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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)
Looks at thread.
Wow it really is September.
I think this argument:
is flawed as it proves far too much.
We consider the (very plausible) hypothetical scenario of a LW meetup with many men and few women. The men are prone to hitting on the women. The women just want to talk about utility functions, and say no.
The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly. They are uncomfortable and upset.
Therefore by the argument above, the women are engaging in creepy behaviour. Plus, a significant fraction of the group are finding it creepy.
Therefore the responsibility to change their behaviour lies with the women, and they presumably need to start putting out more.
Since this is clearly an absurd conclusion, I think there's something wrong with the original argument. Probably we need to introduce some notion of legitimate and illegitimate emotional reactions, but that's a whole can of worms.
I don't think the argument proves this much, and if it does it's easily fixable. I agree that in this sadly plausible scenario, "The men, being nerds, handle rejection badly." They are upset, but are they uncomfortable? Not necessarily so, and even if they are I don't think the emotional response is the same as a general feeling of "creepiness". I think the difference is that creepiness includes not just "unsafe or uncomfortable" but "unsafe AND uncomfortable". The physical and emotional response of being rejected is not the same as the physical and emotional response of being hit on in a "creepy" fashion.
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.
Then why is creepiness so gendered?
Is there any evidence that creepiness is so gendered? It could be just a stereotype.
Even if it is indeed gendered:
Modern causes of creepiness (autistic spectrum condition, etc.) may be gender biased.
Males are less risk adverse than females, expecially when it comes to mating, therefore they might be less sensitive to creepiness.
There is anecdotal evidence that creepiness is gendered, and all of the evidence on creepiness that I know of is anecdotal. The examples trend heavily towards women finding men creepy, rather than any of the other 3 gender combinations. The examples also tend to involve sexual interest (or suspected sexual interest) from the person who is perceived as creepy, even in cases which involve other gender combinations. These seem like important clues that can help us narrow down the hypothesis space, rather than modern-day rationalizations of an unrelated feeling.
Standard evolutionary psychology does include a disease-avoidance mechanism, much like the one you described, which is based on the emotion of disgust. One hypothesis is that creepiness is nothing more than an instance of that, but the patterns of behavior that people describe when they discuss creepiness seem much more closely related to sex than to disease. For example, if creepiness was evidence of an infectious neurological disorder then we'd expect everyone to want to keep their distance from someone who has shown signs of creepiness. But instead, anecdata suggest that avoidance motivations are extremely strong for the creeped-on person, weaker for other people of the same sex as the creeped-on person, and weaker still for people of the opposite sex.
Anecdotal evidence might be affected by a gender-biased sample:
The communities where creepiness is common enough to be a salient issue are "geek" gatherings. People who attend comics conventions, LW meetups, etc., are mostly male. Therefore, even if the average female geek had the same probability of being a creep as the average male geek, you would know much more male geek creeps than female ones due to this base rate bias.
Sexual intercourse is a primary avenue of disease transmission, hence it would be plausible that the creepiness emotion is more salient in people who perceive the sexual interest of an uncanny person.
How sure are we that creepiness is strongly correlated with autism?
We aren't. It was my conjecture based on the fact that autistic people may have difficulties at reading and using facial expressions and body language, show unusual speech patterns (choice of topics, discourse structure, syntax, lexicon, intonation, etc.), poor motor coordination, etc. Thus, I hypothesize that they are more likely to elicit the uncanny valley effect.
I read your links. How very encouraging. I think I'll stop talking to women now...
Why? Have women been complaining that you make them feel uncomfortable by how you talk to them?
Think of the basic advice in the first few links as being like a computer trouble shooting guide that starts off by saying "Is the plug in the socket? Is the socket turned on? Have you tried rebooting?". Sort of a checklist, that you only need to work through if there is actually a problem.
Kind of like: "Do women glare and yell at you when you hug them? Check whether you're using the PolyApproved (tm) procedure of making the awkward 'wanna hug?' gesture first, and only proceeding to an actual hug if the gesture is reciprocated. Note for advanced users: there are alternative procedures and short cuts which can be used at your own risk."
Does the first link not come off to you as very aggressive and (almost) presuming guilt? (I can't imagine how it couldn't, so if it doesn't to you I'm interested in your perspective.)
It feels to me like a troubleshooting guide that continually insinuates how much of a frickin' moron the user would be if they turned off the computer without properly shutting down (or any number of other explicitly-unstated foolish actions), except that troubleshooting guides normally can't morally condemn you.
(The third link actually does read like a decent guide.)
I 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.
I think this conversation could start with a good dose of Korzybski and General Semantics.
"Being creepy" does not represent the situation as well as "Person X is uncomfortable with Person Y's overtures for an increased level of personal contact."
The situation is improved when Person X more clearly communicates their discomfort and disinterest, and when Person Y pays more attention to how well their overtures are received, up to just moving on and avoiding contact.
But neither communication nor perception are perfect, and worse, the incentives would tend to promote a nonzero level of creepiness. The person with interest should be expected to make an overture - they're hoping for more.
The advice I see in the first article basically tells the interested party not to make overtures. I don't see that as helpful. Human beings touch each other. They stand close. They make sexual comments. Particularly when they are interested in someone.
Consider one piece of advice:
If they both want to touch each other, then they never will, both waiting for the other to touch them. Somebody has to make the first overture.
10) actually has some useful advice on how to spot a lack of interest, and indeed, disinterest, dislike, and aversion. That's fine for an article on "knowing when to piss off", but it's not so helpful for someone trying to reach out to someone else.
What's needed is an article "How to make an effective overture that minimizes creepy feelings in the subject of interest".
Give an extensional description of the aspects that increase creepiness, and how those can be minimized by someone trying to make a connection.
THat's a good point. I am rather upset by how much defense of creeping there is here but it might be good if the sufferers discomfort and the creeper's self could be seperated a little.
I'm not sure this is it. If I had to give a definition for "creepy", it would be something like: "Person Y's attitude and behavior are making Person X feel personally unsafe (to some degree) around Person Y."
So yes, it does take two to tango, but it's not clear that Person X can do anything about eir feelings, especially since the feelings may be functionally justified at some level (i.e. most if not all examples of 'creepy' behavior actually are evidence that Person Y is more likely to be a threat).
People can do a lot about their feelings. But whether they can or not, the issue of blame is not resolved. That X feels upset about what Y does, and even can't help feeling upset, does not necessarily imply that X is to blame for anything.
As to "the cause" of the bad feelings, clearly it's combination of the X's emotional disposition and Y's behavior, and if either were sufficiently different, the bad feelings would not have occurred.
But we've at least identified one problem in this conversation. You have a different definition of creepy than I do. I don't think yours is quite so robust, because I'd just call yours "threatening" or "dangerous", not creepy, but it does seem like a potential element of creepiness.
But then, unsafe how? What is the threat? I can see a number.
Threat of physical or sexual assault. Threat to social status by a low status male even showing interest (as if he had a chance, etc.). Threat of that in a public setting. Threat of the discomfort of dealing with him and his interest.
