Part of me wants to write: “You’re a brave and forthright person, and I admire you for it.”
Another part of me, which I think is motivated by your honesty, reads that and says I should write: “I just wrote that because I want you to like me, and it reads like it might get an upvote (after LW acceptance subprocess runs consciously), proving someone else likes me, too.”
When I’m alone, alert and unoccupied, those two parts (there may be more, I don’t know) are always bickering. Thing 1 decides some feeling or idea is good, or correct, or sincere, and Thing 2 almost always has to come back and say why my conclusion is based entirely in bias or rationalization. I think this is why I try not to be alone, alert and unoccupied very often.
When I’m around other people, Thing 2 mostly shuts up, only butting in if Thing 1 is getting carried away with pleasing people, or bragging, or lying (i.e. making the truth sound more exciting), etc. I like Thing 2 quite a lot at those times.
When I’m tired or have a drink, Thing 1 and Thing 2 both go to sleep before the rest of my cognition does.
When I’m occupied, there is sometimes some bickering if I’m occupied at a game, or a blog, or something that’s not useful, but it’s not too bad. It sometimes gets to be enough that I’ll do something useful to stop the conflict.
So, that’s my Usual Live Life subroutine. It’s kind of bleak because Thing 2 insisted I write it this way, but I do manage to be happy, entertained, challenged, or deeply thoughtful most of the time.
So, why write this in response to the OP? Because my first internal response to the OP was “That’s a lot like me!” And then I read Friendly-HI’s response and I thought “That’s a lot like me!” And this bugged me. So, I thought I’d try to describe from an internal, process-oriented perspective how my days go by, and see whether that clicks more with one of you than the other (or anyone else who wants to chime in).
I didn’t catch your comment for a long time, because it wasn’t in response to my own and thus didn’t light up the red message symbol. Just stumbled over it by accident, so here’s my response a mere 1,5 months later:
I feel next to no conflict or friction between my rational and my emotional self, whether I’m on my own or with company. I radically adhere and submit to the guiding principle that “if it is true, I want to believe it and if it is false, I want to reject it”. So if I happen to have some kind of innate feeling or intuition about some objective topic, I immediately catch it and just kill it off as best I can (usually pretty good) in favor of a rational analysis. But these days I usually don’t have many of these “emotional preconceptions” left anyway. Over the years I buried so many of my favorite emotional preconceptions about every imaginable topic in favor of what appears to be “the truth”, that the act of giving up some idiotic emotion about a serious topic in favor of a better model hardly stings at all anymore. It feels quite good to let go actually, it’s a kind of progress I thoroughly welcome. Often I really don’t have any discernible emotion one way or another, even towards highly contentious and controversial topics.
Now if I am in the company of other non-Bayesian people (especially women, with whom the whole point of interaction usually isn’t information-related but purely emotional anyway), I put my rational machinery to rest and just let my instincts flow without paying too much attention to how rational everything I (or they) say is. That’s because enjoying human company is first and foremost about exchanging emotion, not information or rational argument. (Although I have to admit that it always feels like a shocking slap in the face, if suddenly it turns out that she believes in astrology et al. I have to admit that a brain failure of that magnitude kills my libido faster than the kick of a horse). So yes, my red “light bulb” that says “irrational/unproven belief” still gets triggered a lot in typical conversations with the average Joe and Joy, but not every instance justifies the break of rapport in favor of starting an argument. Actually I realize that I tend to argue much more often with guys (maybe because arguing can be a way to establish social status) than with girls, where I often just skip the logical loopholes and inconsistencies in favor of maintaining rapport.
Come to think of it, that is actually a rather rational strategy, given my heterosexual utility-function ;)
If I am interested in improving or expanding my mental model of reality on the other hand, I crank up my “bias & rationality” machinery and have a careful in-depth conversation with someone who is up to the task.
If I’m doing something irrational like procrastinating or playing a game instead of furthering my goals, then often the rationality module kicks in and says I’m a bum wasting my precious (though hopefully unlimited) life-time. Often I can’t (or raher don’t want to) stop having fun however, so I just gently smother the rational voice in my head with a pillow and score a new record time in Dirt 3 instead. I suppose that’s roughly the highest peak of conflict between my emotional needs and rational goals—but unfortunately, especially when it comes to hedonistic procrastination, the rational component doesn’t put up much of a fight, which is certainly less than optimal.
Actually, I’m procrastinating right now instead of studying Psychology, so farewell.
In conclusion: It seems we aren’t all that different, except that for some reason you seem to have some kind of problem with the “conflict” between your rationality and your emotions, which is something I don’t really care about. The important thing is that I can use my rationality when I actually need it, not that I constantly use my rationality to smother every single possibly irrational emotion at every given opportunity. So where is your particular problem and why is any of this important again?
