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Sayeth the Girl
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
- Comments and posts that casually objectify women or encourage the objectification of women. "Objectification" is what happens when a person is treated or discussed as an object, not as an autonomous being. (Non-women can also be objectified, and that too should be stopped.)
- Casual use of masculine and/or heteronormative examples in posts and comments that aren't explicitly about gender. It's just not that hard to come up with an unsexed example. Be especially careful when using the second person. If you need to use an example with a gender, there's no reason to consider male the default - consider choosing randomly, or you could use a real person as an example (who isn't presumed to archetypically represent anyone in the audience) instead of a hypothetical one (who might be).
- Sweeping generalizations about women, if they are not backed up by overwhelming hard data (responsibly gathered and interpreted). The cost of being wrong about this sort of thing is high, even if the culprits don't bear it themselves, and extreme care should be taken.
- Fawning admiration of pickup artists who attain their fame by the systematic manipulation of women. If it is necessary to refer admiringly to a pickup artist or pickup strategy (I'm not sure why it would be, but if), care should be taken to choose one whose methods are explicitly non-depersonalizing, and disclaim that specifically in the comment.
We could use more of the following:
- Thoughtful use of qualifiers and disclaimers in talk about sex and gender. Robin is not right.
- Attention to the privileges of masculinity and attempts to reduce that disparity. (Note that of course there are also female privileges, but until Less Wrong hosts custody battles or we start suspecting that some of us might be violent criminals, they are unlikely to come into play nearly so much in this location.)
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.
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Comments (486)
For a balancing perspective, female privilege checklist.
Most of the entries of masculine privilege checklist are either very weakly supported by data (everything about job discrimination) or purely subjective and not too serious (nobody will think X about me if ..., most of those are untrue too).
A list proven of serious and genuine gender "advantages" would be interesting, but these two lists are worthless.
Robin Hanson said:
The next obvious step is to assign point values to such privileges, so we can add them up and compare totals.
Of course there would be many ways to disagree about such point values, including how they should account for differing abilities and preferences. You’d open yourself up more to ridicule by posting a calculation, as folks could trumpet your most vulnerable estimate as evidence of your insincerity. And you wouldn’t show your impressiveness nearly as much as you could via a fancy math model, statistical data analysis, or semiotic text analysis.
But the essence of analysis is to "break it down", to take apart vague wholes into clearer parts. For the same reasons we make point lists to help us make tough job decisions, or ask people who sue for damages to name an amount and break it into components, we should try to break down these important social claims via simple calculations. And the absense of attempts at this is a sad commentary on something.
Laughed out loud at the clause "this is a sad commentary on something".
It would be an interesting question whether men are more privileged than women, and I'm skeptical that there's a clear way to measure these things. But I also think it's largely irrelevant to the question at hand; that there is a discrepancy in expectations is enough to keep in mind.
It's not at all obvious to me why this might need doing. Inequalities aren't, say, good, so as long as the goal is "make people aware of X" and not "allocate money to alleviating X" (for instance) why have a stupid contest about who is less privileged than whom in numerical fashion?
I agree that Robin's suggestion is somewhat beside the point. Regardless of how male and female privilege tallies up, I want to know about what I can do to make people, including women, feel fairly treated and respected, and to encourage them to participate on LW.
I hope including Robin's comments won't detract from those goals. That said, I do think this sort of accounting is useful for helping me set priorities. i.e. Which groups and issues are most deserving of more of my finite time and resources.
I agree that it would be nice to level advantages from sex wherever feasible.
In evaluating your request that we pay extra "attention to the privileges of masculinity" and "attempt to reduce that disparity", I would definitely want to weigh the overall balance before deciding which wrongs to crusade against.
If you're talking about a disparity in participation (and not privilege) here, then sure, I'd like to see more quality female contribution.
I've tried to avoid being the 'feminism police' around here too, despite apparently having a stronger background in it than you do. I'll try to pay more attention.
This is perhaps an obvious case of "don't be rude or marginalize any groups" that seems like a good rule for inclusivity. But it is worth bringing these things to attention specifically; the places where people are often biased are worth being reminded of.
What percentage of the posts exhibit these problems, would you estimate (or just guess)? Thanks.
ETA, it might well be that potential female contributors would find themselves drawn to topics which are more likely to lead to sexist discussions.
If you mean top-level posts, it's not that many - certainly a single-digit percentage, although I'm not sure which digit. In comments, the ratio is skewed, because calling people on it makes them do it more as they attempt to defend themselves.
I meant, do you have a sense of what percentage of top-level posts have comments which show the problem?
I'm not sure. I have the impression that it is way too many, but that doesn't mean a whole lot, since any positive number is too many and any annoyingly high positive number is way too many. I think most of the top-level posts that mention anything having to do with gender probably have at least one offending comment.
I believe that, to a first approximation, one factor of my utility function can be represented without a token for the woman's autonomy. Or, if this cannot accurately be said of my utility function, it can be said about world states of high instrumental value.
I believe it's in my best interest to fuck.
Related: I'm glad that Alicorn included the word "casually". I myself object strongly to the idea that objectification is an evil per se, but the idea is common one, going back through Kant, the Scholastics etc. etc., and deserving (I think) of at least a second thought's worth of respect.
Do you object when other people use manipulative or coercive techniques on you, to maximize their own utility function without regard for your autonomy?
My objection would be to making a decision that I wouldn't make if I had better information. It's not about the fact that their utility function doesn't have a token for my autonomy.
And if you spend a lot of time being influenced by intelligent people who don't have a token for your autonomy, you'll be making a lot of decisions you wouldn't have made with better information and objectivity.
"Not causing people to make choices they will regret" is a pretty simple ethical principle.
Actually, I originally just said that one term of my utility function can be represented without a token for women's autonomy. The utility function as a whole definitely includes terms for the concerns of every human being.
But I hope you understand why, in some conversations, it would be natural for me to objectify women.
I hope you understand that the issue is not what is natural, but what is ethical.
Actually, it's contradictory. If they actually have autonomy, then you can't truly "cause" them to make a particular choice. So choosing to "not cause" them to make a choice is actually admitting they're not autonomous.
Ergo, given the definition of "objectifying" in use here, you are objectifying someone merely by trying not to influence them.
Are you seriously assuming incompatibilist free will? If we've got (roughly speaking) a deterministic universe, and no Kantian nonsense about noumena, then everybody can be caused to do things, even though they're autonomous.
Unless you're assuming incompatibilism in absence of free will... in which case, it seems like you should have a more basic disagreement with the objection of not treating people as though they are autonomous.
False dichotomy. Autonomy isn't absolute, nor is "causing" someone to make choices.
For this, we will have sexbots.
Ah, but I disapprove of sexbots.
I don't. I'd classify sexbots into two types. Ones that aren't people, so they won't be emotionally sufficient to compete much with real women, but exploiting them is fine. Ones that have been improved until they are people, in which case why not love them? Human diversity makes a species-wide rejection of human-human relationships unlikely.
We already have sexbots that are the size of genitalia, and even people who like them prefer other people as well.
Honestly, I'd like to practice on one.
Sexbots will be like bots in a computer game. They will be fun, sure, but real players will be even more fun. I don't really see the relevance of 'disapproving bots', some people will prefer them (or maybe be their only choice), and some will choose real players. If someone even enjoys playing with bots more than with real players, let them, it's what they want to do.
I trace the treating of women as status objects to be acquired to the recent surge in popularity of Ev. Bio.. In particular, proponents of PUA and allied schools of thought tend to draw direct lines from lower-primate societies to ours. (They also assume that if a technique works, it must be okay to use, but that's a somewhat different issue.)
I've also seen a tendency to miss the difference between adaptation execution and fitness maximization. Of course, that's an easy mistake to slip into, but still.
I don't understand what "objectification" means. Even pickup artists can't think of women as objects, since the only way they can be successful is by interacting with women in accordance with a certain model of the female psyche. Objects don't have psyches.
If the pickup artist somehow deceives a woman to achieve his goal, then what is morally wrong is the deception. How does objectification fit into this?
Deception is wrong too. It's certainly possible to do things that are morally wrong without objectifying anyone. However, "modeling the female psyche" does not mean that no objectification is going on. That modeling is a prerequisite for achieving the goals of the pickup artist, which don't typically seem to include respect for the goals or interests or personhood of the picked-up (except inasmuch as knowledge of these things serves the success of the pickup attempt). It's no more personalizing than modeling the behavior of an AI opponent in a video game, who must be defeated to win the game.
So to objectify someone is to think of him in a way that doesn't include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood?
According to this definition, I objectify the bus driver, the cashier at the local Walmart, and just about everybody I interact with on an average day.
Yes, you probably do.
...
Are you saying that you don't? Or that you do, but that this kind of objectification is somehow different from the kind you condemn? If so, what's the difference?
