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scientism comments on Article about LW: Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York’s Futurist Set - Less Wrong Discussion
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Eliezer's OkCupid profile (as included in the titular link) provides some really good dating advice!
Here's some dating advice: Don't use the sentence "you shouldn't worry about disqualifying yourself or thinking that I'm not accessible to you" anytime anywhere, let alone on your dating profile. Some career advice: If your day job supposedly involves ethics, you should probably tone down the publicly-available dating profile where you advertise yourself as a polyamorous sadist who welcomes the casual advances of women who "want to sleep with me once so you can tell your grandchildren" (provided they don't "disqualify" themselves by thinking you're not "accessible", I suppose).
I'm hoping the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek...? (If so, it's merely the product of poor judgment, rather than terrifying.)
Career advice, simplified: If your day job requires having a good image, you should care about having a good image.
(Note: It's not about ethics, only about perceptions. But the perceptions are important.)
Feynman used to hang in topless bars, didn't he?
Did he also believe that he increases the existential risk by doing so?
Good point.
If Eliezer ever does a complete reversal of his ethical position and starts advocating the 3^^^^3 dust-specks over the quantitatively negligible torture because "I mean wow doesn't that just turn you on?" I'll start to be concerned.
As hard as you have tried to misrepresent the profile through cherrypicking it still doesn't sound so bad. Eliezer's profile is actually a close-to-optimal combination of signalling and screening for someone of Eliezer's strengths and weaknesses. His advice is good, yours is bad---or at least naive and poorly generalised from advice that would be useful for PUA amateurs with a very specific persona and target audience in mind.
An excellent conclusion. I almost quoted that too (but chose to emphasize the advice part instead.)
Terrifying? I don't believe you. I believe this was just a word that sprung to mind when you searched for "word with negative connotations that I can use to attempt to discredit Eliezer". Pjeby's commentary of your reply seems spot on.
I suspect that a lot the disagreement in this thread actually stems from what sets off peoples' "squick" reflexes and how strong the reaction is in different individuals. It seems like you and pjeby don't get a strong "squick" reaction from what Eliezer wrote on his profile, whereas scientism does. Compare scientism's and pjeby's reactions--scientism calls the profile "a new level of squeamishness," where pjeby says that this description is "lacking in any explanation for the connotation applied." To people like scientism, it feels obvious that this kind of squickiness is just bad and ugly-looking, but to yourself and pjeby, it doesn't seem so apparent.
Stepping down from the meta-level and returning to the original point: I don't think "terrifying" is necessarily hyperbole. Some people do actually react so strongly to squick that it makes them physically uncomfortable, and uncomfortableness (to whatever degree) is probably what motivated the arguments scientism made, especially the ones that you consider harsh or misrepresentational. (Note that this isn't a defense of those arguments, just speculation about their origin and why you don't agree with them.)
To be clear: I haven't actually read the profile, only the excerpts posted here. But I'm quite confused as to why Eliezer openly stating an interest in sadism or polyamory would be a problem in any event.
Rationally speaking, the best way to find a partner with matching preferences is to be open and upfront about what it is your preferences are, just in case your potential partner(s) aren't being upfront enough for you to find them.
What's more, societal double standards being what they are, it's generally less costly for a male to state his preferences up front than for a female... not to mention that it's time-saving for all the females who don't share his preferences. Frankly, being as honest and upfront as possible is an altruistic and highly ethical stance to take, because it benefits all of the women who view a person's profile with an eye to dating its author.
And that's is why I'm so utterly baffled by the mudslinging that seems to imply it's, um, unethical? or something.
