Are you intending to respond to my question, or just muse about my motives in asking it?
Just muse.
Pretty please?
Except [supporting lowering the age of consent under some circumstances] doesn't necessarily reflect anything [real] besides [culture], [like witchcraft!] Word salad. What you could have said is, "I was mistaken, as I could not have predicted that," or, "I was correct, because lowering the age of consent is a really popular right now."
Huh? A minute ago you were complaining I was being contrary because the predictions worked fine. I can predict what you'd disapprove of for reasons of ""informed consent" just fine. I just don't think it refers to anything in the territory beyond the bit of the map labelled "informed consent". Or at least, if it does, you seem to be having trouble pointing to it.
I think people should have a say in what happens to them, be it politically or otherwise. Would it "harm" a child to keep him locked in a giant playground/amusement park, with everything he could ever want provided, but kept from any education? Would it "harm" the human race as a whole to be kept in a state of perpetual orgasm, kept alive, but forgetting everything else? Is a slave being harmed, even if his master does not beat him and feeds him well?
I'm with the old-school utilitarians on this. Utility is not hedonism. Immediate pleasure and pain are not the sum of all harm. I think that women and men should have some say in what happens to their bodies. That's why I'm not fond of circumcision, especially fgm. (Another cultural prediction?)
As I said, I recognize the right to bodily integrity, which is violated in both cases. I also value, y'know, not traumatizing people (which you seem to dismiss as "hedonism".)
Also, honestly, I think you probably overestimate the value of freedom and choice and so on. They're nice and all, but they're massive applause lights in our culture; other cultures don't seem to have been so impressed by them.
That's why I have no problem with almost any type of relationship between consenting adults. Bondage? Sure. Open relationships? I've had them and they're my favorite. Polyamory? Why not? Homosexual? Obviously. Incest? With some exceptions concerning guardian/minor relationships, but otherwise, why not? I would even support tax breaks/rights for polyamorous relationships similar to those now granted for monogamous couples, the scale of which to be determined after research into outcomes for children and other - to my knowledge - unknowns.
Thanks for the extra data o pinpoint the precise subculture I should be checking.
But this is obviously "culture", which you would have predicted. That's why it wouldn't have helped you to use "meaningful consent", right? If I were to give some other LWer a checklist of predictions about my feelings about sexual relationships, and tell him to use "culture", he - statistically a `he' - might use polls. If I tell him to use "meaningful consent", how much more accurate would he have been?
Except you cannot explain "meaningful consent" except by pointing to culture/yourself-as-black-box. Why should I treat them as separate theories to be tested? How should I treat them as separate theories, if I haven't already grown up in our culture?
Well, I guess it's a good thing I noted it then, isn't it?
No, it's not. I'm trying to establish that something is an offense, and I'm not interested in whether or not something else aggravates it. I might have cut off her foot, too. Who cares. That's not "conflation." What's clear is that you don't think that violating self-determination is "harm". That's the difference between us.
Hey, it could be worse - your point might have simply sailed over my head.
He could have cut off her foot. In fact, lets talk about that scenario. Lets say there's a well-known crime, stealing someone's purse. This traditionally involves cutting off their foot, because people chain their purses to their feet. But sometimes, a cunning criminal tricks someone into giving them the key to this chain, or steals it out of their pocket, resulting in a purse-theft without the loss of a foot.
Is it a good idea to talk about how this gut is a foot-thief just because the dictionary says a "foot-thief" is someone who teals the purse someone attached to their foot, and attack anyone suggesting (say) a lighter sentence or something as defending those horrible people who cut off feet? Is it useful to ignore the loss of people's feet and increase the penalty for all foot-thefts across the board, instead of punishing them separately?
(Of course, the correct punishment may not be fitted to the damage done for game-theoretical reasons, but I hope you appreciate the idea.)
Keep it to the internet, though, because if you touch a sleeping girl, you might find "Schelling points in act space" won't help you.
Considering my repeated statements that such behavior should, in my opinion, be harshly punished, this particular jab falls a little flat.
