My use of the word "right" has nothing to do with any political structure. If you have a word that carries less of a poli-sci connotation that otherwise means more or less the same thing (i.e. a fact about a person that imposes obligations on agents that causally interact with that person) then I'll happily switch to reduce confusion, but I haven't run across a more suitable word yet.

My ethical theory is not fully developed. I've only said this on three or four places on the site, so perhaps you missed it. But my first-pass intuition about that is that while people may not have the right to think objectifying thoughts, they do have the right not to be interfered with in thinking them.

Want to? Maybe not. There are other demands on my time, after all, and it's already annoying enough being the only person who (locally) catches these things here in the actual world where the objectification is more hazardous. (It was never my ambition to be the feminism police or the token girl on the site, I assure you.) I would still think it was wrong, but you keep emphasizing causality and I'm just not sure why you think that's an interesting question. I guess for the same cause as the (beginnings of) the development of my ethical theory to start out with, which aren't even clearly memorable to me.

I still have very little idea what you mean by 'objectification' and 'objectify people'.

I was momentarily off-put by Roko's comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:

• the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
• the connotation of 'attractive' which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
• the modifier 'extremely' which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women, especially when followed by identifying this desire as a generator for desiring high social status rather than vice versa or discussing both directions of causation. (The latter would have made more sense to me in the context of Roko saying we should value social influential power.)

I had negative associations attached to Roko's comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko's suggestions. However, I wouldn't have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of 'objectificaton' or 'objectifying', or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word 'get' by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of 'getting a girlfriend/boyfriend'.

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.

Ultimately each person's ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.

For instance, consider the sentences "if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2" and "if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2". We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like "how long would it take me to fall from a building" -- which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.

The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working "inside-out" , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered "outside-in", starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)

Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires "person-specific" reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin -- a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants -- turn out to be very relevant.

The same actually goes for the "falling from a building" example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience -- what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc -- but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.

And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.

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.

I'm not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener"?

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.

Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me" makes no sense.

This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons.

That appears to contradict your earlier definition:

By "objectify", I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person.

If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be "like a non-person"?

The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning - i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it's objectification.

(I'm not even going to touch the thoughtcrime part where you're classing speech and thoughts to be unethical in themselves, except to mention that this is the part where having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain. Of course, I expect this comment to be widely downvoted for that idea, since the right to righteous indignation is itself a religious idea around here, even if it's more usually wielded in support of Truth or Theory rather than gender sensibilities. All very on-topic for this post about atheist/rationalist denials, as it turns out!)

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.

Actually, I said I support being tolerant of people who express their thoughts as they think them, even if they happen to sound offensive at first.

A guy who makes a statement about "getting" women is no more insensitive than a woman who speaks of "getting" a man; they're simply using the language that is natural to them and at an appropriate level of specificity given their goals. We should applaud their truthfulness, not encourage them to be indirect, since if we don't like their goals, then knowing about them is a good thing! (It's also good if we DO like their goals, but that of course should be obvious.)

This has zero to do with my own opinions or lack thereof on the language itself -- something I have scrupulously avoided endorsing or condemning. This is not a forum for sharing opinions, it's a forum for advancing rationality... and one where the importance of Truth (with a capital-T) is bandied about regularly. It should be pretty fucking basic rationality to observe that people telling you true things you don't like is useful information, if only because it's a minimally basic sanity check on your own untrustworthy brain!

If I didn't think people telling me things I don't like is useful, I'd have been gone from this place in days! (For that matter, I wouldn't have spent the tens of thousands of dollars on training from marketing gurus, some of whom absolutely infuriate me at times.) The fact that I encounter information that offends me or pisses me off is a helpful signal: it means I'm learning something new.

In particular, it means I have the opportunity to expand my range of useful choices, by dropping whatever mental rules are triggering me to be offended or pissed off, instead of paying attention to whether there's anything useful in the information I've been offered, whether or not I think it's "True" with a capital T.

So all in all, I think perhaps you're having a different conversation than I am. I'm not arguing that people should be intentionally rude or offensive - I'm arguing that trying to cleanse the world of things that offend you is an irrational dead end, not only because it's a fool's errand, but because it will actively HURT you, by depriving you of learning opportunities and locking you into an affective spiral of your own making.

So if you are making statements that drive away women then either you mean to drive away women or you are making an error.

That's not the type of error Alicorn was talking about, AFAICT. Making a statement that doesn't advance your goals is a different class of error than a linguistic one.

If people use language that is hurtful, objectifying, and sexist,

There is no such thing as hurtful(language). There is only considered_hurtful_by(language, person). See Eliezer's post about movie posters with swamp creatures carrying off "sexy" women for explanation, aka the "mind projection fallacy".

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

I didn't say it was "not okay" - I said it was "not useful". HUGE difference.

You are perfectly free to feel any way you like, but that doesn't make it useful, nor grant you any rights regarding whether others should agree with your feelings.

But when I have tried in the past to ask you what you mean, you have not been helpful.

IOW, "not_helpful_to(pjeby_answers, Alicorn_understanding)"... but note that this does not equate to "not_helpful(pjeby)" or "not_trying_to_help(pjeby)", just as "repulsive_to(X, Alicorn)" does not equate to "repulsive(X)" or "unethical(X)".

Perhaps what happened was that I accidentally misunderstood you and got into an argument.

Perhaps. I actually see it more as that people are trying to tell you things that are outside your current frame of reference, and you're telling them they're unethical or in error, when they are actually trying to be clear and helpful and say what they mean, and are puzzled why you're labeling them and their statements. (Even when someone knows male-female idiom translation inside and out, they don't always notice what they're doing, just like most people aren't aware of their own accent.)

Meanwhile, AFAICT, you are taking other people's words and translating them to what you would mean if you used those words, instead of graciously accepting others explanation of what they meant by those words.

Once you get to the point where you're arguing about the definitions of the words, there isn't really an argument any more -- something that also should be clear from Eliezer's past posts.

In short, none of the stuff I'm bringing up is "about" gender issues -- or I wouldn't even have bothered with this conversation in the first place.

I brought this up only because it's directly relevant to core Yudkowskian principles like the mind projection fallacy, arguing over definitions, and not treating one class of human being as a broken version of another class of human being.

In other words, it's about rationality.

I should chalk that up to you being male

That would be if -- and only if -- we had successfully reached understanding, and the misunderstanding was rooted in a gender-based language difference. (i.e., the context of my comments)

Alicorn:

What if I told you that talking about "getting a woman" was a direct and honest expression of my most inner desires, that I really did view her in that objectifying way, and that I considered this attitude perfectly natural and healthy, and that, furthermore, I find it objectionable for others to consider it their perogative to correct me on this?

And that I very often find "being offended" to be an offensive behavior in its own right?

And that I heavily discount verbal contradiction from other males because it signals a very well-established mating posture, that of the helpful and supplicant beta male?