novalis comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: novalis 12 August 2012 05:03AM

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Comment author: Aleksei_Riikonen 13 August 2012 01:48:58PM 13 points [-]

In response to your final questions:

Liberals (myself included) tend to very much like the idea of using regulation to transfer some wealth from the strongest players to the weakest in society. We like to try to set up the rules of the game so that nobody would be economically very poor, and so that things in general were fair and equitable.

In the case of sex and relationships, the argument could also be made for regulation that would transfer "sexual wealth" and "relationship wealth" from the strongest players to those who are not so well off. In fact, it seems to me that very many traditional conservative societies have tried to do just that, by strongly promoting e.g. such values that one should have only one sexual partner (along with marriage) during one's life. Rock stars and other sorts of alpha males who take many hot girls for themselves would be strongly disapproved of by typical traditional conservative societies. The underlying reason may be that traditional monogamy produces a sexually more equal society, and that this has been one contributing factor why societies with such values have been so successful throughout much of human history.

Most liberals, however, would be unwilling to engage in a rational discussion and cost-benefit analysis of whether conservative sexual morals (or some modified version thereof) would in fact create a more equal and strong society. Liberals are ok with the strongest players amassing as much sexual wealth as they can, at the expense of the weaker competitors, which strongly contrasts with their ideas about regulating economic activity and limitless acquisition of monetary wealth.

Comment author: novalis comment score below threshold [+] (44 children)

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 05:44:47PM 3 points [-]

Serial monogomy, rather than polygyny, constitutes the vast majority of all Western relationships.

It constitutes the vast majority of significant, formal, mid to long term Western relationships. It does not constitute the majority of sexual relations that can be described as "It's Complicated" or "Single (but not celibate)".

So I just don't think it's true that there's unequal access.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 06:10:30PM 0 points [-]

Even if serial means "one night at a time", so long as each man is only going home with one woman per night, there will still be an equal number of unattached women and men.

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 06:20:05PM * 6 points [-]

Even if serial means "one night at a time", so long as each man is only going home with one woman per night, there will still be an equal number of unattached women and men.

If all people were forced to be copulating at all times then your conclusion regarding equal access would follow. An acceptable weirdtopia!

All people being obliged to copulate at, and only at, specific times would also lead to the conclusion. A less acceptable weirdtopia.

As it happens it is possible for some males with exceptional attractiveness, skills and motivation to mate with a different female every day while some females do not mate every day. This allows for the possibility that there is not equal access to mates among all members of the population in question.

Comment author: Vaniver 13 August 2012 09:01:16PM 1 point [-]

mate with a different male every day

Typo?

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 09:05:20PM 2 points [-]

Typo?

Well, I suppose if we take that into account there is arbitrary amounts of access for everyone if they look hard enough.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 06:40:29PM 0 points [-]

Right, and the women who are not mating that day, are available to mate with someone else.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 August 2012 08:54:36PM 3 points [-]

Yet, somehow that doesn't seem to happen in practice.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 09:13:56PM 2 points [-]

Nearly 3/4 of American adults are in relatively stable monogamous (in theory, of course) cohabiting relationships including marriage. And that's not counting non-cohabiting relationships or casual sex at all.

Extremely promiscuous straight men are a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, and the extent to which they monopolize female attention is vastly exaggerated. If you look at India and China, where there's a genuine difference in the number of men and women in the population, you'll see all sorts of weird social effects that we just don't have in the US. True, some of that is due to general attitudes towards women, but some of it isn't.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 11:36:59PM * 3 points [-]

True on any given night; but it might well be the case that the unattached men are always the same ones, whereas each woman is unattached on certain nights but not on others. ETA: e.g., on Monday, Albert sleeps with Alice while Bob, Charles, Betty and Cathy stay unattached; on Tuesday, Albert sleeps with Betty while Alice, Bob, Charles and Cathy stay unattached; on Wednesday, Albert sleeps with Cathy while Alice, Bob, Betty and Charles stay unattached.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 11:46:18PM * 1 point [-]

I'd still wager that most (i.e., more than 50%) of the sexual intercourses happening today (i.e. 13 August 2012 from 00:00 to 24:00 UTC) in the Western world (let's define that as NATO countries, for the sake of definiteness, though it's not a particularly natural category) are within monogamous relationships (defined as couples who have --explicitly or implicitly-- promised each other not to have sex with anyone else until the relationship lasts).

Huh, how could such a bet be settled?

(No, let's make that "this year". I think people are less monogamous in August than they usually are.)

