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So basically this series will try to do this but systematically avoid any PUA references and trying to find ways to find some relevance to a few extra groups of people (besides heterosexual males) in order to avoid mind killing?
Your comment sounds like a complaint. Is it?
Partially yes. Some PUA concepts are really neatly formulated, a fraction of LWers are familiar with them and at the end of the day the original synthesis was done by the PUA community, having a bottom line partially written by X, then searching for academic papers to help write up stuff to fill the void once X is cut out is an easy way to stumble rationality-wise once or twice along the way, and thus is bad practice, but mostly I was just curious.
Generally I think avoiding mindkillers is a good thing for the community in my mind, and the comment section of this discussion is better than I expected, so perhaps the comment is coming of harsher than intended.
It was mean more in a "oh I see what you did there, am I right?" way.
I think your comment was quite appropriate. Even under the best imaginable scenario, these articles and their follow-up discussions will suffer from at least two problems.
First, there is the conspicuous omission of any references to the PUA elephant in the room. The body of insight developed by this particular sort of people, whatever its faults, is of supreme practical importance for anyone who wants to formulate practical advice in this area. Without referencing it explicitly, one can either ignore it altogether and thus inevitably talk nonsense, or pretend to speak based solely on official academic literature, which is disingenuous and unfair in its failure to attribute credit (and also misleading for those who would like to pursue their own research in the matter). It's as if someone wanted to talk about electronics but insisted that the only legitimate references should be from pure academic quantum theory, and the nuts-and-bolts work of tech entrepreneurs and industry engineers is forbidden and unmentionable.
Second, really good practical advice in this area simply cannot be inoffensive. To take a clear and obvious example, one absolutely essential sort of knowledge is what kinds of people are likely to lead to various sorts of trouble if you entangle yourself with them. In principle, this is an exercise in assigning conditional probabilities that should be greatly attractive to the LW folks fond of Bayesianism. Yet since in our culture the discussion (let alone practical use) of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people is considered immoral, discussing these things while remaining within the contemporary inoffensive bounds is as if one wanted to discuss sexual techniques while respecting the prudery norms of 17th century puritanism. (Also, on a more mundane level, LW is still far from the standards of rationality that would make people who recognize themselves in some of these conditional probabilities refrain from destroying the discourse by crying offense, and various others not to try boosting their staus by joining them in solidarity, or even complaining preemptively on their behalf.) There are of course many other important aspects of the topic where one faces similar problems.
On the whole, the article is based on the premise that an accurate and no-nonsense analysis of the topic will result in something that sounds not just inoffensive, but actually strongly in line with various fashionable and high-status norms and ideals of the broader society. This premise however is flawed, and those who believe that this has in fact been accomplished should apply the powerful debiasing heuristic that says that when a seemingly rational discussion of some deeply problematic and controversial topic sounds pleasant and reassuring, there's probably something fishy going on. There is simply no way to approach this topic without ending up with something that's either offensive to the mainstream sensibilities and apt to upset certain sorts of people, or disingenuous and inaccurate to a significant degree.
And this was the reason why, I didn't expect a direct response to the original question, from any of the authors. But as well as your opinions stated here resonate with my own, I feel I do need to play the devil's (who is a thoroughly socialized chap) advocate:
People still realized when sex was talked about. And some information was distributed in this way.
While obviously this is not necessarily a stable situation, besides the euphemism treadmill people do eventually shorten the useful inference gaps. Indeed I would argue that cycles form around these sorts of things, perhaps 19th century Victorian society with its anomalous attitude to discussing sexuality is an example of such a spiral and I think in the 20th century there are also to be found potential examples of such spirals in some places.
Generally some information is better than no information and I would say that for all intents and purposes mainstream advice on dating and relations between the sexes is more or less no information. Now I would say that what would be welcomed is a clear acknowledgement of what occurred and what the situation is. While it would be scandalous for a Victorian gentleman or lady to write up a article offering advice on sexuality, and commenting that the original was modified to preserve decency, it would not be scandalous to note that certain things can not be discussed due to decency.
