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Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
I suspect that the ick reaction being labeled "objectification" actually has more to do with the sense that the speaker is addressing a closed group that doesn't include you.
Suppose I wrote a story about a man named Frank, whose twin brother (Frank has learned) is in the process of being framed for murder this very night. Frank is in the middle of a complicated plot to give his brother an alibi. He's already found the cabdriver and tricked him into waiting outside a certain apartment for an hour. Now all he needs is the last ingredient of his plan - a woman to go home with him (as he poses as his brother). Frank is, with increasing desperation, propositioning ladies at the bar - any girl will do for his plan, it doesn't matter who she is or what she's about...
I'd bet I could write that story without triggering the ick reaction, because Frank is an equal-opportunity manipulator - he manipulated the cabdriver, too. The story isn't about Frank regarding women as things on the way to implementing his plan, it's about Frank regarding various people, men and women alike, as means to the end of saving his brother.
If a woman reads that story, I think, she won't get a sense of being excluded from the intended audience.
I suspect that's what the ick factor being called "objectification" is really about - the sense that someone who says "...but you'll still find women alluring" is talking to an audience that doesn't include you, a woman. It doesn't matter if you happen to be a bi woman. You still get the sense that it never crossed the writer's mind that there might be any women in the audience, and so you are excluded.
In general, starting from a perceptual reaction, it is a difficult cognitive task to say in words exactly why that reaction occurred - to accurately state the necessary and sufficient conditions for its triggering. If the reaction is affective, a good or bad reaction, there is an additional danger: You'll be tempted to zoom in on any bad (good) aspect of the situation, and say, "Ah, that must be the reason it's bad (good)!" It's wrong to treat people as means rather than ends, right? People have their own feelings and inner life, and it's wrong to forget that? Clearly, that's a problem with saying, "And this is how you get girls..." But is that exactly what went wrong originally - what triggered the original ick reaction?
And this (I say again) is a tricky cognitive problem in general - the introspective jump from the perceptual to the abstract. It is tricky far beyond the realms of gender...
But I do suspect that the real problem is speech that makes a particular gender feel excluded. And if that's so, then for the purposes of Less Wrong, I think, it may make sense to zoom in on that speech property. Politics of all sorts have always been a dangerous bit of attractive flypaper, and I think we've had a sense, on Less Wrong, that we ought to steer clear of it - that politics is the mindkiller. And so I hope that no one will feel that their gender politics are being particularly targeted, if I suggest that, like some other political issues, we might want to steer sort of clear of that.
I've previously expressed that to build a rationalist community sustainable over time, the sort of gender imbalance that appears among e.g. computer programmers, is not a good thing to have. And so it may make sense, as rationalists qua rationalists, to target gender-exclusionary speech. To say, "Less Wrong does not want to make any particular gender feel unwelcome."
But I also think that you can just have a policy like that, without opening the floor to discussion of all gender politics qua gender politics. Without having a position on whether, say, "privilege" is a useful way to think about certain problems, or a harmful one.
And the coin does have two sides. It is possible to make men, and not just women, feel unwelcome as a gender. It is harder, because men have fewer painful memories of exclusion to trigger. A single comment by a woman saying "All men are idiots" won't do it. But if you've got a conversational thread going between many female posters all agreeing that men are privileged idiots, then a man can start to pick up a perceptual impression of "This is not a place where I'm welcome; this is a women's locker room." And LW shouldn't send that message, either.
So if we're going to do this, then let's have a policy which says that we don't want to make either gender feel unwelcome. And that aside from this, we're not saying anything official about gender politics qua gender politics. And indeed we might even want to discourage gender-political discussion, because it's probably not going to contribute to our understanding of systematic and general methods of epistemic and instrumental rationality, which is our actual alleged topic around here.
But even if we say we're just going to have a non-declarative procedural rule to avoid language or behavior that makes a gender feel excluded... it still takes us into thorny waters.
After all, jumping on every tiny hint - say, objecting to the Brennan stories because Brennan is male - will make men feel unwelcome; that this is a blog only for people who agree with feminist politics; that men have to tiptoe while women are allowed to tapdance...
Now with that said: the point is to avoid language that makes someone feel unwelcome. So if someone says that they felt excluded as a gender, pay attention. The issue is not how to prove they're "wrong". Just listen to the one who heard you, when they tell you what they heard. We want to avoid any or either gender, feeling excluded and leaving. So it is the impression that is the key thing. You can argue, perhaps, that the one's threshold for offense was set unforgivably low, that they were listening so hard that no one could whisper softly enough. But not argue that they misunderstood you. For that is still a fact about your speech and its consequences. We shall just try to avoid certain types of misunderstanding, not blame the misunderstander.
And what if someone decides she's offended by all discussion of evolutionary psychology because that's a patriarchal plot...?
Well... I think there's something to be said here, about her having impugned the honor of female rationalists everywhere. But let a female rationalist be the one to say it. And then we can all downvote the comment into oblivion.
And if someone decides that all discussion of the PUA (pickup artist) community, makes her feel excluded...?
Er... I have to say... I sort of get that one. I too can feel the locker-room ambiance rising off it. Now, yes, we have a lot of men here who are operating in gender-imbalanced communities, and we have men here who are nerds; and if you're the sort of person who reads Less Wrong, there is a certain conditional probability that you will be the sort of person who tries to find a detailed manual that solves your problems...
...while not being quite sane enough to actually notice you're driving away the very gender you're trying to seduce from our nascent rationalist community, and consequentially shut up about PUA...
...oh, never mind. Gender relations much resembles the rest of human existence, in that it largely consists of people walking around with shotguns shooting off their own feet. In the end, PUA is not something we need to be talking about here, and if it's giving one entire gender the wrong vibes on this website, I say the hell with it.
And if someone decides that it's not enough that a comment has been downvoted to -5; it needs to be banned, or the user needs to be banned, in order to signify that this website is sufficiently friendly...?
Sorry - downvoting to -5 should be enough to show that the community disapproves of this lone commenter.
If someone demands explicit agreement with their-favorite-gender-politics...?
Then they're probably making the other gender feel unwelcome - the coin does have two sides.
If someone argues against gay marriage...?
Respond not to trolls; downvote to oblivion without a word. That's not gender politics, it's kindergarten.
If you just can't seem to figure out what's wrong with your speech...?
Then just keep on accepting suggested edits. If you literally don't understand what you're doing wrong, then realize that you have a blind spot and need to steer around it. And if you do keep making the suggested edits, I think that's as much as someone could reasonably ask of you. We need a bit more empathy in all directions here, and that includes empathy for the hapless plight of people who just don't get it, and who aren't going to get it, but who are still doing what they can.
If you just can't get someone to agree with your stance on explicit gender politics...?
Take it elsewhere, both of you, please.
Is it clear from this what sort of general policy I'm driving at? What say you?
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Comments (647)
It's also a story. Frank is imaginary, and his situation is uncommon enough that others could not easily follow his example. If Frank were not imaginary, and he turned up and told us all the story of how he saved his brother, and offered advice on how other people can trick cabbies and females for fun and profit, I'd probably feel some actual qualms about his treatment of the cabdriver and the various women he attempted to bring home in service of his plan.
Thank you.
I approve. Thanks :)
I suggest we have a poll on how many people would like PUA-related discussion and how many would prefer not to.
You're probably being downvoted because rationality is not about what's a majority vote. You also missed the part where we want to be sensitive to non-majorities.
A vote could none the less be enlightening -- it might, e.g., reveal that there's a substantial minority of LW readers who really, really hate PUA discussion. Or that 80% of female LW readers don't mind it at all. Or whatever.
It would be dumb to have a vote with the intention of simply doing whatever the majority prefers, but that's not the only thing one can do with a poll. You might notice that AnlamK didn't use the words "majority" or "vote".
To the PUA enthusiasts.....
If there are women who have been complimented for their intelligence, but are mysteriously not interested in LW, you could try insulting them until you find a few who are willing to accept that this community is a wonderful place they should pay attention to.
And maybe you can take charge of some of the women who are already in your life so that they'll post. After all, they prefer dominant men.
I don't see why lack of easily offendable women on LW is seen as a problem that needs to be solved. As has been said before, the more people you let in, the more the discussion will regress to the internet mean.
There is a matter of truth at stake here: just how does human sexual interaction actually work? Is there a "double standard" at play, of the "Homo Hypocritus type involved? What does that tell us about the potential commons problems that the human race might have? What does it tell us about how the sexual male-female interaction could be improved for all?
These are interesting and important questions for rationalists, and it is a shame to kow-tow a small minority for whom the truth is just too painful.
If it were a discussion of "this is how human sexual attraction works", with a really general overview (that is, at least including a wide range of women's experiences as well as men's) rather than a "this is a discussion which is biased by men who are trying to get particular outcomes and are convinced that what's good for them is good for women or at least harmless to them", it could be useful..
Just to increase the range, check out Yes Means Yes. I'm not saying I agree with every word of it, but at least it's about attraction and consent mostly from a female point of view.
What do you mean by "biased"? Do you mean, there is some factual error that has been made? Or do you mean "Men will benefit from the information being disseminated here"?
Why does this matter? Would it be censorship-worthy if one had a discussion about how teenagers experience life without also discussion how people of other ages do?
I mean that since the men are strongly motivated by their own benefit, they are not likely to be careful in evaluating the effects of their actions on women.
I'm not sure about censoring, but I'd be dubious about a discussion of teenagers which didn't include any input from them, or where the adults insisted that their interpretation of teenagers' experience was complete and correct no matter what teenagers said.
But this is not a bias. The word "bias" means a factual error. Cruel or other-harming behavior is not described by the word "bias". Unless you think that there is motivated cognition rather than explicit cruelty going on.
But it seems that the effect of debate is to challenge bias, whereas the effect of censoring debate is to perpetuate it.
I think you have it reversed. Men, by and large, in this day are conditioned to be overcautious about violating the (feminist-slanted) expectations of their behavior in regard to women. And they ponder, and they fret, and they wring their hands about whether they're crossing the numerous lines.
And women are repulsed by it, and turned off by it, and regard them as low status for it.
What you tend to see is the sliver of men not trapped in this mentality as being way, way overrepresented in the dating pool, for obvious reasons. Because a man who is careful about avoiding leaving any crack in a woman's fragile self-image ... well, who wants to date that kind of wuss?
I think maybe you're still confusing "take charge" with "make people do something they don't want to do", vs. "encourage people to do things they already want to do, anyway, or that will get them highly-valued goals." (i.e. the normal definition of leadership)
For example, I sometimes "take charge" by making my wife stop work to relax and receive a massage, when I know she's working too hard and wouldn't think to ask for the massage. She protests the work stoppage and drags her feet to the bedroom, but afterwards is not only happy with the result but is also glad that I cared enough to do something more than just nag her about her overworking. (Something I used to do, that had only negative results for both of us.)
Is that paternalism? Hell if I know, and I don't really care. I love my wife, and I'm glad I can make her happy.
My wife is not a child. She runs a business that I would be scared out of my mind to try and run for even a day or two. She juggles more tasks than I care to think of. But at least to her, "being her man" means that it's my job to look out for some of her longer-term interests. To be an advocate for her dreams, her ambitions, her health, and her emotional well-being. A true friend, not a boss.
This is the real "alpha male" prototype, which the lesser PUA schools only vaguely imitate and only the superior schools teach. It is not being someone who disrespects or bullies others... no matter how much some of the masculine language might sound like it is.
Do try to bear in mind that, given that men chat about how "dangerous" we are, that almost anything we say to one another about the subject probably isn't going to sound pleasant to a someone who's not socialized in the same way.
Hell, I wasn't socialized that way myself, so I had similar objections to many of the PUA concepts until I "got it". Which, I might add, took some romance novel-reading on my part, as well a lot of discussion with my wife, in addition to some of the better PUA literature.
And during quite a bit of that discussion, I noticed that PUA concepts magically became not only non-objectionable but highly-desired and highly-valued when they were described in the terms one might find in a romance novel, rather than the terms guys might use amongst themselves. (Men tend to talk about everything like it's an object, including each other -- we're really not singling out women for objectification. ;-) )
That's why I believe that the non-deceptive PUA schools are actually teaching men to exhibit qualities that are in fact highly-valued by women, just using language that men "get". .. but which women and men may find offensive as well.
If PUA was generally as you describe it, it might not be a problem. Does your wife also occasionally take charge of you in your best interests?
You are judging PUA by its best. I'm judging it by what shows up here. I haven't gone looking for the most offensive bits.
I grew up with a lot of "I just want you to be happy" combined with failure to listen. This is a major hot button for me, and I don't see any evidence that you (the range of PUA, not just the best) are careful about knowing whether you're overriding women in ways which are inconsistent with their interests.
She looks out for my interests, yes, but does not express them in a way that would match "taking charge". Instead, she... I don't know how to describe it in a way that doesn't sound weird or caricatured, like 50's TV housewives batting their eyelashes... gives me an idealized perception of myself to live up to, maybe?
(This is probably another one of those areas where discussion of effective tactics for women to use with men would sound offensive to men when discussed in language that women could actually understand and apply, but would be baffling to women when described in terms that men would perceive as valuable/desirable.)
Parents do that a lot. It means, "I just want you to do and be what would make me happy."
And I used to do the same thing to my wife.
As it happened, learning about PUA stuff was actually the cure for that, not the cause. In particular, it taught me to not interpret what she said in terms of what it would mean if I said it. PUA stuff, for me, is all about bridging the conceptual language barriers.
I had a similar hot button myself, one which my wife eventually helped me overcome.
Unfortunately, what happens with hot buttons like these is that we tend to project our own helplessness onto other people. For example, it took me forever to realize that, unlike my own past inability to say "no" to a request, my wife did not have the same problem... which meant that my continual avoidance of asking her for anything was unnecessary and harmful to our relationship. (Because of course, I still resented her for not doing any of the things I wasn't asking her to do!)
