This reduces me and other females (including female rationalists) to the category of a fancy car or a big house,
Women reduce men to a fancy car and a big house all the time. I used to find it rather insulting. I’d rather be reduced to a sex object. The grass is always greener.
Both men and women get reduced to status symbols for their mates. That’s the way it is. I don’t get much heartburn over it anymore.
While the statement “unfortunately people from group A undergo experience X” doesn’t logically entail anything about people outside group A, it often does pragmatically implicate that the speaker doesn’t think that people outside group A experiencing X constitute a problem to be worried about at the moment (otherwise, the speaker would likely not have mentioned group A in the first place: when did you last hear anyone lamenting that so many right-handed people die in car accidents?); therefore, the fact that both people within and outside A experience X is a reason to ADBOC with such a statement.
An excellent point, if perhaps a little strong, (objectifying men could simply be less of an issue,) but dan is saying that “That’s the way it is. I don’t get much heartburn over it anymore.”
It is absolutely worth pointing out that neither sex is immune to objectification. Objectification is still bad. Just because I’ve been forced to put up with something doesn’t mean everyone should just suck it up.
Another interpretation of his point: “It’s hypocritical for women to complain about being objectified by men, because they also objectify men themselves.” That’s only a valid point if the women who resent being objectified are the same women who objectify men, which is probably not the case.
Other examples of this failure mode are “Jerusalemites hailed Jesus as a deity when he came back, but five days later they were shouting for Pontius Pilate to crucify him” (maybe he had both supporters and opposers, who weren’t the same people?) and “people are always protesting about that politician, but he keeps on being re-elected” (maybe young people protest and old people vote for him, or something like that).
It’s an inference drawn from a mixture of fallacies of composition and division and the availability heuristic.
“I notice Jerusalemites supporting Jesus, therefore Jerusalem supports Jesus. I notice Jerusalemites opposing Jesus, therefore Jerusalem opposing Jesus. Jerusalem both supports and opposes Jesus; therefore Jerusalem is fickle; therefore Jerusalemites are individually fickle … and should feel bad about their fickleness.”
What do we mean by “objectification”? I would argue that the Baysianism-utilitarianism epistemology cloud around here objectifies all people and all subsets of people by reducing them to the status of tools or victory points, and no one seems particularly concerned about this until the subset being objectified becomes that set of all females.
There’s no problem with seeing women as status tools or victory points if you explicitly state that what you’re playing is a woman-collecting game, or a lay-collecting game, number-close game, etc. Some people might frown at your choice of game for moral reasons, but they’ll admit that you’re doing the strategically correct thing with respect to your game’s objective.
The problem arises when you say that you’re winning at “relationships” or you claim your game is what “everyone knows” to be how relationships work or that’s how “the” game is played. That is when “everyone” gets pissed. We don’t want to be lumped into that group.
The problem arises when you say that you’re winning at “relationships” or you claim your game is what “everyone knows” to be how relationships work or that’s how “the” game is played.
That’s not the claim. The claim is that everyone does this, but most people prefer to believe they’re doing something else.
Oh, I think I agree in that case. Objectifying people is okay because people are really complicated and sometimes you only need to consider one property of a person in order to compute your goals if you’re maximizing utility along some one axis. Sure!
Objectifying people is bad when it hurts them.
no one seems particularly concerned about this until the subset being objectified becomes that set of all females.
When people are concerned about it, it’s probably because it hurts them.
Hurt people expect to gain compassion, understanding and future not-hurtfulness from indicating concern. I don’t understand why you have the “or” there. (I’m also constantly confused how “or” usually means “xor” in English.)
Why do you say gain like it’s a bad thing? Don’t people expect to gain something from doing anything?
(I’m also constantly confused how “or” usually means “xor” in English.)
Not quite. The denotation of “A or B” is normally “A or B”, though it often has the connotation “but not both”. “A and/or B” has the same denotation but lacks that connotation. See the first sentence of the fifth paragraph of this.
The term connotation is usually used for what distinguishes the meanings of “dog” and “cur”. The exclusivity of “or” seems to be a rather different thing and is commonly regarded as a conversational implicature (which explains why it disappears under negation, for instance). Whether that’s really correct is somewhat debatable, especially because nobody really knows what the denotation of “or” actually is; but calling it connotation strikes me as misleading.
Yes, “conversational implicature” is the more precise term for that, but I used “connotation” instead because I thought it was close enough and it is more widely known among LW readers. (I thought that the main difference was that the latter is usually applied to words and the former to sentences; is there another important one?)
There’s at least one that cannot be considered a consequence of implicatures attaching to sentences (or maybe phrases): You can cancel implicatures (“you can do this or that—in fact, you can do both”), but not connotations.
It’s instructive to ask the reverse question: Is there any important commonality between implicatures and connotations other than that neither is part of the literal meaning? I think the answer is no.
Hurt people expect to gain compassion, understanding and future not-hurtfulness from indicating concern that they are hurt. I don’t understand why you have the “or” there.
‘And’ would be unambiguously incorrect. ‘Or’ is correct, obviously doesn’t exclude the possibility that the gain could be of the kind your mentioned and also allows for the other possibilities.
Why do you say gain like it’s a bad thing? Don’t people expect to gain something from doing anything?
Why do you read gain like it’s a bad thing? I have no objection to gain. I’m not judging the expression of concern one way or another, merely commenting on which situations concern is expressed. It is worth making such a comment because the quoted prediction was misleadingly simple.
Okay, but if you’re saying gain isn’t a bad thing, then you’re not really saying anything. Maybe it would help if you name these other things that can be gained by expressing concern?
I’m [...] merely commenting on which situations concern is expressed
But you’re not, because you didn’t name any situations.
I can’t quite explain why it feels trivial to read gain as a good thing, but I have an example. Positive version:
When someone goes to a job interview, it’s probably because they want the job.
Or because they expect to gain from the interview.
It’s kind of confusing, right? It’s like “Err, yes. That’s what I said.” Compared to:
When someone starts a soup kitchen, it’s probably because they want to help starving people.
Or because they expect to gain from the soup kitchen.
I am simply astounded at the men here confidently asserting that they aren’t alienating women when they talk about “getting” “attractive women” and speak of women as symbols of male success or indeed accessories for a successful male. This reduces me and other females (including female rationalists) to the category of a fancy car or a big house, and I feel humiliated when I read it.
Or … look it up. The top three or four results for “objectification of women” on your favorite search engine may be enlightening.
It seems to be a bit more than that. Sometimes sexual objectification seems to include wishing a potential sexual partner were nonsentient — treating people as if they ought to be automata to serve your wishes, and that it’s an outrage that they don’t act like it.
It’s one thing to say, “I wish I had a sexbot.” It’s another thing to say, “You shouldn’t exist; instead there should exist a sexbot in your image, for me.”
I’d like to chime in and say that if this seems absurd and incredible and who does that … Uhh. That’s happened to me. It’s not fun. Maybe a bit more tangled up, but almost exactly that.
Yeah, I was the annoyingly sentient one. The conversation went something like
I want you to do [thing].
Okay, but you know me. That’s really not part of my personality.
But you’re my girlfriend.
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word “girlfriend”, it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot. But he wasn’t trying to be evil, he was just quite innocently incredulous and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the world.
Were you a mono couple? Members of mono couples sometimes have ideas about an obligation to fulfill all the other person’s sexual and romantic needs since the partner can’t go anywhere else. Perhaps he had asymmetrical ideas about this and would not have obliged if you’d made a similar request, but if the notions were symmetrical then it’s not a sexbot thing. One reason I’m careful not to date women who aren’t dating any other men is that my life is full of other and overriding demands, and I don’t want to be someone’s only boyfriendly recourse.
Yeah, I agree that there are circumstances in which this works out. But we were mono and he was very asymmetrical and he had no idea that he was asymmetrical. (There was stuff to which I told him to find another girl, but he’d get mad if I was talking to another guy.) Like the thought that he was asking me for way more stuff than he would be willing to do (and that there’s anything wrong with that) just never crossed his mind. So he was innocently confused and frustrated about why things weren’t going his way.
This also gets into the issue of manipulating language to sneak in blind spots into the meanings of words. “A girlfriend is someone who should make me happy, and not doing [thing] makes me unhappy, so it’s your fault I’m unhappy.” But again, the scariest part was that he wasn’t trying to be evil! He just did all of his reasoning in that kind of spotty language that was skewed in his favor. And then constantly couldn’t figure out why the territory … wasn’t.
