There’s really no chance that people are going to stop discussing “attractive women” (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about “attractive women” on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that’s probably meta-level thinking that’s beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as “Where does demand exceed supply?”)
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
To use the food analogy, masturbation is like subsisting on flavorless but nutritionally adequate food, the proverbial “bread and water.” Sex with someone who finds you desirable is more like that rich, delicious dessert that advertisers hope you’ve been fantasizing about recently. (Note the with someone who finds you desirable. It’s important.)
If we have to use the drug metaphor, masturbation is more like giving a heroin addict all the methadone he wants.
To someone who deeply disdains human society, it probably is equivalent. Suppose that it were possible to soothe your hunger by just rubbing your stomach—how many people would do it and forgo food completely?
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven’t investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I’m undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
In many contexts like this, we need to replace “sex” with “intimacy.” Or simply “attention.”
It’s not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we’re desired by somebody. From what I’ve read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren’t interested in that sort of thing.
It’s not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we’re desired by somebody. From what I’ve read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren’t interested in that sort of thing.
Actually, it’s something of a cliche that the more a sex worker is paid, the less important sex is the interaction, such that it becomes a smaller portion of the time spent, or perhaps doesn’t occur at all.
(Where my information comes from: my wife runs a “sex shop” (selling products, not people!), and I was once approached by one of her customers to do a website for a prostitute review service, and I looked over some of the review materials, as well as some existing review sites to understand the industry and its competition before I declined the job. A significant portion of what gets reviewed on these “hobbyist” sites (as they’re called) relate to a prositute’s personality and demeanor, not her physique or sexual proficiency per se. Certainly, this only correlates with what guys who post prostitute reviews on the internet want, but it’s an interesting correlation, nonetheless.)
I’ve heard that, too. As I said earlier, as far as I can tell, men tend to want girlfriends more than they want sex toys that have a woman’s body, and some women are better actors than others. If I were to hire an escort, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between someone who was genuinely interested in me and someone who was acting, and I don’t want to pay someone to deceive me.
Incidentally, there’s a disturbing similarity between hiring an escort and hiring a therapist—you’re paying someone to act like they’re interested in you, even if they’re not.
Of course, blathering about “attractive women” on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance
Now you sound like one of these scientists suggesting that the scientific community should pretend that religion and science are compatible, even though they believe that that statement is false, purely because doing so will upset the deluded ones.
Rationality and negation(pickup works to a significant degree) are about as incompatible as religion and science. We would expect based upon our understanding of evolutionary psychology, specifically about reproduction strategies for male and female animals that something like this would happen. AND on top of that we have the empirical evidence that companies are making money by selling pickup skills to males at $2000 for a weekend seminar.
I think that on LW, we should call a spade a spade, even if it upsets womens’ cherished beliefs about themselves.
I am personally glad that you wrote a long post shattering my cherished false beliefs about myself a while ago, even if it did upset me at the time and involved objectifying me.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage
There’s a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I’m sure you know that.
if you’re not starving at the moment
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I’m having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don’t objectify people even if I haven’t had a fix of person lately?
heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome
Would that matter if you were missing a heroin dosage? Would you be able to pause that long to think about it, even if the actual consequence of your actions were to drive the heroin dosages away?
Why would you assume that?
To be blunt about this, human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A man experiencing or remembering the pain of sex deprivation is justified in assuming that the prior probabilities are strongly against a randomly selected woman being able to directly empathize with that pain.
human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare.
How in the world would this be possible to know, unless you’re using some kind of behaviorist account of pain?
I’d suggest reading the Hite Reports on Male / Female Sexuality, say. The number one complaint of married men, by far, is about insufficient frequency of sex.
Similarly: If the expression “After three days without sex, life becomes meaningless” doesn’t seem to square with your experience...
Similarly: The vast majority of people who pay money (the unit of caring) to alleviate sex deprivation are men.
Given the statistical evidence, the anecdotal evidence, and the obvious evo-psych rationale, I’m willing to draw conclusions about internal experience.
But drawing from this evidence that lack of sex for many (most?) men is emotionally equivalent to heroine withdraw seems a bit much.
In the very least if this were the case I would expect some direct evidence, rather than a list of things which could be chalked up to the differences in how men and women have been trained to spend money and words on the subject of sex.
I’ll see if I can find the Hite Reports. As for the other things you mention:
I have never heard that expression before. Do some people actually, seriously believe that life is literally meaningless after three days without sex [that involves another person, I assume, since if solo sex did the trick there would be no reason for anybody without a crippling disability to get to this point]? Why are there not more suicides, if this is the case?
I have read that comic before. I don’t think this demonstrates anything other than that the male characters are less picky about how they satisfy their desires than the female character. Suppose you deprived me and some other person of food for 24 hours and then put us in a room with a lot of mint candy. The other person would probably eat some mints; I wouldn’t, because eating mint causes me pain. Would you think this yielded information about how hunger felt to me and the other person? (Note: of course I would eat mint if I were starving or even about to suffer serious malnutrition, but you can’t die of deprivation of sex with other people.)
Women who are willing to have sex with strangers (which comprise just about 100% of the class of prostitutes) can, for the most part, get it for free (or get paid to have it!) with trivial ease. Of course fewer women pay for it: the thing that is for sale (sex with a stranger) is not what women tend to want.
It seems to me that the conclusion to draw isn’t (at least not necessarily) that men experience worse suffering when they don’t have sex, but that “sex” does not just mean “friction with a warm human body” to women, and so it can’t be had as easily as you think.
So from evidence that men, on average, report/perform greater suffering from lack of sex, you can conclude that a specific woman has never felt as much sexual frustration as a specific man, or indeed, anything similar enough to allow for empathy? That seems far from airtight.
It’s also worth noting that there are a great many men who seek physical and emotional intimacy from other men. So if your hypothesis is that men objectify their potential partners solely because their intimacy is temporarily unavailable, then a small but consistent portion of the partner-as-object-to-be-won rhetoric would be about men, which I have not observed.
You do realize, I hope, that there are more than 2 ways for sex to express itself in humans, and humans can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex. See XX male syndrome and Androgen insensitivity syndrome for just a couple of the many examples. Admittedly, generalizing from about 99% of the population doesn’t seem like too bad of an epistemic move, but it’s something to keep in mind.
What I wish you meant by this: ”...so of course we’re warming up the banhammer now!”
What you seem by this: ”...so we won’t be doing a thing to make this a space any less toxic for an inexplicably underrepresented majority.”
I was really hoping this would be a come-for-the-fan-fiction-stay-for-the-awesome-forum situation, but if this community’s priorities are accurately reflected (and please, please do prove me wrong) by the response “Come back and ask us to respect your humanity once everyone else has gotten their rocks off,” then that is...exceedingly disappointing.
Well, it’s probably at least the same chance that Cosmo’s covers are going to stop discussing men’s love and commitment as “objects that can and should be attained under the right circumstances”. ;-)
Or of course, we could just assume that when people talk about doing things in order to attract a mate, that:
This has nothing to do with “objects” or “attainment”,
That any such mates attracted are acting of their own free will, and
That what said consenting adults do with their time together is really none of our business.
pjeby: Can you subjectively discriminate brain states of yours with high medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain states of yours with low medial prefrontal cortex activity? What behavior is primed by each brain state?
Alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. Alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Also, Alicorn did not express these intuitions clearly.
(Also, on this subject: I think utilitarian moral theorizing and transhumanist moral theorizing are two other brain states that are, by most people, mainly intuitively distinguished as characterizable by low mPFC activity. This makes not signaling disapproval of utilitarianism or transhumanism feel like signaling approval of totalitarianism and slavery.)
alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Wow, that’s an awful lot of projection in a tiny space—both your projection onto her, and the projection you’re projecting she’s making.
I don’t think that you can treat the mere use of the word “get” to imply the sort of states you’re talking about, for several reasons.
First, I think it’s interesting that the study in question did not have men look at people—they looked at photographs of people. Photographs of people do not have intentions, so it’d be a bit strange to try to figure out the intentions of a photograph. (Also, human beings’ tendency to dehumanize faceless persons is well-known; that’s why they put hoods on people before they torture them.)
Second, I don’t think that a man responding to a woman’s body as if it were an object—it is one, after all—is a problem in and of itself, any more than I think it’s a problem when my wife admires, say, the body of Jean Claude van Damme when he’s doing one of those “splits” moves in one of his action movies. Being able to admire something that’s attractive, independent of the fact that there’s a person inside it, is not a problem, IMO.
After all, even the study you mention notes that only the sexist men went on to deactivate their mPFC… so it actually demonstrates the independence of enjoyment from oppression or objectification in the negative sense.
So, I’m not going to signal social disapproval of such admiration and enjoyment experiences, whether they’re engaged in by men OR women. It’s a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of “objective” thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
After all, my wife and I are both perfectly capable of treating each other as sex objects, or telling one another we want to “get some of that” in reference to each other’s body parts without it being depersonalizing in the least. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
We can also refer to someone else (male or female) as needing to “get some” without any hostile or depersonalizing intent towards the unspecified and indeterminate party from whom they would hypothetically be getting “some”.
In short, both your own projections and the projections you project Alicorn to be making, are incorrect generalizations: even the study you reference doesn’t support a link between “objectification” and low mPFC, except in people who are already sexist. You can’t therefore use even evidence of “object-oriented” thinking (and the word “get” is extremely low quality evidence of such, anyway!) as evidence of sexism. The study doesn’t support it, and neither does common sense.
It’s a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of “objective” thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
Yes. But when women like Alicorn intuitively solve the signaling and negotiation game represented in their heads, using their prior belief distributions about mens’ hidden qualities and dispositions, their beliefs about mens’ utility functions conditional on disposition, and their own utility functions, then their solutions predict high costs for any strategy of tolerating objectifying statements by unfamiliar men of unknown quality. It’s not about whether or not objectification implies oppressiveness with certainty. It’s about whether or not women think objectification is more convenient or useful to unfamiliar men who are disposed to depersonalization and oppression, compared with its convenience or usefulness to unfamiliar men who are not disposed to depersonalization and oppression. If you want to change this, you have to either change some quantity in womens’ intuitive representation of this signaling game, improve their solution procedure, or argue for a norm that women should disregard this intuition.
Change what? Your massive projection onto what “women like Alicorn” do? I’d think that’d be up to you to change.
Similarly, if I don’t like what Alicorn is doing, and I can’t convince her to change that, then it’s my problem… just as her not being able to convince men to speak the way she wants is hers.
