Thanks for the lengthy response. I better understand the cause of the disagreement. And, I reread my response to the OP with your comments in mind, and you are 100% correct; I did sound more irritated and dismissive than I had any reason to (when I used the word “confused”). That was not my intention; I apologize for any offense caused.

In addition, I would like to respond to and/or comment on some of your other comments. You asked:

Have you read the subthread carefully, going all the way back to Clarity's question? Have you read Roosh's article?

Yes and yes. It was an interesting thread. However the point I was making was not about what Roosh may or may not have meant in his article, nor was it about Clarity’s question, nor about gjm’s comments to Clarity’s question. All of those are interesting topics, and I have opinions on them, but I did not express them. Why not? Because the discussion volume on all of those topics has been large enough that my opinion on each of the main controversial points of the thread has been stated by someone else (in some cases, by multiple people); my stating opinions that have already been stated would add little value to the conversation. However, Jiro’s post did contain a statement that had not been addressed elsewhere and that I thought should be addressed, so I addressed it.

You also said:

You can't simply single out a specific statement and attempt to grapple with its internal logic.

Actually, you can. Jiro made a propositional statement and it can be evaluated independently without rehashing the entire thread history.

Again, Jiro's response is highly contextual and only makes sense when you consider the big picture.

Agreed – Jiro’s entire response was multifaceted, nuanced and complex, and were I disagreeing with his/her entire comment, the context of the thread would be relevant. The one statement I was commenting on however was self-standing and could be evaluated as such:

If you don't want people to be convicted of rape based on evidence obtained by torture, you also "want rape to be legal"

And, no, the quotes in the original do not significantly change the meaning of the sentence; certainly they do not render my objections (stated here) invalid.

So, why did I think that this one statement was important enough to respond to? Two reasons:

1. The statement is factually incorrect – it expresses a false equivalence, as explained here

2. The belief is not only factually incorrect, it is actually harmful; if widely held, it would have a pernicious effect on the justice system. If it was widely believed that placing reasonable limits on what the state can do to win a conviction for some offense is the same as making that offense legal, you could expect to see increased demands (and eventually capitulation to those demands) to actually allow torture to obtain convictions, or to reduce the standard of proof from “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” to “guilty by the preponderance of evidence”, or even “guilty by the majority of the evidence”, etc. This is especially true for crimes that tend to evoke strong emotional responses in the public. This is not a theoretical objection – there are currently voices arguing for torture to be used in cases involving terrorism, for example.

If I sound condescending, it's because it's tiresome to argue with someone who is taking a single point as literally as possible while neglecting to look into the context of the discussion.

Understood, but as stated, my objection was to a single point; various responses to the bulk of the thread’s controversial points have been discussed at length elsewhere. Therefore, it would have been pointless for me to address the entirety of the thread.

While you didn't seem offended, you nevertheless began your reply with an emotionally charged claim that Jiro seemed "confused".

Yes, valid point. I apologize for that.

I admit that I felt a bit of annoyance right from the beginning. The emotional charge you can feel channeled through my words is a product of status-posturing emotions related to defending Jiro.

Understood, and your desire to defend a fellow LWer is noble. My feeling, however, based on Jiro’s history of high-quality, well-argued comments, is that Jiro is in no need of verbal defense. Jiro has a higher karma score than either you or I do, and has (I suspect) a history at LW longer than mine (not sure about yours). None of that of course changes the fact that my initial comment was unduly abrasive, however.

I recently attended a 10 day intensive Vipassana meditation retreat. Would a write-up of the experience be something LWers are interested in as an article for discussion?

I had minimal to moderate experience in meditation before this but now feel much more comfortable with it. I can see potential rationality relevance through,

* Discipline
* Concentration
* Emotion and habit regulation
* Seeing reality as it is

If there is interest then I would appreciate it if someone is willing to look over a draft of the article for me as I haven't written for LW before.

In what way does the PUA paradigm prevent people from opening up and being vulnerable?

Basically people close down if you tell them to force themselves to approach strangers in relatively hostile enviroments. That what the resident person I know who wrote a book on comfort zone expansion and who run a weekly meetup on comfort zone expansion has to say on the topic.

PUA trains man to consistently reflect on whether their behavior is attractive and then change their behavior based on that reflection. Commonly that means that a man thinks he isn't supposed to show weakness when he's in a relationship. It trains the idea that if the man stops engaging in PUA type behavior his girlfriend will cheat on him. That creates resonance with fear of the girlfriend leaving that prevents opening up.

Rather than PUA causing men to lose out on the joy of long-term relationships, it may simply be that the community is disproportionately populated by men who's thinking was already firmly oriented toward short-term flings.

Two of key people in the game are publically out as being depressed a decade afterwards. Tyler and Mystery. That even through those two have actual success in attracting woman and they make a lot of money coaching people.

Herbal/Tynan isn't but then he stopped the PUA lifestyle, by his own account lost skills and is now seeking a wife to settle down with. Losing skills is quite interesting because it indicates that the skills are superficial and not deeply rooted. The fact that Mystery reports still having approach anxiety years after being a PUA is another indication of a failure to actually do deep changes.

I haven't actually meet Mystery or Tyler in person but I do know over a handful of people who make money with selling products to the PUA demographic and who see PUA often as causing those effects. Basically most people linked to MALEvolution think that way.