But we were mono and he was very asymmetrical and he had no idea that he was asymmetrical. (There was stuff to which I told him to find another girl, but he’d get mad if I was talking to another guy.)
We can’t quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated). If he carefully refrained from talking to other girls, then we have a big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work and a probable breakup recommendation, but not an asymmetric non-negotiated demand.
Sorry for being pedantic in my definitions, but while this sort of thing may not in fact be relevant to your case, the general rule may prove important to others.
I think I’m going to have to drop this particular example. I kind of rushed into it blindly because I thought it was really important to point out that the thinking from the original comment wasn’t a straw man. And I do think it’s important to fill in this other information, but unfortunately it’s making me remember a bunch of stuff in more detail that I’d like, oops. (He did think he was allowed to talk to other girls. Also a lot of his behavior was characterized by this type of surprised frustration at very predictable things.)
Being pedantic in definitions is awesome! I think that failure is what gets people into this mess in the first place. If we were really thinking “I’d like you to put away your personal preferences whenever I find them inconvenient,” we wouldn’t have too much trouble realizing our thoughts were evil. But I also think that a non-evil
big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work
can be really damaging anyway and I think it’s easier and more productive to identify the potential for damage rather than establishing watertight evilness after the fact. Which is what I think the people that get mad at that “get a girl” type of rhetoric try to do.
We can’t quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated).
Even without an asymmetry, the idea that when one is in a relationship one should refrain from talking to about 50% of the population sounds so preposterous to me that it’s not even funny. (Or is “talking” in this context a euphemism for something else?)
The fact that the parent and this comment were both downvoted makes me guess that such a position is not as indefensible as it naively sounds; but… Why? What am I missing?
Yes and yes. But my whole point is that I don’t want to say that he was an Evil Incurable Narcissist Demon! He was just a misguided kid with some questionable thought patterns. Like any of us!
Objectification is a cached thought and a weasel word away from anyone. So when someone gets offended about objectification, they’re not saying you’re an Evil Objectifying Narcissist Demon. It’s more like stepping on someone’s foot! It can happen to anyone! Accidentally! And you’d just say “oh, sorry about your foot,” and they’ll say “thanks for understanding.”
I don’t want to say that he was an Evil Incurable Narcissist Demon!
I was merely referring to the medical definition of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which your ex may or may not have had. And NPD people are notoriously hard to treat, precisely because not alieving that they are the problem is one of the main symptoms, and not just your garden-variety denial.
Yep, I understand and I actually think you may be right.
I was saying that using a word, any word, that you wouldn’t use to describe yourself is dangerous for thinking about stuff properly. That’s why I’m still waving this flag around! Sorry to be repetitive. I just don’t want people reading this and caching “Oh, I’m not one of those Nar-whatever people; that means I don’t objectify anyone.”
Tapping out now! Or I might feel compelled to continue flag-waving at a dead horse. =]
But we were mono and he was very asymmetrical and he had no idea that he was asymmetrical. (There was stuff to which I told him to find another girl, but he’d get mad if I was talking to another guy.)
That doesn’t constitute asymmetry of the kind I think Eliezer was talking about. It would be asymmetric if he took you up on your invitation to look for other girls while expecting you not to do the same.
That would depend very much on what the terms of the relationship were, and to what extent asymmetry of the kind Eliezer was talking about was really present. One has to be careful about this, because if A allows her partner B to look for other girls to fulfill some desires of his that she won’t, it’s not clear that this creates an obligation for B to mirror that offer. Saying that there is “significant asymmetry” is language that sort of suggests that obligation is there.
I don’t think obligation is a very good way of framing the issue. Indeed, by far the most satisfying relationship I’ve been in was one where we both took the view “being in a relationship doesn’t obligate us to shit.”
The issue is not whether one person is imposing rules that they don’t want to follow themself, but whether one person has significantly more consideration for the other’s desires and is willing to go to greater efforts to accommodate them.
I didn’t downvote, but maybe it would be helpful to taboo “obligation”: recently I’ve had a feeling that in discussions like this (not just on LW) both parties are thinking something kind-of sort-of reasonable but each thinks the other isn’t because they are using that word with slightly different meanings and each is misunderstanding what exactly the other means by it.
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word “girlfriend”, it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot.
Would he agree with that description? Maybe he would, or perhaps there are other things that he said or did that make your attribution of meaning valid. However in themselves the words quoted are just as compatible with the taboo meaning being “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happen to include X, Y and also [thing]”. That is a matter of someone having incompatible romantic preferences and who has made incorrect assumptions about your conformance to a particular social contract.
Again, I’m not saying the description is incompatible with him wishing you were a non-sentient sexbot. Rather, that this particular story doesn’t come anywhere near making that interpretation the most plausible.
Well no, it specifically comes out to “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happens to include [thing] even when those behaviors go against their personality”. So it’s someone that puts aside their personality and does things that feels weird and uncomfortable that they wouldn’t do otherwise because their “boyfriend” wants them to.
I think it’s closer to “someone who likes me enough that she’s willing to do things that (possibly mildly) go against their personality for me”. I don’t no what [thing] was so I don’t know how reasonable or unreasonable the request was.
It might also help if you tabooed “go against one’s personality”.
I don’t have a definition, but I have an example. Suppose you decide to start dating a really quiet person and you know that they’re really quiet before you ask them out, and they’re consistently really quiet throughout the time that you’re dating, and then you start bringing them to loud social functions. You wouldn’t expect them to suddenly turn extroverted and gregarious, just because they’re dating you, right? (So I guess one stab at a working definition is a very low-probability change in behavior given your evidence from all your previous interaction with them, usually low-probability due to difficult-to-change psychological states.)
What you’re describing is more like “Will you please go with me to these events? They’re really important to me.” The person might like you enough to do it, even if they’re a bit uncomfortable. The important thing is that the question acknowledges that you know what they’re like and you understand they have a choice and it doesn’t expect them to suddenly deviate massively from their usual behavior.
B: Okay, but you know me, that’s really not part of my personality.
A: But you’re my boyfriend!
I personally don’t think it’s particularly offensive. You can be as introverted as you like—as someone’s partner in a monogamous relationship, you are expected to at least not always let them go out alone, and A is just expressing his/her displeasure at having that expectation consistently flaunted.
I also suspect you overestimate how serious people will take the “it’s not part of my personality” objection. It’ll mostly be taken as a cheap excuse unless you make very clear how much it would upset you. Yvain has an insightful post on his blog about this kind of thing, though since he has expressed some worries about having people he doesn’t know link to it, I don’t.
Edit: I realize that this was ridiculously unhelpful. In order to avoid linking directly, I should have pointed out that the blog post I had in mind can be found by googling for the string upset “theory of drama”.
I don’t think the conversation itself is particularly offensive, but it would be offensive if all conversations on the subject of going to parties followed this particular template and showed no evidence of converging at an understanding or compromise.
I personally don’t think it’s particularly offensive.
This is why I ended my first relationship.
Of course there’s going to be some give and take, but it involved exactly the sort of asymmetry jooyous described, where I was being expected to do things I didn’t really like, because that was my “role,” while I wasn’t trying to force her into doing things she didn’t like, because I don’t like doing that to people.
If filling a prescribed role is exactly what you want out of your partner, that might feel like a satisfactory relationship, but to a person who doesn’t, it’s going to feel like their partner isn’t really acknowledging them as a person.
(Now I’m reminded of someone in the Italian edition of Loveline asking a question starting with “I’ve been with my girlfriend for a year, but we haven’t had sex yet” and being answered with something starting more-or-less with “first of all, if you aren’t having sex with her, then by definition she’s not your girlfriend; she’s just a friend”.)
As far as I can remember, something like “well, I can kind-of sort-of see her point, but on the other hand I don’t (say) kiss my friends on the mouth in public on a routine basis or implicitly promise each other to not hook up with anyone else, so assuming the caller does, I wouldn’t say that she’s not his girlfriend but just a friend”. But now that I think about that, that definition is broken, too (e.g. it doesn’t encircle open/poly relationships).
Seems like a total misreading of the situation to me. You understood “But you’re my girlfriend” to mean “you ought to behave like my sex slave”, whereas he meant “I expect you to consider my request as seriously as a GGG person would”. Unless, of course, you two already had this discussion and he is just being a jerk to revisit a settled issue.
