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Really? I think a big no would be a lot more off-putting than a small one. I can totally see myself bulldozing small nos and then taking a big one seriously.
Further, what the socially privileged think of as a "small no" is not recognizable as such to the socially unprivileged.
From the outside, "creepiness" looks a lot like "ew, he doesn't play the social game on my level and should therefore be reviled and shamed". I understand that there's more to it, but that particular aspect looks downright evil.
I used to offer numbers, but the incentives are such that I deliberately switched with exactly this in mind. If you want to fix this, give a fake number, say no, or somehow work on the incentives.
The other examples are worrying, but I'm unsure what to do with this information. I'm already afraid of women, how does it help me to know that some men aren't and it causes problems?
More generally:
I occasionally have these big updates where I realize that women aren't worth associating with. This post caused another one:
I am very sympathetic; I hate the idea of making someone else have a bad time; it's horrifying to me. Then all I hear about the internal experience of women is that interacting with men is uncomfortable and even frightening. This makes interacting with women quite distressing. I am constantly worrying about overstepping boundaries, interpreting subtle cues, etc, even when she's clearly responsive and wants it. So point one: interacting with women can sometimes be actively unpleasant.
I am attracted to women, which makes them seem far more interesting than they actually are. I have a very hard time disengaging from friendship with a woman even when it's clear it's no longer worth it for me. It also makes it hard to interact with women on an intellectual or friendship level without creepily dragging it towards sexuality like some kind of subhuman. I'm starting to really hate this. Maybe If I were asexual I could be friends with women. Point two and three: Women seem more interesting than they are, and I can't trust myself around women.
The worst part is that for whatever reason (bad socialization, lower intelligence variance), there are few women among the types of people I'm interesting in. Not much to say about this. Point four: there is a lower prior on a woman actually being interesting.
So summing up:
So, can someone remind me why I should go out of my way to adjust myself to be women-compatible? I've already given up on 95% of people, why not another 50% (actually more like 10%) of the remainder if it saves me trouble and improves my life?
Thanks for prompting this chain of thought. My life probably just got better.
Sorry for the horrible sexist rant. I'm going to go quit the internet for a while...
I can only think that what you're hearing from women about interacting with men is subject to a really odd selection effect.
Yes. Every time I read a post like this, I wonder "Where are all these horrible overtly sexist men? I have never spoken to one." I can't think of a single time I have witnessed or been subject to a man's overtly sexist behavior, let alone sexual harassment or assault.
But then, I might just be really fortunate. I don't have a good idea of the proportions here.
I'm willing to bet there are regional variations.
Oh, without a doubt. I also live in an enclave of (socially) liberal well-educated people and don't get out much except to hang out with more liberal well-educated people. So there's that.
I think environment and priming play a large factor. If you're comfortable somewhere than it's easier to shrug off potentially annoying behavior, and if you're somewhere you're expecting sexism (or simply primed to expect it from men in general) I think you're likely to notice it a lot more. I think this is part of the reason you get some people who are like "Ugh I see sexism everywhere it's horrible" and others go "I haven't noticed this so much"
Note that I was careful to say "overt" sexism. I haven't noticed anything that would make me say, "That person just did something obviously, unequivocally wrong." But I do notice sexism a fair amount, it's just usually of the "That person doesn't know any better/ is under the influence of a society that has subtly sexist beliefs, and I could very well make the same mistake when not paying attention" variety.
I wouldn't say odd, I'd say rather predictable. The unproblematic happy path is unremarkable, and rarely gets remarked on.
Man, you wrote so much, without being any specific about the most interesting (and probably most emotionally sensitive for you) part of your comment -- what exactly is your definition of "being subhuman"?
Because people can use the same words to mean totally different things, especially with words like that. I can imagine some specific meaning behind them, but your meaning could be miles away. You could be a rapist monster unable to control your impulses. Or you could be an oversensitive guy who feels guilty and depressed for getting a boner in a politically incorrect situation. Or anything between that.
Right. What do I mean by "subhuman"? It's probably a bad word to use.