I maintain that to write up such a series of articles and have a discussion such as it is here, would be a net gain and even would not mislead greatly as long as it was clearly and transparently acknowledged that certain things can not be said due to "decency". Obviously anyone interested in additional this could simply check the archives, or discreetly PM the author of the article for "indecent" advice.
We even have a passable candidate that could serve as the euphemism for the word or rather phrase that is the modern equivalent of the indecent: mindkilling.
But to not clearly acknowledge the situation will lead only to a false consensus emerging, and arguably to a certain extent it already has! That this be addressed is especially important because of the constant stream of new arrivals, who often have no experience whatsoever in thinking critically of such matters. I would argue that if that is the only kind of debate possible we should rather taboo the subject as a whole for a period of twelve months or more, not speaking of it rather than risking increasing irrationality on LessWrong. Before people flinch away from such a situation, this obviously goes for all the "sides" involved, please consider that we basically have exactly this kind of situation when it comes to politics!
Not only is sex and its associated status games as important to our monkey brains as politics, arguably in modern Western society sex is politics.
Actually, I'd say there's a whole lot of strongly misleading information, and the situation is much worse than in most other areas of life. For example, in the conventional wisdom about job hunting there is certainly a lot of trite and suboptimal information, and truly great advice is always a matter of insider information to which few people are privy -- but there is nothing like, say, the respectable opinion telling you that it's best to show up for the job interview drunk and puke on the interviewer's desk. Whereas in dating and inter-sex relations in general, a lot of the respectable opinion, if taken at face value, advises equivalently bad acts of self-sabotage.
Now, a body of advice whose quality is a mixed bag may be on the net either good or bad. If you're given ten tips about driving, nine of which will make you a somewhat better driver but one of which will vastly increase your probability of getting killed in an accident, we'd probably agree that the "some information is better than no information" conclusion doesn't apply. However, if the tenth one merely increases your parking fines slightly, it may well be the case.
So, what about the quality of advice that will be produced by a LW discussion on these topics operating under such constraints of respectability, where disreputable sources of accurate information are tabooed, a pretense must be maintained that the discourse is grounded in officially accredited scholarship and other high-status sources of information, and -- most important of all -- the entire discourse and its bottom line must produce a narrative that is in line with the respectable, high-status views of humanity and society? I am not at all optimistic, especially having seen what has been produced so far!
Yes, I think this is an important issue even aside from the question of the quality of the generated advice. The whole tone of these supposedly successful LW discussions about dating, relationships, and related topics assumes that the relevant high-status ideological views and official scholarship are a product of genuine free-thinking and rationality, so that a truly rational debate about these matters simply cannot lead to anything that respectable and accredited people would frown on. (And, by extension, that people who purportedly try to break the happy death spirals and draw the discourse closer to reality must be dishonest and delusional, and are thus obnoxiously stirring up bad blood without good reason.) This represents delusional wishful thinking of a sort that would be seen as unacceptable on LW if practiced about many other topics.
In the past people have obviously retrospectively looked for academic sources to support PUA ideas. It's instrumentally fine, just a bad habit. Also, it is easy to hint at what is unsaid by saying it would be offensive, and hinting at exactly how offensive it would or wouldn't be. Imagine a map of the world where every feature north of 35 degrees latitude was only described (Canada? Way north, I can't put that on the map, it's not even close! Korea? Look, that's just not the sort of thing that can be boldly painted on the map. I'll sketch a rough outline in pencil, OK?) Such a map would not be misleading.
The reason that convention is difficult to use here is that the taking of offense all goes one way. If one says "Because it is mind-killing, I will not speak of the temporal order, quantity, and relative amount of coercion involved in all property dispossessions in the Middle East since 1800," one does not thereby share much about one's opinion.
If one says "Because it is mind killing, I will not discuss the relationship between sexual attractiveness and time for men and women," it may be that one believes that they are the same, or that there isn't a steep fall for anyone, or whatever, and merely doesn't want to provoke people into speaking of a counterargument. But usually not.
