantly worse on LW in this regard since I started commenting here around two years ago. Back then, it seemed to me like discussions of these topics on LW might result in interesting insight whose worth would be greater than the trouble. However, ever since then, a string of ever worse and more cringe-worthy failures that occurred whenever these topics were opened has convinced me in the opposite.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum. (Though admittedly these days none are anywhere as good as what could be found during the heyday of the contrarian blogosphere some years ago.) I really don’t see any point in trying to open them in a forum like this one, which has conclusively shown to be a bad place for them.
It was the first thought I had. The association in my mind went something like
girl with lots of partners ---> girl is sexually awesome ---> female partners and group sex ---> if someone thinks having multiple partners is bad, is that bad?
No, I meant long term.
I am incredibly curious about your thoughts in these matters. You hint lots of things but don’t spell them out. I disagree with your assertions that LW’s gotten worse and is a bad place for these discussions, and I get that you don’t want to post them publicly on LW, but can you PM me? I promise to keep them private if you’d like.
The ones I’ve seen either a) take weird conservative positions, b) are filled with bitterness and hatred towards women, c) deteriorate into madonna/whore complexes, slut-shaming, and name calling, without much intelligent discussion or reasoning, or d) seem sane to me, but agree with my viewpoint on things.
Besides, I want to know what you think. You’re sane, reasonable, intelligent, and have a viewpoint that’s very different from mine, but seems like it might have a lot to offer. Please PM me. You’re giving me half of thoughts that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and can’t find on fora elsewhere, and I want the other half!
I don’t see how this stacks the deck.
Rather than counting things for or against the girl how about we frame it in terms of to what extent these new behaviors (female partners and group sex with you) also fit into the previously mentioned correlation cluster.
This is of course a more accurate and useful way of stating the problem in general terms.
The specific question still stands, though. Let’s say it’s true that a guy dating a girl who’s had many past partners will have certain problems, as VM suggests. Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
I would be rather surprised if this has been studied in the same way that the “sexual partners—divorce rate” correlations have been. That said, the second question seems to be equivalent to “does having group sex cause or correlate to lower expected duration of the pair bond”. An answer of “Yes, but it’s worth it!” seems plausible.
As for correlations between bulk female-female liaisons in the history of the female partner of a heterosexual pair bond and pair bond duration and level of social game required by the male partner—the only direct evidence I have been exposed to is in the form of anecdotal evidence from my own experience and that of reports. My prediction must be based primarily on what I know about human psychology in general—things like conservativeness and the ‘openness’ personality trait. The prediction I would give is “makes less difference than if all those liaisons were with males but still makes a difference in the same direction”.
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
(I might be joking now, but my jimmies are overall quite rustled with his entire soap opera; moreso when I consider how clear-headed and constructive he can be with simple and ideology-free comments.)
Based on the comments you’ve left so far in response to what I’ve been writing, I estimate a low probability that you are genuinely intrigued by what I might think about certain questions, and a much higher probability that you are baiting.
However, just in case the less probable hypothesis is true, I will for once respond to you. Namely, if you want me to talk about things that I’m reluctant to discuss because I’m not sure if it’s worth the controversy it will cause, then I’d first like to see that you’re making some effort to understand the arguments that I have already made on related topics. So far, I’ve seen zero indication of this, which makes it likely that you are indeed baiting.
Now, this may be a misunderstanding on my part, but honestly, I can hardly see how it might be so. Someone who is genuinely curious about my contrarian opinions would make some effort to respond intelligently to those comments where I have already discussed them, even if I’ve done it only in a cautious and indirect way. You, on the other hand, have shown absolutely no inclination to do so. Rather, you are behaving as if you are eager to get some juicy soundbites that would be a convenient target for attack. And you can’t possibly claim that my writings so far have been devoid of substance, since dozens of other people have evidently found enough substance in them to write well-thought-out responses.
......
Sorry, but I’m just stunned by such an interpretation. Okay, I’ll try to assess some of your more outstanding and upvoted comments as fairly as I can and respond to the best of my ability, if that’s what it takes to initiate a dialogue. I was, however, quite unaware that my remarks could’ve been taken to express any disrespect of your intelligence and epistemic virtue, or disregard for your viewpoints.
Indeed, if you take a look at the enormous thread that was LW’s response to my query in this fascinating direction, you’ll see that I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why). I honestly don’t understand why my desire to learn new perspectives, to consider their implications—and, yes, argue about them, but without aiming for their suppression or vilification of their holders—has now been met with such derision.
If you feel that the above is just so much self-congratulation and platitude, go ahead and tell me so, but, now at least, I really believe that I tried my best and sparked off valuable, constructive discussion with that post.
I’m interested. Why?
I’m trying to abstain from posting, but, in brief, I suspect it’s the same thing that prompted e.g. my (over)reaction to reading Three Worlds Collide, the infanticide thread by Bakkot and some other stuff here. When encountering strong arguments against some element of ordinary, mainstream, liberal commonsense ethics (alongside with guilt for hardly living up to those in the first place), I tend to feel morally imperiled, disgusted by aspects of my own character, unsure of my worth as a person and easy to turn to “evil”. I know how wild and unhealthy this sounds, but such things always appear so personal and not-abstract to me, I just can’t help it. Someone here once told me that this might be not unusual for people who perceive sociopathic tendencies within themselves and repress them; they view all such tricky problems through the prism of their own perceived moral deficiencies.
Sigh, I wish I could explain in a less obtuse manner.
Hmm. I think I understand. I’m the opposite in some ways: I get a wild thrill of excitement and happiness at “taboo” thoughts or ideas, and I’m biased towards them. I remember first discovering Holocaust revisionists and being amazingly awed at the daring and conviction and wrongness of what they were saying.
I don’t know what this says about my personality.
That said, I get somewhat annoyed at overly cynical or oversimplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as when people say that the educational system or the legal system is all about status signaling, or the PUA theory that everything is a test and it’s all about dominance and social value.
What “evil” bothers you the most? And what was your reaction to TWC? You can probably guess what mine was.
Naaaah, let’s just have Eliezer try to get Vlad’s ideas out of the box. :-)
Jokes aside, in a properly arranged duel this would probably work; when directly attempting to persuade his audience of something, Eliezer is among the most convincing writers I’ve ever read (I was similarly impressed by e.g. George Orwell and Hannah Arendt).
You had me convinced that Vladimir really was all talk and bluff until other links in recent comments lead me to some rather detailed explanations by Vladimir of his position.
I have an even stronger dislike than normal for cheap rhetoric when I realize that I have been taken in by it. All future anti-Vladimir_M claims by yourself will now be treated with extreme skepticism.
...maybe. Okay.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy, the point is the same—just by talking here. Maybe it’s all out of my league, and maybe I’m operating under a massive self-deception. I’ll take a couple days off LW at least and won’t think about the whole matter at all. Maybe I’ll have to take a longer break.
Without trying to condescend too much—Something to keep in mind when managing your own sense of adequacy and inclusion is that personal challenges are much more controversial (and likely to be challenged and counterattacked) than more straightforward positions. While direct challenges are sometimes appropriate it is almost always always more practical to avoid them unless you are already feeling entirely secure in your position and not especially vulnerable to potential disagreement.
The above applies both here and elsewhere and even when you are being entirely reasonable.
Well, he has expressed the reluctance to go into further specifics a few times.
He did rather play up the “it’s taboo” angle.
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
I have over 1500 karma as of today; I think 1100 ought to be enough.
I think the mailing list should be set up as invitation only, with some place where one can request an invitation. Then current members could look at their posts, and if the person has a lot of contributions and looks open-minded enough, they can be allowed on. There wouldn’t have to be a hard-and-fast karma cutoff if every new member was “previewed” and disruptive members could be banned easily.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members. The LW moderators and/or Lukeprog* is an obvious Schelling point, but they may not have the time or inclination. Conversely, I could probably figure out how to create a mailing list and would be willing to do so, but I don’t have the reputation here to be seen as a valid judge of who’s non-ideological enough to join.
*Lukeprog would presumably have a significant amount to post to such a list, and is widely respected by the community despite not having moderator powers.
Those are more literally correct, but the acronyms don’t work out as ironically.
Well, given that the idea is to create a place where certain norm-violating ideas can be discussed, it seems like the ones with veto power ought to be the ones who have come up with the idea but are reluctant to discuss it in public (I admit I’ve rather lost track of who this is, in this instance). If nothing else, the veto would be exercised by simply not discussing the topic.
“Contrarian Conspiracy for Correcting Politics”
“New Association for Apolitically Criticizing Politics”
“New Society for Discussing, Apolitically, Politics”
The problem with setting up such a society is that it’s about as secure as a house of cards. If I was a potential attacker, all I’d need to do would be,
Create a new account on Less Wrong (or just use my existing one if I was willing to burn it)
Act really open-minded and gain a lot of karma
Join the Contrarian Conspiracy
Archive all its messages for a few months, then publish them on Slashdot, 4chan, and the National Enquirer
In fact, the first three steps aren’t even necessary, if you assume that instead of being an outside attacker, I’m an internal member who’d gone rogue. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping a person like that.
Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.
One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.
I don’t see why hypothetical conspiratorial mailing list (HCML) identities and LW identities have to be linked at all, really.
The needed barriers to entry are basically taken care of in who gets invited in the first place. On the list itself I don’t actually see that strong a reason to even know which mail address is who, in fact since many people don’t really have all that recognisable a style this might work to improve rationality by breaking up existing sympathies and antipathies.
I saw it as a way of messing up the apparent signal-to-noise ratio for outside observers. However, if one were to wish to do so, there are probably better ways.
This is a good idea, but it does not guarantee security; and I’m not sure how effective it would be against a determined attacker. It would be relatively easy to collect a large enough corpus of text and then use it to match up “46233782482@gmail.com″ with “Bugmaster of LessWrong”. And, of course, this assumes that Google won’t roll over and surrender all of Mr. 46233782482′s contact information to the authorities when said authorities come knocking.
How determined an attacker are we planning for, here? The original goal was to just meliorate the damage that a theoretical rogue member could cause (as it seems hopeless to try to prevent that). Are you really anticipating “the authorities” getting involved?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way. On the other hand, our authorities have been getting quite jumpy lately; for example, merely having an Arabic-sounding last name is already enough for the FBI to attach a tracking device to your car. When you put the two factors together, it seems reasonable to expect said authorities to take an interest in the membership of the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Where on Earth did you read anything like that anywhere in my comments? Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
This, by the way, is another way in which expressing opinions about controversial and charged topics can be more dangerous than one might assume. Already in the second- or third-hand retelling, your opinion is not at all unlikely to be distorted and amplified into a caricatured soundbite that sounds far more crude and awful than anything you ever meant to say or actually said. If such things happen even on the “meta” level, what can one expect to happen when concrete topics are broached?
Ok, I tried doing just that right now, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thread at all at any capacity. So, firstly, I have to withdraw my comment for lack of evidence; my apologies. But secondly, can you offer some advice for navigating gigantic threads on Less Wrong ? For example, is there a way to search just a single thread for comments with certain keywords, or to flatten the thread, or something ?
Such a belief does not exist! Vladimir_M is a liar. A dirty, dirty liar!
(Prove me wrong? :P)
There’s no such thing as a hate-speech basilisk! Don’t be sill-
whisperwhisper
RAARGH DIE YOU FOUL HERETIC
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly, unless it is intended to force the assailant into a particularly dangerous form of confrontation.
There’s the Troll, obviously.
If only those were mythological!
Not exactly mythological, but SCP-053 springs to mind.
It could also work as a curse of the gods that keeps the poor soul forever hiding in fear for its life.
Ahh, good idea. That has almost certainly come up in mythology somewhere.
The first thing that comes to mind is a bit of a stretch, but:
(From Genesis 4.)
So, the curse doesn’t directly cause anyone to attack him, but it does indirectly create a situation in which Cain has to expose himself to attackers. Of course, this version of the curse lasts for all of one verse; in the next, God revises it into the Mark of Cain, which is perhaps even more cruel than the original curse.
This would be a mistake analogous to the mind projection fallacy. I do not so understand.
Trivial inconvenience to protect against a trivial danger.
I find the scenario very low probability if high impact.
This might be useful.
I like this idea, but since I have very little karma, I would be a bit sad to see it happen. Could an email list be contrived in such a way that users with lower karma could read the correspondences of the group without having the ability to post messages? If possible, it seems like that would maintain the integrity of discussion while also allowing interested parties to learn new things.
If you don’t have a lot of karma, and the requisite posting history of being nonpartisan, how could the Conspirators trust you not to spread around the Deep Dark Secrets that would give the site a bad reputation?
(If I seem to be giving off mixed signals, it’s because I’m not sure how I feel about this idea myself yet. I’m having a really hard time imagining what could be somehow so beyond the pale as to be impossible to allude to in public.)
Good question. I don’t have an answer, but I guess there could be tiers? Like, if a person* has a couple hundred karma, has been active on the site for a while, and has conducted him/herself well then that person could receive low level access. With the concern you brought up it’s hard to choose criteria that would make a user trustworthy but that wouldn’t warrant just letting them in completely. I guess I would advocate less stringent requirements. Like, nobody with negative karma and to be accepted you need to have been on the site for x amount of time and have been polite/non-inflammatory/thoughtful in all previous discussions. If a person has low karma because they rarely comment, they likely won’t post much in the email list anyway.
If we need a way to find out if someone’s trustworthy, can’t we just ask them to raise their right hand?
*This hypothetical person happens to be me.
You’d have to ask the people who know what’s going on and why it should be kept secret.
(I am not one of them.)
To take an attested example, discussion of the beliefs and tactics of the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community was either heavily discouraged or banned, I forget which, because of the unpleasant air it seemed to give to this site.
I’m lost. Isn’t that exactly what started this discussion upthread?
That is not really discussion about PUA, but rather about what is problematic about discussing PUA.
Except, you know. It’s being alluded to in public. So it doesn’t seem to qualify.
Apolitical Conspiracy could be abbreviated as APC, a vehicle useful to well-resourced partisans who want to decide when and where to engage without resorting to sneaking about dressed as civilians.
I’d like to request an invite, if this is still a thing.
The comment sections on iSteve and Roissy are not great places either.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
From I Don’t Know:
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
I didn’t see myself as responding to his point, just to yours.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
Indeed, that’s my point.
Observe, however the comment section of certain horribly non PC blogs. By and large. they are very smart, and remarkably well informed. Censorship is never necessary, whereas in more politically correct environments, censorship is essential, because when non PC views are spoken, commenters take it upon themselves to silence the heretic by any means necessary, disrupting communication.
If the blog owner posts fairly heretical views, and himself refrains from censoring or intemperately and rudely attacking views in the comments that are even more heretical than his own, then no one in the comments intemperately or rudely attacks any views that anyone expresses in the comments or on the blog.
The blog owner can say that left wing views are held by fools and scoundrels, but because left wing views are high prestige, a left commenter will not be called a fool and a scoundrel. If the blog owner refrains from saying that views more right wing than his own are held by fools and scoundrels, then commenters with views more right wing than his own will not be called fools and scoundrels in the comments.
Because right wing views are low prestige, it requires only the slightest encouragement from the blog owner to produce a dog fight in the comments, should someone further right than the blog owner comment, but not so easy to produce a dog fight when someone lefter than the blog owner comments.
You have to be kidding, you can’t really believe that. Either that or I haven’t ever read a PC free blog.
This was previously discussed here. Right now, it’s sounding like whatever (if anything) comes out of this will fail by being overly inclusive. My guess is that if this sort of thing ends up working well, it will be because some small group of people who happen to have good taste end up making decisions on a “trust me” basis, rather than because LessWrong as a community successfully applies some attempt at a transparently fair algorithm.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn’t find, but here is a discussion on it.
What I think we’re in danger of forgetting is that, anywhere but Less Wrong, “That’s offensive!” is actually a really persuasive argument. People who blithely ignore even the strongest of evidence will often shut up and look stupid if you successfully play the offense card. PC arguments may be so commonly heard, not because they are the “best” (most valid) arguments that could be made in support of a given assertion, but because they totally work.
If someone says, with no factual basis at all, that members of Group X murder children, piles and piles of evidence may not be enough to make the claim go away, but if you can convince people that to say so is offensive and Anti-X, you’re home free. So why bother presenting the evidence?
“You’re wrong” implies “you’re a liar,” or a more direct response could be “that’s a lie.” If the goal is to make someone look stupid, this can work better. Admittedly that’s not always a major goal, cases won’t overlap, etc.
But I think we do see people make fact-citing arguments that are delivered in the tone of “that’s offensive”, so the methods aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, any argument beginning “There is no scientific evidence that...” in an appropriately shrill tone sends the message that offense is taken and sidesteps the logical evidence to highlight the strongest available evidence, the absence of scientific evidence.
Even if the offense argument is explicit, factual arguments could at least be added to it.
Do you mean Paul Graham’s What you can’t say?
Yes. To gwern (verb) it, to reconstruct it from quotes according to the Pareto principle:
Add “politically correct” to the set of possible x and y and we are in agreement. This was the point of my original comment on the matter.
Saying things violate Paul Grahm’s principle isn’t used here to dismiss ideas, only to, as you said, put the burden of proof on them as being prima facie false. I don’t think that “heretical” was quite the same way, nor are “racist” and “fascist”, etc.
I would never say “prima facie proves” so maybe we are using some words to express very different concepts.
This may be evidence that the critics fear that, but it isn’t always the case. Sometimes they just think that there can be damage if people are mislead by the falsehoods for example.
Sure, it’s not always the case. But if I just think that there can be damage if people are misled by a falsehood, I will probably claim it’s false, and argue for that point.
This isn’t really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn’t stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
How do people respond to the claims? I acknowledge that any response other than just “that’s false” de-emphasizes the falsity of it, but if the response is “That’s a lie and illegal,” that’s a different sort of thing to say than “That’s classist,” or the like for other claims. If people respond with “The powerful Jews will lock you up for saying such a thing, by the way I think it’s 15% likely true,” then that’s an interesting case too, one that isn’t a counterexample.
In one sense legal coercion is at the far end of a single scale from mild disapproval to ostracization to illegalization,but in another sense it is qualitatively different. A country within which saying something is illegal might have most endorse the illegal idea, or most oppose it by simply calling it “false”, or most oppose it by emphasizing its illegality and somewhat mentioning its illegality, etc., or no majority of any type. What’s important here is the social climate around the statements, for which the laws on the books are important evidence but alone don’t make an example or counterexample of a country.
Yes, this is the precise complaint! To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe, one so beloved of tabloid hacks that practically any right of centre* talking point can be described as politically incorrect (“you can’t say [thing I’m saying right now on prime-time television] any more” and so on).
Why declarations of politically incorrectness are taken any more seriously than claims to be totally mad/random or the life of the party I shall never know.
*am I being, ah what’s the equivalent here—unserious perhaps? populist? - if I suggest that this trick is mostly limited to the right? That political correctness just means any non-socialist leftwing opinion, with the added implication that the opinion is both hegemonic and baseless. When left wing commentators trip over themselves to avoid criticising america or soldiers, or rush to condemn protests at the first sign of a black mask, nobody talks about political correctness. Despite all the talk about how OWS has made it acceptable to moral issues in ways that were previously beyond the pale, nobody calls it an anti-PC movement.
Perhaps we should have a separate term to describe this phenomenon, if we are going to keep going on about political correctness, and pretending we aren’t talking about politics? Since otherwise we reach a point where commentators are unable to call people fascists, for being so PC is decidedly politically incorrect.
First, politically correct arguments are obviously a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
Second, that conflates levels.
People don’t randomly decide which arguments to give justifying their statements and actions, they tend to give the strongest ones they have available. Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments. The argument that an argument is politically correct is a non-truth-citing argument. Non-truth-citing arguments are generally weaker than truth-citing arguments.
See here. If someone presents a NTC argument, I infer they don’t have a TCA unless there are extenuating circumstances such that I think that they would have presented a NTCA even when they had a TCA.
Likewise when someone’s presents a TCA, one can infer, all else being equal, that they don’t have a much more compelling one available. Even weak TCAs ought to lower one’s degree of belief something is true when they are presented by someone who probably would have used a better argument had it been available, even though the argument is a valid and novel one, and one had expected the arguments for the position to be better.
Imagine you are watching two people. The first makes a claim about a subject with which you aren’t familiar. At that point, you assign it a certain credibility. The second objects with a NTCA. At that point, you should think the claim more likely than before because the best objection the second person could make was weak and your original estimate had expected them to do better. If the first person objects to the objection with a NTCA, then you should think the claim less likely than at the second point, because the best counterobjection the first person could make was weak and your estimate at the second point in time had expected them to do better.
That “To frame an argument as politically incorrect” is an argument roughly as bad as a politically correct argument does not salvage politically correct arguments.
So, I think I have a reasonable sense of what people mean when they say an argument, or an assertion, is politlcally incorrect. Reading this, though, I begin to suspect that I have no idea what you mean when you say an argument is politically correct.
Ordinarily, I don’t hear that term used to describe arguments at all, I hear it used to describe people who object to politically incorrect arguments… or who object to arguments on the grounds that they are politically incorrect.
Among other things, I can’t tell if you intend for “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” to be jointly exhaustive terms, or whether there’s a middle ground between them. If the latter, I think I agree with most of what you say here, though I’m not sure how many real-world arguments it applies to.
I mean an argument with a few characteristics:
Arguments that are politically correct are non-truth-citing arguments.
For example, they don’t take the form “It’s not true that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants.” They take the form “It’s insensitive to say that all violent rapes in the city were perpetrated by immigrants.”
They are a subset of arguments for conclusions that are the same as those reached by politically correct arguments.
For example, “We’ve done experiments, and the results suggest no difference in intelligence between Koreans and Chinese, controlling for other factors, there are probably no measurable differences between the groups” is not a PC argument, because it appeals to truth. “The assumption that Koreans are smarter than Chinese is racist, if you properly controlled for environmental differences, there would be no measured difference between the groups,” has a very similar conclusion, and is a PC argument. It’s not the argument’s conclusion that makes it PC or not.
Not all non-truth-citing arguments are PC ones.
For example, arguing that something is wrong because “A Muslim said it” is obviously neither truth citing nor PC. PC arguments are those that are rationalizations for a particular set of conclusions.
Truth-citing and non-truth-citing are just poles of a range. Arguments such as evolutionary debunking arguments attempt to show a loose relationship between a proposition and the truth—loose, neither tight nor non-existent.
Unlike PC arguments, PI arguments are just those with conclusions or implicit assumptions targeted by PC arguments. Mercy said “To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe...” this is largely true. The framing corresponds to a certain degree with reality in each case.
Positions for which the best argument is “My opponent’s arguments is PC,” are weak. This weakness is because the accusation that the argument is a rationalization for a predetermined conclusion, i.e. that it is a PC argument, does not attack the conclusion directly. The accusation is a form of evolutionary debunking argument, and weakens the evidence brought for the conclusion without destroying the evdence and without attacking the conclusion. The accusation is weak in a way similar to all PC arguments.
Mercy went wrong in thinking that because calling out arguments as being PC and thus not tightly bound to truth of their conclusions does not address the conclusions either, arguments’ actual status as PC arguments is unimportant.
The reason to especially doubt arguments usually supported by the argument “This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument,” is that valid arguments with true premises and conclusions can usually do better. There is an excuse to say “This argument is rejected because it is a politically incorrect argument,” so long as one has prioritized better arguments, or if it is to explain rather than argue for something, e.g. to explain why someone was fired but not why the statement that person was fired for is true.
(nods) OK, I see what you’re getting at, at least generally. Thanks for the clarification.
One thing...
This would make significantly more sense to me if it said “incorrect.” Was that a typo, or am I confused?
What does this mean?
I believe a “discuss” (or synonym thereof) was omitted between “a” and “moral.”
Your question rests on an assumption that obscurantism must decrease information, but I see that assumption as incorrect. In fact, under this assumption I should never regard anything said to me as obscurantist, as it should never decrease the amount of information available to me.
Wikipedia defines “obscurantism” as “the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known”, and it seems to fit the bill. Of course, it may be useful or beneficial species of obscurantism, though I agree with Prismatic that it is not.
The situation as you describe it seems pre-biased by postulating that the mainstream view is dubious. This may be obvious to you, but to me, the person who’s faced with the “hints” as described, it is not—if it were, I shouldn’t need the hints to begin with. I think it’s incorrect to condition on the dubiousness of the mainstream view. If I am to decide on how to best to take into account hints of that nature, the possibility that the mainstream view is correct after all, and the hint entirely specious, should not be disregarded. In fact, in real-life situations where such hints are offered, this may be the more frequent scenario.
The hint that says “this view is incorrect, but I will not explain why, for doing that will violate a social norm” is annoying and distracting; it engages my attention, bringing no real evidence for its claims. Because it posits a mystery, I’m likely to err on the side of giving it more attention than it deserves. The benefit is that it may cause me to investigate the view more thoroughly than I would otherwise have, and realize it is incorrect. If I precommit to ignoring such signals, I will miss some chances of that, and I will also avoid giving my attention, and more closely investigating, all those views that are correct after all, and where the signal was specious. The bargain may well be worth it.
What makes obscurantism a relevant category is that certain ways of withholding information and intentional abstruseness can be very effective for misleading people and producing convictions without evidence. In LW parlance, it is a particular kind of Dark Arts. Now, of course, it makes no sense to debate definitions when there is a true disagreement about them, but I think it shouldn’t be controversial to insist that the normal meaning of “obscurantism” involves this Dark Arts element. In other words, it involves withholding information with the intent to mislead and produce mistaken or unsubstantiated beliefs, and it cannot be applied to every act of withholding information intentionally.
I do think the Wikipedia definition you quoted is unreasonably overbroad, considering the standard usage of the word. It would cover all sorts of completely honest, reasonable, and non-misleading acts of communication where one chooses to limit the amount of information given—for example, saying that you got a new job but not disclosing the salary, or writing blog comments under a pseudonym.
It is not true that it brings no significant evidence, if the source of the hint is someone about whom you have other information—and information about the intellectual abilities, knowledge, and likely biases of frequent commenters is easy to get in a forum like this one (if you don’t in fact have it already). And you can always simply ignore such hits if you believe you have insufficient information, or you don’t feel like looking for it, the way you presumably ignore any other comments that are not of interest to you.
Also, I note that your complaint here doesn’t state that these hits are misleading and apt to trigger biases leading to incorrect beliefs, so you must indeed be working with the broadest possible (and I would say overbroad) definition of “obscurantism.”
It may indeed—but why precommit unconditionally, without considering the source of these signals?
Not technically true. It is possible to make a perfectly rational mind produce worse predictions about the world by providing it with selected information. This relies on it having insufficient information about your obscuring tendencies or motives. The new probabilities that the rational agent has will necessarily be a subjectively objective improvement but can still produce worse predictions of the relevant aspects of the world in an objective sense.
You’re right, of course. I edited away that part, which is not relevant for the main point anyway.
What is obscurantist exactly? What I said is perfectly clear, if you look at the context of the two preceding posts.
No particular claim about male-female relations was intended (although if you want to know I endorse Roissy’s view of male-female relations, if not his value-set); I was objecting to the idea that “mindkilling” should be redefined as “saying things likely to offend mainstream sensibilities”. Mindkilling refers to the effect of political content on human reasoning powers in general, and the suggested redefinition struck me as Orwellian.
It is not your post that I think is obscurantist. I was commenting on the undesirability of posts that presuppose option 2 has been selected and proceed to imply that the mainstream view is false without actually making explict what alternative is being proposed.
I think the alpha-beta classification is excessively reductive. I would say that I am fairly physically intimidating to a majority of other males, but this doesn’t translate into automatic adoration by nearby females.
After diligently reading through most of Vladimir_M’s comment history, I have no option but to express my fervent agreement. I’ve always had a great dislike of vague hints, but the style in which he does those is just fucking unbearable.
I don’t know why you addressed this to me, because I was merely trying (possibly failing) to resolve Vladimir_M and Konkvistador’s disagreement. Redefining “mindkilling” to mean “dissent” is Orwellian and deserves comment. Or perhaps you think that the mainstream is the truth by definition?
An acknowledgement that something can’t be said because of decency implies that practical and true things could be said in the absence of decency.
This is indeed a real concern. But I would say that a sentence like :
Would have a positive effect on Lesswrong.
The point I was making is that “mindkillers”, under its original definition, refers to political content in general. If someone writes about male-female relations and excludes “politically offensive” material, this does not mean that their article has no political content. It just means that it is the mainstream political line!
In the Soviet Union, Mendelism might have been considered indecent. On the Soviet rationalist forum, Lysenkoist articles might have a caveat attached that political indecency is omitted. Nonetheless it is hardly fair to say that the Mendelism is a mindkiller and Lysenkoism is not in this context—the label “mindkilling” properly applies to the subject of heredity in general, given that it is politically controversial in this scenario.
Likewise if there is political sensitivity involved in the subject of male-female relations, then the subject in general is a mindkiller. The mainstream line is no less “mindkilling” than the dissenting position—it just happens to enjoy hegemony.
The distinction is that mindkilling argument can be avoided if dissent from the mainstream line is taboo; but this does not imply that dissent is mindkilling and mainstream views are not—mindkilling is a property of ideologically controversial subjects in general.
You may wonder why I am arguing about definitions: there is a taboo against mindkilling arguments, and a rational recommendation that politics is the mindkiller and therefore something to be regarded warily. If mindkilling is subtly redefined to mean dissent, people might grow to believe that it is dissent that is the mindkiller, not subjects of political controversy in general, and they should therefore steer clear of it. That is Orwellian (although I don’t mean to suggest that your intentions are bad).
Ah I finally clearly see your objection now. I misused the term “mindkiller” in a way that suggested that the “indecent” explanation was the mindkilling one rather than the field or subject itself.
Indeed something like this could happen if people where not careful with the usage.
Yes you are right, a different formulation needs to be found otherwise my arguments for why such a situation might be better than pure taboo is mostly invalid in the long run.
I wanted something like: “This is as far as I will go in this contribution on the subject on LessWrong for the sake of the community, but it is by no means the full rationalist approach, if anyone wants to discuss this in private or research it on their own and I would in fact encourage this/there is nothing wrong with that. This subject is pretty mindkilling and so these precautions are needed.”
The point I was making is that “mindkillers”, under its original definition, refers to political content in general. If someone writes about male-female relations and excludes politically touchy material, this does not mean that their article has no political content.
If there is political sensitivity involved in the subject of male-female relations, then the subject in general is a mindkiller. The mainstream line is no less “mindkilling” than the dissenting position—it just happens to enjoy hegemony.
The distinction is that mindkilling argument can be avoided if dissent from the mainstream line is taboo; but this does not imply that dissent is mindkilling and mainstream views are not—mindkilling is a property of ideologically controversial subjects in general.
You may wonder why I am arguing about definitions: there is a taboo against mindkilling arguments. If mindkilling is subtly redefined to mean dissent, people might grow to believe that it is dissent that is the mindkiller, not subjects of political relevance in general. That is Orwellian (although I don’t mean to suggest that your intentions are bad).
.
Many modern PC beliefs about women first showed up in Victorian times, which beliefs were I to mention them would be get me as down voted now as much as they would get a Victorian gentlemen in trouble.
Before Victorian times, pretty much everyone agreed with the position taken by Chateau Heartiste—that the alarmingly powerful, reckless, irresponsible, and immoral sexual urges of women, unless restrained, would destroy civilization.
Women’s motives are generally purer than men’s. Women are much more often good mothers than men are good fathers. Women are nearly always more interested in committed relationships than just sex with the most attractive male. Women should be held much less accountable for their criminal and unscrupulous actions than men. Women are always the victims never the abusers. Women do not lie about rape. Women are overwhelmingly sexually attracted to virtuous men (noticeable echo’s of Calvinism in this). A woman’s complaints and grievances are generally reasonable, while a man’s are generally not. Women’s sexual instincts are benign to society while men’s sexual instincts are malign. Women are more altruistic and fair than men. ect.
Most of this is obviously bunk and most of this is also obviously implicitly accepted though it may be denied.
And Sam, I don’t think I will get down voted for stating this.
In practice however if I wasn’t very careful when challenging a argument that implicitly rested on two or more of the above as an axiom I might get down voted on LW (but less so than many other places).
That follows the pattern of a clever way of phrasing arguments such that they can be interpreted as either tautologies or meaning something stupid. It’s more insidious than just unambiguously stupid arguments.
To be fair, they thought that everyone’s unrestrained sexual urges would destroy civilization.
A solution might be to make a sort of subforum for mindkilling topics, and associating them with some karma cost. Doesn’t eliminate the mindkilling aspect, but hopefully makes it so that people with low karmas are kept out, which is hopefully correlated with some minimal rational ability.
Or maybe not. Holding off on that sort of thing is sometimes a good idea.
NOT discussing the moral implications here, but I saw this study and found it relevant. One of the arguments re: PUA is that there have been no scientific studies as to whether it works or not. Apparently, that isnt true. Here is a link to an article about a study that shows that a light non-sexual touch (what the PUA folks would call “kino”) ups the chances that a woman will give you her phone number.
The relevant part is #7 “Touch for a Date”. Excerpt:
I can’t access the full text of the actual study, but maybe some of the university students here can read and summarize.
“Indeed, most young people today no longer go on ‘dates’ to get to know a potential partner. Instead, they meet each other at a social event, ‘hook up’, and then go on dates (if the hookup went well).4”
Can you provide more back up on the “most” here? I tried to find more information, and while I could only locate reviews of the Bogle book online, none of them even mentioned any numbers. However they did make it sound like Bogle did not get a representative sample of “young people today.” If there is not sufficient empirical back up to say ” most,” you might instead say “many” or “a growing portion.”
Changed to ‘many’.
Lukeprog, you have produced exactly that which we have been warned against: an article and a paradigm which has all the appearances and dressings of rationality (lots of citations, links to articles on decision theory, rationalist lingo), but which spectacularly fails to actually pursue the truth.
Vladimir_M puts it better than I could:
he continues:
And finally:
Yvain is also on point:
In three worlds collide, we were introduced to the “Order of Silent Confessors”, which is “charged with guarding sanity, not morality”. In this post especially, I feel that sanity is lying beaten and abused on the floor. I think we need the “Order of Silent Confessors” now.
As a start, Lukeprog, I think you should include the exerpts by vladimir_M and Yvain above in your article.
Thank you for the positive mention, but I’m afraid I disagree with your model of me. Luke is a far braver man than I to even enter this minefield; I won’t condemn him for not dancing a merry jig on top of it too.
Luke originally tried to write an article referring to PUA. People told him this was controversial, not just among ignorant people but among long-time readers of this site, that it had always led to unpleasant flame wars in the past, and that it was making us look bad “abroad”.