First thought was, “WTH? If all those people want is to masturbate using someone else’s body, why don’t they just pay for a prostitute?”, then I remembered that prostitution is illegal in plenty of places. (Now I’m curious whether stuff like date rape drug use is more prevalent in places where prostitution is illegal than where it isn’t.)
First thought was, “WTH? If all those people want is to masturbate using someone else’s body, why don’t they just pay for a prostitute?”, then I remembered that prostitution is illegal in plenty of places.
Possible reasons:
Illegality (as you mention).
Perceived (and as far as I know actual) greater risk of STDs than with their likely alternative partner.
Price. (ie. “I wish I owned a house” is a plausible wish even if only because then they would not have to rent.)
Different expected behavior from a sexbot than a prostitute. The “masturbation” experience is presumably enhanced by various behaviors and expression of the sex toy (be it human or robotic). Related to the price reasoning in as much as the price of a “Full Girlfriend Experience” encounter with a prostitute is likely to be far greater than an encounter with someone who puts less effort into acting out an engaged experience.
Pride, conquest and ego. People like to be achieve and be validated. There are few things that are more validating for humans than to have mates of a suitable level of attractiveness desire your sexual attention.
Robots are cool. Sexbots are sometimes hilarious.
Hygene is much easier to manage with sexbots. Not only can you control access to the bot and so prevent exposure to the bodily fluids of unknown strangers, a sexbot can outright detach the relevant robo-parts and wash them in the sink.
Sexbots can (presumably) be more easily customized to have specific combinations of traits and easily switch between diverse roles or fetishes.
I’m not always sure which instances of “sexbot” in your comment are supposed to be literal and which are supposed to be metaphorical. Anyway...
Pride, conquest and ego. People like to be achieve and be validated. There are few things that are more validating for humans than to have mates of a suitable level of attractiveness desire your sexual attention.
That would require your partner to be sentient, wouldn’t it?
Haha, not quite. I think you’d want it to be sentient just enough to provide a challenge but turn off its sentience whenever it becomes unpleasant or inconvenient.
I’m not always sure which instances of “sexbot” in your comment are supposed to be literal and which are supposed to be metaphorical.
Whichever works (which in some cases means both).
That would require your partner to be sentient, wouldn’t it?
Yes, quite right. My mental cache evidently used too much compression and the reconstruction thereof failed to include the necessary explanation. The ego related possible answer that I originally intended was of course that factors of pride and validation of sexual appeal may be absent in both cases and so “just pay a prostitute” would not help them.
Not necessarily. It would require your partner to be difficult to acquire, probably based on their own selectivity and probably based on traits considered high-status, which is why literally buying a sexbot might not be enough for some people—unless it requires wealth, which is usually high-status. Prostitutes are likewise undesirable, unless they are expensive/choosy high-class prostitutes. It implies that they are more likely to be sentient in that they may be choosing based on their own goals, but that’s a rather fragile implication.
It seems to have multiple meanings and connotations all blurring into each other. Possible meaning include:
“Treating someone as a means rather than an end.” I’m generally OK with treating people as means, as are most LWers AFAICT, but relationships (and to a lesser extent morality) is expected to include having their desires as part of your goal structure.
“Treating someone as not having goals of their own.” Objectively wrong, obviously, and if you genuinely believe or alieve this you’re likely to run into some problems, I guess.
“Treating someone as only existing only to serve as a status symbol, “sex object” or housekeeper.” More subtle than the second one, as it relates to goals rather than beliefs, but ultimately has the same problems if you’re a neurotypical human or similar.
“Focusing on the utility someone’s body provides, rather than their mind/personality.” Depends on your goals, I guess, but probably not conductive to healthy relationships and many would argue it causes all sorts of subtle societal problems.
Most people mean many or all of these when they say “objectifying” due to connotations and sloppy terminology. A few also include “Treating someone as governed by instinct rather than as a sentient being”, especially when discussing PUA.
but dan is saying that “That’s the way it is. I don’t get much heartburn over it anymore.”
Ah, that part I had glanced over. Well, that’s a case of Generalizing from One Example: ‘[I don’t mind {noise, clutter, being objectified}, therefore it’s not a big deal and] if you complain about it you’re oversensitive.’
It happens to everyone [therefore] it doesn’t matter to me
It could, but OTOH a person’s level of annoyance for something isn’t always a monotonically decreasing function of how frequent that is: for example, the more often people post something I’m not interested in (e.g. gossip about celebrities, rooting for football teams, pictures of attractive people in underwear of the gender other than the one I’m attracted to) on Facebook, the more annoyed I am by seeing that particular kind of thing (ceteris paribus).
BTW, I’ve recently noticed a couple examples the reverse phenomenon of “it doesn’t matter to me [therefore] you can get over it”, namely “it annoys me [therefore] you should be outraged”. For example, last night Bob introduced me to Alice; I don’t remember exactly what Alice told me, except that I thought it was supposed to be playful banter; this morning Bob apologized to me on Facebook for introducing “that boorish blonde”, because Carol had told him that Alice had been rude to me. I’m guessing that Carol would be annoyed by… whatever it was that Alice told me, so she assumed that I would be annoyed too. (I have asked Carol herself for clarifications on Facebook.) This has raised my estimate of how much the typical person is annoyed by what would sound to me like playful banter, incidentally making me take PUA critics’ concerns about “negging” more seriously.
Actually, I was implying that it’s a Bad Thing (or at least, I see no reason to discount the evidence that it is based on how common it is.) But “selecting mates based on various criteria” and “reducing mates to status symbols” are different things, and I was only objecting to the latter.
So you think that taking into account the status signalling value of a partner, either direct (“Look at my supermodel wife!”) or indirect (“Look at the fancy car my rich husband bought me!”) is a Bad Thing?
It’s perfectly okay to choose partners based on their status signalling value, as long as both parties know that it’s happening and are happy with the arrangement. I’m sure there are a number of stable and perfectly functional rich husband/trophy wife relationships out there in the world, or maybe even rich wife/trophy husband ones. It is, however, a Bad Thing to say “Yes honey, I adore your personality” when you, in fact, don’t. If you are using someone as a status symbol and find yourself saying things like that, it means know that’s not what they want. You should instead find a willing status symbol.
It’s perfectly okay to choose partners based on their status signalling value, as long as both parties know that it’s happening and are happy with the arrangement.
That morality is unfortunate. In the typical case both partners are choosing mates based significantly on their status signalling value and neither are aware of it.
I am highly suspicious of all morals that punish self-awareness and reward hypocrisy.
If I have a trophy husband but don’t know it, I’m judged morally kosher. But if I realize this, and change nothing else, the arrangement becomes sin—I’m punished for my introspection.
I may or may not get this, so let me try giving an exaggerated for clarity example of what I think you mean.
You’re a billionaire author.
You marry an aspiring trophy poet, not because you like their poetry or dislike their poetry, but because they are utterly gorgeous. But you didn’t realize this when you married.
You then introspectively realize “Wait, I only married this person because they are utterly gorgeous! In all other ways I have no real feelings for anything they do one way or the other.”
You then hear them say “Oh, my love, it’s so nice to have someone who appreciates my poetry.” and you realize they think that you selected them as a spouse because you love their poetry.
If you had not introspected that earlier, you might have said something like “Yes, such sweet poetry, written by a sweet author.” and not thought about it.
But now you KNOW you don’t care about the poetry, so if you say that, you feel like you are lying. but if you tell your spouse the truth, you feel like you are smashing apart the (now apparently fictional) basis of your marriage.
So it might be the fact that the introspection can put you in a position where it may be to your advantage if you make a choice to not tell your spouse the truth, and that is an uncomfortable position to be in.
But where would your spouse get the idea that you appreciate their poetry? If you told them that you did when you really didn’t, they’d notice by your actions that you didn’t really mean it and react accordingly. Meaning, they’d either not care and you could keep on being married or they’d be really upset and confront you, in which case, you’re better off just telling the truth and letting them sort out reality for themselves. Meanwhile, if you never mentioned why you married them and you never asked to read their poetry, they’d be pretty delusional to randomly ascribe motivations to you that don’t explain your actions.
But where would your spouse get the idea that you appreciate their poetry? If you told them that you did when you really didn’t, they’d notice by your actions that you didn’t really mean it and react accordingly.
You believed you appreciated their poetry but on introspection, you realize that was just halo effect.
But why do they think you appreciate their poetry? Is it because the halo effect was so strong, you used to talk about how awesome their poetry is all the time?
