“It’s true that we don’t want women to be driven off by a bunch of awkward men asking them out, but if we make everyone read a document that says ‘Don’t ask a woman out the first time you meet her’, then we’ll immediately give the impression that we have a problem with men awkwardly asking women out too much — which will put women off anyway.”
American social norms around romance continue to be weird to me. For the record, y’all can feel free to ask me out the first time you meet me, even if you do it awkwardly ;)
I think this might be typical-minding. The consequences of this dynamic are actually pretty serious at macro-scale e.g. due to reputation of meetups, and evaporative cooling of women and high-status men as they avoid public meetups and stop meeting people new to AI safety.
I’m glad to hear there’s people who don’t let it get to them, because it is frankly pretty stupid that this has the consequences that it does at the macro-scale. But it’s still well-worthy of some kind of solution that benefits everyone.
I honestly don’t know. The discussions of this problem I encountered are all in the American (or at least Western) context[1], and I’m not sure whether it’s because Americans are better at noticing this problem and fixing it, or because American men generate more unwanted advances, or because American women are more sensitive to such advances, or because this is an overreaction to a problem that’s much more mild than it’s portrayed.
Also, high-status men, really? Men avoiding meetups because they get too many propositions from women is a thing?
To be clear, we certainly have rules against sexual harassment here in Israel, but that’s very different from “don’t ask a woman out the first time you meet her”.
I used the word “high-status men” as a euphemism that I’m not really comfortable talking about in public, did not notice it would be even harder to get for non-americans. My apologies.
I used “high-status men” mainly as the opposite of low-status men, in that they are men who are low status due to being short, ugly, unintelligent, or socially awkward, sufficiently so that they were not able to gain social status. These people are repellent to other men as well as women, sadly. @Roko has been tweeting about fixes to this problem such as reforms in the plastic surgery industry, and EA and rationalists are well above base rate communities (e.g. classical music society) for tolerating/improving low social skills and male shortness. This is due to primate instincts which usually cannot be overcome, in spite of people feeling optimistic about their ability to overcome them. The degree of social awkwardness is defined/measured by the harm it does someone; if someone looks “socially awkward” but in a charming or likable way that remains charming or likable, that is not a serious (or even significant) case, as it does not doom someone to low social status.
This is also a reason why so many people have so little tolerance for non-transhumanists as a class of ideologues; non-transhumanists accept the status quo of our current tech level, where human genetic diversity dooms a large portion of people to a pointlessly sad and miserable life without their consent, (on top of dooming everyone to a short life).
American social norms around romance continue to be weird to me. For the record, y’all can feel free to ask me out the first time you meet me, even if you do it awkwardly ;)
I think this might be typical-minding. The consequences of this dynamic are actually pretty serious at macro-scale e.g. due to reputation of meetups, and evaporative cooling of women and high-status men as they avoid public meetups and stop meeting people new to AI safety.
I’m glad to hear there’s people who don’t let it get to them, because it is frankly pretty stupid that this has the consequences that it does at the macro-scale. But it’s still well-worthy of some kind of solution that benefits everyone.
I honestly don’t know. The discussions of this problem I encountered are all in the American (or at least Western) context[1], and I’m not sure whether it’s because Americans are better at noticing this problem and fixing it, or because American men generate more unwanted advances, or because American women are more sensitive to such advances, or because this is an overreaction to a problem that’s much more mild than it’s portrayed.
Also, high-status men, really? Men avoiding meetups because they get too many propositions from women is a thing?
To be clear, we certainly have rules against sexual harassment here in Israel, but that’s very different from “don’t ask a woman out the first time you meet her”.
I think the implication was that “high-status men” wouldn’t want to hang out with “low-status men” who awkwardly ask out women
I used the word “high-status men” as a euphemism that I’m not really comfortable talking about in public, did not notice it would be even harder to get for non-americans. My apologies.
I used “high-status men” mainly as the opposite of low-status men, in that they are men who are low status due to being short, ugly, unintelligent, or socially awkward, sufficiently so that they were not able to gain social status. These people are repellent to other men as well as women, sadly. @Roko has been tweeting about fixes to this problem such as reforms in the plastic surgery industry, and EA and rationalists are well above base rate communities (e.g. classical music society) for tolerating/improving low social skills and male shortness. This is due to primate instincts which usually cannot be overcome, in spite of people feeling optimistic about their ability to overcome them. The degree of social awkwardness is defined/measured by the harm it does someone; if someone looks “socially awkward” but in a charming or likable way that remains charming or likable, that is not a serious (or even significant) case, as it does not doom someone to low social status.
This is also a reason why so many people have so little tolerance for non-transhumanists as a class of ideologues; non-transhumanists accept the status quo of our current tech level, where human genetic diversity dooms a large portion of people to a pointlessly sad and miserable life without their consent, (on top of dooming everyone to a short life).