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How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
- An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping
- Don’t Be A Creeper
- How to not be creepy
- My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude. How do we clear that up?
- The C-Word
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
- Creepy behaviour is behaviour that tends to make others feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
- If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours.
- There are specific objective behaviours listed in the articles (for example, to do with touching, sexual jokes and following people) that even someone 'bad' at social skills can learn to avoid doing.
- If someone is informed that their behaviour is creeping people out, and yet they don't take steps to avoid doing these behaviours, that is a serious problem for the group as a whole, and it needs to be treated seriously and be seen to be treated seriously, especially by the 'audience' who are not being victimised directly.
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)
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Comments (769)
Question: Is there anyone here who has helped a creep become substantially less creepy? How did you help that happen?
Other question: Is there anyone here who used to be creepy, and now is significantly less so? How did that happen?
raises hand
I read this, included the comments thread, and thought about it.
OTOH, there's the huge confounding factor that it was shortly after I came back from Ireland to Italy, and Italians are harder to creep out than Anglo-Saxon people. Stand one metre from (say) an American and they will freak the hell out; stand one metre from an Italian and they'll wonder whether they smell. Also, I can't see any evidence that many women in Italy are anywhere nearly as scared of potential rapists as Starling describes (at least where I am -- in larger cities and/or more fucked-up regions the situation might be different). So, to be sure it's my absolute creepiness that decreased and not the standard by which it's measured that increased, I'd have to go back to an English-speaking country and see how I'm received there.
From what I'm told about queues in New York, there might be significant regional variations among Americans in that respect.
Not obvious to me that that can be generalized to other interactions. Some people could be much less creeped out by someone waiting in a line two feet behind them but not otherwise interacting with them in any way than by someone standing in front of them talking to them at the same distance.
The example you give illustrates the difference in personal space norms between cultures, I'll take it on your word that Italians also happen to be less easily creeped out. But the difference in personal space norms doesn't itself indicate much about who is most easily creeped out. Trying to make a social approach and standing a more than appropriate distance away could itself be creepy (although obviously not as creepy as a personal space invasion itself.)
Italian doesn't even have a good translation for creepy! (Inquietante ‘unsettling’ is close, but not quite there.) :-)
(Smiley obligatory per Poe's Law, as some people seem to take such arguments seriously.)
I suspect, based to the limited number of cultures I'm familiar with, that if you did cross-cultural studies you'd find that the two are correlated.
That wouldn't surprise me.
I used to be a giant creep. I knew I had no social skills, tried to develop some, and it backfired more often than not. For example, I knew I was clingy and unable to tell if people wanted to get rid of me. So I reasoned that I should just hover around people I wanted to talk to and make it unclear whether I was there because of them or by coincidence, so they would feel free to talk to me or not as they wished.
What helped was Internet articles like those linked above. Those actually explain what behaviors are desirable and undesirable, and basics of reading people.
I still don't know the difference between "You should go away" and "Should I go away?" - verbal expressions of these are identical. "I'm leaving, bye" and "I'm leaving, wanna come along?" are also hard to distinguish.
I apparently sometimes come across as intense, and am often bad at small talk, but once people get to know me, they tend to like me. The result is that I have a number of social links where I was originally perceived as a creepy guy who thought we were closer than they thought we were when we met, and through continued interaction the social distance has settled at an agreed-on point (around my initial estimate, though generally a bit further than it. I've recalibrated since then, and think I would get it right now for most people).
For example, the first guy I dated told me (after I started dating him) that I was creepy the first time I met him. I basically went to a con just to meet him, and didn't have anything else to do. So... I ended up following him around. At one point, he said to a friend "hey, let's go to dinner!" and I said "Great! I'll come along!" Rookie mistakes fueled by wishful thinking. Later, he told me that he was hoping to get rid of me by going to dinner. At no point did he ask me to leave or make obvious that he didn't want me around; any subtle cues I either didn't notice or didn't want to notice. I must also comment that his friend (who I wasn't paying much attention to) was more creeped out by me than he was, and later warned him about me, and so he may have reinterpreted his memories in light of that warning and not actually been sending those signals. Memories are fuzzy, but looking back on it the behavior I would describe it as closer to creepy than not creepy.
The second time we met, it was again at a con- but I had brought a friend along (which was both social proof and distraction), and I used proper distance (said "Hey, I'll be in this game tonight at 8- you should come play it!" and then left). I also lucked out that the people he came with were irresponsible and so I got an easy opportunity to demonstrate responsibility. I ended up driving him the ~six hours back to his place (it was sort of on our way), and then we started dating shortly afterwards.
That transformation was a response to minimal feedback (I think I basically went home, said "hm, that didn't work. Why might it not have worked?" and guessed correctly), a slight level up in social skills, and a significant level up in social equipment / luck (coming with a friend instead of alone, and his friends bailing on him).
It's also a different situation- this isn't me acting poorly around all women (or men in my case), but trying to get over the obstacle of "someone who I only know from the internet is interested in me." One issue with creeping is underestimating social distance, but that's the primary element that my creeping and general creeping share.
Moderately related, I creeped out one of his friends who visited with a poorly made joke. (I failed to hide my ability to memorize numbers and joked about being able to look up publicly available information.) I learned that people famous on the internet are way more concerned about stalkers than the general populace, and now don't make any stalker-related jokes around people famous on the internet.
The commonality of both of those examples, though, is that I recognized that I wasn't going about things properly and I fixed my behaviors. That's not the problem with these creepers, which is a limited case of someone who is generating social pollution as a byproduct of trying to get what they want. The general case is thorny and hard to deal with.
I think this conversation could start with a good dose of Korzybski and General Semantics.
"Being creepy" does not represent the situation as well as "Person X is uncomfortable with Person Y's overtures for an increased level of personal contact."
The situation is improved when Person X more clearly communicates their discomfort and disinterest, and when Person Y pays more attention to how well their overtures are received, up to just moving on and avoiding contact.
But neither communication nor perception are perfect, and worse, the incentives would tend to promote a nonzero level of creepiness. The person with interest should be expected to make an overture - they're hoping for more.
The advice I see in the first article basically tells the interested party not to make overtures. I don't see that as helpful. Human beings touch each other. They stand close. They make sexual comments. Particularly when they are interested in someone.
Consider one piece of advice:
If they both want to touch each other, then they never will, both waiting for the other to touch them. Somebody has to make the first overture.
10) actually has some useful advice on how to spot a lack of interest, and indeed, disinterest, dislike, and aversion. That's fine for an article on "knowing when to piss off", but it's not so helpful for someone trying to reach out to someone else.
What's needed is an article "How to make an effective overture that minimizes creepy feelings in the subject of interest".
Give an extensional description of the aspects that increase creepiness, and how those can be minimized by someone trying to make a connection.
Thankyou buybuy. Tabooing the term and describing the actual behaviors and circumstances specifically is exactly what is called for here!
You're welcome.
You seem to be one of the list elders, so to speak, so I've got a tangential question for you.
I see occasional references to Korzybski, and the Map is Not The Territory sequence article. "Tabooing a word" is just the kind of semantic hygiene practice of which he had zillions - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if he originated "tabooing a word".
But I don't get the impression that a lot of people here have read his work, or if they did, few have interest. What's your sense of the level of familiarity with and interest in Korzybski here?
Yours is the only reference I can recall. From the sound of it I'd like to hear more. Any other key insights of his that you think we could benefit from?
Hard to summarize a lot of stuff, and I don't know that seeing the summary without the explanation of it is that helpful.
Instead, I'll apply General Semantics to my response to the conversation, as an imaginary Korzybski (K). It's been a while since I read the stuff, so my use of his terms will doubtless lack some precision, and be colored by my own attitude as well.
K: We have a discussion here. People are saying things like Joe is creepy, or Joe is a creep.
K: They are using the "is of identity", and the "is of predication". We know that this falsifies reality. An apple is not red, but is perceived as red by us in the proper circumstances. In other circumstances, we would not perceive it as red. Even taking a conscious being out of the equation, the apple would be measured as red by some instrument or process under certain conditions, and not red in other circumstances.
K: Now let's look at the term "creep". Our total evaluative response to the word "creep" contains a mass of associative (often emotive) and extensional (observable) components. We have many negative and unpleasant emotional associations with the term. If we are going to properly evaluate Joe and his behavior instead of merely letting our reactions to words that we chose to apply to Joe dictate our response to Joe, we should limit our discussion to extensional terms.
K: Unfortunately, it seems to me that even the implied extensional usage of the word is highly variable in this discussion, with creep_you <> creep_me <> creep_him <> creep_her, to a degree that impacts effective communication. The same is likely true even of creep_him_1, creep_him_2, creep_him_3 - people aren't being consistent in their own usage of the term.
K: So let's make an explicit extensional definition of the word "creep" to test whether we have been communicating at all.
ME: I would add that the various comments on blame/responsibility that try to get around blame by resorting to causality don't get us anywhere. Joe's behavior no more caused Jane's reaction than Jane's emotional and perceptual makeup. Change either sufficiently, and Jane does not perceive Joe as creepy. I think this is implicit in K's method, but I don't recall him this particular discussion on causality. Although it's starting to ring a few bells in some musty old neurons.
There's a lot of other stuff. I consider General Semantics as semantic hygiene, seeing how certain semantic practices encourage bad habits of thought, and having specific counter practices for avoiding the poor habits of thought. Purell for the mind.