Besides my wife, most of the value I get out of other people is intellectual. Sharing interesting ideas, working together on cool projects, pair programming, etc. I can do these things with the occasional interesting female, and it works for a while, but then it inevitably slides towards flirting and the subtle sexual dance. My thoughts turn towards sex, I start acting differently, sitting close, talking and making jokes, steering things towards sexual escalation, and so on. This is mostly uncontrollable; the meat does as it was programmed to. This ends up distracting from the real reason I might want to be friends with this person; they were intellectually interesting. (This has happened at least five times.)
So why "subhuman"? I've gotten pretty good at noticing the social game and the behavior protocols. People act a lot differently depending on attraction and the gender match; with men and women there's that flirty sexual undertone. It looks a lot like a dog sniffing another dog's butt and then executing different behaviors depending on the result; subconscious, nonsentient, animal behavior.
I think I should be able to treat women as people instead of just automatically executing this absurd mating dance to the detriment of my plans and interests. It's really frustruating to have the meat override me on this, and it makes me feel subhuman (have you read "Dune"? That kind of "subhuman").
So I'm not just oversensitive to political correctness or a rapist monster, I just resent that flirting has root access to my motivations and interferes with my friendships.
Of course the sexual dance is a fun and valuable part of being human, like eating, sleeping, and playing, but I have bigger plans right now and I resent that those things aren't optional.
As they say: the vodka is good but the meat is rotten. Seriously, I think you should just try to exert your self-control to the extent that you manage to, whenever you find that this might be a problem. Eventually, your behavior will improve and it will not require as much effort to maintain.
(Do realize however, that there's nothing wrong with light flirting persay. It's not even clear that it would hinder you from pursuing intellectual interests with your female friends.)
The point of my rant was that I've lost faith that it's worth it to bring out the big magical-free-will guns, as opposed to just disengaging.
Well, TBH, I'm still unsure about that. Have you been approaching this problem with a goal of changing your behavior for the better in the long term, as opposed to simply plowing through and overpowering your instincts occasionally? It could make a difference.
Moreover, it's possible (IMHO) that disengaging outright from socially interacting with women may not work well at all, in terms of helping you achieve your goals. Honestly, I find your experience to be mildly surprising. My understanding is that guys (or guys who have attained a reasonable level of maturity and self-knowledge, at any rate, as you surely have) do not typically have this kind of self-control problem.
Note that, if we assume that mating behavior approaches 0% of a social interaction without reaching it, experiencing this kind of problem depends on the ratio of self-knowledge to self-control.
What about interesting women that clearly aren't available or most likely don't find you attractive?
Thanks for being honest and open about this.
I agree that willpower isn't a solution. How much time have you spent brainstorming- literally and explicitly brainstorming- other solutions? There might be Third Alternatives out there which would allow you to enjoy the company of other women without sliding into those habits.
(Important addendum: when I have a problem this significant, I first brainstorm about any roots of the problem I can find, reducing it as far as possible: e.g. my issues with overcompetitiveness and anxiety boiled down in part to a defense strategy self-narrative I used unconsciously as a kid to feel better about having few friends, and realizing this made it easier to discard that self-narrative now that I have many friends. Only when I don't feel confused about the roots of the problem do I work on brainstorming explicit plans and actions.)
So, you are disgusted with biology in general, with the fact that biological programs have so much power over your mind. The male reproductive instincts are just one part of a larger repulsive whole, perhaps the part which interferes most strongly with your intellectual goals. Do I get that correctly?
How about women you don't find attractive?
Dunno. Can't think of any examples. Probably don't even notice them as people or something horrible like that.
That's a shame. I've had some very good close platonic relationships with men in the past (especially at university) where there's been a lack of attraction on both sides.
[I wasn't attracted to them, and since they were mostly single and generally pretty confident with women, it's likely they would have told me if they had been attracted to me].
I had this problem, and I eventually realized that some of the problem was I was poorly calibrated in my interpretation of certain signals from certain types of women. I interpreted the signals as "this woman is interesting," yet when I got to know those woman, I was not actually interested in their personality. I put a lot of effort into fixing this miscalibration, and I think it was worth the effort.
