= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Konkvistador comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (323)
Nancy, I'm a bit confused by your comment.
What does "PUA believer" mean? Out of the folks who discuss pickup positively on LessWrong, I doubt any of them "believe" in it uncritically. However, they may feel motivated to defend pickup from inaccurate characterizations.
I do not see people who want to discuss pickup in a not-completely-negative way on LW as having an obvious advantage. The debate is not symmetrical. Anyone who can be painted as a defender of pickup is vulnerable to all sorts of stigma. Yet the worst they can say in their defense is to call the attackers close-minded or uneducated about pickup.
Yes, different parts of pickup are different. No, the good parts don't necessarily justify the bad parts, but the presence of good parts means that pickup shouldn't be unequivocally dismissed.
There are lots of assumptions here to unpack, but I would rather hold off until I understand your views better.
Me too, but for different reasons.
I'm hurt that you don't think I've run the most basic consequentialist analyses on these sorts of questions. I've never stated my full moral calculus on pickup, so I don't know how you can say that it has gaps. That would be a complex subject, contingent on a lot of empirical and moral-philosophical questions that I don't know the answer to.
Luckily, since I'm not defending pickup in general, I don't have to know how to perform the moral calculus evaluating pickup in general. But I can assure you that I've thought about it. Nobody has asked me the right questions to learn my thoughts on the subject (well, some people have elsewhere... just not here).
In these discussions, sometimes I feel like some people consider pickup to be evil until proven otherwise, based on their initial impression. And that anyone who speaks positively about pickup in any way (or refutes any criticism) is a "defender" (or as you put it, "believer")... unless they write a long explication of all the problems with pickup that convinces that critics that it's not all bad, and that these believers are not completely horrible people.
Dealing with a biased, inaccurate, and polarized assessment of pickup doesn't exactly put me (and other people discussing pickup in a not-completely-negative way) in the right mood to talk about the practical and ethical problems we have with pickup. Just because we don't nail 95 theses to the door criticizing pickup before discussing it doesn't mean that we don't have problem with it, and that we haven't considered the consequences for women.
I suspect that our feelings about pickup are a lot more ambivalent and complex than you realize, but the discussion has become so polarized that people seem to feel like they are forced to pick "sides," and people who actually have very ambivalent feelings about pickup get thrust into the role of defending it.
I'm tired of defending pickup. I want to have a turn criticizing it! But I can't take my turn yet, because so much of my energy discussing pickup is getting consumed by correcting all the biased and wrong stuff that is written about it. If I wrote critical stuff about pickup, then biased people would just use it selectively as part of their hatchet job, rather than promoting a complete understanding of the subject.
How can we reduce this polarization?
This is very much a first attempt at answering these matters.
I think more honesty on both sides (and you've made a good start) will help.
Part of what's been going on is that your advocacy has left me feeling as though my fears about PUA were being completely dismissed. On the other hand, when you've occasionally mentioned some doubts about aspects of PUA, I've felt better, but generally not posted anything about it.
I may have said something in favor when the idea of "atypical women" (more straightforward than the average and tending to be geeky) was floated. I'm pretty sure I didn't when someone (probably you) said something about some PUA techniques being unfair (certainly not the word used, but I don't have a better substitute handy) to women who aren't very self-assured, even though that's the sort of thing I'm concerned about.
Thanks for posting more about what's going on at your end.
As for stigma, I actually think it's funny that both of us feel sufficiently like underdogs that we're defensive. From my point of view, posting against PUA here leads to stigma not just for being close-minded and opposed to rational efforts to improve one's life (rather heavier stigmas here than in most places), but also for unkindness to men who would otherwise be suffering because they don't know how to attract women.
I don't know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn't performed a moral calculus-- from my point of view, the interests of women were being pretty much dismissed, or being assumed (by much lower standards of proof) to be adequately served by what was more convenient for men. Part of what squicks me about PUA is that it seems as though there's very careful checking about its effects (at least in the short term) on men, but, in the nature of things, much less information about its effects on women.
I think I agree with this.
We are already supposed to be honest here most of the time. I think something needs to be changed to facilitate such a debate, if we wish to have it.
I just think that while there are hopeful signs that we will chew through this with our usual set of tools and norms, but those hopeful signs have been around for years, and the situation dosen't seem to be improving.
