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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)
There are non-obvious reasons why you should perhaps not be talking about this. I can't tell you those reasons (for precisely the same reasons you should perhaps not be talking about this), but I can tell you it leads to slippery slopes of negative sum signaling games.
I think you shouldn't have made this comment, for decision-theoretic reasons.
(I suppose what you're implying is that the fact that we have to talk about it in the first place would imply that we actually do have more of a problem with creepiness than most organizations. Bad publicity, and all that.)
There's a thought provoking video on YouTube:
What Atheists Can Learn from the LGBT Movement
in which a LGBT woman, who is also an atheist, talks about a mistake the LGBT movement ignored in its early days that later came back to bite it, that the atheist community should learn from and avoid repeating.
Given the existence of a problem in SciFi, Atheist and other male dominated geek subcultures, it would be surprising if it wasn't something that, sooner or later, appeared in this one too. Maybe discussing it is temporary bad publicity, but I think it should be considered an investment for the future. Some problems are best tackled early, before they become too ingrained in a culture's tradition. The 'missing stair' phenomena.
The video is an hour long. Summary?
Edit: I found a transcript of a shorter version of the talk.
Here's a link to a related blog post she wrote.
The section I was thinking of was:
Atheists need to work -- now -- on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.
And by now, I mean now. We need to start on this now, so we don't get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.
What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.
The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community... and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we're paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our community.
That makes it hard on everyone in the LGBT movement -- women and men, of all races. It creates rifts that make our community weaker. And it has a seriously bad impact on our ability to make effective social change. For instance, the LGBT movement has a profoundly impaired ability to shift homophobic attitudes in the black communities... since those communities can claim, entirely fairly, that the gay community doesn't care about black people, and hasn't made an effort to deal with our racism.
We screwed this up. We still screw this up. We are paying for our screwups.
Atheists have a chance to not do that.
Meh. Is there any evidence that this sort of crude ingroup/outgroup bias ("treating [minority outgroups] as alien/objectified Others" and the like) is a significant problem in the rationalist community? My prior for this being an issue is quite low, given our emphasis on cognitive biases: the example of LGBT and other social groups is not directly relevant.
Added: My rough, anecdotal evidence is that ingroup favoritism has not been an issue at LW so far, at least if we define "ingroup" conventionally as white, cis-male folks. If anything, the rationalist community is remarkably less ingroup-focused than one would expect given its demographics and some of its beliefs.
I would strongly prefer that the Lesswrong community, whatever that even is, does not get too closely entwined with the mainstream atheist community. Generally, it seems that shifting one's message further to the left of the bell curve is lossy at best, dishonest at worst.
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.
This is unlikely. The idea that male-on-female rape, in humans, is reflective of forced mating as a reproductive strategy makes some big mistakes because it doesn't factor in how human reproduction actually works.
It's true in a general way that if the cost of your gametes is low, and you can get out of the parental investment, then increasing the number of coital acts is an effective way to buy genetic fitness at reduced cost (part of why mammals tend to be much more promiscuous, in a very broad sense, than birds: birds get their embryo out of Mom and into the world early and let it develop there, which means Daddy has a higher incentive to invest parentally -- though this is only a very broad pattern).
Trigger warning for those who'd rather not hear it described in frank, mechanical terms!
But with humans in specific, rape is not a great reproductive strategy. The odds of insemination are lower, because things like self-lubrication and uterine peristalsis (which make a big difference) aren't typically going to occur. Even post-coital cuddling increases the odds of fertilization. Getting into comparative primatology, humans have conspicuously large penises compared to our relatives who do tend to use force as a basic approach to getting sex (gorillas, who have a harem-style arrangement as their basic stable social model).
Rape has been prevalent throughout human history, but forced copulation doesn't seem to be a leading or even closely-tailing human reproductive strategy. It's probably not an adaptation (though if you insist that pretty much every salient feature of behavior is, or is the proximal outcome of some evolutionary adaptation, you can spin a theoretical picture to justify it easily).
Historically, getting pregnant or not wasn't the only important factor; maternal investment in the child (vs abandonment or neglect) was tremendously important too. And, naturally, mothers would be less likely to invest in a child with an absent or non-providing father (this is especially true early in their lives, when they would have more chances to have children with mates of their choice).
So basically you're saying that Todd Akin's recent comments about rape were correct?
Uh, no. This isn't a matter of suppressing pregnancies that aren't wanted -- it's a matter of not boosting the likelihood of pregnancy by means of various reinforcing mechanisms that in all add a minor, though non-negligible, probability of conception.
So you admit that the decrease in the probability of conception is minor. This means that it's not enough to invalidate hg00's argument that what you think of as 'creepy' strategies, even rape, are adaptive under some circumstances.
He may have been misunderstanding some of the same information Jandila supplies. But it's not an absolute effect, it's a probabilistic one. I'm more likely to break an egg yolk if I open the egg two feet above my bowl; that doesn't mean it doesn't happen pretty frequently when I open it closer to the bowl (or that it couldn't land intact from two feet up).
Agreed. However, Jandila requires it to be an absolute (or almost absolute) effect for the argument against hg00's point to work.
Well, even if rape is not an adaptation, men still do it. So it seems plausible that whatever baggage evolved along with rape (from however long ago) would also still be present.
Making sandwiches is not a genetic adaptation. Men still do it.
