It is simply accurate that there is a large group of people, well represented on this site, who consider autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals to be “beyond the pale”, and to be universally condemned in the strongest terms, a reaction nearly indistinguishable from their position on terrorism.
It is simply accurate that there is a large group of people, well represented on this site, who consider autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals to be “beyond the pale”, and to be universally condemned in the strongest terms, a reaction nearly indistinguishable from their position on terrorism.
I haven’t seen any in the comments for this article, but I’ve seen plenty of comments worrying about it. Maybe you should wait until these people actually show up first?
They have shown up before, justifying my prediction. Did you miss the whole Summer ’09 flamewar, including Alicorn’s demands that virtually nothing from PUA (which is one thing I mean by “autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals”) be mentioned?
Just because they didn’t yet show up for this specific discussion, I shoudn’t warn about the consequences of these examples? Is that what you’re saying?
In any case, the same contempt for PUA, for the wrong reasons, did resurface in this discussion, such as here, and here. I’m pleasantly surprised that the “usual suspects” picked up some empathy in the interim between now and Summer ’09, but there were still many unhelpful objections to Roko’s buying-drinks example that this site tries to stay away from. (“You’re wrong” is okay; “that’s not PC so don’t talk about it” isn’t.)
In any case, the same contempt for PUA, for the wrong reasons, did resurface in this discussion, such as here, and here.
Um, neither of those comments shows contempt for PUA, in my estimation. SarahC expressed confusion, and Alicorn made an observation about a group that merely overlaps the bottom-feeding layer of PUA.
So, yes, I still think you’re worrying too much. What’s more, I don’t think that your protests have ever actually helped the situation—if anything, they create more polarization, and further the impression that you’re a low-status male protesting the status quo is unfair to you.
Meanwhile, to the extent that your remarks are successful in scaring off people who’d otherwise participate and maybe get one of their biases overcome or a misconception sorted out, you’re doing a disservice to everyone. How do you think people get any greater empathy, except by engaging with their wrong ideas, so they can learn that they’re wrong?
So all the ominous saber-rattling isn’t helping anyone—not even you.
but there were still many unhelpful objections to Roko’s buying-drinks example that this site tries to stay away from. (“You’re wrong” is okay; “that’s not PC so don’t talk about it” isn’t.)
Where on this thread have “that’s not PC” comments been made? I think I’ve read pretty much every comment so far, and haven’t seen this yet. What I have seen is that I’ve made several “You’re wrong” comments, and none of the PUAs have responded to their substance (“No you’re wrong” doesn’t count).
My most recent, and most thoroughly argued comment, here, is currently buried under the fold due to punitive downvoting of its ancestor comment. So I don’t know if I buy your assertion that the people on the other side of the argument have “picked up some empathy” since last summer… I think it’s more likely they’ve just realized that you’re plugging your ears, chanting “lalalallalala I can’t hear you” and hammering the downvote button, so it’s not worth the effort.
What I have seen is that I’ve made several “You’re wrong” comments, and none of the PUAs have responded to their substance (“No you’re wrong” doesn’t count).
I don’t know if you count me among those, given what I’ve written in this thread, but I have addressed several of the points you made in that comment and elsewhere. In particular, I have pointed out: (1) that the body of expertise in analyzing male-female relations that originated in the PUA community is not limited to picking up girls from self-selected samples in bars and clubs, though some parts of it are; (2) that men successfully use lessons derived from this analysis for achieving and maintaining more permanent and close relationships with women, up to and including marriages; (3) that while some of the techniques recommended by certain PUAs are sly and dishonest, most of these techniques are just about making socially inept men clue onto the regular and normal protocols of human social interaction; and (4) that people are prone to irrationally dismiss insights of this sort as immoral due to the rule-hypocrisy bias. Just click on my name to see my recent posts in which I elaborate on all this.
Also, if you look at pjeby’s comments, he has addressed many of your points at great length, and some other people have too. Therefore, even if you disagree with all this, I don’t think you can realistically claim that nobody has attempted to address the substance of your objections, even if it wasn’t done in direct replies to your comments.