(Also, if I were to ignore the fact that I don't want this happening to me so I want to discourage it, I wouldn't be sadistic enough to tell the victim, harming them again at significant cost to myself.)
LessWrong has been having fun lately with posts about sexism, racism, and academic openness. And here just like everywhere else, somebody inevitably claims taboo status for any number of entirely obvious truths, e.g. "top level mathematicians and physicists are almost invariably male," "black people have lower IQ scores than white people," and "black people are statistically more criminal than whites." In my experience, these are not actually taboo, and I think my experience is generalizable. I'll illustrate.
You're at a bar and you meet a fellow named Bill. Bill's a nice guy, but somehow the conversation strayed Hitler-game style to World War II. Bill thinks the war was avoidable. Bill thinks the Holocaust would not have happened were it not for the war, and that some of the Holocaust was a reaction to actual Jewish subterfuge and abuse. Bill thinks that the Holocaust was not an essential, early plan of the Nazis, because it only happened after the war began. Bill thinks that the number of casualties has been overestimated. Bill claims that Allied abuses, e.g. the bombing of Dresden, have been glossed over and ignored, while fantastic lies about Jews being systematically turned into soap have propagated. Bill thinks that the Holocaust has become a sort of national religion, abused by self-interested Jews and defenders of Zionist foreign policy, and that the freedom of those who doubt it is under serious attack. Bill starts listing other things he's not allowed to say. Bill doesn't think that the end of slavery was all that good for "the blacks," and that the negatives of busing and forced integration have often outweighed the positives. Bill has personally been the victim of black-on-white crimes and racism. Bill is a hereditarian. Bill doesn't think that dropping an n-bomb should ruin a public career.
Here's the problem: everything Bill has said is either true, a matter of serious debate, or otherwise a matter of high likelihood and reasonableness. Yet you feel nervous. Perhaps you're upset. That's the power of taboo, right? Society is punishing truth-telling! First they came for the realists... Rationalists, to arms!
Or.
We can recognize that statements like these correlate with certain false beliefs and nasty sentiments of the sort that actually are taboo. It's just like when somebody says, "well science doesn't know everything." To this, I think, "duh, and you're probably a creationist or medical quack or something similarly credible." Or when somebody says, "the government lies to us." To this, I think, "obviously, and you're likely a Truther or something." Bill is probably an anti-Semite, but Bill doesn't just say, "I'm an anti-Semite," because that really is taboo. He might even believe that he shouldn't be considered something awful like an anti-Semite. Bill probably doesn't think Bill so unpleasant.
That's the paradox: "taboo" statements like black crime statistics are to some extent "taboo" for sound, rationalist reasons. But "taboo" is not taboo: it's about context. People who think that such statements are taboo are probably bad at communicating, and people often think they're racists and misogynists because they probably are on good rationalist grounds. If you want to talk about statistical representatives on the topic of race, be ready to understand that those who are listening will have background knowledge about the other views you might hold.
All this is the leadup to my question: what highly probable or effectively certain truths are genuinely taboo? I'm trying to avoid answers like "there are fewer women in mathematics" or "the size of my penis," since these are context sensitive, but not really taboo within a reasonable range of circumstances. I'm also not particularly interested in value commitments or ideologies. Yes, employers will punish labor organizers and radical political views can get you filtered. But these aren't clear matters of fact. I also don't mean sensitive topics like abortion or religion, nor do I mean "taboo within a political party."
Is there really anything true that we simply cannot say? I have the US in mind especially, but I'm interested in other countries as well. I'm sure there are things that deserve the label, but I've found that the most frequently given examples don't hold water. I think hereditarianism is a close contender, but it's not an "obvious truth." Rather, my understanding is that it is a serious position. It's also only contextually taboo. If it were a definitive finding, it could perhaps become taboo, though I think it more likely that it would be somewhat reluctantly accepted.
Any suggestions? If we find some really serious examples, we might figure out a way to talk about them.