In the end, I don't think the counter practices are necessary to keep your ideas clean and tidy as long as you've internalized an aversion to the poor habits of thought, but they help when confusion is afoot.
(May be worth editing your comment and replacing all instances of "_" with "\_".)
I've seen a few references, and the impression I got is that the sequence on words overlaps a lot with Korzybski's General Semantics.
Eliezer got some early influence from the General Semantics-inspired Null-A books by A.E. van Vogt.
(I'm leaving two versions of this comment in different threads because DeeElf also asked about Korzybski and LW.)
Thank you for the link to the other discussion. I had been assuming more familiarity Korzybski than seems to be the case.
I'm struck by the fact that for centuries there were complex rules of etiquette established for interacting with other members of society depending on class, gender, family relationship, etc. Then during the 20th century that formal system of rules was all but abandoned. Obviously we can't simply revert to Victorian mores, but perhaps we should pay attention to the history of etiquette and re-engineer it for modern society. Pick some Schelling Points for polite behavior and publish them. There is already an Etiquette For Dummies book on amazon, but I've only read the first chapter as a free preview which contains generic advice with few details. I imagine there are more comprehensive collections available.
When I was reading about the elevatorgate flamewar I wondered if perhaps a lot of the people arguing with each other were actually arguing past the elephant in the room; society is currently structured so that it is common and considered normal to put people into social situations that they find very uncomfortable. For instance, who thinks it would be fun and not awkward to get into a 5 by 5 foot windowless room with a complete stranger, close the door, wait 30 seconds (probably without speaking or looking at each other), and then leave? And yet we have elevators everywhere. Originally there were human elevator operators which at least meant you weren't alone with a stranger in a claustrophobic box. Would open-air elevators or monitored security cameras or reintroducing human elevator operators or replacing elevators with stairs have prevented elevatorgate? Possibly.
Not many people would be willing to climb stairs to get to the twentieth floor. Some people (e.g. my very sedentary and morbidly obese grandmother) wouldn't even be able to do that.
It's interesting that the creation of a social awkwardness device is essentially the only reason we have high-rise buildings in the first place. Note that malls, which must make significant efforts to attract people and make them feel comfortable (and ready to spend money), either make limited use of elevators or actually do make them transparent. Escalators wouldn't work for anything more than a few floors. Like you mentioned, stairs don't work either. We need levitation (or at least pneumatic) tubes!
Were they really? Here in France, when you meet a woman you kiss her on the cheek, but when you meet a man you shake his hand; you use different pronouns ("vous" or "tu" - cognates to "you" and "thou" in English) depending on the relative status of your interlocutor (and other things); in many western countries (the US more than France; though it seems) it still seems expected for a man to buy an overpriced piece of rock to the woman he's planning to marry and not the other way around, etc. - we have plenty of rules that depend on gender! (probably more than on class)
I think that what happened is that there was an effort to increase fairness by removing some discriminating rules, which meant those rules became weaker, but also more likely to be tacit: since Victorian society didn't consider gender equality to be a major principle, there wasn't anything wrong with spelling out the norms that regulated gender relations (unless they went against other values of the time). Now nobody wants to sound sexist; so people have to figure the rules out on their own.
Dunno about French, but I think that in most languages with such a system the V form is getting rarer and rarer. For example, in Italian the rule used to be that one only used “tu” with friends, family and children/teenagers (of course this is only as precise as one's definition of “friend”, but still); but nowadays one uses it with everybody except superiors and people obviously (at least a decade) older than oneself (with the weird result that someone in their 20s is more likely to be addressed as “tu” by a stranger in their 40s than by a stranger in their 70s). In English too, addressing people as “Firstname” vs “Mr Lastname” is roughly equivalent, and the latter is becoming rarer and rarer.
Yup, the usage is following the same evolution in France - there are also similar usages in China (ni vs. nin) that are disappearing.
In Spanish, at least, it varies by region, and some places have dropped the familiar in favor of the formal. English did the same thing.
Is it a social blunder not to kiss a woman on the cheek when you meet her? On the same level as asking her out in an elevator at 4 AM? To be honest I'm not sure how strict the rules of etiquette were in the old days, but I think there's a distinction between customs and etiquette. Customs are things most people do and are comfortable with and no one really objects. Not following expected etiquette causes discomfort and potentially emotional harm.
I wonder how much influence etiquette has on a man buying a diamond for a woman and how much influence marketing has. In fact, I wonder just how much of our current etiquette (or at least our customs) has been caused directly by marketing and popular entertainment. I suspect we treat each other a lot like we see people being treated on TV and in movies, rather than how they would like to be treated.
As I understand it, the use of diamonds in engagement and wedding rings was the result of an advertising campaign by DeBeers, but I'd say they actually managed to establish a custom-- one which would endure for quite a while even if DeBeers ceased to exist. It might even endure in the highly unlikely event that advertising ceased to exist.
Not really a social blunder, just possibly slightly awkward, depending of the context. When I arrived in France as a little kid I found all that kissing disgusting and recoiled when someone would try to kiss me on the cheek. I later forced myself to suffer the ordeal in order to fit in socially. Now it's pretty much a habit, so I wouldn't be surprised if I eventually accidentally creeped out an American girl by kissing her on the cheek.
Whether a man is allowed to touch a woman or isn't can depend on the man. If the man feels good and is relaxed he is allowed more touching. If he's high status he's also allowed to initiate more physical contact.
If a guy wants to be seen as non creepy, trying to figure out the rules of etiquette that are valid for a high status member in his group might not be enough. Books are problematic. If you read a book you might see that high status members of your group don't follow the etiquette of the book.
There are basically two ways: (1) Learn to feel when you make other people uncomfortable. (2) Follow a set of rules that make your interactions safe.
If I may argue from anecdote for a bit:
I was at a party a while back where I made a somewhat sexual joke and the people in that conversation (probably more female than male, I can't remember; my social scene is lopsided towards women) all laughed. A couple of minutes later, another guy made the same exact joke with a different group of people at the party and his reception was a lot less warm than mine (some people groaned).
I could only explain why this happened as a result of relative status in a social group. Status seems to determine who is "creepy" and who is "not creepy" even if they are using the same words. Of course I'm tall and in good shape while the other guy isn't so much. So I think that factors into status as well; the first thing that people are going to do when trying to describe "non-creepy" behavior is imagine Brad Pitt or someone who they already are attracted to, and then proceed to describe their ideal encounter with this hypothetical attractive person.
Another piece would be learning how to recognize when people are attracted to you-- a fair number of people (perhaps especially geeks) aren't reliably good at that.
It's an important skill but it's not enough. Even a girl that's attracted to you can get uncomfortable if you touch her too much.
A shy girl might get uncomfortable with physical touch from a guy she's attracted to. Another girl who isn't attracted to the same guy might find the same amount of physical touch acceptable.
I agree with your comment.
It's just that noticing when someone is attracted to you frequently gets left out of advice.
Yes. I creeped out girls who had cold-approached me first a few times in the past.
I remain badly uncomfortable with this portrayal of the situation as "High status men are permitted to touch arbitrary women in their social group more," and this being presumed to be the same as "Women are more happy when high status men touch them [than when low-status men do.]" I can allow someone to touch me for a lot of reasons: fear, paralysis, having been Psychology-of-Persuasion'd into it, being friends with them, being ecstatic about something unrelated, sexual or aesthetic attraction. However, I have good reason to believe that nearly all men don't just want to touch women, they want to touch women and have those women be happy about it, in the moment and afterwards. For certain when I think about touching someone, I'm displeased at the thought of them pretending to enjoy it and feeling vaguely skeeved, but not knowing why/not thinking they have the ability to prevent me from doing so.
A woman who's afraid to resist the touch in the moment might still label the guy afterwards as a creep. When I said allowed, I meant behavior that doesn't lead to being labeled creepy.
When it comes to the girl being happy about being touched things can be more complex. Most people find being tickled a bit uncomfortable. Some guysenjoy tickling a girl even if the girl would prefer in the moment not to be tickled.
Tickling a girl communicates "We have a relationship where I have the power to tickle you without negative consequences for myself". It's demonstration of power. If the girl goes along with it, she recognises the power. It demonstrates status to other people who are watching.
Successful demonstration of power can increase the amount of attraction that a girl feels. Jerks who demonstrate power have more success with girl than nice guys who don't.
The pickup literature is full with advice that suggest that being "nice" isn't enough to create attraction. Unfortunately that frequently leads to guy's behaving in creepy ways. They try to act like they have social power that they don't have.
This is funny to me, because the first time I met a group of Less Wrongers, one of them tickled me a day or two into us having met. However, the person in question was MBlume, who is known to not be scary.
Most of the purposes of LW meetups aren't to be venues for seduction, and the riskier styles have noticeable odds of guaranteeing that some women won't come back.
I myself wouldn't use LW meetups as venues for seduction. I would however guess that most of the people who act creepy on LW meetups do see them as venues for seduction. If you want to convince those people to change their behavior I think it makes sense to speak in a language that they are more likely to understand.
If you use the kind of language in which the main post of this discussion is posted, I think you are unlikely to reach the people who pose the problem. If my intended audience wouldn't be the people who pose the problem but the people who are fluent in deconstrutivist language I would speak differently.
Hard problem.
"Change your behavior if a significant fraction complains" fails to protect isolated victims, who are likely to be the most common targets of bad behavior and also the ones in most need of support. "Change your behavior if one person complains" is grossly abusable, and the first-order fix to complain about frivolous complaints spirals off into meta. Appealing to common sense, good judgment etc. seems to me like passing the buck back to the situation that created a need for this discussion in the first place.