What I have seen is that I’ve made several “You’re wrong” comments, and none of the PUAs have responded to their substance (“No you’re wrong” doesn’t count).
What you’re wrong about is here:
In PUA circles, “winning” is defined by getting laid.
Many men study PUA with the goal of being “good with women” (includes but is not solely defined by getting laid) or to “find my dream girl”, or to impress other men with their game. And even of the ones who do get into it just to get laid, almost invariably find that success to be hollow after a while. (Read Strauss’ book “The Game” for one man’s personal account of this process.)
Do PUAs use the ability to get laid as an acid test for their techniques? Sure. But all of the ones who are about having more and deeper relationships with women—even the women they’re only going to speak to in the bar for 30 minutes or so before moving on.. will definitely tell you that it’s not all about that. Even Mystery, who has one of the most shallow and manipulative PUA systems in existence, doesn’t treat simply getting a random lay as being an adequate definition of success. (He calls it “fool’s mate”.)
Most PUA “outer game” frameworks are about being able to socially relate to people, because this is a minimum requirement for being able to “isolate your target”. If you just walk up to a woman in a group of her friends and try to talk to her, you won’t have much success. So Mystery in particular spent an extensive amount of time learning how to engage—and ally with—his “targets’” friends and companions.
So, it’s this empirical success at social dynamics that is PUA’s relevance to this discussion, not its ability to get men laid via “fool’s mate”. You can’t get laid with someone you can’t meet in the first place, because her friends don’t like you and thus either try to keep you away from her in the first place, or drag her away from you if she seems to like you too much.
I think I accidentally clicked “report” on this comment when I meant to click “reply” (it was either this comment or vladamir’s). It asked “are you sure, yes/no”, which I’d never seen before, and figure it must have something to do with the comment nesting depth having gotten too deep, and clicked “yes”
I’m not sure how to undo this—let me just say that it was not my intention to do this.
OK, my intended reply to this and to vladamir’s sibling comment got sidetracked by my accidental “report” clickage, so let me try to rememeber what I was going to say....
Basically you both just seem to be defending the idea that PUA isn’t just about getting laid, but is also applicable to establishing more meaningful romantic relationships. OK, but I still don’t see how you get from there to it being applicable to anything outside the field of male/female mating interactions.
FYI, cousin_it’s comments are a good example of what I would consider to be meaningfully engaging the substance of my argument.
OK, but I still don’t see how you get from there to it being applicable to anything outside the field of male/female mating interactions.
Well, I am a newbie here, but the site is called “Less Wrong,” and it’s a spin-off, and a self-described “sister site,” of another one named “Overcoming Bias.” I would say that the comments in this thread, both mine and by others, have amply demonstrated that a great many people—including many people here—are wrong about many aspects of this topic, and prone to some very severe and identifiable biases when thinking and talking about it.
Therefore, elucidating this situation seems to me a worthy intellectual pursuit by itself, since, if properly undertaken, it should result in people being less wrong about a topic that is, at the very least, highly relevant in real life, and it should make them identify (and hopefully overcome) certain biases they hold. Furthermore, the identification of these biases could be expected to lead to a more accurate assessment of other issues too, because, considering the undeniably significant role of sexual selection and status signaling in human evolution, biases shaped by them are unlikely to be confined to a small and isolated subset of human thinking and behavior. All this should, I think, fall squarely under the mission statement of improving human rationality.
I hope you’ll find that a satisfactory statement of motivation.
OK, but I still don’t see how you get from there to it being applicable to anything outside the field of male/female mating interactions.
You appear not to have read the part of my comment where I explained that Mystery Method is heavily about quickly befriending groups of strangers and getting them on your side. Sounds like a generally useful skill to me. ;-)
What may not have been clear from my comment is that these groups of strangers are not exclusively female; Mystery’s “targets” might have been the lone female in a group of six men, or part of a mixed group of three men and four women, or some other oddball combination.