Now he seems to be writing more or less the same thing, but communicating it in a less offensive way. I don’t fault him for leaving anything out yet because it’s only been one post in a series. I don’t think anything he wrote is actually false (well, I have issues with the ‘Mean and Variance’ section, but he retracted the meat of that). And I think he made the right decision in trying to pitch it to a wider audience.
He’s not entering a minefield so much as dragging it back to his village.
Yes, I would also like to congratulate Lukeprog for caving in to social pressure and posting information which is deliberately misleading. I am sure that all the (male) people who read this article, and start using his politically correct nonsense to improve their dating lives will really appreciate it too! (As for female dating advice, I don’t know what I am talking about, so I will shut up)
Since the advice given in the article is actively harmful, a better solution would be for Lukeprog to just tell people to google pick up. That way, nobody could flame him on LW, and he wouldn’t be spreading actively harmful information.
he is telling people to display “agreeableness”—pretty much the opposite of PUA advice, he is telling you to “like” others—a dangerous piece of advice which could quickly turn into desperate, supplicative behavior, complimenting, etc. He is emphasizing physical looks over dominance and alpha-male behavior, again the opposite of PUA advice.
I will edit my comment to take account of what you said.
Your point about agreeableness is well taken, so I looked up his reference, Figueredo et al. (2006).
First, keep in mind he’s using agreeableness in the OCEAN sense, not in the sense of “a person who always agrees to everything”. So it’s not diametrically opposed to PUA belief, although I agree there’s still a problem that has to be explained.
That brings us to the reference. Figueredo’s study itself found no impact of agreeableness, but in the introduction, it cites eight previous studies that it said found “extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are reliably correlated with mating success”. I looked up one of these studies, and it was on the success of long-term marital relationships, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the PUA’s usual focus. So depending on the other seven studies I didn’t have the energy to look up, they could both be right. It would have been nice if Luke had qualified that in his post, but really the fault was on Figueredo and not him.
Other than that, I would honestly like to hear what advice of Luke’s you consider misleading. Again aside from the “Mean and Variance” section, it all seems pretty well referenced and backed up.
I would consider the article misleading in the sense that “Women like alpha males, men like beautiful women” is the central truth of dating, in the same sense that evolution is the central truth of biology.
A creationist pamphlet which briefly mentioned a watered-down version of evolution—such as “microevolution”- in small print on page 7 is seriously misleading a student. Likewise, this article briefly mentions status, but then gives a lot of contradictory tips about being “agreeable” and “liking her”, both of which are low-status behaviours, all in amongst a morass of irrelevant, non-field-tested nonsense.
Academics who write papers on dating “science” are simply not in the same kind of tight feedback relationship with reality that pickup artists are, so they produce a collection of half truths and irrelevant effects, as well as missing out the most important aspects of the game. So the fact that he has referenced this stuff is pretty useless. Far better to take a look at what others who have tried stuff have found. The PU community can be thought of as a giant social psychology experiment, except without the arbitrary restrictions of academic science. Mystery is rumoured to have done 10,000 cold approaches and sexed 200-300 women. All the way from meet to penis-in-vagina, with a sample size of 10,000. Then multiply that by all the hundreds of highly successful PU artists. Compare that to a social science experiment which has a small sample size (~30) and only looks at one aspect of relationships and dating, and probably looks at correlations rather than causation. By the way, props for actually pursuing these references. It is a shame that this is hard and tiring to do.
I’m confused—you seem to take it as a given that PUA techniques are the only/best tool for pursuing the many forms of relationship mentioned in the article. I’m by no means an expert, but I’d be surprised if PUA worked as well for, say, a woman trying to extend her list of partners with a man with a shared interest in classical music. (Quickly glancing at some lists, “get out there and meet people” seems to be good advice; but quickly approaching lots of partners may not work well in this case.)
Isn’t it possible that the broader scope of this article justifies de-emphasizing pickup artistry? Even if you don’t think that PUA should be avoided for its mind-killing properties, shouldn’t we at least give lukeprog the benefit of the doubt? If nothing else, there may be follow-up articles dealing with this.
I didn’t say that, let me explicitly disclaim: PU works for hetero men who want to have relationships of any kind with attractive hetero/bi women.
If you are female and looking to have more success dating guys, then I make no claim to be an expert or give advice.
I should disclose immediately that I am one of the people who find the PUA community distasteful on a variety of levels, intellectual and ethical, and this may colour my viewpoint.
The PUA community may present themselves, and think of themselves, as a “disreputable source of accurate information” but in the absence of controlled trials I don’t think the claim to accuracy is well-founded. Sticking strictly to the scientific literature is not so much ignoring the elephant in the room as suspending judgment as to whether the elephant exists until we can turn the lights on.
If it’s been said already I apologise, but it seems obvious to me that an ethical rationalist’s goals in relationship-seeking should be to seek a relationship that creates maximal utility for both parties, and that scientific evidence about how to find suitable partners and behave in the relationship so as to maximise utility for both partners is a great potential source of human happiness. It’s obvious from even the briefest perusal of PUA texts that the PUA community are concerned very much with maximising their own utility and talking down the status of male outgroup members and women in general, but not with honestly seeking means to maximise the utility of all stakeholders.
Given that their methodology is incompatible with scientific reasoning and their attitudes incompatible with maximising global utility for all sentient stakeholders, I think it’s quite correct to leave their claims out of a LW analysis of human sexual relationships.
They write stuff on their version of ArXiv (called pick-up forums) then they go out and try it, and if it works repeatably it is incorporated into PU-lore.
What definition of science did you have in mind that this doesn’t fit?
There are a significant number of methodological problems with their evidence-gathering.
PUAs don’t change just one variable at a time, nor do they keep strict track of what they change and when so they can do a multivariate regression analysis. Instead they change lots of variables at once. A PUA would advocate that a “beta” change their clothes, scent, social environment(s), social signalling strategies and so forth all at once and see if their sexual success rate changed. However if this works you don’t know which changes did what.
The people doing the observation are the same people conducting the experiment which is obviously incompatible with proper blinding.
The people reporting the data stand to gain social status in the PUA hierarchy if they report success, and hence have an incentive to misreport their actual data. When a PUA reports that they successfully obtained coitus on one out of six attempts using a given methodology it is reasonable to suspect that some such reports come from people who actually took sixteen attempts, or from people who failed to obtain coitus given sixteen attempts and went home to angrily masturbate and then post on a PUA forum that they had obtained success. We can’t tell what the real success rate is without observing PUAs in the wild.
Even assuming honest reporting it seems intuitively likely that PUAs, like believers in psychic powers, are prone to reporting their hits and forgetting their misses. It’s a known human trait to massage our internal data this way and barring rigorous methodological safeguards it’s a safe assumption that this will bias any reported results.
There’s no comparison with a relevant base rate, which is a classic example of the base rate fallacy in action. We don’t know what the success rate for a well-groomed, well-spoken person who does not employ PUA social signalling tactics is compared with a similarly groomed and comported person using PUA social signalling tactics, for example.
A successful PUA was mentioned as having obtained coitus ~300 times out of ~10 000 approaches. That’s useless unless we know what success rate other methodologies would have produced. In any case people aren’t naturally such good statisticians that they can detect variations in frequency in a phenomenon that occurs one time in 33 at best with a sample size for a given experiment in the tens at most.
PUA mythology seems to me to have built-in safeguards against falsifiability. If a woman rejects a PUA then it can be explained away as her being “entitled” or “conflicted” or something similar. If a woman chooses a “beta” over a PUA then it can be explained away in similar terms or by saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she is worthy of an “alpha”, and/or postulating that if an “alpha” came along she would of course engage in an extra-marital affair with the “alpha”. As long as the PUAs are obtaining sex some of the time, or are claiming they are doing so, their theories aren’t falsifiable.
We shouldn’t trust a PUA’s reported opinion about their ability to obtain sex more often than chance any more than we should trust a claimed psychic’s reported opinion about their ability to predict the future more often than chance. Obviously our prior probability that they are reporting true facts about the universe should be higher for the PUA since their claims do not break the laws of physics, but their testimony should not give us strong reason to shift our prior.
You’re assuming that there’s no feedback other than a single yes/no bit per approach.
Note that this may be a feature, not a bug: a PUA with unwavering belief in their method will likely exude more confidence, regardless of the method employed.
I remember one pickup guru describing how when he was younger, he’d found this poem online that was supposed to be the perfect pickup line… and the first few times he used it, it was, because he utterly believed it would work. Later, he had to find other methods that allowed him to have a similar level of belief.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on LW, belief causes people to act differently—often in ways that would be difficult or impossible to convincingly fake if you lacked the belief. (e.g. microexpressions, muscle tension, and similar cues)
To put it another way, even the falsifiability of PUA theory is subject to testing: i.e., do falsifiable PUA theories work better or worse than unfalsifiable ones? If unfalsifiable ones produce better results, then it’s a feature, not a bug. ;-)
Only in the same sense that the placebo effect is a “feature” of evidence-based medicine.
It’s okay if evidence-based medicine gets a tiny, tiny additional boost from the placebo effect. It’s good, in fact.
However when we are trying to figure out whether or not a treatment works we have to be absolutely sure we have ruled out the placebo effect as the causative factor. If we don’t do that then we can never find out which are the good treatments that have a real effect plus a placebo effect, and which are the fake treatments that only have a placebo effect.
Only if it turned out that method absolutely, totally did not matter and only confidence in the method mattered would it be rational to abandon the search for the truth and settle for belief in an unfalsifiable confidence-booster. It seems far more likely to me that there will in fact be approach methods that work better than others, and that only by disentangling the confounding factor of confidence from the real effect could you figure out what the real effect was and how strong it was.
This really, really underestimates the number of confounding factors. For any given man, the useful piece of information is what method will work for him, for women that:
Would be happy with him, and
He would be happy with
(Where “with” is defined as whatever sort of relationship both are happy with.)
This is a lot of confounding factors, and it’s pretty central to the tradeoff described in this post: do you go for something that’s inoffensive to lots of people, but not very attractive to anyone, or something that’s actually offensive to most people, but very attractive to your target audience?
You can’t do group randomized controls with something where individuality actually does count.
This is especially true of PUA advice like, “be in the moment” and “say something that amuses you”. How would you test these bits of advice, for example, while holding all other variables unchanged? By their very definition, they’re going to produce different behavior virtually every time you act on them.
There are two classes of claim here we need to divide up, but they share a common problem. First the classes, then the problem.
The first class is claims that are simply unfalsifiable. If there is no way even in theory that a proposition could be confirmed or falsified then that proposition is simply vacuous. There is nothing to say about it except that rational agents should discard the claim as meaningless and move on. If any element of PUA doctrine falls into this category then for LW purposes we should simply flag it as unfalsifiable and move on.
The second class is claims that are hard to prove or disprove because there are multiple confounding factors, but which with proper controls and a sufficiently large sample size we could in theory confirm or disconfirm. If a moderate amount of cologne works better than none at all or a large amount of cologne, for example, then if we got enough men to approach enough women then eventually if there’s a real effect we should be able to get a data pool that shows statistical significance despite those confounding effects.
The common problem both classes of claims have is that a rationalist is immediately going to ask someone who proposes such a claim “How do you think you know this?”. If a given claim is terribly difficult to confirm or disconfirm, and nobody has yet done the arduous legwork to check it, it’s very hard to see how a rational agent could think it is true or false. The same goes except more strongly for unfalsifiable claims.
For a PUA to argue that X is true, but that X is impossible to prove, is to open themselves up to the response “How do you know that, if it’s impossible to prove?”.
Sure… as long as you separate predictions from theory. When you reduce a PUA theory to what behaviors you expect someone believing that theory would produce, or what behaviors, if successful, would result in people believing such theories, you then have something suitable for testing, even if the theory is nonsensical on its face.
Lots of people believe in “The Secret” because it appears to produce results, despite the theory being utter garbage. But then, it turns out that some of what’s said is consistent with what actually makes people “luckier”… so there was a falsifiable prediction after all, buried under the nonsense.
If a group of people claim to produce results, then reduce their theory to more concrete predictions first, then test that. After all, if you discard alchemy because the theory is bunk, you miss the chance to discover chemistry.
Or, in more LW-ish speak: theories are not evidence, but even biased reports of actual experience are evidence of something. A Bayesian reductionist should be able to reduce even the craziest “woo” into some sort of useful probabilistic information… and there’s a substantial body of PUA material that’s considerably less “woo” than the average self-help book.
In the simplest form, this reduction could be just: person A claims that they were unsuccessful with women prior to adopting some set of PUA-trained behaviors. If the individual has numbers (even if somewhat imprecise) and there are a large number of people similar to person A, then this represents usable Bayesian evidence for that set of behaviors (or the training itself) being useful to persons with similar needs and desires as person A.
This is perfectly usable evidence that doesn’t require us to address the theory or its falsifiability at all.
Now, it is not necessarily evidence for the validity of person A’s favorite PUA theory!
Rather, it is evidence that something person A did differently was helpful for person A… and it remains an open question to determine what actually caused the improvement. For example, could it simply be that receiving PUA training somehow changes people? That it motivates them to approach women repeatedly, resulting in more confidence and familiarity with approaching women? Any number of other possible factors?
In other words, the actual theory put forth by the PUAs doing the teaching shouldn’t necessarily be at the top of the list of possibilities to investigate, even if the teaching clearly produces results...
And using theory-validity as a screening method for practical advice is pretty much useless, if you have “something to protect” (in LW speak). That is, if you need a method that works in an area where science is not yet settled, you cannot afford to discard practical advice on the basis of questionable theory: you will throw out way too much of the available information. (This applies to the self-help field as much as PUA.)
I’m perfectly happy to engage with PUA theories on that level, but the methodological obstacles to collecting good data are still the same. So the vital question is still the same, which is “How do these people think they know these things?”.
The only difference is that instead of addressing the question to the PUA who believes specific techniques A, B and C bring about certain outcomes, we address the question to the meta-PUA who believes that although specific techniques A, B and C are placebos that belief in the efficaciousness of those techniques has measurable effects.
However PUA devotees might not want to go down this argumentative path because the likely outcome is admitting that much of the content on PUA sites is superstition, and that the outcomes of the combined arsenal of PUA tips and techniques cannot currently be distinguished from the outcomes of a change of clothes, a little personal grooming and asking a bunch of women to go out with you.
PUA devotees like to position themselves as gurus with secret knowledge. If it turns out that the entire edifice is indistinguishable from superstition then they would be repositioned as people with poor social skills and misogynist world-views who reinvented a very old wheel and then constructed non-evidence-based folk beliefs around it.
So depending on the thesis you are arguing for, it might be safer to argue that PUA techniques do have non-placebo effects.
Even if that were true (and I don’t think that’s anywhere near the case), you keep dropping out the critical meta-level for actual human beings to achieve instrumental results: i.e., motivation.
That is, even if “a change of clothes, a little grooming, and asking a bunch of women out” were actually the best possible approach, it’s kind of useless to just leave it at that, because quite a lot of actual human beings are incapable of motivating themselves to actually DO the necessary steps, using mere logical knowledge without an emotional component. (On LW, people generally use the term “akrasia” to describe this normal characteristic of human behavior as if it were some sort of strange and unexpected disease. ;-) )
To put it another way, the critical function of any kind of personal development training is to transmit a mental model to a human brain in a way such that the attached human will act in accordance with the model so transmitted.
After all, if this were not the case, then self-help books of any stripe could consist simply of short instruction sheets!
“Placebo” and “superstition” are not interchangeable concepts. A placebo is a real effect, a superstition is an imaginary one.
That is, if I think my baseball batting performance is improved when I wear a red scarf, and it is, that’s a placebo effect. (Belief creating a real result.) If I think that it’s improved, but it actually isn’t, then that’s a superstition.
This means that placebo effects are instrumentally more useful than superstitions… unless of course the superstition gets you to do something that itself has a beneficial effect.
To the extent that PUA uses placebo effects on the performer of a technique, the usefulness of the effect is in the resulting non-placebo response of the recipient of the technique.
Meanwhile, there are tons of specific pieces of PUA advice that are easily testable in miniature that needn’t rely on either sort of effect.
For example, if PUAs of the Mystery school predict that “a set will open more frequently if you body-rock away from the group before establishing a false time constraint”, that prediction should be easily testable to determine its truth or falsehood, given objectively reducible definitions of “set”, “open”, “body rock”, and “false time constraint”. (All of which terms the Mystery method does quite objectively reduce.)
So, you could teach a bunch of people to do these things, send them out and videotape ’em, and then get a bunch of grad students to grade the sets as to whether they opened and how quickly (without seeing the PUA’s behavior), and voila… testable prediction.
On the level of such specific, immediately-responded-to actions and events, ISTM that PUAs have strong motivation to eliminate non-working or negatively-reinforced behaviors from their repertoire, especially when in the process of inventing them.
Of course, removing superstitious “extras” is unlikely for a given PUA guru to notice; I have observed that it is students of those gurus, or new, competing gurus who would push back with, “I haven’t seen any need to body rock”, or “Opinion openers are unnecessary”, or “indirect game is pointless”, etc. So, even though individual schools don’t often move in the direction of discarding old techniques, the field as a whole seems to evolve towards simplification where possible.
Indeed, there is at least one PU guru who says that nearly all of Mystery method is pointless superstition in the sense that guys who jump through all its hoops are succeeding not because of what they’re doing in the process, so much as what they’re not doing.
That, in essence, women either find you attractive or they don’t, and all that your “game” needs to do is not blow the attraction by saying or doing something stupid. ;-) His specific advice seems to focus more on figuring out how to tell whether a particular woman is attracted to you, and how to move as quickly as possible from that to doing something about it.
Note: I don’t believe this guru is saying that Mystery’s advice about social skills is wrong, merely that the use of those skills can be completely superfluous to a goal of having sex with attractive women, vs. a goal of being friends with groups of people and hanging out with them before having sex with some of the women, or getting into social circles containing high-status women. And I think he’s largely correct in this stance, especially if your objective isn’t to have sex with the highest-status beautiful woman present (which is Mystery method’s raison d’etre).
If your objective is to meet, say, the kinkiest girl with the dirtiest mind, or the sweetest, friendliest one, or the most adventurous one, or really almost any other criteria, Mystery’s elaborate refinements are superfluous, as they were developed to help him rapidly social-climb his way into his target’s circle of friends and disarm their ready defenses against guys coming to hit on her.
To put it another way: Mystery is using a narrow, red-line strategy specifically tuned to women who are the most attractive to a broad, blue-line spectrum of guys… because they were also his personal red line. If your red line is not those women, then Mystery method is not the tool you should use.
PUA style, in short, is very individual. Once you add back in the context of a given guru’s personality, physique, goals, and other personal characteristics, you find that it’s nowhere near as broad-spectrum/universal as the guru’s declarations appear. Once, I watched some videos online from a conference of PUA gurus who often had what sounded like contradictory advice… but which was intended for people with different personalities and different goals.
For example, one guy focused on making lots of female friends and going out with them a lot—he enjoys it, and then they play matchmaker for him. Another emphasized a lone-wolf strategy of “forced IOIs”, which is PUA code for acting in a way that forces a woman to very quickly indicate (nonverbally) whether she has any interest in him. Just looking at these two guys, you could tell that each had chosen a method that was a better match for their personality, and that neither would be happy using the other’s method, nor would they each be meeting the kind of women they wanted to meet!
So that’s why I keep saying that you’re ignoring the fact that PUA is not a single uniform thing, any more than, say, weight loss is. In theory, everybody can eat less and move more and this will make them lose weight. In practice, it ain’t nearly that simple: different people have different nutritional needs, for example, so the diet that’s healthy for one person can be very bad for another.
Thus, if you want, say, “honest, equal, supportive” PUA, then by all means, look for it. But don’t expect to find One True PUA Theory that will make all women do your bidding. It doesn’t exist. What exists in PUA is a vast assortment of vaguely related theories aimed at very individual goals and personality types.
(And, of more direct relevance to this particular sub-thread, far too many confounding factors to be of much use to group studies, unless you plan to run a lot of experiments.)
Speaking broadly, if the goal is Rational Romantic Relationships than any advice which doesn’t have actual existing evidence to back it up is not advice rational people should be taking.
If a whole bunch of different gurus are each flogging different techniques and none of them have evidence, then a rationalist should dismiss them all until they do have some evidence, just as we dismiss the alt-med gurus who flog different forms of alternative medicine without evidence. Without evidence PUA is no more the elephant in the Rationalist Romantic Relationship room than ayurveda is an elephant in the medical science room.
As far as the superstition/placebo distinction you are making I think you are simply wrong linguistically speaking. Nothing stops a superstition being a placebo, and in fact almost all of alternative medicine could legitimately be described as placebo and superstition.
Superstitions arise because of faulty cause/effect reasoning and may indeed have a placebo effect, like the red scarf you mention. I suspect but cannot prove that some parts of PUA doctrine arise in exactly the same way that belief in a lucky scarf arises. Someone tries it, they get lucky that time, and so from then on they try it every time and believe it helps.
If some pieces of PUA technique are testable, that’s great. They should test them and publish the results. Until they do their beliefs don’t really have a place if we’re talking about Rational Romantic Relationships. If they aren’t testable, then they’re unfalsifiable beliefs and rationalists should be committed to discarding unfalsifiable beliefs. PUA looks to me more like folklore than science, at this stage.
I agree with this statement… but as previously discussed, I mean Bayesian reductionist evidence.
Which means, anecdotes count, even if they still count for less than numbers and double-blind tests.
You’re using a very non-LW definition of “rational” here, since the principles of Something To Protect, and avoiding the Failures Of Eld Science would say that it’s your job to find something and test it, not to demand that people bring you only advice that’s already vetted.
If you wait for Richard Wiseman to turn “The Secret” into “Luck Theory”, and you actually needed the instrumental result, then you lost.
That is, you lost the utility you could have had by doing the testing yourself.
For medical outcomes, doing the testing yourself is a bad idea because the worst-case scenario isn’t that you don’t get your goal, it’s that you do damage to yourself or die.
But for testing PUA or anything in personal development, your personal testing costs are ridiculously low, and the worst case is just that you don’t get the goal you were after.
This means that if the goal is actually important, and whatever scientifically-validated information you have isn’t getting you the goal, then you don’t just sit on your ass and wait for someone to hand you the research on a platter.
Anything else isn’t rational, where rational is defined (as on LW) as “winning”.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the correct application of Bayes’ Theorem. Bayes is not a magic wand, and GIGO still applies. Anecdotal evidence counts but you have to correctly estimate the probability that you would hear that anecdote in a world where PUA methods were just placebos sold to the sex-starved and nerdy, as opposed to the probability that you would hear that anecdote in a world where PUA methods have some objectively measurable effect. I think most of the time the correct estimate is that those probabilities are barely distinguishable at best.
A rationalist should have a clear distinction between Things That Are Probably True, and Things That Might Be True and Would Be Interesting To Try. The goal of the OP was to sum up the state of human knowledge with regard to Things That Are Probably True, which is the standard scholarly starting point in research.
It seemed to me that PUA techniques, lacking any objective evidence to back them up, should be filed under Things That Might Be True and Would Be Interesting To Try but that their devotees were claiming that they were the elephant in the OP’s room and that they had been unjustly excluded from the set of Things That Are Probably True.
I’m not against the ethos of going out and trying these things, as long as the testing costs really are low (i.e. you don’t pay good money for them). They might work, and even if they are just placebos you might get lucky anyway. However it’s not rational to actually believe they probably work in the absence of proper evidence, as opposed to going along with them for the sake of experiment, or to try to squeeze them in to a list of Things That Are Probably True.
Also, better placebo than nothing at all.
That a comment opening with this quote-reply pair is voted above zero troubles me. It is a direct contradiction of one of the most basic premises of this site.
I would have voted it down were it not for the rest of the paragraph cited, which basically comes down to “anecdotes are Bayesian evidence, but with caveats related to the base rate, and not always positive evidence”. Which is, as best I can tell, correct. In isolation, the opening sentence does seem to incorrectly imply that anecdotes don’t count at all, and so I’d have phrased it differently if I was trying to make the same point, but a false start isn’t enough for a downvote if the full post is well-argued and not obviously wrong.
In context, I interpreted pjeby to be saying that anecdotes counted as evidence which should lead a Bayesian rationalist to believe the truth of PUA claims. If that was not their intention I got them totally wrong.
However if I interpreted them correctly they were indeed applying Bayes incorrectly, since we should expect a base rate of PUA-affirming anecdotes even if PUA techniques are placebos, and even in the total absence of any real effects whatsoever. It’s not evidence until the rate of observation exceeds the base rate of false claims we should expect to hear in the absence of a non-placebo effect, and if you don’t know what the base rate is you don’t have enough information to carry out a Bayesian update. You can’t update without P(B).
The truth of this statement depends heavily on how you unpack “believe”. Brains have more than one way of “believing” things, after all. A person can not “believe” in ghosts, and yet feel scared in a “haunted” house. Or more relevant to the current thread, a person can “believe” they are attractive and worthy and have every right to go up to someone and say “hi”, yet still be unable to do it.
IOW, epistemic and instrumental beliefs are compartmentalized in humans by default… which makes a mockery of the idea that manipulating your instrumental beliefs will somehow stain your epistemic purity.
Relevant: willingness to spend money to change is correlated with willingness to actually change. That doesn’t mean spending money causes change, of course, I’m just pointing out that a person’s willingness to incur the costs of changing (whatever sort of cost) is strongly correlated with them taking action to change. (See Prochaska, Norcross, et al; whose research and meta-research of a dozen different types of change goals is summarized in the book “Changing For Good”.)
[Originally, I was going to include a bunch of information about my work with personal development clients that reflects the pattern described in the above-mentioned research, but since you appear to prefer research to experience, I’ve decided to skip it.]
I place a high value on not financially encouraging bad behaviour, and selling non-evidence-based interventions to people who may be desperate, irrational or ill-informed but who don’t deserve to be robbed counts as bad behaviour to me.
There’s a loss of utility beyond the mere loss of cash to myself if I give cash to a scammer, because it feeds the scammer and potentially encourages other scammers to join the market. This is the flip side of the coin that there is a gain in utility when I give cash to a worthwhile charity.
People willing to spend money on attracting a mate have a wide variety of options as to how they spend it, after all. If they are willing to actually change it’s not as if the only way to demonstrate this is to spend money on PUA training rather than clothes, transportation, food, drink, taxi fares and so on.
As I mentioned in the other sub-thread, it’s really tiring to have you continually reframing what I say to make attackable arguments out of it. Unless your sole interest in LessWrong is to score rhetorical points (i.e., trolling), it’s a rather bad idea to keep doing that to people.
Note that the text you quoted from my comment has nothing to do with PUA. It is a portion of my evidence that your professed approach to personal development (i.e., trying things only if they cost nothing) is Not Winning.
On LessWrong, rationality equals winning, not pretending to avoid losing. (Or more bluntly: attempting to signal your intelligence and status by avoiding the low-status work of actually trying things and possibly being mistaken.)
It is better to do something wrong—even repeatedly—and eventually succeed, than to sit on your ass and do nothing. Otherwise, you are less instrumentally rational than any random person who tries things at random until something works.
Meanwhile, any time that you do not spend winning, is time spent losing, no matter how you spin it as some sort of intellectual superiority.
So, on that note, I will now return to activities with a better ROI than continuing this discussion. ;-)
(And sometimes hearing them counts as evidence against the phenomenon!)
Indeed. Careful reading is required when investigating any kind of “folklore”, as occasionally self-help authors provide anecdotes that (in the details) provide a very different picture of what is happening than what the author is saying is the point or moral of that anecdote.
For what it is worth the majority are positioned as ‘acolytes’.
Hi.… I haven’t read this whole thread, but I know one very important thing that immediately discredited PhilosophyTutor in my view. I strongly feel that the best pua’s are not at all about merely extracting something from the woman they interact with. They claim they live by the motto “leave her better than you found her”. From my impression of Casanova, the ultimate pua, he lived by that too.
You’re absolutely right about the methodological issues. I’ve thought it myself; besides the enormous survivor bias of course.
But it is far more irrational to discount their findings on that ground alone, because the alternative, academic studies, are blinded by exactly the same ignore-the-elephant and keep-things-proper attitude that the original poster of this thread pointed out.
Take this into account: a lot of good pua’s may fall far short of the ideal amount of rigor, but at the same time, far exceed the average person’s rigor. I can’t condemn those who, without the perspective gained from this site, nevertheless seek to quantify things and really understand them.
How do they know whether they fulfill this motto well?
Whether someone does better than average is irrelevant to whether they do well enough. It’s possible, indeed very easy, to put more effort into rigor than the average person, and still fail to produce any valid Bayesian evidence.
Not something you have shown (or something that appears remotely credible).
Not much better and also not a particularly good reason to exclude an information source from an analysis. (An example of a good reason would be “people say a bunch of prejudicial nonsense for all sorts of reasons and everybody concerned ends up finding it really, really annoying”).
It is not clear to me that utilities can be easily compared. What tradeoff between my satisfaction and my partner’s satisfaction should I be willing to accept? I can see how to elicit my preferences (for things like partner happiness, relationship duration, and so on) and try to predict how the consequences of my actions will impact my preferences, but I don’t quite see how to add utilities, or compare the amount of satisfaction I could provide to multiple potential partners.
It’s not clear that they want to talk down the status of women in general. Men becoming more attractive and less annoying to women seems to be better for women, and there’s quite a bit in the PUA literature of how to keep a long-term relationship going, if that’s what you want to do.
You are absolutely right that utilities cannot be easily compared and that this is a fundamental problem for utilitarian ethics.
We can approximate a comparison in some cases using proxies like money, or in some cases by assuming that if we average enough people’s considered preferences we can approach a real average preference. However these do not solve the fundamental problem that there is no way of measuring human happiness such that we could say with confidence “Action A will produce a net 10 units of happiness, and Action B will produce a net 11 units of happiness”.
In the case of human sexual relationships what you’d really have to do is conduct a longitudinal study looking at variables like reported happiness, incidence of mental illness, incidence of suicide, partner-assisted orgasms per unit time, longevity and so on.
That said this difficulty in totalling up net utilities is not a moral blank cheque. If women report distress after a one night stand with a PUA followed by cessation of contact then that has to be taken as evidence of caused disutility, and you can’t remove the moral burden that entails by pointing out that calculating net utility is difficult or postulating that their distress is their fault because they are “entitled”/”in denial”/etc.
While this would give people more knowledge about how their actions turn into consequences, this doesn’t help people decide which consequences they prefer, and so only weakly helps them decide which actions they prefer.
So, let’s drop the term utility, here, and see if that clarifies the moral burden. Suppose Bob and Alice go to a bar and meet; they both apply seduction techniques; they have sex that night. Alice’s interest in Bob increases; Bob’s interest in Alice decreases. What moral burdens are on each of them, and where did those moral burdens come from?
I think it does help if people have pre-existing views about whether they like the internal experience of happiness, mental health, continued life, orgasms and so on, and about whether they can legitimately generalise those views to others. I don’t think I would be making an unreasonable assumption if I assumed that an arbitrarily chosen woman in a bar would most likely have a preference for the internal experience of happiness, mental health, continued life, orgasms and so on and hence that conduct likely to bring about those outcomes for her would produce utility and conduct likely to bring about the opposite would produce negative utility.
There is not enough information to say, and your chosen scenario is possibly not the best one for exploring the ethics of PUA behaviour since it firstly postulates that the female participant is also using seduction techniques (hopefully defined in some more specific sense than just trying to be attractive), and secondly it skips entirely over the ethical question of approaching someone in the first place and possibly getting them to participate in sex acts they may not have planned to engage in. By jumping straight to the next morning and asking that the moral path is forward from that point this scenario avoids arguably the most important ethical questions about PUA behaviour.
However I will answer the question as posed to avoid accusations that I am simply avoiding it. From a utilitarian perspective the moral burden is simply to maximise utility, so we need to know what are Bob and Alice’s utility functions are, and what Bob and Alice should reasonably think the other party’s utility function is like.
It might well be that Bob has neither the interest not the ability to sustain a mutually optimal ongoing relationship with Alice and in that case the utility-maximising path from that point forward and hence the ethical option is for Bob to leave and not contact Alice again. However if Bob knew in advance that this was the case and had reason to believe that Alice’s utility function placed a negative value on participating in a one night stand with a person who was not interested in a long-term relationship then Bob behaved unethically in getting to this position since he knowingly brought about a negative-utility outcome for a moral stakeholder.
Knowing that her weights on those things are positive gets me nowhere. What I need to know are their relative strengths, and this seems like an issue where (heterosexual) individuals are least poised to be able to generalize their own experience. It seems likely that a man could go through life thinking that everyone enjoys one night stands and sleeps great afterwards, and not until reading PUA literature realizes that women often freak out after them.
Suppose she flirts, or the equivalent (that is, rather than just seeking general attraction, she seeks targeted attraction at some point). If she never expresses any interest, it’s unlikely she and Bob will have sex (outside of obviously unethical scenarios).
What question do you think is most important?
Suppose Bob and Alice both believe that actions reveal preferences.
Suppose Alices enjoy one night stands, and Carols regret one night stands, though they agree to have sex after the first date. When Bob meets a woman, he can’t expect her to honestly respond whether she’s a Carol or an Alice if he asks her directly. What probability does he need that a woman he seduces in a bar will be an Alice for it to be ethical to seduce women in bars?
As well, if he believes that actions reveal preferences, should he expect that one night stands are a net utility gain or loss for Carols?
Hopefully research like that cited in the OP can help with that. In the meantime we have to do the best we can with what we have, and engage in whatever behaviours maximise the expected utility of all stakeholders based on our existing, limited knowledge.
I think the most important question is “Is it ethical to obtain sex by deliberately faking social signals, given what we know of the consequences for both parties of this behaviour?”. A close second would be “Is it ethical to engage in dominance-seeking behaviour in a romantic relationship?”.
One approach would be to multiply the probability you have an Alice by the positive utility an Alice gets out of a one night stand, and multiply the probability that you have a Carol by the negative utility a Carol gets out of a one night stand, and see which figure was larger. That would be the strictly utilitarian approach to the question as proposed.
If we’re allowed to try to get out of the question as proposed, which is poor form in philosophical discussion and smart behaviour in real life, a good utilitarian would try to find ways to differentiate Alices and Carols, and only have one night stands with Alices.
A possible deontological approach would be to say “Ask them if they are an Alice or a Carol, and treat them as the kind of person they present themselves to be. If they lied it’s their fault”.
The crypto-sociopathic approach would be to say “This is all very complicated and confusing, so until someone proves beyond any doubt I’m hurting people I’ll just go on doing what feels good to me”.
“Deliberately faking social signals”? But, but, that barely makes any sense. They are signals. You give the best ones you can. Everybody else knows that you are trying to give the best signals that you can and so can make conclusions about your ability to send signals and also what other signals you will most likely give to them and others in the future. That is more or less what socializing is. I suppose blatant lies in a context where lying isn’t appropriate and elaborate creation of false high status identities could be qualify—but in those case I would probably use a more specific description.