Finally, I wonder how much a woman perceives any unwanted sexual interest from a man she doesn't trust as something of a threat, even when an objective review of the circumstances would say there is no real threat. That would seem natural to me, in an evolutionary sense.
Both definitions are used, and plenty more besides. This is actually why bubuy's point is so important. The cluster of things that are called 'creepy' is diverse and the most useful response to given situations varies depending on what the actual situation is rather than on whether someone calls it 'creepy'.
Incidentally, your definition is weakened by focusing on preemptively applying judgement more than causal accuracy. While the intent is to convey that the person being labeled 'creepy' is responsible for the feelings of the other it actually implies that even the most lewdly inappropriate, boundary-oblivious and clingy loser is immune to being 'creepy' when their target is sufficiently physically secure, emotionally mature and psychologically self-determined. This is absurd, clearly not your intent and actually forces the 'victim' to be disempowered before they are entitled to any 'anti-creep' rights.
It is quite OK to keep assertions of 'and it is right and fitting that we hold person Y responsible in this case and use some form of sanction' out of the actual definition of 'creepy' and in the realm of policy advocation.
I'm not sure that it is - unless you mean that the target is unjustified in feeling physically safe, and the loser is actually posing a threat to hir. But we can still define such behavior as "creepy" by extension, since the target would actually judge themselfes as being unsafe if they were more reasonable and knowledgeable about the loser's attitude and behavior. Definitions often perform poorly at such boundaries, but this does not imply that there isn't a salient cluster in thingspace which is adequately captured by the above definition.
Like feeling uncomfortable and unsafe when those n*s sit next to you in the bus? Why don't they move to the back rows? How insensitive!
That would also be sufficient to abandon the definition. But no, I mean she is actually are physically safe and the guy is being creepy as @#%#. Either the recipient of the creepiness or an observer can both legitimately call that behavior creepy even if the victim of it neither feels nor actually is physically unsafe.
The above definition conveys concepts that aren't even intended for use in 'thingspace' as opposed to 'political space'. Specifically, the assignment of blame and responsibility. It can be resolved to a thing space cluster but if this is done it points to a cluster that does not, in fact, serve your purposes. If interpreted as a literal epistemic description when executing 'creepiness' prevention policies it would result in inferior outcomes to what you would get if you executed your actual meaning. Fortunately few would (acta as if they) interpret the definition literally and would instead interpret it as an approximate reference to a related thing in thingspace but with additional policy decisions snuck in.
I'd say that the target can legitimately state that the guy's behavior is making her uncomfortable (assuming that this is in fact the case), and/or tell the guy to buzz off and have this enforced as necessary. Either the target or any third party can legitimately caution the guy that his behavior could be interpreted as "creepy" (i.e. at least mildly threatening) by others.
However, I would not use "creepy" to describe all instances where someone is being merely bothered by someone else; nor would I want to have a fixed cluster of behaviors be regarded as "creepy", regardless of the target's actual feelings and reactions. Thus, I'd say that defining the above as not-creepy is in fact very reasonable.
Um, no. Physical causality is not the same as appropriately-assigned blame and responsibility. Even then, I could easily rephrase my definition as: "Person X's experience and overall disposition causes her to feel physically unsafe to some degree, upon being exposed to some peculiar attitudes and behavors on Person Y's part" and this would not change my preferred policy.
Thankyou buybuy. Tabooing the term and describing the actual behaviors and circumstances specifically is exactly what is called for here!
You're welcome.
You seem to be one of the list elders, so to speak, so I've got a tangential question for you.
I see occasional references to Korzybski, and the Map is Not The Territory sequence article. "Tabooing a word" is just the kind of semantic hygiene practice of which he had zillions - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if he originated "tabooing a word".
But I don't get the impression that a lot of people here have read his work, or if they did, few have interest. What's your sense of the level of familiarity with and interest in Korzybski here?
I've seen a few references, and the impression I got is that the sequence on words overlaps a lot with Korzybski's General Semantics.
Eliezer got some early influence from the General Semantics-inspired Null-A books by A.E. van Vogt.
(I'm leaving two versions of this comment in different threads because DeeElf also asked about Korzybski and LW.)
Thank you for the link to the other discussion. I had been assuming more familiarity Korzybski than seems to be the case.
Yours is the only reference I can recall. From the sound of it I'd like to hear more. Any other key insights of his that you think we could benefit from?
Hard to summarize a lot of stuff, and I don't know that seeing the summary without the explanation of it is that helpful.
Instead, I'll apply General Semantics to my response to the conversation, as an imaginary Korzybski (K). It's been a while since I read the stuff, so my use of his terms will doubtless lack some precision, and be colored by my own attitude as well.
K: We have a discussion here. People are saying things like Joe is creepy, or Joe is a creep.
K: They are using the "is of identity", and the "is of predication". We know that this falsifies reality. An apple is not red, but is perceived as red by us in the proper circumstances. In other circumstances, we would not perceive it as red. Even taking a conscious being out of the equation, the apple would be measured as red by some instrument or process under certain conditions, and not red in other circumstances.
K: Now let's look at the term "creep". Our total evaluative response to the word "creep" contains a mass of associative (often emotive) and extensional (observable) components. We have many negative and unpleasant emotional associations with the term. If we are going to properly evaluate Joe and his behavior instead of merely letting our reactions to words that we chose to apply to Joe dictate our response to Joe, we should limit our discussion to extensional terms.
K: Unfortunately, it seems to me that even the implied extensional usage of the word is highly variable in this discussion, with creep_you <> creep_me <> creep_him <> creep_her, to a degree that impacts effective communication. The same is likely true even of creep_him_1, creep_him_2, creep_him_3 - people aren't being consistent in their own usage of the term.
K: So let's make an explicit extensional definition of the word "creep" to test whether we have been communicating at all.
ME: I would add that the various comments on blame/responsibility that try to get around blame by resorting to causality don't get us anywhere. Joe's behavior no more caused Jane's reaction than Jane's emotional and perceptual makeup. Change either sufficiently, and Jane does not perceive Joe as creepy. I think this is implicit in K's method, but I don't recall him this particular discussion on causality. Although it's starting to ring a few bells in some musty old neurons.
There's a lot of other stuff. I consider General Semantics as semantic hygiene, seeing how certain semantic practices encourage bad habits of thought, and having specific counter practices for avoiding the poor habits of thought. Purell for the mind.
In the end, I don't think the counter practices are necessary to keep your ideas clean and tidy as long as you've internalized an aversion to the poor habits of thought, but they help when confusion is afoot.
(May be worth editing your comment and replacing all instances of "_" with "\_".)
Time and place indexing-- for what times and places do you have evidence of something being true?
Now that I think about it, Eliezer's year subscripts for his different stages of understanding may be a result of influence from Korzybski.
Couldn't find the definitive "tabooing a word", if there is such a thing, but after the taboo, I think EY recommends replacing it with what amounts to an "extensional" description.
Gender-related Lesswrong threads have almost always been problematic, historically. However, in all honesty, the signal/noise ratio in this thread seems low, even when compared to others of its kind.