The major difference is that it's more socially acceptable. Yes, I realize this is a non-answer. The answer you probably want is "they're getting paid for it". There's no expectation of social relationship between peers.
Furthermore, as I said elsewhere, wanton disregard for the autonomy of such people is still frowned upon in the extreme cases. Noone likes the boss who treats employees like cogs, or the demanding customer who pushes around customer service staff because they know they can.
Well, no. I happened to pick a bus driver and cashier as my examples, but I could just as easily have picked my next door neighbor. I don't dislike him, but I couldn't care less about his goals or interests or personality.
Treating people in a certain way goes beyond mere objectification as Alicorn has defined it: "Thinking of a person in a way that doesn't include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood."
I'm still trying to obtain a coherent definition of "objectification" that is both morally reprehensible and independent from any harmful action, such as deceiving a woman to get her into bed or treating one's employees like cogs.
If it helps any, instances of 'thinking' that don't go beyond that will probably not appear on this website. They at least need to go as far as 'writing'.
disregard for the autonomy of people =/= thinking of someone in a way that doesn't include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood
I am reading the latter rather literally in much the same way RobinHanson seems to and as I think the author intended.
Sorry, I thought it clear I meant some flavor of "all of the above", shortened for readability.
See SoullessAutomaton's comment; he has it right.
OK, well given this clarification, it seems to me just fine to objectify people, and in fact I recommend doing so when what one is trying to do is neutral analysis about the facts of some matter. Objectify your teacher when deciding if school is worth the effort, and objectify your doctor when deciding if medicine is worth the cost.
It's important to note that neither of those scenarios include interacting with the person being so objectified. Also note the point about the ethical considerations being different in economic transactions, e.g. thomblake's comment.
What about objectifying a job candidate in an interview? Do you choose the candidate with experience, who will feel dead-ended but perform a better job? You might interpret this as a deliberate stunting of their volition (the sense of objectification I'm using), interfering with their actual goals despite their outward actions.
Any overqualified candidate that gets hired is objectified in an arguably worse way than the target of a PUA, despite the potential mitigations the economic transaction may bring about.
(Edit: Rereading this, I'm worried that I sound confrontational; I don't mean to be, but I'm not sure how else to edit without becoming too prolix.)
Maybe this definition is more isomorphic to the "objectification of women" than it first appears. For example, the other day my family was going to get our photograph taken. After about seven pictures were taken, we were lead to another room where a man showed us our photographs in turn so we could decide on the one we liked. It occurred to me that we probably could have operated the computer that did this ourselves, in which case he would have been out of a job. I objectified him, and I'm quite certain he would have been offended if I'd said my thoughts aloud.
So. Objectification is a good thing for the person who does it, but it's quite normal for the person on the receiving end to be offended.
See this comment - there are some contexts where treating people as objects is at least socially expected, and arguably fine, and economic transactions are one of them.
To that degree, yes, just as they objectify you as 'passenger', or 'customer'.
But even as we interact as 'passenger' and 'bus driver', and probably don't have any desire but to do what we have to do as efficiently as possible, we do generally keep in mind that we are both people with concerns about our respect and we don't casually devalue each other for playing out the roles we have. There's still an assumption of basic personhood going on.
But I think that when people start talking about getting sex from a woman with the same degree of respect and mutuality as is required when getting a can of cola from a vending machine, then they've gone an extra step on the road to objectification. And adding on a "well that's what women want too" as an afterthought when questioned about it doesn't really convince.
I'll concede that the "pick up artist" is to some extent a role that is played by guys who aren't necessarily so entirely cynical in reality, but I'm not sure that means it's non-issue.
Am I right in thinking you don't respect the goals, interests, or personhood of the pickup artist? Consider a scenario in which there is a PUA who desires sex and a woman who does not. Which outcome do you prefer, one where the PUA changes her mind and they engage in consensual sex, or the woman turns him down and he goes home alone? If you think the first outcome is negative, why? Would your answer be the same if it was a woman trying to pick up a man? Is it morally objectionable to change someone's mind? Is it only so if manipulative techniques are used? Is it possible to change most people's minds without using manipulative techniques to some degree? If you asked someone to help you move a sofa, would you do so in a monotone voice or would you do so cheerfully with a smile? If these questions seem unnecessarily antagonistic, I apologize. I simply want to understand your position.
For the record, I have a deep personal dislike of pickup artists, especially those who employ NLP. I do not, however, find their methods morally questionable.
We are in grave danger of equivocating the word "respect" here, so let me clarify: when I define objectification, the kind of "respect" I mean is an acknowledgment of those things and recognition of commensurability with one's own corresponding goals, interests, and personhood, not an approval. I acknowledge the goals, interests, and personhood of pickup artists, and recognize them as similar to my own in many ways (in structure, not content). I don't approve of the goals and interests they seem to share as a group (although I do approve of their personhood).
Your question is vastly too broad for me to say which outcome I prefer. If you made it more specific - if I knew something about the method of the PUA, the reasons behind the woman's initial reluctance, her typical dispositions with regards to casual sex, etc., then I might be able to answer you. The same goes for the situation where the woman is attempting to pick up the man.
There are ways to change people's minds without doing anything morally objectionable. My favored method is usually just transparent, bald-faced announcement of all my intentions. I actually go about saying things like "I did work today and seek praise!" or "I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I'm probably going to talk about my ex in a minute" or "I don't like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt" or "I'm going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn't take that long". Of course I accompany these things with either actual smiles or emoticons because I like to project an air of adorable friendliness, but of course I'm actually adorable and friendly so that's okay ;)
Isn't it actually their methods you disapprove of? Disapproving of a pretty innate male desire to engage in frequent intercourse seems unfair at best and Puritan at worst. Their goals do not involve manipulating women any more than my goal of driving to the store is also a goal to drive my car. If a man can pick up a woman simply by talking honestly to her about his romantic feelings, do you still disapprove of his actions because he may share the same goal as the pickup artist?
Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? "I did work today and seek praise" is an extraordinarily manipulative (and clever) statement. It, and the others, are obviously intended to subvert cached thought, catching off guard the recipient who may not rise to the bait of responding positively to the more common, "Today was a tough day" or "I hope I did okay, what do you think?" By using unusual and unexpectedly honest phrasing and presenting yourself as "adorable and friendly", are you really being transparent, or are you actually employing a manipulative method of your own? After all, if it never worked, surely you would self-update to a better technique. And wouldn't claiming you are actually being transparent be a defense against your own cached representation of <manipulative people> in order to preserve your internal belief that you are not being manipulative?
I guess in addition to defining "respect" I should have defined "goal". In attempting to fully describe a goal, I'd usually be inclined to include caveats about what methods wouldn't be okay for me to use to achieve that goal. For instance, it's my goal to watch the entirety of Stargate SG-1, but not if I have to steal the DVDs from WalMart to do it.
I'm... sorry you feel that way? I am genuinely going for "clear and honest", not "manipulative and clever".
If saying "I did work today and request praise" (an example of something I actually said today) doesn't promptly yield praise, I (actually did) follow up with "You are not fulfilling my request. You should fix that." If that hadn't "worked", I probably would have gone and talked to somebody else, and refrained from seeking praise from that person in the future, on the assumption that they had no interest in praising me for doing work. I wouldn't have moved to a less clear and honest strategy to get the uncooperative individual to give me what I wanted.
Under what conditions do you normally find it necessary to attempt to fully describe a goal?
Usually when I'm very, very bored.
So to dig up an old chestnut, the ends do not justify the means. What I am still unsure about is whether or not you disapprove of the ends. Does this mean you are okay with the goal of picking up women, as long as you do not use particular techniques to do so? The stumbling block I run into on this is that there are no male-female sexual interactions entirely free of psychological modeling, signaling or predictive behaviour on both sides -- or if there are, they certainly don't exist in the human population at large. It seems to me that pickup artists are merely trying to compete with men who are naturally charismatic and charming. Is the real solution to actually handicap such men so that manipulative techniques are not necessary for competition?
By the way, I consider watching the entirety of Stargate SG-1 morally questionable, but this argument is subjective enough as it is...
As you have pointed out, your intentions should not be confused with your methods.
You seem to think that adopting a baseline, rational approach to something like requesting praise for your work is maximally non-manipulative and honest. It certainly could be, if you were speaking to a Turing-incomplete chatbot. Unfortunately, people don't operate that way. If you formally ask for praise and object when none is forthcoming, are you respecting the "goals, interests and personhood" of the recipient as much as you would be if you asked nothing of them? And can such a non-standard method of human communication possibly be as "clear and honest" as a standard method? Put another way, does your employment of open honesty contain other signals i.e. does it carry the signal "You should give my request for praise more weight because I am visibly being honest and not trying to bait you into it"?
