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ShannonFriedman comments on Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way! - Less Wrong
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The power disparity point for group 2 is important. My understanding and observation is that its not about sex for them, hence why the term predator is very appropriate. As the article I cited reports, there is an overlap between those who rape and those who abuse children. Its not about sex for this group, its about power and having someone helpless under your control who can do nothing to stop you while you violate them. To these people, that is hot.
That's not something most people get, so that's part of the confusion - normal people assume that rapists are a single consistent population that do things like get drunk and lose control while wanting sex, and that's how they normal people empathize with the behavior.
The rapists that are in this group 2 are very mentally differently motivated than most people. Its a little easier to understand when you look at the things some of them say. And they really do say these things - I've heard things as sadistic or worse than what is posted on these signs, both from women who have been raped and people of both genders who were abused as children.
It is very unfortunate that there is so much confusion about how it is just a few specific men (and women when we add in child abuse) who act this way, and neither "no men" nor "all men." It is also frustrating how they can blend so well, and how since very few people want to talk or think about this topic or consider that they could possibly know someone in this category, the guys who do this sort of thing generally just get away with it so long as they are not stupid enough to do anything like videotape their actions. Few are that stupid.
Its also worth pointing out that I think there are many more groups. For example, there probably actually are occasions where a guy does drugs or gets drunk and gets out of control and it is not motivated by a more systemic lack of empathy or darker problems.
Yes! And it's not just rape.
There's a certain kind of man who has a lot of power, and who really, really enjoys overt displays of his power over anyone he perceives as weak. Luckily, he's pretty rare. Unfortunately, there's another kind of man who isn't very powerful, but who sees the first man as a role-model, and who will march to that first man's drum.
In a lot of cases, actually, the choice of women as the target is just a Schelling point - women are perceived as weak, so they're seen as easy prey, so they get preyed on more, so society normalizes the preying, so they're perceived as weak.
EDIT: A trivial and somewhat pathetic example of this - there is someone on this site that, every time they log in, every one of my posts that I've made since the last time they logged in gets voted down. If I email them to ask about it, someone new registers to the site, and then every post that I've made for the last few months gets voted down again.
Some people treat everything as a chance to inflict power.
I don't know if it makes sense to complain, but the first linked article starts by this:
and concludes this:
Am I just oversensitive or did someone write their bottom line first, and then collected links to anything related to create an impression of research?
(Also, in the second linked article, author complains about being asked to leave a mailinglist 'because of her language' when she complained about a sexist joke. Without any more information, this is outrageous. But there is no link to or quote of the specific complaint she used, so all we have is a report about a conflict, from one of the participants, providing no data. If we had the same kind of report about some other topic, how much credibility would we assign to it?)
Yeah, it is frustrating that documentation by activists is not better, and that they often exaggerate or distort to get seen, and that this ends up getting them discredited, even when they are actually making good points.
This is a classic stereotypical masculine/stereotypical feminine battle - many women and intuitive men are prone to emoting (and losing the rational tools) when upset, and in masculine/non-emotive culture, this gets them instantly discredited and discounted, regardless of content.
Personally, I've learned how to be level under stress and to look for more concrete facts and to keep my head in most cases, and I do find that I am taken much more seriously, but doing this has taken a lot of work and discipline to learn, and I think is something that a lot of people who are more intuitive simply cannot do. Where I have screwed up and gotten emotional, even after building a lot of credit about having real content in what I say, in more logic oriented circles, I have gotten instantly discredited and shunned.
In well functioning feminine/empathetic circles, the response to strong emotion is usually to pay more attention and take the topic seriously and get curious. When this happens the person calms down and the issue is addressed sanely. So I think the problem you're looking at is a result of two different evolutionary strategies clashing.
This post is an expression of acknowledgement and deep dismay that "logic-oriented circles" and "empathetic circles" are considered mutually exclusive, and that they often attempt to deliberately shun and discredit each other.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is experiencing an overload of emotion, the logical response is not to listen to them until they calm down, and therefore increase the level of logic in the discussion.
