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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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.
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."
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, I also support not discussing it here, as long as the ban extends to making negative statements about it.
"But let a female rationalist be the one to say it."
this really bothers me.
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.
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.
that makes a lot of sense. thanks for clarifying.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
I do that on purpose. But I'll fix it.
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.
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
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.
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)?
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.
Yup. But I have no confidence in the ability of bringer-uppers to dance through that minefield, and the whole topic seems eminently skippable.
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?
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.
EXTRA KARMA OFFSET: If you voted two suggestions up, you can use me to equalize the karma effect.
Um...
I zero-box on Newcomb's Problem!
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."
Agreed. So in short, when things go wrong, this should happen:
"blah blah blah"
"Hey, that's the sort of remark we agreed not to have around here"
"Sorry, didn't notice. Edit: bleh bleh bleh"
Sure, until it results in:
"Women might be less willing to take dangerous jobs because in the EEA[1], there was less return to taking big risks."
"Hey, that's disempowering to women and we agreed not to be like that here."
"Sorry, didn't notice. Edit: Women can do every job a man can."
[1]Environment of evolutionary adaptation aka ancestral (ETC wrong word) environment aka where most modern human psychology was molded
Come now. "Less willing to take risks" is a probabilistic statement, not a statement about every female or any individual female. To consider that disempowering is wrong (though some might mistakenly).
I would encourage prefacing potentially mis-interpreted statements with a reminder genetic or evolutionary pressures do not determine any individual's behavior.
It should be the responsibility of the person who presents a fact or theory to at least take steps to make sure it's not intentionally or unintentionally misused. If you discover something about ethnicity and IQ, or nurture and homosexuality, or anything else that's potentially explosive, you should be sure you make an effort to disarm the dark side from abusing it.
Sure, just like to consider it disempowering to say, "getting rich will get you women" is wrong.
But you don't get to make that call. It will be up to the special class of feminist censors to (arbitrarily) decide what counts as "objectifying". Who can then use that power to taboo any argument they don't like, since that topic is "beyond the pale". Because who's going to stop them, right?
I understand your objection to granting immunity from criticism certain ideological preferences (and I didn't vote your comment down). However, my thought is that here at LW we can identify the difference between "women can't do the same jobs as men" and "many women don't do the same jobs as men, perhaps in part because of prehistorical environments."
"Getting rich will get you women" isn't disempowering; it's just lame. "Research/theory suggests that getting rich will make you more attractive to potential mates, if you are male" is at least defensible.
By the way: ancestral environment.
That's a complete non-sequitur. The first statement is not the sort of thing we've been talking about, and its 'rephrasing' has an entirely different meaning. Are you just trying to keep this conflict going?
Precisely.
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.
you need to do some formatting on that link. looks like your (] got switched around.
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
One of the (few?) areas where I would disagree with Nussbaum. She believes that ordinary human emotions are informative and should be taken seriously, with the special case that disgust should be ditched entirely, and I'm pretty sure there's at least an obvious tension there.
I don't necessarily agree with Nussbaum, I just thought it was interesting and related.
There is ample stuff that's perhaps more empirical
Also, are there any papers on the evolutionary psychology of giving and taking offense in general? The closest thing I've found is http://www.slate.com/id/2202303/pagenum/all/, but that's a magazine column rather than a scientific study.
I'd also be interested in any papers on the ethics of giving and taking offense from a consequentialist perspective.
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.
While this doesn't confuse me, I do find it confusing.
While I don't find this amusing, it does amuse me. ;-)
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 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?
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?
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.
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 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.
Do PUA techniques withstand the woman's reflection? Once made aware, do they acknowledge the effectiveness and accurately reaffirm their interest independently of the technique's effect? If incredulous, is her attention held after a demonstration on another woman?
If the answer is yes, that does a good deal in converting PUA from a ("dirty") trick (like Fool's Mate, in chess) into a valid strategy (like Sicilian defense). If you could demonstrate valid strategies, you'd get a lot more karma out of the effort.
For PUA styles described as "inner", "direct" or "natural" game, the answer is yes, since they all focus on making the man actually have attractive qualities (such as honesty, confidence, social connections, and emotional stability), rather than simply presenting the appearance of these qualities.
It's rather like "How to Win Friends and Influence People", in that respect. (Whose advice is to cultivate a genuine interest in other people, as opposed to merely faking an interest in other people.)