Be wary of saying things that are the equivalent of "I'm not going to say 'trust me', because that doesn't mean anything, but a is b." Such a statement actually indicates that the speaker is doubly untrustworthy.
Now, I don't believe you are being intentionally manipulative and clever, or that you are definitely being so unintentionally. This is not an argument I'm trying to win against you. I'm just asking you to consider the chance that you unaware of the possibility of it.
I have no ethical problems with the desire to have no-strings-attached sex with people of any description. I simply require that this be pursued honestly and non-coercively.
I also have no ethical problem with people trying to become more charismatic and charming.
No, not really. Or if it does, that's an accident. I started doing my intention-announcement when I decided that if I was going to get annoyed at other people wanting me to read their minds, I'd better provide the courtesy I wanted to them. I did not wish to become one of the people whose interpersonal relationships were plagued with arguments that wind up culminating in "Well, why didn't you just say so?" If I seek praise, I announce it. Other people may or may not care about my seeking, and may or may not indulge my desire. This gives me information about their dispositions towards me, instead of confused feedback that might reflect on either that or their level of telepathic ability.
It's possible that I'm being unintentionally manipulative, and if that is the case, I would like to stop. If you have suggestions about how I can signify all and only the things I think I'm signifying in my sample statements and statements like them, I'd welcome the input.
For reference, I didn't find it particularly manipulative, though I also don't appreciate attempts at telepathy.
Did you offer your conversation partner anything of value, other than an implied threat of disapproval if they failed to accede to your demand? Were you thinking about their goals, other than how they related to your desire to receive praise?
It seems to me that, by your definitions, one can objectify, or manipulate, but not both. If you took your conversant's goals into consideration and offered something for what you wanted, then you manipulated. If you didn't take them into account, then you objectified.
Or do you claim that there is a third category, in which you thought about their goals, but didn't allow this to affect your choices in any way? Then this seems like even worse objectification, since you knew they had other goals and nonetheless chose not to act accordingly.
Or perhaps the loophole is that if you just state what you want, then other people simply "should" give it to you, and that therefore this isn't manipulation? Is it only manipulation if you offer to give someone something they actually want, and offering veiled threats instead is just "honest" communication?
Now, let's contrast your strategy with a pickup-artist strategy, known as the Apocalypse Opener. Like your approach, it's based on blunt honesty and an open statement of intention. But there are a couple of key differences.
First, the PUA waits until the third sentence of the conversation (not counting "hello" or "hey") to state his intention, treating the other person with conventional courtesy first, rather than simply stating a demand.
Second, the request is not even a request, let alone a demand. It's framed as an invitation, an offering of something valuable.
Third, if the invitation is declined, the PUA neither pressures the other person with a threat of disapproval, nor departs the conversation. He simply continues treating them in a friendly way, leaving the invitation open and giving them time to consider it.
By your definitions, which is more manipulative? Which more objectifying? To whom?
At a first glance, yours strikes me as both more manipulative and more objectifying, since you don't offer your conversant anything of value to them (i.e. ignoring their goals and objectifying), and you include a veiled threat (using their goals to get what you want, i.e. manipulation). In contrast, the PUA does nothing but offer things of potential value to his conversant, and does not offer even the minor threat of withholding his approval or company.
This is the beginning of the conversation in question:
Alicorn: I did work and request praise!
Alicorn: You are not fulfilling my request.
Alicorn: You should fix that.
Interlocutor Mine, Name Redacted: *praise*
Alicorn: :D
Interlocutor Mine, Name Redacted: Good job, keep up the good work
Alicorn: *is pleased with self*
Prior context in an earlier conversation included an exchange about how I've been having trouble getting work done lately, and should be chided if I didn't do any today. So... I guess I offered my charming company and a smiley? IMNR is my friend, we talk frequently, I usually operate under the assumption that IMNR has some desire to interact with me in a friendly manner. IMNR is free to disabuse me of this notion at any time and I will leave him alone.
Explicit trades of services do not have to be objectifying. I exchange Christmas gifts with various relatives, and if I stopped giving people Christmas presents, I'd probably stop getting them; that doesn't mean anybody is being objectified.
Something can be an influencing factor without being a controlling factor. For instance, when I make curry, the cayenne pepper contributes to the curry being spicy. If I left out the cayenne, it would still be spicy, because there are a half a dozen other spicy things in it.
No, not really. Certain desires ought to be accommodated (e.g. I just asked my roommate if it'd bother her for me to have music on in a particular room when she went to bed; she said yes, so I moved to a different room). Certain desires don't have to (I doubt I would have harbored resentment if IMNR had refrained from supplying desired praise) and satisfying them is super-erogatory.
Meh. It looks honest enough; some phatic introduction and a question. There doesn't seem anything wrong with this strategy in particular to me. It surprises me that it works, but that's purely empirical.
If people want things of value from me, they can ask me for them. If I want things from other people, I ask for them. If I have something I think someone else would like and I like them and want them to have it, I offer it to them. People who like me and have things they think I would like and want me to have them offer them to me. These events don't always occur simultaneously, but over the course of a friendship or other extended interpersonal association, it works well enough to suit me.
I like your style.
At the risk of making people of all genders feel uncomfortable, I'll add that this is also a fantasy of mine.
You mean talking like that is something you fantasize about doing, or fantasize about other people doing?
The more significant issue is the lack of respect for autonomy and the other individual's goals. It is, shall we say, "unFriendly".
It's perfectly possible to have excellent models of other people's psyches but no respect for their autonomy; in fact it's a useful skill in sales and marketing. In the pathological extreme, it's popularly called "sociopathy".
I suggest that unFriendly is a hugely more useful general concept than "objectifying". I often find myself frustrated I can't use it in conversation with strangers.
The more I think about it the more I suspect that it's actually the best description yet of the underlying complaint, at least from my perspective.
The term "objectifying" has a lot of additional implications and connotations that distract, cf. the "I objectify supermarket cashiers all the time" type remarks with the "yes but that's not really wrong" replies.
I'd say it's entire denotation is useless. Which explains the problems: we're fighting over denotation when all the data is in the connotation (and ought to be extracted to stand alone).
"unFriendly" is the more general concept, but I think "objectifying" is still an important special case.
Also, 'unFriendly' is supposed to be a technical term involving AI 'behavior', and as Eliezer points out, it's hard to see how it applies to human behavior.
Right - the human concept is good ol' "unfriendly", no CamelCase.
"UnFriendly" is supposed to be a technical term covering a tremendous range of AIs. What do you mean by it in this context? Flawed fun theory? Disregard for volition?
Mostly disregard for volition, but also satisficing too early on fun.
In this specific case, the disregard for volition. In the more general sense, stretching the term by analogy to describe any behavior from an agent with a significant power advantage that wouldn't be called "Friendly" if done by an AI with a power advantage over humans.
The implicit step here, I think, is that whatever value system an FAI would have would also make a pretty good value system for any agent in a position of power, allowing for limitations of cognitive potential.
I would also hazard a guess that people who are "naturally good with women" objectify women more than people who use PUA techniques. Without the benefit of careful analysis, respect for the "goals or interests or personhood" of the picked-up turns out to be detrimental: many "naturals" flounder when they have to abandon their "tried and tested" rules-of-thumb and seek an intimate relationship.
I think the idea of objectification has more to do with considering instances to be fungible. The typical PUA thinking about how to "bang the next hot chick" (which he phrases as "get a woman") is considering a small subset of women as completely interchangeable for his purposes, as if they were completely fungible entities like dollar bills or bars of gold-pressed latinum.
But as has been talked about recently, it's not the objectification alone that makes it icky, because we probably agree that there's nothing wrong with "we need to get a gardener". What makes the latter okay is why you want to get one: for a mutually beneficial business relationship. When we hear people talk about "getting a woman", it is usually not in the sense of entering into a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather in the sense of deceiving the woman into believing what they think will make her more likely to sleep with them (and then discarding them).
So to summarize, bad objectification is objectification for malevolent ends (simple test: does the object object to the objectification? In the case of the gardener or cook, probably not; in the case of a woman, almost certainly yes).
What sort of masculine privilege is appearing on LW that isn't covered by the sort of blundering myopic obliviousness already mentioned in the lines above that? The notion of "privilege" is one that I regard as dangerously general (and generally dangerous), so a bit more narrow advice might be helpful here.
I guess the most salient one is the privilege to ignore male privilege (#46 on the list I linked). Numbers 6, 19, and 32 are also important, plus the fact that the local "role models" (everybody on the Top Contributors list except me and AnnaSalamon, plus Robin Hanson and most of the mathematicians / psychologists / economists / bloggers / philosophers etc. cited by people here) are all male.
#46 is the one I was going to point to as well, though it seems to make little sense by itself.
If you put spaces around your slashes above, it will improve the comment's layout.