Honestly I think our only hope of addressing this is having a farm more robust debating style, far more limited in scope than we are used to since tangents often peter out without follow up or any kind of synthesis or even a clear idea of what is and what isn't agreed upon in these debates.
I don't know what you mean by that-- could you expand on the details or supply an example of a place that has the sort of style you have in mind?
My instincts are to go for something less robust. I know that part of what drives my handling of the subject is a good bit of fear, and I suspect there was something of the sort going on for HughRustik.
I'm not sure what would need to change at LW to make people more comfortable with talking about their less respectable emotions.
I'm contemplating using a pseudonym, but that might not be useful-- a number of people have told me that I write the way I talk.
You've probably got a point about synthesis. It might help if people wrote summaries of where various debates stand. I bet that such summaries would get upvoted.
I doubt talking about the emotions, specifically about individual's emotions, or even how each "side" (ugh tribalism) may feel about the matter, will improve the situation. If anything I suspect it will result in status games around signalling good tactically usefull emotions and people resenting others for their emotions.
Perhaps this should be a start.
I think the last clause of the first sentence is missing some words.
Emotions are part of what's going on, and it's at least plausible that respect for truth includes talking about them.
Discussion which includes talk about emotions can blow up, but it doesn't have to. I suggest that there are specific premises that make talk about emotion go bad-- the idea that emotions don't change, that some people's emotions should trump other people's emotions, and that some emotions should trump other emotions. This list is probably not complete.
The challenge would be to allow territorial emotions to be mentioned, but not letting them take charge.
I think the crucial thing is to maintain an attitude of "What's going on here?" rather than "This is an emergency-- the other person must be changed or silenced".
Correct, I was writing at a late hour. I've fixed the missing bits now.
This has shifted my opinion more in favour of such a debate, I remain sceptical however. First identifying what exactly are the preconditions for such a debate (completing that list in other words) and second the sheer logistics of making it happen that way seem to me daunting challenges.
More for the list, based on your point about groups: It's important to label speculations about the ill effects of actions based on stated emotions as speculations, and likewise for speculations about the emotions of people who aren't in the discussion.
Part of what makes all this hard is that people have to make guesses (on rather little evidence, really) about the trustworthiness of other people. If the assumption of good will is gone, it's hard to get it back.
If someone gives a signal which seems to indicate that they shouldn't be trusted, all hell can break loose very quickly. and at that point, a lesswrongian cure might be to identify the stakes, which I think are pretty low for the blog. The issues might be different for people who are actually working on FAI.
As for whether this kind of thing can be managed at LW, my answer is maybe tending towards yes. I think the social pressure which can be applied to get people to choose a far view and/or curiosity about the present is pretty strong, but I don't know if it's strong enough.
The paradox is that people who insist on naive territorial/status fights have to be changed or silenced.
We could have a pidgin language pseudonym thread.
My $0.02:
It might help to state clearly what "addressing this" would actually comprise... that is, how could you tell if a discussion had done so successfully?
It might also help if everyone involved in that discussion (should such a discussion occur) agreed to some or all of the following guidelines:
I will, when I reject or challenge a conclusion, state clearly why I'm doing so. E.g.: is it incoherent? Is it dangerous? Is it hurtful? Is it ambiguous? Is it unsupported? Does it conflict with my experience? Etc.
I will "taboo" terms where I suspect people in the conversation have significantly different understandings of those terms (for example, "pickup"), and will instead unpack my understanding.
I will acknowledge out loud when a line of reasoning supports a conclusion I disagree with. This does not mean I agree with the conclusion.
I will, insofar as I can, interpret all comments without reference to my prior beliefs about what the individual speaker (as opposed to a generic person) probably meant. Where I can't do that, and my prior beliefs about the speaker are relevantly different from my beliefs about a generic person, I will explicitly summarize those beliefs before articulating conclusions based on them.
What exactly do you mean? If the situation is getting no worse, notice the population is expanding.
It is not improving.
This is up for debate. Vladimir_M and others have argued that precisely the fact that blow ups are rarer means more uninterrupted happy death spirals are occurring and we are in the processes of evaporative cooling of group beliefs on the subject.
I think they are right.
LessWrong actually needs either better standards of rationality or better mechanisms to sort through the ever growing number of responses as it grows in order to keep the signal to noise ratio close to something worth our time. Also I'm confused as to why a larger population of LWers, would translate into this being something LWers can more easily make progress on.