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AdeleneDawner comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
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I'm not confused at Eliezer's linked comments; I'm confused at your confusion. I think the linked comments clarified things because I learned relevant information from them, the following points in particular:
The rape comment was not intended to be a plot point, or even major worldbuilding, for 3WC. The fact that we don't have enough in-story context to understand the remark may have been purposeful (though the purpose was not 3WC-related if so), and whether it was purposeful or not, 3WC is intended to be able to work without such an explanation.
Eliezer believes that he understands the psychology behind rape well enough to construct a plausible alternative way for a society to handle the issue. He attempted to support the assertion that he does by explaining how our society handles the issue. I found his explanation coherent and useful - it actually helped solve a related problem I'd been working on - so I believe that he does understand it. I understand that you didn't find his explanation coherent and/or useful, but I don't know why, so I don't know if it's an issue of you not having some piece of information that Eliezer and I have and take for granted, or you noticing a problem with the explanation that Eliezer and I both missed, or perhaps some other issue. My method of solving this kind of problem is to give more information, which generally either solves the problem directly or leads the other person to be able to pinpoint the problem they've found in my (or in this case, Eliezer's) logic, but on such a touchy subject I'm choosing to do that carefully.
Here's my attempt at explaining Eliezer's explanation. It's based heavily on my experiences as someone who's apparently quite atypical in a relevant way. This may require a few rounds of back-and-forth to be useful - I have more information about the common kind of experience (which I assume you share) than you have about mine, but I don't know if I have enough information about it to pinpoint all the interesting differences. Note that this information is on the border of what I'm comfortable sharing in a public area, and may be outside some peoples' comfort zones even to read about: If anyone reading is easily squicked by sexuality talk, they may want to leave the thread now.
I'm asexual. I've had sex, and experienced orgasms (anhedonically, though I'm not anhedonic in general), but I have little to no interest in either. However, I don't object to sex on principle - it's about as emotionally relevant as any other social interaction, which can range from very welcome to very unwelcome depending on the circumstances and the individual(s) with whom I'm socializing*. Sex tends to fall on the 'less welcome' end of that scale because of how other people react to it - I'm aware that others get emotionally entangled by it, and that's annoying to deal with, and potentially painful for them, when I don't react the same way - but if that weren't an issue, 'let's have sex' would get about the same range of reactions from me as 'let's go to the movies' - generally in the range of 'sure, why not?' to 'nope, sorry, what I'm doing now is more interesting', or 'no, thanks' if I'm being asked by someone I prefer not to spend time with.
Now, I don't generally talk about this next bit at all, because it tends to freak people out (even though I'm female and fairly pacifistic and strongly support peoples' right to choose what to do with their bodies in general, and my cluelessness on the matter is unlikely to ever have any effect on anything), but until recently - until I read that explanation by Eliezer, actually - it made no sense to me why someone would consider being raped more traumatic than being kidnapped and forced to watch a really crappy movie with a painfully loud audio track. (Disregarding any injuries, STDs, loss of social status, and chance of pregnancy, of course.) Yeah, being forced to do something against your will is bad, but rape seems to be pretty universally considered one of the worst things that can happen to someone short of being murdered. People even consider rape that bad when the raped person was unconscious and didn't actually experience it!
According to Eliezer - and this makes sense of years' worth of data I gathered while trying to figure this out on my own - this seemingly irrational reaction is because people in our society tend to have what he calls 'sexual selves'. As you may have picked up from the above text, I don't appear to have a 'sexual self' at all, so I'm rather fuzzy on this part, but what he seems to be describing is the special category that people put 'how I am about sex' information into, and most people consider the existence and contents of that category to be an incredibly important part of their selves**. The movie metaphor could be extended to show some parallels in this way, but in the interests of showing a plausible emotional response that's at least close to the same ballpark of intensity, I'll switch to a food metaphor: Vegans, in particular, have a reputation for considering their veganism a fundamental part of their selves, and would theoretically be likely to consider their 'food selves' to have been violated if they discovered that someone had hidden an animal product in something that they ate - even if the animal product would have been discarded otherwise, resulting in no difference in the amount of harm done to any animal. (I know exactly one vegan, and he's one of the least mentally stable people I know in general, so this isn't strong evidence, but the situation I described is the only one other than complete mental breakdown in which I'd predict that that otherwise strict pacifist might become violent.) Even omnivores tend to have a 'food self' in our society - I know few people who wouldn't be disconcerted to discover that they'd eaten rat meat, or insects, or human flesh.***
The rules that we set for ourselves, that define our 'food selves', 'sexual selves', 'movie-watching selves', etc., are what Eliezer was talking about when he mentioned 'boundaries of consent' (which is a specific example of one of those rules). They describe not just what we consider acceptable or unacceptable to do or have done to us, but more fundamentally what we consider related to a specific aspect of our selves. For example, while a google search informs me that this may not be an accurate piece of trivia, I've never heard anyone claim that it's implausible that people in Victorian England considered ankles sexual, even though we don't now. Another example that I vaguely remember reading about, in a different area, is that some cultures considered food that'd been handled by a menstruating woman to be 'impure' and unfit to eat - again, something we don't care about. Sometimes, these rules serve a particular purpose - I've heard the theory that the Kosher prohibition on eating pork was perhaps started because pork was noticed as a disease vector, for example - but the problems that are solved by those rules can sometimes be solved in other ways (in the given example, better meat-processing and cooking technology, I assume), making the rule superfluous and subject to change as the society evolves. It's obvious from my own personal situation that it's also possible - though Eliezer never claimed that this was the case for 3WC - for certain 'selves' that our society considers universal not to develop at all. (Possibly interesting example for this group: Spiritual/religious self.)