So the problem I see with your statement, is that it presumes disempowerment of women -- that they're going to be overridden and led astray by bossy men who don't listen. And ISTM that this is more paternalistic and anti-feminist in its implications, than "taking charge" actually is.
Have you considered the possibility that maybe you're projecting a personal feeling of helplessness onto others, or that the responsibility for ending such feelings of helplessness are up to each individual?
Yes, good people like my wife, good people like me will certainly help people with hot buttons like that. But isn't everyone ultimately responsible for addressing their own?
And, isn't that a big part of what the mission of this site is? To identify common patterns of irrational thinking that we are each responsible for dealing with in our own thoughts?
Not a judgment or an argument here, just some food for thought.
That's actually related to something I've been trying to frame for FAI-- using actual human friendliness as a starting point for some features we might want in an FAI. One piece is the question of how a "best self" for another person which is actually helpful is conceived.
In my experience, people can and do sometimes take advantage of each other-- there's such a thing as being socially outstrengthed.
I'll take this under consideration. I certainly learned too much about helpless anger when I was a kid, and I'm quite angry now.
It may be that you're right, and the only wrong with the situation is how fucked up I am-- or maybe your good will and perception isn't also quite as thorough as you think it is, or possibly the range of PUA includes worse than you want to believe of it.
In my expereience, this is due to over-restrictive SASS rules in the "outstrengthed" party, and can be repaired. (My wife and I have been doing extensive work in this area on ourselves.)
Yeah, helpless anger's usually associated with status perception, i..e, being taught you don' t have enough importance to be listened to, paid attention to, etc.
The key to resolving it is understanding that the reason you still feel like you have insufficient status, is because we internalize others behaviors' in relation to ourselves, to learn the rules for when to grant ourselves status. When it "clicks" that you can give yourself importance, it's possible to re-evaluate the rules you've internalized, and grant yourself status even in situations where you were historically taught that you were not worth listening to.
Oh, I'm well aware of how far down that goes, even if I only looked at some of the bitterness posted here!
I just don't like it when people who are arguing that you should say "some women" or "many women" don't also say "some PUA" or "many PUA".
The arts have a LOT of positive things to teach men, for the benefit of men and women both.
The issue about helpless anger at my end seems to be that I'd have to believe I shouldn't have been hurt when I was mistreated if I could choose whether or not I'm angry.
I actually have better resources now-- probably not as good as they should be, considering that I was screaming at a pocket the other day[1]-- but I also believe I was doing the best I could when I was a kid. I couldn't access choices I didn't know I had.
I'm trying to be more careful about saying "some PUA", and I've been referring to it as a group of sub-cultures.
You can grant accuracy, even to people who don't offer it. :-)
The kind of thing I imagine when I hear about PUA is a woman I met some time ago-- she would love to spend some time by the ocean, but her husband doesn't like the ocean and isn't willing to have her spend time away from him. He'd taken charge to the extent that she's presumably never going to see the ocean again unless she outlives him in good enough health do it.
He probably wasn't PUA-- this is probably from before PUA was invented. For all I know, she would prefer living with a man like that than someone who'd find a way to tolerate a trip to the beach, but speaking as a person who needs to see an ocean now and then, I find her situation horrifying.
It may be a matter of, not just the way I react to PUA, but the way a lot of others do, but you write as though the best side of PUA is all that's real about it.
Any thoughts on how women can distinguish early between "good guy in charge" vs. "bad guy bullying" vs. "average guy who's taking excessive advantage"?
[1] I kept getting phone calls which consisted of a ring and then rustling-- and the "person" wouldn't get off the line when I hung up. After the first few, I was yelling and slamming the phone. It turned out to be a phone carried in a pocket where the autodial was repeatedly pressed by accident.
This sounds really interesting, but I'm afraid I can't parse it.
I was pretty close to incoherent when I posted that.
I'm not sure whether I can make it clearer now, but I'll take a crack at it.
I grew up with a lot of criticism, and I wasn't supposed to show anger at it. I also was harassed by other students at school, and told to just ignore it. In other words, they were under no obligation to control their actions, while it was my job to control my involuntary reactions.
In addition, I realized recently that my mother modeled helpless anger herself. While she could pretty much get away with dumping anger on other people in the immediate family, she rarely got what she wanted from the people she was angry at, and it didn't seem to occur to her that the situation could be made any better.
My current emotional reaction is something like if I could have prevented my anger at the situations I was in as a kid, I was obligated to to so. If I can prevent anger now, it proves that I was getting things wrong then, and I deserved the way I was treated. And at that point, I get angry again.
I think that's what was going on when I posted-- the objective bit is that I felt very angry and was whaling away at my completely innocent keyboard.
I don't know whether sorting things out more clearly to the extent that I have in this post is likely to do any good, but there's some hope. At least there's some handle on the confusion between past and present..
FWIW, I've fixed similar patterns to this in myself by realizing that I actually did have the right to not want the (ciriticism, teasing, harassment), the right to act in order to stop it, the right to feel bad that it continued and no-one else stopped it, and the right to feel like a worthwhile person even if I fought back.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to put into words how to create those realizations (and that was really just a summary, rather than the full list), but I can at least say that if it causes you to break down sobbing with relief, you're probably going in the right direction.
The central process, though, is identifying which of your SASS needs were used to condition the learned helplessness, and then give yourself the right to meet that need in the circumstances where you were taught not to. For example, if you weren't supposed to show anger because your parents withdrew their acceptance of you, then you would need to give yourself the right to accept yourself when you show anger. And so on.
Individual rules can be complex, though, and based on what you describe in your comment, I would guess you've got maybe 15-20 such rules you'd have to tweak just to get started. But it's definitely fixable.
One book that may be of use to you is "Healing The Shame That Binds You" - it has an excellent set of examples of how shame-binds form, even though its techniques for fixing anything absolutely sucks.
(Psychologists rarely aim anywhere near high enough in their standards for devising ways to fix things, IMO; my personal standard is that you should be able to change something in 15 minutes or so, if you know what you're doing and precisely what you need to fix. As Eliezer says in one of his stories, it only takes a few minutes to have an insight, if you have all the data)
Your honesty and self insight are refreshing to hear.
I, personally, found it useful when I realised my anger was mine and I was free to be angry whenever I wanted and whenever it suited my purposes! I hope yours serves you as well as mine serves me at times. A useful advisor, anger, providing you can keep it aligned with the rest of you.
Good guy in charge would find some way to get her needs met. Just not liking the ocean shouldn't count -- dude's not being much of a man, there. At the very least, he shouldn't have a problem with her going.
Drawing the line between "bullying" and "co-dependent" is tough, though. There've been times in the past where my wife wanted to do something that I didn't, but she didn't want to go if I didn't want to come. (If I'd truly been taking charge at the time, I'd have gone with her, or helped her get the need met in some other way.)
Who do you blame when both people in a relationship are dysfunctional? Most of the time, people end up in long-term relationships with partners who have complementary dysfunctions.
I'd say that people in general should focus on getting rid of as many of their own dysfunctions as they can -- a functional person isn't going to get trapped by a bully or in their own co-dependence, and will rapidly ditch someone who doesn't fit.
(I'm reminded of an early relationship of mine, when I was about 20, with a woman almost twice my age. I was infatuated, but I didn't have the same emotional maturity she did. She broke it off because the relationship wasn't [emotionally, long-term] good for her, no matter how much she enjoyed our good times. Someone with a level of dysfunction closer to mine or more complementary to mine would've been stuck with me, expecting that things were supposed to be that way.)
(I wish this was a post so that my vote was worth +10).
This is only an aside, but if you go and dig for the origins and theoretical meanings of the phrase "alpha male" you'll find that the phrase carries much emotional baggage but doesn't seem to do useful explanatory work.
I plan to cover this as part of my long-delayed post on "status".
While I am not a PUA enthusiast I suspect my description of human social behavioural patterns (including those you attempt to caricaturize here) would cause you to apply that label to me. As such I consider your comment offensive as well as ignorant.
I was going to be more cautious but, this is the road to disaster. There is so much room to turn apparently good intentions into ugly ugly concrete implementations that I'd rather act as if this post never existed.
What post?
I will just shortly pick up the pick up artist part of the article. I'm wondering whether there is any useful understanding about human cognition to understand - and whether that lesson is more gender neutral than people seem to believe.
I have a hypothesis that many of the things advocated by pick up artists work towards both sexes and that one of the primary issues is human as hierarchical and social animal and the allure of those above your perceived status.
Do we give different weights to opinion depending on the status of the one saying things? How much does this affect our rationality?
I find it virtually impossible to be offended by anything. The very concept of 'being offended' seems to indicate something of an ego-blow, or a status-puncture.
I think perhaps there's a bit of a difference between "being offended" and "finding something offensive". "Being offended", to me, implies taking something personally as an insult or something of the kind -- as you say, an ego-blow.
Being offended is pretty counterproductive, because if the other person meant to offend you, they've got exactly what they wanted, and if they didn't, your offended reaction will probably just upset them and not cause any useful change to their accidentally-offensive behaviour.
Finding something offensive, though, is not necessarily counterproductive at all. If you find something offensive, you don't take it as a personal insult or ego-blow, but you point out calmly and politely why they other person's behaviour is alienating or unpleasant or potentially insulting or whatever the actual problem with it is.
Maybe my labels for the two reactions are wrong, but this is how I think of it, anyway. I (would like to?) think I'm very seldom offended. But I point out when I find things offensive quite a bit more often.
Thank you; this is much more eloquently put than I could have done. I am typically not offended, but I often find things offensive.
Wat???
While this doesn't confuse me, I do find it confusing.
While I don't find this amusing, it does amuse me. ;-)
I tried to think of situations where this apparent rule does not apply.
While this doesn't include me, I do find it inclusive. While this doesn't coerce me, I do find it coercive. While this doesn't illustrate me, I do find it illustrative. While this doesn't detect me, I do find it detective?
Funny enough I just saw this comment in the recent comments section without reading any of the context. I took your comment to imply exactly the sort of distinction Emily explained. I figured that you were replying to to a comment which you managed to decipher despite it being from objectively confusing (equivocating, poor word choice, grammatically wrong etc.)
I thought this until I encountered a jerk cop in the middle of the night. I was driving home on a basically deserted road, and he pulled me over and asked me whether I'd been drinking (which I've never done in my life), if I knew how fast I was going (yes, 10 under the speed limit), why I was following that other car so closely (what car? Almost nobody is out at 2 AM). I made a really dumb comment asking if he'd pulled over the right car, and then he gave me a ticket for tailgating (I guess his radar wouldn't have supported a speeding ticket?).
I was mad (and felt powerless), but not offended. I got offended later when my friend behind me was also stopped and searched for weapons. Being young, male, and out at night was evidently reason enough for a traffic stop, which struck me as an offense and abuse of power.
I learned a lesson, though - making a sarcastic jab does not win you more points in life. I stop to think before saying something when emotions run high.
I strongly agree. Being "offensive" reflects poorly on the speaker, not me. Why should I get upset if someone else is stupid or holds beliefs I vehemently disagree with? Isn't that their problem?
Too many italics.
The conclusion was unclear to me.
The PUA bit ("driving away the very gender you're trying to seduce") doesn't follow because seducing women doesn't mean luring them to LW.
I liked orthonormal's take a lot more.
(Note) This is veering off the gender topic and into the objectification topic.
Objectification holds more problems than exclusivity. I remember someone once walking past me with a book titled "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Apparently this book is extremely popular and one I never bothered to read, but I remember thinking that if you view friends as something to "win" you are already on the wrong track. Influencing people into being your friend is objectifying a process to the point of losing its intent. Part of the value in friendship is the process of becoming friends. The relationship itself is the focus, not the object of the relationship. By learning how to Win Friends you reduce the relationship to a game or a form of winning. The object of the relationship is still there, but the relationship itself may not hold as much value. (Or the same type of value?)
(Edit) Apparently the book itself agrees with me? As I said, I have not read it. I was merely making a point. The point has little to do with the book. Sorry for the confusion.
The book was written two generations ago; "win friends" is just a semi-antiquated figure of speech. If it were written today, it would probably be called something like, "How To Make Friends And Network Effectively". Well, actually, it'd probably be called something a lot catchier, but you get my meaning, I hope. Language changes.
Good to know, thanks.
This is rather ironic, since the central message of that book is "be a genuinely nice and friendly person;" I have never heard it critcized as manipulative by anyone who actually read it.
Disliking talk about PUA in a place like this is very ironic, as that's the best example of practical use of evolutionary psychology I can think of.
If we also start disliking behavioral economics as equally manipulative, we're running of real world examples.
As far as I can tell most people who dislike PUA techniques don't really understand them.
What about women who dislike PUA techniques, them too?
Women are basically anosognosiacs about pick-up. In fact, I once discussed the efficacy of PU with a woman, and she started insisting that women couldn't possibly be that stupid. I had to remind her that she'd left her long-term boyfriend for a fling with afellow PUA a few months earlier.
People in general often misstate their preferences, or their behavior fails to match it. According to research summarized on my blog, both men and women do this, and women on average just do it more.
From Urbaniak, G. C., & Kilmann, P. R. (2006). Niceness and dating success: A further test of the nice guy stereotype. Sex Roles, 55, 209-224. (emphasis mine):
From the Sprecher article:
Some women aren't. I know because I'm one of them. I've already commented on this subject, and my views haven't changed much since then.
While I'm open to the idea that discussing PUA on LW is a net loss, selfishly I want the discussion to stay because I find it fascinating. Since I know it works on me, learning about it helps me understand myself better and make more informed choices.
Personally, I think controversy is more interesting than not. The internet keeps proving this over and over again. So if you want to attract more females, KEEP TALKING ABOUT THEM.
Getting offended is one way to get started on a rationalist path because it evokes an emotion. It evokes an inner-conflict. Which can result to greater self-understanding. Offending people is fine. Since it reflects more badly on the offensive person than on the offended person. It might even reflect badly on this community as a whole, but hey, if it gets people to start thinking, what's so bad? If it gets women to understand something about themselves? What's so bad?
