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Eugine_Nier comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong
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Comments (148)
1) Agreed, I'm truly sorry, title changed.
2) I do sincerely believe that evolution made us have sex by making it, and the process leading to it fun. I do believe that humans have intentionally attempted to reduce the risks of having sex. We have in particular invented several kinds of contraceptives, condoms, spermicides, and vaccination with the conscious, deliberate intent of making sex less dangerous. I do believe that, so to say, evolution succeded, and sex is a lot of fun. For everyone. All research in positive psychology indicates that intercourse either tops, or rivals only conversation with friends in amount of experiential happiness. (Gilbert2007, Layard 2004, Lyubuomirsky 2008, Seligman201x). I have no reason, and I mean, no reason which I have ever seen, anywhere, or ever heard, from anyone, reliable or not, to think that we are not under-calibrated for how much fun sex is now, given its reduced level of danger. I would be sad, it is true, if new information came up saying so, and would require lots of evidence. But as far as my mind can reach, I do, sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of humans, regardless of age and gender, would lead better and more pleasureful lives if they had sex more often, with less guilt, with less fear.
3) Removed PUA off from the title. PUA is only related to short-terming males. I find it abusive and asymmetric that the other three quadrants don't get that much attention, and wanted to say things to the three states that are not short-terming males. I saw the controversy, and thought that a less narrow view of mating could help controversies like that not to happen again.
EDIT: *I do understand the patterns of downvoting and upvoting in all comments and the original post uptill now, all of it. How it was upvoted in the beggining, how slowly the comment that begins with the word "downvoted" rose to the top, thus starting the snowball which as I predicted below in another comment will cause trouble to the post later on.
But I have absolutely no clue why this very comment is being downvoted.
It starts by agreeing that the posts title was bad, and accepting change. It ends by removing PUA, and saying that if anything I wanted to give a broader picture to a narrow vision, which is present in the PUA debate (here as well), and is very undesirable to women (who don't get any info on what they should do) and to long-terming men. And in the middle, it is the most sincere and honest explanation of why I felt it is okay to say that people are under-calibrated for sex. No one disagreed with the reasons I gave for it, yet, this comment is being downvoted. If you downvoted it, please, tell me why, I am deeply intrigued. Reasons 1 and 3 don't exist anymore, and what I did about reason 2 was to explain my feelings and sentiments about it, almost begging for someone to explain to me what is wrong with that statement. Instead of getting an explanation, this comment is being downvoted. I remain intrigued.
In what sense is sex under-calibrated? From the point of view of evolution enjoying condomed sex at all is a flaw. If you're reply to this is something along the lines of "screw the blind idiot god, I enjoy sex and I'm not care that it's not adaptive" you are left with the question of why you identify with the preference for sex but not with all the associated guilt, value of chastity, etc.? If your reply is that you get more pleasure this way, why not cut out the middleman and go directly to wire heading?
This is why the noncentral fallacy really deserves the title of the Worst Argument In The World. If [abortion], why not [murdering retarded people]? If [taxation], why not [slavery]?
(Also, "YOUR/YOU'RE"! What the hell's up with that, I don't understand how native English speakers can confuse those at all, never mind so frequently.)
In most present-day accents of English they're homophones, and it's not uncommon for people to accidentally mixing homophones up when typing quickly in a language they hear on a daily base. (When I went to Ireland, the frequency at which I made such brain farts in English increased by an order of magnitude within a few weeks.) OTOH, personally most of the times I realize that I've accidentally typed the wrong word within seconds of typing it, and much of the rest of the time I catch it while proof-reading myself.
This is not the noncentral fallacy. This is me pointing out that the hypothetical argument I'm responding to proves too much.
Basically the problem with arguments of the form doing X gives pleasure therefore we should do more X, is that the same argument applies to wireheading. If you have no better reply than wireheading seems ewe and X doesn't, keep in mind that your intuitions about what is ewe change depending on what you do.
I tend to assume that it's a typo when I see someone confuse them, unless that person makes lots of other similar errors.
By your reasoning, it would follow that we should keep all our preferences just as they are and never change them. But actually we have many reasons to want to change (other) preferences that we consider valid.
For example, we want to reduce violence and war. We want to reduce overeating in the presence of food superstimulus. We want to be attracted to and happy with average human partners in the presence of media-sponsored super-beautiful models. We want to reduce religiosity (although this is more controversial among humans). We want to reduce akrasia, which derives in part from time-discounting of preferences. We want to eliminate various biases.
All these things are places where we want to go against our evolutionary preferences. At the very least we support one preference over another. And similarly, I support and wish to increase the preference for sex over the preference for modesty, chastity, and sexual guilt and shame.
There are possibilities other than “we should maximize our inclusive genetic fitness” and “we should maximize our hedonic pleasure”. Thou art godshatter.
I know, I was objecting to diegocaleiro providing no argument for his position beyond a somewhat confused combination of these two.