Are you suggesting rape doesn't happen among hunter-gatherers? What does "adaptation" mean, exactly?
No, but I am suggesting it's probably not been selected for as a genetic predisposition due to the fitness it supposedly brings. The cost/benefit ratio seems pretty damn bad. Let's assume a man of 25 (great fertility, past the peak risk-of-mortality age on a pure-forager's lifespan curve, presumably able to provide for himself to greater or lesser degree.) Assume he only targets women of peak reproductive age, 25 to 30 years (this is very generous for the rape-as-adaptation argument; in reality rapists are known to target women of any age, from single-digits to senescence), thereby maximizing expected payoff per act.
He loses fitness if:
-He is killed by the victim or her relatives. How likely this is depends entirely on his culture -- some forager band societies are quite pacifistic; others resort quickly to violence and have no real way to regulate its spread. It's a pretty strong risk, though.
-The mother refuses to raise the child. This is unlikely to happen, but in a society with high infant mortality rates and established protocols for socially-legitimate infanticide by abandonment or handing off to a relative for culling (standard practice in societies like these if the baby is more than 48 hours old; otherwise the mother usually does it), it's not socially-costly behavior either.
-Having a reputation as a rapist makes it harder for him to survive. This is a virtual certainty -- cooperative food acquisition, compulsory sharing and an ethic of reciprocity are standard features of societies like these. Cutting someone off from this network of assistance is as good as a death sentence in most cases; it also means he's unlikely to ever get consensual sex, or medical assistance when he's hurt. I can't overstate how bad an outcome this is, and how likely it is to happen -- tribal societies don't keep many secrets!
Meanwhile, he gains fitness if and only if all of the following happen: -The victim is potentially able to concieve on that given day AND -She does (the cumulative on these first two items equals 3 - 5 percent odds of conception for consensual sex), AND -She doesn't then miscarry (true 90 percent of the time), AND -She won't voluntarily let the unwanted baby die (not sure, but estimates for the probability of routine infanticide in paleolithic cultures ranges from 15 percent on the lower end, up to 20 or even 50 percent in some cases). No idea offhand, but it seems a heck of a lot more likely than it would be today in the Western European culture area.
You'd have to get incredibly lucky to have a payoff even once; it's certainly not a viable reproductive strategy, not even a distant also-ran that some minority of the population favors. Human population densities in the EEA simply don't support it.
So the fact that rape is common suggests that it's happening for some other reason than it being an evolutionarily-fixed, advantageous trait.
[citation needed]
If nothing else, a reputations as a "rapist" is not at all the same thing in a society where women aren't considered to be people, but property. Hunter gatherers as well as civilization at least up to the biblical level have also engaged in Bride kidnapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping) Which we would definitely think of as rape but clearly wasn't viewed in the same way at those times. Genghis Khan didn't get to be the ancestor of 8 percent of people in east asia by being nice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan)
You seem to be doing a lot of theorizing about ancient behavior on very little data, because you don't want rape to have been adaptative.
That does not describe forager societies at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Common_characteristics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami_women#Violence
Not strict "foragers"
The Yanomamo are horticulturalists. They grow bananas, manioc and other crops available in the wild by means of slash-and-burn and managed planting. They are not an example of a forager (aka hunter-gatherer) society.
It should be considered rude to post:
and then offer irrelevant information to back up your point.
I agree that the first part is rude, but how is information irrelevant? It's an undisputed example of violent tactics working for reproduction, and a description of how the culture of many societies either endorsed or did not frown on what we would see as rape.
It's irrelevant because Neolithic-era societies are not representative of plausible assumptions about the evolutionary ancestral environment or early human and protohuman lifestyles. It's not an example of the thing being talked about; it has no direct bearing on it; ergo, it's irrelevant.
The article on bride kidnapping contained no hunter-gatherers, as far I could see.
I do not think it wise to attempt to extrapolate information about the EEA from contemporary (or even merely ancient) societies whose material conditions do not resemble the conditions of bands in the EEA. (Hell, I don't even know if we can extrapolate information from modern bands. All of this is an incredible epistemic mess.)
I do not dispute the truth of this fact. However, the ruler of the largest contiguous land empire in history is not the sort of fellow we wish to be looking at in order to determine whether or not rape was adaptive in the EEA. If you were interested in answering such a question, I guess you would want to look at some folks like the Hadza and observe how reproductively successful fellows like Scumbag Sengani, a hypothetical rapist, end up being.
As someone with almost no vested interest in the conversation I'm not going to do the (rather extensive) work it would take to provide a good summary of the science of rape, however I find it odd that this conversation seems to be completely ignoring that fact that it is a heavily researched area, particularly by evolutionary psychologists. As a representative example this experiment suggests a link between status manipulations and additudes towards rape, and the evo-psyc journal it's in has 50+ other articles that mention rape, even though its less than ten years old.
I'm aware of the evo psych research into the subject of rape. I disagree with it, but I'm aware of it, I've read some fair portion of it, and I think that the idea that rape is a behavioral adaptation driving a reproductive strategy is flawed.
Observe that if he's unlikely to be able to have sex otherwise, it's worth the risk.
No way -- kin selection. He can still net genetic fitness by helping out his social unit, which will almost invariably contain his relatives, who share some of his genetic payload. Conversely, raping someone is likely going to be terminal in some fashion, which eliminates any chance of getting lucky later. Even if they only cast him out instead of killing him, his chances of successfully mating later drop precipitously.
