I have to take a hard exception to some transhumanists’ advocacy of “sex robots,” “marrying robots” and similar abominations. Istvan does that in this piece.
Young men need to get into sexual relationships with women “organically,” by which I mean that the women feel attracted to them, as a necessary part of men’s healthy personal development. Which goes to show why having alienated sexual experiences with prostitutes don’t get the job done. A prostitute can teach a man the mechanics of sex—or so I’ve gathered—but she can’t teach him how to have these experiences with regular women. Having these organic experiences lead to the development of skills which don’t exist in isolation, but instead play a role in knowing how to deal with women successfully in the rest of life.
Yet the introduction of passable sex robots would sabotage this process, and it would leave a whole generation of young men psychologically stunted. This seems obvious to me, but apparently not to the people who publish propaganda about the wonders of giving men artificial ways to jerk off, as if we have just undergone a cultural transformation which holds that most men don’t deserve sexual relationships with women any more, so they should just abandon that aspiration as an unattainable fantasy, plug into these machines and leave women alone.
I can understand the appeal of this scenario to, say, some of the incels and MGTOW’s. But Istvan has a wife and two daughters, so he clearly has the experiences and skills to know the difference. Why would he therefore advocate something so preposterous and so disrespectful of a lot of men, other than the fact that he wants to keep his name in circulation, so he keeps publishing these trolls as “transhumanist” proposals?
No woman owes sex to no man. If you think that women have any kind of duty to sexually satisfy men, you are deluded and have very unhealthy and dangerous attitudes.
Contrast this with:
No boss owes a job to no potential employee. If you think that bosses have any kind of duty to employ you, you are deluded and have very unhealthy and dangerous attitudes.
Compare your reaction to the first and second sentiment. What accounts for the difference?
In principle “no woman owes sex to no man” and “no boss owes a job to no potential employee” are indeed closely analogous (I myself lean libertarian-ish so I agree with both), but empirically the kind of people who “think that women have any kind of duty to sexually satisfy men” and the kind of people who “think that bosses have any kind of duty to employ you” seem demographically and culturally different to me—if anything, I’d expect those two sentiments to anti-correlate for hysterical raisins (e.g. the former is more common among Red Tribers, the latter is more common among Blue Tribers, etc.). People are often bad at or uninterested in thinking about those kind of things at the meta level.
Also, empirically the former people do seem more dangerous to me (at least nowadays; probably not in e.g. 1917 Russia), e.g. applicants/former employees becoming violent toward bosses after being turned down/fired (or vice versa) don’t seem particularly common to me.
How would “I have a duty to hire you, but even if I don’t, nobody has a right to force me to (or, at least, to punish me)” be worth the paper it’s written on? How would a world where that’s the case differ from one where “I have no duty to hire you, and therefore if I don’t, nobody has a right to force me to”, how can I tell the difference, and why should I care?
I’m not Mirzhan_Irkegulov, but my reaction to the two is very similar: both are correct, and in general no one has an obligation to have sex with anyone else and no one has an obligation to employ anyone else.
I’ll guess that you’re thinking about anti-discrimination laws, according to which in some circumstances an employer can get into trouble for not employing someone. But those are quite special circumstances that very rarely apply to sex (it might apply to prostitution, and I can kinda see a case for forbidding prostitutes to refuse clients on the basis of race etc., but also prostitution can be really dangerous and it’s therefore probably better to say that prostitutes should have absolute discretion to refuse clients).
(The other obvious kind of case in which such obligations might exist is where a relationship is already in existence. You might reasonably be aggrieved if your spouse suddenly starts refusing to have sex, or if your employer fires you. But I don’t think either side of this comparison is what anyone in the thread had in mind.)
Anyway. Apparently you consider that there should be harmony between one’s answers to those questions. I’m pretty sure you don’t think that employers should ever be obliged to employ particular employees. Do you think that women commonly have a duty to provide sex to men? In contexts other than existing long-term sexual relationships?
I’ll guess that you’re thinking about anti-discrimination laws, according to which in some circumstances an employer can get into trouble for not employing someone.
No, I’m thinking about the fact that politicians and pundits routinely talk about lowering unemployment, and this is universally agreed to be a desirable goal and not something creepy for implying that every worker ‘deserves’ a job, heck the “right to a job” is frequently listed in lists of “second generation human rights”. Contrast this with the reaction advancedatheist got for suggesting men deserve a sexual relationship with women.
Oh, OK. So in that case, again, I think I think more or less the same in the two cases.
For any given potential worker, it is good if they are able to have a job if they want one.
But no one in particular is obliged to give them a job.
(And I think at some point we will need a transition to a different way of organizing production that drops the idea that everyone should be working. But that’s another matter.)
For any given potential sexually active person, it is good if they are able to have plenty of satisfying sex if they want to.
But no one in particular is obliged to have sex with them.
I don’t know to what extent this resembles the opinions of the politicians and pundits you have in mind. I would expect that most agree about jobs but many disagree about sex (on account of not thinking as I do that in general more sex is a good thing).
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it’s socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it’s not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I’m not sure it indicates anything worse.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men. I don’t know whether he actually does think that, but it’s explicitly what Mirzhan_Irkegulov says he thinks advancedatheist thinks: “your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will”.
For any given potential worker, it is good if they are able to have a job if they want one.
But no one in particular is obliged to give them a job.
However, it is generally understood that society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t seem to agree with your claim that “no one in particular is obliged to give them a job”, at the every least they seem to think this is someone’s duty even if they’re not clear on whose.
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it’s socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it’s not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I’m not sure it indicates anything worse.
Except sex used to be an even more sensitive topic in the past, and it was taken for granted the society had a duty to arrange for people to have the opportunity to get married.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men.
The statement “women have an obligation to have sex with men” is ambiguous. However, Mirzhan_Irkegulov presumed that it was meant in a creepy way and is thus unacceptable. By contrast consider Part III, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
(1) The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right.