Can anyone here honestly state that they learned something from this thread?
Note: The question was not rhetorical. If anyone was helped, I would actually like to learn that they were helped. Other note: I apologize for making the signal/noise ratio of this thread even worse by going meta.
It would have been nice if, instead of just picking holes in my attempt at a TLDR summary, more people had instead proposed alternative one paragraph summaries of the advice within the links.
I think it would also have been helpful if there had been a bit more direct advice for someone in a LW meeting who is feeling creeped out, advice for someone in a LW meeting who notices someone else giving signs of feeling creeped out, and a show of visible support for the best such advice.
However this thread, so far, has not gone in that direction.
I would note that, even if true, we are unlikely to see replies of the form "I learned that I am creepy" or "I knew I am creepy, but from this thread I learned that LessWrong is aware of the problem and I'm unlikely to get away with it in meetings because people have named the problem and are aware of the importance of picking up on it."
I was also pleasantly surprised to notice how little this thread was mindkilled.
As for something I learned, the distinction between individual interpretation of someone's behavior as charismatic v. an individual's social status within a group was made salient in a way that let me notice it. There's several other things I can't call to mind but which I'm pretty sure I did learn.
I think you may have misread the comment you are replying to. He said that this thread had a low signal to noise ratio, and expressed disbelief that anyone "honestly... learned something from this thread."
Thanks! I totally did misread the comment.
Honestly, I might just be filtering out the noise at this point - or having recently worked out how to point out that a comment is noise in a certain way might be helping me consider noise more of a learning experience and less of a blank field.
I'm struck by the fact that for centuries there were complex rules of etiquette established for interacting with other members of society depending on class, gender, family relationship, etc. Then during the 20th century that formal system of rules was all but abandoned. Obviously we can't simply revert to Victorian mores, but perhaps we should pay attention to the history of etiquette and re-engineer it for modern society. Pick some Schelling Points for polite behavior and publish them. There is already an Etiquette For Dummies book on amazon, but I've only read the first chapter as a free preview which contains generic advice with few details. I imagine there are more comprehensive collections available.
When I was reading about the elevatorgate flamewar I wondered if perhaps a lot of the people arguing with each other were actually arguing past the elephant in the room; society is currently structured so that it is common and considered normal to put people into social situations that they find very uncomfortable. For instance, who thinks it would be fun and not awkward to get into a 5 by 5 foot windowless room with a complete stranger, close the door, wait 30 seconds (probably without speaking or looking at each other), and then leave? And yet we have elevators everywhere. Originally there were human elevator operators which at least meant you weren't alone with a stranger in a claustrophobic box. Would open-air elevators or monitored security cameras or reintroducing human elevator operators or replacing elevators with stairs have prevented elevatorgate? Possibly.
Yeah, I think we do need to schelling points. I think that many of the worst creepers would ignore them (and then it would be obvious that they were ignoring them and they could be stopped) and other people would be able to conform without confusion.
Not many people would be willing to climb stairs to get to the twentieth floor. Some people (e.g. my very sedentary and morbidly obese grandmother) wouldn't even be able to do that.
It's interesting that the creation of a social awkwardness device is essentially the only reason we have high-rise buildings in the first place. Note that malls, which must make significant efforts to attract people and make them feel comfortable (and ready to spend money), either make limited use of elevators or actually do make them transparent. Escalators wouldn't work for anything more than a few floors. Like you mentioned, stairs don't work either. We need levitation (or at least pneumatic) tubes!
Whether a man is allowed to touch a woman or isn't can depend on the man. If the man feels good and is relaxed he is allowed more touching. If he's high status he's also allowed to initiate more physical contact.
If a guy wants to be seen as non creepy, trying to figure out the rules of etiquette that are valid for a high status member in his group might not be enough. Books are problematic. If you read a book you might see that high status members of your group don't follow the etiquette of the book.
There are basically two ways: (1) Learn to feel when you make other people uncomfortable. (2) Follow a set of rules that make your interactions safe.
If I may argue from anecdote for a bit:
I was at a party a while back where I made a somewhat sexual joke and the people in that conversation (probably more female than male, I can't remember; my social scene is lopsided towards women) all laughed. A couple of minutes later, another guy made the same exact joke with a different group of people at the party and his reception was a lot less warm than mine (some people groaned).
I could only explain why this happened as a result of relative status in a social group. Status seems to determine who is "creepy" and who is "not creepy" even if they are using the same words. Of course I'm tall and in good shape while the other guy isn't so much. So I think that factors into status as well; the first thing that people are going to do when trying to describe "non-creepy" behavior is imagine Brad Pitt or someone who they already are attracted to, and then proceed to describe their ideal encounter with this hypothetical attractive person.
I liltle touch in the upper arm(women) in dating situations make a difference(signal high status), but could end very bad, if is a overeaction.
I remain badly uncomfortable with this portrayal of the situation as "High status men are permitted to touch arbitrary women in their social group more," and this being presumed to be the same as "Women are more happy when high status men touch them [than when low-status men do.]" I can allow someone to touch me for a lot of reasons: fear, paralysis, having been Psychology-of-Persuasion'd into it, being friends with them, being ecstatic about something unrelated, sexual or aesthetic attraction. However, I have good reason to believe that nearly all men don't just want to touch women, they want to touch women and have those women be happy about it, in the moment and afterwards. For certain when I think about touching someone, I'm displeased at the thought of them pretending to enjoy it and feeling vaguely skeeved, but not knowing why/not thinking they have the ability to prevent me from doing so.
A woman who's afraid to resist the touch in the moment might still label the guy afterwards as a creep. When I said allowed, I meant behavior that doesn't lead to being labeled creepy.
When it comes to the girl being happy about being touched things can be more complex. Most people find being tickled a bit uncomfortable. Some guysenjoy tickling a girl even if the girl would prefer in the moment not to be tickled.
Tickling a girl communicates "We have a relationship where I have the power to tickle you without negative consequences for myself". It's demonstration of power. If the girl goes along with it, she recognises the power. It demonstrates status to other people who are watching.
Successful demonstration of power can increase the amount of attraction that a girl feels. Jerks who demonstrate power have more success with girl than nice guys who don't.
The pickup literature is full with advice that suggest that being "nice" isn't enough to create attraction. Unfortunately that frequently leads to guy's behaving in creepy ways. They try to act like they have social power that they don't have.
This is funny to me, because the first time I met a group of Less Wrongers, one of them tickled me a day or two into us having met. However, the person in question was MBlume, who is known to not be scary.
Most of the purposes of LW meetups aren't to be venues for seduction, and the riskier styles have noticeable odds of guaranteeing that some women won't come back.
I myself wouldn't use LW meetups as venues for seduction. I would however guess that most of the people who act creepy on LW meetups do see them as venues for seduction. If you want to convince those people to change their behavior I think it makes sense to speak in a language that they are more likely to understand.
If you use the kind of language in which the main post of this discussion is posted, I think you are unlikely to reach the people who pose the problem. If my intended audience wouldn't be the people who pose the problem but the people who are fluent in deconstrutivist language I would speak differently.