At some point, all problems are our own problems. You can ask other people to change, but then you can either accept the world as it is, or suffer needlessly.
(To forestall the inevitable analogies and arguments: “accept” does not mean “not try to change”—it means, “not react with negative emotion to”. If you took the previous paragraph to mean that nobody should fight racism or sexism, you are mistaken. It’s easier to change a thing you accept as a fact, because your brain is not motivated to deny it or “should” it away, and you can then actually pay attention to the human being whose behavior you’d like to change. You can’t yell a racist or sexist into actually changing, only into being quiet. You can, however, educate and accept some people into changing. As the religious people say, “love the sinner, hate the sin”… only I go one step further and say you don’t have to hate something in order to change it… and that it’s usually easier if you don’t.)
The double negative is because of peoples’ different assumed feelings about utilitarianism or transhumanism and totalitarianism or slavery. There is a strong consensus about totalitarianism and slavery, but there is not a strong consensus about utilitarianism and transhumanism. So I expect most people to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of totalitarianism or slavery, but not to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of utilitarianism or transhumanism.
Thanks for the clarification. I think that you should not have indicated it in such a subtle way: either you should have spelled it out, as in the follow-up, or you should have probably left it out. It’s the kind of thing footnotes are good for.
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved. I also think you intuited that, if women see men in a forum saying things that might be expressions of those states of mind, and see that those things are tolerated, it will cause the women to feel uncomfortable in that forum. I think that your intuition does refer to a real difference between states of mind that can be objectively characterized. (I don’t mean to say that you intuited that mPFC measurements were part of that objective characterization.)
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved.
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad. I think objectifying people in thought, word or deed is wrong. I can still think that the “thought” and “word” varieties of objectification are wrong even if they don’t lead to the “deed” kind, so it’s not at all necessary for me to have intuited the leap you suggest. That doesn’t make it false, it just means you’re reading your own views into mine.
But… if objectification never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about it or think it was wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about it or think it was wrong?
My ethical views are based on rights. I think that people have the right to be thought of and spoken about as people, not as objects. Therefore, thinking or speaking of people as objects is a violation of that right. Therefore, under my ethical system, it is wrong, even if it really never went any farther.
I’m happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can’t get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people’s heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means “the state does or should guarantee this”. But I’m guessing that can’t be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
My use of the word “right” has nothing to do with any political structure. If you have a word that carries less of a poli-sci connotation that otherwise means more or less the same thing (i.e. a fact about a person that imposes obligations on agents that causally interact with that person) then I’ll happily switch to reduce confusion, but I haven’t run across a more suitable word yet.
My ethical theory is not fully developed. I’ve only said this on three or four places on the site, so perhaps you missed it. But my first-pass intuition about that is that while people may not have the right to think objectifying thoughts, they do have the right not to be interfered with in thinking them.
That seems cumbersome, although maybe in lengthy expositions I could get away with saying “moral right” once, footnoting it, and saying just “right” for the rest of it...
But… if violations of rights never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about them or think they were wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about them or think they were wrong?
Want to? Maybe not. There are other demands on my time, after all, and it’s already annoying enough being the only person who (locally) catches these things here in the actual world where the objectification is more hazardous. (It was never my ambition to be the feminism police or the token girl on the site, I assure you.) I would still think it was wrong, but you keep emphasizing causality and I’m just not sure why you think that’s an interesting question. I guess for the same cause as the (beginnings of) the development of my ethical theory to start out with, which aren’t even clearly memorable to me.
. . . you keep emphasizing causality and I’m just not sure why you think that’s an interesting question.
This is hard to explain.
What makes it an interesting question for me is your disagreement with my causal explanation of your motivations (that I gave to pjeby, so he would understand your motivations and not dismiss them).
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved.
which could be reworded as,
I think the cause of your being motivated to object to objectification is that you intuited that objectification is a state of mind that causes oppression of women when it is socially tolerated and approved.
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad.
This means,
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! If I am motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and complain about instances of objectification, it does not necessarily mean that I think it causes something bad.
But to counterargue what I had meant, and what I had thought I had said, you would have had to say:
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! If I am motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and complain about instances of objectification, it does not necessarily mean that I ever intuited the emotional association that objectification or toleration of objectification could sometimes cause situations (such as oppression) that I and other women would, reasonably, want to avoid being in.
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and to complain about instances of it?
If the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a problem is that it is a violation of a right, then what was the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a violation of a right? Would you also say:
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! If I am motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right, this does not necessarily mean that I ever intuited the emotional association that objectification or toleration of objectification could sometimes cause situations (such as oppression) that I would want to avoid, even though the ways I would want to avoid those situations would be the same ways that I would want to avoid the situations (such as oppression) that could sometimes be caused by other violations of rights or by toleration of other violations of rights.
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right?
I think there is human-universal psychological machinery for intuitively learning subtle differences between states of mind in other people that might be advantageous or disadvantageous to oneself or one’s allies, and for negotiating about those states of mind and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. “Objectification” and “depersonalization” would be two of these states of mind. I think the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is bad, and the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right, is that in your mind this machinery intuitively learned that “objectification” is a state of mind in other people that might be disadvantageous to you or people you cared about, and the machinery made you want to negotiate about objectifying states of mind in other people and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. (I think the concepts of “rights” and “dignity” are partly ways to talk about intuitions like that.)
If I am mistaken that this is an essential part of the cause of your motivations, then what is the cause of your motivations? What is the alternative that makes me mistaken?
If the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a problem is that it is a violation of a right, then what was the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a violation of a right?
At that point, I’m relying on intuition.
I hope that answers your question, because I didn’t understand anything you said after that.
Steve was attempting to go half-meta and have you independently come to the conclusion he had reached about where that intuition came from by getting you to look back at the probable sequences of events that had led to the intuition and realize that your position was simply a higher level abstraction of the actual causal process that he was describing, thus allowing him to credibly claim to pjeby and others that your objections to perceived objectification were not entirely silly and thereby resolve the whole gender wars thing via a chain of absurdly long and complex sentences whose veracity is totally overpowered by their inscrutability.
I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad.
It’s not against consequentialism to see some things as bad in themselves, not because they cause something else to be bad. It’s easy to see: for it to be possible for something else to be bad, that something else needs to be bad in itself.
It’s hard to buy the idea that it’s not supposed to have to do with objects or attainment when the phrasing looks like:
extremely attractive women that money and status would get them
You could just as easily say the same thing about cars or a nice house or something else readily available for sale. I wouldn’t mind if the mate-seeking potential of money and status was discussed indirectly in a way that didn’t make it sound like there is a ChickMart where you can go out and buy attractive women. “If I were a millionaire I could easily support a family”, “if I were a millionaire I would have more free time to spend on seeking a girlfriend”—even “if I were a millionaire I could afford the attention of really classy prostitutes”, because at least the prostitutes are outright selling their services. It’s probably not even crossing the line to say something like “if I were a millionaire I would be more attractive to women”.
How’s this different from women’s magazines having articles on how to “get” a man? Is this not idiomatically equivalent to “be more attractive to more-attractive men”? If so, then why the double standard?
Meanwhile, the reason that the phrasing was vague is because it’s an appropriate level of detail for what was specified: men with more money have more access to mating opportunity for all of the reasons you mention, and possibly more besides. Why exhaustively catalog them in every mention of the fact, especially since different individuals likely differ in their specific routes or preferences for the “getting”? (Men and women alike.)
Do you have some evidence that I approve of that feature of women’s magazines, or are you just making it up? I find it equally repulsive, I just haven’t found that particular behavior duplicated here so I haven’t mentioned it.
If concision is all that was intended, there are still other, less repellent ways to say it (“If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me”, leaving it implied that some of these people will be women and some of these women might have sex with the millionaire.) Or it could have been left out.
So you find goal-oriented mating behavior offensive in both men and women. What’s your reasoning for that? Does it enhance your life to find normal human behavior offensive? What rational benefit does it provide to you or others?
If concision is all that was intended, there are still other, less repellent ways to say it
And we could call atheism agnosticism so as not to offend the religious. For what reason should we do that, instead of simply saying what is meant?
What kind of rationalism permits a mere truth to be offensive, and require it to be omitted from polite discussion? Truths we don’t like are still truths.
I did not use the word “offensive” (or for that matter “goal-oriented mating behavior”), and I’d appreciate if you would refrain from substituting inexact synonyms when you interpret what I say. (You specifically; you seem bad at it. Other people have had better luck.)
There is a difference between upsetting people who hold a certain belief, and upsetting people who were born with a particular gender.
What “mere truth” do you mean to pick out here, anyway? I have made some ethical claims and announced that I am repelled by the failure to adhere to the standards I mentioned. I’m not “offended” by any facts, I’m repulsed by a behavior.
I did not use the word “offensive” (or for that matter “goal-oriented mating behavior”), and I’d appreciate if you would refrain from substituting inexact synonyms when you interpret what I say.
If I didn’t do that, how would we know we weren’t understanding each other? Now at least I can try to distinguish “offensive” from “repulsive”, and ask what term you would use in place of “goal-oriented mating behavior” that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
What “mere truth” do you mean to pick out here, anyway?
That men and women do stuff to “get” mates. This was what the original poster stated, that you appeared to object to the mere discussion of, and have further said that you wished people wouldn’t mention directly, only by way of euphemism or substitution of more-specific phrases.
I have made some ethical claims
I guess I missed them. All I heard you saying was that it’s bad to talk about men “getting” women by having money. Are you saying it’s unethical that it happens, or that it’s unethical to discuss it? I think I’m confused now.
and announced that I am repelled by the failure to adhere to the standards I mentioned. I’m not “offended” by any facts, I’m repulsed by a behavior.
Which behavior? Seeking mates, or talking about the fact that people do?
There is a difference between upsetting people who hold a certain belief, and upsetting people who were born with a particular gender.
You seem to be implying that it’s your gender that makes you repulsed, but that makes no sense to me. I assume the women’s magazines that sell on the basis of “getting” men would not do so if the repulsion [that I understand you to be saying] you have were universal to your gender, AND it were not a sexist double standard.
what term you would use in place of “goal-oriented mating behavior” that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
I’ve been using “objectification” to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn’t the only one, but it’s the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, “If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me”, would not make sense if you changed “people” to “cars”, because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. “So-and-so is five feet six inches tall”; “that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall”.)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person.
Ultimately each person’s ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.
For instance, consider the sentences “if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2” and “if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2″. We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like “how long would it take me to fall from a building”—which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.
The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working “inside-out” , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered “outside-in”, starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)
Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires “person-specific” reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin—a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants—turn out to be very relevant.
