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AndrewHickey comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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"If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours."
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
One thing that is spoken about over and over in those links is how majority-male groups often ignore creepy -- or outright abusive -- behaviour towards women. If you're a man, and you're in a large group with only a small number of women, and they find your behaviour creepy, you need to change it even if none of the men care. It's actually worse if it's not 'a significant fraction', because then the person you're upsetting may have no support within the group.
If someone tells you "don't do that, it's creepy and it's upsetting me" then don't do that.
IAWYC but this gets you the conjugate problem of allowing some asshole who finds things like partial loss of speech creepy to evict people from the group.
That doesn't seem a very plausible problem. In the majority of cases I'd guess that someone declaring themselves creeped are actually creeped out - and in the few cases where they're just obviously trying to make trouble, I expect the group's common sense will prevail in order to evict them instead.
As a sidenote, isn't it just as easy to write "Agreed" instead of IAWYC"? I had to look up what that meant...
Being creeped out by some manifestations of disability seems quite plausible to me. If not "partial loss of speech", we could go with something like stereotypical Tourette's.
Also, people who are prejudiced against certain groups (or against specific behaviors by those groups) might claim to be creeped out by those people, while giving a reason that seems entirely distinct from their prejudice. It might not even be at all conscious.
E.g. if a woman is assertive and has strong opinions, people are more likely to say that the woman is being rude than if a man had exactly the same behaviors. In a man, they might even consider those traits admirable. It's not at all a given that the complainers even realize that they have a double standard - to them, the woman simply comes off as rude while the man comes off as strong-willed and charismatic.
Some people are creeped out by sex-related behavior described in the post. We agree that this creepy behavior is wrong and want to reduce it, so we talk about norms and actions against creeping.
Some people are creeped out by disabilities, or by minorities, race, disfigurement, and a host of other things. We think (some of) these creepy things are not wrong and want to encourage or legitimize them, so we talk about not allowing anti-creepy action.
This seems indeed like the worst argument in the world. The problem seems to be that the behavior discussed in the post has no precise name of its own, so it appropriates the term "creepy" which was originally much wider in application. Then others react against the new norms being applied to all "creepy" behavior.
We're trying to assign a static attribute to explain behaviors which shake out to a particular (and highly individual) emotional response. That's not quite the Worst Argument -- though it is related -- but it is a very bad habit of argument.
We're never going to find a "creepyp" type predicate attached to anyone. It may be that some subset of LWers exhibit behavior which reliably tends to alienate certain groups we'd be interested in hearing more from, though, and if so it should be possible for us to describe this behavior and try to develop group norms to exclude it: as a community we're pretty good at analyzing that sort of thing, and it certainly beats spiraling further into semantic fail.
On the other hand, I can see some potential for close examination of the problem to lead into gender fail -- something that we've historically been very poor at dealing with.
I'm reminded of the Diseased Thinking post. If you can't successfully discourage someone with Tourette's from inappropriate swearing but you can successfully discourage a neurotypical male from exhibiting inappropriate sexual-like behaviour, then it makes sense to attempt the latter but not the former.
I thought the issue was creep behavior, not sexual-like behavior (the latter of which I assume nerds are permitted, from time to time!). And that makes it harder, since a person can also seem weird for erring in the opposite direction, in which they don't start conversations or make eye contact (outside of conversations).
I was mentioning swearing and sexual-like behaviour as two different examples of behaviours which might creep people out. (Edited the grandparent to say “inappropriate swearing” and “inappropriate sexual-like behaviour”.)
"Creepy" is a natural category - it describes behaviors that are likely to cause a certain emotion. This emotion is triggered by things that are obviously bad, by things that are subtly bad and often announce worse things when the group isn't looking, and by non-bad things.
Our aim is to combat the first two while allowing the last one. Anti-creepy action ("Stop all creepy behavior, get out if you can't") acts against all three. Banning obviously bad things ("Ask before you touch") acts only against the first one.
No, it doesn't, because it's talking about the responsibility of the individual, not the group. If someone tells me I'm behaving inappropriately, that's for me to deal with. It's only if and when I don't deal with it that it becomes a problem for a group -- and one would hope that any group confronted with such a person would dismiss their complaints.
This directly contradicts your comment in response to Douglas_Reay lower down
How so?
He recommends bringing it to the group in this comment, but says in the other comment that even if the entire group disagrees with the creeped out person they are still in the right.
Only as a last resort, and he didn't prescribe a particular action for the group to take. The whole point was that individual people should take responsibility for addressing problems if they can, but that individuals don't have sole power to evict people from the group, which was the argument he was responding to.
