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Jandila comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - Less Wrong
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Comments (428)
Man, that's variable. Especially in South Asia, where "Hinduism" is more like a nice box for outsiders to describe a huge body of different practices and theoretical approaches, some of them quite divergent. Chastity in general was and is a core value in many cases; where that's not the case, or where the particular sect deals pragmatically with the human sex drive despite teaching chastity as a quicker path to moksha, there might be anything from embrace of erotic imagery and sexual diversity to fairly strict rules about that sort of conduct. Some sects unabashedly embrace sexuality as a good thing, including same-sex sexuality. Islam has historically been pretty doctrinally down on it, but even that has its nuances -- sodomy was often considered a grave sin and still is in many places, while non-penetrative same-sex contact might well be seen as simply a minor thing, not strictly appropriate but hardly anything to get worked up about.
"East Asia" has a very large number of religions as well, and the influence of Confucianism and Buddhism hasn't been uniform in this regard. One vague generality that I might suggest as a rough guideline is that traditionally, homosexuality is sort of tolerated in the closet -- sure, it happens, but as long as everyone keeps up appearances and doesn't make a scene or get caught doing something inappropriate, it's no big deal. Some strains within Mahayana Buddhism have a degree of deprecation of sexual or gender-variant behavior; others don't. Theravada varies as well, but in different ways.
In both cases, cultures vary tremendously. If you widen the scope, many cultures, including many of the foregoing, have traditionally been a lot more accepting of sex and gender variance. There are and were some cultures that were extremely permissive about it.
If you want more on the subject of how people think about sexuality, try Straight by Hanne Blank. She tracks the invention of heterosexuality (a concept which she says is less than a century old) in the west.
If part of CEV is finding out how much of what we think is obviously true is just stuff that people made up, life could get very strange.
The word is likely that recent, but is she claiming that the idea of being interested in members of the other sex but not in members of the same sex as sexual partners was unheard-of before that? Or what does she mean exactly?
It's a somewhat complex book, but part of her meaning is that the idea that there are people who are only sexually interested in members of the other sex, and that this is an important category, is recent.
How could such a thesis be viable, when so much of the historical data has been lost?
There's more historical data than you might think-- for example, the way the Catholic Church defined sexual sin in terms of actions rather certain sins being associated with types of people who were especially tempted to engage in them.
There's also some history of how sexual normality became more and more narrowly defined (Freud has a lot to answer for), and then the definitions shifted.
A good bit of the book is available for free at amazon, and I think that would be the best way for you to see whether Blank's approach is reasonable.
The introduction is a catalog of ambiguities about sex, gender, and sexual orientation:
All of these are fair enough, and I've only read the introduction, but I don't have a lot of confidence that she goes on to resolve these contradictions in Less Wrong tree-falls-in-a-forest style. Instead of trying to clarify what people mean when they something like "most people are heterosexual," I get the feeling she only wants to muddy the waters enough to say "no they aren't."
I think her point is closer to "people make things up, and keep repeating those things until they seem like laws of the universe".
A possible conclusion is that once people make a theory about how something ought to be, it's very hard to go back to the state of mind of not having an opinion about that thing.
The amazon preview includes the last couple of chapters of the book.
The book could be viewed as a large expansion of two Heinlein quotes: "Everybody lies about sex" and "Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to fly a kite".
I don't recognize the quotes.
If so, then her point is more specific: "people made heterosexuality up." But I don't see how this can be supported. Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
I'll check it out.
Edit: By the way what I can see of the amazon preview is pretty heavily redacted, and doesn't include any complete chapter.
The abstract property that people we categorize as heterosexual have in common has existed, as you imply, for as long a members of bisexual species have been preferentially seeking out opposite-sex sex partners.
The explicit category in people's brains is more recent than that.
I mean, every human being who has ever lived came from a sex act between two people who were in close physical proximity, but that doesn't mean that the category of "people who prefer to have sex in close physical proximity to one another, rather than at a distance" has been explicitly represented. Indeed, I may have just made it up.
