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buckwheats comments on In praise of gullibility? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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
So you're actual definition of "cobjectification" amounts to "ignoring people's preferences except where there's a gjm!'obvious reason' to ignore them".
BTW, I'm not making fun of you. I seriously can't see how this case is different from the case of PUA.
Except you weren't thinking of me as a person with preferences. You were thinking of me, if at all, as "just another person I interact with".
Note: I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this, but I don't see how it's different from a PUA thinging of a girl as "just another girl I banged" or "just another girl I can't get".
Nope. (Nor do I see how what I wrote leads to that conclusion. As an aside, I have this problem quite frequently in discussions with you, and I have the impression that some other people do too. My impression is that you are adopting a sort of opposite of the "principle of charity": when there are two interpretations of what someone else has said, pick whichever is less sensible. Perhaps that's not what's going on, but in any case it doesn't make for constructive discussion.)
By "cobjectification" I mean, as I have already said, not thinking of someone else as a person with preferences etc. This is not at all the same thing as thinking of them as a person with preferences etc., but not being at all times consciously aware of all their preferences.
If I am talking to someone, then -- as I already said -- the question of whether they would like me to give them $1M generally doesn't cross my mind, perhaps because there'd be no point in its doing so. And also because there are countless different things someone might want me to do, and I am several orders of magnitude short of enough brainpower to think about them all explicitly. Which is to say that not considering whether to send VoR $1M is simply business as usual, it's about equally likely whoever I'm talking to and however I think about them, and none of that applies to thinking about someone only in terms of how I can get them to have sex with me.
What makes you think that?
So in it's not cobjectification if you abstractly know the person has preferences? Well, the PUA certainly abstractly knows the women has preferences. I don't see how this is different from say only thinking of a Batista in terms of getting coffee.
No, the point isn't abstractly knowing, it's how (if at all) those preferences (and other distinctly "personal" features of the person in question) affect your thinking and speaking and action. There's a lot of interaction where the answer is "scarcely at all, for anyone" and such interaction is therefore not a very good measure of objectification. (Though your example is an interesting one; if A and B but coffee from the same barista, and A notices that she looks harassed, takes extra trouble to be polite to her, and maybe remarks "you look rushed off your feet -- has it been a long day?" while B is brusque and rude, that might in fact reflect a difference in the extent to which A and B see her as a person. But this is a very noisy signal.)
It's not (in the usage I'm proposing) cobjectification if the way in which you are thinking about the person does not pay markedly less attention to their preferences, personality, hopes, fears, etc., than some baseline expectation. Exactly where that baseline is will change what counts as cobjectification (and hence indirectly what counts as bobjectification) for a given person: objectification is an expectation-dependent notion just like "stupid", "strong", or "beautiful".
In the case of PUA, I suppose a reasonable baseline might be "other somewhat-personal face-to-face conversations between two people in a social setting". And if someone claims that PUA commonly involves objectifying women, they mean some combination of (1) would-be pickup artists are attending less to the personhood of their interlocutors than they would to that of other people (especially other men) in other contexts and (2) they behave as if #1 were true.
Perhaps an analogy might be helpful. Suppose that instead of "personhood-neglect" we think about "danger-neglect". You might claim that sometimes people fail to recognize others as dangerous when they should, or behave as if they do. An objection exactly parallel to your million-dollar objection to "objectification" would go like this: "We had a conversation the other day, and I bet it never once occurred to you during it that I might have 20kg of TNT in my backpack and set it off while we were talking. So you're engaging in danger-neglect all the time, which shows what a silly notion it is." And the answer is also exactly parallel: "Yes, that's a possibility in principle, but experience shows that that's a really unlikely danger, and there's not much I can realistically do about it, and if you were likely to blow us both up with a large quantity of TNT then there'd probably be some indication of it in advance. Danger-neglect doesn't mean not thinking consciously of every possible danger -- no one could do that, so that would be a useless notion -- it means paying less attention than normal to genuine threats posed by particular people."
If you agree that this objection would be bad and the response reasonable, where does the analogy with objectification break down?
(I don't think danger-neglect is a terribly useful notion in practice, not least because in practice most people don't actually pose much threat. This is a respect in which it fails to resemble objectification, since in practice most people do have beliefs and personality and preferences and so forth.)