Also #23, #30 and #33.
Why do you think that applies here?
At least 20% of the "Top Contributors" are female, which is far higher than expected given LW demographics. How does that fit with point 6?
As an immediately obvious example, the grandparent, my comment answering Eliezer's question about which privileges I thought relevant, is at 0 and has been negative. Julian Morrison's reply, which does just about exactly the same thing, is at 2 points. Not that his comment was not helpful and doesn't deserve two points, but it seems roughly similar to its parent in content. This could be personal, instead of related to my gender, or I might have actually put something badly whereas his very concise comment avoided such issues - or it could be #6. I have no way of knowing.
AnnaSalamon is still there, but she has not posted anything in two months and it's not obvious that she'll be back in the forseeable future. She's slipping down the list, and unless she returns to regular activity and gets new karma, I will be the only female there after a while.
Also, mere overwhelming male prevalence on the site is a form of privilege in itself.
Edit: After my third instance of suspiciously rapid karma drop, I'm no longer one of the top ten highest-karma'ed posters - as soon as the list refreshes I will be off it unless I get upvoted enough before then. I guess that solves the representative demographics problem.
Edit 2: Now it's back...
I actually perceive this kind of comments as haggling, a form of noise that annoys me and that I expect has at least as strong negative effect on some people as the topic of this post has on you, probably stronger.
Downvoted due to trying to shame people into obedience to your norms and complete misunderstanding of what PUA is about.
And you aren't? Shame, obedience and norms are value-loaded words and you used them with intent to provoke emotion.
Edit: the above is tu quoque, I know. I'm expressing my moral preference for overt judgment over emotional leading. The latter feels like a volitional back-door. Silly me for doing what I was decrying!
Upvoted because as aspiring rationalists we are presumably intelligent, and should act as though we are enlightened.
See Hofstadter's article in Metamagical Themas on using gendered pronouns (preview here). I was sympathetic to its conclusions before I read it, but it gives good ideas to consider.
Thank you for mentioning this. Given the number of GEB fans around here, Hofstadter's thoughts on the matter may be of interest.
This is fascinating and insightful. Thank you very much for the link.
Yup, that was when I decided to grit my teeth and use non-gendered language no matter what it did to prosody. Once I transitioned from "ve" to "they" it grew on me surprisingly fast, and no longer takes a conscious effort; male-specific language now seems jarring.
Not that "they" isn't the current best option for practical writing, but had you ever tried Spivak?
ETA: The notability I claim for Spivak is that it does not add sounds not present in the standard English pronouns (such as z and v).
"They" has long been in use for that purpose anyhow. Singular "they" being incorrect is a relatively modern, and quickly fading, notion.
Hofstadter (and Dawkins) were both influential to my thoughts on non-gendered language, but XKCD best sums up my thoughts on "they" vs. awkward substitutes.
I believe the favored gender-neutral third-person subject pronoun du jour is "zie."
ie. "Zie bought hir shoes at Walmart."
Another contribution via Hofstadter was mentioned recently on Less Wrong: A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Be sure to read the postscript, even if you don't finish the main body.
There's a distinction I draw between objectifying a particular person and a class of people. I think what drew you (Alicorn) into the argument which sparked this post is the idea of "getting attractive women". Women should not, conceptually, be "got", you say. Well, if you mean a particular woman, who one sees in a club or on the street, then I agree with you. If you mean that a man should not talk about the modal preferences and cognitive styles of attractive women, so that when he meets one that he likes, he knows how to convey his own value in a way that isn't self defeating, then I disagree, and I guess that calling it "objectification" isn't going to change my mind. To use the distinction in a different context: I claim that there's a difference between standing in front of someone and thinking about "what you're going to do to their body", and lying in bed thinking about what you might like to do to some body, sometime.
Yeah, that sucks.
Such generalizations are generally - not always - lazy and demeaning, so I do support your proposal, but in reality the argument normally centres on whether a particular statement is a generalization, whether it's a sweeping generalization, and whether the data in its favour are overwhelming or not. Good luck not getting bogged down in that. Really a small moderation team that explicitly deals with such matters would be a good idea. Metafilter has one and benefits from it.
Again, I agree with the literal meaning of your words, but I wager that you will find most of the people you have in mind very resistant to being characterized as "fawning" over anyone. In any case, comment after comment of "I don't admire this technique, but I've verified (400 cold approaches) that negging in the opener is a very effective tool for SNLs" wouldn't be made very satisfactory by the addition of "don't" in the previous sentence.
Also, it would be a good idea to immerse yourself in PUA blogs and forums for a while, if you want to get a good idea of what motivates people to do this stuff. I think I first became aware of the subculture in 2007, and thought it propagated immature and offensive nonsense. Its natural growth eventually forced it back into my consciousness earlier this year, and I have refined my view: it naturally attracts a number of immature or offensive people, but I like to think of it as fundamentally an applied sociology club for boys.
I did smile at your request for more qualifiers and disclaimers. In your article, I saw several qualifiers and one bolded disclaimer, but none that could actually weaken your arguments. Rather, you prefer to express absolute moral judgements. There's a touch of hypocrisy in that.
I mostly agree with your comment, but:
I'm not seeing it. There doesn't seem to be any contradiction between "expressing absolute moral judgements" and "adding qualifiers and disclaimers". Perhaps you can point it out more clearly?
It was specifically the idea that generalisations of women are bad and shouldn't be used without overwhelming evidence, because they're very harmful, that got me. There are exceptions. Robin expresses well what I think about this.
The hypocrisy lies in the lack of what I consider adequate qualification of this statement, and maybe the "fawning admiration" one too, in an article that requests qualification of "opposing" statements, i.e. ones that could be construed as anti-feminist. Phrasing things in an absolute, i.e. unqualified, fashion is just an extension of that argumentative style. An apologia for the PUA community or for some sort of "men's rights" position would have to be written in a much softer manner than this article, in order to satisfy this article's requests.
To prohibit generalizations about gender without overwhelming hard data is usually to in effect silence the topic. We are all very interested in gender, and many of us have made interesting and relevant observations about the gender we see around us, but few of us have much in the way of overwhelming hard data. This post seems to be making generalizations about gender aspects of LW posts and comments without itself offering overwhelming hard data - why hold this meta gender discussion to a lower standard?
...observations of a sort which are, in my experience, quite likely to be extemely inaccurate. Since we're doing anecdotal observations, I've observed that people's thoughts on gender differences, when not backed up with hard data, are maybe 90% likely to be seriously off base. For whatever reason, these sorts of perceptions seem to be subject to extreme effect from all the usual biases to the extent that I don't even trust people around here to have reasonable intuitions on the matter.
Also, I'd like to note that the post here included nigh-Yudkowskian levels of cross-linking to other material on LW. When we're talking about "conversation norms on LW", how is that not solid data?
The evidence presented is a number of anecdotes from LW conversation. A fully analysis of LW would need to categorize different types of offending comments, discuss their frequency and what role they play in LW discussion. Even better would be to identify who does them, etc.
Although I do find it plausible that LW should enact a policy of altering present discussions of gender seems I certainly will not say the evidence presented is "overwhelming".
I said "solid data" in this case, not "overwhelming evidence". Alicorn was probably being a bit overly strong in phrasing; even a modest amount of evidence would go a long way.
Robin is, of course, being disingenuous here, because even that is more evidence than many of his observations carry.
To prohibit generalizations about gender without overwhelming hard data is usually to in effect silence the topic.
I think the concern is that a lot of these generalizations aren't being made through a good-faith attempt to unbiasedly order one's observations about the world. A lot of people see these arguments and have an (arguably often justified) prior that the individuals who make them are biased and/or bigoted. I realize that it can be frustrating to be told that you're being criticized because your arguments resemble those made by morally-reprehensible people, but.... it's often not unjustified for people to come to the table with those assumptions.
You also have the less-defensible argument sometimes being made that we shouldn't make these theories lightly because they often lead to cryptosexism. That probably won't fly in a rationalist discussion community, but it does in many other communities where the "social consequences" of one's speech are supposed to be a serious factor in its moral evaluation.
Why is it necessarily more rational to disregard "social consequences"? There's plenty of objective evidence that calling attention to such issues can in fact be self-fulfilling prophecies, cf. cognitive priming, stereotype threat, &c.
It is of course valuable to be able to discuss ideas freely, but my patience wears thin very quickly when the evidence for such theories is far weaker than the evidence that the theories are harmful.
I think it's not irrational per se, just that it probably wouldn't fly in this community as a substantive consideration in whether an argument should or should be presented here. Usually it's considered eminently rude (but not strictly false) to say that the members of your own ingroup are too dumb/biased to discuss a given topic fairly.
I suppose I could also try to bootstrap this into an argument for a strong presumption against restricting speech due to its expected "social consequences" in general, but I think my original points suffice.