(2) The steps to be taken by a State Party to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include technical and vocational guidance and training programmes, policies and techniques to achieve steady economic, social and cultural development and full and productive employment under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms to the individual.
Notice that it is also vague on just who is obliged to provide the employment but carries no such presumption of creepiness.
society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I’m pretty sure it’s usually felt that one can’t have an obligation to do something impossible. I think the actual sentiment is the one I already expressed: if someone wants to have a job, it is better if they can get one.
(On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I’m pretty sure it’s (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work, and (2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working—e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.)
Anyway, it’s not clear to me what your actual argument is. Do you think that someone in this discussion (Mirzhan_Irkegulov, me, the United Nations General Assembly, I dunno) holds inconsistent opinions? If so, what inconsistent positions? Because all I’m seeing so far is that sex and jobs are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and my opinions on them are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and I don’t see what the problem’s meant to be.
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I’m pretty sure it’s usually felt that one can’t have an obligation to do something impossible.
Ok, now you’re not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I’m pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you’d be arguing some variant of “just because things will never be perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make them as good as possible”.
On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I’m pretty sure it’s (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work,
So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I’m sure advencedatheist’s comments were also aspirational in this sense.
(2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working—e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?
This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I’m not saying you’ve done it twice in this thread]. I promise it’s wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what’s going wrong here—am I missing something that’s so obvious to you that you can’t imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to “you’re not even trying to argue in good faith”? Thanks.
(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it’s a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)
just because things will never be perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make them as good as possible
Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I’ve been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I’m not sure what.
(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn’t then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)
how is this relevant to the argument at hand?
I honestly don’t know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it’s relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there’s an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don’t think there is such an inconsistency.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships
Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.
Okay, it seems to me that people use the word “right” with at least different meanings, and misunderstand each other as a result.
As a EU citizen, I have a right to travel to other EU countries in the sense that, if by mutual consent between me and an airline I buy a plane ticket and take a plane to Poland, I must not be stopped by the police or anybody else. (By comparison, I don’t have a right to travel to Pakistan unless I get a visa first.) But it sounds like there are people using the word “right” with a narrower sense, according to whom I have no right to go to Poland because if I can’t afford a plane ticket there’s nobody who must take me there anyway.
Do we all agree that people should have a right to have a job in the former sense but not in the latter sense, and that people should have a right to have sex in the former sense but not in the latter sense?
(Well, maybe there is an intermediate sense whereby I have a right to fly to Poland iff there are no market failures preventing me from flying to Poland a non-negligible fraction of the times I would be able to do so in a perfectly efficient market. But I hope we all agree that 1. EU citizens probably don’t all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren’t excessive, though 3. requiring airlines to take EU citizens to Poland whenever the latter want whether the former want it or not wouldn’t be anywhere remotely near a good way of achieving that; and 4. the same things applies to employment and to sex, except that the kinds of market failures that there exist are different in each case.)
EU citizens probably don’t all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren’t excessive,
So would you agree to the analogous thing for relationships, because advancedatheist’s point is that there is a huge ‘market failure’ there right now?
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I’m not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking) also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others (much like I guess you’d agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others) and would stay so even in a hypothetical perfect efficient market.
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I’m not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking)
More like, the ‘powers that be’ doesn’t actually want to fix the market failure, and thinks offering inferior substitutes will at least cause the poeple complaning about it to shut up.
also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others
Well, the market failure was a lot less in the recent past.
(much like I guess you’d agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others)
I wouldn’t agree that this is an explanation for a rise in unemployment.
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
The fact that I can’t acquire a superyacht is not a market failure.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative of “I have a right, I couldn’t exercise this right, so I’m a victim, somebody make sure I can exercise my rights!”
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
Let, me translate that into the unemployment analogy for you:
Remind me, why are [we] calling the inability of some to find a job a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I’m not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative
Except have you seen any other instance of the entitlement narrative get the same kind of reaction.
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement.
Mild. There has been a mostly polite discussion of the so-called zero marginal product workers, that is, people who are of no use (and, actually, often bring negative utility) to an employer. More generally, the idea that some people can’t hold (and eventually can’t find) a job is not particularly controversial.
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I’m not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Mild. There has been a mostly polite discussion of the so-called zero marginal product workers, that is, people who are of no use (and, actually, often bring negative utility) to an employer.
That’s not what I said. I said, consider what the reaction would be if someone made the above statement (in those words).
Also, most of the discussion of zero marginal product workers is along the lines of, “it is the fault of government regulation that these workers are zmp, hence said regulations should be repealed”.
But it isn’t worded in a “sufficiently disingenuous way”, it’s worded in a way similar to Lumifer’s sex statement. If it isn’t acceptable because of the offensive wording, why is the sex statement acceptable?
I think the implication is that the sexual marketplace is inefficient (with an implied dig at the idea that employment is a right in the sense that you describe). Given roughly equal numbers of men and women who want sex and/or relationships, and treating men and women as fungible, there is an inefficiency if everybody isn’t satisfied, as partners can be rearranged to produce a greater number of satisfied people.
On the down side for this view, people aren’t in fact fungible. On the up side for this view, there are some obvious inefficiencies in the sexual marketplace, such as the distribution of genders across cities. On the “whatever” side for this view, I’m inclined to say that the root of the problem is that value on the sexual marketplace has greater variance for men than women, so the tails on both ends are dominated by men whose preferences cannot be satisfied, and the middle of the distribution has more women than there are men available to satisfy their preferences.
First, people are not fungible at all (outside of the fairly rare “any hole will do” approach and no, I don’t mean bisexuals).
Second, there is a lot of fuzziness about what’s actually being traded because under consideration is the whole spectrum from casual one-night stands to till death do us part. Notably when talking about the sex marketplace, what many people want is actually a relationship and that’s a bit different.