I missed most of the PUA stuff, so bear with me a bit. Does "honesty" include averred intention? Does the "natural" style promote the mutual and explicitly acknowledged one night stand associated with PUA, or does it foster a "Relationship Artist"?
Have discussions of the "inner" style conjured "ick" factors? Would continued discussions be frowned upon? (If yes, I think this is a more fruitful area for dissection.)
Yep.
Different teachers promote different things. Daniel Rose, for example, says that one-night stands are stupid because you can't get the same physical or emotional intensity that you can with a longer relationship. Soporno doesn't seem to have an explicit duration preference, but implies that most of the women in his circle have been there for years, and that those who left because they thought they found "the one" are always welcome to return.
But now I'm sitting here repeating stuff that really should be in a FAQ. You should probably just search for my previous comments about these teachers, or perhaps just google their stuff directly; my comments are based on free materials of theirs, as I don't actually spend any money on pickup stuff. I just read it for the articles, so to speak.
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.
You can always write it up on another blog and link to it here. I'm sure many people would follow and comment on it there. I'd certainly be interested in what experimental evidence you propose to collect in order to really confirm or refute the predictions of the theory.
But is PUA discussed here because it's a great example of evolutionary psychology in practise, or because this is a community of mostly single men who are interested in evolutionary psychology? I find neuro-linguistic programming endlessly fascinating and would love to see a good article on it at Less Wrong, but what are the odds that it will reference* pickup artists rather than, say, Derren Brown?
*The odds that no pop cultural references will be made are low. This is Less Wrong.
I admire Derren Brown enormously for his cleverness, but he's not doing NLP (if indeed there's anything to do: an article which addressed the evidence would be good, I think). He just wants you do think he is. The bit at the end of the trick where he gleefully shows you how he did it using NLP to implant words in people's minds is itself misdirection. It's part of his act, as pretending to be psychic would have been back in the days when people kind of believed in that.
Brown: "Years ago the issue was whether or not you told people it was psychic because people were prepared to believe in psychic ability--and how far down that road do you take them. Now we're in a situation where we're into pop psychology, and NLP, all these huge industries, and people are prepared to believe in that, and maybe in a way that's the new psychic realm." The whole interview the quote came from is worth reading.
Especially since it contradicts what you just said about Brown not doing NLP. From the interview:
It struck me that the interviewer was really pressing Brown rather hard to say that things like NLP and hypnosis are shams and false, and Brown was pressing back rather hard with the idea that no, people can actually get some benefits from learning these things, they just won't be able to duplicate all my effects that way.
Of course, I've seen Brown do certain things that are pretty much straight-up, textbook NLP or hypnosis with no real embellishing. For example, confusing a woman about what color her car is - a simple submodality anchoring belief-change exercise, straight out of the NLP textbooks, with no alterations that I noticed.
And the one where he uses blank pieces of paper to pay for things as if it were money, he uses an NLP language pattern to prime the person at a critical moment with the idea that "it's good; take it". (Although I suppose you could say it's an Ericksonian hypnosis pattern; the NLP inventors certainly were among the first to document it, however.)
That having been said, quite a few things he does are not NLP at all, or at least not any cataloged NLP technique I know of.
In neither of the two cases that I just mention, did Brown draw any attention to the NLP aspect of the effects, either verbally or nonverbally. He provided no explanation at all for either, actually. (Maybe he only does it with techniques that aren't real NLP?)
Anyway, I had to very carefully view the paying-with-paper footage several times in order to notice what he was doing, as he was telling different stories each time in which to embed the "it's good, take it" message, which was always timed to occur just as he was handing them the "money".
(Of course, I also respect him for including outtake footage in the episode of him trying the trick on a suspicious hotdog vendor (whose English wasn't so good) and having it fail miserably. I'm glad he's not representing these things as working every time on everybody without fail.)
So, the context is whether it's ethical to let people believe they've understood how the tricks work when their understanding is that it's done with psychic powers or with NLP.
There's also Brown's statement in Tricks of the Mind (see the Straight Dope article on Brown and NLP) that
Given the way NLP is a "dirty word", I don't think Brown is doing whatever you find on NLP courses, or at least, he doesn't think it's quite ethical to let people think he is and as a result decide to pay for an NLP course.