(especially women, with whom the whole point of interaction usually isn’t information-related but purely emotional anyway)
This evidently didn’t bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong. It may be that the society around you is the main culprit for doing stereotypes wrong, but as a woman I still find this attitude frustrating.
EDIT: This comment was unclearly and unhelpfully worded; I was having fun being indignant at the expense of being specific. Will add more specificity when I’m not trying to run out the door to work.
This evidently didn’t bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong. It may be that the society around you is the main culprit for doing stereotypes wrong, but as a woman I still find this attitude frustrating.
I’m tempted to inject a ‘speak for yourself!’ here, or at least a caveat that the (subjectively asserted) mistake must include “or you are choosing to interact with the wrong women” in it somewhere.
Some people of a certain kind of social disposition (yes, more female than male from what I can tell) do mostly have interactions that would be classified as emotional rather than informational according to the inferred intent of the labels. Having that preference and style works well for them and others declaring that they are doing it ‘wrong’ is invasive and irrelevant. Similarly, when interacting with someone in the style that works best for interacting with that person and someone else declaring that you are doing it wrong is out of place.
I also note that much of what is labelled (and sometimes dismissed) as ‘emotional’ is itself information. Just information in a different, insufficiently nerdy, format.
I’m tempted to inject a ‘speak for yourself!’ here, or at least a caveat that the (subjectively asserted) mistake must include “or you are choosing to interact with the wrong women” in it somewhere.
Me too, but then I thought that “interacting with the wrong women” is one possible case of “doing it wrong”, if the latter is to be interpreted at all charitably.
Noted. I was not being very specific/using sufficient disclaimers in this discussion.
Disclaimer: if you are interacting this way with women on LW or interested in rationality, I am >90% sure that you are missing out on some valuable interesting/intellectual conversations.
Hypothesis: if you are interacting this way with women who aren’t interested in rationality (who you don’t think are interested), it may be contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that women aren’t interested in rationality. (Disclaimer: I’m probably guilty of this for both genders, in that I don’t introduce enough of my potentially interested friends to LW ideas, period.)
This evidently didn’t bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong.
I say this with no small amount of cynicism and bitterness: according to the appropriate roles and goals spelled out by our current society, he is doing it exactly right.
And remember that rejecting those roles and goals takes a LOT of effort, which means it takes a lot of motivation. Some people can find that motivation internally (they see a better way for their lives to be), others find it externally (they just aren’t equipped to fit into the roles their culture wants to assign them), but most people don’t find it at all.
It may be unpleasant to realize that most people don’t particularly care about your thoughts or feelings capability or even your well-being except instrumentally, but it is true. And even with all the strides that feminism and gender equality have made against the stereotype you quoted, it’s still entrenched enough that merely saying “you are doing something wrong” is inadequate. You have to explain to people why they should see you as a human being, and what seeing you as a human being actually looks like, or they will simultaneously fail to understand why they should, and fail to understand how they are not doing so already.
As a “young female with higher-then-average physical attractiveness” (if I remember your self-description accurately), you may be used to not having to spell that out in face-to-face interactions. Susceptible men will likely tend to implicitly understand “you are doing something wrong” as “you will not unlock the puzzle-box that has ownership of me as the prize”. But here, you have the advantage of not being able to rely on that misunderstanding; I would strongly recommend that you practice using it.
It may be unpleasant to realize that most people don’t particularly care about your thoughts or feelings capability or even your well-being except instrumentally, but it is true.
Do you mean that this is true of how people interact with other people in general, or specifically how men interact with women?
You have to explain to people why they should see you as a human being, and what seeing you as a human being actually looks like, or they will simultaneously fail to understand why they should, and fail to understand how they are not doing so already.
They should because it’s self-evident that I am a human being? To me, at least. I spend a lot of time in a male-dominant community (atheists/skeptics/rationalists cluster), and even more time in a female-dominated domain (nursing), and my conversations among females are no more dominated by emotion than those among males. We have conversations to share useful information and ask for practical advice, to tell morbid anecdotes that we all find hilarious, to share personal goals, to point out new discoveries in medicine that we think are fascinating and exciting, etc etc etc. It’s so freaking obvious to me that this whole gender thing just Does. Not. Matter.
Most people in my immediate social circle already do this right, including the local Less Wrong group. It’s all the more jarring when I’m reminded that right, this whole feminism thing isn’t a moot point yet after all.
you will not unlock the puzzle-box that has ownership of me as the prize.
If that is someone’s goal in talking to women in general, they are doing it wrong, no matter the content and tone of their discussion.
I get that some women’s revealed preferences seem to indicate that they expect and want to be treated this way. This is deeply confusing to me. Anyone who wants ownership of me as a prize for their interesting conversation is going to be disappointed, because that prize is not on the table.