Third, there are difficulties because what you offer to exchange is not well-defined, partially hidden, and, to top it off, the participants have an incentive to lie about it.
Fourth, as you note, the market isn’t quite symmetric in that men and women have different needs, expectations, approaches, and techniques.
All in all, the market certainly isn’t perfect, but I don’t know if I would characterize the situation as a “market failure”. It’s just the usual human mess that most manage to muddle through.
Plus one point for treating women as consumers, rather than products, in the sexual marketplace. Minus one point for treating men as inferior products, rather than unsatisfied consumers, in the sexual marketplace.
That’s not what “right” means. As a EU citizen, I have the right to travel to other EU countries, but this doesn’t mean that if I want to go to Poland there’s someone who must take me there.
I’m not Mirzhan_Irkegulov, but my reaction to the two is very similar: both are correct, and in general no one has an obligation to have sex with anyone else and no one has an obligation to employ anyone else
I’m not VoiceOfRa, but I’d like to throw a little twist into this comparison. Let’s change from “no woman owes sex” : “no boss owes a job” to “a women has the right to withdraw consent to sex at any time” : “a boss has the right to fire anyone at any time”. Still very similar?
As I said in my third paragraph, I think that particular question is some way removed from the points originally at issue in this discussion. But to both of those my reaction is “well, kinda”. In more detail (reluctantly because I think it’s a big digression):
If two people are in a longstanding sexual relationship and one suddenly withdraws consent, clearly something has gone badly wrong. The same is true if one has been working for the other for some time and suddenly gets fired.
Having sex when you really, really don’t want to is much worse than missing out on sex when you want it. Having no job is much worse than having one employee who isn’t performing well. This is an important respect in which the analogy breaks down.
People should be able to fire employees and to refuse consent to sex.
They have a moral obligation to do so in as reasonable a fashion as they can.
In some cases that may still mean doing it suddenly (e.g., you find that your partner is violent and dangerous; you find that your employee has been embezzling; you contract a medical condition that makes sex agonizingly painful; your company loses a contract and suddenly has no money).
Because losing all of your income is generally a big disaster, much worse than having to pay one employee’s salary, it is reasonable to require employers not to leave their employees completely screwed if they get fired unless it’s because of the employee’s serious misconduct.
Because being forced to have sex on one occasion is so much worse than being denied sex on one occasion, it is reasonable to say that if one partner says no then the other is obliged not to force sex on them. (But because being denied sex on all occasions is bad, it is also reasonable to say that if one partner is consistently refusing consent then the other is entitled to look elsewhere, even if their relationship is notionally monogamous.)
I don’t see any inconsistency in the above; my positions on the two questions aren’t identical, for reasons tightly bound up with the ways in which the two questions themselves aren’t identical.
I’m not attacking your position :-) It’s just that I expect that my reformulation will bring a different set of responses from some people than the original one.
In the US that’s already the case and even the people who don’t think that wives should be allowed to refuse sex from husbands seem to see nothing wrong with that. Well, except when someone is fired is for saying something factually correct but offensive.
As OrphanWilde already pointed out, no, it’s not. Even other than protected classes of people and protected reasons, trade union jobs and many public sector jobs are not employment at-will.
You might reasonably be aggrieved if your spouse suddenly starts refusing to have sex, or if your employer fires you. But I don’t think either side of this comparison is what anyone in the thread had in mind.
Interestingly, the likes of James A. Donald lament that wives are now allowed to deny consent to sex or to divorce while apparently seeing nothing wrong with at-will employment.
The problem is, I felt this way when I was, like, 16, and I don’t feel that way anymore. It frightens me that there are men, who are no longer teenagers, who still live in a constant state of anxiety, that women are there to “get you” by refusing to have sex with you.
This actually isn’t a gendered issue. “Fat acceptance” and “Nerd acceptance” are two sides of the same coin, but both sides insist it is gendered.
Sexual deprivation has real psychological effects. Shit, we should -expect- it to have real psychological effects; you’re failing to function as the wind-up toy evolution designed you as. Why do people deny the psychological effects? Why do -you- deny the psychological effects, and insist they can just be overcome?
Because, by the standard morality of our society, problems must be solved. Admitting that it’s a genuine issue for these people implies some obligation to do something about it, which implies some obligation by some people to have sex with other people, and that’s just wrong.
Personally? I think it’s fine to say that it’s sad that some people lack what is probably the most fundamental kind of affirmation. And I think it’s fine to say that it’s sad, and I think it’s fine to say that, y’know, the situation sucks for them, and they shouldn’t just pretend otherwise. And I can think it’s sad, and the situation sucks, without thinking that implies some kind of sexual obligation.
When you can’t say there is a problem without also believing the problem can, and should, be solved, the problem to be solved often becomes the problem itself. And either the problem to be solved is that these individuals don’t get sex—but the solution to that is both immediately obvious and immediately unacceptable—or the problem is the way these individuals -feel-, as a result of not getting sex. And because they can’t acknowledge a problem without believing it can and should be solved, they choose the problem whose solution is acceptable to them: The problem is with the people who are suffering, rather than the suffering itself.
I’m not like that, I have empathy, because I was just like that at some point.
The former doesn’t follow from the latter. Rather, it seems more like you have disavowed empathy with your past self so that you can feel superior to people like your past self. Given that you appear to have very little otherwise to feel superior about, e.g., you apparently still can’t actually get sex, this is of course an understandable reaction.
But you can be happy without sex, and sex is not a need. Of course sex is a good thing, and it’s great, when there’s more of it (consensual, obviously). But so can be said of video games, or action films, or hiking, or chess playing. People can be happy without them, and these are not needs, and so is true of sex.
The only problem I see with young male virgins in today’s world is not lack of sex, but terrible self-esteem, depression and anxiety around the belief that they ought to have sex, but because there’s something wrong either with them, or the world, they don’t have it. Get rid of that crap from their minds, and you’ll make young men happy, confident, self-respecting, motivated and self-reliant.