His methods also include such things as how to do “forward and backward merging” and “pawning”—i.e., using one group of strangers you’ve just met, to gain access to a different set of strangers, while implicitly convincing both groups you’re a sociable guy who knows everyone and is therefore worth knowing. How to use this to join and split groups to leave you with the person(s) you want to talk with. On and on and on this stuff goes… and that’s only the stuff I know about because I watched his TV show; I haven’t actually studied any of it myself.
If you genuinely don’t think that any of that kind of knowledge would be useful for non-romantic purposes, I don’t really know what else to say.
You appear not to have read the part of my comment where I explained that Mystery Method is heavily about quickly befriending groups of strangers and getting them on your side.
Ok, yes, that does sound like a generally useful skill, and I was not aware that some of the things you cite were part of PUA material.
But none of that is what was originally cited by the OP. What was cited was the drink-buying thing, something which just sounds positively wacky to anyone not committed to the PUA ethos.
If he’d cited an example of something like what you’re talking about here, I don’t think anyone would have had a problem with it.
If you genuinely don’t think that any of that kind of knowledge would be useful for non-romantic purposes, I don’t really know what else to say.
I’m not kodos96, but I imagine that people who host parties would like that kind of skill, and good hosts probably have it. No romance involved (for the host).
Responding to a complaint about punitive downvoting without substantively engaging the argument, by punitively downvoting and failing to engage the argument?
What pjeby said. I can’t even guess who you might be talking about, since some of the usual suspects that spring to mind have been positively contributing to the discussion already.
And like I said to pjeby, that’s a pleasant surprise. But that’s the thing—surprise. It certainly wasn’t forseeable based on past behavior of those suspects.
It’s a topic that runs afoul of several major human biases—and the biases involved in this topic happen to be exactly some of those that, statistically speaking, happen to sneak exceptionally well under the radars of the sort of people who hang out here, and who are otherwise usually so attentive to eliminating bias from discussion. Therefore, you need lots of tact and a very good didactic approach to avoid ticking people off when talking about it. I think pjeby did an amazing job in that regard.
Perhaps your model of what causes offense does not accurately track what causes offense.
Edit: I mean to say that the people who were offended previously may have been offended by some characteristic of the previous discussion which you did not attend to, that is strongly correlated with the measure you employed. The fact that people (e.g. pjeby) have returned to this subject without invoking offense, despite discussing similar content, suggests that the offensive characteristic is not a necessary component of the subject.
The fact that people (e.g. pjeby) have returned to this subject without invoking offense, despite discussing similar content, suggests that the offensive characteristic is not a necessary component of the subject.
FWIW, it has been previously argued that I don’t really talk about PUA, but only a bastardized female-friendly version thereof.
I, OTOH, maintain that this is merely a function of using non-misogynistic language and metaphor to describe the same acts, and the fact I don’t signal loyalty to men protesting that they’re being oppressed by an unjust conspiracy of women and traitorous men .
My personal take: shit yea it’s unjust. But I don’t see those guys doing anything to fix the injustices on women’s side of things (or even really trying to understand them in the first place), instead just proclaiming their own side’s values to be superior.
But that’s just stupid. If you want to relate to women, you need to… well, relate. I think that both women in general and “dog people” in particular have a few peculiar or irrational values by my “cat-man” lights… but they’re still their values.
And if I want to interact with those people, that means honoring their values, not insisting that they behave by mine. So, let’s replace the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”) with the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do.
Or, better yet for LessWrong, let’s coin the “Dilithium Rule”: do unto others that which you can empirically expect will produce the response(s) you wish to receive. ;-)
(And by this rule, protesting men’s oppression is silly, unless your goal is to ally with other true believers. It can be empirically observed to have little effect on anyone else.)
In fairness, I’m sorta stealing it from NLP’s wishy-washier pseudo-deep version, “the meaning of a communication is the response you get.”
But, I’d guess from the discussion around this point for the article, that it’s actually an important rule for people with atypical social responses to learn. “As you would have them do unto you” only works with people who match your preferences, and a too-literal interpretation of “as they would have you do” might make you do what people say they want, while completely missing the things that are actually important to them, but difficult or impossible to verbalize.
Both of these errors are also prevalent in negative reactions to discussions of social dynamics, marketing, and PUA.