A third would be “could the majority of humans have a romantic relationship without dominance-seeking behavior?” and the fourth : “would most people find romantic relationships anywhere near as satisfying without dominance-seeking behavior?” (My money is on the “No”s.)
One more question: What principles would help establish how much dominance seeking behavior is enough to break the relationship or in some other way cause more damage than it’s worth, considering that part of dominance is ignoring feedback that it’s unwelcome?”
Yes, that part is hard, even on a micro scale. I have been frequently surprised that I underestimate how much dominance seeking would be optimal. I attribute this to mind-projection. ie “This means she would prefer me to do that? Wow. I’d never take that shit if it was directed at me. Hmm… I’m going do that for her benefit and be sure not to send any signal that I am doing it for compliance. It’s actually kind of fun.”
(Here I do mean actual unambiguous messages—verbal or through blatantly obvious social signalling by the partner. I don’t mean just “some source says that’s what women want”.)
Fortunately we can choose which dominance seeking behaviors to accept and reject at the level of individual behavioral trait. We could also, if it was necessary for a particular relationship, play the role of someone who is ignoring feedback but actually absorb everything and process it in order to form the most useful model of how to navigate the relationship optimally. On the flip side we can signal and screen to avoid dominance seeking behaviors that we particularly don’t want and seek out and naturally reward those that we do want.
Wow, really? How? I make the opposite mistake all the time (at least I think I do) so I’d be interested in hearing some examples.
PUAs have trouble grasping that there is a difference between appearance and reality, which is ironic in some ways. It’s an implicit part of their doctrine that if you can pass yourself off as an “alpha” that you really are an “alpha”, in the sense of being the kind of person that women really do want to mate with.
However it seems obvious to me that the whole PUA strategy is to spoof their external signals in a way they hope will fool women into drawing incorrect conclusions about what is actually going on within the PUA’s mind and what characteristics the PUA is actually bringing to the relationship table. It’s a way for socially awkward nerds to believe they are camouflaging themselves as rough, tough, confident super-studs and helping themselves to reproductive opportunities while so camouflaged.
They excuse this moral failing by saying “Everybody else is doing it, hence it’s okay for me to do it only more so”.
However it’s well-established in general societal morals that obtaining sex by deception is a form of non-violent rape. If you’re having sex with someone knowing that they are ignorant of relevant facts which if they knew them would stop them having sex with you, then you are not having sex with their free and informed consent.
The fact that someone is a PUA using specific PUA techniques to misrepresent their real mind-state seems to me like highly relevant information in relationship decision-making.
Is there proper scientific evidence for this? If not do you acknowledge that this is at least potentially a moral excuse of the same form as “Everyone else is doing it, so it’s okay for me to do it”?
I suspect it would actually turn out that correctly socialised people would prefer and flourish more completely in relationships which are free of dominance games, and I think my naive folk-psychological guesswork is just as good as yours.
I find that those with any significant degree of PUA competence are not particularly inclined to try to excuse themselves to others. Apart from being an unhealthy mindset to be stuck in it sends all the wrong signals. They would instead bock out any hecklers and go about their business. If people try to shame them specifically while they are flirting or socializing they may need to handle the situation actively but it is almost certainly not going to be with excuses.
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.
It is a third and fourth question added to a list. Unless the first two were supposed to be scientific proclamations this doesn’t seem to be an appropriate demand.
No to the “if not” implication—not presenting proper scientific evidence wouldn’t make it an excuse. No to the equivalence of these questions to that form. Most importantly: nothing is an ‘excuse’ unless the person giving it believes they doing something bad.
I really don’t think naivety is a significant failing of mine.
So far in this conversation those I have mentally labelled pro-PUA have inevitably introduced scenarios where both parties are using “seduction techniques”, which I think is a term which is dangerous since it conflates honest signalling with spoofed signalling, or by claiming (as you did) that the idea of spoofing social signals “barely makes any sense”. I take those arguments to be excusing the act of spoofing social signals on the basis either that all women also spoof their social signals and that two wrongs make a right, or that there is in fact no such thing as social spoofing and that hence PUAs cannot be morally condemned for doing something which does not exist.
In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.
However unless you believe that pick-up targets’ relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target’s free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.
″ In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know”.
Socrates
Edit in response to edit: I was asked what I thought the most important ethical questions were with regard to PUA, and answered that question with two ethical questions. You responded by asking two factual questions of your own, which if answered in the negative would make my second question redundant, and stated that your money (which since you are posting here I took to mean that you have a Bayesian conviction that your answer is more likely to be right than not) was on the answer to those questions being negative.
You must have some basis for that probability estimate. Saying that it’s not an “appropriate demand” to ask for those bases doesn’t solve the problem that without access to your bases we can’t tell if your probability estimate is rational.
It is also a category error to put ethical questions and factual questions in the same bin and argue that because my ethical questions are not “scientific proclamations” that this means you don’t have to provide support for your factual probability estimates.
I certainly wouldn’t say is true either.
Like what?
It is odd that a reply that is entirely to wedrifid quotes is made in response to NancyLebovitz comment which makes an entirely different point. Did you click the wrong ‘reply’ button?
It looks like I did. Is the correct move in this situation to delete the misplaced post, repost it in the correct spot, and delete this one too?
I would just leave it. No big deal and there are already replies.
This question seems malformed. “Deliberating faking social signals” is vague- but is typically not something that’s unethical (Is it unethical to exaggerate?). “What we know of the consequences” is unclear- what’s our common knowledge?
Yes.
And, of course, you saw the disconnect between your original statement and your new, more correct one.
Right?
The reason I asked that question is because you put forth the claim that Bob’s fault was knowingly causing harm to someone. That’s not the real problem, though- people can ethically knowingly cause harm to others in a wide variety of situations, under any vaguely reasonable ethical system. Any system Bob has for trying to determine the difference between Alices and Carols will have some chance of failure, and so it’s necessary to use standard risk management, not shut down.
Rhetorical questions are a mechanism that allows us to get out of making declarative statements, and when you find yourself using them that should be an immediate alert signal to yourself that you may be confused or that your premises bear re-examination.
Deceiving others to obtain advantage over them is prima facie unethical in many spheres of life, and I think Kant would say that it is always unethical. Some role-ethicists would argue that when playing roles such as “salesperson”, “advertiser” or “lawyer” that you have a moral license or even obligation to deceive others to obtain advantage but these seem to me like rationalisations rather than coherent arguments from supportable prior principles. Even if you buy that story in the case of lawyers, however, you’d need to make a separate case that romantic relationships are a sphere where deceiving others to obtain advantage is legitimate, as opposed to unethical.
PUA is to a large extent about spoofing social signals, in the attempt to let young, nerdy, white-collar IT workers signal that they have the physical and psychological qualities to lead a prehistoric tribe and bring home meat. The PUA mythology tries to equivocate between spoofing the signals to indicate that you have such qualities and actually having such qualities but I think competent rationalists should be able to keep their eye on the ball too well to fall for that. Consciously and subconsciously women want an outstanding male, not a mediocre one who is spoofing their social signals, and being able to spoof social signals does not make you an outstanding male.
Okay. We come from radically different ethical perspectives such that it may be unlikely that we can achieve a meeting of minds. I feel that dominance-seeking in romantic relationships is a profound betrayal of trust in a sphere where your moral obligations to behave well are most compelling.
Can you point me to the text that you take to be “my original statement” and the text you take to be “my new, more correct statement”? There may be a disconnect but I’m currently unable to tell what text these constructs are pointing to, so I can’t explicate the specific difficulty.
People can ethically and knowingly burn each other to death in a wide variety of situations under any vaguely reasonable ethical system too, so that statement is effectively meaningless. It’s a truly general argument. (Yes, I exclude from reasonableness any moral system that would stop you burning one serial killer to death to prevent them bringing about some arbitrarily awful consequence if there were no better ways to prevent that outcome).
We agree completely on that point, but it seems to me that a substantial subset of PUA practitioners and methodologies are aiming to deliberately increase the risk, not manage it. Their goals are to maximise the percentage of Alices who sleep with the PUA and also to maximise the percentage of Carols who sleep with the PUA.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to go further and say that in large part the whole point of PUA is to bed Carols. Alices are up for a one night stand anyway, so manipulating them to suspend their usual protective strategies and engage in a one night stand with you would be as pointless as peeling a banana twice. It’s only the Carols who are not normally up for a one night stand that you need to manipulate in the first place. Hence that subset of PUA is all about maximising the risk of doing harm, not minimising that risk.
(Note that these ethical concerns are orthogonal to, not in conflict with, my equally serious methodological concerns about whether it’s rational to think PUA performs better than placebo given the available evidence).
That sounds wrong. I dabbled in pickup a little bit and I would gladly accept a 2x boost in my attractiveness to Alices in exchange for total loss of attractiveness to Carols. If you think success with Alices is easy, I’d guess that either you didn’t try a lot, or you’re extremely attractive and don’t know it :-)
I wasn’t trying to say that bedding an Alice is “easy” full stop, just that if they find you attractive enough you won’t have to get them to lower their usual protective strategies to get them into bed the same night. That follows directly from how we have defined an Alice. Being an Alice doesn’t mean that they can’t be both choosy and in high demand though.
Carols are the ones who, regardless of how attractive they find you, don’t want to end up in bed that night and hence are the ones where the PUA has to specifically work to get them to lower their defences if the PUA wants that outcome.
ETA: This post seems to be getting hammered with downvotes, despite the fact that it’s doing nothing but clearing up a specific point of confusion about what was being expressed in the grandparent. I find that confusing. If the goal is to hide a subthread which is seen as unproductive it would seem more logical to hammer the parent.
You admit it’s not easy, then turn right back around and say it shouldn’t require a lot of effort.
Irrelevant. Is all fair in love?
Are you claiming that all romantic relationships which include the domination of one party by the other betray trust? I think we have differing definitions of dominance or good behavior.
Sure! First statement:
Second statement:
The first statement is judging a decision solely by its outcome; the second statement is judging a decision by its expected value at time of decision-making. The second methodology is closer to correct than the first.
(In the post with the first statement, it was the conclusion of a hypothetical scenario: Bob knew X about Alice, and had sex with her then didn’t contact her. I wasn’t contesting that win-lose outcomes were inferior to win-win outcomes, but was pointing out that the uncertainties involved are significant for any discussion of the subject. There’s no reason to give others autonomy in an omniscient utilitarian framework: just get their utility function and run the numbers for them. In real life, however, autonomy is a major part of any interactions or decision-making, in large part because we cannot have omniscience.)
That does not seem reasonable. Alices may be up for one night stands, but they only have sex with at most one guy a night. The challenge is being that guy.
See, ah, I think I’m against advocating deliberately unethical behavior / defection on LW.
Prude. :P
The question is what ethical standard to use. Whether or not exaggeration is unfair in matters of romance has not been established, and I would argue that exaggeration has a far more entrenched position than radical honesty.
That is, I would argue that not exaggerating your desirability as a mate is defection, rather than cooperation, and defection of the lose-lose variety rather than the win-lose variety.
That’s… not what you said.
There’s a big difference between asserting something is “irrelevant” versus “incorrect” or “unestablished”.
The treatment of ethics in PUA threads makes me somewhat nervous.
What was irrelevant is that deceit is unethical in many spheres of life. If deceit is unethical for a scientist* but ethical for a general, then knowing that deceit is unethical for a scientist is irrelevant if discussing generals.
What has not been established is whether romance is more like science or war. I think the former position is far weaker than the latter.
* I had a hard time coming up with any role in which any form of deceit is questionable, and thus I suppose if I were out for points I would question the correctness of the assertion, rather than merely its relevance. Even for scientists, exaggeration- the original behavior under question- is often ethical.
Let me check… nope, it looks like utilitarian ethics holds that ethical actions are those that maximise positive outcomes (however defined) factoring in the consequences for all stakeholders. I can’t see anything in there excluding actions or outcomes related to sex from the usual sorts of calculations. So I’m going to go ahead and say that the answer is no from a utilitarian perspective.
If we can exclude those cases where one partner or another honestly and explicitly expresses a free, informed and rational preference to be dominated then mostly yes.
(From a utilitarian perspective we have to at least be philosophically open to the idea that a person who is sufficiently bad at managing their utility might be better off being dominated against their will by a sufficiently altruistic dominator. See The Taming of the Shrew or Overboard. Such cases are atypical).
I have located the source of the confusion. What I actually said in the earlier post was this:
“t might well be that Bob has neither the interest not the ability to sustain a mutually optimal ongoing relationship with Alice and in that case the utility-maximising path from that point forward and hence the ethical option is for Bob to leave and not contact Alice again. However if Bob knew in advance that this was the case and had reason to believe that Alice’s utility function placed a negative value on participating in a one night stand with a person who was not interested in a long-term relationship then Bob behaved unethically in getting to this position since he knowingly brought about a negative-utility outcome for a moral stakeholder.”
I was not judging a situation solely on its outcome, because it was an if/then statement explicitly predicated on Bob knowing in advance that Alice’s utility function would take a major hit.
I guess you just lost track of the context and thought I’d said something I hadn’t. Are we back on the same page together now?
Possibly the recency effect of having skimmed one of Roissy’s blog posts where he specifically singled out for ridicule a female blogger who was expressing regret and confusion after a one night stand colours my recollection, but I am sure I have read PUA materials in the past that had specific sections dedicated to the problem of overcoming the resistance of women who had a preference not to engage in sex on the first/second/nth date, a preference that is certainly not inherently irrational and which seems intuitively likely to correlate with a high probability of regretting a one night stand if it does not turn into an ongoing, happy relationship.
Speaking more broadly a stereo salesperson maximises their sales by selling a stereo to every customer who walks in wanting to buy a stereo, and selling a stereo to as many customers as possible who walk in not wanting to buy a stereo. I’m sure they would prefer all their customers to be the first kind but you maximise your income by getting the most out of both. Game-theory-rational PUAs who don’t have Alices on tap, or a reliable way of filtering out Carols, or who just plain find some Carols attractive and want to sleep with them, would out of either necessity or preference have an interest in maximising their per-Carol chances of bedding a Carol.
It should be noted that, from the perspective of a utilitarian agent in certain environments, it may be the utilitarian action to self-modify into a non-utilitarian agent. That is, an unmodified utilitarian agent participating in certain interactions with non-utilitarian agents may create greater utility by self-modifying into a non-utilitarian agent.
(This seems obviously true. I removed the downvote!)
How prevalent do you think those cases are?
Did what you wrote agree with the parenthetical paragraph I wrote explaining my interpretation? If so, we’re on the same page.
Let’s go back to a question I asked a while back that wasn’t answered that is now relevant again, and explore it a little more deeply. What is a utility function? It rank orders actions*. Why do you think stating regret is more indicative of utility than actions taken? If, in the morning, someone claims they prefer X but at night they do ~X, then it seems that it is easier to discount their words than their actions. (An agent who prefers vice at night and virtue during the day is, rather than being inconsistent, trying to get the best of both worlds.)
(As well, Augustine’s prayer is relevant here: Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.).
*Typically, utility functions are computed by assigning values to consequences, then figuring out the expected value of actions, but in order to make practical measurements it has to be considered with regards to actions.
Right. But it’s not clear to me that it’s unethical for a salesman to sell to reluctant buyers. If you consider a third woman- Diana- who does not agree to have sex on the first date, then both of us would agree that having sex with Diana on the first date would be unethical, just like robbing someone and leaving them a stereo in exchange would be unethical. But pursuing Diana would not be, especially if it’s hard to tell the difference between her and Carol (or Alice) at first glance. Both Carols and Alices have an incentive to seem like Dianas while dating (also car-buying, though not stereo-buying), and so this isn’t an easy problem.
It seems odd to me to suggest a utilitarian should act as though Carols are Dianas.
Interesting question! However I think that we’d need to agree on a definition of “dominated” before any estimate would be meaningful. I’m happy to supply my estimate of prevalence for any definition that suits you.
For the definition I had in mind, which might be something like “in a relationship where one partner routinely makes the majority of important decisions on the basis of superior status” I would be surprised if it was below 0.1% or above 5%.
Well no, I wouldn’t agree with that either, but that’s a separate issue. I don’t think it can be philosophically consistent to apply techniques which purportedly manipulate people by spoofing social signals that act on an unconscious level, distorting their sense of time and so forth and then excuse this on the basis that the agent you are manipulating has autonomy. If they had autonomy in the sense that excused you for attempts at manipulation you could not manipulate them, and if you can manipulate them then they lack the kind of strong autonomy that would give you a moral blank cheque.
I think it’s more indicative for a few reasons. Firstly conclusions made sober, rested and with time to reflect are more reliable than conclusions made drunk, late at night, horny and in the heat of the moment, and both parties to any such decisions know this in advance. Secondly wishful thinking (which you could also call self-delusion) plays a role, and before being—to borrow a phrase from Roissy—“pumped and dumped” by a PUA a woman might be a victim of cognitive bias that makes her act as if a long-term relationship with a supportive partner is a possibility whereas with hindsight this bias is less likely to distort her calculations. Thirdly the PUA literature that I have read explicitly advocates playing on these factors by not giving the target time to pause and reflect, and by deflecting questions about the future direction of the relationship rather than answering those questions honestly.
I conclude from this that part of PUA strategy is to attempt to manipulate women into making decisions which the PUA knows the women are less likely to make when they are behaving rationally. So not only do I think that stated regret is more indicative of someone’s reflective preferences than their actions the night before in general, but I also think that PUAs know this too.
As always there will be individual exceptions to the general rule.
Considering only the two parties directly involved, the salesperson and the buyer, it seems fairly clear to me that on average reluctant buyers are more likely to regret the purchase, and that transactions in which one party regrets the transaction are win/lose and not win/win.
Being a highly effective salesperson is not seen as unethical conduct in our current society, and that tends to very strongly influence people’s moral judgements, but I think from a utilitarian standpoint salesmanship that goes beyond providing information is obviously ethically questionable once you get past the default socialisation we share that salespersons are a normal part of life.
I’m not completely clear on the Carol/Diana distinction being made here. Could you give me the definitions of these two characters as you were thinking of those definitions at the time you posted the parent?
This. But you forgot “using canine social structure as if it were identical to human social structure.”
My complaint with the whole “alpha” and “beta” terminology is that it doesn’t seem to be derived from canine social structure. The omega rank seems more appropriate to what PUAs call “beta.”
Reading more, it doesn’t seem like any of these terms are accurate even to canine society. They were based on observing unrelated gray wolves kept together in captivity, where their social structures bore little resemblance to their normal groupings in the wild (a breeding pair and their cubs). More accurate terms for would be “parents” and “offspring”, which match nicely to human families but aren’t that useful for picking up women in bars.
We hope.
What about just “until someone proves scientifically”?
Even that weaker position still seems incompatible actually being a utility-maximising agent, since there is prima facie evidence that inducing women to enter into a one-night-stand against their better judgment leads to subsequent distress on the part of the women reasonably often.
A disciple of Bayes and Bentham doesn’t go around causing harm up until someone else shows that it’s scientifically proven that they are causing harm. They do whatever maximises expected utility for all stakeholders based on the best evidence available at the time.
Note that this judgment holds regardless of the relative effectiveness of PUA techniques compared to placebo. Even if PUA is completely useless, which would be surprising given placebo effects alone, it would still be unethical to seek out social transactions that predictably lead to harm for a stakeholder without greater counterbalancing benefits being obtained somehow.
That isn’t a utility maximising agent regardless of whether it demands your ‘proof beyond any doubt’ or just the ‘until someone proves scientifically’. Utility maximising agents shut up and multiply. They use the subjectively objective probabilities and multiply them by the utility of each case.
The utility maximising agent you are talking about is one that you have declared to be a ‘good utilitarian’. It’s maximising everybody’s utility equally. Which also happens to mean that if Bob gains more utility from a one night stand than a Carol loses through self-flaggelation then Bob is morally obliged to seduce her. This is something which I assume you would consider reprehensible. (This is one of the reasons I’m not a good utilitarian. It would disgust me.)
Neither “utility maximiser” nor “good utilitarian” are applause lights which match this proclamation.
(Edited out the last paragraph—it was a claim that was too strong.)
I took it for granted that the disutility experienced by the hypothetical distressed woman is great enough that a utility-maximiser would seek to have one-night-stands only with women who actually enjoyed them.
Given that Bob has the option of creating greater average utility by asking Alices home instead I don’t see this as a problem. What you are saying is true only in a universe where picking up Carol and engaging in a win/lose, marginally-positive-sum interaction with her is the single best thing Bob can do to maximise utility in the universe, and that’s a pretty strange universe.
I also think that PUAs are going to have to justify their actions in utilitarian terms if they are going to do it at all, since I really struggle to see how they could find a deontological or virtue-ethical justification for deceiving people and playing on their cognitive biases to obtain sex without the partner’s fully informed consent. So if the utilitarian justification falls over I think all justifications fall over, although I’m open to alternative arguments on that point.
I don’t think the Weak Gor Hypothesis holds and I don’t think that you maximise a woman’s utility function by treating her the way the misogynistic schools of PUA adovcate, but if you did then I would buy PUA as a utility-maximising strategy. I think it’s about the only way I can see any coherent argument being made that PUA is ethical, excluding the warm-and-fuzzy PUA schools mentioned earlier which I already acknowledged as True Scotsmen.
I cannot reconstruct how you are parsing the first sentence so that it contradicts the second, and I’ve just tried very hard.
This seems to be a straw man. I don’t recall ever hearing someone advocating having sex with people that would experience buyers remorse over those that would remember the experience positively. That would be a rather absurd position.
Yes, Bob should probably be spending all of his time earning money and gaining power that can be directed to mitigating existential risk. This objection seems to be a distraction from the point. The argument you made is neither utilitarian nor based on maximising utility. That’s ok, moral assertions don’t need to be reframed as utilitarian or utility-maximising. They can be just fine as they are.
If so forgive me—I have not seen a PUA in the wild ever mentioning the issue of differentiating targets on the basis of whether or not being picked up would be psychologically healthy for them, so my provisional belief is that they attached no utility or disutility to the matter of whether the pick-up target would remember the experience positively. Am I wrong on that point?
This is a general argument which, if it worked, would serve to excuse all sorts of suboptimal behaviour. Just because someone isn’t directing all their efforts at existential risk mitigation or relieving the effects of Third World poverty doesn’t mean that they can’t be judged on the basis of whether they are treating other people’s emotional health recklessly.
I don’t see how you get to that reading of what I wrote.
I see this as a perfectly valid utilitarian argument-form: There is prima facie evidence X causes significant harm, hence continuing to do X right up until there is scientifically validated evidence that X causes significant harm is inconsistent with utility maximisation.
There’s a suppressed premise in there, that suppressed premise being “there are easily-available alternatives to X”, but since in the specific case under discussion there are easily-available alternatives to picking women up using PUA techniques I didn’t think it strictly necessary to make that premise explicit.
There are separate, potential deontological objections to PUA behaviour, some of which I have already stated, but I don’t see how you got to the conclusion that this particular argument was deontological in nature.
The goalposts have moved again. But my answer would be yes anyway.
Strictly speaking you moved them first since I never claimed that anyone was ” advocating having sex with people that would experience buyers remorse over those that would remember the experience positively.” (Emphasis on over). As opposed to advocating having sex with people disregarding the issue of whether that person would experience remorse, which is what I’d seen PUA advocates saying. I just put the goalposts back where they were originally without making an undue fuss about it, since goalposts wander due to imprecisions in communication without any mendacity required.
I think this conversation is suffering, not for the first time, from the fuzziness of the PUA term. It covers AMF and Soporno (who has a name which is unfortunate but memorable, if it is his real name) who do not appear to be advocating exploiting others for one’s personal utility, and it also covers people like Roissy who revel in doing so.
So I think I phrased that last post poorly. I should have made the declarative statement “many but not all of the PUA writers I have viewed encourage reckless or actively malevolent behaviour with regard to the emotional wellbeing of potential sexual partners, and I think those people are bad utilitarians (and also bad people by almost any deontological or virtue-ethical standard). People who are members of the PUA set who do not do this are not the intended target of this particular criticism”.
The thing is, some (granted, not all) of what falls under PUA or “apply seduction techniques” falls unambiguously into the category of dark arts.
I find it hard to believe that we want to argue that, “Dark arts are bad, except when they can get you laid.”
Dark arts AREN”T bad in general! Nor is avadakadavraing anyone that you would have shot with a gun anyway.
Ah. I prefer not to argue “dark arts are bad,” rather “dark arts do not illuminate.” Tautologies have the virtue of being true.
(Put flippantly, sex is sometimes easier with the lights off.)
I was using “dark arts” here in the more narrow sense of “techniques designed to subvert the rationality of others by exploiting cognitive biases.” I’m not speaking of being an effective flirt, or wearing flattering makeup and clothing. The sort of things I had in mind are, to take a mild example, bringing a slightly less attractive “wingman” to make oneself look more attractive than one would alone, or to take a serious example, whisking a woman from bar to bar to create the illusion of longer-term acquaintance. I see this as wrong for essentially the same reason that spiking someone’s drink is wrong if they wouldn’t sleep with you sober.
To oversimplify somewhat, I tend to see society as divided into three groups: those who don’t generally aspire to rationality (the majority of the population), those who want to share the bounty of rationality to help others overcome their biases (Lesswrong), and those who would instead use their knowledge of rationality to exploit people in the first group. I acknowledge that I am more confused by the current negative karma of my grandparent than the karma of any other comment I have ever made on this site.
My observation is that most of the posts I have made that criticised PUA or PUA-associated beliefs have been voted down very quickly, but then they have bounced back up over the next day or so such that the overall karma delta is highly positive. One hypothesis that explains it is that there are a certain number of people reviewing this thread at short intervals who are downvoting posts critical of PUA, but that they are not the plurality of posters reviewing this thread.
ETA: Update on this. Posts critical of PUA ideology that are concealed from the main thread either by being voted to −3 or below, or by being a descendant of such, get voted into the ground, and as far as I can see this effect is largely insensitive to the intellectual value or lack thereof of the post. I hypothesise that the general LW readership doesn’t bother drilling down to see what’s going on in those subthreads and hence their opinions are not reflected in the vote count, while PUA-enthusiasts who vote along ideological lines do bother to drill down.
Posts critical of PUA that are well-written, logical, pertinent and visible to the general readership are voted up, overall.
One explanation is that the first to read your messages are those you responded to, who are those most likely to note any poorness of fit between what they said and what they are alleged or implied to have said or believed.
I’m shocked that it didn’t stay below 0. Forget any point it was trying to make about dating—it sends totally the wrong message about ‘lesswrong’ attitudes towards ‘dark arts’!
So, this gets at something that frequently confuses me when people start talking about personal utilities.
It seems that if I can reliably elicit the strength of my preferences for X and Y, and reliably predict how a given action will modify the X and Y in my environment, then I can reliably determine whether to perform that action, all else being equal. That seems just as true for X = “my happiness” and Y = “my partner’s happiness” as it is for X = “hot fudge” and Y = “peppermint”.
But you seem to be suggesting that that isn’t true… that in the first case, even if I know the strengths of my preferences for X and Y and how various possible actions lead to X and Y, there’s still another step (“adding the utilities”) that I have to perform before I can decide what actions to perform. Do I understand you right?
If so, can you say more about what exactly that step entails? That is… what is it you don’t know how to do here, and why do you want to do it?
You’re missing four letters. Call the strength of your preferences for X and Y A and B, and call your partner’s preferences for X and Y C and D. (This assumes that you and your partner both agree on your happiness measurements.)
I agree there’s a choice among available actions which maximizes AX+BY, and that there’s another choice that maximizes CX+DY. What I think is questionable is ascribing meaning to (A+C)X+(B+D)Y.
Notice there are an infinite number of A,B pairs that output the same action, and an infinite number of C,D pairs that output the same action, but when you put them together your choice of A,B and C,D pairs matters. What scaling to choose is also a point of contention, since it can alter actions.
So, we’re assuming here that there’s no problem comparing A and B, which means these valuations are normalized relative to some individual scale. The problem, as you say, is with the scaling factor between individuals. So it seems I end up with something like (AX + BY + FCX + FDY), where F is the value of my partner’s preferences relative to mine. Yes?
And as you say, there’s an infinite number of Fs and my choice of action depends on which F I pick.
And we’re rejecting the idea that F is simply the strength of my preference for my partner’s satisfaction. If that were the case, there’d be no problem calculating a result… though of course no guarantee that my partner and I would calculate the same result. Yes?
If so, I agree that that coming up with a correct value for F sure does seem like an intractable, and quite likely incoherent, problem.
Going back to the original statement… “an ethical rationalist’s goals in relationship-seeking should be to seek a relationship that creates maximal utility for both parties” seems to be saying F should approximate 1. Which is arbitrary, admittedly.
Yes. If you and your partner agree- that is, A/B=C/D- then there’s no trouble. If you disagree, though, there’s no objectively correct way to determine the correct action.
Possibly, though many cases with F=1 seem like things PhilosophyTutor would find unethical. It seems more meaningful to look at A and B.
You make a very good point here. But you see, women don’t find men who try to be nice to them attractive. They call it “clingy”, “creepy” behavior. Human male-female interaction is actually a signalling game, where the man being nice simply sends a signal of weakness. Women are genetically programmed to only let alpha sperm in, and the alpha is not a character who goes around being nice to strangers.
Think about the effect on her inclusive genetic fitness if she bears the child of a nice-guy who tries to maximize other people’s utility before his own, versus having the child of an alpha who puts himself first and likes to impregnate lots of women.
And let me disclaim: I don’t like it that the world is this way, I don’t morally support the programming that evolution has given to women. But I accept it and work within its bounds.
Perhaps one day we will reprogram ourselves? Maybe transhuman love will be of a different. But in human love, the heart is not heart shaped, it is shaped like a clenched fist.
Oversimplified to the extent that it is basically not true.
You comment would be more useful if you said which ways it is oversimplified, and which additions and caveats you think are most important to restore it to being true.
And yet I would bet that it is still closer to true than I approve of. In particular, closer to true than the mental model used by the naive “nice guy”/”beta”.
This is starting to remind me of what happened to nutritional advice in the 1980s:
In nutrition “complex carbohydrates good! fats bad!” was widely promulgated
In dating “niceness/agreeableness good! alpha behavior bad!” was widely promulgated
in about the same time frame—and looks like it was comparably bad advice...
Well, no. I’ve received quite a bit of help and favors from men who didn’t seem creepy or clingy, and have found a few creepy who weren’t being helpful. I don’t think my experience is unusual.
One of the big reasons that LW is unable to be rational about pickup is that we have a small group of vocal and highly non-average women here who take any comment which is supposed to be a useful observation about the mental behavior of the median young attractive woman to be about THEM IN PARTICULAR.
You, NancyLebovitz, are not the kind of woman that PU is aimed at. You do not go to night clubs regularly. You do not read gossip magazines and follow celebrity lifestyles, you do not obsess about makeup . You post on weird rationality websites. You are not the median young, attractive woman. And that goes for Alicorn too.
Even amongst the set of IQ + 1 sigma women you are almost certainly highly nontypical.
Comments about female psychology are not directed at you, they are not about you, your personal experience of YOUR OWN reactions are not meant to be well described by pick-up theory.
I do not mean this in a negative way. I mean you no offence; in fact you should take it as a compliment in the context of intelligence and rationality. I am merely making an epistemological point.
The next time I make a comment about PU, I will carefully disclaim that PU is primarily designed to analyse the average psychology of just one particular kind of woman: namely relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive.
Especially important since major and well-respected proponents of PUA around here do not assume this premise, and in fact it is generally assumed that there are different areas of PUA that will help people of particular sex/gender/sexual orientation accomplish varying sorts of goals.
PU may well apply (to a certain extent) to almost all pre-menopausal hetero/bi women, but the case is much more clear cut for women who are also relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive, because that’s the subgroup of women where extensive field-testing of the concepts has been done.
PUA is a large field with many different subfields and schools of thought. There are those who aim for one-night-stands at bars, and those who aim to find the particular soulmate they’ve been searching for. There is PUA writing from the perspective of homosexuals, both men and women, teens, older folks, and all sorts of different perspectives.
If you think there is just one set of techniques in the field and they are only applicable to a small subset of humanity, then you’re not very familiar with PUA and should stop making blanket assertions about the field.
The definition of “pick up artist” from wikipedia is:
So if we are indeed referring to the same thing by the phrase, then I think that I am correct in saying that
There have been small offshoots into “girl game” and some guys focus more on older women, and I am explicitly not denying that there are results and facts there. But the core of the concept, the VAST majority of the field testing and online material is about quickly seducing “women who are relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive”
It certainly looks like you are::
Maybe you forgot a ‘not’ in there somewhere?
It sounds like you’re making a strawman out of your own arguments. You made blanket statements about how this is a bad and misleading article because it ignores the truth about how women respond to men. When people pointed out that this is not true of particular women, you amended it to refer just to the vast majority of women, and now you’re amending it further to only apply to a particular goal regarding a minority of women.
So the takeaway from your arguments seems to be that you should not follow the advice given in the above post, in the case that you have a very specific goal with respect to a relatively small group of women.
If that is what you meant to say, then yes you needed to be specific about what special circumstance you thought the post doesn’t apply to. It is not particularly surprising that the advice given in the post only works for most people with most goals.
This goes too far. The vast majority of men are heterosexual, gender-normal, and the vast majority of those are most attracted to women who are not:
post-menopause/50+
ugly
lesbian (i.e. not attracted to men)
Pickup is popular because it tells men how to attract precisely those women who they desire most.
You left out:
Which was apparently important to your case above.
It’s an interesting claim, though I’m not buying it, and it is anyway irrelevant to my earlier claim.
Most people are not heterosexual, gender-normal men who are most attracted to women with none of those qualities. And most relationship goals are not seducing such people. And most people do not have that goal.
Probably ~40% of pepople are heterosexual, gender-normal men who are most attracted to women who are young and straight.
It seems like you are using weasel words to describe the goal of ~40% of the people on the planet as a “very specific goal”.
Let me put it another way. On a website with a strong majority heterosexual male readership, the article fails to mention what I think is the definitive body of knowledge to improve the dating lives of heterosexual men. You then criticize me because, of all people, just under half are heterosexual males, almost all of whom (surprise) like young, attractive, straight women; you use weasel words saying that my point is for a “very specific goal”, when in fact probably ~60-80% of people reading this site have the goal of attracting/keeping a young, attractive, hetero/bi woman.
TBH, I feel that you, and LW in general, are trying to use pedantry/weasel words/motivated cognition to close your eyes to the truth about attraction between men and women. Perhaps there is some subset of people here who want to know, but I feel that if I mention the subject I will end up arguing against some form of denial/motivated cognition, rather than discussing the subject in the spirit of a collaborative enquiry to get at the truth.
