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Roko comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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The utility function is not up for grabs. Why should we care about "success" if the price of "success" is being a greedy, self-interested asshole? You know, maybe some of us care about deep insights and meaningful, genuine relationships, which we value for their own sake. Maybe we don't want to spend our days plotting how to grind the other guy's face into the dust. Maybe we want the other guy to be happy and successful, because life is not a zero-sum game and our happiness does not have to come at the expense of anyone else. Tell us how to optimize for that. Don't tell us that we're nerds; we already knew that!
Rationalists should win, full stop and in full generality. Not "triumph over others in some zero-sum primate pissing contest," win.
ADDENDUM: See my clarification below.
Why should we assume that financial success requires being a greedy, self-interested asshole?
Maybe some of us can do these things while still figuring out how to make ourselves sufficiently valuable to society to exchange those skills for significant wealth?
Maybe economic wealth isn't a zero-sum game?
Now I'm repeating myself. Maybe delivering sufficient value to society that society is willing to reward you richly for your contribution doesn't necessarily come at anyone else's expense?
You're assuming wealth is a zero-sum game. Most of the time, its not.
Oh, dear, I'm afraid I haven't expressed myself clearly. I agree with you on all of these points! It is honorable to create goods or services that people want and then to make money selling them. Wealth is not a zero-sum game; I totally, totally agree. To clarify my intentions, I was not objecting to the suggestion that nerdy male LessWrongers should make money; I was objecting to the suggestion that they should relinquish their allegedly "weak" personalities to better seek power and status and sex. Sorry this wasn't clearer in my original comment.
I wonder how much of your complaints should really be addressed to Roko (in the parent of Z. M. Davis's comment).
Roko's claims:
Z. M. Davis's claim:
Incidentally, while wealth acquisition is obviously not a zero-sum game, Robin Hanson has argued that status acquisition is in some sense a zero sum game: you can't have high status without there being someone having lower status than you.
ETA: This post was made redundant while I was writing it. Darn it.
I'm taking that proverb as "rationalists should win everything at everything everywhere all the time forever" lest I risk redefining success and deluding myself. Real life's lack of predefined win conditions is actually a bad thing.
say more.
What more do you want to hear?
"If at first you don't succeed, redefine success." goes the demotivator. The life's lack of preset win conditions allows you to define your current state as a win. That leads to complacency and boredom. Bad, bad, bad!
So one should set his win condition as high as possible, so the journey has maximum amount of experience and fun.
Maybe people say they like these things for the same reason they say they like alcohol.
Not buying the analogy. In a big world full of six billion people, all of whom have their own interests and desires, and a universe still larger than this, it's not even clear to me what it means to be high-status or significant. Think of all those precious moments in your life---every book and every insight and every song and every adventure. Is all of this to be considered as dust because someone somewhere in the depths of space and time has had more books, greater adventures?
Small is beautiful, if only because large is incomprehensible.
I feel a gut reaction to upvote your comment because it seems both right and profound, and yet I cannot relate what you're saying to the comment's parent.
The parent seemed to be suggesting that those who say they're living for insight are lying or self-deceiving in the same way that those who say they drink alcohol for the taste are conjectured to be lying or self-deceiving, so I put forth an argument for why it makes sense to live for insight. (I don't know why people drink alcohol.)
Well, one reason people drink alcohol is because it stops the internal dialog and you just do whatever comes to your mind, which sometimes results in arrest and disaster, and sometimes reward you with getting laid. It is remarkable how much more attractive the person of your fascination is when the bottle is empty. ;-)
I'm absolutely sure that at least some people here had sex with women more attractive than Melinda Gates and Monica Lewinsky.
I thought about this too, but both Bills were womanizers with attractive women as well.
I'm not going to argue about it, but I find it much more likely than not:
E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you know just basic PUA techniques) > E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you're in top 1% rich and/or powerful)
and definitely beyond any reasonable doubt:
E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you know just basic PUA techniques) P(you can learn basic PUA techniques) >>> E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you're in top 1% rich and/or powerful) P(you can get into top 1% rich and/or powerful)
It's even more drastic for percentiles narrower than top 1% - so even if you could get laid slightly more if you went that far, but your chances of getting that far are slim. Marginal laid-utility of money and power is very very small.
Here's another piece of data relevant to estimating the expected laid-utility of interventions designed to increase fame, wealth or power relative to the expected laid-utility of other interventions one might design.
Actress Dana Delany told an interviewer from People magazine or similar magazine that if you want her to kiss you, owning a jet plane and a condo on Bon Air does not make up for having bad breath because of gum disease. That suggest that making a point of never getting so strapped for cash that you cannot afford to pay a good dental hygenist might increase laid-utility more than starting your own company.
Parenthetically I might write a post explaining why according to my mental models, for a male scientist who is bad at getting laid to choose to work on an extinction-risky technology has significantly lower expected utility than for a male scientist good at getting laid to choose to do so where U (the human species goes extinct) = -1 and U (nonextinction) = 0. The effect might apply to female scientists, too, but I am currently almost completely confused about that -- except "confused" might be the wrong word because it might connote that I expect to gather additional evidence for or against the question. The effect stems from what has been called the crime-genius connection and from the cognitive benefits to the man of the love of a woman with strong "ego skills", "ego skills" being the term some psychotherapists use for some practical fragment of rationality.
Er... perhaps you would find different responses here from non-actresses not being interviewed in People magazine. Or not. Just sayin', the degree to which someone cares about something may have something to do with the degree to which they are ordinarily deprived of it. If you are not deprived of men owning jet planes, then you may feel free to weight it less than bad breath.
Do we have any serious evidence on how much more sexually successful rich people are?
I estimate wealth to have amazingly small effect compared to what most people believe.