I have yet to understand why, when someone is expressing a rational attempt to solve someone else's emotional problem, the reaction is almost invariably hostility rather than appreciation for the attempt.
A proper rationalist recognizes that people are not always rational, and that tending to their emotional needs will lead to a more rational outcome in the long run.
A proper empath recognizes that emotions have consequences, and that these consequences need to be weighed rationally to the best of everyone's rational capacity.
Keep honing your capacity to express your empathic understanding through logic, because it's a sorely needed skill in these kinds of communities.
Actually, after discussions in this thread, I realized that this is a skill I should develop. (I don't want to react like this all the time, just to be able to do this when I decide to; and to be aware of the situations where doing this might be the right choice.)
But whether it is the right choice or not, depends on circumstances. For this method to work well, there are a few conditions:
- the person will eventually calm down and be able to communicate logically, because the person is not insane;
- your listening will make the person calm down, because there are no other people interfering with the process and keeping the person emotionally overloaded (either by opposing the person, or by socially validating their emotional overload);
- the person will be there to communicate with after they calm down, they will not go away (in an internet discussion, this is often unpredictable and likely);
- you have enough time to be there when the person calms down (also, your patience could be depleted);
- the person will not cause significant preventable damage during the emotional overload, in which case your priority could be to prevent or reduce the damage (the damage can include emotional damage for wittnesses of the emotional overload, damage to your reputation, etc.).
The situation is different in real life and on internet, whether you know the person or not, how much and how specifically do other people interfere. (Best circumstances: you know the person, you trust the person to be sane, there is no damage done, it's just two of you together, and you both have enough time.)
Well, let's back up a little.
Do you understand why, when I point a gun at your head and tell you to give me your wallet, the rational response is not necessarily to give me your wallet? More generally: do you understand why, when I threaten you, the rational response is not necessarily to accede to the threat?
Not really, no - but I may have an impairment in this regard. Can you walk me through it?
Compare the following two scenarios.
Scenario A: There are a thousand people, P1-P1000, and one mugger M. M threatens P1, P1 gives M their wallet. The next day, M threatens P2 and the same thing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually other people become muggers, since it's a lucrative line of work. Eventually everyone's wallet is stolen.
Scenario B: As above, but P1 does not give M their wallet, and M shoots P1 and flees walletless. The next day, M threatens P2 and the same thing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually M gives up mugging because it's not a lucrative line of work.
I don't mean to suggest that either of these scenarios are realistic; they aren't. But given a choice between A and B, however unrealistic that choice, do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B? (EDIT: Or how a society of rational agents might want to create a framework of enforceable precommitments that incentivizes B to a point such that P1, when being mugged, will prefer B?)
No, a rational agent with majority-human goals would prefer for others to do B, while itself doing A. At least if it cares about its life more than about the collective wallets of the others, modulo the impact that getting shot might conceivably have on the mugger's future behavior.
Even using TDT makes no difference unless the agents valued a potential muggerless society over its own life. And the muggerless society would still be assuming that other agents are similar enough to use TDT as well as share the martyr trait, and don't defect to save their own lives. It's still "life or 1 wallet" for each individual. Not that TDT mandates valuing the collective wallets of arbitrarily many others over your own life.
Not to get sidetracked though, I take issue with taking rational as also implying "caring about the welfare of society" over "caring about whether I live or die". A rational agent doesn't need to be that altruistic, it can just be rational about how to keep alive (if that's high on its priority list) effectively (the effectively captures the 'instrumentally rational' part), which would lead to giving up the wallet.
You can think of perfectly rational agents who crave nothing more than being shot the first chance they get (orthogonality thesis), so a "rational agent might prefer B" just comes down "an agent might prefer B", which is obviously true since there can be agents preferring anything over anything.