I find it hard to believe that a tendency to rape (or more specifically, the psychological traits that make one more likely to be a rapist today) wouldn't have been a fitness advantage in at least some of our forager ancestors. There are too many examples in societies close to our own where various forms of rape or were forgivable/forgiven (by society, not necessarily by the victim): rape of foreigners in war, marital rape, rape as punishment, protection of the rapist by an influent member of his family, marrying the rapist ... sure, some of those situations may not happen in a forager society, but there may be different ones that do happen.
This supposes that the society in question has a concept of "rapist" analogous to our own; I suspect many societies would have different concepts, and only harshly punish some of the behaviors (rape of enemies and marital rape seem to usually get off the hook, except in very recent history).
As an illustration of the way different societies approach the problem, I've already been in a conversation with African men who were saying how under certain conditions rape was an acceptable way of getting sex from a girl.
That being said, I don't know much about how foragers approach the question of rape, I'm merely skeptical of the idea that they have very few children of rape.
Also, date rape of course, duh.
I didn't think it was quite fair that your comment was downvoted to -2, but then I read the sentence "When women feel desperate, they cry about it."
While I think your comment was overall constructive to the discussion, that kind of thing is a turnoff. I assume you meant it in the best possible way, but I would encourage you to avoid that particular construction in the future.
I'm genuinely curious why hg00's amended comment is now even more downvoted? And why my advice is also? Generally I take downvotes to mean "Would not like to read more of such comments at Less Wrong," but I'm a little puzzled at these.
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.
Even if hanging out with women makes you grow less creepy over time, you're still inflicting your creepy self on them at the beginning. Being willing to do this for your own benefit is... creepy.
I'm still not convinced there's an ethical way out of the creepy trap. Is there any sound (not self-serving) argument against the idea that the best thing for creepy males to do is just go away?
Presumably some women are less averse to creepiness than other women. Perhaps a socially awkward guy could start by interacting with women who are tolerant of social awkwardness, but who will point out his mistakes so he can improve. Then, he could work his way up to interacting with people who are less and less tolerant of creepiness.
Your theory fails to account for cases of creepiness among men surrounded by their targets (women, children, men, whatever). See my explanation.
I agree. I'm not sure what fraction of creepy behavior is explained by my theory. BTW, you might like this comment.
If that works, it might just be that by doing so you learn more about those women's preferences. In other words, that specific sort of creepitude may just be low skill, and the remedy is practice. That is, it's not an adaptation firing any more than the fact that an untrained trumpet player produces painfully unpleasant noise (and doesn't get invited to perform at parties) is an adaptation firing!
What worries me is some folks' readiness to rationalize exhibiting the low-skill behavior — especially when it comes at others' expense. "Asking me not to play my trumpet at meetup is just calling me low-status!"
This is different in its causes from deliberate, exploitative creepitude — the person who gets off on blatting their crappy trumpet at others to demonstrate their dominance, or some such ...
Yep, I raised that hypothesis in the latter half of my comment.
I don't wish to rationalize exhibiting low-skill behavior at all. I think discouraging low-skill behavior is a good idea. In fact, I think it can potentially be valuable negative feedback if done right (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5h/how_to_deal_with_someone_in_a_lesswrong_meeting/7daq). I'm hoping my proposed solutions can be done in tandem with discouraging low-skill behavior.
Sure, I wanted to point out that it may well explain away the whole effect, leaving the "adaptation that fires when a man is feeling desperate" explanation looking unnecessary — and excluded by Occam. Flirty skills are skills and follow the usual patterns for skills; that they're involved in reproduction doesn't give them any more evopsych fairy dust than (say) language or music. (Which get a lot, but they don't get "being bad at singing is an adaptation".)
I didn't think you did — "some folks" was meant to imply "not you, at least not here". But some people do that. See, for instance, Elevatorgate and any number of other cases where folks readily engage in motivated search to find reasons to stick up for the creeper at the expense of the creeped.
Shouldn't the rejection of creepy/non-conformist-in-general behavior be a reaction to be overcome, not something to be accommodated?
Not if it comes from terminal values - don't wanna modify in caveats to those.
Note that it doesn't have to be a terminal value - it can be a rational response if something like P(terminal values negatively impacted | creepy) > P(terminal values negatively impacted | average) is true.
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.
No, it is not don't do X with low status. It is don't do X when unwanted. Status may influence what is wanted, but it does not excuse unwanted physical contact. It is just as wrong for the alpha male to do this as the omega male. For instance, I know someone with OCD who really does not like being touched. Are you saying it would be ok for some high status person to leave her uncomfortable with an unwanted hug?
So the rule is to use a mind-reader?
I'm saying that the rare failure of a heuristic does not make it wrong to employ the heuristic; it just means that the user of it should stop employing it after it is known for this (very unusual) case.
There exist people who are extremely allergic to peanuts, so much that taking them out would cause a negative reaction far worse than an unwanted hug. Does that mean you're going to go around promoting a rule that "You should never bring peanuts with you"? Or would you recognize that this condition is rare enough to make it the obligation of the person with the condition to alert others, rather than demonizing those who fail to account for cases like this?
(Note: hug-unwanting is, of course, far more common than this peanut allergy, and thus carries different implications.)
No, I am not saying that being a mind reader is required. Obviously we use physical and verbal cues. The point is that there is a goal to be achieved. The goal is not making people uncomfortable. It is not controlling the behavior of low status males.