Only one side takes offense regarding this issue, so to say that one's opinions are offensive, and especially the degree to which they are, is to reveal them. People are neither motivated to, nor good at, using the same language for "I will not share my opinion because people will take offense," and "I will not share my opinion because the way some people discuss the topic is offensive." In both cases, people take the opportunity to signal and communicate rather than maintain an ambiguous neutral convention to end conversations.
"Mindkilling" refers to the idea that it is particularly hard (although not impossible) for humans to discuss politically or ideologically controversial subjects without succumbing to bias. The implicit prohibition on "mindkilling" political discussion seems to have worked well here in creating a very civilised discussion forum.
On the other hand, you would redefine mindkilling as dissent from the ideological mainstream. This is unwise, because this merely priviliges a certain view of things at the expense of truth-seeking - it enshrines bias, since the ideological mainstream (American?) view of all things cannot be considered true or rational by definition.
To merely acknowledge that "indecency" (dissent) is forbidden, so caveat lector does little to counteract the inherent bias of the arrangement, since people are still going to read articles on a rationality forum expecting them to be essentially accurate, which they will not be to the extent that the dissenting view of things is the only fully accurate view. In other words this acknowledgement is hardly going to cancel out the persuasive force of a biased article unless the caveat is written in massive bold letters at the top of every such article "This Is Not True", which is clearly unsatisfactory.
In other words the choices are:
1) Allow no discussion of ideologically controversial matters (to minimise mindkilling, but limit the scope of the forum)
2) Your solution, i.e. permit only the mainstream view (also minimising the possibility of mindkilling arguments, but legitimising bias)
3) Anything goes (possibly degrading the civility and in the long term the rationality of the forum)
Since the prohibitions are in fact only implicit, luckily there is no need to actually make a choice and some kind of uneasy equilibrium between 2 and 3 can exist (in which dissent is allowed, but is only encouraged in small and perhaps euphemistic doses). But I think this clarifies the point Vladimir_M is making.
An acknowledgement that something can't be said because of decency implies that practical and true things could be said in the absence of decency.
This is indeed a real concern. But I would say that a sentence like :
Would have a positive effect on Lesswrong.
The point I was making is that "mindkillers", under its original definition, refers to political content in general. If someone writes about male-female relations and excludes "politically offensive" material, this does not mean that their article has no political content. It just means that it is the mainstream political line!
In the Soviet Union, Mendelism might have been considered indecent. On the Soviet rationalist forum, Lysenkoist articles might have a caveat attached that political indecency is omitted. Nonetheless it is hardly fair to say that the Mendelism is a mindkiller and Lysenkoism is not in this context - the label "mindkilling" properly applies to the subject of heredity in general, given that it is politically controversial in this scenario.
Likewise if there is political sensitivity involved in the subject of male-female relations, then the subject in general is a mindkiller. The mainstream line is no less "mindkilling" than the dissenting position - it just happens to enjoy hegemony.
The distinction is that mindkilling argument can be avoided if dissent from the mainstream line is taboo; but this does not imply that dissent is mindkilling and mainstream views are not - mindkilling is a property of ideologically controversial subjects in general.
You may wonder why I am arguing about definitions: there is a taboo against mindkilling arguments, and a rational recommendation that politics is the mindkiller and therefore something to be regarded warily. If mindkilling is subtly redefined to mean dissent, people might grow to believe that it is dissent that is the mindkiller, not subjects of political controversy in general, and they should therefore steer clear of it. That is Orwellian (although I don't mean to suggest that your intentions are bad).
Ah I finally clearly see your objection now. I misused the term "mindkiller" in a way that suggested that the "indecent" explanation was the mindkilling one rather than the field or subject itself.
Indeed something like this could happen if people where not careful with the usage.
Yes you are right, a different formulation needs to be found otherwise my arguments for why such a situation might be better than pure taboo is mostly invalid in the long run.
