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J_Taylor comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong
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Could you, by chance, link to Sailer expressing his opinions on the topic of homosexuality? I am having difficulty finding anything conclusive.
Damn right he's got nothing conclusive. Here's some bullshit that's awful hard to interpret charitably, though:
http://www.isteve.com/Decline_of_the_Metrosexual.htm
"Straight flight", my ass.
Also:
"Punishing." I find it impossible to believe that he performed even a crude survey upon a fair and meaningful sample of "straight men" instead of just projecting his personal tastes and prejudgices upon them.
The idea there that LGBT identification being out in the open has led to more pronounced heteronormativity signaling looks kinda interesting, actually.
On a sort-of-related subject, there are really are some unfortunate consequences for heterosexual men to being stuck in a society at the halfway point between intolerance of gays and actual equality.
In a lot of places in the developing world that are still at or close to the we-kill-people-for-being-gay stage, the (ridiculous) common wisdom is that since homosexuality is abnormal, there are no homosexuals (I have actually heard immigrants from parts of Africa claim that there are no homosexuals where they are from).
As a consequence of "nobody here is gay", straight men can hug, hold hands, share a bed (literally -- not a sex euphemism here), etc. without having their masculinity or sexual orientation challenged.
I think Western society would be better off if we could do that here too. I'm not willing to sacrifice the utility of gay people's lives for it, however, so I see it as a reason to push faster for full LGBT acceptance.
I strongly suspect that one of the other consequences of the "there are no homosexuals" social norm in such cultures is that under certain circumstances same-sex pairs can also have sex with one another without having their sexual orientation "challenged." (Similar things were true of opposite-sex pairs in cultures with the "there is no extramarital sex" cultural norm... e.g., bundling.)
But I agree with you that as long as queer visibility is noticeably higher than queer acceptability, there's a class of previously acceptable behaviors that become less acceptable (e.g., certain expressions of affection), and I agree with you that that's unfortunate, and I endorse closing that gap.
Further benefit of full queer acceptance: people of different genders could also hug, hold hands and share beds without summoning a chorus of "He liiiiikes her".
Not necessarily. I went to college in a very queer-accepting social context, and the general assumption was that any couple, or group, that shared a bed was having sex (for some unspecified value of "sex") regardless of their stated preferences. And rather a lot of good-natured teasing took place in consequence.
I'm really much more concerned with assault and murder than I am with teasing, though.
Why would that follow? I don't think it would.
But certainly one couldn't rationally argue from a humane position that the damage from something like that could add up to the point where it outweighs the cost of outlawing gay marriage, right?
Well, one could certainly argue it.
For example, one could argue that refusing to recognize any marriages and therefore, implicitly, refusing to recognize (aka "outlawing") same-sex marriages was a net benefit.
Or one could argue that common forms of heteronormativity signalling include anti-queer violence, bullying, discrimination in employment and residential selection and etc., and various other more substantial issues, and that those things are worse than discrimination in the recognition of marriage, so if official recognition of queer marriages results in more heteronormativity signaling and thus more violence, bullying, discrimination, etc. it causes more harm than good.
In fact, people do argue these positions in the real world.
As always on this issue, I feel a certain compulsion to reference my husband. He's actually completely irrelevant here, but I generally expect people to be so primed to pattern-match on heteronormative privilege when I talk abstractly about queer equality that they don't actually read what I say unless I do something to break that pattern.
Oh. Well, I admit that my bottom line is "Steve Sailer betrays his attitude of disgust and holding straight men above queers in many separate and unconnected phrases (like the "punishing" gaffe above) while taking care not to leave larger handholds to his critics."
(nods) I haven't read Sailer, but it's not unlikely: lots of people do that.
Some years ago, I ran into someone at a party who was arguing essentially this position (that increased queer visibility/equality leads to increased straight anxiety which leads to increased violence and discrimination against queers, and therefore that working towards increased queer visibility/equality is a bad idea on the grounds that it makes things worse for queer people, and don't we care about queer people?) and clearly getting off on the yummy contrarian goodness.
As I recall, I pointed out (calmly but loudly) that he was missing an opportunity to tailor his message to the group he was talking to, as this group was sufficiently accepting of trans folk that he could cause far more trouble more efficiently if he argued specifically that trans folk, as a more visible and vulnerable subset of the queer community, would receive the majority of the negative consequences of straight anxiety, and therefore queer equality was really just another way for gay folk to abuse and take advantage of trans folk. He could use the same strategy to divide gay men and lesbians and more generally to fragment the queer community to the point where we didn't stand a chance of achieving our political goals.