As a secondary consideration, there's the spectrum between an ex-Muslim requesting that all women present cover up for a few meetings while acclimatising, and a nudist showing up to a meeting and being requested by others to wear clothing while present. At what point does one's apparel start to constitute "behavior" that other people may complain about as creepy?
On thinking about this (five minutes by the clock!) I start to suspect that trying to write rules about creeping is too high-level and abstract, and it would be better to codify rules on what specific behaviors are tolerated or not, and this ruleset could vary by group. Such as:
Edit: oops, list syntax
I think this argument:
is flawed as it proves far too much.
We consider the (very plausible) hypothetical scenario of a LW meetup with many men and few women. The men are prone to hitting on the women. The women just want to talk about utility functions, and say no.
The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly. They are uncomfortable and upset.
Therefore by the argument above, the women are engaging in creepy behaviour. Plus, a significant fraction of the group are finding it creepy.
Therefore the responsibility to change their behaviour lies with the women, and they presumably need to start putting out more.
Since this is clearly an absurd conclusion, I think there's something wrong with the original argument. Probably we need to introduce some notion of legitimate and illegitimate emotional reactions, but that's a whole can of worms.
POST IDEA- Feedback Wanted
When these gender discussions come up, I am often tempted to write in with my own experiences and desires. But I generally don't because I don't want to generalize from one example, or claim to be the Voice of Women, etc. However, according to the last survey, I actually AM over 1% of the females on here, and so is every other woman. (i.e. there are less than 100 of us).
My idea is to put out a call for women on LessWrong to write openly about their experiences and desires in this community, and send them to me. I will anonymize them all, and put them all up under one post.
This would have a couple of benefits, including:
Anonymity allows for open expression- When you are in the vast minority, speaking out can feel like "swimming upstream," and so may not happen very much.
Putting all the women's responses in one posts helps figure out what is/is not a problem- Because of the gender ratio, most discussions on the topic are Men Talking About what Women Want, it can be hard to figure out what women are saying on the issues, versus what men are saying women say.
The plural of anecdote is data- If one woman says X, it is an anecdote, and very weak evidence. If 10% of women say X, it is much stronger evidence.
Note that with a lot of the above issues, one of the biggest problems in figuring out what is going on isn't purposeful misogyny or anything. Just the fact that the gender ratio is so skewed can make it difficult to hear women (think picking out one voice amongst ten). The idea I'm proposing is an attempt to work around this, not an attempt to marginalize men, who may also have important things to say, but would not be the focus of this investigation.
Even with a sample size of 10 responses (approximately the amount I would say is needed for this to be useful), according to the last survey, that is 10% of the women on this site. A sizable proportion, indeed.
Please give feedback, if you think this is a good or bad idea, and if you are a woman (or transgendered person, or female-identifying, or...etc), if you would participate. I will only run this experiment if a) people want it, and b) women will respond.
I would be game for this. In fact, I've pretty much been going round doing this where I thought people were failing to understand how women worked anyway. This is a great way of avoiding generalising from one example though, which from what I've noticed of posts on the subject of women, happens a lot.
Just also remember that this isn't going to give helpful advice unless we can all learn to stop saying things that we say and really don't mean. I might be generalising from one example again, but women often rationalise more than men, so it's hard for us to speak in an unbiased way about our actual preferences. It took me a lot of effort just to learn /when/ I was rationalising, let alone fix it.
I'm really curious what this would turn up (and I wonder if it'll bring up things that no one woman would say by themselves to everyone on the site), so I definitely think it should happen!
This seems interesting. There have been threads on specifically female viewpoints before, but the anonymity is a wrinkle that no one's tried yet as far as I know. Go for it; the worst that can happen is not turning up anything new.
(Well, I suppose the short-term worst that can happen might involve stirring up resentment that's been obscured for social reasons and that turning into a fight, but in the long run that resentment either is or isn't there already.)
I'm unclear on what exactly I would tell you, but assuming there exists a useful answer to that question other than "y'know, stuff", I'm game. Also, given that there are so few, anonymity may not be anonymity (my writing style's probably recognizable to some; any individual incident I've probably already told all my friends about so it'll be recognized at least by those; etc.); how would you work around that?
This comment actually gave me An Idea, so thank you!
Idea- In the Call for Responses post, there could be a Ask the Women thread, where people can submit questions. If you want a question answered, upvote it.
When the women write their responses, they can use the questions as prompts. A question that gets many upvotes will probably be written on by more women, thus getting more data. But if you want to respond to a more lower voted question, you can (or just say whatever you want to say)
I would say that the submitted questions will be assumed to be answered using Crocker's Rules, no exceptions. What we want is a more stream-of-consciousness, gut-level reaction . Not self-censored, want-to-be-polite-and-concise, filtered answers.
Some topics for the call for responses I would propose:
Occasions when a man was creepy towards you at a social event.
Occasions when a woman was creepy towards you at a social event.
Occasions you met a new male friend at a social event, and how it wasn't creepy, and what was fun/interesting/good about it.
Occasions you met a new female friend at a social event, and how it wasn't creepy, and what was fun/interesting/good about it.
(I mean new friend in the sense that you didn't know them, not that they were already a new friend before the event)
"This has never happened to me" would also be a useful response.
All of the above questions could be answered for either lesswrong-related events, or social events in general.
Occasions (or general patterns) when someone tried too hard to not be creepy toward you and displeased you as a result.
(Some of the policies that get tossed around are pretty extreme, so I'd be interested in measuring the overcompensation risk.)
I'm expecting few enough responses that I'm willing to work with people on a case-by-case basis. For example, for you I could edit your writing towards my own style, or even (so long as it's not pages) read it, wait an hour, and re-write it in my own voice, if needed (going back to make sure all relevant details are added in)
Discussing individual incidents is a bit trickier. In general, I would like to keep the narratives individual-specific. (i.e. "Lady Q writes: <insert her text >" , rather than "Thoughts on Question X: <insert all the paragraphs from different people on Question X >") . Otherwise, the concern would be unable to differentiate between 10 women writing 1 good thing and 2 bad things each, OR 9/10 women wrote 1 good thing, and 1 woman writes 20 bad things.
That said, I do see the use of an "Anonymous Incidents" section, where people can put identifying incidents they would like to discuss, without associating it with the rest of their narrative. Do you think that would solve this issue?
I'm .8 confident it won't turn up anything surprising enough to make it worth your effort, but if you're motivated to expend the effort anyway, I'd certainly read the results. I'm cis-male, so pretty much irrelevant to the effort other than as a reader.
I'm never a fan of "don't"-oriented guides to social interaction. In my experience, the reason people do things that are taken as creepy is that they don't know a better way -- if they did, wouldn't they do that and thus avoid alienating everyone in the first place?
Giving more "don'ts" doesn't solve that problem: it just makes it harder to locate the space of socially-optimal behavior. What's worse, being extremely restrictive in the social risks you take itself can be taken as creepy! ("Gee, this guy never seems to start conversations with anyone...")
These guides should instead say what to do, not what not to do, that will make the group more comfortable around you.
Edit: Take this one in particular. 90% is "don'ts", 5% is stuff of questionable relevance to the archetypal target of these guides (the problem is that male nerds announce their sexual fetishes too early? really?), and the last 5% is the usual vague "be higher status" advice which, if it were as easy as suggested, would have obviated the need for this advice in the first place.
(To its credit, it has a link to more general social adeptness advice that I didn't read, but then that article, if useful, should be the one linked, not this one.)
While this kind of advice seems useful, I do wish those articles you linked wouldn't attempt to stay gender-neutral: many of our social norms are gender-specific, and describing them with minimal reference to gender is going to be inaccurate!
In addition to that, the gender ratio in this community and in many nerdy/geeky communities (open source, sci-fi fandom, atheism, etc.) means that a majority of the "creepiness problem" is going to be a guy creeping out a girl, and not some other combination - since that's the kind of interaction that needs the most "fixing", why not focus exclusively on it?
It's nice to try to find a general rule that applies to many cases, but if you're giving a talk to a bunch of people about to go camping and hiking in British Columbia, "How to avoid getting mauled to death by a Grizzly Bear" is more useful than "How to avoid large carnivores, like Tigers, Bears and Lions".
Yes, but the gender-specific aspects vary from culture to culture, even within the First World. (Silly example: it is normal throughout Italy to greet a female friend by kissing her on the cheeks, but greeting a male friend that way is normal for some Italians, unusual for others --i.e. they only do that with close friends they haven't seen in a while--, and almost unthinkable for others still.)
Sure! But the gender-invariant rules also vary from culture to culture.
(I'm French by the way, we have the same cheek-kissing as you italians, and I think neither of us hugs nearly as much as those weird Americans)
Gender-related Lesswrong threads have almost always been problematic, historically. However, in all honesty, the signal/noise ratio in this thread seems low, even when compared to others of its kind.
Can anyone here honestly state that they learned something from this thread?
Note: The question was not rhetorical. If anyone was helped, I would actually like to learn that they were helped. Other note: I apologize for making the signal/noise ratio of this thread even worse by going meta.
I would note that, even if true, we are unlikely to see replies of the form "I learned that I am creepy" or "I knew I am creepy, but from this thread I learned that LessWrong is aware of the problem and I'm unlikely to get away with it in meetings because people have named the problem and are aware of the importance of picking up on it."
I was also pleasantly surprised to notice how little this thread was mindkilled.