I share jooyous’ confusion. How does it follow from “it’s OK to choose partners based on signalling value as long as we both know it” that “I’m judged morally kosher if I have a trophy husband but don’t know it”?
To say that it’s OK to do X given Y is not to say that it’s OK to do X in the absence of Y.
“It’s okay as long as both parties know it’s happening” pragmatically implicates “it’s not okay if...” Oh, wait. You’re right. Something had flipped a bit in my brain. Never mind.
I am still super-confused. I was going for a morality that has a penalty for hurting people. So that if you’re doing something that makes someone else unhappy, you have an incentive to figure out what you’re doing that has that effect and then take steps accordingly. Meanwhile, if you’re lying about something or you’re clueless about something and no one notices or cares, that’s fine.
I don’t think that it’s rewarding hypocrisy. I think that this moral stance is about punishing deliberate liars. If you are more self-aware, then yes, you would have more opportunities to deliberately lie (about, for example, what attracts you to a given partner); but this is not, to my mind, a reason to avoid self-awareness. Similarly, if you understand more science, then this gives you the option of creating better, more believable lies; but this is not a reason to reject the study of science.
I don’t think that it’s rewarding hypocrisy. I think that this moral stance is about punishing deliberate liars. If you are more self-aware, then yes, you would have more opportunities to deliberately lie (about, for example, what attracts you to a given partner);
Self awareness successfully penalized.
but this is not, to my mind, a reason to avoid self-awareness.
I often ignore punishment too. After all, punishment of me isn’t something I want to reward! But when I refuse to respond to an incentive I do not try claim that the incentive does not exist.
Similarly, if you understand more science, then this gives you the option of creating better, more believable lies; but this is not a reason to reject the study of science.
Not the same. (Unless you want to also declare that the social environment is one in which people often say that the world is flat and that people declining to say the world is flat are at a disadvantage.)
Oh, so the idea is that if you’re really clueless, then you’re not lying to your partner? You just feel compelled to bring them to fancy dinner parties but never spend one-on-one time with them and you don’t know why? Sorry, I’m still having trouble understanding. =/
I wasn’t quite going for a moral stance that punishes deliberate liars, but I was going for one where the people cooperate to maximize … combined utility, I guess? If both people are happy, it’s better than an arrangement where one person is making the other unhappy. Which sort of requires honesty, because if you don’t tell the other person your real utility function, they won’t be able to help with it. And if you act according to a different utility function than you tell them about, that will reflect in your actions and they’ll be able to tell something’s up.
maximize … combined utility, I guess? If both people are happy, it’s better than an arrangement where one person is making the other unhappy.
I agree that both being happy is better than one making the other unhappy, but it’s important to note that
The two are not mutually exclusive: I could reduce your happiness, but be unable to overcome your naturally sunny disposition.
One happy one unhappy might have a higher “combined utility” than both happy, if one is a sadistic utility monster.
if you don’t tell the other person your real utility function, they won’t be able to help with it.
No-one’s ever told me their utility function, but I still think I’ve helped them. When I hold a door open for someone, I help them, but they didn’t tell me any coefficients.
if you act according to a different utility function than you tell them about, that will reflect in your actions and they’ll be able to tell something’s up.
If people could always tell something was up there’d be no unknowing trophy spouses and hence no problem.
That just works because most people appreciate you opening doors. If you met someone that hated having their door opened, you’d stop! right? And you wouldn’t really know they hate it unless they tell you honestly! Or maybe you’d be able to tell because they cringe and grimace every time you do it, which is what I mean by actions reflecting happiness. Maybe they wouldn’t even know why they cringe and grimace, but you could experiment and tell it was door-related.
Yes there are scenarios where you need to ask in order to help people. But there are also scenarios where you don’t, and in the comment I was replying to you suggested that one had to ask to help.
Yeah, I think I meant that communication happens somehow, either explicitly or through cringing-like behavior. But you’re right, I didn’t combine utility properly in my earlier comment. I wanted a way to penalize unhappiness more. Like if something makes me reeeally happy and the other person a bit unhappy, it should be up to the other person to decide if I get to do it. In the sense that unhappiness is unpleasantness and not quite the same as absence of happiness. Arr, complicated.
(Unless you want to also declare that the social environment is one in which people often say that the world is flat and that people declining to say the world is flat are at a disadvantage.)
Not sure how much of this is true, but I hear rumours about that being the case (if you replace “the world is flat” with something like “humans were intelligently designed”) in certain geographical locales. (I do hope that Conservapedia is eventually revealed to be just a parody, though.)
EDIT: To avoid appearing to be one-sided, I’ll point out that the equivalent of that at the other end of the political spectrum is something like “all races have the same average intelligence”.
I don’t think that it’s rewarding hypocrisy. I think that this moral stance is about punishing deliberate liars. If you are more self-aware, then yes, you would have more opportunities to deliberately lie (about, for example, what attracts you to a given partner);
Self awareness successfully penalized.
I disagree. Greater self-awareness creates greater opportunity to lie, but it does not compel the person to lie. Where is the penalty in that?
Similarly, if you understand more science, then this gives you the option of creating better, more believable lies; but this is not a reason to reject the study of science.
Not the same. (Unless you want to also declare that the social environment is one in which people often say that the world is flat and that people declining to say the world is flat are at a disadvantage.)
I don’t understand your point. Given what little I do understand, I suspect that it may be related to my generally poor awareness of social environments. What social environment are you assuming?
I disagree. Greater self-awareness creates greater opportunity to lie, but it does not compel the person to lie. Where is the penalty in that?
The person who sincerely, but falsely believes p is not lying when they assert p. Someone who has greater awareness and knows that p is false has one fewer option to chose from morally: he can’t say p, because that would be lying. This becomes a problem especially when there is a social cost attached to not saying p, in which case the person with greater knowledge is effectively penalized: they have to either do something immoral (lying) or incur the costs of failing to say p (or, God forbid, saying ~p!).
The person who sincerely, but falsely believes p is not lying when they assert p. Someone who has greater awareness and knows that p is false has one fewer option to chose from morally: he can’t say p, because that would be lying.
True, and true.
This becomes a problem especially when there is a social cost attached to not saying p, in which case the person with greater knowledge is effectively penalized: they have to either do something immoral (lying) or incur the costs of failing to say p (or, God forbid, saying ~p!).
Yes; but why should there be a penalty for not saying p? Surely it is just as likely, on average, that there will be a penalty for not saying the inverse of p (in which case greater self-awareness rewards instead of penalizes).
Yes; but why should there be a penalty for not saying p? Surely it is just as likely, on average, that there will be a penalty for not saying the inverse of p (in which case greater self-awareness rewards instead of penalizes).
In the case that was the starting point of this dicussion, there surely is a penalty for saying ~p, but quite possibly also one for failing to say p: your partner might complain if they never hear nice things about themselves from you (or at least not nice things of the kind they want to hear).
On average, I would expect it to be more likely that there is a social penalty for failing to say something that only a very self-aware person would not believe (i.e. for failing to go along with the “official narrative”) than that there is a social penalty for not saying something that only a very self-aware person would know (thereby forcing non-self-aware people to lie).
In the case that was the starting point of this dicussion, there surely is a penalty for saying ~p, but quite possibly also one for failing to say p: your partner might complain if they never hear nice things about themselves from you (or at least not nice things of the kind they want to hear).
Ah; so you’re not arguing that there’s a moral penalty for self-awareness in all situations, you’re saying that there’s a moral penalty for self-awareness in a specific situation! (Apologies; I was trying to consider the rule as applied in general).
Thank you, that helped to clear things up.
And, just to make sure that there’s no more assumption traps (i.e. where we each assume that something mutually exclusive is obvious) I will describe my understanding of that situation (correct me if I’m wrong):
A person finds a romantic partner to which they are attracted. He (or she) compliments said partner on some aspect which he (or she) finds attractive only due to the halo effect; on the basis of these compliments, both partners enter a long-term romantic relationship. The person later improves their self-awareness, and realises that the earlier compliments were only due to the halo effect; admitting so then carries a social penalty.
In that case, I would agree; however, improved self-knowledge earlier in the process can head off the problem entirely. So it’s not penalizing self-knowledge; it’s rather penalizing the earlier lack of self-knowledge.
Ah; so you’re not arguing that there’s a moral penalty for self-awareness in all situations, you’re saying that there’s a moral penalty for self-awareness in a specific situation!