However I would try to balance it out by ALSO examining men in such a way. There's a lot of literature on PUA, and it is actively discussed here. Why not just find proven methods for attracting men and discuss them also? In a rationalist fashion, of course. If it offends the men on the site, then... all the better. Men need a wake-up call, too.
I think you're assuming that the things you like will work across a wide range of people.
Speaking as a woman who posts to LW, I'm not especially interested in PUA being discussed here unless there's some consideration of consent issues. Those consent issues actually have some parallels to FAI problems-- who decides whether someone is better off? By what standards?
I would say that the equally offense-laden parallel for PUA would be methods for getting men to commit. I don't know whether they've been as carefully studied as PUA--- at a minimum, it's a harder subject because the cost of experiments is higher.
There's an optimal level of controversy and offense for individuals (not necessarily the same for interest and for learning), and it probably isn't the maximal level.
Because PUA comes off as dividing women into hackable systems and not worth hacking. If it's too accepted, it can make it seem as though talking to you isn't worth the trouble.
"Talking about women" isn't enough. How they're talked about matters.
"My opinion is that LW shouldn't be for PUA/beauty tips or how-to's. But it would be appropriate to discuss why these methods work, under what conditions you'd want to resist them, and what countermeasures you can take. (And I suspect some don't even want it to go this far, or want to restrict PUA more than beauty.)"
To clarify, I was promoting discussing PUA under this context, not FROM THE LENS of a working PUA. Certainly Pickup Artistry should never be actively encouraged on this site - there are way too many sites that handle this better than this one. But to discuss PUA from an observer's lens - discuss its merits and its pitfalls - I don't see why this type of discussion would drive individuals away unless the majority of the discussion turned into nonsense.
I think discussing PUA is going to attract a lot of individuals, and the right kind of individual. As long as the community continues to discuss this highly controversial topic in a rationalist manner, then other would-be rationalists are going to be find that unique and hopefully interesting. It's when controversial topics are viewed in a rationalist light that you truly shine a beacon declaring, "We are mindful. Not mindless."
If the discussion truly devolves then it should be a banned topic.
Well, whether it's been researched or not, it's certainly being sold:
On a side note... I actually was at a conference where the guy who writes the sales material for the above products discussed the psychology of their advertising methods for using women's fears of "dying alone" to drive sales, as an example for how to identify and exploit irrational fears in general.
So yes, advertising is definitely researched at least as much as PUA, especially by PUAs-turned advertisers. ("Christian Carter/Catch Him And Keep Him" is a brand owned by the same company that owns "David DeAngelo/Double Your Dating" -- both are character/stage names, like "Sara Lee" or "Ronald McDonald". And the names are alliterative for reasons that were also discussed at that conference...)
This is a really interesting point, actually. What is about PUA that makes it more concerning from a consent standpoint than, say, advertising? Both are manipulative, and I see considerable parallels between the two. (I find it hard to believe that the big advertising firms have put less effort into figuring out how to get people to do things than pickup artists have...) Should advertising to someone require their consent? Is there a significant difference between product placement in entertainment media and PUA techniques that are based on normal conversations, as opposed to PUA techniques based on being in a traditional picking-up-dates scenario, which seem more like standard commercials? What does consent even mean in the context of situations like PUA or advertising where the point of the manipulation is to get you to say yes? Is it even possible to require consent to that kind of thing, without just pushing the problem back a level and having the manipulators focus on getting you to give your consent to be advertised/PUA'd to?
There are some PUA techniques, at least, which only work on people who are not aware of them. There's this funny passage in The Game which discusses how one group of guys is preemptively spoling another group's pick-up lines at a party, and later on something along the same lines happens to the protagonist (it would be spoilerish to give any more detail).
By contrast I doubt that advertising agencies would suffer much if their techniques were exposed; the reason Avatar was so successful, I surmise, is simply that they saturated the public's awareness with it, which only required a large cash outlay.
"Techniques which only work against you because you're not aware of them" is one of the reasons for the PUA's bad rap, I suspect. (There are others, such as insincerity, but that'll have to be for another time.)
This sounds intuitively like a good heuristic, but the underlying logic isn't obvious to me. Can you expand?
Assume that when someone finds out about a technique, they judge whether they think it ought to work on them or not, and adjust their behavior accordingly. If a technique doesn't work when the subject is aware of it, that usually means that they would decide, for some reason, that they don't want it to work. So if a technique works only when the subject is unaware of it, then using that technique is going against their preferences.
You're considering whether advertising is problematic and/or should be legal without looking at whether people on the receiving end of advertising want it or benefit by it.
If someone wrote in Less Wrong about successful techniques of advertising, and said it must be a good thing because people buy what's advertised, I don't think it would go over entirely well.
Even before I'd read Rain's comment, I was willing to bet that most LWers limit their exposure to advertising-- not so much for political reasons or for fear of it, as just that it's low information repetitive input. I admit I'm generalizing from myself on this one, though it's worth noting that even the general public tends to avoid tv ads if they can.
One thing that's clear from the akrasia and luminosity discussions is that not everything in people's minds can be relied on to make their lives better. It's reasonable to be concerned about inputs from people who are trying to influence your mind and have specific goals which do not include your welfare.
In the case of PUA, saying that some women like that approach (which is true), or that PUAs mean well (which is neither trustworthy [1] nor relevant) substitutes for a general follow-up on how women who've been PUAd perceive the experience later,.
At this stage, advertising may well be less effective than PUA-- for most things, it isn't personally directed. A small story-- I know a person who used to sell stuffed dragons, and she said she sold them by finding the little part of the potential customer which wanted one ot the dragons, and (by implication) getting that part of the person to make the decision. She didn't see any problems with that, but I later met someone who wouldn't go near that woman's table because of being afraid of getting talked into buying a dragon she didn't want all that much.
Even if the sales effort had been more carefully constructed so that anyone who bought a stuffed dragon would not be capable of regretting it, there would be more consent issues, not fewer.
If advertising becomes that effective, I don't know how this should be addressed legally or philosophically. I do think there are problems.
[1] Some PUAs start from a position of resenting women for turning them down.
In the case of women using beauty-enhancing techniques (high heels, push-up bras, make-up, hairstyling), saying that some men like that in women (which is true), or that women mean well (which is neither trustworthy [1] nor relevant) substitutes for a general follow-up on how men who've been allured perceive the experience later.
At this stage, advertising may well be less effective than sexy attire on women -- for most things, it isn't personally directed. ...
If advertising becomes that effective, I don't know how this should be addressed legally or philosophically. I do think there are problems.
[1] Some women start from a position of resenting men for not caring more about their personality.
I'm not sure that many would object to this analogy. It strengthens the case that sharing PUA techniques isn't an appropriate use of LW, just as sharing beauty-enhancing techniques isn't.
It seems to me that the situation is pretty simple, for PU artistry as well as for advertising. Most PUA techniques that I've seen amount to efforts to persuade using Dark Side Epistemology. Bottom-lining is rampant. For example, with "negging", the PUA starts with the bottom line "You should feel self-conscious and insecure", and then seeks only evidence that supports this conclusion.
Such PUA techniques should be discussed like any other Dark Side methods: with a view towards minimizing their use and effectiveness.
At the risk of being seen standing up for low-status males, I feel obliged to point out that that's not incompatible with "meaning well".
It's not incompatible with meaning well, but I wouldn't recommend taking their word that they aren't doing harm.
I don't think this holds true for me. I am somewhat selective about what advertising I attend to but I don't in general limit my exposure to it and I sometimes actively seek it out.
I tend to skip over adverts when viewing TV on my PVR because they are of low average quality, high density and are generally interrupting something I was actually interested in. On the other hand I will sometimes watch adverts that catch my attention when skipping through either because they are visually interesting or because they are providing information about something I am interested in.
There are a variety of adverts that I don't avoid and may actively seek out. These include movie trailers for films I might be interested in watching, adverts that are notable for clever or dramatic visuals and adverts for products I am interested in purchasing. I'm interested in visual media in general and so find both filmed adverts and commercial photography interesting from that standpoint when the quality is high. I have purchased a number of DVD collections that include the advertising works of directors - many of todays most interesting film directors started out in advertising and music videos (which are a form of advertising). I also have photography books that include commercial photography.
In the age of the Internet there is a blurred line between advertising and product information and I'm not uncomfortable reading information in the blurred area, though I prefer clear disclosure of any commercial interests driving the material. I quite happily use a manufacturer's website as one source of product information for products I am considering purchasing though and I also find that third party reviews can be valuable even when it is disclosed that the product was provided free to the reviewer or that there are other reasons to treat the opinions provided as not entirely unbiased.
In general I find advertising less problematic in terms of bias and manipulation than political speech or much journalism (which is very often just lightly disguised political speech).
The topic of PUA seems to suffer from the Streisand effect around here. Mentioning reasons people shouldn't talk about it gets people talking about it, as evidenced by this now quite long, and expanding, thread, and most of the previous threads as well.
I deleted my initial comment here since I didn't want to contribute. Now I'd say to others that non-engagement may be a better strategy.
Rather than non-engagement, I would advise dependency management: if there is a topic we find it difficult to inquire into, switch priorities to observing and discussing why we find it difficult to have the object-level discussion.
I think I can solve the mystery: people keep bringing up PUA because they like thinking and talking about sex and things related to sex.
The only reason it "appears to be relevant" is this weak relationship to dark side epistemology that everyone keeps mentioning. But I haven't seen a 'dark side' discussion, separate from sex, in a long while.
If politics is the mind-killer, then what is an even more fundamental drive?
I believe it was originally brought up in a discussion about instrumental rationality - applying rationality to achieve concrete goals rather than as empty discussion. It was in the same vein as Alicorn's luminosity sequence (applying rationality to improve life outcomes) as opposed to the more abstract discussions over things like Newcomb's problem.
If rationality is supposed to be about winning then it should be possible to use rationality to improve outcomes in areas of life that you place value on. Most humans place high value on sex and relationships and so instrumental rationalists will often be interested in applying rationality to improving outcomes in these areas. Do you disagree with some part of that line of reasoning or is it simply the specific approaches of 'game' that you disapprove of?
I think sex is worse than politics when it comes to mind-killing.
I think the key question is the difference between visitors and regulars - we'd like more people to be active, not just show up. Does controversy actually bring in all that many people who stay?
P.S. Welcome to Less Wrong! Please feel free to introduce yourself in that thread.
Most people here don't understand them because they have this model in their mind that if you treat an attractive woman nicely, try to respect her desires and needs, perhaps compliment her, with the internal attitude that women should be "respected" she will respond in kind by respecting your desire to have sex with her.
They never test this model by going to a bar and trying to use it to achieve the goal of sex with an attractive woman. I know this, because if they had tested it even 3 nights in a row, they would have discarded it as "broken". I would love to go out into the field with 10 guys from LessWrong and alicorn to coach them, and watch them get rejected time after time by attractive women.
I would write a top level post explaining the techniques, the PUA model of the generic male-female interaction, the predictions it makes, and how you can go out and collect experimental evidence to confirm or disconfirm those predictions, but I think that I would not get promoted (no matter how good the post was from a rational perspective, measured in bits of information it conveys about the world) and not get much karma, because people here just don't want to hear that truth.
I suspect that efficiency is not necessarily the reason that many dislike PUA techniques. Personally, I don't particularly doubt that there are patterns for how women react to men (and vice versa), and that these can be used to have more sex. On the other hand, spiking people's drinks or getting them drunk can also be used for the same purpose, and that's commonly known as rape.
Sure, there are ways to hack into people's minds to get them to do what you want. The fact that they exist doesn't make them ethically acceptable.
Now, I don't know whether PUA methods are or aren't - but the fact that "the attitude that your partner should be respected" is seen as a negative thing seems to be pointing pretty clearly towards the no direction.
No! NO! NO!
Your long-term partner should be your soulmate, with a high degree of mutual trust and respect. But a woman who you have not yet had sex with is simply not going to respond well to you "respecting" her.
Actually, people in general will be creeped out or think you're of lower status if you're too easily impressed, i.e. offer too much "respect" before they feel they've earned it. It's got nothing to do with gender, except insofar as low status-ness is unattractive.
I think that some people will easily misread your comment as implying that men should not respect women early in the interaction.
My guess is that you are actually trying to say something different, based on your use of "respect" in quotes: You are saying that women may not respond well to attempts by men to signal respect.
If you are saying the second thing, then I agree: it is important to hold respect for the other person at all points in the interaction, yet certain ways that society encourages men to signal respect are counterproductive and unattractive.
Right. But now we have an ontological problem: "hack into someone's mind" and "not hack into someone's mind" are not natural kinds.
In any social, romantic interaction, there is some degree of mind-hacking going on. When a person spends all their time and energy chasing a member of the opposite gender who is not interested, what has happened is mindhacking. The pain of unrequited love is a result of asymmetric mindhacking.
Love itself is symmetric mindhacking: you have hacked her mind, and s/he has hacked yours, and both of your implicit utility functions have been shifted to highly value the other person.
What the Seduction community seeks is to allow men to create an asymmetric situation to cause a woman to have sex with them (and this is a place where some members of the community really do behave like assholes and not let the woman down gently afterwards, a practise know as "expectation management", though the community has built up a tradition of karma: we ostracise men who break the rule of always managing expectations and leaving the woman in a happier state than when we met her).
The other major goal of the community is to allow the man to create a symmetric situation - which is usually achieved by first creating an asymmetric situation (male strong), and then gradually evening it out by allowing yourself to fall in love with the woman.
Women who have been "screwed and left" by pickup artists feel good about themselves more often than one would naively expect - and this surprised me until I realized that if the PUA has demonstrated enough alpha quality, the woman's emotional mind has classified him as "good to have sex with even without commitment" because alpha-male sperm is so evolutionarily advantageous - if you are impregnated by an alpha male then your male descendants will have whatever alpha qualities he has - and will impregnate other women, spreading your genes.