This is a learnable skill. The fact that some high status people don't bother to learn it is a separate issue.
In my experience, constantly bulldozing my small nos creates a lot of unhappiness for me. The stakes at issue when my consent is at issue is not closely correlated to how much I am upset when my consent is overridden.
Details?
I was interested in intellectual women, and somehow got it in my mind a that certain kind of contrarian signalling in women was evidence that they were intellectual.
Thus, I tried to spend more time with that type of woman, both as friends and potential partners. But that type of woman didn't find me very interesting. Several times, particular individuals were painfully careless with my emotions.
Eventually, I realized that (1) those types of people didn't find me interesting, and (2) I didn't actually find those types of people interesting. So whenever I received the contrarian signals and got a first impression that the sender was interesting to me, I would try to consciously remember what I'd learned.
In short, I realized I needed a better / more compatible group of friends, and went and found better friends. It hasn't been an unqualified success, but some of that is that I've invested time in things other than making friends - and Paul Graham is probably right that popularity is a skill, and needs an investment of time just like any other skill.
I'm interested in intellectual people, even angels or robots. The shape of their reproductive system is irrelevant.
I'm interested in doing the innate programmed courship dance that Nyan referred to, mostly with women
But in particular I am interested in doing the innate programmed courtship with intellectual women and that I never managed to do on the southern hemisphere.
I don't feel creepy or creepied around women. During the last 11 years, from 15 to 26, the majority of groups and classes I belonged to were mostly female (Theather, Psychology, Dance, Neighbors, travellers...)
I am interested in knowing whether it is impossible to keep intellectual with an attractive women as a straight male while doing the dancing.
The problems are many: As Nyan mentioned, due to biocultural heritage, women are less interesting on average. Males are attracted mostly to fertility characteristics, so I'll just want to do the dance with women who are less than 15 years older than me, have different genetic profiles, different immune system (smell good) and have the oh my goodness I hate evolution so much stupid, evil 0,7 waist to hip ratio. Words cannot express how I hate this fact, it's nearly as much as I hate ageing, yep, that much. So there's about 20% of my age women I'd like to do the dance with. 45% in northern areas where my genes are outliers.
To find the interesting ones, It is necessary to see through the thick signalling fog. Isn't it disgusting that the thickness is not only proportional to the attractiveness, but it is the attractiveness?
If that was not enough, let me remind you that the more attractive a woman is, the less incentives she'll have to bother being interesting beneath the fog.
There, here is the human condition. Thank you darwinian evolution for such a thoughful careful design of a hell worst than Dante's for anyone who wants to have a truly interesting women with whom he can interact both intellectually and do the sex dance...
Damn I wish all you Americans and European LW straight and quasi-straight guys have better world surrounding you for this goal than I do, and if not, I feel your pain.
And if you think girls have it good and easy, then 1) you didn't grasp the meaning of these entries 2)the comment below might help you change your mind
And if any male feels this is correct, then just begin to think how each of the items can be reversed, and how it is even ever more terrible to be a female that is reading that commentary, or things Unbelievably more stingy.
If you are a girl, a guy's fog is as thick as his attractiveness for the same reason, but he is also larger than you, and because in humans as a near-universal it is the woman that moves into a male's house/city/village/hut that fog not only keeps hidden the secret of the attractive and intellectual partner, but may sometimes be literally guarding the difference between life and death. Or at least having kids or not (if that is a value for you).
Women are not much socially smarter than man for nothing. They are smarter on social cues because they have much higher stakes if they access people incorrectly. A betrayed men usually will turn his rage on a woman. Whereas a woman that is betrayed will not turn hers into the man first, but the woman with whom he slept. This is not completely understood yet, but on thing is known, the guy is more dangerous than the woman.
If evolution has made being a male looking for a dance with intellectuals in Latin America hard, I can only begin to fathom how hard it must be to be a woman in some societies (!kung, Arabic, Yanomamo)....
Huge inferential distance between us. I don't understand your response, and I can't even tell if you agree or disagree with my comment.