Yes, exactly. Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that you thought we were talking about a general rule or I would have cleared this up earlier.
In that case, I would agree; however, improved self-knowledge earlier in the process can head off the problem entirely. So it’s not penalizing self-knowledge; it’s rather penalizing the earlier lack of self-knowledge.
I don’t think so. It’s penalizing becoming self-aware. After all, if the person never became self-aware, she would never incur the penalty.
I don’t think so. It’s penalizing becoming self-aware. After all, if the person never became self-aware, she would never incur the penalty.
And, similarly, if a person never hits the ground, he never incurs any injury from falling. If he becomes self-aware quickly enough, then he takes comparatively minor social damage—as a man who falls and quickly hits the ground may only twist an ankle. If he becomes self-aware only after twenty years of marriage, then he potentially takes severe social damage; as a man who falls from a skyscraper, take severe damage when he hits the ground.
So, yes, I can see why you make that statement; it is a reasonable statement, but I think it places the emphasis on the wrong part of the fall.
No. “Reducing” implies that you aren’t taking other factors into account, like, y’know, the actual person.
(It wouldn’t be all that hard to argue that ignoring the status signalling value is a good idea, though. And ideally, you shouldn’t have to, I should think.)
A person is reduced to their status when if they were to no longer signal status, they would become of no interest to you.
An “actual person” typically has other qualities in addition to those that make them a status symbol. An actual person is also frequently aware of these qualities and therefore often doesn’t appreciate being just a status symbol.
The multiple negation might be confusing, but basically:
“It’s not just A that has horrible things happen to them, A^C also do!” does not imply “It is good/okay that A and A^C have horrible things happen to them”.
Women reduce men to a fancy car and a big house all the time. I used to find it rather insulting. I’d rather be reduced to a sex object. The grass is always greener.
Both men and women get reduced to status symbols for their mates. That’s the way it is. I don’t get much heartburn over it anymore.
The whole point of this website is that we can do something about big problems. Like dying!
I feel like not treating each other like crap should be a much easier problem to tackle than dying. Your comment smacks of System Justification.
While it’s worth noting that men can also be objectified, I don’t see how it follows that this isn’t a Bad Thing.
While the statement “unfortunately people from group A undergo experience X” doesn’t logically entail anything about people outside group A, it often does pragmatically implicate that the speaker doesn’t think that people outside group A experiencing X constitute a problem to be worried about at the moment (otherwise, the speaker would likely not have mentioned group A in the first place: when did you last hear anyone lamenting that so many right-handed people die in car accidents?); therefore, the fact that both people within and outside A experience X is a reason to ADBOC with such a statement.
An excellent point, if perhaps a little strong, (objectifying men could simply be less of an issue,) but dan is saying that “That’s the way it is. I don’t get much heartburn over it anymore.”
It is absolutely worth pointing out that neither sex is immune to objectification. Objectification is still bad. Just because I’ve been forced to put up with something doesn’t mean everyone should just suck it up.
Another interpretation of his point: “It’s hypocritical for women to complain about being objectified by men, because they also objectify men themselves.” That’s only a valid point if the women who resent being objectified are the same women who objectify men, which is probably not the case.
Other examples of this failure mode are “Jerusalemites hailed Jesus as a deity when he came back, but five days later they were shouting for Pontius Pilate to crucify him” (maybe he had both supporters and opposers, who weren’t the same people?) and “people are always protesting about that politician, but he keeps on being re-elected” (maybe young people protest and old people vote for him, or something like that).
It’s an inference drawn from a mixture of fallacies of composition and division and the availability heuristic.
“I notice Jerusalemites supporting Jesus, therefore Jerusalem supports Jesus. I notice Jerusalemites opposing Jesus, therefore Jerusalem opposing Jesus. Jerusalem both supports and opposes Jesus; therefore Jerusalem is fickle; therefore Jerusalemites are individually fickle … and should feel bad about their fickleness.”
(BTW, the term for this is “Muhammad Wang fallacy”)
Or awesome, depending on your preference in the specific instance.
For most meanings of “objectification”, I figured this possibility is so unusual as to be irrelevant. Am I missing something?
What do we mean by “objectification”? I would argue that the Baysianism-utilitarianism epistemology cloud around here objectifies all people and all subsets of people by reducing them to the status of tools or victory points, and no one seems particularly concerned about this until the subset being objectified becomes that set of all females.
There’s no problem with seeing women as status tools or victory points if you explicitly state that what you’re playing is a woman-collecting game, or a lay-collecting game, number-close game, etc. Some people might frown at your choice of game for moral reasons, but they’ll admit that you’re doing the strategically correct thing with respect to your game’s objective.
The problem arises when you say that you’re winning at “relationships” or you claim your game is what “everyone knows” to be how relationships work or that’s how “the” game is played. That is when “everyone” gets pissed. We don’t want to be lumped into that group.
That’s not the claim. The claim is that everyone does this, but most people prefer to believe they’re doing something else.
Oh, I think I agree in that case. Objectifying people is okay because people are really complicated and sometimes you only need to consider one property of a person in order to compute your goals if you’re maximizing utility along some one axis. Sure!
Objectifying people is bad when it hurts them.
When people are concerned about it, it’s probably because it hurts them.
Or because they expect to gain from indicating concern.
Few things:
Hurt people expect to gain compassion, understanding and future not-hurtfulness from indicating concern. I don’t understand why you have the “or” there. (I’m also constantly confused how “or” usually means “xor” in English.)
Why do you say gain like it’s a bad thing? Don’t people expect to gain something from doing anything?
Not quite. The denotation of “A or B” is normally “A or B”, though it often has the connotation “but not both”. “A and/or B” has the same denotation but lacks that connotation. See the first sentence of the fifth paragraph of this.
The term connotation is usually used for what distinguishes the meanings of “dog” and “cur”. The exclusivity of “or” seems to be a rather different thing and is commonly regarded as a conversational implicature (which explains why it disappears under negation, for instance). Whether that’s really correct is somewhat debatable, especially because nobody really knows what the denotation of “or” actually is; but calling it connotation strikes me as misleading.
Yes, “conversational implicature” is the more precise term for that, but I used “connotation” instead because I thought it was close enough and it is more widely known among LW readers. (I thought that the main difference was that the latter is usually applied to words and the former to sentences; is there another important one?)
There’s at least one that cannot be considered a consequence of implicatures attaching to sentences (or maybe phrases): You can cancel implicatures (“you can do this or that—in fact, you can do both”), but not connotations.
It’s instructive to ask the reverse question: Is there any important commonality between implicatures and connotations other than that neither is part of the literal meaning? I think the answer is no.
I had been primed by this post when choosing the word connotation, but I didn’t remember Footnote 0.
‘And’ would be unambiguously incorrect. ‘Or’ is correct, obviously doesn’t exclude the possibility that the gain could be of the kind your mentioned and also allows for the other possibilities.
Why do you read gain like it’s a bad thing? I have no objection to gain. I’m not judging the expression of concern one way or another, merely commenting on which situations concern is expressed. It is worth making such a comment because the quoted prediction was misleadingly simple.
Okay, but if you’re saying gain isn’t a bad thing, then you’re not really saying anything. Maybe it would help if you name these other things that can be gained by expressing concern?
But you’re not, because you didn’t name any situations.
I can’t quite explain why it feels trivial to read gain as a good thing, but I have an example. Positive version:
It’s kind of confusing, right? It’s like “Err, yes. That’s what I said.” Compared to:
That’s why I read it as the second one.
From Rachael’s comment:
Or … look it up. The top three or four results for “objectification of women” on your favorite search engine may be enlightening.
EY is opposed to not-caring-about-whether-your-sexual-partner-is-sentient (which is my understanding of the top Google hit for that phrase), FWIW.
It seems to be a bit more than that. Sometimes sexual objectification seems to include wishing a potential sexual partner were nonsentient — treating people as if they ought to be automata to serve your wishes, and that it’s an outrage that they don’t act like it.
It’s one thing to say, “I wish I had a sexbot.” It’s another thing to say, “You shouldn’t exist; instead there should exist a sexbot in your image, for me.”
I’d like to chime in and say that if this seems absurd and incredible and who does that … Uhh. That’s happened to me. It’s not fun. Maybe a bit more tangled up, but almost exactly that.
Which one were you, the one who wished your partner were nonsentient or the one whom your partner wished were nonsentient?