Whether there's anything to NLP is a separate consideration from whether Brown uses it on stage (except that if there's nothing to it, it's obviously not how Brown does it). On the wider question of whether there's anything to it, in the section on NLP in Tricks of the Mind, he says there's some valid stuff in NLP, but he was put off actually being an NLP practitioner by attending an NLP course where there was a lot of bunk mixed in with the valid stuff.
The tricks where I've seen him "explain" how it was done using what I think of as NLP (although, as Brown says, he never uses that word) were the one where he predicted Simon Pegg's ideal birthday present (a BMX bike), and the finale of one of his stage shows, where the effect is that he predicts a word freely chosen from a newspaper which itself was freely chosen from a bunch of possible newspapers (I can't access the formerly working YouTube links for any of these, or indeed your own link, but that may be because I'm in the UK, so you might have more luck viewing them). In both cases, the "explanation" involved words hidden within sentences ("that would B-aM-Xellent present"). "Part of what I do" might mean that he does some stuff which NLP lays some claim to (telling people are lying by watching eye movements) and/or that his act includes him making it look like it was done using NLP :-)
As I pointed out above, at least one effect of his is a straight-up use of two pure textbook NLP techniques: submodality elicitation plus anchoring. Thus in at least one case, "part of what I do" refers to "the entire mechanic of the effect", while perhaps leaving out things like:
However, the actual application and result of what's shown is precisely what you'd expect from a reasonably responsive subject, in response to the demonstrated NLP procedures.
On a semi-unrelated note, if someone you don't trust to muck around with your head ever asks you the questions that Brown asks at the beginning of that video -- i.e. asking you about something that you believe and something that you don't believe -- you would probably be best off answering "no, thanks". AFAIK, even the slimiest, mind-hackiest of NLP and hypnosis-trained PUA teachers don't suggest doing something as unethical as what Brown actually did in that video would've been, if it were done to a non-consenting subject.
I did not realize that NLP was involved in that trick, probably because I know little about it past the name (suggested remedy?).
Which video?
The one I linked to in the grandparent comment, which shows Brown confusing a woman about her car color.
If you mean the paper-as-money one, that one is probably more accurately classified as a hypnosis trick using "quotes" to mask an embedded command ("it's good, take it"), although there are NLP books that explain/teach the same process. (You could consider it a form of applied priming, discovered by hypnotists and NLP people long before the modern studies of priming.)
Do you want technical/theoretical knowledge or practical applications? There are zillions of practical application books, most of which contain considerable amounts of nonsense.
Bandler and Grinder's books also contain lots of nonsense, but it's far more useful nonsense. (I think one even began by saying, "we're going to tell you lots of lies. None of them are true, but most of them are useful. And if you pretend to believe these lies, and act as if they're true, then your clients will also pretend to change. And if you pretend really well, they will continue to pretend to be better, for the rest of their lives.")
Anywho, Structure of Magic I and NLP Volume I are probably the best books for getting the fundamental ideas/theories, and Using Your Brain For A Change contains the basics of the technique Derren Brown used in the car-color-confusion video. The "quotes" pattern and embedded commands (as used in the paper-money trick) are discussed in Frogs Into Princes and Trance-Formations. (All of the above are by Bandler and Grindler, or Bandler by himself, except for NLP Volume I which is by Dilts and others.)
Well, about fourteen lines later he starts talking about NLP again and says "I've taken NLP courses and learned some NLP" and "It's part of what I do." I do think it's all part of his act when he lets you in on the NLP "secret", but I think it's also part of the magic that he puts it out in plain view so that people say "ah, that's misdirection" and discard it. I think magicians have been using NLP much longer than NLP has been an acronym, and I think Brown uses it, along with a host of other methods. However, I think it is often mistaken for more fundamental (and tried & true) psychological techniques like priming.
Thanks for the link.
I'd love to see a detailed text on Derren Brown because the Wikipedia article about him is so intriguing.
My favourite of his shows is his Channel 4 special "Messiah". It's an extraordinary piece on confirmation bias, but worth watching purely for the entertainment value as well. Unfortunately, Brown declines to share his actual methods, although many can be inferred.
[edit] Adding to this, Brown himself is a rare phenomenon: an entertainment celebrity who promotes overcoming bias. Since he appeals to a large audience, not just those who are interested in 'magic' or psychology, I wouldn't be surprised if his shows have caused a measurable increase of critical thinking among his viewers.
