Sorry if this is overly tangential, but as a sex educator I’m interested to know what you all think are your tribal beliefs around sexuality, and what kind of sexuality-related arguments would lead you to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief.
Heh. My tribal beliefs are from reading Spider Robinson books as a teen. Ciphergoth is an example of the sort of person I grew up thinking of as normal, and I’ve always felt a little guilty about not being bisexual. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to go outside that mainstream, which is one reason I went to the lengths of postulating legalized rape in Three Worlds Collide.
Ah, Spider Robinson. I remember buying a stack of his books at Borders around age 12 and having the clerk give my mother an alarmed look. Mom just waved her hand ….
I think it’s pretty normal for science-fiction-reading middle- to upper-middle-class kids to think that alternative sexuality is “normal” and to feel guilty for being vanilla/monogamous/whatever. (I used to feel a lot of pressure to be polyamorous.) Interestingly, though, there still seems to be a lot of internalized stigma about certain forms of sexuality, as demonstrated for example in my coming-out story. I would imagine that most people here fit that tribal group.
Still, within that tribal group I still encounter a lot of people with assumptions I’d call weird and/or irrational, which is why I asked specifically what kind of sexuality-related arguments would lead you to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief. I think your legalized rape post (it was forwarded to me last year, actually, and I still haven’t decided how I feel about it) is a definite example of defending a non-mainstream belief, but I wonder if there are less dramatic ones.
I’m adamant that none of us should use the messed-up word “Rape” to point to a benevolent social practice of a made-up libertarian utopia, where that term and its implications are not just forgotten but can hardly be understood. Something like “meta-consensual sex” would be way better. This alone would’ve allowed us to avoid half the controversy about this relatively minor point.
*smiles* I’m sure you know this, but I don’t think it makes any sense to think you should enjoy X. And I agree, alt-sex is not a useful discriminator here. I’ve been having a lot of arguments about cryonics with my friend David Gerard who is also an alt-sex community member, and this article could have been written specifically with him in mind (as well as other contributors to the “RationalWiki” article on cryonics).
There’s a warning flag you don’t mention: the logical rudeness of the skeptical Gish Gallop. I have over and over again begged David to pick one counter-argument to cryonics and really press it home. Instead he insists on picking up everything that looks to him like shit and flinging it as fast as he can, and it appears to give him no pause at all when one argument after another turns out to be without merit.
I’m sure you know this, but I don’t think it makes any sense to think you should enjoy X.
Why doesn’t it make sense? If there were a pill to turn me bisexual, I’d take it, modulo the fact that in general I take almost no pills (it’d have to be really really safe, but I hold all mind-affecting substances to that standard, don’t drink etcetera, it’s not a special case for the bisexuality pill).
I’m somewhat sympathetic to that idea (I haven’t felt guilty about being straightish, but I’ve wished I were more bisexual once in a while, and succeeded in pushing myself in that direction in some cases), but I’m curious now: is gender the only dimension you’d apply that to? Would you also take a pill (again assuming it’s really really safe) that would make all outward physical attributes irrelevant to how attractive you find someone? Would you take a pill that would make you enjoy every non-harmful sexual practice/fetish (not necessarily seeking them out, but able to enjoy it if a partner initiated it)?
(I originally started writing this comment thinking something like “hmm, I’d take the bi-pill, but let’s take that reasoning to its vaguely-logical conclusion and see if it’s still palatable”, but now I’m actually thinking I’d probably take both of those pills too.)
I can’t believe I had never heard of that before. Fascinating.
A question if you can answer it. Wikipedia says:
When close proximity during this critical period does not occur—for example, where a brother and sister are brought up separately, never meeting one another—they may find one another highly sexually attractive when they meet as adults
The addition of “highly” seems to suggest that separated brothers and sisters find themselves especially or unusually attracted to one another. Is that the case or is Wikipedia just adding unnecessary adjectives?
Does “loli” mean non-persons and emotionally mature persons who look like a child, or are actual children (of average or below average emotional maturity) included by the effect?
If it meant the former, I would take the loli pill if the (unlikely) circumstances called for it. Why not? If it meant the latter, then you would have to tell your libido “no” a lot, but it wouldn’t necessarily lead to doing bad things. I doubt it would be worth the hassle, though, except in very special circumstances.
Actually, the biggest drawback to either version of the loli pill would probably be how society would react if they ever found out. It probably wouldn’t matter if the one you’re sleeping with is really 700 years old; you’d still get put on every sex offender registry out there, and shunned vigorously, at the very least. People are damn tense on this subject. Just look at how much trouble Christopher Handley got in for his manga collection.
Edit: I felt pretty uncomfortable writing this post, even though I know I shouldn’t be. Looks like this really is a good question.
If I understand correctly, loli only refers to cartoon depictions of preteen girls (and maybe roleplaying with that theme). Being attracted to actual preteen girls is just pedophilia.
(At least that’s what loli fans say. I’ve always been a bit confused by the distinction — I’ve known people into loli and shota who seemed to find actual children as unappealing as any normal person does, but I can’t quite figure out why a person would be turned on only by a cartoon and not the real thing.)
Japanese term for Lolita, which means young, pre-teen girls.
Google define:’s lolita as -
a sexually precocious young girl
In the marketing of legal pornography, lolita is used to refer to a neotenic female, frequently one who has only recently reached the age of consent, or appears to be younger than the age of consent. Usually overlaps with ‘barely legal’.
There is a well-established mechanism within the transformation fetish subculture making use of devices which work a bit like temporary tattoos, altering the subject’s body and/or personality in ways both profound and fully reversible. Like most magic intended to make a story possible rather than to make it interesting, the patches in question are entirely without negative side effects.
As demonstrated with Clippy, I would be willing to provide further information even if doing so does not serve my long-term interests in any obvious way.
Yes in all cases, but absolutely only if reversible.
I am asexual and thus have not experienced any of the romantic/sexual emotions. I feel as if doing so would almost certainly help my understanding of others, as well as broaden my emotional range. However, I seem to do quite fine without these emotions, and they seem to cause more problems than they are worth in many of the people around me. Therefore I would only take such pills if they were reversible, as my present state is quite happy and the alternative could certainly be worse.
However, I seem to do quite fine without these emotions, and they seem to cause more problems than they are worth in many of the people around me.
No kidding.
Do people remember that guy who was here at the very beginning and wouldn’t shut up about how the key to being rational was castration? I doubt that troll would have had much to say would have been helpful but the position has a certain intuitive plausibility to me. To begin with, I’m pretty sure the ebb and flow of sexual arousal would be really easy to money pump.
Those contributions were… interesting. I’m somewhat tempted to doubt the disclosure. While researching permanent forms of contraception, in particular vasectomy, I learned that the procedure was illegal in France up until a few years ago: it was considered “self-mutilation”. I’d be rather surprised to learn about someone getting elective castration, unless some plausible details substantiated that story.
Agreed. And I obviously wouldn’t volunteer. But sexuality does appear to generate some serious bias. I imagine straight men might be unreliable rebutters and evaluators of arguments made by attractive females, for example.
How do you distinguish the sort of fun it’s worth changing your values to enjoy from the sort of fun (like wireheading) it’s worth not having access to?
Of course, it’s nothing like half the fun you’re missing. Adding a gender would increase your fun by less than 100% since it’s not that different in many ways. Adding all the sexual variation in the world would be a humongous amount of fun, but you’d start to hit diminishing returns after a while.
Technically, given that most people are heterosexual, Woody Allen’s quote—“The good thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chance of a date on a Saturday night.”—is inaccurate. It only increases your chances by the percentage of people of your gender who are open to same-sex encounters.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, gay men are so much more promiscuous than straight women that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a man to have sex. But your point is well taken and certainly applies to chances for a monogamous relationship.
Point of curiosity if anyone knows the answer: How promiscuous are bisexual men and do they tend to have more m-m than m-f sex because the m-m sex is much easier to obtain? If not, why not?
I’m a 1 on the Kinsey scale but I have only had sex with women, not men. I don’t identify as bisexual.
I suspect that the median bisexual man has more m-m sex because the median person willing to identify as bisexual is not a 3 on the Kinsey scale but leans towards the homosexual side of the scale. Also, especially for young people just coming to terms with their sexuality, identifying as bisexual is often a path towards identifying as gay, and such people are likely to have more sex with their true preferred type of partners.
There is a negative perception in the gay community that bisexual people are more promiscuous, but this probably isn’t true. I’m pretty sure the reason bisexual men tend to have sex with men more often than women is not because getting gay sex is as easy as posting a “Hey, who wants to come over, blow me, and leave right away without talking?” on Craigslist, but because most people that identify as bisexual are just more gay than straight.
Btw, if anyone was intrigued by the possibility of making such a Craigslist post, if you say you’re straight you’ll get at least twice as many replies! :D
This is of course controversial but I’ve had a number of gay friends and acquaintances deny that there even are true bisexual men. The position they take it is that homosexuality is a binary, pre-natal development characteristic and that bisexual males are pretty much just gay men holding out hope for a normal marriage/family life.
No offense to those men here who identify as bisexual, obviously. This all may just be in group posturing and what not.
I, meanwhile, am not entirely sure that there are straight women.
(Every woman I have met has fallen into one of the following categories: 1) She would not know if she were non-straight, due to inadequate self-examination or understanding of the concept of orientation. 2) I would not know if she were not straight, due to not having a close enough relationship with her or due to social constraints on her end preventing her from being out or due to the topic never having come up. 3) I know her to be bisexual, gay, asexual, or some other non-straight sexuality.)
Counterexamples are welcome to present themselves, of course.
Reminds me of a study I read about. They basically showed men and women different types of porn and measured genital arousal. The results were straightforward for men: if they identified as straight, girl-on-girl porn caused the greatest arousal, girl-on-guy was ok, and guy-on-guy caused almost no arousal. For gay men, the results were reversed. For girls, there were no simple categories, and their identification as straight or gay didn’t predict which images would be the biggest turn-on.
The thread seems to be resurrected, so I’ll present myself. :)
I am a cissexual slightly genderqueer exclusively androsexual monogamously married woman. I think about sexuality and orientation a lot. Including my own. I don’t recall ever being sexually or romantically attracted to a woman. Intellectually, monosexuality seems a little weird to me, but nevertheless it seems to describe me. In fact I think of my monosexuality as a gender fetish, but I hesitate to apply that paradigm to other people’s monosexuality.
That is one of the most delightfully precise explanations of personal gender identity and sexual preferences I have ever seen. Also, as an exclusively monosexual male, I agree with your thoughts that monosexuality is understandable but doesn’t seem optimal from an individualistic standpoint.
My impression from attending a women’s college was that by the fourth year, most women who came in identifying as straight had experienced some attraction to other women. And those who came in saying “My life would be so much easier if I liked girls” were more likely to be dating women by the end (though no data on whether their lives were actually easier!)
Not necessarily true—it’s possible you had an implicit “given that she is straight” at work when you were interpreting evidence. If you conditioned on her being straight it makes perfect sense that you’d have no evidence one way or the other from a blind prior.
(People conditioning on such things is extremely common—for a much less innocuous example, consider what “no thanks, I don’t want to” looks like to someone who is conditioning on “this person wants me to”)
You’re right, actually. This occurred to me when posting the above. I started from “She’s a girl who says she is straight” and then updated down to .9 based on what I learned.
I think you both need to clarify your definitions a bit. It seems to me that females have a lot more scope for physical intimacy with other females in western society without generally being considered non-straight than males do. A straight female expressing physical attraction/admiration for other females is not considered grounds for doubting self-reported sexuality the way it might be for males.
It’s true that evidence one has for classifying people’s sexual orientation can be different for men and women. Thus I have female friends who, if they were men and behaved toward men the way they now behave toward women, my beliefs about their sexual orientation would alter dramatically. But such behaviors don’t define heterosexuality. An Anglo-American man who compliments other men on their attractiveness, holds hands or is affectionate toward other men is giving us evidence that he is gay or bisexual. But these facts don’t make him gay or bisexual. Facts about who wants to have sex with and who he wants to have romantic relationships define his sexual orientation.
People really aren’t comfortable with their naive notion of heterosexuality? It’s true that these concepts, like all cultural and social concepts, might break down upon extremely close examination. There are often degrees and exceptions. But I think we can use them just fine.
I more or less agree with your interpretation but it seems to me that the crux of any disagreement you have with Alicorn may well be over your respective defintions of ‘straight’ for males and females rather than a disagreement over the prevalence of certain behaviours.
Examples of behaviours that are quite common between girls I consider ‘straight’ but I would consider an indication of homosexuality in (western/anglo-american) males: holding hands; kissing on the lips; sharing a bed; overtly sexual dancing; commenting on the sexual attractiveness of other females. Would you consider any of these behaviours evidence that your girlfriend is not straight? Would Alicorn consider any of them evidence that a girl is not straight? That’s where I think some clarification is needed.
I’m actually not sure how much my data point suggests a disagreement with Alicorn. After all this is my girlfriend and I’m still only 90% sure she is straight.
Actually, I think all of those behaviors are evidence of non-heterosexuality in women they’re just weak and easily trumped by other kinds of evidence. After all, pretty much every non-straight girl I know does these things and only some of the straight girls I know do them. None are, of course, constitutive of non-heterosexuality. Incidentally, none are a pattern with my girlfriend.
For what it’s worth, I know a few women (2 certainly, 1 arguably) who strike me as reasonably self-aware, are at least as familiar with the concept of orientation in the abstract as I am, whose sex lives I’m reasonably well acquainted with, who have expressed sexual attraction to and initiated/accepted sexual intercourse with a number of men, and who have expressed (sometimes with regret) their lack of sexual attraction to and have never initiated/accepted sexual intercourse with any women.
Calling them straight seems reasonable to me… certainly I would call myself gay were all of that true of me.
That said, I can certainly imagine all of them having sex with another woman were the circumstances perfectly aligned (at least, I suppose I can imagine it; I’ve never actually done so and it seems vaguely impolite to do so now, especially since I’m at work).
So you think it is possible for a woman to be fully gay but not fully straight? That seems unlikely. According to Bailey, Kim, Hills & Linsenmeier (1997) 1% to 2% of women describe themselves as as having a primary or exclusive female orientation. On the continuum of sexuality, that leaves a vast potential area of women who likely have totally straight sexual orientations.
So there is actually new evidence since we had this conversation. Bisexual men do exist! Past studies found that the men they studied who identified as bisexual weren’t.
The different results are likely due to the different procedures used to determine the participant pool. The 2005 study took it’s sample of bisexual men mainly from college campus LGBTQ student associations while the more recent study advertised on craigslist M/F for M and, on top of that, refused to include anyone whose claim to bisexuality they didn’t believe.
There are also “David Bowie bisexuals”, straight men willing to identify as bisexual in solidarity with the gay rights movement, or as an acknowledgement of the general fluidity of sexuality and gender.
So I think I just figured out the motivation behind this tactic which wasn’t obvious to me before (maybe it was to you). I doubt straight men innately dislike kissing or showing affection toward men. It seems more likely to me that they (okay, we) are either homophobic or wary of the status cost of being seen as gay or bisexual. Thus a straight male who declares himself to be bisexual demonstrates a rejection of homophobia and in part shows that he doesn’t think being gay or bisexual is low status and refuses to accept some (but not all) of the privileges he has as a straight male (the privilege language is obviously controversial but it probably isn’t to the people who do this).
The problem is part of the anti-gay narrative is that homosexuality isn’t actually an important part of anyone’s identity, that it isn’t innate but basically just people choosing to be “sinful”. Identifying as bisexual for political reasons bolsters this position. “If these straight males can choose to behave like bisexuals, then the bisexuals can choose to behave like good, church-going straight people!” Also, the fact is a straight male really can’t take on the same persecution non-heterosexuals face. They can always opt out and they are never told that a part of their identity is immoral (their told that the act their putting on is immoral, but that isn’t the same thing). And of course in some circles being gay or bisexual is a status booster- my friends would be suspicious I was “coming out” for these status-benefits, not out of a genuine attempt at solidarity. Actually, I’ve seen this complain leveled at some college-aged bisexual women.
I doubt straight men innately dislike kissing or showing affection toward men.
I went to a kissing workshop. (Things escalated slowly and nothing was mandatory.) I was turned off more quickly than I expected by kisses with guys—just by a very short closed-mouth kiss.