Our civilization does indeed have quite solid evidence that rich men have more sex and have sex with a greater variety of women than less-rich men. However, that removes only a small fraction of the support for the proposition that the kind of heterosexual single man reading these words is better off hiring a pickup/seduction trainer or spending heavily on dentists, hairdressers, gym memberships, etc, than seeking to enter the top percentile of wealth or power if his goal is to increase his sexual access to the sorts of women who will most improve his life -- because it is not as if getting a few million dollars is easy. All the dollars in the world are owned by persons, and these persons invariably resisting giving the dollars up. It is significantly easier to identify the women with whom sex will most improve your life and then get them to give the sexual favors up.
Give me this evidence. I want numbers. I suspect the correlation will be ridiculously tiny, perhaps far smaller than with stuff like height etc.
I suspect that while wealth is indeed correlated to sex, the causation runs from status and social skills to wealth and sex, meaning that a male at the 90th percentile of wealth and 10th percentile of status (think well-paid but socially inept geek) will have significantly less than average success with women.
I don't find it hard to believe that such preferences would be common among non-actresses. One way or another, the jet-or-lack-thereof isn't going to be right up in her face during the actual kissing.
I'll be the first to concede that my humble data point would be helpless to resist any real evidence of the sort that social psychologists specialize in obtaining. But even though I have failed to establish anything that cannot be easily knocked down by even one piece of strong evidence, I have undermined the "Roko hypothesis" entailed in Roko's comment that interventions to improve a man's weath or power have high expected laid-utililty -- since after all there is also no real evidence for the "Roko hypothesis". Or so it seems to me.
Also, and this is evidence that has professional social scientific experimental expertise or expertise in opinion surveys or such behind it, high status women are even less likely to form certain kinds of sexual bonds (marriage?) with a man of lower status than the woman has than middle-class or lower-class women are likely to -- a result born out by my personal experience as a man of bottom-quartile financial security and bottom-quality social status according to the the metrics used by some of the women who have been willing to discuss with me the idea or possibility of their having sex with me (I refer here to the ones that do not swoon over my intelligence, good looks, tallness and mastery of science) and robust across at least American, East-Indian/Hindu and IIRC British women. In other words, you would think that an American or East-Indian woman who already has more financial security than most kings and emperors throughout history have had would care less about the financial security of her long-term mate than the average woman would, but peer-reviewed psychological or opinion research finds that they care more. In other words, owning a Lear jet is more helpful to convince Dana Delany to enter into certain kinds of sexual bonds with you than it is helpful to convince the hairdresser at the corner mall or the average co-ed at a prestigious university to enter into that kind of sexual bond.
(The reason for the need for me to use the phrase "certain kinds of sexual bonds" is that I do not recall whether the studies I have seen surveyed opinions about marriage or what and that it is a robust result believed by a strong consensus of evolutionary psychologists that if Dana Delany is married to some rich movie star but contemplating an extra-marital no-strings-attached coupling, for the cuckolder to own a Lear jet probably does him almost no good at all -- signs of genetic fitness such as muscles, tallness, self-confidence and good looks being what women look for in that situation.)
Moreover, the image going through his mind when Roko wrote his words was probably that of a high-status woman.
You seem to accept that women prefer men who have more money than them. Therefore, a man with a lot of money has more potential mates. Isn't that just the "Roko hypothesis"?
Well, yeah, but if you do not already have a lot of money, I claim that if you are very bright, there are probably ways of making yourself more attractive to women that are quicker, more reliable and easier than getting a lot of money.
What are those ways? I list some here.
Have you written such a post?
I just read something by someone who'd seen Lewinsky in person-- he said she had spectacular skin and a very sexy attitude. It's plausible that neither would necessarily come through in photographs.
It's not impossible, but if that person has met Lewinsky after Clinton thing became known that's way more easily explained by halo effect.
P(Accomplish goals given get really rich) > P (Accomplish goals given ~get really rich)
vs.
P[(Accomplish goals given try to get really rich & (get really rich or ~get really rich)] ?>=<? P(Accomplish goals given ~try to get really rich)
My symbols kind of suck in this format, but you seem to be arguing the former when the latter is the relevant consideration. It also ignores the goal of personal happiness; I would guess that most people in practice have very high coefficients for themselves and loved ones in their utility functions, regardless of what they profess to believe.
Oh, and the whole claim about not valuing social status enough and, in particular, not valuing sex with extremely attractive women is, well, unsupported, to put it extremely charitably. Unless people here have the goals of "showing people up" or "having sex with extremely attractive women whose interest in them is contingent on their wealth," adapting those values would not be conducive to accomplishing their current goals, so failing to adapt them is hardly an error.
More to the point, saying that people aren't pursuing wealth and claiming the specific cause of this is a lack of valuing social status is like saying people aren't buying a Mercedes because they don't adequately value an all-leather interior. There are many other values that would attain the ends, and there are many other ends that would fulfill the values. I'd go into this at length, but the post did explicitly condone trolling, so I won't take this too seriously.
This is not to say that you're wrong (about wealth being a rational goal for meeting our existing goals); I don't have the numbers to shut up and multiply. I'm just saying you may well not be right.
What kind of numbers do you think you would need to shut up and multiply? No trolling, just an honest question. To clarify, I support Roko here -- I've been thinking along the same lines for some time.
You'd need to know the goals in question. Then you'd need to know how much great wealth would benefit these goals. Then the odds of becoming wealthy. Then the benefits if you try to get wealthy but fail. Then you'd need to compare that to the benefits of just doing what you're doing. It's not really quantifiable enough to fit into the shut-up-and-multiply, especially since it varies based on goals and individuals.
I have a very specific response.
I'm skeptical that money is very effective at making scientific discoveries. I'm extremely skeptical money is a good way of getting credit for science. If your goal is to get credit for science or to impress scientists, you probably should be a scientist. Who has recently used money to achieve scientific fame? Craig Ventnor is the only one I can name. and I suspect the money diluted the credit, but it was probably worth it. If your goal is to advance science, maybe money is a good tool. Bell Labs was good for the world (and for IBM). But it's pretty easy to waste money trying to duplicate it.
