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AdeleneDawner comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
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This isn't an explanation at all.
The purpose was to test the waters for another story he was developing; there probably wasn't an in-story purpose to it beyond the obvious one of making it clear that the younger people had a very different worldview than the one we have now. He's been unwilling to give more detail because the reaction to the concept's insertion in that story was too negative to allow him to safely (without reputational consequence, I assume) share the apparently much more questionable other story, or, seemingly, any details about it.
I did upvote your question, by the way. I want to hear more about that other story.
I don't see it doing much good to his reputation to stay silent either, given the inflammatory nature of the remark. Sure, people will be able to quote that part to trash Eliezer, but that's a lot worse than if someone could link a reasonable clarification in his defense.
Yes, I voted Alicorn's question up. I want to know too.
Actually, there's a very good clarification of his views on rape in the context of our current society later in that same comment thread that could be linked to. It didn't seem to be relevant to this conversation, though.
That's certainly an explanation. "Very good" and "clarifying" are judgment calls here...
<non-sarcastic> <non-rhetorical> How could it be better? What parts still need clarifying?
Okay, after reading the thread and more of Eliezer's comments on the issue, it makes more sense. If I understand it correctly, in the story world, women normally initiate sex, and so men would view female-initiated sex as the norm and -- understandably -- not see what's wrong with non-consensual sex, since they wouldn't even think of the possibility of male-initiated sex. Akon, then, is speaking from the perspective of someone who wouldn't understand why men would have a problem with sex being forced on them, and not considering rape of women as a possibility at all.
Is that about right?
ETA: I still can't make sense of all the business about redrawing of boundaries of consent.
ETA2: I also can't see how human nature could change so that women normally initate sex, AND men continue to have the same permissive attitude toward sex being forced upon them. It seems that the severity of being raped is part and parcel of being the gender that's choosier about who they have sex with.
Regarding the first part, I don't think we were given enough information, either in the story or in the explanation, to determine how exactly the 3WC society differs from ours in that respect - and the point wasn't how it's different so much as that it's different, so I don't consider that a problem. I could be wrong, though, about having enough information - I'm apparently wired especially oddly in ways that are relevant to understanding this aspect of the story, so there's a reasonable chance that I'm personally missing one or more pieces of information that Eliezer assumed that the readers would be bringing to the story to make sense of it.
Regarding 'boundaries of consent', I'm working on an explanation of how I understood Eliezer's explanation. This is a tricky area, though, and my explanation necessarily involves some personal information that I want to present carefully, so it may be another few hours. (I've been out for the last four, or it would have been posted already.)
My understanding was that any society has things that are considered consented to by default, and things that need explicit permission. For instance, among the upper class in England in the last century, it was considered improper to start a conversation with someone unless you had been formally introduced. In modern-day America, it's appropriate to start a conversation with someone you see in public, or tap someone on the shoulder, but not to grope their sexual organs, for instance.
I think this is what EY meant by "boundaries of consent": for instance, imagine a society where initiating sex was the equivalent of asking the time. You could decline to answer, but it would seem odd.
Even so, there's a difference between changing the default for consent, and actually allowing non-consensual behavior. For instance, if someone specifically tells me not to tap her shoulder (say she's an Orthodox Jew) it would then not be acceptable for me to do so, and in fact would legally be assault. But if a young child doesn't want to leave a toy store, it's acceptable for his parent to forcibly remove him.
So there's actually two different ideas: changing the boundaries of what's acceptable, and changing the rules for when people are allowed to proceed in the face of an explicit "no".
It seems you're still about as confused as I am. Why do you think the linked comment clarified anything?
Evolutionarily, it would seem that the severity of women being raped is due to the possibility of involuntary impregnation. Do we have good data on truly inborn gender differences on the severity of rape, without cultural interference?
I don't see the need for more than this:
I just figured that these humans have been biologically altered to have a different attitude towards sex. Perhaps, for them, initiating sex with someone is analogous to initiating a conversation. Sure, you wish that some people wouldn't talk to you, but you wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone needed your permission before initiating a conversation. Think of all the interesting conversations you'd miss!
And if that's what's going on, that would constitute a (skeezy) answer to my question, but I'd like to hear it from the story's author. Goodness knows it would annoy me if people started drawing inaccurate conclusions about my constructed worlds when they could have just asked me and I would have explained.
Alicorn: On the topic of your constructed worlds, I would be fascinated to read how your background in world-building (which, iirc, was one focus of your education?) might contribute to our understanding of this one.
Yes, worldbuilding was my second major (three cheers for my super-cool undergrad institution!). My initial impression of Eliezer's skills in this regard from his fiction overall are not good, but that could be because he tends not to provide very much detail. It's not impossible that the gaps could be filled in with perfectly reasonable content, so the fact that these gaps are so prevalent, distracting, and difficult to fill in might be a matter of storytelling prowess or taste rather than worldbuilding abilities. (It's certainly possible to create a great world and then do a bad job of showcasing it.) I should be able to weigh in on this one in more detail if and when I get an answer to the above question, which is a particularly good example of a distracting and difficult-to-fill-in gap.
If I understand EY's philosophy of predicting the future correctly, the gaps in the world are intentional.
Suppose that you are a futurist, and you know how hard it is to predict the future, but you're convinced that the future will be large, complicated, weird, and hard to connect directly to the present. How can you provide the reader with the sensation of a large, complicated, weird, and hard-to-connect-to-the-present future?
Note that as a futurist, the conjunction fallacy (more complete predictions are less likely to be correct) is extremely salient in your thinking.
You put deliberate gaps into your stories, any resolution of which would require a large complicated explanation - that way the reader has the desired (distracting and difficult-to-fill-in) sensation, without committing the author to any particular resolution.
The author still has to know what's inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent - they can't appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won't create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I've never published anything that I would've considered sending in to a science fiction magazine - maybe I'm holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it's not like I'm outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn't suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author's proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer's fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it's unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.
Maybe he's a good futurist. That does not make him a good worldbuilder, even if he's worldbuilding about the future. Does it come as any surprise that the skills needed to write good fiction in well-thought-out settings aren't the exact same skills needed to make people confused about large, complicated, weird, disconnected things?
Taking your question as rhetorical, with the presumed answer "no", I agree with you - of course the skills are different. However, I hear an implication (and correct me if I'm wrong) that good fiction requires a well-thought-out setting. Surely you can think of good writers who write in badly-constructed or deeply incomplete worlds.
Good fiction does not strictly require a well-built setting. A lot of fiction takes place in a setting so very like reality that the skill necessary to provide a good backdrop isn't worldbuilding, but research. Some fiction that isn't set in "the real world" still works with little to no sense of place, history, culture, or context, although this works mostly in stories that are very simple, very short, or (more typically) both. Eliezer writes speculative fiction (eliminating the first excuse), and his stories typically depend heavily on backdrop elements (eliminating the second excuse, except when he's writing fanficiton and can rely on prior reading of others' works to do this job for him).
Perhaps see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination