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Emile comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (647)
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.