Replace “sex” with “not dying” and you have the standard deathist position.
Not having sex and feeling unhappy about it is strictly worse than not having sex and being ok with it.
Except that feeling unhappy about it makes one more likely to fix the situation. Seriously, this is the exact same argument made by deathists, and generally a universal argument against caring about anything.
I could easily argue the opposite way: Once perfect sex becomes something you can easily buy in a form of sex robots, and the practice becomes so widespread that it will be socially accepted by the mainstream… maybe the partner relationships will become better, because people would use them to optimize for other values—such as being nice to each other, being a good conversational partner, etc.
And those people who can’t provide any other value, they will stay at home with their sexbots, and won’t pass their genes to another generation. Genetic pool improved and overpopulation solved using this one simple trick!
(I am not suggesting this as a serious prediction, just as an example that you can easily verbally argue towards almost any bottom line.)
Why would he therefore advocate something so preposterous and so disrespectful
I use ad-blocking software, so the most obvious hypothesis is a bit difficult to verify, but the prior probability is so high I would still bet on it.
I could easily argue the opposite way: Once perfect sex becomes something you can easily buy in a form of sex robots, and the practice becomes so widespread that it will be socially accepted by the mainstream… maybe the partner relationships will become better, because people would use them to optimize for other values—such as being nice to each other, being a good conversational partner, etc.
Has this happened with any other technologically supplied superstimulus?
“Technologically applied superstimulus” is a pretty narrow category, but here are a couple of things that come close enough that I think they’re relevant.
My impression is that gourmet food has become more interesting as the need for it also to be filling has decreased (because industrial-scale food production has made adequate food really cheap, much as sexbots might hypothetically make adequate sex really easy to get; “perfect” seems too much to hope for).
There is some evidence that violent video games reduce their users’ tendency to engage in actual physical violence.
My impression is that gourmet food has become more interesting as the need for it also to be filling has decreased
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce. For an example of technological superstimulus applied to food think mass-produced food that is sweeter/more satisfying then anything in the ancestral environment, a.k.a., fast/junk food.
See here for the standard examples of superstimuli as applied to food and video games.
I’m not suggesting that gourmet food is a technologically applied superstimulus, I’m suggesting that cheap mass-produced food is a bit like one and that maybe its availability has enabled the flourishing of cuisine-as-quasi-artform.
This is not exactly what you asked for but I think it’s still relevant—it’s not so very different from what Viliam suggested could conceivably happen with sexbots. Hence my first paragraph.
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce.
I don’t think so. Gourmet food nowadays is:
tasty in a complex way
unusual
That requires creativity and a sense of style much more than it requires a lot of skilled labour. In a way it’s like fashion—fashionable clothes could require complex production, but they don’t have to. Neither fashion nor gourmet cooking is about being “skilled-labour intensive”.
It seems like the relevance would be if the technologically supplied superstimulus replaced a function previously supplied solely through partner relationships. The following chain of examples involving video games doesn’t seem directly relevant, unless before the advent of video games, people played board games exclusively with their romantic partners.
Microwaves (There was a fear that microwaves would destroy the nature of decency of food culture, I for one use both an oven and a microwave and a stove for different purposes)
fast food
TV to newspapers
Computers to TV
Texting to writing a letter
In all of these cases, technology has found its place among the various options to fulfilling the need. Yes some people get addicted to videogames; but people also get addicted to alcohol.
Yes some people get addicted to videogames; but people also get addicted to alcohol.
So? Alcohol is (or was) also a superstimulus. It’s just that some human populations have been exposed to it long enough to become adapted to it. Specifically adapting to it by finding it less stimulating.
An example of something not a technology that people get addicted to.
Alcohol is not inherently bad—like say cyanide (or a bomb) might be considered bad because it’s primary purpose causes death; it’s the nature of people to use it badly. And principally—many people use alcohol (and videogames) without getting addicted to it, and lead a fully functional life while partaking in a bit of alcohol (or videogames).
An example of something not a technology that people get addicted to.
You have a very weird definition of “technology” if alcohol is not a technology.
Alcohol is not inherently bad
Only because (Western) humans have had several millennia to develop adaptations to it. Go to, say, an Indian (Native American) reservation to see what affect alcohol has on humans not adapted to it. It’s not pretty.
many people use videogames without getting addicted
Thanks to advancements we now have sustainable food, security of food availability. Heck! People have enough substitutes to meat to not need to eat it ever!
Yes the availability of junk food has caused some people to eat unhealthily; but the availability of vegetables has helped many more people to eat healthily and have fulfilling eating lives.
Technology frequently improves some things while making other things worse. But sooner or later people find a way to improve both the some things and the other things. In this particular case, maybe they haven’t found it yet.
I think you’re mistaken about how important sex is to relationships, This varies pretty wildly by individual, but I find it easy to believe that a good portion of the populace would be better off if there were many uncomplicated orgasm sources, rather than requiring a deep committed exclusivity.
That bundled commitment is valuable, and I’m quite happy in it. And, over time, as technology improves and my wife and I age and change, I can easily believe we’ll add robots to our marriage. We have some now, but they’re mostly there for mechanical assistance, and we don’t have much of a deep bond with them.
Having these organic experiences lead to the development of skills which don’t exist in isolation, but instead play a role in knowing how to deal with women successfully in the rest of life.
I often hear claims like that here on LW, but they sound very implausible to me. I never had a girlfriend until I was 26 but I’m not under the impression that before then I was deficient in otherwise dealing with female friends/professors/etc. in a way that I no longer am, or in a way that I was not with male friends/professors/etc. (In particular, in most of my late teens and early twenties I had many more female friends than male friends.) Do you (or anybody else who’s been making such claims) have any evidence (that could be easily shared on a Web forum) of that?
