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Konkvistador comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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Comments (1529)
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.
Firstly - I hadn't read that article yet, thanks. Still making my way through the backlog.
Secondly - I don't think we are in agreement on this. You are claiming that I was making a 1-place argument.
In fact I was pointing out that roissy seems to be under the incorrect impression that his 1-place, curryed algorithm is the algorithm for determining the "sexual worth" of a woman. In my (admittedly brief) time on his site, I didn't see any reference to alternative algorithms for evaluating the sexual worth of women (based, say, on alternative preferences).
My understanding on how he sees women predicts that he would be quite surprised to find a man that honestly finds a woman to be attractive that he considers to not be attractive. ie he would be truly astonished to find that some men really and honestly find 40 YO old women perfectly good bedmates. ie he would find it hard to accept that other men used a different sexiness function than what he uses.
Of course my other understandings about him mean that I predict that if he found a man that claimed the above - roissy would think the man was not being honest and was simply "settling" for what he could get.
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.