I wanted something like: "This is as far as I will go in this contribution on the subject on LessWrong for the sake of the community, but it is by no means the full rationalist approach, if anyone wants to discuss this in private or research it on their own and I would in fact encourage this/there is nothing wrong with that. This subject is pretty mindkilling and so these precautions are needed."
I, for one, find obscurantist posts hinting that there are unspoken-because-unpalatable-to-the-mainstream truths to be far more irritating than posts explicitly saying things that I personally find distasteful. The former leaves the dissident view just amorphous enough to be impossible to subject to scrutiny. Given that, even in cases where the mainstream view is wrong, the implied dissident view may also be wrong in some important regard, the obscurantism is highly suboptimal.
I haven't been downvoting for this phenomenon so far, but I'm going to start doing so if it keeps happening.
What is obscurantist exactly? What I said is perfectly clear, if you look at the context of the two preceding posts.
No particular claim about male-female relations was intended (although if you want to know I endorse Roissy's view of male-female relations, if not his value-set); I was objecting to the idea that "mindkilling" should be redefined as "saying things likely to offend mainstream sensibilities". Mindkilling refers to the effect of political content on human reasoning powers in general, and the suggested redefinition struck me as Orwellian.
It is not your post that I think is obscurantist. I was commenting on the undesirability of posts that presuppose option 2 has been selected and proceed to imply that the mainstream view is false without actually making explict what alternative is being proposed.
I think the alpha-beta classification is excessively reductive. I would say that I am fairly physically intimidating to a majority of other males, but this doesn't translate into automatic adoration by nearby females.
To whoever is upvoting this, it seems like you must be taking one of the following positions:
Could you guys clarify?
I upvoted Prismatic, and I'm taking this position: 4. It may or may not be safe to post certain views on Less Wrong, but whatever they are, I precommit that I will not be part of a blowup over them. If your views are justified, I will update on them, and if they are not, I will calmly state my objections, but I will not punish you for dissent. If other people punish you unfairly for dissent, I will punish them. I would rather you post your dissenting views than hide them, and I will support you for doing so.
If enough of Less Wrong takes this position, eventually position 1. will be correct. I hope to bring about this state of affairs.
I always appreciate when someone else comes along and explains my position better than I did, so thanks.
Why not publish the "unsafe" arguments under a pseudonym (or an alternate pseudonym if your main identity is already a pseudonym)?
To do so consistently and stay safe, you'd need to take the unusual or otherwise identifiable parts of your set of concepts, favorite examples, verbal quirks, patterns of reasoning, and so on, and split everything into two: one part for use under your true identity, and one part for pseudonymous use. Even then, each of your novel ideas could taint each of your other novel ideas. There would also still be the harm to LessWrong's reputation as a whole. And what would it accomplish? It's notoriously hard to get people to change their minds on these topics, even here, and if you do there's no clear causal path from that to better long-term future outcomes. I'd rather just collectively give up.
I second this question.
Isn't is possible that Prismattic's comment could be receiving so many upvotes because other people also find comments of the sort described irritating and are embracing the opportunity to signal that irritation? Like Prismattic, I don't generally downvote comments on this basis alone. But I'm definitely tired of seeing the types of comments described, especially in those instances when, at least to my eyes, the commenters seem to be affecting a certain world-weary sorrow and wisdom while hinting at the profound truths that could be freely discussed but for -alas!- the terrible tyranny of modern social norms. But because the commenters are hiding the exact substance of their own views, there's no basis on which to judge whether these views are, as Prismattic suggests, actually more correct than the mainstream view, or perhaps equally or even more wrong in some different direction.
If what's suggested is "You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore I win the debate", I agree that's unreasonable. If what's suggested is "You guys would punish me for stating my arguments, therefore no real debate has taken place", I think that's far more reasonable.
I am also interested in a clarification.