Why would he therefore advocate something so preposterous and so disrespectful of a lot of men
What kind of question is this? There a lot of rubbish posted on the internet.
Despite the stuff about sex bots, writing like: “In 15 to 20 years time, cranial implant technology will enable humans to overcome many of their idiosyncrasies and bad behaviors—making a new generation of very wholesome and exemplary children. In fact, going to college may be replaced by downloading higher educations into our brains.” doesn’t look like a serious analysis.
Learning is an active process. It’s a process of engaging in critical thinking. It’s not simply replaced by a download into the brain.
This seems obvious to me, but apparently not to the people who publish propaganda about the wonders of giving men artificial ways to jerk off, as if we have just undergone a cultural transformation which holds that most men don’t deserve sexual relationships with women any more
They don’t, at least not simply by virtue of being men.
Somewhat related:
Marriage Won’t Make Sense When Humans Live for 1,000 Years, by Zoltan Istvan
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/marriage-will-make-less-sense-when-humans-live-for-1000-years
I have to take a hard exception to some transhumanists’ advocacy of “sex robots,” “marrying robots” and similar abominations. Istvan does that in this piece.
Young men need to get into sexual relationships with women “organically,” by which I mean that the women feel attracted to them, as a necessary part of men’s healthy personal development. Which goes to show why having alienated sexual experiences with prostitutes don’t get the job done. A prostitute can teach a man the mechanics of sex—or so I’ve gathered—but she can’t teach him how to have these experiences with regular women. Having these organic experiences lead to the development of skills which don’t exist in isolation, but instead play a role in knowing how to deal with women successfully in the rest of life.
Yet the introduction of passable sex robots would sabotage this process, and it would leave a whole generation of young men psychologically stunted. This seems obvious to me, but apparently not to the people who publish propaganda about the wonders of giving men artificial ways to jerk off, as if we have just undergone a cultural transformation which holds that most men don’t deserve sexual relationships with women any more, so they should just abandon that aspiration as an unattainable fantasy, plug into these machines and leave women alone.
I can understand the appeal of this scenario to, say, some of the incels and MGTOW’s. But Istvan has a wife and two daughters, so he clearly has the experiences and skills to know the difference. Why would he therefore advocate something so preposterous and so disrespectful of a lot of men, other than the fact that he wants to keep his name in circulation, so he keeps publishing these trolls as “transhumanist” proposals?
Contrast this with:
Compare your reaction to the first and second sentiment. What accounts for the difference?
In principle “no woman owes sex to no man” and “no boss owes a job to no potential employee” are indeed closely analogous (I myself lean libertarian-ish so I agree with both), but empirically the kind of people who “think that women have any kind of duty to sexually satisfy men” and the kind of people who “think that bosses have any kind of duty to employ you” seem demographically and culturally different to me—if anything, I’d expect those two sentiments to anti-correlate for hysterical raisins (e.g. the former is more common among Red Tribers, the latter is more common among Blue Tribers, etc.). People are often bad at or uninterested in thinking about those kind of things at the meta level.
Also, empirically the former people do seem more dangerous to me (at least nowadays; probably not in e.g. 1917 Russia), e.g. applicants/former employees becoming violent toward bosses after being turned down/fired (or vice versa) don’t seem particularly common to me.
Note that “duty to do X” isn’t necessarily the same as “if they don’t do X, someone has a right to force them to”.
How would “I have a duty to hire you, but even if I don’t, nobody has a right to force me to (or, at least, to punish me)” be worth the paper it’s written on? How would a world where that’s the case differ from one where “I have no duty to hire you, and therefore if I don’t, nobody has a right to force me to”, how can I tell the difference, and why should I care?
The question you are asking is, “what is morality?”
I’m not Mirzhan_Irkegulov, but my reaction to the two is very similar: both are correct, and in general no one has an obligation to have sex with anyone else and no one has an obligation to employ anyone else.
I’ll guess that you’re thinking about anti-discrimination laws, according to which in some circumstances an employer can get into trouble for not employing someone. But those are quite special circumstances that very rarely apply to sex (it might apply to prostitution, and I can kinda see a case for forbidding prostitutes to refuse clients on the basis of race etc., but also prostitution can be really dangerous and it’s therefore probably better to say that prostitutes should have absolute discretion to refuse clients).
(The other obvious kind of case in which such obligations might exist is where a relationship is already in existence. You might reasonably be aggrieved if your spouse suddenly starts refusing to have sex, or if your employer fires you. But I don’t think either side of this comparison is what anyone in the thread had in mind.)
Anyway. Apparently you consider that there should be harmony between one’s answers to those questions. I’m pretty sure you don’t think that employers should ever be obliged to employ particular employees. Do you think that women commonly have a duty to provide sex to men? In contexts other than existing long-term sexual relationships?
No, I’m thinking about the fact that politicians and pundits routinely talk about lowering unemployment, and this is universally agreed to be a desirable goal and not something creepy for implying that every worker ‘deserves’ a job, heck the “right to a job” is frequently listed in lists of “second generation human rights”. Contrast this with the reaction advancedatheist got for suggesting men deserve a sexual relationship with women.
Oh, OK. So in that case, again, I think I think more or less the same in the two cases.
For any given potential worker, it is good if they are able to have a job if they want one.
But no one in particular is obliged to give them a job.
(And I think at some point we will need a transition to a different way of organizing production that drops the idea that everyone should be working. But that’s another matter.)
For any given potential sexually active person, it is good if they are able to have plenty of satisfying sex if they want to.
But no one in particular is obliged to have sex with them.
I don’t know to what extent this resembles the opinions of the politicians and pundits you have in mind. I would expect that most agree about jobs but many disagree about sex (on account of not thinking as I do that in general more sex is a good thing).
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it’s socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it’s not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I’m not sure it indicates anything worse.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men. I don’t know whether he actually does think that, but it’s explicitly what Mirzhan_Irkegulov says he thinks advancedatheist thinks: “your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will”.