(I like hugs though.)
I’m certain I’d also benefit from the bisexual pill, and my aversion to the idea is irrational.
“I hate spinach, which is a good thing because if I liked it I’d eat it all the time, and I hate the stuff.”—half remembered second-hand quote, apparently from the 19th C(?)
This isn’t exactly very common (I can’t think of a David Bowie bisexual other than David Bowie), and David Bowie was also all kinds of crazy and drugged up at the time. Saying he was gay was kind of stupid, but it certainly was not the dumbest thing he did under the influence of drugs. This is the guy who read some Nietzsche and then misunderstood it so dramatically that he wrote The Supermen. Good song, though.
I understand that you’re describing another’s position not your own, but can you describe how that position’s predictions differ from the predictions from “true bisexuality”?
I suppose it predicts a likelihood that any given male bisexual will more and more exclusively have sexual relationships with males, a higher probability of eventually identifying as gay (relative to the probabilities of those of other orientations changing their identifications) and a low probability of a successful and happy relationship with a female.
ETA: The number of people who still identify as bisexual and lead bisexual lifestyles late into adulthood should be negligible modulo some kind of continued denial.
So having been in the bi community for 19 years, I should know lots of men who used to identify as bi but now identify and behave as gay, and relatively few who still identify and behave as bi? In that case I can confidently say that this is nonsense.
Obviously the ones who “turn gay” might not continue to come to bi events, but I’d still have noticed through social networking websites.
bisexual males are pretty much just gay men holding out hope for a normal marriage/family life.
I dunno… I talked to a couple of (male, straight) friends of mine about this once. We all agreed that although we were straight, 100% would be an exaggeration. I think it’s probably a continuum, although dominance/submission factors muddy the waters a bit too.
EDIT: I have now officially heard of the Kinsey scale.
I don’t think the fact that most straight men wouldn’t say 100% is particularly strong evidence against the original thesis. It is consistent with the claim that sexual orientation for men is very heavily clustered at the poles of the Kinsey scale.
On the other hand, I think I’ve read claims that everyone is actually bisexual, and people who claim they’re heterosexual are just suppressing their homosexual tendencies and vice versa.
Well, the claims are certainly made. I find them about as absurd as the claims that everyone is actually monosexual, myself, though I’d certainly agree that there are a whole lot of people asserting a far greater degree of monosexuality than they actually possess.
Whenever this subject comes up I’m reminded of a woman at a party who was trotting out the “there are no bisexual men, they’re just gay men in denial” chestnut, to which I replied “Right! I mean, consider me and my husband. We’ve been in a monogamous same-sex relationship for the last twenty years, but we claim to be bisexual solely to preserve our heterosexual privilege. Um. No, wait, how does that work again?”
My understanding is that bisexuality rarely endures past one’s twenties, and that bisexuals of both genders tend to end up choosing men. Of course, that may stem from the fact that publicly displayed bicuriousity is far less ostracized when it occurs amongst women, so more straight-leaning women are tempted to fool around than straight-leaning men, resulting in most bisexuals settling with men.
Of course, there are people who remain bisexual past that, and my data is not exactly rigorously gathered—I have some friends who study psychology and sexuality, and I’ve heard it from them.
Is someone who is what might be called “prison gay” bisexual? (That is, someone who will engage in homosexual acts as a substitute for masturbation, but is not physically attracted to members of the same sex. Yes, it’s probably a bad/loaded term, but I don’t know what a better one is.)
As I understand it, it’s a standard human response to being trapped with substandard mates to have increasingly-greater estimates of their attractiveness. This has no relevance to sexual orientation.
There don’t seem to be any findable sources that present an unbiased view on the matter (say, relevant statistics), and I suspect that the categories are sufficiently fluid at the moment that the question would be difficult to pin down.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, straight men are so turned on by the idea of girl on girl sex that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a woman to have sex.
Well, not really. The having enough evidence part at least.
I think “opportunities for a woman to have sex” must mean something entirely different from “opportunities for a man to have sex”, given the facts on the ground w.r.t. the market.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, straight men are so much more promiscuous than gay women that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a woman to have sex.
:-)
Edit: On reflection, this might not be right. But yeah, my point doesn’t exactly apply to straight women.
It only increases your chances by the percentage of people of your gender who are open to same-sex encounters.
But the other people of your gender are also restricted to this smaller pool in their search for a pairing, giving you a better chance of being accepted/selected by a particular individual that you’re attracted to (assuming you spend significant time around people in this pool). So this factor may not have a big effect.
I’ll settle for the bisexuality pill, an attractive female-shaped body (including the “vagina-shaped penis”), some time to get used to moving around in it, and the capacity for having multiple orgasms. “Gay man in a woman’s body” is close enough for my purposes. ;)
Someone who believes that homosexuality is not immoral, but believes it is a dysfunction.
Actually I have more answers, but this question is just too toxic. So I’ll go meta: Anyone who responds to this question either by saying that rationality is indicated either by signalling acceptance of more-outlandish sexuality, or by signalling intolerance, is indicating their own irrationality; they are turning this question into a tribal test.
There’s a large community where you are expected to be open to anything except sex with children; and a large community where you are expected to not be open to anything except sex between a monogomous man and woman.
I’m not arguing whether either of these points of view is valid. But both have enough adherents that no position that can be characterized entirely as more liberal or less
liberal can identify its holder as rational. Therefore, anyone who says that such a position (for instance, being open to polyamory) indicates rationality, is merely stating their tribal affiliation. The fact that they think that such a stance demonstrates rationality in fact demonstrates their irrationality.
I can think of a few possible exceptions (sexual practices that are far enough beyond the pale that even tongue-pierced goths disclaim them, yet which have no rational basis for being banned), but they’re too toxic for me to mention.
Therefore, anyone who says that such a position (for instance, being open to polyamory) indicates rationality, is merely stating their tribal affiliation.
“Merely” is incorrect. If people are employing consistent justifications for their beliefs, that indicates rationality. If their beliefs rely on inconsistent justifications, then they are not.
Suppose I believe polyamory is OK, because I believe that sex between consenting parties will make people happier. If you provided me with overwhelming evidence that most people who practice polyamory are especially miserable specifically because they practice polyamory, that would test my rationality. If I continue to be OK with it, I have an inconsistent belief system. If I cease being OK with it, I am consistently adhering to my beliefs.
Conversely, suppose I believe, “Homosexual sex is wrong because two men can’t procreate.” If you point out, “Post-menopausal women can’t procreate,” then, if I say, “Well, they shouldn’t have sex either!” then I may be a bit crazy, but I’m consistent. If I say, “Well, that’s different” without providing a very specific “that’s different” principle, my beliefs are inconsistent, and I am irrational. If I say, “Homosexuality is wrong because the bible says so,” then I’d better not be wearing clothing made from both cotton and wool while I burn oxen for the Lord.
I think most of what you see in the “internet crowd” is approval of any sexual activity between consenting adults, which is (usually) a highly consistent principle. I am not aware of any such consistent principle among the married hetero-only crowd. I’m not saying there aren’t consistent principles that support a married hetero-only lifestyle, only that it is not my understanding that a large group of people embrace such principles.
If this observation is correct, beliefs about sexuality can be a very strong indicator of rationality if inconsistent, or (at least) a weak indicator if consistent. If they remain consistent through difficult or unusual hypotheticals, that is a strong indication of rationality.
If this observation is correct, beliefs about sexuality are a very strong indicator of rationality.
The problem is if the supposedly rational beliefs also happen to be the tribal belief system of a large, pre-existing tribe. Then someone was rational, sometime back in the history, but it isn’t necessarily the person you’re talking to right now.
A better test would be to ask them to defend a sexual view of theirs that they see as unconventional, or at least, not a typical view of their tribe as yet.
A better test would be to ask them to defend a sexual view of theirs that they see as unconventional, or at least, not a typical view of their tribe as yet.
This is absolutely true and I’ve changed the last paragraph to reflect that.
Therefore, anyone who says that such a position (for instance, being open to polyamory) indicates rationality, is merely stating their tribal affiliation.
I wouldn’t suppose that “being open to polyamory” per se indicates rationality. But I would consider someone rational who, having thought about the matter, and concluded on the basis of sound reasoning that there is no valid reason to condemn polyamory, decided to adopt that lifestyle even in the face of some cultural opposition.
And I would consider someone irrational who, having no sound reasoning behind that position, would act in such a way as to deny others the enjoyment of a non-straight-monogamous lifestyle.
Controversies involving third parties are a valid matter of debate, for instance, I’d concede that there is some grounds to ask whether gay couples should adopt. But to assert, without argument, an interest in what consenting adults do behind closed doors, and that doesn’t cause anyone lasting harm, just because it concerns sex—that does strike me as irrational.
This all presupposes a consequentialist and libertarian ethic: that morality is about harm.
Not necessarily—I don’t think of myself as a consequentialist but as a contractarian. Although I’m less than firm in my metaethical convictions.
Still, I have the clear intuition that someone who would assert a claim against me, based on who I chose to spend time in bed with, isn’t all right in the head. They wouldn’t deny me the right to have dinner with whomever I choose, and (within some reasonable bounds on consent, privacy, and promises made to other people) I see no sound basis to distinguish sex from another sensual experience like dinner.
At the moment I am straight, monogamous, and in fact legally married (for fiscal reasons mostly), but I see no reason to elevate my personal choices and inclinations to the status of universal moral law.
If you wanted to kill yourself you could satisfy the desires of quite a few fringe people at once: have a psychopath kill you, a necrophiliac rape you, and a cannibal eat you. Hell, if done under the right medical supervision it might even be possible to save the organs too (of course, if I were a cannibal I’d probably be bummed out if I didn’t get any liver).
I’ve heard that many deaths ruled suicide might be better classified as signaling botches. That is, the individual in question was doing something with the lowest available probability of actually killing them, which would still be recognized as a suicide attempt and thereby provoke reassurances. A multifetish scenario would be far enough outside societal norms to be unlikely to attract support, and virtually impossible to survive.
In other cases, it’s a matter of extreme altruism, not wanting to be a burden on others. That’s more compatible with the psychopath/necrophile/cannibal option, but, statistically speaking, so few people empathize with any of those demographics (let alone all three) that they aren’t common targets for even minor altruism, let alone literal self-sacrifice.
Liver grows back far more readily than any other organ. It might be possible to give the cannibal a slice and still use the rest. Of course, given the shortages of livers, it would probably be better to split it and graft into multiple people.
Eat your simulated body while you are in it (presumably with pain turned off or at least down?) or your original body (which you don’t have any use for anymore in the scenario?)?
Depends on my current state of wealth and the current meaning of “wealth” in the universe. I think if I uploaded I’d still prefer to be frozen/vitrified (or whatever the current state of the art with regards to that is), just in case I ever changed my mind. Also, I hold a bit of sentimental value towards my body, and if I could afford to keep it well preserved for an extremely long time, why not?
If, say, I could only afford to upload if I let someone eat my body and that paid better than medical research or donating my organs, sure, a cannibalism fetishist or super-hardcore foodie could eat my body.
No, but I’d remind them that if they uploaded they could simulate eating it as many times as they wanted. That could go badly if they wanted it as a token of friendship or intimacy, but in that case a too-casual agreement would be equally bad.
Hey, good idea. New question for getting evidence of rationality: “How do you feel about cannibalism? Not killing people, just the act of eating human meat. Imagine that the meat was vat-grown, or you’re a starving survivor of a plane crash, or something.”
I remember once reading Richard Stallman saying that when he dies, if his body cannot be used for medical research, he would want it to be used for cannibalism or necrophilia.
A rather weird thing to say, but on reflection, not quite as weird as people’s usual thoughts on death — “I want my body to be put into the ground so it can decompose” or “I want my body to be burned so it can be of no use to anybody” — right?
Well, along with medical research, organ donation and cryonics also probably exceed the expected utility of cannibalism or necrophilia.
That said, I’m not sure they would be mutually exclusive. My head for my future self, my innards for the sick, my penis and anus for lovers, and my arms and legs for the hungry.
Cryonics and organ donation is really a winning combination. It solves the organ donor’s worry that doctors might not take long shots at saving your life if they can harvest your organs instead.
This is correct but I imagine it could be bypassed, if you severed the head and used the carotid arteries / jugular veins. I imagine that’s much messier and more difficult than doing the whole body through one well-defined entry point, but may be possible.
I tried searching to find a citation for this and the most obvious keywords just take me here. 50 karma to anyone who has enough Google-fu to find me a citation.
I was thinking of the fourth post on this page. Looks like I misremembered, he didn’t mention cannibalism, but given the rest of that post, I’d bet money that he’d be fine with it (perhaps as a third choice).
It could be a good test of feeling rational, if the premises were defined clearly enough. Presumably, most of us would not object morally to the idea of eating human meat if we were certain that it had been vat-grown, and would not object practically if we were reasonably sure that it is safe, but I’d guess that many of us would have a cached disgust response anyway, which, under these circumstances, would not be rational (because the disgust emotion would be stopping us from doing something that does not oppose our goals or values). I have to admit I’d probably fall into that group, those people who would not morally object but would feel disgusted anyway (especially as I’m used to feeling disgusted by all meat).
ISTM that the most likely evolutionary origin of disgust is a warning sign of a high risk of infection or poisoning, which would be present in the plane crash scenario so I wouldn’t even necessarily call it an irrational feeling.
Moreover not being content with someone merely acting rationally when being confronted with a powerful impulse towards a certain reaction that in this particular situation happens to be irrational, but going so far as requiring that they not even feel this impulse in that situation seems to be asking a bit much. One might say that displaying this attitude towards humans is rather irrational.
“How do you feel about cannibalism? Not killing people, just the act of eating human meat. Imagine that the meat was vat-grown, or you’re a starving survivor of a plane crash, or something.”
Hey, good idea. New question for getting evidence of rationality: “How do you feel about cannibalism? Not killing people, just the act of eating human meat. Imagine that the meat was vat-grown, or you’re a starving survivor of a plane crash, or something.”
Vat-grown meat could still be a problem if it provided the real (killer) cannibals with camouflage.
I’d appreciate if you would read my parenthetical qualifications before making misleading comments about my “reasoning”.
I disapprove of coercion in general, but it seems clear that people in general experience sex as a much more significant experience than eating, to the extent that rape can make for life-threatening emotional trauma. Given these (possibly local) facts of human nature, we would clearly not agree to a social contract that provided no protection from rape.
At the moment I am straight, monogamous, and in fact legally married (for fiscal reasons mostly), but I see no reason to elevate my personal choices and inclinations to the status of universal moral law.
I don’t see any reason to either. The problem is I’m not sure I see a reason not to. Rationality governs our degrees of belief and how we incorporate new evidence into our degrees of belief. I don’t see how rationality can govern our terminal values. You’re right that there is no sound basis to distinguish sex from dinner, but there is also no sound basis to distinguish sex from murder. To say otherwise requires a pretty untenable kind of moral naturalism. Moral acts and immoral acts aren’t natural kinds. PhilGoetz’s original point is fully generalizable to all claims about terminal values. Policy positions are indicative of irrationality only when they are inconsistent with the subscriber’s own values.
Thus, in my comment elsewhere on this post, I hedged when it came using support for immigration as an indicator of rationality among conservatives because opposition to immigration may well be the right position to hold if you don’t value the welfare of immigrants or value cultural homogeneity.
but there is also no sound basis to distinguish sex from murder
There clearly is, at least on my contractarian view. You would not consent to a social contract that left you vulnerable to murder, if it could be avoided.
I’m not sure this works (Why would a strict social conservative consent to a contract that allowed me to have sex with multiple partners at the same time?). But no matter: If the distinction is only non-arbitrary given your normative ethics then you need to give non-arbitrary reasons why we should all be contractarians. Otherwise you’ve just pushed the conversation back a step.
The contract view appeals to me because it takes as a starting point the fact of our living in large groups; that much is non-arbitrary. In this context, some sort of basis for adjudicating our claims against each other is a requirement, just as food or shelter are a requirement. On this view, the features of social contracts that would make for more general agreement—such as protection from murder—can be treated differently from features of these contracts that would make for narrower (temporally and geographically local) agreement. One way to formalize this intuition is Rawls’ veil of ignorance.
