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tmgerbich comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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It would be really good to have a definition that had some shreds of objectivity to it. As it stands your definition simply assigns to one person the responsibility for another person's feelings. This is infantilizing to the 'victim' and places the 'perpetrator' at the mercy of the "victim's" subjectivity.
The alleged safeguard that a significant fraction must agree the behavior is creepy is rarely applied in practice. "If you made her feel creeped out, man, that's creepy".
In practice this definition of creepiness is almost solely used against men. I had a female colleague (many, actually over the years) who wore inappropriately 'hot' outfits at work and behaved in overtly sexual ways that left me feeling uncomfortable. One cannot complain about this because it is "slut shaming".
I notice a disturbing trend for rationality orientated groups to be invaded by people who like to impose long lists of rules about acceptable behavior and speech, generally with a feminist flavor. These people generally have made little to no contribution to the groups in question. I see here for example OP's first post here was all of three months ago. The open source and atheism communities have seen similar phenomena.
We need to expose these people and their ideas to full rational scrutiny. I have read a lot of feminism literature and I believe that the field could benefit significantly from an infusion of LW style rationality.
Finally can I point out a clear source of irrational thinking that tends to surface in these discussions: the "protective instinct" towards women. For reasons that don't particularly matter in this context, when we see women (or children) at the risk of harm, powerful emotions arise. Thus, if you want a massacre to sound as bad as possible you say "100 people were killed including 50 women and children." In movies, it is almost always unacceptable for a sympathetic female character to be killed (read any guide to writing move scripts).
The problem with this is that there is no objectivity. It's not just about the behavior, or the "perpetrator", or the "victim". It's the intersection of all of them and it's basically dependent on how the "victim" interprets certain aspects of the "perpetrator's" behavior- which is hugely biased by the personal characteristics of the "perpetrator". A hot guy walking up to a girl in a bar is flattering. An ugly guy doing the exact same thing is creepy. A confident guy using a line is an segue to flirtation. A nervous guy using the exact same line is creepy.
This makes it really difficult to teach people to not be creepy by telling them specific actions to take or not take. Much more useful would be a guide with certain tests that people could put out there to gauge the "temperature" of social situations before committing to a course of action.