Theists comprise a much larger percentage of the global population than 40%, but that doesn’t mean we’d consider a goal like “being closer to God” to be particularly important or worthy of discussion here.
Just FYI, some of us hate pro-PUA rants as much as we hate anti-PUA rants. Actually, I hate the pro-PUA rants more, because they do more harm than good.
Telling people they’re closing their eyes to the truth is not a rational method of persuasion in any environment, and certainly not here.
If you learned half as much from PUA as you think you have, you should have learned that if you want to catch fish, then don’t think like a fisherman, think like a fish.
In this discussion, you are not thinking like a fish.
Like the saying goes, you catch more flies with fly pheremones...
Also note that I am just as pedantic when I’m talking about a subject that I like, and I’m sure people would back me up on this. Maybe I should step up the pedantry in general to make that clearer, to avoid this sort of accusation.
And nowhere here did I say something like “PUA should not be discussed” or “PUA is incorrect about its subject matter” or even “The particular sub-branch of PUA you have in mind is incorrect or useless”. Indeed, I think rational inquiry into relationships is a noble goal and often cite PUA as a rare area of discourse where beliefs are tested against the world in rapid iteration.
Rather, I was annoyed that you were making patently false claims and then when people called you on it you acted like they were doing something wrong. If you want to assert falsehoods, please do it elsewhere.
I don’t think that means what you think it means.
Ceteris paribus, I would regard pedantry as evidence of a vice in favor of truth-seeking, not in the opposite direction. I’m surprised you think otherwise.
I find this hard to believe. As of the last survey only 33% are “single and looking”. If we combine that with the 24.2% that were “in a relationship”, assume they were all polyamorous, and that all of both groups were men, we still do not approach the lower bound of your estimate. It fails a basic sanity check.
I would assert that most people here would benefit more from attracting vastly atypical partners, and we are mostly outliers in more ways than one, so your generalizations are even less helpful here than in the world at large. But that belief is irrelevant to my above statements.
ETA: bad sanity check.
You excluded ‘married’ from the check, which is the only thing that allows your “sanity failure” assertion to stand. This is either an error or disingenuous. ‘Married’ applies for the same reason ‘in a relationship’ applies. 24% are single but not looking, not the 57% that you suggest. The “all polyamorous” assumption is not needed given that keeping was included.
Agreed. I was not considering “attracting” and “keeping” as separate states; rather, I read it as “attracting or (attracting and keeping)” which clearly was not warranted. So if we assume everyone not “single but not looking” was male and interested in the sorts of things mentioned above, that’s 76%, which while still a stretch falls well within the range above.
Listen carefully to what I said, Thomblake:
One must distinguish carefully between the set of women for which I (in a Bayesian sense) believe PU would apply to, versus the set of women for which I am stably highly confident that it applies to because of overwhelming field-testing.
Indeed, saying that “PU may well apply (to a certain extent) to almost all pre-menopausal hetero/bi women” does not logically entail that I think it doesn’t apply to post-menopausal women or lesbians etc. Personally I have no clue about lesbian attraction, and very little about how to attract post-menopausal women, so I make no claim in particular.
As I’ve pretty much argued before, people could escape the majority of needless wasteful friction if they were just willing to use words like “average” and/or “median” when that’s indeed what they mean instead of “all”.
You could have said “average women” from the start. Am not talking about “careful” disclaimers here—I’m just talking about the single word “average”, which by itself would have vastly improved your comment. And yet you didn’t choose to have that word. Why? Was one word so costly to you?
Or was rudeness and stereotyping intentionally being signalled here in a “Alphas don’t bother with politeness, that’s submissive behaviour” sort-of-thing?
Surely you mean
“the average person could escape the majority of needless wasteful tension if they were just willing to use words … ”
since I am sure there is some person out there who overuses “average” when they really mean “all”, yes? And yet you didn’t choose to have that word. Why? Was one word so costly to you?
No, I’m sure I wasn’t talking about average people, I was talking about people collectively. If I added the word “all” it would be closer to my meaning that if I had added the word “average”.
But I guess I was right in my estimation about the intentionality of the signals you were giving, as you’re now reinforcing them.
Assuming for the sake of argument that women are sentient, but also that they have absolutely no free will when it comes to sexual relationships and that they can be piloted like a remote-controlled drone by a man who has cracked the human sexual signalling language (a hypothesis only slightly more extreme than the PUA hypothesis), that would still leave us with the question of how to maximise the utility of these strange, mindless creatures given that they are sentient and their utility counts as much as any other sentient being’s.
PUA might be compatible with this if you assume that just by chance the real utility function of the human female just happens to be maximised by the behaviour which maximises the utility of the PUA, which is to say that you maximise the utility of all human females by having a one night stand with them if you find them physically attractive but not inclined to be subservient, and a longer-term relationship with them under some circumstances if you want regular sex and you can manage the relationship so that you are dominant. (We could call this the Weak Gor Hypothesis).
However this has not been demonstrated, and it might turn out that in some cases women are happier if they are communicated with honestly, treated as equal partners in a relationship, given signals that they are high-status in the form of compliments and “romantic” gestures and so forth. If that was the case then ethically some weight would have to be given to these sources of utility, and it would be ethically questionable to talk down such behaviour as “beta” since it would have turned out that the alpha/beta distinction did not match up with a real distinction between utility-maximising and non-utility-maximising behaviour in all cases.
LOL. Given that IRL Goreans (male and female) exist, someone who wants that sort of thing needn’t try converting anyone from the general dating pool.
I’ve paraphrased your comment to make it gender neutral and preference-neutral.
The thing is, what maximizes our happiness isn’t always what’s predictably enjoyable. (See prospect theory, fun theory, liking vs. wanting, variable reinforcement...) Excitement and variety are very often the spice of life.
Frankly, having a partner who does nothing but worship you is both annoying and unattractive… even though it might sound like a good idea on paper. (For one thing, you can feel pressured to reciprocate.)
I’m reminded of Eliezer’s “fun theory” posts about the evolution of concepts of heaven: that if you’re a poor farmer then no work to do and streets paved with gold sounds like heaven to you, but once you actually got there, it’d be bloody boring.
In the same way, a lot of romantic ideals for relationships sound like heaven only when you haven’t actually gotten there yet.
I think we need to be careful of false dichotomies and straw men, since so much of PUA doctrine/knowledge/dogma (pick your preferred term) is communicated in the form of dichotomies, which I suspect are false to at least a significant extent.
The possibility I advanced was that “women are happier if they are communicated with honestly, treated as equal partners in a relationship, given signals that they are high-status in the form of compliments and “romantic” gestures and so forth”. This does not seem to me to be the same thing as saying that women are happier with “a partner who does nothing but worship [them]”, although I can see how if you were trained to see relationships in terms of the PUA alpha/beta dichotomy it might seem to be the same thing to you. Most obviously treating someone as an equal partner is inconsistent with doing nothing but worshipping that person.
You also are asserting without evidence that the kind of relationship I just described would not be fun if you were actually in one, which seems to me to contain implicit status attack, since it assumes that I have never been in such a relationship and hence that I am speaking from a position of epistemological disadvantage compared to yourself.
Would I be far wrong if I guessed that your data set for this implicit assumption is based on interacting with a significant number of PUAs? If so the underlying problem may well simply be self-selection bias. The kind of people who have long-term relationships based on honesty, equality and support are probably unlikely to self-select for participation in PUA forums and hence their experiences and viewpoints will be under-represented in those circles compared to their prevalence in the general population.
Actually, it’s my observation that men who consciously make an effort to do what you said, actually end up doing what I said, from the point of view of the people they interact with.
That is, they are poorly calibrated and overshoot the mark. (Been there, did that.)
Hm. Sorry—the important piece left out of my explicit reasoning is above: i.e., that people who think they are “communicating honestly”, et al usually end up doing something completely different; it’s the absence of that which I implicitly assume you’ve had… and which is AFAICT a less common experience for men (with no implied connotations about status) if for no other reason than that women are on average better socially calibrated than men.
Yes, you would. ;-)
Data point: I have been married for 15 years and would not classify myself as a PUA in any sense, although based on what statistics I’ve read about men in general, I would have to consider myself to have had above-average sexual success (though not drastically so) before I got married—largely due to behaviors PUAs would’ve described as social game, direct game, and qualifying. (However, the terms didn’t exist at the time, as far as I know—this was pre-internet for the most part.)
At no time were a lack of honesty, equality, or support a part of what I did or sought, so I’m not sure why you think they are anathema to PUA goals.
PUA literature, like so many other things, is largely what you make of it. When I look at it, I find the parts that are positive, life-affirming, and utility-increasing for everybody involved. So your objections look to me like strawman attacks.
One thing I have observed is that once I’ve read the parts of PUA theory that sound good (i.e., more politically correct), I find that on reading the less politically-correct things, they are actually advocating similar behaviors, and simply describing them differently. Some use more inflammatory and controversial language laced with all sorts of negative judgments about men and women; others emphasize empathy and helping men to see things from women’s point of view (without an added heap of patronizing the women in the process).
And yet, when it comes right down to it, they’re still saying to do the same things; it’s only the connotations of their speech that are different.
IOW, ISTM that you are arguing with the misogynistic connotations of some fragment of PUA theory that you’ve encountered; I disagree because the connotations are AFAICT superfluous to functional PUA advice, having had the opportunity to compare misogynistically-connotated and non-misogynistically-connotated descriptions of the same thing.
This is something that PUA and self-help in general have in common, btw: they are best read in such a way as to completely disregard connotation, judgment, and theory, in favor of simply extracting as directly as possible what precise behaviors are being recommended and what predictions are being made regarding the outcomes of those behaviors. Only after determining whether the behavior produces the predicted result, is it worth exploring (or refuting) the advocate’s theories about “how” or “why” it works.
Case in point: “The Secret” and other “law of attraction stuff”, much of which turns out to be scientifically valid, if (and only if) you completely ignore the nutty theories and focus on behavior and predictions. Richard Wiseman’s research into “luck theory” actually demonstrates that the behaviors and attitudes recommended by certain “law of attraction” proponents actually do make you luckier, by increasing the probability that you will notice and exploit serendipitous positive opportunities in your environment.
If Wiseman had simply dismissed “The Secret” as another nutty new-age misinterpretation of physics, that research couldn’t have been done. I suggest that if you seriously intend to research PUA (as opposed to making what seem to me like strawman arguments against it), you follow Wiseman’s example, and break down whatever you read into concrete behaviors and outcome predictions, minus any theories or political connotations of theories.
I think your position is going to turn out to be unfalsifiable on the point of whether relationships involving honesty, equality and mutual support actually exist. If your response to claims that they exist is to say “Well in my experience they don’t exist, the people who think they do are just deluded” I can’t provide any evidence that will change your views. After all, I could just be deluded.
As for whether I’m engaging with, and have read, the “real” PUA literature or the “good” PUA literature, I’m not sure whether or not this is an instance of the No True Scotsman argument. There’s no question that a large part of the PUA literature and community are misogynist and committed to an ideology that positions themselves as high-status and women and non-PUA men as low-status. As such that part of PUA culture is antithetical to the goals of LW as I understand them since those goals include maximising everyone’s utility.
If there’s a subset of positive-utility PUA thinking then that criticism does not apply and it’s at least possible that if they have scientific data to back up their claims then there is something useful to be found there.
I think it’s the PUA advocates’ burden of proof to show us that data though, if there really is an elephant of good data pertinent to pursuing high net-utility outcomes in the room. As opposed to some truisms which predate PUA culture by a very long time hidden under an encrustation of placebo superstitions.
Huh? I didn’t say those things didn’t exist. I said I was not searching for a lack of those things (I even bolded the word “lack” so you wouldn’t miss it), and that I don’t see why you think that PUA requires such a lack.
Authentic Man Program and Johnny Soporno are the two schools I’m aware of that are strongly in the honesty and empowerment camps, AFAICT, and would constitute the closest things to “true scotsmen” for me. Most other things that I’ve seen have been a bit of a mixed bag, in that both empathetic and judgmental material (or honest and dishonest) can both be found in the same set of teachings.
Of notable interest to LW-ers, those two schools don’t advocate even the token dishonesty of false premises for starting a conversation, let alone dishonesty regarding anything more important than that.
(Now, if you want to say that these schools aren’t really PUA, then you’re going to be the one making a No True Scotsman argument. ;-) )
As I said, I’m less interested in “scientific” evidence than Bayesian evidence. The latter can be disappointingly orthogonal to the former, in that what’s generally good scientific evidence isn’t always good Bayesian evidence, and good Bayesian evidence isn’t always considered scientific.
More to the point, if your goals are more instrumental than epistemic, the reason why a particular thing works is of far less interest than whether it works and how it can be utilized.
I took a quick look at AMP and Soporno’s web sites and I’m more than happy to accept them as non-misogynistic dating advice sources aiming for mutually beneficial relationships. I wasn’t previously aware of them but I unconditionally accept them as True Scotsmen.
I’m now interested in how useful their advice is, either in instrumental or epistemic terms. Either would be significant, but if there is no hard evidence then the fact that their intentions are in step with those of LW doesn’t get them a free pass if they don’t have sound methodology behind their claims.
I’m aware Eliezer thinks there’s a difference between scientific evidence and Bayesian evidence but it’s my view that this is because he has a slightly unsophisticated understanding of what science is. My own view is that the sole difference between the two is that science commands you to suspend judgment until the null hypothesis is under p=0.05, at least for the purposes of what is allowed into the scientific canon as provisional fact, and Bayesians are more comfortable making bets with greater degrees of uncertainty.
Regardless, if your goals are genuinely instrumental you very much want to figure out what parts of the effect are due to placebo effects and what parts are due to real effects, so you can maximise your beneficial outcomes with a minimum of effort. If PUA is effective to some extent but solely due to placebo effects then it only merits a tiny footnote in a rationalist approach to relationships. If it has effects beyond placebo effects then and only then is there something interesting for rationalists to look at.
There is a word for the problem that results from this way of thinking about instrumental advice. It’s called “akrasia”. ;-)
Again, if you could get people to do things without taking into consideration the various quirks and design flaws of the human brain (from our perspective), then self-help books would be little more than to-do lists.
In general, when I see somebody worrying about placebo effects in instrumental fields affected by motivation, I tend to assume that they are either:
Inhumanly successful and akrasia-free at all their chosen goals, (not bloody likely),
Not actually interested in the goal being discussed, having already solved it to their satisfaction (ala skinny people accusing fat people of lacking willpower), or
Very interested in the goal, but not actually doing anything about it, and thus very much in need of a reason to discount their lack of action by pointing to the lack of “scientifically” validated advice as their excuse for why they’re not doing that much.
Perhaps you can suggest a fourth alternative? ;-)
I’d prefer not to discuss this at the ad hominem level. You can assume for the sake of argument whichever of those three assumptions you prefer is correct, if it suits you. I’m indifferent to your choice—it makes no difference to my utility. I make no assumptions about why you hold the views you do.
My view is that the rationalist approach is to take it apart to see how it works, and then maybe afterwards put the bits that actually work back together with a dollop of motivating placebo effect on top.
The best way to approach research into helping overweight people lose weight is to study human biochemistry and motivation, and see what combinations of each work best. Not to leave the two areas thoroughly entangled and dismiss those interested in disentangling them as having the wrong motivations. I think the same goes for forming and maintaining romantic relationships.
Me either. I was asking you for a fourth alternative on the presumption that you might have one.
FWIW, I don’t consider any of those alternatives somehow bad, nor is my intention to use the classification to score some sort of points. People who fall into category 3 are of particular interest to me, however, because they’re people who can potentially be helped by understanding what it is they’re doing.
To put it another way, it wasn’t a rhetorical question, but one of information. If you fall in category 1 or 2, we have little further to discuss, but that’s okay. If you fall in category 3, I’d like to help you out of it. If you fall in an as-yet-to-be-seen category 4, then I get to learn something.
So, win, win, win, win, in all four cases.
This is conflating things a bit: my reference to weight loss was pointing out that “universal” weight-loss advice doesn’t really exist, so a rationalist seeking to lose weight must personally test alternatives, if he or she cannot afford to wait for science to figure out the One True Theory of Weight Loss.
This presupposes that you already have something that works, which you will not have unless you first test something. Even if you are only testing scientifically-validated principles, you must still find which are applicable to your individual situation and goals!
Heck, medical science uses different treatments for different kinds of cancer, and occasionally different treatments for the same kind of cancer, depending on the situation or the actual results on an individual - does this mean that medical science is irrational? If not, then pointing a finger at the variety of situation-specific PUA advice is just rhetoric, masquerading as reasoning.
I imagine you’d put me in category #2 as I’m currently in a happy long-term relationship. However my self-model says that three years ago when I was single and looking for a partner that I would still want to know what the actual facts about the universe were, so I’d put myself in category #4, the category of people for whom it’s reflexive to ask what the suitably blinded, suitably controlled evidence says whether or not they personally have a problem at that point in their lives with achieving relevant goals.
I think we should worry about placebo effects everywhere they get in the way of finding out how the universe actually works, whether they happen to be in instrumental fields affected by motivation or somewhere else entirely.
That didn’t mean that I chose celibacy until the peer-reviewed literature could show me an optimised mate-finding strategy, of course, but it does mean that I don’t pretend that guesswork based on my experience is a substitute for proper science.
The difference between your PUA example and medicine is that medicine usually has relevant evidence for every single one of those medical decisions. (Evidence-based medicine has not yet driven the folklore out of the hospital by a long chalk but the remaining pockets of irrationality are a Very Bad Thing). Engineers use different materials for different jobs, and photographers use different lenses for different shots too. I don’t see how the fact that these people do situation-specific things gets you to the conclusion that because PUAs are doing situation-specific things too they must be right.
It doesn’t. It just refutes your earlier rhetorical conflation of PUA with alternative medicine on the same grounds.
At this point, I’m rather tired of you continually reframing my positions to stronger positions, which you can then show are fallacies.
I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose (you could just be misunderstanding me, after all), but you’ve been doing it a lot, and it’s really lowering the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, you appear to disagree with some of LW’s premises about what “rationality” is. So, I don’t think continued discussion along these lines is likely to be very productive.
My intent was to show that in the absence of hard evidence PUA has the same epistemic claim on us as any other genre of folklore or folk-psychology, which is to say not much.
I admit I’m struggling to understand what your positions actually are, since you are asking me questions about my motivations and accusing me of “rhetoric, not reasoning” but not telling me what you believe to be true and why you believe it to be true. Or to put it another way, I don’t believe you have given me much actual signal to work with, and hence there is a very distinct limit to how much relevant signal I can send back to you.
Maybe we should reboot this conversation and start with you telling me what you believe about PUA and why you believe it?
Ok. I’ll hang in here for a bit, since you seem sincere.
Here’s one belief: PUA literature contains a fairly large number of useful, verifiable, observational predictions about the nonverbal aspects of interactions occurring between men and women while they are becoming acquainted and/or attracted.
Why do I believe this? Because their observational predictions match personal experiences I had prior to encountering the PUA literature. This suggests to me that when it comes to concrete behavioral observations, PUAs are reasonably well-calibrated.
For that reason, I view such PUA literature—where and only where it focuses on such concrete behavioral observations—as being relatively high quality sources of raw observational data.
In this, I find PUA literature to be actually better than the majority of general self-help and personal development material, as there is often nowhere near enough in the way of raw data or experiential-level observation in self-help books.
Of course, the limitation on my statements is the precise definition of “PUA literature”, as there’s definitely a selection effect going on. I tend to ignore PUA material that is excessively misogynistic on its face, simply because extracting the underlying raw data is too… tedious, let’s say. ;-) I also tend to ignore stuff that doesn’t seem to have any connection to concrete observations.
So, my definition of “PUA literature” is thus somewhat circular: I believe good stuff is good, having carefully selected which bits to label “good”. ;-)
Another aspect of my possible selection bias is that I don’t actually read PUA literature in order to do PUA!
I read PUA literature because of its relevance to topics such as confidence, fear, perceptions of self-worth, and other more common “self-help” topics that are of interest to me or to my customers. By comparison, PUA literature (again using my self-selected subset) contains much better raw data than traditional self-help books, because it comes from people who’ve relentlessly calibrated their observations against a harder goal than just, say, “feeling confident”.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that there are people who believe they have relentlessly calibrated their observations against reality using high quality sources of raw observational data and that as a result they have a system that lets them win at Roulette. (Barring high-tech means to track the ball’s vector or identifying an unbalanced wheel).
Roulette seems to be an apt comparison because based on the figures someone else quoted or linked to earlier about a celebrated PUAist hitting on 10 000 women and getting 300 of them into bed, the odds of a celebrated PUAist getting laid on a single approach even according to their own claims is not far off the odds of correctly predicting exactly which hole a Roulette ball will land in.
So when these people say “I tried a new approach where I flip flopped, be-bopped, body rocked, negged, nigged, nugged and nogged, then went for the Dutch Rudder and I believe this worked well” unless they tried this on a really large number of women so that they could detect changes in a base rate of 3% success I really don’t think they have any meaningful evidence. Did their success rate go up from 3% to 4% or what, and what are their error bars?
What’s the base rate for people not using PUA techniques anyway? People other than PUAs are presumably getting laid, so it’s got to be non-zero. The closer it is to 3% the less effect PUA techniques are likely to have.
I’ve already heard the response “Look, we don’t get just one bit of data as feedback. We PUAs get all sorts of nuanced feedback about what works and does not”. If that’s so and this feedback is doing some good this should be reflected in your hit rate for getting laid. If picking up women and getting them in to bed is an unfair metric for PUA effectiveness I really think it should be called something other than PUA.
My thinking is that you don’t have enough data to distinguish whether you are in a world where PUA training has a measurable effect, from a world where PUA have an unfalsifiable mythology that allows them to explain their hits and misses to themselves, and a collection of superstitions about what works and does not, but no actual knowledge that separates them in terms of success rate from those who simply scrub up, dress up and ask a bunch of women out.
I want to see that null hypothesis satisfactorily falsified before I allow that there is an elephant in the room.
Once again, you are misstating my claims.
Notice that nowhere in my post did I say pickup artists get laid, let alone that they get laid more often!
Nowhere did I state anything about their predictions of what behavior works to get laid!
I even explicitly pointed out that the information I’m most interested in obtaining from PUA literature, has notthing to do with getting laid!
So just by talking about the subject of getting laid, you demonstrate a complete failure to address what I actually wrote, vs. what you appear to have imagined I wrote.
So, please re-read what I actually wrote and respond only to what I actually wrote, if you’d like me to continue to engage in this discussion.
Okay. What observable outcomes do you think you can obtain at better-than-base-rate frequencies employing these supposed insights, and why do you think you can obtain them?
As I said earlier I think that if PUA insights cannot be cashed out in a demonstrable improvement in the one statistic which you would think would matter most to them, rate of getting laid, then there is grounds to question whether these supposed insights are of any use to anyone.
But if you would prefer to use some other metric I’m willing to look at the evidence.
Guesswork based on your experience isn’t supposed to be a substitute for science. It’s the part of science that you do when choosing which phenomena you want to test, well before you get to the blinding and peer review.
The flip side is that proper science isn’t a substitute for either instrumental rationality or epistemic rationality. Limiting your understanding of the world entirely to what is already published in journals gives you a model of the world that is subjectively objectively wrong.
I don’t disagree but a potentially interesting research area isn’t an elephant in the room that demands attention in a literature review, and limiting yourself to proper science is no sin in a literature review either. Only when the lessons we can learn from proper science are exhausted should we start casting about in the folklore for interesting research areas, and we certainly shouldn’t put much weight on anecdotes from this folklore. In Bayesian terms such anecdotes should shift our prior probability very, very slightly if at all.
No ad hominem fallacy present in grandparent.
Why don’t you first describe one, then the other, then contrast them? Then, describe Eliezer’s view and contrast that with your position.
I’ll try to do it briefly, but it will be a bit tight. Let’s see how we go.
Bayes’ Theorem is part of the scientific toolbox. Pick up a first year statistics textbook and it will be in there, although not always under that name (look for “conditional probability” or similar constructs). Most of scientific methodology is about ensuring that you do your Bayesian updating right, by correctly establishing the base rate and the probability of your observations given the null hypothesis. (Scientists don’t state their P(A), but they certainly have an informal sense of what P(A) is likely to be and are more inclined to question a conclusion if it is unlikely than if it is likely).
If you’re doing Bayes right it’s the same as doing science, but I think some of the LW groupthink holds that you can do a valid Bayesian update in the absence of a rigorously established base rate, and so they think this is a difference between being a good Bayesian and being a good scientist. I think they are just being bad Bayesians since updating is no better than guesswork in the absence of a rigorously obtained P(B).
Eliezer (based on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? ) doesn’t quite carve up science-culture from ideal-science-methodology the way I do, and infers that there is something wrong with Science because the culture doesn’t care about revising instrumentally-indistinguishable models to make them more Eliezer-intuitive. I think this has more to do with trying to win a status war with Science than with any differences in predicted observations that matter.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t underlie the entire structure. As an analogy, to get from New York to Miami, one must generally go south. But instructions on how to get there will be a hodgepodge of walk north out of the building, west to the car, drive due east, then turn south...the plane takes off headed east...and turns south...etc. Showing that going south is one of several ways to turn while walking doesn’t mean its no conceptually different than north for getting fro New York to Miami. Similarly:
If one is paid to do plumbing, then there is no difference between being a good plumber and a “good Bayesian”, and in that sense there is no difference between being a “good Bayesian” and a “good scientist”.
In the sense in which it is intended, there is a difference between being a “good Bayesian” and a “good scientist”. To continue the analogy, if one must go from Ramsey to JFK airport across the Tappan Zee Bridge, one’s route will be on a convoluted path to a bridge that’s in a monstrously inconvenient location. It was built there—at great additional expense as that is where the river is widest—to be just outside of the NY/NJ Port Authority’s jurisdiction. The best route from Ramsey to Miami may be that way, but that accommodates human failings, and is not the direct route. Likewise for every movement that is made in a direction not as the crow flies. Bayesian laws are the standard by which the crow flies, against which it makes sense to compare the inferior standards that better suit our personal and organizational deficiencies.
Well, yes and no. It’s adequately suited for the accumulation of not-false beliefs, but it both could be better instrumentally designed for humans and is not the bedrock of thinking by which anything works. The thing that is essential to the method you described, “Scientists...have an informal sense of what P(A) is likely to be and are more inclined to question a conclusion if it is unlikely than if it is likely”. What abstraction describes the scientist’s thought process, the engine within the scientific method? I suggest it is Bayesian reasoning but even if it is not, one thing it cannot be is more of the Scientific method, as that would lead to recursion. If it is not Bayesian reasoning, then there are some things I am wrong about, and Bayesianism is a failed complete explanation, and the Scientific method is half of a quite adequate method—but they are still different from each other.
P(B|~A) is inversely proportional to P(A|B) by Bayes’ Rule, so the direction is right—that’s why we can make planes that don’t fall out of the sky. But just using P(B|~A) isn’t what’s done, because scientists interject their subjective expectations here and pretend they do not. P(B|~A) doesn’t contain whether or not a researcher would have published something had she found a two tail rather than one tail test—a complaint about a paper I read just a few hours ago. What goes into p-values necessarily involves the arbitrary classes the scientist has decided evidence would fit in, and then measures his or her surprise at the class of evidence that is found. That’s not P(B|~A), it’s P(C|~A).
Do you have examples of boundary cases that distinguish a rigorously established one with one that isn’t?
If one believes in qualitatively different beliefs, the rigorous and the non-rigorous, one falls into paradoxes such as the lottery paradox. It’s important to establish the actual nature of knowledge as probabilistic, and not be tricked into thinking science is a separate non-overlapping magisteria with other things.
With such actually correct understanding of how beliefs should work, we can think about improving our thinking rather than eternally and in vain trying to smooth out a ripple in a rug that has a table on each of its corners, hoping our mistaken view of the world has few harmful implications like “Jesus Christ is God’s only son” and not “life begins at conception”.
Or, we could not act on our most coherent world-views, only acting according to whatever fragment of thought our non-coherent attention presents to us. Not appealing.
Thank you for saying my point better than I was able to.
I don’t think scientists think about it much. That’s more the sort of thing philosophers of science think about. The smarter scientists do what is essentially Bayesian updating, although very few of them would actually put a number on their prior and calculate their posterior based on a surprising p value. They just know that it takes a lot of very good evidence to overturn a well-established theory, and not so much evidence to establish a new claim consistent with the existing scientific knowledge.
Stating your hypothesis beforehand and specifying exactly what will and will not count as evidence before you collect your data is a very good way of minimising the effect of your own biases, but naughty scientists can and do take the opportunity to cook the experiment by strategically choosing what will count as evidence. Still, overall it’s better than letting scientists pore over the entrails of their experimental results and make up a hypothesis after the fact. If a great new hypothesis comes out of the data then you have do to your legwork and do a whole new experiment to test the new hypothesis, and that’s how it should be. If the effect is real it will keep. The universe won’t change on you.
It’s not a binary distinction. Rather, if you’re unaware of the ways that people’s P(B) estimates can be wildly inaccurate and think that your naive P(B) estimates are likely to be accurate then you can update into all sorts of stupid and factually false beliefs even if you’re an otherwise perfect Bayesian.
The people who think that John Edward can talk to dead people might well be perfect Bayesians who just haven’t checked to see what the probability is that John Edward could produce the effects he produces in a world where he can’t talk to dead people. If you think the things he does are improbable then it’s technically correct to update to a greater belief in the hypothesis that he can channel dead people. It’s only if you know that his results are exactly what you’d expect in a world where he’s a fake that you can do the correct thing, which is not update your prior belief that the probability that he’s a fake is 99.99...9%.
If someone’s done some actual work to see if they can falsify the null hypothesis that PUS techniques are indistinguishable from a change, a comb, a shower and asking some women out I’d be interested in seeing it. In the absence of such work I think good Bayesians have to recognise that they don’t have a P(B) with small enough error bars to be very useful.
Exactly, it’s a cost and a deviation from ideal thinking to minimize the influence of scientists who receive no training in debiasing. So not “If you’re doing Bayes right it’s the same as doing science”, where “science” is an imperfect human construct designed to accommodate the more biased of scientists.
These are costs. It’s important, and in some contexts cheap, to know why and how things work instead of saying “I’ll ignore that since enough replication always solves such problems,” when one doesn’t know in which cases one is doing nearly pointless extra work and in which one isn’t doing enough replication. It’s an obviously sub-optimal solution along the lines of “thinking isn’t important; assume infinite resources.”
It’s praise through faint damnation of the laws of logic that they don’t prevent one from shooting one’s own foot off. Handcuffs are even better at that task, but they are less useful for figuring out what is true.
Exactly, so in “some of the LW groupthink holds that you can do a valid Bayesian update in the absence of a rigorously established base rate,” they are right, and “updating is no better than guesswork in the absence of a rigorously obtained P(B),” is not always true, such as when the following condition doesn’t apply, and it doesn’t here:
What do you think this site is for? People are reading and sharing research papers about biases in their free time. One could likewise criticize jet fuel for being inappropriate for an old fashioned coal powered locomotive. Yes, jet fuel will explode a train...this is not a flaw of jet fuel, and it does not mean that the coal-train is better at transporting things.
That’s not the claim in question.
In any case, there are better ways to think about this subject than with null hypotheses. Those are social constructs focusing (decently) on optimizing preventing belief in untrue things, rather than determining what’s most likely true, here false beliefs have relatively less cost than in most of science, and will in any case only be held probabilistically.
There’s a very good reason why we do double-blind, placebo-controlled trials rather than just recruiting a bunch of people who browse LW to do experiments with, on the basis that since LWers are “trained in debiasing” they are immune to wishful thinking, confirmation bias, the experimenter effect, the placebo effect and so on.
I have a great deal more faith in methodological constructs that make it impossible for bias to have an effect than in people’s claims to “debiased” status.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that training in avoiding cognitive biases is very important because there are lots of important things we do where we don’t have the luxury of specifying our hypotheses in strictly instrumental terms beforehand, collecting data via suitably blinded proxies and analysing it just in terms of our initial hypothesis.
However my view is that if you think that scientific methodology is just a set of training wheels for people who haven’t clicked on all the sequences yet and that browsing LW makes you immune to the problems that scientific methodology exists specifically to prevent then it’s highly likely you overestimate your resistance to bias.
There’s also a cost to acting on the assumption that every correlation is meaningful in a world where we have so much data available to us that we can find arbitrarily large numbers of spurious correlations at P<0.01 if we try hard enough. Either way you’re spending resources, but spending resources in the cause of epistemological purity is okay with me. Spending resources on junk because you are not practising the correct purification rituals is not.
The accepted scientific methodology is more like a safety rope or seat belt. Sometimes annoying, almost always rational.
Rather than what a site is for I focus on what a site is.
In many, many ways this site has higher quality discourse than, say, the JREF forums and a population who on average are better versed in cognitive biases. However this discussion has made it obvious to me that on average the JREF forumites are far more aware than the LWers of the various ways that people’s estimates of P(B) can be wrong and can be manipulated.
They would never put it in those terms since Bayes is a closed book to them, but they are very well aware that you can work yourself into completely wrong positions if you aren’t sophisticated enough to correctly estimate the actual base rate at which one would expect to observe things like homeopathy apparently working, people apparently talking to the dead, people apparently having psychic powers, NLP apparently letting you seduce people and so on in worlds where none of these things did anything except act as placebos (at best).
If your P(B) is off then using Bayes Theorem is just being a mathematically precise idiot instead of an imprecise idiot. You’ll get to exactly the right degree of misguided belief, based on the degree to which you’re mistaken about the correct value of P(B,) but that’s still far worse than being someone who wouldn’t know Bayes from a bar of soap but who intuitively perceives something closer to the correct P(B).
The idea that LW browsers think they are liquid-fuelled jets while the scientists who do the actual work of moving society forward are boring old coal trains worries me. I think of LW’s “researchers” as a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs with cheap compasses and hand-drawn maps running around in the bushes in a mildly organised fashion, while scientists are painstakingly and one inch at a time building a gigantic sixteen-lane highway for us all to drive down.
Yes, and people who actually understand the tradeoffs in using formal scientific reasoning and its deviations from the laws of reasoning are the only people in position to intelligently determine that. Those who say “always use the scientific method for important things” or, though I don’t know that there ever has been or ever will be such a person, “always recruit a bunch of people who browse LW,” are not thinking any more than a broken clock is ticking. As an analogy, coal trains are superior to jet planes for transporting millions of bushels of wheat from Alberta to Toronto. It would be inane and disingenuous for broken records always calling for the use of coal trains to either proclaim their greater efficiency in determining which vehicle to use to transport things because they got the wheat case right or pretend that they have a monopoly on calling for the use of trains.