The contract view appeals to me because it takes as a starting point the fact of our living in large groups; that much is non-arbitrary.
I suppose this is a nifty feature for a normative theory to have but there doesn’t seem to be a reason why my values must proceed from this fact. I have a theory where an old book tells me what I should value. What argument is there to dissuade me? Moreover, contractarianism is hardly the only normative theory which uses this fact as a starting point. Indeed, the other theory I have in mind, communitarianism, is often sympathetic to certain kinds of social conservative positions!
On this view, the features of social contracts that would make for more general agreement—such as protection from murder—can be treated differently from features of these contracts that would make for narrower (temporally and geographically local) agreement.
True, you can treat them differently. But the social conservative wants to treat them the same.
One way to formalize this intuition is Rawls’ veil of ignorance.
Rawls is formalizing our intuitions about justice in a liberal society. But it is exactly that—a popular intuition. I share this intuition. But there is nothing in rationality (as we mean the term, here) that compels that intuition if you don’t already hold it. If you believe in liberal justice it is indeed irrational to oppose polyamory. The point is, lots of people aren’t Rawlsian liberals!
Looping back to the starting point of this discussion, from which we are in danger of drifting too far, what I wanted to say is that people who take an intolerant position on the subject of (say) homosexuality do not seem to do so after having held up their own ethical intuitions to anything like the kind of scrutiny you and others here are clearly capable of.
Rather, they seem to rationalize an immediate “eww” reaction and look for any ammunition they can find supporting their intution that “people shouldn’t do that”. That strikes me as irrational. This comment seemed to be saying much the same thing.
My stance, I guess, could be summarized as “Show me someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, or polyamory.” That is, consistent reasons, stable under reflection.
The best general argument for conservativism I’ve encountered is that we should pay attention to established social customs and innate moral intuitions because the world is a complex place and practices that persist over time probably exist for a good reason. The fact that we don’t fully understand the reason for a practice is not enough to discard it, we should exercise caution when messing with established customs because we don’t fully understand what customs are key to society achieving whatever level of success it has so far achieved.
I don’t fully buy this argument but I think it has some merit. Thus it is not necessarily irrational to see an intuitive “eww” reaction as a reason to think that we should exercise caution when liberalizing attitudes towards the provoking practice. I think the generous interpretation of the social conservative attitude to homosexuality is that the “eww” reaction probably exists for some ‘good’ reason and should not be totally ignored. Generating hypotheses to explain why the “eww” is beneficial is not necessarily an irrational first step to understanding what’s really going on.
Relatively few social conservatives can articulate this argument but some can and I don’t think it is fair to dismiss them as irrational. Indeed the more thoughtful conservatives tend to think that most people are not capable of thinking rationally about the costs and benefits of certain behaviours and so social customs must do the work of preserving the ‘good’ society.
mattnewport’s comment was much more broad and insightful than “This is old therefore it is good”.
His point (paraphrasing the general conservative thesis) is that social customs arise as solutions to difficult problems and have highly immodular interplay. Therefore, before relaxing them, you should at least identify what problem it was (believed to be) solving, and how it interplays with the other customs and factors (including the ick factor in others).
In the case of homosexuality, the taboo against it is extremely common across cultures, which suggests some kind of mechanism like, “Cultures that didn’t have a taboo against it were outbred or otherwise dominated by a more populous culture.”
Of course, no one actually argues for such a taboo against it today on that basis, though it has the trappings of a good argument: “If we don’t have pro-reproduction customs, we’ll be unable to withstand the memetic overload from cultures that do, and will be unable to perpetuate our values across generations.” (Several European countries provide good examples of cultures slowly losing their ability to protect Western values by being outbred by those who don’t share those values.)
But even so, if this is the concern, there are much better, Pareto-surperior ways to go about it: e.g., require everyone to either have children, help with the raising of other’s children, or pay a tax after a certain age that goes toward relieving the burden of others’ childbearing.
Unfortunately, the debate on the issue is nowhere near this point.
I’m sorry if you felt I was advocating a position when instead I understood and was in agreement with his points. I was merely supplying an interesting quote about half of them.
I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning.
Tell me what reasoning I was supposed to find your comment, as it related to the parent’s point, and if we can agree there’s something non-foolish about it, I’ll revise my comment. Sound good?
One says, “This is old therefore it is good.”: Conservatism, when the person is holding beliefs for irrational reasons (fear, ick-factor, a desire to avoid all change, etc.)
The other one says, “This is new therefore it is better.”: Change advocates, when they fail to take into account the possibility that conservative positions may be robust or long standing solutions to difficult problems that made sense for a large period of time or in certain cultures.
Both sides can hold the correct position for irrational reasons, and one should put thought into it, and obtain more knowledge, before deciding which is correct.
And as much as I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning, likewise, I do not appreciate passive aggressive questions whose intent is apparently to state my comment is worthless to you.
I’m sorry that I took the valuable 4 seconds it took to read the quote, and that it spawned this subthread where you have continued to complain about my posting of the comment. I’m sorry that it bothers you enough that you feel the need to indirectly call me a fool, and to indirectly say my comment is worthless.
When I initially saw it, the tone of the quote seemed to reveal a lack of assimilation of the insight mattnewport gave; to the extent that the quote is doing so in this context, such oversimplification does count as a (3rd) kind of foolishness. I do not, however, deem you a fool.
While I still don’t think the quote was helpful, I will remove the remark that implies you are a fool. And, as standard practice, I didn’t mod down any of your comments in this thread because I was involved in the thread’s argument.
There are 1 types of people in the world: those who start indexes at 0, and those who don’t.
Lame quote because everyone I have ever met who starts indexes at 0 says “2 types”: it is just that they call them Type 0 and Type 1 instead of Type 1 and Type 2.
ADDED. I am not saying that writers should start indexes at 0, just that the fact alluded to in the quote (that, e.g., the “1” in “Type 1″, is different from “2”) is not a good reason for avoiding the practice. A good reason to avoid the practice is that diverging from a long-standing stylistic convention distracts without contributing anything substantial to your point.
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
You can start your indexes anywhere. 0 and 1 are the most common but I have had occasion to use others. (Not technically contradicted by the joke but enough to make it lame… you just have to count the types after the colon and ignore the number).
It doesn’t matter how you index it, the size is not altered. {0 ⇒ “a”, 1 ⇒ “b”}.size = 2. {1 ⇒ “a”, 2=>”b”}.size = 2. (I say this to elevate it from rhollerith’s “everyone I have ever met” to “everyone who isn’t wrong”.)
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails. In fact, even here the “It’s a joke” reply is upvoted to 3. Humor as a conversation halter is (epistemically) undesirable when it conveys false meaning.
I thought the error in logic contributed to the humour in the joke. A perfect parallel to a joke I’d already heard (the binary one) would be less amusing.
I saw the joke before the context so I can’t really say how it affected the conversation, but it didn’t look sufficiently related to the parent to be either misleading or informative about how many types of fools there are. At worst it could be distracting.
I agree with you about jokes in general having a risk of being misleading. I think a good response to a joke that’s misleading in a way you care about is to acknowledge that it’s a joke and respond seriously anyway. And distinguish between replying to the joke and the joke-teller, unless you’re willing to assume the teller agrees with the joke’s implications.
This advice is targeted at the context of lesswrong discussions, where the joke’s been there for minutes or hours,. I don’t know that it would be a faux pas in general, but it would changing conversation tone to a serious mood to respond in real-time like that. Also I don’t know that I’d use it in a hostile environment.
Ignore it. At the margin such effort would be far better spent on bigger, easier to fix issues. On average humor seems (to me) to push away from bullshit rather than towards it so counters would need to be fine tuned.
Something most of us do automatically is reduce association with people who don’t share our sense of humor. People who actively use humor for anti-epistemic purposes (ie. not you) I tend to avoid unconscously. They feel evil.
It would probably work well if you rattle it off quickly in a real-time conversation because it would show that you are engaged and have some wits about you, but what does it contribute to a conversation in which participants have hours to formulate a reply before the reply becomes stale?
Maybe I’m missing something: is there a truth or half-truth buried in, “There are 1 types of people in the world: those who start indexes at 0, and those who don’t,” that I have missed?
what does it contribute to a conversation in which participants have hours to formulate a reply before the reply becomes stale?
The potential for humor. Is this not an acceptable purpose on Lesswrong? If so, I will cease posting potentially humorous or interesting quotes and other miscellany outside of Quote and Open Threads.
I don’t think most people object to humour here, I think the complaint was not that this was a joke but that it was not a very good joke.
I don’t think it’s a very good joke for the same reason as rhollerith but then I’m a dyed-in-the-wool C++ programmer so I can’t understand why anyone would start indexes at 1...
Speaking just for myself—well, speaking for myself and for anyone who upvotes this comment—I have a slight preference for you to restrict your humor and interesting quotes to Rationality Quotes, which by the way I do not read. (I do not have a way to avoid reading humorous comments in Open Thread without avoiding all the other comments there.)
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
You can start your indexes anywhere. 0 and 1 are the most common but I have had occasion to use others.
It doesn’t matter how you index it, the size is not altered. {0 ⇒ “a”, 1 ⇒ “b”}.size = 2. {1 ⇒ “a”, 2=>”b”}.size = 2.
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails.
I have found the persona required to interact positively with this community to be very different than the others I have adopted in the past, and the scrutiny is merciless.
Which is to say, I have mixed feelings on the matter, and am willing to continue engagement.
1) Use longer sentences and bigger words. The community appears to react favorably to academic styling in prose.
2) State all the givens. Things which I believed would be understood automatically and omitted to save time are much more likely to be picked apart as flaws, where the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
3) Be careful about how much you share. People here are far more willing to do research and analysis to pick apart every claim you make, even if its a metaphor, and they will look into your background. Any of the information you’ve posted can and will be used against (for?) you. Alternately, this same point should be used as a suggestion for how to treat other posters. Link to their previous comments and any evidence regarding their claims.
4) Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery. I feel that this community doesn’t treat commenters as friends; rather, it feels more like being treated as a coworker who is on the clock. As Morendil phrased it, “I wish someone had told me, quite plainly [...] this is a rationality dojo.”
That’s off the top of my head and in no particular order. There are other aspects I’m still developing which do not have a formal definition.
2) State all the givens. Things which I believed would be understood automatically and omitted to save time are much more likely to be picked apart as flaws, where the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
Yes—I have seen this so many times!
It’s particularly frustrating, because encountering it feels like discovering that you’ve overestimated your audience at the same time that they’ve underestimated you.
4) Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery. I feel that this community doesn’t treat commenters as friends; rather, it feels more like being treated as a coworker who is on the clock. As Morendil phrased it, “I wish someone had told me, quite plainly [...] this is a rationality dojo.”
I’ve noticed this too, and I long for the day when our rationality skills have advanced to the point where we can be rational and nice.
I haven’t really seen 3), and EY’s posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.
EY’s posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.
Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9, You’re Entitled to Arguments is at 16 and 17.8, and Outside View as Conversation Halter is at 14 and 14.5. Note that a score of 15+ is considered academic writing by these measures. Tests of his recently upvoted comments show scores ranging from 7 to 20.
Here’s the Flesch-Kincaid calculator I used, and the Gunning Fog calculator. I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it to be academic-level writing.
Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9,
“Undiscriminating Skepticism”—why, that’s ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!
Seriously: tests like those do not control for the content or subject matter of the writing. There exists, furthermore, a significant subset of the (adult!) human population who would consider a phrase like “undiscriminating skepticism” itself to be difficult and unusually abstract. Needless to say, tests which heavily weight the judgements of such people are not very useful for the purpose of judging “readability” in most contexts here.
If you want to judge the readability of LW posts, I suggest spending some time reading typical articles published in academic journals.
“Undiscriminating Skepticism”—why, that’s ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!
You’re right! It’s agonizing! Oh the pain of posting and reading here! My mouth is bloodied. You have defeated me, oh wise and amazing person who obviously knows better and is fully within their right to ridicule every attempt I make to explain the use of a single word in a sentence whose structure is still largely intact, as it was meant to be a frickin’ suggestion.
I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it [Eliezer’s postings] to be academic-level writing.
And yet I find his writing a model of clarity here, despite a few randomly chosen articles by other people having a far lower Fog Index. How useful are these indices? On the Gunning Fog page it says “The higher the Fog Index the trickier it is to read.” But the Wikipages for these tests reference no empirical studies.
I find his writing to be very readable as well. However, I consider myself highly educated, with excellent English skills, and I have been following his writing for some years now.
I was deferring to experts in the field of readability, and considered it likely that they would provide a better measure than self-reports of “looks fine to me.”
Further, it seems likely to me that Eliezer is very good at targeting his audience and maintaining interest despite the complexity of his prose. Academic doesn’t mean “boring” by necessity. One of the references from the Gunning Fog page states:
Although we have often given permission for reprinting the Fog Index, our means of measuring reading difficulty, we have sometimes cringed at the use made of it. In our work, we emphasize that the Fog Index is a tool, not a rule. It is a warning system, not a formula for writing. Testing without the support of analysis based on experience can be detrimental.
And yes, I do realize that this criticism can be applied to my own use of the tool, but point out that the measure directly supports my initial statement: “Use longer sentences and bigger words,” with the caveat that you should also be a good writer, to ensure the complexity doesn’t hinder the message. Or I could add, only do this if you can get away with it (still be a successful communicator).
I’d also like to point out that this feels like a good example of the dojo-style response to my clumsy use of a single word: academic.
For better or worse, [EY] enjoys a special status in this community.
A status earned precisely by writing posts that people enjoy reading!
If you’re suggesting that the ordinary academic/intellectual norm of only allowing high-status people to write informally, with everyone else being forced to write in soporific formal-sounding prose, is operative here, then I suggest we make every effort to nip that in the bud ASAP.
It’s particularly frustrating, because encountering it feels like discovering that you’ve overestimated your audience at the same time that they’ve underestimated you.
It feels the same way from the other end too! I.e. “Really? I have to explain this to you?”
There’s definitely a martial feel to the way this community requires you to earn its respect, rather than granting it to you almost immediately upon uttering the appropriate shibboleths as is common elsewhere. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
Sometimes I feel that upvotes are wordless substitutes for what would otherwise be verbal “strokes” of appreciation; the community prefers when words are used to convey info rather than good vibes.
I would add a 5) which really surprised me when I noticed it: link, link, link. This is a community which lives less than others in an ever-flowing present, but instead constantly strives to weave together past, present and future thought and discourse. That could well be an explanation for your 3.
I feel perfectly at home with 1) as long as it doesn’t reach the passive-voice level of academic styling. I see the writing style here as literate rather than academic. ;)
Actually, to me, the first seems rather like a G* for the G that is precision and the third and fourth seem like ordinary, fully-general good advice.
It might be worth noting that all are fundamentally comparative—it could be that your starting point on 2-4 is sufficiently different to Rain’s as to render them inapt.
Good list. I was going to say “in particular, 3)” but 2, 3 and 4 all seem to be vying for first spot. I’ve certainly noticed that any forays into comradery seem to backfire. I don’t notice 1) but that is probably because I have instead stopped noticing the converse.
the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
It is sometimes very difficult detect expertise and to communicate it. This would be a very helpful skill to improve on but I have no idea how.
1) Use longer sentences and bigger words. The community appears to react favorably to academic styling in prose.
I guess this is right. I tend to very rapidly adapt the style of writing or talking of people around me. I feel like I manage to get in a fair amount of levity, though. Somehow “True story: my lesbian roommate runs mad game” got 5 karma. Sometimes I think, informal language is a way people here highlight really important messages. You’ll see really informal bumper-stickers to summarize academic style posts, I guess because informal language stands out from the formal.
Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery.
This makes me sad. It hasn’t felt quite that bad to me, still sad that people feel this way though.
Have you thought about which of these you would change?
Have you thought about which of these you would change?
They were observations about how I’ve had to alter myself to fit in successfully. I wasn’t trying to judge whether they were good or bad, and I’m not sure any of them really need changing.
The only thing I’d look into further is the amount of time people spend “on the clock” or sparring in the dojo, preferring a bit more tolerance of lighter material. But this desire appears at odds with the standards of the community, as it seems to consider lighter material as pure noise in the signal/noise ratio, and there’s a high demand for signal.