The same actually goes for the “falling from a building” example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience—what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc—but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.
And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.
I still have very little idea what you mean by ‘objectification’ and ‘objectify people’.
I was momentarily off-put by Roko’s comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women, especially when followed by identifying this desire as a generator for desiring high social status rather than vice versa or discussing both directions of causation. (The latter would have made more sense to me in the context of Roko saying we should value social influential power.)
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions. However, I wouldn’t have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of ‘objectificaton’ or ‘objectifying’, or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
I’m sorry you don’t understand where I’m coming from. I don’t have any bright ideas about how to make it less ambiguous.
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don’t share your desires? If the desire in question was something like “I desire to behave ethically” that would be okay, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with wanting sex but no relationship. There are ethical ways to pursue that desire.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
It’s certainly nice that your attraction isn’t dominated solely by physical features, but that isn’t actually what “attractive” means on a reliable enough basis that I thought it was worth bringing up. Even if “conventionally physically attractive” was what Roko meant, there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with that in light of the focus on sex over a relationship. One person can want to have no-strings-attached sex with multiple conventionally physically attractive women and I can want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a bespectacled dark-haired person with an IQ over 120 and there is no reason to think that these desires can’t both be okay simultaneously.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women
I don’t see this as any more problematic than the mention of attractiveness in the first place. If it’s okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 120, presumably it’d be okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 140, it’d just make a person satisfying my criteria trickier to find; the same would be true if Roko or anyone else wants to have sex with women several standard deviations above the physical attractiveness mean.
The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
Not more than, but “getting a [girl/boy]friend” isn’t unloaded language either… (I have been known to use the word “obtain” with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that’s mostly because “marry” would sound redundant.)
Not more than, but “getting a [girl/boy]friend” isn’t unloaded language either… (I have been known to use the word “obtain” with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that’s mostly because “marry” would sound redundant.)
Then why is “getting” objectionable? I (obviously) don’t “get” it, no pun intended.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don’t share your desires?
Read Roko’s comment again and you’ll realize that Wu wei is quite justified in being put off by it. Roko was implying that people who do not adopt these specific values are setting themselves up for failure at their goals due to not being motivated enough.
In my opinion, Roko’s whole argument reeks of availability bias. People who have attained more wealth and social status are certainly more salient to us, but this doesn’t make them more influential by real-world measures. Still, money makes the world go round and having more wealthy philanthropists who can look beyond warm fuzzies to actual utilons created would be a very good thing.
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions.
This sentence was meant to explain why I was momentarily off-put. I did not mean to imply that I have any ethical problems with the desires mentioned (I don’t), though now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I do retain some knee-jerk ethical intuitions against them.
For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag.
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me” makes no sense.
This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons.
That appears to contradict your earlier definition:
By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person.
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be “like a non-person”?
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning—i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it’s objectification.
(I’m not even going to touch the thoughtcrime part where you’re classing speech and thoughts to be unethical in themselves, except to mention that this is the part where having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain. Of course, I expect this comment to be widely downvoted for that idea, since the right to righteous indignation is itself a religious idea around here, even if it’s more usually wielded in support of Truth or Theory rather than gender sensibilities. All very on-topic for this post about atheist/rationalist denials, as it turns out!)
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me” makes no sense.
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you’re not, I’ll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be “like a non-person”?
Because grammar is like that. For instance, most sentences that use gendered pronouns would be deeply strange if applied to non-boat inanimate objects, but that doesn’t stop some such sentences from being objectifying.
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning—i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it’s objectification.
No, sometimes things I find repulsive are non-objectifying, and are bad for some other reason. Occasionally, I’m even repulsed by things that are not unethical.
having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain.
Not so. By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
...and how is that useful?!
That’s like saying that it’s good to dislike chocolate because then you can make sure nobody gives you any, or that banging your head on the wall is a pleasure because it feels good when you stop. It’d be more useful to just not bang your head, unless there’s something else you’re getting from the activity.
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you’re not, I’ll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
Then kindly point out what noun phrase you would have replaced. Or in the alternative, please provide a definition of “objectification” that doesn’t boil down to, “I know it when I see it.”
I really have no clue what you’re talking about in the first bit. Do you think that having ethical opinions is useless because if one didn’t have them it would save one a headache? Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation? Are you even trying to understand what I’m typing?
Second bit:
“If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me.” → “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes.”
Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation?
What I was saying was that I think considering people’s words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
I also think repulsion is not an appropriate response to “detecting an ethical violation”, since that emotion motivates signaling behavior rather than useful behavior. For example, it encourages one to communicate one’s beliefs in a judgmental way that communicates entitlement, and discourages co-operation from others.
“If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me.” → “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes.”
So, how do you arrive at this substitution? You keep removing the part that only a person can do, so if that rule is applied consistently, you end up with any statement being objectification.
Words are verbal behavior. If you don’t think people can be held ethically responsible for verbal behavior, I’m sure I could come up with some persuasive examples, but I’m no longer sure this discussion is worth my attention, as you’re very persistent in missing the point.
considering people’s words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
Sure, there are unethical verbal behaviors. Truthfully expressing opinions or discussing one’s goals are not among them, however.
Even if somebody opines that their goal is to do something awful to me, then if that is a true statement, it is actually ethically good for them to give me advance warning! So considering someone’s (truthful) verbal behavior about their goals or opinions as unethical is simply not useful to me, regardless of what opinion I may hold about what behavior may result from that opinion or goal.
But what if somebody, in opining that their goal is to do something awful to you, solicits ideas on what awful things to do and how to accomplish them, and encourages others to do awful things to you themselves?
I think that situation is closer to what Alicorn is objecting to.
That is verbal behavior that goes above and beyond just truthfully stating things.
How so? If the first one is what the person actually means, then blowing smoke up my ass about it doesn’t help me.
AFAICT, you are still arguing a bottom line: that truthful verbalization about one’s internal state can be ethically bad. I won’t claim that NO such verbalization can exist as a mathematical absolute, but I haven’t yet seen you offer an example that’s bad by anything other than your own definition of “ethics”—i.e., what makes you feel bad.
So, how can something be wrong that has no bad results, probabilistically OR actually?
For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag.
I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”?
I’m not sure if a gardener is “objectified” (I find that an confusing word). He or she certainly is a substitutable unit of gardening skill. Another gardener with the same skill would be just as good. Similar does apply to “attractive woman”. Another attractive woman would fit the job just as well. Leaving aside “objectified”, it’s certainly impersonal.
You make a very good point. I’m tempted to draw a distinction between referring to a hypothetical member of a profession as opposed to a hypothetical member of a gender, but until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener”.
It is perhaps a salient distinction that people choose their profession, but not their gender.
However, I disagree; both are objectifying to some degree, but it is considered socially acceptable to objectify people in the context of employment, presumably because both parties are getting some explicit value out of the transaction.
It’s certainly something that mid-20th-century radicals would object to. The language of ‘objectification’ that we’ve inherited primarily from radical feminists grew out of the intellectual framework of the Marxists, who were explicitly objecting to that sort of treatment of employees; cf Marx (or better yet Hagel)’s notion of alienation.
That said, I don’t think we have any radicals here in that sense, and I agree with Alicorn’s characterization that it would have probably been fine for OP to say (roughly speaking) “get lots of prostitutes”.
Marx’s equivalent to objectification is actually called “commodity fetishism” (seriously—no pun intended). It corresponds to replacing social relations between human beings with mere exchange of commodities. In Marxian analysis, this obscures the social and exchange relations between producers and consumers, since e.g. a worker becomes utterly unaware of the people who will consume his products, except to the extent that his “labor-power” is valued as a commodity.
Of course, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek observed, commodity fetishism (or the “commercial production process”) is what makes modern-day specialization and complex supply chains possible: even something as humble as a cotton shirt might incorporate designs sketched out in Italy, cotton grown in Africa and plastic buttons made in China. Requiring human contact or conscious agreements between so many agents would clearly be infeasible.
The benefits of sexual objectification are far less clear, except to the extent that (as some empirical evidence bears out) some people are positive towards being objectified in a sexual context.
Well, it is somewhat tacky to blatantly objectify employees—it tends to make one sound like a pompous, entitled jerk. But that’s a much shallower sort of objection than what Alicorn is raising. At a general social level, objectifying in the context of employement is on the “acceptable” side, whereas objectifying in the context of personal relationships, especially sexual relationships, straddles the line and is probably drifting toward “unacceptable”.
As for me, since I figure it’s heading that way, I’m getting in on the ground floor on avoiding such language, so that when I’m 70 years old I don’t embarrass younger family members with quaint objectifying language.
I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”? [writes Emile]
until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener” [writes Alicorn].
Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile’s question if we replace “gardener” with “butler”?
Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.
I think what I’m going to wind up saying to both the gardener and butler examples is that those individuals are explicitly selling their work, so it’s okay to refer to the profession as a stand-in for a semi-objectified human representation of that work. I’ve said elsewhere that when people want to have sex with women, it’s “at least honest” to purchase it outright from prostitutes who are selling it; I imagine it’s no less honest to purchase the work of a gardener or a butler. It’s when random “attractive women”/”girls”/whatever are said to be taking action other than the actual, literal sale of some sort of work as a result of hypothetical millionaire-ness that it stops being acceptable.
I think the problem is that you need to think though what it is you’re protesting. Objectification, to me, doesn’t mean wanting to get, acquire or obtain a girl. Buying a girl, raping a girl—that’s objectification, because the rapist ignores the fact that the girl has free will. It’s still true that she is ALSO an object, though. And a chordate animal. And an ultra-feminist.
Buying women, kidnapping women, shotgun wedding, buying off the cops to cover up your rape—these are no-nos. But what’s wrong with attracting girls by being more awesome?
(Also, it is immoral to abuse bugs in people’s decision-making algorithms.)
The first Google result for this is the parent comment. I have no idea what you mean. From what I gather, it’s supposed to be invoked when someone calls one’s opponent a Communist. Did that happen?
“Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things.
It’s not.”
Then what DO you mean? Minutae of phrasing?
When I said “more awesome”, I meant “richer”. That is also what Roko said—that money gets you girls. He didn’t say that money gets you girls on the black market. Money gets you all sorts of girls—from sex slaves to true love. Not being a jerk is a separate problem.
Nothing, unless by “more awesome” you mean “more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish”.
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
I assume here that by “wrong” you intend to ascribe some higher form of wrongness than merely your own disgust. But even if it’s just your personal disgust, I find it hard to see how that disgust is any different from say, homophobia.