I'll also say that insofar as women think that PUA "mind-hacking" techniques are black-hat subversions of female rationality, the most obvious solution I see is disseminating more information about them. Knowledge of these techniques would allow women to at least attempt to "patch" themselves, assuming they are open to the idea that they actually work.
For example, say I learn about negs. I can either think, "Oh good, it's fun to be attracted to guys, so I hope guys neg me effectively," or "I think it is immoral to neg girls, the world would be a better place if guys didn't do it, and individual guys who neg are probably not worth my time, therefore I will avoid them even if their techniques work and I find myself attracted to them."
Either way, I think I'm better off knowing about negs and how they work. (Apologies for a not very nuanced view of the neg, but it's not that relevant to my main point.)
I realized after I wrote this comment that I think learning about PUA is an excellent exercise in rationality for women in general and me specifically, since it exposes areas where I have in the past not always been aware of the reasons for my decisions.
I could see how women who believe themselves to be immune to PUA (perhaps because the are in fact immune), would not find the topic as interesting.
The subject definitely deserves a few top posts, considering how important it is, and how many misconceptions there are.
You get positive expected karma for almost every kind of activity, and karma doesn't make much difference anyway, so I don't know why you're concerned about it.
I think most of us here have had at least some exposure to the PUA worldview and a sizable fraction (including me) feels quite sympathetic to it. That said, I wouldn't want to see a toplevel post introducing the basics. There's already plenty of good introductory material elsewhere on the 'net, a couple clicks away. Our site will interest me more if it follows the general direction that Eliezer and Robin initiated at OB, not getting overly sidetracked into applied rationality topics like pickup, marketing or self-help.
I think anyone who feels excluded as a gender is not a very good rationalist, and therefore might want to shut up and study some more.
You are not your genetalia. Stop being a girl or a guy; put your rationalist hat back on. PLEASE.
For the record, I'm female and have been adversely affected by what other females have called objectification on this site.
It might be considerate to realize that females do have a legitimate reason for why they are more salient to their own sex and issues regarding gender. More so than males. This is because society treats male-ness as the norm versus female-ness, which is treated as special. As a result, many females become VERY AWARE of the fact they are female, have female genitalia, are treated "differently" because of their sex. Perhaps a lot of this awareness is in fact, subconscious. But none-the-less, this results in a stronger identification with their own gender. Whereas males have less problem disassociating with their own genitalia.
Becoming a good rationalist is a journey one takes, not something one "is" or "isn't". It is insulting to simply say "you're not a good rationalist if..." and then hold everyone to these standards.
I'm not saying your end-goal isn't correct, but the way to attract people to a site like this is not to BEGIN by assuming everyone is a "good rationalist" but that more people start out as "bad rationalists" and attracting them might take different approaches than what is rationally optimal or acceptable to current members.
This comment was never intended to attract people to the site, so your last paragraph is not relevant.
Please refrain from lecturing a female on what females do or do not do.
I think that most of the discussion of content quality around here revolves around either community-building or effective rational inquiry. It is a valid criticism of any comment to say that it fails at community-building, though it's not necessarily a standard everyone needs to worry about all the time.
Please explain your second statement exactly. I don't see why you have this objection.
Your comment begins "It might be considerate to realize that females do have a legitimate reason for why they are more salient to their own sex and issues regarding gender".
In saying this, you are telling me (a female) that I need to realize something about females. This is questionable, at best, and is so regardless of your own gender.
Then you conclude "... a stronger identification with their own gender. " to which I reply "Balderdash".
Gender is a part of one's identity, obviously, but to say that women can't help but feel theirs is more salient is a broad-strokes over-generalizing statement that is ultimately as patroniaing as anything else that can or has been taken to be biased against women. It effectively says "Oh, women can't help but feel they are treated differently," and in doing so, treats them differently.
Do you understand the objection, now?
More to the point, my original comment was expressing that rationality is NOT a gender issue. I very strongly believe that to let gender issues interfere in one's goals, be they rationality goals or not, is a bad move. That is all.
The site lost my response; bugger.
I have to object to your first objection there. What can you claim to know about the female sex in general solely based on the fact that you yourself are female? You are just a data point. So, regardless of your gender, I think it's fairly legitimate to say, "You need to realize something about females."
That something -- whether females identify with their own gender more strongly than males -- is absolutely verifiable using scientific channels. The only thing that may be objectionable about my statements - is if they're flat-out wrong.
But to remedy that is easy - just find the truth.
Your objections threw me off. I could understand saying, "That hasn't been verified." But to say, "I'm a female, so you shouldn't lecture me on females" - something struck me as wrong about that. Can we agree on this or am I falling for bad logic?
As for the last statement, I respect your belief that gender issues interfere with your goals. But the way you stated it in the original post was judgmental. You could have just presented a rational case for it. Or is that not the way things run around here? Is it better to insult everyone that doesn't think the way you do?
We can certainly agree on this point. Though I hasten to add that if you had indeed presented some sort of research, I would not have made the comment. Without objective fact behind it, it smacked of condescencion.
I made no original post. I urge you to read the actual original post my comment was made to respond to, and the threads the prompted it. I will not be recapping the gender kerfluffle for you.
Consider your bait safely ignored.
(The point is good but it is obscured by punctuation. Extra proof reading is recommended when potential readers do not have an incentive to be persuaded by your words.)
You could say the same thing about any bias. If it were shown that, for example, young people are more susceptible to confirmation bias, it would be useful for a young rationalist to know that, and it would not be a good objection for a young person to respond, "please refrain from lecturing a young person on what young people do or do not do." (and saying "You are not your age" probably doesn't help.)
If you believe that letting gender issues interfere in one's goals is a form of bias, then you should believe it's precisely the sort of thing that we should be aware of, and your objection (if any) should have been that orange seems to be making a dubious claim, and he should have to provide experimental evidence to back it up.
At current tech levels, I do not believe it will be possible for a rationalist to stop being a girl or a guy. Additionally, I don't know that it's even desirable for people to try to think only in a gender-neutral fashion, any more than it would necessarily be desirable for humans and Happies to try to think only in species-neutral terms.
It is desireable to think in a rational fashion. Prioritizing your gender is not rational, optimal, or desirable for pursuing rational discussion.
Gender is salient and important in some discussions, but it is not the only salient part of your identity. I am amazed this even needs to be said, but here it is anyway: you don't have to stop thinking like your gender ALL THE TIME. Just ignore your hormones when they are not salient to the topic at hand, as surely you do any time you are not interacting with bedable members of the appropriate gender.
Humans are meat puppets run by hormones, but at least we can recognize the hormonal signal and, you know, not respond when it's innapropriate.
Seconding this sentiment.
Personally, I cannot even fathom why people seem to consider it an unusually significant part of their identity compared to other traits.
Agreed
Hopefully this site is not strictly preaching to the choir. Someone who believes people here have good ideas and understands why you should probably be charitable to naive generalizations or somewhat offensive assertions made here will not have a problem occasionally running into them.
However, it is not hard to imagine an individual unfamiliar with "rationalism" seeing a few too many posts on pickup artists and deciding their time would be better spent on another site.
If the person is familiar with PUAs, won't they just laugh and ignore the posts? That's what I did until this ugly gender/hormonal mess flared up.
I agree, pretty much completely.
In general, I thought the recent discussions on seduction were beneath us. First I was put off by the de-personalization of people considered as sexual partners; and then I was equally offended by the undercurrent of "some people don't deserve (a high level of) sexual gratification, because they're not attractive enough" running through some of the indignant responses that I should otherwise have agreed with. For all the talk about "altruism" and concern for "humanity" in this community, there wasn't much of that spirit to be found anywhere in those threads.
Having locker-room discussions in public is low-status behavior. Now it is a debatable question whether we should go out of our way to signal high status. (I for one think the prestige of Overcoming Bias, run as it was by high-status folks like Robin Hanson and associated with no less than Oxford University, contributed in no small part to getting us this far, and is something we are in danger of losing to the extent we become perceived as a group of underachieving sex-starved male computer programmers in their twenties.) But I think most of us should be able to agree that signaling low status is not helpful toward our goals as a community (which after all don't necessarily include individual members' getting laid in the short term).
So, yes, this is in fact an argument for a certain kind of political correctness -- just enough of it to avoid signaling low status if at all possible. Let me suggest a heuristic: this should in theory be a place where someone like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett would be comfortable posting. (Speaking of which, why haven't we seen them here? They share many of our goals and interests.) Now these are folks who definitely aren't unwilling to call a spade a spade. At the same time I have a feeling they'd be turned off by some of the discussions of "PUA" and the like.
No no no. Discouraging topics with "low status" connotations (as opposed to topics which are politically divisive or needlessly exclusionary) is cowardly and epistemically dangerous. If we were playing a chronophone game, this would come out as "Let's not discuss Copernicus' theories: this should be a place where Jesuit scientists and philosophers can be comfortable".
Rationalists should win, and one can win big by seeing things that society at large dares not point out just yet.
Nonsense. It was with the aim of preventing this misunderstanding that I suggested the Dawkins/Dennett test (apparently to no avail). "Low status" doesn't mean what you seem to think; it's not the same thing has holding a minority opinion. Galileo's status was quite high, which is why he was treated as a threat by the church rather than being ignored as a lunatic. A more appropriate chronophone rendering might be: "Let's make sure we wear our wigs and robes properly and have a Latin version ready to go ."
Finally note that I said "if at all possible". If for some reason a particular line of reasoning actually does signal low status but nonetheless needs to be heard, we have an escape clause. It shouldn't be used lightly, however.
Factual nitpick: scientific status doesn't imply sexual status, in fact I gut-feel the real-world correlation is negative when controlled for income, though of course I don't have enough data.
Value nitpick: if we manage to find important truths at the price of collectively looking like sex-starved nerds, I for one am willing to pay that price. Those of us who aren't can always conceal their identities with nicknames.
I may be in the minority in this respect, but I like it when Less Wrong is in crisis. The LW community is sophisticated enough to (mostly) avoid affective spirals, which means it produces more and better thought in response to a crisis. I believe that, e.g., the practice of going to the profile of a user you don't like and downvoting every comment, regardless of content, undermines Less Wrong more than any crisis has or will.
Furthermore, I think the crisis paradigm is what a community of developing rationalists ought to look like. The conceit of students passively absorbing wisdom at the feet of an enlightened teacher is far from the mark. How many people can you think of, who mastered any subject by learning in this way?
That said... both "sides" of the gender crisis are repeating themselves, which strongly suggests they have nothing new to say. So I say Eliezer is right. If you can't understand the other side's perspective by now--if you still have no basis for agreement after all this discussion--you need to acknowledge that you have a blind spot here and either re-read with the intent to understand rather than refute, or just avoid talking about it.
Eliezer, I think you're spot on here. I think objectification is both exclusion from the dialogue and being relegated to the status of an object, but I hadn't considered the first aspect to it before.
The PUA dialogue as a whole is unpleasant for me, as a woman, exactly because women are implicitly excluded as agents. I am bisexual and I would like it if more women were interested in me, so one would think PUA might be of interest. But PUA excludes me completely and alienates me. When I read about it, I realise with a horrified fascination that I am reading instructions for someone else on how to hack MY BRAIN for their own personal gratification.
Being "objectified" in the sense of being relegated to the status of an object implies that one neither needs nor deserves autonomy or agency. A person willing to employ pickup artistry or similar is revealing their opinion that women do not deserve full agency and/or the chance to make informed decisions in this arena, purely because the Artist disagrees with their probable decision. I believe that's why I and so many other women find PUA repulsive: it is an attempt to control us and dilute our autonomy.
And for the record, I am really interested in evolutionary psychology and don't understand how it could be offensive. It doesn't attempt to exclude or disempower any group to my knowledge - am I wrong? From my reading on the matter, it is simply one scientific approach attempting to explain and predict human behaviour.
(edited for clarity)
I can't understand your position. There are people who seem to reliably be able to (in a sense) "hack" women's minds ... and you don't want to know about it? Wouldn't you want to be aware of when you are tricked into wanting something that goes against your interest?
ETA: I'm male, and I felt the same revulsion at PUA discussions, but decided that it's all the more reason to learn about them.
I see I didn't make myself clear on this one, sorry. I do want to know about it, and indeed I spent some time researching it when I first found out about it. But I find any discussion of it in the context of possibly trying to use it on women, or any attempt to optimise the process to that end, to be repulsive. I don't want to be in an environment where it is considered acceptable. I'm not against discussing it per se, I am against discussing it as an acceptable/admirable course of action or in a positive light.
I had the same reaction of revulsion to PUA sites until I realized it only works when I let it, and I suspect the same for most women.
PUAs work in singles bars and other places where single people go to interact with other single people. Girls go to these places when they want sexual attention; IE when they want to be picked-up. Sure there are accompanying reasons like drinking and dancing, but a woman who wants to avoid getting hacked by these techiniques has the very simple option of just not exposing herself to them.
If one of these "artists" hit on you when you are not in a receptive frame of mind, wouldn't you just reject him? I certainly do. When you are in a receptive frame of mind, it is of course different, and that is when the PUA-stuff can hack you, so to speak, into accepting the advances of someone you'd otherwise reject. That is not to say these guys can just point a finger at you in the street and Bang.
Long story short, he can't deny you agency unless you are already objectifying yourself.
If someone offers you a tasty dessert when you're hungry, is that "hacking" your mind, because you otherwise wouldn't choose to eat it?
If someone who is trying to quit smoking complains about a craving, and you offer them a cigarette, are you doing them a favor?
I'm sorry, I don't understand the connection.
All three situations are roughly equivalent, in that someone is offered something that they are currently primed to accept for some reason, but that they would reject normally in a typical mental state.
Many people seem to consider this ethically dubious, especially when the one offering has participated in priming the offeree to be receptive.