Yes, it's common to find that offering numbers doesn't work very well. One common thing is to ask to exchange numbers.
You're going to have a bad time, especially since your emotional distress can be sensed by others and unconciously make them more wary as well. When in doubt, you need to project yourself as outcome independent, i.e. you should not care whether the other person is interested in you. You can make this easier by practicing social interaction with other sorts of people, where sexuality or things like that are not going to be an issue.
There is something wrong about things when the people who care the most are the ones who are most likely to fail.
And I don't mean wrong as in incorrect. It's just a horrible way for the world to work.
The trouble is that multiple meanings of 'care' are involved here. If I'm a really good artist, I'm not going to care1 about producing a quality picture, but I am going to care2 about producing a quality picture. The difference is whether you're thinking about 'doing it right this time', or 'doing it right, however many tries that takes'
It certainly seems like a perverse incentive, but when I think about it, it's really just the difference between wanting a magic bullet and being willing to work hard to achieve your desired outcome. The only real alternative would be a world that incentivized wanting magic bullets.
Or to put it another way: One of those types of 'care' should be written 'is desperate'/'enslaved to their emotions'.
(i'd format those numbers as superscript, but I haven't found how to.)
Well. Dang it. I was hoping we could be friends.
Likewise. You being a lw meetup organizer pretty much screens off everything I said above.
Hmm. Okay. I am less confused by your rant now, though still somewhat confused. Does a female attending a LW meetup or being a LW regular also screen off those things? And if not, what is the difference?
(Also, yay possible friendship.)
Specifically the interestingness prior; LW is selected for intellectual interestingness.
The inane sexual dance is still a problem.
I suppose it would help that you are hundreds of miles away from where I am, too.
As a female nerd, I've more or less resigned myself to the problem of sexual tension in my social circle. The vast majority of my friends are male, and of those, I have asked out or been asked out by just about every one (with the exception of guys who have been in relationships the whole time I've known them, or who are clearly outside my age group). Most of the time this has worked out okay in the end. Not always. So... Be glad you can still be friends with guys without having this problem, I guess?
It's interesting: I seem to have the rare case of the opposite problem. I'm male, pretty nerdy --though probably a standard deviation less than the LW median-- but I have no close nerdy male friends. Nearly all my friends are women who are nerdy but not nearly nerdy enough to fit in at a Less Wrong meet up. I've been romantically or sexually entangled with a little over half of them at various times. I have the flirty friends-but-maybe-more thing down pretty good and have several very deep, very close friendships with women. But find it extremely difficult (if not impossible) to connect deeply and maintain a friendship over time with someone of my own gender. I'd really like to change that. But women seem to be both a) more likely to want to make new friends and b) interested in meeting me and talking with me under a framework of maybe-we-can-date that can turn into a friendship. People are often trying very hard to meet new people for dating, so it isn't that hard for me to meet people that way. But men don't seem to try hard at all to make new male friends, so I have no idea how to go about it.
Consider coming to LessWrong meetups! We'll, uh, we'll increase your male-to-female ratio?
Sigh...
http://lesswrong.com/lw/haz/meetup_washington_dc_books_meetup/8v1h?context=1#8v1h
Yay!
Why is the fact that most of your friends lack a penis a problem? I had that for years, but I newer saw anything wrong about that.
"Most" would be fine. But having no close male friends means I lose out on certain conversations, perspectives and experiences.
I was about to reply “So does having no close X friends; I don't think that's such a big deal either” for a few other values of X (e.g. “foreign” or “non-nerdy”), but if I get what your point is correctly it only applies if you're an X yourself, so never mind.
Boardgames? If you live in a metropolitan area, there's probably an active scene.
Look on the bright side, you could be bisexual. (I've caught myself flirting with a dozen people simultaneously in the same thread of conversation without having realized I had started doing it.)
Perhaps you can elaborate on what that bright side is?
(personally, being bisexual myself, I can agree that it has good points and bad points. In this conversation however what comes up is mostly the bad -- experiencing that sexual tension distorting my behaviour with both sexes, pushes me towards the belief that there's no escape -- that sane behaviour and interesting relationships are mutually exclusive. Maybe sane behaviour is just a myth :P.)