I didn't get around to watching this until today, but having just finished part 3/8, I want to urge everyone to watch it and the end of part 2 as well; it was extremely moving and horrifying for me.
It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about what must necessarily be true about irrational believers, but it gave me a more detailed and authentic set of examples than I'd imagined.
Of course, it does occur to me that some of his amazing feats may have involved a few less successful attempts that didn't make the cut - i.e. I feel like his success must be in some way exceptional or unusual (but probably it isn't).
Great recommendation. Just watched it on youtube.
ETA: I'll be sharing that video with family members that I've had fruitless discussions with in the past on psychics, alien abduction, etc.. It's too bad that his programs aren't shown in the USA and his DVDs aren't available here for purchase. I wonder why that is? Surely not lack of interest, given that there are 5 times as many people in the USA than the UK. And the greater number (proportion?) of proudly irrational people in the USA would only ensure that any such program would be that much more controversial and thus that much more lucrative.
One could also reference marketing; there are two NLP-in-advertising blogs out there that I read, for example. (http://nlplanguagepatterns.blogspot.com/ and http://nlpcopywriting.com/). Both are pretty shallow, though, compared to, say, the stuff Frank Kern does. Kern sort of is to other NLP marketers as Brown is to other NLP magicians -- i.e., he disclaims any expertise in the subject, but wields it like a master of the craft instead of like a geek fascinated by the subject.
Funny thing that. Your mention of marketing gave me an instant "ick, sleazy" reaction. Does Alicorn feel the same way every time she sees mentions of PUA? If so, I can finally understand where she's coming from!
(This will be my first post on the current flamewar, which I've been hesitant to post on, for obvious reasons.)
If that's where she's coming from, it's a horribly wrong reason to exclude discussion of it. Whether or not PUA techniques repulse you, whether or not you'd be receptive to them, whether or not you intend to use them...
You do need to understand why such counterintuitive methods work, to the extent that they do in fact work. Otherwise, you have a huge hole in your understanding of social psychology, and are setting yourself up to Lose, whether your are a man or a woman.
For what it's worth, I also get a negative physical reaction from PUA discussion, though for very different reasons. I would describe it as a combination of hopelessness at my own ignorance, and refusal to accept that it could be true. In fact, the first time I'd heard about PUAs, someone referenced a related Feyman anecdote, and I rushed to look it up, and after I read it, I felt really, really, unexplainably miserable, almost giving up all hope. By itself, that almost made me fly into a rage.
But rather than ask to be shielded from this mental pain, I save the threads devoted to them, so I can process them at a later time, once I've built up the courage.
To avoid discussion of the topic on the grounds that it makes some people, even most people, feel icky, is to go against everything this site stands for.
Agreed, but there's a world of difference between a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is actively interested in applying them, and a post that discusses PUA techniques under the assumption that the readership is interested in learning more about "the enemy".
In much the same way, there would be a world of difference between a post that gave advice on how best to convert people to Christianity, or to market the latest designer piece of crap, and a post that documented commonly used conversion or marketing techniques for the purposes of understanding how people can come to believe silly things or buy stupid products.
I accept that, in the interest of good communication, people can do a better job with their tone and emphasis when they make PUA posts.
The danger, however, is buying into this idea that you have to adhere to some vague feminist concern that can only result in good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases. While there are valid feminist concerns about objectification, this kafkaesque hypervigilance simply serves to enforce a very self-limiting mindset in posters.
It wussifies them, in other words. I believe that has been my experience, having resolved at an early age to be supersensitive to offending women. I've certainly avoided it, but it's not very conducive to leaving copies of me in the next generation.
Feminist concerns are vague and the only possible result of thinking about them is "good-intentioned male posters walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong secret phrases"?
I guess I can see how, if you don't understand the relevant feminist concerns, then they will seem vague, and that the effect of not really knowing what it is you're supposed to avoid could be quite frustrating. But I tend to think that vagueness, like probability, is in the mind, rather than being a property of the concerns themselves. If you do understand and appreciate such concerns, then it's usually not very difficult to avoid offending people - and even if you do end up accidentally offending someone, it's easy enough to just apologise after the fact, without it opening yet another front in the gender wars.
Maybe this means that the feminists among us need to do a better job of communicating the concerns, but it would also be nice if attempts to do so didn't result in (IMHO pretty ridiculous) accusations of "kafkaesque hypervigilance".