Also, successful scientists are greedy and self-interested.
I suspect that prizes are good for spurring technological progress. I'm thinking of the X Prize Foundation and the DARPA Grand Challenge for robotic cars. One reason I'd like to have more money is so I could donate it to prizes that would spur technological progress.
There's really no chance that people are going to stop discussing "attractive women" (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(
Related:
Envy Up and Contempt Down: Neural and Emotional Signatures of Social Hierarchies, presented by Susan T. Fiske, co-authors Mina Cikara and Ann Marie Russell, in the "Social Emotion and the Brain" session of the 2009 AAAS Meeting in Chicago (The Independent, Scientific American podcast, The Guardian, The Daily Princetonian, National Geographic, CNN, The Neurocritic)
The Independent:
Scientific American:
The Independent:
Scientific American:
Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups, by Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske:
This is interesting, but I fear that the authors and the media are over-interpreting the data. There is a whole lot of research that basically goes from "the same area of the brain lights up!" to a shaky conclusion.
This sounds like highly motivated research. I'm curious about their test for scoring sexism, and how they established validity for that. Also, that isn't really how brain scanners work. It's not really possible to make those kinds of high-level determinations.
A slightly different angle-- it's not just that attractive women (or their sexual favors) are presented as objects, it's that this sort of discussion seems to be set in a world where people at the same level of attractiveness are fungible. It seems like a world where no one likes anyone, or at least no one likes anyone they're in a sexual relationship with enough to be interested in the difference between one person of equivalent attractiveness and another.
Do you want me to stop seeking sex with attractive women or to stop signaling that I like sex with attractive women?
Neither. I'd like you to be thoughtful of the independent personhood of attractive women when you think or talk about them, which would affect the structure and phrasing of your desires but not make much of a substantive change in them.
He sees the shape of the mesh, you see the fish caught in it. "Attractive" is a selection criterion, not yet a group of persons.
Well, it's probably at least the same chance that Cosmo's covers are going to stop discussing men's love and commitment as "objects that can and should be attained under the right circumstances". ;-)
Or of course, we could just assume that when people talk about doing things in order to attract a mate, that:
Shouldn't Less Wrong have a bit more subtlety and detail than Cosmo?
pjeby: Can you subjectively discriminate brain states of yours with high medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain states of yours with low medial prefrontal cortex activity? What behavior is primed by each brain state?
Alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. Alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Also, Alicorn did not express these intuitions clearly.
(Also, on this subject: I think utilitarian moral theorizing and transhumanist moral theorizing are two other brain states that are, by most people, mainly intuitively distinguished as characterizable by low mPFC activity. This makes not signaling disapproval of utilitarianism or transhumanism feel like signaling approval of totalitarianism and slavery.)
[edit fix username capitalization]
Wow, that's an awful lot of projection in a tiny space - both your projection onto her, and the projection you're projecting she's making.
I don't think that you can treat the mere use of the word "get" to imply the sort of states you're talking about, for several reasons.
First, I think it's interesting that the study in question did not have men look at people -- they looked at photographs of people. Photographs of people do not have intentions, so it'd be a bit strange to try to figure out the intentions of a photograph. (Also, human beings' tendency to dehumanize faceless persons is well-known; that's why they put hoods on people before they torture them.)
Second, I don't think that a man responding to a woman's body as if it were an object -- it is one, after all -- is a problem in and of itself, any more than I think it's a problem when my wife admires, say, the body of Jean Claude van Damme when he's doing one of those "splits" moves in one of his action movies. Being able to admire something that's attractive, independent of the fact that there's a person inside it, is not a problem, IMO.
After all, even the study you mention notes that only the sexist men went on to deactivate their mPFC... so it actually demonstrates the independence of enjoyment from oppression or objectification in the negative sense.
So, I'm not going to signal social disapproval of such admiration and enjoyment experiences, whether they're engaged in by men OR women. It's a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of "objective" thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
After all, my wife and I are both perfectly capable of treating each other as sex objects, or telling one another we want to "get some of that" in reference to each other's body parts without it being depersonalizing in the least. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
We can also refer to someone else (male or female) as needing to "get some" without any hostile or depersonalizing intent towards the unspecified and indeterminate party from whom they would hypothetically be getting "some".
In short, both your own projections and the projections you project Alicorn to be making, are incorrect generalizations: even the study you reference doesn't support a link between "objectification" and low mPFC, except in people who are already sexist. You can't therefore use even evidence of "object-oriented" thinking (and the word "get" is extremely low quality evidence of such, anyway!) as evidence of sexism. The study doesn't support it, and neither does common sense.
Yes. But when women like Alicorn intuitively solve the signaling and negotiation game represented in their heads, using their prior belief distributions about mens' hidden qualities and dispositions, their beliefs about mens' utility functions conditional on disposition, and their own utility functions, then their solutions predict high costs for any strategy of tolerating objectifying statements by unfamiliar men of unknown quality. It's not about whether or not objectification implies oppressiveness with certainty. It's about whether or not women think objectification is more convenient or useful to unfamiliar men who are disposed to depersonalization and oppression, compared with its convenience or usefulness to unfamiliar men who are not disposed to depersonalization and oppression. If you want to change this, you have to either change some quantity in womens' intuitive representation of this signaling game, improve their solution procedure, or argue for a norm that women should disregard this intuition.
Change what? Your massive projection onto what "women like Alicorn" do? I'd think that'd be up to you to change.
Similarly, if I don't like what Alicorn is doing, and I can't convince her to change that, then it's my problem... just as her not being able to convince men to speak the way she wants is hers.
At some point, all problems are our own problems. You can ask other people to change, but then you can either accept the world as it is, or suffer needlessly.