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
If you’re talking about the ilk of BDSM, I do not think those desires or their enactments are wrong, but there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they’re going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner—even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names. By a similar token, battery is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on a masochist; murder is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on someone who was about to commit suicide; etc. Information, not luck.
The next logical thing to bring up is 24⁄7 BDSM relationships, but responsibly conducted those at least begin with a personal and consensual ceding of control.
But there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they’re going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner—even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names.
The question was, is it then “wrong” (as you suggested it was) for person B to think person A is “more awesome” in situation Y?
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome, at least not at being ethical people (I suppose they could be awesome at something else, like curling or origami). To think an abuser is awesome at being an ethical person is to be mistaken and, probably, to be mistaken about facts of morality.
The comment of yours I’m referring to is the one where you said:
Nothing [is wrong] unless by “more awesome” you mean “more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish”.
And it was in reply to a comment asking what was wrong with attracting people via awesomeness, so switching it to “being ethical people” now is a complete red herring.
You still haven’t said what it is that’s “wrong” here with someone having a different definition of awesomeness than you.
So when you say:
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome
My question to you is, what are you saying about person B thinking person A is awesome, in the sense of being attractive? (as was the context of this thread) You implied that it is “wrong”. How so?
I’m asking you simple, straightforward questions about your comments.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I give a personal example.
When I was a lot younger, I was in a relationship with a woman who, well, largely held me in contempt, except as a vehicle for satisfying certain of her sexual desires. Was I wrong to find this depersonalizing piggishness of hers awesome, despite the fact that her contempt was not part of a negotiated BDSM scene, nor any sort of playacting on her part? Was her attitude somehow morally wrong? Was mine?
My point here is that this sort of bright-line moralism invariably ends up depriving other people of choice, or framing them as second-class humans. The very attempt to codify objective criteria for “objectification” ends up objectifying and oppressing people.
We can be considerate of individuals, but trying to be considerate of classes of people doesn’t scale: just segregating people into classes in the first place is half the problem! (e.g. stereotype priming)
Edit to add clarification: one reason defining classes and labeling people members of them is depersonalizing is because it downplays their individuality to merely a set of footnotes on the ways in which they are or are not like the class they are being seen as a member of. For example, saying that a woman is a good programmer “for a woman” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent to compliment. In the same way, Alicorn’s classing other people’s activity as “abuse” or “wrong” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent of that labeling.
For example, it labels me as a victim of abuse, regardless of how I choose to see myself. By Alicorn’s own definitions (as I understand them) this is morally “wrong” for her to do—which appears to me to demonstrate the self-contradictory (or at least inconsistent) nature of her definitions.
My own resolution to such a paradox is to assume that it’s good to be considerate to individuals, but also to accept that others do not have a corresponding obligation to be considerate to me. I don’t expect that Alicorn must refrain from stating her opinions about my past relationship, just because it might be inconsiderate of her to do so, nor do I feel a need to make her feel bad for implying something bad about me. And if I did feel bad about it, that would be my responsibility to fix, not hers.
And if I couldn’t simply fix the problem by changing my feelings, and chose to ask Alicorn or anyone else to be more considerate in their speech, I certainly wouldn’t do it by starting out with the implication that they were morally wrong and that it was unquestionably a good idea that they should take my feelings into consideration! If I was going to ask at all, I’d ask for it as what it is: a favor to a specific person.
How’s this different from women’s magazines having articles on how to “get” a man? Is this not idiomatically equivalent to “be more attractive to more-attractive men”? If so, then why the double standard?
What double standard? Did anyone here claim that using language that teats men as objects is fine? Is Cosmo now supposed to be our standard of excellence?
Depending on whether you and I have the same working definition of “substantive”, the following:
In the first statement, but not the second, the women are not “gotten” as an open-and-shut act of obtainment. They are only attracted (and that’s assuming that the empirical claim is true).
In the first statement but not the second, the improvement to the person’s attractiveness is described only as an improvement, not as a binary switch from not having extremely attractive women to having them.
In the second statement but not the first, the women singled out are a particular narrow group selected for that are implied to be the only ones of interest or import.
The panel of 21 heterosexual male students were first rated in terms of their sexist attitudes to women, using answers to interview questions. Then they were placed in a brain scanner while viewing a set of images of women in bikinis, women in clothes and men in clothes. The scientists also used “sexualised” images, where the head of each semi-naked photograph was cut off so that only the torso was visible. . .
Scientific American:
. . . they had the men look at the photos while their brains were scanned and what she found was that, ”...this memory correlated with activation in part of the brain that is a pre-motor, having intentions to act on something, so it was as if they immediately thought about how they might act on these bodies.”
Fiske explained that the areas, the premotor cortex and posterior middle temporal gyrus, typically light up when one anticipates using tools, like a screwdriver. “I’m not saying that they literally think these photographs of women are photographs of tools per se, or photographs of non-humans, but what the brain imaging data allow us to do is to look at it as scientific metaphor. That is, they are reacting to these photographs as people react to objects.”
Fisk also tested the men for levels of sexism and found a surprising effect those who scored high on this test, ”...the hostile sexists were likely to deactivate the part of the brain that thinks about other people’s intentions. The lack of activation of this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens. It’s a very reliable effect, that the medial prefrontal cortex comes online when people think about other people, see pictures of them, imagine other people.”
“Normally when you examine social cognition, people’s aim is to figure out what the other person is thinking and intending. And we see in these data really no evidence of that. So the deactivation of medial prefrontal cortex to these pictures is really kind of shocking.”
The Independent:
“The only other time we’ve observed the deactivation of this region is when people look at pictures of homeless people and drug addicts who they really don’t want to think about what’s in their minds because they are put off by them.”
Scientific American:
To be sure this is a preliminary study, and Fiske intends to follow up with a larger sample, but nonetheless she concludes, ”...these findings are all consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they are responding to objects and not to people with independent agency.”
Abstract -- . . . The SCM [Stereotype Content Model] predicts that
only extreme out-groups, groups that are both stereotypically
hostile and stereotypically incompetent (low warmth,
low competence), such as addicts and the homeless, will be
dehumanized. . . .
Functional magnetic resonance imaging provided data for
examining brain activations in 10 participants viewing 48
photographs of social groups and 12 participants viewing
objects . . .
Analyses revealed mPFC activation to all social
groups except extreme (low-low) out-groups . . . No objects,
though rated with the same emotions, activated the mPFC.
This neural evidence supports the prediction that extreme
out-groups may be perceived as less than human, or dehumanized. . . .
Accumulating data from social neuroscience establish that
medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is activated when participants
engage in distinctly social cognition² (Amodio & Frith, 2006;
Ochsner, 2005). Prior functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) data show the mPFC as differentially activated in social
compared with nonsocial cognition. . . .
² We are not implying that the function of mPFC is solely social cognition. The
evidence as to its exact functions is still being gathered. However, the literature
indicates that mPFC activation reliably covaries with social cognition, that is,
thinking about people, compared with thinking about objects.
This is interesting, but I fear that the authors and the media are over-interpreting the data. There is a whole lot of research that basically goes from “the same area of the brain lights up!” to a shaky conclusion.
This sounds like highly motivated research. I’m curious about their test for scoring sexism, and how they established validity for that. Also, that isn’t really how brain scanners work. It’s not really possible to make those kinds of high-level determinations.
Neither. I’d like you to be thoughtful of the independent personhood of attractive women when you think or talk about them, which would affect the structure and phrasing of your desires but not make much of a substantive change in them.
The whole “must have sex with attractive women” thing is just a catch phrase used in the pick-up community. Actually, most of the people who read such forums/blogs, and even the PUAs themselves are normal people who just want a normal relationship with a normal girl. I think this is especially true of the “beta males”. It’s just that some of these people are full of cynicism and frustration, which explains why it may all sound like an insult to some women (women viewed as objects, etc).
I would suggest that every time you see women or sex being discussed here, just interpret it as a discussion on how to solve a problem one might have with women, or as a general discussion on how one can improve with women. Which is what it actually means. The exact words used shouldn’t bother you as long as you understand what underlies them.
Since you’ve been so generous with advice about how I should read such conversations, I’ll return the favor. I suggest that every time you see a woman complain about how her gender is being discussed, you interpret it as (most likely) an identification of an actual problem that actually hurts an actual person, which identification you were unable to make because you are not a member of the victimized group, and too insensitive to pick up on such issues when they don’t apply to you. Also, when I call you insensitive, you should understand that I only mean that you don’t have the capacity to pick up on this one thing and I’m not making a sweeping statement about your personality—the exact word I use shouldn’t bother you as long as you understand what underlies it.
I’m surprised by this response. What I suggested is that most guys here don’t really want to have random sex with random women, they don’t view women as objects that they can just use, or anything to that effect. And that the pick up community jargon and writings generally do not reflect what the average guy wants either.
Does this strike you as wrong?
I realize now that my “suggestion” may have sounded as if I’m denying that there is a problem or that I’m ignoring it. I’m not, I was just pointing out the above.
If they don’t really want that and don’t really view women that way, why do they persist in talking as though they do? I’d chalk it up to a simple error of linguistic expression if they didn’t get so defensive when called on it.
I’d chalk it up to a simple error of linguistic expression if they didn’t get so defensive when called on it.
Men are not broken women, so the way we speak is not actually an “error”.
Don’t get me wrong, though: a man who thinks that women’s language around mating matters is repulsive or in “error” is making exactly the same mistake: women aren’t broken men either.
Both men and women are certainly better off trying to translate their language when specifically speaking to the other, as well as trying to translate the language of others when listening.
However, neither language has some sort of blessed status that makes the other one an “error”, simply because someone is repulsed as a result of having mistaken what language an utterance was made in.
You’re just not trying anymore, are you. Lightwave said that some people did not mean to say the things they appeared to be saying. I said that I would think that the disparity between the things said and the things meant was a simple mistake of expression if people did not consistently defend their statements as originally phrased. And now you’re bringing in irrelevant nonsense about men not being broken women? What did I say that remotely resembled that?
If they don’t really want that and don’t really view women that way, why do they persist in talking as though they do?
and further referred to it as an “error of linguistic expression”.
I am saying that it’s not an error. That women would generally use different words to describe the same thing does not mean that the man was in error to use those words. Those are the most correct and concise words in male language for what was said.
Many things that are said by men in few words must be said in many words for a woman to understand them, just as the reverse is true for things that women can say briefly to each other but require a lengthier explanation for a man to understand. This is normal and expected, since each gender has different common reference experiences, and therefore different shorthand.