P.S. If trying to understand others' perspectives and attempting not to unnecessarily offend them means that I'm a wuss, then I'll wear the badge proudly. I can't speak for anyone else, but certainly hasn't affected my ability to leave copies of me in the next generation.
But the thing is, we're interested in the truth. What you or anyone else will use it for is their own business. Our goal is not to filter out topics which could potentially enable marketers to sell more crap or something.
Interesting, I don't agree with this at all. Perhaps it comes down to a difference between those of us who are most interested in truth, and those of us who are most interested in winning.
Insofar as anyone's utility function has a term for people-not-being-converted-to-Christianity, people-not-buying-loads-of-crap-they-don't-need, or people-not-treating-members-of-whatever-gender-they-happen-to-be-attracted-to-as-sexual-trophies, what others do with knowledge is their business. Which is not to say that they should somehow censor people who advocate such things; but I wouldn't expect them to sit idly by and pretend that they think these goals are all fine and dandy either.
I agree, but on the other hand, how important is the topic? We can rationally decide to lose the topic here on this ground: not everyone posting or reading has achieved perfect equanimity, but we can help them develop that quality more effectively by tricking them into thinking that we already have it (the illusion would be shattered in the type of failures elicited by each discussion of the sensitive topic).
An absolute prohibition would be ridiculous, though.
Be a rationalist and get over it, since it will inhibit your ability to accomplish "real world" goals like getting paid for your work. But more than that, it'll diminish your quality of life, by requiring you to avoid things that are just a normal part of life.
One reason I'm here is because I used to be the sort of person who got all squicked out by PUA and marketing and whatnot, before I realized that most of my "rationality" was being used in the service of justifying my pre-existing emotional reactions to things.
The thing that really opened my eyes about marketing was understanding that people want experiences, not things, and trying to get them to want what you believe they should want (vs. giving them what they actually want) is not really about being nice to them: it's just your ego talking.
This insight is equally applicable to marketing and PUA, as in both cases, the objection is, "but people shouldn't want that", whatever "that" is. Women "should" want nice guys, and people "should" want products based on their quality, instead of what makes them feel good or enhances their status or sounds more like it's specific to their goals.
But they don't. Not even the people who are talking about how it "should" be; they're just not paying attention to how they actually make buying or mating decisions at the time they're doing it. (It's easy to rationalize afterwards.)
When I first started studying marketing, I began paying closer attention to how I made buying decisions, especially in areas where I had incomplete information or was in a hurry, or focused on some goal other than obtaining the best possible product. And I saw that what I'd been reading was true: I did make decisions based on all sorts of stupid little things, like a difference in one word on the box.
Not because I was stupid or being manipulated, but because I was using the best information I had to make a decision.
Meanwhile, I was also instantly filtering out and rejecting other products, because something sent up a red flag or a question in my mind.
So marketing and PUA are both practical arts of not getting filtered, and giving people what they actually want, without injecting your own ideas of that.
I read and view PUA stuff to understand marketing better, because the best of both have one concept in common: it's called disqualification.
Disqualification means quickly turning off people who are not going to be happy with your product (or person), so as to better turn on the people who will be happy with the product (or person).
This is an inherently polarizing process, though, which is why all the people who aren't in the market for "Obeying 1 Rule Of Fat Loss" or whatever are gonna get squicked, in the same way that women who aren't attracted to the confidence of a man who says he has 30 girlfriends and she can only be his if she's not jealous are going to be squicked by the very idea of it, let alone the actual experience of it.
This is also probably related to the "fandom requires something awful" concept. If you're not willing to turn people off, you'll be forced to dilute your signal to the people you actually want to reach.
That doesn't mean you're going to be perfect at it, of course. I'd prefer it, for example, if my "signal" were accessible to a few more people at LW than it is (notably EY), and I've made some minor tweaks for the LW audience in general. But I'm not going to change it significantly, because the most vocal parts of LW do not always correspond to the parts of LW that enjoy or are informed by what I write... any more than EY is going to change his style to attract religious people, just because Robert Aumann believes in God.
I am extremely leery of rationalism being used as a reason not to feel things.
I would just like to say that among the things most likely to make me want to scream at someone is when they try to give me what they think I want, or what they would want, or what most people superficially similar to me want, instead of what I tell them I want. In words. Out loud.
