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Konkvistador comments on The Power of Reinforcement - Less Wrong
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It's probably worth noting that the original article, which lukeprog quoted, ended with this:
This actually bothers me less than the original, simply because the stereotype of "properly raised wife having to train her lower-status husband to act appropriately" is a VERY common social meme, whereas "husband training wife" is something I generally only see in the context of physical abuse (which, given the lack of violence, this obviously isn't).
Is there a cultural meme I'm missing here that makes THIS version the more offensive one? o.o
"Woman Training Man" is generally presented as funny with no negative ramifications. "Husband training wife" is presented in the context of either physical abuse, emotional abuse, or as part of a widespread societal trend of women being "domesticated" which is now generally considered distasteful. If this had been phrased "husband training wife", it wouldn't pattern match to "funny, harmless joke", it'd pattern-match to either abuse or societal oppression. (The abuse angle wouldn't necessarily be accurate, but for many people it would come to mind before the "mirror-image-of-the-woman-training-man" concept did).
So whether it actually makes sense, the example would produce negative affect in many people.
No, it sounds like you're aware of the relevant cultural meme.
"wife training lower-status husband" is a cultural meme
"man abusing woman" is a very strong meme, and "man <something> woman" pattern-matches it
man abusing woman is not only a very strong "meme", but also a common occurrence due to biological detail of males in mammals generally a: being larger b: being more aggressive and c: likely being naturally more selfish (due to different reproductive role). edit: all I am saying is that there is a biologically justified prior here, that most people use, a body of utterly indisputable evidence across many species of mammals. Except subpar evidence-evaluators, of course, whom do not process the prior and are also subject to Dunning-Kruger effect about it.
Why the hell was that downvoted? I guess it was supposed to be a descriptive statement but people misunderstood it as a normative one.
At least 2 people seem to think you guess wrong.
edit: as of how i interpret reactions to such statements, i have already an explanation for e.g. gaming forums where we have very similar white privileged male nerd demographics. We don't do downvoting there because enabling downvotes lets the white privileged male nerd majority enforce their worldviews and discourage any dissent, which we can not afford because we make games for everyone not just the white privileged male nerd majority. Tho its up to -1 here.
The edit is worthy of a downvote, the original part an upvote.
I agree with all of those statements, and am left with the sense that you were trying to convey an additional message that I didn't quite get.
Just an observation of sexism in our society. We are hypersensitive about anything negative that happens to women (it is a great opportunity for signalling moral superiority above people who are not outraged), while misfortunes of low-status males are just funny (signalling care about them is low-status).
How exactly does this happen? How exactly appears the paradox that this unequal reaction is percieved as fair, while complaining about it can be so easily labeled as sexist?
There is an obvious evolutionary explanation (low-status males are expendable, there is no advantage for high-status males or any-status females to care about them), but how does the algorithm feel from inside? First, there is a rationalization that problems of low-status males are either not real, or could (and should) be easily avoided by them, so if they don't avoid the situations, they obviously deserve the consequences. (Unless they are members of some minority, in which case it is OK to express moral outrage about the opression of given minority.) Second, we are hyper-sensitivised by feminism about everything related to women, because even the smallest joke means that you are a supporter of patriarchy and rape culture, which makes you a complice in every abuse and murder and whatever. There are no innocent jokes about women. Saying your wife "thank you" for doing something nice for you is just a first step on a slippery slope of evil male behavior. (And no, there is no female privilege, and if you have a misunderstood word, go read feminism 101 until you accept it.)
There. Sorry for the mindkilling, I don't know how to write it better without spending too big part of a weekend online.
EDIT: related video
I seem to recall having seen at least one introduction to feminism which did acknowledge that there are forms of female privilege (e.g. children usually end up with the mother after divorces), even though far fewer than forms of male privilege (their list was about an order of magnitude shorter). (This made me find that introduction much more credible, as otherwise it would have failed Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.)
I would have more respect for such introduction, too, for pretty much the same reasons.
There are several such, but they don't tend to inspire quite as strong a reaction as the ones the OC is reacting to.
OK. Thanks for being explicit.
Interesting I have seen research that suggests a major difference in perceptions between men and women. Men tend to assess the average woman as, well, average in overall attractiveness. Women tend to assess about 80% of men as below average. So in a monogamous society women tend to think they have settled too low.
Such a gap in perceptions would make sense in a polygamous society where a few men at the top have most of the women - so the women marry up, and end up perceiving this as normal. From my reading, most hunter gatherer societies were polygamous.
Have some tact, man. My post was fine, but you... you are a god damned sexist.
Given the many asymmetries between men and women, it seems at least plausible to me that the above would be much more problematic than the original.
It also seems plausible that the reverse is true. Or neither.
Or, most likely of all, that it depends on the relative salience at any given moment of the large set of factors that "problematic" aggregates.
Sounds like standard PUA to me.
Really? Exactly which PUA recommends thanking women more as a way to pick up women? That seems out of character.
There is a relation, I suppose, in as much as both are about a male influencing a female subject and both rely on principles of human or mammalian psychology. They differ in goal and (so) differ in the specific kinds of tactics.
Quite a few PUA schools advise ignoring behavior you don't like, and rewarding behavior you do like, as well as ensuring that you aren't inadvertently sending out a lot of positive reinforcement just because someone is attractive.
True, "thank you" is not generally a recommended form of reinforcement; non-verbal reinforcements like smiles, nods, touch, laughter, looking interested, turning towards the person, etc. are more generally recommended. Occasionally, a certain old story is cited: the one about the professor whose class conditioned him to stop pacing back and forth by looking interested only when he was in the middle of the room.