Technically, given our modern technology, this is no longer true; though throughout most of human history this was indeed the case.
When giraffes mate in such a manner as to produce viable offspring, is that "heterosexuality?"
If yes, why do male giraffes frequently engage in same-sex behavior when nearby females are not in oestrus and receptive to their advances?
To clarify: the term "heterosexuality" doesn't necessarily mean simply "male/female sexual contact." Humans have been doing that for as long as there have been humans. Humans have also been doing same-sex sexual contact for as long as there have been humans (this is not a controversial idea given the huge number of animal species that do, inclusive of our near relatives), but the phenomenon of people being defined as, or identifying with the terms "heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual" is quite recent and cultural-contextual.
Mating such that offspring may be viably produced is a piece of the territory. "Heterosexuality" is a label on one particular map of that territory, and its boundaries and name don't necessarily represent the reality accurately.
The quotes are from Heinlein's "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" which were sections in Time Enough for Love. In theory, they're the wisdom of a man who's thousands of years old. If you pay attention to the details, it turns out that they're selections by a computer (admittedly, a sentient computer) from hours of talk in which Lazarus Long was encouraged to say whatever he wanted. He could be mistaken or lying. He's none too pleased to be kept alive for his wisdom when he'd intended to commit suicide.
He may or may not be a mouthpiece for Heinlein.
Oh, so her thesis is that in the west, orientation-as-identity dates back to 1860-ish. I can imagine that being defensible. That's way different from what you originally wrote, though.
You see, the first thing that came to mind was Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium, which explicitly recognizes orientation-as-identity and predates the Catholic Church by a couple centuries.
Thanks for the cite.
Hell, you don't need CEV for that. A decent anthropology textbook will get you quite a distance there (even if only superficially)...
Can you recommend a book / author? (Interested outsider, no idea what the good stuff is, have read Jared Diamond and similar works.)
The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky is a favorite of mine, wich focuses on the Eveny people of Siberia. The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia, by Anna Read, is a good overview of SIberian peoples. Marshall Sahlins' entire corpus is pretty good, although his style puts some lay readers off. Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Branislaw Malinowski deals with Melanesian trade and business ventures. It's rather old at this point, but Malinowski had a fair influence on the development of anthropology thereafter. Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso, which deals with an Apache group. The Nuer by EE Evans Pritchard is older, and very dry, but widely regarded as a classic in the field. It deals with the Nuer people of Sudan. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman is not strictly an ethnography, but it's very relevant to anthropological mindsets and is often required reading in first-year courses in the field. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho, is pretty much what it says in the title, and a bit more contemporary. Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber mixes in history and economics, but it's generally relevant. Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer focuses on the poor in Haiti. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Ana Tsing is kind of complicated to explain. Short version: it takes a look at events in Indonesia and traces out actors, groups, their motivating factors, and so on.
I wonder whether people who've studied anthropology find that it's affected their choices.
It certainly did mine.
I'm interested in any details you'd like to share.
It made me a lot more comfortable dealing with people who might be seen as "regressive", "bland", "conservative" or just who seem otherwise not very in-synch with my own social attitudes and values. Getting to understand that culture and culturally-transmitted worldviews do constitute umbrella groups, but that people vary within them to similar degrees across such umbrellas, made it easier to just deal with people and adapt my own social responses to the situation, and where I feel like the person has incorrect, problematic or misguided ideas, it made it easier to choose my responses and present them effectively.
It made me more socially-conscious and a bit more socially-successful. I have some considerable obstacles there, but just having cultural details available was huge in informing my understanding of certain interactions. When I taught ESL, many of my students were Somali and Muslim. I'm also trans, and gender is a very big thing in many Islam-influenced societies (particularly ones where men and women for the most part don't socialize). I learned a bit about fashion sense and making smart choices just by noticing how the men reacted to what I wore, particularly on hot days. I learned a lot about gender-marked social behavior and signifiers from my interactions with the older women in the class and the degree to which they accepted me (which I could gauge readily by their willingness to engage in casual touch, say to get my attention or when thanking me, or the occasional hug from some of my students).