Yeah, I was the annoyingly sentient one. The conversation went something like
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word “girlfriend”, it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot. But he wasn’t trying to be evil, he was just quite innocently incredulous and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the world.
Were you a mono couple? Members of mono couples sometimes have ideas about an obligation to fulfill all the other person’s sexual and romantic needs since the partner can’t go anywhere else. Perhaps he had asymmetrical ideas about this and would not have obliged if you’d made a similar request, but if the notions were symmetrical then it’s not a sexbot thing. One reason I’m careful not to date women who aren’t dating any other men is that my life is full of other and overriding demands, and I don’t want to be someone’s only boyfriendly recourse.
Yeah, I agree that there are circumstances in which this works out. But we were mono and he was very asymmetrical and he had no idea that he was asymmetrical. (There was stuff to which I told him to find another girl, but he’d get mad if I was talking to another guy.) Like the thought that he was asking me for way more stuff than he would be willing to do (and that there’s anything wrong with that) just never crossed his mind. So he was innocently confused and frustrated about why things weren’t going his way.
This also gets into the issue of manipulating language to sneak in blind spots into the meanings of words. “A girlfriend is someone who should make me happy, and not doing [thing] makes me unhappy, so it’s your fault I’m unhappy.” But again, the scariest part was that he wasn’t trying to be evil! He just did all of his reasoning in that kind of spotty language that was skewed in his favor. And then constantly couldn’t figure out why the territory … wasn’t.
We can’t quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated). If he carefully refrained from talking to other girls, then we have a big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work and a probable breakup recommendation, but not an asymmetric non-negotiated demand.
Sorry for being pedantic in my definitions, but while this sort of thing may not in fact be relevant to your case, the general rule may prove important to others.
I think I’m going to have to drop this particular example. I kind of rushed into it blindly because I thought it was really important to point out that the thinking from the original comment wasn’t a straw man. And I do think it’s important to fill in this other information, but unfortunately it’s making me remember a bunch of stuff in more detail that I’d like, oops. (He did think he was allowed to talk to other girls. Also a lot of his behavior was characterized by this type of surprised frustration at very predictable things.)
Being pedantic in definitions is awesome! I think that failure is what gets people into this mess in the first place. If we were really thinking “I’d like you to put away your personal preferences whenever I find them inconvenient,” we wouldn’t have too much trouble realizing our thoughts were evil. But I also think that a non-evil
can be really damaging anyway and I think it’s easier and more productive to identify the potential for damage rather than establishing watertight evilness after the fact. Which is what I think the people that get mad at that “get a girl” type of rhetoric try to do.
Even without an asymmetry, the idea that when one is in a relationship one should refrain from talking to about 50% of the population sounds so preposterous to me that it’s not even funny. (Or is “talking” in this context a euphemism for something else?)
The fact that the parent and this comment were both downvoted makes me guess that such a position is not as indefensible as it naively sounds; but… Why? What am I missing?
Sounds pretty narcissistic of him. And narcissism is basically incurable, so hopefully you moved on.
Yes and yes. But my whole point is that I don’t want to say that he was an Evil Incurable Narcissist Demon! He was just a misguided kid with some questionable thought patterns. Like any of us!
Objectification is a cached thought and a weasel word away from anyone. So when someone gets offended about objectification, they’re not saying you’re an Evil Objectifying Narcissist Demon. It’s more like stepping on someone’s foot! It can happen to anyone! Accidentally! And you’d just say “oh, sorry about your foot,” and they’ll say “thanks for understanding.”
I was merely referring to the medical definition of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which your ex may or may not have had. And NPD people are notoriously hard to treat, precisely because not alieving that they are the problem is one of the main symptoms, and not just your garden-variety denial.
Yep, I understand and I actually think you may be right.
I was saying that using a word, any word, that you wouldn’t use to describe yourself is dangerous for thinking about stuff properly. That’s why I’m still waving this flag around! Sorry to be repetitive. I just don’t want people reading this and caching “Oh, I’m not one of those Nar-whatever people; that means I don’t objectify anyone.”
Tapping out now! Or I might feel compelled to continue flag-waving at a dead horse. =]
Are there still people like that? o.O
That doesn’t constitute asymmetry of the kind I think Eliezer was talking about. It would be asymmetric if he took you up on your invitation to look for other girls while expecting you not to do the same.
It might not be the same sort of asymmetry Eliezer was talking about, but do you really think it’s not a significant sort of asymmetry?
That would depend very much on what the terms of the relationship were, and to what extent asymmetry of the kind Eliezer was talking about was really present. One has to be careful about this, because if A allows her partner B to look for other girls to fulfill some desires of his that she won’t, it’s not clear that this creates an obligation for B to mirror that offer. Saying that there is “significant asymmetry” is language that sort of suggests that obligation is there.
I don’t think obligation is a very good way of framing the issue. Indeed, by far the most satisfying relationship I’ve been in was one where we both took the view “being in a relationship doesn’t obligate us to shit.”
The issue is not whether one person is imposing rules that they don’t want to follow themself, but whether one person has significantly more consideration for the other’s desires and is willing to go to greater efforts to accommodate them.
I’d appreciate it if the people downvoting this would offer an explanation.
I didn’t downvote, but maybe it would be helpful to taboo “obligation”: recently I’ve had a feeling that in discussions like this (not just on LW) both parties are thinking something kind-of sort-of reasonable but each thinks the other isn’t because they are using that word with slightly different meanings and each is misunderstanding what exactly the other means by it.
Would he agree with that description? Maybe he would, or perhaps there are other things that he said or did that make your attribution of meaning valid. However in themselves the words quoted are just as compatible with the taboo meaning being “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happen to include X, Y and also [thing]”. That is a matter of someone having incompatible romantic preferences and who has made incorrect assumptions about your conformance to a particular social contract.
Again, I’m not saying the description is incompatible with him wishing you were a non-sentient sexbot. Rather, that this particular story doesn’t come anywhere near making that interpretation the most plausible.
Well no, it specifically comes out to “someone who executes a set of behaviors that happens to include [thing] even when those behaviors go against their personality”. So it’s someone that puts aside their personality and does things that feels weird and uncomfortable that they wouldn’t do otherwise because their “boyfriend” wants them to.
I think it’s closer to “someone who likes me enough that she’s willing to do things that (possibly mildly) go against their personality for me”. I don’t no what [thing] was so I don’t know how reasonable or unreasonable the request was.
It might also help if you tabooed “go against one’s personality”.
I don’t have a definition, but I have an example. Suppose you decide to start dating a really quiet person and you know that they’re really quiet before you ask them out, and they’re consistently really quiet throughout the time that you’re dating, and then you start bringing them to loud social functions. You wouldn’t expect them to suddenly turn extroverted and gregarious, just because they’re dating you, right? (So I guess one stab at a working definition is a very low-probability change in behavior given your evidence from all your previous interaction with them, usually low-probability due to difficult-to-change psychological states.)
What you’re describing is more like “Will you please go with me to these events? They’re really important to me.” The person might like you enough to do it, even if they’re a bit uncomfortable. The important thing is that the question acknowledges that you know what they’re like and you understand they have a choice and it doesn’t expect them to suddenly deviate massively from their usual behavior.
What would you say about the following discourse?
I personally don’t think it’s particularly offensive. You can be as introverted as you like—as someone’s partner in a monogamous relationship, you are expected to at least not always let them go out alone, and A is just expressing his/her displeasure at having that expectation consistently flaunted.
I also suspect you overestimate how serious people will take the “it’s not part of my personality” objection. It’ll mostly be taken as a cheap excuse unless you make very clear how much it would upset you. Yvain has an insightful post on his blog about this kind of thing, though since he has expressed some worries about having people he doesn’t know link to it, I don’t.
Edit: I realize that this was ridiculously unhelpful. In order to avoid linking directly, I should have pointed out that the blog post I had in mind can be found by googling for the string upset “theory of drama”.
I don’t think the conversation itself is particularly offensive, but it would be offensive if all conversations on the subject of going to parties followed this particular template and showed no evidence of converging at an understanding or compromise.
This is why I ended my first relationship.
Of course there’s going to be some give and take, but it involved exactly the sort of asymmetry jooyous described, where I was being expected to do things I didn’t really like, because that was my “role,” while I wasn’t trying to force her into doing things she didn’t like, because I don’t like doing that to people.
