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VoiceOfRa comments on In praise of gullibility? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Of course, any idiot who doesn't like the conclusion of some argument can accuse the person making it of being a smart asshole.
I don't see what this has to do with the "smart asshole" problem. A "smart asshole" (or a boxed AI, or the devil) can just as easily create a plausible sounding argument about physics as about human behavior.
Is the term somehow ambiguous? Maybe your English isn't that good but it seems pretty self-explanatory.
To the extent there is a different culture, it's probably caused by the social situation in Hungary being much less dysfunctional than the social situation in the US.
I haven't lived in Eastern Europe for about 10 years now. When I did it felt a lot like a "gangsta" culture, like in GTA: San Andreas esp. in the nightlife / club scene, big buff aggressive guys and stripperish girls with infantile Hello Kitty accessories - does that come accross as functional? I have lived in the UK which is probably the closest to the US culture around here - I must admit I did not like much the music pubs with the fat girls being drunk and cussing and even fighting as if they were male sailors, but as my expertise was in manufacturing software, I lived in a really industrial, read, PROLE area, near Dudley, so that is not really a good sample. It is just prole culture for the most part. Now living in Vienna the only serious social dysfunction I see is everybody being fscking old - it has a retirement home vibe. Demographics screwed up.
But what does it have to do with the problem I raised with the word access? The problem I raised is that it is a dehumanizing term that ignores the romantic and loving aspects of relationships, even ignores how sex is a mutual pleasing participating act, it objectifies women as something passive and handing out sex as rewards, basically it has something akin to a prostitution vibe. This is not how a healthy relationship works. Not even how a healthy one night stand - it is based on mutual desire and mutual escalation. It feels incredibly transactional at best and objectifying at worst.
But I am not trying to raise a moral finger here. The issue is not that this is morally wrong, the issue is the inferential distance, that there is not one objectively examinable set of human behaviors but the author and me think/talk about entirely differently behaving humans. How the heck to find a rational conclusion in that? There is hardly a shared set of experience because there is hardly a shared value or goal or motive.
Yes, but the motives would be entirely different - and yes, they matter. The human mind is apparently too well optimized to win arguments instead of be right. Which suggests listening to arguments is not even a good way to find truth but even when you do at least you need to have some idea about the personality of the other, their motives, where are they coming from and where they want to go. You have to be at least the same tribe, in the sense of shared motives and goals. This is even true in physics - the difference being that academia has a very good institutional setup for sharing goals and motivations and values. Academia built a tribe in natural science. Go outside academia and you find the same mess - "Vedic science" guys arguing with UFO believers and so on. Cross-tribal it doesn't work.
The point is that from what I heard Hungary is a culture where someone whose "interest in women is loving them, being loved by them, and making love, in that order" has a chance of winding up with a woman.
What do you mean by "objectifies". I've yet to see a coherent explanation of the concept that doesn't boil down to "applying Baysian (or any) reasoning to humans is evil".
Now you're just resembling the semi-marxist/semi-aristocratic "how dare you reduce what I do to something as banal as trade!"
Care to explain what you think the two sets of motives are?
Rather you have to be running good epistomology rather than anti-epistomology.
This IMHO works in every culture, Anglo ones including, you just have to ignore the party b...es and go for the intelligent and non-crazy. Usually it means training yourself to be not too focused on cover-girl looks and be okay with stuff like no makeup. As a theoretical example, consider how would you pick up Megan McArdle - she writes, sounds and looks a lot like my past girlfriends, and Suderman looks and sounds broadly like the same kind of guy I am. This just a hunch, though.
However I fully agree that my dating experience in the UK was worse than in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia or Serbia. (Lived in some places and went to all kinds of meditation camps in the others.) And perhaps it would be worse in the US too. This is largely because I can tolerate things like no make-up, no heels, body hair etc. but I cannot really deal with obesity, and that means playing in a shrinking and increasingly competitive market. Yet, on the whole, my UK experience was not so bad either. On speed dating events in Birmingham, there was a non-fat, intelligent, friendly, considerate 15-20% always.
This is that simple basic Kantian thinking that got deeply incorporated into the cultural DNA of the West centuries ago, this why I don't understand what is in not to understand about. It is about primarily treating people as ends and only secondarily and cautiously as means. It is about understanding humans have a faculty of reason and thus autonomy. What follows from this? Autonomy means people can decide to be different from each other, and thus be really cautious with generalizations and stereotypes - perhaps, cultural ones are still okay, because socialization is a powerful thing, but gender is not a culture. Second, and more important, the ends not means stuff means not seeing sex as a prize to be won by an active, driven men and women just passively hand it out as a reward for the effort, but as an mutually initiated, mutually desired interaction between two autonomous beings with their own desires. It would be useful to read a bit around on the Pervocracy blog about this.