Sex, dessert, and cigarettes are "roughly equivalent"? Remind me not to come over to your house for dinner. ;-)
Edit to add: Wow, some people have no sense of humor. Or at least were unable to see past the humor to the actual point. That is, that it stretches the analogy too far to equate "emotionally complicated" and "fattening" with a dependency-forming drug that will then proceed to give you cancer and kill you. Bit of a negative applause light, eh?
If I'm in a bakery, they can hardly be blamed for offering me a cupcake. If I don't want the sweets, it is on me to avoid sellers of desserts. if I'm in a music store and someone offers me a dessert, I'm going to go "WTF" and leave before the weirdo with the candy starts doing something even weirder.
My point is about the "hacking" part, not where the thing is being offered.
Let me rephrase. If a person deliberately sets out to make a tastier dessert, so that it's more attractive than competing desserts, how is this "hacking" anyone's mind? If it's more attractive, then it's more attractive!
One can argue about whether it might be better from a health or finanical perspective to skip the dessert. One can even say that it's rude to offer a person some dessert in an inappropriate context. But none of these things have to do with how the dessert tastes, or the quality of ingredients used, or the presentation of the dessert on the plate.
If the baker doesn't lie about what's in the dessert, and has gone to extra trouble to procure the finest ingredients, and make the best possible presentation...
And if you choose that dessert because of these things, is that "hacking" your mind? Or just someone offering you a nice dessert?
Your earlier comment implied that someone is "hacking" your mind, when all they've actually done is try their best to offer you a nice dessert. Whether you choose to indulge or not is still an essentially free choice, just like we are all free to turn down an actual dessert, no matter how tempting to our palates it may be.
It seems wrong (to me) to imply that using better ingredients or presentation of a dish somehow equals reaching out into someone's brain and taking control of it. If it were, then we could turn around and argue that men have no control when they see an attractive woman... and I don't think any of us like where that kind of thinking takes us (e.g. burqas, to say the very least).
(Footnote: is this comment insensitive to Muslims? I'm going to have to guess that religion is the one reasonably-safe whipping boy on LW, at least for the moment.)
I see.
Well no, -making- a more attractive dessert is not in any way hacking. PUA techniques that rely on maximising the man's attractiveness to women are not hacking her brain, they are life-hacks for him. These are not the techniques likely to be objected to, methinks.
I think the improving-the-product aspect is eminently laudable. Self improvement is good.
What does count as hacking is more along the lines of this: To push the bakery example; I do not like caramel, but let's say I go to a bakery intending to buy a banana muffin, but the charming presentation of fresh baked caramel ones, along with some tactics by the bakery employees, convince to buy a caramel muffin just this once.
The tactics of presentation and salesmanship have effectively hacked my brain into going for a lower-order preference.
It would take one amazing hack to make me eat a caramel muffin when I'm not hungry and not in a bakery, one that I suspect is not acheivable. I can say no to banana muffins, too.
I don't mean to say that all PUA technique is fakery and salesmanship; rather I think that the sales-based portions are the ones that horrify women.
Given that I don't find salesmanship horrifying when buying food or anything else, I've stopped finding descriptions of PUA work horrifying.
In all fairness, the consequences of choosing a bad "dessert" are probably much worse in the singles' bar than in the bakery, so I can certainly empathize with an intuitive horror of being "sold" something you don't really want in that context.
Thanks for listening and being open-minded. I appreciate it.
Interesting thought. I've never been to a "singles bar" or similar place, I think, and I wonder if the divide here was between people who go to such places, and people who do not.
Is a person willing to take a class on public speaking revealing their opinion that audiences do not deserve full agency or the chance to make informed decisions about what they're presenting in a speech? Should they not practice to make the best possible impression?
I realize there are schools of PUA that are based on trickery. However, the "direct", "natural", and "inner" schools of PUA studies deal only with what makes men more attractive to women, generally. That information is unlikely to be useful to you as a bisexual woman, but it is certainly not about treating women as objects. Some teachers (most notably Johnny Soporno) are quite explicitly about emancipating women from oppressive societal constructs around sexuality (such as the idea that having sex with more than one partner means a woman has no self-worth).
Still other teachers (e.g. Juggler) teach men how to make emotional connections in conversation -- to reveal themselves better and to learn more about a woman than just "what do you do" type chitchat. And others (e.g. Tyler of RSD) emphasize learning how to provide a woman with a safe space and positive energy. (I know that sounds kind of woo-woo, but actually explaining it in a reductionist way would take way more time and space than I want to spend here.)
None of these things are any more offensive or objectifying to women than public speaking classes are to audiences. They're teaching men to be better men, not how to "control" women.
Not that I'm arguing a normative point here, but I've always gotten the same negative vibe from public speaking classes (and rhetoric) as from marketing/PUA. But then, I've often been known to disregard relevant social skills.
I have no problem with attempting to make oneself more attractive to other people or make the best possible impression. When you make a speech to a lot of people, of course you should practice it - but nobody in the audience thinks that you got up and ad-libbed it, just like nobody who sees me dressed up thinks I'm always going to look like that. We realise we're seeing your best effort, which acts as a signal of your valuation of the event or activity - we don't think that you're always like this, and the self enhancement is common knowledge.
Pick up artists are different. Let's break them into two groups: the outright tricksters and the "inner" school. We can agree, unless i'm very much mistaken, that the tricksters are clearly attempting to hack women's brains (ie with the little psychological games to make them look insightful or deep, with use of negging, etc) in an unethical way. Mystery is a good example of this. By "hack" I mean "influence in an underhanded way without permission" - if for example you managed to convince me PUA is good, you didn't hack my brain, you changed my mind.
But the inner school is also problematic, and I think you misrepresented them. I have no problem with people trying to teach other people to be more attentive, more able to reveal themselves, more considerate. This is purely optimising yourself rather than attempting to optimise the other person. But the inner school still includes techniques to optimise/hack the woman, for example the systems of how to touch women casually so that they "feel safe" or ways to elicit "indications of interest" from women. I don't see how that's any different from the tricksters. For example, Juggler says: "You can figure out what IOIs you want and then 'trick' or command them from girls. " He even says men should "Tell her to sit with the proper posture" or get "her" to "accept your commands" by starting small and then building up. (http://www.bristollair.com/outer-game/techniques/tactics/forcing-iois.html)
To me the inner school is fundamentally the same as the tricksters, except it adds in a component of self-optimising as well as the manipulation of the woman - that makes it less wrong but certainly not right.
Rachael, I think you raise some excellent questions about the ethics of social influence.
Could you explain this without using loaded terms so I can understand exactly what your objection is? I'm glad you try to unpack "hack" as "influence in an underhanded way without permission", but "underhanded" is still a loaded term!
My best guess is that you're saying that it's unethical to intentionally use a tactic of social influence that the other person doesn't understand and hasn't granted permission for. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
I would agree that such behavior is often creepy or distasteful, but I think calling it unethical would have results that are counter to our intuitions. Does it imply that if the other person knew what you were doing, then it would be OK? Or that if you didn't know you were influencing them, it would be OK? Let's look at an example from the feminine behavioral repertoire: push-up bras. Are these a hack into the male mind? Some males probably don't know what push-up bras are, or what their effect is, so they are being influenced by that "tactic" without their knowledge or permission.
To avoid potentially banning large swathes of male and female mating behavior, I think we really have to look at the content of social influence techniques, not just at who knows how it works and who doesn't. I think what we should really be asking is: is the technique harmful, can the user of the technique reasonably be expected to know that, and can any potential harm be justified by potential benefits to the recipient of the technique? Are there any similar techniques out there that can accomplish the same result with less risk of harm?
When looking at pickup techniques, I think we would see a whole gamut of answers to those questions.
I think you’re right that we have to look at the harm and good of influence tactics. That probably would help us separate, say, wearing push up bras and learning how to be attentive and confident around women, from learning to put women down or make them feel negative emotions so they’re more vulnerable to you.
I do think the permission aspect is still important, though, because otherwise it smacks of a kind of paternalistic approach – the male judges what’s good for everyone and then executes it, without checking with the woman if this is what she thinks is good too. Sort of “I should trick her into liking me because I’m a really swell guy, so it would be better for her if she liked me!” Because in relationships between people a lot of things are subjective and personal, this is an area where it’s reasonable that rational people’s estimations of what’s good and bad will differ.
I don’t think permission is an issue when you’re self-optimising. So I don’t think it matters if men secretly take courses to be more confident and comfortable around women, or if women secretly wear push-up bras. I think it’s important when you’re trying to directly influence the other person, like with the PUA mind games and strategies for producing emotional vulnerability.
Unpacking "hack" more is difficult, I guess "underhanded" would be "using a technique that is deceptive, dishonest, and potentially harmful". Except now I brought harm back into it so I'm not sure if that helps at all. I do think a hack has to be a direct influence on the other person, not an indirect influence, so that the self-optimising never counts as a hack. I realise the line between direct and indirect is difficult to draw here and it could take us a while to figure it out (if we felt so inclined.)
I'll probably need to do a couple posts to properly reply to you, but I like your idea of consolidating them into one thread. For others' reference, I'm also replying to this post by Rachael.
I do think we can say that if a form of influence is harmful and covert, then the covertness makes it worse. Trying to harm someone sneakily is worse than trying to harm them overtly.
I still have trouble with banning covert methods of influence, merely for being covert, even direct influence. That's why I brought up the example of the push-up bra. It's not self-optimization, it's deception, and it's a direct attempt to effect male sexual psychology in a way that can "substantially influence" their behavior. To say that it is ethical suggests that certain types of deception can be justified.
The use of covert influence techniques raises a question: if the person it was being used on found out later, how would they feel?
In the case of push-up bras, I think the intuition is that if/when a man finds out about the covert technique, he will/should consider it justified, or at least excusable, if he understood the challenges women go through in satisfying men's sexual preferences for looks. Likewise, the intuition around a PUA a technique may be that if women discovered it, they would or should consider it to be justified, or at least excusable, if they understood the challenges men go through in satisfying women's sexual preferences (e.g. for masculine traits, and see the Draco In Leather Pants TV Trope for some less-empirical but more humorous examples of the dark side of female preferences). Furthermore, in both cases, the intuition may be that once the other person's stereotypical sexual preference is satisfied (e.g. looks for men, or masculinity for women), and they actually get to know the other person, they might be less concerned about the other sex using using a bit of deception to get their foot in the door.
The level of deception typically involved in pickup techniques is much lower than the push-bra, because PUAs are actually trying to embody traits that are attractive to women. When pickup artists are "faking" things, the faking is merely a temporary phase in the process of "fake it til' you make it." Probably the worst type of male deception for females is when males are deceptive about their relationship interest or availability. Yet PUAs advocate avoiding false promises of relationship interest, and are often explicitly upfront about what they are looking for, which is one of the ways that PUA behavior is actually more ethical than certain normal male behaviors.
To the extent that PUAs practice deception, it's less like being wolves in sheeps' clothing, and more like being sheep in wolves' clothing. If a woman finds out that the seemingly-badboy PUA she is dating is really a sweetheart inside, how bad actually is that? Many women would probably be thrilled.
I do agree with you that using influence tactics when the other person isn't aware of is morally problematic, even though I don't see selectively banning them from dating-challenged men to be an easy solution for multiple reasons that I might get into in the future. Consequently, I want to see full transparency for social influence, particularly mating-related social influence in society. I tell women I date for any length of time about the seduction community, in a level of detail that depends on how interested they seem in the subject. As you've probably noticed, I'll also talk the ear off of anyone who seems interested in the subject with an open mind.
In a future post, I want to address the ethics of potentially harmful social influence, the ethics of exposing other people to risks, and whether or not these can be justified by believing oneself to be a "swell guy."
Agreed. Ross Jeffries and Mystery both explicitly belong to this school. However, the general trend in successful schools has been moving progressively further and further away from these approaches. Indeed, even Mystery is viewable as a step away from Jeffries' position - arguably most of the Mystery Method can be compared to a generalized pattern for "how to give a speech" -- i.e., this is the order of steps that people go through in becoming attracted to one another, so this is the order in which you should do things. You can discard all of the specific problematic techniques at each stage, and just use the stages themselves.
In fact, this is what the RSD people do - the company formed from the feud between Mystery and certain of his Project Hollywood brethren. They kept the logistics, and substitute what might simplistically be called "confidence" for the use of canned material and tricks. The RSD people have famously claimed that any statement, no matter how ridiculous, can be used to start a conversation, if used with the right attitude. And one of their examples is, "I like salad!"
Clearly, this is not some sort of underhanded mind hack.
It seems to me that, in general, the direction of larger PUA schools since Mystery is increasingly away from the direction of "tricks", and for various economic/marketing reasons (which I won't bore you with here), I expect this trend to continue. But in addition to those business reasons, there's a deeper reason as well.
In one workshop video excerpt I saw, a teacher told a story about his first attempt at pickup, after having read some stupid poem on the internet that was supposed to be a magic pickup line or something. Only, being young and gullible, he totally and utterly believed it would work. So he went to the nearest bar, went straight to the best-looking woman in the room, and used it... and it worked.
Not because it was magic. But because he believed it would work, and therefore gave off all the attractive signals of a man with complete confidence in himself.
So, what's been happening is that there's an increasing realization among the teachers that, really, there are only two things to teach: confidence, and the details. (Where details might be compared to stage management, planning & prep., and improvisation skills in relation to public speaking.)
In practice, I'm also using the word "confidence" to cover a broad spectrum of ideas such as frame control, nonreactivity, positive state and projections, self-image, etc.
Surely you'd want to know how not to touch someone in an offputting way, or to convey a degree of interest that you didn't mean to? I guess I'm confused how learning to touch in a courteous way constitutes "hacking".
The public speaker gets up in front of an audience, and says, "How's everybody doing tonight?" No responses. Louder: "How's everybody doing tonight?", and gets some response. Later, the speaker asks how many people are local/from out of town, asks them to raise their hands.