If filling a prescribed role is exactly what you want out of your partner, that might feel like a satisfactory relationship, but to a person who doesn’t, it’s going to feel like their partner isn’t really acknowledging them as a person.
prescribed?
Yes, edited.
(Now I’m reminded of someone in the Italian edition of Loveline asking a question starting with “I’ve been with my girlfriend for a year, but we haven’t had sex yet” and being answered with something starting more-or-less with “first of all, if you aren’t having sex with her, then by definition she’s not your girlfriend; she’s just a friend”.)
What’d you think when you heard it?
As far as I can remember, something like “well, I can kind-of sort-of see her point, but on the other hand I don’t (say) kiss my friends on the mouth in public on a routine basis or implicitly promise each other to not hook up with anyone else, so assuming the caller does, I wouldn’t say that she’s not his girlfriend but just a friend”. But now that I think about that, that definition is broken, too (e.g. it doesn’t encircle open/poly relationships).
Seems like a total misreading of the situation to me. You understood “But you’re my girlfriend” to mean “you ought to behave like my sex slave”, whereas he meant “I expect you to consider my request as seriously as a GGG person would”. Unless, of course, you two already had this discussion and he is just being a jerk to revisit a settled issue.
First thought was, “WTH? If all those people want is to masturbate using someone else’s body, why don’t they just pay for a prostitute?”, then I remembered that prostitution is illegal in plenty of places. (Now I’m curious whether stuff like date rape drug use is more prevalent in places where prostitution is illegal than where it isn’t.)
Possible reasons:
Illegality (as you mention).
Perceived (and as far as I know actual) greater risk of STDs than with their likely alternative partner.
Price. (ie. “I wish I owned a house” is a plausible wish even if only because then they would not have to rent.)
Different expected behavior from a sexbot than a prostitute. The “masturbation” experience is presumably enhanced by various behaviors and expression of the sex toy (be it human or robotic). Related to the price reasoning in as much as the price of a “Full Girlfriend Experience” encounter with a prostitute is likely to be far greater than an encounter with someone who puts less effort into acting out an engaged experience.
Pride, conquest and ego. People like to be achieve and be validated. There are few things that are more validating for humans than to have mates of a suitable level of attractiveness desire your sexual attention.
Robots are cool. Sexbots are sometimes hilarious.
Hygene is much easier to manage with sexbots. Not only can you control access to the bot and so prevent exposure to the bodily fluids of unknown strangers, a sexbot can outright detach the relevant robo-parts and wash them in the sink.
Sexbots can (presumably) be more easily customized to have specific combinations of traits and easily switch between diverse roles or fetishes.
I’m not always sure which instances of “sexbot” in your comment are supposed to be literal and which are supposed to be metaphorical. Anyway...
That would require your partner to be sentient, wouldn’t it?
Haha, not quite. I think you’d want it to be sentient just enough to provide a challenge but turn off its sentience whenever it becomes unpleasant or inconvenient.
Or to have been sentient.
The squick has been doubled!
Whichever works (which in some cases means both).
Yes, quite right. My mental cache evidently used too much compression and the reconstruction thereof failed to include the necessary explanation. The ego related possible answer that I originally intended was of course that factors of pride and validation of sexual appeal may be absent in both cases and so “just pay a prostitute” would not help them.
Not necessarily. It would require your partner to be difficult to acquire, probably based on their own selectivity and probably based on traits considered high-status, which is why literally buying a sexbot might not be enough for some people—unless it requires wealth, which is usually high-status. Prostitutes are likewise undesirable, unless they are expensive/choosy high-class prostitutes. It implies that they are more likely to be sentient in that they may be choosing based on their own goals, but that’s a rather fragile implication.
It seems to have multiple meanings and connotations all blurring into each other. Possible meaning include:
“Treating someone as a means rather than an end.” I’m generally OK with treating people as means, as are most LWers AFAICT, but relationships (and to a lesser extent morality) is expected to include having their desires as part of your goal structure.
“Treating someone as not having goals of their own.” Objectively wrong, obviously, and if you genuinely believe or alieve this you’re likely to run into some problems, I guess.
“Treating someone as only existing only to serve as a status symbol, “sex object” or housekeeper.” More subtle than the second one, as it relates to goals rather than beliefs, but ultimately has the same problems if you’re a neurotypical human or similar.
“Focusing on the utility someone’s body provides, rather than their mind/personality.” Depends on your goals, I guess, but probably not conductive to healthy relationships and many would argue it causes all sorts of subtle societal problems.
Most people mean many or all of these when they say “objectifying” due to connotations and sloppy terminology. A few also include “Treating someone as governed by instinct rather than as a sentient being”, especially when discussing PUA.
Does that answer your question?
Prior discussion about that
I made the same point there as well.
Ah, that part I had glanced over. Well, that’s a case of Generalizing from One Example: ‘[I don’t mind {noise, clutter, being objectified}, therefore it’s not a big deal and] if you complain about it you’re oversensitive.’
Could be a bit of both. “It happens to everyone [therefore] it doesn’t matter to me [therefore] you can get over it.”
It could, but OTOH a person’s level of annoyance for something isn’t always a monotonically decreasing function of how frequent that is: for example, the more often people post something I’m not interested in (e.g. gossip about celebrities, rooting for football teams, pictures of attractive people in underwear of the gender other than the one I’m attracted to) on Facebook, the more annoyed I am by seeing that particular kind of thing (ceteris paribus).
BTW, I’ve recently noticed a couple examples the reverse phenomenon of “it doesn’t matter to me [therefore] you can get over it”, namely “it annoys me [therefore] you should be outraged”. For example, last night Bob introduced me to Alice; I don’t remember exactly what Alice told me, except that I thought it was supposed to be playful banter; this morning Bob apologized to me on Facebook for introducing “that boorish blonde”, because Carol had told him that Alice had been rude to me. I’m guessing that Carol would be annoyed by… whatever it was that Alice told me, so she assumed that I would be annoyed too. (I have asked Carol herself for clarifications on Facebook.) This has raised my estimate of how much the typical person is annoyed by what would sound to me like playful banter, incidentally making me take PUA critics’ concerns about “negging” more seriously.
Good point.
Do you suggest that people should select their mates randomly?
Him:
Me:
So no, no I don’t.
I thought that you implied that it was a Bad Thing, while you were just objecting the logic of the argument. Thanks for the clarification.
Actually, I was implying that it’s a Bad Thing (or at least, I see no reason to discount the evidence that it is based on how common it is.) But “selecting mates based on various criteria” and “reducing mates to status symbols” are different things, and I was only objecting to the latter.
So you think that taking into account the status signalling value of a partner, either direct (“Look at my supermodel wife!”) or indirect (“Look at the fancy car my rich husband bought me!”) is a Bad Thing?
It’s perfectly okay to choose partners based on their status signalling value, as long as both parties know that it’s happening and are happy with the arrangement. I’m sure there are a number of stable and perfectly functional rich husband/trophy wife relationships out there in the world, or maybe even rich wife/trophy husband ones. It is, however, a Bad Thing to say “Yes honey, I adore your personality” when you, in fact, don’t. If you are using someone as a status symbol and find yourself saying things like that, it means know that’s not what they want. You should instead find a willing status symbol.
That morality is unfortunate. In the typical case both partners are choosing mates based significantly on their status signalling value and neither are aware of it.
I am highly suspicious of all morals that punish self-awareness and reward hypocrisy.
I’m confused, how does being honest about a trophy spouse arrangement in which both parties are satisfied punish self-awareness and reward hypocrisy?
If I have a trophy husband but don’t know it, I’m judged morally kosher. But if I realize this, and change nothing else, the arrangement becomes sin—I’m punished for my introspection.
I may or may not get this, so let me try giving an exaggerated for clarity example of what I think you mean.
You’re a billionaire author.
You marry an aspiring trophy poet, not because you like their poetry or dislike their poetry, but because they are utterly gorgeous. But you didn’t realize this when you married.
You then introspectively realize “Wait, I only married this person because they are utterly gorgeous! In all other ways I have no real feelings for anything they do one way or the other.”
You then hear them say “Oh, my love, it’s so nice to have someone who appreciates my poetry.” and you realize they think that you selected them as a spouse because you love their poetry.
If you had not introspected that earlier, you might have said something like “Yes, such sweet poetry, written by a sweet author.” and not thought about it.
But now you KNOW you don’t care about the poetry, so if you say that, you feel like you are lying. but if you tell your spouse the truth, you feel like you are smashing apart the (now apparently fictional) basis of your marriage.