(To forestall the inevitable analogies and arguments: "accept" does not mean "not try to change" - it means, "not react with negative emotion to". If you took the previous paragraph to mean that nobody should fight racism or sexism, you are mistaken. It's easier to change a thing you accept as a fact, because your brain is not motivated to deny it or "should" it away, and you can then actually pay attention to the human being whose behavior you'd like to change. You can't yell a racist or sexist into actually changing, only into being quiet. You can, however, educate and accept some people into changing. As the religious people say, "love the sinner, hate the sin"... only I go one step further and say you don't have to hate something in order to change it... and that it's usually easier if you don't.)
Why the double negative in the last sentence? Are you claiming that utilitarianism and transhumanism feel stronger than totalitarianism and slavery?
The double negative is because of peoples' different assumed feelings about utilitarianism or transhumanism and totalitarianism or slavery. There is a strong consensus about totalitarianism and slavery, but there is not a strong consensus about utilitarianism and transhumanism. So I expect most people to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of totalitarianism or slavery, but not to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of utilitarianism or transhumanism.
Thanks for the clarification. I think that you should not have indicated it in such a subtle way: either you should have spelled it out, as in the follow-up, or you should have probably left it out. It's the kind of thing footnotes are good for.
Can I really be said to have intuited something that makes less than no sense to me?
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved. I also think you intuited that, if women see men in a forum saying things that might be expressions of those states of mind, and see that those things are tolerated, it will cause the women to feel uncomfortable in that forum. I think that your intuition does refer to a real difference between states of mind that can be objectively characterized. (I don't mean to say that you intuited that mPFC measurements were part of that objective characterization.)
I think you're mistaken. I'm not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad. I think objectifying people in thought, word or deed is wrong. I can still think that the "thought" and "word" varieties of objectification are wrong even if they don't lead to the "deed" kind, so it's not at all necessary for me to have intuited the leap you suggest. That doesn't make it false, it just means you're reading your own views into mine.
It's not against consequentialism to see some things as bad in themselves, not because they cause something else to be bad. It's easy to see: for it to be possible for something else to be bad, that something else needs to be bad in itself.
But... if objectification never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about it or think it was wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about it or think it was wrong?
My ethical views are based on rights. I think that people have the right to be thought of and spoken about as people, not as objects. Therefore, thinking or speaking of people as objects is a violation of that right. Therefore, under my ethical system, it is wrong, even if it really never went any farther.
I'm happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can't get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people's heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means "the state does or should guarantee this". But I'm guessing that can't be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
But... if violations of rights never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about them or think they were wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about them or think they were wrong?
It's hard to buy the idea that it's not supposed to have to do with objects or attainment when the phrasing looks like:
You could just as easily say the same thing about cars or a nice house or something else readily available for sale. I wouldn't mind if the mate-seeking potential of money and status was discussed indirectly in a way that didn't make it sound like there is a ChickMart where you can go out and buy attractive women. "If I were a millionaire I could easily support a family", "if I were a millionaire I would have more free time to spend on seeking a girlfriend" - even "if I were a millionaire I could afford the attention of really classy prostitutes", because at least the prostitutes are outright selling their services. It's probably not even crossing the line to say something like "if I were a millionaire I would be more attractive to women".
How's this different from women's magazines having articles on how to "get" a man? Is this not idiomatically equivalent to "be more attractive to more-attractive men"? If so, then why the double standard?
Meanwhile, the reason that the phrasing was vague is because it's an appropriate level of detail for what was specified: men with more money have more access to mating opportunity for all of the reasons you mention, and possibly more besides. Why exhaustively catalog them in every mention of the fact, especially since different individuals likely differ in their specific routes or preferences for the "getting"? (Men and women alike.)
Do you have some evidence that I approve of that feature of women's magazines, or are you just making it up? I find it equally repulsive, I just haven't found that particular behavior duplicated here so I haven't mentioned it.
If concision is all that was intended, there are still other, less repellent ways to say it ("If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me", leaving it implied that some of these people will be women and some of these women might have sex with the millionaire.) Or it could have been left out.
So you find goal-oriented mating behavior offensive in both men and women. What's your reasoning for that? Does it enhance your life to find normal human behavior offensive? What rational benefit does it provide to you or others?
And we could call atheism agnosticism so as not to offend the religious. For what reason should we do that, instead of simply saying what is meant?
What kind of rationalism permits a mere truth to be offensive, and require it to be omitted from polite discussion? Truths we don't like are still truths.
I did not use the word "offensive" (or for that matter "goal-oriented mating behavior"), and I'd appreciate if you would refrain from substituting inexact synonyms when you interpret what I say. (You specifically; you seem bad at it. Other people have had better luck.)
There is a difference between upsetting people who hold a certain belief, and upsetting people who were born with a particular gender.
What "mere truth" do you mean to pick out here, anyway? I have made some ethical claims and announced that I am repelled by the failure to adhere to the standards I mentioned. I'm not "offended" by any facts, I'm repulsed by a behavior.
If I didn't do that, how would we know we weren't understanding each other? Now at least I can try to distinguish "offensive" from "repulsive", and ask what term you would use in place of "goal-oriented mating behavior" that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
That men and women do stuff to "get" mates. This was what the original poster stated, that you appeared to object to the mere discussion of, and have further said that you wished people wouldn't mention directly, only by way of euphemism or substitution of more-specific phrases.
I guess I missed them. All I heard you saying was that it's bad to talk about men "getting" women by having money. Are you saying it's unethical that it happens, or that it's unethical to discuss it? I think I'm confused now.
Which behavior? Seeking mates, or talking about the fact that people do?
You seem to be implying that it's your gender that makes you repulsed, but that makes no sense to me. I assume the women's magazines that sell on the basis of "getting" men would not do so if the repulsion [that I understand you to be saying] you have were universal to your gender, AND it were not a sexist double standard.