However, it is generally understood that society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t seem to agree with your claim that “no one in particular is obliged to give them a job”, at the every least they seem to think this is someone’s duty even if they’re not clear on whose.
Except sex used to be an even more sensitive topic in the past, and it was taken for granted the society had a duty to arrange for people to have the opportunity to get married.
The statement “women have an obligation to have sex with men” is ambiguous. However, Mirzhan_Irkegulov presumed that it was meant in a creepy way and is thus unacceptable. By contrast consider Part III, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
Notice that it is also vague on just who is obliged to provide the employment but carries no such presumption of creepiness.
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I’m pretty sure it’s usually felt that one can’t have an obligation to do something impossible. I think the actual sentiment is the one I already expressed: if someone wants to have a job, it is better if they can get one.
(On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I’m pretty sure it’s (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work, and (2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working—e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.)
Anyway, it’s not clear to me what your actual argument is. Do you think that someone in this discussion (Mirzhan_Irkegulov, me, the United Nations General Assembly, I dunno) holds inconsistent opinions? If so, what inconsistent positions? Because all I’m seeing so far is that sex and jobs are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and my opinions on them are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and I don’t see what the problem’s meant to be.
Ok, now you’re not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I’m pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you’d be arguing some variant of “just because things will never be perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make them as good as possible”.
So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I’m sure advencedatheist’s comments were also aspirational in this sense.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?
This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I’m not saying you’ve done it twice in this thread]. I promise it’s wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what’s going wrong here—am I missing something that’s so obvious to you that you can’t imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to “you’re not even trying to argue in good faith”? Thanks.
(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it’s a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)
Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I’ve been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I’m not sure what.
(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn’t then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)
I honestly don’t know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it’s relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there’s an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don’t think there is such an inconsistency.
Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.
Okay, it seems to me that people use the word “right” with at least different meanings, and misunderstand each other as a result.
As a EU citizen, I have a right to travel to other EU countries in the sense that, if by mutual consent between me and an airline I buy a plane ticket and take a plane to Poland, I must not be stopped by the police or anybody else. (By comparison, I don’t have a right to travel to Pakistan unless I get a visa first.) But it sounds like there are people using the word “right” with a narrower sense, according to whom I have no right to go to Poland because if I can’t afford a plane ticket there’s nobody who must take me there anyway.
Do we all agree that people should have a right to have a job in the former sense but not in the latter sense, and that people should have a right to have sex in the former sense but not in the latter sense?
(Well, maybe there is an intermediate sense whereby I have a right to fly to Poland iff there are no market failures preventing me from flying to Poland a non-negligible fraction of the times I would be able to do so in a perfectly efficient market. But I hope we all agree that 1. EU citizens probably don’t all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren’t excessive, though 3. requiring airlines to take EU citizens to Poland whenever the latter want whether the former want it or not wouldn’t be anywhere remotely near a good way of achieving that; and 4. the same things applies to employment and to sex, except that the kinds of market failures that there exist are different in each case.)
So would you agree to the analogous thing for relationships, because advancedatheist’s point is that there is a huge ‘market failure’ there right now?
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I’m not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking) also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others (much like I guess you’d agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others) and would stay so even in a hypothetical perfect efficient market.
More like, the ‘powers that be’ doesn’t actually want to fix the market failure, and thinks offering inferior substitutes will at least cause the poeple complaning about it to shut up.
Well, the market failure was a lot less in the recent past.
I wouldn’t agree that this is an explanation for a rise in unemployment.
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a “market failure”? It might well be that the “market” does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
The fact that I can’t acquire a superyacht is not a market failure.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative of “I have a right, I couldn’t exercise this right, so I’m a victim, somebody make sure I can exercise my rights!”
Let, me translate that into the unemployment analogy for you:
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I’m not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Except have you seen any other instance of the entitlement narrative get the same kind of reaction.
Mild. There has been a mostly polite discussion of the so-called zero marginal product workers, that is, people who are of no use (and, actually, often bring negative utility) to an employer. More generally, the idea that some people can’t hold (and eventually can’t find) a job is not particularly controversial.
I don’t know what reaction are you talking about.
That’s not what I said. I said, consider what the reaction would be if someone made the above statement (in those words).
Also, most of the discussion of zero marginal product workers is along the lines of, “it is the fault of government regulation that these workers are zmp, hence said regulations should be repealed”.
Depending on the audience, of course. Among smart people, mild. Could it create a Twitter shitstorm? Probably could. So what?
Yeah, even statements with uncontroversial factual accuracy can be offensive when worded in a sufficiently disingenuous way. That’s a quite general phenomenon, with hardly anything specific to your example. So what’s your point?
But it isn’t worded in a “sufficiently disingenuous way”, it’s worded in a way similar to Lumifer’s sex statement. If it isn’t acceptable because of the offensive wording, why is the sex statement acceptable?
I think the implication is that the sexual marketplace is inefficient (with an implied dig at the idea that employment is a right in the sense that you describe). Given roughly equal numbers of men and women who want sex and/or relationships, and treating men and women as fungible, there is an inefficiency if everybody isn’t satisfied, as partners can be rearranged to produce a greater number of satisfied people.
On the down side for this view, people aren’t in fact fungible. On the up side for this view, there are some obvious inefficiencies in the sexual marketplace, such as the distribution of genders across cities. On the “whatever” side for this view, I’m inclined to say that the root of the problem is that value on the sexual marketplace has greater variance for men than women, so the tails on both ends are dominated by men whose preferences cannot be satisfied, and the middle of the distribution has more women than there are men available to satisfy their preferences.
There are, of course, complications :-)
First, people are not fungible at all (outside of the fairly rare “any hole will do” approach and no, I don’t mean bisexuals).
