I don’t think what you are doing should be called a shittest, since arguing isn’t shitty behaviour. It’s just a regular test, which doesn’t seem objectionable. Your central examples of shittesting (giving a partner an unreasonable task to see if they do it, insulting a suitor, or behaving in a particularly unpleasant way to test for loyalty) all involve bad behaviour, and I don’t think men should do more of it. If someone acted that way towards me, I’d probably just walk away to find a more pleasant partner, especially if I realised they hurt me on purpose to “test” me.
Agree, and this is an area where we should be precise in our language. Coming up with justifications for regular healthy testing, then labeling them with a name for toxic power moves, risks spreading confusion at best, and bad behavior at worst.
Hmmm. That’s an interesting thought. In part I gave it this title to get responses, because responses improve my communications skills. But also I had no regular word for testing someone on a date. The concept of shittesting probably taught me that testing people was possible. But I probably would have figured it out from signaling theory.
As an aside, for a woman who shittests in the classic sense, are you saying that the behavior is not selfishly instrumentally rational (SIR)? I would still argue that it is, but am very unconfident.
Do you believe that unpopular statements, supported by novel arguments, damage the commons? I think having more voices particularly voices that challenge our preconceived notions and values is good for the commons.
The commons at hand are LessWrong. Publishing unpopular statements on LessWrong does have the potential of producing damage.
When arguing for unpopular positions it’s generally best to use more abstract language instead of using language that’s likely to trigger people to respond.
Most standard relationship advice is that if you’re looking for a healthy, committed relationship, you should ask lots of questions early on and make sure you’re on the same page. Have them meet your friends and see if the friends like them. Do some challenging things together, like taking a road trip. Put yourselves in situations where you can expect to experience some adversity, and see how you cope together.
You don’t need to be a devious calculating shit-tester. You just need to take basic steps to make sure that you’re a good fit together. This can be a collaborative experience if both people have healthy attachment styles.
I’m saying this as somebody who’s been in satisfying, unsatisfying but healthy, and one toxic relationship. The shit-test was a defining feature of the toxic one, and was absent from the other two categories. And the toxic relationship was about as bad for my shit-testing toxic ex as it was for me (a non-shit-testing non-toxic person behaving in a codependent manner). Because when you’re shit-testing, you’re in a mindset that prevents you from the truly excellent experiences it’s possible to have with other people.
So no, I don’t think that shit-testing is instrumentally rational. I think it’s a horrible trap of confused insecurity, control issues, anxiety, and exploitation that ruins the lives of people who engage in it, and everybody around them.
I’m sorry that your ex hurt you like that. It sounds terrible.
I also apologize for the way I titled and framed the ideas of this post. I was aware that it would provoke strong emotional responses, and intended that. Many people respond to slightly edgey dating posts with strong norm-enforcing comments. I like these comments because they highlight places where readers misunderstand my arguments, they tend to come with compelling advice, and I can evaluate the moral content of dating strategies.
It did not occur to me that I would hurt people by reminding them of the pain that so many of us carry from our romantic lives. But that was reasonably foreseeable from my perspective. You deserve an apology.
At least on my end, you didn’t hurt my feelings. I appreciate your sensitivity to that possibility, though.
The tactic of using an “edgy,” but in this case simply wrong, wording in order to provoke a response seems like you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. After all, you seem to have already known that normal healthy evaluation of prospective partners is good, and that shit-testing is bad.
Now you’ve provoked a large number of comments, but they’re mostly focused on reinforcing the common definition of shit-testing rather than on the dating advice you said you wanted.
Woah woah woah, I don’t think my title is “simply wrong”. I could have been more sensitive to your concern, but I’m not endorsing such sweeping moral generalizations about complicated courtship behaviors at all. Let’s break it down in a couple ways.
Firstly, you’ve asserted a pretty narrow definition of the word shittest, where it means “loyalty test”. In the usage cases I’ve seen, a minority of uses of shittest refer to loyalty testing. The most common usage case is shittesting of a man’s status or social skills. So if you are asserting that loyalty tests are ethically wrong in all cases, that does not mean that shittesting is ethically wrong in all cases.
Secondly, I think good can be parsed as instrumentally selfishly rational or as ethical (which itself has lots of meanings).
Instrumentally selfishly rational: I still think if a person wants to know the attributes of a potential partner they benefit from testing those attributes. Since most shiittesting is done by women toward men it’s common that men talk about shittesting as a “irrational behavior”. I was arguing in the piece that in certain circumstances some shittesting is not irrational but a sensible behavior. Women are usually interested in the social status and skills of potential partners.. The fact that some people use shittesting to abuse their partner, while deeply tragic, isn’t a nockdown article which makes all shittesting irrational.
Fleischman has argued that in the evolutionary environment being abandoned with child by a partner was a huge risk to her fitness. In hunter-gatherer societies if a man dies or leaves the tribe while a woman is pregnant the odds of her child dying is much higher. So loyalty testing may have been good for fitness in the EE. Of course, that doesn’t make it ethical today.
Ethical: I think offending people, in a reasonably predictable way, is unethical. I don’t think testing the attributes of a prospective partner is irrational in all cases. As I’ve said below, I do believe that loyalty testing in general is immoral (in both relationships and institutions) and that testing someone in an ongoing relationship is mostly unethical, particularly if the behavior is frequent. But I think the majority of the shittesting that people do is really far from your case.
Now you’ve provoked a large number of comments, but they’re mostly focused on reinforcing the common definition of shit-testing rather than on the dating advice you said you wanted.
it’s not a battle to control the definition of some word? I want to understand which behaviors are good for me to do, and to understand which behaviors are ethical for me to do. This comment section has helped open up the diversity of the term and discuss different cases and heuristics we can use to assess both usefulness and ethics. That’s pretty cool.