[ I did upvote your post because I do feel it adds something to the discussion.]
The bright side is that Nyan (AFAIK) isn't bisexual, and only has to deal with this problem with half the population, so pretty much what you seem to be anticipating here.
(On the other hand, bisexuality means you have a lot more practice dealing with sexual tension. Good or bad out of that depends on whether or not the extra practice helps you solve the problem rather than just exaggerating it.)
Ah, it's another victim of the absence of tone in text, then.
(That's also a good point. Certainly I don't suffer from the more facepalm-worthy expressions of sexual tension, and I can make fun of it instead of taking it seriously.)
Fantastic point.
FWIW, I endorse not interacting with people who don't interest you, especially when doing so is distressing and/or makes you behave in ways you consider subhuman.
It seems like there might be more productive ways to address this problem, no? Especially since our say in who we interact with is often limited. One could, for instance, work on changing yourself so you are no longer distressed and no longer behave like a subhuman when around those people.
Certainly. I would endorse that as well.
And once that work is complete, I would likely endorse interacting with those people again.
I tend to behave differently around people I choose to interact with than around people I need to interact with; the latter set of behaviours is more low-risk low-reward, so to speak.
Being a magnus opus about why living for others is not worth it, I suggest we henceforth refer to this post as "Nyan_sandwich Shrugs".
Clarification please - what do you mean by "socially privileged" in this context?
Over generalizing.
More over generalizing in the face of biased sampling.
Woman come in all styles. Many enjoy flirting. Many like to be pursued, even when not interested. Many perceive a man's interest in them not as a threat, but as a compliment and an asset. Many like confidence, strength, and assertiveness in a man. Many want a man to be driving the bus. Many are quite sympathetic and understanding about your lack of psychic powers, and are unobtrusively doing what they can "under the rules" to make it easier for you. They are cheering for you. They're on your side. But they will cut off your penis, drive over it, grill it on a hibachi, and feed it too you if ask for a first kiss. Many, in short, are quite old fashioned, follow old stereotypes of male/female roles, and like it that way.
Much of the comments about what men should do are ideologically driven by what a particular subculture think men and women should be, not what they are. If you look to what women are, you'll find that they're generally quite wonderful and adorable as they are, and they don't hate you for asking them out for a drink even if they're not interested.
Behave appropriately to the beliefs and preferences of the woman you're with, and be with a woman whose beliefs and preferences are appropriate to what you want. Life isn't so hard.
I think what is generally true is that women often perceive men as a threat, and it's good manners and good policy to try to avoid pressing that button. Before they know they can trust you, don't put them into a position where they would be unsafe if you had bad intent.
I don't think this is usually the case, especially not within the context of rationalist gatherings. I have had several interactions with people on (or who seem to be on) the Autism spectrum, and I have not ever felt creeped on by them, and most of my interactions have been positive with them. While it seems that low status men are more likely to act creepily, I do not automatically feel this way about someone who is low status, and I do feel creeped out by high status people who disrespect my boundaries. So I don't think this is a significant part of creepiness.
As a woman, I would rather avoid people like you anyway. Hope that helps.
Why is this? Is it because he admitted to being socially low status?
I did no such thing! I expressed sympathy with socially unprivileged men, and complained about how my interactions with women tend to be driven by sexuality rather than friendship.
I'm actually rather high status (eg. everyone shuts up and listens when I talk, and I'm not shy at all.) in the circles I move in.
Sorry about being unclear.
This is generally a status-lowering move. If you can afford that in real life, it could be a counter-signal, but it probably doesn't work online.
If I imagine a similar post in which all references to "women" have been replaced by references to some other group with which I identify more strongly, like "Jews" or "queer men" or "white people," my desire to interact with the hypothetical author of that hypothetical post similarly plunges, to varying degrees.
If the reason for that plunge were the author's admission to low status, it would seem to follow that I could infer the status of various groups in my society from the degree of plunge. I haven't thought too hard about this, but I doubt that would actually work terribly well.