They should because it’s self-evident that I am a human being? To me, at least. I spend a lot of time in a male-dominant community (atheists/skeptics/rationalists cluster), and even more time in a female-dominated domain (nursing), and my conversations among females are no more dominated by emotion than those among males. We have conversations to share useful information and ask for practical advice, to tell morbid anecdotes that we all find hilarious, to share personal goals, to point out new discoveries in medicine that we think are fascinating and exciting, etc etc etc. It’s so freaking obvious to me that this whole gender thing just Does. Not. Matter.
In my case at least, I think it’s more precise to say that gender is screened off by context: a randomly chosen conversation between me and a male is more likely to be about physics and less likely to be about emotions than a randomly chosen conversation between me and a female, but once you specify whether or not they’re a colleague of mine, whether or not we are on a walk together, etc., knowing their gender doesn’t provide much more evidence either way; it’s just that I have more male colleagues than female ones, take more walks with females than with males, etc.
Do you mean that this is true of how people interact with other people in general, or specifically how men interact with women?
I explicitly mean both at once.
it’s self-evident that I am a human being?
But it is not self-evident that they are required to treat you as one, or even that they will gain a net benefit from doing so. Perhaps I should have avoided the rhetorical device “like a human being” and used the more precise “like a person”, instead. Let me reframe in that way:
It is obvious that you are a human being—that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens.
It is less obvious that you are a person—that is, a being that they must treat with the same level of rights and respect with which they expected to be treated.
This statement:
(especially women, with whom the whole point of interaction usually isn’t information-related but purely emotional anyway)
indicates that you are a tool / resource for achieving specific instrumental goals, and that those instrumental goals are different when they involve you than when they involve men. Your own preferences of which instrumental goals you would like to be utilized for is irrelevant; your average heterosexual male cares exactly as much for your preferences as your average Congressman or your average corporate marketing team: your preferences are useful for determining how to manipulate you towards instrumental ends, but other than that they don’t really enter into the equation.
Perhaps you want to be treated as an equal—seen as a terminal value rather than as an instrumental tool or resource? That’s an admirable goal, and one you will find that most people share. And thus, a good deal of social manipulation involves providing the appearance that we care about each other as terminal values, while behaving very clearly as if we really only see each other instrumentally. It is ironic that in this specific case, a significant portion of the motivation for unlocking your puzzle-box is so that the male can believe that you see him as a terminal value. Our cultural narrative strongly reinforces to men that the only way they will ever get someone to see them as a terminal value is by finding a woman and unlocking her puzzle-box—for many men (especially the so-called “Nice Guys”), this is actually a more powerful motivation even than sex.
Anyone who wants ownership of me as a prize for their interesting conversation is going to be disappointed, because that prize is not on the table.
That is irrelevant. The fact that you are in front of them, and they can imagine you fulfilling the role, means (from their perspective) that that prize is on the table. The fact that you do not wish to reward it will not disuade them; at most it just means (again, from their perspective) that they need to give the puzzle-box one or two more twists before it opens.
(EDIT: Re-reading this post, the picture I was painting of human nature is perhaps unnecessarily bleak. I think it is more accurate to say that people do not naturally treat each other as terminal values unless they are given explicit reason to, and that family, friendship etc. are all the normal reasons that they are given explicit reason to. Humans CAN be taught to treat all other humans as terminal values by default, but this is not particularly common. Unfortunately, it is far more common for people to learn to PRETEND to treat all other humans as terminal values—and to pretend to themselves just as much as they pretend to each other. Breaking through that to teach people how to truly love each other is something that mystics and visionaries strive towards every generation; you can look around you to get a rough estimate of their success rates.)
Perhaps you want to be treated as an equal—seen as a terminal value rather than as an instrumental tool or resource?
This may be a little on the pedantic side, but people are not values. They may factor into values, terminal or otherwise, in some way—you might for example want to maximize their happiness or their preference satisfaction—but if you say “Alice is a terminal value to me” or “Bob is an instrumental value”, you haven’t actually said anything well-defined about how to optimize your behavior. You haven’t even said anything about how they relate to other people in your value system: you can weight values differently, and it’s entirely consistent to treat Alice and Bob’s happiness as (separate) terminal values while weighting Alice’s needs over Bob’s in every situation where they come into conflict.
I find your interlocutors’ comments to be very insensitive, and think that they’re being hyperbolic.
I think that their descriptive characterizations of the world are true to some degree, but that this is highly contingent on culture. Our culture places very high emphasis on women’s physical appearance to the exclusion of most other things. I don’t think that this is biologically engrained. I think that men have small genetically rooted tendencies to view women in a more sexualized way than they view men, and that these tendencies have been greatly exacerbated by self-reinforcing runaway cultural feedback loops. I think that your interlocutors have (whether knowingly or unknowingly) reinforced these with their comments.