What doesn’t make any bloody sense is to insist that men (OR women) translate their every utterance into the other gender’s language in advance of any question, then treat it as some terrible faux pas or “ethical violation” to fail to do so, or to classify the (correct-in-its-own-langauge) utterance as “linguistic error”.
(Because to do so is basically to take the position that men are broken women (or vice versa).)
Instead, the reasonable/rational thing to do is, if you understand what was meant, then leave it alone. If you don’t understand, ask politely. If you accidentally misunderstand and get into an argument, stop when you do understand, instead of blaming the other person for not having thought to translate their language to use another gender’s reference experiences.
That’s funny, as about half of the comments on this thread that thought the language was inappropriate were by males. Hiding behind your gender is no excuse for being insensitive and offensive. Use “I support talking this way because I’m a rude person”, not “I support talking this way because I am male”. Leave the rest of us out of it.
Use “I support talking this way because I’m a rude person”, not “I support talking this way because I am male”. Leave the rest of us out of it.
Actually, I said I support being tolerant of people who express their thoughts as they think them, even if they happen to sound offensive at first.
A guy who makes a statement about “getting” women is no more insensitive than a woman who speaks of “getting” a man; they’re simply using the language that is natural to them and at an appropriate level of specificity given their goals. We should applaud their truthfulness, not encourage them to be indirect, since if we don’t like their goals, then knowing about them is a good thing! (It’s also good if we DO like their goals, but that of course should be obvious.)
This has zero to do with my own opinions or lack thereof on the language itself—something I have scrupulously avoided endorsing or condemning. This is not a forum for sharing opinions, it’s a forum for advancing rationality… and one where the importance of Truth (with a capital-T) is bandied about regularly. It should be pretty fucking basic rationality to observe that people telling you true things you don’t like is useful information, if only because it’s a minimally basic sanity check on your own untrustworthy brain!
If I didn’t think people telling me things I don’t like is useful, I’d have been gone from this place in days! (For that matter, I wouldn’t have spent the tens of thousands of dollars on training from marketing gurus, some of whom absolutely infuriate me at times.) The fact that I encounter information that offends me or pisses me off is a helpful signal: it means I’m learning something new.
In particular, it means I have the opportunity to expand my range of useful choices, by dropping whatever mental rules are triggering me to be offended or pissed off, instead of paying attention to whether there’s anything useful in the information I’ve been offered, whether or not I think it’s “True” with a capital T.
So all in all, I think perhaps you’re having a different conversation than I am. I’m not arguing that people should be intentionally rude or offensive—I’m arguing that trying to cleanse the world of things that offend you is an irrational dead end, not only because it’s a fool’s errand, but because it will actively HURT you, by depriving you of learning opportunities and locking you into an affective spiral of your own making.
Actually, I said I support being tolerant of people who express their thoughts as they think them, even if they happen to sound offensive at first.
Actually, you said: (emphasis added)
That women would generally use different words to describe the same thing does not mean that the man was in error to use those words. Those are the most correct and concise words in male language for what was said.… Many things that are said by men in few words must be said in many words for a woman to understand them, just as the reverse is true for things that women can say briefly to each other but require a lengthier explanation for a man to understand. This is normal and expected, since each gender has different common reference experiences, and therefore different shorthand....What doesn’t make any bloody sense is to insist that men (OR women) translate their every utterance into the other gender’s language in advance of any question
I’m saying that the person speaking offensively was not doing so merely because he was a male, and the people taking offense were not only females. Gender does not seem to factor heavily into the problem. I don’t see how appeal to ‘gendered language’ helps, and I take offense to you implicitly associating me with such people.
I’m saying that the person speaking offensively was not doing so merely because he was a male, and the people taking offense were not only females.
Did I ever say that all women only ever speak or comprehend female-specific language, or that men only ever speak or comprehend male-specific language? If language is based on reference experiences, then not all men and all women will share precisely the same language, even if there are general tendencies by gender (whether cultural or genetic).
That is, not all men share the same reference experiences—and geeky guys in particular are more likely to share certain classes of reference experience with women. Hell, I used to find the same sort of talk offensive, myself.
I take offense to you implicitly associating me with such people.
If you take offense to implicit associations every time somebody omits to adequately delineate their generalizations, you’re going to be offended a LOT around here. ;-)
(Personally, I just didn’t feel the need to disclaim each and every instance of a gendered term with “sombunall” or “BOCTAOE”—it’s more than a little tedious, especially since ANY gender-based generalization should be considered to have sombunalls and BOCTAOE’s liberally sprinkled throughout.)
You are always talking about NLP, so I expect you to know that the meaning of a statement is the reaction it gets in the person you are talking to. So if you are making statements that drive away women then either you mean to drive away women or you are making an error.
So if you are making statements that drive away women then either you mean to drive away women or you are making an error.
That’s not the type of error Alicorn was talking about, AFAICT. Making a statement that doesn’t advance your goals is a different class of error than a linguistic one.
What. The. Heck. You do not get your own language. If people use language that is hurtful, objectifying, and sexist, they do not get the excuse that they have an idiolect in which those things are magically no longer hurtful, objectifying, and sexist (all of which are bad things to be). It just does not work that way.
Instead, the reasonable/rational thing to do is, if you understand what was meant, then leave it alone. If you don’t understand, ask politely. If you accidentally misunderstand and get into an argument, stop when you do understand, instead of blaming the other person for not having thought to translate their language to use another gender’s reference experiences.
Okay, I’ll try it on you. I think I understand what you meant, so it’s not okay for me to feel any way at all about how you said it, or to care if you were rude, or to think that it reflects on your character if you go about saying hurtful things… hm, that doesn’t seem to be the right thing to do. Maybe I didn’t understand you. But when I have tried in the past to ask you what you mean, you have not been helpful. Perhaps what happened was that I accidentally misunderstood you and got into an argument. I should chalk that up to you being male, even though I know plenty of males who do not say such things—wait, that doesn’t make sense either. Do you have other, less patronizing recommendations in your bag of tricks?
If people use language that is hurtful, objectifying, and sexist,
There is no such thing as hurtful(language). There is only considered_hurtful_by(language, person). See Eliezer’s post about movie posters with swamp creatures carrying off “sexy” women for explanation, aka the “mind projection fallacy”.
Okay, I’ll try it on you. I think I understand what you meant, so it’s not okay for me to feel any way at all about how you said it
I didn’t say it was “not okay”—I said it was “not useful”. HUGE difference.
You are perfectly free to feel any way you like, but that doesn’t make it useful, nor grant you any rights regarding whether others should agree with your feelings.
But when I have tried in the past to ask you what you mean, you have not been helpful.
IOW, “not_helpful_to(pjeby_answers, Alicorn_understanding)”… but note that this does not equate to “not_helpful(pjeby)” or “not_trying_to_help(pjeby)”, just as “repulsive_to(X, Alicorn)” does not equate to “repulsive(X)” or “unethical(X)”.
Perhaps what happened was that I accidentally misunderstood you and got into an argument.
Perhaps. I actually see it more as that people are trying to tell you things that are outside your current frame of reference, and you’re telling them they’re unethical or in error, when they are actually trying to be clear and helpful and say what they mean, and are puzzled why you’re labeling them and their statements. (Even when someone knows male-female idiom translation inside and out, they don’t always notice what they’re doing, just like most people aren’t aware of their own accent.)
Meanwhile, AFAICT, you are taking other people’s words and translating them to what you would mean if you used those words, instead of graciously accepting others explanation of what they meant by those words.
Once you get to the point where you’re arguing about the definitions of the words, there isn’t really an argument any more—something that also should be clear from Eliezer’s past posts.
In short, none of the stuff I’m bringing up is “about” gender issues—or I wouldn’t even have bothered with this conversation in the first place.
I brought this up only because it’s directly relevant to core Yudkowskian principles like the mind projection fallacy, arguing over definitions, and not treating one class of human being as a broken version of another class of human being.
In other words, it’s about rationality.
I should chalk that up to you being male
That would be if—and only if—we had successfully reached understanding, and the misunderstanding was rooted in a gender-based language difference. (i.e., the context of my comments)
Do you have any evidence for the male-language/female-language thing? Isn’t it at least as likely that men talk about concepts that offend women, and women talk about concepts that elude men? (I speak as a male)
The stuff you’re talking about here is mainly communication problems. I’m not convinced you and alicorn are having a communication problem...
The stuff you’re talking about here is mainly communication problems. I’m not convinced you and alicorn are having a communication problem...
As she’s pointed out, we’ve been having at least one, and probably several. However, my comments about language were in relation to a different communication problem. (i.e., the one between Alicorn and others)
Do you have any evidence for the male-language/female-language thing? Isn’t it at least as likely that men talk about concepts that offend women, and women talk about concepts that elude men? (I speak as a male)
I don’t think so, because the key is unexpressed connotations.
A non-sexist man can talk about “getting” women without this having (in his mind) any negative connotation, because “of course” he wants something more than just sex, expects to settle down with only one partner after a bit of field-playing, and would never intentionally hurt or manipulate anyone. IME, however, women tend to prefer that all of these things be explicitly stated or disclaimed… just like there are plenty of things women expect to be obvious to men, but which men would much rather hear explicitly stated.
For example, Alicorn was trying to be polite to me during our thread, by NOT directly stating how rude she thought I was being, because from her POV, that idea was a clear and obvious implication of something that she said in a meta-example nested within a comment of hers. (This completely escaped me until she pointed it out in email later.)
Anyway, the gender distinctions here are really secondary—the key point is that people with different reference experiences expect different things to be “obvious”, and are very likely to think you clueless or socially miscalibrated when you don’t pick up on them without it being spelled out.
That’s why Alicorn ends up wanting to know why guys “don’t just say that”—they think that the rest “goes without saying”, just as she expected her oblique implications to me to be understood without being made explicit.
(And I would find it difficult to list all the times in the history of my marriage where a conflict boiled down to, “So why didn’t you just say that?”—i.e., one person expecting the other to pick up on an “obvious” connotation, where the other person would’ve highly valued an explicit statement of such.)
Anyway, my point was simply that it’s not reasonable to demand that everybody go around explaining all the connotations of their statements, all the time, just because your personal connotations for those statements result in a negative emotional reaction. It’s more useful (and less stressful) to translate that person or group’s statements in future. That is, to do the expansion internal to yourself, rather than insist on other people doing the translation for you.
(I wish I could’ve stated all this as clearly yesterday, but I was operating with only 3 hours sleep and probably should’ve stayed away from the computer altogether.)