By the speed of the responses, the speaker knows whether his audience is responding to his message. Also, by making them do things, the speaker is asking for a greater commitment to and involvement with whatever message is being presented.
However, this is not "hacking" the audience. If somebody is not open to what is being said, they're gonna sit there with folded hands and their mouth shut, no matter what the speaker says or asks. The speaker's actions may increase the response of audience members who are at least minimally responsive, but their minds are hardly being hacked! If it were possible to really hack minds in this way, seminar speakers would make considerably more money than they already do. ;-)
These types of responsiveness requests are mainly useful for measuring the temperature of an interaction, and prompting a move to the next stage of an interaction that's already going well. They can't be used to create something that isn't already there, which is why public speakers can't just give people a bunch of commands to raise their hands or stand up or sit down or clap, as a simple lead up to saying, "now go to the back of the room and give me all your money."
Do you really think that even the most devious PUA tricks have any more mind hacking power than this? I don't. And my general impression is that the skilled PUAs and teachers don't expect any of these tricks to do the work for them; having showmanship or salesmanship is not really a substitute for having something worth showing or selling.
Well, since I haven't taken any classes from any of these people, I can't absolutely refute this with any certainty. But my understanding is that, for example, RSD's "Blueprint Decoded" workshop consists of four days of nothing but self-improvement, as do the Double Your Dating "Man Transformation", "Deep Inner Game", and "On Being A Man" workshop products. So, there are definitely guys out there wanting to buy stuff that's only inner game and has nothing to do with manipulating anybody (or the DYD people sure as heck wouldn't have made three high-end products on the topic!).
Now, whether the products match the way they're promoted, I couldn't say. But I think it's interesting, the shifts in marketing that have taken place over the years, and I think it reflects an increasing understanding that while many guys will buy tricks, what a large percentage of them really want, is just to be someone who's comfortable around attractive women, and doesn't put them off in a hundred tiny ways they don't even realize they're doing.
I think this is a worthwhile thing, and I assume you do as well.
We both think it’s a good thing if men want to learn about how to be more considerate, more confident, and more comfortable around women – you were right to assume I agree here. I have no problem with your examples; in fact, I can tell you now I would probably respond well if a guy started a conversation with me about salad in a confident way. :D
You and I disagree about the extent to which the PUAs are teaching people that. You say that they are, and I believe your examples, but most of the sites I can find are all about sequences, “running game”, tricks, mind games, strategies, etc. They rank women from 1 to 10 and advise different techniques. So many of the websites I am seeing talk about women as though they're objects, not people - and simplistic, easily hackable objects at that. Press button X, the man is assured, and she is likely to respond with Y. I went back to look at them for the purposes at this discussion and I feel revolted all over again. The Mystery Method for example explicitly advises stimulating positive AND negative emotions in a woman, specifically jealousy and frustration, because that makes her emotionally vulnerable to male advances! Do you agree this is highly objectionable?
We also disagree about the touching example. This isn’t about touching in a “courteous way”, this is about touching in a strategic way in order to get her to let her guard down, and to trust you, or even to subconsciously conform to your wishes (ie firm hand on the small of the back). That’s a hack.
The third thing I want to address is your public speaking example. As I said before, this differs from PUA because everyone realises what is going on. The artifice is on the surface – if a public speaker convinces me of something, it is with my permission. The PUArtist intends to hide the artifice, to convince a woman to sleep with him or lust after him without her realising he is using mind tricks to do it. The hiding of the artifice is not always successful, but that doesn’t matter: the problem here is the intention to deceive, the intention to trick a woman into feeling something. That’s why the PUA tricks have more mind-hacking power than asking an audience how they’re feeling or to raise their hands: the participant is not supposed to be aware they’re being played, so their guard against it is unlikely to be as strong.
Yes. The rating system is controversial in the community, and many PUAs refuse to use it exactly because they see it as objectifying. The reason that it probably sticks around is that it happens to be useful: a woman's conventional attractiveness is a factor in how she has been treated by men, and the physiological effect she has on the PUA, both of which are highly relevant.
Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?
Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.
The problem I have with the term "mind tricks" is that a lot of these behaviors are isomorphic to social behaviors shown by men who are naturally successful with women (which is not to say that I don't have a problem with some techniques, see below). The neg, and cocky/funny for instance. It seems counter-intuitive to hold that these behaviors are OK if you don't realize you are doing them, but not OK if you know how they work. Of course, you might see the neg as bad either way, in which case it sounds like the main problem you have is with the effects of the technique, not its covert nature.
And indeed, I also have a problem with the neg. I think that the potential benefits it provides don't outweigh the potential discomfort or insult it can cause to the woman. Or though it might in some contexts, there are better ways to get the same interest without risking hurting her feelings. I think the seduction community as a whole is coming around to this view. Mystery had them believing that negs were practically necessary on highly attractive women in clubs, but eventually people discovered that there were other ways to get their foot in the door, so the neg could no longer be justified on the grounds of virtual necessity.
I'm glad to hear the 1-10 scale is out of favour. I don't care how useful it is. :)
“Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?”
When a guy comes up to me, no, I don’t know how to instantly differentiate a nice guy who wants to make conversation with me from a “nice” guy who wants to subtly insult me to make me emotionally vulnerable.
“Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.”
On reflection, I’m not against all hidden artifice – as I said in my other reply to you, and this I think is also clear from the comment you're responding to now, what I don’t like is the hidden attempt to directly influence the other person. If a person chooses to act such that the other person is completely unaware that actions are being performed on them, and these actions can substantially influence their behaviour, I think that is morally problematic.
So, Ido see the neg as bad either way! That behaviour is wrong whether you are taught to do it by Mystery, or you were just born with the innate ability to put women down to further your own gratification. It’s also covert either way, the only way I would consider it non-convert is if a guy came up to a woman and said “would you mind if I subtly put you down?”. Other seduction techniques are overt: “Can I buy you a drink?” “Can we go somewhere more private?”. Those are fine. I'm not asking for super awkward overtness - there's a set of social conventions people have in place to avoid that (ie "do you want to come up for coffee") and the conventions are common knowledge. But I definitely find the clear harm more objectionable than the covertness - I do still object to the covertness, as I explained in the previous paragraph.
Possibly it would be easier if we had one thread going so either in your next reply or my next reply perhaps we could try to combine both.
The neg can simply be more on the teasing side than on the insulting side. I don't think teasing is all that objectionable.
Part of the issue is that, even when the hurt is minimal, it's a decision that one's own self-interest outweighs the harm to someone else, and as humans we're not very good at making that calculation objectively.
Exactly, thank you.
Hi jfpbookworm, long time no see. I agree with skepticism when making decisions over whether one's self-interest outweighs harm to someone else, which is why in this post I advocated weighing in the potential benefit to the other party also (emphasis added):
I think I came by this way of thinking from reading Mane Hajdin's The Law of Sexual Harassment. He wrote an article in this book that has some relevant comments (read page 297-299, though we don't get 298 in the preview):
He then sets up three hypothetical advances:
10% chance of success, 88% chance of mild annoyance, 2% chance of offense
10% success, 89% mild annoyance, 1% offense
11% success, 69% mild annoyance, 20% offense
He says that advances #2 is obvious preferable to advance #1. As for advance #3, the relevant question to ask is:
When pickup artists think about ethics, I suspect this is the kind of implicit moral framework they are using. Of course, all of these calculations have subjective factors, but they are better than nothing.
Yeah, I don't read most of those sites. As I said, it certainly can be considered selection or availability bias on my part.
However, that being said, I must reject the idea that "PUA is bad" because some or even most PUA are bad. If most women have some disliked property X, it would be just as wrong for me to attribute property X to "women".
Seriously, doesn't virtually every book in the "relationships" section of a bookstore (not to mention Cosmo) do just the same with men?
If one of those books says, "Men need X in order to give you Y, so be sure to give them X", how is this actually any different?
In truth, it isn't. Many men prefer to use language that sounds like they have control or mastery over a situation, and many women prefer language that sounds like they are caring or giving in the same situation.
And, this language difference is independent of the person's behavior. There are women who can read that relationship book and use what they find to make men miserable, and those who want to know because they care.
Same thing with men: there are those who learn PUA to get back at women and society, and there are those who genuinely want to relate better. And for the latter men, the language may or may not be a barrier. I personally relate better to materials that are about "this is what she needs/wants" rather than "this is what button to push", but usually even the button-pushers (among the professional trainers) will include some info about the need/want side of things.
My impression is that the jealousy and frustration here is very mild, on a very playful level. After all, we are talking about two people who've just met a few minutes ago. If someone experiences real jealousy or frustration from a few minutes of Mystery's antics, I suspect they would not be able to handle a normal relationship very well... and not just with him!
For the rest of your comment, I think HughRistik has done a good job of addressing your points. The touch issue, for example, falls under the heading of, "so... it's okay if somebody does it without thinking, but if they do it on purpose, it's somehow bad?" And likewise, if we are not to have any artifice at all, then should we all go out to the clubs unwashed and unkempt, since that's what we look like when we get out of bed in the morning?
And there isn't a single one of these things that isn't matched in one way or another by the advice given to women. Heck, the Double Your Dating guy actually has a product out now for women called "Catch Him And Keep Him", for women to game men with.
Heck, you want to talk about mind hacking... the marketing for Catch Him and Keep Him has far, far more female mind hacking in it than any PUA material I have ever seen. Fortunately for you, it will probably not work on a female rationalist who isn't insecure about relationships - it is specifically targeted at typical fears and insecurities about men.
Of course, that gets back to the question: if you make something that will actually help that insecure woman, is it "evil mind hacking" to tell her what you have and what it will do for her?
And if a guy actually has good qualities, is it wrong for him to advertise them?
More to the point, if the thing a woman happens to want from a guy is a positive experience, then how is it manipulation for him to give her that positive experience, whatever it consists of? Confidence, touch... or even jealousy, intrigue, and drama.
(To say that "a lot of women like drama" would be an understatement of both "a lot" and "like".)
Very unfortunate that we are suggesting censoring a rather important and fertile topic that fits bang in the middle of the overcomingbias/lesswrong framework because:
PUA related discussions are certainly of enormous practical importance; it offers enormous insight into the working of attraction, though I dare say folks at lesswrong may be able to push the frontier way more particularly with their knowledge of evolutionary psychology etc.
PUA related discussions are all the more important and relevant to lesswrong since attraction is an area that conventional wisdom doesn't say enough about, in part due to political correctness.
One thing I have really liked about lesswrong is its manner of addressing politically incorrect questions with honesty; and not having a long list of taboo topics.
PUA tells us a number of uncomfortable things about the human condition, which are true. If Alicorn does like that she would be better off understanding what the reality is and probably figuring out if she can come up with some kind of mass consciousness raising exercise that would ensure that PUA methods are useless and that "Nice guys" without a "game" are seen as attractive (I think it will be a mammoth task to beat the internal attraction hardwiring of people though). At any rate, closing herself to the reality of the world, calling it offensive serves no purpose.
Where do we go from here? We can ban all hard discussions relating to race, religion, IQ differences, inherent difference in people's abilities, inherent mean differences in group abilities etc. We can turn this blog into something with trite and obvious posts or one that simply lies and obfuscates the truth on sensitive topics in the name of political correctness. In that case, this blog would just not be worth reading.
With a ban on this kind of discussion, I think one part of lesswrong and the rationality community here just died...
I'd like to see a more scientific study of what are the real triggers of the ick/"I'm offended" reaction. Perhaps collect all of the instances of comments that caused it and compare with a representative sample of non-icky/offensive comments?
The hypotheses I've seen so far are:
Doesn't that assume that whoever suggested the edits knows what's really causing the ick/offense, which you just pointed out may not be the case?
Is it out of bounds to consider plain and simple prejudice as the trigger?
Disgust reactions are frequently based on prejudices that should be challenged and rebutted. People frequently describe male sexuality in strikingly similar ways to how prejudiced people describe (typically male) homosexuality. You know, it's disgusting, it's ridiculous, it's wrong in some indescribable way, it's threatening and dangerous in some abstract, unfalsifiable sense. Except it's not taboo to talk about male heterosexuality that way. Men are pigs, after all, and that they want to have sex is ridiculous and wrong ipso facto. We should question and challenge rather than try to rationalize these impulses. Maybe the validity of this kind of reaction shouldn't be automatically assumed. Maybe the icky wrongness is hard to articulate because you're trying to implausibly rationalize a slippery gut reaction, not trying to describe an elusive actual moral principle.
Here's an interesting interview with Martha Nussbaum on related topics: http://www.reason.com/news/show/33316.html
If by "over time" you mean a time frame in excess of a few decades, I'll point out that LW-style rationality is a large set of complex memes and that empirically, the best way to transmit such meme complexes is parent-to-child, which tends to work better with a viable breeding population.
(How's that for objectifying everyone here and all future potential members?)
I self-identify as a feminist but I'm troubled by a ban on discussing PUA techniques. In the discussions I've seen I've usually come down on Alicorn's side. But I wonder if the need to avoid language that is objectifying or excluding requires us to avoid the topic of pua/game in its entirety. That seems strange. The times I've seen complaints voiced have had to do with how the topic is brought up not the topic itself.
For example if someone says, "I think posters on less wrong don't value having sex with women." Or "here's how you can get women to sleep with you." then the sense in which female posters are being excluded is pretty obvious. But I don't see why a discussion of game needs to necessarily be done in this way. Its just that, unlike all the other subjects we discuss here, game isn't a typical topic in academia so the traditional ways of communicating methods and knowledge is "Here's what you do to bed women" rather than a descriptive account of behavior or an experiment. Obviously any account which attempts to predict the behavior of people will be objectifying-- but that isn't the problem. The problem is that as it is traditionally discussed PUA theory only objectifies women. Indeed, it subjectifies men when it is explained in first or second person. What we ought to do here is stop talking about it like that and start talking about game the way we do signaling and evolutionary psychology-- so that both the men and the women are objectified.
