A couple months ago I read a post on facebook about how perhaps more young female virgins should sell their virginity, if they receive a lot of money. It was based on this article about a young women selling her virginity for 120k.
What bugs me is these cases are often lazy in assuming there aren't incredibly complex systems lurking behind these simple calculations.
If you wanted to be rational about this, you could map your perception of this story to dollars, take the situation as well specified, and estimate what a women ought to do (or at least seriously consider) given those circumstances. For the sake of argument let's assume that the news story is totally accurate, and it's a real decision that is available to all young women. Given this, would this analysis robust?
[Edit: Daniel_Burfoot makes a fair point that I shouldn't cite facebook posts as they are supposed to have a semblance of privacy. Since my argument doesn't rely on the specific post made by EY, I abstracted it away. This is why his name is in the comments.]
About 53 years ago Karl Popper wrote about the hostility between tradition and rationality in an essay in Conjectures and Refutations. In a passage that could have come from Less Wrong he wrote “There is a traditional hostility between rationalism and traditionalism. Rationalists are inclined to adopt the attitude: 'I am not interested in tradition. I want to judge everything on its own merits; I want to find out its merits and demerits, and I want to do this quite independently of any tradition. I want to judge it with my own brain, and not with the brains of other people who lived long ago.'”
That's kinda the tone set by some rationalists. Actually, I think more often than not it's the right way to study certain problems in rationality. Does it always work though? I'm skeptical.
Popper framed this problem as rationalists vs. traditionalists. He didn't claim to know the answer or take a side, but did argue that rationalists were sometimes too dismissive of traditional without at least critically examining it. What even is tradition though? Well, about 31 years after Popper's article a Computer Scientist, R. G. Reynolds, wrote a paper on culture as an algorithm. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's an accepted model for the crowd reading this argument. Based on my own casual observations of culture, it's easy (or at least feels easy) to intuitively understand why some cultural rules are formed. It's particularly nice when it's based on something hidden at the time, which we directly observe in the future, like how pork is forbidden by some religions, which we now know is due to trichinosis caused by parasites in pork.
Sometimes it's harder. The evolution of sexual norms is complicated. It appears to be the lowest level code both genetically and culturally. If you pull on a string you never really know what's going to happen. It seems a reasonable claim that the distributed filtering method of a cultural algorithm could, in theory, optimize over norms and dimensions that are too complicated for us to intuit or hold in our heads. I don't want to come across as too nihilistic though, once we figure out that female genital mutilation is horrible, we should encourage people to stop (that is its own challenge).
Sometimes these algorithms run crazy weird experiments. I was on vacation last year visiting the Yucatan state in Mexico, and saw the sacrificial wells of Chichen Itza. I don't remember their specific rules, but they'd drown a young virgin to encourage rain for their crops. What is creepy is that it is a very rational and reasonable experiment, even though they weren't acutely aware they were running an experiment. If killing a single person could have a low chance of improving the rain, well you need to do it or test it. At least until you're sure it doesn't work. And, hey, life is weird enough. If sacrificing people had some impact on the cosmos it wouldn't have been that much weirder than volcanoes. At least at the time. My point is there are some intensely complex dynamics at play that might be hidden to our brains.
Thinking through this stuff is hard sometimes, because we view ourselves as having an unclouded vision of sexuality as we contrast ourselves to basically everyone else who isn't a well educated person living on the West Coast of the U.S. in 2016 (and if not with us geographically, with us in spirit). And again, I'm not trying to take some post-colonialist (I can't believe I used that term) view that 'all cultures are equally valid.' If we view gay marriage or acceptance as an experiment, the prediction that “nothing bad will happen except lots of people will be happier, with some who won't be at first but will eventually move on” seems to have been the right prediction.
If everyone adopted the Less Wrong framework would sexuality drastically change? Or are we a heterogeneous group who self-selected into this because we are more capable than most to reprogram our brain? Or a hard-to-predict combination of the two?
I suspect, even if we've never considered it, we all have some hard barriers in our brain that we wouldn't cross. Most people seem to be programmed to find incest repulsive. Obviously some edge cases have existed that can override that programming, but I doubt most people could, even if they wanted to (whatever that means).
The point I'm trying to get to is we don't fully understand the limits of human rational analysis towards sex and other biological constraints. There could be strange societal unintended consequences If there was an experimental shift towards more young women selling their bodies. We don't know how their families would react on an aggregate scale.We can still ask if it's an experiment worth advocating for, as a society, but is it?
We don't know exactly why there was a cultural algorithm developed for us to want to protect our young daughters from prostitution. If a tradition intuitively sounds outdated and can be overridden by rationalist analysis, maybe it is, or maybe there is a level of complexity with societal equilibrium we are completely unable to predict. We shouldn't have hubris when dismissing tradition as clearly outdated, clearly wrong, clearly beneath us.
I want to address your specific points, but let me first clarify what I'm not saying: I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad move, EY might be right that it's good and should be considered. Maybe it's true that the sexual habits of children are unimportant to parents, and if we reach a world where they are no longer considered that would be a better one. It's also probably true that all things constant, laws that forbid this type of prostitution hurt more people than they help by building black markets. I am not disagreeing with him on any of those points.
I'm trying to make a much more subtle point, which is that when thinking through the possibilities we are often unable to decompose or understand some tradition, which doesn't mean it isn't still founded on a real and still actively useful reason.
To go back to why parents should care about the sexual habits of their children, I don't think what I personally think matters. I think the reason parents care is due to very complex set of evolutionary and cultural systems, and they may be outdated and ready for us all to move past, or they may be achieving a purpose we aren't aware of. I don't think I can just invoke some philosophy and state "Based on my moral tenants of individual rights parents ought not to care about their children's sexuality." I think it's a question of measurement and the pros/cons of a counterfactual world where they care less or more, and how that turns out.
I agree that in the past it seemed to be common to be unhappy (to understate it) if your child was homosexual, and the world seems better the more accepting parents are of their gay children. But I don' think that's sufficient evidence to predict they shouldn't ever care.
In the "10,000 Year Explosion" Greg Cochran tracks how small selection pressures between genetics and culture resulted in crazy different outcomes for Ashkenaz Jews. It is possible small tweaks to complex systems can have outcomes nearly impossible to predict.
To go back to your point 2, as you note '[He] argues that there are women for whom doing this might be a good move, and aren't thinking enough about the possibility." That's what I was trying to disagree with. For some reason they aren't considering it, there is a taboo or a cultural more that blocks them from consideration. It could be true that this is based on an outdated view of sexual morality, and all would be better if it were removed. That, honestly, could be the case. It could also be true that there is a good reason, but it's embedded in this complex cultural system that doesn't reveal itself to us. The point I wanted to make was that we need to be very careful when decomposing tradition, because it's built on a complex system that makes understanding our impulses and societal moral institutions very hard.
Thanks for your comment though. I agree with you that I could have been clearer, and was not sufficiently charitable in arguing against and for his simpler and best points, and didn't expand on the scenarios where he could be right, and the points I agreed with. I didn't intend to make it seem as though he suggested all women should be considering this, but I do agree that's how it came across. I'm trying to improve as a writer, so I do sincerely appreciate your feedback.
I'm not saying that there are no parents who care about the fact that their children aren't homosexual or that it's unimportant to them.
It seems to me like homosexuality is a much better example if you are sincere about exploring how traditional morality has advantages then deciding how a woman spends single day of her life. Yes, the woman might be more independent if she self funds university then being dependent on her parents funding her but the fact that homosexuals don't p... (read more)