Imagine the "creepiness" question were also coordinated on race; black people come off as creepy, and a black person complains that all the complaints white people make about creepy black people makes them disinclined to try to interact with white people.
Does this change how you regard the hypothetical author?
Do you mean a post that also says the same things about white people that n_s's post says about women (e.g., that the author becomes subhuman around white people, that interacting with white people is distressing, that white people are less interesting than black people and that the author's occasional belief otherwise is simply an illusion they ought to adjust for)?
Yeah, I expect that would change how I regard the author. I mean, if nothing else, I'm a white person, and it's difficult to listen to that sort of thing without having an emotional reaction to it.
Or do you just mean a post that says that the complaints of white people about black creepiness make the author disinclined to try to interact with us? I expect that would change how I regard the author less.
The latter is how I interpret nyansandwich's post; it's what it starts with, it's how it justifies the former points, and what it isn't used to justify comes off as something like sour grapes. (How does nyan_sandwich know how interesting women are if he's too nervous to interact with them on a human level?)
Can't really criticize you for taking the more negative interpretation, however, since I do the same thing pretty frequently.
Especially given that the "more negative interpretation" in this case involves treating the author's statements about their experience as accurately describing their experience.
But, sure, if I restrict my attention to only those claims which are somehow justified by the assertion that the complaints of women about male creepiness make the author disinclined to try to interact with women, my reaction to the post is very different.
That said, I'm not sure why I ought to restrict my attention in that way.
FYI, the former "uncharitable" interpretation is correct.
I'm quite sure the creepiness question is coordinated on race. Black men often have a really difficult time hitting on white women without coming off as creepy.
Probably because of wall of text phrased in rather misogynistic terms, (which were not really strictly necessary)
Or perhaps because he is as bitter as quinine?
He's said that he doesn't really enjoy the company of women and that they make him "subhuman." I think that's reason enough to not want to be around him if you're female!
My brain just doesn't wrap around that and find the second sentence true.
You don't believe I have never felt creeped out by an autistic person? Or what?
I apologize, I should have quoted. I was referring to the last couple of sentences.
Sorry, I am still not sure what you mean.
This post is really popular (at +12 right now), and I'm finding it difficult to see why. Is it because people empathise with it, or is it something else? I may be being mindkilled by the "women are less interesting" statement.
I don't really get it either. I was expecting to get heavily downvoted, flamed, and possibly banned. This conversation is surprisingly civil.
Do you feel uncomfortable/awkward around men at all? Or is is just female company that makes you feel this way?
It's not uncomfortable or awkwardness, it's frustration with the meat having different plans from me, and the meat usually winning.
I'm married and reasonably skilled at women, I'd just rather do things other than flirting.
Ah Ok, I'd misunderstood the problem. I thought you were socially lower status than you are.
I upvoted it for a few reasons. First, it's interesting to read. Second, the author is being brutally honest, not just about how he feels about women but also how he feels about himself. Third, he wrote this apparently expecting to be attacked from every angle; I can respect that, in a I-might-as-well-die-with-a-sword-in-my-hand kind of way. Fourth, the post is reasonably insightful; he does a pretty good job of laying out exactly how he feels and why, and notices that his own behavior is pretty self-destructive.
If he had written it from a position of authority, written it as something that should be treated as beyond reproach, it wouldn't have read the same way to me; it would have just been a sexist rant. As it is, it comes across as the bitter regrets of somebody who feels they don't have anything to lose because they've never won. It's hard for me to take it as anything but sour grapes.
Thanks for getting it.
Consider, for example, that you were a male and your interests (hypothetically) were limited to computer games, programming and rationality forums. Mind you, not that there are any such persons out there... But just for a hypothetical:
Given these interests, would you not agree that a random 20 something male you encounter has a larger chance of having at least some of those in common with you, compared to a random 20 something female?
The statement you find so mindkilling would follow.