Ideally, all of these disciplines are about maximizing personal outcomes by actually giving people what they really want, but in the unfortunate worst cases can be degenerated into pretending to give people what they want. (Which then stigmatizes the entire field of knowledge on a guilt-by-association basis.)
(I suppose you could say that “co-operator” marketers, charismatics, and PUAs are those who genuinely want to give others what they want, and their study is a means to that end. “Defectors”, on the other hand, only want to know how to get what they want, and don’t care whether the other people are getting what they want.
Personally, while I’m aware that what I say I want differs from what makes me happy, I’d rather get the former. I don’t know how widespread this is, but I suspect it’s wide enough that such suspicious is not generally an error.
It is simply accurate that there is a large group of people, well represented on this site, who consider autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals to be “beyond the pale”, and to be universally condemned in the strongest terms, a reaction nearly indistinguishable from their position on terrorism.
I don’t think that you are trying very hard to understand their actual views. Even if they used the phrase “beyond the pale” (which your use of quotation marks implies), it is not valid to assume that all actions deemed “beyond the pale” are considered to be morally equivalent. An act can be considered “unacceptable” in a certain context, while still being vastly preferable to some other act.
You say that they want to condemn PUA discussion in the “strongest terms”. Even if they used that phrase (which you don’t imply because you didn’t use quotation marks), do you really think that they meant that literally? Do you really think that your evidence justifies the claim that they reserve no stronger terms for terrorists?
Suppose that Omega presented one of the people whom you’re thinking of with the following choice: Either a PUA discussion will happen on LW or a terrorist attack will happen somewhere. Do you really believe that this person would be indifferent between these choices?
Your conversations with such people certainly justify the belief that they take a very dim view of PUA discussions. But how could you justify a strong belief (you call it “simply accurate”) that they would be indifferent between the choices above? Have you engaged them in equally extensive conversations about their views on terrorism? If not, how can you be so sure that they don’t consider it to be even worse?
I think that you could justify your inference only if you had good evidence that they considered PUA discussions to be so bad that literally nothing could be worse. I don’t think that I would believe someone even if they explicitly said that they felt this way. I would assume that they were either engaged in hyperbole, or that they just hadn’t paused to reflect on just how bad things could be. The only way that I could be convinced that they were accurately representing their views is if we had wide-ranging conversations about all sorts of very bad things, and they steadfastly maintained, with all evident seriousness, that they would not prefer that a PUA discussion happen over these things.
But perhaps your sense of the phrase “moral equivalence” does not imply that they’d be indifferent between “morally equivalent” acts. If so, what do you mean when you say that someone considers two acts to be “morally equivalent”?
It is simply accurate that there is a large group of people, well represented on this site, who consider autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals to be “beyond the pale”, and to be universally condemned in the strongest terms, a reaction nearly indistinguishable from their position on terrorism.
I haven’t seen any in the comments for this article, but I’ve seen plenty of comments worrying about it. Maybe you should wait until these people actually show up first?
They have shown up before, justifying my prediction. Did you miss the whole Summer ’09 flamewar, including Alicorn’s demands that virtually nothing from PUA (which is one thing I mean by “autistic-oriented, non-PC discussion of dating rituals”) be mentioned?
Just because they didn’t yet show up for this specific discussion, I shoudn’t warn about the consequences of these examples? Is that what you’re saying?
In any case, the same contempt for PUA, for the wrong reasons, did resurface in this discussion, such as here, and here. I’m pleasantly surprised that the “usual suspects” picked up some empathy in the interim between now and Summer ’09, but there were still many unhelpful objections to Roko’s buying-drinks example that this site tries to stay away from. (“You’re wrong” is okay; “that’s not PC so don’t talk about it” isn’t.)
Um, neither of those comments shows contempt for PUA, in my estimation. SarahC expressed confusion, and Alicorn made an observation about a group that merely overlaps the bottom-feeding layer of PUA.
So, yes, I still think you’re worrying too much. What’s more, I don’t think that your protests have ever actually helped the situation—if anything, they create more polarization, and further the impression that you’re a low-status male protesting the status quo is unfair to you.