To appease both desires, perhaps improve on the Open Thread-style areas. Forums? More easily followed thread structures? Allowance for ‘OpenThread’ tagged, top-level posts with separate ‘recent’ threads? I’m not sure what specific action to suggest.
That is perhaps a good argument in favor of conservatism in general, but it falls short of my request to point at someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, at the very least as practiced in private.
I’m not saying that anyone who opposes, say, gay marriage or gay adoption is irrational by virtue of having that position. But it seems clear that people who allow their “eww” reaction to become an excuse to “pick on the queer”, as is seen for instance in cases of workplace harassment, are simply not using their heads, to put it mildly.
There’s one more belief needed for that complex to make sense—that the costs (both to homosexuals and to heterosexuals) of suppressing homosexuality are low enough to counterbalance the benefits.
I was considering adding it in, but I think the costs of the missed ‘lives worth living’ would likely exceed it greatly, assuming the first premise is true.
Edit: I just editted it in, and then re-removed it. Firstly, it makes the whole thing trivial, and secondly, I was only presenting a sketch of a case- really, we’d need a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, this is outlining one of the benefits.
If you’re trying to convey a system of thought you don’t agree with, you might as well include all the bits and pieces.
The interesting thing about that anti-homosexual argument is it considers the costs of repressing homosexuality to be so low for homosexuals that they aren’t even generally conscious for the conservative.
Also, there are costs to non-homosexuals—frex, it’s rough for a heterosexual to be married to a homosexual who’d hoped (with support from their culture) that they’d get over their homosexuality.
And if a homosexual is driven to suicide, it’s very hard on their family.
Well, part of the idea may be that you’re not repressing, you’re curing: they cease to be homosexual. They’re ex ante pleased to be cured, and the cost of healing/oppressing is one-time rather than life-long.
Whatever the suicide rate would be, I doubt it’s high enough to make up for the loss of potential-children.
I’m sure that’s part of the premise, but my point was that the low cost is simply assumed rather than examined. Also, the possibility of a failure rate isn’t considered.
None of the premises are examined; they’re all assumed. Clearly, as we all agree the argument is unsound at least one of them (including those implied but not delineated) must be false, and it’s not particularly important which. What Morendil asked for, more or less, was a rational argument against private homosexuality.
Obviously, no unsound argument should be stable under reflection, but from the point of view of Classical Logic this seems to satisfy the requirements.
If you’d like it more formally, I’ll write out all the premises in full and come up with a cost/benefit analysis / natural deduction proof—but it wouldn’t help answer the request, because we’re not discussing whether or not private homosexuality is bad, but whether there are any (close enough to) rational arguments for the other side.
Mostly agree, but what exactly is “the” libetarian reason for rejecting that chain of reasoning? A libertarian (and I consider myself one) would tend to reject the premises, but not the deductions you made based on the premises.
Also, as a libertarian, do you believe something like, “If rampant homosexuality/ childless/ etc. leads to a libertarian society being undermined and outbred, so be it—that means the whole program was flawed to begin with”? What’s your general position on libertarian-permitted acts that, at the large scale, would undermine the ablity of a society to remain libertarian?
(Btw, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a “hardcore” libertarian drew a lot of criticism for his position that practioners of non-family-centered lifestyles would have to be “physicallly removed” from a libertarian society for it to function.)
Usual disclaimer: the chain of reasoning you gave still wouldn’t justify opposition to homosexuality, but rather, a kind of compromise like I proposed before, where you can either have/adopt children of your own, or pay a tax after a certain age.
Things like the utility homosexuals get from freely expressing themselves, and the various Public Choice problems with implementing the system. But I also think the first premise is false, and third is at least a simplification.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t adopt the nearest stable system, which could be Libertarianism without sexual freedom.
I would bite the HHH bullet and say that we’d have to do something about it. Things like SeaSteading provide non-coercive alternatives, in basically the same way that making property rights totally secure would prevent being outnumbered being a problem.
However, Minarchists are quite happy to accept taxes to defend liberty, and I know the President of the Oxford Libertarians would accept conscription, and I don’t think there’s that much difference. It may well be that we should adopt a consequentialist deontology: we act in such a way as to maximise rule-following. The danger here is that in breaking rules to try to enforce them, we might undermine them further.
In general, I don’t think Libertarianism has much chance without a culture of individual responsibility, quite possibly family-based.
That is perhaps a good argument in favor of conservatism in general, but it falls short of my request to point at someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, at the very least as practiced in private.
I would imagine the general form of an argument to that effect would be that taboos against homosexuality must exist for a reason and despite not fully understanding that reason we should preserve the taboos for fear of causing unintended damage to society. If you are the kind of person who believes that society should formalize its taboos as legal prohibitions then you might support laws against the private practice of homosexuality.
To be clear, I’m a staunch libertarian and so firmly oppose laws against any kind of sexual activity between consenting adults but the libertarian position on prohibitions on the activities of individuals is neutral on the question of whether any activity is in the best long term interests of the participants or on the pros or cons of indirect consequences on society as a whole. I also support the right of an employer to refuse to employ homosexuals or the proprietor of a business to refuse to serve them for example.
It is fairly common on both the left and the right to oppose practices that are considered harmful both through social taboos and through legal prohibition on private activity. The only real difference is in the types of activities that are considered harmful. I see little difference between a social conservative arguing that homosexuality should be illegal because we don’t know the potential consequences for society and a left liberal arguing that GM foods should be illegal because we don’t know the potential consequences for society. In both cases it arguably should be an empirical question but in practice it is driven largely by the “eww” response in the majority of people.
My stance, I guess, could be summarized as “Show me someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, or polyamory.” That is, consistent reasons, stable under reflection.
I suggest looking up the views of communitarians on these topics. Some names: David Popenoe, Amitai Etzioni. See this book, and especially this part from Popenoe. tl;dr: The won’t go as far as the most bigoted but they’re also not cool with just affirming homosexuality and out of wedlock promiscuity. Communitarianism isn’t my bag of tea but it has pretty firm theoretical foundations and the research that suggests marriage’s importance isn’t obviously bunk.
As for those who are just rationalizing an “eww” reaction, their mistake isn’t basing their terminal values on disgust, their mistake is trying to justify those values in terms liberals, who don’t share their intuition, can understand. “Polyamory should be prohibited because polyamory is immoral” is a consistent position. See Jonathan Haidt’s page on the foundations of morality. Most people who object to polyamory and homosexuality are coming from the purity/sanctity foundation (i.e. “ewww!”). But there is nothing rationalist or not rationalist about these intuitions. They’re just intuitions like all moral reasons. You and I might have more complicated intuitions that can be formalized in interesting ways and employ philosophers—But I’m with Hume here, you can’t reason your way to morality.
An interesting related recent post from Haidt regards the similarity between the social conservative attitude to sexual purity/sanctity and the left liberal attitude to food and the environment:
Yet there are enough hints of “liberal purity” scattered about that we at Yourmorals are actively trying to measure it … It can be seen in the liberal tendency to moralize food and eating, beyond its nutritive/material aspects. (See this fabulous essay by Mary Eberstadt comparing the way the left moralizes food and the right moralizes sex). It can be seen in the way the left treats environmental issues and the natural world as something sacred, to be cared for above and beyond its consequences for human – or even animal—welfare.
We should be tolerant of these practices when they are engaged in voluntarily, in private, and do no harm to others.
That’s a direct quote from Popenoe, so our very different intuitions are converging to at least some common ground. That’s suggestive of something.
I’m with Hume here, you can’t reason your way to morality.
Well, there seem to be strong regularities in the moral intutions developed by healthy humans, strong regularities in our terminal values, strong and predictable regularities in our instrumental values (or more precisely what Gary Drescher calls our “delegated values”, what Rawls calls “primary social goods”, what it is rational to desire whatever else we desire).
Reason is a tool whereby we can expoit these regularities and so compress our discourse about people’s claims against each other; I don’t see why we should refrain from using that tool merely because the subject of discourse is a particular subset of human intuitions. We do not shy from using it in our analysis of other types of intuitions, and there is nothing which designates “moral thinking” as less subject to analysis than other types of thinking.
Further, there is some evidence that our moral intutions are changing over time; and they are changing in consequence of our thinking about them. In the same way that we have found it useful for our thinking about the material world to incorporate some insights that we now label “rationality”, so I expect to find that our thinking about our own moral intutions (which are part of the material world) will also benefit from these insights.
I don’t think Rawls’s work is useless or meaningless. Indentifying regularities in human moral intuitions and applying our reasoning to them to clarify or formalize is a worthwhile enterprise. It can help us avoid moral regret, spot injustice and resolve contradictions. But you can’t justify the whole edifice rationally. There isn’t any evidence to update on beyond the intuitions we already have. You start with your moral intuitions, you don’t adopt all of them as a result of evidence. There is no rationalist procedure for adjudicating disputes between people with different intuitions because there isn’t any other evidence to tilt the scale.
Actually I come closer to being convinced by this one here, at least for the general case in favor of transcribing taboos into prohibitions.
I do note that both the Popenoe passage linked earlier and the observation that “the taboo against [homosexuality] is extremely common across cultures” run counter to some of the evidence. And that there is plenty of evidence that this and similar taboos, when enforced, are enforced hypocritically.
Actually I come closer to being convinced by this one here, at least for the general case in favor of transcribing taboos into prohibitions.
That links to this comment. Which argument did you mean?
I do note that both the Popenoe passage linked earlier and the observation that “the taboo against homosexuality” is extremely common across cultures” run counter to some of the evidence
The relevant period to look at would be the modern era (post 1500), when new advances would screen off the apparent connection between old taboos as their function. And in that period, it is significant that populations making up most of the world, depsite separation and diversity in other areas, had such a taboo. Yes, places have relaxed taboos since then, but they were all taboos that had a long origin.
And that there is plenty of evidence that this and similar taboos, when enforced, are enforced hypocritically.
What do you mean “hypocritically”? Homosexuals enforcing the taboo? I’ll assume you meant “inconsistently”, in which case I still think you’re not addressing the conservative argument. Of course their enforcement will look inconsistent, because it has long been detached from its original change-in-taboo/consequence feedback loop (like the woman who follows the family tradition of cutting off the ends of a turkey without realizing that the tradition only began in order to be able to fit it into the first generation’s small oven).
Nevertheless (the conservative argument goes), you still need to be able to identify the need the taboo filled and its interplay with the other social mechanisms before justifably concluding it’s time to end the taboo.
So, I ask you: Do you accept that a culture has to be pro-reproduction to avoid memetic overload from cultures with different values? If so, what would be the limit of the taboos/prohibitions you would want for achieving that end, given the resistance people will put up to different kinds of laws? (e.g. why not make use of people’s existing ick-reactions?)
Just to clarify, I’m not defending laws against homosexuality, just pointing out reasonable concerns that underlie the (unjustifiable) prohibitions, since you asked.
I concur with Morendil that Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance” is a rather elegant way of showing morality to be conditionally objective.
Why would a strict social conservative consent to a contract that allowed me to have sex with multiple partners at the same time?
I think you may be overestimating the consistency of the social conservative viewpoint. If you were to tell them about how, when, where & why they could have sex, they would be outraged—even if you couched it in, say, biblical terms. I don’t think many social conservatives really believe that sex is a community matter. They’re just applying a good old fashioned double standard. Call them on their own sexual behaviour and they’ll rush back to consensual ethics (“none of your business!”) so fast you’ll see Lorentz contraction.
I concur with Morendil that Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance” is a rather elegant way of showing morality to be conditionally objective.
I don’t know what work “conditionally” is doing here. But I’m pretty sure Rawls himself doesn’t take his theory to justice to show that morality is objective. In fact, in A Restatement he explicitly disclaims that he has demonstrated morality is objective. What he is doing is trying to formalize Western/liberal intuitions about justice.
(EDIT: Just checked. The correct interpretation of the initial publication of A Theory of Justice is that Rawls is trying to demonstrate the objective truth of liberalism, but in later publications he changes his mind in response to criticisms and agrees that he is really just formalizing this intuition of justice as fairness)
I think you may be overestimating the consistency of the social conservative viewpoint. If you were to tell them about how, when, where & why they could have sex, they would be outraged—even if you couched it in, say, biblical terms.
I’m certain there are non-hypocritical social conservatives somewhere. I don’t think prohibiting polyamory while also allowing measures of sexual privacy are necessarily inconsistent. Holding that some aspect of sexual behavior should be community matters does not require holding that all aspects of sexual behavior must be community matters.
I suspect that there are good game-theoretical/TDT reasons for the rule that one shouldn’t break promises, so if Alice has promised to Bob that she won’t have sex to anybody else, I’d say it’d be wrong for Alice to have sex with Charlie even if both Alice and Charlie are consenting. (But the idea that people should never have sex unless they promise each other to not have sex with anyone else I do find silly.)
I can think of a few possible exceptions (sexual practices that are far enough beyond the pale that even tongue-pierced goths disclaim them, yet which have no rational basis for being banned), but they’re too toxic for me to mention.
Your position may be valid; but in the context of the current distribution of opinions on sexuality, it does not in itself signal rationality to me. And that’s what we’re discussing.
Emotionally, I feel I have two tribes: the meatspace upper-middle-class collegiate culture and my Internet circle of acquaintances.
In the meatspace tribe, vanilla heterosexuality or homosexuality are considered normal and unremarkable, things like 2 girls 1 cup, goatse, etc. are considered disgusting/gross-out material—and I cannot remember anyone acknowledging anything else.
In the Internet tribe, sexual relations of any kind between consenting adults are considered fine provided that they are carried out in private, sexual intercourse between teenage minors is considered normal (fine or not may vary), and crossing the line … well, I haven’t heard Snape/Hermione strongly condemned, but pedophilia is definitely out. I note that no-one I know talks about anything involving permanent damage, however.
If you’re looking for unusual concepts for use as test cases (and have a strong stomach), I recommend poking around and asking some open-ended questions on gurochan.net. The site has, of necessity, a very diverse and open-minded attitude toward anything which does not directly threaten it’s primary objectives.
Hi Clarisse, and Welcome to LessWrong! I’ve seen your blog, and I’m happy to see you commenting here. (I comment as “Doug S.” on various feminism-related blogs—I’m not very prolific, but you may have seen a couple here and there.)
Hi Doug! Yes, I remember you. I’ve actually read a number of posts here, and I’ve commented once here before, but I was too angry and irrational and in feminist-community mode during that little fracas, so I decided to give myself lots of time to cool off before posting again. (Note that the original post has been edited to the point where it is no longer clear what pissed me off.) (I also discussed some of the cultural differences between this site and the feminist blogosphere that contributed to that blowup in the comments here.)
Almost every tribe tacitly accepts the assumption that it is healthy and appropriate to have a passionate interest in the sex lives of complete strangers. Disagreement with that assumption would lead me to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief.
I disagree with it on two points. I’m pretty sure the legal age of consent is set considerably too high, though I’m not sure where it should be, or whether there should be a legal age of consent.
I think the “enthusiastic consent” standard in Yes Means Yes makes sense.
Sorry if this is overly tangential, but as a sex educator I’m interested to know what you all think are your tribal beliefs around sexuality, and what kind of sexuality-related arguments would lead you to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief.
Heh. My tribal beliefs are from reading Spider Robinson books as a teen. Ciphergoth is an example of the sort of person I grew up thinking of as normal, and I’ve always felt a little guilty about not being bisexual. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to go outside that mainstream, which is one reason I went to the lengths of postulating legalized rape in Three Worlds Collide.
Ah, Spider Robinson. I remember buying a stack of his books at Borders around age 12 and having the clerk give my mother an alarmed look. Mom just waved her hand ….
I think it’s pretty normal for science-fiction-reading middle- to upper-middle-class kids to think that alternative sexuality is “normal” and to feel guilty for being vanilla/monogamous/whatever. (I used to feel a lot of pressure to be polyamorous.) Interestingly, though, there still seems to be a lot of internalized stigma about certain forms of sexuality, as demonstrated for example in my coming-out story. I would imagine that most people here fit that tribal group.
Still, within that tribal group I still encounter a lot of people with assumptions I’d call weird and/or irrational, which is why I asked specifically what kind of sexuality-related arguments would lead you to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief. I think your legalized rape post (it was forwarded to me last year, actually, and I still haven’t decided how I feel about it) is a definite example of defending a non-mainstream belief, but I wonder if there are less dramatic ones.