Not really. It is true, I think, that more men than women share my interests, but it doesn't follow that more men are interesting (to me). I've met women (and men) who I have very little in common with interests-wise, but who I still consider extremely interesting people. An example: I'm not all that interested in surfing but I have a number of friends who are really into it and I've had fascinating conversations with them about surfing.
Being able to take a certain amount of vicarious pleasure in another person's enthusiasms, even if you do not share those enthusiasms, seems like a useful social skill to develop (and I do think it's trainable).
I would characterize the condition you describe as being interested in people. (It applies to me as well.)
Kawoomba's hypothetical posits that "you" aren't interested in people, merely in computer games, programming and rationality forums.
Fair enough, but if this hypothetical character is not interested in people at all, I don't see why he cares about the gender distribution of people who share his interests. The implication seems to be that this person is interested in social contact, and uses his other interests as a filter to decide who he spends time with. My suggestion was that the desire for social contact might be more effectively satisfied if the person trained himself to be able to talk about (and at least temporarily be interested in learning about) things that he isn't immediately interested in.
I wouldn't characterize myself as merely being interested in people, incidentally, because my desire to converse with other people about their interests isn't indiscriminate. I doubt I could sustain an interesting conversation with someone who is really into the life and work of Kim Kardashian, for instance.
I was hoping your reply was the 'more pointed summary' I intended to post, but since it's not:
.. Being interested in how people work and universal human experiences.
I don't follow what you meant to express here.
You wrote
I originally intended to post something similar but more pointed. Since your post didn't quite attain the suitable level of pointedness, I replied to your post instead of the original.
That is, I originally intended to post something like (combining the wording of your and my posts):
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.
Yes, if my interests are limited to activity-set X, and interest in X is strongly gender-linked, then I should not be surprised if my chances of a random person sharing an interest with me correlate strongly with that person's gender. And if I have a choice between picking humans at random from either a mixed-gender or a single-gender jar of humans, picking the proper single-gender jar maximizes my chances of finding an interesting human.
But in real life, that's not the only choice I have. If I'm only interested in X, I can choose social activities that are highly structured around X. Having done so, I'm effectively picking humans at random from an X jar. And, yes, I should expect the gender ratio in the X jar to not be evenly distributed. But also, at that point I should stop using gender as a proxy metric for X, because otherwise I'm in effect double-counting gender.
If instead I continue to select by gender, even on reflection, that seems to indicate that I'm not using gender as a proxy metric for X, but rather interested in gender for some other reason.
I understand. I would have found it less mindkilling if he'd said "women are less interesting to me" or "I find women less interesting than men." [Edit: re-read - he does actually sort of say this.]
I think sarcasm's unnecessary here!
"Interesting" isn't defined without a frame of reference, so the "to me" interpretation should be the default.
Perhaps it should be, normatively speaking, but I've interacted with enough people who behave as though "to normal/admirable people" was the interpretation they meant that my priors are pretty high for that interpretation.
You might find this exchange a useful pair of data points. Then again you might not.
For my own part, when I ask myself whether I want to see more discussions like this on LW, or fewer, I get a muddled answer... basically, I don't find the discussion itself terribly valuable, but I have a vague intuition that it represents a missed shot at a valuable target, and I'm not quite willing to write the target off.
So I haven't yet voted either way.
Yeah, I think it is sympathy.
If you are attracted to them, they are interesting to you, you're just ruling out their type of interesting as counting.
Than who? Men? I've found that they're interesting in different ways.
You don't have to be "women-compatible", anymore than you have to be "human-compatible". The number of women you might like to have in your life is a tiny tiny fraction of all available women. And these reports from women that are distressing you aren't all women either.
Do you think that improves the experience for her? For you? No? Then knock it off.
I'd say your problem is that you think that was a sexist rant. You're frustrated with the way you perceive society is supposed to work. I suggest you look at how it actually works, and how it can work better for you.
(In this comment, by “interesting” I specifically mean ‘interesting to me’, and my “men” and “women” I specifically mean ‘men around my age’ and ‘women around my age’.)
FWIW, I think there's larger variance among men than among women: most women fall in the ‘somewhat interesting’ bin, whereas most men fall either in the ‘hardly interesting at all’ bin or in the ‘very interesting’ bin. I think the median woman is more interesting than the median man, but that might be me overcompensating for sampling bias.