Isn't social acceptance of saying rude but not false things exactly what you're arguing in favor of?
In general I do carry a strong presumption against restricting speech. But I have a lot of prior experience that, for "gender difference observations not backed by data", the value of the speech approaches nil in the average case, and is only marginally better on LW, so counterarguments carry a lot more relative weight.
I don't think so, unless you're implying that the armchair theorizing in this community is always rude. I'd prefer to presume that not to be the case unless there's evidence otherwise... and I conceded in my top-level reply to this thread that there sometimes is (in my view.)
Well, all else equal, speculations about other people based on their intrinsic demographics seems fairly rude to me; your mileage may vary.
I am, as I said, willing to accept rudeness when stating facts, though tact is always appreciated.
To add to SoullessAutomaton's response, the accusation is that the topic is already not being discussed fairly. And I think one could follow the spirit of this post without actually leaving out any ideas, but merely employing some considerate phrasing.
Gender bias is not some objective feature of writing; it is determined and defined by our perceptions. Men seem extremely likely to perceive it differently from women (see almost every sexual harassment lawsuit). Alicorn has never been super outspoken on this issue and has never been confrontational about it. As one of the most active female readers of this site, if she perceives a gender bias in many posts/comments here that she believes warrants a top-level post, that seems to me to be very strong evidence that something is wrong. That fact combined with the data she did provide seem to me quite convincing that this issue is at least worth thinking about.
Also, if I understand her correctly, her objection is not to making generalizations without overwhelming hard data, it is to making generalizations without the humility appropriate to generalizations not supported by overwhelmingly hard data. If some little study fits a pre-existing belief about ev-psych and how the genders work, posters shouldn't be super-certain that it's correct simply because it conforms to their pre-existing beliefs. After all, being human, they may well dismiss a similar study showing the exact opposite effect without second thought.
To start with, generalizations about what sort of gender? Chromosomal? Developmental? Self-identified? Cultural by nurture? Cultural by presentation?
Mostly we only see the latter and assume all the rest.
We already hold discussions of politics to a higher standard - I see the reproof 'politics is the mind-killer' relatively often. And this without any particular post arguing that we're so hideously biased about politics that we need to hold ourselves to a much higher standard than on just about any other topic. And given that the long and very well-documented history of sexism and discrimination against women suggests that enormous masses can be completely wrong for long periods of time (both us and the ancients can't be right about women), we already have arguments that we specifically are massively biased about gender issues and should hold ourselves to unusually high standards.
Or, if the relevant comments Alicorn cited were about blacks, I don't think anyone here would even question the need for a higher standard. We all understand intuitively the appeal of racism, its long, hateful, and entrenched history, and that if we're going to make arguments like blacks are stupider, we'd better have damn good evidence - and merely anecdotal evidence like we see in the cited comments, which boil down to 'in my experience' and 'according to my armchair theorizing', will cut absolutely no mustard.
Indeed. I, for one, found myself genuinely surprised by the last word of RobinZ's introduction and had a reaction similar to that of Hofstadter upon finding the answer to the surgeon riddle.
RobinZ illustrates a good point about race-consciousness, though. I was in the Boy Scouts myself, worked at 2 camps, and have seen some demographic data, and the simple fact is: the Boy Scouts are as white as sour cream. It's not just that there are/were more white Americans than blacks, it's that whites participate at a vastly higher rate. From a Bayesian perspective, shouldn't we be surprised to learn that RobinZ is both black and a Boy Scout?
(The Hofstadter example isn't good for this point; Bayesianly, I think there are many more female surgeons than there are reincarnated-train-wreck-victim-surgeons, so thinking about the latter before the former is just biased and stupid.)
I hate to confess this, but I got stuck on a similar problem, in which the solution was "The secretary is the boy's father." (I kept thinking of divorces and such.)
So yeah.
Hah! I almost didn't include that word - now I'm glad I did.
I would question imposing a much higher standard of evidence, e.g. overwhelming hard evidence, for discussions about blacks; that would also basically prohibit discussing such topics.
But arguments that aren't merely about, but which run down the well-worn grooves of racist quack science, those would need overwhelming hard evidence.
Seconding SoullessAutomaton's reply. Also making an analogy to discussions of race.
In addition: "overwhelming hard data" isn't too high a standard when prejudice and other cultural factors cloud the picture. I don't think it's too big a stretch to suppose that such factors are present in this case.
(Finally: a stronger emphasis on hard data in the meta-gender discussion might not be a bad thing, but remaining silent when a problem of this kind exists is a decidedly bad thing.)
I have to concur with the overall sentiment of this post. It bothers me more than a bit that sweeping generalizations about gender behaviors are made using armchair "just-so" evopsych stories. I even consider myself a relatively ardent supporter of evopsych in general, but a lot of the discussions of gender relationships seem to be motivated by an undercurrent of bitterness rather than an objective desire to understand the reality of gender differences. I realize that this is a vague ad hominem critique, and I could probably attempt to back this up by specific examples and analysis, but.... I think it's just more imperative to call this stuff out as it arises.
I remember Razib on GNXP making fun of the demographic poll done here, that this is a community of young white male nerds. Oftentimes it shows... I often wonder what would happen if a Jezebel blogger stumbled upon this place.
"I often wonder what would happen if a Jezebel blogger stumbled upon this place."
What would happen and why should we care?
Upvoted because I appreciate Alicorn's efforts and would like to hear additional rational presentations of views in the same neighborhood as her's.
I would bet I also upvoted some of the comments Alicorn is referring to as comments that perpetuate the problem.
I don't think any of the comments you cited warrant going meta, but I can certainly understand why discussion of picking up physically attractive women might annoy you. Presumably there are more appropriate forums for that.
I've been annoyed at people who grab attention by strutting/flirting in what should be a nonsexual context, but upon reflection, I've decided that usually such disapproval is best kept to oneself.
I upvoted because I agree on the meta level that it would be nice to have more diversity of ideas in this and most other communities. And I read all of the comments, so it obviously triggered a discussion that interested me.
I agree with Robin, however, that generalizations need not be prohibited--that is going too far. However, generalizations should whenever possible be made falsifiable.
I sincerely doubt it. This site is hugely less sexist than society at large. The comments at very high traffic sites are regularly flamed by many, many trolls who are explicitly, obnoxiously sexist, and yet these sites have a much larger percentage of women. As far as I can tell, the "misogynisitic comments" here are sincere, if somewhat indelicate questions or statements of opinion.
In fact "Roissy in DC" (a blog written by an openly misogynistic male "pick-up artist") has a much larger percentage of female commenters than Less Wrong. If you are looking for a culprit for why there are more men than women here, I suggest you start here.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm
Its just a start, (and the poll is sort of old) but twice as many men believed in evolution without divine intervention. Combine that with the fact that less women spend less time on the internet and I think we have a good start when it comes to explaining the dearth of female commenters.
Roko, I've read through a lot of your comments and we agree on a lot. I think you're bringing very important ideas to the table, including your politics comment down the page, which I upvoted.
I would never advocate the censorship of language, but I think that a lot of what is potentially offensive to females results from careless thinking about gender that could be corrected with the appropriate information. I don't care about my feelings being hurt, I care because I think that their current perceptions about females that are showing through in the posts result from a lack of information which I have, and that they would probably appreciate receiving.
Anyways... no one is actually censoring anyone because no one is keeping anyone from saying anything, right? Someone is just calling to attention what I think most gender sensitive people (which would probably be the majority of the people here!) would avoid anyway if they considered it for a moment.
I would like to say again, that I can see why you would be concerned. We should continue to promote things based on scientific or rational merit and not take the easy way out using political-like appeals.
"Rationality is basically the art of not censoring thought because it hurts your feelings."
And driving is basically the art of turning a wheel back and forth.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this is principally defensive or similarly self-interested. Women interested in not being duped by jackasses will benefit little from understanding why they should one-box Newcomb's problem, compared to the benefit of understanding how to spot guys like Roissy.
Not that I'm implying every single woman who follows him has that motivation; his topic is admittedly much simpler and has virtually universal appeal than most LW content, at least to single people (not his take on the topic, just the topic generally).
I think my point still stands. The women aren't always posting supportively, but they are posting. They post because they are interested in the subject matter: dating relationships, sex, etc. These are topics of broad appeal.
This site, however appeals to a group of self-identified rationalists who are interested in obscure topics like Newcomb's problem and the possibility of strong AI. This mindspace cluster is small and overwhelmingly male. Obviously, this is not a criticism of women. Enjoying these topics (or not) is merely a matter of preference.
Women aren't avoiding this site because of occasional comments alluding to the fact that men like having sex with attractive women.
This is what I'm talking about in my other comment. "Women" are interested in "dating, relationships, sex" and "self-identified rationalists" are interested in "newcomb's problem, and the possibility of strong AI". Do you know what most men are doing tonight? Not hanging out here.