I’m adamant that none of us should use the messed-up word “Rape” to point to a benevolent social practice of a made-up libertarian utopia, where that term and its implications are not just forgotten but can hardly be understood. Something like “meta-consensual sex” would be way better. This alone would’ve allowed us to avoid half the controversy about this relatively minor point.
I like it. I hope the term catches on—even if the situations where it can be useful are rather uncommon.
I call that a win for literature.
*smiles* I’m sure you know this, but I don’t think it makes any sense to think you should enjoy X. And I agree, alt-sex is not a useful discriminator here. I’ve been having a lot of arguments about cryonics with my friend David Gerard who is also an alt-sex community member, and this article could have been written specifically with him in mind (as well as other contributors to the “RationalWiki” article on cryonics).
There’s a warning flag you don’t mention: the logical rudeness of the skeptical Gish Gallop. I have over and over again begged David to pick one counter-argument to cryonics and really press it home. Instead he insists on picking up everything that looks to him like shit and flinging it as fast as he can, and it appears to give him no pause at all when one argument after another turns out to be without merit.
Why doesn’t it make sense? If there were a pill to turn me bisexual, I’d take it, modulo the fact that in general I take almost no pills (it’d have to be really really safe, but I hold all mind-affecting substances to that standard, don’t drink etcetera, it’s not a special case for the bisexuality pill).
I’m somewhat sympathetic to that idea (I haven’t felt guilty about being straightish, but I’ve wished I were more bisexual once in a while, and succeeded in pushing myself in that direction in some cases), but I’m curious now: is gender the only dimension you’d apply that to? Would you also take a pill (again assuming it’s really really safe) that would make all outward physical attributes irrelevant to how attractive you find someone? Would you take a pill that would make you enjoy every non-harmful sexual practice/fetish (not necessarily seeking them out, but able to enjoy it if a partner initiated it)?
(I originally started writing this comment thinking something like “hmm, I’d take the bi-pill, but let’s take that reasoning to its vaguely-logical conclusion and see if it’s still palatable”, but now I’m actually thinking I’d probably take both of those pills too.)
Well, to ask the non-mainstream-relative-to-this-community version of the question, ask “Would I take the loli pill?”
How about the anti-Westermark effect pill? ;)
I can’t believe I had never heard of that before. Fascinating.
A question if you can answer it. Wikipedia says:
The addition of “highly” seems to suggest that separated brothers and sisters find themselves especially or unusually attracted to one another. Is that the case or is Wikipedia just adding unnecessary adjectives?
There are clearer language and relevant citations at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction)
There is a hypothesis that claims that, but the evidence is dubious.
The two pills I proposed are mainstream relative to this community?
I’m surprised yet not surprised. Good to know, anyway.
(So, alright, would you take the loli pill?)
Does “loli” mean non-persons and emotionally mature persons who look like a child, or are actual children (of average or below average emotional maturity) included by the effect?
If it meant the former, I would take the loli pill if the (unlikely) circumstances called for it. Why not? If it meant the latter, then you would have to tell your libido “no” a lot, but it wouldn’t necessarily lead to doing bad things. I doubt it would be worth the hassle, though, except in very special circumstances.
Actually, the biggest drawback to either version of the loli pill would probably be how society would react if they ever found out. It probably wouldn’t matter if the one you’re sleeping with is really 700 years old; you’d still get put on every sex offender registry out there, and shunned vigorously, at the very least. People are damn tense on this subject. Just look at how much trouble Christopher Handley got in for his manga collection.
Edit: I felt pretty uncomfortable writing this post, even though I know I shouldn’t be. Looks like this really is a good question.
Upvoted for noticing discomfort
upvoted for citing tvtropes :)
Downvoted for encouraging such irresponsible behavior as citing TV Tropes!
You just say that because your karma is over nine thousand!
Loli means actual preteen girls.
If I understand correctly, loli only refers to cartoon depictions of preteen girls (and maybe roleplaying with that theme). Being attracted to actual preteen girls is just pedophilia.
(At least that’s what loli fans say. I’ve always been a bit confused by the distinction — I’ve known people into loli and shota who seemed to find actual children as unappealing as any normal person does, but I can’t quite figure out why a person would be turned on only by a cartoon and not the real thing.)
This is a really a frustrating exchange given the number of terms that need googling and the fact that I am in a public library.
The TV Tropes page is work-safe and pretty illuminating. No guarantees if you click on any of the links, though.
Google define:’s loli as -
Abbreviation of lolita
Japanese term for Lolita, which means young, pre-teen girls.
Google define:’s lolita as -
a sexually precocious young girl
In the marketing of legal pornography, lolita is used to refer to a neotenic female, frequently one who has only recently reached the age of consent, or appears to be younger than the age of consent. Usually overlaps with ‘barely legal’.
Because they’re lying
I’d definitely take all three of the above pills. In fact, I wonder how much harm such pills would have to do for me not to take them.
There is a well-established mechanism within the transformation fetish subculture making use of devices which work a bit like temporary tattoos, altering the subject’s body and/or personality in ways both profound and fully reversible. Like most magic intended to make a story possible rather than to make it interesting, the patches in question are entirely without negative side effects.
As demonstrated with Clippy, I would be willing to provide further information even if doing so does not serve my long-term interests in any obvious way.
Would it be reversible?
You can just answer it for each case. Would you take either pill if they were irreversible? If they were reversible?
Yes in all cases, but absolutely only if reversible.
I am asexual and thus have not experienced any of the romantic/sexual emotions. I feel as if doing so would almost certainly help my understanding of others, as well as broaden my emotional range. However, I seem to do quite fine without these emotions, and they seem to cause more problems than they are worth in many of the people around me. Therefore I would only take such pills if they were reversible, as my present state is quite happy and the alternative could certainly be worse.
No kidding.
Do people remember that guy who was here at the very beginning and wouldn’t shut up about how the key to being rational was castration? I doubt that troll would have had much to say would have been helpful but the position has a certain intuitive plausibility to me. To begin with, I’m pretty sure the ebb and flow of sexual arousal would be really easy to money pump.
Buying and selling bulk cupons for the service of prostitutes?
I was actually thinking pornographic website subscriptions. That works too, though.
Easy enough to find by searching. ;)
Those contributions were… interesting. I’m somewhat tempted to doubt the disclosure. While researching permanent forms of contraception, in particular vasectomy, I learned that the procedure was illegal in France up until a few years ago: it was considered “self-mutilation”. I’d be rather surprised to learn about someone getting elective castration, unless some plausible details substantiated that story.
Agreed. And I obviously wouldn’t volunteer. But sexuality does appear to generate some serious bias. I imagine straight men might be unreliable rebutters and evaluators of arguments made by attractive females, for example.
Why would you take such a pill? So that you can have more fun, or for some other reason?
So I wouldn’t miss out on half the fun.
How do you distinguish the sort of fun it’s worth changing your values to enjoy from the sort of fun (like wireheading) it’s worth not having access to?
Of course, it’s nothing like half the fun you’re missing. Adding a gender would increase your fun by less than 100% since it’s not that different in many ways. Adding all the sexual variation in the world would be a humongous amount of fun, but you’d start to hit diminishing returns after a while.
Technically, given that most people are heterosexual, Woody Allen’s quote—“The good thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chance of a date on a Saturday night.”—is inaccurate. It only increases your chances by the percentage of people of your gender who are open to same-sex encounters.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, gay men are so much more promiscuous than straight women that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a man to have sex. But your point is well taken and certainly applies to chances for a monogamous relationship.
Point of curiosity if anyone knows the answer: How promiscuous are bisexual men and do they tend to have more m-m than m-f sex because the m-m sex is much easier to obtain? If not, why not?
I’m a 1 on the Kinsey scale but I have only had sex with women, not men. I don’t identify as bisexual.
I suspect that the median bisexual man has more m-m sex because the median person willing to identify as bisexual is not a 3 on the Kinsey scale but leans towards the homosexual side of the scale. Also, especially for young people just coming to terms with their sexuality, identifying as bisexual is often a path towards identifying as gay, and such people are likely to have more sex with their true preferred type of partners.
There is a negative perception in the gay community that bisexual people are more promiscuous, but this probably isn’t true. I’m pretty sure the reason bisexual men tend to have sex with men more often than women is not because getting gay sex is as easy as posting a “Hey, who wants to come over, blow me, and leave right away without talking?” on Craigslist, but because most people that identify as bisexual are just more gay than straight.
Btw, if anyone was intrigued by the possibility of making such a Craigslist post, if you say you’re straight you’ll get at least twice as many replies! :D
This is of course controversial but I’ve had a number of gay friends and acquaintances deny that there even are true bisexual men. The position they take it is that homosexuality is a binary, pre-natal development characteristic and that bisexual males are pretty much just gay men holding out hope for a normal marriage/family life.
No offense to those men here who identify as bisexual, obviously. This all may just be in group posturing and what not.
I, meanwhile, am not entirely sure that there are straight women.
(Every woman I have met has fallen into one of the following categories: 1) She would not know if she were non-straight, due to inadequate self-examination or understanding of the concept of orientation. 2) I would not know if she were not straight, due to not having a close enough relationship with her or due to social constraints on her end preventing her from being out or due to the topic never having come up. 3) I know her to be bisexual, gay, asexual, or some other non-straight sexuality.)
Counterexamples are welcome to present themselves, of course.
Reminds me of a study I read about. They basically showed men and women different types of porn and measured genital arousal. The results were straightforward for men: if they identified as straight, girl-on-girl porn caused the greatest arousal, girl-on-guy was ok, and guy-on-guy caused almost no arousal. For gay men, the results were reversed. For girls, there were no simple categories, and their identification as straight or gay didn’t predict which images would be the biggest turn-on.
The thread seems to be resurrected, so I’ll present myself. :)
I am a cissexual slightly genderqueer exclusively androsexual monogamously married woman. I think about sexuality and orientation a lot. Including my own. I don’t recall ever being sexually or romantically attracted to a woman. Intellectually, monosexuality seems a little weird to me, but nevertheless it seems to describe me. In fact I think of my monosexuality as a gender fetish, but I hesitate to apply that paradigm to other people’s monosexuality.
That is one of the most delightfully precise explanations of personal gender identity and sexual preferences I have ever seen. Also, as an exclusively monosexual male, I agree with your thoughts that monosexuality is understandable but doesn’t seem optimal from an individualistic standpoint.
My impression from attending a women’s college was that by the fourth year, most women who came in identifying as straight had experienced some attraction to other women. And those who came in saying “My life would be so much easier if I liked girls” were more likely to be dating women by the end (though no data on whether their lives were actually easier!)
I’m around 90% confident my girlfriend is straight.
Update- She has a date with a girl next week. So… oops. :-)
Update #2-- And now.… she is in a long-term relationship with a woman.
Feels like I should tie a bow around this, in memory of old Less Wrong. They got married 6 months ago.
Huh, that sure was an interesting series of comments. Thanks for updating this after so many years and providing a tiny bit of data (and humour).
I’ve gone on dates with a couple guys just to check—I’m still pretty definitely straight.
Polls show that about 10% identify as non-straight, so your initial estimate wasn’t bad.
One would hope that dating someone would provide enough evidence to make a better estimate than a blind prior.
Not necessarily true—it’s possible you had an implicit “given that she is straight” at work when you were interpreting evidence. If you conditioned on her being straight it makes perfect sense that you’d have no evidence one way or the other from a blind prior.
(People conditioning on such things is extremely common—for a much less innocuous example, consider what “no thanks, I don’t want to” looks like to someone who is conditioning on “this person wants me to”)
You’re right, actually. This occurred to me when posting the above. I started from “She’s a girl who says she is straight” and then updated down to .9 based on what I learned.
I think you both need to clarify your definitions a bit. It seems to me that females have a lot more scope for physical intimacy with other females in western society without generally being considered non-straight than males do. A straight female expressing physical attraction/admiration for other females is not considered grounds for doubting self-reported sexuality the way it might be for males.
It’s true that evidence one has for classifying people’s sexual orientation can be different for men and women. Thus I have female friends who, if they were men and behaved toward men the way they now behave toward women, my beliefs about their sexual orientation would alter dramatically. But such behaviors don’t define heterosexuality. An Anglo-American man who compliments other men on their attractiveness, holds hands or is affectionate toward other men is giving us evidence that he is gay or bisexual. But these facts don’t make him gay or bisexual. Facts about who wants to have sex with and who he wants to have romantic relationships define his sexual orientation.
People really aren’t comfortable with their naive notion of heterosexuality? It’s true that these concepts, like all cultural and social concepts, might break down upon extremely close examination. There are often degrees and exceptions. But I think we can use them just fine.
I more or less agree with your interpretation but it seems to me that the crux of any disagreement you have with Alicorn may well be over your respective defintions of ‘straight’ for males and females rather than a disagreement over the prevalence of certain behaviours.
Examples of behaviours that are quite common between girls I consider ‘straight’ but I would consider an indication of homosexuality in (western/anglo-american) males: holding hands; kissing on the lips; sharing a bed; overtly sexual dancing; commenting on the sexual attractiveness of other females. Would you consider any of these behaviours evidence that your girlfriend is not straight? Would Alicorn consider any of them evidence that a girl is not straight? That’s where I think some clarification is needed.
I’m actually not sure how much my data point suggests a disagreement with Alicorn. After all this is my girlfriend and I’m still only 90% sure she is straight.
Actually, I think all of those behaviors are evidence of non-heterosexuality in women they’re just weak and easily trumped by other kinds of evidence. After all, pretty much every non-straight girl I know does these things and only some of the straight girls I know do them. None are, of course, constitutive of non-heterosexuality. Incidentally, none are a pattern with my girlfriend.
Which category do you yourself fall into? (Or would you prefer not to answer that question?)
I’m bi.
For what it’s worth, I know a few women (2 certainly, 1 arguably) who strike me as reasonably self-aware, are at least as familiar with the concept of orientation in the abstract as I am, whose sex lives I’m reasonably well acquainted with, who have expressed sexual attraction to and initiated/accepted sexual intercourse with a number of men, and who have expressed (sometimes with regret) their lack of sexual attraction to and have never initiated/accepted sexual intercourse with any women.
Calling them straight seems reasonable to me… certainly I would call myself gay were all of that true of me.
That said, I can certainly imagine all of them having sex with another woman were the circumstances perfectly aligned (at least, I suppose I can imagine it; I’ve never actually done so and it seems vaguely impolite to do so now, especially since I’m at work).
So you think it is possible for a woman to be fully gay but not fully straight? That seems unlikely. According to Bailey, Kim, Hills & Linsenmeier (1997) 1% to 2% of women describe themselves as as having a primary or exclusive female orientation. On the continuum of sexuality, that leaves a vast potential area of women who likely have totally straight sexual orientations.
I don’t exist -_-;;
So there is actually new evidence since we had this conversation. Bisexual men do exist! Past studies found that the men they studied who identified as bisexual weren’t.
The different results are likely due to the different procedures used to determine the participant pool. The 2005 study took it’s sample of bisexual men mainly from college campus LGBTQ student associations while the more recent study advertised on craigslist M/F for M and, on top of that, refused to include anyone whose claim to bisexuality they didn’t believe.
Neither do I, apparently, even after meeting with LWers in person!
There are also “David Bowie bisexuals”, straight men willing to identify as bisexual in solidarity with the gay rights movement, or as an acknowledgement of the general fluidity of sexuality and gender.
Interesting. I’m pretty sure my gay friends would find this offensive and patronizing.
I have trouble imagining how I would feel if heterosexuals were persecuted and one of my gay male friends kissed a woman to show solidarity.
So I think I just figured out the motivation behind this tactic which wasn’t obvious to me before (maybe it was to you). I doubt straight men innately dislike kissing or showing affection toward men. It seems more likely to me that they (okay, we) are either homophobic or wary of the status cost of being seen as gay or bisexual. Thus a straight male who declares himself to be bisexual demonstrates a rejection of homophobia and in part shows that he doesn’t think being gay or bisexual is low status and refuses to accept some (but not all) of the privileges he has as a straight male (the privilege language is obviously controversial but it probably isn’t to the people who do this).