Another piece would be learning how to recognize when people are attracted to you-- a fair number of people (perhaps especially geeks) aren't reliably good at that.
It's an important skill but it's not enough. Even a girl that's attracted to you can get uncomfortable if you touch her too much.
A shy girl might get uncomfortable with physical touch from a guy she's attracted to. Another girl who isn't attracted to the same guy might find the same amount of physical touch acceptable.
Yes. I creeped out girls who had cold-approached me first a few times in the past.
Wow, that's impressive. :)
I agree with your comment.
It's just that noticing when someone is attracted to you frequently gets left out of advice.
I'm selfishly glad my husband was late in learning that. If he'd learned sooner, he'd have been married to someone else long before we met. :-)
Were they really? Here in France, when you meet a woman you kiss her on the cheek, but when you meet a man you shake his hand; you use different pronouns ("vous" or "tu" - cognates to "you" and "thou" in English) depending on the relative status of your interlocutor (and other things); in many western countries (the US more than France; though it seems) it still seems expected for a man to buy an overpriced piece of rock to the woman he's planning to marry and not the other way around, etc. - we have plenty of rules that depend on gender! (probably more than on class)
I think that what happened is that there was an effort to increase fairness by removing some discriminating rules, which meant those rules became weaker, but also more likely to be tacit: since Victorian society didn't consider gender equality to be a major principle, there wasn't anything wrong with spelling out the norms that regulated gender relations (unless they went against other values of the time). Now nobody wants to sound sexist; so people have to figure the rules out on their own.
Is it a social blunder not to kiss a woman on the cheek when you meet her? On the same level as asking her out in an elevator at 4 AM? To be honest I'm not sure how strict the rules of etiquette were in the old days, but I think there's a distinction between customs and etiquette. Customs are things most people do and are comfortable with and no one really objects. Not following expected etiquette causes discomfort and potentially emotional harm.
I wonder how much influence etiquette has on a man buying a diamond for a woman and how much influence marketing has. In fact, I wonder just how much of our current etiquette (or at least our customs) has been caused directly by marketing and popular entertainment. I suspect we treat each other a lot like we see people being treated on TV and in movies, rather than how they would like to be treated.
Not really a social blunder, just possibly slightly awkward, depending of the context. When I arrived in France as a little kid I found all that kissing disgusting and recoiled when someone would try to kiss me on the cheek. I later forced myself to suffer the ordeal in order to fit in socially. Now it's pretty much a habit, so I wouldn't be surprised if I eventually accidentally creeped out an American girl by kissing her on the cheek.
As I understand it, the use of diamonds in engagement and wedding rings was the result of an advertising campaign by DeBeers, but I'd say they actually managed to establish a custom-- one which would endure for quite a while even if DeBeers ceased to exist. It might even endure in the highly unlikely event that advertising ceased to exist.
Dunno about French, but I think that in most languages with such a system the V form is getting rarer and rarer. For example, in Italian the rule used to be that one only used “tu” with friends, family and children/teenagers (of course this is only as precise as one's definition of “friend”, but still); but nowadays one uses it with everybody except superiors and people obviously (at least a decade) older than oneself (with the weird result that someone in their 20s is more likely to be addressed as “tu” by a stranger in their 40s than by a stranger in their 70s). In English too, addressing people as “Firstname” vs “Mr Lastname” is roughly equivalent, and the latter is becoming rarer and rarer.
In Spanish, at least, it varies by region, and some places have dropped the familiar in favor of the formal. English did the same thing.
Yup, the usage is following the same evolution in France - there are also similar usages in China (ni vs. nin) that are disappearing.
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.
In places where there is a socially determined reputation, that's exactly what it's like.
Oh, I don't disagree that happens. But it's not what this thread — and, particularly, the "how not to be creepy" sources in the OP — are about.
The first paragraph, specifically, is more relevant. I don't really think anyone here is planning on maliciously accusing anyone else of being creepy in order to exploit the representativeness heuristic. But I'm worried that someone with good intentions might move too quickly in determining whether someone is really creepy or not, and that bad consequences would result.
The key is just to question whether a noncreepy person could also have reasons for engaging in behavior X, before concluding that they're creepy and then immediately proceeding to take action. If there's no reminder to look for what does or does not distinguish the two people then you'll end up privileging whatever hypothesis you already had in mind, which as a result of this post would be the creepiness hypothesis.
Does the label and motive matter?
Or is the important thing whether someone is engaging in a behaviour that they have control over, that is having negative consequences, and they are failing to take steps to change this even when the negative consequences are pointed out to them?
Not all actions which are labeled creepy have negative consequences or are exclusive to creepy people. If someone does an action without negative consequences but that action is then labeled creepy prematurely without considering the motive behind it, then this premature labeling will have negative consequences. Bad labels mean bad models of reality which result in bad decisions. Mistaking someone for a creep when they're not precludes making friends with a potentially good person, and means your predictions of their behavior will be wrong.
You say that "they are failing to take steps to change this even when the negative consequences are pointed out to them". I am confused. You seem to be envisioning a very specific type of scenario here, and I don't know why you think that I would be envisioning the same scenario. Since when did my argument get restricted to instances where someone has been confronted with their creepiness and refused to change? My argument is meant to encourage caution in the people here are considering experiences from their own lives and trying to determine who is and isn't creepy, on a general overall sort of level, not to this very specific kind of instance that you mention.
But the point is potentially relevant to any discussion where the label "creepy" is being applied.
POST IDEA- Feedback Wanted
When these gender discussions come up, I am often tempted to write in with my own experiences and desires. But I generally don't because I don't want to generalize from one example, or claim to be the Voice of Women, etc. However, according to the last survey, I actually AM over 1% of the females on here, and so is every other woman. (i.e. there are less than 100 of us).
My idea is to put out a call for women on LessWrong to write openly about their experiences and desires in this community, and send them to me. I will anonymize them all, and put them all up under one post.
This would have a couple of benefits, including:
Anonymity allows for open expression- When you are in the vast minority, speaking out can feel like "swimming upstream," and so may not happen very much.
Putting all the women's responses in one posts helps figure out what is/is not a problem- Because of the gender ratio, most discussions on the topic are Men Talking About what Women Want, it can be hard to figure out what women are saying on the issues, versus what men are saying women say.
The plural of anecdote is data- If one woman says X, it is an anecdote, and very weak evidence. If 10% of women say X, it is much stronger evidence.
Note that with a lot of the above issues, one of the biggest problems in figuring out what is going on isn't purposeful misogyny or anything. Just the fact that the gender ratio is so skewed can make it difficult to hear women (think picking out one voice amongst ten). The idea I'm proposing is an attempt to work around this, not an attempt to marginalize men, who may also have important things to say, but would not be the focus of this investigation.
Even with a sample size of 10 responses (approximately the amount I would say is needed for this to be useful), according to the last survey, that is 10% of the women on this site. A sizable proportion, indeed.
Please give feedback, if you think this is a good or bad idea, and if you are a woman (or transgendered person, or female-identifying, or...etc), if you would participate. I will only run this experiment if a) people want it, and b) women will respond.