Their comments contain a valid overarching point which isn’t specific to gender relations at all: people greatly exaggerate their own and others’ prosocial motivations, deluding themselves into believing that they play a greater role than they do. The things that superficially appear to be altruistic often turn out not to be upon further investigation. People have some concern for others, but when they have conflicting motivations, they’ll generally succumb to them. I do believe that it’s possible to overcome these tendencies to a substantial degree, but most people aren’t sufficiently self-aware to recognize that there’s an issue that needs to be corrected, or interested enough to put effort into it.
And remember that rejecting those roles and goals takes a LOT of effort
What? It takes me more effort to follow them than to go my own way. YMMV, but remember not to generalize from one example.
EDIT: The “others find it externally (they just aren’t equipped to fit into the roles their culture wants to assign them)” suggests you did already understand that. (Still a weird way to put it IMO—“refraining from smoking is hard, but certain people are motivated to do that because they don’t like tobacco”? -- but still.)
I thought It’s about time I replied to this topic. I’ve seen the response(s) earlier but didn’t feel like responding at the time and unfortunately forgot all about it afterwards—up until now.
It seems to me there is a major point I should make.
According to this definition of “stereotype” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype) I would claim they are unavoidable and useful cognitive tools for categorizing and streamlining our internal map of the world, including other people. They are not to be confused with “prejudices”, which include an affective judgement.
So me believing that most Italians like spaghetti and eat it more often than people of other nationality or origin is a stereotype. For me this is not an affective judegement because I could(n’t) care less about spaghetti or whether someone is Italian or not. I would however be more surprised if an Italian told me he does not like spaghetti, than if a Russian told me likewise. Furthermore this stereotype may or may not be true, as in principle it is a claim about what reality is like—in this case the average food preferences of a certein group.
A prejudice on the other hand may be for example that Americans are on average less rational and less well educated than average central Europeans. If this view carried an affective judement it would be a prejudice, which is essentially a hybrid of a stereotype and an attached affective judgement. Personally I actually do believe this to be the case, but I do not know if it really is a prejudice or a stereotype on my part, since I don’t really “feel” traces of affective judement wrapped into this belief. For me it is simply a simplified model of a huge group.
I admit to having this stereotype, and as far as I can tell it mainly results from me occasionally watching American news programs (several of which would be unthinkable to exist on this side of the pond, although standards seem to be falling) and watching TV programs like the Colbert Report or many years ago “Real Time with Bill Maher”. I also read several statistics (like percentage of atheists, or prevalence of certein irrational non-religious beliefs etc. etc.) that roughly confirm my internal model of what an “average American” (whatever that is ecactly) believes, behaves like and thinks like.
Personally I’m not even sure this belief qualifies as a prejudice on my part, since it may be nothing more than a simple stereotype, since I cannot discern a “negative affective sting”. For me this view is simply consistent with the data I know of and the things I experienced through the media it may or may not be true, but I certainly do not “hate” Americans and I sure don’t waste time on ranting about “those impossible Americans”.
If I know absolutely nothing more about a person other than the fact that he or she is American, what happens in my brain is that I correct the probability that said person is less well ducated, more religious, and has “republican” views upwards, because of some data I am aware of. Again this may or may not be true.
On the other hand I happen to know some statistical data on the religious views of Swedes as well, which is probably not true because it places the number of atheists at roughly 60-80% (I would rather estime something like 40% atheists with another 30-40% “believing in some metaphysical notions”).
If you just grant me the axiom, that Americans are more religious then Swedes, we can play through this hypothetical situation: If you set up an experiment where you tell me I have to spend an hour conversing with a) a completely random American or b) a random Swede, that is an easy decision for me. However, that does of course not mean that I indiscriminately dislike every American I meet, because of no other reason than their country of origin which would be ridiculous. Americans also don’t have to “prove themselves more” than Swedes do.
I’m perfectly aware that not every American -and in fact not even a single one- fits my stereotype of “the average American”. And of course I’m also perfectly aware of a multitude brilliant people and inventions that are of “US-origin”. Maybe it is just a case of the worst parts being the most salient.
So why write all this? It’s obviously an analogy to my stereotypes of women and my internal model of what “they” like to converse about. In spite of what I wrote it doesn’t actually matter to me if someone is American or not, because I -tada- update on incoming evidence and once I have an actual person in front of me that happens to be American he or she gets taken out of the drawer labeled “what I think an average American is like” and gets “promoted” into the category labelled “things I know ad beleive about James Smith”, which includes a free and nearly effortless upgrade to a more complex and custom model of who that person is.