It made me a far better worldbuilder than I was before, because I have some sense of just how variable human cultures really are, and how easy it is to construct a superficially-plausible theory of human cultures, history or behavior while missing out on the incredible variance that actually exists.
It made me far less interested in evolutionary psychology as an explanation for surface-level behaviors, let alone broad social patterns of behavior, because all too often cited examples turn out to be culturally-contingent. I think the average person in Western society has a very confused idea of just how different other cultures can be.
It made me skeptical of CEV as a thing that will return an output. I'm not sure human volition can be meaningfully extrapolated, and even if it can, I'm far from persuaded that the bits of it that cohere add up to anything you'd base FAI on.
It convinced me that the sort of attitudes I see expressed on LW towards "tradition" and traditional culture (especially where that experiences conflict with global capitalism) are so hopelessly confused about the thing they're trying to address that they essentially don't have anything meaningful to say about it, or at best only cover a small subset of the cases that they're applied to. It didn't make me a purist or instill some sort of half-baked Prime Directive or anything; cultures change and they'll do that no matter what.
It helped me grasp my own cultural background and influences better. It gave me some insight into the ways in which that can lock in your perceptions and decisions, and how hard that is to change that, and how easy it is to confuse that with something "innate" (and how easy it is to confuse "innate" with "genetic"). It helped me grasp how I could substitute or reprogram bits of that, and with a bit of time and practice it helped me understand the limitations on that.
There's...probably a whole ton more, but I'm running out of focus right now.
EDIT: Oh! It made me hugely more competent at navigating, interpreting and understanding art, especially from other cultures. Literary modes, aesthetics, music and styles; also narrative and its uses.
Fascinating, but... my Be Specific detector is going off and asking, not just for the abstract generalizations you concluded, but the specific examples that made you conclude them. Filling in at least one case of "I thought I should dress like X, but then Y happened, now I dress like Z", even - my detector is going off because all the paragraphs are describing the abstract conclusions.
With regard to examples about clothing, one handy one would be:
I'd been generally aware that while the Muslim women's reactions to me seemed to be more or less constant for a while, it had stood out to me that the men's reactions were considerably more volatile. At the time I gauged this in terms of body language: the apparent tension of the facial muscles, the set of the shoulders, the extension of the arms, what the hands are doing, gestural or expressive mirroring... I don't have formal training in this stuff, and being fairly autistic I don't seem to have the same reactions to it that neurotypical people do, but on some perceptual level it just clicks that this person is relaxed or curious or uncomfortable or very uncomfortable.
Anyway, so I hadn't really put thought into how I should dress before, in that context. I just wore the clothes I was comfy with the first day I started teaching, and didn't notice any issues that stood out to me. I kept doing that until summer arrived. My usual fashion sense is fairly covering and drapey (I like cardigans, skirts and "big billowy hippie pants"). At the time I also had a penchant for wearing a head scarf (not a full wrap like the Muslim women in class wore, though -- just fancy bandanas), more on that later.
On warmer days, I'd avoid wearing my hoodie or jacket and just do short-sleeve shirts. Some days I'd wear the hoodie but have shorts instead of pants or skirt. I was mostly busy with the teaching so it took a while for the pattern to reach conscious awareness, but gradually it dawned on me that the men displayed more signs of discomfort on these days. It didn't seem like such a big deal that I was worried, though; it was a noticeable element but didn't really interfere with the flow of class, and the bulk of the class (non-Muslim men and women plus Muslim women) didn't seem to care.
Then one day I wore a tank top plus shorts. This was during the height of summer, and it didn't strike me as particularly unusual. Suddenly the reaction difference was very marked. None of the Muslim students, men or women, felt comfortable looking at me at all. They tensed up in reaction to me getting closer. They entirely avoided asking for help during computer time (which necessitates me getting pretty close since I'd have to peer over their shoulders at the laptop, in a crowded classroom -- on a related note, this was a huge test case for how my "gendered socialization" cues were doing, since when the women were comfy with me their body language was VERY clear on that point), and no matter how obviously they were struggling with the material they said they were fine. They wouldn't actually breach etiquette and tell me to leave them alone with it, but they also clearly weren't comfortable with me there. They wouldn't make eye contact, they wouldn't even look at me directly, and they certainly weren't okay with me entering their personal space distance. This even applied to the women who'd treated me like a friend, not just a teacher -- all the informality was gone.