However, I tend to take Alicorn’s point of view; given that some (many?) men really do think of women in objectifying ways, there’s no way for Alicorn (or anyone) to know if a given offensive phrase is male-speak, or if it ought to be literally interpreted. If one actually knows the speaker well, one could probably tell if such a sentiment is consistent with their personality, but it seems like you’d have to know someone very well to make a reliable judgment there.
Therefore, I do think it is worth the effort to avoid speaking of women in ways that are objectifying. I don’t think it really takes that much effort once one is aware of it...
One could say that Alicorn ought to just assume the best about transgressors, and perhaps she should, but I think there’s some value in enforcing the concept that it’s Not Ok to treat human beings as objects.
Therefore, I do think it is worth the effort to avoid speaking of women in ways that are objectifying. I don’t think it really takes that much effort once one is aware of it...
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t object to being considerate. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to try to enforce being considerate. It tends to backfire, for one thing, as people generally don’t like being told what to do, thereby creating perverse incentives. It also tends to make people on both sides of the discussion “flip the bozo bit” and assume the people on the other side are just jerks, instead of any increased understanding being reached.
(Of course, in that respect, there’s an extent to which I did the exact same thing I criticized Alicorn for! Mea culpa.)
Therefore, I do think it is worth the effort to avoid speaking of women in ways that are objectifying. I don’t think it really takes that much effort once one is aware of it...
And more to the point, we’ve already had a similar conversation and I thought it was apparent at that time that there’s a certain way we want to avoid writing around here, in the interest of inclusivity.
IME, however, women tend to prefer that all of these things be explicitly stated or disclaimed…
Is it really the case that women would respond positively towards this kind of “full disclosure”? If we are to take dating experts seriously, men are much better off if they leave such things unsaid. I agree with Steve Rayhawk that what most people really object to is depersonalization, i.e. the absence of empathy: as long as it is known with certainty that this is not your intent, you are in practice free to objectify as much as you want.
Is it really the case that women would respond positively towards this kind of “full disclosure”? If we are to take dating experts seriously, men are much better off if they leave such things unsaid.
Different context. First, what dating experts say about creating relationships doesn’t always apply to sustaining them. Try being married for 13 years without ever explicitly telling your partner how much you love them!
Second, almost everything I’ve been saying is very strictly grounded in the context of a specific statement made here, and the subsequent discussion. So when I said “prefer that all of these things be explicitly stated or disclaimed”, I meant in the social context of a man stating an intention to “get” a woman, that is not specifically directed at the subject of his statement, and which occurs in the presence of persons other than that man, and the woman. (A very narrow context, in other words.)
Also, “respond positively” does not equal “prefer”. Someone can “prefer” one thing, and yet respond positively to another… which is the usual point being made by those dating experts.
Rest assured, there is some communication problem. I’m sufficiently convinced that pjeby doesn’t get my point that I have given up. Whether I understand him or not, I couldn’t tell you for sure.
What if I told you that talking about “getting a woman” was a direct and honest expression of my most inner desires, that I really did view her in that objectifying way, and that I considered this attitude perfectly natural and healthy, and that, furthermore, I find it objectionable for others to consider it their perogative to correct me on this?
And that I very often find “being offended” to be an offensive behavior in its own right?
And that I heavily discount verbal contradiction from other males because it signals a very well-established mating posture, that of the helpful and supplicant beta male?
If, as you say, a man is unable to identify and insensitive to the problem reflected in his statement, and you point it out in a way that comes across primarily as an accusation of bad character (when his statement seems to be weak evidence that he has this form of bad character), it’s not surprising that he would get defensive.
A slightly different angle—it’s not just that attractive women (or their sexual favors) are presented as objects, it’s that this sort of discussion seems to be set in a world where people at the same level of attractiveness are fungible. It seems like a world where no one likes anyone, or at least no one likes anyone they’re in a sexual relationship with enough to be interested in the difference between one person of equivalent attractiveness and another.
(It might be worth noting that people often do talk this way about other classes of people. Employer-employee relations tend to be treated similarly; “How to get a job” discussion is as often as impersonal as “how to get laid” discussion. It’s still a bigger problem when the topic is the sexual favors of women with conventionally attractive bodies, though.)
(You might want to ignore the preceding comment. I just feel compelled to nitpick everything I can. Assume good faith, and all that.)
There’s really no chance that people are going to stop discussing “attractive women” (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(
I want you to continue to participate here, Alicorn. And I want to increase the female: male ratio in the rationalist/ altruistic/ selfless/ global-situation community. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.
How do you – or how does anyone – think Roko’s sentiment could have been rephrased to not come across as objectifying? The only change obvious to me is making it clear that money and status are not sufficient conditions for sexual success, but I doubt that’s a significant part of the problem.
“Get” is a large part of what bothers me. I don’t like your first statement—“women are attracted to rich men” is still a disturbing generalization even if this attraction isn’t supposed to lead to “getting” anybody, and I’m not terribly comfortable with the implied goal of just “sleeping with attractive women” (although I won’t ethically condemn that goal as long as it’s pursued honestly). But the second statement is definitely worse.
“attractive women” (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(
I am curious: do you think it is rational to taboo all discussion that involves treating women as physical systems that can be manipulated by providing appropriate sensory input to their sense organs?
Do you think that all discussion that involves treating men as physical systems that can be manipulated by providing appropriate sensory input to their sense organs should be similarly stopped? Like, if I have a business idea that involves selling particularly manipulative pornographic material to men which will cause them to give me money which I can donate to an efficient charity and save millions of lives, that such an idea should not even be discussed?
I think it is unethical (not necessarily “irrational”) to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation. If you had been actually talking about the production and sale of porn, I’d be more forgiving; porn (like purchasing the services of prostitutes, which I’ve also acknowledged as non-manipulative) is at least honest, in the sense that everybody knows what porn is for.
it is unethical (not necessarily “irrational”) to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation
oh dear. Now you are accusing me of a thought crime! You may actually be deluded at the same level as Catholics who tell each other that even thinking about the possibility of God not existing is a sin…
...Thought crime? Really? That’s what you get from me saying that it’s unethical to think of people as suitable objects of manipulation? Yes, I used the word “think”, but the emphasis was really on “suitable”. I could have used the phrasing “it’s inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people”, or “the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong” or “the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false”, or “to speak of people as suitable objects of manipulation reflects an ethically abhorrent facet of the speaker’s personality”—and meant more or less the same thing. Is that clearer?
I’d phrase it a little bit differently, but overall, yeah, I’d accept that position. That is, I basically agree with you here.
Alternately (probably a bit more general but, I think, capturing the main relevant offensive bits) “goal systems which do not assign inherent terminal value to persons, but only see them in terms of instrumental value are immoral goal systems.”
“it’s inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people”
“the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong”
“the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false”
Ahem… Why? To me, these claims seem baseless and to some great degree, false.
I suspect you’re using the word “manipulation” to mean different things.
For that matter, a lot of “manipulation” goes on in Brennan’s world, it’s expected on all sides, they don’t think of themselves as immoral because of it, and I would go ahead and endorse that aspect of their fictional existence. I think that it’s manipulation of someone who isn’t expecting manipulation which is the main ethical problem.
What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that’s a very different matter). I don’t think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I’m sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
but I’m sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
well, it could be and often is harmful to someone, if and only if you act upon it. But We should not place an injunction upon even considering the possibility and working out its implications; I think that this much is pretty clear. That is the route to religious-level delusion.
I would be the first to emphasize that thinking of people as manipulable physical systems and acting to naively maximize your own goals based upon that conceptualization is a path to disaster much of the time.
I should have made clear that I am advocating thinking about the possibility and working out its implications quite carefully, and then perhaps adopting a new decision procedure as the result of this meta-analysis.
For example, one way this could work is as follows: you consider (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, do a utilitarian analysis and then work out a decision procedure for your social interactions based upon this analysis. In the spirit of Toby Ord’s consequentialism and decision procedures, this decision procedure might not involve considering (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, but might instead involve re-wiring your own brain to reconceptualize (wo)men as people again, but people who stand in a different relation to you than before you did the utilitarian meta-analysis. In the particular case of pick-up, this “different relation to you” is “they have lower status than me” and “they really like me!” and “Human sexual interaction is a positive sum game!”
well, it could be and often is harmful to someone, if and only if you act upon it.
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can’t observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn’t think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow “acting” on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).
Actually the accusation was not of a ‘thought crime’, but rather of doing something unethical with your thoughts.
If you believe that there are some actions that are unethical, I fail to see how some of those actions can’t be thoughts, unless you think thoughts are metaphysically different from other actions.
That seems very unlikely on the face of it (I hadn’t meant it in a specifically virtue ethics context, and Alicorn isn’t necessarily a fan), though I’d also gotten that impression from some of the phrasings in Alicorn’s recent comment. Surely though it’s an empirical question whether thinking of people in a particular way predisposes one to behave differently about them.
Actually the accusation was not of a ‘thought crime’, but rather of doing something unethical with your thoughts.
define: “thought crime” finds “labeling disapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime”
WARNING We are now arguing about definitions of words. This indicates that we are no longer in the rational part of human-interaction phase-space. /WARNING
No, it’s OK. If you go off of his source, women want to be objectified, so it’s no harm, no foul. You just don’t know it yet. Brilliant, right?
Seriously, though, he’s deriving his theory from someone who evaluates the worth of men by their ability to score with attractive women [Edit: phrase removed]. The theory is more complicated than that, but, really, it’s not that much more complicated.
(In case it’s not entirely clear from the above, I emphatically don’t endorse this view.)
I don’t think Roissy claims women want to be objectified. He agrees with the majority opinion that they like to be treated like human beings, appreciated for the qualities particular to them as individuals etc.
He just adds the coda that giving women what they like is a very poor strategy for sleeping with as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible*. Roissy doesn’t really care what women want except insofar as knowing it furthers his aims, so this doesn’t create a great deal of cognitive dissonance for him.
It was in fact reading him that inspired me to write this comment yesterday.
*In fact, he claims it makes women disdain you and calls it “supplication”. The Roissy way is never explain, never apologise.
Note that number of affairs is a descriptor of all alphas and no betas, and it increases with rank. Thus, infidelity reflects a man’s worth positively.
If you’re not going off Roissy, I apologize for misinterpreting you, but your language and his matched up almost exactly, and I’ve seen him linked a bit here and on OB, so I figured that’s where the ideas came from.