I don’t think what you are doing should be called a shittest, since arguing isn’t shitty behaviour. It’s just a regular test, which doesn’t seem objectionable.
Your central examples of shittesting (giving a partner an unreasonable task to see if they do it, insulting a suitor, or behaving in a particularly unpleasant way to test for loyalty) all involve bad behaviour, and I don’t think men should do more of it. If someone acted that way towards me, I’d probably just walk away to find a more pleasant partner, especially if I realised they hurt me on purpose to “test” me.
Agree, and this is an area where we should be precise in our language. Coming up with justifications for regular healthy testing, then labeling them with a name for toxic power moves, risks spreading confusion at best, and bad behavior at worst.
Hmmm. That’s an interesting thought. In part I gave it this title to get responses, because responses improve my communications skills. But also I had no regular word for testing someone on a date. The concept of shittesting probably taught me that testing people was possible. But I probably would have figured it out from signaling theory.
As an aside, for a woman who shittests in the classic sense, are you saying that the behavior is not selfishly instrumentally rational (SIR)? I would still argue that it is, but am very unconfident.
Don’t damage the commons to get people to respond to you.
Do you believe that unpopular statements, supported by novel arguments, damage the commons? I think having more voices particularly voices that challenge our preconceived notions and values is good for the commons.
The commons at hand are LessWrong. Publishing unpopular statements on LessWrong does have the potential of producing damage.
When arguing for unpopular positions it’s generally best to use more abstract language instead of using language that’s likely to trigger people to respond.
Most standard relationship advice is that if you’re looking for a healthy, committed relationship, you should ask lots of questions early on and make sure you’re on the same page. Have them meet your friends and see if the friends like them. Do some challenging things together, like taking a road trip. Put yourselves in situations where you can expect to experience some adversity, and see how you cope together.
You don’t need to be a devious calculating shit-tester. You just need to take basic steps to make sure that you’re a good fit together. This can be a collaborative experience if both people have healthy attachment styles.
I’m saying this as somebody who’s been in satisfying, unsatisfying but healthy, and one toxic relationship. The shit-test was a defining feature of the toxic one, and was absent from the other two categories. And the toxic relationship was about as bad for my shit-testing toxic ex as it was for me (a non-shit-testing non-toxic person behaving in a codependent manner). Because when you’re shit-testing, you’re in a mindset that prevents you from the truly excellent experiences it’s possible to have with other people.
So no, I don’t think that shit-testing is instrumentally rational. I think it’s a horrible trap of confused insecurity, control issues, anxiety, and exploitation that ruins the lives of people who engage in it, and everybody around them.
I’m sorry that your ex hurt you like that. It sounds terrible.
I also apologize for the way I titled and framed the ideas of this post. I was aware that it would provoke strong emotional responses, and intended that. Many people respond to slightly edgey dating posts with strong norm-enforcing comments. I like these comments because they highlight places where readers misunderstand my arguments, they tend to come with compelling advice, and I can evaluate the moral content of dating strategies.
It did not occur to me that I would hurt people by reminding them of the pain that so many of us carry from our romantic lives. But that was reasonably foreseeable from my perspective. You deserve an apology.
At least on my end, you didn’t hurt my feelings. I appreciate your sensitivity to that possibility, though.
The tactic of using an “edgy,” but in this case simply wrong, wording in order to provoke a response seems like you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. After all, you seem to have already known that normal healthy evaluation of prospective partners is good, and that shit-testing is bad.
Now you’ve provoked a large number of comments, but they’re mostly focused on reinforcing the common definition of shit-testing rather than on the dating advice you said you wanted.
Woah woah woah, I don’t think my title is “simply wrong”. I could have been more sensitive to your concern, but I’m not endorsing such sweeping moral generalizations about complicated courtship behaviors at all. Let’s break it down in a couple ways.
Firstly, you’ve asserted a pretty narrow definition of the word shittest, where it means “loyalty test”. In the usage cases I’ve seen, a minority of uses of shittest refer to loyalty testing. The most common usage case is shittesting of a man’s status or social skills. So if you are asserting that loyalty tests are ethically wrong in all cases, that does not mean that shittesting is ethically wrong in all cases.
Secondly, I think good can be parsed as instrumentally selfishly rational or as ethical (which itself has lots of meanings).
Instrumentally selfishly rational: I still think if a person wants to know the attributes of a potential partner they benefit from testing those attributes. Since most shiittesting is done by women toward men it’s common that men talk about shittesting as a “irrational behavior”. I was arguing in the piece that in certain circumstances some shittesting is not irrational but a sensible behavior. Women are usually interested in the social status and skills of potential partners.. The fact that some people use shittesting to abuse their partner, while deeply tragic, isn’t a nockdown article which makes all shittesting irrational.
Fleischman has argued that in the evolutionary environment being abandoned with child by a partner was a huge risk to her fitness. In hunter-gatherer societies if a man dies or leaves the tribe while a woman is pregnant the odds of her child dying is much higher. So loyalty testing may have been good for fitness in the EE. Of course, that doesn’t make it ethical today.
Ethical: I think offending people, in a reasonably predictable way, is unethical. I don’t think testing the attributes of a prospective partner is irrational in all cases. As I’ve said below, I do believe that loyalty testing in general is immoral (in both relationships and institutions) and that testing someone in an ongoing relationship is mostly unethical, particularly if the behavior is frequent. But I think the majority of the shittesting that people do is really far from your case.
it’s not a battle to control the definition of some word? I want to understand which behaviors are good for me to do, and to understand which behaviors are ethical for me to do. This comment section has helped open up the diversity of the term and discuss different cases and heuristics we can use to assess both usefulness and ethics. That’s pretty cool.