IOW: "Do you understand how a rational agent might prefer B" is actually asking "Are you certain there can be no agents who prefer B", for which the answer is a blanket "no" regardless of the B, so it's not really pertinent to what y'all discussing, bless your hearts.
Certainly, given a third choice C in which others don't give up their wallets and P1 does, P1 chooses C. Agreed.
I agree.
I take issue with you describing the question I asked in those terms, as opposed to "preferring a small chance of dying and a large chance of keeping my wallet over a large chance of losing my wallet."
True, it doesn't.
Sure. Not what I meant, but certainly true.
Anyway, if the only way you can imagine a rational agent choosing B over A is to posit it has radically different values from yours, then I suspect that I am unable to explain the thing you initially said you didn't understand. Tapping out now.
[EDIT: I just realized that the original question I was trying to answer wasn't your question to begin with, it was someone else's. Sorry; my error. Nevertheless tapping out here.]
What is your analogy between the mugger and the inconveniently emotional or inconveniently logical person?
http://acestoohigh.com/2012/04/23/lincoln-high-school-in-walla-walla-wa-tries-new-approach-to-school-discipline-expulsions-drop-85/
Effective program which is based on the premise that a lot of bad behavior is the result of stress, and adding stress to ill-behaved people doesn't work. I'd been meaning to post it here anyway because it's a change in a high school discipline which requires changing a number of factors at the same time.
That analogy is too convoluted to be worth unpacking.
But some people react with hostility to A's "rational problem solving" in the face of B's "emotional problems" because they see A as a threat. Which A might well be; this sort of framing can be a significant challenge to B's credibility. (More generally, it's a status challenge.) Similarly, some people react with hostility to B's "overload of emotion" because they see that as a threat.
So understanding why acceding to a perceived threat isn't necessarily the only rational response seems important if I want to understand the thing ialdabaoth has yet to understand.
As for stress-reduction as a behavior-manipulation tool... I'm all in favor of it when the power differential is sufficiently high in my favor. When the differential favors the ill-behaved person, though... well, I'm less sanguine. For example: yes, I understand being X in public frequently causes anxiety in non-Xes, which can sometimes lead them to bad behavior, but for many Xes the (oft suggested) response of not being X in public so as to reduce the incidence of that bad behavior seems importantly unjust.
Non-Violent Communication is a system for lowering anxiety in confrontations without giving in.
(nods) Fair enough. In cases where the underpowered person happens to know techniques for lowering the anxiety of the overpowered person without suffering additional penalties by so doing (e.g., has been trained in NVC), I'm more inclined to endorse them doing so.
Yeah, I came up with a disturbing hypothesis after reading that article talking about the overlap with rape and child abuse. I know rape drops off when men are around 24-26, and the theory I'd heard for it was that it was because of the drop in testosterone.
Given what I have learned about how predatory behavior is about a very small subset of men who repeatedly violate and appear to be motivated by desire for power over others more so than horniness, I now think its quite possible that getting more easy targets around that age when more people have kids could potentially be a significant contributing factor to the drop off.
Given how much I have heard about unreported child abuse at this point, I think that abuse of children is a lot more common than rape. Kids really don't report - they don't have the context to know that what they're experiencing isn't normal.
Also, the cost of reporting is potentially much higher for children. They risk being left with an angrier abuser, or losing their home.
Yes, true. There was one case that I recall when I was in elementary school myself - a boy mentioned to another girl and I that a parent had beaten him. He came back a week later and was enraged at the other girl - apparently she had reported it, and it had landed him in a foster home, which he considered much worse.
By the way, depending on the circumstances being beaten by parent =/= child abuse.
Interesting. Under what circumstances do you consider beating children to be reasonable?
Spanking, i.e., punishing the child for particularly egregious behavior.
I've read many arguments in favor of spanking, and they tend to go out of their way to distinguish spanking from beating; for instance by admonishing parents not to administer corporal punishment while angry with the child; and distinguishing measured spanking from lashing out physically at a child.
How did we go from "beating" to "lashing out physically"?