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Nate646 comments on The Fable of the Burning Branch - Less Wrong
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Comments (175)
I'm interested to know if anyone would have considered voting this up if the attempted rape portion of the metaphor had been omitted and the story had been ended just before then?
I wouldn't upvote this in any case, as it doesn't belong here as it stands.
With some thorough editing, and a lot of boiling down, it could turn into an insightful discussion of the blind spot so many people have where social needs are concerned; that education or internet are something like a basic human right, but sexual satisfaction, which is far more primal and necessary to us, isn't. It's a necessary blind spot in ideologies which treat needs as rights to be satisfied by other people, because it's full of ugly truths about those ideologies.
But I doubt the insightful post would be received well, either. Perhaps I overestimate people, but I suspect most people have an inkling of the currents running under the surface, here.
Interestingly, there appears (at least in my local cultural circle) that being attended by human caretakers when incapacitated by age, is supposed to be a basic right. Hence, there must be some other reason - and not just the problem about rights being fulfilled by other persons, why the particular example assumed to underlie the parable, is reprehensible to many people.
There is another reason. In social-standing friendly language, "Sex is sacred".
For the less socially-friendly approach... sex is clearly not sacred, and the issue isn't the idea of sex being a right, as one can readily see by looking at people who can complain about involuntary celibacy without much social risk, and do so. I'm not going to name the ugliness, both because it's broad and ill-defined - a patch of area defined more by what a set of ideologies fail to say, than what they explicitly name - but also because it's something you have to see for yourself to believe.
I can't find it - where IS the rape part?
2nd to last paragraph.
I can see a reference to rape in the second to last paragraph if I squint real hard and look at it through rape-colored glasses, but when I take the glasses off or stop squinting it simply doesn't look like rape anymore.
Many LWers are careful enough to notice when even the slightest signaling towards a hot button issue crops up. This is just a good idea as a form of basic social hygiene since people in other environments have very powerful reactions to even the slightest of comments made towards those topics and can easily put you into an Enemy category or become much less comfortable around you for the foreseeable future.
Much of the annoyance at this thread was the fact that it included a signalling towards that at all since it's a substantial faux pas. This is especially true if the story was meant to have a different purpose as the writer later claimed.
This is a horrible thing to do from a rationality stand-point since it amounts to pre-mindkilling yourself.
As I write this, the parent comment is at -1 despite the fact that it simply answers a question someone asked. There is something very strange about the voting in this post's comments.
Someone downvoted your comment as well. Elsewhere in the thread, username2 asserted that Nancy could not be trusted as a moderator. I am pretty sure that comment was negative before, now it is at +4 with 55% positive. So that looks like some kind of vote manipulation.
There are some comments on this post where I wonder about vote manipulation because they seem to have changed score rapidly, some considerable time after posting.
TheAltar's comment upthread, and my comment on it, don't seem like examples of that. I think they may be unreasonable downvotes but not improper ones, if you see what I mean. (My reading of the situation is that there are some people on LW who have a strong aversion to anything suggestive of "social justice", and that that's responsible for a lot of the downvotes here. E.g., someone suggests that one bit of the OP is endorsing rape or complaining about people getting punished for rape; vocal opposition to rape is a Social Justice Thing and therefore bad in these people's eyes[1]; and then anything that engages with that without condemning it -- e.g., TheAltar's comment -- is guilty by association.)
[1] How could anyone have a problem with vocal opposition to rape? Well, the idea is that the word "rape" gets attached to things that are not rape (e.g., in phrases like "rape culture", "rape apologist", etc.) and then those things can get smacked down almost as if they were actual rape, even if they don't remotely deserve it.
EphemeralNight and Old_Gold's posts seem to have jumped up in votes massively in the last 1-2 days when they were both in the negative iirc.
This is a behaviour I have often observed on the scores of comments from Eugine_Nier/Azathoth123/VoiceOfRa/The_Lion. (And, I think, more generally on the scores of "neo-reactionary-friendly" comments[1].) It's tempting to attribute this to Eugine's socks, but it could also be that there are a few people of a particular political persuasion who happen to read LW only every few days, and happen to do so in sync.
It might perhaps be worth noting that Lumifer called out Old_Gold as Eugine redivivus practically as soon as he appeared. Make of that what you will.
[1] I don't like this terminology; perhaps someone can suggest something better. I mean comments that say highly negative things about groups that traditionally have low status but that more recently one is supposed to be positive about and understanding of: those who are female, black, gay, poor, transgender, etc.
I suspect it's because infrequent old members like myself only check the site every couple of days. I didn't upvote because the fable was good; I upvoted because I felt the author was being unfairly penalized by the downvoting.
Doubtful. The differences are large, one-sided, and occurred in a cluster. They also don't match LW's general leanings for voters.
Old_Gold seems to be Eugine. (My subjective probability is about 70% at this moment.)
EphemeralNight behaves quite differently. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Eugine used his sockpuppets to upvote him.
I've seen the votes fluctuate and some posts with odd points counts. The karma amounts do seem to be balancing out into what I would generally expect from LW users over time though.
(The entire thread has slowly moved from -22 to -17 which seems odd.)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I thought it was very bad[1] even aside from the attempted-rape bit.
[1] I mean in quality rather than morally, though the attempted-rape part (at least) is horrible morally too.
IMHO the 'attempted rape' claim is far more interpretation than substance - an interpretation that is specious at best.
In my experience, people who are not the likely victims of a kind of danger are much less likely to spot the warning signs of that danger than those who are. Women spot potential-rape more frequently, the same way that soldiers that have been stationed in the middle east are more likely to spot potential IEDs - not every discarded thing on the road is an IED, and not every "man roughly handling a women" is a potential rape... but some are... and some women have gotten better at spotting the latter due to either being trained to do so, or having had the experience themselves...
In other words... just because many people didn't see it for a potential-rape... doesn't mean it can't easily be interpreted as pattern-matching on exactly that kind of situation.
To some extent, it doesn't even matter that it was not the original intent of the author to represent rape. It was close enough that it was a plausible interpretation (specious or no) for those who know what to look for. I expect the author has learned something about how people can interpret things even when they are unintended...
Interestingly, and vaguely related, there's an ongoing debate about the Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series: apparently many women interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as containing a lot of sexual tension... and a lot of men (and the writer(s)) think that idea is rubbish.... it all has to do with how close they stand to each other, and the way they are portrayed to gaze at each other.
I'll admit that I'd missed that part when I first read the post, I only noticed it after I went through the comments section
While almost everyone who commented interpreted it that way, I think it's also worth pointing out that at least one person in the comments thread missed the metaphor completely.