With reasoning, one can intelligently determine a situation’s particulars and spend to eliminate a bias (for example by making a study double-blind) rather than doing that all the time or relying on skill in this case,and without relying on intuition to determine when. One can see that in an area, the costs of thinking something true when it isn’t exceeds the costs of thinking it’s false when it’s true, and set up correspondingly strict protocols, rather than blindly always paying in true things not believed, time, and money for the same, sometimes inadequate and sometimes excessive, amount of skepticism.
My view is that if you think anyone who has interacted with you in this thread has that view you have poor reading comprehension skills.
So one can simply...not do that. And be a perfectly good Bayesian.
It is not the case that every expenditure reducing the likelihood that something is wrong is optimal,as instead one could instead spend a bit on determining which areas ought to have extra expenditure reducing the likelihood that something is wrong there.
In any case, science has enshrined a particular few levels of spending on junk that it declares perfectly fine because the “correct” purification rituals have been done. I do not think that such spending on junk is justified because in those cases no, science is not strict enough. One can declare a set of arbitrary standards and declare spending according to them correct and ideologically pure or similar, but as one is spending fungible resources towards research goals this is spurious morality.
Amazing, let me try one. If a Bayesian reasoner is hit by a meteor and put into a coma, he is worse off than a non-Bayesian who stayed indoors playing Xbox games and was not hit by a meteor. So we see that Bayesian reasoning is not sufficient to confer immortality and transcendence into a godlike being made of pure energy.
People on this site are well aware that if scientific studies following the same rules as the rest of science indicate that people have psychic powers, there’s something wrong with the scientific method and the scientists’ understanding of it because the notion that people have psychic powers are bullshit.
People here know that there is not some ineffable magic making science the right method in the laboratory and faith the right method in church, or science the right method in the laboratory and love the right method everywhere else, science the right method everywhere and always, etc., as would have been in accordance with people’s intuitions.
How unsurprising it is that actually understanding the benefits and drawbacks of science leads one to conclude that often science is not strict enough, and often too strict, and sometimes but rarely entirely inappropriate when used, and sometimes but rarely unused when it should be used, when heretofore everything was decided by boggling intuition.
Grammar nitpick: should be “is bullshit,” referring to the singular “notion.”
I’m not going to get into a status competition with you over who is in a position to determine what.
The most obvious interpretation of your statement that science is “an imperfect human construct designed to accommodate the more biased of scientists” and that “it’s a cost and a deviation from ideal thinking to minimize the influence of scientists who receive no training in debiasing” is that you think your LW expertise means that you wouldn’t need those safeguards. If I misinterpreted you I think it’s forgivable given your wording, but if I misinterpreted you then please help me out in understanding what you actually meant.
I’m responding under the assumption that the second “scientific” should read “psychic”. My point was not that people here didn’t get that—I imagine they all do. My point is that the evidence on the table to support PUA theories is vulnerable to all the same problems as the evidence supporting claimed psychic powers, and that when it came to this slightly harder problem some people here seemed to think that the evidence on the table for PUA was actually evidence we would not expect to see in a world where PUA was placebo plus superstition.
I think the JREF community would take one sniff of PUA and say “Looks like a scam based on a placebo”, and that they would be better Bayesians when they did so than anyone who looks at the same evidence and says “Seems legit!”.
(I suspect that the truth is that PUA has a small non-placebo effect, since we live in a universe with ample evidence that advertising and salesmanship have small non-placebo effects that are statistically significant if you get a big enough sample size. However I also suspect that PUAs have no idea which bits of PUA are the efficacious bits and which are superstition, and that they could achieve the modest gains possible much faster if they knew which was which).
OK, I will phrase it in different terms that make it explicit that I am making several claims here (one about what Bayesianism can determine, and one about what science can determine). It’s much like I said above:
Some people claim Bayesian reasoning models intelligent agents’ learning about their environments, and agents’ deviations from it is failure to learn optimally. This model encompasses choosing when to use something like the scientific method and deciding when it is optimal to label beliefs not as “X% likely to be true, 1-X% likely to be untrue,” but rather “Good enough to rely on by virtue of being satisfactorily likely to be true,” and “Not good enough to rely on by virtue of being satisfactorily likely to be true”. If Bayesianism is wrong, and it may be, it’s wrong.
The scientific method is a somewhat diverse set of particular labeling systems declaring ideas “Good enough to rely on by virtue of being satisfactorily likely to be true,” and “Not good enough to rely on by virtue of being satisfactorily likely to be true.” Not only is the scientific method incomplete by virtue of using a black-box reasoning method inside of it, it doesn’t even claim to be able to adjudicate between circumstances in which it is to be used and in which it is not to be used. It is necessarily incomplete. Scientists’ reliance on intuition to decide when to use it and when not to may well be better than using Bayesian reasoning, particularly if Bayesianism is false, I grant that. But the scientific method doesn’t, correct me if I am wrong, purport to be able to formally decide whether or not a person should subject his or her religious beliefs to it.
I disagree but here is a good example of where Bayesians can apply heuristics that aren’t first-order applications of Bayes rule. The failure mode of the heuristic is also easier to see than where science is accused of being too strict (though that’s really only a part of the total claim, the other parts are that science isn’t strict enough, that it isn’t near Pareto optimal according to its own tradeoffs in which it sacrifices truth, and that it is unfortunately taken as magical by its practitioners).
In those circumstances in which the Bayesian objection to science is that it is too strict, science can reply by ignoring that money is the unit of caring and declare its ideological purity and willingness to always sacrifice resources for greater certainty (such as when the sacrifice is withholding FDA approval of a drug already approved in Europe), “Either way you’re spending resources, but spending resources in the cause of epistemological purity is okay with me. Spending resources on junk because you are not practising the correct purification rituals is not.”
Here, however, the heuristic is “reading charitably”, in which the dangers of excess are really, really obvious. Nonetheless, even if I am wrong about what the best interpretation is, the extra-Bayesian ritual of reading (more) charitably would have had you thinking it more likely than you did that I had meant something more reasonable (and even more so, responding as if I did). It is logically possible that you were reading charitably ideally and my wording was simply terrible. This is a good example of how one can use heuristics other than Bayes’ rule once one discovers one is a human and therefore subject to bias. One can weigh the costs and benefits of it just like each feature of scientific testing.
For “an imperfect human construct designed to accommodate the more biased of scientists”, it would hardly do to assume scientists are all equally biased, and likewise for assuming the construct is optimal no matter the extent of bias in scientists. So the present situation could be improved upon by matching the social restrictions to the bias of scientists and also decreasing that bias. If mostly science isn’t strict enough, then perhaps it should be stricter in general (in many ways it should be) but the last thing to expect is that it is perfectly calibrated. It’s “imperfect”, I wouldn’t describe a rain dance as an “imperfect” method to get rain, it would be an “entirely useless” method. Science is “imperfect”, and it does very well to the extent thinking is warped to accommodate the more biased of scientists, and so something slightly different would be more optimal for the less biased ones.
″...it’s a cost and a deviation from ideal thinking to minimize the influence of scientists who receive no training in debiasing,” and less cost would be called for if they received such training, but not zero. Also, it is important to know that costs are incurred, lest evangelical pastors everywhere be correct when they declare science a “faith”. Science is roughly designed to prevent false things from being called “true” at the expense of true things not being called “true”. This currently occurs to different degrees in different sciences, and it should, and some of those areas should be stricter, and some should be less strict, and in all cases people shouldn’t be misled about belief such that they think there is a qualitative difference between a rigorously established base rate and one not so established, or science and predicting one’s child’s sickness when it vomits a certain color in the middle of the night.
It’s not too similar since psychic powers have been found in controlled scientific studies, and they are (less than infinitely, but nearly) certainly not real. PUA theories were formed from people’s observations, then people developed ideas they thought based on the theories, then tested what they thought were the ideas, tested them insufficiently rigorously. Each such idea is barely more likely than the base rate for being correct due to all the failure nodes, but each is more likely, the way barely enriched uranium’s particles are more likely to be U-235 than natural uranium’s are. This is in line with “However I also suspect that PUAs have no idea which bits of PUA are the efficacious bits and which are superstition, and that they could achieve the modest gains possible much faster if they knew which was which”.
When it comes to action, as in psychological experiments in which one is given a single amount of money for correctly guessing the color of something between red and blue, and one determines 60% of the things are red, one should always guess red, one should act upon ideas most likely true if one must act, all else equal.
Any chance of turning this (and some of your other comments) into a top-level post? (perhaps something like, “When You Can (And Can’t) Do Better Than Science”?)
Yes.
I think the first section should ignore the philosophy of science and cover the science of science, the sociology of it, and concede the sharpshooter’s fallacy, assuming that whatever science does it is trying to do. The task of improving upon the method is then not too normative, since one can simply achieve the same results with fewer resources/better results with the same resources. Also, that way science can’t blame perceived deficiencies on the methods of philosophy, as it could were one to evaluate science according to philosophy’s methods and standards. This section would be the biggest added piece of value that isn’t tying together things already on this site.
A section should look for edges with only one labeled node in the scientific methods where science requires input from a mystery method, such as how scientists generate hypotheses or how scientific revolutions occur. These show the incompleteness of the scientific method as a means to acquire knowledge, even if it is perfect at what it does. Formalization and improvement of the mystery methods would contribute to the scientific method, even if nothing formal within the model changes.
A section should discuss how science isn’t a single method (according to just about everybody), but instead a family of similar methods varying especially among fields. This weakens any claim idealizing science in general, as at most one could claim that a particular field’s method is ideal for human thought and discovery. Assuming each (or most) fields’ methods are ideal (this is the least convenient possible world for the critic of the scientific method as practiced), the costs and benefits of using that method rather than a related scientific method can be speculated upon. I expect to find, as policy debates should not be one sided, that were a field to use other fields’ methods it would have advantages and disadvantages; the simple case is choice of stricter p-value modulating wrong things believed at the expense of true things not believed.
Sections should discuss abuses of statistics, one covering violations of the law (failing to actually test P(B|~A) and instead testing P((B + (some random stuff) - (some other random stuff)|~A) and another covering systemic failures such as publication bias and failure to publish replications. This would be a good place to introduce intra-scientific debates about such things to show both that science isn’t a monolithic outlook that can be supported and how one side in the civil war is aligned with Bayesian critiques. To the extent science is not settled on what the sociology of science is, that is a mark of weakness—it may be perfectly calibrated, but it isn’t too discriminatory here.
A concession I imagine pro-science people might make is to concede the weakness of soft science, such as sociology. Nonetheless, sociology’s scientific method is deeply related to hard sciences’, and its shortcomings somewhat implicate them. What’s more, if sociology is so weak, one wonders whence the pro-science person gets their strong pro-science view. One possibility is that they get it purely from philosophy of science, (a school of which) they wholly endorse, but if that is the case they don’t have an objection in kind to those who also predict science as is works decently but have severe criticisms of it and ideas on how to improve upon it, i.e. Bayesians.
I think it’s fair to contrast the scientific view of science with a philosophical view of Bayesianism to see if they are of the same scope. If science has no position on whether or not science is an approximation of Bayesian reasoning, and Bayesianism does, that is at least one question addressed by the one and not the other. It would be easy to invent a method that’s not useful for finding truth that has a broader scope than science, e.g. answering “yes” to every yes or no question unless it would contradict a previous response. This alone would show they are not synonymous.
A problem with the title “When You Can (And Can’t) Do Better Than Science” is that it is binary, but I really want three things explicitly expressed: 1) When you can do better than science by being stricter than science, 2) when you can do better than science by being more lenient than science, 3) when you can’t do better than science. The equivocation and slipperiness surrounding what it is reasonable to do is a significant part of the last category, e.g. one doesn’t drive where the Tappan Zee Bridge should have been built. The other part is near-perfect ways science operates now according to a reasonable use of “can’t”; I wouldn’t expect science to be absolutely and exactly perfect anywhere, any more than I can be absolutely sure with a probability of 1 that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn’t exist.
Second order Bayesianism deserves mention as the thing being advocated. A “good Bayesian” may use heuristics to counteract bias other than just Bayes’ rule, such as the principle of charity, or pretending things are magic to counteract the effort heuristic, or reciting a large number of variably sized numbers to counteract the anchoring effect, etc.
Is there a better analogy than the driving to the airport one for why Bayes’ Rule being part of the scientific toolbox doesn’t show the scientific toolbox isn’t a rough approximation of how to apply Bayes’ Rule? The other one I thought of is light’s exhibiting quantum behavior directly, it being a subset of all that is physical, but all that is physical actually embodying quantum behavior.
A significant confusion is discussing beliefs as if they weren’t probabilistic and actions in some domains as if they ought not be influenced by anything not in a category of true belief “scientifically established”. Bayesianism explains why this is a useful approximation of how one should actually act and thereby permits one to deviate from it without having to claim something like “science doesn’t work”.
Thoughts?
Not necessarily to reopen anything, but some notes:
I’m not sure it’s at all possible to debias against this.
I agree that those are better metaphors than handcuffs all else equal, but those things would not prevent one from shooting one’s foot, and so it didn’t fit the broader metaphor.
A better analogy would be a law that no medical treatment can be received until a second opinion is obtained, or something like that.
Are you familiar with Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge?
His view is only slightly more strict, yet he arrives at some very different conclusions. For example, under your framework Rhine’s ESP experiments are scientific hypothesis tests, and under his they are illogical. I am not convinced by Polanyi, but it is far from clear to me how you could show he is wrong. If you know how to show he is wrong and could explain that in a couple paragraphs (or point me to such a document) I would be very interested in reading it.
I’m not familiar with his work, unfortunately.
However a quote from one of the reviews concerns me. The reviewer says:
If that’s Polanyi’s position it seems both kooky and not immediately relevant to the topic, so unless you can take a shot at explaining what you think Polanyi’s insights are that are relevant to the topic at hand I think we should drop this and take it up elsewhere or by other means if you want to talk about it further.
What are some examples of good scientific evidence that isn’t good bayesian evidence?
Uh, how about all of parapsychology, aka “the control group for the scientific method”. ;-) Psi experiments can reach p .05 under conventional methods without being good Bayesian evidence, as we’ve seen recently with that “future priming” psi experiment.
(Note that I said “scientific” not Scientific. ;-) )
Ok, I wouldn’t have necessarily classed that as ‘good scientific evidence’ but it seems to be useful Bayesian evidence so we must be looking at it from different angles.
If they see this behavior from a stranger, they hate it like a bad smell. Yuck.
If they see a lot of this in a relationship, they begin to lose attration for him, and in the end hate him and cheat on him.
By the way, have you studied game theory? A man who always gives you treats and compliments is signalling his own low value, therefore his treats and compliments are devalued. Yes?
My personal belief is that female utility is maximized by a man who is alpha, who leads them rather than treating them as an equal, who keeps them “on their toes” by flirting with other chicks, but who occasionally surprises them with a big romantic gesture like a surprise weekend break, champagne on ice, hot sex in the penthouse suite. But he doesn’t do it all the time, his rewards are unpredictable. This is in line with what game theory would predict.
Note that “utility” is not the same thing as “sexual pleasure”.
Perhaps the reason you’re being downvoted is because you’re confusing game theory with behaviorism. Variable reinforcement schedules, and all that.
Also, I expect if you phrased the last part of your comment, say, as:
“People enjoy a little variety and unpredictability from their partners, and generally prefer not to have to come up with all the ideas for what to do.”
It’d be less likely to be perceived as some sort of chauvinism. That statement, as it happens is true of both men and women.
(Likewise, the first part of your comment describes things that men do in response to women’s behavior, despite your writing it as if it were unique to women’s response to men.)
Finding ourselves with the ability to reflect on how our instinctual behavior and preferences are derived from inclusive genetic fitness necessitates neither fully accepting, nor fully rejecting these preferences.
I understand that, in seeking a romantic partner, there are qualities I value above those as determined by the blind idiot god. One of these qualities is reflectively the ability to rationally self-determine preferences, to the extent that such a thing is possible.
I liken my understanding to the fable of the oak and reed. I prefer, and indeed expect, potential romantic partners to signal appropriate … fertility, in a reductive sense. Likewise, I exhibit desirable behavioral cues (actually, much of the alpha male mentality is worthwhile in itself): confidence, leadership, non-neediness, etc. In neither case (hopefully) are these the qualities that are primarily desired, but merely the minimum threshold that our biology imposes on such endeavors.
Is finding a partner with such an understanding realistic, or even possible? Yes, to an extent. It is a very unfortunate fact of our society that females aren’t socialized in a way that facilities rationality, relative to males; a scarcity which makes such an individual that much more appealing. I have met some, and dated a very few of these. I’m still optimistic.
Absolutely. Just to be clear, I never said, and in fact explicitly disclaimed the former. I agree 100%.
.… (wall of references at the end).… I am mystified by this. How the how the heck do you even skim all of that? I think it’s awesome to have all these references, but can somebody enlighten me as to how one can do this?
Some people read faster than others, and there’s a skill to reading academic writing that can improve your speed on that particular genre.
Luke also has the advantage of that this is his job.
It is not uncommon for research articles to have 50+ references, and review articles often have over 300 references.
Edit: Luke’s articles do have way more than the usual number of references. This article has approximately 120 sentences, with 37 notes and about 150 references, which doesn’t make sense the way that I am familiar with. I am used to references referring to cited sources, and am not sure how Luke is using it. If it is a list of works consulted that makes sense.
I would presume that most papers will include a number of references to sources that the authors have only briefly skimmed, only read the abstract, or not actually read at all.
I saw an article somewhere (I wish I’d remembere where) about a widely-read paper making a mistake when it cited one of its sources, claiming that the source said something which it didn’t. A number of later papers by other authors then repeated this mistaken claim, presumably because their authors didn’t bother checking whether the prestigious paper was correct in its cite.
I’m about .90 confident that Luke hasn’t actually read all of his cites in entirety.
Correct. You win some Bayes points.
“source X claims/proves statement Y”—the author should have read source X carefully
“For general background information on subject A, see e.g. source B”—the author tries to make the paper more accessible to people from other fields by providing some context, but they do not need to have read source B in detail. Not reading all of your sources is not necessarily evil
This is quite true, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was evil.
Also, and especially in the physical sciences—“Other techniques for achieving similar goals include...” or “A complementary measurement of the same quantity...” In these cases knowing what they’re doing/trying to do is sufficient.
Of course, the more relevant it is, the more important it is to actually read it. By the time you get to things that you claim actually support your argument, you had better have read them several times carefully.
I think it is not rare for errors in citing to be repeated because no-one bothers to go back to the original source.
Not reading the paper at all can be dangerous. I once read a paper in which the authors had unwittingly rediscovered, but in inferior form, mathematical results that were already proved in one of the papers they cited. Fortunately for the authors, I was refereeing their paper, and had read the paper they cited, so I was able to save them the embarrassment of publication.
Though, this particular post was actually written before I was hired by SIAI at the beginning of September.
I assume you’re using software to collect references as you research / write? And then you have the software disgorge your collection of references at the end? What software are you using?
Nope. It’s still all a manual process because all the programs I’ve tried aren’t good enough, and don’t sufficiently improve my workflow. (You may also notice that my preferred format for references is my own, instead of one of the standards that I have to use when writing for peer-review.)
You don’t even use something like OttoBib?
That might help a little, but mostly I cite papers not books. Do you know of one that doesn’t suck, for papers?
Endnote doesn’t suck at all; it just doesn’t do the things you were demanding like deduce citation from pdf.
Negative.
Well, a huge part of it is the section with the bullet poins where literally every sentence needed a citation to back it up.
Belief propagation is an exact computation that brains can’t be expected to perform (or even represent a problem statement for). Pointing to (absence of) it as an explanation for compartmentalization feels rather arbitrary (similarly with the reference to decision theory).
What I mean is that if brains enforced belief propagation (and thus, were configured to do so), there wouldn’t be compartmentalization. I guess I can clarify that by adding a period and a few words.
This doesn’t mark it as a natural explanation. By the same pattern, I don’t have a tail because I’m not a kangaroo.
But in fact, you don’t have a tail because you’re not a kangaroo. And if we were all fairly familiar with kangaroos and thought they were fairly analogous to Vladimir_Nesovs, then we would make note of the distinction.
Is the new wording still confusing?
I don’t see how it helps. I think the idea is wrong, not the wording. This situation also seems somewhat analogous to that with your use of Aumann agreement term: drawing a loose analogy with a technical tool that isn’t really relevant.
(To alleviate the usual worry, I note that I upvoted the post itself, and this trivial isolated point has no bearing on overall impression.)
I have purposefully stayed out of the PUA discussion so far, but as it is still going on and no one seems to have taken a macro view, I am going to just this once give some of my opinion on it:
I think that the vast majority of people on this site want a general egalitarianism between the sexes. I’m not saying that I think men and women are completely equal in all ways, but rather that I think that women making 80 cents to the dollar is bad. Males growing up being taught to be ashamed to talk about feelings (especially in cases like PTSD or suicide) is bad. All the hidden messages society teaches our children about what they can’t do because of their gender is bad.
Rationalize it however you want. Call it utilitarianism or values ethics or whatever. But I for one want to live in a society where the children I care for don’t have their choices limited (directly or indirectly) by their gender. I am willing to bet that the majority of people on this site, both male and female, agree with me. If I am wrong about that, well then I wouldn’t want to be on this site anyway. But how does that apply to PUA?
Parts of PUA may work. Parts may be moral. Parts may be immoral. I will definitely say that I think SOME of it is misogynist. I will also agree that there is stuff out there that is completely OK. But all of that is irrelevant to the point I want to make now, which is that PUA is bad for gender equality in the macro view.
Don’t focus on the ethics of ONE guy seducing ONE girl, who may or may not want to be seduced. Think about the affect of MANY guys thinking of women as “things to be seduced”, and countless young girls stumbling upon PUA on the internet or on the tv, and consequently thinking of THEMSELVES as things to be seduced.
In other words, my problem with PUA is that it precipitates a CULTURE that is not conducive to gender equality. Of course, PUA isn’t the only problem, nor is it even the main problem. For example, I think this is a WAY more important fight than PUA.
That being said, I do not think all PUA stuff is bad. I myself am, for all intents and purposes, a professional PUA, and when I looked it up on the internet (after reading so much about it here), I actually thought it was pretty amazing that they had terms for the stuff I learned through trial and error. So I definitely don’t want to bash everything that PUA can teach on an individual basis.
What then to do about men who lack the confidence and social skills to obtain relationships? Firstly, I would like to say that I think this is another way that gender inequality raises its head. Females are socialized from childhood to have high social skills. Men are not. Therefore they have trouble interacting with the generally much higher social skills of women. (Guys, think of a person you know with the lowest level of social skills. Imagine having a conversation with them. Get the picture?)
I would be totally ok, if certain aspects of PUA were taught instead as general social skills. Not “how to seduce women”, but rather “how to strike up conversations with random people and have them like you”. I would even be ok if there were UNDER THE GENERAL RULES some specific exceptions for how to interact with women, and how to interact with men. However the very one-sided way it is right now (with some small exception to girl game) is NOT helpful to humanity overall, regardless of whether it actually works or not. And regardless of whether it is moral on a case-by-case basis or not.
That phrase doesn’t mean just one thing. I think that the vast majority of people on this site want a fair system of college admissions. That just means the label “fair”, like “general egalitarianism” points inward at the speaker towards the speaker’s values. “General” backs away from meaning anything too specific, and its use provides the opportunity for readers to insert their own idea of reasonableness.
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I can talk to anyone, you’re engaging, he’s a creepy PUA?
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I’m playing the usual game: I’m , you’re , he’s . It’s not really a question.
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It’s a lighthearted cultural reference (which does have something of a useful moral embedded within). A common form is “I’m strong willed, you’re stubborn and she’s pig headed”. It is just a comment about the same thing being labelled differently depending on how closely we associate with it. It tends to be approximately neutral to the subject matter.
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I don’t have an opinion on PUA. I’m just playing a game.
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You’d probably be interested in Clarisse Thorn’s Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. She spent quite a bit of time researching PUA, both in theory and in practice.
Short version: There are a lot of kinds of PUA, ranging from types which are generally benevolent through types which are iffy to flat out misogyny. PUA is probably better for men who learn some skills, then leave the subculture(s).
Having a strong habit of maintaining “strategic ambiguity” (I think this is Thorn’s phrase) can lead to loneliness, no matter how many people it attracts.
Note: there’s a section about Thorn’s relationship with a PUA which isn’t terribly interesting. You may want to skip to the end which gets back to good stuff. She’s aware of the problem with the section, but no one could agree on what needed to be cut.
She says that feminists have been working on explicit verbal consent, and PUAs have been working on understanding non-verbal consent, and the two groups have useful things to learn from each other.
That’s already been proposed.
After reading your comment, my thoughts are somewhat confused. The first half seemed like a censorship by association: “some people feel that X is related to Y, we agree that Y is bad, therefore we should never tolerate a discussion about X”.
Then, the last paragraph seemed very reasonable, which makes me wonder whether the rest of the comment was just one huge disclaimer necessary to remove the guilt of speaking about X (which as we know is associated with Y, which is bad).
Now on the topic—Teaching about general social skills, with some gender-specific sidenotes, seems to me like a great idea. But I feel that this version somehow removes the most motivating part for some people. The “you should learn this because it can make your life awesome!!!” motivation turns into rather anemic “you should learn this because we told you so”.
Is this a necessary cost? It is even allowed to discuss things that seem awesome to a typical guy but not to a typical girl, or does any such discussion automatically deepen gender inequality? Seems to me that focusing too much on inequality leads to a zero-sum worldview. Generally, creating a positive utility for some people and zero utility for other people seems like a net improvement; but if it happens to statistically deepen some inequality, should we percieve it as bad and try to avoid it? So even things that highly motivate men to learn social skills should be replaced by their less attractive alternatives, simply because men are already having it too awesome today.
If people are willing to learn calculus, so that they can learn physics, so that they can go out and actually do engineering, I think it would be feasible to have entry-level training in general etiquette and ethics as a prerequisite before someone can learn rigorously scientific flirting.
For more on the subject: Confessions of a Pick-up Artist Chaser by Clarisse Thorne. It’s an extensive overview of PUA practices and subculture, with many quotes from HughRistik.
When you click on the envelope underneath your karma score in the right sidebar, you are taken to a page that displays both private messages as well as replies to your comments.
Also, please stop posting. It has become clear that the Less Wrong community is not interested in what you have to say. You might consider seeking out another internet forum that will be more receptive to your contributions; I expect this will be more satisfying from both your perspective and ours.
Now that this thread has gathered around a thousand comments, and with presumably two more such threads ahead of us, let’s have a poll to help us figure out whether deciding to discuss such subjects as gender and politics was a good idea.
All things considered, has this comment thread made LessWrong more or less valuable to you? (ETA: This is excluding Luke’s original post, and relative to what you would have expected the site to be like if the comment thread had not taken place, not relative to what it would be like if the comment thread disappeared now.)
See the child comments for the poll options. If neither applies, don’t vote.
Vote this comment up if this comment thread has made LessWrong less valuable to you.
Less. A bunch of bickering about ethics with almost no actual practical content describing the world. Basically it is embarrassing to be associated with.
I agree that this whole thread, while admittedly I have been following it myself, is a net negative for LW.
It’s my contention that (1) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely negative outlook regarding women, (2) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely positive outlook regarding women (3) some people will just organically figure it out without any significant use of literature and (4) people that enjoy reading/writing/debating about this will continue to do that and may or may not actually pursue relationships.
I don’t think lukeprog’s writing is going to substantially change anyone’s inclinations or abilities in this area because relationships and dating are something one learns by doing and becoming, not talking and thinking.
Rational romantic relationships is a topic inextricably linked to ethics, in a universe where it’s a fact of human nature that human happiness is immediately and radically affected by our love lives.
I do agree that it’s disappointing that the pro-PUA posters here have not presented any hard evidence that the PUA community has something to offer an evidence-based analysis of rational romantic relationships. That would have been interesting and valuable.
Thank you for this poll!
I would like to endorse an idea that there should be a separate PUA discussion post. It’s acceptable if LW-ers want to discuss PUA at length, but the main disutility I get from it, is that it seems to constantly rear its head in posts that aren’t explicitly about PUA (such as this one.)
I would have loved to have been involved in a discussion on the original post topic, and do not at all think that the subjects of gender and relationships should be discouraged. I just think it would make more sense if there were a separate thread for PUA-related discussion, and any time someone tried to bring up PUA in a non-PUA post they were referred to the PUA post.
I would post it myself, but I doubt I have the karma to handle the inevitable downvoting that would ensue without going deep into the negatives.
EDITED: see below
I got to agree here. having a single discussion thread with PUA would let out some steam, and if some people feel wierded out/ threatened by it, they can just not read the thread. As it is, avoiding the topic seems very hard, since it comes up almost every time relationships, polyamory. dark arts, or rational social skills are mentioned. This makes the tabooing of PUA pretty moot.
I’m pretty okay with modding posts with PUA outside of the designated area, though, if only because it’s so damn mindkilling.
Indeed PUA discussion has proven impossible to avoid without tabooing relationship/romance to the same extent as politics (which is something I advocated should be done in a different comment here).
I like this suggestion. One thread where the beliefs, practice and theory of PUA can be discussed. Actually to make any progress whatsoever, I think we need to go further, lets make that thread explicitly devoid of any ethical recommendations implied or explicit.
A thread that just discusses the theories, practices and beliefs of the PUA community. First establish what they are, then how well they map to reality.
Only after this is done open a separate thread where we discuss ethical implications and recommendations related to PUA. It has been demonstrated time and time again since at least 2008, that LW/OB blow up when this is discussed. “Is” is constantly interpreted as should and vice versa. I am convinced that quarantining and breaking up the debate in two such threads would drastically improve the signal to noise ratio on the comment sections of all romance and relationships discussions and might even eventually allow us to begin making progress on something we have systematically failed on as a community for years.
I’d almost as soon we just banned the ethical discussion entirely; as that’s the part that’s actually mindkilling. People with “PUA=bad” or “PUA=good” labels basically trash the place over that argument, and neither are particularly interested in listening to the “PUA=lots of different stuff with varying levels of good, bad, and effective-ness” folks.
All in all, we might get rid of some of the need for the “PUA=evil misogynist manipulation” rants by banning the “PUA=good, righteous savior of downtrodden oppressed men” ones (and vice versa). There are plenty enough people here who’ve shown themselves capable of avoiding either trap; we just need someone who can be trusted to swing the banhammer hard on comments that are more about signaling who they’re for and against, than they are about informing or problem-solving.
Actually, I suppose it’s not really a problem of ethics discussion per se, just that ethics is a useful wedge topic for partisans on either side to get their foot in the door.
Hm. Maybe we’d be better off just not answering partisan posts. I suspect that (counter to my intention), trying to moderate partisans on either side just prolongs the amount of ranting the forum is subjected to. If I’d just downvoted people (instead of trying to educate them), it might’ve been better for all concerned.
I like the idea of having a designated PUA discussion thread, and I absolutely love the idea of making that thread explicitly ethics-free. The idea seems good enough to just try it and see what happens! Do you want to write that post (in the discussion area, I guess) and lay down the rules?
You’ve got the karma for it. Why not you?
Thanks for the offer! Konkvistador has a prior claim to the idea, so I’ll do that if he/she prefers me to do that.
I’m considering posting such a thread, but I’m thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.
Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen’t really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don’t want to cause any damage with a botched fix.
See here. I’m inclining more and more toward the opinion that this topic-cluster simply doesn’t belong here, any more than (other) controversial contemporary political issues do. It’s too fraught with (perceived) implications for tribal struggles that people (even unconsciously) feel themselves to be party to.
In all honesty, I’m not even terribly enthused about Luke’s proposed sequence being here, especially in Main. (It might well be okay in Discussion.) It sends the signal that LW is full of people who have trouble with these sorts of relationships. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not exactly something one would want to showcase, it seems to me.
Thanks for replying. I think you’re right.
I’m not quite sure what this means. I think if you start the discussion thread, you’d need to elaborate on that. (Are you sure you agree with cousin_it on understanding of these words?)
Seriously now. Konkvistador?
I didn’t know! (Though my guess would have been accurate.) I went wading through old comments:
Konkvistador: he
cousin_it: he
lessdazed: No pronoun stated, but you’re Jewish!
RomanDavis: No pronoun stated, but the first name makes “he” likely.
Upvoted, but… it looks like the kind of shiny clever idea nerds love and that blows up in their faces big time. “Purely factual questions discussed separately from ethics” sounds like something Paul Graham would pat you on the back for. Specific instances thereof, such as “Do people have more sex if they ignore body language expressing discomfort?” are significantly less tasteful.
The problem is that this is a public forum. In our ivory towers—inside our own heads, and with other people who like to toy with weird ideas—we can totally argue that genocide is legitimate if there’s a genetic disorder spreading whose carriers only have male children with the disorder. But we don’t expect it to be harmless to discuss that in front of the neonazis (or even ourselves, really). There are people I don’t want looking at a factual discussion of how to get away with rape.
My cursor was literally hovering over the upvote button from the first paragraph on… and then I got to the last sentence, which completely reversed my view of it. Then I went back and parsed it more carefully, and now it looks to me like there’s some pretty sketchy rhetoric in there.
Specifically: there’s mindkilling ideas and then there’s ideas which represent a physical propagation risk, and while PUA is undoubtedly the former, framing it with rape and genocide implies the latter. Now, I suppose it might look like that to some of its more extreme opponents, those who see it as not just squicky or disrespectful but actively dangerous. But that’s not the consensus, and there are substantial differences in the way we should be approaching it if it was.
On the other hand, if you’d cast your objection in terms of signaling or associational problems, I’d be right there with you. I’m pretty much neutral on PUA as such, but it’s an incredibly polarizing topic, and this isn’t a big enough site that we can discuss stuff that volatile in public and expect it not to reflect substantially on the site as a whole.
I did mean risky, not just mindkilling. Also a third category of “slight side effects that may add up to risky”.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape. For example, alcohol may be used to make people more open and sociable (both directly and because social norms change for groups of drunk people). It may also be used to make people pass out. Both of these reduce the likelihood of them turning down sex you initiate. That’s actually not a very good example because people know that so we aren’t teaching anyone how to rape, but discussion of other techniques may involve it.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless, discussing the usefulness of such a belief may allow it to leak.
Other problems: Yeah, so for a while good posters will waste time in an unproductive conversation, and onlookers will disapprove. Meh.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant. That this kind of disingenuous argument is tolerated in this context (parent was +1 when I encountered it, not −10) is why I am not against tabooing all related subject matter unilaterally. If people can get away with this something is wrong.
What on earth are you talking about? That’s approximately the opposite of the kind of belief that is useful for a PUA. Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
This is a false dichotomy, and the child post asking for clarification should not have been voted down.