The problem is part of the anti-gay narrative is that homosexuality isn’t actually an important part of anyone’s identity, that it isn’t innate but basically just people choosing to be “sinful”. Identifying as bisexual for political reasons bolsters this position. “If these straight males can choose to behave like bisexuals, then the bisexuals can choose to behave like good, church-going straight people!” Also, the fact is a straight male really can’t take on the same persecution non-heterosexuals face. They can always opt out and they are never told that a part of their identity is immoral (their told that the act their putting on is immoral, but that isn’t the same thing). And of course in some circles being gay or bisexual is a status booster- my friends would be suspicious I was “coming out” for these status-benefits, not out of a genuine attempt at solidarity. Actually, I’ve seen this complain leveled at some college-aged bisexual women.
I went to a kissing workshop. (Things escalated slowly and nothing was mandatory.) I was turned off more quickly than I expected by kisses with guys—just by a very short closed-mouth kiss.
(I like hugs though.)
I’m certain I’d also benefit from the bisexual pill, and my aversion to the idea is irrational.
“I hate spinach, which is a good thing because if I liked it I’d eat it all the time, and I hate the stuff.”—half remembered second-hand quote, apparently from the 19th C(?)
This isn’t exactly very common (I can’t think of a David Bowie bisexual other than David Bowie), and David Bowie was also all kinds of crazy and drugged up at the time. Saying he was gay was kind of stupid, but it certainly was not the dumbest thing he did under the influence of drugs. This is the guy who read some Nietzsche and then misunderstood it so dramatically that he wrote The Supermen. Good song, though.
I’m willing to forgive David Bowie for nearly anything.
We could almost call Oh! You Pretty Things transhumanist pop.
I’d embed a copy of the song but Markdown doesn’t allow, so anyone that wants to listen will have to google for it.
I understand that you’re describing another’s position not your own, but can you describe how that position’s predictions differ from the predictions from “true bisexuality”?
I suppose it predicts a likelihood that any given male bisexual will more and more exclusively have sexual relationships with males, a higher probability of eventually identifying as gay (relative to the probabilities of those of other orientations changing their identifications) and a low probability of a successful and happy relationship with a female.
ETA: The number of people who still identify as bisexual and lead bisexual lifestyles late into adulthood should be negligible modulo some kind of continued denial.
So having been in the bi community for 19 years, I should know lots of men who used to identify as bi but now identify and behave as gay, and relatively few who still identify and behave as bi? In that case I can confidently say that this is nonsense.
Obviously the ones who “turn gay” might not continue to come to bi events, but I’d still have noticed through social networking websites.
I dunno… I talked to a couple of (male, straight) friends of mine about this once. We all agreed that although we were straight, 100% would be an exaggeration. I think it’s probably a continuum, although dominance/submission factors muddy the waters a bit too.
EDIT: I have now officially heard of the Kinsey scale.
I don’t think the fact that most straight men wouldn’t say 100% is particularly strong evidence against the original thesis. It is consistent with the claim that sexual orientation for men is very heavily clustered at the poles of the Kinsey scale.
On the other hand, I think I’ve read claims that everyone is actually bisexual, and people who claim they’re heterosexual are just suppressing their homosexual tendencies and vice versa.
Well, the claims are certainly made. I find them about as absurd as the claims that everyone is actually monosexual, myself, though I’d certainly agree that there are a whole lot of people asserting a far greater degree of monosexuality than they actually possess.
Whenever this subject comes up I’m reminded of a woman at a party who was trotting out the “there are no bisexual men, they’re just gay men in denial” chestnut, to which I replied “Right! I mean, consider me and my husband. We’ve been in a monogamous same-sex relationship for the last twenty years, but we claim to be bisexual solely to preserve our heterosexual privilege. Um. No, wait, how does that work again?”
She was annoyed with me.
My understanding is that bisexuality rarely endures past one’s twenties, and that bisexuals of both genders tend to end up choosing men. Of course, that may stem from the fact that publicly displayed bicuriousity is far less ostracized when it occurs amongst women, so more straight-leaning women are tempted to fool around than straight-leaning men, resulting in most bisexuals settling with men.
Of course, there are people who remain bisexual past that, and my data is not exactly rigorously gathered—I have some friends who study psychology and sexuality, and I’ve heard it from them.
Bisexual males often don’t identify as 50-50 which complicates the matter.
Is someone who is what might be called “prison gay” bisexual? (That is, someone who will engage in homosexual acts as a substitute for masturbation, but is not physically attracted to members of the same sex. Yes, it’s probably a bad/loaded term, but I don’t know what a better one is.)
As I understand it, it’s a standard human response to being trapped with substandard mates to have increasingly-greater estimates of their attractiveness. This has no relevance to sexual orientation.
There don’t seem to be any findable sources that present an unbiased view on the matter (say, relevant statistics), and I suspect that the categories are sufficiently fluid at the moment that the question would be difficult to pin down.
But what if you’re female?
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, straight men are so turned on by the idea of girl on girl sex that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a woman to have sex.
Well, not really. The having enough evidence part at least.
I think “opportunities for a woman to have sex” must mean something entirely different from “opportunities for a man to have sex”, given the facts on the ground w.r.t. the market.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, straight men are so much more promiscuous than gay women that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a woman to have sex.
:-)
Edit: On reflection, this might not be right. But yeah, my point doesn’t exactly apply to straight women.
Funny!
We’ll have to make enough bi-pills for everyone, then.
But the other people of your gender are also restricted to this smaller pool in their search for a pairing, giving you a better chance of being accepted/selected by a particular individual that you’re attracted to (assuming you spend significant time around people in this pool). So this factor may not have a big effect.
Actually, what you really need is the sexchange pill, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds.
I’ll settle for the bisexuality pill, an attractive female-shaped body (including the “vagina-shaped penis”), some time to get used to moving around in it, and the capacity for having multiple orgasms. “Gay man in a woman’s body” is close enough for my purposes. ;)
If you’re calculating this, remember that men are statistically a lot more promiscuous than women.
(See also)
Someone who believes that homosexuality is not immoral, but believes it is a dysfunction.
Actually I have more answers, but this question is just too toxic. So I’ll go meta: Anyone who responds to this question either by saying that rationality is indicated either by signalling acceptance of more-outlandish sexuality, or by signalling intolerance, is indicating their own irrationality; they are turning this question into a tribal test.
How far can you judge a person’s rationality by what sort of evidence they use to support their beliefs about sexuality?
That’s a specific instance of what this post is about, right?
I’m having difficulty parsing your meta observation.
There’s a large community where you are expected to be open to anything except sex with children; and a large community where you are expected to not be open to anything except sex between a monogomous man and woman.
I’m not arguing whether either of these points of view is valid. But both have enough adherents that no position that can be characterized entirely as more liberal or less liberal can identify its holder as rational. Therefore, anyone who says that such a position (for instance, being open to polyamory) indicates rationality, is merely stating their tribal affiliation. The fact that they think that such a stance demonstrates rationality in fact demonstrates their irrationality.
I can think of a few possible exceptions (sexual practices that are far enough beyond the pale that even tongue-pierced goths disclaim them, yet which have no rational basis for being banned), but they’re too toxic for me to mention.
“Merely” is incorrect. If people are employing consistent justifications for their beliefs, that indicates rationality. If their beliefs rely on inconsistent justifications, then they are not.
Suppose I believe polyamory is OK, because I believe that sex between consenting parties will make people happier. If you provided me with overwhelming evidence that most people who practice polyamory are especially miserable specifically because they practice polyamory, that would test my rationality. If I continue to be OK with it, I have an inconsistent belief system. If I cease being OK with it, I am consistently adhering to my beliefs.
Conversely, suppose I believe, “Homosexual sex is wrong because two men can’t procreate.” If you point out, “Post-menopausal women can’t procreate,” then, if I say, “Well, they shouldn’t have sex either!” then I may be a bit crazy, but I’m consistent. If I say, “Well, that’s different” without providing a very specific “that’s different” principle, my beliefs are inconsistent, and I am irrational. If I say, “Homosexuality is wrong because the bible says so,” then I’d better not be wearing clothing made from both cotton and wool while I burn oxen for the Lord.
I think most of what you see in the “internet crowd” is approval of any sexual activity between consenting adults, which is (usually) a highly consistent principle. I am not aware of any such consistent principle among the married hetero-only crowd. I’m not saying there aren’t consistent principles that support a married hetero-only lifestyle, only that it is not my understanding that a large group of people embrace such principles.
If this observation is correct, beliefs about sexuality can be a very strong indicator of rationality if inconsistent, or (at least) a weak indicator if consistent. If they remain consistent through difficult or unusual hypotheticals, that is a strong indication of rationality.
The problem is if the supposedly rational beliefs also happen to be the tribal belief system of a large, pre-existing tribe. Then someone was rational, sometime back in the history, but it isn’t necessarily the person you’re talking to right now.
A better test would be to ask them to defend a sexual view of theirs that they see as unconventional, or at least, not a typical view of their tribe as yet.
This is absolutely true and I’ve changed the last paragraph to reflect that.
I wouldn’t suppose that “being open to polyamory” per se indicates rationality. But I would consider someone rational who, having thought about the matter, and concluded on the basis of sound reasoning that there is no valid reason to condemn polyamory, decided to adopt that lifestyle even in the face of some cultural opposition.
And I would consider someone irrational who, having no sound reasoning behind that position, would act in such a way as to deny others the enjoyment of a non-straight-monogamous lifestyle.
Controversies involving third parties are a valid matter of debate, for instance, I’d concede that there is some grounds to ask whether gay couples should adopt. But to assert, without argument, an interest in what consenting adults do behind closed doors, and that doesn’t cause anyone lasting harm, just because it concerns sex—that does strike me as irrational.
This all presupposes a consequentialist and libertarian ethic: that morality is about harm.
Not necessarily—I don’t think of myself as a consequentialist but as a contractarian. Although I’m less than firm in my metaethical convictions.
Still, I have the clear intuition that someone who would assert a claim against me, based on who I chose to spend time in bed with, isn’t all right in the head. They wouldn’t deny me the right to have dinner with whomever I choose, and (within some reasonable bounds on consent, privacy, and promises made to other people) I see no sound basis to distinguish sex from another sensual experience like dinner.
At the moment I am straight, monogamous, and in fact legally married (for fiscal reasons mostly), but I see no reason to elevate my personal choices and inclinations to the status of universal moral law.
There really do exist those who consider who you’re having dinner with, and what you’re eating to be valid regulatory targets.
Consuming human meat is generally disapproved of...
If you uploaded, would you be willing to let someone else eat your body if they were, y’know, into that sort of thing?
If you wanted to kill yourself you could satisfy the desires of quite a few fringe people at once: have a psychopath kill you, a necrophiliac rape you, and a cannibal eat you. Hell, if done under the right medical supervision it might even be possible to save the organs too (of course, if I were a cannibal I’d probably be bummed out if I didn’t get any liver).
I am constantly amazed by the number of people who commit suicide without getting on the evening news.
I’ve heard that many deaths ruled suicide might be better classified as signaling botches. That is, the individual in question was doing something with the lowest available probability of actually killing them, which would still be recognized as a suicide attempt and thereby provoke reassurances. A multifetish scenario would be far enough outside societal norms to be unlikely to attract support, and virtually impossible to survive.
In other cases, it’s a matter of extreme altruism, not wanting to be a burden on others. That’s more compatible with the psychopath/necrophile/cannibal option, but, statistically speaking, so few people empathize with any of those demographics (let alone all three) that they aren’t common targets for even minor altruism, let alone literal self-sacrifice.
Wait, is it rape if you give pre-mortem consent?
Liver grows back far more readily than any other organ. It might be possible to give the cannibal a slice and still use the rest. Of course, given the shortages of livers, it would probably be better to split it and graft into multiple people.
Eat your simulated body while you are in it (presumably with pain turned off or at least down?) or your original body (which you don’t have any use for anymore in the scenario?)?
Depends on my current state of wealth and the current meaning of “wealth” in the universe. I think if I uploaded I’d still prefer to be frozen/vitrified (or whatever the current state of the art with regards to that is), just in case I ever changed my mind. Also, I hold a bit of sentimental value towards my body, and if I could afford to keep it well preserved for an extremely long time, why not?
If, say, I could only afford to upload if I let someone eat my body and that paid better than medical research or donating my organs, sure, a cannibalism fetishist or super-hardcore foodie could eat my body.
No, but I’d remind them that if they uploaded they could simulate eating it as many times as they wanted. That could go badly if they wanted it as a token of friendship or intimacy, but in that case a too-casual agreement would be equally bad.
Are you talking about vore in general, or snuffie?
Hey, good idea. New question for getting evidence of rationality: “How do you feel about cannibalism? Not killing people, just the act of eating human meat. Imagine that the meat was vat-grown, or you’re a starving survivor of a plane crash, or something.”
I remember once reading Richard Stallman saying that when he dies, if his body cannot be used for medical research, he would want it to be used for cannibalism or necrophilia.
A rather weird thing to say, but on reflection, not quite as weird as people’s usual thoughts on death — “I want my body to be put into the ground so it can decompose” or “I want my body to be burned so it can be of no use to anybody” — right?
Well, along with medical research, organ donation and cryonics also probably exceed the expected utility of cannibalism or necrophilia.
That said, I’m not sure they would be mutually exclusive. My head for my future self, my innards for the sick, my penis and anus for lovers, and my arms and legs for the hungry.
NEW UTILITARIAN LITMUS TEST
Perhaps a slightly more poetic phrasing like “My head for myself, my organs for the sick, my crotch for the horny, and my limbs for the hungry.”
(Of course the most tasty meat is on the torso, at least in cows...)
Cryonics and organ donation is really a winning combination. It solves the organ donor’s worry that doctors might not take long shots at saving your life if they can harvest your organs instead.
As I understand, current cryo practices use your circulatory system to get cryopreservant into your brain, and this leaves your organs useless.
Is this wrong?
This is correct but I imagine it could be bypassed, if you severed the head and used the carotid arteries / jugular veins. I imagine that’s much messier and more difficult than doing the whole body through one well-defined entry point, but may be possible.
shit
I tried searching to find a citation for this and the most obvious keywords just take me here. 50 karma to anyone who has enough Google-fu to find me a citation.
I was thinking of the fourth post on this page. Looks like I misremembered, he didn’t mention cannibalism, but given the rest of that post, I’d bet money that he’d be fine with it (perhaps as a third choice).
Here.
Command-F “corpse”.
In context and reading quickly, I thought you were suggesting a macro in Emacs.
I think disgust is the normal reaction and doesn’t tell anything about rationality so you’d need to ask about the ethics of eating human meat.
It could be a good test of feeling rational, if the premises were defined clearly enough. Presumably, most of us would not object morally to the idea of eating human meat if we were certain that it had been vat-grown, and would not object practically if we were reasonably sure that it is safe, but I’d guess that many of us would have a cached disgust response anyway, which, under these circumstances, would not be rational (because the disgust emotion would be stopping us from doing something that does not oppose our goals or values). I have to admit I’d probably fall into that group, those people who would not morally object but would feel disgusted anyway (especially as I’m used to feeling disgusted by all meat).
ISTM that the most likely evolutionary origin of disgust is a warning sign of a high risk of infection or poisoning, which would be present in the plane crash scenario so I wouldn’t even necessarily call it an irrational feeling.
Moreover not being content with someone merely acting rationally when being confronted with a powerful impulse towards a certain reaction that in this particular situation happens to be irrational, but going so far as requiring that they not even feel this impulse in that situation seems to be asking a bit much. One might say that displaying this attitude towards humans is rather irrational.
Dunno, I’ve never tasted it.
If your main decision criterion is the taste of the meat, then you have already given your answer.
(I hear it tastes more or less like pork, in case you were wondering.)
Vat-grown meat could still be a problem if it provided the real (killer) cannibals with camouflage.
I’m not the first to point this out, but by that reasoning, rape is no worse than forcing someone to eat broccoli.
I’d appreciate if you would read my parenthetical qualifications before making misleading comments about my “reasoning”.
I disapprove of coercion in general, but it seems clear that people in general experience sex as a much more significant experience than eating, to the extent that rape can make for life-threatening emotional trauma. Given these (possibly local) facts of human nature, we would clearly not agree to a social contract that provided no protection from rape.
