= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
PhilosophyTutor comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - 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 (1529)
You are absolutely right that utilities cannot be easily compared and that this is a fundamental problem for utilitarian ethics.
We can approximate a comparison in some cases using proxies like money, or in some cases by assuming that if we average enough people's considered preferences we can approach a real average preference. However these do not solve the fundamental problem that there is no way of measuring human happiness such that we could say with confidence "Action A will produce a net 10 units of happiness, and Action B will produce a net 11 units of happiness".
In the case of human sexual relationships what you'd really have to do is conduct a longitudinal study looking at variables like reported happiness, incidence of mental illness, incidence of suicide, partner-assisted orgasms per unit time, longevity and so on.
That said this difficulty in totalling up net utilities is not a moral blank cheque. If women report distress after a one night stand with a PUA followed by cessation of contact then that has to be taken as evidence of caused disutility, and you can't remove the moral burden that entails by pointing out that calculating net utility is difficult or postulating that their distress is their fault because they are "entitled"/"in denial"/etc.
While this would give people more knowledge about how their actions turn into consequences, this doesn't help people decide which consequences they prefer, and so only weakly helps them decide which actions they prefer.
So, let's drop the term utility, here, and see if that clarifies the moral burden. Suppose Bob and Alice go to a bar and meet; they both apply seduction techniques; they have sex that night. Alice's interest in Bob increases; Bob's interest in Alice decreases. What moral burdens are on each of them, and where did those moral burdens come from?
The thing is, some (granted, not all) of what falls under PUA or "apply seduction techniques" falls unambiguously into the category of dark arts.
I find it hard to believe that we want to argue that, "Dark arts are bad, except when they can get you laid."
Dark arts AREN"T bad in general! Nor is avadakadavraing anyone that you would have shot with a gun anyway.
Ah. I prefer not to argue "dark arts are bad," rather "dark arts do not illuminate." Tautologies have the virtue of being true.
(Put flippantly, sex is sometimes easier with the lights off.)
I was using "dark arts" here in the more narrow sense of "techniques designed to subvert the rationality of others by exploiting cognitive biases." I'm not speaking of being an effective flirt, or wearing flattering makeup and clothing. The sort of things I had in mind are, to take a mild example, bringing a slightly less attractive "wingman" to make oneself look more attractive than one would alone, or to take a serious example, whisking a woman from bar to bar to create the illusion of longer-term acquaintance. I see this as wrong for essentially the same reason that spiking someone's drink is wrong if they wouldn't sleep with you sober.
To oversimplify somewhat, I tend to see society as divided into three groups: those who don't generally aspire to rationality (the majority of the population), those who want to share the bounty of rationality to help others overcome their biases (Lesswrong), and those who would instead use their knowledge of rationality to exploit people in the first group. I acknowledge that I am more confused by the current negative karma of my grandparent than the karma of any other comment I have ever made on this site.
My observation is that most of the posts I have made that criticised PUA or PUA-associated beliefs have been voted down very quickly, but then they have bounced back up over the next day or so such that the overall karma delta is highly positive. One hypothesis that explains it is that there are a certain number of people reviewing this thread at short intervals who are downvoting posts critical of PUA, but that they are not the plurality of posters reviewing this thread.
ETA: Update on this. Posts critical of PUA ideology that are concealed from the main thread either by being voted to -3 or below, or by being a descendant of such, get voted into the ground, and as far as I can see this effect is largely insensitive to the intellectual value or lack thereof of the post. I hypothesise that the general LW readership doesn't bother drilling down to see what's going on in those subthreads and hence their opinions are not reflected in the vote count, while PUA-enthusiasts who vote along ideological lines do bother to drill down.
Posts critical of PUA that are well-written, logical, pertinent and visible to the general readership are voted up, overall.
One explanation is that the first to read your messages are those you responded to, who are those most likely to note any poorness of fit between what they said and what they are alleged or implied to have said or believed.
I'm shocked that it didn't stay below 0. Forget any point it was trying to make about dating - it sends totally the wrong message about 'lesswrong' attitudes towards 'dark arts'!
I think it does help if people have pre-existing views about whether they like the internal experience of happiness, mental health, continued life, orgasms and so on, and about whether they can legitimately generalise those views to others. I don't think I would be making an unreasonable assumption if I assumed that an arbitrarily chosen woman in a bar would most likely have a preference for the internal experience of happiness, mental health, continued life, orgasms and so on and hence that conduct likely to bring about those outcomes for her would produce utility and conduct likely to bring about the opposite would produce negative utility.