The example was meant to provide a clear counterexample to "Don't do X when low status." That implies "X is acceptable when high status." It isn't. In fact, we often view high status creepers as much worse. It's worse if the boss is touchy-feely at work than if a coworker is.
Okay, but then why do you assume the problem is that the person doesn't know X is wrong, rather than that the person misread the cues, and thus diagnose the problem with long expositions of "don't do X" rather than "hey, here's how to read cues better"?
More importantly, why do so many people respond as you did, despite it being about as helpful as "The problem is that you need to sell non-apples!"
Of course I do try to help people read cues better. However, the problem is behavior. Misreading cues can lead to bad behavior, but someone can know they are making someone else uncomfortable and still act that way. I make no assumption about why someone does something. I only ask that they stop.
My point were that accepting creepiness is not cool and that low status is not what makes the behavior wrong. They were not meant to help people avoid being creepy, and naturally are not helpful.
Roughly, yes. Standard-model humans come with mind-reader included. So the average person writing these is effectively saying to use it.
Isn't that kind of missing the point, though, since the people in question almost certainly don't have mind-readers with such a capability? Sounds like yet another failure of insight on the part of the writers.
It reminds me of a certain LWer's "helpful" advice that, "You have to dress right, and wear the right clothes, that look good, and wear it the right way." Ah, thanks, man, how'd I miss that?
But even more importantly, I don't think anyone has a mind reader capable of what these writers are expecting of it. Everyone has some margin of error and so can't be categorically expected (or advised) to avoid "all" "unwanted" behavior -- much more reasonable to ask that they not do a (person-invariant) category of generally disliked behavior, whether or not a particular person happens to like or not like it (and punish even if it happened to be liked, because of incentive effects).
Worse, "unwanted" behavior with respect to Jones might be for Smith not to make romantic overtures toward Doe (assuming Doe and Jones aren't in a relationship). Or for Smith not to offer products for sale that are competitive with Jones's. Or for Smith to keep his golden watch rather than give it away.
No reasonable social rule requires you to junk your life in order to be a perpetual font of charity, however wanted that might be.
I was not under the impression that we were discussing reasonable, consistent social rules.
To someone with built-in social skills, it basically feels like the policy reduces to "do what other people want". It takes a lot of effort to see that the reduction goes the other way (i.e. we're trying to reduce "do what other people want" to actionable rules). Additionally, the writers are probably giving the first explanation that comes to mind for why people seem creepy (naturally, one that reflects favorably on them and, more importantly, unfavorably on the person they're criticizing). If they dug deeper, they might (might) be able to come up with specific verbal and nonverbal behaviors that trigger the "creepy" association. This would be useful if they were interested in helping creepy people become less creepy, but for the most part the people writing about creepiness are writing because they've just been on the receiving end, and just want it to go away.
I suspect that at least some people have a mind-reader at least close to the specs of these writers, particularly people those from the writers' social groups. The standard model onboard human emulator really is quite good, particularly when it's been trained by large amounts of social contact (something most people labeled creepy (the low-status kind) don't get much of). Which is why the most successful advice on how to become less creepy is to get out more. Being creepy isn't something you can really think yourself out of, because it has a lot to do with posture, timing, intonation, and trained guesswork. I'm fairly sure that formal training for becoming less creepy would be effective (possibly more so than the "getting out more"), but it's something that would require an outside, experienced party.
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.
In the good old tradition of making up armchair evolutionary psychology "explanations" (aka just so stories), here is my uneducated guess:
In the ancestral environment, abnormal behavior patterns (unusual body language or lack of proper feedback to body language, unusual vocalizations, poor motor coordination, anything "odd" in general) were symptoms of neurological disorders. Neurological disorders were typically caused by infectious diseases, because, well, infectious diseases were so common back then that pretty much any disorder was probably caused by them.
So, there is this odd-behaving ape. The apes that are not bothered by that and keep hanging around it or, gods forbid, mate with it, catch meningitis or some other nasty bug and die. The apes who are creeped the hell out of it avoid infection and get to pass their genes.
Fast forward a couple million years, to some odd-behaving dude. Chances are that he has no infectious disease. Maybe an autism spectrum condition, or poor socialization or socialization in a different culture, or whatnot. But your ape amygdalae don't know that. They just say to your cortex "odd behavior = mortal threat".
Perhaps you rationalize this visceral fear as justified adversion to risk of assault, but it may be actually an innate response evolved for something completely unrelated.
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.
As a low-status male, right now I'm less worried about being excluded from a meetup than I am about being publicly associated with LW at all. It already has a reputation (and not just for the things mentioned there); now it's a place where a comment like Jade's here isn't just downvoted, but downvoted to a level that labels it a troll comment not worth replying to.
lesswrong wishes it had a reputation!
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.
That Readercon example points out an irrationality in the thinking of some creeps, rapists, or PUAs: "sex is a need." Related to that fallacy is the sense of entitlement that sex with desired sex objects should be a reward for being "nice," even though real nice persons avoid using sentient beings as tools and may avoid short-lived pleasures like sex altogether (e.g. Paul Erdos, Nikola Tesla). [And I can tell you from experience, women fawn over good guys. I even had a crush on Tesla. But being good guys, they focus on doing good and may not even notice women fawning over them.] Another fallacy in the minds of some creeps is that their behavior is good for their targets, e.g. "she needs a dicking."