Meanwhile, to the extent that your remarks are successful in scaring off people who’d otherwise participate and maybe get one of their biases overcome or a misconception sorted out, you’re doing a disservice to everyone. How do you think people get any greater empathy, except by engaging with their wrong ideas, so they can learn that they’re wrong?
So all the ominous saber-rattling isn’t helping anyone—not even you.
Where on this thread have “that’s not PC” comments been made? I think I’ve read pretty much every comment so far, and haven’t seen this yet. What I have seen is that I’ve made several “You’re wrong” comments, and none of the PUAs have responded to their substance (“No you’re wrong” doesn’t count).
My most recent, and most thoroughly argued comment, here, is currently buried under the fold due to punitive downvoting of its ancestor comment. So I don’t know if I buy your assertion that the people on the other side of the argument have “picked up some empathy” since last summer… I think it’s more likely they’ve just realized that you’re plugging your ears, chanting “lalalallalala I can’t hear you” and hammering the downvote button, so it’s not worth the effort.
kodos96:
I don’t know if you count me among those, given what I’ve written in this thread, but I have addressed several of the points you made in that comment and elsewhere. In particular, I have pointed out: (1) that the body of expertise in analyzing male-female relations that originated in the PUA community is not limited to picking up girls from self-selected samples in bars and clubs, though some parts of it are; (2) that men successfully use lessons derived from this analysis for achieving and maintaining more permanent and close relationships with women, up to and including marriages; (3) that while some of the techniques recommended by certain PUAs are sly and dishonest, most of these techniques are just about making socially inept men clue onto the regular and normal protocols of human social interaction; and (4) that people are prone to irrationally dismiss insights of this sort as immoral due to the rule-hypocrisy bias. Just click on my name to see my recent posts in which I elaborate on all this.
Also, if you look at pjeby’s comments, he has addressed many of your points at great length, and some other people have too. Therefore, even if you disagree with all this, I don’t think you can realistically claim that nobody has attempted to address the substance of your objections, even if it wasn’t done in direct replies to your comments.
What you’re wrong about is here:
Many men study PUA with the goal of being “good with women” (includes but is not solely defined by getting laid) or to “find my dream girl”, or to impress other men with their game. And even of the ones who do get into it just to get laid, almost invariably find that success to be hollow after a while. (Read Strauss’ book “The Game” for one man’s personal account of this process.)
Do PUAs use the ability to get laid as an acid test for their techniques? Sure. But all of the ones who are about having more and deeper relationships with women—even the women they’re only going to speak to in the bar for 30 minutes or so before moving on.. will definitely tell you that it’s not all about that. Even Mystery, who has one of the most shallow and manipulative PUA systems in existence, doesn’t treat simply getting a random lay as being an adequate definition of success. (He calls it “fool’s mate”.)
Most PUA “outer game” frameworks are about being able to socially relate to people, because this is a minimum requirement for being able to “isolate your target”. If you just walk up to a woman in a group of her friends and try to talk to her, you won’t have much success. So Mystery in particular spent an extensive amount of time learning how to engage—and ally with—his “targets’” friends and companions.
So, it’s this empirical success at social dynamics that is PUA’s relevance to this discussion, not its ability to get men laid via “fool’s mate”. You can’t get laid with someone you can’t meet in the first place, because her friends don’t like you and thus either try to keep you away from her in the first place, or drag her away from you if she seems to like you too much.
IOW, “no, you’re wrong”, and that’s why. ;-)
I think I accidentally clicked “report” on this comment when I meant to click “reply” (it was either this comment or vladamir’s). It asked “are you sure, yes/no”, which I’d never seen before, and figure it must have something to do with the comment nesting depth having gotten too deep, and clicked “yes”
I’m not sure how to undo this—let me just say that it was not my intention to do this.
OK, my intended reply to this and to vladamir’s sibling comment got sidetracked by my accidental “report” clickage, so let me try to rememeber what I was going to say....