Ok, so I don’t go off Roissy, and I don’t think that cheating on your partner is a good thing. I am more a fan of the people at Real Social Dynamics, e.g. Tyler Durden. Sure, there are plenty of people in the seduction world who have what we would call a “subgoal stomp” problem: being a little bit more alpha is a subgoal of a good life, but if you optimize that subgoal you end up with problems.
Folks here seem to buy into the folk anthropology notion that successful men become successful specifically in order to attract a mate, presumably the most conventionally attractive one. I’m not sure that idea is going to go away, regardless of how disgusting it sounds to those of us who married for love.
I’m quite sure that the idea won’t go away, if only because in at least some cases, it’ll be flagrantly true- season with a dash of confirmation bias and serve hot.
The idea deserves some objective light shedding on it. It’s easy to pick out cases where beautiful women and high-status (not necessarily rich) men choose to affiliate, but are the two groups really more likely to hang out together? Or is this a sort of male-evolutionary-psyche mirage, which is always over the next status hill?
There’s really no chance that people are going to stop discussing “attractive women” (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(
Barring full-scale banhammer wielding… probably not, I’m afraid.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about “attractive women” on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that’s probably meta-level thinking that’s beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as “Where does demand exceed supply?”)
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
Masturbation is not sex. If the only good thing about sex is having an orgasm, you’re doing it wrong!
(That’s not to say the analogy to heroin addiction is a reasonable one.)
No, but it should be similar enough to break the analogy to starvation or heroin deprivation.
Well, that seems right, but allow me to clarify.
To use the food analogy, masturbation is like subsisting on flavorless but nutritionally adequate food, the proverbial “bread and water.” Sex with someone who finds you desirable is more like that rich, delicious dessert that advertisers hope you’ve been fantasizing about recently. (Note the with someone who finds you desirable. It’s important.)
If we have to use the drug metaphor, masturbation is more like giving a heroin addict all the methadone he wants.
I’m just questioning the idea that masturbation is to sex-starved people as food is to actually starving people.
(Course, that’s not exactly what you said either.)
To someone who deeply disdains human society, it probably is equivalent. Suppose that it were possible to soothe your hunger by just rubbing your stomach—how many people would do it and forgo food completely?
Actually, if I didn’t have to eat, I probably wouldn’t.
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven’t investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I’m undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
May I make a suggestion:
In many contexts like this, we need to replace “sex” with “intimacy.” Or simply “attention.”
It’s not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we’re desired by somebody. From what I’ve read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren’t interested in that sort of thing.
Actually, it’s something of a cliche that the more a sex worker is paid, the less important sex is the interaction, such that it becomes a smaller portion of the time spent, or perhaps doesn’t occur at all.
(Where my information comes from: my wife runs a “sex shop” (selling products, not people!), and I was once approached by one of her customers to do a website for a prostitute review service, and I looked over some of the review materials, as well as some existing review sites to understand the industry and its competition before I declined the job. A significant portion of what gets reviewed on these “hobbyist” sites (as they’re called) relate to a prositute’s personality and demeanor, not her physique or sexual proficiency per se. Certainly, this only correlates with what guys who post prostitute reviews on the internet want, but it’s an interesting correlation, nonetheless.)
I’ve heard that, too. As I said earlier, as far as I can tell, men tend to want girlfriends more than they want sex toys that have a woman’s body, and some women are better actors than others. If I were to hire an escort, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between someone who was genuinely interested in me and someone who was acting, and I don’t want to pay someone to deceive me.
Incidentally, there’s a disturbing similarity between hiring an escort and hiring a therapist—you’re paying someone to act like they’re interested in you, even if they’re not.
Now you sound like one of these scientists suggesting that the scientific community should pretend that religion and science are compatible, even though they believe that that statement is false, purely because doing so will upset the deluded ones.
Rationality and negation(pickup works to a significant degree) are about as incompatible as religion and science. We would expect based upon our understanding of evolutionary psychology, specifically about reproduction strategies for male and female animals that something like this would happen. AND on top of that we have the empirical evidence that companies are making money by selling pickup skills to males at $2000 for a weekend seminar.
I think that on LW, we should call a spade a spade, even if it upsets womens’ cherished beliefs about themselves.
I am personally glad that you wrote a long post shattering my cherished false beliefs about myself a while ago, even if it did upset me at the time and involved objectifying me.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Saying you could have expressed a proposition better isn’t disagreeing with the proposition.
Right. Specifics on “could have expressed a proposition better” would be of high utility/
There’s a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I’m sure you know that.
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I’m having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don’t objectify people even if I haven’t had a fix of person lately?
Would that matter if you were missing a heroin dosage? Would you be able to pause that long to think about it, even if the actual consequence of your actions were to drive the heroin dosages away?
To be blunt about this, human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A man experiencing or remembering the pain of sex deprivation is justified in assuming that the prior probabilities are strongly against a randomly selected woman being able to directly empathize with that pain.
How in the world would this be possible to know, unless you’re using some kind of behaviorist account of pain?
I’d suggest reading the Hite Reports on Male / Female Sexuality, say. The number one complaint of married men, by far, is about insufficient frequency of sex.
Similarly: If the expression “After three days without sex, life becomes meaningless” doesn’t seem to square with your experience...
Similarly: http://www.wetherobots.com/2008/01/07/youve-been-misinformed/
Similarly: The vast majority of people who pay money (the unit of caring) to alleviate sex deprivation are men.
Given the statistical evidence, the anecdotal evidence, and the obvious evo-psych rationale, I’m willing to draw conclusions about internal experience.
But drawing from this evidence that lack of sex for many (most?) men is emotionally equivalent to heroine withdraw seems a bit much.
In the very least if this were the case I would expect some direct evidence, rather than a list of things which could be chalked up to the differences in how men and women have been trained to spend money and words on the subject of sex.
I’ll see if I can find the Hite Reports. As for the other things you mention:
I have never heard that expression before. Do some people actually, seriously believe that life is literally meaningless after three days without sex [that involves another person, I assume, since if solo sex did the trick there would be no reason for anybody without a crippling disability to get to this point]? Why are there not more suicides, if this is the case?
I have read that comic before. I don’t think this demonstrates anything other than that the male characters are less picky about how they satisfy their desires than the female character. Suppose you deprived me and some other person of food for 24 hours and then put us in a room with a lot of mint candy. The other person would probably eat some mints; I wouldn’t, because eating mint causes me pain. Would you think this yielded information about how hunger felt to me and the other person? (Note: of course I would eat mint if I were starving or even about to suffer serious malnutrition, but you can’t die of deprivation of sex with other people.)
Women who are willing to have sex with strangers (which comprise just about 100% of the class of prostitutes) can, for the most part, get it for free (or get paid to have it!) with trivial ease. Of course fewer women pay for it: the thing that is for sale (sex with a stranger) is not what women tend to want.
It seems to me that the conclusion to draw isn’t (at least not necessarily) that men experience worse suffering when they don’t have sex, but that “sex” does not just mean “friction with a warm human body” to women, and so it can’t be had as easily as you think.
So from evidence that men, on average, report/perform greater suffering from lack of sex, you can conclude that a specific woman has never felt as much sexual frustration as a specific man, or indeed, anything similar enough to allow for empathy? That seems far from airtight.
It’s also worth noting that there are a great many men who seek physical and emotional intimacy from other men. So if your hypothesis is that men objectify their potential partners solely because their intimacy is temporarily unavailable, then a small but consistent portion of the partner-as-object-to-be-won rhetoric would be about men, which I have not observed.
You do realize, I hope, that there are more than 2 ways for sex to express itself in humans, and humans can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex. See XX male syndrome and Androgen insensitivity syndrome for just a couple of the many examples. Admittedly, generalizing from about 99% of the population doesn’t seem like too bad of an epistemic move, but it’s something to keep in mind.
If I were missing my heroin dosage, I weren’t able to do all that smart discussion going on here.
What I wish you meant by this: ”...so of course we’re warming up the banhammer now!”
What you seem by this: ”...so we won’t be doing a thing to make this a space any less toxic for an inexplicably underrepresented majority.”
I was really hoping this would be a come-for-the-fan-fiction-stay-for-the-awesome-forum situation, but if this community’s priorities are accurately reflected (and please, please do prove me wrong) by the response “Come back and ask us to respect your humanity once everyone else has gotten their rocks off,” then that is...exceedingly disappointing.
Well, it’s probably at least the same chance that Cosmo’s covers are going to stop discussing men’s love and commitment as “objects that can and should be attained under the right circumstances”. ;-)
Or of course, we could just assume that when people talk about doing things in order to attract a mate, that:
This has nothing to do with “objects” or “attainment”,
That any such mates attracted are acting of their own free will, and
That what said consenting adults do with their time together is really none of our business.
Shouldn’t Less Wrong have a bit more subtlety and detail than Cosmo?
pjeby: Can you subjectively discriminate brain states of yours with high medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain states of yours with low medial prefrontal cortex activity? What behavior is primed by each brain state?
Alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. Alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Also, Alicorn did not express these intuitions clearly.
(Also, on this subject: I think utilitarian moral theorizing and transhumanist moral theorizing are two other brain states that are, by most people, mainly intuitively distinguished as characterizable by low mPFC activity. This makes not signaling disapproval of utilitarianism or transhumanism feel like signaling approval of totalitarianism and slavery.)
[edit fix username capitalization]
Wow, that’s an awful lot of projection in a tiny space—both your projection onto her, and the projection you’re projecting she’s making.
I don’t think that you can treat the mere use of the word “get” to imply the sort of states you’re talking about, for several reasons.
First, I think it’s interesting that the study in question did not have men look at people—they looked at photographs of people. Photographs of people do not have intentions, so it’d be a bit strange to try to figure out the intentions of a photograph. (Also, human beings’ tendency to dehumanize faceless persons is well-known; that’s why they put hoods on people before they torture them.)
Second, I don’t think that a man responding to a woman’s body as if it were an object—it is one, after all—is a problem in and of itself, any more than I think it’s a problem when my wife admires, say, the body of Jean Claude van Damme when he’s doing one of those “splits” moves in one of his action movies. Being able to admire something that’s attractive, independent of the fact that there’s a person inside it, is not a problem, IMO.
After all, even the study you mention notes that only the sexist men went on to deactivate their mPFC… so it actually demonstrates the independence of enjoyment from oppression or objectification in the negative sense.