Basically, what we're dealing with are persons who need some luminosity, or awareness and control, over their lusty wants, so they no longer act on those wants as "needs," spending more resources on satisfying those wants over other wants (their own or others') or other beings' real needs, like humans' need to feel safe enough to socialize.
High-status creeps are the worst because they're allowed to be repeat offenders (e.g. Jerry Sandusky). In my experience with a low-status creep, he excluded himself after not getting what he "needed" from his target. That is, he was welcome at meetings but didn't want to go without the prospect of his "need" being met by his desired sex object. That was several years ago, with a freethought group, before I developed this understanding and ability to counteract that irrationality.
Simply saying "sex is not a need; you can live well without it" actually worked in one case. A case that's been difficult for me to crack is where the person, somewhat high-status, is committed to irrationalities and harasses people (sexually harassing females, verbally harassing whomever does something he doesn't like). I might break of his icon of Mercy, taking away his method for reducing his guilt, which he should feel to avoid harming others.
[Edit replacing backslashes with commas. Not that it changes the meaning to me, having known creeps, rapists, and literature by PUAs.]
See "Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships." Apologetics or confabulations are part of the process of passion escalating into aggression or violence. A rational person would avoid the costs and risks of continuing interactions with someone interested in sex and who's brain, like most brains, could rationalize or delude itself, with such fallacies as I noted above (another example: "blue balls") or with thinking that the woman wants sexual relations with him when she doesn't. Hence, avoidance of "creeps." Women poor at detecting and avoiding such dynamics may be more likely to get abused (http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/12/2199.full.pdf+html).
Evidence of what I said about lack of illumination: "Results indicate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between victims of physical violence and offenders over time and that certain covariates including school commitment, parental monitoring, low self-control, and sex significantly discriminate victim and offender groups. Furthermore, low self-control appears to be the most salient risk factor for distinguishing both victimization and delinquency trajectories" 2010 Longitudinal Assessment of the Victim-Offender Overlap.
This comment is the first that has ever made me want to build an army of sock puppets for downvoting purposes, not that I shall do so.
Do you want to taboo "want" and "need"?
Seriously? Creeps/rapists/PUAs. People kept reading after that introduction?
I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Sexuality isn't a physical need in the sense that, say, water is a physical need, but it is a pretty fundamental drive. It certainly doesn't morally oblige any particular person to fulfill it for you (analogously, the human need for companionship doesn't oblige random strangers to accept overtures of friendship), but it's sufficiently potent that I'd be cautious about casually demoting it below other social considerations, let alone suggesting sexual asceticism as a viable solution in the average case; that seems like an easy way to come up with eudaemonically suboptimal prescriptions.
Nice Guy (tm) psychology is something else again. I'm not sure how much of the popular view of it is anywhere near accurate, but in isolation I'd hesitate to take it as suggesting anything more than one particular pathology of sexual politics and maybe some interesting facts about the surrounding culture.
Some have argued the same regarding revenge, nepotism, and various other "drives" that we might expect people to learn how to express in a moral way.
I'm not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it's easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It's far better -- if far harder -- to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
We don't have to "casually demote" anything. Like Fox News says, "we report -- you decide."
Generally, "need" is used to refer to something perceived to be necessary in an optimization process. There are cases where a human doesn't need companionship, let alone sex (see recluses or transcendentalists' recommendations that persons isolate themselves from society for a while to clear their heads of irrationalities).
If "the average case" involves little luminosity of sexuality and lots of sexualization of beings, then of course sexual abstinence wouldn't be likely. Rape occurs in epidemic proportions in such places where people are also demoralized or decommissioned from doing much good work, like on reservations.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society. Some oppose gender roles to the extent that they limit persons from doing good, esp. when they make one gender subservient to the other or make a person of one gender subservient to another person of another gender (like the promulgated view that wife should serve husband). A person or AI caring only about one person or half the human population would not be optimal.
I think we're talking past each other here. The "Nice Guy (tm)" phenomenon I was referring to is categorically not an idealized gender role within an optimal or any other society, hence the sarcasm trademark, although it has its roots in (a misinterpretation of) one idealized masculinity. Instead, it's a shorthand way of describing the pathology you described in the ancestor: the guy in question (there are women who do similar things, but the term as I'm using it is tied up in the male gender role) performs passive masculinity really hard and expects that sexual favors will follow. When this fails, usually due to poor socialization and poor understanding of sexual politics, bitterness and frustration ensue.
I actually think the terminology's pretty toxic as such things go, since it tends to be treated as a static attribute of the people so described instead of suggesting solutions to the underlying problems. It's common jargon in these sorts of discussions, though, and denotationally it does describe a real dysfunction, so I'm okay with using it as shorthand. Apologies for any bad assumptions on my part.
You might want to link “Nice Guy (tm)” in the grandparent to, er..., somewhere.
It's too specific/complicated to be low level/fundamental. Actually all of them are too specific/complicated to be low level. They're just so widely and thoroughly internalised (to the point where not being that way will likely be bad for you just because other people will dislike you for it) very few people realise they are changable, or are motivated to change them. There's little reason to change them for most people. Not having a desire for revenge or redress grievances is a quick way to become a target/victim, status seeking gets you status if you do it right which gets you power. nepotism makes you a more attractive ally.
