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Matt_Caulfield comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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Even if hanging out with women makes you grow less creepy over time, you're still inflicting your creepy self on them at the beginning. Being willing to do this for your own benefit is... creepy.
I'm still not convinced there's an ethical way out of the creepy trap. Is there any sound (not self-serving) argument against the idea that the best thing for creepy males to do is just go away?
Ceteris paribus, the world where a creepy guy turns into a non-creepy guy is better than the one where the creepy guy ceases to exist. (Marginally, at least, the world needs a whole lot more well-adjusted nerds.)
So a better question is, how does a social group help and encourage creeps to become non-creeps wherever possible (without enabling creepy behavior)?
Point them at the links in the OP.
This one too (which, on a totally unrelated note, exhibits the groping-her-way-towards-Bayesianism phenomenon I have noticed -- to the point of (appearing to) incorrectly think that Schrödinger's cat is about epistemic probability).
What do you mean by that? Who needs them for what purpose and as opposed to what alternative?
Best thing for who?
The world. Find highest possible total utility, act accordingly.
Of course that result may not work out great for some particular person, and that's interesting, but that's not the question I'm asking right now.
So you think the world would be better off if creepy men all "go away"? A bold point to make. Maybe they should just kill themselves while they're at it?
Creepy behavior should go away. Individuals can update.
There is little value in staying creepy, after all.
It's hard enough to learn to update one's abstract formal beliefs. Updating one's unconsciously regulated social behavior is impossible in the general case, and in most of the desirable concrete cases too. And here the people who should "update" are the ones who are least adept at social behavior to begin with.
I don't see why that should necessarily be the case. It would simply require specifying the desired behavior and bringing it into the realm of the conscious until the new behavior is learned.
For example, if I were able to realize that a major barrier to my social communication is my lack of eye contact, I could make a deliberate effort to always make eye contact when having conversations. Ideally this behavior would eventually become internalized, but even if it didn't there's no actual reason why I couldn't keep it up for the rest of my life.
"Impossible" is a big claim. We don't put much stock in zero or one probabilities around here ...
System 1 can be programmed by System 2. There are cases of individuals updating to become (e.g.) less socially anxious; less triggered by various things; or less bigoted in various ways. About fifteen years ago I took a massive update about taking responsibility for actions that had harmed others; the details are more private than I care to post about, though. For that matter, there are religious and philosophical conversion experiences that produce dramatic social behavior change; and psychedelic experiences that do so, too.
People can change. Many people spend a lot of effort constructing rationalizations as to why they shouldn't have to, though.
I'm not sure, I'm still thinking it through. The point is that it is not immediately obvious to me that we should reject a result just because it seems unattractive. Maybe our intuitions are just wrong. See the Repugnant Conclusion and Torture vs. Specks.
If noncreepiness can be learned fairly quickly under the right circumstances, and the decreepified individual can contribute to people around him significantly, then the benefit to the world at large of decreepification is larger than the cost.
Maybe. Telling people to go away makes them stop listening to you - and probably not "go away", but "find people who agree with them and hang out there instead". You can move the problem, but making it stop being a problem isn't going to happen through mere eviction unless you can effect very systematic culturewide change.
Yeah, I see this in the wild pretty often and it seems... suboptimal. Not to name names, but when you get lots of creepy-labeled people hanging out together, one natural consequence is the formation of identity groups based partly around the behaviors that got them labeled as creepy in the first place. Which in turn creates positive reinforcement that makes those behaviors a lot harder to get rid of and the process of removing them a lot more painful.
That seems like a straightforward loss for everyone, except in the hypothetical case where allegedly creepy behavior is consequentially positive but maintains negative associations thanks to some random social hangover -- and I think those cases are pretty rare.
I suspect you and Matt are talking past each other a bit.
Let's say we've got a guy who went to engineering school, works as an engineer, and plays Magic the Gathering in his spare time. As a result most of the people he has interacted with over the past decade are men, and evolution has programmed him to feel desperate and act creepy. Is there any ethical way for him to overcome his creepiness problem? Matt's arguing that maybe there isn't, because even if he finds women to hang out with, he'll end up creeping them out some at first by accident. So the ethical thing to do is to avoid women at all costs.