I'm interested in the possibility of strong AI and am slowly but surely obtaining and reading the necessary foundational material (starting off with SIAI core reading). I'm perfectly able to love and understand Newcomb's problem and similar. Whether you meant "the average woman" or what, it's careless of you to say this.
Though I agree with you that it is unlikely that women are not participating because of perceived sexism.
Edit: I'd like to mention that I've tried my hardest to get my boyfriend to read this site more often, but he refuses, because he thinks some of the stuff we talk about is ridiculous and irrelevant to life.
Edit: deleted female anecdote, but leaving male anecdote, because it is still necessary to provide support for my point.
What part of my comment are you disagreeing with? You seem to think I was claiming "men like rationality topics" and "women like dating/relationship topics". This is not at all what I was claiming.
I was stating that almost everyone, male and female, is interested in dating/relationship topics and there is only a tiny set of people interested in LW-style rationality topics. For whatever reason, this set is mostly male. I don't know what your anecdote is supposed to demonstrate, except that there are some men who aren't interested in LW and some women who are (which is totally compatible with my comment).
With the new information from your second comment, I read your original comment in a different way. We have no disagreements.
Despite being female, I generally find I could not give a damn about alleged 'social' pressures on women, since people who get all weepy because everyone doesn't treat them nice are (in my opinion) laughable, regardless of their sex.
"Comments and posts that casually objectify women or encourage the objectification of women. " Human beings ARE objects. All of them. Whatever an 'autonomous being is', if it exists it is still an object in both the grammatical and ontological sense. I objectify everyone, and it seems absurd not to.
"If you need to use an example with a gender, there's no reason to consider male the default - consider choosing randomly," This just seems silly to me. A total waste of effort. I can't imagine being bothered by the gender of hypothetical people, and especially not by casual use of words which are unisex anyways (such as 'man' for 'human').
"Sweeping generalizations about women" Most sweeping generalizations are flawed, but the amount of stupid things people believe about women is far less ridiculous than the stuff they believe about people they have literally no experience with - such as the Japanese, or Mormons.
"Fawning admiration of pickup artists who attain their fame by the systematic manipulation of women." 'Manipulation'? I though these were 'autonomous' beings? People who can't look after their own social well-being get what coming to them.
"Attention to the privileges of masculinity and attempts to reduce that disparity." The law favors women just as often as it doesn't, especially in various legal disputes. As far as the 'privileges' of men - insofar as they aren't legally enforced, I couldn't give a damn. No one owes you anything.
While I appreciate and share your brash disregard for social pressures, I don't think it's inappropriate to expect a modicum of politeness and tact in how people present ideas. Not everyone is immune to such pressure and I don't think saying what amounts to "HTFU, noobcake" is a reasonable way to improve the level of discourse.
Well, I don't very much care about those sorts of people. It's not that I have any desire to aggravate them, but they're usually useless to me as anything but vending machines.
Resistance to social pressure is, within reason, largely orthogonal to the ability to contribute useful information to an informed discussion, or cooperate with others on productive tasks.
If you really want to limit the set of people you can usefully interact with, be my guest, but it seems a tad suboptimal.
'Suboptimal' for what? There is no such thing as 'general efficiency', success and failure (and their degress) are meaningless without an actual framework of goals and preference. I simply do not enjoy socially interacting with people like that. I am aware that this includes most of the human race. I happen to find most of the human race useless beyond the buy-sell relationship.
Why are you interacting with an un-filtered human? Your professed chances of a hit are far lower than a miss, unless you go someplace where the culture ups the odds.
Because it's easy enough to ignore people who bore me, and there are a handful of you on here who are worth interacting with. What's more, sometimes 'normal' people do produce something worth reading, I just wouldn't want to share an apartment with them.
x
I object to speaking unlike ordinary people do in ordinary life. Your suggestion would make this community even more insular.
Change has to start somewhere, although this particular phrasing seems a bit awkward...
So use "go pulling", "get laid", "hot", etc. English is surprisingly full of gender neutral sex talk.
Why is sexual desire irrational? If such a major feature of human psychology can be written off as irrational, what remains? Sexual desire is an enormously important human motivation, perhaps even the most important of all. Lust is every bit as important a feature of our minds as kindness, hunger, fear, or love. Indeed, these parts of ourselves are exquisitely and intrinsically intertwined.
I'm voting down because I see this comment, the top-level post, and the ideology behind it, as a futile attempt to pathologize a very healthy kind of human desire.
That last example is particularly amusing slash enlightening - I think in part because the original version feels like it intends: "You are such a nerd, you will never earn high social status".
(Which is why it's so wrong, actually - it objectifies women as symbols of male achievement.)
Huh? If somebody says to a woman, "you're so ugly, you'll never have a man," is that objectifying men as symbols of female attractiveness?
(I'm not saying either putdown is sensible; I'm just saying I don't see how either of them is objectifying to the opposite sex from the target of the putdown. Arguably, the "nerd" putdown objectifies men as having value to women only for their status, whereas the reverse objectifies women as having value to men only for their physical attractiveness. I suppose you could say that each putdown also implies the opposite sex is shallow, but is that really objectification?)
Hmm ... no, they're still parallel: the man is objectified as a symbol of female achievement, with unattractiveness being cited as the barrier to a relationship.
The thing is, you don't address the thing you objectify, you just talk about them like it is an object.
(That's not to say that the content you point out in both examples isn't toxic and sexist, just that it falls under a different heading.)
Great link, thanks!
Welcome!
"Welcome"? Huh? Did you turn on the anti-kibitzer?
lol, I think he meant "(You're) Welcome!" =)
What (ah, history repeating itself) MBlume said. (;
I still don't get it. How about, "your research is so awful, no respectable scientists will cite you." Are we objectifying scientists, then?
AFAICT, these statements are of the form "you lack quality X, therefore those who desire quality X will not give you the form of approval or validation you desire." That is, the statement takes into account the expected goals of the agent being putdown, as well as a presumed class of agents whose approval is sought. That doesn't sound like anybody's being considered an "object" whose goals don't count; it's saying, your results don't align with this other group's goals.
True, the assumed goals may not apply to every member of the presumed class (perhaps there are some "respectable scientists" who will cite your work), but this doesn't somehow reach out and harm every single "respectable scientist"! (It doesn't even harm the scientists who would cite the work, unless they take the putdown to indirectly imply that they are not "respectable".)
The researcher reward is citations - those are the objects. In the other two cases, the rewards are people.
No, in all three cases, the true reward is the approval of those people; i.e., the true message of the putdown is, "nobody approves of you".
That's a generous interpretation. In some cases it may even be correct. But in some cases it is not.
This idea does not have my approval.
I concur. I agree with a lot of what you say... I get upset frequently because of things said about women, many just offhandedly.
I am here, I've been reading for over a year and am a huge advocate of this site, but was not counted in the survey. But I'm 20 years old and rarely feel like I have anything valuable to offer the community... and because of that actually feel hesitation to respond to these kind of things. I also don't live a life about feminism or being a girl and would hate to be perceived that way.
I'm twenty years old, too - so?
Ah. Interesting... I guess I should stop making excuses then... I have occasionally felt like posting things but... I'm so nervous! Everyone here impresses me so much generally.
User Chronophasiac lives near me, and I've talked to him about some of my concerns about the conversations about gender we have on lesswrong/OB. My concern is that because of the lack of female presence in rationality forums, that perhaps males have to generalize on a small sample. Rationalist males are noticeably different from the average male, and rationalist females are probably comparably different from average females. I guess I often have a bit of a negative response to how rationalist males talk about females... because even though they might be making correct decisions about most females, they're certainly not right about me. It's possibly irrational- but I guess I have a strange worry that they don't know that. Ah, I remember that these feelings were triggered when they were discussing why there aren't more women here. But I have no reason to think they haven't considered it, in fact, I remember Eliezer mentioning that... I should link but I'm lazy.
I'm not mad at the males here for trying to figure out why females aren't here, and trying their hardest. But... I'm female and I'm here... and all the proposed ideas sounded so off to me. I've been trying to think of better ideas though and failing... since I like it here. I guess my best hypothesis is that there are still less women in the topics related to Less Wrong and Overcoming bias, due to the kinds of reasons they've proposed for that (past inequality, culture, etc...). But I digressed.
I guess the best thing I can do is just contribute to the site more. In the meantime, just consider what it would possibly be like if lesswrong was ran by women, and we were trying to figure out how to bring in more males, and we wondered if we should consider how males liked hunting, and let that inform our decisions. I mean, you'd know we were trying our best, but those of you who don't really care for hunting would be like "we really have to let them know we aren't all like that, and we wouldn't appreciate it as much as they think".