Trying to put words to my own intuitions on the matter, I would stipulate a modified 3:
It may be unsafe (in terms of image/status/etc - I would certainly expect and hope not physically) to express certain views, particularly those sufficiently far from both societal mainstream and LW mainstream, and particularly those that touch too heavily on mind-killing topics.
It is reasonably within norms to acknowledge this, particularly with an eye to reducing its effect.
What is decidedly a violation of norms, I think, is to do so in a self-serving manner.
"Norms forbid honest discussion of my pet issue X, therefor X" is obviously flawed.
"Norms forbid discussion of my pet issue X, and I have strong evidence for X but can't share it because of those norms, so just trust me that X" amounts to the same thing, in terms of what kinds of discussions are possible. It is also, to some degree, inconsistent - it is unlikely that we forbid evidence for a proposition while allowing discussion otherwise implying/assuming it.
Perhaps my view is one of 1-3, but I'm finding it difficult to categorize it:
It is ill-advised to discuss certain topics on LessWrong; if they are discussed anyway, the following choices are in the decreasing order of preference: a) not join the discussion; b) state your view clearly and be prepared to defend it; c) hint at your view but refuse to explain it or cite evidence for it, claiming that'll violate a social norm.
b) is much better than c), but a) is much better than b).
It's the same attitude that I think already exists on LW for politics (strongly influenced by the mind-killer post).
So you prefer the situation in which a dubious mainstream view remains entirely unchallenged to a situation where a doubter, instead of remaining silent, states that it is likely wrong but that spelling out an explicit argument why it is so would violate social norms? As far as I see, the information made available in the second case is a proper superset of the information available in the former. So how can this constitute "obscurantism" in any reasonable sense of the term?
I'd prefer social norms be violated. Asserting that a proposition is wrong without explaining why one has reached that conclusion or presenting an alternative is not a behavior that is generally viewed as beneficial in any other context on Lesswrong.
ETA: I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of "politically correct" as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic. Society functions on polite fictions, but that does not mean that everything that is polite is inherently false.
Do you upvote people that do?
I have mostly grown tired of making comments where I mention a contrarian position. I get asked to explain myself; it sometimes leads to an argument, and I put a lot of work into comments that often end up at negative karma. I suspect those threads add to LW, but the feedback I'm getting is that they don't.
This does not answer my question. You claim that a situation in which information X and Y is made available constitutes "obscurantism" relative to the situation where only information X is provided. Now you say that you would prefer that not just X and Y, but also information Z be provided. That's fair enough, but it doesn't explain why (X and Y) is worse than just (X), if (X and Y and Z) is better than just (X and Y). What is this definition of "obscurantism," according to which the level of obscurantism can rise with the amount of information about one's beliefs that one makes available?
It sounds, then, as though you should be talking to the people punishing norm violations, not to the people responding rationally to such punishment.
I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn't find, but here is a discussion on it.
Your question rests on an assumption that obscurantism must decrease information, but I see that assumption as incorrect. In fact, under this assumption I should never regard anything said to me as obscurantist, as it should never decrease the amount of information available to me.
Wikipedia defines "obscurantism" as "the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known", and it seems to fit the bill. Of course, it may be useful or beneficial species of obscurantism, though I agree with Prismatic that it is not.
The situation as you describe it seems pre-biased by postulating that the mainstream view is dubious. This may be obvious to you, but to me, the person who's faced with the "hints" as described, it is not - if it were, I shouldn't need the hints to begin with. I think it's incorrect to condition on the dubiousness of the mainstream view. If I am to decide on how to best to take into account hints of that nature, the possibility that the mainstream view is correct after all, and the hint entirely specious, should not be disregarded. In fact, in real-life situations where such hints are offered, this may be the more frequent scenario.
The hint that says "this view is incorrect, but I will not explain why, for doing that will violate a social norm" is annoying and distracting; it engages my attention, bringing no real evidence for its claims. Because it posits a mystery, I'm likely to err on the side of giving it more attention than it deserves. The benefit is that it may cause me to investigate the view more thoroughly than I would otherwise have, and realize it is incorrect. If I precommit to ignoring such signals, I will miss some chances of that, and I will also avoid giving my attention, and more closely investigating, all those views that are correct after all, and where the signal was specious. The bargain may well be worth it.