Same goes for women, I start out from my stereotype -or bayesian prior- (where else should I start from?) and update on the “evidence” as it rolls in. Not every conversation with every woman I meet is about the fluffy emotional stuff, if I pick up on signals that indicate she is interested in talking about “heavy” stuff then that’s where I’ll go. If I met you in real life, my prior/stereotype of you aka. “Swimmer963” looks different than the grossly oversimplified one that only says “women” on the drawer.
It’s still a crude stereotype but hey you gotta start somewhere, right?
I agree, it seems we’re pretty similar in this arena. I think maybe I just feel more negative emotion about, as you put it, hedonistic procrastination than you do. Those are the times I feel the most unpleasant conflict. I should just stop procrastinating, I guess. I’m working on that, getting better about it. Anyway, I don’t need to go into too much detail on this side topic. Thanks for the reply.
Part of me wants to write: “You’re a brave and forthright person, and I admire you for it.”
Another part of me, which I think is motivated by your honesty, reads that and says I should write: “I just wrote that because I want you to like me, and it reads like it might get an upvote (after LW acceptance subprocess runs consciously), proving someone else likes me, too.”
When I’m alone, alert and unoccupied, those two parts (there may be more, I don’t know) are always bickering. Thing 1 decides some feeling or idea is good, or correct, or sincere, and Thing 2 almost always has to come back and say why my conclusion is based entirely in bias or rationalization. I think this is why I try not to be alone, alert and unoccupied very often.
When I’m around other people, Thing 2 mostly shuts up, only butting in if Thing 1 is getting carried away with pleasing people, or bragging, or lying (i.e. making the truth sound more exciting), etc. I like Thing 2 quite a lot at those times.
When I’m tired or have a drink, Thing 1 and Thing 2 both go to sleep before the rest of my cognition does.
When I’m occupied, there is sometimes some bickering if I’m occupied at a game, or a blog, or something that’s not useful, but it’s not too bad. It sometimes gets to be enough that I’ll do something useful to stop the conflict.
So, that’s my Usual Live Life subroutine. It’s kind of bleak because Thing 2 insisted I write it this way, but I do manage to be happy, entertained, challenged, or deeply thoughtful most of the time.
So, why write this in response to the OP? Because my first internal response to the OP was “That’s a lot like me!” And then I read Friendly-HI’s response and I thought “That’s a lot like me!” And this bugged me. So, I thought I’d try to describe from an internal, process-oriented perspective how my days go by, and see whether that clicks more with one of you than the other (or anyone else who wants to chime in).
I didn’t catch your comment for a long time, because it wasn’t in response to my own and thus didn’t light up the red message symbol. Just stumbled over it by accident, so here’s my response a mere 1,5 months later:
I feel next to no conflict or friction between my rational and my emotional self, whether I’m on my own or with company. I radically adhere and submit to the guiding principle that “if it is true, I want to believe it and if it is false, I want to reject it”. So if I happen to have some kind of innate feeling or intuition about some objective topic, I immediately catch it and just kill it off as best I can (usually pretty good) in favor of a rational analysis. But these days I usually don’t have many of these “emotional preconceptions” left anyway. Over the years I buried so many of my favorite emotional preconceptions about every imaginable topic in favor of what appears to be “the truth”, that the act of giving up some idiotic emotion about a serious topic in favor of a better model hardly stings at all anymore. It feels quite good to let go actually, it’s a kind of progress I thoroughly welcome. Often I really don’t have any discernible emotion one way or another, even towards highly contentious and controversial topics.
Now if I am in the company of other non-Bayesian people (especially women, with whom the whole point of interaction usually isn’t information-related but purely emotional anyway), I put my rational machinery to rest and just let my instincts flow without paying too much attention to how rational everything I (or they) say is. That’s because enjoying human company is first and foremost about exchanging emotion, not information or rational argument. (Although I have to admit that it always feels like a shocking slap in the face, if suddenly it turns out that she believes in astrology et al. I have to admit that a brain failure of that magnitude kills my libido faster than the kick of a horse). So yes, my red “light bulb” that says “irrational/unproven belief” still gets triggered a lot in typical conversations with the average Joe and Joy, but not every instance justifies the break of rapport in favor of starting an argument. Actually I realize that I tend to argue much more often with guys (maybe because arguing can be a way to establish social status) than with girls, where I often just skip the logical loopholes and inconsistencies in favor of maintaining rapport.
Come to think of it, that is actually a rather rational strategy, given my heterosexual utility-function ;)
If I am interested in improving or expanding my mental model of reality on the other hand, I crank up my “bias & rationality” machinery and have a careful in-depth conversation with someone who is up to the task.