Operant conditioning works pretty much the same way on some non-mammals as well.
Yes, it's the PUA tactics that are in general more mammal specific (at least).
Your reaction to the idea of kisses to encourage a man to pick up his clothes reminds me of the way a number of women (including me) react to the idea of PUA. It's going ballistic about a hypothetical boundary violation and it's more fun in LW, where one is apparently outnumbered by people who don't see the boundary violation at all. (The boundary violation is hypothetical because the person may not have experienced it..)
Applying that label is both grossly inaccurate and unwelcome.
I noted that certain instances of 'influence by reward' I wouldn't accept and would respond by asking her politely to stop and then escalating as necessary to ensure that the undesired rewarding was not itself rewarded. A couple of users seemed to find the notion that someone else doesn't unconditionally accept all reinforcement offensive.
I'd say that describing small amounts of M&Ms as a significant health threat is a sign of using arguments as soldiers.
On the other hand, you've got better access to your internal experience than I do.
This is utterly bizarre. Even allowing that you completely missed the obvious meaning of "the most significant risks are the health and dental considerations and they are so insignificant that I'm making a joke about them" my words still can't be taken to mean "there is a significant health threat to small amounts of M&Ms". Not only that but the tangent being answered, something about the relative "risk" of kisses vs M&Ms isn't something I have a position on so I have no idea which side to send 'soldiers' to. Neither of those things are at all 'risky'. It pretty much comes down to "rotten teeth and diabetes vs spreading infectious mononucleosis and herpes simplex" - both at insignificant probabilities and I don't care either way.
Access to internal experience isn't required to dismiss your accusations. Non-motivated reading of my actual words is.
If I was going to "go ballistic" about anything it would be the active misrepresentation of my words and actions by yourself and pjeby. Not only have you been allowed to get away with slander without sanction you have been actually rewarded for it. I am disgusted.
Sorry for not getting that you intended to make a joke-- I've found that, even in real life and more so online, hyperbolic humor and reduction to absurdity are risky strategies. People are apt to not get the context, or to not agree on what's absurd.
I hadn't gotten around to asking why I was getting upvotes on my previous comments in this thread. It's possible that people agreed with my take what you said, but it's also possible that they mostly found the prospect of a quarrel entertaining. (They presumably agreed with me to some extent, or we'd both be getting upvotes.)
Part of my reason for saying "ballistic" is that I don't think most people would consider a policy of kisses for putting clothes in the hamper to be such a serious infringement that if it isn't stopped after one request, it's a good reason for divorce.
I admit I missed this sentence on previous readings, and it's probably at the center of your objections. I do think "hostile" is extreme, but maybe I'm missing something.
I think there's a middle range between benign efforts at improvement and hostility-- the range where the person is fairly indifferent to the attempted behavior change. I'm guessing that it's the lack of respect for conscious choice by the person being reinforced which causes you to frame it as hostile.
This is true.
I've also found, especially online, that characterizing the emotional states of my interlocutors for them is a risky strategy. On those rare occasions where the other person's emotional state really is important, I find I do better to explicitly ask for confirmation of my perception about it, rather than implying or referring to it as an observed fact.
That position sounds bizarre, I don't think it exists outside of pjeby's straw man. I believe my stated response was to shun the kisses.
As it happens I've never even had to escalate to the "ask politely" level. A smirk, a knowing look and a "Really?" avoided the conflict while keeping the interaction at the level of play, while still communicating the presence of a boundary.
Yes.
I was thinking at a higher level of abstraction. Moulding the woman's behaviour by psychological manipulation, indeed a form of "exotic animal training". This is standard doctrine in the PUA blogosphere -- see also pjeby's reply. PUA, btw, is not about picking up women.
"Psychological endocytosis" might be a better metaphor than "animal training" at the more extreme end of things.
"Psychological endocytosis"-- I don't understand the metaphor.
Endocytosis is the process by which a cell engulfs a food particle, by extending itself around it and pulling it into its interior. Metaphorically, I am suggesting a process whereby one person similarly extends their own reality around another, undermining the other's perceptions and replacing them with their own. For example, that is what "negging" is about. It is intended to convey the message, at least in the imagination of those advocating it (fictionally imagined here), that the man's beliefs are reality and the woman's are merely pretty lies that deserve to die.
I recommend Clarisse Thorne's Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, a substantial overview of the PUA communities.
PUA covers a wide range from decent behavior to just plain vile. Depending on who's talking, negging can be light-hearted teasing between people who know it's a game or a deliberate effort to keep the target off-balance and dependent on the targeter's good opinion.
It can also be an effort at light-hearted teasing which goes wrong because some PUAs just assume that beautiful women aren't nervous about how they're perceived.
Endocytosis is an interesting metaphor, and it would cover everything from total environment abusiveness (prisons, cults, some dysfunctional familes) to efforts to keep one's voice whispering in the back of a subject's mind. (Anyone have the quote about Saruman handy?)
"Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler's trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will..."
From The Two Towers, the chapter "The Voice of Saruman". The passage, btw, seems to have become a favorite of the American Right to use of Obama.
Your link appears to point to the imagination of a critic, not the imagination of an advocate.
It's the imagination of a critic imagining an advocate. I'll try and reword the link to make that clearer.
Or rather, a lower standard of epistemic accuracy.
PUA skills pertain to influence by males over female behavior using methods that include operant conditioning (including reinforcement). It does not follow that all instances of influence by a male over a female using operant conditioning is standard PUA methodology. In fact this example is significantly different to the kind of application we see in standard PUA. This is unsurprising - after all, we got the example in question when Konkvistador took a wife-influencing-her-husband example and substituted roles.
I prefer the grandparent: