VoiceOfRa comments on Rational approach to finding life partners - Less Wrong

1 Post author: c_edwards 16 August 2015 05:07PM

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Comment author: VoiceOfRa 09 September 2015 03:41:45PM 2 points [-]

No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I'm pretty sure it's usually felt that one can't have an obligation to do something impossible.

Ok, now you're not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I'm pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you'd be arguing some variant of "just because things will never be perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make them as good as possible".

On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I'm pretty sure it's (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work,

So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I'm sure advencedatheist's comments were also aspirational in this sense.

(2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working -- e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.

Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?

Comment author: gjm 09 September 2015 04:29:12PM *  -1 points [-]

now you're not even trying to argue in good faith

This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I'm not saying you've done it twice in this thread]. I promise it's wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what's going wrong here -- am I missing something that's so obvious to you that you can't imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to "you're not even trying to argue in good faith"? Thanks.

(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it's a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)

just because things will never be perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make them as good as possible

Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I've been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I'm not sure what.

(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don't want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn't then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)

how is this relevant to the argument at hand?

I honestly don't know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it's relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there's an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don't think there is such an inconsistency.

Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships

Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.