I suspect this might have drifted off-topic, but my large ego won't let me transmit it elsewhere.
LOL'd and upvoted. I will be tempted to cite this comment every time I see a discussion anywhere by a bunch of men trying to figure out "how to bring in more women" to some group, without actually asking any women.
This is a pet peeve of mine in IT forums, where guys often have no idea how offensive their special treatment proposals are to precisely the sort of women that they'd want to have participate, and are bemoaning that no women apply for IT jobs, when I managed to run a gender-balanced IT department for over five years without any "affirmative action" hiring. (i.e., it fell naturally out of our choosing to evaluate based on group fit and potential, rather than out of any need to have a gender balance.)
If you think you will be in a better position to contribute in 10 years, that is a positive fact about your current self, not a negative one. Note that I am 30 and I'm convinced that my contributions would be more valuable in 10 years as well, but that doesn't seem to be a reason not to contribute now.
I know what you mean - I don't live a life about affirmative action or being black, and I hate playing the role of "black".
::clicks links::
Wow, I go away to Otakon for a 3-day weekend and LW decides to go throw a flame war. (And my very old grandmother is sitting on our couch refusing to go home, but that's not relevant to the discussion here.)
What the hell, LWers?
::sigh::
Don't make me take matters into my own hands.
Hilarious.
But seriously, if this is what you call a flame war, then you haven't been 'round the Internet much.
I'm pretty sure we're still in 'honest disagreement' territory, though I don't think the conversation is going anywhere currently; too many tangents.
Yeah, I know. This is nothing compared to some real flame wars out there, but people are still getting upset. We've got a bad case of meanings being garbled in the transition between different people's brains, and that's never good. We aren't even at the stage of honest disagreement, since we haven't been able to successfully paraphrase each other's positions. (And this is very important.) In other words, we don't understand what we disagree about, which is worse than simply disagreeing.
This post (and the comments on it) made me finally to register in here, partly because I had few discussions about similar topics just a few days ago.
As knb said: "This site is hugely less sexist than society at large." While this might be true, it only means that most people in here are "less wrong" than society at large. This does not mean that they are right. It also has the same ring to my ears as "Some of my friends are black/jewish/<insert minority here>".
Gender bias is rampant even in the internet where it should hold no sway (there are no visual clues, no pheromones etc.), and denying its excistence only enforces it. If you want to see it, just try using feminine nickname for few weeks.
On the topic of objectification and PUA, I have decided to read "The Book" because I know that I hold a bias against it.
Heteronormative examples actually bother me more than masculine ones, and this might be because there are no gender specific pronomins in my native language. My brain just seems to skip over the usual "he/his/him" and interpret it as a gender neutral version.
Generalizations of certain type of either sex are very annoying. By this I refer to things like "men don't cry" and "women are such gossips". My annoyance with things like these most likely stems form two points. First, I don't recognize myself or anyone I know in them (I know, anecdotal evidence and all that). Second, they put up a framework according which one should behave.
As Alicorn says, costs of this type of thinking can be very high. For excample, because of "women are the weaker sex" they were effectively shut out of the intellectual community until about 100 years ago. Because of "men are not caring" they still lose custodity battles more often than not, and end up being deprived of their children.
Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.
Upvoted for this but... in a way this reminds me of the Tversky and Edwards experiment mentioned in the Technical Explanation where participants are shown a sequence of red and blue cards and asked to guess the next in the sequence. Since 70% of the cards are blue the best strategy is to always guess blue, but participants irrationally guess a mixture of blue and red as if they could predict the sequence.
So, if you are confident that a group exists (confident that you are 'carving reality at its joints'), are confident that an individual is a member of that group, have good evidence that more than half of the members of the group have Trait X, and no further information about a member-of-the-group and you must make a decision based on available information with no opportunity to gather more information (or it is prohibitively expensive to gather information), you should assume that member-of-the-group has Trait X. In all other cases it is not rational to operate under the assumption that the individual has Trait X.
(Reading back through that my point seems kind of pedantic. But that's what we do here, right? Anyway.)
Using gendered language or (much worse) thought experiments in a discussion that has nothing to do with gender adds noise and impedes understanding. This is the danger of using PUAs as examples of winners in "rationalists should win"* discussions. It brings in irrelevant assumptions and excludes women by using an example most of them can't relate to (technical details about picking up women in bars or bookstores or the singularity summit or whatever.) So what I'm saying is discussions about sex (in both senses of the word) should be deliberately kept seperate from other discussions of rationalism, and that allowing irrelevant sex talk to bleed into our discussions distorts them and our conclusions.
*This phrase bugs me so much!
Is it me, or was this post a little heavy on the other-optimizing? Yes, there's been a bit of talk about wanting more female posters here, but I haven't even seen an agreement that that's a priority, much less a request for advice on the topic. (Did I miss one? I'll admit I haven't been following the comments that closely recently.)
Well, there's been nothing like a vote on it. But I've definitely gotten the impression that we're doing community-building here, and attracting potential rationalists was one of Eliezer's stated goals. So it seems that a community norm against repelling potential rationalists would be a good one.
Well said.
Obligatory XKCD link.
When Alicorn wrote, "some people seem to earnestly care about the problem", she accompanied it with a link to [a comment][1] made by me, in which I said that "I want to increase the female: male ratio [here]. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know."
Let me clarify that although I want to hear Alicorn's objections to my statements about women (especially since she is better than most feminists at explaining the grounds for her objections) I might not be able to cater to all her objections.
For example, most existential-risks activists (scientists doing networking and research about risks like unFriendly AI) are male, and I plan a top-level post to assert that not having reliable access to sex with the kind of sexual partners who can most improve the life of an existential-risks activist should be considered a large disability in a male prospective existential-risks activist -- in the same way that, e.g., an inability to stop rationalizing one's own personal agenda should be considered a large disability.
Note that recruiting existential-risks activists (though he did not use that exact phrase) is one of the stated goals in Eliezer's creating this web site.
Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other qualifications for existential-risks activism (such as extremely good mastery of math) do not currently have the knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex with the kind of partners who can most improve their lives, I have a strong interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them (because doing so decreases existential risk according to my current models of male psychology) and it is possible that despite persistent strenuous effort on my part, I will not be able to do a lot of that without alienating Alicorn and other feminists.
Maybe the correct course is for me to start another site where male prospective existential-risks activists can acquire this sort of knowledge, but sex is such a large part of life that it seems overly limiting for the 90 or 95% or so of the participants on this site who are heterosexual men to refrain from discussing how to identify the prospective sexual partners who can most improve their lives and how to increase one's sexual chances with those prospective partners.
If Alicorn goes beyond discouraging certain modes of expression and starts discouraging certain ideas from being expressed at all, that's beyond the pale as far as I'm concerned. Hope she thinks so too.
I support this solution.
Edit: although I'd extend it. Not all males prefer women, not all women prefer males, some women will also want to learn seduction of their preferred sex, and there are a bunch of gender categories in the middle (trans, queer, intersex, etc) who can be either the source or object of sexual interest. I have never heard that seduction is much studied outside male-wants-female.
I have never heard that seduction is much studied outside male-wants-female.
What? Clothing lipstick fingernails haircut tan waxing liposuction diet aerobics... Women strive to improve their seduction abilities much more than men.
Systematically?
Also, a whole lot of that stuff (most?) is for intra-women signaling.
What do you mean by "systematically"? There's lots of magazines for females that discuss the exact set of topics I enumerated, add sex and relationship advice into the bargain, and very little else. This approach works, so women don't need to study evo-psych or whatever PUAs study.
I defy your claim about signaling because it seems wildly improbable to me. Why would women want to signal their attractiveness to other women? Give a citation or something.
Peruse Vogue any time. None of that stuff is for males. it signals things like: I'm rich, I'm young, I'm cultured, I'm upper-class, I'm able to devote effort to display, I'm socially well-connected...
What evolutionary reason could a woman have for wanting to signal being rich and cultured to other women? 'Cause it doesn't make those other women want to become her allies; rather, it aggravates them. And do you consider it a weird coincidence that all the things I listed (tan, lipstick etc.) also increase the woman's attractiveness to men?
I'm sorry, but that's just a wierd question. Why wouldn't women want to play status games?
Most of those things were originally developed as seduction aids and do double duty, but they have been adopted as status aids and probably are more important in that role. (Signaling only to men, women can get away with much less work - compare porn.)
In their original pure seduction aid role, some stuff - lipstick and perfume for example - used to be extremely disreputable.
Also some obvious fashion fetishes are void of signal to males - handbags are an example.
It seems to me a lot of this has to be female-female signaling as proposed. Most men do not seem to care what I'm wearing, and would probably prefer it was 'nothing'. I have NEVER had a guy bring up something I'm wearing unless it was clearly being used as an opening for chatting me up.
