Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Interlude with the Confessor (4/8) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2009 09:11AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2009 01:00:08PM 16 points [-]

When I think of this particular Weirdtopia premise, I think "the boundaries of consent have been redrawn in different places" rather than "the boundaries of consent have been eliminated". (Can you do the latter without changing human nature a lot?) There would still be a place where "no" means "no", and things you shared only with someone you chose. But then kissing someone against their will, however much of a psychic violation it might be in their society, still isn't quite analogous to the present-day concept of "rape" with all the threat of damage and death that it implies. More like having a naked photo of you posted to the Internet, say. So in that sense, yes, they wouldn't have any concept directly analogous to our "rape", unless it was beating someone up while kissing them - and conversely, beating someone up while having sex with them would sound just as odd to them as the previous phrase did to you.

But as I didn't actually write any of this into the story, feel free to exercise the reader's right of interpretation here.