Objectification is not necessarily sexual and it is really an old idea, not some later day SJW fashion. It is treating people as means. Marx argued that in a 19. century factory the proletarian is objectified into being treated like a human machine. This may or may not be true, but an example of the idea. Or if you look at how people realized maybe slavery is not such a good idea, a large part of this was this old Kantian idea that a human should not use a human as a mere tool, without regard to the will of the other human. Rather if we want people to work for us, we should negotiate with them a price on an equal level, acquire consent, and make sure both got our will satisfied in the transaction. This is the same idea. But objectification is gradual, it is not a binary switch - one could argue employment in a hierarchical business is still more so than being an entrepreneur.
An object is simply something that does not have own goals, it is the object of desire, or the tool to achieve other desires with, of other people. If you understand what being a person, what personhood means, well, objectification is just a denial of it.
I must stress it is not some kind of a far-left ideology, it is something a traditional gentleman from 1900 would understand. Persoonhood is a through and through traditional Christian idea, one of the central concepts of Christian philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood#Christianity and objectification is just whatever denies it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectification
Similarly, I would not say objectifying people is a traditional, conservative thing. Just because feminists fight it it does not mean it is so - reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed progressivism is not traditionalism. If you look up Roger Scruton's Right-Hegelian philosophy of sex, it is very decently non-objectifying.
I would say objectification is largely a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon in an age where machines and processes are so predominant that we tend to see people like them, too, and the essence of personhood - intellect and will - gets ignored.
I would also say mass gunpowder armies played an important role in objectifying people.
Sexual objectification is simply a subset of this generic trend.
Another useful resource is existentialists like Sartre, "The Other".
The intelligent asshole will perhaps present a bogus physical theory to gain status - but the arguments will be about a commonly understood, verifiable thing outside himself. But a social theory will not be about a thing, it will be essentially about himself, something only he really knows and we can just guess.
Running good epistemology on human concerns, social concerns is highly desirable but incredibly hard becasue we cannot separate the observer from the observed.
Interestingly, Rothbard and Austrian Economics have something interesting to say here, the limitations of empiricism about people's behavior. You need repeatable experiments. But if you repeat it with different people, that is not really valid because people are far, far too diverse - remember, autonomy. It is simply wrong in principle to treat beings with intellect and will fungible. If I repeat a behavior experiment with two different groups of people and get something like 62% an 65% do X then of course that means something, but it is not, strictly speaking, the repetition of the experiment. If you repeat it with the same people, you find they learned from the previous experiment rendering the experiment less valid, because not really repeated the same way. So basically we cannot, without brainwashing, repeat experiments in human behavior. Nevertheless at the end of the day we still run experiments with human behavior because just what else can one do? We work with what we have. But the confidence in these things should always necessarily be far lower, for these reasons. The strict repetition criteria is never satisfied.
Just a hunch but I suspect Megan McArdle would not be doing speed dating.
Except the generalizations are frequently correct and have enormous predictive power.
Why? Yes, socialization is powerful, but so is genetics, including the difference between XX and XY. In particular the SRY gene has much more influence than a typical gene.
You see to be confusing is and ought there. However, you think sex ought to be obtained, being active and driven (among other things) makes a man more likely to get it. Whether, you consider the women's behavior here "passive" or "actively seeking driven men" is irrelevant, and probably doesn't correspond to any actual distinction in reality.
So you're saying its not just SJW because it was also used by their leftist predecessors?
If you mean that humans are game-theoretic agents, I agree. However, I don't see how "therefore we can't or shouldn't apply probability theory to them" follows.
Doesn't this seem to contradict your earlier claim that anti-objectification was responsible for the abolition of slavery?
Well, in this case the social theory in question is indeed about a verifiable thing outside the person, namely the dynamics of human romantic interaction.
Quote please. I'm guessing you're badly misinterpreting what they wrote. Probably something about how since people respond to incentives, empirically observed behavior will change when the incentives change. Something like a proto-version of Goodhart's law. This is not the same thing as the claim that the laws of probability don't apply to humans, which is the claim you seem to be making.
If you mean there is a lot of variance among humans, I agree. However, you seem to be arguing that we should worship and/or ignore this variance rather then studying it.