There is not enough information to say, and your chosen scenario is possibly not the best one for exploring the ethics of PUA behaviour since it firstly postulates that the female participant is also using seduction techniques (hopefully defined in some more specific sense than just trying to be attractive), and secondly it skips entirely over the ethical question of approaching someone in the first place and possibly getting them to participate in sex acts they may not have planned to engage in. By jumping straight to the next morning and asking that the moral path is forward from that point this scenario avoids arguably the most important ethical questions about PUA behaviour.
However I will answer the question as posed to avoid accusations that I am simply avoiding it. From a utilitarian perspective the moral burden is simply to maximise utility, so we need to know what are Bob and Alice's utility functions are, and what Bob and Alice should reasonably think the other party's utility function is like.
It might well be that Bob has neither the interest not the ability to sustain a mutually optimal ongoing relationship with Alice and in that case the utility-maximising path from that point forward and hence the ethical option is for Bob to leave and not contact Alice again. However if Bob knew in advance that this was the case and had reason to believe that Alice's utility function placed a negative value on participating in a one night stand with a person who was not interested in a long-term relationship then Bob behaved unethically in getting to this position since he knowingly brought about a negative-utility outcome for a moral stakeholder.
Knowing that her weights on those things are positive gets me nowhere. What I need to know are their relative strengths, and this seems like an issue where (heterosexual) individuals are least poised to be able to generalize their own experience. It seems likely that a man could go through life thinking that everyone enjoys one night stands and sleeps great afterwards, and not until reading PUA literature realizes that women often freak out after them.
Suppose she flirts, or the equivalent (that is, rather than just seeking general attraction, she seeks targeted attraction at some point). If she never expresses any interest, it's unlikely she and Bob will have sex (outside of obviously unethical scenarios).
What question do you think is most important?
Suppose Bob and Alice both believe that actions reveal preferences.
Suppose Alices enjoy one night stands, and Carols regret one night stands, though they agree to have sex after the first date. When Bob meets a woman, he can't expect her to honestly respond whether she's a Carol or an Alice if he asks her directly. What probability does he need that a woman he seduces in a bar will be an Alice for it to be ethical to seduce women in bars?
As well, if he believes that actions reveal preferences, should he expect that one night stands are a net utility gain or loss for Carols?
Hopefully research like that cited in the OP can help with that. In the meantime we have to do the best we can with what we have, and engage in whatever behaviours maximise the expected utility of all stakeholders based on our existing, limited knowledge.
I think the most important question is "Is it ethical to obtain sex by deliberately faking social signals, given what we know of the consequences for both parties of this behaviour?". A close second would be "Is it ethical to engage in dominance-seeking behaviour in a romantic relationship?".
One approach would be to multiply the probability you have an Alice by the positive utility an Alice gets out of a one night stand, and multiply the probability that you have a Carol by the negative utility a Carol gets out of a one night stand, and see which figure was larger. That would be the strictly utilitarian approach to the question as proposed.
If we're allowed to try to get out of the question as proposed, which is poor form in philosophical discussion and smart behaviour in real life, a good utilitarian would try to find ways to differentiate Alices and Carols, and only have one night stands with Alices.
A possible deontological approach would be to say "Ask them if they are an Alice or a Carol, and treat them as the kind of person they present themselves to be. If they lied it's their fault".
The crypto-sociopathic approach would be to say "This is all very complicated and confusing, so until someone proves beyond any doubt I'm hurting people I'll just go on doing what feels good to me".
"Deliberately faking social signals"? But, but, that barely makes any sense. They are signals. You give the best ones you can. Everybody else knows that you are trying to give the best signals that you can and so can make conclusions about your ability to send signals and also what other signals you will most likely give to them and others in the future. That is more or less what socializing is. I suppose blatant lies in a context where lying isn't appropriate and elaborate creation of false high status identities could be qualify - but in those case I would probably use a more specific description.
A third would be "could the majority of humans have a romantic relationship without dominance-seeking behavior?" and the fourth : "would most people find romantic relationships anywhere near as satisfying without dominance-seeking behavior?" (My money is on the "No"s.)
One more question: What principles would help establish how much dominance seeking behavior is enough to break the relationship or in some other way cause more damage than it's worth, considering that part of dominance is ignoring feedback that it's unwelcome?"
Yes, that part is hard, even on a micro scale. I have been frequently surprised that I underestimate how much dominance seeking would be optimal. I attribute this to mind-projection. ie "This means she would prefer me to do that? Wow. I'd never take that shit if it was directed at me. Hmm... I'm going do that for her benefit and be sure not to send any signal that I am doing it for compliance. It's actually kind of fun."