I would be game for this. In fact, I've pretty much been going round doing this where I thought people were failing to understand how women worked anyway. This is a great way of avoiding generalising from one example though, which from what I've noticed of posts on the subject of women, happens a lot.
Just also remember that this isn't going to give helpful advice unless we can all learn to stop saying things that we say and really don't mean. I might be generalising from one example again, but women often rationalise more than men, so it's hard for us to speak in an unbiased way about our actual preferences. It took me a lot of effort just to learn /when/ I was rationalising, let alone fix it.
There's already the option of doing this through alternate accounts.
Two points:
1) Alternate accounts are suspect to manipulation (anyone can create an account claiming anything), and as such what they say carries little weight. The cohesive post will have the added weight that the submissions will be verified as being written by actual female Less Wrongers, and not sock puppets with 0 karma. Also, some posters might be ok having their name associated at the level of "I wrote A submission" versus "I wrote THIS submission."
2) If you post on your own, rather than as a group, you will still run into the difficulty of being overpowered by the amount of male voices, so either few will hear you, or you'll be one against many, or you'll be taken as "single anecdote/ feminazi" rather than "The Women of Less Wrong"
That seems like enough of a trivial inconvenience to deter a lot of people, even if it was being actively encouraged in some context similar to this one. Sending a PM to Daenerys seems much less inconvenient, if more work for her.
If you do this you could also make a small poll for the participants; numbers are easier to skim and to regroup than anecdotes are.
Anyway, I think this is a good idea, whatever form it takes.
Is there a missing word after "small"?
ETA: I probably should have sent that by private message
Yep, fixed, thanks.
I'm .8 confident it won't turn up anything surprising enough to make it worth your effort, but if you're motivated to expend the effort anyway, I'd certainly read the results. I'm cis-male, so pretty much irrelevant to the effort other than as a reader.
I wonder if there's a general rule about how confident you should be there.
Dunno. What confidence level would you consider appropriate?
I could have said "I'm pretty confident..." or "I don't expect it to turn up anything..." or something along those lines, but I figure I have more of a chance of calibrating my confidence levels if I state them more precisely in the first place.
I don't know. I'm mostly musing about whether "it won't turn up anything surprising" is already contained in the concept of a confidence level, or else whether there is a particular confidence level at which you expect to not be surprised.
Put another way, when do you expect to be surprised?
Well, for example, if more than a third of the women responding reported never experiencing any unpleasant experiences of the sort described, that would surprise me.
I actually am very curious to the responses, but whether the results are surprising or not, I think another value it would have is as a place to point people to. For example, Norm New-Guy or Felicity the Feminist says "I think X is a problem," you can point them to the narratives, and say "8/10 women disagree." (or vice versa)
Also, even if there are no "surprises" per se, it could still be enough to redefine your hypothesis space. For example, maybe before the results, I would guess that any one of six issues might be occurring to effect the gender ratio. After reading the samples, I notice that most the results focus on only 3 of my original issues, and maybe there is a new one women were discussing, that although it wasn't in my original hypothesis space, wasn't necessarily "surprising" (depending on your definition- perhaps you hadn't thought of it yourself, but when someone said it, it made sense. I can see how you'd consider this a "surprise" though.)
In general, when making an example that could equally be made in either direction, I think it's best to go the direction against what you think - or what others think you think.
So in the same way I think Yvain's post would have been improved if his examples had been against positions he held, so too you might in future want your examples to be phrased more like
Obveously this is a purely about reducing system 1 negative reactions to posts and demonstrating an ability to visualise the other side's hypothesis, and not a content issue at all. It's much like the motivation behind Politics is the Mind Killer.
Thanks! I like this idea a lot, and have changed the relevant example accordingly.
This seems interesting. There have been threads on specifically female viewpoints before, but the anonymity is a wrinkle that no one's tried yet as far as I know. Go for it; the worst that can happen is not turning up anything new.
(Well, I suppose the short-term worst that can happen might involve stirring up resentment that's been obscured for social reasons and that turning into a fight, but in the long run that resentment either is or isn't there already.)
I'm unclear on what exactly I would tell you, but assuming there exists a useful answer to that question other than "y'know, stuff", I'm game. Also, given that there are so few, anonymity may not be anonymity (my writing style's probably recognizable to some; any individual incident I've probably already told all my friends about so it'll be recognized at least by those; etc.); how would you work around that?
I'm expecting few enough responses that I'm willing to work with people on a case-by-case basis. For example, for you I could edit your writing towards my own style, or even (so long as it's not pages) read it, wait an hour, and re-write it in my own voice, if needed (going back to make sure all relevant details are added in)
Discussing individual incidents is a bit trickier. In general, I would like to keep the narratives individual-specific. (i.e. "Lady Q writes: <insert her text >" , rather than "Thoughts on Question X: <insert all the paragraphs from different people on Question X >") . Otherwise, the concern would be unable to differentiate between 10 women writing 1 good thing and 2 bad things each, OR 9/10 women wrote 1 good thing, and 1 woman writes 20 bad things.
That said, I do see the use of an "Anonymous Incidents" section, where people can put identifying incidents they would like to discuss, without associating it with the rest of their narrative. Do you think that would solve this issue?
I don't have a clear picture of what this would look like.
I think I can illustrate with an example. Let me know if this helps!
Jane submits her narrative to the post. One paragraph in her narrative describes an incident that many people would recognize as her. Jane wants to mention this incident, but does not want to associate it with the rest of her narrative, because then people who could recognize that single incident, will know that the rest of the narrative is also hers. She pulls out the identifiable incident to be placed in a "Anonymous Comments" section that is not linked to the rest of her narrative. It is still somewhat anonymous, in that her name isn't on it, and only the people who already know the story realize it is hers. But they can not trace knowledge of that particular story back to the rest of her narrative.
The post layout would be something like:
Okay. But what is the content of "whee, I'm a narrative"?
By "narrative", I am referring to the bulk of whatever Jane wrote. Probably items such as answering the questions upvoted in the forum. It would be everything Jane submitted to me, modulo the paragraph or two that she wanted placed in the "Comments" section instead, because they are incidents known to be hers.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the phrase "Anonymous Comments". The narratives are also anonymous. The Comments section is what allows them to be so, by having somewhere else to place Obviously-Jane material. In fact, the Comments section is probably even LESS anonymous than the narratives, because they are composed of identifiable material that you don't want associated with your super-anonymous narrative....
Um.....feel free to suggest better words than "Narrative" or "Comments section"... I don't think I'm explaining well. :P
All of the other stuff you have to say that wouldn't be easily identified as something said by you.
This comment actually gave me An Idea, so thank you!
Idea- In the Call for Responses post, there could be a Ask the Women thread, where people can submit questions. If you want a question answered, upvote it.
When the women write their responses, they can use the questions as prompts. A question that gets many upvotes will probably be written on by more women, thus getting more data. But if you want to respond to a more lower voted question, you can (or just say whatever you want to say)
I would say that the submitted questions will be assumed to be answered using Crocker's Rules, no exceptions. What we want is a more stream-of-consciousness, gut-level reaction . Not self-censored, want-to-be-polite-and-concise, filtered answers.