Through all of this, my non-Muslim students (men and women both) remained more or less consistent about their body language; whether or not they liked me personally seemed a whole lot more relevant to their comfort (always erring on the side of polite in any case). My clothing choices didn't seem to faze them.
I decided the very next day to compromise. I wore something a bit more covering...and blasted the air conditioner in the room. It took a while to find an equilibrium that really worked for people (differing temperature comfort zones), but negotiating settings on a thermostat was a whole lot easier, than trying to teach a class full of students who were too uncomfortable to focus. After a week, the Muslim women students were acting like it had never happened, the Muslim men were comfy enough to function in class (if a little more politely-distant than they had been) and the non-Muslim men and women remained pretty consistent throughout.
(Mind, once winter came around, we had the opposite problem -- all of my students were from hot places, I can't stand heat, and to preserve social comfort I had to keep them from blasting the heat all day...)
EDIT: Oh right, the headscarf thing. I noticed that it seemed to make a small but positive difference as well, mostly with newly-arrived Muslim women students. It wasn't a huge effect, but after about eight months I'd elected to wear a scarf every day for the first week or two after we got a new student matching those labels, especially during one-on-one pullouts and interactions between class. It seemed to make affective mirroring go smoother during the get-to-know-you period, although it was a subtle thing, and didn't seem to make a difference at all with anyone who'd been there for more than a couple months as of when I met them.
(Bows.) Thank you for Being Specific!
I suspect humans are a lot better at remembering abstract generalizations about what occurs than specific instances. (And probably with good reason; abstract generalizations probably take up less space.)
As a child, arguing with siblings, I had lots of arguments of the form "You're accusing me of X? But you always do it yourself!" / "Oh yeah? Name one example!" / "I can't think of any, but you still always do it!" But even if I was on the side asking for examples, I kind of knew in the back of my head that I was being dishonest, because I remembered the abstract generalization myself as well.
Of course being specific is still a good idea. It may be that the habit of being specific only helps you going forward, as you begin to get in the habit of storing specific instances.
For politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons, specifics in this instance run a substantial chance of being downvoted. If Jandila wants, for politeness sake, to avoid starting a fight, that's a rational choice.
Nonetheless, I agree that be more specific would be valuable, both intrinsically and because specifics would show that Jandila has a deeper grasp of rationality (Talk is cheap, and such-like). To restate my point, I agree that specifics would make "an interesting and valuable top-level post"
More like "Am feeling low confidence about own ability to express this in a way such that intended point will come through with sufficient signal to seperate it from the noise of other possible readings." This is not simply confusing "has understood my point" with "agrees with my point"; I actually have a bit of a difficult time unpacking things like this because of how low-level perceptual it gets for me. I have conceptual synaesthesia, so I can glimpse distinctions and nuances pretty clearly, but it's very difficult to translate "It's that curly bit of the shape over there" back into argument-speak. Makes downvoting easy; even when I know what I mean and can tell the other party hasn't understood what I said, I can't really argue that my presentation sucked.
Since there seems to be an interest in me making a go at it, I'll give this some thought.
See my reply to Tim S below -- you're right that it's vague, and I'm thinking it might be worthwhile to go to the trouble of laying it out a bit more.
(I think this could make an interesting and valuable top-level post.)
Maybe. I'm not sure I'm able to write on that particular topic well enough to sit at the top-level, but it does get weird. Partly it's my own perspective as a person with cultural backgrounds that are not common here (mixed in with some cultural backgrounds that are) and perspectives on those; I can see what's bugging me but it's hard to construct it into any kind of overarching thesis (other than "LW is collectively bad at this").
Me too.