(Here I do mean actual unambiguous messages - verbal or through blatantly obvious social signalling by the partner. I don't mean just "some source says that's what women want".)
Fortunately we can choose which dominance seeking behaviors to accept and reject at the level of individual behavioral trait. We could also, if it was necessary for a particular relationship, play the role of someone who is ignoring feedback but actually absorb everything and process it in order to form the most useful model of how to navigate the relationship optimally. On the flip side we can signal and screen to avoid dominance seeking behaviors that we particularly don't want and seek out and naturally reward those that we do want.
Wow, really? How? I make the opposite mistake all the time (at least I think I do) so I'd be interested in hearing some examples.
This question seems malformed. "Deliberating faking social signals" is vague- but is typically not something that's unethical (Is it unethical to exaggerate?). "What we know of the consequences" is unclear- what's our common knowledge?
Yes.
And, of course, you saw the disconnect between your original statement and your new, more correct one.
Right?
The reason I asked that question is because you put forth the claim that Bob's fault was knowingly causing harm to someone. That's not the real problem, though- people can ethically knowingly cause harm to others in a wide variety of situations, under any vaguely reasonable ethical system. Any system Bob has for trying to determine the difference between Alices and Carols will have some chance of failure, and so it's necessary to use standard risk management, not shut down.
Rhetorical questions are a mechanism that allows us to get out of making declarative statements, and when you find yourself using them that should be an immediate alert signal to yourself that you may be confused or that your premises bear re-examination.
Deceiving others to obtain advantage over them is prima facie unethical in many spheres of life, and I think Kant would say that it is always unethical. Some role-ethicists would argue that when playing roles such as "salesperson", "advertiser" or "lawyer" that you have a moral license or even obligation to deceive others to obtain advantage but these seem to me like rationalisations rather than coherent arguments from supportable prior principles. Even if you buy that story in the case of lawyers, however, you'd need to make a separate case that romantic relationships are a sphere where deceiving others to obtain advantage is legitimate, as opposed to unethical.
PUA is to a large extent about spoofing social signals, in the attempt to let young, nerdy, white-collar IT workers signal that they have the physical and psychological qualities to lead a prehistoric tribe and bring home meat. The PUA mythology tries to equivocate between spoofing the signals to indicate that you have such qualities and actually having such qualities but I think competent rationalists should be able to keep their eye on the ball too well to fall for that. Consciously and subconsciously women want an outstanding male, not a mediocre one who is spoofing their social signals, and being able to spoof social signals does not make you an outstanding male.
Okay. We come from radically different ethical perspectives such that it may be unlikely that we can achieve a meeting of minds. I feel that dominance-seeking in romantic relationships is a profound betrayal of trust in a sphere where your moral obligations to behave well are most compelling.
Can you point me to the text that you take to be "my original statement" and the text you take to be "my new, more correct statement"? There may be a disconnect but I'm currently unable to tell what text these constructs are pointing to, so I can't explicate the specific difficulty.
People can ethically and knowingly burn each other to death in a wide variety of situations under any vaguely reasonable ethical system too, so that statement is effectively meaningless. It's a truly general argument. (Yes, I exclude from reasonableness any moral system that would stop you burning one serial killer to death to prevent them bringing about some arbitrarily awful consequence if there were no better ways to prevent that outcome).
We agree completely on that point, but it seems to me that a substantial subset of PUA practitioners and methodologies are aiming to deliberately increase the risk, not manage it. Their goals are to maximise the percentage of Alices who sleep with the PUA and also to maximise the percentage of Carols who sleep with the PUA.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to go further and say that in large part the whole point of PUA is to bed Carols. Alices are up for a one night stand anyway, so manipulating them to suspend their usual protective strategies and engage in a one night stand with you would be as pointless as peeling a banana twice. It's only the Carols who are not normally up for a one night stand that you need to manipulate in the first place. Hence that subset of PUA is all about maximising the risk of doing harm, not minimising that risk.
(Note that these ethical concerns are orthogonal to, not in conflict with, my equally serious methodological concerns about whether it's rational to think PUA performs better than placebo given the available evidence).
That sounds wrong. I dabbled in pickup a little bit and I would gladly accept a 2x boost in my attractiveness to Alices in exchange for total loss of attractiveness to Carols. If you think success with Alices is easy, I'd guess that either you didn't try a lot, or you're extremely attractive and don't know it :-)
Irrelevant. Is all fair in love?
Are you claiming that all romantic relationships which include the domination of one party by the other betray trust? I think we have differing definitions of dominance or good behavior.