I suspect that you are taking an expansive interpretation of what it is in the OP that I am objecting to. As I have already stated, I am objecting to exactly one statement:

If you don't want people to be convicted of rape based on evidence obtained by torture, you also want rape to be legal

And, I will repeat and (hopefully) clarify my objection as well:

Making rape legal is not the same as not permitting the state to resort to torture to obtain a conviction in rape cases. Making rape legal is tantamount to a legal endorsement of rape in the sense that the law is stating that it is legally OK to commit a rape, and that the law will not take action against the perpetrator of that rape. Declining to allow torture to be used to obtain a conviction in a rape case is however not an endorsement of rape.

The distinction I am making is a distinction with tangible differences. For example, suppose action X is taken against person Y. Now consider two different scenarios:

1. X is legal.
2. X is illegal, but there is insufficient evidence against any suspected perpetrator to allow a conviction without, for example, resorting to torture to obtain a confession.

In scenario 1, legally no crime has been committed (because X is legal). Therefore, person Y is not a victim of a crime. This means that person Y is not entitled to victim’s services. Beyond that, since there is no crime, it is doubtful that the state will even mount an investigation. And, there could be implications for insurance settlements and/or liability resulting from action X as well (e.g. suppose X occurs at a nightclub with lax security. If X is legal, it is less likely that person Y would win a liability settlement against the facility than it would be if X were illegal).

In scenario 2, a crime has been committed. Presumably the state will mount an investigation, update crime statistics to reflect the incident, attempt to bring the perpetrator to justice, etc. Even if no one can be convicted or even brought to trial, person Y is recognized as a victim of a crime and would be eligible for victim’s services (if victims' services are offered by the state). And, recognition that a crime has occurred can in some cases be beneficial to person Y’s psychological recovery from the incident, and could factor in to liability settlements, etc.

I believe that I understand the point that Jiro is attempting to make with the OP. However the argument presented utilizes a false equivalence between (X being legal) and (X being illegal but not allowing torture to be used to obtain a conviction for X). It is that false equivalence that I am objecting to.

Finally, your comment:

Let this be a lesson for how easily words lead to systematic miscommunication

frankly sounds condescending; IMO comments like that are inappropriate for LW.

and more importantly the people with a political agenda, who stay.

Well, the political agenda is also a natural evolution. After getting laid enough times, it gets dull. Also if one is at all philosophically inclined, one notices that the very existence and need for PUA is a symptom of how dysfunction certain aspects of society are. Thus one is naturally led to politics.

Most people who are focused only on understanding sexual/romantic dynamics well enough to get a girlfriend they're happy about being with will dip their feet into the community for a few months or a couple years and then disappear. It's the perpetual failures, and more importantly the people with a political agenda, who stay.

Well, you're certainly right that the people who stay in the community are likely unrepresentative of the average. But there are many people who stay because they're seeking to be PUA wingmen/coaches (either amateur or paid-for), or simply to improve their outcomes and their understanding of seduction- and social dynamics. To some extent, this describes 2007!Roissy and 2007!RooshV too, but even then they were quite controversial and 'political', in a way that many others in the community would have found distasteful and unhelpful.

The flip side of it though is that if the 'heavyweight' political folks are right about what they infer from PUA micro dynamics (I'm far from convinced about this, but we can assume it for the sake of this argument) there might not even be much need for further work on the micro side. Overall, PUA has seen remarkably little change since 2007, though there's definitely been a welcome emphasis on 'inner game' and 'being a natural' as being the next level, and low-level tactics and tricks as useful training wheels that can eventually be dispensed with to a large extent.

If you read "The Feeling Good Handbook" than it claims that vunerability is central for love relationships. There are PUA people like Mark Manson who are pro-vunerability but Roosh certainly isn't.

Quite a lot of PUA behavior leads those people to not living long-term relationships because the PUA paradigm prevents them from opening up and being vulnerable.

The idea of how the law is supposed to benefit woman is by making woman so fearful of getting raped that they don't go home with a boy after a club night.

It's that woman are too promiscuous and have to be forced by fear to to less promiscuous. It's an ugly argument.

These days I would point to /r/seduction on reddit as a good example. Notably, the now mildly-infamous '/r/TheRedPill' section split off from the '/r/seduction' folks arguing that they were being too PUA-focused and apolitical, i.e. they were not focusing enough on 'manosphere' concerns.

If you say you want insider stock trading to be legal as long as you wear a suit, but your rationale is "it's so easy to convict innocent people of insider stock trading that the benefits from stopping false convictions outweighs the harm done by the insider trading", then that's the noncentral fallacy--a noncentral use of "want". Normally saying that someone wants X carries the connotation that they like X and don't believe X causes harm, which isn't true in this case.

If you don't want people to be convicted of rape based on evidence obtained by torture, you also "want rape to be legal" (specifically, you want the subset of rapes "rapes where evidence is only obtained by using torture" to be legal) but describing it that way would be misleading. You don't think rape is good, you just think encouraging torture is worse than rape. It would be possible to think that encouraging false accusations is worse than rape as well (especially if false accusations are common) and want to allow some rapes so you can discourage false accusations in the same way that you might want to allow some rapes to discourage torture.

(I really hope it's okay to even talk about this. I would rather not get banned.)