As for something I learned, the distinction between individual interpretation of someone's behavior as charismatic v. an individual's social status within a group was made salient in a way that let me notice it. There's several other things I can't call to mind but which I'm pretty sure I did learn.
I think you may have misread the comment you are replying to. He said that this thread had a low signal to noise ratio, and expressed disbelief that anyone "honestly... learned something from this thread."
ADBOC to the first link in this context — its tone is appropriate if the target audience is unrepentant creepers* who need to be shamed into shaping up**, but as advice to random people who may or may not behave creepily, it feels way too aggressive, like it's presuming guilt. (The third link, on the other hand, is great tone-wise.)
* A narrower category than "people who behave creepily some of the time".
** Not that I would expect it to work well; most people wouldn't consider the author a moral authority who's entitled to shame them. Behavior modification is hard.
Not a moral authority for most people who might stumble upon the post, sure, but I would guess that Scalzi is a reasonable facsimile of such of person for the audience of SFF fandom and con attendees at whom the post was more specifically aimed. He's perhaps not a "moral authority" but he is a person of sufficiently high status in that community that his words would carry some weight.
As for tone, it seems pretty typical of Scalzi-style prose, so again, for his main audience of fans, I don't know that tone would be a problem. The follow-up post linked on the page also seems to do a fair job explaining why the post is not just targeted to unrepentant creepers but also applies to people who may quite accidentally veer into that territory without even realizing it, and details how he has had to consciously check himself from doing so on occasion.
Looks at thread.
Wow it really is September.
Creepiness is bad.
But, I've seen labeling people as creepy used as an extremely Dark Arts sort of tactic. The problem is, if someone is labeled as creepy, it becomes very difficult for them to justify themselves to other people, or to confront those who've labeled them. People use the representativeness heuristic and see that they expect a creeper to deny their creepiness and to confront the people who are calling them creepy, so for the wrongly accused it's very difficult to ever clear their names in the eyes of the general public.
There were a couple guys in my high school who admittedly had big personality flaws, but then girls preyed on them by intentionally putting the guys in positions where the guys thought the girls were showing interest, but then the girl could immediately retreat to calling the guy creepy. This was useful for discrediting people the girls didn't like, as well as making the girls seem more desirable. This always really pissed me off and made me sad at the world.
(Full disclosure: something like this happened to me in middle school. I waited it out and made extra efforts to signal not creepy behavior. It worked, but only to a limited extent, people were always cautious when they were first getting to know me and it made me a bit sad. In high school, I never had any issues.)
"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.
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.
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"
Don't do that to them, and reevaluate tactics in general after updating for this encounter.
“If” just means it's a sufficient condition, not necessarily that it's also a necessary one.
Is there an actual history of people complaining about 'creepy behavior' in LW meetups? Or is this just one of those blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence?
The creepy-expulsions will continue until the sex ratio improves!
Only if that process is faster than females leaving on their own accord because they think there are creepy males.
Considering that the atheist and fannish communities were somewhat caught by surprise, I think it's reasonable for LW to try to avoid this problem before it surfaces.
It's amusing how some comments to this thread degenerated into versions of Yvain's worst argument in the world:
<Behavior A> is labeled creepy and the archetypal example of creepy is harmful, therefore A is bad.
Also: behavior B is bad and is creepy. People talk about creepiness being bad, rather than behavior B being bad. But behavior A is also creepy, and some people think it's not bad. So they say creepiness is not bad. Then they feel they have to defend behavior B against claims of being bad (blue/green politics).
I just wanted to say that I'm truly impressed: things are teetering a bit, but it's been 24 hours and we still have a multifaceted conversation that hasn't degenerated into a flamewar! On the Internet!
(In case anyone wondered, yes, I do like to tempt fate with statements like this—it's no different from loudly announcing, "Nothing can stop me now!" at various intervals.)
Is anyone else distressed by the fact that, at the time of writing this comment, all of the "Recent Comments" displayed on the front page of the site are on a topic called "How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy"?
I'm not usually the kind of person who worries about "marketing" considerations, but....
Discussion section, ffs!
Since this comment got more upvotes than the article itself, I'm moving to Discussion.
I read your links. How very encouraging. I think I'll stop talking to women now...
Why? Have women been complaining that you make them feel uncomfortable by how you talk to them?
Think of the basic advice in the first few links as being like a computer trouble shooting guide that starts off by saying "Is the plug in the socket? Is the socket turned on? Have you tried rebooting?". Sort of a checklist, that you only need to work through if there is actually a problem.
Kind of like: "Do women glare and yell at you when you hug them? Check whether you're using the PolyApproved (tm) procedure of making the awkward 'wanna hug?' gesture first, and only proceeding to an actual hug if the gesture is reciprocated. Note for advanced users: there are alternative procedures and short cuts which can be used at your own risk."
Does the first link not come off to you as very aggressive and (almost) presuming guilt? (I can't imagine how it couldn't, so if it doesn't to you I'm interested in your perspective.)
It feels to me like a troubleshooting guide that continually insinuates how much of a frickin' moron the user would be if they turned off the computer without properly shutting down (or any number of other explicitly-unstated foolish actions), except that troubleshooting guides normally can't morally condemn you.
(The third link actually does read like a decent guide.)
I am amused that you came up with exactly the same list I would produce in trying to introduce this discussion to any geeky audience. :) The Captain Awkward ones especially have many useful comments - a bit of a read but nothing compared to the Sequences.
Since there have been lots of requests for specific rules to implement that don't reference supposed categories of people:
To expand on the second point: rather than ask "may I [x]?", ask "would you like me to [x]?" Keen readers will note an analogy with opt-out vs. opt-in. It is easy to mumble, to take too long thinking about it, to start calculating social & status costs if the opt-out is chosen... but those issues are largely addressed by the second form.
I suppose that these rules could move someone from "creepy" to "extremely awkward", which is probably an improvement. People never say no to "Would you like to talk to me?" or "You look kinda bored, do you want to continue this conversation?" (unless they take the latter to mean "I'm bored, go away").
Refusals are always at least a little rude. True opt-in forms use implications (things like "I like bowling, too bad my friends don't" vs "Want to go bowling?"), but they require social skills to generate and understand.
That sounds backwards to me: the former sounds like I really want to go play bowling with you, the latter (in certain contexts at least) like I'm just inviting you out for politeness' sake but not actually expecting you to come.
I think either of them could be the more pushy one, depending on the context, intonation, etc.
Yes. OTOH, if you say the former in a context/intonation such that it doesn't sound like an invitation at all, it kind of defeats the point.
If someone asked me point blank "would you like to talk to me?" I would evaluate the answer to this question and provide it, and sometimes it would be no.
I will have to try that at a party now, just to see what kinds of reactions I get.
I'm going to disagree with this. Honestly, straight up asking can be even more creepy in a lot of situations. For example if you ask, "Can I give you a hug?", you've double creeped me out.
First, you violated my boundaries because we're not hugging friends yet if ever. Second, you violated my social norms by not reading our friendship hug level from the vibe of our conversation and my body language. You're right that I may not actually tell you "no" because it is more difficult to opt-out, but that doesn't make it less creepy.
There are some situations where asking is appropriate, but most of the time I would say if the social cues aren't clear err on the side of caution and later on ask a buddy who's good at that stuff what was going on in that situation and if you made the right call. Asking for stuff just tacks awkward onto creepy.
There is a deep, bad problem with "if you can't read cues, go fuck yourself". I'm fine with generic norms of what is and isn't okay to ask: don't ask to hug someone on your first conversation, don't ask for anything romantic/sexual outside of certain specific contexts, only ask for things a little more intimate than what's already approved. You can learn those.
I'm not fine with there being nothing you can do given unclear cues. The cost of two people who wanted to hug not hugging is negligible; the cost of someone being unable of social interaction until someone comes to clue them in is not.
I think the "real norms" are awfully complicated and depend of gender (not only of people, but of whether the present company is all-male, all-female or mixed), status and subtle cues; whereas the "spoken norms" are simpler and give more lip service to our far values by being gender-neutral and not referring to status.
You can probably get along with the simpler spoken rules, but you will miss some opportunities, and may occasionally break an unspoken rule and look bad. How big of a difference it will make will depend of the gap between the spoken and unspoken rules (a small gap for nerds; a larger gap for say European aristocracy).
The articles in the OP seem to try to address this problem mostly by making the "spoken norms" restrictive enough so that you won't screw up following them, you'll "only" miss opportunities that would be allowed by the unspoken norms (like hugging given the right cues). Another approach is to close the gap in the other directions by allowing more things to get closer to the spoken norms, e.g. Crocker's Rules.
The heart of the problem is body language.
It's an actual language that must be learned and spoken, but a lot of people for some reason never learned it, or learned it poorly.
When these people interact with strangers, it's exactly like the guy with a bad understanding of a foreign language who tries to speak it, and instead of saying "Hi, are you friendly? Lets be friends!" he says "Hi, I want swallow your head!"
I hope you can see why people wouldn't like someone who goes around talking like that on a regular basis, and that the problem really does lie with the speaker, not the people he's speaking to.
What's worse, if he doesn't understand what others are trying to tell him (in the language he speaks poorly - aka body language) when he makes these kinds of statements he certainly can remain oblivious to the problem and be unable to fix it himself. If a person in that situation never meets a kind soul willing to help him speak correctly then he really is screwed, and there isn't much he can do about it unless he recognizes the problem on his own and seeks help.
