Comment on In praise of gullibility?

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 01:53:49 GMT

Exactly where that baseline is will change what counts as cobjectification (and hence indirectly what counts as bobjectification) for a given person:

So if we're going by social baseline, that means blacks weren't cobjectified in the ante-bellum south since treating them as property was the baseline.

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".

Except by that standard PUA isn't objectifying. Robin Hanson analyzes all kinds of personal interactions in terms of status games and no one calls that objectification unless it involves gender (or race or some other protected category).

"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."

Except this analogy doesn't work. Most people aren't carrying around TNT, but most people would in fact like a million dollars.

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