If I’m doing something irrational like procrastinating or playing a game instead of furthering my goals, then often the rationality module kicks in and says I’m a bum wasting my precious (though hopefully unlimited) life-time. Often I can’t (or raher don’t want to) stop having fun however, so I just gently smother the rational voice in my head with a pillow and score a new record time in Dirt 3 instead. I suppose that’s roughly the highest peak of conflict between my emotional needs and rational goals—but unfortunately, especially when it comes to hedonistic procrastination, the rational component doesn’t put up much of a fight, which is certainly less than optimal.
Actually, I’m procrastinating right now instead of studying Psychology, so farewell.
In conclusion: It seems we aren’t all that different, except that for some reason you seem to have some kind of problem with the “conflict” between your rationality and your emotions, which is something I don’t really care about. The important thing is that I can use my rationality when I actually need it, not that I constantly use my rationality to smother every single possibly irrational emotion at every given opportunity. So where is your particular problem and why is any of this important again?
This evidently didn’t bother me a few years ago when I wrote this post, but I want to say that if all of your interactions with women are like this, you are doing something wrong. It may be that the society around you is the main culprit for doing stereotypes wrong, but as a woman I still find this attitude frustrating.
EDIT: This comment was unclearly and unhelpfully worded; I was having fun being indignant at the expense of being specific. Will add more specificity when I’m not trying to run out the door to work.
I’m tempted to inject a ‘speak for yourself!’ here, or at least a caveat that the (subjectively asserted) mistake must include “or you are choosing to interact with the wrong women” in it somewhere.
Some people of a certain kind of social disposition (yes, more female than male from what I can tell) do mostly have interactions that would be classified as emotional rather than informational according to the inferred intent of the labels. Having that preference and style works well for them and others declaring that they are doing it ‘wrong’ is invasive and irrelevant. Similarly, when interacting with someone in the style that works best for interacting with that person and someone else declaring that you are doing it wrong is out of place.
I also note that much of what is labelled (and sometimes dismissed) as ‘emotional’ is itself information. Just information in a different, insufficiently nerdy, format.
Me too, but then I thought that “interacting with the wrong women” is one possible case of “doing it wrong”, if the latter is to be interpreted at all charitably.
Noted. I was not being very specific/using sufficient disclaimers in this discussion.
Disclaimer: if you are interacting this way with women on LW or interested in rationality, I am >90% sure that you are missing out on some valuable interesting/intellectual conversations.
Hypothesis: if you are interacting this way with women who aren’t interested in rationality (who you don’t think are interested), it may be contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that women aren’t interested in rationality. (Disclaimer: I’m probably guilty of this for both genders, in that I don’t introduce enough of my potentially interested friends to LW ideas, period.)
I say this with no small amount of cynicism and bitterness: according to the appropriate roles and goals spelled out by our current society, he is doing it exactly right.
And remember that rejecting those roles and goals takes a LOT of effort, which means it takes a lot of motivation. Some people can find that motivation internally (they see a better way for their lives to be), others find it externally (they just aren’t equipped to fit into the roles their culture wants to assign them), but most people don’t find it at all.
It may be unpleasant to realize that most people don’t particularly care about your thoughts or feelings capability or even your well-being except instrumentally, but it is true. And even with all the strides that feminism and gender equality have made against the stereotype you quoted, it’s still entrenched enough that merely saying “you are doing something wrong” is inadequate. You have to explain to people why they should see you as a human being, and what seeing you as a human being actually looks like, or they will simultaneously fail to understand why they should, and fail to understand how they are not doing so already.
As a “young female with higher-then-average physical attractiveness” (if I remember your self-description accurately), you may be used to not having to spell that out in face-to-face interactions. Susceptible men will likely tend to implicitly understand “you are doing something wrong” as “you will not unlock the puzzle-box that has ownership of me as the prize”. But here, you have the advantage of not being able to rely on that misunderstanding; I would strongly recommend that you practice using it.
Do you mean that this is true of how people interact with other people in general, or specifically how men interact with women?
They should because it’s self-evident that I am a human being? To me, at least. I spend a lot of time in a male-dominant community (atheists/skeptics/rationalists cluster), and even more time in a female-dominated domain (nursing), and my conversations among females are no more dominated by emotion than those among males. We have conversations to share useful information and ask for practical advice, to tell morbid anecdotes that we all find hilarious, to share personal goals, to point out new discoveries in medicine that we think are fascinating and exciting, etc etc etc. It’s so freaking obvious to me that this whole gender thing just Does. Not. Matter.
Most people in my immediate social circle already do this right, including the local Less Wrong group. It’s all the more jarring when I’m reminded that right, this whole feminism thing isn’t a moot point yet after all.
If that is someone’s goal in talking to women in general, they are doing it wrong, no matter the content and tone of their discussion.
I get that some women’s revealed preferences seem to indicate that they expect and want to be treated this way. This is deeply confusing to me. Anyone who wants ownership of me as a prize for their interesting conversation is going to be disappointed, because that prize is not on the table.