PUA, if it worked, would be an excellent way for a date-rapist to get women alone in circumstances such that there might be reasonable doubt in a subsequent court case as to whether or not the victim consented to sex. Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances, specifically those circumstances where they get a woman alone, are not successful in obtaining consensual sex at that time and are not otherwise unable to commit rape safely.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning. I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
Yes, PUA skills are generalizable to a certain extent. Rather than use them to seduce people you could use them to rape people, kidnap them and harvest their organs to sell on the black market or to try to convince them to buy some steak knives. But again, as you quoted: If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t.
Yes, and conventional rape without the pesky hassle of pick up too—and I’m honestly not sure which kind of rape comes with the greatest risk of getting caught. But nobody has ever suggested that we discuss how to maximise sex. That is the whole point being made here—that equivocation in the great-grandparent just isn’t acceptable.
I have a similar concern—at least in as much as it troubles me that sloppy thinking tends to be accepted based on the fact that it is talking about a moral/ethical/social-political position. I have made rather different observations about how the trend seems to flow.
It is one thing to suggest tabooing a subject—and with the caveat that it must be relationship and dating advice that is tabooed (so as not to allow a distorted reality to remain) a lot of people agree. But it is an entirely different thing to try to declare just the opposing view (or your stereotype thereof) to be unacceptable.
Now I’m curious. The account PhilosophyTutor is a new account which has more or less contributed only via PUA-ethical debate. Yet I’m getting the impression here that you are coming from, well, a “larger LW perspective”. Is PhilosophyTutor a dummy account for more generally active member so that you can get involved in the subject without it looking bad for your primary identity or are you actually a new user who thus far has mostly been interested in dating-ethics?
This subtopic, unless I’ve gotten confused, relates specifically to one proposed method for trying to make discussion of the broader relationship topic more productive, that being the proposition that we hold a discussion of effective PUA methodology while holding off on any ethical discussion about the topic whatsoever. The argument against this proposition was that there are serious ethical issues which trying to figure out the maximally effective ways of getting sex without any regard for ethics.
Your response seems to be (and I am open to correction if I have misunderstood) that PUA methods, if indeed they worked, could be abused but that we do not need to discuss this because anything could be abused and hence discussing the potential abuse of this particular thing is a waste of time.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”. Whether that is a definition of “good” that includes manipulating women into acts they will predictably regret and which they would not have chosen to engage in were they fully informed and rational is an interesting discussion that, if the original proposal were followed, we would not be able to engage in. However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
However another possibility is that you have in mind a definition of “PUA methods” which excludes archetypal rape and most other acts which meet the legal and moral definition of rape but are not archetypal, and hence you think that a discussion of “PUA methods”, even if it taboos all ethical discourse, will thus by definition not involve anything meeting the legal and moral definition of rape. If so you need to make this definition explicit, I think, and then resolve the issue of whether obtaining sex while concealing information which you know is highly relevant and important to the other party’s decision to consent meets the legal or moral definition of rape. If needed I can cite cases where people have been imprisoned for obtaining sex by withholding information which they knew would have been highly relevant, so this is not an entirely academic concern.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
Not even remotely. That position would be the opposite of stupidity.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say. In fact.
What you said was:
Now I can’t see this discussion from your perspective, but from my perspective it looks like you are performing a manoeuvre where you cheer for ethical discussion in theory but in practice you dismiss all ethical criticism that comes from outside the PUA tent with a No True Scotsman argument.
If you think that some ethical criticisms of PUA are off the mark because they target a form of PUA which doesn’t actually exist that is of course a fair point to make. However that doesn’t move the argument forward unless you point us to the set of PUA practices and beliefs that you personally consider canonical so that we can discuss those from an ethical perspective. If your goal is an intelligent discussion we shouldn’t have to play a game with you where we try to discover by a process of elimination the subset of PUA practises and methods that you are willing to accept as PUA.
Eliezer Yudkowsky drives a sports car?!?!?? ;)
Disagreeing with your specific moral prescriptions for everyone is not attacking ethics in general.
What you say is so, however quoting the grandparent:
I read that as an attack on the idea that ethical judgments about the topic should “dominate” any discussion of it. It did not specify any particular ethical prescriptions as being problematic.
I’m going to assume that despite your words you meant “obviously fallacious” to only refer to part of the first paragraph of the comment you are responding to. That would make your argument much stronger.
Assuming your intuition about why people are voting as they are is correct, saying that something shouldn’t dominate is hardly an attack against it. The statement that it shouldn’t dominate was justified with a reason—a defeasible reason that does not apply in all contexts. When people can agree on facts, ethics based conversations can flow.
When people make ethical condemnations of caricatures that don’t exist and refer to them with labels used for their political enemies, forcing the accusers to detach their claims from their subjective values hopefully keeps them honest.
Arguments aren’t voted on. Posts are. Posts with multiple aspects. “It’d be kind of redundant,” is wrong. Obviously fallacious, as you said. ” If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA,” would approach being a non sequitur except for that the post responded to was so detached from reality that it may have had to have been said in that context.
The rest of the post is good, and worth upvoting. You are overconfident in attributing the worst possible motives to those voting for a post you disagree with.
One final distinction: the argument that ethical considerations should not dominate discussions is an argument against discussing ethics to a certain extent, at most it attacks discussing ethics, and the contextual posts show that ethical considerations were not being disregarded. This is in addition to the argument that there should be somewhat less of something being a mild one.
It looks like you are trying to soften wedrifid’s stated position for them, and presenting a new version where wedrifid was really saying that ethical discussion is great up until some demarcating point at which point it becomes bad. I can’t see any support in the original text for such a view.
I endorse lessdazed’s interpretation as at least somewhat closer to my position than the caricature you have attributed to me.
What I’m talking about is techniques that get people to let you stick your dick in them. Many of these techniques grow more effective as they are intensified, but also less ethical after a certain point. “Get them drunk” is an example, but not PUA. Better examples would be persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex), and intermittent reinforcement (ranging from not being a spineless, clingy sycophant, to emotional abuse).
Consider the difference between the slut and the quality girl. Also the phrase “pumped and dumped”.
This belief is useful because if a woman agrees to sex early, you can think that you’re worth more than her, and display related behaviors (making her chase you and fear competition); moreover, if you get sex by promising to call the next day but don’t, you don’t have to feel guilty because she’s just a slut anyway.
I have a very hard time imagining this working. Women and men of high social status have very effective ways of getting rid of people that fall short of sex. Also constant “nagging” signals horrible things about you in pure fitness terms, it much reduces one’s attractiveness, I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
I meant that.
In my mind, “nagging” in this context meant repeating a request such that the other person changed their response to the request rather than be subjected to further pestering, not pulling down a girl’s pants time and time again until she stopped saying no and said neither yes nor no.
Yes, nagging and pulling down pants are definitely entirely different things. The latter is more ethically grey while the former is more pathetic.
And yet it happens. People get pressured into sex.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you missed this, you should become less confident in your ability to make accurate judgments in this arena.
Obviously pressured sex happens.
I am simply saying its not a good tactic in the context of situations that PUA usually focuses on.
Note that pressure =/= nagging. For it to be pressure you need to have some social or physical leverage over the other person. Nagging dosen’t imply you have either and in their absence the word brings up associations of begging. It is hard to gain great leverage on people of high social status.
My point was not about PUA. You said:
You also talked about PUA, but the above is a simple claim of fact which is incorrect.
The post was a response to:
This was given as a better example of a potential PUA tactic that could be unethical. I was implicitly taking and critiquing the course of action as a tactic a PUA would or would not adopt based on how effective or ineffective it was. I thought it obvious, but looking back I see I should have made an explicit mention of PUA in the comment.
I think the point here isn’t that people don’t get pressured into sex but rather that the specific strategy mentioned isn’t one that PUAs would use because it is both pathetic and a highly ineffective strategy for them to be using. So if a completely amoral PUA was using unethical tactics to get laid he would still not use this one because he wouldn’t expect this one to work.
Well, sure. I was taking issue specifically with Konkvistador’s post, above, and the claim:
This is NOT me saying “evil PUAs do this”, it’s “orthogonal to your points about PUA, you have made a simple factual claim backed by personal incredulity which is, in fact, false”.
I think you need to give us the definition of PUA you are using, because you seem to be using one that excludes a lot of actions or strategies which one might think would be advantageous to a person who wants to get laid, and unethical persons who want to get laid seem highly likely to be a subgroup of people perusing and participating in a hypothetical discussion of PUA that tabooed all ethical criticism.
Could you define rape, please?
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category and saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
Here, the question of “Is PUA really rape?” is entirely useless, even if the questioner is referring a clearly delineated subset of it, because we are already told to assume states of the world and consequences are true in the hypotheticals (about Alice, Carol, etc.).
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
For abortion opponents, woman X aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age). For proponents, woman X aborted “A two month old fetus.” For abortion opponents, woman Y aborted “A nine month old fetus.” For proponents, woman Y aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age).
“Women who are 41 are “41”. Women who are 49 are “in their forties”.
Relevant LW posts: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Diseased Thinking. Kudos for noticing that the dangling categorization mistake sometimes also serves as a rhetorical trick. Do other biases also double as rhetorical tricks?
I’m going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren’t prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I’m writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn’t find will be more meaningful.
Wish me luck, I’m going in!
ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I’ll elaborate later.
I didn’t want to say anything before you looked, but this is a classic exercise for a basic logic class. Yes, logical fallacies abound.
That’s really cool. By all means write a discussion post if you find something interesting!
Thanks for this short phrasing for something I often want to say.
I agree with your connotation etc. - but I think the question “Is waterboarding really torture?” does have moral implications beyond presidential candidates: whether or not it is torture can determine whether or not waterboarding goes against a preexisting law or even informal promise (“No ma, I promise I won’t torture anybody in Iraq”), and breach of agreement is morally relevant.
More generally, categorizing things even after they are fully described can still be a gain of information if the category label is mentioned in some outside agreement.
For another example, if Professor Witkins the Mineralogist told you “I’ll give you $10 for each blegg you bring back from the mine, but nothing for rube.”, and you’re considering whether to put a purplish weird-shaped rock in your bag, even if you have full information on it you might still wonder if a Mineralogist would classify it as a blegg or a rube (Even if you know Witkins wants the bleggs for their vanadium, you still expect him to pay you for vanadiumless bleggs).
I guess I Agree Denotationally But Disagree Connotationally. As in, that is technically true in a hypothetical situation wherein you can fully describe a situation, but a human is unlikely to find themself in such a situation (at least for the time being), and my question was not an attempt to categorize a described thing—rather, it was an attempt to elicit a description for a categorized thing.
It is relevant to a discussion with wedrifid, regarding rape, what wedrifid means by the term.
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
To say that PUA techniques and theories regarding persuasion necessarily count as rape is, to me, absurd. To say that they could not be used in a coercive manner seems equally absurd (like saying “if you’re going to trick people you don’t need psychology” (and therefore the study of psychology, divorced from ethical concerns, would not teach people how to trick others)).
So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)
If you have strong arguments about whether torture is worth doing, than knowing what should be categorized as torture would be useful.
“Torture” is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you’re making a disguised query but you can’t get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label “torture” to don’t exist.
If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn’t make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.
This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn’t make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set’s boundaries aren’t arbitrary and sharp.
What I was thinking was that if it’s true that pain is much more likely to elicit answers that the pain-giver wants to hear than anything else (an argument against torture for the purpose of getting information), then it’s worth establishing which sorts of treatment supply sufficient pain to get that sort of reaction.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
You said this
and this
What’s the charitable interpretation of that?
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.
Coercing sexual intercourse via physical violence or the threat thereof.
This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Note: This post is explicitly not about PUA. I do not believe that I have heard of any PUA technique involving roofies or blackmail.
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
(nods) That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
Drugging I would consider physical violence, so that falls within my definition; blackmailing, no.
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
Okay, though you should probably be aware that those are somewhat idiosyncratic definitions of rape and violence.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
You’re right.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I am.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
No, I didn’t. I pointed out a feature of sexual morality that you completely ignored.
Yes, you did. Here is what you said:
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
Poorly. It does not seem to be of much benefit any motives which I could plausibly attribute to you.
Downvoted for professing to be a troll.
OK, why have this comment and the next one I made garnered this many downvotes?
Two is not many. Four is not even many.
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
Almost certainly not.
BBC
Thanks for the updated data.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind. Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.
Either “Nonconsentual (or coerced) sex” or “Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the universal approval of internet critics before having sex”. Seems to depend on who you are talking with and what they are trying to prove.
No no no wedrifid, the date’s mother is clearly not objective.
You need to approach a local sociology or woman’s studies professor, for preliminary consultation. After that schedule an appointment with your lawyer to set up a proper contract (since an informal written agreement wouldn’t stand up to later scrutiny if parties are dissatisfied with the outcomes) that is then reviewed, supplemented by hearings of all involved, by an ethics committee that includes legal experts, psychologists, doctors, philosophers and social workers.
I strongly urge you to reconsider this entire argument. I’m really worried about the sorts of reactions and arguments flying in this thread / topic. I don’t think MixedNuts’ post was based on cynical disingenuous argumentation, but rather an honest disagreement with you, a differing view of reality, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
The umbrella of PUA encompasses harmless advice that seems to have helped a lot of people, as well as vicious misanthropy. Some techniques focus on improving oneself, others on harming others. There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others. There are (different) parts that should be analyzed here.
I’m not attacking you. I’m asking you to be careful. There are vivid warning signs in an alarming proportion of posts on this topic. I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others, especially when they could benefit from hiding from themselves the harm they could do. More to the point, in such situations, we should not trust ourselves.
I’m pretty sure the question was rhetorical.
Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.
...and I’m probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.
Indeed.
I have a policy of not commenting on the “underlying issue(s)”, but I will permit myself the meta-level remark that the topic in question really does apparently amount to a hot-button dispute in contemporary social politics. In which case, quite frankly, it should be avoided as far as possible on Less Wrong.
I do have a stance. Stances. I’m arguing here that 1) wedrifid and MixedNuts are talking past each other, 2) we need to be more careful about PUA than many think. In particular, the idea of somehow just diving in while avoiding any discussion of ethics seems awfully ill-advised, if it’s even possible. It does seem like a valuable topic for some of LW to pull apart, if it can be done properly (on the one hand, how likely is it that sex & sexual politics is a mindkiller topic? on the other, if LW can’t handle a little sex & politics, I’d like to know.)
And branching off of your comment about factions—to whom it may concern, I wish to explicitly distance myself from any given LW faction, real or illusory. Yes, even yours, even if I may agree with you on some / many topics.
Indeed. It’s a figure of speech that I didn’t even consider when using. I suppose it could be replaced with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!”—but the question seems to be a bit milder.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing. I don’t think you and MixedNuts are on the same page. Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different. The sort of rhetorical equivocation Mixed used is not accepted here no matter the subject and when it comes to something as important as rape it is something I consider offensive.
I gave my example because it is the closest related ethical consideration that is, in fact, sane. I assumed that at very least it is something you would agree with and could possibly be similar to what you had resolved Mixed’s words to. This was to establish that I was rejecting any and all arguments along the lines of “PUA means rape” but not rejecting questions of whether certain social practices are or not ethical in their own right.
To be frank it was disgust, not surprise that I experienced.
?? Can we be a little more explicit about what exactly we’re referring to? I meant that your replacement of “What on earth are you talking about?” with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!” still indicates an acknowledgement on your part that your interpretation of MixedNuts’ post seems wildly incongruous, and therefore that said interpretation should be subject to closer scrutiny.
Similarly, when you say
is that “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!”
If so then I think we pretty much agree except WRT MixedNuts’ meaning, and our other apparent disagreements flow from that issue.
To me it seems clear that MixedNuts was NOT saying “PUA means rape” or similar. My reading was more along the lines of “PUA is concerned, to a large extent, with methods of obtaining sex. If you’re discussing PUA sans ethics, then you are likely to discuss ‘methods of obtaining sex’ sans ethics, which conspicuously includes rape—a problematic situation if you’re banning ethical objections.” You appear extremely confident in your reading—could you point to something in particular that convinces you?
Of course if MixedNuts could resolve our disagreement that would be quite helpful.
Rather than trying to resurrect this one particular argument may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates. Because there are valid arguments to be made and ethical questions to be considered. But that particular argument is sloppy thinking of the kind we don’t accept here and offensive—both to the actual victims of rape who are having their experience trivialized and to the group that is being vilified as rapists.
This highlights a further problem that is sometimes encountered when ethical questions come up. When people are moralizing they often make terrible arguments—and in the wild terrible arguments about moral questions tend to suffice. But here terrible arguments and sloppy thinking tends to be brutally rejected. This means observers are going to see a whole lot of obnoxious, incoherent arguing in the general direction of a perceived virtuous moral positions rejected. Naturally that leads people to believe that the community is totally in support of the opposite side to whatever the nonsense comments are.
If someone were to, say, argue “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!” then I suspect it would meet with overwhelming support. Some would enjoy fleshing out the related concepts and details.
Um. I think I perhaps was unclear? I have added more posts, which may explain my position better. I almost certainly read MixedNuts in a very different way than you did.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics? That argument, as I understand it, wasn’t trying to highlight an actual ethical problem with respect to seducing mates; rather, it was an argument in favor of including ethics in the discussion.
The topic was whether we should have a separate thread for ethics and for discussing models of how the world actually works. MixedNuts was arguing against that proposal by alleging one ethical problem it would cause (“Rape”). Regardless of whether CuSeth is intending to argue that seperating ‘is’ from ‘should’ is bad because of ethical problem that are caused by the split or intending to talk about an ethical problem for its own sake it is better off using her own argument than MixdNuts’. Because if she used her own I would be able to take her seriously.
For onlookers wondering about the genetic disorder thing, it was discussed in Evolving to Extinction. The relevant part:
It just occurred to me that such a situation can rectify itself without the need for genocide :-) If females can detect males carrying the segregation-distorter, they will avoid mating with such males, because having female children is a reproductive advantage in a population where males outnumber females. Or am I getting confused again?
It seems easier to evolve a preference for incest.
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
A modest proposal:
If mothers made a habit of snacking on (each other’s) litters of all sons, that would counteract the problem. That wouldn’t require being able to differentiate among adult males, just between male and female children.
If the species takes a long time to wean children and doesn’t reproduce until that process ends, this works better.
Mice, pigs, rabbits etc. (animals with large litters) already eat weak children fairly often, so this is somewhat plausible.
I love lesswrong!
Rather than rely on females recognizing things about males, what about genes that capitalize on the difference between regular males and those with the disorder—sisters!
Females could more greatly than presently value aggression (this would only need a boost, the trait already exists), and a gene could make females intervene to break up their brothers’ fights. Young males with the disorder would tear each other to shreds or be too timid to reproduce, and males without the disorder would have sisters preventing them from killing each other.
“Strong” for sure. Unfortunately for the species it would have to emerge fully functional in the time it takes for the species to evolve to extinction. Not so easy.
Nice!
Now I wonder why Eliezer’s post calls the original problem unsolved. Surely such elementary solutions couldn’t have evaded the experts in the field? I’m guessing that I made a mistake somewhere...
Unfortunately, this will only work in a population with a weak segregation distorter. Remember, mutations that do a specific thing are rare, and detecting the presence of a specific allele that doesn’t have large-scale phenotypic effects is tough. By the time the segregation distorting allele is a large fraction of the population it is almost too late for the population.
Almost certainly not! That’s valuable information needed to calibrate optimal seduction technique, even for a PUA of perfect soullessness.
Certainly something to keep in mind if Luke goes and posts a “Part 2” on the subject. He (or someone else) should also post a corresponding “trolling about morals” thread so as to minimize the damage.
I’m indifferent to the primary point, but curious about a tangent—do you believe that LW is capable of creating that first thread? Or only that, if it did so, that would help?
I belive most LWers are capable of this. However those who aren’t make this in my opinion very difficult for the community to pull off. And then there are the signalling concerns, one big reason behind the politics taboo was for LW to not look bad. This is why I previously proposed tabooing the subject (romance ect.) in the same way we did for that other problematic topic. I also found someone’s proposal to set up a rather elitist and private mailing list for certain delicate and difficult discussion appealing.
If LW did that we might actually make some progress on the issue for a change in that we would at least unambiguously establish what people’s maps of reality are (allowing everyone involved to update accordingly) and engage in a, you know, dialogue instead of speaking past each other and slipping into factionalism.
That sounds completely impossible to me. Surely PUA is primarily about what one should do.
For example, if we have the background assumption that Billy is trying to achieve X, and we note that stabbing 10 people would make him 20% more likely to achieve X, then it is not an unwarranted inferential leap that Billy should stab 10 people. To prohibit anyone from replying that Billy should not stab people for other reasons doesn’t prohibit implied ethical recommendations, it just heavily biases them.
If you think I’m wrong, I’d like to see an explanation of how this could work.
ETA: Explanation given—it’s not impossible. See subthread.
Can I thus generalize your objection that the optimal course of action for achieving X is impossible to discuss sans ethics in the first analysis? Or do you think that PUA is something special in this regard? And if so, why?
Yes. Discussing the optimal course of action for achieving X is absolutely under the purview of ethics. Else you’re not really finding what’s optimal. Editing grandparent.
ETA: Leaving the first ‘PUA’ since that it is about courses of action motivates the rest.
I agree that finding the optimal course of action for humans dosen’t mean much if it dosen’t include ethics. But humans in order to do that often construct and reason within systems that don’t include ethics in their optimization criteria.
There is a sometimes subtle but important difference between thinking and and considering “this is the optimal course of action optimizing for X and only X” and discussing it and between saying “you obviously should be optimizing for X and only X.”
I argue that this is former is sometimes a useful tool for the latter, because it allows one to survey how possible action space differs taking away or adding axiom to your goals. It is impossible to think about what people who might have such axioms do, or how dangerous or benign to your goals the development of such goals seeking systems might be. You need to in essence know the opportunity costs of many of your axioms and how you will measure up either in a game theoretic sense (because you may find yourself in a conflict with such an agent and need to asses it capabilities and strategic options) or in a evolutionary sense (where you wish to understand how much fitness your values have in the set of all possible values and how much you need to be concerned with evolution messing up your long term plans).
In short I think that: generally It is not unethical to think about how a specific hypothetical unethical mind would think. It may indeed perhaps be risky for some marginal cases, but also very potentially rewarding in expected utility.
One can say that while this is theoretically fine but in practice actually quite risky in people with their poor quality minds. But let me point out that people are generally biased against stabbing 10 people and similar unpleasant courses of action. One can perhaps say that a substantial minority isn’t, and using self-styled ethical agents cognitive capacity to emulate thinking of (in their judgement) unethical agents and sharing that knowledge willy-nilly with others will lead to unethical agents having lower enough costs and greater enough efficiency that it cancels out or overwhelms the gains of the “ethical agents”.
This however seems to lead towards a generalize argument against all rationality and sharing of knowledge, because all of it involves “morally constrained” agents potentially sharing the fruits of their cognitive work with less constrained agents who then out compete them in the struggle to order the universe into certain states. I maintain this is a meaningless fear unless there is good evidence that sharing particular knowledge (say schematics for a nuclear weapon or death ray) or rationality enhancing techniques will cause more harm than good one can rely on more people being biased against doing harmful things than not and thus using the knowledge for non-harmful purposes. But this is a pretty selected group. I would argue the potential for abuse among the readers of this forum is much lower than average. Also how in the world are we supposed to be concerned about nuclear weapons or death rays if we don’t have any good ideas if they are even possible? Can you ethically strongly condemn the construction of non-functioning death ray? Is it worth invading a country to stop the construction of a non-functioning death ray?
And note that at this point I’m already basically blowing the risks way out of proportion because quite honestly the disutility from a misused death ray is orders of magnitude larger than anything that can arise from what amounts to some unusually practical tips on improving one’s social life.
How can something not include “ethics” in its “optimization criteria”? Do you just mean that you’re looking at a being with a utility function that does not include the putative human universals?
ETA: Confusion notwithstanding, I generally agree with the parent.
EDIT: (responding to edits)
I actually wasn’t thinking anything along those lines.
Sure, but people do unhealthy / bad things all the time, and are biased in favor of many of them. I’m not supposing that someone might “use our power for evil” or something like that. Rather, I think we should include our best information.
A discussion of how best to ingest antifreeze should not go by without someone mentioning that it’s terribly unhealthy to ingest antifreeze, in case a reader didn’t know that. Antifreeze is very tasty and very deadly, and children will drink a whole bottle if they don’t know any better.
Our disagreement seems to boil down to:
A … net cost of silly biased human brains letting should cloud their assessment of is.
B … net cost of silly biased human brains letting is cloud their assessment of should.
Statement: Among Lesswrong readers: P(A>B) > P(B>A)
I say TRUE. You say FALSE.
Do you (and the readers) agree with this interpretation of the debate?
I don’t.
My point is that a discussion of PUA, by its nature, is a discussion of “should”. The relevant questions are things like “How does one best achieve X?” Excluding ethics from that discussion is wrong, and probably logically inconsistent.
I’m actually still a bit unclear on what you are referring to by this “letting should cloud their assessment of is” and its reverse.
Should and is assessed as they should be:
I have a good map, it shows the best way to get from A to B and … also C. I shouldn’t go to C, it is a nasty place.
Should and is assessed as they unfortunately often are:
I don’t want to go to C so I shouldn’t draw out that part around C on my map. I hope I still find a good way to B and don’t get lost.
I have a good map, it shows the best way to get from A to B and … also C. Wow C’s really nearby, lets go there!
Aha. I agree. Do people really make that mistake a lot around here?
Also note that ‘should’ goes on the map too. Not just in the “here be dragons” sense, but also indicated by the characterization that the way is “best”.
There is a whole host of empirically demonstrated biases in humans that work in these two directions under different circumstances. LWers may be aware of many of them, but they are far from immune.
Agreed but, should is coloured in with different ink on the map than is. I admit mapping should can prove to be as much of a challenge as is.
I see my proposal of two quarantined threads, as a proposal to lets stop messing up the map by all of us drawing with the same color at the same time, and first draw out “is” in black and then once the colour is dry add in should with red so we don’t forget where we want to go. Then use that as our general purpose map and update both red and black as we along our path and new previously unavailable empirical evidence meets our eyes.
I didn’t point this out before, but this is actually a good argument in favor of the ‘ethics later’ approach. It makes no sense to start drawing paths on your map before you’ve filled in all of the nodes. (Counterargument: assume stochasticity / a non-fully-observable environment).
Also, if this technique actually works, it should be able to be applied to political contexts as well. PUA is a relatively safer area to test this, since while it does induce mind-killing (a positive feature for purposes of this test) it does not draw in a lot of negative attention from off-site, which is one of the concerns regarding political discussion.
I am majorly in favor of researching ways of reducing/eliminating mind-killing effects.
So an analogous circumstance would be: if we were constructing a weighted directed graph representing routes between cities, we’d first put in all the nodes and connections and weights in black ink, and then plan the best route and mark it in red ink?
If so, that implies the discussion of “PUA” would include equal amounts of “X results in increased probability of the subject laughing at you” and “Y results in increased probability of the subject slapping you” and “Z results in increased probability of the subject handing you an aubergine”.
If the discussion is not goal-directed, I don’t see how it could be useful, especially for such a large space as human social interaction.
But it would be goal directed: “To catalogue beliefs and practices of PUAs and how well they map to reality.”
Without breaking the metaphor, we are taking someone else’s map and comparing it to our own map. Our goal being to update our map where their map of reality (black ink) is clearly better or at the very least learn if their map sucks. And to make this harder we aren’t one individual but a committee comparing the two maps. Worse some of us love their black ink more than their red one and vice versa, and can’t shut up about them. Let’s set up separate work meetings for the two issues so we know that black ink arguments have no place on meeting number 2. and the person is indulging his interests at the expense of good map making.
The reason why I favour black first is that going red first we risk drawing castles in clouds rather than a realizable destinations.
Oops.
Yes, that’s absolutely possible, and is (on reflection) what we have been talking about this whole time.
So the challenge, then, would be to distinguish the black from red ink in PUA, and make sure we’re only talking about the black ink in the ‘no ethics’ thread.
I have no intuitions about how feasible that is, but I withdraw my assertion it is ‘impossible’, as I was clearly talking about something else.
Yes! We can’t take PUA’s at their word. Even when they believe with unwavering certainty they are talking black ink, they are in the best of cases as confused as we are and in the worst quite a bit more confused. Also some people just like to lie to others to get to the red destination faster (heh).
It is hard, but apparently enough posters think we can make a decent map of the reality of romance that they try and write up posts and start discussions about them. Limiting ourselves to the more popular PUAs I think we can also get a pretty good idea of what their idea of reality is.
Comparing the two and seeking evidence to prove or disprove our speculations about reality seems like a worthy exercise.
I think this is a horrendously bad idea—“more popular” is not always positively correlated with “more correct”. ;-)
Also, “more popular” isn’t always positively correlated with “more useful”, either. The most popular PUA material is about indirect game, social tricks, and the like… and that’s why it’s popular. That doesn’t mean those things are the most useful ways to get into relationships.
Consider Bob, who believes he is unattractive to women. Will Bob be more interested in course A which tells him there are secrets to make women like him, or course B, which teaches him how to notice which women are already attracted to him? His (quite common) belief makes course B less attractive, even if course B would be far more useful.
Of available courses that fit Bob’s existing belief structure, the ones that will be most popular will be the ones that purport to explain his unattractiveness (and the attractiveness of other men) in a way that Bob can understand. And if they offer him a solution that doesn’t sound too difficult (i.e. act like a jerk), then this will be appealing.
What’s more, because Bob is convinced of his unattractiveness and fundamental low worth where women are concerned, Bob will be most attracted to courses that involve pretending to be someone he is not: after all, if who he is is unattractive, then of course he needs to pretend to be somebody else, right?
I could go on, but my point here is that popularity is a horrible way to select what to discuss, because there’s a systematic bias towards “tricks” as being the most marketable thing. However, even companies that sell tricks on the low end of the market to get people interested, usually sell some form of self-improvement as their “advanced” training. (That is, stuff that involves people actually being a different sort of man, rather than simply pretending to be one.)
(There are probably exceptions to this, of course.)
Anyway, a better selection criterion would be goal relevance. Most PUA sales material has end-user goals explicitly or implicitly stated—why not select materials on the basis of goals that LW has use for, and evaluate them for how well they achieve those stated goals?
What popular PUA is saying matters quite a bit because it helps us understand the PUA community as a cultural phenomena it also can help us by helping expose some biases that probably exist to some degree in harder to detect form in higher quality material. Perhaps well respected or esteemed authors (within the PUA community) rather than the ones that sell the most material (where would we even get that data?), are even better for this purpose.
But overall I’m not saying we shouldn’t extend our analysis to PUA’s that are less well known but seem particularly compelling to LessWrong readers. The thing is they have to be put in context.
How is that bad? The whole point is to locate actual beliefs and test them. If they’re incorrect, all the better—our job is probably easier. By focusing on the general population, we can cull down the potentially-useful beliefs without needing to ourselves bring ethics into the discussion. Thus, we only test “X results in a 20% chance of being handed an aubergine” if that is a belief some PUA practitioner actually holds.
These are all ‘red ink’ concerns. The ‘black ink’ thread is supposed to evaluate beliefs of PUAs without reference to how effective they are at achieving goals. You can’t presuppose what the goals are supposed to be or determine whether they’re optimal ways of achieving goals. Thus, we can test for the presence of aubergines, but we don’t need to know whether we actually want aubergines.
My initial response to your comment, is, “WTF?”
My second, more polite response, is simply that your suggestion isn’t particularly compatible with finding out useful things, since your proposed selection criteria will tend to filter them out before you have anything to evaluate.
I’m talking about following the strategy laid out by Konkvistador above. Have you been following this thread?
Possibly. But the goal was to have separate threads for non-normative and normative claims, and this is how it will be accomplished. My initial response was “That cannot be done”, probably from intuitions similar to yours, but that turned out to be false.
My understanding was that the goal was to have a useful discussion, minus the mindkilling. AFAICT your proposal of the means by which to accomplish this, is to throw out the usefulness along with the mindkilling.
Different goals. The goal was indeed to have a useful discussion mins the mindkilling. The proposed subgoal was to have one thread for non-normative claims and another for normative claims. It might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if you think so then you should (at a much lower level of nesting) propose a different strategy for having the discussion minus the mindkilling. Or at least say you have a problem with that subgoal at the start of the thread, rather than the end.
I didn’t mean to misrepresent your position or the debate so far. I was just trying to communicate how I’m seeing the debate. Hope you didn’t take my question the wrong way! :)
Not at all (I think).
Ethics is a whole different thing than putative human universals. Very few things that I would assert as ethics would I claim to be human universals. “Normative human essentials” might fit in that context. (By way of illustration, we all likely consider ‘Rape Bad’ as an essential ethical value but I certainly wouldn’t say that’s a universal human thing. Just that the ethics of those who don’t think Rape Is Bad suck!)
Different ethical systems are possible to implement even on “normal” human hardware (which is far from the set of all humans!). We have ample evidence in favour of this hypothesis. I think Westerners in particular seem especially apt to forget to think of this when convenient.
I think I agree with what you are saying but I can’t be sure. Could you clarify it for me a tad (seems like a word is missing or something.)
Westerners certainly seem to forget this type of thing. Do others really not so much?
Human can and do value different things. Sometimes even when they start out valuing the same things, different experiences/cricumstances lead them to systematize this into different reasonably similarly consistent ethical systems.
Modern Westerners often identify their values as being the product of reason, which must be universal. While this isn’t exactly rare, it is I think less pronounced in most human cultures throughout history. I think a more common explanation to “they just haven’t sat down and thought about stuff and seen we are right yet” is “they are wicked” (have different values). Which obviously has its own failure modes, just not this particular one.
It would be interesting to trace the relationship between the idea of universal moral value, and the idea of universal religion. Moldbug argues that the latter pretty much spawned the former (that’s probably a rough approximation), though I don’t trust his scholarship on the history of ideas that much. I don’t know to what extent the ancient Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Arabs considered their values to be universal (though apparently Romans legal scholars had the concept of “natural law” which they got from the Greeks which seems to map pretty closely to that idea, independently of Christianity and related universal religions).
Thankyou. And yes, I wholeheartedly agree!
I suspect you meant “I certainly wouldn’t say”… confirm?
Confirm.
What would be an example of a “Normative human essential”?
Killing young children is bad.
My guess is you wanted another example?
Yea, Konkvistador supplied well.
Raping folks is bad!
That’s not very helpful to me.
Ethics can arguably be reduced to “what is my utility function?” and “how can I best optimize for it?” So for a being not to include ethics in its optimization criteria, I’m confused what that would mean. I had guessed Konkvistador was referring to some sort of putative human universals.
I’m still not sure what you mean when you say their ethics suck, or what criteria you use when alleging something as ethics.
Ethics aren’t about putative human universals. I’m honestly not sure how to most effectively explain that since I can’t see a good reason why putative human universals came up at all!
Cooperative tribal norms seems more plausible. Somebody thinking their ethics are human universals requires that they, well, are totally confused about what is universal about humans.