Second, there is a lot of fuzziness about what’s actually being traded because under consideration is the whole spectrum from casual one-night stands to till death do us part. Notably when talking about the sex marketplace, what many people want is actually a relationship and that’s a bit different.
Third, there are difficulties because what you offer to exchange is not well-defined, partially hidden, and, to top it off, the participants have an incentive to lie about it.
Fourth, as you note, the market isn’t quite symmetric in that men and women have different needs, expectations, approaches, and techniques.
All in all, the market certainly isn’t perfect, but I don’t know if I would characterize the situation as a “market failure”. It’s just the usual human mess that most manage to muddle through.
How do you know it’s not the past which had a market failure making women have more sex with unattractive men than they would have had ideally?
Plus one point for treating women as consumers, rather than products, in the sexual marketplace. Minus one point for treating men as inferior products, rather than unsatisfied consumers, in the sexual marketplace.
That’s not what “right” means. As a EU citizen, I have the right to travel to other EU countries, but this doesn’t mean that if I want to go to Poland there’s someone who must take me there.
I’m not VoiceOfRa, but I’d like to throw a little twist into this comparison. Let’s change from “no woman owes sex” : “no boss owes a job” to “a women has the right to withdraw consent to sex at any time” : “a boss has the right to fire anyone at any time”. Still very similar?
As I said in my third paragraph, I think that particular question is some way removed from the points originally at issue in this discussion. But to both of those my reaction is “well, kinda”. In more detail (reluctantly because I think it’s a big digression):
If two people are in a longstanding sexual relationship and one suddenly withdraws consent, clearly something has gone badly wrong. The same is true if one has been working for the other for some time and suddenly gets fired.
Having sex when you really, really don’t want to is much worse than missing out on sex when you want it. Having no job is much worse than having one employee who isn’t performing well. This is an important respect in which the analogy breaks down.
People should be able to fire employees and to refuse consent to sex.
They have a moral obligation to do so in as reasonable a fashion as they can.
In some cases that may still mean doing it suddenly (e.g., you find that your partner is violent and dangerous; you find that your employee has been embezzling; you contract a medical condition that makes sex agonizingly painful; your company loses a contract and suddenly has no money).
Because losing all of your income is generally a big disaster, much worse than having to pay one employee’s salary, it is reasonable to require employers not to leave their employees completely screwed if they get fired unless it’s because of the employee’s serious misconduct.
Because being forced to have sex on one occasion is so much worse than being denied sex on one occasion, it is reasonable to say that if one partner says no then the other is obliged not to force sex on them. (But because being denied sex on all occasions is bad, it is also reasonable to say that if one partner is consistently refusing consent then the other is entitled to look elsewhere, even if their relationship is notionally monogamous.)
I don’t see any inconsistency in the above; my positions on the two questions aren’t identical, for reasons tightly bound up with the ways in which the two questions themselves aren’t identical.
I’m not attacking your position :-) It’s just that I expect that my reformulation will bring a different set of responses from some people than the original one.
In the US that’s already the case and even the people who don’t think that wives should be allowed to refuse sex from husbands seem to see nothing wrong with that. Well, except when someone is fired is for saying something factually correct but offensive.
No it isn’t. You can fire unprotected classes of people, for unprotected reasons.
As OrphanWilde already pointed out, no, it’s not. Even other than protected classes of people and protected reasons, trade union jobs and many public sector jobs are not employment at-will.
Interestingly, the likes of James A. Donald lament that wives are now allowed to deny consent to sex or to divorce while apparently seeing nothing wrong with at-will employment.
Fortunately, the likes of James A Donald are not participating in this thread.
Should others have been frightened of you at 16?
This actually isn’t a gendered issue. “Fat acceptance” and “Nerd acceptance” are two sides of the same coin, but both sides insist it is gendered.
Sexual deprivation has real psychological effects. Shit, we should -expect- it to have real psychological effects; you’re failing to function as the wind-up toy evolution designed you as. Why do people deny the psychological effects? Why do -you- deny the psychological effects, and insist they can just be overcome?
Because, by the standard morality of our society, problems must be solved. Admitting that it’s a genuine issue for these people implies some obligation to do something about it, which implies some obligation by some people to have sex with other people, and that’s just wrong.
Personally? I think it’s fine to say that it’s sad that some people lack what is probably the most fundamental kind of affirmation. And I think it’s fine to say that it’s sad, and I think it’s fine to say that, y’know, the situation sucks for them, and they shouldn’t just pretend otherwise. And I can think it’s sad, and the situation sucks, without thinking that implies some kind of sexual obligation.
When you can’t say there is a problem without also believing the problem can, and should, be solved, the problem to be solved often becomes the problem itself. And either the problem to be solved is that these individuals don’t get sex—but the solution to that is both immediately obvious and immediately unacceptable—or the problem is the way these individuals -feel-, as a result of not getting sex. And because they can’t acknowledge a problem without believing it can and should be solved, they choose the problem whose solution is acceptable to them: The problem is with the people who are suffering, rather than the suffering itself.
The former doesn’t follow from the latter. Rather, it seems more like you have disavowed empathy with your past self so that you can feel superior to people like your past self. Given that you appear to have very little otherwise to feel superior about, e.g., you apparently still can’t actually get sex, this is of course an understandable reaction.
Sorry, when you argue based on an appeal to your life experience, ad hominem is no longer a fallacy.
Replace “sex” with “not dying” and you have the standard deathist position.
Except that feeling unhappy about it makes one more likely to fix the situation. Seriously, this is the exact same argument made by deathists, and generally a universal argument against caring about anything.
I’ve read parts of what is commonly called the “manosphere” and I can safely say, you have no idea what the f* you’re talking about.
That is the key to Zoltan Istvan.
I could easily argue the opposite way: Once perfect sex becomes something you can easily buy in a form of sex robots, and the practice becomes so widespread that it will be socially accepted by the mainstream… maybe the partner relationships will become better, because people would use them to optimize for other values—such as being nice to each other, being a good conversational partner, etc.
