On the other hand, I don't think the author was collecting cross cultural material, so I don't know what insults/shame looks like in cultures where religious prejudice is a larger factor.

I'm not an expert on this by any means, but insult content varies quite a bit across cultures. Dutch profanity is largely medical, for example; kankerlijer ("cancer-sufferer") is very strong. I've heard speculation that this is due to the largely urban landscape that Dutch evolved in, where being a vector of infection (never mind that most causes of cancer aren't infectious) meant being a clear danger to the community.

So religious insults seem plausible in any culture that takes religion especially seriously. Spanish profanity has retained a lot of religious content; I don't know much about its evolution, but it could plausibly be related to Spanish-speaking culture's historically strong Catholicism.

It's worth noting that not every piece of social interaction has a non-trivial influence from evolutionary psychology. Sometimes an insult is just an insult...

Humans have emotions and don't think rationally by default. Most people do not like to feel inadequate, though how they respond to that feeling varies a great deal. Most people in a relationship also don't like to feel they were rejected sexually over some perceived inadequacy.

So when a mate gives them a 20-page lecture on their failures to hold their attraction and concludes by rejecting them as a sex partner, it's probably not vanishingly far from the null hypothesis that the person is going to get upset...

Well it's almost definitional. If evolutionary selection pressures were extreme enough to actually make lukeprog that way, then all men are that way. If evolution did it to him, then it did it to everyone. Evolution doesn't discriminate. What's more likely is that evolution didn't actually make him that way, but societal pressures did.

But that's setting aside the fact that most people tend to wildly anthropomorphize evolution...

I think you're assuming too rational a partner.

If you're honest and say, "Your breasts are too small," the person in question might seek a guy who likes smaller breasts next time. Or she might fall into a deep self-loathing in which she believes that her body is imperfect and nobody could be attracted to her, thus sabotaging her own future potential relationships. Or she could run out and get breast implants, even though she doesn't really want them, in hopes that you / other future guys will find her more attractive--which is much more expensive and possibly less rewarding than simply finding people who like small breasts.

In my view it's better to keep it vague. Guessing over dozens of possible flaws is likely to be less harmful than obsessing over one particular flaw, since it's difficult to figure out / change whatever possible flaw you think may exist.

(Disclosure: I have been dumped once and did the dumping once. The dumper kept it vague; I kept it specific but lied. I can't judge how keeping it specific while lying worked, since the person in question was bipolar and therefore not at all a normal test subject. I can judge how keeping it vague went: I obsessed over dozens of flaws for a while, until I found other people who were interested, at which point I decided it was probably just a bad match and nothing really to do with absolute flaws at all. I do not know how a completely honest dumping pans out.)

true reason for rejecting them

This usually makes little sense, particularly for someone one was attracted to for a while.

It's almost never true that for someone whose breasts one once found sufficient, her breasts would be a deal breaker, and no woman would be attractive with similar breasts regardless of her personality, face, legs, etc.

The problem is that the character sheet was filled out with mostly low die rolls, not that stat X is too low.

ETA: asking what the "true reason" for a breakup was is like asking what the "true reason" for a war, such as the Iraq War, was. Was it possible WMD? Past links to Al-Qaida? Possible future links to Al-Qaida? Past human rights abuses such as mass torture and murder? Aquiring influence over oil? Creating a pro-western regime? Creating a democratic regime? Perceived divine guidance during Bush's praying?

The first test to figure out if someone is more rationalist than emotional about the Iraq war to ask them what the "true reason" for the invasion was and see if they right that wrong question. It's just as much the wrong question in this context as that one.

Calling it "grossly insensitive" is too quick a rejection of the possibility of telling a truth.

I agree.

A complementary position is that just because something is 'grossly insensitive' doesn't mean it isn't both a kindness and exactly the right thing to do. Humans learn from unpleasant things. Especially targeted unpleasant things. So 'got to be cruel to be kind' often applies.

If your true and actual reason for breaking up with someone is that her breasts are too small, consider that (a) saying "It was because you were too clingy" may cause them to try and mess with an aspect of their personality that doesn't even need fixing, and (b) total silence, which you may fondly imagine to be mercy, may result in her frantically imagining dozens of possible flaws all of which she tries desperately to correct, just on the off-chance it was that one. As opposed to, say, looking for a guy who's into smaller breasts next time.

Tangent: The tricky thing is that often "because you were too clingy" will technically be the real reason, just not the most useful part of the causal chain to select. If she had bigger breasts that will change both how 'clingy' any given behavior seems and how much attraction to her you exhibit which in turn influences how clingy she is likely to be. So sometimes even 'real' reasons can be a cop-out!

Maybe I'm just being inordinately naive, but telling someone honestly, softly, and believably, your true reason for rejecting them, seems like it really should have certain advantages for them, if not for you.

That certainly seems likely for most cases.

Even bigger tangent: I can't think of many better ways to be broken up with than this! Seriously. It's (counter-intuitively) one of the least personally insulting break ups I've seen. Because pussy-footying around being 'sensitive' is in its own way just another kind of insult.

It would depend on the broader social context - in particular, will you still share a social context - but if you do it seems likely you could get your name dragged through the mud in that example,and she still might not believe you and so suffer b) anyway.

If your point is that going on about evolutionary psychology adds to the obfuscation but not to the insensitivity, I disagree.