Edited to add: Just read the actual profile, and I am now updated even more in the direction that I have no clue WTF people are thinking. The sexual bits seem pure and innocent as the driven snow (at least to my own corrupt mind), and even the excessive citation of other people's finding him impressive came off more as insecurity than arrogance. WTF are people complaining about, besides, "some people won't like it"? "Some people won't like it" is a fully general counterargument against doing or saying anything, anywhere, anytime, ever.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree by engaging the specific arguments scientism is making rather than looking at what motivated these arguments in the first place. See this comment by scientism:
I don't think this is actually about Eliezer's preferences being unethical or anything like that, and it's certainly not about broader things like the optimal way of finding a partner with matching preferences. This is about a subset of the population reading Eliezer's profile and thinking oh god this is weird ew ew get it away from me ick ick ick and then writing these kinds of arguments as a reaction. This might sound like I'm being uncharitable to scientism, accusing him/her of giving nontrue rejections, but I think it's accurate because a) the comment I quoted about indicates that this is largely about squick rather than ethics, and b) I also experienced a very strong squick reaction upon reading Eliezer's profile, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to freaking out about it.
I think I've made it clear that I don't find offence in any of the particular lifestyle choices expressed in the profile (i.e., sadomasochism and polyamory), but I think it's more than an issue of mere presentation or the squick factor. My point is that the profile offers some insight into where following LW/SIAI/CFAR recommendations might take you. When somebody sets themselves up as an ethics and rationality expert their own lifestyle and character are going to be subject to especial scrutiny and rightly so. That isn't to say that people should be alarmed at sadomasochism or polyamory; what I tried to convey was that everything together - the quirks, the presentation, the personality - painted a picture of something altogether bizarre. That combined with the fact that this person is offering advice on how to live your life was the source of potential terror.
Based on your previous comment, I had guessed that you were squicked out by the presentation rather than Eliezer's actual lifestyle choices; thank you for clarifying. As I indicated above, I had a similar emotional reaction to the presentation.
I'm curious as to what underlying psychological factors caused us to react this way, and what subset of the population would also feel this kind of squick.
I guess what I want to emphasise is that I don't think the reaction is illicit or even particularly subjective. One of the ways a system of ethics can fail is that it's impoverished. It doesn't capture everything we want to say about the subject. When you encounter a person or group who are living their life according to a particular ethical system and you have the sense of things spiralling away from normalcy, that's a legitimate cause for concern. It's a sense that something might be missing here. That's why I said it could almost serve as a reductio. It's similar to performing a long calculation and being left with the sense that the answer is an order of magnitude out.
Imagine replacing the polyamory with homosexuality, and imagine it is a few decades ago when homosexuality was as risque as polyamory is currently. Do you have the same reaction? If not, what is different? If so, do you condone that reaction?
To me, what society considers "normal" is terribly unethical, so "spiraling away from normalcy" isn't a cause for concern, but perks my curiosity.
"Maybe he's on to something..."
You seem to be saying that the fact that "a picture of something altogether bizarre" was painted has something particular to do with the LW community — that there is something that the LW community could have covered up, or done differently, that would have prevented that picture from being painted.
But the writer in question is in the business of gossip-mongering: providing entertainment in the form of bizarre pictures of social groups. This is not a truth-tracking endeavor. An effective gossip-monger can find something kinky and kooky about any group deemed sufficiently important to write about. Moreover, hiding your bi-poly-switch-trans-cuddle-nudist tendencies is not effective against gossip-mongers: if they can't call you an oversexed pervert, they will call you a sexually-repressed virgin who can't get laid.
Yes, it was actually shockingly good presentation, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised after reading HPMOR.
It seems to me that EY does not need your dating advice.
Why is it bad ethics? And why is it bad for EY's career? He does not seem to be interested in soliciting donations from social conservatives.
It's not so much the content as the presentation. The tone is incredibly self-absorbed and condescending. I thought the whole thing was a joke until I encountered the above quoted paragraph with its apparent sincerity. Presumably some of the content is intended to be tongue-in-check and some of it posturing, but it's difficult to separate. There's a compounding weirdness to the whole thing. Fetishes or open relationships or whatever aren't in themselves causes for concern but when somebody is trying to advocate for rationalism and a particular approach to ethics, the sense that you're following them somewhere very strange isn't good to have.