Some topics for the call for responses I would propose:
Occasions when a man was creepy towards you at a social event.
Occasions when a woman was creepy towards you at a social event.
Occasions you met a new male friend at a social event, and how it wasn't creepy, and what was fun/interesting/good about it.
Occasions you met a new female friend at a social event, and how it wasn't creepy, and what was fun/interesting/good about it.
(I mean new friend in the sense that you didn't know them, not that they were already a new friend before the event)
"This has never happened to me" would also be a useful response.
All of the above questions could be answered for either lesswrong-related events, or social events in general.
Occasions (or general patterns) when someone tried too hard to not be creepy toward you and displeased you as a result.
(Some of the policies that get tossed around are pretty extreme, so I'd be interested in measuring the overcompensation risk.)
I'm really curious what this would turn up (and I wonder if it'll bring up things that no one woman would say by themselves to everyone on the site), so I definitely think it should happen!
Shouldn't the rejection of creepy/non-conformist-in-general behavior be a reaction to be overcome, not something to be accommodated?
Depends how reliable a signal of threat it is, and also on how we feel about sexual status markers. As others have noted, the behavior that gets labeled "creepy" covers a pretty wide spectrum -- sometimes it's a reliable indication that the person you're dealing with is sexually threatening, sometimes it's an indication of inexperience or low status but not a strong marker of threat, and occasionally it shows up due to conflicting social protocols even when both parties are high-status and nonthreatening.
The latter's straightforwardly something to overcome, or at least to recognize and route around. The former's straightforwardly adaptive. It's the "indicator of low status" category that gets ambiguous, but I don't think it's obvious that we'd be better off if our concept of sexual status was weakened or abolished.
On the other hand, if something in our culture (rather than our basic emotional machinery) is causing us to unnecessarily conflate low status with actual threat, then that also seems suboptimal; even if the subject would be rejected either way, it can't be pleasant for either party for him to be assumed dangerous. In that case the fault's in the culture, though, not in the emotional reaction.
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.
These aren't mutually exclusive choices.
If someone is violently allergic to peanuts, I certainly endorse them overcoming that reaction if they're able to do so (e.g., if there's a viable cure for peanut allergies available) but I also endorse accommodating it (e.g., by not putting peanuts in their food).
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.)
While this kind of advice seems useful, I do wish those articles you linked wouldn't attempt to stay gender-neutral: many of our social norms are gender-specific, and describing them with minimal reference to gender is going to be inaccurate!
In addition to that, the gender ratio in this community and in many nerdy/geeky communities (open source, sci-fi fandom, atheism, etc.) means that a majority of the "creepiness problem" is going to be a guy creeping out a girl, and not some other combination - since that's the kind of interaction that needs the most "fixing", why not focus exclusively on it?
It's nice to try to find a general rule that applies to many cases, but if you're giving a talk to a bunch of people about to go camping and hiking in British Columbia, "How to avoid getting mauled to death by a Grizzly Bear" is more useful than "How to avoid large carnivores, like Tigers, Bears and Lions".
Yes, but the gender-specific aspects vary from culture to culture, even within the First World. (Silly example: it is normal throughout Italy to greet a female friend by kissing her on the cheeks, but greeting a male friend that way is normal for some Italians, unusual for others --i.e. they only do that with close friends they haven't seen in a while--, and almost unthinkable for others still.)
Sure! But the gender-invariant rules also vary from culture to culture.
(I'm French by the way, we have the same cheek-kissing as you italians, and I think neither of us hugs nearly as much as those weird Americans)
And "what creeps a person out" varies between cultures and also significantly within a culture.
Is anyone else distressed by the fact that, at the time of writing this comment, all of the "Recent Comments" displayed on the front page of the site are on a topic called "How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy"?
I'm not usually the kind of person who worries about "marketing" considerations, but....
Discussion section, ffs!
Since this comment got more upvotes than the article itself, I'm moving to Discussion.
It won't help.
ADBOC to the first link in this context — its tone is appropriate if the target audience is unrepentant creepers* who need to be shamed into shaping up**, but as advice to random people who may or may not behave creepily, it feels way too aggressive, like it's presuming guilt. (The third link, on the other hand, is great tone-wise.)
* A narrower category than "people who behave creepily some of the time".
** Not that I would expect it to work well; most people wouldn't consider the author a moral authority who's entitled to shame them. Behavior modification is hard.
Not a moral authority for most people who might stumble upon the post, sure, but I would guess that Scalzi is a reasonable facsimile of such of person for the audience of SFF fandom and con attendees at whom the post was more specifically aimed. He's perhaps not a "moral authority" but he is a person of sufficiently high status in that community that his words would carry some weight.
As for tone, it seems pretty typical of Scalzi-style prose, so again, for his main audience of fans, I don't know that tone would be a problem. The follow-up post linked on the page also seems to do a fair job explaining why the post is not just targeted to unrepentant creepers but also applies to people who may quite accidentally veer into that territory without even realizing it, and details how he has had to consciously check himself from doing so on occasion.
In context, it was literally about an unrepentant creeper.
I mean in the context of this LW post. Also, the title "An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping" strongly suggests an intended audience of not-necessarily-creepers.
Yes, but in terms of the actual historical context of the blog post, it was spurred into existence due to a nonrepentant creeper and a conversation springing from that.
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.
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.
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." ?
If you think that is your best course of action, then by all means follow it. That wasn't the point I was trying to make (like I said, I think decreasing creepiness is a good thing). Although I would suggest that if you really want to improve social skills, you can do much better by reading Luke's post on romance and accompanying references. Also, by reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. Take this with a grain of salt as I haven't read the books myself but am mainly going off of skimming the subject matter. (You may wonder why something on romance matters for non-creepiness; it's not as directly related as I would like, but creepiness is essentially the result of unwanted sexual advances, which can be as implicit as a guy showing inordinately high amounts of attention towards a girl that is not attracted to him.)
The point I was trying to make was that this post would be analogous to the situation where, say, Luke or Yvain were to write a post that was substantially and obviously technically incorrect, but such that following the advice in that post was better than not doing anything. I therefore disagree with JoeW's claim that poor reception towards this post indicates sexism (although there are plenty of comments elsewhere in this thread that do indicate sexism, or at least extreme social naievete, as well as plenty of comments coming from poorly-thought-out feminist positions; there are also plenty of comments that indicate not sexism but a valid critique of the poorly-thought-out feminist positions, as well as well-thought-out feminist positions; the story is not as black-and-white as most are trying to make it out to be, and there is plenty of noise and bias to go around).
You are looking at this as being advice aimed at the person being creepy, and evaluating whether the information in the links would be practical at helping them improve their social skills.
Have you considered it from the perspective of it being aimed at someone who is uncertain about the validity of their feeling there is something wrong in a group, and whether the information in the links would help them identify the problem and confirm to them that it is actually a problem that they do have a right to have addressed?