So it might be the fact that the introspection can put you in a position where it may be to your advantage if you make a choice to not tell your spouse the truth, and that is an uncomfortable position to be in.
But where would your spouse get the idea that you appreciate their poetry? If you told them that you did when you really didn’t, they’d notice by your actions that you didn’t really mean it and react accordingly. Meaning, they’d either not care and you could keep on being married or they’d be really upset and confront you, in which case, you’re better off just telling the truth and letting them sort out reality for themselves. Meanwhile, if you never mentioned why you married them and you never asked to read their poetry, they’d be pretty delusional to randomly ascribe motivations to you that don’t explain your actions.
You believed you appreciated their poetry but on introspection, you realize that was just halo effect.
But why do they think you appreciate their poetry? Is it because the halo effect was so strong, you used to talk about how awesome their poetry is all the time?
That is what I mean, yes; your billionaire would probably prefer not to have realized.
I share jooyous’ confusion. How does it follow from “it’s OK to choose partners based on signalling value as long as we both know it” that “I’m judged morally kosher if I have a trophy husband but don’t know it”?
To say that it’s OK to do X given Y is not to say that it’s OK to do X in the absence of Y.
“It’s okay as long as both parties know it’s happening” pragmatically implicates “it’s not okay if...” Oh, wait. You’re right. Something had flipped a bit in my brain. Never mind.
I am still super-confused. I was going for a morality that has a penalty for hurting people. So that if you’re doing something that makes someone else unhappy, you have an incentive to figure out what you’re doing that has that effect and then take steps accordingly. Meanwhile, if you’re lying about something or you’re clueless about something and no one notices or cares, that’s fine.
I don’t think that it’s rewarding hypocrisy. I think that this moral stance is about punishing deliberate liars. If you are more self-aware, then yes, you would have more opportunities to deliberately lie (about, for example, what attracts you to a given partner); but this is not, to my mind, a reason to avoid self-awareness. Similarly, if you understand more science, then this gives you the option of creating better, more believable lies; but this is not a reason to reject the study of science.
Self awareness successfully penalized.
I often ignore punishment too. After all, punishment of me isn’t something I want to reward! But when I refuse to respond to an incentive I do not try claim that the incentive does not exist.
Not the same. (Unless you want to also declare that the social environment is one in which people often say that the world is flat and that people declining to say the world is flat are at a disadvantage.)
Oh, so the idea is that if you’re really clueless, then you’re not lying to your partner? You just feel compelled to bring them to fancy dinner parties but never spend one-on-one time with them and you don’t know why? Sorry, I’m still having trouble understanding. =/
I wasn’t quite going for a moral stance that punishes deliberate liars, but I was going for one where the people cooperate to maximize … combined utility, I guess? If both people are happy, it’s better than an arrangement where one person is making the other unhappy. Which sort of requires honesty, because if you don’t tell the other person your real utility function, they won’t be able to help with it. And if you act according to a different utility function than you tell them about, that will reflect in your actions and they’ll be able to tell something’s up.
I agree that both being happy is better than one making the other unhappy, but it’s important to note that
The two are not mutually exclusive: I could reduce your happiness, but be unable to overcome your naturally sunny disposition.
One happy one unhappy might have a higher “combined utility” than both happy, if one is a sadistic utility monster.
No-one’s ever told me their utility function, but I still think I’ve helped them. When I hold a door open for someone, I help them, but they didn’t tell me any coefficients.
If people could always tell something was up there’d be no unknowing trophy spouses and hence no problem.
That just works because most people appreciate you opening doors. If you met someone that hated having their door opened, you’d stop! right? And you wouldn’t really know they hate it unless they tell you honestly! Or maybe you’d be able to tell because they cringe and grimace every time you do it, which is what I mean by actions reflecting happiness. Maybe they wouldn’t even know why they cringe and grimace, but you could experiment and tell it was door-related.
Yes there are scenarios where you need to ask in order to help people. But there are also scenarios where you don’t, and in the comment I was replying to you suggested that one had to ask to help.
Yeah, I think I meant that communication happens somehow, either explicitly or through cringing-like behavior. But you’re right, I didn’t combine utility properly in my earlier comment. I wanted a way to penalize unhappiness more. Like if something makes me reeeally happy and the other person a bit unhappy, it should be up to the other person to decide if I get to do it. In the sense that unhappiness is unpleasantness and not quite the same as absence of happiness. Arr, complicated.
Not sure how much of this is true, but I hear rumours about that being the case (if you replace “the world is flat” with something like “humans were intelligently designed”) in certain geographical locales. (I do hope that Conservapedia is eventually revealed to be just a parody, though.)
EDIT: To avoid appearing to be one-sided, I’ll point out that the equivalent of that at the other end of the political spectrum is something like “all races have the same average intelligence”.
I disagree. Greater self-awareness creates greater opportunity to lie, but it does not compel the person to lie. Where is the penalty in that?
I don’t understand your point. Given what little I do understand, I suspect that it may be related to my generally poor awareness of social environments. What social environment are you assuming?
The person who sincerely, but falsely believes p is not lying when they assert p. Someone who has greater awareness and knows that p is false has one fewer option to chose from morally: he can’t say p, because that would be lying. This becomes a problem especially when there is a social cost attached to not saying p, in which case the person with greater knowledge is effectively penalized: they have to either do something immoral (lying) or incur the costs of failing to say p (or, God forbid, saying ~p!).
True, and true.
Yes; but why should there be a penalty for not saying p? Surely it is just as likely, on average, that there will be a penalty for not saying the inverse of p (in which case greater self-awareness rewards instead of penalizes).
In the case that was the starting point of this dicussion, there surely is a penalty for saying ~p, but quite possibly also one for failing to say p: your partner might complain if they never hear nice things about themselves from you (or at least not nice things of the kind they want to hear).
On average, I would expect it to be more likely that there is a social penalty for failing to say something that only a very self-aware person would not believe (i.e. for failing to go along with the “official narrative”) than that there is a social penalty for not saying something that only a very self-aware person would know (thereby forcing non-self-aware people to lie).
Ah; so you’re not arguing that there’s a moral penalty for self-awareness in all situations, you’re saying that there’s a moral penalty for self-awareness in a specific situation! (Apologies; I was trying to consider the rule as applied in general).
Thank you, that helped to clear things up.
And, just to make sure that there’s no more assumption traps (i.e. where we each assume that something mutually exclusive is obvious) I will describe my understanding of that situation (correct me if I’m wrong):
A person finds a romantic partner to which they are attracted. He (or she) compliments said partner on some aspect which he (or she) finds attractive only due to the halo effect; on the basis of these compliments, both partners enter a long-term romantic relationship. The person later improves their self-awareness, and realises that the earlier compliments were only due to the halo effect; admitting so then carries a social penalty.
In that case, I would agree; however, improved self-knowledge earlier in the process can head off the problem entirely. So it’s not penalizing self-knowledge; it’s rather penalizing the earlier lack of self-knowledge.
Yes, exactly. Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that you thought we were talking about a general rule or I would have cleared this up earlier.
I don’t think so. It’s penalizing becoming self-aware. After all, if the person never became self-aware, she would never incur the penalty.
And, similarly, if a person never hits the ground, he never incurs any injury from falling. If he becomes self-aware quickly enough, then he takes comparatively minor social damage—as a man who falls and quickly hits the ground may only twist an ankle. If he becomes self-aware only after twenty years of marriage, then he potentially takes severe social damage; as a man who falls from a skyscraper, take severe damage when he hits the ground.
So, yes, I can see why you make that statement; it is a reasonable statement, but I think it places the emphasis on the wrong part of the fall.
No. “Reducing” implies that you aren’t taking other factors into account, like, y’know, the actual person.
(It wouldn’t be all that hard to argue that ignoring the status signalling value is a good idea, though. And ideally, you shouldn’t have to, I should think.)
Taboo “actual person”.
Isn’t reductionism fun. ;)
A person is reduced to their status when if they were to no longer signal status, they would become of no interest to you.
An “actual person” typically has other qualities in addition to those that make them a status symbol. An actual person is also frequently aware of these qualities and therefore often doesn’t appreciate being just a status symbol.
Everything they should be taking into account besides status :P
The multiple negation might be confusing, but basically:
“It’s not just A that has horrible things happen to them, A^C also do!” does not imply “It is good/okay that A and A^C have horrible things happen to them”.