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taryneast comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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While it's definitely interesting to point out the correlation between egg-bank and attractiveness, I have to say that my god but that site is chauvanistic! Apparently, after "hitting the wall" a woman is "sexually worthless" o_O I do not agree.
Hmmm - my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I'd like to know why.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the "sexually worthless" comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader... ?
After all, he didn't say "Due to my own personal predilections, i find that a woman over the age of 40 is no longer at all sexually attractive for me", but instead made his value judgment and considers it to be some kind of inherent value of the woman (ie value == 0) completely oblivious to the fact that other men (and possibly women) may have a different value-judgment of that woman.
I disagree with his assessment because her worth is not 0... just his own personal map-value for that woman.
I don't take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I've never understood him as comparing women's value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by "the sexual marketplace". Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like "being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don't face a punishing gender ratio in that niche."
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn't an oversaturation of people like you that you're competing with.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person... which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from... well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal - but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time... therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective - and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the "sexual appeal" rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can "get anybody" - that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them... but for anybody not an alpha male... (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
Her "value" on the marketplace is not zero.
It depends. Was the context marketplace value or value to the individual who most values that person sexually? Ifthe latter, it was the MPF. If the former (which it implicitly probably was there), then I don't think marketplace valuations necessarily fail in that way.
They can still be wrong valuations.
I got the sense that he was actually using his personal valuation, and passing it off as a marketplace-valuation. His references to studies felt like he was trying to find facts to fit his own valuations. However - I'll freely admit that I have not read his stuff widely. This is one of those websites where I decided it would not be a good idea for me to keep going as it simply continued to fuel my anger. It was more rational simply to stop reading.
It's not the content of what you said (though, given the topic we're on, people are getting offended, this being one of the things LessWrong can't really discuss without exploding and drawing battle lines) but the way in which you said it; your online habitus automatically marks you as an outsider. Lurk a bit more and you'll get an idea of how to phrase things.
Thank you for responding. :)
Firstly - can you define "online habitus" in this context? the dictionary gives me "physical characteristics", but I'm not sure exactly how that relates here, but I've taken a stab at it:
ie that it was the emotive content of my comment that was objected to. I', surprised that the reaction against my personal expression of shock was disliked so much so that I was downvoted. Surely rational people are allowed to be offended too? :)
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
How should I have expressed my reaction in a way that would not have offended?
First of all, let me say I didn't downvote you. Or upvote you either.
Secondly, there's some confusion of terminology here.
a) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared beliefs about the state of the world. (Epistemological agreement - ("is" statements)
b) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared beliefs about how the world should be. (Moral agreement - "ought" statements)
c) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared preferences. (Agreement in taste - "like" statements)
(a)s have objective truth value.
(c)s are subjective.
(b)s have people always debate about their objectivity/subjectivity thereof.
Now the three types aren't always clearly distinct. If someone makes a statement about "attractiveness" it's both a (c) statement about preferences, but it may also be a statement about what real-life people like on average -- in which case it can be an (a) statement about the distribution of preferences in a population, which has a truth value.
So, if someone calls someone else "sexually worthless", and you say you don't agree -- do you mean that you simply have different preferences -- are you making a (c) statement? That you believe his statement factually false -- you're making an (a) statement about the distribution of attraction feelings towards such women in the real world?
Or do you mean that you consider it MORALLY WRONG for him to speak and behave in such a rude way?
If the last of these, then "I morally object to such an attitude" is obviously a clearer way of talking about your objection rather than "I do not agree" which is vague and imprecise.
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than "it isn't true".
If someone tells me "Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans," I don't have to try and refute that by saying "that's racist," because I have available the refutation "that's false". When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that's unpopular, and can't say "that's false," I will have to say something else, such as "that's racist". Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:
1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect--they want to live in a society that respects their elders.
2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.
3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.
4.) Any number of other things.
You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone's preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person's core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.