Exactly,
So, my social skills are not great. Aren't even really good. But over the last few years, I've gotten so much better from where I was that it's ridiculous.
Anyway, I wish people, particularly women, had been that open with me about my behavior.
Let me be clear: the scenario you present almost never happens. Now, if it does happens, yes, the creep involved has no excuse but to stop. But the signals people, and particularly woman, give off can be much more obscure if you don't know what you're doing.
That sounds like placing the onus for dealing with poor social skills onto the person who's confronted with them, though, in a general sort of way.
If you're dealing with a person with a person with poor social skills, the onus is already on you. You can try to help, or you can run away, or do a hundred other things, but you are already dealing with it.
I'd just like to suggest that using subtle social cues on the socially inept might not be terribly effective for accomplishing desired social outcomes with that person.
I'd just like to point out that "onus" is a horrible word, one that should automatically be marked with a red flag. It's probably not doing you any favors here.
As a person with poor-to-middling social skills at the best of times: no, that's silly and I reject it as a working premise for conflict resolution and group interaction.
Establishing a social norm that hey, some folks here might be autistic or poorly socialized or otherwise have some difficulties with the usual set of interactions is completely different from establishing a norm that whenever someone failing at some element of socialization, and thereby causing others to feel unsafe, pressured or disturbed, then those who've had the reaction are obligated to see the situation resolved to that first party's favor.
I didn't say that. You can do what you want. But if someone made you feel uncomfortable, you already feel uncomfortable. Should they not have made you feel uncomfortable? Yes. Is it fair? No.
What are you going to do about it? That's the only question you get to answer.
You're swinging rather wide of my point, here.
The point of my post was: you may have swung rather wide of mine.
For practical purposes, the onus should be on whoever has the ability to deal with it. If someone unknowingly does something you don't like, and you want them to stop, telling them is say more useful to both of you, regardless of your views on "victim blaming"
The scenario may not have happened to you. That doesn't mean it 'almost never happens'.
If you haven't been told that you're doing anything wrong, then obviously you can't be blamed for carrying on. My point is only that if you have been told, you shouldn't be waiting for some quorum to come to a conclusion, just stop doing the thing that is upsetting the other person.
They totally told me I was doing things wrong. All the time. It's just they were doing so in a code I didn't understand and expecting me to operate by rules I wasn't told about. If a woman did something like this seven years ago, (And, while the same thing didn't happen, a lot of the subtler cues did.), I would have done the same things the man did. I was never, ever told, "Hey man, you're being creepy. Cut it out." I wouldn't have known what to do, and I would have done the exact wrong thing.
I wouldn't do it now. I'm roughly as good of a person as I was then, I just understand the rules better.
Saying "You do NOT touch me" or "Don't want to talk about this", as that person did, is not a code.
Great! Now speak in non-code when people are approaching the line, not five miles past it.
If (1) a population varies widely in terms of how direct a demand needs to be before they recognize it as one, and
(2) framing a demand much more directly than necessary for a particular target to recognize it is viewed as socially inappropriate ("hey, OK, you don't have to make a federal case out of it lady! Jeez. Some people have no friggin sense of proportion, y'know?"), and
(3) framing a demand much more weakly than necessary is both ineffective (that is, my demand gets ignored) and viewed as socially inappropriate when I eventually ramp up to the necessary level of directness...
...well, you tell me: what should I do in that situation, when there's a demand I want to make of an individual whose sensitivity to demands I don't know?
You forgot (4): not recognizing a demand and refusing to comply are indistinguishable.
Can be. Depending how the refusing is done I'd even suggest that not recognizing can be 'creepier'.
This is troubling if true. The worst offenders described in the OP's links are creepers of the latter type, who know their behavior is bad but do it anyway. And yet this is seen as not as creepy as behavior from someone who is socially inept but not malicious?
Can you clarify why you consider this something I forgot?
How do you figure? Also, what do you mean? 'Only a small fraction of men do this,' or 'This almost never happens to women as described'? And are you taking 'creepy' to mean deliberately malicious, or more like what you just said you used to do?
I mean, women almost never react to being creeped out with an unambiguous response that makes a socially inept person know what's going on with no room for denial.
I really wished they did, but I can understand why they don't.
Sure, I think we agree on all that. Do you see why "no room for denial" might seem deeply creepy, and not a requirement that an inept adult could possibly be applying consistently?
I suspect the denial doesn't come so much from "determined to do things despite consent" as much as "determined to preserve one's own self esteem." But it comes off creepy anyway.