I know what you mean, but I think there is a coherent notion in there, along the following lines: 1. Human beings are people, with hopes and fears and plans and preferences and ideas and so forth. 2. Inevitably, some of our thoughts about, and actions toward, other human beings involve more attention to these features of them than others. 3. Something is "objectification" to the extent that we would change it if we attended more to the specifically person-ish features of the other people involved: their hopes, fears, plans, preferences, ideas, etc. (Or: that a decent person would, or that we should. These framings make the value-ladenness of the notion more explicit. Or, and actually this may be a better version than the other three, that they would prefer you to. The fact that on my account there are these different notions of "objectification" isn't, I think, a weakness; words have ranges of meaning.)
So, e.g., consider "treating someone as a sex object", which for present purposes we may take to mean ignoring aspects of them not relevant to sex. If you are currently engaged in having sex with them, this is probably a good thing; on careful consideration of their wants and needs as a person you would probably conclude that when having sex they would prefer you to focus on those aspects of them that are relevant to having sex. On the other hand, if you are in the audience of a seminar they are presenting, you should probably be attending to their ideas about fruit fly genetics or whatever rather than to how they'd look right now with no clothes on; at any rate, that would probably be their preference.
I *would prefer it" if you sent me a million dollars. By this definition it would seem that you're objectifying me by not sending me the money?
Only in so far as the reason why I don't is that I'm not paying attention to the fact that you have preferences.
If I'm perfectly well aware of that but don't give you the money because I don't have it, because I think you would waste it, because I would rather spend it on enlarging my house, or because I have promised my gods that I will never give anything to someone who uses the name of their rival, then I may or may not be acting rightly but it's got nothing to do with "objectification" in the sense I described.
Did you think of the fact that I wanted a million dollars until I told you?
OK, if you allow excuses like that, i.e., "I know your preferences and don't care", then I don't see how PUA stuff counts as "objectification".
Explicitly? No, but I don't think that's relevant. I'm aware that people generally prefer having more money, and giving someone else $1M would be difficult enough for me that it seems vanishingly unlikely that explicitly generating the thought "X would be better off with an extra $1M" for everyone I interact with would change my behaviour in any useful way. If in the course of talking to you it became apparent that you had a need so extraordinary as to give a near-stranger reason for mortgaging his house and liquidating a big chunk of his retirement savings, then I'm pretty sure I would explicitly generate that thought. (I still might not act on it, of course.)
The borderline between objectification and mere selfishness is sometimes fuzzy, no doubt. On reflection, I think "nothing to do with objectification" in my earlier comment was an overstatement; if A treats B just as he would if he were largely ignoring the fact that B has preferences and opinions and skills and hopes and fears and so forth, then that has something to do with objectification, namely the fact that it generates the same behaviours. Let's introduce some ugly terminology: "cobjectification" (c for cognitive) is thinking about someone in a way that neglects their personhood; "bobjectification" (b for behaviour, and also for broad) is treating them in the same sort of way as you would if you were cobjectifying them.
I am very far from being an expert on PUA and was not commenting on PUA. But if you are approaching an encounter with someone and the only thing on your mind is what you can do that maximizes the probability that they will have sex with you tonight, that's a clear instance of bobjectification. It's probably easier to do if you cobjectify them too, but I don't know whether doing so is an actual technique adopted by PUA folks. And I guess that when anti-PUA folks say "PUA is objectifying" they are making two separate claims: (1) that PUA behaviour is bobjectifying, which is harmful to the people it's applied to, and (2) that people practising PUA are (sometimes? always?) cobjectifying, which is a character flaw or a cognitive error or a sin or something. It seems hard to argue with #1. #2 is much harder to judge because it involves guessing at the internal states of the PUAs, but it seems kinda plausible.
Now: perhaps objectification in the broad ("bobjectification") sense is just the same thing as, say, selfishness. They certainly overlap a lot. But I think (1) they're not quite the same -- e.g., if you treat someone as an object for the benefit of some other person you're objectifying them without being selfish, and (2) even when they describe the same behaviours they focus on different possible explanations. Probably a lot of selfishness is made easier by not attending fully to the personhood of the victim, and probably a lot of objectification is motivated by selfishness, but "X isn't paying (much/enough) attention to Y's personhood" and "X is (strongly/too) focused on his own wants" are different statements and, e.g., might suggest different approaches if you happen to want X to stop doing that.