Ah, I misinterpreted your original comment and did not realize you were the OP. Re-reading the top-level post, I now realize that you did in fact intend this to be aimed not just at the perpetrators but at the community as a whole.
I now feel slightly confused about something, but it's hard to point to what exactly. So instead of trying to figure it out, let me just re-iterate that I approve of the point that if anyone feels uncomfortable it is the group's responsibility to fix that. I also approve of global over local (i.e. this person is here to hang out with all the other people here, not for my sole benefit). I suspect that a large portion of the people on this thread would also approve of both of these. The issue seems to be more the part where the links are also framed as social advice, where I now (I think?) see that they were not intended as such, but instead as a set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons.
I am probably at fault for this, but I did not understand any of that until I reread the OP. I interpreted it in the context of intended social advice. If other people did as well, I think that explains some of the reactions (but not all of them --- I think some of it results from having previously had bad experiences with feminist memespace, in the same way that some of the anti-FAI / anti-SingInst discussion results from having had bad experiences with the FAI/SingInst memespace). If it is not too late, your cause may be helped by unambiguously reframing it in the way you intended (if I am correct about what you intended).
I wasn't sure of the etiquette about editing top level posts.
I've now added a clarification to the end of the post. Thank you for the suggestion.
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'm sorry, do you have actual evidence that reading Yet Another List of Don'ts will "quickly level you up" in this field? Or that the TC is an expert? Or that they are even high-value resources? Can you identify even one person that has (as you put it) gained a few levels from these resources?
Being extremely doubtful of this parallel you've made, I can't buy your claim that this is being treated differently.
I saw the main gains of the top post being the links. I don't agree that the links contain only "don'ts"... but, well, so what if they did? If there are clumsy don'ts as routine mistakes, learning to recognise and avoid them is surely an improvement?
As these aren't academic peer-reviewed articles, I can't give you objective evidence in the form of citations and impact measures. What sort of metrics could one provide that would make them more convincingly expert? If these aren't the best experts available I too would like to know who is better so as to learn more.
If you're saying you'll accept anecdotes as weak evidence, then yes, I am one data point there. :) Comments particularly on the pervocracy and Captain Awkward links contain other such claims.
As many have said - both here, and perhaps ironically, in many of those links too - it's more productive to focus on behaviours rather than on labels for people. "Creeper" is a very laden term, probably very similar to "racist" - most of us don't want to think of ourselves as someone with all the imputed characteristics of those labels, and we get defensive.
When I started being able to focus on behaviours (my own and others'), I recognised a number of ways in which my own biases, ignorance and negligence were costing me flawless victories in many social & business settings. This is why I wonder why there's so much pushback, as the upgrades in general communication/social/people skills from a good reading of privilege and social justice are useful everywhere.
Rationality & intelligence should win, right? If smart women with better people skills than us have specific practical advice, how can we lose by listening carefully and bypassing our defensiveness? Even if only 1% of it were useful, don't you want that 1%? I do.
For the reason I gave earlier: the weird stuff happens because they don't know what the superior option is, not because they're under the impression that it was a great idea all along. Moreover, to borrow from EY's felicitous phrasing, non-wood is not a building material, non-selling-apples is not a business plan, and non-hugs-without-asking is not a social adeptness enhancement method.
you should probably avoid implying that they met such a standard with a statement like:
I accept anecdotes as weak evidence. I accept self-reports as weak(er) evidence. I do not, however, accept that this evidence suffices given the strength of your claim (and confidence in it), nor do I accept the comparison to the other articles you mentioned.
These are good points, and I don't have great answers to them.
My weak answer is that in a field that isn't well represented in peer-reviewed academic journals, we still have to sift it by some measures. I agree self-reports are close to worthless - we could find self-reports extolling the virtues of astrology and homeopathy.
My other weak answer is that Elevator-Gate and responses to the discussion of forming a Humanist+ community make it abundantly clear that the atheist/rationalist movement is widely perceived by a lot of smart women as both passively a horrible place to be and actively hostile to anyone who says so. I haven't tried exhaustive online searches but I'm not finding even 1% of the same data volumes from women saying they find atheist/rationalist space actively attractive because of these attitudes.
I like your point about non-wood, but if someone tells you you are stepping on their foot, non-stepping-on-feet probably does need to figure prominently in your short term decision tree.
(Great link, it's short, it's to the point.)
If someone is routinely stepping on feet, it would make more sense to find out why, and offer non-destructive ways of accomplishing that. For example, if they're stepping on feet to get attention, then offering the general rule of "don't step on feet" is just setting yourself up to write an unending list of articles about "... or lift people in the air", "... or play airhorns", "...or dress as a clown", etc.
(And I know, "you're not obligated to fix other people's problems", but once you've decided to go that route, you should take into account which methods are most effective, and "don't [do this specific failure mode]" isn't it.)
I find I agree with everything you've said, yet I'm still wondering what happens to the poor person whose foot has been stood on.
Perhaps I'm just restating and agreeing with "no obligation to fix others", but the comments in the CaptainAwkward link address this specifically: the approach you describe still makes the person transgressing boundaries the focus of our attention and response. I find that caring about why someone routinely steps on feet is quite low on my list, and (perhaps this is my main point) something I'm only willing to invest resources in once they (1) stop stepping on people's feet and (2) agree and acknowledge they shouldn't be stepping on feet.
I'm also a bit skeptical of the idea you peripherally touch on, but we're seeing in a lot of the comments in this post, that avoiding the "creeper" equivalent on stepping on toes is a tough bar to clear and is unfair to ask of someone with deficits in social/people/communication skills. I think it's very telling that such people seldom seem to get into boundary-related trouble with anyone they recognise as more powerful than them (law enforcement; airport security; workplace bosses).
There was that study about (average, neurotypical) men's supposed deficits in reading indirect communication compared to women that found that it's basically rubbish - they can do it when they think they have to, and they don't with women because they think they don't have to. (Link is to non-academic summary, but has the links to the journal articles.)
I'm wandering well past your point here but you reminded me of this. :)
Certainly, if your main priority is stopping this behavior, that affects how your respond to it. But once you've decided to write articles telling the creeps how to act at events, and the advice is something other than "never go to events, just be alone", then I think you need to offer advice more than "don'ts".
And so if you've closed off the "they should just go away" route, then I think you have no choice but to offer solutions that avoid having to write the infinite list of articles about "... or dance Irish jigs at random, either". And that means saying what to do right.
I've never suggested that. That is an easy bar to clear indeed. My point is that clearing every such bar without positive advice (about what to do rather than not do) is hard. And so, again, you can certainly take the "who cares if they just never come at all?" approach, but since these articles don't go that way, they have to do better than "don'ts".
How is that relevant to the non-neurotypical creep type we're concerned about here?
I am willing to attempt a separate Discussion post that attempts to put together specific, practical, measurable "do this (and here's why)" techniques from a rationalist approach. (Or as close as possible; there won't be a lot of peer-reviewed scholarly research here, but there is some.)
If there's interest in this, I'd welcome assistance and critiques. I'm not stonewalling but I'm feeling we've wandered a bit too far from the OP.
