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Vladimir_M comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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Comments (1529)
Yes, that's another way in which it just doesn't look like a good idea. When you're organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you're doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don't make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn't perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn't be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don't seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn't made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster -- and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual -- who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic ("openly," at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I'm glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I'm not sure how you're supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
Coming out and saying what exactly?
Is this a joke? I don't know what exactly. That's the point.
OK, then to phrase it in purely grammatical terms, what exactly is the antecedent of the pronoun "it" in your question above?
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I'd like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I'm afraid to do so. There's nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. ("Offends" in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it's smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It's this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that's offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful "Soylent Green is people" bombshells.
Well, it's fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I'm not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was not alone in that interpretation (I see you've already responded to one of those comments as well).
In that case, I'm somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn't worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I'm not going to second-guess you.
But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.
The trouble is, I really don't see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don't want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I'd hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.
Redheads? Now I'm curious what kinds of traits X you're talking about.
To take a prominent example, it's impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman's sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it's usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of "prejudice" and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).
On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.
Perhaps if you started by sharing your dataset first (with names changed to protect the guilty, etc.), then the conclusions you drew from it, and only afterwards the advice you would give to a younger version of yourself?
So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you're willing, I'd like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won't personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?