Ok, let's apply these terms to the million dollar example. You didn't know or care whether I wanted the money (cobjectification) and once you found out you wouldn't send it to me (bobjectification). So it appears your new terminology applies just as well to the refusing to send money example.
Incorrect. I didn't know whether you wanted the money, but not because I was thinking of you as an object without preferences; simply because the question "should I send VoR a million dollars?" never occurs to me. Just as the parallel questions never occur to me in day-to-day interactions with friends, colleagues, family, etc. It's got nothing to do with cobjectification, and everything to do with the fact that for obvious reasons giving someone $1M isn't the kind of thing there's much point in contemplating unless some very obvious and cogent reason has arisen.
It is, indeed, true that not sending you $1M is a thing I might do if I didn't think of you as a person with preferences and all the other paraphernalia of personhood. But it's also a thing I might do (indeed, almost certainly would do) if I did think of you as a person. Therefore, it is not a good example of bobjectification. (We could say, in the sort of terms the LW tradition might approve of, that something is bobjectification precisely in so far as it constitutes (Bayesian) evidence of cobjectification. In this case, perhaps Pr(not send $1M | cobjectify) might be 1-10^-9 and Pr(not send $1M | not cobjectify) might be 1-10^-8, or something. So the log of the odds ratio is something like 10^-8: very little bobjectification
It's not ambiguous. It's just that it communicates certain values that are foreign to DeVliegendeHollander.
And, to be quite clear about it, DVH at no point suggested that he doesn't understand what the term means (despite VoR's respose which seems to presuppose that he did). He understands what it means, he just thinks it implies a strange and unpleasant attitude.
And yet here he claims that he's "not trying to raise a moral finger here".
So is his problem that this "strange and unpleasant attitude", represents a flaw in the argument that would render its conclusions false.
Calling something unpleasant is perfectly consistent with "not trying to raise a moral finger". (For the avoidance of doubt, the word "unpleasant" here is mine, not DVH's, but I don't think I've misrepresented his meaning.) I am not entirely convinced that he really isn't trying to raise a moral finger, at least a little bit.
I don't think I see how the attitude DVH thinks he perceives via the idea of "sexual access to women" could represent a flaw in any argument, nor is it quite clear to me what argument you have in mind or which conclusions would be being invalidated. Could you be a bit more explicit?
I have no idea either but if you look up thread, you'll see that DVH seems to think it does.
Oh, OK, I'd misunderstood what you were saying. But I don't think I agree; I don't see that DVH is claiming that any argument is invalidated, exactly. I'm not sure to what extent there are even actual arguments under discussion. Isn't he rather saying: look, there's all this stuff that's been written, but its basic premises are so far removed from mine that there's no engaging with it?
I expect that, e.g., the book he mentions has some arguments in it, and I expect he does disagree with some of the conclusions because of disagreeing with this premise, by it looks to me as if that's a side-effect rather than the main issue.
Imagine reading a lot of material by, let's say, ancient Egyptians, that just take for granted throughout that your primary goal is to please the Egyptian gods. You might disagree with some conclusions because of this. You might agree with some conclusions despite it (e.g., if the goods are held to want a stable and efficiently run state, and you want that too). But disagreement with the conclusions of some arguments wouldn't be your main difficulty, so much as finding that practically every sentence is somehow pointing in a weird direction. I think that's how DVH feels about the stuff he's referring to.
Except he didn't object to a premise, he objected to the term "sexual access to women".
In which case I could point to a specific false premise, namely the existence of the Egyptian gods. Neither you not DVH have pointed to any false premises. You've objected to terms used, but have not claimed that the terms don't point to anything in reality.
Here's the most relevant bit of what he actually wrote:
"Not about strictly defined concepts". "Your own light which can be utterly different from the light of other people". "For example". "What kind of a life could this come from". The point isn't that there's something uniquely terrible about this particular term, it's that if someone finds it natural to write in such terms then they're looking at the world in a way DVH finds foreign and unpleasant and confusing.
Falsity isn't (AIUI) the point. Neither is whether the term in question points to anything in reality. The point is that the whole approach -- values, underlying assumptions, etc. -- is far enough removed from DVH's that he sees no useful way of engaging with it. "When discussing human behavior you cannot really separate facts from values, and thus you need a certain kind of agreement in values."
Anyway, I'm getting rather bored of all the gratuitous downvotes so I think I'll stop now. By the way, you've missed a couple of my comments in this discussion. But I expect you'll get around to them soon, and in any case I see you've made up for it by downvoting a bunch of my old comments again.