It could go either way. Digression into a bunch of theory and science impersonalizes things as well as focussing on 'me' instead of 'you' The main problem with getting into a big speel on science is that it increases the total time spent dwelling on the painfully negative topic. The fact that it is talking about the science isn't the insulting part.

There are often ways of more or less sensitively coming clean about (what one takes to be) one's true reasons for breaking up. Maybe you wouldn't go so specific as "you're too fat," but you could talk about lack of physical chemistry or whatever without uttering a falsehood or being too misunderstood.

Talking about 'lack of physical chemistry' is less insulting by virtue of being a vague pre-packaged euphemism rather than brutally personal criticism of highly status-sensitive personal features. It seems to be an entirely different kind of difference to whether you mention evolutionary psychology or not.

Yes, but in addition to it being change, it's also genuinely a change I don't like. I've visited enough website to know what I do and don't like. A small topic indicator icon like you see on Slashdot would be fine.

I seem to remember running into such people, but don't remember any particular occasion well enough to give a cite.

Asking people to be precise is also a signal of something. We usually don't demand perfect clarity for every sentence we ever read or hear, even on LW. I suppose we usually demand it when we disagree with one's opinion.

I don't want "perfect clarity* from people, I want for the people on this site who make declarative statements about groups of people they're not in (especially when the implications shape their behavior toward members of that group) to be factually-accurate and not misleading in their implications. This is not a complex or censorious idea.

I don't want "politically correct", I want actually correct. Do you see the difference? What I want to see is people not committing the ecological fallacy (Population X is statistically Y on average, ergo more members than not will be Y) and nobody pointing it out just because the conclusions are agreeable to a majority on this site.

I do not have the power, let alone the desire, to censor you or any other poster on this site (other than by means of downvoting a comment, and I only get the one downvote).

Summary: It is possible to selectively use demands for precision as a form of censorship.

Now now, insight like that might slow the evaporative cooling that has been happening on Lesswrong when it comes to gender and sexuality (and to a much lesser extent on all unPC matters). Thinkers here used to be much less burdened by this, makes even a fool hard pressed to chuckle.

This comment is shockingly insightful and I would like to thank you for it.

Upvoted for clear communication.

I'm sort of puzzled, though, as to how I could have possibly interpreted your statements as applying to anything but the post and the comments on it; I saw no context clues suggesting that you meant "in everyday conversation." Did I miss these?

That said, if one of us had added just three or four words of proviso earlier, limiting our generalizations explicitly, we could have figured the disconnect out more quickly. I could have said that my generalizations apply best to essays and edited posts. You could have said that your generalizations apply best to situations where the added cost of qualifiers carries a higher burden.

Because we did not explicitly qualify our generalizations, but instead relied on context, we fell prey to a fake disagreement. However, any vindication I feel at seeing my point supported is nullified by the realization that I, personally, failed to apply the communication strategy that I was promoting.

Oops.

a thought-out-in advance, unrestricted-in-length, document.

For a moderately loose definition of 'thought out in advance', this describes most text-based, internet-based communication, and certainly the types of communication that can happen on LW.

It seems that I've failed to make my point.

It is, as far as I can tell, safe to assume that everyone who reads LW understands enough about probabilities that saying 'zero' would communicate exactly the same concept regarding the probability at hand as saying 'epsilon', if we had a norm of allowing the former. The reason for doing the latter is about signaling, in much the same way that saying 'most women' instead of just 'women' is about signaling. In both cases, the point of the signal is to encourage accurate thought in the long run, rather than letting a small amount of convenience in the near term to outweigh that.

So, no. My statement is fine as is. Did I leave out a great heaping swath of precisions, provisos, and details? > Absolutely!! -- but that was the point from the outset.

And you wouldn't hear a peep out of me if it wasn't depressingly common to see people couch advice, theories and other mental-model-of-the-world stuff in such terms, giving no obvious sign that they've thought about the distinction between "speaking to a specific audience" and just speaking with the assumption that the listeners fit their relatively vague preconception of who they talk to, rather than about.

It's far from clear when an Anglophonic Western man says "Men and women marry each other for romantic love" that he is cognizant of the distinction. After all, that's his default context, other possibilities are barely even mentioned in his expected cultural background (let alone presented as normal), and unless he has much overt contact with people for whom that's not the case, the odds are pretty good it's a thing-over-there, done by some outgroup about whom he knows rather little.

It may not be terribly important if he's just talking among a peer group of like folks, but when he's got access to a wide and relatively unknown audience (it could be anyone reading), and he's trying to frame it in terms of general information about "how people work", it's usually a safe bet he just didn't think about how his own norms influence his advice, and hence how applicable it might be to even, say, an English-speaking, technically-trained man in India (where arranged marriages for purposes other than romantic love are still pretty standard).

Sometimes people on this site even take norms like that and try to infer over all of human evolution. So yeah -- this is not an unreasonable thing to question.

I haven't noticed a correlation between flirting and the kind of humor that is compatible to my own sense of humor, but again, it might be there. For me, however, one of the issues I actually actively look for when meeting a new person and considering a relationship with them is whether or not they are inclined to flirt. If someone flirts with me, it is generally a detractor and both she and I are probably better off not pursuing anything further, again except possibly for short term sexual interests. If someone else cares a lot about flirting (perhaps legitimately) that is usually a signal that I am not a good match for them. It would be the same if our first conversations focused heavily on NASCAR or high-end fashion... these are signs of a mismatch with my own personality and flirting is among them (though of course not the most telling or severe sign).