Kneejerk downvoted. Finished reading post. Un-downvoted. You could have toned that down.
I kneejerk upvoted. Then finished reading the post (with the pessimistic self-sabotaging thoughts) and removed the upvote. Returned it again after seriously considering.
I find myself marveling at the concept of anything SEEMING more interesting than it IS.
First of all, interesting is not a property of the thing you are interested in, it is your reaction to the thing. Maybe you could say women are far more interesting to you than your rational mind wishes they were, or that because you are attracted to women you find yourself both interested in them and pained at their lack of apparent interest in you, or something like that. But I parse what you wrote as, essentially, "I feel more interested in women than I actually am."
I think you will find these issues easier and more satisfying to deal with when you treat "interesting" to mean "I am interested in..." and not some property of things outside of you that you may or may not be correctly perceiving. So for example:
If you ARE interested in women and you'd therefore like to know more of them better, than you would be interested in making yourself more women-compatible, just as if you were interested in skiing you might want to strengthen your legs and build some of your physical endurance before going on a skiing trip.
Conversely, if you are interested in women and skiing, but you can't be bothered to make yourself more woman-compatible or a stronger skier, you need to decide whether in your out-of-prepared state there is likely to be enough payoff for you in engaging in either skiing or spending time with women anyway.
It is YOU that is interested or not interested, not women that are either interesting or not interesting. It is your decision what you will try in terms of interacting with either women or snowy mountains.
Re-translate it like this: A woman "seems" more interesting than she "is" if after finding out she's not available suddenly the things she says and does are a lot less interesting and fun to hear about. I've definitely had situations where I liked and was interested in someone and then later on looked back and realized they were fairly boring and I was just feeling attraction to them.
So, if I understand the sequence of events, it's:
- At time T1, I am interested in a woman, and think she's available.
- At time T2, I discover she's unavailable and I am no longer interested in her.
We interpret this as my judgment at T2 being accurate -- she actually is boring -- and my judgment at T1 was being distorted by attraction, which I no longer feel at T2.
Have I understood this correctly?
pretty much? But when you use "interested in a woman" in that phrase it has different connotations than "a woman is interesting".
Agreed about different connotations.
That said... are you suggesting that the connotations of "interested in a woman" are less accurate/relevant? What evidence suggests that?
For that matter, why should I prefer this interpretation over my judgment at T1 being accurate -- she actually is interesting -- and my judgment at T2 is being distorted by some other factor, such as (for example) "sour grapes"?
Well, there may be other relevent facts, like "I'm married, and have generally sworn off hedonism except to maintain the meat, I'm only really interested in people as high-intellectual/networking-utility nodes in my social network".
That sounds like a vitally important detail, which you need to mention in the initial comment lest it gives a totally incorrect impression of what your issue is, especially given your talk of phone numbers near the beginning. (So, you don't actually have it with women, you just have it with your elephant, do you?)
BTW, do the women you interact with know that? IME, when there's common knowledge between me and another person that our riders aren't interested in sex e.g. because either of us is already taken, pretty much no interaction will be taken to be sexual (except jocularly), short of stuff like a kiss on the lips or a hand on the crotch; hell, I've had people jokingly proposition me in front of their boyfriend/husband/children. (OTOH, this may just be nice guy privilege and not apply to more masculine guys.) Have you tried to somehow bring up in conversation the fact that you have a wife (and if possible somehow imply that you aren't looking to cheat on her), and see if the women are still as uncomfortable?
The logic here being that because of those things, I should expect that you are fairly resistant to the natural tendency to judge something as less desirable once it's no longer available, so they would therefore serve as evidence against the second interpretation?
That is a good approximation, but it is insufficient change. You brain won't get around a woman's attractiveness because she is 1)allegedly 2)temporarily 3)according to her, not available.
To get a good sense of how interesting a woman is, you have to imagine she is 50. Beyond reproductive age, then you'll see how interesting you truly find what she says and does.