What about forcing 3^^^3 people to eat broccoli?
I don’t see any reason to either. The problem is I’m not sure I see a reason not to. Rationality governs our degrees of belief and how we incorporate new evidence into our degrees of belief. I don’t see how rationality can govern our terminal values. You’re right that there is no sound basis to distinguish sex from dinner, but there is also no sound basis to distinguish sex from murder. To say otherwise requires a pretty untenable kind of moral naturalism. Moral acts and immoral acts aren’t natural kinds. PhilGoetz’s original point is fully generalizable to all claims about terminal values. Policy positions are indicative of irrationality only when they are inconsistent with the subscriber’s own values.
Thus, in my comment elsewhere on this post, I hedged when it came using support for immigration as an indicator of rationality among conservatives because opposition to immigration may well be the right position to hold if you don’t value the welfare of immigrants or value cultural homogeneity.
There clearly is, at least on my contractarian view. You would not consent to a social contract that left you vulnerable to murder, if it could be avoided.
I’m not sure this works (Why would a strict social conservative consent to a contract that allowed me to have sex with multiple partners at the same time?). But no matter: If the distinction is only non-arbitrary given your normative ethics then you need to give non-arbitrary reasons why we should all be contractarians. Otherwise you’ve just pushed the conversation back a step.
The contract view appeals to me because it takes as a starting point the fact of our living in large groups; that much is non-arbitrary. In this context, some sort of basis for adjudicating our claims against each other is a requirement, just as food or shelter are a requirement. On this view, the features of social contracts that would make for more general agreement—such as protection from murder—can be treated differently from features of these contracts that would make for narrower (temporally and geographically local) agreement. One way to formalize this intuition is Rawls’ veil of ignorance.
I suppose this is a nifty feature for a normative theory to have but there doesn’t seem to be a reason why my values must proceed from this fact. I have a theory where an old book tells me what I should value. What argument is there to dissuade me? Moreover, contractarianism is hardly the only normative theory which uses this fact as a starting point. Indeed, the other theory I have in mind, communitarianism, is often sympathetic to certain kinds of social conservative positions!
True, you can treat them differently. But the social conservative wants to treat them the same.
Rawls is formalizing our intuitions about justice in a liberal society. But it is exactly that—a popular intuition. I share this intuition. But there is nothing in rationality (as we mean the term, here) that compels that intuition if you don’t already hold it. If you believe in liberal justice it is indeed irrational to oppose polyamory. The point is, lots of people aren’t Rawlsian liberals!
Looping back to the starting point of this discussion, from which we are in danger of drifting too far, what I wanted to say is that people who take an intolerant position on the subject of (say) homosexuality do not seem to do so after having held up their own ethical intuitions to anything like the kind of scrutiny you and others here are clearly capable of.
Rather, they seem to rationalize an immediate “eww” reaction and look for any ammunition they can find supporting their intution that “people shouldn’t do that”. That strikes me as irrational. This comment seemed to be saying much the same thing.
My stance, I guess, could be summarized as “Show me someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, or polyamory.” That is, consistent reasons, stable under reflection.
The best general argument for conservativism I’ve encountered is that we should pay attention to established social customs and innate moral intuitions because the world is a complex place and practices that persist over time probably exist for a good reason. The fact that we don’t fully understand the reason for a practice is not enough to discard it, we should exercise caution when messing with established customs because we don’t fully understand what customs are key to society achieving whatever level of success it has so far achieved.
I don’t fully buy this argument but I think it has some merit. Thus it is not necessarily irrational to see an intuitive “eww” reaction as a reason to think that we should exercise caution when liberalizing attitudes towards the provoking practice. I think the generous interpretation of the social conservative attitude to homosexuality is that the “eww” reaction probably exists for some ‘good’ reason and should not be totally ignored. Generating hypotheses to explain why the “eww” is beneficial is not necessarily an irrational first step to understanding what’s really going on.
Relatively few social conservatives can articulate this argument but some can and I don’t think it is fair to dismiss them as irrational. Indeed the more thoughtful conservatives tend to think that most people are not capable of thinking rationally about the costs and benefits of certain behaviours and so social customs must do the work of preserving the ‘good’ society.
-- John Brunners
mattnewport’s comment was much more broad and insightful than “This is old therefore it is good”.
His point (paraphrasing the general conservative thesis) is that social customs arise as solutions to difficult problems and have highly immodular interplay. Therefore, before relaxing them, you should at least identify what problem it was (believed to be) solving, and how it interplays with the other customs and factors (including the ick factor in others).
In the case of homosexuality, the taboo against it is extremely common across cultures, which suggests some kind of mechanism like, “Cultures that didn’t have a taboo against it were outbred or otherwise dominated by a more populous culture.”
Of course, no one actually argues for such a taboo against it today on that basis, though it has the trappings of a good argument: “If we don’t have pro-reproduction customs, we’ll be unable to withstand the memetic overload from cultures that do, and will be unable to perpetuate our values across generations.” (Several European countries provide good examples of cultures slowly losing their ability to protect Western values by being outbred by those who don’t share those values.)
But even so, if this is the concern, there are much better, Pareto-surperior ways to go about it: e.g., require everyone to either have children, help with the raising of other’s children, or pay a tax after a certain age that goes toward relieving the burden of others’ childbearing.
Unfortunately, the debate on the issue is nowhere near this point.
I’m sorry if you felt I was advocating a position when instead I understood and was in agreement with his points. I was merely supplying an interesting quote about half of them.
I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning.
Tell me what reasoning I was supposed to find your comment, as it related to the parent’s point, and if we can agree there’s something non-foolish about it, I’ll revise my comment. Sound good?
There are two kinds of fools:
One says, “This is old therefore it is good.”: Conservatism, when the person is holding beliefs for irrational reasons (fear, ick-factor, a desire to avoid all change, etc.)
The other one says, “This is new therefore it is better.”: Change advocates, when they fail to take into account the possibility that conservative positions may be robust or long standing solutions to difficult problems that made sense for a large period of time or in certain cultures.
Both sides can hold the correct position for irrational reasons, and one should put thought into it, and obtain more knowledge, before deciding which is correct.
So it didn’t say anything that the parent of your quotation comment hadn’t already said?
Yes. It’s almost as if I was merely supplying an interesting quote.
And as much as I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning, likewise, I do not appreciate passive aggressive questions whose intent is apparently to state my comment is worthless to you.
I’m sorry that I took the valuable 4 seconds it took to read the quote, and that it spawned this subthread where you have continued to complain about my posting of the comment. I’m sorry that it bothers you enough that you feel the need to indirectly call me a fool, and to indirectly say my comment is worthless.
I apologize for giving you grief about the quote.
When I initially saw it, the tone of the quote seemed to reveal a lack of assimilation of the insight mattnewport gave; to the extent that the quote is doing so in this context, such oversimplification does count as a (3rd) kind of foolishness. I do not, however, deem you a fool.
While I still don’t think the quote was helpful, I will remove the remark that implies you are a fool. And, as standard practice, I didn’t mod down any of your comments in this thread because I was involved in the thread’s argument.
Please do not take offense.
“Discrimination when considering changing things is important” is what I got from it.
That is a severe undercounting of types of fools.
-- Unknown
Lame quote because everyone I have ever met who starts indexes at 0 says “2 types”: it is just that they call them Type 0 and Type 1 instead of Type 1 and Type 2.
ADDED. I am not saying that writers should start indexes at 0, just that the fact alluded to in the quote (that, e.g., the “1” in “Type 1″, is different from “2”) is not a good reason for avoiding the practice. A good reason to avoid the practice is that diverging from a long-standing stylistic convention distracts without contributing anything substantial to your point.
It’s a joke.
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
You can start your indexes anywhere. 0 and 1 are the most common but I have had occasion to use others. (Not technically contradicted by the joke but enough to make it lame… you just have to count the types after the colon and ignore the number).
It doesn’t matter how you index it, the size is not altered. {0 ⇒ “a”, 1 ⇒ “b”}.size = 2. {1 ⇒ “a”, 2=>”b”}.size = 2. (I say this to elevate it from rhollerith’s “everyone I have ever met” to “everyone who isn’t wrong”.)
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails. In fact, even here the “It’s a joke” reply is upvoted to 3. Humor as a conversation halter is (epistemically) undesirable when it conveys false meaning.
I thought the error in logic contributed to the humour in the joke. A perfect parallel to a joke I’d already heard (the binary one) would be less amusing.
I saw the joke before the context so I can’t really say how it affected the conversation, but it didn’t look sufficiently related to the parent to be either misleading or informative about how many types of fools there are. At worst it could be distracting.
I agree with you about jokes in general having a risk of being misleading. I think a good response to a joke that’s misleading in a way you care about is to acknowledge that it’s a joke and respond seriously anyway. And distinguish between replying to the joke and the joke-teller, unless you’re willing to assume the teller agrees with the joke’s implications.
This advice is targeted at the context of lesswrong discussions, where the joke’s been there for minutes or hours,. I don’t know that it would be a faux pas in general, but it would changing conversation tone to a serious mood to respond in real-time like that. Also I don’t know that I’d use it in a hostile environment.
What would be your suggestion for repairing the situation?
Ignore it. At the margin such effort would be far better spent on bigger, easier to fix issues. On average humor seems (to me) to push away from bullshit rather than towards it so counters would need to be fine tuned.
Something most of us do automatically is reduce association with people who don’t share our sense of humor. People who actively use humor for anti-epistemic purposes (ie. not you) I tend to avoid unconscously. They feel evil.
It would probably work well if you rattle it off quickly in a real-time conversation because it would show that you are engaged and have some wits about you, but what does it contribute to a conversation in which participants have hours to formulate a reply before the reply becomes stale?
Maybe I’m missing something: is there a truth or half-truth buried in, “There are 1 types of people in the world: those who start indexes at 0, and those who don’t,” that I have missed?
The potential for humor. Is this not an acceptable purpose on Lesswrong? If so, I will cease posting potentially humorous or interesting quotes and other miscellany outside of Quote and Open Threads.
I don’t think most people object to humour here, I think the complaint was not that this was a joke but that it was not a very good joke.
I don’t think it’s a very good joke for the same reason as rhollerith but then I’m a dyed-in-the-wool C++ programmer so I can’t understand why anyone would start indexes at 1...
Speaking just for myself—well, speaking for myself and for anyone who upvotes this comment—I have a slight preference for you to restrict your humor and interesting quotes to Rationality Quotes, which by the way I do not read. (I do not have a way to avoid reading humorous comments in Open Thread without avoiding all the other comments there.)
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
You can start your indexes anywhere. 0 and 1 are the most common but I have had occasion to use others.
It doesn’t matter how you index it, the size is not altered. {0 ⇒ “a”, 1 ⇒ “b”}.size = 2. {1 ⇒ “a”, 2=>”b”}.size = 2.
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails.
I hope I have not made you feel unwelcome, Rain. I find what you have to say interesting in general, and I am glad you are here.
ADDED. And I admire anyone who donates to the Singularity Institute.
I have found the persona required to interact positively with this community to be very different than the others I have adopted in the past, and the scrutiny is merciless.
Which is to say, I have mixed feelings on the matter, and am willing to continue engagement.
I am intrigued and wonder how much my experience matches yours. Are there any observations you would be willing to share?
1) Use longer sentences and bigger words. The community appears to react favorably to academic styling in prose.
2) State all the givens. Things which I believed would be understood automatically and omitted to save time are much more likely to be picked apart as flaws, where the other person assumes I have not thought the matter through.
3) Be careful about how much you share. People here are far more willing to do research and analysis to pick apart every claim you make, even if its a metaphor, and they will look into your background. Any of the information you’ve posted can and will be used against (for?) you. Alternately, this same point should be used as a suggestion for how to treat other posters. Link to their previous comments and any evidence regarding their claims.
4) Don’t let your rationality slip due a sense of comradery. I feel that this community doesn’t treat commenters as friends; rather, it feels more like being treated as a coworker who is on the clock. As Morendil phrased it, “I wish someone had told me, quite plainly [...] this is a rationality dojo.”
That’s off the top of my head and in no particular order. There are other aspects I’m still developing which do not have a formal definition.
Yes—I have seen this so many times!
It’s particularly frustrating, because encountering it feels like discovering that you’ve overestimated your audience at the same time that they’ve underestimated you.
I’ve noticed this too, and I long for the day when our rationality skills have advanced to the point where we can be rational and nice.
I haven’t really seen 3), and EY’s posts undermine 1) significantly, it seems to me.
Of his most recently posted articles: Undiscriminating Skepticism scores at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level 17 and a Gunning Fog index of 17.9, You’re Entitled to Arguments is at 16 and 17.8, and Outside View as Conversation Halter is at 14 and 14.5. Note that a score of 15+ is considered academic writing by these measures. Tests of his recently upvoted comments show scores ranging from 7 to 20.
Here’s the Flesch-Kincaid calculator I used, and the Gunning Fog calculator. I would be surprised if other measures of readability, and tests of his other posts, did not show it to be academic-level writing.
“Undiscriminating Skepticism”—why, that’s ten (10) syllables right there in the title! My head is already spinning!
Seriously: tests like those do not control for the content or subject matter of the writing. There exists, furthermore, a significant subset of the (adult!) human population who would consider a phrase like “undiscriminating skepticism” itself to be difficult and unusually abstract. Needless to say, tests which heavily weight the judgements of such people are not very useful for the purpose of judging “readability” in most contexts here.
If you want to judge the readability of LW posts, I suggest spending some time reading typical articles published in academic journals.
You’re right! It’s agonizing! Oh the pain of posting and reading here! My mouth is bloodied. You have defeated me, oh wise and amazing person who obviously knows better and is fully within their right to ridicule every attempt I make to explain the use of a single word in a sentence whose structure is still largely intact, as it was meant to be a frickin’ suggestion.
good jorb.
(addresses both of the posters above)
Wow, sarcasm. That’s original.
And yet I find his writing a model of clarity here, despite a few randomly chosen articles by other people having a far lower Fog Index. How useful are these indices? On the Gunning Fog page it says “The higher the Fog Index the trickier it is to read.” But the Wiki pages for these tests reference no empirical studies.
I find his writing to be very readable as well. However, I consider myself highly educated, with excellent English skills, and I have been following his writing for some years now.
I was deferring to experts in the field of readability, and considered it likely that they would provide a better measure than self-reports of “looks fine to me.”
Further, it seems likely to me that Eliezer is very good at targeting his audience and maintaining interest despite the complexity of his prose. Academic doesn’t mean “boring” by necessity. One of the references from the Gunning Fog page states:
And yes, I do realize that this criticism can be applied to my own use of the tool, but point out that the measure directly supports my initial statement: “Use longer sentences and bigger words,” with the caveat that you should also be a good writer, to ensure the complexity doesn’t hinder the message. Or I could add, only do this if you can get away with it (still be a successful communicator).
I’d also like to point out that this feels like a good example of the dojo-style response to my clumsy use of a single word: academic.
What works for EY may not work for everyone else. For better or worse, he enjoys a special status in this community.
A status earned precisely by writing posts that people enjoy reading!
If you’re suggesting that the ordinary academic/intellectual norm of only allowing high-status people to write informally, with everyone else being forced to write in soporific formal-sounding prose, is operative here, then I suggest we make every effort to nip that in the bud ASAP.
This is a blog; let’s keep it that way.
It feels the same way from the other end too! I.e. “Really? I have to explain this to you?”
There’s definitely a martial feel to the way this community requires you to earn its respect, rather than granting it to you almost immediately upon uttering the appropriate shibboleths as is common elsewhere. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
Sometimes I feel that upvotes are wordless substitutes for what would otherwise be verbal “strokes” of appreciation; the community prefers when words are used to convey info rather than good vibes.
I would add a 5) which really surprised me when I noticed it: link, link, link. This is a community which lives less than others in an ever-flowing present, but instead constantly strives to weave together past, present and future thought and discourse. That could well be an explanation for your 3.
I feel perfectly at home with 1) as long as it doesn’t reach the passive-voice level of academic styling. I see the writing style here as literate rather than academic. ;)
Perhaps I’m just being oblivious, but only the first of these ring true for me.
Actually, to me, the first seems rather like a G* for the G that is precision and the third and fourth seem like ordinary, fully-general good advice.