Not at all. Many prominent ethicists and anthropologists and doctors agree that there are human universals. And any particular fact about a being has ethical implications.
For example, humans value continued survival. There are exceptions and caveats, but this is something that occurs in all peoples and amongst nearly all of the population for most of their lives (that last bit you can just about get a priori). Also, drinking antifreeze will kill a person. Thus, “one should not drink antifreeze without a damn good reason” is a human universal.
If these people don’t frequently disagree with others about ethics, they become unemployed.
This group’s opinions on the subject are less correlated with reality than most groups’.
ETA: I have no evidence for this outside of some of their outlandish positions, the reasons for which I have some guesses for but have not looked into, and this is basically a rhetorical argument.
Actually, if anything I think I’d be more likely to believe that the actual job security ethicists enjoy tends to decrease their opinions’ correlation with reality, as compared to the beliefs about their respective fields of others who will be fired if they do a bad job.
I don’t believe this, and am not aware of any evidence that it’s the case.
If it was intended to be merely a formal argument, compare:
ETA: Note that many prominent ethicists are tenured, and so don’t get fired for anything short of overt crime.
I thought you had an overwhelming point there until my second read. Then I realized that the argument would actually be a reasonable argument if the premise wasn’t bogus. In fact it would be much stronger than the one about ethicists. If mathematicians did have to constantly disagree with other people about maths it would be far better to ask an intelligent amateur about maths than a mathemtician.
You can’t use an analogy to an argument which uses a false premise that would support a false conclusion as a reason why arguments of that form don’t work!
The best reason I could come up with why someone would think ethicists need to disagree with each other to keep their jobs, is that they need to “publish or perish”. But that applies equally well to other academic fields, like mathematics. If it’s not true of mathematicians, then I’m left with no reason to think it’s true of ethicists.
You appear to have presented the following argument:
… as an argument which would be a bad inference to make even if the premise was true—bad enough as to be worth using as an argument by analogy. You seem to be defending this position even when it is pointed out that the conclusion would obviously follow from the counterfactual premise. This was a time when “Oops” (or perhaps just dropping the point) would have been a better response.
The premise wasn’t present. Yes, it would be formally valid given some counterfactual premise, but then so would absolutely every possible argument.
I’d expect “publish or perish” to apply broadly in academic fields, but there are several broad categories of ways in which one can publish. One can indeed come up with a disagreement with a view that someone else is promoting, but one can also come up with a view on an entirely different question than anyone else addresses. In a very abstract sense, this might count as as disagreement, a kind of claim that the “interesting” area of a field is located in a different area than existing publications have pointed to, but this isn’t quite the same thing as claiming that the existing claims about the previously investigated area are wrong.
Mathematicians—along with scientists—discover new things (what is a proof other than a discovery of a new mathematical property). That’s what their job is. In order for Ethicists to be comparable, wouldn’t they need to discover new ethics?
Sure, and they do. One out of the three major subfields of ethics is “applied ethics”, which simply analyzes actual or potential circumstances using their expertise in ethics. The space for that is probably as big as the space for mathematical proofs.
I don’t think they need to disagree with each other, only with outsiders.
So the premise, then, is that the institution of Ethics would come tumbling down if it were not the case that ethicists seemed to have special knowledge that the rest of the populace did not?
if so, I think it again applies equally well to any academic discipline, and is false.
Or am I still missing something?
Yes.
Other academic disciplines are tested against reality because they make “is” statements. Philosophy is in a middle ground, I suppose.
Which reality was it that the ethicists were not correlated with again? Oh, right, making factual claims about universals of human behavior. I don’t disbelieve you.
This does not refute!
No duh. Though it does suggest.
Was the “Not at all.” some sort of obscure sarcasm?
EDIT: At time of this comment the quote was entirety of parent—although I would have replied something along those lines anyway I suppose.
No. I was disagreeing with your point, and then offering supporting evidence. You took one piece of my evidence and noted that it does not itself constitute a refutation. I don’t know how it is even helpful to point this out; if I thought that piece of evidence constituted a refutation, I would not have needed to say anything else. Also, most arguments do not contain or constitute refutations.
It seems necessary to strengthen my reply to
Unless an individual had an ethical system which is “people should behave in accordance to any human universals and all other behaviors are ethically neutral” the fact that there are human universals doesn’t have any particular impact on the claim. Given that a priori humans can’t be going against human universals that particular special case is basically pointless.
I think I’m confused about what your actual claim was. It seemed to be that human universals have nothing to do with ethics. But it’s easy to show that some things that are putatively human universals have something to do with ethics, and a lot of the relevant people think putative human universals have a large role in ethics.
Was it just that ethics is not equivalent to human universals? If so, I agree.
Sorry for posting the first few paragraphs and then immediately editing to add the later ones. It was a long post and I wanted to stop at several points but I kept getting hit by “one more idea/comment/argument” moments.
It seems to me that the ethical discussion should come first, if one must have priority over the other.
After you’ve published the plans for a Death Ray it’s a bit late to have a discussion about whether or not it would be ethical to publish the plans for a Death Ray.
The plans for the Death Ray are already out there. The two possible discussions are, first, whether it’s ethical to kill someone with a Death Ray.
The second discussion asks whether the effectiveness of the Death Ray (compared to just punching someone) can be attributed to the placebo effect. Or maybe the Death Ray only works on the sort of people that evil villains want to kill, but when it comes time to protagonists, our opponents are mostly invulnerable to Death Rays. It’s also possible that the Death Ray doesn’t really work better than chance, but it gives villains the confidence to step up and shoot someone who’s about to have a heart attack, anyway. Then again, maybe a lot of people prefer to be shot with Death Rays and it’s hypocritical to say that the tried-and-true method of punching someone to death is better just because it doesn’t involve any mechanical devices...
I’m allowing for the possibility that PUA does little harm in its current inchoate, unscientific form but that with analysis and refinement it could do more harm. Establishing how well PUA beliefs map to reality could at least potentially identify a subset of PUA beliefs which did map to reality, and distinguish them from those that don’t.
If PUA as it currently exists in the wild, schisms and subgroups and all, is the most effective possible form of PUA then and only then is the invention already in the wild.
We’re not the only rationalists in the world.
A post entitled “[censored] Romantic Relationships” is non-PUA? That’s assuming conclusions to all kinds of open questions.
At the least all non-PUA relationship posts would require giant Happy Death Spiral warnings atop them.
Good point. I should have phrased better. I will edit my post to say “posts that aren’t explicitly about PUA.
It’s been awhile since I read the OP, and honestly I forgot about all the social interaction stuff that was posted. Being poly, I focused on the first part, and was sorta hoping there would be a discussion about different relationship styles. :)
Meh. It’s not like anyone forced me to read the whole thread (which I haven’t done).
Vote this comment up if this comment thread has made LessWrong more valuable to you.
If you’re going to conduct such a poll, I’d recommend asking a similar question about some other thread on some other topic (or possibly several) to act as a control group. (I would also recommend these be staggered in time in the hopes of simulating independent measurement, and the results reported as ratios to the number of posts in the thread.)
I dislike the loud and bad-feelings-producing retread of old topics that the comment thread appears (I have skimmed and sampled only) to have become, but I specifically wish that posts like this one are not prohibited/avoided in the future.
Apologies for cluttering up the poll area, but it seems like relevant information that I haven’t read much of the comment thread at all because I don’t think it’ll be valuable to me. If I had to break it down, I’d say that I don’t expect it to be particularly useful or interesting to me.
More valuable because it’s the weekend and I will read most but not all of it, but bad for signal/noise ratio overall.
Right now, the poll is at 14 to 1. Poll results don’t translate straightforwardly to net harm, but these numbers are pretty clear. So shall we implement some sort of official or unofficial safeguard against it happening again, either by banning certain topics, or by imposing stricter rules on how to discuss them?
I distinctly remember it being something to 2 earlier. In any case, other options might be even worse. A new norm of approving of people posting in the middle of threads “This is a happy death spiral but it would be impolite to say why” might be a net good.
Hi, this comment caused me to vote in this poll, in protest of its validity. I do agree actually that sanctions should be made, preferably norm based ones like lessdazed suggested. The protest is what the poll is clear of exactly. Such a poll is representative of the outliers. Specifically, anyone past the threshold it takes to make a vote. If you conclusions are based on that subset of people, then I have no disagreement.
Karma balance. Vote this down if you voted up one of the sibling comments.
What ought one do when the problem is not solved by social skills?
I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate about any skill at which i am not noticeably better than everyone I know about. Due to this quirk of my psychology, I spent a significant portion of my life believing myself to have horrendous social skills. And, for a long time, I attributed my social and sexual failings to that perceived lack of social skill, despite a gradually growing mass of evidence in favor of my social skills being adequate.
(relatively) Recent evidence and experience has now finished falsifying the premise that my social skills are not viable.
Unfortunately, having (a lack of) social skills ruled out as a cause of the problem leaves me, seemingly, without any more low-hanging fruit to pursue. And when even the woman who literally wrote the sequence on self-awareness tells me that she doesn’t know why her interest in dating me suddenly evaporated, I begin to… worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.
(And this doesn’t even touch the non-trivial problem of meeting suitable mates, which is obviously a prerequisite to attracting anyone.)
Have you tried reading PUA-Game material (and then selectively applying the ethical parts of it)? I could /feel/ my attraction to my OH increasing just by getting him to Game me.
It turns out that making friends and attracting mates requires different sorts of social behaviour. For example, women seeking mates tend to be very status-aware, but you can get on with friends perfectly well without any ability to signal high status. If you felt inadequate very often, that itself could mean you were projecting low status and driving off mates.
I might, if I had any idea where to find said material (rather that just people talking about the material), or how to identify the optimal starting point within the material. (Or anyone to apply it to.)
It depends on what data you need. My general recommendation would be:
“The Blueprint Decoded”—a video about pickup and social skills in general that gives you a greater context, instead of just throwing thousand random details at you. (Buy, or find a torrent.)
Married Man Sex Life—a blog about maintaining attraction in marriage. I recommend reading the older articles (before he published a book) because they seem to have much better signal:noise ratio.
From all the PUA stuff I have seen, these two seem highest-quality to me. The first one is like “the best of PUA”. The second one contains additional information about human chemistry; the author is a nurse. Both of them seem to me ethically OK, but because different people have different degrees of OK-ness, let me add a data point: The author of the second one has a wife who is also reading the blog and commenting on it; and they seem to have a very good relationship. This is also an evidence that the advice is long-term-relationship compatible.
Thanks for actually providing a link. Being told to “just google it” gets frustrating.
However...
I started at the beginning of the archive, the oldest posts, and I am reading them in order. Granted, I have only yet read a handful of posts, but I can’t imagine a person who thinks like the author writes having a worthwhile life. What he advocates seems so hollow and dishonest that I’ve had a steadily growing sense of disgust since I began reading. Frankly, I think I’d rather be alone forever than relate to people in the way he seems to, because I would feel just as alone either way.
This is an example of the “good” version of PUA material?
I am going to continue reading in case there is useful information, despite my disgust, but I haven’t seen any yet.
Be specific. Taboo “hollow”. Taboo “dishonest”.
The important information from that website, and from PUA materials in general, is that (heterosexual) women have sexual preferences, too. Those preferences were shaped by evolution. The preferred traits would statistically increase reproductive success in ancient environment (which is not necessarily true today).
This should not be a surprise, unless you believe that men are beasts, but women are pure angelic souls that only happen to have a body. (Problem is, that idea is implicitly present in our culture. That does not make it true.) However, many (heterosexual) men either don’t understand women’s preferences, or keep forgetting; simply because those are not their preferences.
Unlike men’s preferences, which are mostly about the shape of the body, women’s preferences are more behavior-based. This is a problem, because a man, despite once having been selected by a women, can simply forget to display the same behavior that made him attractive to her. He will not notice that he is doing something wrong! She will notice that something is wrong (she feels less attracted), but usually can’t pinpoint what! A few months or years later, they have a divorce, and no one really understands what happened. And this happens to maybe 50% of the population, in some cultures.
What exactly is “hollow” about this? Women having sexual preferences? Guess what, evolution does not care about what you decide to label as “hollow”. Would you rather not know about it, and worship your ignorance? That actually is what many men do, but then there are consequences like cheating, divorce, and child support.
What exactly is “dishonest” about fulfilling one’s wife’s sexual preferences? Not more dishonest than a woman applying make-up and dressing nice, to make her husband happy. It’s a role-play to satisfy the instinctual need to mate with a tribal leader from ancient environment, which no longer exists. And unlike many other PUA materials, this one recommends it only to maintain a marriage.
Certainly some of these ideas can offend people; especially people with wrong models of the world. Some people are offended by evolution; some people are offended by reductionism; some people are offended by the idea of husband and wife doing something to make each other happy. Unlike other PUA materials, this one has scientific support; the author explains (in a simplified version, accessible to layman) the effects of dopamine, oxytocine, and testosterone on human body; which is more than typical “just so stories” with evolutionary or pseudo-evolutionary explanations.
If this offends you, then I’m afraid that reality offends you. Sure, that happens to many people, too. In which case I cannot recommend you a better material, except maybe to read something PUA-unrelated but still related to sexuality and evolution, for example some books by Matt Ridley, and come back later when the idea of sexual behavior reductionism stops being so offensive.
Translation into usual Less Wrong language:
Men and women all have elephants and riders. While female riders are not intrinsically different from male riders, female elephants have lots of differences to male elephants, which is expected if the elephant is the animal hardware/operating system that we are run on.
Therefore, just as to understand and be successful in your own decision you must be aware of your biases and cognitive quirks, to successfully interact with others you must be aware of theirs. Most biases are shared across the human population, but sexual partner preferences are obviously not. Also, elephants can’t be reasoned with: you correct elephant biases by tricking the elephant. You don’t adjust well for the priming effect by trying to out-reason your instincts. You adjust for the priming effect by making sure you’re primed correctly for achieving your aims.
It’s important therefore to distinguish between tricking the elephant and tricking the rider. Tricking the rider is usually considered unethical, but tricking the elephant can be a case of correcting someone else’s biases for them: the wife thinks (rider, or attachment part of elephant + rationalisation) she should be attracted to the husband, after all she married him, but she (attraction part of elephant) isn’t. There are two ways of resolving that: one the rider decides to leave, or two the husband makes himself more attractive to the elephant.
My wife really didn’t appreciate this when I explained it to her. Can’t work out what went wrong in that conversation...
Beisutsukai unlock Option III at level 25: Get the rider to look down and see the elephant, craft reins for the elephant, and cooperate to steer the elephant.
Also, at level 45, they unlock the legendary Option IV (both riders must have this ability to use successfully): Both riders perform a combo-takedown on the elephants and develop low-maintenance long-term elephant-control plans that guarantees self-perpetuating elephant attraction and automatic steering (e.g. by training the elephants to follow the road/eachother on their own without further direction).
Incidentally, all Beisutsukai unlock Option 0 at level 5: Find a mate that already knows how to ride the elephant in the first place.
I have an elephant riding strategy, it involves throwing rocks at the environment and surrounding elephants to entice/scare it into going the right way. It’s kinda hard work, but elephants don’t really do reins… (How do people actually steer elephants, out of interest?)
Two methods are anchoring and positive reinforcement. Availability control is also usually very effective. Essentially, the same stuff as for behavior/habit training works best, since as per my best model you’re essentially training a psychological/biological behavior there too. That’s more for “training” elephants though. Direct, in-the-moment steering requires actually training the elephant to respond to steering by whatever reins you craft, in the first place, otherwise it’s very hard and sketchy (and usually, as you say, involves throwing rocks).
I forgot where, but I recall reading a study that concluded that making one kind of sexual stimulus more “present” and reducing the availability/presence of other stimuli would increase the natural response of men to that stimulus later on (with long-term effects) in those subjects. I’m not sure of the specifics anymore, but for “sexual stimulus” think “pictures of mostly-naked ladies in X”, for X being wearing a specific item of clothing, fetish setup, or particular situation/setting.
Most studies I’ve found regarding such things seem to be crafted exclusively around men, so it’s pretty hard to find good “official” scientific data for women in that regard. Most of the data apparently comes from PUA material, unfortunately.
Indeed, it is pseudo-endocrinology instead. (I usually take these with the same grain of alt I take the other ‘layman science’ explanations.)
Who would have thought?
Which culture? I suppose that this misconception might be present in cultures where women are considered little more than chattel, but if you live in a culture where women freely choose their partners, you would have to be stupid or delusional to think they don’t have sexual preferences.
Actually, it looks like pseudoscience. Just throwing in the names of a few neurotransmitters and hormones doesn’t make a claim scientifically supported.
The idea of individual female sexual preferences is OK, as long as they remain mysterious.
The outrage starts at the moment when someone suggests that they are statistically predictable, and gives specific examples. This is quickly labeled as “offensive to women”. And in some sense, the label is correct—being unpredictable is higher status than being predictable. On the other hand, there is no harm in saying that male sexual preferences are statistically predictable.
I suggest a thought experiment—imagine starting a discussion in LW Open Thread about which female sexual preferences are most frequent, and what is the easiest way to trigger them. Then, watch the downvotes and offended complaints. (This is just a thought experiment, don’t do it really.) The topic is probably instrumentally important to majority of LW readers, yet it will never get the same space as e.g. a rational toothpaste choice. So there is some kind of a taboo, isn’t it?
I’m under the impression that hypergamy is common knowledge, but I suppose that it may be politically incorrect to discuss it in public in certain subcultures.
Other aspects of female sexual preferences, like social intelligence, athletic physique, masculine facial bone structure, deep voice, etc. are also well known and not so controversial to discuss.
LW might not be the best place for such an experiment, even as a thought experiment. I think this should actually be experimented in some other, “general-population” forum, perhaps with a control test in a different one replacing “female” with “male” for comparison framing. It would still obviously not be study-material, but it certainly sounds fun.
Um, wow. Clearly you’ve pattern-matched to something completely different than the objection I was trying to convey. I’m so not in any way offended by sexual behavior reductionism.
To me, the author of MMSL only seems to care about creating something that looks like an intimate relationship from the outside. And he’s other-optimizing; very egregiously so. My revulsion stems from my belief that I wouldn’t be any happier living the way he advocates than I am now. I want something that feels like an intimate relationship from the inside, and the sort of relationship he depicts as ideal wouldn’t.
That’s what I mean by hollow.
I also doubt I could ever feel safe with someone with whom, to use the metaphor, appealing to the elephant is more effective than appealing to the rider, but he seems to live in an isolated bubble where he only interacts with other riders through the intermediary of their elephants, which I would find just as lonely as my current life of no interaction at all.
That’s what I mean by dishonest.
I’m totally with you there, in that it wouldn’t be any fun to be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t aware of this stuff.
You have to be aware though that sometimes appealing to the elephant IS more effective than appealing to the rider. It is not possible to consciously reason myself into being turned on. I am /not/ in conscious control of my hormone emitters. I need my environment to influence them for me. Even if I’m consciously aware that you’re a great guy and super smart and all that, if you don’t press my elephant buttons, so to speak, being in a relationship with you just isn’t any fun. Placating the elephant isn’t a terminal value for sufficiently awake people, but for most people it’s an important instrumental value.
Also, the impression he usually gives is not that he interacts with only his wife’s elephant, just that his rider-rider interaction is fine and he never struggled with it. He also occasionally gives advice for female riders regarding male elephants.
Also, take it from me that this stuff adds to rather than detracts from intimate relationships. From the inside. (If it helps you believe me, this is what Athol’s wife thinks.)
No you aren’t. You’re saying something entirely different—a mix of orthogonal points and contradictory ones—but using the form “I’m with you there” because it is typically an amazingly effective tool for leading around and getting along with metaphorical elephants.
Impossible is such a strong term. I’d suggest possible but completely unrealistically implausible, possibly take years of unnatural mental training and being ultimately far less satisfying than just finding a mate that is actually attractive.
Would it be offensive to claim that I’m a woman and I can’t help doing that, re your first comment? (The “it wasn’t me it was my elephant!” defence?) I’ve subtly edited the phrasing so it’s less objectionable.
And I suppose Buddhists have meditated their way into their reptilian-level hardware before. Though I’m not sure it’d be worth a lifetime of meditation training just so I can think myself into releasing testosterone and oestrogen and dopamine ;) Instrumental and terminal values and all that.
Though if I could release dopamine at will then it’s the wireheading discussion all over again...
I imagine some women may conceivably be offended by the stereotyping.
I wouldn’t have said “objectionable” so much as “fascinating example of exactly the kind of influence technique either a PUA or business social skills adviser may recommend”.
Especially since any one of those things can be injected far more simply routinely. Purely mental wireheading tactics are just terribly inefficient these days!
This conversation is making my elephant very confused… Based on interpreting my reactions, did I just get negged? (more power to you if I did)
You’re letting your elephant loose on this stuff? And it actually moves? Darn.
Mine’s just been standing there munching on some rationality leaves all along, completely uninterested. It’s more annoyed about the rider jumping in excitement on its back, if anything.
Letting my elephant loose? I don’t know about you, but my elephant is almost always loose. I just try to pay attention to what it does, because, well, isn’t that the point of this site?
Analyzing...
...Not in the pure sense of “negative compliment”. Because, well, I seem to have neglected the ‘compliment’ part. Let’s see… You have beautiful eyelashes… Are they real?
Nevertheless, the style of interaction could be used in a similar social role to the neg—that is, demonstrating playfulness, arrogance and a willingness to assert themselves higher in status (at least for the purpose of that one social transaction.)
To a certain extent there is the reverse of a neg. Surface level cavalier contradiction which nevertheless serves to overall lend support to your position. In particular the replies in the grandparent could be replaced with “Not to me.”, “Oh, no, I didn’t want to imply that you were being objectionable and using that strategy is OK.” and “You are totally right.” respectively without changing the object level meaning drastically. Yet that would have conveyed an entirely invalid connotations of supplication and wishy-washy backtracking. Complimentary-contradiction and then flippant elaboration avoids that frame.
In summary: No, but with that style of interaction adding negs would be overkill!
...I think I’m just going to leave it at “you are far too good at this”. :P
If that is what you really want then by all means go ahead. To the external observer that just looks like someone sitting in the corner sulking because the universe doesn’t give them what they want.
I.E. If what you want is magic, magic won’t work.
Isn’t that a false dilemma? That’s just one relative comparison, which is meant to illustrate just how much he dislikes that particular option by visibly placing and signalling it as even lower than something else generally understood as being a net negative option.
Basically: “I’ve considered this, but so far found that it was even worse than other options I’ve already considered, so I’ll keep looking”—is what I understand as the main point behind the wording he used.
Please imagine I inserted “would rather” in appropriate places in the grandparent so that the token relativity is duly represented in the declared observations of the typical observer.
I didn’t really look at much of MMSL either, but I did notice an encouraging sign: the author’s wife is listed as a coauthor and adds occasional remarks to the posts, which if nothing else suggests that she reads them. This puts an upper bound on how dishonest it can possibly be.
Yes, it requires that two people be lying about something for their mutual benefit, instead of just one. Two people is practically a conspiracy!
(We need to use another term for where the actual upper bound doesn’t change that much at all but the probability of a moderate amount of deception is present is reduced.)
I was assuming that “hollow and dishonest” referred to the author being hollow and dishonest to his wife. And in fact I don’t think this can be done very effectively when you document your hollowness and dishonesty on a blog your wife reads.
MMSL is my personal source and what I had in mind as something that worked when I recommended just googling it. Most Game material sounds weird without being able to put the ideas into practise, which is why I recommended you search for material more applicable to you: I was able to get instant feedback on ideas by getting or prompting my OH or myself (depending on material) to try them.
I don’t recommend the start of MMSL though, it sounds cynical because it is; that part is mainly aimed at men who are married to wives who aren’t attracted to them, who really need to do something drastic if they want to keep their relationships. I’m not actually sure I’d recommend the blog at all to someone not in a long term relationship; in terms of referring to the science of attraction it doesn’t do much different from sites like Hooking Up Smart, which afaics is information of a similar quality aimed at a different audience (college students, in this case). I’m sure there are more sites of a similar quality out there. (Look for references to Helen Fisher), whose research is most commonly cited).
Apologies if the google advice isn’t useful, looks like I failed to avoid other-optimising after all! (I usually take a “just google it” approach to these things myself.)
ETA: if you’re having ethical “disgust” responses, it may help to keep firmly in mind the elephant/rider (in the usual LW language) or hamster/agent distinction. Manipulation is done from the rider to the other party’s elephant. This can be done with or without the other rider’s permission, and the ethics of the action where done without permission may well depend on how much the other rider is in control of their own elephant. In the specific case advocated by the opening posts of MMSL, the wife who says things like “I love you but I’m not in love with you” or cheats on their husband without knowing why, has an actively harmful elephant, whose rider is unaware of how to control the elephant, or worse, vehemently denying the existence of the elephant. In cases like this, calling out directly to the elephant may well be an ethical course of action. (“recognising the rider-elephant distinction” translates to “taking the red pill”; the more misogynistic sites assume that females aren’t capable of this, but these sites can still have useful advice in terms of elephant-control.)
Thanks for the insights. This is shining more light on just what it is I’m looking for in a relationship, too, which should help me greatly in improving the shape of my sweet-spot-in-personspace.
There are torrents of it. Someone linked a torrent of a bunch of books by some famous PUA a while back, I found it fairly interesting, but “what was true wasn’t new.” It may be helpful in building your confidence to actually go out and try things, which is the hard part but also rather key.
Where to find said material: I’m going to steer clear of other-optimising here, and suggest what I did (rather than link you to my favourites), which involved basically google, then a breadth-first (affiliated links and commenters with their own blogs will help) search of blogs that seem relevant by sampling critical posts, then reading the most useful blogs in depth from the start chronologically, skipping material that seems irrelevant to you. Since I’m female, I ranked reading material by looking for posts that described their model of women and seeing which applied best. You’ll have to decide which posts to look for by your own selection criteria, though I suggest checking any of: the posts that the site owner chooses to highlight, posts that describe the type of relationship the author wants/has/caters for, posts which echo strongly with your personal situation, or just random posts.
Similar principles apply for forums and general websites, though it makes the breadth-first search harder.
I’d be happy to help if you tell me the specifics, either via messaging or replying, since I had to read a lot of material to get to where I am.
As for people to apply it to (assuming heterosexual male), you can try making more female friends by actually going to social activities and clubs/meetups. You can also test the theory by going to places where women go to be approached by strange men, such as bars and clubs if you live near a busy area. You’re unlikely to find the type of girl you’ll want long-term there, but it can be useful for experimenting theory and confidence-building.
If you’re wary of experimenting in person, and are relatively good at applying a general theory to a new situation, I think the principles of Game should also apply well to dating sites, so you may want to give those a go: it’s a very low-cost way of experimenting, and you also might find someone you like!
I did not say that. I looked at the chatlog to be sure, and I did not say that.
I was paraphrasing based on my understanding of that conversation. Apologies if I misunderstood and inadvertently misrepresented you.
This might come out a little harsh, but...
whining about having been rejected, in public, in front of the woman who rejected you, is not exactly a turn on, I suppose.
There aren’t enough italics in the world to sufficiently emphasize how much whining about being rejected was not the intent of my comment.
It may not have been the intent, but that was what it looked like to me also.
Well, it didn’t sound like that to me. (Mmm… Should I start up a karma poll to know how it sounded to other people?)
I have a hack which usually gets such points across efficiently, though:
“How did you—that’s exactly, completely what I was thinking! You’re totally right!
...(short pause)...
Now put that in parenthesis, and put a minus sign in front. You’ll see what I mean.”
I’d also add that the whining itself could not possibly have caused the rejection, since you’d have some kind of causal loop.
I agree on the implied denotation that such a general attitude, if applied in other circumstances, would be detrimental. I disagree about the also-implicit conclusion that EphemeralNight does use that attitude in general. Nothing in particular seems to indicate that this person is prone to whining about rejection in general. We’ve only seen one single instance of some person kicking the soda machine, without knowing about their brother that just got arrested and the 5K$ debt they just learned about—to reuse an old example.
Hopefully she PM’d you her best estimate of her real reason for losing interest.
I would if he asked. Until then I can’t be sure he wants to know.
Aww, too bad he never invoked Crocker’s Rules. That would give you immediate license and confirmation that he does want to know.
Also, he’d probably go batshit insane.
Ask him whether he wants to know?
I would prefer not to do that. (At least not directly. Having this oblique conversation in public is fine.)
This is my primary problem. “Meeting people that I can interact well with, regardless of the mate-suitability criterion” is a fairly/relatively trivial (and different) problem, but all my approaches to meeting people generate massive amounts of noise-results, such that finding a combo-match of (person-I-could-find-suitable) + (person-that-could-find-me-suitable) + (meeting-said-person) + (sufficient-common-knowledge-barrier) statistically becomes very hard. For each of the above “suitable mate met” events, I would have to generate tens of thousands of “person met” events.
Considering the amount of time required to generate these events, and the relative resulting chance of a payoff, it becomes trivially obvious that my time is better spent otherwise (such as reducing the noise through learning better event-generation behaviors) since it computes to rather low expected value.
If p(X would be a suitable mate|you met X) is actually around 10^-4, then maybe trying to lower your standards (if you can manage to do that) might help.
Well, widening / loosening the “margin” or distribution of suitability criteria is indeed one of the valid approaches, but one this is still only part of the equation for the problem AFAICT.
Yes, currently, to my model, that P() really is in that ballpark. I’m currently hitting (with P>.98) way off my current “sweet spot in personspace”, with few hits ever getting closer to it and forming a cloud around a completely different area, so my best WAG pretty much give those numbers when trying to project how many I’d have to meet to expect at least one statistical outlier to hit the margin. Making said sweet spot larger is something that would indeed help a lot, but doing so without reducing the total expected payoff of this whole calculation is also non-trivial, for reasons I hope are obvious.
I strongly suspect that my current noise is in no small part due to my current approaches / general behaviors. There’s at bare flat minimum 1 in 50 people (assuming IQ stats are any indication) with sufficient reasoning ability for me to find them very interesting, of those at least 1 in 3 is using that ability in a way that I probably wouldn’t perceive as noise (so I’d probably notice quickly enough), my preferences / personspace “sweet spot” check would eliminate around (WAG: intuitions from personspace stuff) 80-95% of those remaining.
Which means that, by those numbers and assumptions, around 1 in 750 to 1 in 3000 would be a valid match if I were meeting persons according to a uniform personspace probability distribution and breaking the sufficient-common-knowledge barrier in a proportionally uniform manner over persons met. The clear difference indicates that I’m probably doing something wrong, so the most efficient way I know of solving the problem is to find what I’m doing wrong and fix it first, not just meeting more people.
IMO, 1 in 750 is not a particularly constraining margin, especially if you consider that under ideal circumstances you should do the reverse of what I’m doing and actually be concentrating your hits around your sweet spot, not some other place far away from it.
Also, I dislike the term “lowering your standards”. The imagery puts person on a scale basically equivalent to transforming personspace into a Me.perceivedValue(X) function that outputs the scalar distance between Me.perceivedPSLoc(X) and Me.sweetSpotCenter. It gives exactly zero information about the other components of the equation. It also gives very little information on the measurement unit of the scalar.
1 in 50 people among the whole population has IQ >= 131; in places such as university towns that fraction is likely to be substantially higher.
Yes, it would seem so.
Unfortunately, even living in a very student-dense city and deliberately targeting locales near universities doesn’t seem to have quite the effect I was hoping for. Things are not helped by the fact that French, the main language of 2⁄3 of the population here, distinctly lacks key words and concepts that seem necessary for bayesianism. The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge—even the French wikipedia page on Bayes’ Theorem struggles with this.
As I’ve said, I’m most likely doing a lot of things wrong, because even going to places near university campus(es) (which I’d go to anyway, since they’re otherwise still the places I’d prefer going to) gives these results. I’m also going with the assumption that the actual odds for people I am meeting there are much higher than 1⁄50 for the intelligence criterion, but calculating flat minimum ratios for an IQ level I’m certain is high enough seemed like a more appropriate conservative figure.
Oh, that explains why Quebecois seem to think and behave in such silly ways :). At least it’s the way it looks from the other end of the country.
It’s the way it looks and feels from here too—I seem to be a rare exception in considering reason, logic and knowledge to have any value (besides the obvious monetary value of “knowledge” of things related to a business) among native French speakers here.
Campaigns to “preserve language and culture” and keep forcing children to go to only French schools and study only in French make me cringe constantly.
That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
And that’s what really makes me cringe.
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.
It has no terribly good Italian equivalent either, but this doesn’t make it hard to talk in a Bayesian way: you just say stuff like “it’s likely that X, given that Y”. (In particular, ISTM that—among the kind of people usually I hang with at least—“folk probability” resembles Bayesianism much more than frequentism, and most people who use frequentist statistics only give lip service to it without being actually convinced it makes all that sense.)
Maybe part of the problem is you go around saying things like that.
Maybe I should refer you to this other comment I made on this topic.
Or, to put it in this particular context: I don’t go around saying things like that. This is a discussion about relationships and attraction, and the things I say here are (or so I perceive them to be) very relevant to the subject at hand. You’ve seen me once say something like that, in a place where saying things like that is both appropriate and productive, and you deduce that I always go around saying things like that to random people I’ve just met before I even know them? I’d be very afraid if I were a suspect in a murder investigation led by you.
You also seem to have misinterpreted just what it is that “that” was saying. To put it in other words that might be less prone to “pompous elitist” pattern-matching, I’m basically saying that there’s a statistical guarantee that I’d be very interested in maintaining an intellectual discourse (and hopefully long-term relationship of some kind, even as acquaintances) with, given enough time to talk with and get to know them, at least one out of every fifty people out there. Even more than that in practice, since there will be many people who are interesting despite not being Mensa material. That sentence just puts a lower boundary on the amount of people I could find very interesting.
I apologize. Even if my comment had had a small probability of being helpful, I should have stated it differently, and I did jump to more conclusions than was warranted.
I didn’t mean to imply a misinterpretation, though. If you did go around saying things like that, the pattern-matching would be the whole problem. If you actually believed something to the effect of “people with IQ less than X are not worth knowing”, that might also be an obstacle, but at a later stage of relationship-forming. In any case, that appears to be irrelevant.
You meant to say “despite not being”?
Yes, thanks for catching that. Fixed.
I believe that this is a serious problem in itself. It’s probably undercutting your quality of life in many ways,
In particular, it’s probably on your mind when you’re in relationships, distracting you from what’s actually going on between you and the other person.
Cognitive behavioral therapy might help. It goes into detail about undercutting that sort of belief.
More generally, I believe that the crucial thing is to believe that it’s safe to be on your own side. Getting to that belief can be amazingly difficult (believing that you shouldn’t be on your own side is probably the result of gut-level fear from repeated attacks), but it’s worth the trouble.