What kind of help? If you don't speak a language, you can buy a grammar, or ask native speakers to think up some examples and build rules from them. Whereas if you ask people "How do I know if someone is bored?" they don't give you actual tips, or even "There's no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case" and a few examples. They just say "Oh, I can never tell either" when they obviously can, or "Well, they just look and act bored...".
Impro acting, maybe, or have someone point things out like "don't you see how impatient he looks?", etc. - the kind of things parents may do with their kids. Or read a book on etiquette, or hire some kind of body language coach, I'm sure it exists. Or of course a pick-up artist book.
By the way, "There's no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case" is something I often had to say when teaching French to Chinese students; or rather often it was "there may be a rule underneath all those cases, but I have no idea what it is!". Often finding the rule for your native language requires significant effort; and some rules you come up may not accurately describe the way the language actually works.
What motivation do people with social skills and those norms have to help those with less social skills? Because unless there's something in it for them they're not doing it. Many of the kind of people who have social skills find hanging out with the kind of people who don't actively unpleasant. That is actually overlaps substantially with the way creepy is used; people whose social skills are so low that they are unpleasant to be around in a group, who do not have redeeming features/high status.
Also, other people's lack of social skills? Mostly not my problem. The only people I would give social skills advice to unsolicited would be those who are clearly likely to be receptive to it, i.e. people who are in a status hierarchy I'm in where I'm superior. Most people who ask for advice don't want the real thing, and sugarcoating it and getting the real message through is hard.
Which is why Internet articles are so wonderful. You can give general, detailed, justified advice with many examples, and it's not a personal attack on anybody in particular.
What I find really annoying is the following dynamic:
1) not allowed into existing groups, people without social skills form their own group
2) said group acquires higher status (largely because people without social skills frequently have other useful skills)
3) people with social skills notice the new group with rising status and start joining it
4) said high-social-skills people use their skills to acquire high positions in the group and start kicking the original low-social-skills people out
This more-or-less describes the history of geek/nerd culture over the past several decades.
Do you find this more annoying than other patterns where people lacking X trait and thereby excluded from valuable X-having groups form their own groups, create value within those groups, and then lose control of those groups (and the associated value) to X-havers who appropriate it?
Because it seems to me there are a great many Xes like this. Wealth is an obvious one, for example.
I don't know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don't involve malice.
An alternative model is that people with social skills tend to be used to subtle and implicit modes of interaction (guess culture vs. ask culture), and the group's explicit modes of interaction makes them uncomfortable (giving rise to this thread).
Yet another model that skips step 1): small groups with a homogenous membership will have simple norms; as the group gets successful it grows and attracts more people and more diversity (in age, sex, nationality, and interests), and the simple norms don't work as well, and "success" in the group depends more and more on being able to handle social complexity ("social skills" and "politics" in the office politics meaning).
I never said step 4) involve malice.
"Malice" may have been a bit strong; maybe it's something like "I prefer explanations that don't imply moral blame for one of the parties involved".
I only provide the explanation, assigning blame or other moral elements is up to you.
I would say that if the people with the high social skills have the option of removing the people with low social skills from the group then there is little/no incentive to help them beyond perhaps altruism.
But in many situations these mixed groups are forced, and teaching the people with low social skills to interact according to the understood cultural rules can make them more pleasant company. So if you're continually forced into an environment with someone, improving their social skills can be of direct benefit to you. Examples would include a coworker in a team work environment, a family member or in-law, the roommate or significant other of a valuable friendship, etc.
I don't think that's what I was intending to get at. If you can't read the cues about the appropriateness of a particular course of action then it is advisable to wait until you can ask someone more informed for information about how to act in a future similar situation.
But that doesn't mean you have to stand there and not participate. For example, let's say you and I are talking and I'm telling you a story about how something in my immediate environment is causing me to think of something that caused me personal distress in the past. Now for the sake of the example, let's say that you and I have met a couple times but are not close friends. During the interaction I shift my body to close out the rest of the room and increase the intimacy and exclusivity content of the private conversation between the two of us. Perhaps I even visibly deflate while telling the story, shifting my posture convey a decrease in confidence and happiness.
This is a situation where it might be appropriate to give someone a hug. But if you're not comfortable reading the cues at the time to determine if this is that kind of situation then I would advise you NOT to ask me right then. Because even though on the surface it may seem as though I have given all the right signals to convey that I would welcome physical comfort, I have not told you anything about the number of other people in the room, the style of clothing being worn by the conversationalists, the presence or absence of mind-altering substances, the relationship statuses of the conversationalists, etc. There are many other factors that could influence whether or not a hug is appropriate here.
And yes, I recognize that in this situation asking "Can I give you a hug" may work out, depending on how "creepily" you ask (and that's a whole different topic, but body language while asking makes a HUGE difference). But most likely I would find it off-putting and it would increase my desire to removal myself from the situation, because this person has just demonstrated either a lack of understanding or a disregard for the general rules of social interaction in my society.
The thing is, not asking about a hug does not close you off to other alternatives that are much lower risk. For example, you could share a similar story from your personal history. You could voice an offer to listen further if I want to talk more about it. You can ask if I would be more comfortable leaving a situation that I have already indicated is in someway unpleasant to me. And while I recognize that each of those actions could be inappropriate depending on the specifics of a given situation, they are much lower risk. And if you're unsure, defaulting to the lower risk interaction option is generally preferable. Plus, like I said, you can always recount the situation later on LessWrong and ask if in the future given those parameters a hug would have been ok.
At Bicon in the UK, the code of conduct requires that people ask before touching. People hug a lot there, but they nearly always ask (unless they know each other well). It doesn't seem at all creepy because it's a community norm.
I think it's generally an excellent system. Once you've asked a lot of people an occasional no* doesn't hurt. And generally, people haven't seemed offended when I've said no to them.
*It's important to remember that no doesn't necessarily mean "go away you creep." Some people don't enjoy hugs.
I have seen several posts in LW where someone moderately informed in a field comes to us with (my paraphrase) "there are many flaws and mistakes being made here, and time spent dealing with issues that are actually well understood in the field; here are some high-value expert resources that will quickly level you up in this field so you can at least now make interesting and important mistakes, rather than repeating basic mistakes the whole field moved past".
These have been universally well received (AFAIK) except for this one - and make no mistake, that's exactly what the OP was.
I strongly suspect in any other topic area, the defensiveness, cached behaviours and confirmation bias abounding in many of the replies here would be called out for what it is.
I also suspect in any other topic area, any links presented as "read these to quickly level up" would in fact be read before the post is being argued with. I strongly suspect that is not the case here because, well, basic arguments are being made which are addressed and dealt with in the links (sometimes in the comments rather than in the OP).
Variations on "but if we did that, all of us would constantly be in trouble" are the main ones I'm thinking of there. Since I'm sure there's a significant overlap of LW readers with SF fandom, many of you would also have seen this thoroughly dealt with in the Readercon debacle.
I suspect there is also a correlation here with approving of PUA and disapproving of anti-"creeper" measures, and am now fascinated by how we might confirm or deny that.
I'm not a PUA expert by any means, but from what I've read of the field its approach is complex. On the one hand, it concerns itself extensively with not coming off as creepy, as that's one of the easier ways to be profoundly unattractive. On the other, it acknowledges that building social skills entails a lengthy awkward phase while they're being learned, wherein an aspiring PUA might inadvertently seem creepy, and encourages an aggressive approach during this phase in order to gain skill faster. Offhand I couldn't say whether this approach inspires more or less lifetime creepy feelings than the alternative.
I'd model most of the PUA types I've read as being dismissive of at least some attempts to minimize creepy behavior on grounds of it trying to solve a wrong problem, but as being outright contemptuous of the behavior itself.
The links above do not strike me as good advice. For people with sufficiently low social skills, the only way to follow the advice above is to never interact with anyone ever (i.e. it is easy to fail the eye contact test if you do not know how to initiate conversations, or if you happen to hang out with a group that does not make eye contact often, something which is particularly common among nerdier folk). Furthermore, one can break some of these rules and yet still be non-creepy; never following a group along when they go to do something is a recipe for meeting many fewer people, and not necessary to avoid creepiness if you are decent at interpreting social cues. I therefore do not think the parallel you are drawing is a valid one.
As a further point, the post on weight-lifting a while back was not well-received, despite being more correct than this post. What is has in common with this post is a lack of citations back to reputable-seeming sources (such citations definitely do not guarantee the correctness of a post, so I am not claiming this to be good grounds for discrimination, but am pointing it out as a difference).
ETA: I have no strong opinions on PUA, I think decreasing creepiness is a good thing, but I don't think that these are great resources for doing so. I definitely got something out of them --- for instance, an outside view awareness of the different responses that men and women tend to have when a man is creeping on a woman --- but it is hard to endorse the advice given in aggregate.
I, for one, have read these. They come up any time feminism rubs up against male geekdom, like blisters. Hopefully they do some help, but change is hard, and that's just how social skills are: they're skills, and acquiring them is and requires serious change on your part as a person.
This is obfuscated by other things, like hey, sometimes it is the other person's problem. Not all the time. Maybe even only rarely. But sometimes. And the temptation to make that excuse for yourself is very strong, even if you do know better.
The defensiveness isn't a good thing, but it's certainly understandable, and if you're part of the contrarian cluster, there's going to be some instinctive, automatic pushback. I know there is in me. Plus the criticism is leveled at (one of) my (our) tribe. What did you think was going to happen?
Naively, I thought the LessWrong commitment to being, well, less wrong, would extend to all opportunities to be less wrong.