And I'm extremely confused by your reference here to my post, which was an attempt to illustrate the dangers of allowing your thought process to be driven by your emotions, and to illustrate a tool for identifying whether that is happening (i.e., observing somatic markers).
When I say "get over it", I don't mean "don't pay attention to your feeling", I mean, "pay careful attention to this signal you aren't thinking or behaving rationally, and do whatever it takes to change your thinking in such a way that the feeling does not arise in the first place."
That is, when you can think about the subject in question without the somatic marker of "ick", then you will know you've successfully removed whatever cached thought was making you feel that way. The "ick" does not exist in outside reality, it exists solely in your mind and body, and any attempt to justify it as existing in outside reality is prima facie bottom-line reasoning. That is, irrational.
Wow. That post was particularly hard to read, but somehow I got the impression it was about quite the opposite.
Emotions are powerful tools, and should not be undervalued.
It said that your emotions control your thought process. It didn't say that was a good thing, it said it was a fact.
Nor are they to be used inappropriately. Negative emotions in lasting doses are likely harmful to your health, as well as to your rationality. Depressed people aren't thinking rationally.
I've noticed several instances of "that's so gross and low-class" signaling at LW, and agonized over whether it was worth pointing out (that it's signaling). I don't claim that the internal gross-out feeling is affected; I have had similar reactions all by myself, especially to pumped-up motivational speak on e.g. pjeby's site.
I've decided it's still a valid signal, so I won't be bitching about it when I see it, and I'll continue to express disgust at trashy (even if effective) persuasion (I'm so sophisticated!), but I'll try to moderate my actual feelings of revulsion, so (I hope) I can evaluate the content more accurately.
Relevant post. There is a huge difference between marketing communications which is the garden-variety sort of marketing you're talking about, and marketing research, which is about giving people the things they'll want to buy. (And not just what they say they want to buy, but what they'll actually put cash down for).
Neither of which is, of course, the same thing as what they'll actually enjoy the most.
I'm not even sure what relevant difference there is, the fundamental character of both seem pretty much identical to me.
I'm curious why you have such different reactions to the two.
Huh?!? Seriously, marketing seems sleezy to you but PUA doesn't? To each his own I guess.
I really agree with pjeby below though.
I don't think Eliezer is saying he doesn't like PUA techniques, but rather that the way they're brought up here can make women feel like they're not part of the intended audience - hence the Frank example, which shows a situation where those techniques could be discussed without giving off that impression.
Yup. Is there somewhere in the PUA literature where they tell you to, you know, notice the way women react to your speech? We're not talking about slavish adaptation here. We're talking about noticing.
Yes, it's called "social calibration", and from the way teachers go on about it, I gather it's one of the most difficult things to teach to someone who doesn't have it. By default, people pay more attention to their projections of what other people are thinking about what they're doing, than they are to either what they're actually doing, or how people are actually reacting to it.
Of course, social calibration is even harder in a purely textual environment, especially one where it's easy to mistake one's conversation for a one-on-one interaction with the person you're directly replying to. Here, it can be almost as if you're having a nice little person-to-person chat in a noisy club, and then all of a sudden, the music goes quiet just as you're yelling (to make yourself heard to the person next to you) some embarassingly out-of-context thing , and then everybody's staring at you...
I don't want to have to be socially calibrated on LW.
Social calibration for the seduction community has a very simple rule about talking about pick-up techniques: don't do it, except with other trusted members of the community. If someone outside the community brings it up, just don't mention it, because society has conditioned them to start going into a feminist death-spiral about it.
So if I follow that rule, I will just have to not mention it here.
That seems awfully close to "I want to act like an asshole on LW and not care what effect it has on anyone else". I hope that if you do then you'll get voted into the ground.
I think that holding a belief of the form "You mustn't admit to X outside our inner circle, because the unenlightened have been conditioned by society to hate and fear it" should be treated as a warning sign that one might have been sucked into something unpleasant. I expect the members of various cults have similar rules.
(Of course, sometimes it might be perfectly correct; see, e.g., Paul Graham's essay on what you can't say. But my guess is that such occasions are outnumbered considerably by ones where the reason why you'd get in trouble for saying X in public is because X is stupid or unpleasant or something of the kind, and people who haven't been desensitized to it will notice.
Fully general counterargument against any unpleasant truth.