Similarly, because pua theory has been developed by a community of straight men/straight male run businesses it isn't used to incorporating female and homosexual voices. In the same way that male-dominated university sciences has long had a weaker understanding of female sexuality than male sexuality (someone can correct me, that has always been my understanding) the PUA industry has little to say about how women seduce men and even less about developing attraction between lesbians and gays. But there is no necessary reason for this topic to exclude those voices, its just overwhelming has in the past. I don't know if such a male dominated community could or would make strides in this area. However, as long as we didn't lose the good female feminists on this site (We must have some non-hetero posters too!?) I think we could have discussions on this topic that don't exclude.
Do those who feel excluded think that this topic needs to be outright banned or do they think there is a way that PUA theory could be discussed that you wouldn't object to (along the lines I mentioned above)?
I think an outright moratorium on PUA discussion is probably the most practical of the acceptable results. If the people inclined to talk about PUA had the skills and sensitivity necessary to separate the appropriate methods from the inappropriate ones, then this problem would probably be moot in the first place. I said specifically:
These non-depersonalizing methods (or at least, methods which can be used by non-depersonalizers) exist. pjeby mentioned one a while ago that consisted of a greeting, a couple of sentences, and a straightforward request; there is nothing dishonest or intrinsically objectifying about that, and if I could rely on PUA-discussion-inclined people to confine discussions to non--depersonalizing ways of achieving their (not inherently immoral) goals, I'd back off.
Sadly, I cannot rely on that.
As long as that moratorium applied equally to denigrations of PUA and related concepts, I'd be fine with it myself. Virtually all my comments on the subject are attempts to correct ignorance and stereotyping (or less often, to answer questions), so stopping the stereotyping would eliminate my desire to correct said stereotyping.
(Not that I claim to speak for anyone else's feelings about the matter. Just saying I'd be fine with a moratorium, because I'm not the one who keeps bringing the subject up.)
It's a bit of a cliche, but I don't think techniques depersonalize people. People depersonalize people. It's a rare PUA technique that falls unequivocally into one camp or another, because people can do the same thing with different attitudes or for different reasons.
As far as "techniques" go in any case, some PUGs have said that, apart from honesty, confidence, and other "inner" issues, the most important things to learn are social and logistical skills, like how to gracefully handle her friends' concerns about you, set up other meeting times, etc. But these basic and pragmatic qualities and skills are unlikely to be a topic of heated discussion on LessWrong!
The nature of the PUA topic is that discussion will be biased towards the sensational and the controversial, since to the extent everybody agrees that honesty and confidence and basic social skills are good, we don't see any reason to talk about all that.
Thus, the only things that get talked about here are:
The bad things that outsiders have heard about, but don't always know much about, and
The things some insiders believe outsiders get wrong about "women" or "dating" or whatever
And I don't actually like either #1 OR #2 showing up here, because #2 usually consists of overzealous, immature, borderline-misogynistic babblings about how terrible conventional views of relationships are and why guys shouldn't be "nice", and occasionally attacking honesty as a poor policy.
In its own way, this is just as ignorant as the things in category #1, except that the people in group #2 really ought to know better. So then I end up wasting a lot of trying to educate (or just arguing with) both groups... something I could just as easily do without.
Yup. But I have no confidence in the ability of bringer-uppers to dance through that minefield, and the whole topic seems eminently skippable.
What have we learned from discussion of PUA to date? I honestly can't say I've gained anything useful from reading about it, but then I've never considered using a pickup technique, either. The problem is that I haven't learned anything of other interest to a rationalist. If someone can offer what they've learned from talking about PUA on Less Wrong that applies to the art of refining human rationality and not simply picking up women, perhaps it's an appropriate subject. In that case, if someone writes a good article on PUA, I don't see a reason to ban it. I would expect to see it argued from a more credible perspective than anecdotal evidence and self-help books, though.
This. I'm not "creeped out" by people merely talking about PUA techniques, but I do find it boring, irrelevant, and pretty much useless in terms of any capacity to improve my thinking abilities. I don't think all examples / analogies used to make a point about rationality, etc., need to be things everyone can identify with (that would likely be impossible anyway), but PUA stuff really is sort of distractingly specific to the "hetero males trying to score hot chicks" demographic. I'd just as soon be reading about how to choose the best golf shoes.
Ok, I'll try to put together a top level post.
"But let a female rationalist be the one to say it."
this really bothers me.
Indeed. I don't see why that bit was needed, but I was hoping we could all ignore that one.
Okay, sorry for the ambiguity here.
I'm not assuming that the hypothetical original denigrator of evolutionary psychology would react better to a feminine rebuke. I think this hypothetical person is lost to us anyway.
I think that someone who calls evolutionary psychology unfeminine, is insulting the honor of feminity - but it's not my place to say that. It's not my place to borrow offense, if indeed the honor of feminity has been insulted.
Someone who has actually, directly, personally been offended... can be apologized to, her offense has a limit because it's hers. Someone borrowing offense - how do they ever know when an apology is enough? They can always insist that it's not enough because they're not really the one being apologized to, and maybe if they accepted the apology, it would mean they weren't sufficiently virtuous enough in their offense.
It's sort of like how I'm willing to argue with genuinely religious people or Luddites but not with hypothetical religious people or Luddites being simulated by nonreligious people or non-Luddites, who can always refuse to be hypothetically persuaded because there is no limit to how unreasonable and evil the simulator thinks a theist or Luddite can be, in contrast to real theists and Luddites who think of themselves as the good side.
That is, in general, I don't like to borrow trouble - the first-order troubles of this world are enough.
...Is there some chance I can, like, deputize individual (amenable) males who I think have their heads on straight? This would make me feel less like I have to go on being the feminism police because I am one of a handful of people around here eligible (by your standard) and one of even fewer who also cares and is obstinate enough to speak up.
Edit: Why does this apparently bother multiple different people that I suggested it?
Edit 2 to address replies (thanks for the explanations): I was not suggesting that I should, upon seeing a sexism-related problem, call on these hypothetical deputies and collaborate on hammering the comment into oblivion. I meant that the hypothetical deputies would have the approval of me, a female, to identify things that are "insulting the honor of femininity" so that if this identification needs doing, it doesn't have to fall to me to do it. In my mental model, they'd do this on their own initiative, much as [anyone who I would select] already does; they'd just have the backing from someone with the anatomical credentials Eliezer wants to make this sort of call.
You could -stop being the feminism police-and move on.
Okay, anyone who ridiculed my remark about the potential "special class of feminist censors", you may begin your gold-plated apologies ... now.
Did you not read the rest of this thread? EY suggested that one might require certain 'anatomical credentials' (not his wording) to speak up, and Alicorn despaired that it might put an undue burden on her and asked if other people could help.
Incidentally, insisting that people apologize to you is not good form.
That speaks to whether the feminist censors' existence is justified. That issue is distinct from my point, which is that Eliezer_Yudkowsky's proposal amounts to assigning feminist censors, which turns out to be an accurate assessment.
You may have wonderful reasons for supporting this policy, but I was absolutely right about the implications of Eliezer_Yudkowsky's proposal, when others didn't see such implications.
Perhaps, but so is:
1) Ignoring warnings that turn out to be correct.
2) Not apologizing for ridiculing someone who turned out not to deserve it.
This would be a credential of negative value. I think (whether accurately or not) that I have my head on straight on this matter, but if I comment on these things it will only be because I have found it worth commenting on, not because I have been conferred with an office of The Male Voice of Feminism, no matter who by.
I downvoted you because you're endorsing overt factionalization of Less Wrong's userbase (again). As the previous discussion has shown, there's no shortage of people (male and female) who will take genuine offense at objectifying or otherwise insensitive language: we have no need for meat-puppets or "deputies".
Edited to address reply: The only situation where Eliezer called for female rationalists to intervene was to debunk a hypothetical feminist commenter who took offense at eminently sensible things like, say, evolutionary psychology [1]. This is not at all the same as identifying genuine sexism concerns.
[1] Which is ironic, since evolutionary psychology as currently practiced is full of baseless "just-so stories". It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of these stories were genuinely problematic.
I downvoted you because I believe mod power should never be centralized. Once you deputize four other people, you're able to instantly make any unfavored comment invisible; I wouldn't like any entity on LW (except maybe Eliezer) to have such power.
Unless, of course, anyone else upvotes the comment in question.
The idea of deputies is... well... silly... but I suppose if you actually were finding that it took up your time, then sure, I guess so. I'm hoping you won't have to do this more than once in a blue moon once we settle what the actual LW policy is.
I have no idea. Those downvotes really should've come with an explanation.
I have plenty of guesses, on the other hand, for the downvotes:
1) divisive langauge - there are those who "I think have their heads on straight" and everyone else, who is suspected of wrongdoing. probably more offense at being suspected than desire to behave brutishly
2) attempt to assume authority and power - unless your position is secure, or your proposal compelling, people will tear down and mock the young upstart
3) interpetation of "i think we should do this" as a call for votes
4) actual rational disagreement
Given the variety of ways people objected to "Sayeth the Girl", I suspect even firsthand "anatomical credentials" are ineffectual.
I'm not saying I won't help call out sexist remarks, but that "how would you know that's sexist?" is a Fully General Counterargument you will face whatever reproductive system you have.
That's why I'm suggesting a policy which says "We want to avoid writing that causes women (or any other gender) to flee", rather than a policy which says "Sexism is a bad, bad thing." You don't need to know what's sexist. You just need to know what makes you personally (not some hypothetical average woman) want to flee.
You just need to know what makes you personally (not some hypothetical average woman) want to flee.
This assumes two things.
One: there being enough women available to identify the offputting behavior.
Two: there being no men capable of identifying the offputting behavior.
The first is false and the second offensive - and yes, offensive to me personally, as a black male social liberal. It's not the victim's job to fight unjust discrimination. It's everyone's.
Edit: As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out, "discrimination" is an unfairly loaded term in this context. I shouldn't have used it. To reword: offputting behavior can be recognized by more than just those it would make uncomfortable, and it is, in fact, everyone's responsibility to avoid it in their own writing and to point it out in others. (With the caveat, as thomblake and Jonathan_Graehl observed, that offensiveness should not be pointed out where it does not exist, and overzealous policing should be discouraged as well.)
But it's not about discrimination. It's about providing a non-gender-unfriendly environment. We are not assuming the speaker is guilty - of sexism, of deliberate intent, of anything. We are not on a crusade. We are just trying to avoid that sort of speech in the future.
True, but Eliezer's point is well-taken. One wouldn't want to defend hypothetical people that don't even exist.
Women exist. Given that, your objection must be other than that expressed in the surface content of your words. Please make it explicit so it may be rationally discussed.
In the interests of full disclosure and not being deliberately obtuse: I suspect you may be concerned that kneejerk censorship of remarks perceived to be offensive to a given group by those ignorant of the feelings of members of that group towards said remarks (a phenomenon often pejoratively referred to as "political correctness") would inhibit the free exchange of ideas to an unacceptable degree. I propose that a reason why you might be concerned in this fashion is because "offensive" looks like a chaotic feature of the environment to you - the metaphor in this case being that of a minefield, with the pejorative political correctness being roping off the entire thing even though many topics you wish to discuss are within it.
If that's your concern, stop it. It's not a minefield. If you want to avoid accidentally giving offense, all you need is empathy and education. And if you think you have those things but you're still accidentally offending people, you're probably wrong. Now let's start getting less so.
The "hypothetical people that don't even exist" would be "people who are offended by comment X". Given how often people are mistaken about what might give offense, it's easy for some crusader to start campaigning on behalf of someone who doesn't want or need their help.
Another critique of offense once-removed comes from the comedian Bill Maher. He rails against what he calls "feigned outrage", which he takes to be mostly to be aimed at establishing one's status as a defender of the weak.
I don't think second-hand offense is all conscious signaling, but it's certainly sometimes inapt and even a little patronizing.
I've complained about racist comments in various net communities I've been a part of, and been met with the excuse "you're not even Mexican, don't be so intolerant" etc.
I don't mind leaving the "that's unfairly demeaning of X-people" argument as long as there are refutations available independent of that. But there are certain offenses which, when met with only silence, could result in every single offended person simply deciding that the community is not worth it, leaving without even a reply.
That's clearly not the case re: the pickup teapot's tempest.
When we find such crusaders, we should criticize and downvote them appropriately. We should all avoid being ones ourselves. And, on a different note, we should establish a norm in which declarations of offensiveness require justification.
None of these require that we restrict all complaints of offense to when we are personally insulted. That requirement would almost entirely eliminate complaints even in the face of endemic bad behavior, which is precisely what we do not want.
A policy that says we have to carefully monitor our writing lest we scare someone away makes me want to flee.
I already carefully monitor my writing so that it reads properly for the intended audience. It's called "writing well". Sometimes "editing" specifically.
You may be overestimating the effort involved here. I doubt you are in the habit of using - to draw an example from the French Revolution, as has been suggested - the phrases "clergy" and "enemies of the revolution" interchangeably, or any of the equivalent modern equivocations which can offend. If I were to try to make concrete rules, I would say to use the singular "they" or randomize pronouns for hypothetical persons, take care to be general when speaking in the second-person, and question any generalizations you propose not strongly backed by peer-reviewed evidence (particularly about nations and genders). That set of rules doesn't sound onerous.
It's not about the amount of effort it takes, it's about this whole mentality that when a certain turn of phrase or writing style risks 'offending' or 'scaring off' a person, the one who has to give way is always the writer, never the reader. In other words, it's assumed that the responsibility lies with the writer to change his wording, rather than with the reader to see past the offending words to the meaning behind them.
The mentality described above is similar to the one that has forced anyone speaking in public to use the childish euphemism "n-word" instead of saying "nigger", even when it's obvious from the context that they're not expressing a racist sentiment. People will even say, "Hey, don't use the n-word, you racist!" They have to speak this way because, where the word "nigger" is concerned, it's universally believed that it's the speaker's responsibility to censor himself rather than the listener's responsibility to actually use his brain and understand what the other guy is saying.