I think it's more accurate to say that changing motivational structure is hard and risky than the ability is limited. There's no hard or soft cap afaik (which is what limited makes it sound like to me) it's just really hard to do and most people don't care to anyway.
Also wtf is a need. Is that like a right? It means you really really want something? really really really? really really really really? nonsense on stilts. Take your fucking stilts off bro.
edit: I can't believe I put bro at the end of that post. Kinda ruins it.
edit2: no it doesn't, stop pandering.
I'm having trouble making sense of this in context. Did you mean to reply to this post?
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?
In answer to the second question---If done so awkwardly, in a way that violates local norms or expectations or in a way that makes you look bad in public. (These are all things other than being low status that seem to play a part in the 'creepiness'.)
I was about to answer "Well, if they behaved like that then you'd most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)", then I realised that if we interpret counterfactuals this way, my comment would be nearly tautological.
Those are certainly unattractive traits and would often be sufficient to remove the desire. But no, the effect isn't anywhere near strong enough to make the potential tautological definition valid.
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".
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
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.
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.
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger's netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
People who frequently fall into patterns of behavior that others regard as "creepy" tend to be those who do not find this easy.
Could you create a set of instructions that can easily be followed by people with low levels of social fluency, which would allow them to make this judgment with low levels of false positives and false negatives? If so, you'd be doing a big favor both to people who're frequently exposed to "creepy" behavior, and people who frequently engage in that behavior. It would also probably be unique in the world.
I'm not sure what you are using status to mean. Would you be willing to restate your argument with 'status' tabbooed?
It's easy to be low-status without being creepy.
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.
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 agree with the first part of your comment, but the last paragraph seems contradictory:
Creepiness is by definition unwelcome behavior; that's just the meaning of the term - "that which causes someone to feel creeped out". Of course any welcome behavior would not be labelled creepy.
But the entire problem is that its welcomeness is not known until you do it! That's why you have to go based on general standards of acceptable behavior in judging an action, not by whether one person happened to not like it.
Imagine if Elevatorgate started from, not some elevator, but just the mere fact of Watson being "asked out", and she went on to say, "Whoa! Creepy! Guys, don't ever ask a woman out!"
Someone might protest, "Wait, what?"
Do you understand why it's not a very satisfactory answer to say, "It's okay, we're only talking about those cases where it's unwanted"? If so, apply it to your own answer.
I reread your first comment and I think I just misread it the first time. (And you may have misread mine). I think we were just talking past each other.
We seem to agree on the important bits, namely that:
I don't think we agree, in particular, because I don't agree that the particulars of how a specific event was perceived are relevant for general rules of condemnation. That is, I'm fine with saying "Don't do X" if X really is widely disliked, regardless of the person, but not with giving the same advice, while actually predicating it on people's ability to know others' reaction in advance.
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.
Likewise, there are times and places when creepy is not low-status.
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.
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.
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.
Yup. Really, I did nothing more than describe elements of the old-fashioned class system and the timeless informal status system, with a few bells and whistles.
Except that in mainstream caste systems, behaviors considered 'creepy' because they signal low status, not the other way around.
Nah. Many creepy behaviors, like boxing people in and ignoring reluctance, convey "I have high enough status not to fear the social cost of this behavior; if you try to punish me for it, everyone will be on my side". This is high-status. Some creepy behaviors, like the creepy monotone, convey "I am unable to conform to many social norms", which causes and signals low status.
More like "I have high enough status that you will actually want this".
Creepy is when it turns out the person doing this actually didn't have high enough status.
It's complicated-- my impression is that there are a lot of low status people (including most low status men) aren't seen as creepy. There's something additional-- body language? postural?-- and I've never seen it adequately defined or described.
It would be really good to have a definition that had some shreds of objectivity to it. As it stands your definition simply assigns to one person the responsibility for another person's feelings. This is infantilizing to the 'victim' and places the 'perpetrator' at the mercy of the "victim's" subjectivity.
The alleged safeguard that a significant fraction must agree the behavior is creepy is rarely applied in practice. "If you made her feel creeped out, man, that's creepy".
In practice this definition of creepiness is almost solely used against men. I had a female colleague (many, actually over the years) who wore inappropriately 'hot' outfits at work and behaved in overtly sexual ways that left me feeling uncomfortable. One cannot complain about this because it is "slut shaming".
I notice a disturbing trend for rationality orientated groups to be invaded by people who like to impose long lists of rules about acceptable behavior and speech, generally with a feminist flavor. These people generally have made little to no contribution to the groups in question. I see here for example OP's first post here was all of three months ago. The open source and atheism communities have seen similar phenomena.
We need to expose these people and their ideas to full rational scrutiny. I have read a lot of feminism literature and I believe that the field could benefit significantly from an infusion of LW style rationality.
Finally can I point out a clear source of irrational thinking that tends to surface in these discussions: the "protective instinct" towards women. For reasons that don't particularly matter in this context, when we see women (or children) at the risk of harm, powerful emotions arise. Thus, if you want a massacre to sound as bad as possible you say "100 people were killed including 50 women and children." In movies, it is almost always unacceptable for a sympathetic female character to be killed (read any guide to writing move scripts).
The problem with this is that there is no objectivity. It's not just about the behavior, or the "perpetrator", or the "victim". It's the intersection of all of them and it's basically dependent on how the "victim" interprets certain aspects of the "perpetrator's" behavior- which is hugely biased by the personal characteristics of the "perpetrator". A hot guy walking up to a girl in a bar is flattering. An ugly guy doing the exact same thing is creepy. A confident guy using a line is an segue to flirtation. A nervous guy using the exact same line is creepy.