I know attempts to discuss privilege here have typically not gone well, which is a pity because I think there's some good argument that privilege is itself a cognitive bias - a complex one, that both builds on and encourages development of others.
It's not clear to me that privilege is a bias of its own, so much as aspects of privilege are examples of other biases, like availability bias.
I think the primary reason that attempts to discuss privilege don't go well is because the quality of most thought on privilege is, well, not very good. People who volunteer to speak on the topic generally have strong enough opinions that they can't help but moralize, which is something to resist whenever possible.
I think another problem with discussions of privilege is that they frequently sound as though some people (in the ways that they're privileged) should have unlimited undefined obligations and other people (in the ways that they're not privileged) should have unlimited social clout.
Or is that what you mean by moralizing?
I would love to see a discussion of privilege in terms of biases. Obvious ones include: attribution errors (fundamental & ultimate); system justification; outgroup homogeneity & ingroup superiority biases.
I hadn't considered the availability heuristic but yes, that's probably relevant too.
That's actually a really interesting thought. I am white and male and straight and am very aware of my privilege, and also am very interested in heuristics and biases and how they are part of our thought patterns. I consider myself very much a feminist, and also a realist in terms of how people actually work compared with how people would like each other to work. I might brood on this for a bit and write about it.
Well put. I lean towards the "requiring more of male geeks" side, but that's a really good analysis.
Exactly. (Interestingly, the clash that led me to write that post had the shoe on the other foot, so to speak.)
I'm sorry, do you have actual evidence that reading Yet Another List of Don'ts will "quickly level you up" in this field? Or that the TC is an expert? Or that they are even high-value resources? Can you identify even one person that has (as you put it) gained a few levels from these resources?
Being extremely doubtful of this parallel you've made, I can't buy your claim that this is being treated differently.
I saw the main gains of the top post being the links. I don't agree that the links contain only "don'ts"... but, well, so what if they did? If there are clumsy don'ts as routine mistakes, learning to recognise and avoid them is surely an improvement?
As these aren't academic peer-reviewed articles, I can't give you objective evidence in the form of citations and impact measures. What sort of metrics could one provide that would make them more convincingly expert? If these aren't the best experts available I too would like to know who is better so as to learn more.
If you're saying you'll accept anecdotes as weak evidence, then yes, I am one data point there. :) Comments particularly on the pervocracy and Captain Awkward links contain other such claims.
As many have said - both here, and perhaps ironically, in many of those links too - it's more productive to focus on behaviours rather than on labels for people. "Creeper" is a very laden term, probably very similar to "racist" - most of us don't want to think of ourselves as someone with all the imputed characteristics of those labels, and we get defensive.
When I started being able to focus on behaviours (my own and others'), I recognised a number of ways in which my own biases, ignorance and negligence were costing me flawless victories in many social & business settings. This is why I wonder why there's so much pushback, as the upgrades in general communication/social/people skills from a good reading of privilege and social justice are useful everywhere.
Rationality & intelligence should win, right? If smart women with better people skills than us have specific practical advice, how can we lose by listening carefully and bypassing our defensiveness? Even if only 1% of it were useful, don't you want that 1%? I do.
For the reason I gave earlier: the weird stuff happens because they don't know what the superior option is, not because they're under the impression that it was a great idea all along. Moreover, to borrow from EY's felicitous phrasing, non-wood is not a building material, non-selling-apples is not a business plan, and non-hugs-without-asking is not a social adeptness enhancement method.
you should probably avoid implying that they met such a standard with a statement like:
I accept anecdotes as weak evidence. I accept self-reports as weak(er) evidence. I do not, however, accept that this evidence suffices given the strength of your claim (and confidence in it), nor do I accept the comparison to the other articles you mentioned.
These are good points, and I don't have great answers to them.
My weak answer is that in a field that isn't well represented in peer-reviewed academic journals, we still have to sift it by some measures. I agree self-reports are close to worthless - we could find self-reports extolling the virtues of astrology and homeopathy.
My other weak answer is that Elevator-Gate and responses to the discussion of forming a Humanist+ community make it abundantly clear that the atheist/rationalist movement is widely perceived by a lot of smart women as both passively a horrible place to be and actively hostile to anyone who says so. I haven't tried exhaustive online searches but I'm not finding even 1% of the same data volumes from women saying they find atheist/rationalist space actively attractive because of these attitudes.
I like your point about non-wood, but if someone tells you you are stepping on their foot, non-stepping-on-feet probably does need to figure prominently in your short term decision tree.
(Great link, it's short, it's to the point.)
If someone is routinely stepping on feet, it would make more sense to find out why, and offer non-destructive ways of accomplishing that. For example, if they're stepping on feet to get attention, then offering the general rule of "don't step on feet" is just setting yourself up to write an unending list of articles about "... or lift people in the air", "... or play airhorns", "...or dress as a clown", etc.
(And I know, "you're not obligated to fix other people's problems", but once you've decided to go that route, you should take into account which methods are most effective, and "don't [do this specific failure mode]" isn't it.)
I find I agree with everything you've said, yet I'm still wondering what happens to the poor person whose foot has been stood on.
Perhaps I'm just restating and agreeing with "no obligation to fix others", but the comments in the CaptainAwkward link address this specifically: the approach you describe still makes the person transgressing boundaries the focus of our attention and response. I find that caring about why someone routinely steps on feet is quite low on my list, and (perhaps this is my main point) something I'm only willing to invest resources in once they (1) stop stepping on people's feet and (2) agree and acknowledge they shouldn't be stepping on feet.
I'm also a bit skeptical of the idea you peripherally touch on, but we're seeing in a lot of the comments in this post, that avoiding the "creeper" equivalent on stepping on toes is a tough bar to clear and is unfair to ask of someone with deficits in social/people/communication skills. I think it's very telling that such people seldom seem to get into boundary-related trouble with anyone they recognise as more powerful than them (law enforcement; airport security; workplace bosses).
There was that study about (average, neurotypical) men's supposed deficits in reading indirect communication compared to women that found that it's basically rubbish - they can do it when they think they have to, and they don't with women because they think they don't have to. (Link is to non-academic summary, but has the links to the journal articles.)
I'm wandering well past your point here but you reminded me of this. :)
Certainly, if your main priority is stopping this behavior, that affects how your respond to it. But once you've decided to write articles telling the creeps how to act at events, and the advice is something other than "never go to events, just be alone", then I think you need to offer advice more than "don'ts".
And so if you've closed off the "they should just go away" route, then I think you have no choice but to offer solutions that avoid having to write the infinite list of articles about "... or dance Irish jigs at random, either". And that means saying what to do right.
I've never suggested that. That is an easy bar to clear indeed. My point is that clearing every such bar without positive advice (about what to do rather than not do) is hard. And so, again, you can certainly take the "who cares if they just never come at all?" approach, but since these articles don't go that way, they have to do better than "don'ts".
How is that relevant to the non-neurotypical creep type we're concerned about here?
I'm not saying either way which it is, but if only 1 percent is useful, that doesn't mean the other 99 percent is neutral. It could very well be BAD.
I agree with you that the socially awkward among us could reap large benefits by implementing these "anti-creeper measures". That's because we live in a society where such "creepy" behaviors are deemed unacceptable, and in order to fit into a society, one has to follow that society's norms.
However, I think many people on this thread have a problem with these norms existing, and that's what they're upset about; they'd like to combat these social norms instead of acquiescing to them. And I can certainly see why a rationalist might be opposed to these norms. The idea of "creepiness" seems to be a relatively new social phenomenon, and since it emerged, people have gotten much more conscious about avoiding being "creepy". Most of the discussion in the comments has been about unwanted physical contact, but another part of creepiness is unwanted verbal communication. Social norms seem to cater increasingly to the oversensitive and easily offended; instead of asking oversensitive people to lighten up a bit, we often go out of our way to avoid saying things that will offend people. And of course, any social norm that prevents people from communicating their beliefs and opinions honestly is contrary to the goals of the rationalist movement. It may then be of interest to rationalists to fight this increase in sensitivity by encouraging open discussion, and discouraging taking offense.
Of course, to actually change social norms, we would first have to infiltrate society, which requires gaining basic competence in social skills, even ones we disagree with.
It isn't clear to me that the connotations of "oversensitive" as it's used here are justified. Some people suffer, to greater or lesser degrees, in situations that I don't. That doesn't necessarily make them oversensitive, or me insensitive.
There are some things we, as a culture, are more sensitive to now than our predecessors were. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
I don't believe a rational person, in a situation where honesty causes suffering, necessarily prefers to be honest.
All of that said, I certainly support discouraging people from suffering, given the option. And I support discouraging people from claiming to suffer when they don't. But I don't support encouraging people to keep their mouths shut when they suffer. And I suspect that many social structures that ostensibly do the former in reality do the latter.
What the whuh? Perhaps the label is new (though I find that implausible too), but I really don't think the behaviour as an observed phenomenon is. What do you base your statement on?
Hmm, I think I meant that the label is new, as well as the increased social consciousness of creepiness. A couple years ago, I realized that at my college, the two things everyone wanted to avoid being were "awkward" and "creepy". I could tell because people would preface comments with "this is super awkward, but" or "I don't mean to come across as creepy, but". Usually, the comments would be anything but awkward or creepy, but prefacing the comment does a couple of useful things:
The speaker safeguards himself against being judged by anyone who might possibly find the comment awkward/creepy, or on the threshold of awkward/creepy. If he knows that he's being awkward/creepy, at least no one will think he's so socially maladjusted that he's doing it by accident.
