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lessdazed comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong
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Instead of saying "Women want..." and "Women mean..." would it not be more accurate to say "Some women want.../mean..., and those are the kind of women I wanted to seek, so this knowledge was useful to me."? Also, did your studying convincingly impart that these general desires were gender specific, or would it be more accurate to say "Some people want.../mean"?
Does the name of this dog breed (the Pointer) strike you as outlandishly inappropriate?
Just say what you mean. Making a point obliquely in a way that requires readers to click a link is not very helpful.
This is good advice.
"Pointer" dogs are not the only dogs that point, many others do or can be trained to. What's more, not every dog of that breed will grow up to be a hunting dog or ever point! Even those that hunt frequently will spend a very, very small portion of their lives pointing. They will spend far more time eating, sleeping, having four legs (most anyway, some will have accidents or birth defects) and most time of all having warm blood.
We do not call the breed "warm-bloods" because this would not go far in distinguishing them among animals. We latch onto this tiny difference of action, which they spend a tiny portion of their lives doing, which is an even tinier amount more than other dogs do it, and name them by what they distinctly do. It's fine to discuss differences without spending every sentence on similarities. The similarities are the background assumption.
It's entirely appropriate for Luke to speak in generalities with his group as a base case for comparison, and to in writing ignore exceptions and outliers as we know there are always some. He doesn't just mean "some women want", one could construct many, many different true sentences about what "some women want" and it would not be at all useful.
We know men and women are of the same species and are similar. We are interested in differences, it is these differences that the males will fail to correctly model when they mentally model females' minds using their own, as if those minds were like exactly their own.
If Zeb had requested that he use the word "many" rather than "some" would you consider his point to be more valid?
Less invalid, but Luke did a fine Gricean job saying that the mean and mode and median woman differs from her counterpart man in the described ways.
I think you missed Zeb's point. E wasn't claiming that Luke was saying that no men do X; e was claiming that Luke was saying that all women do X, or at least that a large enough portion of women do X that the rest are a minority small enough to be safely ignored.
That kind of statement is particularly annoying, above and beyond considerations of its truth value, because it tends to come across as judgmental: "Real" men/women/rationalists/whatever do X or Y or Z, so if I don't, does that mean something's wrong with me? Even if that's not the intention, enough messages like that tend to build up in the form of cached thoughts that can be very frustrating to deal with.
I interpret Luke's claim as being about what women do more than men. It's an aid to model other minds that, along several axes, tend to systematically differ. I disagree with "ignored", I think that's inserting a charged intention into Luke's essay that is obviously not intended.
Women (generally) want to have children more than men do (I think, which is sufficient for the example). I personally very much want to have children one day. I don't think that makes me "not a real man" or anything like that.
It's obviously not.
Fair enough.
Would you agree that Luke communicated that it's fairly safe to assume that all women X? That's a more diplomatic way of putting it, but to my way of thinking boils down to essentially the same message.
This seems to miss the bulk of my point. If one leaves out the 'generally', and just says "women want to have children more than men do", a man who is very interested in having children can think that women want children even more. He'll probably be incorrect, but he can think that, without it being a source of immediate stress or drama. But a woman who has no desire to have children is in a different situation - there's no plausible way that the average degree of wanting-children in men is lower than that, so it's immediately obvious that she doesn't fit the speaker's definition of 'women', which can be quite stressful. The case where men aren't referred to at all is similar, except that the man seeing the message is likely to come to a conclusion that's a bit closer to correct.
(Also, does it change your perception of this conversation at all if I point out that 1) I'm in a particularly a-gendered phase of genderfluidity right now and don't identify as female at the moment, and 2) my most recent priming for having this kind of argument actually came from a male-focused gender-egalitarianism blog? These things do run both ways, even if the example at hand is female-focused.)
Edit: Downvote of parent comment: Not me.
So I upvoted this comment and then saw when I looked at it again that it was now at zero. I'm deeply curious what in it someone thought deserved a downvote.
It's quite likely that I'm being downvoted for having a conversation about gender at all, given that those have a bit of a habit of exploding when they happen here.
Has anyone else noticed considerably more downvotes than usual in the past week- in particular for comments which are well above what we expect here in terms of writing, manner, education and rationality? (I may have just spent too much time in threads that got political.)
No, I haven't noticed it. But I confess my standards are rather brutal and I haven't been paying close attention.
Can you point to a few examples that you would not expect to be voted down as much at other times?
If I voted this comment down, would you take that as supporting evidence that there are recently more downvotes than usual, or as evidence opposing that theory?
It depends on the passage. For example, "Women want men to be better at making them laugh and feel good and get aroused and not be creeped out," applies to basically all women, and also applies to all men but the message from context is that it is generally more important to women than to men. So yes to "all women want X" and "women generally want X more than men want X" but no to "all women want X more than men want X".
One has to assume something from context and insert either "generally", "exclusively", "equally", or whatever, if it isn't explicit. My assumption that the intention was best captured by "generally" was a) the charitable reading b) the most likely reading.
The argument that a sentence could be interpreted as offensive seems like it unfairly ignores the principle of charity.
Is it a definition?
Not consciously.
I'm going to have to let my response to this stew for a bit before it's suitable to post, if I can get the inferential distances reasonable at all.
The short, probably-won't-work, only-posting-it-so-the-above-doesn't-sound-like-an-evasion version is that your assumption that people will automatically parse things like that assumes that such people are at stage 4 (possibly 5) or better of Perry's development theory (or equivalent), and that such an assumption is not safe to make, even here.
The principle of charity forces people to privilege interpretations they consider unlikely, even if they aren't the readings they glean automatically. If their first reading implies that the author is innately evil or incredibly stupid, that indicates reinterpretation is in order.
If your point is that it pattern matches for bad things, OK, Luke is communicating suboptimally in the context of many readers being systematically biased and unfair and other writers using similar words to mean mean things.
Yah; it comes across all too often like a retroactive attempt to patch an idea that might be compromised by bias. Especially because those minority of cases may be the real salient test of the idea -- if your theory is predicated on the idea that all X are Y, and along comes an X purporting to be a Z but not a Y, then conditional on the truth of this statement your theory is wrong. It's one thing to look at the failures of your original formulation and go, hmmm, clearly I missed something and need to patch or reject my theory; but in a context like this it's usually more, well, a rationalization -- "your counterexample doesn't apply because my factual error can be retconned as a previous, weak definition of the scope of my statement!"
It seems to me what is important about Luke's statement is the assertion that the kind of women he wants to [blank] are likely to respond appropriately to the behaviors he has learned. Sure, if he just want to [blank] any woman, then it is useful to know what behaviors most women will respond appropriately to. Otherwise it hardly matters what portion (few, many, most...) of women Luke is accurately describing. It only matters that he is describing the ones he is interested in. By failing to qualify the subset of women (and "some...which are the ones I want" would be the most general way to qualify them), Luke is potentially misleading the people who want to [blank] other women, and he is contributing to the general gender stereotyping of women. Furthermore I think it would be very interesting and relevant to know if everything Luke says applies equally or significantly to men. The construction "women want..." does not denote that "men do not want..." but it perhaps accidentally connotes it.