This makes it really difficult to teach people to not be creepy by telling them specific actions to take or not take. Much more useful would be a guide with certain tests that people could put out there to gauge the "temperature" of social situations before committing to a course of action.
Yes, to the vast benefit of both.
This is argument by assertion. What evidence do you have for "this vast benefit"?
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? :/
At least one (myself). And many others like them.
The problem is that it is not specific behavior that is forbidden. It is more like "making advances while male to someone to who finds you unattractive at the time, or later on" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBVuAGFcGKY) or, in another context "driving while black".
Actually that's a very useful and powerful analogy because it also references ingroup vs. outgroup asymmetry, and how that is a driver for power imbalance and perceptions.
... did you even read the post you are replying to? :/
"Allowing people to define their own subjective states ("this is how I feel") seems to me to in fact be the opposite of infantilizing."
This has nothing to do with whether defining "creepiness" by how people feel is infantilising. Defining any behaviour that affects someones feelings a certain way is not even close to "allowing people to define their own subjective states."
As it stands it's so barely related I have to assume as well as not reading the post you are replying to you are also misusing define.
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.
If you add language that says "reasonably interpreted to be threatening" you are getting closer to an objective test. But that is not what was proposed here. The problem occurs when you assign to one person the responsibility for another person's feelings, irrespective of the context or reasonableness.
Science fiction conventions too. Clearly, this is an outrage.
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 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.
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.
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?
What reason does lucidian have to go with their preference level instead of his own.
I'm not saying he has any such reason. But neither does anyone else have a reason to go along with his preferences.
Well, the OP was about the first and not the second.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mm, that's fair. I don't think anything should be taken uncritically.
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. :)
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.
Do you have better advice to give?
For someone with low social skills, who has been told that their behaviour is making other people uncomfortable, maybe the correct course of action is not to continue those behaviours until they have improved their social skills sufficiently to be able to do them without making other people uncomfortable.
Because what's the alternative? Asking people to put up with X's behaviour that makes them feel creeped out, because "Oh dear X can't help it, they have poor social skills." ?
You want to give people that are acting creepy advice that it's at least slightly in their interest to follow, otherwise they will ignore it.
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.
Of course, but you don't get surprised when we turn out to be a bunch of apes after all.
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 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.
My experience of PUA memes for "improving success with women" is that they're written by men, cast interaction in competitive terms, treat all the parties' interests as zero sum, and their success relies on women having little or no agency and remaining that way.
I contrast that with intersectional social justice feminism, which is largely written by women, casts interaction in collaborative terms, rejects zero-sum framings, and its success relies on upgrading everyone's agency & ability.
I also can't help but think that if & when PUA works, its success inversely varies with a woman's intelligence, self-awareness and rationality. The opposite is true with social justice feminism.
Your testimony thereof gives an overwhelming impression that your experience with such memes comes either exclusively from or is dominated by second hand sources who are themselves hostile to the culture.
Yes. (And dating advice for men written by women gets a different label.)
A significant aspect of it, at certain phases of courtship, yes.
Nonsense.
This assumes that the will directing said agency does not wish to mate with or form a relationship with someone with the social skills developed by the PUA. As it happens the universe we live in enough people (and, I would even suggest most people) do prefer people with those skills
Those sound like noble ideals. It is plausible that there is a group of people who adhere to them. Did they come prepackaged with your prejudice or can you buy them separately?
I doubt that.
Social justice feminism is a strategy for attracting mates that can be compared in efficacy to skills developed with the active intent to attract said mates? That would be an impressive set of ideals indeed if true!
Mm, I agree I could know PUA better than I do. You're under no obligation to educate me, of course, but if you had a few links you thought exemplary for PUA at its best, I'd be much obliged.
I'm finding (scholarly, thoughtful) critiques of PUA and the seduction community from a feminist social justice perspective, but in case they're attacking PUA at its worst. I'll do some reading. I'm concentrating on inside-view critiques from people well versed in PUA techniques and the seduction community, there are some good links out there.
Putting this as charitably as possible, even if in fact there is nothing misogynistic or unjust in PUA, there is a vast amount of feminist distrust of it, and PUA doesn't seem to have responded well to those critiques (or even particularly to think they need to be responded to, as far as I can tell).
PUA is probably too far off-topic for this post and I'm willing to continue this elsewhere (Discussions?) or let it drop for now.
Why would they find that worth their time?
What's the downside?
Adopting PUA techniques and values: arguably improves sex and/or relationship outcomes with some women. Visibly adopting and affiliating with PUA: definitely worsen sex and/or relationship outcomes with some (other but not wholly disjoint set of) women.
Addressing those perceptions might offset some of the latter (certain) penalty, and it's not clear to me that it would come at any reduction to the former (possible) bonus.
I'm still reading the "PUA at its best" links so I don't know enough to say how costly this approach is. Perhaps you're saying you think it's better to cut your losses, completely give up on any women alienated by PUA and focus on those who don't notice or don't care?
Well, I really don't see much hope for bridging the gap between pro- and anti-PUA camps on this board; both positions are already entrenched, and large portions of both sides have adopted the other as a Hated Enemy with whom no rational dialogue can be maintained. It's not a battle I'm interested in fighting; besides, that battle's already been fought. Several times. To no productive effect.