That sentence wasn't an argument. The two paragraphs containing the sentence do constitute an argument or something like one; they are not "fully general" in any sense that seems problematic to me. The most one can say is this: they claim that if a proposition is socially unacceptable to state then it's less likely to be true. I'm happy to stand by that: I think "unacceptable" propositions are less often true than "acceptable" ones. Do you really disagree with that?
Incidentally, I wasn't primarily thinking of X as being a proposition but as a behaviour or an attitude. I bet that among, say, politicians, advertisers, tobacco company executives, television evangelists, there are common habits or ways of thinking that "of course we wouldn't mention in public -- they wouldn't understand". And that neither you nor I would be keen to defend those habits or ways of thinking, even if we're pretty sure we do understand them.
For the avoidance of doubt, let me repeat something I already said. Of course, some "unacceptable" ideas, behaviours and attitudes are in fact perfectly sensible and are unacceptable only because of silly social traditions or whatever. I claim only that such unacceptability is a useful warning signal.
Apt simile. Noted for posterity.
I can't tell whether your comment was sarcastic or sincere. If the latter, the answer is: yes, oh yes. PUAs devote a lot of effort to reading female responses. But you aren't going to appreciate this noticing when you see it up close. Example (don't click, this is my last warning): Doggy Dinner Bowl Look.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
I can't say that I've ever seen women make as general claims for benevolence and good general effects for dressing up as I've seen made for PUA.
Afaik, woman either say they have fun doing it, and follow up with what's wrong with that?, or they say they're pushed into it because men want it. They don't say they're making men better off even if men say they don't like it.
Also, (and this may be more interesting than the above), being resentful about women dressing up isn't a mainstream modern point of view. It's common in a number of religions and also showed up in communist China.
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.
FWIW, it's the increasing frequency of such events occurring that has forced the evolution of "natural" methods, which aren't vulnerable to such revelations. (Since they attempt mainly to modify the male's personality and expressiveness, rather than teaching him ways to manipulate.)
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...)
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.
Valid concern. I don't know how to get more people active, but it couldn't hurt to get more people aware of this community.
The more people you attract, the more likely some percentage of those people will continue to becoming active, contributing members. Everyone starts out as a visitor. Only a few of those end up becoming regulars. If you get more visitors, your regulars proportionally should rise.
Contrariwise, the worse a first impression you leave, the fewer visitors will remain long enough to become regulars. It is not a priori obvious which effect is the stronger.
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:
Thanks for that study!
Have you ever learned a useful fact from the PUA discussions here?
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?)
Works fine as long as it doesn't objectify a particular gender... is what I think the rule is empirically.
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.
The question is whether that's necessary (or helpful) for finding important truths. You implicitly assume it is a required cost. More generally, is "writing in a way expected to alienate large numbers of people" a price that we must pay in order for our community to succeed?
Any pervasive trend that results in our community being the sort of place that a Dawkins or Dennett or Pinker would avoid is a trend that we should carefully analyze, and the burden of proof is correspondingly high to show that the net benefits of that sort of behavior warrant allowing it. I don't think anybody has shown that the sort of objectionable writing in question has such benefits or that there aren't alternate ways of communicating the same ideas without being alienating, the primary cost being some extra effort required on the part of the writer.
(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.
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.
Ironically, the book's advice is essentially to evoke in yourself genuine interest in what others have to say. You have to abandon the objectifying mindset to achieve the objective.
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.
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.
Yes, I can't imagine any nascent PUAs here are really interested in attempting a text-only seduction of distant, anonymous, females. If they are, they should probably try to attain some basic rationality first, and see why that plan is flawed.
I apparently missed most or all of the PUA discussions here, but my guess is they were trying to discuss strategies--not actually attempting to seduce the women on this forum.
Actually, what happens is that "rationalists should win" usually ends up in someone using PUAs as an example of basic instrumental rationality being applied to winning, or examples from the field of PUA-teacher competition as to the success of visible criteria for rationality teacher awesomeness.
This is then followed by various people (mostly men) denouncing the arts as evil or self-defeating, followed by other men defending them. Unfortunately, this is just as useless of an ongoing conflict as the gender wars; for the most part, the people making ignorant stereotype-based judgments about the pickup arts will no more be convinced by reason or facts than anybody making ignorant stereotype-based judgments about anything. So, I think I at least will stop bothering to answer such ignorance, though if somebody wants to throw together a FAQ page on the wiki, I might be willing to contribute to it. (Certainly, someone with more time is free to link my comments or use the text from them to create such a FAQ).
