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hg00 comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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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.
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.