Eliezer didn't share with us the details of how the 3WC society solved the relevant underlying problems and allowed the boundaries of sexuality and consent to move so dramatically, but he did indicate that he's aware that those boundaries exist and currently solve certain problems, and that he needed to consider those issues in order to create a plausible alternative way for a society to approach the issue. I don't see any reason to believe that he didn't actually do so.
* I am, notably, less welcoming of being touched in general than most people, but this is not especially true of sex.
** I find this bizarre.
*** I have a toothache. The prescription pain meds I took just kicked in. If the rest of this post is less insightful than the earlier part, or I fail to tie them together properly, it's because I'm slightly out of my head. This may be an ongoing problem until Tuesday or Wednesday.
One of the adverse effects of pain pills is temporarily to take away the ability of the person's emotions to inform decision-making, particularly, avoidance of harms.
According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, for most people, the person's ability to avoid making harmful decisions depends on the ability of the person to have an emotional reaction to the consequences of a decision -- particularly an emotional reaction to imagined or anticipated consequences -- that is, a reaction that occurs before the decision is made.
When on pain pills, a person tends not to have (or not to heed) these emotional reactions to consequences of decisions that have not been made yet, if I understand correctly.
The reason I mention this is that you might want to wait till you are off the pain pills to continue this really, really interesting discussion of your sexuality. I do not mean to imply that your decision to comment will harm you -- I just thought a warning about pain pills might be useful to you.
I noticed this issue myself, last night - I'd been nervous about posting the information in the second and third paragraphs before I took the meds, and wasn't, afterwards, which was unusual enough to be slightly alarming. (I did write both paragraphs before my visit to the dentist, and didn't edit them significantly afterwards.) The warning is appreciated, though.
I've spent enough time thinking about this kind of thing, though, that I'm confident I can rely on cached judgments of what is and isn't wise to share, even in my slightly impaired state. I'll wait on answering anything questionable, but I suspect that that's unlikely to be an issue - I am really very open about this kind of thing in general, when I'm not worrying about making others uncomfortable with my oddness. It's a side-effect of not having a sexual self to defend.
I assume that by "pain pills" you mean opioids and other narcotics? I suspect that asprin and other non-narcotic painkillers wouldn't impair emotional reactions...
I'm taking an opioid, but I suspect that the effect would be seen with anything that affects sensory impressions, since it'll also affect your ability to sense your emotions.
Bit of a repeat warning: if you don't want to read about sex stuff, don't read this.
You know, given my own experiences, reading this post makes me wonder if sexual anhedonia and rationality are correlated for some reason. (Note, if you wish, that I'm a 17-year-old male, and I've never had a sexual partner. I do know what orgasm is.)
I would be shocked if they weren't. The most powerful biasses are driven by hard-wired sexual signalling mechanisms.
This makes me wonder how I would be different if I weren't apparently anhedonic. Note that I don't remember whether I first found out about that or stumbled upon Eliezer Yudkowsky; it's possible that my rationality-stuff came before my knowledge.
Thinking again, I have been a religious skeptic all my life (and a victim of Pascal's wager for a short period, during which I managed to read some of the Pentateuch), I've never taken a stand on abortion, and I've been mostly apolitical, though I did have a mild libertarian period after learning how the free market works, and I never figured out what was wrong with homosexuality. I don't know whether I, before puberty, was rational or just apathetic.