In my case at least, I think it’s more precise to say that gender is screened off by context: a randomly chosen conversation between me and a male is more likely to be about physics and less likely to be about emotions than a randomly chosen conversation between me and a female, but once you specify whether or not they’re a colleague of mine, whether or not we are on a walk together, etc., knowing their gender doesn’t provide much more evidence either way; it’s just that I have more male colleagues than female ones, take more walks with females than with males, etc.
I explicitly mean both at once.
But it is not self-evident that they are required to treat you as one, or even that they will gain a net benefit from doing so. Perhaps I should have avoided the rhetorical device “like a human being” and used the more precise “like a person”, instead. Let me reframe in that way:
It is obvious that you are a human being—that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens.
It is less obvious that you are a person—that is, a being that they must treat with the same level of rights and respect with which they expected to be treated.
This statement:
indicates that you are a tool / resource for achieving specific instrumental goals, and that those instrumental goals are different when they involve you than when they involve men. Your own preferences of which instrumental goals you would like to be utilized for is irrelevant; your average heterosexual male cares exactly as much for your preferences as your average Congressman or your average corporate marketing team: your preferences are useful for determining how to manipulate you towards instrumental ends, but other than that they don’t really enter into the equation.
Perhaps you want to be treated as an equal—seen as a terminal value rather than as an instrumental tool or resource? That’s an admirable goal, and one you will find that most people share. And thus, a good deal of social manipulation involves providing the appearance that we care about each other as terminal values, while behaving very clearly as if we really only see each other instrumentally. It is ironic that in this specific case, a significant portion of the motivation for unlocking your puzzle-box is so that the male can believe that you see him as a terminal value. Our cultural narrative strongly reinforces to men that the only way they will ever get someone to see them as a terminal value is by finding a woman and unlocking her puzzle-box—for many men (especially the so-called “Nice Guys”), this is actually a more powerful motivation even than sex.
That is irrelevant. The fact that you are in front of them, and they can imagine you fulfilling the role, means (from their perspective) that that prize is on the table. The fact that you do not wish to reward it will not disuade them; at most it just means (again, from their perspective) that they need to give the puzzle-box one or two more twists before it opens.
(EDIT: Re-reading this post, the picture I was painting of human nature is perhaps unnecessarily bleak. I think it is more accurate to say that people do not naturally treat each other as terminal values unless they are given explicit reason to, and that family, friendship etc. are all the normal reasons that they are given explicit reason to. Humans CAN be taught to treat all other humans as terminal values by default, but this is not particularly common. Unfortunately, it is far more common for people to learn to PRETEND to treat all other humans as terminal values—and to pretend to themselves just as much as they pretend to each other. Breaking through that to teach people how to truly love each other is something that mystics and visionaries strive towards every generation; you can look around you to get a rough estimate of their success rates.)
This may be a little on the pedantic side, but people are not values. They may factor into values, terminal or otherwise, in some way—you might for example want to maximize their happiness or their preference satisfaction—but if you say “Alice is a terminal value to me” or “Bob is an instrumental value”, you haven’t actually said anything well-defined about how to optimize your behavior. You haven’t even said anything about how they relate to other people in your value system: you can weight values differently, and it’s entirely consistent to treat Alice and Bob’s happiness as (separate) terminal values while weighting Alice’s needs over Bob’s in every situation where they come into conflict.
I find your interlocutors’ comments to be very insensitive, and think that they’re being hyperbolic.
I think that their descriptive characterizations of the world are true to some degree, but that this is highly contingent on culture. Our culture places very high emphasis on women’s physical appearance to the exclusion of most other things. I don’t think that this is biologically engrained. I think that men have small genetically rooted tendencies to view women in a more sexualized way than they view men, and that these tendencies have been greatly exacerbated by self-reinforcing runaway cultural feedback loops. I think that your interlocutors have (whether knowingly or unknowingly) reinforced these with their comments.
Their comments contain a valid overarching point which isn’t specific to gender relations at all: people greatly exaggerate their own and others’ prosocial motivations, deluding themselves into believing that they play a greater role than they do. The things that superficially appear to be altruistic often turn out not to be upon further investigation. People have some concern for others, but when they have conflicting motivations, they’ll generally succumb to them. I do believe that it’s possible to overcome these tendencies to a substantial degree, but most people aren’t sufficiently self-aware to recognize that there’s an issue that needs to be corrected, or interested enough to put effort into it.
What? It takes me more effort to follow them than to go my own way. YMMV, but remember not to generalize from one example.
EDIT: The “others find it externally (they just aren’t equipped to fit into the roles their culture wants to assign them)” suggests you did already understand that. (Still a weird way to put it IMO—“refraining from smoking is hard, but certain people are motivated to do that because they don’t like tobacco”? -- but still.)