Sure! First statement:
Second statement:
The first statement is judging a decision solely by its outcome; the second statement is judging a decision by its expected value at time of decision-making. The second methodology is closer to correct than the first.
(In the post with the first statement, it was the conclusion of a hypothetical scenario: Bob knew X about Alice, and had sex with her then didn't contact her. I wasn't contesting that win-lose outcomes were inferior to win-win outcomes, but was pointing out that the uncertainties involved are significant for any discussion of the subject. There's no reason to give others autonomy in an omniscient utilitarian framework: just get their utility function and run the numbers for them. In real life, however, autonomy is a major part of any interactions or decision-making, in large part because we cannot have omniscience.)
That does not seem reasonable. Alices may be up for one night stands, but they only have sex with at most one guy a night. The challenge is being that guy.
Let me check... nope, it looks like utilitarian ethics holds that ethical actions are those that maximise positive outcomes (however defined) factoring in the consequences for all stakeholders. I can't see anything in there excluding actions or outcomes related to sex from the usual sorts of calculations. So I'm going to go ahead and say that the answer is no from a utilitarian perspective.
If we can exclude those cases where one partner or another honestly and explicitly expresses a free, informed and rational preference to be dominated then mostly yes.
(From a utilitarian perspective we have to at least be philosophically open to the idea that a person who is sufficiently bad at managing their utility might be better off being dominated against their will by a sufficiently altruistic dominator. See The Taming of the Shrew or Overboard. Such cases are atypical).
I have located the source of the confusion. What I actually said in the earlier post was this:
"t might well be that Bob has neither the interest not the ability to sustain a mutually optimal ongoing relationship with Alice and in that case the utility-maximising path from that point forward and hence the ethical option is for Bob to leave and not contact Alice again. However if Bob knew in advance that this was the case and had reason to believe that Alice's utility function placed a negative value on participating in a one night stand with a person who was not interested in a long-term relationship then Bob behaved unethically in getting to this position since he knowingly brought about a negative-utility outcome for a moral stakeholder."
I was not judging a situation solely on its outcome, because it was an if/then statement explicitly predicated on Bob knowing in advance that Alice's utility function would take a major hit.
I guess you just lost track of the context and thought I'd said something I hadn't. Are we back on the same page together now?
Possibly the recency effect of having skimmed one of Roissy's blog posts where he specifically singled out for ridicule a female blogger who was expressing regret and confusion after a one night stand colours my recollection, but I am sure I have read PUA materials in the past that had specific sections dedicated to the problem of overcoming the resistance of women who had a preference not to engage in sex on the first/second/nth date, a preference that is certainly not inherently irrational and which seems intuitively likely to correlate with a high probability of regretting a one night stand if it does not turn into an ongoing, happy relationship.
Speaking more broadly a stereo salesperson maximises their sales by selling a stereo to every customer who walks in wanting to buy a stereo, and selling a stereo to as many customers as possible who walk in not wanting to buy a stereo. I'm sure they would prefer all their customers to be the first kind but you maximise your income by getting the most out of both. Game-theory-rational PUAs who don't have Alices on tap, or a reliable way of filtering out Carols, or who just plain find some Carols attractive and want to sleep with them, would out of either necessity or preference have an interest in maximising their per-Carol chances of bedding a Carol.
It should be noted that, from the perspective of a utilitarian agent in certain environments, it may be the utilitarian action to self-modify into a non-utilitarian agent. That is, an unmodified utilitarian agent participating in certain interactions with non-utilitarian agents may create greater utility by self-modifying into a non-utilitarian agent.
How prevalent do you think those cases are?
Did what you wrote agree with the parenthetical paragraph I wrote explaining my interpretation? If so, we're on the same page.
Let's go back to a question I asked a while back that wasn't answered that is now relevant again, and explore it a little more deeply. What is a utility function? It rank orders actions*. Why do you think stating regret is more indicative of utility than actions taken? If, in the morning, someone claims they prefer X but at night they do ~X, then it seems that it is easier to discount their words than their actions. (An agent who prefers vice at night and virtue during the day is, rather than being inconsistent, trying to get the best of both worlds.)
(As well, Augustine's prayer is relevant here: Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.).
*Typically, utility functions are computed by assigning values to consequences, then figuring out the expected value of actions, but in order to make practical measurements it has to be considered with regards to actions.