What's your take on this argument? My take is that someone needs to give Matt a big hug.
Correction, Matt needs someone to give him a big hug.
For all that it's relevant to your point and means in context, you might as well replace "evolution has programmed him" with "he is being moved by the gods."
Yeah, I'm not sure why telling myself "I have a strong inclination to do x" and "evolution programmed me to do y in order to acheive z" feel so different.
Generally, I find that if the behavior is fitness-maximizing (seeking social interaction, sex, food, etc), I think of it as "evolution programmed me", whereas in the case of things that are not obviously fitness-maximizing (finding interesting puzzles/challenges, building things, playing guitar, etc), I think of it as "I have an inclination to X". It might actually also have to do with whether most people have similar urges as well, now that I think about it.
The blind idiot god Evolution knows little of this human invention called "morality" ...
It might be optimal for this guy to befriend men, or women he knows to be married or gay, who know how to socialize with people and are willing to help him out with that. There's a bootstrapping issue, but it's the best outcome if it can be attained.
[ETA: I failed a pronoun.]
Married women frequently (warning, availability) report men making unwanted sexual advances. That they're married makes them even more creepy.
[Edit] Misread, unfairly singled out one responder, editing to make generic.
My take is that any such person can read all the links provided by the OP, some of which are written specifically for people in that scenario.
Some of the other links have many comments now, but it's worth reading all of them. Anyone who can read every comment on all of those links is pretty much guaranteed to level-up in all sorts of ways that will be to their benefit in many respects, including improving their interactions with other people, which includes women.
I'm not sure what the difference supposed to be. If they hang out with someone else, and are happy there, and don't bother you anymore, how is that "not going away", and why is that not a good solution?
The problem seems to be not your scenario, but the one where they fail to find people who agree with them and hang out there.
ETA: reading Nornagest's comment below, maybe you mean that they find others who agree with them, but instead of hanging out together somewhere else, they come back with those others and bother you as a group (or bother someone else). That's a problem, but if these other similar-minded people are around to be found, I'm not sure if not telling them to go away will prevent them from finding one another and banding together.
Tl;dr of my point: telling people to go away should on balance make them go away more.
What I meant (but didn't express well) was more like "they go find another group, which is composed of people who agree with them and can protect each other, and there are also some people around for some reason who don't like all this creeping but don't have the wherewithal to leave for some reason".
Telling them to go away may well increase such congregations (I'm interested in hearing non-anecdotal evidence). But even assuming that happens, do you think the net amount of being-creeped-out increases as a result? Some people do get them to go away, after all.
Yes, but I'm not so much interested (right now) in what are the optimal rules to impose on people; I'm asking what is the right thing to do, which is a subtly different question. Your argument that eviction leads to problems in other places is clearly true. Analogously, it would be a very bad idea to impose a 80% marginal tax rate on top earners to fund the Against Malaria Foundation, because most of them would work less and there would be huge deadweight loss. However, Peter Singer and people like that argue persuasively that very wealthy people should as a matter of principle voluntarily give a high percentage of their income to efficient charity. And this causes no deadweight loss if they make sure to work as much as before.
Similarly, if there are creeps in your group, don't you wish they would just leave, and not try to infiltrate another innocent group? Then that is what they should do.
I wish them to do their part to not run into the people they creep on, and allow other people in the group (if any exist) to continue to extract any available value from their participation. And fix them, if that's doable. (This is if all they are doing is creeping. If they are committing assaults or something I wish them to go away, to a corrections facility.)
The tax rate was 90 percent on them for a long time, in the US -- what's your basis for that claim? It sounds like a cached belief.
One popular tax dodge that made the effective tax rate much lower. Also, until the 80's (Reagan?) you could get lots of stuff paid for by the company without paying tax on it; company car, housing allowance, other stuff. I'm not an expert but the "real" tax rates were that high only for some.