That is really, really interesting - thanks!
(P.S. I do think that this is a fair elaboration on Eliezer's comment, insofar as I understood either.)
You're welcome. :)
This was a fascinating comment; thank you.
By the way, the Bering at Mind blog over at Scientific American had a recent, rather lengthy post discussing asexual people.
Okay, sounds plausible. Now, I ask that you do a check. Compare the length of your explanation to the length of the confusion-generating passage in 3WC. Call this the "backpedal ratio". Now, compare this backpedal ratio to that of, say, typical reinterpretations of the Old Testament that claim it doesn't really have anything against homosexuals.
If yours is about the same or higher, that's a good reason to write off your explanation with "Well, you could pretty much read anything into the text, couldn't you?"
I don't think the length in words is a good thing to measure by, especially given the proportion of words I used offering metaphors to assist people in understanding the presented concepts or reinforcing that I'm not actually dangerous vs. actually presenting new concepts. I also think that the strength (rationality, coherency) of the explanation is more important than the number of concepts used, but it's your heuristic.
Fine. Don't count excess metaphors or disclaimers toward your explanation, and then compute the backpedal ratio. Would that be a fair metric? Even with this favorable counting, it still doesn't look good.
I don't think that evaluating the length of the explanation - or the number of new concepts used - is a useful heuristic at all, as I mentioned. I can go into more detail than I have regarding why, but that explanation would also be long, so I assume you'd disregard it, therefore I don't see much point in taking the time to do so. (Unless someone else wants me to, or something.)
Given unlimited space, I can always outline plausible-sounding scenarios where someone's outlandish remarks were actually benign. This is an actual cottage industry among people who want to show adherence to the Bible while assuring others they don't actually want to murder homosexuals.
For this reason, the fact that you can produce a plausible scenario where Eliezer meant something benign is weak evidence he actually meant that. And it is the power of elaborate scenarios that implies we should be suspicious of high backpedal ratios. To the extent that you find length a bad measure, you have given sceanarios where length doesn't actually correlate with backpedaling.
It's a fair point, so I suggested you clip out such false positives for purposes of calculating the ratios, yet you still claim you have a good reason to ignore the backpedal ratio. That I don't get.
More generally, I am still confused in that I don't see a clean, simple reason why someone in the future would be confused as to why lots of rape would be a bad thing back in the 20th century, given that he'd have historical knowledge of what that society was like.
I wasn't trying to explain how Eliezer's world works - I upvoted the original comment specifically because I don't know how it works, and I'm curious. If you were taking my explanation as an attempt to provide that information, I'm sure it came across as a poor attempt, because I was in fact specifically avoiding speculating about the world Eliezer created. What I was attempting to do was show - from an outsider's perspective, since that's the one I have, and it's obviously more useful than an insider's perspective in this case - the aspects how humans determine selfhood and boundaries that make such a change possible (yes, just 'possible'), and also that Eliezer had shown understanding of the existence of those aspects.
If I had been trying to add more information to the story - writing fanfiction, or speculating on facts about the world itself - applying your backpedal-ratio heuristic would make some sense (though I'd still object to your use of length-in-words as a measurement, and there are details of using new-concepts as a measurement that I'm not sure you've noticed), but I wasn't. I was observing facts about the real world, specifically about humans and how dramatically different socialization can affect us.
As to why the character didn't understand why people from our time react so strongly to rape, the obvious (to me) answer is a simple lack of explanation by us. There's a very strong assumption in this society that everyone shares the aspects of selfhood that make rape bad (to the point where I often have to hide the fact that I don't share them, or suffer social repercussions), and very little motivation to even to consider why it's considered bad, much less leave a record of such thoughts. Even living in this society, with every advantage but having the relevant trait in understanding why people react that way, I haven't found an explanation that really makes sense of the issue, only one that does a coherent job of organizing the reactions that I've observed on my own.
So does your lack of a sexual self make it so you can't see rape as bad at all, or "only" as bad as beating someone up? Presumably someone without a sexual self could still see assault as bad, and rape includes assault and violence.
Disregarding the extra physical and social risks of the rape (STDs, pregnancy, etc.), I expect that I wouldn't find assault-plus-unwelcome-sex more traumatic than an equivalent assault without the sex. I do agree that assault is traumatic, and I understand that most people don't agree with me about how traumatic assault-with-rape is compared to regular assault.