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 05:11:00PM * 7 points [-]

One might uncharitably describe this as the "nerds whining about not having a girlfriend" argument.

I know! Its like those icky poor people whining about material inequality.

Serial monogomy, rather than polygyny, constitutes the vast majority of all Western relationships. So I just don't think it's true that there's unequal access.

This might shatter your brains, serial monogamy in practice basically is soft polygamy. You badly need to read some of Roissy's writing on how sexual attraction seems to work if your own IRL observations haven't sufficed. Once there do a search for "hypergamy".

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 05:26:37PM 2 points [-]

One might uncharitably describe this as the "nerds whining about not having a girlfriend" argument.

I know! Its like those icky poor people whining about material inequality.

The difference, of course, is that there is in fact no shortage of available partners. (Also, I am a nerd myself -- it's just that this particular argument tends to descend rather quickly into Nice-Guyism).

This might shatter your brains, serial monogamy in practice basically is soft polygamy. Sexually 5 minutes of alpha is worth 5 years of beta.

Serial monogamy is not equivalent to polygamy, because at any time, there are in fact plenty of partners to go around. I have no idea why you would think there is any similarity at all.

Also, of course, the term "alpha" does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 05:27:37PM * 11 points [-]

The difference, of course, is that there is in fact no shortage of available partners.

There is no shortage of available wealth either! I don't know why those Africans go on starving when we clearly have enough food for everyone on the planet. I mean all they have to do is arrange to get hired by someone and then buying some food!

There is in fact no shortage of people employing desirable employees.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 05:32:00PM 0 points [-]

The argument that there is a shortage of available women (as though women were a commodity) relies on assumptions that just aren't true. In a mostly-monogamous (including serial monogamy), mostly-straight society, for every man who does not have a partner, there is a woman who does not have a partner.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 13 August 2012 06:17:34PM 8 points [-]

CharlieSheen is making a bad case for what he's making a case for.

Simply because the distribution of men and women without partners is equivalent between the genders doesn't mean the history of men and women is equivalent. Every child must have a male and a female parent, generally speaking; it doesn't follow that parentage is equally distributed among men and women. Every woman could have one child and 80% of men could have none, simply if the 20% of men have on average five children. Similarly, it doesn't follow from "Men and women lack partners in equal number" that "Men and women have equal relationship opportunity." The median man could have 1 relationship in his entire life, and the median woman could have 5, at the same time; the means/averages must be the same, but the distribution doesn't.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 06:33:19PM -2 points [-]

Ah, I see. You and CharlieSheen think that the unit is one relationship, while I think the unit is one relationship-hour.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 13 August 2012 06:43:49PM 8 points [-]

That doesn't resolve the issue; relationship hours can be unevenly distributed as well. Take five men and five women; one man can have ten relationship-hours, four can have zero, and all five women can have two.

The idea of hypergamy can be loosely summed up thus: Women have higher expectations than men.

Which implies, in a more connotation heavy manner, that the average man is less attractive to the average woman than the average woman is to the average man.

I'm not sure that hypergamy is strictly necessary, even presuming the phenomenon (uneven romantic/sexual opportunity distribution) it attempts to explain. Men having higher variability of attractiveness would produce the same phenomenon.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 06:50:07PM * -2 points [-]

Yes, relationship hours are of course unevenly distributed -- but in this case, there would still be forty available female relationship-hours, to the forty available male relationship-hours.

continue this thread »

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 05:37:53PM * 9 points [-]

You are missing the point.

There is no shortage of available employers either!

A man being desired by other women is intrinsically sexy to women. Consider what this means if you take a laissez-faire approach to the sexual marketplace.

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 05:36:18PM * 4 points [-]

Also, of course, the term "alpha" does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.

There are social groups within which there is a one clear, overwhelmingly dominant individual. That individual is referred to as the 'alpha'. Describing that kind of group/tribe/pack role is what the letter was adopted for in the first place.

(I would agree that alpha and especially beta are being misused in the grandparent.)

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 05:42:49PM 1 point [-]

In animal groups, alphas control mating (which is what this whole discussion is about). That is rarely true in Western human groups.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 05:45:21PM 1 point [-]

Do these terms have a scientific meaning in PUA to begin with? I always thought they were just used as shorthand for vague (often self-contradictory) categories of behavior.

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 06:00:21PM * 1 point [-]

Do these terms have a scientific meaning in PUA to begin with?

Yes, a misleading one that diverged rather significantly from the term) they originally adopted and still refer to. (It is all too often used for any kind of dominance, including groups who think of themselves as all alpha males---which can't make sense.)