Huh, interesting claim in the link. I Googled, though, and I couldn't find any source for this besides the comments on Y Combinator. Can you find another source (preferably one that explains how big an effect this had in aggregate)?
And they still dodge taxes now, even when the rates have been slashed into oblivion. If anything they only seem more determined to do it.
Mindkiller Alert!
The yield of a tax at 0% is 0. The yield of tax at 100% is also close to zero, as nobody will do anything to earn money that will be taxed at 100% (i.e. ensure all earnings dodge that tax). Therefore the set of policies that give maximum tax yield do not have a tax rate of 100%, and increasing tax rates beyond that reduce tax yield.
This analysis is subject to some caveats, and where the optimal rate is is a very complicated and politically charged question, of course, and this is already completely off topic.
(Not to mention that some taxes are easier to evade than others, and it's easier for some people (e.g. self-employed workers) to evade taxes than for others (e.g. public servants).)
Taxes will be dodged regardless of the rate as long as paying lawyers and accountants is cheaper than paying those taxes. Simplifying the tax code would do a lot to prevent this deadweight loss
Presumably some women are less averse to creepiness than other women. Perhaps a socially awkward guy could start by interacting with women who are tolerant of social awkwardness, but who will point out his mistakes so he can improve. Then, he could work his way up to interacting with people who are less and less tolerant of creepiness.
Even if such women are numerous enough, a socially awkward man who is bad at reading others will not be able to reliably identify them, and so will occasionally creep out more-averse women, and that may be enough for him to be banished from the whole social group. This is a matter for empirical measurement.
It's the worst thing for them, but it's probably the best thing for everyone else.
And what do you mean, non self-serving argument? Who else could it serve except for the people making it? If creeps go away, everyone else benefits, so everyone else is served by the argument that they should go away. That's tautological.
I guess I meant self-serving from the creep's point of view.
I agree. It seems to me that the best, most straightforward solution to creepiness is to have very low tolerance for it, and eject anyone who violates with extreme prejudice. A lot of the discussion in this thread is about how to compromise with creepers, which seems a little shameful, like negotiating with terrorists.
Ugh. Now you're kinda creeping me out.
I probably should've just said "I agree" in the grandparent and left it at that. But I would like to plead that I don't want to use power against anyone. I realize I have been treating this whole discussion more like a thought experiment (in which we are free to create and kill 3^^^3 people, tile the universe with paperclips, and negotiate with babyeating aliens) than a real-world issue. Maybe that was insensitive and I'm sorry.
If you can see your way clear to it, please try to take my comments as being the equivalent to saying "Well, it appears that egalitarian utilitarianism obligates us to give most of our money to the AMF and live lives of impoverishment, isn't that interesting," without having any real desire to take anyone's money.
But again, the error is mine; this is a near problem and shouldn't be treated like a far idea. Apologies.
I am creeped out by Matt's comment too, and not just by way of making an ironic point. The declared wish to use power based against others based on his own naivety. Creepy and dangerous (to the extent that it is not impotent).
If it's better for creeps to not go away, then any argument that they should not go away serves them. This is regardless of the actual argument.
I probably was not clear enough. What I mean is: let's assume creeps want to stay and everyone else wants them to leave. Then any argument made by the creeps that tries to dissuade others from evicting them is self-serving. (You say, well of course). The problem is that most arguers in favor of creep-tolerance don't acknowledge those competing interests, instead they try to assert that higher intolerance for creeps would be bad for the group as a whole somehow. I am tentatively of the opinion that these arguments are bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense. People who argue this way are like those who claim they are buying an expensive TV to stimulate the economy, or those who claim they don't give to charity because handouts only hurt poor people in the long run. Of course, those are not the real reasons; the real reasons are much more simple and selfish.
This is all true but doesn't seem relevant. You asked if there was any argument against making creeps go away that wasn't self serving (if made by a creep). The answer is that there isn't and cannot be one, because any such argument made by a creep serves the creep.
Well, most arguers against creep-tolerance aren't acknowledge their competing interests either.