Basically you both just seem to be defending the idea that PUA isn’t just about getting laid, but is also applicable to establishing more meaningful romantic relationships. OK, but I still don’t see how you get from there to it being applicable to anything outside the field of male/female mating interactions.
FYI, cousin_it’s comments are a good example of what I would consider to be meaningfully engaging the substance of my argument.
kodos96:
Well, I am a newbie here, but the site is called “Less Wrong,” and it’s a spin-off, and a self-described “sister site,” of another one named “Overcoming Bias.” I would say that the comments in this thread, both mine and by others, have amply demonstrated that a great many people—including many people here—are wrong about many aspects of this topic, and prone to some very severe and identifiable biases when thinking and talking about it.
Therefore, elucidating this situation seems to me a worthy intellectual pursuit by itself, since, if properly undertaken, it should result in people being less wrong about a topic that is, at the very least, highly relevant in real life, and it should make them identify (and hopefully overcome) certain biases they hold. Furthermore, the identification of these biases could be expected to lead to a more accurate assessment of other issues too, because, considering the undeniably significant role of sexual selection and status signaling in human evolution, biases shaped by them are unlikely to be confined to a small and isolated subset of human thinking and behavior. All this should, I think, fall squarely under the mission statement of improving human rationality.
I hope you’ll find that a satisfactory statement of motivation.
Dunno about him, but I found your statement most satisfactory in explaining a good chunk of my motivation as well. Bravo.
As they say on Reddit, have an upvote and an orangered. (Referring to the reply indicator envelope color.)
You appear not to have read the part of my comment where I explained that Mystery Method is heavily about quickly befriending groups of strangers and getting them on your side. Sounds like a generally useful skill to me. ;-)
What may not have been clear from my comment is that these groups of strangers are not exclusively female; Mystery’s “targets” might have been the lone female in a group of six men, or part of a mixed group of three men and four women, or some other oddball combination.
His methods also include such things as how to do “forward and backward merging” and “pawning”—i.e., using one group of strangers you’ve just met, to gain access to a different set of strangers, while implicitly convincing both groups you’re a sociable guy who knows everyone and is therefore worth knowing. How to use this to join and split groups to leave you with the person(s) you want to talk with. On and on and on this stuff goes… and that’s only the stuff I know about because I watched his TV show; I haven’t actually studied any of it myself.
If you genuinely don’t think that any of that kind of knowledge would be useful for non-romantic purposes, I don’t really know what else to say.
Ok, yes, that does sound like a generally useful skill, and I was not aware that some of the things you cite were part of PUA material.
But none of that is what was originally cited by the OP. What was cited was the drink-buying thing, something which just sounds positively wacky to anyone not committed to the PUA ethos.
If he’d cited an example of something like what you’re talking about here, I don’t think anyone would have had a problem with it.
I’m not kodos96, but I imagine that people who host parties would like that kind of skill, and good hosts probably have it. No romance involved (for the host).
Responding to a complaint about punitive downvoting without substantively engaging the argument, by punitively downvoting and failing to engage the argument?
Really???
What pjeby said. I can’t even guess who you might be talking about, since some of the usual suspects that spring to mind have been positively contributing to the discussion already.
And like I said to pjeby, that’s a pleasant surprise. But that’s the thing—surprise. It certainly wasn’t forseeable based on past behavior of those suspects.
It’s a topic that runs afoul of several major human biases—and the biases involved in this topic happen to be exactly some of those that, statistically speaking, happen to sneak exceptionally well under the radars of the sort of people who hang out here, and who are otherwise usually so attentive to eliminating bias from discussion. Therefore, you need lots of tact and a very good didactic approach to avoid ticking people off when talking about it. I think pjeby did an amazing job in that regard.
Perhaps your model of what causes offense does not accurately track what causes offense.
Edit: I mean to say that the people who were offended previously may have been offended by some characteristic of the previous discussion which you did not attend to, that is strongly correlated with the measure you employed. The fact that people (e.g. pjeby) have returned to this subject without invoking offense, despite discussing similar content, suggests that the offensive characteristic is not a necessary component of the subject.
FWIW, it has been previously argued that I don’t really talk about PUA, but only a bastardized female-friendly version thereof.