It was kind of a funny moment, as I wasn't following his script and he had to scramble a little to change tack.
I should have added, but didn't, that it was important to get everyone upset enough in the process that nobody thought to ask why, if the only problem with queer equality was the threat posed by anxious straight folk, we shouldn't deal with that by acting to minimize the power of anxious straight folk to hurt us.
Heh.
See Sailer's discussion of homosexual stereotypes, and his interview with a researcher of homosexuality.
All in all, Sailer strikes me as a fair observer of homosexuality. He's sometimes rude, and willing to accept stereotypes as evidence, but he wouldn't be in the field he's in if he weren't interested in the truth.
That's by far THE most... optimistic view of human psychology I've ever seen expressed on LW/OB. Like most of us poor sinful bastards, when he's talking about "disclosing the truth They want to stay undisclosed", he's interested in making himself feel comfortable in his hypocrisy through a self-perpetuating cycle of external and internal signaling. Also, he's awfully whiny for a Straight Old-School Manly Guy.
From your second link:
This doesn't add up on a very fundamental level. WHY on earth would homosexual "recruitment" would be a bad thing at all, if homosexuality is a legitimate and respectable trait of a person? Because of homophobic prejudices? Is setting up comprehensive re-education measures against instinctive and cultural homophobia Evil Orwellian Social Engineering according to him, so gays should just mind their own business and Keep It In The Bedroom?
Overall, I'm 95% confident that none of his caveats and asides about him being such an ardent defender of fairness and respect to gays would have surfaced if he were to investigate the same class of issues and come upon the same conclusions (for example) in 1950s US. He'd be just a usual old-fashioned inquisitor and Moral Guardian, enlightening the public about the misguided, irresponsible, deceitful perverts undermining Western institutions.
I contest both the factual assertion and the implications. The number of times I've seen 'save the world' sentiments expressed seriously on this site should make any cynic grumpy. As for the implications, I admit I could be giving Sailer too much credit. Do you think you could be giving him too little?
...what? Where are you going with this?
Notice that the pro-gay comment is Michael Bailey's line, not Sailer's.
To me, 'pro-gay' implies "I want homosexuals to live fulfilled lives" not "I want there to be more homosexuals," though 'anti-gay' does imply "I want there to be less homosexuals." Suppose homosexuality is worse then heterosexuality, in a manner similar to how, say, deafness is worse than hearing. If deafness were contagious, there would be strong arguments for quarantining the deaf, whereas if deafness were not contagious, there would be strong arguments for accommodating and including the deaf.
That is, the questions "homosexuals are here, what do we do with them?" and "how many homosexuals should we have?" are very different questions.
Where is this coming from?
It doesn't look like that's the case for race, though, so I'm not clear on why you believe this.
A relevant data point should perhaps be that Steve Sailer actually seems to genuinely not dislike African Americans. This is very impressive for someone who discusses what he does. I don't think he's faking it either. Perhaps his fascination with sport statistics lets him pump enough warm fuzzies to maintain a balance.
Indeed. (I linked to a number of articles pointing towards that in my last line, but thanks for the independent summary.)
I suspect that it is difficult to make progress from that point without first clarifying whether what is meant is "I want fewer people to have same-sex sex," "I want fewer people to want same-sex sex," "I want fewer people to endorse same-sex sex," something else, or some combination.
Agreed, but it's not clear to me progress needs to be made from that point. To my knowledge, no one who is participating in or a topic of the conversation is anti-gay in any of those senses, if we measure wants by expended effort to achieve those wants.
Nowhere much, just pointing out another reason for why his writing is so unappealing to me.
I can't visualize that in any way at all, if the "Society will never be tolerant enough" card is dropped.
Well, he can't write an article without mentioning the authoritarian, utterly clueless feminists who are trying to reshape the poor unwilling America into their image.
Never said or implied or insinuated that he was racist; hell, in practice he might well have less prejudices on the race front that you or me. Don't you consider that a person's bigotry might be restricted to one issue, neither propagating outward nor fading away but supported by fairly elaborate rationalization, some examples of which I'm sensing here?
