The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

I observe that by their very nature claims that something is the "best argument against X" can more readily support X than undermine it.

Rejecting all the arguments against democracy that are better than said five minute conversation constitutes rather comprehensive support for democracy. (It rules out considerations of the various failure modes, perverse incentives and biases that are associated with such a system.)

Oh, and some of the less rational ones might worry that this was an indicator that I was a dangerous psychopath.

Why is this irrational? Having a fantasy of doing X means your more likely to do X.

I'm honestly not embarrassed by this story because it's "smug and disrespectful", I'm embarrassed because the more I stare at it the more it looks like a LWy applause light (which I had not originally intended).

...horrified by the social unacceptability of his fantasy life

What would be the reaction of your social circle if you told your friends that in private you dream about kidnapping young girls and then raping and torturing them, about their hoarse screams of horror as you slowly strangle them...

Just fantasy life, of course :-/

I think it's a question of what you program in, and what you let it figure out for itself. If you want to prove formally that it will behave in certain ways, you would like to program in explicitly, formally, what its goals mean. But I think that "human pleasure" is such a complicated idea that trying to program it in formally is asking for disaster. That's one of the things that you should definitely let the AI figure out for itself. Richard is saying that an AI as smart as a smart person would never conclude that human pleasure equals brain dopamine levels.

Eliezer is aware of this problem, but hopes to avoid disaster by being especially smart and careful. That approach has what I think is a bad expected value of outcome.

I'm not sure what your point is with those two quotes. Are you trying to say that OrphanWilde already addressed what I was saying? If so, the points are different: Orphan was discussing was how distinct groups have different standards. The point I was making that in small geographic areas one can have a large number of groups with different standards that all have to interact with each other. And the example of the Modern Orthodox showed, even within a small, superficially uniform group, there can be a lot of variation.

Hang on, I don't think that feminism is non-disprovable! If you think I do then you've misinterpreted me in a big way.

I don't agree that feminism is an instrumentally rational theory, I think it's justifiable (and justified) on moral grounds. It doesn't (or shouldn't) make any predictions about the way the world actually is or will be because it isn't a science, it's an ethics, and ethical theories make predictions about how the world should be.

Of course, that makes it harder to disprove but not impossible. If I thought that morals were totally relative and non-disprovable then I'd give up on them altogether and s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶ ̶b̶u̶i̶l̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶e̶r̶-̶o̶'̶-̶d̶o̶o̶m do whatever I wanted without thinking hard about whether or not it was right. I really do believe that consequentialism is the way to a correct theory of ethics, and I think that it leads to feminism, given our current situation.

EDIT: see ̶s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶

I think one problem is what wedrifid says: it is difficult to work out what your comment actually means.

• "the empirical claims of feminism are now successful": what does it mean for an empirical claim to be successful? Is that the same as "true", or something else?
• "but they did exist": why "but"? what's the opposition between existing and "being successful"?

I gather that you were disagreeing with Argency's statement that feminism "doesn't (or shouldn't) make any predictions about the way the world actually is or will be" on the grounds that you consider that feminism does (among other things) make claims about how the world is. Fair enough (and for what it's worth I'd agree), but it seems to me that the obvious diagnosis is that you and Argency disagree about what "feminism" means, in which case merely saying "but it does make empirical claims" doesn't achieve much.

So: two problems. A statement whose meaning is hard to make sense of, treating a disagreement as one about how the world is when it's probably actually more about how to use one particular word. I'd guess that whoever downvoted you had one or both of those in mind.

(I'd also say: being downvoted by one person is not particularly strong evidence of anything; don't get upset about it. But if you find yourself being downvoted a lot, the chances are that either you should change something or else LW just isn't a good place for you.)

Getting back on track, the lack of cultural unity was not in fact generally a problem a few decades ago, before the internet. Each community could have its own standards and this wouldn't pose too much of an issue, and this is more or less the way things worked. This system dissolved long before television, which was heavily regulated (hell, they weren't allowed to show belly buttons), became able to seriously impact standards of provocative clothing.

I think you are overestimating pre-internet uniformity here. If for example one spent time in Crown Heights one would have Orthodox Jews, generic African-Americans (mainly Christian), and some Muslim African-Americans. Each group has different ideas of what would constitute provocative clothing. Or to use a different example: when I was an undergrad I was involved in an interfaith Jewish-Muslim group. One thing that struck me was that among many of the Orthodox Jews, women wearing pants was considered what you would probably call provocative, but hair covering wasn't an issue. In contrast, for many of the Muslim women, the reverse held (pants fine, uncovered hair immodest).

Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we'd invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention.

If some women set themselves apart in this way with an unambiguous signal, I think they'd attract negative attention from people who disapprove of their attitudes.

It's possible they'd be at increased risk from sexually predatory men, but I think it's even more likely they'd be stigmatized by other women who take it upon themselves to enforce social norms.