A note, for my own personal safety: The fact that I wouldn't find it as traumatic means I'm much more likely to report it, and to be able to give a coherent report, if I do wind up being raped. It's not something I'd just let pass, traumatic or no; people who are unwilling to respect others' preferences are dangerous and should be dealt with as such.
You seem confused about several things here. Unlike Biblical exegesis, in this conversation we are trying to elaborate and discuss possibilities for the cultural features of a world that was only loosely sketched out. You realize this is a fictional world we're discussing, not a statement of morality, or a manifesto that would require "backpedaling"?
The point of introducing socially acceptable non-consensual sex was to demonstrate huge cultural differences. Neither EY nor anyone else is claiming this would be a good thing, or "benign" : it's just a demonstration of cultural change over time.
Someone in the future, unless he was a historian, might not be familiar with history books discussing 20th century life. He might think lots of rape in the 20th century would be good (incorrectly) because non-consensual sex is a good thing by his cultural standards. He'd be wrong, but he wouldn't realize it.
Your question is analogous to "I don't see why someone now couldn't see that slavery was a good thing back in the 17th century, given that he'd have historical knowledge of what that society was like." Well, yes, slavery was seen (by some people) as a good thing back then, but it's not now. In the story, non-consensual sex is seen (incorrectly) as a good thing in the future, so people in the future interpret the past through those biases.
Maybe it's just my experience with Orthodox Judaism, but the backpedal exegesis ratio - if, perhaps, computed as a sense of mental weight, more than a number of words - seems to me like a pretty important quantity when explaining others.
I could see it being important in some situations, definitely, if I'm understanding the purpose of the measurement correctly.
My understanding is that it's actually intended to measure how much the new interpretation is changing the meaning of the original passage from the meaning it was originally intended to have. That's difficult to measure, in most cases, because the original intended meaning is generally at least somewhat questionable in cases where people attempt to reinterpret a passage at all.
In this case, I'm trying not to change your stated meaning (which doesn't seem ambiguous to me: You're indicating that far-future societies are likely to have changed dramatically from our own, including changing in ways that we would find offensive, and that they can function as societies after having done so) at all, just to explain why your original meaning is more plausible than it seems at first glance. If I've succeeded - and if my understanding of your meaning and my understanding of the function of the form of measurement are correct - then the ratio should reflect that.
FWIW, I think people don't find it implausible because they know, even if only vaguely, that there are people out there with fetishes for everything, and I have the impression that in heavily Islamic countries with full-on burkha-usage/purdah going, things like ankles are supposed to be erotic and often are.
That interpretation sounds odd to me, so I checked wikipedia, which says:
'Conventional' seems to be the sticking point. Ankles are conventionally considered sexual in that culture, so it's not a fetish, in that context; it's a cultural difference.
It seems to make the most sense to think of it as a kind of communication - letting someone see your ankle, in that culture, is a communication about your thoughts regarding that person (though what exactly it communicates, I don't know enough to guess on), and the content of that communication is the turn-on. In our culture, the same thing might be communicated by, say, kissing, with similar emotional results. In either case, it's not the form of the communication that seems to matter, but the meaning, whereas in the case of a fetish, the form does matter, and what the action means to the other party (if there's another person involved) doesn't appear to. (Yes, I have some experience in this area. The fetish in question wasn't actually very interesting, and I don't think talking about it specifically will add to the conversation.)
I'm... not quite following. I gave 2 examples of why an educated modern person would not be surprised at Victorian ankles and their reception: that fetishes are known to be arbitrary and to cover just about everything, and that contemporary cultures are close or identical to the Victorians. These were 2 entirely separate examples. I wasn't suggesting that your random Saudi Arabian (or whatever) had a fetish for ankles or something, but that such a person had a genuine erotic response regardless of whether the ankle was exposed deliberately or not.
A Western teenage boy might get a boner at bare breasts in porn (deliberate but not really communicating), his girlfriend undressing for him (deliberate & communicative), or - in classic high school anime fashion - a bra/swimsuit getting snagged (both not deliberate & not communicative).
It seems like we're using the word 'fetish' differently, and I'm worried that that might lead to confusion. My original point was about how the cultural meanings of various things can change over time - including but not limited to what would or would not be considered a fetish (i.e. 'unusual to be aroused by'). If nearly everyone in a given culture is aroused by a certain thing, then it's not unusual in that culture, and it's not a fetish for people in that culture to be aroused by that thing, at least given how I'm using the word. (Otherwise, any arousing trait would be considered a fetish if at least one culture doesn't or didn't share our opinion of it, and I suspect that idea wouldn't sit well with most people.)