Right. But it's not clear to me that it's unethical for a salesman to sell to reluctant buyers. If you consider a third woman- Diana- who does not agree to have sex on the first date, then both of us would agree that having sex with Diana on the first date would be unethical, just like robbing someone and leaving them a stereo in exchange would be unethical. But pursuing Diana would not be, especially if it's hard to tell the difference between her and Carol (or Alice) at first glance. Both Carols and Alices have an incentive to seem like Dianas while dating (also car-buying, though not stereo-buying), and so this isn't an easy problem.
It seems odd to me to suggest a utilitarian should act as though Carols are Dianas.
See, ah, I think I'm against advocating deliberately unethical behavior / defection on LW.
Prude. :P
The question is what ethical standard to use. Whether or not exaggeration is unfair in matters of romance has not been established, and I would argue that exaggeration has a far more entrenched position than radical honesty.
That is, I would argue that not exaggerating your desirability as a mate is defection, rather than cooperation, and defection of the lose-lose variety rather than the win-lose variety.
This. But you forgot "using canine social structure as if it were identical to human social structure."
My complaint with the whole "alpha" and "beta" terminology is that it doesn't seem to be derived from canine social structure. The omega rank seems more appropriate to what PUAs call "beta."
Reading more, it doesn't seem like any of these terms are accurate even to canine society. They were based on observing unrelated gray wolves kept together in captivity, where their social structures bore little resemblance to their normal groupings in the wild (a breeding pair and their cubs). More accurate terms for would be "parents" and "offspring", which match nicely to human families but aren't that useful for picking up women in bars.
What about just "until someone proves scientifically"?
Even that weaker position still seems incompatible actually being a utility-maximising agent, since there is prima facie evidence that inducing women to enter into a one-night-stand against their better judgment leads to subsequent distress on the part of the women reasonably often.
A disciple of Bayes and Bentham doesn't go around causing harm up until someone else shows that it's scientifically proven that they are causing harm. They do whatever maximises expected utility for all stakeholders based on the best evidence available at the time.
Note that this judgment holds regardless of the relative effectiveness of PUA techniques compared to placebo. Even if PUA is completely useless, which would be surprising given placebo effects alone, it would still be unethical to seek out social transactions that predictably lead to harm for a stakeholder without greater counterbalancing benefits being obtained somehow.
That isn't a utility maximising agent regardless of whether it demands your 'proof beyond any doubt' or just the 'until someone proves scientifically'. Utility maximising agents shut up and multiply. They use the subjectively objective probabilities and multiply them by the utility of each case.
The utility maximising agent you are talking about is one that you have declared to be a 'good utilitarian'. It's maximising everybody's utility equally. Which also happens to mean that if Bob gains more utility from a one night stand than a Carol loses through self-flaggelation then Bob is morally obliged to seduce her. This is something which I assume you would consider reprehensible. (This is one of the reasons I'm not a good utilitarian. It would disgust me.)
Neither "utility maximiser" nor "good utilitarian" are applause lights which match this proclamation.
(Edited out the last paragraph - it was a claim that was too strong.)
I took it for granted that the disutility experienced by the hypothetical distressed woman is great enough that a utility-maximiser would seek to have one-night-stands only with women who actually enjoyed them.
Given that Bob has the option of creating greater average utility by asking Alices home instead I don't see this as a problem. What you are saying is true only in a universe where picking up Carol and engaging in a win/lose, marginally-positive-sum interaction with her is the single best thing Bob can do to maximise utility in the universe, and that's a pretty strange universe.
I also think that PUAs are going to have to justify their actions in utilitarian terms if they are going to do it at all, since I really struggle to see how they could find a deontological or virtue-ethical justification for deceiving people and playing on their cognitive biases to obtain sex without the partner's fully informed consent. So if the utilitarian justification falls over I think all justifications fall over, although I'm open to alternative arguments on that point.
I don't think the Weak Gor Hypothesis holds and I don't think that you maximise a woman's utility function by treating her the way the misogynistic schools of PUA adovcate, but if you did then I would buy PUA as a utility-maximising strategy. I think it's about the only way I can see any coherent argument being made that PUA is ethical, excluding the warm-and-fuzzy PUA schools mentioned earlier which I already acknowledged as True Scotsmen.
I cannot reconstruct how you are parsing the first sentence so that it contradicts the second, and I've just tried very hard.
This seems to be a straw man. I don't recall ever hearing someone advocating having sex with people that would experience buyers remorse over those that would remember the experience positively. That would be a rather absurd position.
Yes, Bob should probably be spending all of his time earning money and gaining power that can be directed to mitigating existential risk. This objection seems to be a distraction from the point. The argument you made is neither utilitarian nor based on maximising utility. That's ok, moral assertions don't need to be reframed as utilitarian or utility-maximising. They can be just fine as they are.