The speaker demonstrates that she's not awkward/creepy. I mean, if she's worried about a comment as innocuous as /that/ being perceived as awkward/creepy, she's certainly not going to do anything /actually/ awkward/creepy!
The conspicuous self-consciousness and constant safeguarding against awkward/creepiness always annoyed me, so I'm likely responding to that as much as I'm responding to the content of this thread.
EDIT: Maybe I'm completely misinterpreting the social situation. Maybe in the past, people were unable to express anything potentially awkward/creepy for fear of being seen as such. And maybe the increased social consciousness and explicit prefacing allow people to discuss ideas or opinions that they previously wouldn't have been able to say aloud at all.
You're just asserting that your preferred level of sensitivity is better than other people's higher preferred level. You call them "oversensitive and easily offended", which assigns your preferences an apparently objective or otherwise special status, but you don't give a reason for this. What reason does anyone else have to go along with your preferences instead of their own?
Actually society mostly has no problem at all with these behaviours, which is why the creeper memes flourish. The success of high-status creepers critically relies on this.
But if I grant you your point, I'm reading what you say as the benefit of not being a creeper is conformity with supposed anti-creeper norms. Is that what you meant? Because if so, er, I would have thought the benefits of not being a creeper were the upgrades from no longer seeing women chiefly (or solely) as mating opportunities.
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).
Science fiction conventions too. Clearly, this is an outrage.
Um, no. There is legal precedent for this phrasing in related contexts, albeit with the understandable proviso that the behavior must be "reasonably believed" to be threatening. This is pretty much what we're dealing with here: the whole problem with creepy behavior (as opposed to merely being awkward or anti-social) is that it puts people's personal safety at risk.
It seems to me that it is this argument that infantilizes the targets of harassment and other unwelcome behaviour we're lumping under "creepy". It only works if these targets are "gormless, passive babies who can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves". (That link is on "trigger warnings" but applies here for the same reasons.)
Allowing people to define their own subjective states ("this is how I feel") seems to me to in fact be the opposite of infantilizing.
"Oh no we'll all be in trouble if this sort of behaviour is explicitly forbidden" is actually quite a common response in these sorts of discussions, and it is discussed and addressed in the OP's links.
... how many commenters here have actually read those links? :/
What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the "nasty" "exclusionary" mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.
Most real-life social groups have mechanisms to exclude low-status people - from informal shunning to formal membership criteria. Since people as well as groups seek to maximize status, this evolves into a complex equilibrium. (Groucho: "I wouldn't want to join a club that would have [a status exclusion mechanism weak enough to have] me as a member.")
But since we at LW must have a rational explanation for things, these arbitrary criteria (of which my proposal is a pastiche) won't do. Half of the folks here are OK with outsourcing the power and responsibility for excluding low-status folks onto the women of LW. The other half doesn't even want that. Both sides want to consciously come up with convoluted arguments about why "creepy" [low-status male] behavior is objectively bad. That dog won't hunt.
What your comment boils down to is a statement that you intend to treat other people's objections to your (or your friends') nonconsensual or threatening behavior as attempts to exclude you (or them) as low-status rather than as requests for you to behave in a more consensual and nonthreatening manner towards them.
It's easy to be low-status without being creepy.
Likewise, there are times and places when creepy is not low-status.
It's entirely possible (I'm imagining being meek and social risk-averse) in the same way as it's entirely possible to grow up poor and stay out of trouble with the law. It's a lot easier to be creepy if you're low-status, and much of the behavior that is deemed creepy would not be called creepy if a high-status person did the exact same thing (think "quirky," "endearing," "charming").
In practice, cracking down on creepiness means excluding low-status people, except for a meek remnant.
There's high-status creeping too (like someone putting an arm round someone who doesn't want him to). This can be very bad for the creepee - the high status means that complaints to the group are likely to be dismissed as oversensitivity or whining.
It's a natural human tendency to let high-status people get away with things, but I don't think it's so immutable that a group can't develop a culture that reduces the damage.
And if you are the creep, there's at least a chance that you didn't mean to be and that you're willing to modify your behaviour in ways that have large advantages for the creepee and only small disadvantages for you.
Yes, but if you're high-status, a much higher fraction of people do want (or are okay with) your arm around them, and so the GP is right that status affects the probability of triggering the creep classifier.
True, but it's also entirely possible to want behavior X from person Y and still find it creepy when Y actually does X, depending on how and in what context they do it. Creepiness is often about those details.
That still wouldn't justify the unhelpful, over-general warning of "don't do X", stripped of the specific (correctly-diagnosed) "how and in what context" caveats.
For at least some X's, the real warning is not "don't do X, ever." It's: "if you do X, you are responsible for anyone being creeped out by X. You might get away with it, depending on how considerate, socially aware, or charismatic you are - just don't complain if you get it wrong and we have to kick you out so that people can feel safe and comfortable."
AFAICT, there's nothing wrong with this rule: in fact, it is close to optimal for the purposes of LW meetups.
Pretty much this. Also, the advice being given might more accurately be "you don't do X, because you obviously don't know how to judge the context and details and are therefore very likely to get it wrong". Except, if someone actually says that, the person it's being said to is liable to try to rope them into explaining the context-and-details thing, which 1) is very complicated, to the point where explaining it is a major project and 2) most people can't articulate, so that's awkward if it happens. Also, it's often true that once a person does learn how to judge the context and details properly (on their own, generally speaking, by observation and reading many things on the topic), they will then be able to see what they were doing wrong before and how to avoid that mistake, and conclude that they can try again regardless of previous advice.
Most of what I just said isn't relevant to meetup groups, though; bogus' angle is much more relevant there.
If male creepiness is contributing to the gender imbalance on LessWrong, I would expect high-status creepiness to be far more problematic than low-status creepiness. In a social setting, it's a lot easier to call a low-status member out for being creepy. If a high-status member is being creepy, a newcomer might prefer to leave than to confront him/her or complain about his/her behavior to the rest of the group. Alternatively, if the newcomer does complain about the high-status member, he/she might be scoffed at by the rest of the group, who likes that individual.
"Status" is not quite the right term here — social rank correlates with the kind of charm that can make an ambiguous behavior be not-creepy, but isn't the same.
Creepiness is not down to status. High-status people can be plenty creepy.
Can be, sure. The claim is still valid as a heuristic.
What's more, people are more likely to pre-judge the high status person favorably, and thus want whatever behavior would be a "no-no" for the low-status person, and so behavior violating the supposed anti-creep rules is much less likely to be noticed and recognized as such (e.g. my example before about pushy hugs).
Anytime you find yourself saying, "How dare he do X? That's creepy! Don't ever do X, folks!", ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X. If the answer is no, you've misdiagnosed the problem.
I think the truth of that statement depends on how you chunk the behavior.
To get back to this, Rene's approaches to Genevieve would have been appropriate as behaviors in that sort of a relationship if you chunk them as things a person might do, and very inappropriate because she was moving away from him/not responding, etc., so that if your chunk includes what she does (not to mention that a relationship didn't already exist) as well as what he does, you get a different answer.
Moreover, when a low-status person creeps on me, I feel like I have more freedom to express nicely to them that I was creeped out and offer to explain why. When a high-status person creeps on me, I feel like they have too much power to want to stop or listen to me, and nobody else will listen to me either, because this person has social command.
Yeah, same here. Creepy behavior from people with high status is a big red flag on a group or social situation for me; it implies that at least in some cases they can get away with that, and I categorically don't feel emotionally safe in those environments.
See also: The Missing Stair. Source has a history of overusing feminist memes with the result of obfuscating their point, but I think this piece was particularly well-written.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account, and low status (this is also a bad thing) can prevent the target from being heard.
For further enlightenment, see, for example, here.
Actually, "unwelcome" means that the definition sometimes depends almost exclusively on status. In the extreme situation that a guy is so high status I wouldn't mind anything he did and would always say yes, he couldn't possibly be creepy.
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like "you're beautiful" or "your hair looks amazing" depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy was sufficiently low status that my intuition doesn't process the statement as sincere.
Similarly I mentally flinch violently when touched by males who are too low status for my intuition to classify as attractive, have no such reaction for moderately attractive guys, and get a jolt of pleasure if the guy is very attractive. This effect is consistent and something I have no conscious control over.
I think people dismissing status are underestimating either the degree to which people's unconscious can control their conscious, or the degree to which status interactions controls the unconscious.
Why am I getting karma for this when it's been established that I'm using a highly unconventional definition of status? I mean, I like karma and all, but this confuses me...
Status is not an extremely clear thing to begin with, the same criticism could probably be applied to most uses of the term on LessWrong. I just mentally reparse what you write as
You're basically talking about how attractive you find him, but using "status" adds the connotations that it's not just about the looks, and that how others judge him comes into the equation; both those connotations seem true.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn't want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
Or did you think people would never get the C-word for doing just that?
I missed the enlightenment you were expecting me to get from learning of a case where a high-status person got surprisingly little punishment (and no effective loss to social life) from doing creep things.
attempts at (unwelcome intimacy) = naked aggression.
unwelcome (attempts at intimacy) = failure to anticipate rejection. both sides lost.
asking for harsher penalties for the second (which is already quite painful) is like asking cops to beat up panhandlers - the price you pay for a place you want to live.