I assume 'chatting me up' is being used here to mean something involving dating? An internet search for the expression just turned up synonyms for "making conversation", which wouldn't make sense in context.
Curious... where are you from?
ETA: thanks to anonym below.
In that case, it seems odd to me that guys you know never bring up anything you're wearing. Do you have many male friends? Maybe this is a cultural thing, or am I the 'odd one out' here?
For the record (I don't think this is objectifying, but my calibration's pretty confused lately), yes we'd probably prefer it was 'nothing,' but we still notice what you're wearing and respond strongly to it, and no, it's not as simple as "less is better".
Evolutionary reason? Sounds like you're automatically discounting the possibility that the specific status games of a specific group of people in our specific society are a result of cultural development that has no particular basis in evolutionary psychology.
Pecking order.
Most of this is part of some silly game which women play amongst themselves: some of it may be male-directed, but it's definitely a minor portion. Overall, F2M seduction and "focused self-improvement" are still woefully underexplored.
Clothing, haircut, diet and aerobics apply equally to men as well, and waxing has shaving as a counterpart.
Also, do you have figures on what percentage of women undergo liposuction? Or tan regularly?
Seems to me that all you've done is generalized from a couple cliches.
I didn't get the impression that there was proposed any sort of prohibition on ideas that can be discussed. Rather, just perform a quick 'sanity check' against the criteria and make sure you're not needlessly alienating vast numbers of potential members of the community.
I don't think anyone is even going so far as advocating 'political correctness', and I laughed out loud at calling Alicorn a 'feminist' (reluctantly pushed into that role as she is).
You may think this is a great contribution you can make, but it's probably simpler and more effective to donate money.
I feel some skepticism that you possess special knowledge on this topic. The language above seems objectifying even to me. Do you have a record of success here?
Wouldn't that just eat up a lot of their valuable existential-risk minimizing time? I might be stealing an idea from Hopefully Anonymous, but I'd ideally like to clone large numbers of the most effective minimizers and devote every waking hour of theirs to minimizing our existential risk (really, maximizing my odds of persistence, but that goal won't get as many other cloners to buy in). In the absence of that kind of control, convincing them that they can never obtain partners and should just give up would be second-best. I believe Narses put so much effort into living on through his accomplishments precisely because, as a eunuch, he could have no progeny.
On a related note, I've got a post saying we should be grateful for diversity-induced anomie. Bryan Caplan & Mencius Moldbug have both had interesting things to say on the virtues of abject surrender.
I'm still not sure that the problem is real or at least worth the fuss. It might be, but I'm not convinced. It might be more like the name effect, for example: real, but tiny. The first step before trying to do something about the issue should be to make sure the issue isn't illusory.
So far, I see Alicorn complaining about her aesthetic preferences not met by the prose on the forum, but how typical is it? Some people agree that the writing decisions made by some of the posters are not that great, but how much of it is support of hypothetical preferences of other people isn't clear. A whole information cascade about preferences may form this way, with hardly any of the participants benefiting, but most of them thinking that they help others. A few can't demand of a community what they intuitively think is fair.
Everything that involves arguing that it's important to not drive women away from the site is contingent on the reality of effect of writing style choices on the number of female participants.
Indeed. Where these issues bump into such empirical questions, it seems like we should need statistical, rather than merely anecdotal, evidence.
But the evidence that we do have is anecdotal, and it does suggest that some valued members of our community are made uncomfortable (to the point of considering leaving) by some inconsiderate use of language. And those who like this site are already a statistical anomaly.
In my experience, most women don't have a negative emotional response to men talking about "getting girls". They themselves talk about "getting a man". I suspect that the percentage of women are actually offended by this kind of talk is not large (10%-20%?).
Of course each such statement has to be evaluated separately, but for the word 'get' in this context specifically, I think the above applies.
Maybe we could gather a bunch of such statements and ask women whether they find each one offensive and why. We might be able to gather some statistical data.
I have the same problem with this post that I would have with a member of an ethnic minority speaking "for" their group here. the type of person who posts on less wrong is a statistical oddity, belief and action wise.
I think what the original poster is really saying: I am made uncomfortable by certain types of recurring posts. Since an individual has little leverage, I will borrow the theoretical support of others.
Note: not trying to completely dismiss the concerns noted in the original post, just my initial reaction to it.
The above does not apply to me per se, but this post neverthless doesn't interest me for its content. The poster of this article certainly looks like an immature feminist who is incapable of separating rational inquiry and the asking of hard questions, when they get close to her value system.
I have found Anna's posts way more mature and tackling issues and hard questions with sensible arguments instead of holding a long list of taboo topics and crying foul when anyone ever talks bluntly about them. Similar is the case with other girls that I know of. I particularly recall Robin Hanson's post regarding applying an SAT score correction factor to factor in the prior information of greater variance in the performance of men (which would lead to removing a few points from the high scoring women). While there were mindless argument by immature feminists crying foul, instead of addressing the math, I thought Anna's follow up post detailing how the prior knowledge of variance differences becomes less and less consequential with multiple SAT trials whose scores are averaged or when SAT is coupled with other pieces of information, was extremely insightful.
Anyway, the girl that's posting this article seems only 20 and has plenty of time to grow up. :-) I am hoping that exposure to these politically incorrect communities for enough time will ensure that she "grows up" in a couple of years and fearlessly asks and investigates hard questions and acknowledges uncomfortable realities rather than allow clear thought to be constantly muddied by political sensibilities. Good luck!
Seriously? It would be helpful if you could re-read those two fragments, and resolve the tension.
My main problem with this post is that it attempts to impose social norms based on nothing more than your personal feelings, Alicorn.
I found your "Disclaimer" very off-putting. Though I'm sure you will say that you were either trying to be as straight-forward as possible or that you are just being cute and charming (taking these assumptions from comments you have already posted), I immediately read this disclaimer as saying: "Anyone who disagrees in the comments with what I have to say in this post is almost certainly going to be labelled as sexist." This casts a pallor over the entire discussion.
Imagine if I wanted to post something controversial on AI, something that I knew from past experience with the community was going to get me a lot of challenges in the comments, and I prefaced it with "If you are a stupid person who doesn't really understand AI the way I do, and who can't really do math as well as I can, this post is unlikely to interest you." I'd be laughed off the board, and rightly so.
In fact, one might consider it an excellent piece of evidence of one's own yet-unseen bias if one feels the need to preface a discussion with all-purpose disagreement-deflectors of this kind!
My other objection to the way you have framed this issue is to your twin assertions that you (A) are not interested in feminist stuff per se, and (B) are not easily offended. I believe you on both counts, of course, though I have nothing to go on except your own assertion. Nevertheless, it is my observation that on the particular issues you raise in this post (and many, many times before in the comments of other posts), you are easily offended. To my mind, almost comically so.
But, to follow your rhetorical maneuver here: You (A) aren't particularly a "feminist" and (B) aren't particularly sensitive, therefore (C) you aren't being overly-sensitive on this issue. Well, even granting (A) and (B) on very little evidence, I still reject (C).
However, from where I sit, you have raised some legitimate concerns, and for that reason I upvoted this post. But I want to register that I strongly disapprove of the borderline-coercive way in which you do it in this post and have done it in the past in the comments. This post feels creepily thought-police-y to me, which I am sure is not your intent.
To respond to your specific suggestions, I'd like to register that ....
I agree with #1 in principle but it's clear to me that I have a very different definition of what constitutes an unethical level of "objectification" and therefore this one may calculate out to disagreement on my part.
I agree with #2, though it seems like a rather tiny issue. I know, I know... Male advantage #46, right? Nevertheless, having duly considered my Male Advantages, I still think this is a negligible issue, one that you have every right to try and change if you please, but which I emphatically reject as a norm to be placed on others in this community.
I strongly agree with #3, because those kinds of unfounded generalizations are both unfair to women (or whatever subgroup), and bad-faith argument, and sloppy thinking.
I strongly agree with #4, mainly because I don't see what PUA discussion adds to Less Wrong. I'm actually fascinated with PUA theory and practice, but it's rife with pseudo-science and discussed in such detail on so many other blogs that I'd prefer to see Less Wrong steer relatively clear of it as a serious topic.
Your suggestions for what we can "use more of:"
Number 1: I agree most strongly with this suggestion, both on gender issues specifically and on all topics in general. Thoughtful qualifiers are always a good idea. I actually think these are part of the secret to the power and popularity of Eliezer's writing and Yvain's too.
Number 2: is a useless catch-all that, again, makes me feel creepy. What do you mean "attention"? Should we all post one comment a week that deplores male privilege? I know you are not advocating anything mandatory, and my question is tongue-in-cheek. But do you see how this kind of talk (along with your first disclaimer) casts a gauzy shroud of "guilty of sexism until proven innocent" over the place?