I've been using "objectification" to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn't the only one, but it's the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By "objectify", I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me", the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, "If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me", would not make sense if you changed "people" to "cars", because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. "So-and-so is five feet six inches tall"; "that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall".)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
What double standard? Did anyone here claim that using language that teats men as objects is fine? Is Cosmo now supposed to be our standard of excellence?
Depending on whether you and I have the same working definition of "substantive", the following:
In the first statement, but not the second, the women are not "gotten" as an open-and-shut act of obtainment. They are only attracted (and that's assuming that the empirical claim is true).
In the first statement but not the second, the improvement to the person's attractiveness is described only as an improvement, not as a binary switch from not having extremely attractive women to having them.
In the second statement but not the first, the women singled out are a particular narrow group selected for that are implied to be the only ones of interest or import.
Barring full-scale banhammer wielding... probably not, I'm afraid.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage - at least that's the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you're not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about "attractive women" on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that's probably meta-level thinking that's beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as "Where does demand exceed supply?")
May I make a suggestion:
In many contexts like this, we need to replace "sex" with "intimacy." Or simply "attention."
It's not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we're desired by somebody. From what I've read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren't interested in that sort of thing.
Actually, it's something of a cliche that the more a sex worker is paid, the less important sex is the interaction, such that it becomes a smaller portion of the time spent, or perhaps doesn't occur at all.
(Where my information comes from: my wife runs a "sex shop" (selling products, not people!), and I was once approached by one of her customers to do a website for a prostitute review service, and I looked over some of the review materials, as well as some existing review sites to understand the industry and its competition before I declined the job. A significant portion of what gets reviewed on these "hobbyist" sites (as they're called) relate to a prositute's personality and demeanor, not her physique or sexual proficiency per se. Certainly, this only correlates with what guys who post prostitute reviews on the internet want, but it's an interesting correlation, nonetheless.)
I've heard that, too. As I said earlier, as far as I can tell, men tend to want girlfriends more than they want sex toys that have a woman's body, and some women are better actors than others. If I were to hire an escort, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between someone who was genuinely interested in me and someone who was acting, and I don't want to pay someone to deceive me.
Incidentally, there's a disturbing similarity between hiring an escort and hiring a therapist - you're paying someone to act like they're interested in you, even if they're not.
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven't investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I'm undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
Masturbation is not sex. If the only good thing about sex is having an orgasm, you're doing it wrong!
(That's not to say the analogy to heroin addiction is a reasonable one.)
No, but it should be similar enough to break the analogy to starvation or heroin deprivation.
Well, that seems right, but allow me to clarify.
To use the food analogy, masturbation is like subsisting on flavorless but nutritionally adequate food, the proverbial "bread and water." Sex with someone who finds you desirable is more like that rich, delicious dessert that advertisers hope you've been fantasizing about recently. (Note the with someone who finds you desirable. It's important.)
If we have to use the drug metaphor, masturbation is more like giving a heroin addict all the methadone he wants.
I'm just questioning the idea that masturbation is to sex-starved people as food is to actually starving people.
(Course, that's not exactly what you said either.)
To someone who deeply disdains human society, it probably is equivalent. Suppose that it were possible to soothe your hunger by just rubbing your stomach - how many people would do it and forgo food completely?
Actually, if I didn't have to eat, I probably wouldn't.
There's a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I'm sure you know that.
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I'm having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don't objectify people even if I haven't had a fix of person lately?
Would that matter if you were missing a heroin dosage? Would you be able to pause that long to think about it, even if the actual consequence of your actions were to drive the heroin dosages away?
To be blunt about this, human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A man experiencing or remembering the pain of sex deprivation is justified in assuming that the prior probabilities are strongly against a randomly selected woman being able to directly empathize with that pain.
How in the world would this be possible to know, unless you're using some kind of behaviorist account of pain?
I'd suggest reading the Hite Reports on Male / Female Sexuality, say. The number one complaint of married men, by far, is about insufficient frequency of sex.
Similarly: If the expression "After three days without sex, life becomes meaningless" doesn't seem to square with your experience...
Similarly: http://www.wetherobots.com/2008/01/07/youve-been-misinformed/
Similarly: The vast majority of people who pay money (the unit of caring) to alleviate sex deprivation are men.
Given the statistical evidence, the anecdotal evidence, and the obvious evo-psych rationale, I'm willing to draw conclusions about internal experience.
But drawing from this evidence that lack of sex for many (most?) men is emotionally equivalent to heroine withdraw seems a bit much.
In the very least if this were the case I would expect some direct evidence, rather than a list of things which could be chalked up to the differences in how men and women have been trained to spend money and words on the subject of sex.
I'll see if I can find the Hite Reports. As for the other things you mention:
I have never heard that expression before. Do some people actually, seriously believe that life is literally meaningless after three days without sex [that involves another person, I assume, since if solo sex did the trick there would be no reason for anybody without a crippling disability to get to this point]? Why are there not more suicides, if this is the case?
I have read that comic before. I don't think this demonstrates anything other than that the male characters are less picky about how they satisfy their desires than the female character. Suppose you deprived me and some other person of food for 24 hours and then put us in a room with a lot of mint candy. The other person would probably eat some mints; I wouldn't, because eating mint causes me pain. Would you think this yielded information about how hunger felt to me and the other person? (Note: of course I would eat mint if I were starving or even about to suffer serious malnutrition, but you can't die of deprivation of sex with other people.)
Women who are willing to have sex with strangers (which comprise just about 100% of the class of prostitutes) can, for the most part, get it for free (or get paid to have it!) with trivial ease. Of course fewer women pay for it: the thing that is for sale (sex with a stranger) is not what women tend to want.
It seems to me that the conclusion to draw isn't (at least not necessarily) that men experience worse suffering when they don't have sex, but that "sex" does not just mean "friction with a warm human body" to women, and so it can't be had as easily as you think.
So from evidence that men, on average, report/perform greater suffering from lack of sex, you can conclude that a specific woman has never felt as much sexual frustration as a specific man, or indeed, anything similar enough to allow for empathy? That seems far from airtight.