I only mentioned that to explain the origin of a false belief. It is not currently a problem for me, just an annoyance.
By “annoyance” I assume you mean you still have the feeling but work around it?
In that case, it may be a problem in ways you’re not aware of. Other people, prospective mates especially, can pick up on that feeling in tricky subtle ways and react to it.
Ok—sorry for unneccesary advice.
Ask someone who knows you and has seen you interacting with women to give you honest feedback. Such feedback will help you spot the actual causes of your inability to attract suitable mates more than anything anyone could tell you here.
When I ask that, the answer is usually “I have no idea, you are not ugly nor unpleasant nor stupid after all” or “You just haven’t found the right one yet.”
(Oh, and the people who give me the former answer are almost invariably already taken, or otherwise not looking for a relationship at the moment.)
When you approached these people, did you make it clear that you were looking for honest feedback, however painful it might be?
Well… I though I had, but now that I think about that… (OTOH, I usually ask that when we’re both drunk, so that—I’d expect—there are fewer filters in place than usual.)
I’ve also created an account on whatiswrongwithme.com and share it on Facebook once in a while—promising I won’t get offended no matter what I read, but I didn’t get much feedback there either.
You may consider offering money in exchange for good feedback. A while ago, I agreed to pay a friend of mine $5 per individual piece of feedback that I judged to be sufficiently valuable. I learned a lot about myself as a result.
That had never occurred to me. Maybe I’ll try that some day.
Actually, if you find the comment on this page (among the thousands) about useless studies (I recall it being highly upvoted), in a lot of people self-reporting is highly inaccurate. I suspect this is mostly either via automatic face-saving or via only reporting conscious reactions when unconscious ones are equally important.
I recommend either asking friends who both understand how the conscious/unconscious division works for them, and are willing to be brutally honest (actually if they have both these qualities they don’t need to be a friend, just anyone willing to talk to you will do), or if no such person is available, form hypotheses yourself and get evidence by changing your behaviour and observing the responses, rather than asking outright.
There is no such person.
Then I think you might benefit from improving your social skills after all.
First, accumulate 117 acquaintances who would trust you to relay an unimportant piece of information accurately, and four true friends who would trust you to provide support in a situation which unexpectedly became violent.
You look at:
“I seem to have a tendency to feel extremely inadequate”
″ I begin to… worry, and that feeling of helplessness starts showing up.”
The “social skills” referred to when considering mating potential are somewhat specific and include particular emphasis on displaying confidence, particularly sexual confidence. Google “dating inner game” and you’ll have an overabundance of resources explaining what signals you need to send and giving tips on how to change yourself so that you are the kind of person who sends those signals more.
Retracted. I had written some brutally honest advice but realized after reading a bit more that you know a lot of people on here in person, so I’ll PM instead.
“Long-term monogamy should not be done on the pretense that attraction and arousal for one’s partner won’t fade. It will.”
This is precisely the point of monogamy. Polyamory/sleeping around is a young man’s game. Long-term monogamy is meant to maintain strong social units throughout life, long after the thrill is gone.
Way too many coments to reed, but..
“We are even more likely to marry someone with a similar-sounding name.15”
Perhaps not. I googled it and found this: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/workshops/marketing/archive/sp10/Spurious20100424.pdf
Meta comment
There are more than a thousand comments on this thread now (is that an LW record?). This makes it very difficult for newcomers to navigate the threads and arguments. As such it might be worth summarising some of the discussions and splitting them into separate discussion threads.
Why did you not mention PUA? This sucks. No, PUA sucks. This post is almost ok because it is mostly gender neutral. No, it does suck because it is censored. Why is the word ‘rational used?’ Boo! Ethics! Morals! You’re a bunch of one-dimensional stereotypes! Women like jerks—or not. Nice guys are grossly obese and smelly girls—or not. Utilitarianism! I deny Bayes theorem! No, Bayes is awesome, even better than science. You are a rapist. No I’m not. You forgot polygynous relationships under the polyamoury category. Ooh, ooh meta, let’s discuss whether this was good or bad, with polls!
On second thoughts let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
I figure this comment was mostly intended as a joke but it is honestly a useful summary (and a useful overview of some LW memes, especially ones relating to relationships).
My favorite humor tends to be flippantly sincere. :)
This just saved me so much time.
Do the dangling variable dance! It goes something like this:
I’m a conservative! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Abortion is murder! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
I’m a libertarian! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Taxation is slavery! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
I’m a liberal! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape! Dangle dangle dangle dangle!
Followed by: this thread is lame, everything’s lame.
(“Followed by followed by” coming soon?)
In any case, sing it with me: I respect women when I’m on a date/I take them to the park/or maybe a museum...
(Upvoted)
If nothing else, I am now convinced there’s nothing to be gained from trawling through the thread.
I really liked this post because 1: I like picking up women for the obvious reasons, and 2: I love people who are into LW style rationality and I think the best way for it to spread is to demonstrate its applicability to a diverse range of standard human endeavors.
But I have to say that the method of marketing to a specialized group can be taken way too far. And it isn’t too hard to do this. I for instance, have long unkempt dreads down to my ass. I get compliments on this at least three times a day (no exaggeration). But all in all, I think I would likely be more successful in picking up women if I had short well kept hair. If your style is so eccentric that only 1/100000 women will find it attractive (though they’ll find it insanely attractive), and you live an area where you meet 1 or 2 new women a day, you might need to de-eccentiric-ize a bit to be effective.
I just deleted the two paragraphs about OkTrends. Also, see here.
Sure, that explains the weakly negative (-.1) coefficient on 4. The real meat of the effect, though, is the positive coefficient (.4) on 1. Each person who rates you a 1 gives you about half as many messages as each person who rates you a 5 (.9), which does strongly suggest ‘play up what you think will turn some people off.’
The whole goth guy/ alternative look point misses a significant part of the appeal. People (particularly men) who prominently display membership in a subculture often have a strong sense of self. This kind of self-confidence is generally attractive to women, so those who aren’t immediately put off by his group identity are likely attracted to that confidence and the charisma that goes with it.
Practically, this means that alternative styles only tend to work when they’re genuine and you’re comfortable with them. Someone who feels most natural in more conservative clothing may actually hurt themselves by trying niche appeal, because they need to belong to that niche.
In other words it comes of as incongruent.
This is fantastic. Well researched, fairly well written.
I have a niggling general complaint about how LW seems to use rationality as just a general good word. It just, icks me a bit. I suspect that it might really turn off new readers.
Seriously, my one complaint is that when reading this on an iPad it took me too long to scroll past all the references.
I can’t wait to read more of this.
Yeah, there should be a “skip to comments” link before the bibliography, or a show/hide button or something.
I agree that it would be nice for articles with long bibliographies to have a show/hide options (starting hidden). I am unsure how this would be possible at the moment, so a “skip to end” link might have to do.
What would you prefer? Instrumental Rationality is a bit of a mouthful, Common Sense is an abused term is means whatever the speaker believes in, and our super dictionary “Acting as to maximize expected utility” seems formal. I agree we pepper the word Rationality enough that it may turn off outsiders, but I am personally not seeing other terms or phrases that don’t either under formalize to the point of meaningless folksiness or over formalize to the point of turning even more people off.
If you find that “Rational” belongs at the beginning of most posts, then it can go entirely unsaid.
Much like as I realized just recently, we really don’t need a symbol for “such that” in
∃x(Px)This.
I found the article quite interesting as a new reader, for what it’s worth. Would love to see more in this vein as well as the more formal or abstract articles about rationality, bias, etc.
I actually don’t like the word “rationality” at all considering that it is most commonly used to mean rationalization which is of course not rationality. If somebody is “rational” I usually think of it to mean “he has justified his actions to himself” or “he has common sense” (common sense being a terrible thing). I prefer the word “logic” as mathematician, but maybe that’s associated with proofs instead of probabilities or something.
But whatever, just sematics and definitions.
Well, the two have a different meaning to me. Logic is a class of mathematical systems, like first-order logic. But logic stays within an axiomatically constructed system, it doesn’t claim or pretend to have a direct link with “reality”.
Rationality is the art of using such a system in relation to reality—to understand reality, predict it, and therefore gain the power to steer it in a preferred direction.
Logic itself will never tell you if the universe uses Newtonian or relativistic laws of motion. Both systems are logically consistent. But rationality will tell you that relativistic laws of motion are a closer map of reality than Newtonian laws of motion (but that Newtonian laws of motion is still a very valid map for daily life).
Yea, this is a good explanation. Logic seems to be considered as more abstract rules, while rationality seems to apply it to reality.
Although considering Bayes Theorem is a logical, mathematical construct, I could certainly argue against the idea that “logic doesn’t claim or pretend to have a direct link with reality”.
Well, I would say Bayes Theorem itself is purely logical, but realizing how it applies to updating your belief network and scoring your hypothesis, and then using it that way, especially the part of devising tests that could falsify your hypothesis, is rationality. I knew Bayes Theorem before discovering Less Wrong, I even knew a bit about Bayesian networks in computer science, but I never realized how deep Bayes Theorem was (and how it was a more powerful, more technical version of the scientific method) before reading the “intuitive explanation” and the Sequences.
But of course, the two are far from totally isolated. Words are fuzzy boundaries, not precise definitions.
It’s only ‘deep’ if you have to dredge it up and out from a pile of bullshit. ;)
Applying Bayes Theorem is just applying logic to your life. It follows directly from the theorem. That would make you logical.
Or perhaps we are just differentiating from the abstract and the real.
How about “decision theory”?
BTW, given the usual reaction to posts about relationships, I expect this post to get a fair number of downvotes. But I would genuinely like to hear from downvoters about why they’re downvoting. Previous explanations were useful.
Individually very minor, petty reasons, befitting a very minor, petty action:
1) It bored me.
2) Your research skills are very impressive and I’d rather them be directed towards CEV or the like.
3) Ugh field concerning this site and sex/dating questions.
4) There’s no puzzle to it; you’re not illustrating any broader methodological point or coming to any new conclusions, just acting as a clearinghouse for dating advice.
5) “A Rational Approach to...”
Just to agree with the above, and expand my feelings:
I don’t see a lot of new ideas here. It would surprise me if an average less wrong reader hadn’t spent a little time researching this topic, and all of this is fairly mainstream information.
I have a very strong ugh field set up around instrumentally pursuing females. After a bad break up, I spent about 6 months learning PUA, I had quite good success (my physical appearance is not lacking), but found the whole thing to be so pathetically empty compared to previous “organic” relationship that I felt defeated even though I wasn’t.
I realize that this can probably be accounted for, and note that it is one area that the PUA community seems to be lacking in. Lots of emotionally unfulfilling sex isn’t optimal by a long shot, though it may be beneficial for a certain subset of individuals.
Anyways, one of the most important things I learned was to try and avoid too much theory, and break it down into individual actionable items. Given that with this topic especially, readers will likely come from all over the spectrum of possible skill levels, that might be a hard thing to do. But perhaps behavioral exercises… links to resources and specific suggestions for conversation, fashion, body language.
On #5, part of me wants to agree, because we’re not a sciencer about.com, but another part of me really wants there to be more lesswrong members becoming more instrumentally rational. Maybe even, as an exercise, asking members to find there own ugh field, use the value of scholarship, compile useful material into a quality post (along the same lines as Luke does), apply it in real life, and then report on it, either in a discussion thrsad or in an offshoot of the main post. This seems like a really basic thing that a rationalist gym should/ would do.
So thorough! Thanks.
As for being boring, I will admit this post was written before I decided to sometimes try harder with my writing style.
In general I’m concerned with the way the community is headed—I joined for the philosophy, I’m less interested in reading about analytic people’s approaches to basic social interaction. Some days I feel like this site has gone from Less Wrong to Wrong Planet.
So I guess I’m downvoting as a political stance, rather than anything to do with the quality of your writing. Sorry, I’m afraid that’s not helpful.
I’d be concerned if the community failed to explore these sort of topics.
Mere “philosophy” would be kind of empty. Once the idea of instrumental rationality was held up, the idea that rationalists should win, then it’s either start trying to apply it to real problems, or concede that we didn’t really mean it and that we just want to talk about stuff that makes us sound intelligent and sophisticated. That “applied rationality” features prominently here adds enormously to the credibility of LW and especially of the authors who have something to say about it, at least in my eyes.
Perhaps the problem is whether this generates the perception of “self-help” as opposed to “becoming awesome”. The former kinda smacks of low status and might turn some people off, while impressive success is obviously not a problem. Perhaps it’s a presentation issue (I suck at PR so I can’t judge), or perhaps we just haven’t amassed a sufficient wealth of evidence of awesomeness to overcome the negative connotations.
I second this position. Despite the fact that I will probably benefit from these self-help kinds of posts, I’m nonetheless more interested in posts about creating new rationality skills and dissolving philosophical dilemmas.
Also, affixing the word “rational” to everything is mildly grating.
Seconded.
Rationally seconded?
Thanks for explaining, Nominull and Tetronian!
I would also prefer more quality philosophy like the original sequences, but I prefer quality posts about relationships to low-quality posts about philosophy that present rambling thoughts or stuff that’s already been covered to death.
I joined for the same reason, but since I maintain a Stoic stance I’m actually very comfortable with my philosophy impinging on my practical considerations. Philosophy need not be impractical (although I agree that some things, like “rational gift buying for persons 8 or under”, are too disconnected from the philosophy espoused here that it would be best we didn’t encourage those kinds of posts).
My impression is that sometimes there are more epistemic or otherwise technical articles, and sometimes there are more instrumental rationality articles. I don’t have a feeling for whether it’s mostly random variation, or if articles of one sort tends to inspire more of the same until people run out of ideas and/or get sick of it.
I downvoted for several reasons.
The post is long, yet there isn’t much of value here, just a lot of things that are obvious (e.g. goth dress might help success with goths, here is a graph to demonstrate that already totally intuitive bit of info). People on LW like to see obvious things restated in formal ways, with graphs and footnotes. This feels like accessing secret knowledge via x-rationalist super powers. But it isn’t. It isn’t even standard learning. I see this kind of thing a lot on LW.
Relationship advice is outside of the LW comparative advantage (and I suspect absolute advantage as well).
I get the feeling this is about to turn into a commercial for polyamory, and I don’t want that to happen. There have now been several posts devoted to advocating polyamory as a “rational” relationship style. To me this feels a lot like hearing people talking about creating “rationally-planned” utopian communes. (It’s no coincidence that polyamory and utopian socialism have so often been found together, from the early Christian Adamites, to the Radical Swedenborgians, to the counterculture hippies in the 1970s.) It’s depressing and non-productive to see people falling into the same traps over and over.
I didn’t downvote, but I didn’t upvote, and I’d actually be a bit embarrassed if it were the first thing that a friend of mine saw on Less Wrong. This is mostly due to a few lingering phrases that, although I know you don’t intend them that way, have widely known sexist connotations. For instance:
I know you mean to say “the current community of self-identified rationalists contains many more men than women”, but you can easily imagine what connotations someone else might imbue it with. I got an ‘ugh’ reaction upon first reading it, even though I know you meant better.
Similarly, for reasons of connotation/signaling I’d prefer it if you avoided examples that fit the “nice guy’s lament” genre, or at least put a citation to them rather than treating them as too obvious to bother backing up.
ETA: I should mention that I hold the language of Main-level posts to a much higher standard than I do Discussion posts or comments. If you’re making something public, then you have the burden of proper communication.
You might recall that (befitting my very nature) I was extremely grouchy about a previous foray of yours into this territory. I’m not downvoting the current post because I think you’ve more-or-less successfully avoided the worst of the problems I foresaw if you went down the previously outlined path.
I also haven’t upvoted the current post. First, I endorse Nominull and Tetronian’s comments above, with respect to this kind of topic not really being central to the LW mission (but that’s okay as long as community members find it valuable and it doesn’t do any harm). However, following on those, I think it is much more important that LW remain a welcoming and inclusive place than that this topic be discussed. By that I mean that I would very strongly encourage you to keep these posts gender- and orientation-neutral—not just nominally so, but really at the level of substance. This post certainly succeeds in that, which is encouraging. (The co-authors are indispensable here, I think.)
And I hope you will be open to simply shutting this series of posts down if the comments on them can’t maintain a similar level of decorum and inclusivity. (I can hardly imagine new women joining this community if PUA and “seduction” are routinely discussed in comments.)
It’s the other way around.
Great post Luke, I liked the wealth of informations provided and that you’re trying to make the topic respectable to LW readers: relationship is an area of our life that is too important to let it in the grasp of superstition and old unfulfilling social scripts.
What I would like to see in the next post is something about partner selection: inside every mode of relationship there’s a wide variance of experiences possible depending on the partner… I think a rational approach to romantic life should investigate the topic of selection on this level of granularity too.
I’m seeing this model inside your post: “learn how to use attractiveness as a currency to obtain the kind of relation that you like”. Is this correct?
To increase attractiveness, I see that the adjustable parameters are basically physical aspect (what you can modify in the gym or with haircut/makeup/etc.), fashion, proximity and behaviour. Is this also correct?
Interesting article, and I enjoyed reading it, although I’m not sure how much new material you cover. A lot of this looks familiar, but I’m not sure whether it’s from your other articles or from random reading. Could be just from random reading, actually. I’ve read a lot in this area because relationships and sexuality are so generally mystifying to me. And real-world ‘just go out and do it’ experience is what seems to help the most, but ‘the virtue of scholarship’ helps too, so your articles are useful to me.
New to Less Wrong? Almost all of it.
New to the scientific community? Almost none of it.
Those are the kinds of posts I generally try to write.
And a very valuable kind of post that is, because I’m sure there are plenty of people who haven’t read the material that’s in the scientific literature, and even for the people who have, it’s great to have a well-written summary. In a format that’s easier to forward to friends to read, too.
Unless you mean “78% of college students worldwide”, please specify what country you’re talking about.
In my experience dressing differently, not necessarily trying to abide to specific subculture dress code often attract a lot, maybe not (always) because you appeal to some special preference but rather you highlight yourself, thus increasing the total number responses (good and bad).
What will it be today? Tuxedo, Quarterback or Clown outfit . . . Hmm tough choice.
Great post, though it seems the exact same advice is useful for career success too. You want to find an employer who is very invested in your particular skills/personality/values/culture. A high variance approach is more useful for this than trying to display mean characteristics. I think this is why a lot of people end up unhappy with their jobs. They settle for average employment criteria.
Lastly, I dislike all this mention of things like fashion and common/social behavior. Those are specific things that function as detractors for me. I want to wear what I like to wear, behave how I like to behave, and have someone be attracted to me for that stuff by default. If I happen to be at an extreme end of some distribution in either of those categories, oh well. Better to be satisfied with infrequent relationships than force myself to live in a category that I don’t like. Fashion as wealth/value signaling is to me like a sink full of water is to a cat.
We’ve hit over 800 comments. Is it time for a new thread?
Maybe even one with a new topic? ;)
This vid on relationship issues helped me get aware of reasons I may be such a bad date! things i’m gonna work on from the vid: flaking or trash talking commitments, hostile existing relationship with family when I let down my guard that could be scripted over, sense of entitlement with resentment and anger that I am the priority, lots of relationship fails that I attribute to others and not me, flexibility and getting frazzled when things aren’t exactly how I want them, and iron sharpens iron but from the man’s perspective to women
Great.
Where is part 2? Can’t find it. Did you ever write it? As this is linked a lot you might consider to remove the “part 1” from the title. Except if you intend to send lots of people onto a quest to find the missing part 2 - which might be a good idea actually.
He had released two drafts that I can’t be bothered to find. Maybe lukeprog can find it. I looked for part 2 but couldn’t find it.
Or just agree with me: http://lesswrong.com/r/UnrequitedHope-drafts/lw/ln9/meta_list_all_users_posts/
EDIT: There’s also this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/70u/rationality_lessons_learned_from_irrational/
Interesting on the first link I get “You aren’t allowed to do that.”.
Yeah, there’s some stupid antifeature where you need 20 or so karma to publish anything and on the other hand you can’t even link to your own draft.
Resurrecting a long dead post, it’s been two years. Was there ever a followup post for this?
Doesn’t seem to be. There are other posts on relationships by the authors, but nothing in the sequence this occupies (indeed, this is the sequence’s last existing post), and nothing similarly named that I can find.
At this rate it might be very rational to look at ways to modify our cognitive architecture and limbic system to experience long term and sustained attraction and love… rather than hack it via external stimuli.
MDMA is promising when it comes to revive intimacy between long term couples. But its neurotoxic profile makes this non-workable for most people. Long term sustainable mood enrichers and love enhancers should be developed… this will be much more life enriching than just rationally learning what relationship style best suits you.
Adding to the pile of comments:
I don’t know if it is because I might be compulsively questioning my emotions in general putting thing out of focus but when it comes to romance I often find myself often utterly confused; I’ve been in three relatively short (monogamous) relationships—relationships that I have actively perused or at least tangoed—with women that I genuinely liked and felt attracted to, but a feeling of “you are probably not romantically interested in her” or “probably not on the same wave length as you” always seems to hang over me, in relationships and even some times during brief sparks of interest. I find myself only being able to think romantically about idolised images of people without the constant guilty feeling . . .
Any advise?
Wanna practice? ;-)
(Wait, you’re not one of those “straight” people I keep hearing about, are you?)
Unfortunately I am one of those infamous people. But if stray I’ll promise to get back to you. Even though my narrow-mindedness might have ruled “practice” out of the question (I realize your preference might have done so as well) I’m awfully curious of what this “practice” might have consisted of? (I feel just like child).
A naive method is simply to use available opportunities to observe the development, or failure to develop, of various types of interest, both in yourself and in others. Now I don’t claim an advantage in this area.
However, simply practicing a lot with no underlying techniques is often very inefficient, as Raemon points out about drawing. Long-time Less Wrong readers have skills in integrating data, running experiments, luminosity and going outside defaults that can prove extremely useful in figuring out how your interest manifests and what increases or lessens it; not to mention willingness and even eagerness to figure it out rather than throwing a fit if you don’t spontaneously emit bluebirds at the required step in the dating instruction manual.
Moreover, once you start to recognize what romantic interest feels like and what courting styles spark it in you, you’ll have to learn how to apply them in practice, even if they’re common enough ones that you can start from cultural templates. You’ll get good at this faster with someone who practices LW-style conflict resolution, has repertoried feelings other than “like” and “like-like” and interpersonal relationships other than “friend”, “friend with benefits” and “soulmate”, and has experience with compromising on nonstandard preferences.
An example of this would be exchanging comments with people who are interested in you, and measure your reactions to them directly asking you out, flirting more or less obviously, or leaving the topic entirely off the table and hoping interest develops on its own.
This is probably the best relationship advice I’ve ever got, as far as a can remember. But there are a few general obstacles that need to be addressed before I’m actually able to widely applying a strategy.
Motivation: Of course other things go into motivation but I think that expectancy of success and cost failure (rejection) are the biggest hurdles for a lot of people (including me).
Feedback: Sometimes it’s not so easy to really know if a person is interested in you or whether one particular strategy working or not. You could ask but “asking” about peoples reactions can sometimes (in my experience) be intrepid as a way of saying that your VERY interested in that person.
I don’t know if I make ANY sense but again thanks for your advice, I will try to apply it. I could get back to you if I strike gold(?).
You might want to think of asking people out as asking for the option of developing and acting on mutual interest, rather than saying “Let’s suck face now”.
The cost of rejection is usually extremely low. You feel slightly awkward and disappointed for a few minutes, then go back to acting less flirty than the average Victorian priest.
I’m bad at reading people, but if you’re just asking “Are they at all interested?”, asking them out is the way to go. And if you get a “yes” to that, it creates a situation where it’s acceptable to test more or less directly how interested they are.
This comes from personal experience, not reading.
Your incredible questioning/self-examination is not that unusual. If you’re not sure of your feelings it says less about the (potential) relationship than it does about you. And all it says about you is that you have high levels of self-consciousness, really. The longer a relationship lasts the more ending it, or having it ended on you is likely to hurt, even if you don’t think you fit well together etc.
Alcohol relaxes people and makes them maudlin. As such it can be a good way to get relatively sane, sobre people to discuss their feelings together. Drinking excessively (whatever that means in context) can also get people to speak freely and give them an excuse to “not remember” the next day.
You’re probably going to get over her, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Any relationship or fling is likely to make the getting-over-it period shorter.
One idealises people and while I may advise you, or anyone else, I give advice. Feel free to PM me, if for some reason you’d like to.
Sorry for taking so long to answer, but I think you might have misunderstood my problem slightly, I don’t have any problem with getting over anyone—at the moment). I do agree that a couple of beers helps out with suppressing excessive self-questioning, but my problem is really—though I’m making progress—that I don’t know what I’m feeling as well as feeling guilt about not not feeling butterflies in my tummy and the likes.
Anyway thanks for your advise—and the offer!
17 insulting quotes from your comments sent to you in private message.
There’s a difference between “plainly” and “insultingly” (or “obnoxiously”), which the insultingly obnoxious rarely seem to get.
Seriously, stop feeding the troll. I am downvoting replies to sam0345′s comments, and encourage others to do so as well.
(I was following this strategy was a while too.)
Punish the non-punishers? Hm… alright, you convinced me.
It’s more about punishing the enablers. If you reply to trolls, they reply to you, and the worthless conversation continues.
Not something that is convenient in the context. Apart from being anonymous votes and the lack thereof are not able to be voted on to punish them.
Nice article. I’m quite interested in this subject and I like to find it writen the rational way.
For rationality’s sake, people.
What in science’s name are you on about?
Please don’t use the word “rationality” or “rational” simply as a buzzword or applause light.
Really???
I find this really surprising. Human history has so much mixing of races throughout, and usually there are social norms against mixing. I would never have guessed that physical similarity has anything to do with attraction.
Don’t want to be rude, but are you American?
Its always fascinating to me how American minds rush so quickly to race with any mention of appearance (and indeed often any topic whatsoever), from the outside it seems like a society wide obsession.
It does from the inside, too. (I wonder if South Africans have a similar tendency?)
Yes, I am American. Certainly I’m rushing to race, but that’s the point I was having trouble with. If I didn’t consider race, then I don’t see how I would have found it so surprising in the first place. Regardless of American’s obsession with race, race is still a simple example of this. Race. :D
I don’t know if this sort of information is wanted, but your post keeps setting off my sarcasm detector.
No, I’m not being sarcastic, though I can see how it seems like that. I’ll try to avoid coming off that way.
That information surprised me. Maybe it seems obvious to other people (or possibly hindsight bias), but I don’t think that’s obvious at all.
Such as...?
If you already knew this, why would you find it surprising?
Uh… any culture? The Jews have gone around and if you notice Sephardic and Ashkenazi look incredibly different, because they mixed with the people in the different areas. Asia (and specifically China) has a variety of races that have all mixed with each other over the years.
In the Americas we also saw lots of mixing of the races with hispanics, despite amazing racism and hatred. Hell, American slavery caused a lot of mixing despite it being entirely based on racism. I mean when races don’t mix, like Japan’s harsh xenophobia, seems to be the exception.
While xenophobia and racism is so much of a part of history and so many cultures, why is all this mixing happening if we are attracted to similar people?
This is really sloppy thinking.
Suppose I on average found category X of dissimilar people, less attractive because they are different, this would not mean I would find every member less attractive than average.
In fact I’ll go a step further, while I may find category X on average less attractive because they are different (which is a penalty groups A, B, C, D, … share), they may more commonly have a specific trait or set of traits (which A, B, C, D may not share) that makes them on average more attractive to me.
Also historically, people really haven’t been that picky, its amazing to what extent we chose those that are available. While barriers between populations that coexist on the same territory do exist, they are not absolute. And all else being equal the smaller group will quickly become basically a hybrid population, while the larger population will still have a bunch of people who match their previous genetic profile. To give an extreme example If you are the last member of your tribe, the only way you get to mate is to find a partner outside your tribe.
Okay. That definitely makes more sense.
While I can certainly understand why minorities would mix with majorities, that doesn’t really explain the opposite.
But I suppose the opposite isn’t really that true. After all, looking at America, we see that blacks have lots of european ancestry, but we don’t really see whites having lots of african ancestry (unless I’m mistaken). My example with Jews explains how Jews took from the majority populations, not the other way around.
Thanks for the clarification.
That’s because people of mixed European and African ancestry are called “black”.
And upper class people of European and native American ancestry are called “white” in many places in Latin America.
The majority and minority group, by definition are called different if they consider themselves different, otherwise there is no minority.
But consider the toy model of a society made up 90% of group C and 10% of group D. There is no discrimination, no class differences, no differential birth rates, no selection pressures, no gene expression complications, no differences in cultural norms. I don’t know why in the world they call themselves C and D then or why any researcher would divide them into two groups for the purposes of a study, but lets say for the sake of argument they do.
Lets say you have X generations later, purely from a genetic perspective a 80% group C, 5% group D and 15% hybrid CD. Lets say you have x+n generations after 60% group C and 40% group CD.
Regardless of whether Hybrid group CD identifies as “C” or as “D”, biologically speaking the minority population is the one that hybridised, perhaps even vanished if they where tiny enough.
The point is the minority population becomes the hybrid, and the majority population changes relatively less.
Also why did you implicitly assume that extensive mixed populations are always the result of extensive mixing between groups?
They could simply have higher fitness! Introgression does happen, also things like hybrid vigour or outbreeding depression might make a reasonable size mixed population more or less prominent (and desirable as mates) as the generations go on.
I don’t understand. All of those (except Introgression I suppose) are just additional reasons why the groups would mix. That’s not suggesting that extensive mixed populations are sometimes not the result of mixing between groups.
How do those things go against my implication?
Actually it is introgression that is an excellent reason to mix if you want to maximise genetic fitness (because of kin selection effects if your group gets some new genes), you just don’t need a whole lot of mixing to acheive it.
And hybrid vigour is a reason in its favour if you want to just make people with neat traits, while outbreeding depression is a reason against.
The effects I mention as colourfully illustrated by Oligopsony change the overall effect of mixing. Under different selective pressures (which may well be caused by dominant cultural preference for visible phenotype!) group A and B may mix at about the same rate in all universes, yet in one universe group A may be 80% of the population (with a few introgressed genes from B) several generations later, while under a different set of pressures it may be 5% of the population, and an AB hybrid could be anything from 1% to 90%. Indeed mixing would not nesecarilly be created equal, it is perfectly possible that 400 years later, even if marriage between the groups was symmetrical 95% of Y chromosomes are variants that group B possessed and 80% of the mDNA is that which was possessed by A. It is even possible that group A and B both receive significant amount of admixture, but differing selective pressures (due to class or mountain people vs. costal people) create two or more coexisting groups say AAB and BBA or BAB.
Also even in the absence of any fitness advantage very small groups can get their genetic imprint wiped out eventually.
If you are doubtful that this has ever happened with humans, you are quite flatly wrong. Modern Tibetans are genetically basically Chinese farmers who swept over the region a few thousand years ago, but they picked up useful altitude adaptations from the pre-existant people who weren’t farmers. Middle Eastern farmers to a large extent replaced Southern and Western European hunter gatherers genetically in several waves in the past few thousand years. Had the Andeans people in America not have been an agricultural people with the demographic numbers that that implies I’m pretty sure they would have shared the ancient Tibetan’s fate and you would have some odd looking white and perhaps black people inhabiting the Andean mountains today. To give another example modern humans swept aside Neanderthals in Eurasia but Eurasian humans picked up from 1 to 4% of their DNA from the Neanderthals, that was most likley adaptive to that environment.
Did the ancient Tibetans die out or did they just get assimilated into the Chinese farmers?
See, now you’re just getting me curious about this stuff.
Nothing wrong with curiosity. :)
Depends on how you define die out. They didn’t leave a genetic mark much beyond those specific adaptations. Generally speaking waves of farmer expansion seem to be more actual literal expansions than cultural diffusions of farming techniques, despite some mDNA sometimes sticking around from the previous hunter gatherer populations.
Pre-farming people so clearly do or did intermix with farmers, perhaps they culturally assimilated or perhaps their women and men where just enslaved, who knows, but both their small numbers and a probable lack of some adaptations puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to leaving a genetic mark in the long run.
Culturally they are today pretty much extinct and replaced by modern “NeoTibetans”, which ironically may also be culturally swapped by Chinese eventually, but it is hard to say what their culture was several thousand years earlier. Its perfectly possible that the expanding farmers adopted a lot of cultural influence that however got lost in the long march until reliable written records first show up.
A somewhat related article in the NYT.
Note: It was only later proposed that Tibetan adaptations are “better” (or rather different ) than Andean adaptations because they had more time to evolve, in the previous inhabitants of Tibet, since we know from archaeological evidence peoples have lived there for far longer than just the past few thousand years.
Also Razib Khan on the Gene Expression blog writes a lot about the interplay of history and genetics (genes can document population or cultural shifts and help us build a better picture of history, but they can also be the causes of such shifts—say the expansion of lactose tolerance in Western Eurasia or resistance of Africans/Europeans to old world diseases that killed off many Native Americans)
The key line is “extensive” (and also, of course, “always.”) Imagine that out of a large population of Star-Bellied Sneeches and Sneeches With No Stars Upon Thars, a few marry and have Half-Starred Sneech children. Thereafter (for whatever reason) Half-Starred Sneeches tend to mate with each other, and, in part due to their greater resistance to the Great Whoville Plague, in due time grow to greater numbers than either the Star-Bellied or Blank-Belied populations. But this doesn’t produce a (biologically, rather than culturally, mediated) “reason” to mix except insofar as the original Sneeches who formed multi-ethnic families had genes that made them less ethnocentric (and that this effect continues to be produced by this gene in the new environment etc.)
You and I have very different definitions of “a lot”.
This makes perfect sense. Downvote reversed.
23andme says “the average proportion of European ancestry that African Americans have . . . is from 20 percent to 25 percent.” I’d call that a lot.
That could be a lot or it could be not so much, depends on what the median is.
Remember, people consider Obama black when in reality he’s just as white as he is black. One just has to look at the massive variety of shades of skin color that we associate with “African-American” compared to “African” to realize there was lots of mixing.
Had Obama been born a generation earlier, he would not, in fact, have been able to choose which water fountain to drink at. It is in that sense that people correctly assess that he is black. It is a social construct, not a biological one.
I think that was a part of the point.
I dislike conclusions about human behavior based on statistics unless the conclusion comes with information about the amount and distribution of the tendency.
It’s obvious that some people like exoticism in their sexual partners, though perhaps they still want some of the subtle similarities like distance between the eyes.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a pull in both directions, with a minority preferring partners who look different from themselves.
For my own part, I’ve noticed that most of the people I know prefer that their sexual partners be far more dissimilar to them than I do, at least when it comes to secondary sexual characteristics. Of course, I realize that’s not what anyone means when they talk about partners looking or being similar. But it suggests that the issue is more complicated than a simple similarity metric would take into account.