I, OTOH, maintain that this is merely a function of using non-misogynistic language and metaphor to describe the same acts, and the fact I don’t signal loyalty to men protesting that they’re being oppressed by an unjust conspiracy of women and traitorous men .
My personal take: shit yea it’s unjust. But I don’t see those guys doing anything to fix the injustices on women’s side of things (or even really trying to understand them in the first place), instead just proclaiming their own side’s values to be superior.
But that’s just stupid. If you want to relate to women, you need to… well, relate. I think that both women in general and “dog people” in particular have a few peculiar or irrational values by my “cat-man” lights… but they’re still their values.
And if I want to interact with those people, that means honoring their values, not insisting that they behave by mine. So, let’s replace the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”) with the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do.
Or, better yet for LessWrong, let’s coin the “Dilithium Rule”: do unto others that which you can empirically expect will produce the response(s) you wish to receive. ;-)
(And by this rule, protesting men’s oppression is silly, unless your goal is to ally with other true believers. It can be empirically observed to have little effect on anyone else.)
I’m definitely stealing that.
In fairness, I’m sorta stealing it from NLP’s wishy-washier pseudo-deep version, “the meaning of a communication is the response you get.”
But, I’d guess from the discussion around this point for the article, that it’s actually an important rule for people with atypical social responses to learn. “As you would have them do unto you” only works with people who match your preferences, and a too-literal interpretation of “as they would have you do” might make you do what people say they want, while completely missing the things that are actually important to them, but difficult or impossible to verbalize.
Both of these errors are also prevalent in negative reactions to discussions of social dynamics, marketing, and PUA.
Ideally, all of these disciplines are about maximizing personal outcomes by actually giving people what they really want, but in the unfortunate worst cases can be degenerated into pretending to give people what they want. (Which then stigmatizes the entire field of knowledge on a guilt-by-association basis.)
(I suppose you could say that “co-operator” marketers, charismatics, and PUAs are those who genuinely want to give others what they want, and their study is a means to that end. “Defectors”, on the other hand, only want to know how to get what they want, and don’t care whether the other people are getting what they want.
Personally, while I’m aware that what I say I want differs from what makes me happy, I’d rather get the former. I don’t know how widespread this is, but I suspect it’s wide enough that such suspicious is not generally an error.
I don’t think that you are trying very hard to understand their actual views. Even if they used the phrase “beyond the pale” (which your use of quotation marks implies), it is not valid to assume that all actions deemed “beyond the pale” are considered to be morally equivalent. An act can be considered “unacceptable” in a certain context, while still being vastly preferable to some other act.
You say that they want to condemn PUA discussion in the “strongest terms”. Even if they used that phrase (which you don’t imply because you didn’t use quotation marks), do you really think that they meant that literally? Do you really think that your evidence justifies the claim that they reserve no stronger terms for terrorists?
Suppose that Omega presented one of the people whom you’re thinking of with the following choice: Either a PUA discussion will happen on LW or a terrorist attack will happen somewhere. Do you really believe that this person would be indifferent between these choices?
Your conversations with such people certainly justify the belief that they take a very dim view of PUA discussions. But how could you justify a strong belief (you call it “simply accurate”) that they would be indifferent between the choices above? Have you engaged them in equally extensive conversations about their views on terrorism? If not, how can you be so sure that they don’t consider it to be even worse?
I think that you could justify your inference only if you had good evidence that they considered PUA discussions to be so bad that literally nothing could be worse. I don’t think that I would believe someone even if they explicitly said that they felt this way. I would assume that they were either engaged in hyperbole, or that they just hadn’t paused to reflect on just how bad things could be. The only way that I could be convinced that they were accurately representing their views is if we had wide-ranging conversations about all sorts of very bad things, and they steadfastly maintained, with all evident seriousness, that they would not prefer that a PUA discussion happen over these things.
But perhaps your sense of the phrase “moral equivalence” does not imply that they’d be indifferent between “morally equivalent” acts. If so, what do you mean when you say that someone considers two acts to be “morally equivalent”?