That's why people usually use other things to object with if they are available. I don't object to a critic's value judgement that an opinion is bad if spread, but the most convenient way for the critic to encourage me to disfavor the opinion is to convince me it is false. If the critic does something else, perhaps that is because the truth of the opinion is not contested.
Actually, my point is that an opinion = facts + preferences. First, you form a belief about the state of the world, and then you may assign a value to that state and decide on an action. Two people may have identical beliefs about a certain fact in the world, but may not assign identical value to that state. If this is the case, there is no point in trying to prove the fact being considered wrong. Sometimes it is the preferences themselves that differ. This can sometimes be resolved, but it does require thinking about the thought processes behind those preferences, and not just focusing on the facts we are assigning value to. Your last two sentences imply that opinions have a truth value. I am saying that they don't. Only the facts that opinions are based on have a truth value.
Agreement on opinions requires not just agreement on facts, but also agreement on preferences. I feel a high degree of confidence that people's preferences are not identical. Therefore, I suspect that agreeing on the facts alone rarely solves the problem. If we verify the fact that one person has one preference, and another person an opposing preference, the verification of that alone will not resolve their disagreement. The only approach is to try to understand the similarities and differences in the preferences involved, and see if anything can be worked out from there.
I only intended that in the sense that someone's opinion may be based on a misconception. If someone in fact enjoys eating cheese, and thinks the moon is made of cheese, I'll tend to just call his opinion that he would enjoy eating a piece of the moon "wrong".
Disagreeing on facts is often sufficient to cause a problem.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other's opinion. If we don't understand each other's preferences, we can still negotiate, if poorly. But if we are trading items it helps to establish common understanding of what me giving you an apple and you giving me an orange even mean.
Certainly. As I said in my first post, you can have objections to a fact stated if you believe it is incorrect.
This is also true. Whether two people disagree only on the facts or only on preferences, the same amount of trouble can be had. Also if people disagree on both.
This is itself an opinion, so I cannot assign a truth value to it. The assignment of importance can only be done if preferences exist. For example, a preference may exist to gain benefit from a certain fact, but not necessarily to satisfy the preference of another person. Given such a preference, it would not, of course, be important to know what the other person's preferences are. On the other hand, if a person wanted to satisfy another person's preferences (or to go against them), then it would be very important. Are you saying that you generally prefer to discover facts about the world over facts about the preferences of other people, or that you think the statement you made is itself some fact about the world? If it is the first, then I assume you have more knowledge of your preferences than I do. If it is the second, then I think I have to disagree.
You don't think it's acceptable to argue against things by saying various forms of "it has bad consequences"?
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it's best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it's better for me to say "P is false, and also has bad consequences" than to say "P has bad consequences."
That wasn't how I saw the context here, because of the statement "I do not agree". Also, no consequences were enumerated. "I agree with the facts as stated, but think phrasing them this way has bad consequences," is a fine way to argue against a presentation of ideas.
I am very suspicious of obscuring truth in the name of positive consequences, of applying only or mostly first-order idea utilitarianism.
It's perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than "I do not agree", which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
Yep - this is a good point. I realise that my statement was ambiguous about how/why I disagreed. I left it up to the reader.
I did this, at the time, because I was quite angry at the things said on the website, and the way they were said. I was not in any fit state to argue my reasoning. I've since clarified in the followon comments... after sufficient time passed.
You haven't heard of Roissy before have you?
Nope.
He is pretty famous for his offensive and rude style.
I can see why. I also note he has ready-made fully-general counterarguments for any detractors... ie "any woman that objects to what I say is just old and jealous"
He is pretty well known around here, Robih Hanson at Overcoming Bias has him on his blogroll for exmaple.
No, not necessarily. He often just says her hamster is doing overtime.
Also his main argument is basically that "boners don't lie". A large enough fraction of men find a specific subset of women on average more sexually desirable than others that sexual desirability may as well be a objective criteria at least when comparing averages of groups like say 20 year old vs. 50 year old women or overweight vs. slim women.
Freudian slip?
Heh, obviously.