It might be worth noting that all are fundamentally comparative—it could be that your starting point on 2-4 is sufficiently different to Rain’s as to render them inapt.
Good list. I was going to say “in particular, 3)” but 2, 3 and 4 all seem to be vying for first spot. I’ve certainly noticed that any forays into comradery seem to backfire. I don’t notice 1) but that is probably because I have instead stopped noticing the converse.
It is sometimes very difficult detect expertise and to communicate it. This would be a very helpful skill to improve on but I have no idea how.
I guess this is right. I tend to very rapidly adapt the style of writing or talking of people around me. I feel like I manage to get in a fair amount of levity, though. Somehow “True story: my lesbian roommate runs mad game” got 5 karma. Sometimes I think, informal language is a way people here highlight really important messages. You’ll see really informal bumper-stickers to summarize academic style posts, I guess because informal language stands out from the formal.
This makes me sad. It hasn’t felt quite that bad to me, still sad that people feel this way though.
Have you thought about which of these you would change?
They were observations about how I’ve had to alter myself to fit in successfully. I wasn’t trying to judge whether they were good or bad, and I’m not sure any of them really need changing.
The only thing I’d look into further is the amount of time people spend “on the clock” or sparring in the dojo, preferring a bit more tolerance of lighter material. But this desire appears at odds with the standards of the community, as it seems to consider lighter material as pure noise in the signal/noise ratio, and there’s a high demand for signal.
To appease both desires, perhaps improve on the Open Thread-style areas. Forums? More easily followed thread structures? Allowance for ‘OpenThread’ tagged, top-level posts with separate ‘recent’ threads? I’m not sure what specific action to suggest.
Right, but it’s obviously inferior to the common “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who use binary, and those who don’t.”
Or as G. K. Chesterton may have put it:
(It’s a good summary of the linked passage, but I can’t find evidence that he ever expressed it in this form, which is variously attributed.)
That is perhaps a good argument in favor of conservatism in general, but it falls short of my request to point at someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, at the very least as practiced in private.
I’m not saying that anyone who opposes, say, gay marriage or gay adoption is irrational by virtue of having that position. But it seems clear that people who allow their “eww” reaction to become an excuse to “pick on the queer”, as is seen for instance in cases of workplace harassment, are simply not using their heads, to put it mildly.
If you believed that
The level of homosexuality could be reduced through taboos (for example, if people chose to be gay)
Homosexuals have fewer children than heterosexuals
You were a total utilitarian, or wanted to ensure your culture wasn’t out-competed.
a few trivial other beliefs, like that gay people didn’t have unusually high positive externalities)
then you might oppose homosexuality, including as practiced in private.
Disclaimer: I do not hold the above view, for fairly standard Libertarian reasons, and also do not believe all the premises are true.
There’s one more belief needed for that complex to make sense—that the costs (both to homosexuals and to heterosexuals) of suppressing homosexuality are low enough to counterbalance the benefits.
I was considering adding it in, but I think the costs of the missed ‘lives worth living’ would likely exceed it greatly, assuming the first premise is true.
Edit: I just editted it in, and then re-removed it. Firstly, it makes the whole thing trivial, and secondly, I was only presenting a sketch of a case- really, we’d need a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, this is outlining one of the benefits.
If you’re trying to convey a system of thought you don’t agree with, you might as well include all the bits and pieces.
The interesting thing about that anti-homosexual argument is it considers the costs of repressing homosexuality to be so low for homosexuals that they aren’t even generally conscious for the conservative.
Also, there are costs to non-homosexuals—frex, it’s rough for a heterosexual to be married to a homosexual who’d hoped (with support from their culture) that they’d get over their homosexuality.
And if a homosexual is driven to suicide, it’s very hard on their family.
I’m not familiar with this word but I’ve seen you use it a couple of times now. Google didn’t enlighten me either. Is it short for for example?
Yes. I didn’t realize it was so rare.
Well, part of the idea may be that you’re not repressing, you’re curing: they cease to be homosexual. They’re ex ante pleased to be cured, and the cost of healing/oppressing is one-time rather than life-long.
Whatever the suicide rate would be, I doubt it’s high enough to make up for the loss of potential-children.
I’m sure that’s part of the premise, but my point was that the low cost is simply assumed rather than examined. Also, the possibility of a failure rate isn’t considered.
None of the premises are examined; they’re all assumed. Clearly, as we all agree the argument is unsound at least one of them (including those implied but not delineated) must be false, and it’s not particularly important which. What Morendil asked for, more or less, was a rational argument against private homosexuality.
Obviously, no unsound argument should be stable under reflection, but from the point of view of Classical Logic this seems to satisfy the requirements.
If you’d like it more formally, I’ll write out all the premises in full and come up with a cost/benefit analysis / natural deduction proof—but it wouldn’t help answer the request, because we’re not discussing whether or not private homosexuality is bad, but whether there are any (close enough to) rational arguments for the other side.
Mostly agree, but what exactly is “the” libetarian reason for rejecting that chain of reasoning? A libertarian (and I consider myself one) would tend to reject the premises, but not the deductions you made based on the premises.
Also, as a libertarian, do you believe something like, “If rampant homosexuality/ childless/ etc. leads to a libertarian society being undermined and outbred, so be it—that means the whole program was flawed to begin with”? What’s your general position on libertarian-permitted acts that, at the large scale, would undermine the ablity of a society to remain libertarian?
(Btw, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a “hardcore” libertarian drew a lot of criticism for his position that practioners of non-family-centered lifestyles would have to be “physicallly removed” from a libertarian society for it to function.)
Usual disclaimer: the chain of reasoning you gave still wouldn’t justify opposition to homosexuality, but rather, a kind of compromise like I proposed before, where you can either have/adopt children of your own, or pay a tax after a certain age.
Things like the utility homosexuals get from freely expressing themselves, and the various Public Choice problems with implementing the system. But I also think the first premise is false, and third is at least a simplification.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t adopt the nearest stable system, which could be Libertarianism without sexual freedom.
I would bite the HHH bullet and say that we’d have to do something about it. Things like SeaSteading provide non-coercive alternatives, in basically the same way that making property rights totally secure would prevent being outnumbered being a problem.
However, Minarchists are quite happy to accept taxes to defend liberty, and I know the President of the Oxford Libertarians would accept conscription, and I don’t think there’s that much difference. It may well be that we should adopt a consequentialist deontology: we act in such a way as to maximise rule-following. The danger here is that in breaking rules to try to enforce them, we might undermine them further.
In general, I don’t think Libertarianism has much chance without a culture of individual responsibility, quite possibly family-based.
I would imagine the general form of an argument to that effect would be that taboos against homosexuality must exist for a reason and despite not fully understanding that reason we should preserve the taboos for fear of causing unintended damage to society. If you are the kind of person who believes that society should formalize its taboos as legal prohibitions then you might support laws against the private practice of homosexuality.
To be clear, I’m a staunch libertarian and so firmly oppose laws against any kind of sexual activity between consenting adults but the libertarian position on prohibitions on the activities of individuals is neutral on the question of whether any activity is in the best long term interests of the participants or on the pros or cons of indirect consequences on society as a whole. I also support the right of an employer to refuse to employ homosexuals or the proprietor of a business to refuse to serve them for example.
It is fairly common on both the left and the right to oppose practices that are considered harmful both through social taboos and through legal prohibition on private activity. The only real difference is in the types of activities that are considered harmful. I see little difference between a social conservative arguing that homosexuality should be illegal because we don’t know the potential consequences for society and a left liberal arguing that GM foods should be illegal because we don’t know the potential consequences for society. In both cases it arguably should be an empirical question but in practice it is driven largely by the “eww” response in the majority of people.
I suggest looking up the views of communitarians on these topics. Some names: David Popenoe, Amitai Etzioni. See this book, and especially this part from Popenoe. tl;dr: The won’t go as far as the most bigoted but they’re also not cool with just affirming homosexuality and out of wedlock promiscuity. Communitarianism isn’t my bag of tea but it has pretty firm theoretical foundations and the research that suggests marriage’s importance isn’t obviously bunk.
As for those who are just rationalizing an “eww” reaction, their mistake isn’t basing their terminal values on disgust, their mistake is trying to justify those values in terms liberals, who don’t share their intuition, can understand. “Polyamory should be prohibited because polyamory is immoral” is a consistent position. See Jonathan Haidt’s page on the foundations of morality. Most people who object to polyamory and homosexuality are coming from the purity/sanctity foundation (i.e. “ewww!”). But there is nothing rationalist or not rationalist about these intuitions. They’re just intuitions like all moral reasons. You and I might have more complicated intuitions that can be formalized in interesting ways and employ philosophers—But I’m with Hume here, you can’t reason your way to morality.
An interesting related recent post from Haidt regards the similarity between the social conservative attitude to sexual purity/sanctity and the left liberal attitude to food and the environment:
That’s a direct quote from Popenoe, so our very different intuitions are converging to at least some common ground. That’s suggestive of something.
Well, there seem to be strong regularities in the moral intutions developed by healthy humans, strong regularities in our terminal values, strong and predictable regularities in our instrumental values (or more precisely what Gary Drescher calls our “delegated values”, what Rawls calls “primary social goods”, what it is rational to desire whatever else we desire).
Reason is a tool whereby we can expoit these regularities and so compress our discourse about people’s claims against each other; I don’t see why we should refrain from using that tool merely because the subject of discourse is a particular subset of human intuitions. We do not shy from using it in our analysis of other types of intuitions, and there is nothing which designates “moral thinking” as less subject to analysis than other types of thinking.
Further, there is some evidence that our moral intutions are changing over time; and they are changing in consequence of our thinking about them. In the same way that we have found it useful for our thinking about the material world to incorporate some insights that we now label “rationality”, so I expect to find that our thinking about our own moral intutions (which are part of the material world) will also benefit from these insights.
I don’t think Rawls’s work is useless or meaningless. Indentifying regularities in human moral intuitions and applying our reasoning to them to clarify or formalize is a worthwhile enterprise. It can help us avoid moral regret, spot injustice and resolve contradictions. But you can’t justify the whole edifice rationally. There isn’t any evidence to update on beyond the intuitions we already have. You start with your moral intuitions, you don’t adopt all of them as a result of evidence. There is no rationalist procedure for adjudicating disputes between people with different intuitions because there isn’t any other evidence to tilt the scale.
I believe my comment here addresses your concern.
Actually I come closer to being convinced by this one here, at least for the general case in favor of transcribing taboos into prohibitions.
I do note that both the Popenoe passage linked earlier and the observation that “the taboo against [homosexuality] is extremely common across cultures” run counter to some of the evidence. And that there is plenty of evidence that this and similar taboos, when enforced, are enforced hypocritically.
That links to this comment. Which argument did you mean?
The relevant period to look at would be the modern era (post 1500), when new advances would screen off the apparent connection between old taboos as their function. And in that period, it is significant that populations making up most of the world, depsite separation and diversity in other areas, had such a taboo. Yes, places have relaxed taboos since then, but they were all taboos that had a long origin.
What do you mean “hypocritically”? Homosexuals enforcing the taboo? I’ll assume you meant “inconsistently”, in which case I still think you’re not addressing the conservative argument. Of course their enforcement will look inconsistent, because it has long been detached from its original change-in-taboo/consequence feedback loop (like the woman who follows the family tradition of cutting off the ends of a turkey without realizing that the tradition only began in order to be able to fit it into the first generation’s small oven).
Nevertheless (the conservative argument goes), you still need to be able to identify the need the taboo filled and its interplay with the other social mechanisms before justifably concluding it’s time to end the taboo.
So, I ask you: Do you accept that a culture has to be pro-reproduction to avoid memetic overload from cultures with different values? If so, what would be the limit of the taboos/prohibitions you would want for achieving that end, given the resistance people will put up to different kinds of laws? (e.g. why not make use of people’s existing ick-reactions?)
Just to clarify, I’m not defending laws against homosexuality, just pointing out reasonable concerns that underlie the (unjustifiable) prohibitions, since you asked.
A google search for:
vatican prostitution ring, or
anti-gay congressman
should be amusing.
Edited grandparent to point to correct comment.
People imposing the taboo on others are violating it privately.
I’d have to think about that.
I concur with Morendil that Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance” is a rather elegant way of showing morality to be conditionally objective.
I think you may be overestimating the consistency of the social conservative viewpoint. If you were to tell them about how, when, where & why they could have sex, they would be outraged—even if you couched it in, say, biblical terms. I don’t think many social conservatives really believe that sex is a community matter. They’re just applying a good old fashioned double standard. Call them on their own sexual behaviour and they’ll rush back to consensual ethics (“none of your business!”) so fast you’ll see Lorentz contraction.
I don’t know what work “conditionally” is doing here. But I’m pretty sure Rawls himself doesn’t take his theory to justice to show that morality is objective. In fact, in A Restatement he explicitly disclaims that he has demonstrated morality is objective. What he is doing is trying to formalize Western/liberal intuitions about justice.
(EDIT: Just checked. The correct interpretation of the initial publication of A Theory of Justice is that Rawls is trying to demonstrate the objective truth of liberalism, but in later publications he changes his mind in response to criticisms and agrees that he is really just formalizing this intuition of justice as fairness)
I’m certain there are non-hypocritical social conservatives somewhere. I don’t think prohibiting polyamory while also allowing measures of sexual privacy are necessarily inconsistent. Holding that some aspect of sexual behavior should be community matters does not require holding that all aspects of sexual behavior must be community matters.
Lorentz contraction. (Oddly enough, I made the opposite correction a week ago for the Lorenz attractor.)
Yikes, thanks!
Already corrected. :) It’s late.
I suspect that there are good game-theoretical/TDT reasons for the rule that one shouldn’t break promises, so if Alice has promised to Bob that she won’t have sex to anybody else, I’d say it’d be wrong for Alice to have sex with Charlie even if both Alice and Charlie are consenting. (But the idea that people should never have sex unless they promise each other to not have sex with anyone else I do find silly.)
I for one would like you to mention them.
It’s just as dysfunctional as non-vaginal straight sex is.
Your position may be valid; but in the context of the current distribution of opinions on sexuality, it does not in itself signal rationality to me. And that’s what we’re discussing.
Emotionally, I feel I have two tribes: the meatspace upper-middle-class collegiate culture and my Internet circle of acquaintances.
In the meatspace tribe, vanilla heterosexuality or homosexuality are considered normal and unremarkable, things like 2 girls 1 cup, goatse, etc. are considered disgusting/gross-out material—and I cannot remember anyone acknowledging anything else.
In the Internet tribe, sexual relations of any kind between consenting adults are considered fine provided that they are carried out in private, sexual intercourse between teenage minors is considered normal (fine or not may vary), and crossing the line … well, I haven’t heard Snape/Hermione strongly condemned, but pedophilia is definitely out. I note that no-one I know talks about anything involving permanent damage, however.
If you’re looking for unusual concepts for use as test cases (and have a strong stomach), I recommend poking around and asking some open-ended questions on gurochan.net. The site has, of necessity, a very diverse and open-minded attitude toward anything which does not directly threaten it’s primary objectives.
Hi Clarisse, and Welcome to LessWrong! I’ve seen your blog, and I’m happy to see you commenting here. (I comment as “Doug S.” on various feminism-related blogs—I’m not very prolific, but you may have seen a couple here and there.)
Hi Doug! Yes, I remember you. I’ve actually read a number of posts here, and I’ve commented once here before, but I was too angry and irrational and in feminist-community mode during that little fracas, so I decided to give myself lots of time to cool off before posting again. (Note that the original post has been edited to the point where it is no longer clear what pissed me off.) (I also discussed some of the cultural differences between this site and the feminist blogosphere that contributed to that blowup in the comments here.)
Almost every tribe tacitly accepts the assumption that it is healthy and appropriate to have a passionate interest in the sex lives of complete strangers. Disagreement with that assumption would lead me to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief.
Cultural norm for me is “sexuality is a matter of choice between consenting adults”.
Non-mainstream beliefs around sexuality that I’m currently curious about include PUA lore, and this interesting site.
I agree about what my cultural norm is.
I disagree with it on two points. I’m pretty sure the legal age of consent is set considerably too high, though I’m not sure where it should be, or whether there should be a legal age of consent.
I think the “enthusiastic consent” standard in Yes Means Yes makes sense.
open thread