It's also worth noting that there are a great many men who seek physical and emotional intimacy from other men. So if your hypothesis is that men objectify their potential partners solely because their intimacy is temporarily unavailable, then a small but consistent portion of the partner-as-object-to-be-won rhetoric would be about men, which I have not observed.
You do realize, I hope, that there are more than 2 ways for sex to express itself in humans, and humans can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex. See XX male syndrome and Androgen insensitivity syndrome for just a couple of the many examples. Admittedly, generalizing from about 99% of the population doesn't seem like too bad of an epistemic move, but it's something to keep in mind.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Saying you could have expressed a proposition better isn't disagreeing with the proposition.
If I were missing my heroin dosage, I weren't able to do all that smart discussion going on here.
What I wish you meant by this: "...so of course we're warming up the banhammer now!"
What you seem by this: "...so we won't be doing a thing to make this a space any less toxic for an inexplicably underrepresented majority."
I was really hoping this would be a come-for-the-fan-fiction-stay-for-the-awesome-forum situation, but if this community's priorities are accurately reflected (and please, please do prove me wrong) by the response "Come back and ask us to respect your humanity once everyone else has gotten their rocks off," then that is...exceedingly disappointing.
Alicorn writes,
I want you to continue to participate here, Alicorn. And I want to increase the female: male ratio in the rationalist/ altruistic/ selfless/ global-situation community. So if you [ever see me][1] using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.
seconded.
Folks here seem to buy into the folk anthropology notion that successful men become successful specifically in order to attract a mate, presumably the most conventionally attractive one. I'm not sure that idea is going to go away, regardless of how disgusting it sounds to those of us who married for love.
In particular, I think it's not going to go away as long as powerful politicians keep having extramarital affairs.
I'm quite sure that the idea won't go away, if only because in at least some cases, it'll be flagrantly true- season with a dash of confirmation bias and serve hot.
Probably not.
(It might be worth noting that people often do talk this way about other classes of people. Employer-employee relations tend to be treated similarly; "How to get a job" discussion is as often as impersonal as "how to get laid" discussion. It's still a bigger problem when the topic is the sexual favors of women with conventionally attractive bodies, though.)
(You might want to ignore the preceding comment. I just feel compelled to nitpick everything I can. Assume good faith, and all that.)
The whole "must have sex with attractive women" thing is just a catch phrase used in the pick-up community. Actually, most of the people who read such forums/blogs, and even the PUAs themselves are normal people who just want a normal relationship with a normal girl. I think this is especially true of the "beta males". It's just that some of these people are full of cynicism and frustration, which explains why it may all sound like an insult to some women (women viewed as objects, etc).
I would suggest that every time you see women or sex being discussed here, just interpret it as a discussion on how to solve a problem one might have with women, or as a general discussion on how one can improve with women. Which is what it actually means. The exact words used shouldn't bother you as long as you understand what underlies them.
Since you've been so generous with advice about how I should read such conversations, I'll return the favor. I suggest that every time you see a woman complain about how her gender is being discussed, you interpret it as (most likely) an identification of an actual problem that actually hurts an actual person, which identification you were unable to make because you are not a member of the victimized group, and too insensitive to pick up on such issues when they don't apply to you. Also, when I call you insensitive, you should understand that I only mean that you don't have the capacity to pick up on this one thing and I'm not making a sweeping statement about your personality - the exact word I use shouldn't bother you as long as you understand what underlies it.
I'm surprised by this response. What I suggested is that most guys here don't really want to have random sex with random women, they don't view women as objects that they can just use, or anything to that effect. And that the pick up community jargon and writings generally do not reflect what the average guy wants either.
Does this strike you as wrong?
I realize now that my "suggestion" may have sounded as if I'm denying that there is a problem or that I'm ignoring it. I'm not, I was just pointing out the above.
If they don't really want that and don't really view women that way, why do they persist in talking as though they do? I'd chalk it up to a simple error of linguistic expression if they didn't get so defensive when called on it.
If, as you say, a man is unable to identify and insensitive to the problem reflected in his statement, and you point it out in a way that comes across primarily as an accusation of bad character (when his statement seems to be weak evidence that he has this form of bad character), it's not surprising that he would get defensive.
Men are not broken women, so the way we speak is not actually an "error".
Don't get me wrong, though: a man who thinks that women's language around mating matters is repulsive or in "error" is making exactly the same mistake: women aren't broken men either.
Both men and women are certainly better off trying to translate their language when specifically speaking to the other, as well as trying to translate the language of others when listening.
However, neither language has some sort of blessed status that makes the other one an "error", simply because someone is repulsed as a result of having mistaken what language an utterance was made in.
You're just not trying anymore, are you. Lightwave said that some people did not mean to say the things they appeared to be saying. I said that I would think that the disparity between the things said and the things meant was a simple mistake of expression if people did not consistently defend their statements as originally phrased. And now you're bringing in irrelevant nonsense about men not being broken women? What did I say that remotely resembled that?
You said:
and further referred to it as an "error of linguistic expression".
I am saying that it's not an error. That women would generally use different words to describe the same thing does not mean that the man was in error to use those words. Those are the most correct and concise words in male language for what was said.
Many things that are said by men in few words must be said in many words for a woman to understand them, just as the reverse is true for things that women can say briefly to each other but require a lengthier explanation for a man to understand. This is normal and expected, since each gender has different common reference experiences, and therefore different shorthand.
What doesn't make any bloody sense is to insist that men (OR women) translate their every utterance into the other gender's language in advance of any question, then treat it as some terrible faux pas or "ethical violation" to fail to do so, or to classify the (correct-in-its-own-langauge) utterance as "linguistic error".
(Because to do so is basically to take the position that men are broken women (or vice versa).)
