= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
V_V comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (472)
A:
Beware of hasty generalization. The fact that you have been in an abusive relationship and you've read similar stories doesn't imply that these relationships are typical.
The intersection between the set of sociopaths and the set of university professors is not necessarily empty. However, claiming that this behavior is normal among males is outright sexist defamation. It's like, after sharing a story of being robbed by a black person you said: "You might think my robber was an antisocial person, but no -- they are a normal black person"
B:
I'm not sure what you describe as a body/mind dichotomy really makes sense or is the proper way of describing your experiences. What you describe seems to be known as egodystonicity, which is a quite common phenomenon to a certain extent, but can potentially become pathological.
Receiving abuse doesn't justify committing abuse.
That's a patronizing view of male sexuality.
Consider it's reversal: instead of trying to fullfill women preferences (such as preference for high status mates), men should try to enlighten women so they internalize and enact men’s porn views (such as engaging in casual intercourse with random strangers).
Beware of fictional evidence.
You describe creepiness essentially as a fear response. That's not mutually exclusive of being creeped by of low-status or unattractive persons. In fact, evidence suggests that people tend to instinctively trust attractive and high-status individuals and fear unattractive and low-status individuals.
I'd like to read that evidence, if you happen to remember where you found it. A quick search only yielded studies using interpersonal attraction and trust as measurement mechanisms.
Do you mean this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7845772 ?
I can understand how one could extrapolate trust from "babies' preference" , but have trouble imagining a large effect size of attractiveness on adults' trust. The same goes for a replication of the baby study that shows adults pairs of faces then inquires after the most trustworthy-seeming of the pair (assuming such a replication exists). Split-second trust decisions may fall well within the effect size, yet I consider trust enough of a system 2 process that forcing a system 1 trust decision has limited applicability. Does the evidence suggest this consideration mistaken?
Halo effect
For context, the trusting-high-status/attractiveness claim often stems from the Halo Effect cognitive bias, and you might have more luck searching for that.
I believe the evidence is likely to have come from there, rather than baby studies.
Over 20% of women in the U.S. experience domestic violence. The incidence of sociopathy is at or below 5% so it's more likely that an abusive male in a relationship is not a sociopath. In India it actually is the "normal male" who is abusive, with the domestic violence rate against women at 50%, although I didn't see any analysis of whether it is a flat 50% of head-of-household males engaged in violence or a higher level of violence perpetrated by a few male family members in extended families.
That isn't logically valid. It's possible for a single person to abuse more than one woman. Therefore, the percentage of abusers in the population is likely lower than the percentage of abused. I don't know how much lower that is, but "less than 10%" is entirely plausible.
It's also possible for the same person (e.g. a child or teenager) to receive abuse from more than one person (e.g. both parents). This may counterbalance the above somewhat.
(On the other hand, it seems rather certain that the proportion of rape victims is higher than the proportion of rapists, since IIRC almost all rapists are repeat offenders.)
I'd argue that being a repeat offender is, for any crime and especially those with low conviction rates, more likely than being a repeat victim, by simple logic of "an offender chooses, a victim does not." You are right, though, in that I should have mentioned the possibility.
Don't suppose anyone has a source for this? I can see how it could come about, but it would be nice to have something solid.
Good catch. The Harvard rape study (Lisak & Miller 2002) claims 63%, which my brain had apparently rounded up to "almost all". Sigh. Silly brain.
There's also a potential confounding effect if a higher percentage of abusers and abused remain in the same set of relationships, e.g. an abused person moves from one abuser to the next. It looks like sociopathy/psychopathy has a higher prevalence in the abuser population, about 15% to 30% for "batterers", from Domestic violence and psychopathic traits: distinguishing the antisocial batterer from other antisocial offenders., with a non-paywall version here. Most of the studies those results are based on seem to be relatively small (N < 100) and essentially self-selected, but I couldn't find anything better.
This isn't directly related, but according to one study, at least 5% of male college students are rapists, with an average of 5 attempted rapes each. And it's plausible that the study detects most rapists. This doesn't necessarily mean that most rapists are sociopaths, though.
The study also shows that most of the recidive rapists also commit other forms of abuse, which is consistent with a sociopathic personality.
The Wikipedia article you linked doesn't reference the source of that claim. Anyway, IIUC a large part of abuse comes from relatively few perpetrators.
I also felt while reading this that my sex as a group was being defamed, but while I doubt that the author has the evidence to conclude that such behavior is truly typical of males in general, I also have to be skeptical that my own experiences are sufficient evidence to suppose that such behavior is atypical. Our own social circles tend to be very heavily filtered compared to the overall population, and just because the behavior the author wrote about describes few of the guys I've associated with, doesn't mean it's not normal.
I agree that we don't have evidence that his behavior is typical of men, but I find it plausible that a moderately high proportion of men and women have a script about relationships which makes it easy to maintain such behavior for quite a while without either partner being explicitly aware that it's abusive.
That's what statistics are for.
On the other hand, I can't hold it against people that they care about their group reputation.
See also the nice guy privilege.
It makes a fair point, although I think it's also an illustration of how privilege is a terrible term for the phenomenon it's used to describe.
In general I agree that “blind spot” (as suggested in the comments to that series of posts) would be a better term, but in this case, I think that being able to joke and display affection without people freaking out is a privilege even in the ordinary colloquial sense of the word.
Thanks for the link-- I'd missed a bunch of the comments, including Ragen Chastain explaining why (though she won't criticize other people for using "privilege", she doesn't use it herself.
Here I genuinely suggest an improvement upon the quoted form of expression in what I hope is an agreeable manner.*
A better way to express this sentiment, without demeaning another's experience:
*I only just noticed some may have been reading a negative affect into the above which I have hopefully now meliorated.
For the benefit of non-American readers: is HLN fiction? I was under the impression it was a news program.
According to wikipedia, HLN used to be the Headline News part of CNN. So it is supposed to be real news.
But looking at its home page shows that V_V is probably right that there is a lot of sensationalizing going on - P(sensationalizing | Nancy Grace is involved) is essentially the definition of (1 - epsilon).
I don't know, I assumed the OP was referring to some crime show like Law and Order, but in fact that might have been some "true story" type of program.
If this is the case, then it should be noted that
these stories are often fictionalized to some extent
even if the story was depicted in an accurate and unbiased way, it doesn't mean that is was typical enough to use it as evidence to update your beliefs.
Er... Why? If someone is too weak (in a generalized sense) to possibly harm me without repercussions, wouldn't that make me less afraid of him?
I suppose so, but unattractive and low-status doesn't necessarily mean potentially less harmful. In fact, it could be argued that low-status individuals have less to lose form breaking social rules and resorting to aggression (in a generalized sense). Or that just associating with low-status individuals may lower your own status.
Anyway, human congnitive heuristics and biases doesn't necessarily need to have an adaptive value.