Hey, in the Discussion thread I made Nornagest is, right now, telling me that I might be exhibiting quasi-intellectual bigotry of a similar sort regarding race, hiding behind a few lofty sentiments - so how unlikely is it that Sailer might have this towards sexuality?
I agree that it's more pleasant to read the writing of satisfied people than unsatisfied people.
I'm having trouble parsing this. Do you mean "homosexuality cannot be a detriment in a society where homosexuals are respected equally with heterosexuals"? Off the top of my head, I can think of three significant detriments in such a society, and could come up with more if I needed to. If you can't come up with three, I don't think you're thinking about this issue clearly enough.
But... he can and does?
Can you elaborate please?
Yes, though I regret the loss of an opportunity for Multiheaded (and others) to test their imagination. Try to give this a full five minutes of thought before reading on.
My first three:
Smaller dating pool, by a factor of ~20: presuming the rate of gays is still ~3% of men, your dating pool goes from about 98% of women to about 5% of men. (Lesbians are less common than gay men by about a factor of 2, and so things are worse for them, though I believe bisexual women are more common than bisexual men.)
Inability to naturally conceive children.
Anal sex is much harder on the receiving partner than vaginal sex, particularly when it comes to the spread of blood-borne diseases like AIDS. (Two men can have sex without one of them bottoming, and pegging is a thing for heterosexual men, but it should be obvious that rates of bottoming with a potentially infectious partner are much higher among homosexuals, and while the situation is worsened by prejudice it is fundamentally an engineering issue.)
I'd say that 1 is compensated by the fundamentally different approach to dating between two men and a men and a woman, no matter what you might call their sexuality. I am speaking from personal experience!
Why the hell is 2 a net harm? Two partners who are confident they're both clean can do anything without birth control and have absolutely no worries of unintended pregnancy.
3... well, I'll be blunt, it's only an issue for sexually unimaginative men who don't stop to think and assume that they must have penetration in this way, otherwise they're losing out on some amazing satisfaction. Me, I've never had it in either role and I'm not planning on it. My BF, if I remember correctly, doesn't care for trying the passive role either, although he's done active and found it to be nothing special compared to some other sexual activities.
Seconded! Seconded! Also, I'm talking about bisexuality here as well, which he might simply be rolling into his concept of modern American homosexuality due to how underreported it is and how there's no strong incentive to always put bisexuals into their own proper category.
(Note: I'm not downvoting you.)
Eliezer Yudkowsky is probably among the most unsatisfied humans alive right now; I think that the beauty and persuasiveness of his writing would suffer if he repressed his dissatisfaction with the current state of us more in his articles and such.
Heterosexuality as a norm (In the sense of being the majority preference) may in the long term be the only thing keeping the sexes from splitting off into different species and civilizations with diverging values. Note that as with encountering an alien civilization there is no guarantee whatsoever that peaceful coexistence would be viable in the long term. Bisexuality could also work, depends on how different the extrapolated desires of the genders really are.
Before you say "I don't think gender will remain a viable concept in transhuman space", consider the starting point. In the first approximation each half of mankind have been wired for millions of years in a systematically slightly different fashion. So what if civilization A happens to have 10% of "in pre-singularity times self-identified as female" people on the census, instead of 0%, this dosen't change the fact that most former male or female brains might eventually find a future tailored more to their tastes than to those of the other group (if civilization A or B wins).
Some of the psychological differences between males and females do have roots that go back millions of years.
Well, don't you think something this would be more or less a clear win for both sexes?
Generally actually I would. Honestly as much as I love sexual and romantic entanglement with women, I can't help but feel giddy about the awesomeness (according to my values) of an all male civilization on Mars. And I've already spoken about how I would probably take a pill that would make me asexual. Sexbots or homosexuality inducing pills seem an inferior solution but not that much. As long as the pill that would make me homosexual would change just my sexual preference and nothing else (I suspect the typical male homosexual brains actually differ in other subtle systematic ways from typical heterosexual male brains).
The problem comes here:
Most LessWrongers have given very little though to the idea that human values might differ significantly enough to be incompatible. Even fewer have thought of finding a way to have them coexist rather than just making sure their own value set gobbles up as much matter.
That's because it seems more likely that there's only one FAI to rule them all, and whatever values it has will dominate the light-cone.