Instead, the reasonable/rational thing to do is, if you understand what was meant, then leave it alone. If you don't understand, ask politely. If you accidentally misunderstand and get into an argument, stop when you do understand, instead of blaming the other person for not having thought to translate their language to use another gender's reference experiences.
Is that clearer now?
That's funny, as about half of the comments on this thread that thought the language was inappropriate were by males. Hiding behind your gender is no excuse for being insensitive and offensive. Use "I support talking this way because I'm a rude person", not "I support talking this way because I am male". Leave the rest of us out of it.
You are always talking about NLP, so I expect you to know that the meaning of a statement is the reaction it gets in the person you are talking to. So if you are making statements that drive away women then either you mean to drive away women or you are making an error.
What. The. Heck. You do not get your own language. If people use language that is hurtful, objectifying, and sexist, they do not get the excuse that they have an idiolect in which those things are magically no longer hurtful, objectifying, and sexist (all of which are bad things to be). It just does not work that way.
Okay, I'll try it on you. I think I understand what you meant, so it's not okay for me to feel any way at all about how you said it, or to care if you were rude, or to think that it reflects on your character if you go about saying hurtful things... hm, that doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. Maybe I didn't understand you. But when I have tried in the past to ask you what you mean, you have not been helpful. Perhaps what happened was that I accidentally misunderstood you and got into an argument. I should chalk that up to you being male, even though I know plenty of males who do not say such things - wait, that doesn't make sense either. Do you have other, less patronizing recommendations in your bag of tricks?
Disregard.
The comment is three years old, and is parent to a giant thread detailing Alicorn's position in painstaking detail.
Damn it, I always forget to check the dates on these things. Ah well, nevermind.
No, it's OK. If you go off of his source, women want to be objectified, so it's no harm, no foul. You just don't know it yet. Brilliant, right?
Seriously, though, he's deriving his theory from someone who evaluates the worth of men by their ability to score with attractive women [Edit: phrase removed]. The theory is more complicated than that, but, really, it's not that much more complicated.
(In case it's not entirely clear from the above, I emphatically don't endorse this view.)
I don't think Roissy claims women want to be objectified. He agrees with the majority opinion that they like to be treated like human beings, appreciated for the qualities particular to them as individuals etc.
He just adds the coda that giving women what they like is a very poor strategy for sleeping with as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible*. Roissy doesn't really care what women want except insofar as knowing it furthers his aims, so this doesn't create a great deal of cognitive dissonance for him.
It was in fact reading him that inspired me to write this comment yesterday.
*In fact, he claims it makes women disdain you and calls it "supplication". The Roissy way is never explain, never apologise.
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/defining-the-alpha-male/
Note that number of affairs is a descriptor of all alphas and no betas, and it increases with rank. Thus, infidelity reflects a man's worth positively.
If you're not going off Roissy, I apologize for misinterpreting you, but your language and his matched up almost exactly, and I've seen him linked a bit here and on OB, so I figured that's where the ideas came from.
I think it is unethical (not necessarily "irrational") to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation. If you had been actually talking about the production and sale of porn, I'd be more forgiving; porn (like purchasing the services of prostitutes, which I've also acknowledged as non-manipulative) is at least honest, in the sense that everybody knows what porn is for.
What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that's a very different matter). I don't think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I'm sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can't observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn't think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow "acting" on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).
Actually the accusation was not of a 'thought crime', but rather of doing something unethical with your thoughts.
If you believe that there are some actions that are unethical, I fail to see how some of those actions can't be thoughts, unless you think thoughts are metaphysically different from other actions.
Actually I think we're dealing in virtue ethics here.
That seems very unlikely on the face of it (I hadn't meant it in a specifically virtue ethics context, and Alicorn isn't necessarily a fan), though I'd also gotten that impression from some of the phrasings in Alicorn's recent comment. Surely though it's an empirical question whether thinking of people in a particular way predisposes one to behave differently about them.
But what did you mean by that?
...Thought crime? Really? That's what you get from me saying that it's unethical to think of people as suitable objects of manipulation? Yes, I used the word "think", but the emphasis was really on "suitable". I could have used the phrasing "it's inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people", or "the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong" or "the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false", or "to speak of people as suitable objects of manipulation reflects an ethically abhorrent facet of the speaker's personality" - and meant more or less the same thing. Is that clearer?
I'd phrase it a little bit differently, but overall, yeah, I'd accept that position. That is, I basically agree with you here.
Alternately (probably a bit more general but, I think, capturing the main relevant offensive bits) "goal systems which do not assign inherent terminal value to persons, but only see them in terms of instrumental value are immoral goal systems."
"it's inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people" "the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong" "the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false"
Ahem... Why? To me, these claims seem baseless and to some great degree, false.
It would seem that you and I disagree on matters of ethics, then - probably on an awfully basic level.
I suspect you're using the word "manipulation" to mean different things.
For that matter, a lot of "manipulation" goes on in Brennan's world, it's expected on all sides, they don't think of themselves as immoral because of it, and I would go ahead and endorse that aspect of their fictional existence. I think that it's manipulation of someone who isn't expecting manipulation which is the main ethical problem.
Disregard.
How do you – or how does anyone – think Roko's sentiment could have been rephrased to not come across as objectifying? The only change obvious to me is making it clear that money and status are not sufficient conditions for sexual success, but I doubt that's a significant part of the problem.
See here.
"Get" is a large part of what bothers me. I don't like your first statement - "women are attracted to rich men" is still a disturbing generalization even if this attraction isn't supposed to lead to "getting" anybody, and I'm not terribly comfortable with the implied goal of just "sleeping with attractive women" (although I won't ethically condemn that goal as long as it's pursued honestly). But the second statement is definitely worse.
So having concluded that talk of "getting" women is a big part of why I don't like the things you say, you go on to use it again immediately?
The idea deserves some objective light shedding on it. It's easy to pick out cases where beautiful women and high-status (not necessarily rich) men choose to affiliate, but are the two groups really more likely to hang out together? Or is this a sort of male-evolutionary-psyche mirage, which is always over the next status hill?