What makes obscurantism a relevant category is that certain ways of withholding information and intentional abstruseness can be very effective for misleading people and producing convictions without evidence. In LW parlance, it is a particular kind of Dark Arts. Now, of course, it makes no sense to debate definitions when there is a true disagreement about them, but I think it shouldn't be controversial to insist that the normal meaning of "obscurantism" involves this Dark Arts element. In other words, it involves withholding information with the intent to mislead and produce mistaken or unsubstantiated beliefs, and it cannot be applied to every act of withholding information intentionally.
I do think the Wikipedia definition you quoted is unreasonably overbroad, considering the standard usage of the word. It would cover all sorts of completely honest, reasonable, and non-misleading acts of communication where one chooses to limit the amount of information given -- for example, saying that you got a new job but not disclosing the salary, or writing blog comments under a pseudonym.
It is not true that it brings no significant evidence, if the source of the hint is someone about whom you have other information -- and information about the intellectual abilities, knowledge, and likely biases of frequent commenters is easy to get in a forum like this one (if you don't in fact have it already). And you can always simply ignore such hits if you believe you have insufficient information, or you don't feel like looking for it, the way you presumably ignore any other comments that are not of interest to you.
Also, I note that your complaint here doesn't state that these hits are misleading and apt to trigger biases leading to incorrect beliefs, so you must indeed be working with the broadest possible (and I would say overbroad) definition of "obscurantism."
It may indeed -- but why precommit unconditionally, without considering the source of these signals?
Yes, why should the heretic have the right to remain silent! If he speaks truth the good doctors of the holy mother church will surely update their theological arguments accordingly and if not, well why is he risking his immortal soul by relying only on his feeble and fallible mind?
We're not discussing anyone's right to remain silent. The objection is to a heretic's tendency to announce himself as a heretic without mentioning any doctrinal specifics, then run away giggling.
After diligently reading through most of Vladimir_M's comment history, I have no option but to express my fervent agreement. I've always had a great dislike of vague hints, but the style in which he does those is just fucking unbearable.
Many modern PC beliefs about women first showed up in Victorian times, which beliefs were I to mention them would be get me as down voted now as much as they would get a Victorian gentlemen in trouble.
Before Victorian times, pretty much everyone agreed with the position taken by Chateau Heartiste - that the alarmingly powerful, reckless, irresponsible, and immoral sexual urges of women, unless restrained, would destroy civilization.
Women's motives are generally purer than men's. Women are much more often good mothers than men are good fathers. Women are nearly always more interested in committed relationships than just sex with the most attractive male. Women should be held much less accountable for their criminal and unscrupulous actions than men. Women are always the victims never the abusers. Women do not lie about rape. Women are overwhelmingly sexually attracted to virtuous men (noticeable echo's of Calvinism in this). A woman's complaints and grievances are generally reasonable, while a man's are generally not. Women's sexual instincts are benign to society while men's sexual instincts are malign. Women are more altruistic and fair than men. ect.
Most of this is obviously bunk and most of this is also obviously implicitly accepted though it may be denied.
And Sam, I don't think I will get down voted for stating this.
In practice however if I wasn't very careful when challenging a argument that implicitly rested on two or more of the above as an axiom I might get down voted on LW (but less so than many other places).
That follows the pattern of a clever way of phrasing arguments such that they can be interpreted as either tautologies or meaning something stupid. It's more insidious than just unambiguously stupid arguments.
A solution might be to make a sort of subforum for mindkilling topics, and associating them with some karma cost. Doesn't eliminate the mindkilling aspect, but hopefully makes it so that people with low karmas are kept out, which is hopefully correlated with some minimal rational ability.
Or maybe not. Holding off on that sort of thing is sometimes a good idea.