And those people who can’t provide any other value, they will stay at home with their sexbots, and won’t pass their genes to another generation. Genetic pool improved and overpopulation solved using this one simple trick!
(I am not suggesting this as a serious prediction, just as an example that you can easily verbally argue towards almost any bottom line.)
I use ad-blocking software, so the most obvious hypothesis is a bit difficult to verify, but the prior probability is so high I would still bet on it.
Has this happened with any other technologically supplied superstimulus?
“Technologically applied superstimulus” is a pretty narrow category, but here are a couple of things that come close enough that I think they’re relevant.
My impression is that gourmet food has become more interesting as the need for it also to be filling has decreased (because industrial-scale food production has made adequate food really cheap, much as sexbots might hypothetically make adequate sex really easy to get; “perfect” seems too much to hope for).
There is some evidence that violent video games reduce their users’ tendency to engage in actual physical violence.
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce. For an example of technological superstimulus applied to food think mass-produced food that is sweeter/more satisfying then anything in the ancestral environment, a.k.a., fast/junk food.
See here for the standard examples of superstimuli as applied to food and video games.
I’m not suggesting that gourmet food is a technologically applied superstimulus, I’m suggesting that cheap mass-produced food is a bit like one and that maybe its availability has enabled the flourishing of cuisine-as-quasi-artform.
This is not exactly what you asked for but I think it’s still relevant—it’s not so very different from what Viliam suggested could conceivably happen with sexbots. Hence my first paragraph.
[EDITED to fix a ridiculous typo.]
I don’t think so. Gourmet food nowadays is:
tasty in a complex way
unusual
That requires creativity and a sense of style much more than it requires a lot of skilled labour. In a way it’s like fashion—fashionable clothes could require complex production, but they don’t have to. Neither fashion nor gourmet cooking is about being “skilled-labour intensive”.
In other words it requires skilled labor where the relevant skills are creativity and a sense of style.
Skilled labour, yes. Labour-intensive, no.
It seems like the relevance would be if the technologically supplied superstimulus replaced a function previously supplied solely through partner relationships. The following chain of examples involving video games doesn’t seem directly relevant, unless before the advent of video games, people played board games exclusively with their romantic partners.
technology stimulus examples:
Video Games
Facebook
Microwaves (There was a fear that microwaves would destroy the nature of decency of food culture, I for one use both an oven and a microwave and a stove for different purposes)
fast food
TV to newspapers
Computers to TV
Texting to writing a letter
In all of these cases, technology has found its place among the various options to fulfilling the need. Yes some people get addicted to videogames; but people also get addicted to alcohol.
So? Alcohol is (or was) also a superstimulus. It’s just that some human populations have been exposed to it long enough to become adapted to it. Specifically adapting to it by finding it less stimulating.
An example of something not a technology that people get addicted to.
Alcohol is not inherently bad—like say cyanide (or a bomb) might be considered bad because it’s primary purpose causes death; it’s the nature of people to use it badly. And principally—many people use alcohol (and videogames) without getting addicted to it, and lead a fully functional life while partaking in a bit of alcohol (or videogames).
You have a very weird definition of “technology” if alcohol is not a technology.
Only because (Western) humans have had several millennia to develop adaptations to it. Go to, say, an Indian (Native American) reservation to see what affect alcohol has on humans not adapted to it. It’s not pretty.
Wait until the market for videogame addictiveness saturates.
But more to the point, are you going to argue that video games have actually improved social iterations?
I was going to start with—they didn’t destroy the world. (because they didn’t)
And advance into; some video games have been beneficial.
That’s not what I asked.
I asked whether they in general have been beneficial.
Videogames are hard to say. There is a net complex situation.
Take the food example. Technology has enabled food to improve. Easy to say.
And has the presence of food based superstimuli, a.k.a., junk food, improved to worsened our diets?
Technology has improved our food and our diets.
Thanks to advancements we now have sustainable food, security of food availability. Heck! People have enough substitutes to meat to not need to eat it ever!
Yes the availability of junk food has caused some people to eat unhealthily; but the availability of vegetables has helped many more people to eat healthily and have fulfilling eating lives.
Technology frequently improves some things while making other things worse. But sooner or later people find a way to improve both the some things and the other things. In this particular case, maybe they haven’t found it yet.
I think you’re mistaken about how important sex is to relationships, This varies pretty wildly by individual, but I find it easy to believe that a good portion of the populace would be better off if there were many uncomplicated orgasm sources, rather than requiring a deep committed exclusivity.
That bundled commitment is valuable, and I’m quite happy in it. And, over time, as technology improves and my wife and I age and change, I can easily believe we’ll add robots to our marriage. We have some now, but they’re mostly there for mechanical assistance, and we don’t have much of a deep bond with them.
What’s the advantage of many sources? As to uncomplicated, well, your own hand is about as uncomplicated as it gets...
I often hear claims like that here on LW, but they sound very implausible to me. I never had a girlfriend until I was 26 but I’m not under the impression that before then I was deficient in otherwise dealing with female friends/professors/etc. in a way that I no longer am, or in a way that I was not with male friends/professors/etc. (In particular, in most of my late teens and early twenties I had many more female friends than male friends.) Do you (or anybody else who’s been making such claims) have any evidence (that could be easily shared on a Web forum) of that?
What kind of question is this? There a lot of rubbish posted on the internet. Despite the stuff about sex bots, writing like: “In 15 to 20 years time, cranial implant technology will enable humans to overcome many of their idiosyncrasies and bad behaviors—making a new generation of very wholesome and exemplary children. In fact, going to college may be replaced by downloading higher educations into our brains.” doesn’t look like a serious analysis.
Learning is an active process. It’s a process of engaging in critical thinking. It’s not simply replaced by a download into the brain.
They don’t, at least not simply by virtue of being men.