I'm not convinced that financial success actually increases your success with women, although I'd love it if that were true. I suspect that appearance and behavior play a bigger role as soon as you have an apartment, a car, and a cell phone.
There is a subset of the population consciously interested in exploiting partners for their wealth. That subset aside, yeah, I think once you're able to provide and take care of yourself, the marginal value of money in your relationships plummets.
INCLUDING YOU!!!
This is only significant if you, well, have long-term goals that involve changing the world.
I don't.
Not really, unless you count things like "avoid feeling bad due to boredom, hunger, cold, etc."
I do usually want to finish whatever video game I'm playing at any given time, though, but that's not something you need to be a millionaire to do.
Do you have any interest in acquiring goals?
If you could figure out what makes you enjoy video games and duplicate it in some other task that had more external value, would you do that?
I dunno, really. If getting goals means I have to do ::shudder:: work, then I don't think I want goals. Also, one important thing that I like about video games is that failure has no meaningful consequences; if you fail at a job, you could be in trouble for a while, but if you fail at a game, you can just try again or even do something else.
Some other things I like about video games:
There's probably more things I could list...
If you fail at a job, you don't have a job. If you currently are happy about not having a job, then this shouldn't be so bad. Yeah, maybe someone will yell at you before firing you, but I simply reject that complaint. I can imagine months of stress when you believe you'll be fired, but I think that it is possible to accept a job as transitory and avoid this stress. I think that I would find this stressful mainly because the uncertainty of what I would do when the job is over. If I knew that I'd go home and play video games for a few months, I think I could avoid the stress. But, maybe I'm wrong; and maybe you're different. I'm probably more sympathetic to your other complaints.
This is an instrumental equivalent to believing something for a reason other than that it is true. The goals are a first step, setting stage for the planning. The best available plan wins, even if it's a "bad" plan, that is even if it doesn't exactly "achieve" any of the goals.
For example, you may want to jump from a cliff, but not want to die (from hitting the ground). The plans not involving a parachute may dissuade this intention, prompting one to give an answer immediately, and declare the task undesirable, placing a curiosity stopper of this line of investigation. The correct approach is to keep your goals, not to stop considering them, and wait for a better plan: maybe the idea of a parachute will come, given time and careful study.
I don't know if you'd be good at it or not, and I don't know if your circle of friends lends itself to discussions on other topics, but apart from "exciting and intense" (and the specific applicability of GameFAQs.com), most of those criteria apply to many forms of artwork. Drawing, for instance, is cheap, can be pursued at any time and with any amount of delay between putting one down and picking it up, putting things up on the Internet or showing them to friends yields prompt feedback, persistence pays off no matter how much initial talent you have, and many people find it very absorbing. Unlike playing video games, there is some chance of art netting an income, although it would probably take a while for such an enterprise to take off.
I find many "creative" pursuits, such as writing and computer programming, to be both extremely difficult and rather exhausting. I'm often good at them, but they're so much harder than anything that's merely a matter of mastering and executing specific algorithms. In other words, I can't brute force my way through writing a story the way I can brute force my way through a video game, by trying over and over again until I finally get it right. If I get stuck, I'm really, really stuck, and there's no FAQ I can go read which will tell me what my next sentence or line of code ought to be. (Which is why I mentioned GameFAQs.com as one of the things I like about video games.)
I don't know much about drawing, though. I never had much interest in it before...
I recommend it, personally, but that's my hobby, and won't be universal. There are lots of drawing tutorials available for all levels of expertise and assorted styles and at varying levels of step-by-step detail, and it's more than a little easier to assess a ballpark of objective quality in drawing than it is with writing. If you like to write, you could do your own webcomic (although I don't know how well you'd react to keeping an update schedule, you'd be in good company if you didn't stick to one); that's a good way to get in regular practice and improve. If you don't like to write and have halfway decent art, it's not hard to find a writer willing to collaborate.
I recommend drawing from real life. I don't think people get stuck like writer's block. You may get stuck at a plateau of ability, but that might be OK, depending on the level.
Playing a musical instrument is quite amenable to brute-forcing techniques* (as you might guess from the multitude of musical-instrument-simulating videogames).
*You would still need instruction to get started, and for specialized tricks, however.
Indeed it is! I can play the piano at the "talented amateur" level. I enjoy it, and like performing, but it's damn hard to make money doing it.
Have you tried programming in a language with an interactive interpreter, extensive documentation and tutorials, and open source code?
I think this is a good suggestion. CronoDAS, you might also like to look into web design, or just design in general. I'm learning it right now - in an amateurish, inconsistent way - because it'll help my website programming work. I'm really enjoying it even though my current skill level could be regarded as "terrible". It involves learning tools like Photoshop (or GIMP if you like Linux), CSS and the principles of design. It helps me make things that appeal to my aesthetic sense and give me a sense of accomplishment, and I get satisfaction from improving a skill. As a self-directed exploration of this skill, it should be low-stress and there's not really a way to fail.
It sounds like you have programming talent but don't like getting stuck (I sympathize), but it's hard to get actually stuck when your tools just include HTML, CSS and Photoshop.
I'm in a similar boat as CronoDAS. I had actually stopped playing video-games over a year ago (and stopped reading fiction months ago), though I just recently downloaded Daggerfall. I did feel really good when I got a job, though I am anxious that I could screw up and lose it (especially in this economy, as we've had the first layoffs in the company's history).
Back to the issue of automatic-denial: Thought some of you might be interested in this from Mind Hacks on bias blind spot.
What counts as extreme steps?
I think the problem is risk aversion. If people take on such goals, and fail (which is not uncommon), they will be worse off than if they never fully embraced the goals in the first place.
Only if the failure is permanent. If 9 out of 10 businesses go under, that just means you have to be prepared/willing to start 10, and learn from your mistakes each time. ;-)