I propose that the useful dividing line between a fetish and an aspect of a given person's culture is whether or not the arousing thing is universal enough in that culture that it can be used communicatively - that appears to be a good indication that people in that culture are socialized to be aroused by that thing when they wouldn't naturally be aroused by it without the socialization. I also suspect that that socialization is accomplished by teaching people to see the relevant things as communication, automatically, as a deep heuristic - so that that flash of ankle or breast is taken as a signal that the flasher is sexually receptive, without any thought involved on the flashee's part.
It makes much more sense to me that thinking that someone was sexually receptive would be arousing than that somehow nearly everyone in a given culture somehow wound up with an attraction to ankles for their own sake, for no apparent reason, and without other cultures experiencing the same thing. There may be another explanation, though - were you considering some other theory?
This seems true to me. No American male would deny that he is attracted to at least one of the big three (breasts, buttocks, face), and attracted for their own sake, and for no apparent reason. (Who instructed them to like those?)
Yet National Geographic is famous for all its bare-breasted photos of women who seem to neither notice nor care, and ditto for the men. The simplest explanation to me is just that cultures have regions of sexiness, with weak ties to biological facts like childbirth, and fetishes are any assessment of sexiness below a certain level of prevalence. Much simpler than all your communication.
It seems I was trying to answer a question that you weren't asking, then; sorry about that.
Well, the awareness that there are people who have a fetish for X in this culture might make it less surprising that there is a whole culture that finds X sexy.
You're at least partly right about the communication theory. One big turn on for most people is that someone is sexually interested in them, as communicated by revealing normally hidden body parts. Supposedly in Victorian times legs were typically hidden, so revealing them would be communicative.
Another part of this is that the idea of a taboo is itself sexy, whether or not there is communicative intent. Just the idea of seeing something normally secret or forbidden is arousing to many people.
I'm curious about your example that came up in your life, if you're willing to share.
I suppose that's true, though it's not obvious to me that something would have to start as a fetish to wind up considered sexual by a culture.
This appears to be true - I've heard it before, anyway - but it doesn't make sense, to me, at least as a sexual thing.
Except, as I'm thinking of it now, it does seem to make sense in the context of communicating. Sharing some risky (in the sense that if it were made public knowledge, you'd take a social-status hit) bit of information is a hard-to-fake signal that you're serious about the relationship, and doing something risky together is a natural way of reciprocating with each other regarding that. It seems like it'd serve more of a pair-bonding purpose than strictly a sexual one, but the two are so intertwined in humans that it's not really surprising that it'd do both.
My first boyfriend had a thing for walking through puddles while wearing tennis shoes without socks. Pretty boring, as fetishes go.
This is interesting to know and read about. Are you a-romantic as well as asexual?
It depends how you define 'romantic'. I have a lot of trouble with the concept of monogamy, too, so if you're asking if I pair-bond, no. I do have deeply meaningful personal relationships that involve most of the same kinds of caring-about, though. On the other hand, I don't see a strong disconnect between that kind of relationship and a friendship - the difference in degree of closeness definitely changes how things work, but it's a continuum, not different categories, and people do wind up in spots on that continuum that don't map easily to 'friends' or 'romantic partners'. (I do have names for different parts of that continuum, to make it easier to discuss the resulting issues, but they don't seem to work the same as most peoples' categories.)
Well, I was mostly referring to this feeling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence
From your response, I'd have to guess that, no, you don't "fall in love" either. My personal experience is that there's a sharp, obvious difference in the emotions involved in romantic relationships and in friendships, although the girls I've had crushes on have never felt similarly about me.
Yep, limerence is foreign to me, though not as incomprehensible as some emotions.
The wikipeida entry on love styles may be useful. I'm very familiar with storge, and familiar with agape. Ludus and pragma make sense as mental states (pragma more so than ludus), but it's unclear to me why they're considered types of love. I can recognize mania, but doubt that there's any situation in which I'd experience it, so I consider it foreign. Eros is simply incomprehensible - I don't even recognize when others are experiencing it.
That said, it seems completely accurate to me to describe myself as being in love with the people I'm closest with - the strength and closeness and emotional attachment of those relationships seems to be at least comparable with relationships established through more traditional patterns, once the traditional-pattern relationships are out of the initial infatuation stage.
Thanks for the link. This part was fascinating:
Does this mean you've experienced orgasms without enjoying them, or experienced orgasms without setting out to do so for pleasure, or something else?
The former. It actually took some research for me to determine that I was experiencing them at all, because most descriptions focus so heavily on the pleasure aspect.