Speaking as someone who's fairly familiar with both sides yet identifies with neither, though, I think they have more in common than they're willing to admit. There's a great deal of adversarial framing going on, yes, to the point where you've got people like Heartiste who've built their reputations on it. But both sides are basically trying to advocate for greater agency and fulfillment within their scope and among their constituents, which sounds like a great opportunity for intersectionality if I've ever heard one. As to zero-sum framing -- well, "leave her better than you found her" is a well-known, and fairly mainstream, PUA catchphrase.
If I'm going to demonize anything here, this unspeakably stupid war-of-the-sexes model seems like by far my best target.
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!
It won't help.
Since this comment got more upvotes than the article itself, I'm moving to Discussion.
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'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.
It seems to me that if we update to be less creeped out by people asking for permission that we don't end up granting, we will make it safer for people to ask for permission. This means that ① some people who might otherwise not hug, but whom we would like hugs from, might be more likely to ask and thence to hug; and ② some people who might hug without asking will instead ask and take no for an answer.
So, encouraging asking will get us ① more wanted hugs, and ② fewer unwanted hugs.
I do agree with everything you say here.
I say in another reply here that I'm a fan of reframing for active consent and opt-in. I don't ask "can I give you a hug" for precisely the reasons you say.
If it's not clear to me if we're on hugging terms or not, then I assume we're not. Cost to me if wrong about that = low.
If I have high confidence that we're on hugging terms, but I don't know if you feel like it right now, and I have high confidence that we're on terms where asking this is ok, I'll ask "would you like me to hug you?" That's an implied "at this particular time", and not used for escalating from non-hugging to hugging. If I have doubt on any of these points, I don't ask. Cost to me if I'm wrong about that = low.
Perhaps it asks a lot in terms of social/people/communication skills to model if processing the question will be costly, or if the cost to them is high for me asking when perhaps I shouldn't have. It doesn't particularly seem so, to me.
TL;DR : costs to you in me asking when I shouldn't are higher than the costs to me of not asking when it would've been ok. I'm ok with that asymmetry - privilege is profoundly asymmetric.
Indeed. Expected utility maximization (using a TDT-like decision theory so as to not defect in prisoners' dilemmas), keeping in mind that one of the possible actions is gathering more information. We're on Less Wrong after all.
When it comes to hugging you can to ask nonverbally. You look at the person and open your arms in prepartion of the hug.
If the reciprote the gesture, you hug them. Otherwise you don't.
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."
I think I understand what nyan_sandwich means; some quotes from the link "My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude. How do we clear that up?":
I wrote-up a (draft) post on my own blog because I was offended by the implication that, by being a member of "society", and one that is a Rape Culture by-the-way, I am culpable for rape, sexual assault, and the ongoing minimization of women's safety.
And that post is actually one of the better ones, in that it doesn't instruct the reader "don't touch".
I mean, don't you know that everyone says you should be cool about being raped? Reading that makes me livid.
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 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 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?
All Douglas said on that score is that creepiness is "one social skills issue that might be affecting this". I think you are overreacting just a teensy little bit.
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.
"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.
I agree, I just wasn't sure how to word it to make clear that the same reasoning applies if a significant fraction of the members of one gender think you're creepy then, even if they are outnumbered by the other gender, that's still a significant fraction.
No.
Not 'a significant fraction'.
One of the prime tools used by the kind of arsehole who infiltrates groups in order to rape is to isolate individuals, and behave differently towards them. If any individual person thinks your behaviour towards them is creepy, it is your responsibility to change your behaviour towards that person, even if everyone else disagrees with them.
Given we're establishing guidelines that people will choose to follow in order not to be jerks, "don't rape people" is a perfectly good rule. You said yourself that for group-enforced guidelines, the group has to judge (and thus reject "Alice speaks in a creepy monotone, I am creeped out, she must stop"-type complaints); it's hard to see how to do that if every one else disagrees.
I can understand this on a sort of "don't be a dick" set of rules where if something you do makes someone uncomfortable you should prefer not to do it, a rule of this kind is not just open to abuse but oppressive in and of itself.
Taking responsibility for one's own actions is not oppressive.
I find your point of view creepy, and want you to stop talking about it. Take responsibility for your actions, and stop creeping me out.
“If” just means it's a sufficient condition, not necessarily that it's also a necessary one.
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.
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.)
Fortunately, this isn't just about some kind of abstract "being creepy" XML tag getting attached to individuals. It's about specific behaviors which individuals can learn not to do.
Sounds like pretty typical but unfortunate levels of high-school harassment and hazing. That's not what we're talking about here.
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.)
I think the Dr Nerdlove link does give useful advice. It tells you what not to do and what you should do instead. I have pretty good social skills, and I'm female, so it's unlikely that people see me as being creepy, but I actually think that reading through that may have improved my social skills further! For instance, in the past, when I've been interested in someone I have sometimes tried to keep talking even when they appear to be losing interest. This paragraph gives very useful advice:
If the conversation is starting to die off – as opposed to a natural lull – you don’t want to try stick around desperately trying to keep things going. Make your excuses and bow out of the conversation gracefully. Similarly, if you notice that her eyes are starting to dart around to the sides – as though she were looking around for someone – you need to realize that she’s looking for someone to rescue her from you.