Sorry, I have trouble phrasing things normally. It’s one of the reasons I often fall back on metaphor.
Hi again.
I thought It’s about time I replied to this topic. I’ve seen the response(s) earlier but didn’t feel like responding at the time and unfortunately forgot all about it afterwards—up until now.
It seems to me there is a major point I should make.
According to this definition of “stereotype” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype) I would claim they are unavoidable and useful cognitive tools for categorizing and streamlining our internal map of the world, including other people. They are not to be confused with “prejudices”, which include an affective judgement.
So me believing that most Italians like spaghetti and eat it more often than people of other nationality or origin is a stereotype. For me this is not an affective judegement because I could(n’t) care less about spaghetti or whether someone is Italian or not. I would however be more surprised if an Italian told me he does not like spaghetti, than if a Russian told me likewise. Furthermore this stereotype may or may not be true, as in principle it is a claim about what reality is like—in this case the average food preferences of a certein group.
A prejudice on the other hand may be for example that Americans are on average less rational and less well educated than average central Europeans. If this view carried an affective judement it would be a prejudice, which is essentially a hybrid of a stereotype and an attached affective judgement. Personally I actually do believe this to be the case, but I do not know if it really is a prejudice or a stereotype on my part, since I don’t really “feel” traces of affective judement wrapped into this belief. For me it is simply a simplified model of a huge group.
I admit to having this stereotype, and as far as I can tell it mainly results from me occasionally watching American news programs (several of which would be unthinkable to exist on this side of the pond, although standards seem to be falling) and watching TV programs like the Colbert Report or many years ago “Real Time with Bill Maher”. I also read several statistics (like percentage of atheists, or prevalence of certein irrational non-religious beliefs etc. etc.) that roughly confirm my internal model of what an “average American” (whatever that is ecactly) believes, behaves like and thinks like.
Personally I’m not even sure this belief qualifies as a prejudice on my part, since it may be nothing more than a simple stereotype, since I cannot discern a “negative affective sting”. For me this view is simply consistent with the data I know of and the things I experienced through the media it may or may not be true, but I certainly do not “hate” Americans and I sure don’t waste time on ranting about “those impossible Americans”.
If I know absolutely nothing more about a person other than the fact that he or she is American, what happens in my brain is that I correct the probability that said person is less well ducated, more religious, and has “republican” views upwards, because of some data I am aware of. Again this may or may not be true.
On the other hand I happen to know some statistical data on the religious views of Swedes as well, which is probably not true because it places the number of atheists at roughly 60-80% (I would rather estime something like 40% atheists with another 30-40% “believing in some metaphysical notions”).
If you just grant me the axiom, that Americans are more religious then Swedes, we can play through this hypothetical situation: If you set up an experiment where you tell me I have to spend an hour conversing with a) a completely random American or b) a random Swede, that is an easy decision for me. However, that does of course not mean that I indiscriminately dislike every American I meet, because of no other reason than their country of origin which would be ridiculous. Americans also don’t have to “prove themselves more” than Swedes do.
I’m perfectly aware that not every American -and in fact not even a single one- fits my stereotype of “the average American”. And of course I’m also perfectly aware of a multitude brilliant people and inventions that are of “US-origin”. Maybe it is just a case of the worst parts being the most salient.
So why write all this? It’s obviously an analogy to my stereotypes of women and my internal model of what “they” like to converse about. In spite of what I wrote it doesn’t actually matter to me if someone is American or not, because I -tada- update on incoming evidence and once I have an actual person in front of me that happens to be American he or she gets taken out of the drawer labeled “what I think an average American is like” and gets “promoted” into the category labelled “things I know ad beleive about James Smith”, which includes a free and nearly effortless upgrade to a more complex and custom model of who that person is.
Same goes for women, I start out from my stereotype -or bayesian prior- (where else should I start from?) and update on the “evidence” as it rolls in. Not every conversation with every woman I meet is about the fluffy emotional stuff, if I pick up on signals that indicate she is interested in talking about “heavy” stuff then that’s where I’ll go. If I met you in real life, my prior/stereotype of you aka. “Swimmer963” looks different than the grossly oversimplified one that only says “women” on the drawer.
It’s still a crude stereotype but hey you gotta start somewhere, right?
He said “usually”, not “always”, but still...
I agree, it seems we’re pretty similar in this arena. I think maybe I just feel more negative emotion about, as you put it, hedonistic procrastination than you do. Those are the times I feel the most unpleasant conflict. I should just stop procrastinating, I guess. I’m working on that, getting better about it. Anyway, I don’t need to go into too much detail on this side topic. Thanks for the reply.
Maybe Thing 1, Thing 2, and you (if there’s anything left) could agree on a new way of doing things that leaves all parties better off.