I always thought they were just used as shorthand for vague (often self-contradictory) categories of behavior.

Disagreement among users or communities, perhaps. Different (jargonised) usage to the scientific one? Often. Self-contradictory? Not especially. The models of reality being described seem for most part to be internally coherent.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 06:31:49PM 0 points [-]

The models of reality being described seem for most part to be internally coherent.

Under what evidence?

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 06:45:09PM * 1 point [-]

Under what evidence?

Your move is rejected. (Almost all demands for evidence by one party attempting to debate another are logically rude and I tend to reject this kind of tactic in general.)

You made an assertion. I just made a counter assertion. Not only do I reject games of forcing 'burden of proofs' on the other side you are demanding evidence of a negative, which is typically much harder. What evidence are you expecting? Perhaps:

The following is a list of all the examples I have seen of popular PUA resources that match paper-machine's claim that the usage of alpha is self-contradictory:

<NULL>

If this is something that occurs often then I can reasonably expect to have seen it at least once, given my level of exposure, specific irritation at misuse of alpha and beta jargon and general sensitivity to self-contradicting claims. "I looked. What you said was there was not actually there." is sufficient reason to deny a claim that a thing is there.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 06:56:32PM * 3 points [-]

This wasn't a "tactic," nor was it a "debate." This was an honest request for information that you've somehow pattern-matched as logical rudeness. "Disagreement among users or communities" was all I meant by "self-contradictory."

My interest in PUA is purely academic, because as far as I can tell little work has been done to make it work in my demographic. I've asked other people in the community before what the link was between the meaning of alpha/beta in the biological sciences and the meaning of alpha/beta in PUA, but so far no luck.

EDIT: Also, I would really like to know why I triggered such a hostile response, because I would like to not trigger such responses in the future.

continue this thread »

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 05:34:18PM -2 points [-]

Serial monogamy is not equivalent to polygamy, because at any time, there are in fact plenty of partners to go around. I have no idea why you would think there is any similarity at all

Also, of course, the term "alpha" does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.

Run rationalization hamster run!

Just in case there is a misunderstanding I was using PUA terminology.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 05:42:07PM 2 points [-]

Run rationalization hamster run!

Quite an impressive argument there.

I wasn't familiar with the PUA term. Googling reveals some variance of usage, but I don't think any definition does anything to improve your argument.

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 05:46:31PM * -1 points [-]

You get the kinds of arguments you deserve brah. But I know it kind of sucks, its like when someone sneaks in an ad hominem or something like that.

One might uncharitably describe this as the "nerds whining about not having a girlfriend" argument..

At this rate I don't think I'll be able to cure your brain today.

My condolences.

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 07:00:06PM * 10 points [-]

Charlie, your argument style in this conversation started insightful and tactfully expressed. It has become lax and contemptuous. While the contempt happens to be warranted by the context it nevertheless serves to give the casual reader a negative impression of what you are saying, can cede some of the 'high ground' to the person you are arguing with and potentially changes what arguments will be accepted.

I would very much appreciate it if you would quit while you are (or were) ahead. Your early points were excellent and I really don't want them to be undermined just because you are disgusted by the rebuttal attempts. They were what I would have said if I got there first (or so my hindsight tells me!)

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 08:09:42PM * 6 points [-]

Charlie, your argument style in this conversation started insightful and tactfully expressed. It has become lax and contemptuous.

I can see that now, I was tired and went emotional. Sent an apology to novalis and I'll retract the ones that now seem inappropriate.

Comment author: Vaniver 13 August 2012 09:03:12PM 1 point [-]

I was tired and went emotional.

Insufficient tiger blood?

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2012 06:02:49PM * -1 points [-]

I've since edited that out, and I regret posting it. But if you're not interested in making an argument, and you would rather just snipe, there's not much anyone can do about that.

BTW, I later noticed that you had edited a previous post to point out rape-apologist Roissy. I happen to prefer his many deleted posts, since they're more psychologically honest. Also, if you want to talk about ad hominems, that seems to be almost the entirety of Roissy's writing.

Comment author: CharlieSheen 13 August 2012 06:31:19PM * 5 points [-]

The link was there since before your responded. All I was saying that if you don't see my argument yet I won't be bothering with you further today since people are wrong on the internet all the time and I'm unfortunately mortal. Maybe I will write up a post in response tomorrow or maybe someone else can pick up where I ended.

I might have had more patience with you if you hadn't so clearly displayed tribal feeling in the OP btw. Thought I must admit once you threw around "rape apologist" that made me laugh hard enough to forgive you.

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