Yes - "her hamster" is an interesting way of saying "women aren't rational, they just rationalise everything away".
it's an unfalsifiable proposition. Have you had a look at the list of things that he says women say? Yep - they could indeed be rationalisations... or they could in fact be the truth... how can you tell the difference? well - you can't. That's because this, as I said, is a fully-general counterargument.
No matter what his (as he says) "screechy feminist kvetches" about... he can just say "that's just a rationalisation" and not think any further or take it into account. he never has to update on anything a woman says to him ever. Also, i note that he seem to think that female rationalisation is a totally different species to male rationalisation... and doesn't even mention instances of the latter.
As to "boners don't lie" - this is demonstrably untrue any time somebody is turned on by a picture. There are no doubt objective criteria which have high correlation with the average male's likely attraction to a woman. Studies into facial symmetry, smooth complexion etc etc have clearly shown this. yes, you can compare averages...
However - need I remind you of the alien stealing our sexy women aspect of the mind-projection fallacy? the woman is not sexy... the men are attracted to certain types of women.
You can definitely make a case to me that "the average 40 year old woman has a reduced likelihood of finding male sexual partners"... but that does not mean "sexual worth = zero"
I might also add that as yet I have never met a woman anywhere that could find literally zero partners anywhere. She may not be interested in the men that would be likely to have sex with her... but that is a different question. There is a vanishingly small percentage of women who would literally have zero "worth" on the open market. To lump in every 35YO (and older) women is to be particularly ignorant of sexual dynamics... it is this man mistaking his own preferences for reality.
AWYC, but
I think you're modus tollensing a modus ponens. Eliezer's metaethical conclusion was that sexy is an objective criteria which does not mean "sexually attractive to aliens;" the word for that would be "kvy'ztar" or something.
I'm not sure that I am.
Are 9 year old girls "sexy" because some humans find them sexy? Or is "sexy" in the eye of the beholder here?
Sexy is a transistive verb attached to the person who considers the other person sexy, not to the subject of said attentions. It may so happen that there's more than one person who finds a certain subject sexy - it's still something that attaches to the group. What can be said about the subject is "she is symmetrical, unblemished, has large breasts and a low body fat percentage" and it so happens that a large number of men find that to be high on their sexiness-scale. There's a cluster there that has been named "sexy" - but don't forget that this cluster is in map-space, not territory-space.
I think we're still in agreement. The reference post makes it clear that "sexy" is a different word for a bug-eyed monster, a normal heterosexual male, and a paedophile.
Yes he is saying that. About as sound as the argument you characterised.
Thanks for letting me rant about it a bit :)
Not to take a stance on any of the wider issues, but that's not fully general: if all the women who objected were young, for example, it would be false.
Yeah but... he gets to decide how old is "old" - and from what I an tell, his idea of "old" is pretty darn young. Those women who simply cannot be manipulated into the "old" category easily fall into the "jealous" category.
Just call them fat. If they're skinny enough to disprove that, resort to calling them ugly.
The existance of an infinite sequence of arguments whose union is fully-general doesn't mean that any given argument is.
Additionally, those counter-arguments aren't fully general. If you admit of some objective (or inter-subjective, or whatever; collectively accessible) standard of attractiveness, all of these counterarguments would be falsified by a positive correlation between attractiveness and saying feminist things.
This isn't to say that these counter-arguments aren't a bad idea for other reasons; we probably want some way of getting information from ugly people, for example.
This dosen't deserve down votes. Roissy's style (aesthetically pleasing but quite outrageous) and persona are hard to stomach (at first?).
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I'm a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It's completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you'd read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost") and social skills books ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock") sound as artificial when you're not used to them?
Agreed. There's a sense of futility in life there that doesn't really have an upside, or even a non-downside
Forever.. Ok, probability one minus epsilon.
I see the "just jealous" claim as equivalent to A attempting to lower B's status, and when B says they don't like it, A says "you just don't like having your status lowered, so your point should be ignored".