The arrogant vulgarity doesn't fit well with the demonstration of naivety (come to think of it "The fuck it does" wouldn't be be appropriate here even if well informed). Creepiness is significantly about status. Typically it refers to something along the lines of "low status male attempting interaction".
This doesn't mean I'm endorsing any particular instance of creepiness but it is useful to understand what it is that prompts the perception 'creepy'.
High status can also make the identical behaviors not creepy in the first place. Even if unwelcome the perception of the high status 'unwelcome' will feel different to the creepy low-status 'unwelcome'.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn't like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously -- why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?), and (especially if “someone” is male and “you” are female), whether you would like to have sex with them correlates with their status. But would that still hold to the same extent if you could change the “status” variable while holding the “attractiveness” (broadly construed) variable constant?
Tabooing "status" might be necessary. I couldn't compute your last sentence... Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status. (They might not be the same thing as far as hormones are concerned, but they arise from the same mechanisms.)
What you call a less "attractive", higher "status" man, I call a lower "status" man who has motivating factors to have incorrect beliefs about his "status".
Compare Bill Gates to Jose the charming tour guide.
Consider interaction among heterosexual people of the same sex (men with men, women with women). This is probably a majority of all social interaction, and it strongly influences status in mixed-sex social groups. While attractiveness is generally helpful here too, it's less important than other factors.
Imagine two men who have the same socio-economical position, the same amount of social skills, wear similar clothes, behave the same way, etc., etc., but one is 5'6" (1.68 m) and one is 6' (1.83 m). Most women will likely be more attracted to the latter; would you say he has higher status?
Yes, minorly: halo effect. Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren't the same thing, they're just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it's very easy to think of them as the same thing. Having more women be attracted to you usually leads to better social skills. Having more height usually means more self-confidence, etcetc.
The specific situation you describe also can't possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they'd be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn't.
Suppose you're standing on a staircase. The taller man stands on a step below you, while the shorter man stands on a step above you, and the steps are of such height that each would be looking you directly in the eye. Is that a sufficiently inconvenient world?
Take it from someone with rather low basic social status (multiple forms of visible minority, many of which are still thought of mainly as "deviant" rather than just "other", who can't can't hide it out and about in daily life): the fact that you see it this way has more to do with your own situation and your own unfulfilled preferences, than with it being a basic feature of how status works. Status is not primarily about your sexual attractiveness to people. Low-status people get laid all the time. Low-status people get into lasting relationships. Low-status people have children. Low-status people even make ethical nonmonogamy work for them. (Low status people who fit all of the above can even be sexually frustrated!)
There's your problem right there!
I'm usually not a big fan of the "look it up on Wikipedia" approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you're viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
Huh. Ok. What do you call the ape status-instinct then? That's thing that you get by cleverly body-language and verbally sparring with people. I've managed to end up on top of a number of authority figures doing that.
Edit: the human version of the behaviour that Wikipedia describes as "dominance hierarchies".
Double edit: would it make more sense to distinguish the terms as system-1-status and system-2-status?
Synonymous---clearly not. "Largely so" is more of an exaggeration than a fundamental incomprehension.
I think it's clear that:
Therefore, I propose the following system to reduce the stress of creepiness in LW groups while still maintaining a "big tent."
In this way, we'll have a series of meetup groups that accommodate people of all creepiness tolerances. People who dislike dealing with creepy people can choose groups that exclude them, but the automatic membership in lower-tiered system avoids the problem of losing the interesting-but-creepy people. The only people who miss out are creepy people with low creepy tolerances, but we probably don't want them anyway.
That might cover a fair portion of the autistic spectrum.
LessWrong readers are about the only group of humans on the planet that I can see explicitly describing such rules and then making them work. It is far more common to end up with this kind of arrangements but put up some façade to save face.
I think the most important advice is not "Don't be a creep." It is "Do not tolerate creepiness in others."
If someone is accused of being a creep do not back them up or dismiss their accuser unless you are damn sure they weren't being creepy. If someone looks creepy based on social cues (ex. is focusing on someone much more intently than it is returned.) consider creating a break in the conversation that would allow for a graceful exit. If someone is consistently creepy, especially with touching or gross innuendo and will not stop they should not be welcome in your group.
Assume guilt!
No. Address the behavior, not the person. "Don't hug people without asking" is not the same as "You are an evil person, begone with you." Aspiring rationalists should be able to accept the request and update their beliefs regarding others' preferences accordingly. Failure to update when others' happiness is at stake, is bad rationality and morally wrong.
I don't really understand attempts to solve creepiness problems with things like "don't hug people without asking". In my experience, the most socially adept people violate this rule in spades, it's just that they more correctly guess who wants to hug them (which is easy when most want to hug them to begin with).
More generally, it bothers me when advice is of the form, "Don't do X" when the real rule is "don't do X with low status" and the advised's problem is more the low status than the X, and the advisor has no intention of giving advice on status.
(Mostly unrelated to your point)
Things become even more complicated when that rule means that doing X can work as a status signal (like a way of "acting confident").
First: Skill ("socially adept") and status are distinct; I'm not sure but it kinda sounds like you are conflating them.
Second: Formal "don't hug without asking" rules are usually recommended for situations involving strangers, such as conventions and meetups — and for situations where a person might be discouraged by power imbalance from expressing their discomfort, such as workplaces. Much of the purpose of the rule is to assure people who don't want to be hugged that they will not be. The goal isn't to regulate intimacy but to deter unwanted intimacy and to assure people they won't be subjected to it.
(I posted the relevant bit of the OpenSF polyamory conference's code of conduct elsethread, but here's the link.)
Third: Some of the times that you think you've seen someone correctly predict that someone wanted a hug, you may have actually witnessed someone who didn't want a hug playing along to avoid making a scene, or to please the hugger, or the like — especially if the hugger is high-status. Pretending to enjoy something is a thing. Part of the point of the rule is to reduce the chance of putting anyone in that situation — and to remind people that saying no is respected.
I think you're right about the socially adept overhugging situations. Nevertheless, I don't think the non-hugging-without-asking advice is helpful to the intended audience.
For one thing, this socially-adept over-hugger, for all his flaws, is still much preferable and beneficial to the group than the archetypal, socially-inept creep under discussion. So, while the overhugger might be strictly better for the group to the follow the hugging advice, I would still say the most important thing (the low-hanging fruit here) is to teach the creep the things that the overhugger is doing right, not to tell him to avoid the things the overhugger is doing wrong.
Like I've tried to demonstrate here, it's hard to form a model of the things you need to do in a group setting when a) you don't know how to act, and b) all advice you get is in the negative. If it does anything, the negative advice just reinforces a mental model that says, "to be on the safe side, don't even talk to anyone because you might hit one of the prohibited things", which is not a step forward. And if my own experience is any guide, it just blends into the same old message of, "your desires are bad, how dare you act on them" -- not a healthy mentality to encourage in the target audience, who probably already assimilated this message early on.
EDIT: OK, on reflection I'm less confident in all this. Feel free to read my original comment below.
I have a theory that a high male-to-female ratio actually triggers creepy behavior in men. Why?
Creepy behavior has an evolutionary purpose, just like all human behavior. The optimal mating strategy changes depending on my tribe's gender ratio. As nasty as it sounds, from the perspective of my genes it may make sense to try to have sex by force, if it's not going to happen any other way.
I suspect evolution has programmed men to be more bitter, resentful, and belligerent if they seem to be in an area where there aren't many women. Hence you get sexual assault problems in the military, countries with surplus young males causing various forms of societal unrest, etc.
In other words, maybe it's not that individuals are creepy so much as men "naturally" act more rapey if there are only a few women around. Of course, we're all adults and we can supress unwanted internal drives, but it may also be a good idea to attack the root problem.
So in light of this, some possible solutions for male creepiness:
* When men feel desperate, they act creepy. That doesn't necessarily mean we should treat these men like bad people. Yes, these are antisocial behaviors. But they're a manifestation of internal suffering. So, try to feel compassion and respect for people that are suffering, in addition to letting them know that their behavior is antisocial.
* If you're a man and you notice yourself acting creepy, one idea is to try to get interested in something that's got a decent number of women involved with it. (Possible examples: acting, dancing, book clubs. Maybe other commenters have more ideas?) Hopefully, this will program your subconscious to believe you're no longer in a desperate situation. In the best case, maybe you'll find a girlfriend.
Was jumping from creepy to rapey like that intentional?
The primary 'evolutionary purpose' here is in the selection of instincts for things feeling 'creepy', not evolving to be 'creepy'. It is at the core a mechanism for reducing the chance that the host will mate with a low value male---either consensually or otherwise. 'Creepy behavior' then is largely a matter of losing at an evolutionary arms race. (With confounding factors around there being trade-offs to acting confident.)
Humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Evolution may have crafted me into a person who wants to sit at home alone all day and play video games, but sitting at home alone all day and playing video games doesn't offer me a fitness advantage.
(I don't actually want to sit at home alone all day and play video games. At least, not every day.)
Yep. I'm arguing that creepy/misogynistic behavior may be an adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate.
It's weird because since thinking of this yesterday, I've noticed that it has a ton of explanatory power regarding my own feelings and behavior. And it actually offers a concrete solution to the problem of feeling creepy: hang out with more women. But I'm getting voted down both here and on reddit. I guess maybe I'm generalizing from myself improperly, and lack of social awarenesss is actually a much larger problem?
Hanging out with more women could also be a solution to lack of social awareness, by the way. In my experience, I naturally tend to start making friends with some of them, and in conversations I learn a lot more about how they think and feel.