They're totally applying it inconsistently. But they don't know that. Hence, the social ineptitude.
This says that people understand indirect refusals the same in sexual and non-sexual contexts. It doesn't say that everyone understands them.
A person who never thinks "Shit, are they bored, or are they just making sure I'm not bored?" will never think "Shit, are they turning down sex, or are they just making sure I really want it?". A person who has trouble with the former may well run into the latter. (Still not an excuse though.)
It doesn't always work anyway.
Of course. But it destroys excuses, which I've found to be the best motivation for action, both in myself and others
Don't do that to them, and reevaluate tactics in general after updating for this encounter.
Right.
I'll add that you should also reevaluate how much you should be interacting with that person at all, and not just changing some particular behavior.
Someone who finds you upsetting is just not your natural market in the first place, and even if that limited data sample is an unfortunate fluke, or even if you agree that your behavior was inappropriate, it has happened, so you're now Mr. Creepy to that person. Maybe you can climb your way out of that hole, but you're likely better off spending your time and energy where you're not starting out in a hole. Know when to fold a bad hand.
“If” just means it's a sufficient condition, not necessarily that it's also a necessary one.
I agree, I just wasn't sure how to word it to make clear that the same reasoning applies if a significant fraction of the members of one gender think you're creepy then, even if they are outnumbered by the other gender, that's still a significant fraction.
No.
Not 'a significant fraction'.
One of the prime tools used by the kind of arsehole who infiltrates groups in order to rape is to isolate individuals, and behave differently towards them. If any individual person thinks your behaviour towards them is creepy, it is your responsibility to change your behaviour towards that person, even if everyone else disagrees with them.
I can understand this on a sort of "don't be a dick" set of rules where if something you do makes someone uncomfortable you should prefer not to do it, a rule of this kind is not just open to abuse but oppressive in and of itself.
Most moral guidelines have a bajillion exceptions. All rules are ultimately something of a "don't be a dick" rule.
It occurs to me that perhaps, as LW-ers we tend to like nice, codified rules you could program into an AI, so our tendency is to read rules as "execute this behavior consistently" rather than "this is the generally correct heuristic, but use your judgement as appropriate."
Falling back on vagueness misses the entire point of the rules, which is simultaneously to provide a guideline for well-meaning but oblivious people and to allow your group to expel people for clearcut reasons. If you are worried about being creepy and bad at reading social signals, the rules do you the favor of allowing you to be good nonetheless, whereas a vague exception-filled guideline is almost useless as telling someone to not be creepy. If you are a bad person, the rules mean you can't defend yourself by saying you're well-meaning or whatever, because if you touch people without permission a bunch, we can point to the rules and say "Go away".
First: I'm actually in the process of figuring out my own take on this, so my opinion may be subject to change over the course of this thread (and a few other threads elsewhere in the internet that happened to come up at the same time).
There's two sets of rules getting talked about here - one is the rules for the group, the other is the rules for an individual.
Because of things like bystander effect, status-quo bias, etc, it's important for groups to have some clear cut lines which, if crossed, result in expulsion (or at least a solid warning with a clear threat of expulsion).
I think AndrewHickey was not referring to codified group rules at the time, but to your own personal rules you should be following, regardless. The group shouldn't automatically expel every member who's doing something that one person finds arbitrarily creepy. But if you find that someone is creeped out by a behavior of yours, you should still take it upon yourself to alter that behavior, at least around that person, for no reason other than that it bothers them. You should also use common sense in the corner case that some person is arbitrarily deciding "I find X creepy" in a deliberate effort to screw with you.
It's also your responsibility to treat that question seriously and not look for reasons like "this person is arbitrarily declaring me creepy" as an excuse to not have to change your behavior.
I agree that the distinction between group rules and personal rules is very important, and should be more explicit in this sort f conversation
Exactly. I was talking about the 'rule' "If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours."
That's a rule for an individual's behaviour. And as written it's a stupid rule that invites abuse -- the stereotypical 'nice guy' can just say "well, no-one else complained" and still carry on behaving that way and thinking of himself as behaving properly.
Taking responsibility for one's own actions is not oppressive.
I find your point of view creepy, and want you to stop talking about it. Take responsibility for your actions, and stop creeping me out.
Given we're establishing guidelines that people will choose to follow in order not to be jerks, "don't rape people" is a perfectly good rule. You said yourself that for group-enforced guidelines, the group has to judge (and thus reject "Alice speaks in a creepy monotone, I am creeped out, she must stop"-type complaints); it's hard to see how to do that if every one else disagrees.