Let me try to make that clearer: Utilitarianism already has the problem of frequently sounding as if sociopaths are discussing ethics as something entirely abstract. Applying that to relationships, in the form of evangelical polyamory, takes it to another level of squeamishness (as others here have indicated). Seeing those ideas put into practice in the context of the dating profile of a self-professed sadist (who has been accused of wanting to take over the world, no less), replete with technical terminology ("primary", "dance card", etc), condescending advice to prospective conquests to help them overcome their fear of rejection and a general tone of callousness, sends it over the edge. Read straight, the profile could almost serve as a reductio for SIAI-brand ethics and rationality.
I'm also worried about who the intended audience is. Since I can't imagine anyone not deeply immersed in the Less Wrong community responding positively to it, I was left with the sense that perhaps our community's figurehead is (ab)using his position in ways that, as some else put it, "don't help the phyg pattern matching." It's basically an advertisement saying, "I'm a leader in small community x and I'm open to your sexual advances, so don't be shy."
And the problem with this is what, exactly? AFAIK, that's simply the male equivalent to a cleavage photo.
This bit is quite similar to the rest of your comment: a denotative description with negative connotation, but lacking in any explanation for the connotation applied.
More precisely your criticism appears to all be of the form, "this is weird, and weird is bad." There isn't any explanation of "bad", not even bad for whom or what goals, let alone how it is expected to be bad.
Less Wrong is already weird enough without the blatant weirdness in EY's OKCupid profile. I'm seriously disappointed and worried by the fact that it's still public, to be honest...
I think we're all committing the typical mind fallacy by assuming that random other people are like us in that they'll actually evaluate the ideas behind something instead of just superficially judging the people describing the ideas. Yes, we should try to get people to actually evaluate ideas as much as possible, but we should also try to appear as normal as possible for people who don't instinctively actually evaluate ideas. See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/01/dear-young-eccentric.html
As far as I can tell, a large part of the reason PR departments exist in the first place is to control superficial impressions. I think this sends a bad superficial impression (and possibly even a worrisome non-superficial impression, i.e. on reflection maybe we don't want to have someone who would write what EY wrote as a high-status figure in the aspiring rationalist community).
The latter is a somewhat stronger signal in as much as it is hard to fake. You have to have cleavage if you wish to show it off in a crudely overt way. Writing that you have status requires nothing.
Push-up bras. Photoshop. Or even uploading a picture of someone else.
I can't imagine someone with an IQ of 90 able to come up with what EY wrote. Even the lack of spelling or grammar errors would be unusual for such a person. And his position within SIAI is easily googleable.
Pjeby was referring to a specific, fairly simple sentence. The most complex part was the single comma. The sentence is rather less impressive than even moderately endowed cleavage displays.
I agree that the overall profile is a strong signal. If I recall correctly I described it in a cousin comment as an approximately optimal combination of signalling and screening given Eliezer's strengths and weaknesses. Someone else attempting to convey the same message would require non-trivial amounts of intelligence and an awful lot of familiarity with Eliezer's culture.
As someone who had read Eliezer's OkCupid profile sometime not very recently, I was actually gonna reply to this with something like "well, scientism goes maybe a bit too far, but he does actually have a point"
...but then I just went and reread the OkCupid profile, and no, actually it's wonderfully funny and I have no worries similar to scientism's, unlike earlier when the profile didn't explicitly mention sadism.
Obviously Eliezer is a very unusual and "weird" person, but the openness about it that we observe here is a winning move, unlike the case where one might sense that he might be hiding something. Dishonesty and secrecy is what the evil phyg leaders would go for, whereas Eliezer's openness invites scrutiny and allows him to emerge from it without the scrutinizers having found incriminating evidence.
Also, where are you seeing evangelical polyamory? I'm very much not polyamorous myself, and haven't ever felt that anyone around here would be pushing polyamory to me.
I was going to post: "What makes it evangelical polyamory as opposed to just plain old polyamory?"
It seems to me the "evangelical" part was just added to make it seem worse without actually giving any valid reasons.
I think there's a strong effect wherein "open non-ashamed polyamory wherein you mention any positive reason why you like it" = "evangelical polyamory", or even just "open polyamory" = "evangelical polyamory", for the same reasons as "evangelical atheism" and "evangelical homosexuality".