I think this mentality is lazy and anti-rational. The way I see it, if you're offended by the superficiality rather than by the substance of my words, it's your problem, not mine. Being able to overlook the surface of a message (and suppressing whatever feeling of offense it may have triggered in you) is an essential skill to a rationalist, and skewing the balance in favor of easily offended readers can only cause its atrophy.
If you find the kind of monitoring Eliezer is advocating natural, go for it, but don't pester the rest of us about it.
I take it you're not a professional writer, then?
You sure as hell aren't a professional reader.
EDIT: I guess I'll clarify, just in case thomblake isn't the only who doesn't get it. I am not arguing that crafting your post, article, or comment to 'reach the widest audience possible' isn't the best thing to do. What I'm arguing against is the promotion of the mentality I've described at length in my previous post. Constantly pestering LW posters (however politely) to get them to change their wording promotes that mentality.
If all LW posters magically started using 'them' instead of 'him', and so forth, do you think I'd be saying "No, no, no, this is wrong, go back to using 'him'!" Of course not. It's the pestering about the wording I'm against, not the wording itself.
You're right that people can be hypersensitive. It's a fool's errand trying to avoid offending such people, and if I were suggesting that you try, you'd have every right to tell me off.
But think about what you're sounding like for a moment. From what you said, you'd think it was an imposition to expect that you not call black people "niggers"! Why would you want to? Why would you want to anger a large part of your potential audience, why would you want to lose their respect and their attention?
I wouldn't call black people niggers in a sentence such as, "Niggers tend to be less well educated than whites", because that would clearly imply that I'm being racist (or a troll).
On the other hand, using 'him' instead of 'them' as a gender-neutral pronoun doesn't imply sexism. Maybe one day it will, but right now it doesn't. Anyone who is offended by this kind of wording is hypersensitive.
Behold, the internet. It's full of people, and most of them have something to say. In a market of attention where people decide "should I bother to read this", the power is purely on the buyer's side. In other words, if you want to be taken seriously as a writer it's your responsibility to communicate effectively.
As a group, we all share an interest in keeping the quality of communication on Less Wrong high.
There's a difference between communicating effectively and catering to hypersensitive nuts.
I think we actually agree with each other more than it seems. I agree with the following:
Do you disagree on any particular point? The details are up for grabs, but the gist sounds right to me.
Why is that? And, more importantly, if you are not willing to think about the community before clicking "comment," why would the community mind if you flee?
Now, of course, "carefully monitor" is a bit relative. I would consider myself in thomblake's camp in the sense that I already try to monitor what I write. I also appreciate posts that let me know I accidently offended someone. Hopefully I am not in the minority with either of those behaviors.
Agreed with EY. "deputize" sounds silly.
And I think it's clear enough at this point that you don't need to take any action, as there are enough people being affected regardless of 'anatomical credentials'.
Hey, I doubt I have my head on straight, but if I see comments that display objectionable gender attitudes in my view, I will do my best to critique them. Here's an example of how I've gone about it in the past. The goal was to point out the potentially objectionable implications of that post, and to do so in a way that might actually convince the other person rather than making them feel shamed.
that makes a lot of sense. thanks for clarifying.
I agree that calling evolutionary psychology "unfeminine" because it "denigrates women" is bullshit. The truth about the human brain is not determined by our preferences. But failing to control for cultural influences in ev-psych-speculation is bullshit too. In fact, it's reversed stupidity.
Evolutionary psychology is about human universals and therefore should, in the ideal case, apply to all human cultures at all times. Exceptional cultures that deviate from the biologically determined base should be actively sought for and if found, explained. The pick-up-related speculation here (and on many other forums I've read; I'm not familiar with the PUA literature though) has considered only modern Western women (and to a lesser extent, modern Western men) and tried to explain their behavior by fitness arguments. Cultural explanations of behavior haven't even been considered, even though the proper application of evolutionary psychology should start from identifying human universals, that is, controlling for culture.
As the debate has dragged on, it has seemed to me that some have even hinted that offering cultural explanations of behavior instead of fitness arguments is evidence of a mental stop-sign or a refusal to accept the "hard facts". I invite them to consider the historically widespread practice of pederasty. Does pederasty confer a fitness advantage to either partner or maybe both? If it indeed does confer a fitness advantage, how can it be determined if this has actually been adapted for? How does the explanation take into account the revulsion towards pederasty felt in our modern culture? Or alternatively, if pederasty is to be considered a cultural deviation from the evolutionarily determined base culture, how can it be assumed that the modern Western culture is free of such deviations?
So, in my opinion, a very relevant issue for this whole debate is that the pick-up-related ev-psych-speculation has failed at actively seeking for contradicting evidence. Combined with the "objectifying" nature of the speculation - women considered as little more than sex-providers - it shouldn't be in the least bit surprising that offense has been taken.
That was something of a rant, I guess. What did it have to do with the possible limiting of discussion anyway? Well... A theory that sounds offensive but is (according to overwhelming evidence) correct shouldn't offend anyone. A theory that sounds offensive and is obviously wrong can just be ignored and downvoted into oblivion. Speculation that sounds offensive, is taken seriously by some but actually fails to consider simple, less offending alternative possibilities is something that communities should seriously be wary of.
Why do you think the comment bothers you?
partially because if I was a female rationalist it would be offensive to me that Eliezer assumes I would respond differently to the same comment simply because of the gender of the commenter. Just like it would be offensive to me as a black person if the LW community thought that I would only respond positively to comments made by another black person.
there's absolutely nothing wrong with men making generalizations about women, nothing wrong with whites making generalizations about blacks or vice versa. allowing overly sensitive members of minority groups to dictate behavior is a waste of time.
"there's absolutely nothing wrong with men making generalizations about women, nothing wrong with whites making generalizations about blacks or vice versa. allowing overly sensitive members of minority groups to dictate behavior is a waste of time."
Are you serious? Assuming that you are, you are treading on ground that is far from stable, especially in a place such as this...
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I fear I play a poor inquisitor, and you a poor Galileo. The thought that it's all right to make broad generalizations about large groups of people isn't some great new theory that society is trying to suppress-- it's just wrong. Indeed, such an idea is regressive, not revolutionary.
you're attaching a bunch of words with negative connotation without actually telling what's wrong. we all make generalizations all the time. we can't interface with reality without making generalizations. if it is clearly wrong then you have the entire apparatus of social statistics to debunk.
I'm quite surprised that this requires explanation, since this seems like basic-level rationality to me, but here we go:
Generalizations about people of a particular ethnicity, based solely on their ethnicity, are racist. Overt racism is not acceptable in modern civilized society. In the past, overt racism was acceptable, but we have moved beyond that. It is extremely unwise both from a personal belief perspective and from a general signalling perspective to hold or argue for such views.
generalizations about individuals based on their ethnicity is clearly dumb. inquiring into broad trends that correlate well with ethnic divisions is interesting and demands further research.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/116483.html
we're at the dawn of understanding genetics. to preemptively decide that a branch of inquiry will not be allowed simply because our ancestors were ignorant douche bags is silly. as rationalists I'd say it's our job more than most to take a mature, level headed look at the data that emerges. things are really going to heat up once we get cheap complete genome sequencing. we'll be able to look at actual allele distributions in ethnic sub-groups on a large scale for the first time in history (!)
I understand this research, view it as important, and know several people who are working in this field at the present time. That said, the work of geneticists is quite different from casual social observations and generalizations. When I speak out against sweeping generalizations based on gender or ethnicity, I do not speak out against the geneticists.
And you'd be wrong to be offended.
Because as far as we know, humans can't reliably switch off the biases that would make them act irrationally in such a circumstance, and a rationalist should be humble enough to acknowledge when his/her brain can't be expected to do the right thing.
That being said, I agree with your second paragraph: there's nothing wrong with making generalizations, per se. (Actually speaking about them, however, or otherwise revealing them to other persons, alas, is fraught with many perils.)
See... that's where I'm not willing to go, there. That is a hole with no bottom. There's enough real trouble in the world without borrowing imaginary subjunctive counterfactual trouble on top of that. If I really said something offensive to a female rationalist, a female rationalist can tell me so.
I'm not sure Eliezer qualifies as an "overly sensitive member of a minority group" but I take your point. I think he's making a pragmatic decision but we can disagree.
In this particular case, I think Eliezer is arguing that the hypothetical woman who thinks all evolutionary psychology discussions are sexist is not a rationalist. As such she has no rationalist honor and would probably not respond as you (being a male rationalist) would. I think it's fair to give her (as a female assumed-non-rationalist) a little breathing room, which is what I think Eliezer is suggesting.
I think this is consistent with his narrative of trying to recruit/grow the rationalist pool, and as such trying to be more tolerant/welcoming of people who may not yet be rationalists but are interested and learning.
Put me in the camp of those who agree with avoiding exclusionary language (particularly sexist language), but who disagree with limiting or eliminating discussion of particular topics.
So far, the situation seems to be that some people who have detailed knowledge of the seduction community think that it is relevant to discussions of rationality.
Other people suggest that this topic may lead to low quality discussions, particularly due to the tendency of some people who discuss it displaying gender-related insensitivity. Consequently, some of this latter camp suggest limiting the discussion of pickup on LessWrong.
This view suggests that the difficulties in discussing pickup are so great that they exceed the benefits of discussing it, at least for now. I argue that this view is premature.
It is premature to assume that the pitfalls associated with discussing pickup and rationality are best dealt with by a moratorium on the topic. It is only the "best solution" in the same way that a police state is the "best solution" to crime: solving the problem, but at what cost? As I pointed out to Alicorn, some of the comments she protests met with vigorous disagreement, including by some people like pjeby who support discussing pickup here. As I result I suggest a revolutionary solution to posts that show problematic gender-related attitudes: it's called the reply button and the downvote button.
So far, a detailed case relating pickup to rationality and bias has not been made on LessWrong (though I've made brief starts ). Consequently, people without detailed knowledge of pickup are not qualified to judge whether it is worth discussing on a forum devoted to rationality, even granting that the pitfalls may be difficult to deal with. It seems close-minded and antithetical to a rationalist forum for some of these people to attempt to block a discussion that they can't know the potential value of, merely because of certain pitfalls in those discussions, pitfalls that maybe avoidable in better ways. The poll is worthless because many voters are unaware of the potential important relations of pickup to rationality, and why other posters here believe that such relationships exist.
Rather than blocking discussion on pickup, we should attempt to improve it. Improve first, ban later. Specifically, the community can enforce norms on minimizing locker room language or uncritical discussion of potentially morally problematic techniques.
In short, reply > ban, and karma > Kafka.
Additionally, sometime we might see some top level posts relating pickup to rationality (including with a critical perspective, such as observing biases in the community). That way, the skeptics can see what the fuss is all about. I'm been considering a top level post, but I'd been planning other posts first to minimize inferential distance. Top level posts will also allow people to get stuff off their chests on this subject without creating tangents in other threads.
Frankly, I thought the idea of a ban on a topic was a bit heavy-handed. But it's clear that the sanity of those who participated in this discussion should be called into question, and when Kiritsugu speaks, we should listen.
To be clear, I also support not discussing it here, as long as the ban extends to making negative statements about it.
I just can't get over the fact that there is an active discussion of professional Casanovas on a blog for hardcore pocket-protecting nerds. And from this discussion, it also seems that these Casanovas form a thriving community, like makers of miniature cars.
I can sort of see how a woman might find such a thing just a tad creepy. Like sleeping with a spy.
In many cases perhaps the appropriate action would be raise this woman's consciousness: men's sexuality isn't necessarily scary or threatening.
I also see the amusement value of the fact that there is a semi-cultish PUA subcommunity. It reminds me of people who regularly spend significant money attending real-estate conventions to receive advice on how to make big deals, yet have never made a deal in their life and possibly never will (this comes from a friend who has purchased, rented, and sold real estate, and thought to get some value out of said conventions).
However, I hope your "just can't get over the fact" is for dramatic effect, because you really do need to accept the reality: they're rational, except they're suspiciously easily convinced that they really could be getting all the sex they want.
Methinks you underestimate the diversity of the readership here. Or, at the very least, you underestimate the diversity of people who can be described as hardcore pocket-protecting nerds.
Facebook says otherwise :)
It would seem more accurate to say there are two seperate phenomenon. Using male-gender only pronouns or male-centered examples and hypotheticals doesn't seem to objectify so much as it seems to exclude.
Objectifying, as you allude to, is more related to Kant's good old categorical imperative of treating people as ends and not means. Statements that women (or sex with women) are goods to be obtained, like a nice car, seems to be the issue. That is, treating women without any respect for their utility (or humanity) seems to be the problem called "objectifying," and it seems different from "excluding."
Banning specific topics is probably a good meta-policy for the community: once anything associated with a topic starts to hurt the discussion, for any reason at all, without coming to a resolution, a "cool-down" mode can be switched on by adding the topic to a list of banned topics. This improves the forum for the coming months, and once the ban is lifted (there should be no permanent bans), the topic either loses its harmful qualities in the new context, loses attention of the community, thus causing no more trouble, or gets resolved after a fresh look.
(Inspired by Alicorn's comment.)
ETA: Here's a poll about banning the PUA topic.
I second this; I think that a moratorium (for a month or two) on PUA theorizing would be better for the LW community than either a permanent ban or the continuation of the currently-entrenched battle on it, either of which would probably drive away a number of valuable rationalists. (Goes without saying that bashing PUA theories would also count as trolling during the moratorium.)
I want to see what the support looks like for this. Below is an informal poll: vote your preferred option(s) up and the karma offset comment down.
EDIT: You know, Vladimir has a better setup: take his poll below and we'll count them up after a bit. I'm deleting the current poll setup, with nothing at more than +2; sorry if you'll have to revote.
I'm keeping my "zero-boxing" comment, though.