We could probably generally use more FAQs that summarize the positions on various standard debates here, like the ones on True vs. Useful, Perception vs. "Reality", etc.
Yes. Also, while the jury's still out on whether discussing PUA should be deemed offtopic, I consider it self-evident that actual seduction attempts in the comment threads should be downvoted to oblivion, or better yet never happen here. This would be like students using the "anyone got questions?" phase of the lecture as an opportunity for loud flirting.
Sounds good to me.
This is actually fairly similar to the comment I was thinking of posting, if the discussion headed in a direction that would allow it:
Assume that accessability is relatively isomorphic. I'm not sure if it is, but using that assumption seems to work in this case.
If you're designing a building, and want it to be accessable, it's a good idea to imagine it being used by people of varying abilities. Consider how it'd be used by someone in a wheelchair, someone who's blind and uses a cane, someone with a seeing eye dog, someone who's deaf, someone who has trouble walking very far, and so on. If you can envision all of those people being able to use every aspect of your building, you've probably done a reasonable job.
If you're trying to have a public discussion, and want it to be accessable, it's a good idea to imagine it being used by various kinds of people, too. Would a woman feel comfortable contributing to all of the discussions here? How about a parent? A teenager? Someone from another culture? Someone who's more interested in painting than in programming?
I use the RSS feed, and don't bother clicking on links to articles that don't sound interesting, so I have too much selection bias to comment on what portion of the articles are useful to all of those groups. And I'm not saying that every article has to be useful to everyone. But to whatever degree the discussion here focuses on the interests of unpartnered, heterosexual, male computer geeks - or any other group - over everyone else, people who are not members of that group will find less value here, and simply won't stay.
Teenagers? Parents? What's with that?
The world is full of discussion clubs available to everyone. But virtually all the online communities I've ever liked have first thrived on exclusivity and early adopter bias, and then became utterly uninteresting due to dilution. I, for one, would volunteer to get banned and have read-only access to LW if this would increase the quality of discussion back to pre-gender-wars levels.
See, I'm precisely that math and code nerd that you stereotype. I don't want "accessible"; I want interesting, thought-provoking, mind-expanding. I'd like every post to include math and psychology references to follow into the maze, simulator programs to run and rewrite... If there's an interesting application of math to PUA, I want to see it and try it out, not be overwhelmed by a chorus of accessibility activists who can't even recite the formulas from memory, much less make sense of them. You want to talk gender politics because my choice of words offends you? Go back to your hole where other people's opinions matter instead of facts. I heard Facebook is a nice site - they even have special forums where you can argue about gay marriage.
Whew, sorry if that was inflammatory. I didn't mean you specifically; just a strawman I desperately want to knock down and forget the whole topic like a bad dream.
I really need to find a way of making my 'if' statements more obvious. If you're interested in having a discussion that's accessable to a diverse group of people, consider following the above advice. If not, ignore it. I didn't comment one way or the other on whether or not the group should do so, and even commented negatively on the fact that Alicorn did.
I'm not sure what to make of the comment that I've stereotyped nerds. I strongly implied that the topics here focus on the interests of the most common demographic (again, there was an 'if' in front of that), but you just said that you see that as a good thing, so I'm not sure why you're offended that I mentioned that it may be happening.
I've also said nothing about word choice, mostly because I find feminists who take offense at word choice to be fairly confusing, and if I have to chime in on that issue, my comment will not be in support of them.
ETA: I'm having a very bad brain day. I know this post is probably not as coherent as I usually try to be. My appologies if I put my foot in my mouth somehow.
I found a flaw in my post. There is not a dichotomy between valuing making LW more accessable and valuing other things, so the second sentence should read "To the degree that you value having a discussion that's accessable to a diverse group of people, consider following the above advice. In cases where other things that are more important conflict with that, ignore it."
My apologies; I didn't read your comment as carefully as I should have before replying.
Don't feel too bad, that kind of misreading happens all the time. It's almost certainly something about my writing style. :P
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".
I completely agree. And I like your solution of not going meta and talking about the problem but just making concrete suggestions on the sentences in question. I tend to just downvote in those sorts of situations, but the more constructive response is to suggest a better phrasing.