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.
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.
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.
Actually society mostly has no problem at all with these behaviours, which is why the creeper memes flourish. The success of high-status creepers critically relies on this.
But if I grant you your point, I'm reading what you say as the benefit of not being a creeper is conformity with supposed anti-creeper norms. Is that what you meant? Because if so, er, I would have thought the benefits of not being a creeper were the upgrades from no longer seeing women chiefly (or solely) as mating opportunities.
It 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, 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?
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.)
Naively, I thought the LessWrong commitment to being, well, less wrong, would extend to all opportunities to be less wrong.
I know attempts to discuss privilege here have typically not gone well, which is a pity because I think there's some good argument that privilege is itself a cognitive bias - a complex one, that both builds on and encourages development of others.
It's not clear to me that privilege is a bias of its own, so much as aspects of privilege are examples of other biases, like availability bias.
I think the primary reason that attempts to discuss privilege don't go well is because the quality of most thought on privilege is, well, not very good. People who volunteer to speak on the topic generally have strong enough opinions that they can't help but moralize, which is something to resist whenever possible.
I think another problem with discussions of privilege is that they frequently sound as though some people (in the ways that they're privileged) should have unlimited undefined obligations and other people (in the ways that they're not privileged) should have unlimited social clout.
Or is that what you mean by moralizing?
I would love to see a discussion of privilege in terms of biases. Obvious ones include: attribution errors (fundamental & ultimate); system justification; outgroup homogeneity & ingroup superiority biases.
I hadn't considered the availability heuristic but yes, that's probably relevant too.
There's also the fundamental attribution error ("they're not doing a good job because they're just lazy").
That's actually a really interesting thought. I am white and male and straight and am very aware of my privilege, and also am very interested in heuristics and biases and how they are part of our thought patterns. I consider myself very much a feminist, and also a realist in terms of how people actually work compared with how people would like each other to work. I might brood on this for a bit and write about it.
This could be something that's kicked around in Discussions for a while perhaps?
Related, I'd like to see defensiveness discussed through the lens of cognitive bias. It has wide impact; it can be improved; improving it likewise has wide impact on one's life. I think it's one of those meta-levels of improvement where upgrades significantly affect our ability to upgrade many other things.
Of course, but you don't get surprised when we turn out to be a bunch of apes after all.
The function of JoeW's comment is not informing you "I put P(LWers behaving badly)<.05" but "If I remind LWers of a virtue they profess to like, they may alter their behavior to be more in line with that virtue."
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.
Furthermore, PUA often seems very focused on specifically-sexualized enviroments in which nobody is actually speaking directly (A particular sort of high-class Los Angeles nightclub seems to be the original target) and really ruthlessly optimizing.
Plus wayyyyyyyy too much Dark Arts.
I actually taught my girlfriend some of the PUA stuff so that she's better at seducing me! (with success)
I hope that doesn't make me any of those things :p
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?
Time and effort spent are a very real costs as is opportunity cost.
I'm not sure why women who are alienated by PUA would be off the table as potential romantic partners. I'm sure it has a cost, but I'm not sure the kind of person who sough out PUA in the first place doesn't still have better odds using game and paying the price, rather than doing what he would have done before.
I'm sceptical of claims that PUA being practised in the wild is easy to spot. To bring in ancedotes from my social life, I've had both false positives and negatives when guessing which strangers (later acquaintances and friends) where running game and which had never heard of it.
I've had very positive experience talking to my gfs about game as I see and practice it (sprinkled with general Hansonian observations about status and behaviour), they are very interested and often talk to me about it. One became very enthusiastic to the point of reading the same gaming blogs as I do and reporting gossip in the jargon, which makes it almost fun to listen to. Not to mention the opportunity for great inside jokes. :)
I think it made communication about desire, sexuality, socialization and relationships easier. Maybe I would be even better off if I hadn't shared this interest or didn't have it in the first place, but I don't think that is the case.
That was my question though, albeit not stated so clearly: is it really an opportunity cost?
Does fetishising intelligence, sex positivity, communicative effectiveness, intersectional social justice, and active informed consent really turn off mainstream conventional women? Serious question; I seldom have relationships or sex outside that constellation of characteristics.
Some of these, yes. PUA makes it easier to connect with women who have no preference for thinking about sex/sexuality - or even gender relations - in such active and overt terms.
The thing is convincing people on the internet about something is very different from talking to people in your personal life.
I'm just wondering what is intersectional social justice? I found it challenging to unpack the meaning behind the words used in the wikipedia article. Please try to idiot proof the explanation in accordance with this while retaining as much accuracy as possible.
Agree and my own reaction took this a step further---I was glad to hear that JoeW, as someone who seems to affiliate with people politically opposed to PUA, got the impression that the PUA community felt no obligation to engage or respond. I would have thought less of the community if it did.
PUAs are not political activists. They are people who enjoy, practice and develop a specific set of skills with a specific purpose. Their comparative advantage really isn't in engaging in moral and political debate to convince others that they deserve respect, acceptance or special treatment. Moreover acting as if you need to justify yourself (or your group) to others already represents a significant loss of standing. That is one aspect of politics in general that PUAs should be expected to be familiar with, since it overlaps so much with the rules of the social game that they are dedicated to mastering.
(This is different from simply explaining their own personal ethical values completely divorced from any reference to external critics and in terms of conveying information rather than giving excuse. That is something that PUA-instructor types seem to enjoy doing.)
Here are a few quick counterexamples to your comments about zero-sum, lack of agency, lack of response to feminism, etc::
I think these should be sufficient to provide a shift in your opinion regarding what the field of "PUA" includes, even if you view these schools of thought as isolated examples. (They aren't the only such schools, of course; they just happen to be ones it was easy for me to find representative links for.)
Thank you, I'll take a look.
EDIT: Have read those links several times and digested them over the last few days. I am poking at why the third one bothers me (I think it's the "it's in their nature" statement).
Certainly the first two are good counter-examples to my earlier impressions. Thank you again.
See also Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, a substantial overview of different sorts of PUA, a woman's experiences exploring the PUA subcultures, and some theory on the subject.
Has anyone read the book?
She picks up on something I find off-putting about much of the PUA material I've seen (and LW is almost the only place that I've seen PUA material). It seems to be set in a universe where no one likes anybody.
It was written by a Less Wronger. I'm not sure whether that's ironic or not.
I read and enjoyed it.
That is actually a good way of stating the difference between the material that I don't like, vs. the material I do. People who focus on the zero-sum aspects of mating and dating (i.e. both inter- and intra-gender competition) seem, well, creepy to me.
I suppose those folks might write off my concerns as simply saying they're displaying low status by focusing on those aspects, but I think the real issue, as you state, is simply that they seem to live in a universe where nobody likes anybody or has any positive intentions, and people who think otherwise are all just signalling or deluded. It's like if HP:MoR's Professor Quirrel was giving relationship classes!
(Luckily, this is not a universal characteristic of PUA theory, as Soporno and AMP demonstrate.)
[Edit: brain fart - I wrote "non-zero sum" when I meant "zero sum"]