So, I’m not going to signal social disapproval of such admiration and enjoyment experiences, whether they’re engaged in by men OR women. It’s a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of “objective” thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
After all, my wife and I are both perfectly capable of treating each other as sex objects, or telling one another we want to “get some of that” in reference to each other’s body parts without it being depersonalizing in the least. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
We can also refer to someone else (male or female) as needing to “get some” without any hostile or depersonalizing intent towards the unspecified and indeterminate party from whom they would hypothetically be getting “some”.
In short, both your own projections and the projections you project Alicorn to be making, are incorrect generalizations: even the study you reference doesn’t support a link between “objectification” and low mPFC, except in people who are already sexist. You can’t therefore use even evidence of “object-oriented” thinking (and the word “get” is extremely low quality evidence of such, anyway!) as evidence of sexism. The study doesn’t support it, and neither does common sense.
Yes. But when women like Alicorn intuitively solve the signaling and negotiation game represented in their heads, using their prior belief distributions about mens’ hidden qualities and dispositions, their beliefs about mens’ utility functions conditional on disposition, and their own utility functions, then their solutions predict high costs for any strategy of tolerating objectifying statements by unfamiliar men of unknown quality. It’s not about whether or not objectification implies oppressiveness with certainty. It’s about whether or not women think objectification is more convenient or useful to unfamiliar men who are disposed to depersonalization and oppression, compared with its convenience or usefulness to unfamiliar men who are not disposed to depersonalization and oppression. If you want to change this, you have to either change some quantity in womens’ intuitive representation of this signaling game, improve their solution procedure, or argue for a norm that women should disregard this intuition.
Change what? Your massive projection onto what “women like Alicorn” do? I’d think that’d be up to you to change.
Similarly, if I don’t like what Alicorn is doing, and I can’t convince her to change that, then it’s my problem… just as her not being able to convince men to speak the way she wants is hers.
At some point, all problems are our own problems. You can ask other people to change, but then you can either accept the world as it is, or suffer needlessly.
(To forestall the inevitable analogies and arguments: “accept” does not mean “not try to change”—it means, “not react with negative emotion to”. If you took the previous paragraph to mean that nobody should fight racism or sexism, you are mistaken. It’s easier to change a thing you accept as a fact, because your brain is not motivated to deny it or “should” it away, and you can then actually pay attention to the human being whose behavior you’d like to change. You can’t yell a racist or sexist into actually changing, only into being quiet. You can, however, educate and accept some people into changing. As the religious people say, “love the sinner, hate the sin”… only I go one step further and say you don’t have to hate something in order to change it… and that it’s usually easier if you don’t.)
Why the double negative in the last sentence? Are you claiming that utilitarianism and transhumanism feel stronger than totalitarianism and slavery?
The double negative is because of peoples’ different assumed feelings about utilitarianism or transhumanism and totalitarianism or slavery. There is a strong consensus about totalitarianism and slavery, but there is not a strong consensus about utilitarianism and transhumanism. So I expect most people to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of totalitarianism or slavery, but not to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of utilitarianism or transhumanism.
Thanks for the clarification. I think that you should not have indicated it in such a subtle way: either you should have spelled it out, as in the follow-up, or you should have probably left it out. It’s the kind of thing footnotes are good for.
Can I really be said to have intuited something that makes less than no sense to me?
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved. I also think you intuited that, if women see men in a forum saying things that might be expressions of those states of mind, and see that those things are tolerated, it will cause the women to feel uncomfortable in that forum. I think that your intuition does refer to a real difference between states of mind that can be objectively characterized. (I don’t mean to say that you intuited that mPFC measurements were part of that objective characterization.)
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad. I think objectifying people in thought, word or deed is wrong. I can still think that the “thought” and “word” varieties of objectification are wrong even if they don’t lead to the “deed” kind, so it’s not at all necessary for me to have intuited the leap you suggest. That doesn’t make it false, it just means you’re reading your own views into mine.
But… if objectification never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about it or think it was wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about it or think it was wrong?
My ethical views are based on rights. I think that people have the right to be thought of and spoken about as people, not as objects. Therefore, thinking or speaking of people as objects is a violation of that right. Therefore, under my ethical system, it is wrong, even if it really never went any farther.
I’m happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can’t get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people’s heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means “the state does or should guarantee this”. But I’m guessing that can’t be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
My use of the word “right” has nothing to do with any political structure. If you have a word that carries less of a poli-sci connotation that otherwise means more or less the same thing (i.e. a fact about a person that imposes obligations on agents that causally interact with that person) then I’ll happily switch to reduce confusion, but I haven’t run across a more suitable word yet.
My ethical theory is not fully developed. I’ve only said this on three or four places on the site, so perhaps you missed it. But my first-pass intuition about that is that while people may not have the right to think objectifying thoughts, they do have the right not to be interfered with in thinking them.
Perhaps “moral right” or somesuch.
That seems cumbersome, although maybe in lengthy expositions I could get away with saying “moral right” once, footnoting it, and saying just “right” for the rest of it...
But… if violations of rights never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about them or think they were wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about them or think they were wrong?
Want to? Maybe not. There are other demands on my time, after all, and it’s already annoying enough being the only person who (locally) catches these things here in the actual world where the objectification is more hazardous. (It was never my ambition to be the feminism police or the token girl on the site, I assure you.) I would still think it was wrong, but you keep emphasizing causality and I’m just not sure why you think that’s an interesting question. I guess for the same cause as the (beginnings of) the development of my ethical theory to start out with, which aren’t even clearly memorable to me.
This is hard to explain.
What makes it an interesting question for me is your disagreement with my causal explanation of your motivations (that I gave to pjeby, so he would understand your motivations and not dismiss them).
When I said,
which could be reworded as,
you said, intending it as a counterargument,
This means,
But to counterargue what I had meant, and what I had thought I had said, you would have had to say:
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and to complain about instances of it?
If the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a problem is that it is a violation of a right, then what was the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a violation of a right? Would you also say:
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right?
I think there is human-universal psychological machinery for intuitively learning subtle differences between states of mind in other people that might be advantageous or disadvantageous to oneself or one’s allies, and for negotiating about those states of mind and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. “Objectification” and “depersonalization” would be two of these states of mind. I think the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is bad, and the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right, is that in your mind this machinery intuitively learned that “objectification” is a state of mind in other people that might be disadvantageous to you or people you cared about, and the machinery made you want to negotiate about objectifying states of mind in other people and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. (I think the concepts of “rights” and “dignity” are partly ways to talk about intuitions like that.)
If I am mistaken that this is an essential part of the cause of your motivations, then what is the cause of your motivations? What is the alternative that makes me mistaken?
At that point, I’m relying on intuition.
I hope that answers your question, because I didn’t understand anything you said after that.
Steve was attempting to go half-meta and have you independently come to the conclusion he had reached about where that intuition came from by getting you to look back at the probable sequences of events that had led to the intuition and realize that your position was simply a higher level abstraction of the actual causal process that he was describing, thus allowing him to credibly claim to pjeby and others that your objections to perceived objectification were not entirely silly and thereby resolve the whole gender wars thing via a chain of absurdly long and complex sentences whose veracity is totally overpowered by their inscrutability.
I’m stupid that way too sometimes.
It’s not against consequentialism to see some things as bad in themselves, not because they cause something else to be bad. It’s easy to see: for it to be possible for something else to be bad, that something else needs to be bad in itself.
It’s hard to buy the idea that it’s not supposed to have to do with objects or attainment when the phrasing looks like:
You could just as easily say the same thing about cars or a nice house or something else readily available for sale. I wouldn’t mind if the mate-seeking potential of money and status was discussed indirectly in a way that didn’t make it sound like there is a ChickMart where you can go out and buy attractive women. “If I were a millionaire I could easily support a family”, “if I were a millionaire I would have more free time to spend on seeking a girlfriend”—even “if I were a millionaire I could afford the attention of really classy prostitutes”, because at least the prostitutes are outright selling their services. It’s probably not even crossing the line to say something like “if I were a millionaire I would be more attractive to women”.
How’s this different from women’s magazines having articles on how to “get” a man? Is this not idiomatically equivalent to “be more attractive to more-attractive men”? If so, then why the double standard?
Meanwhile, the reason that the phrasing was vague is because it’s an appropriate level of detail for what was specified: men with more money have more access to mating opportunity for all of the reasons you mention, and possibly more besides. Why exhaustively catalog them in every mention of the fact, especially since different individuals likely differ in their specific routes or preferences for the “getting”? (Men and women alike.)
Do you have some evidence that I approve of that feature of women’s magazines, or are you just making it up? I find it equally repulsive, I just haven’t found that particular behavior duplicated here so I haven’t mentioned it.
If concision is all that was intended, there are still other, less repellent ways to say it (“If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me”, leaving it implied that some of these people will be women and some of these women might have sex with the millionaire.) Or it could have been left out.
So you find goal-oriented mating behavior offensive in both men and women. What’s your reasoning for that? Does it enhance your life to find normal human behavior offensive? What rational benefit does it provide to you or others?
And we could call atheism agnosticism so as not to offend the religious. For what reason should we do that, instead of simply saying what is meant?
What kind of rationalism permits a mere truth to be offensive, and require it to be omitted from polite discussion? Truths we don’t like are still truths.
I did not use the word “offensive” (or for that matter “goal-oriented mating behavior”), and I’d appreciate if you would refrain from substituting inexact synonyms when you interpret what I say. (You specifically; you seem bad at it. Other people have had better luck.)
There is a difference between upsetting people who hold a certain belief, and upsetting people who were born with a particular gender.
What “mere truth” do you mean to pick out here, anyway? I have made some ethical claims and announced that I am repelled by the failure to adhere to the standards I mentioned. I’m not “offended” by any facts, I’m repulsed by a behavior.
If I didn’t do that, how would we know we weren’t understanding each other? Now at least I can try to distinguish “offensive” from “repulsive”, and ask what term you would use in place of “goal-oriented mating behavior” that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
That men and women do stuff to “get” mates. This was what the original poster stated, that you appeared to object to the mere discussion of, and have further said that you wished people wouldn’t mention directly, only by way of euphemism or substitution of more-specific phrases.
I guess I missed them. All I heard you saying was that it’s bad to talk about men “getting” women by having money. Are you saying it’s unethical that it happens, or that it’s unethical to discuss it? I think I’m confused now.
Which behavior? Seeking mates, or talking about the fact that people do?
You seem to be implying that it’s your gender that makes you repulsed, but that makes no sense to me. I assume the women’s magazines that sell on the basis of “getting” men would not do so if the repulsion [that I understand you to be saying] you have were universal to your gender, AND it were not a sexist double standard.
I’ve been using “objectification” to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn’t the only one, but it’s the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me”, the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, “If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me”, would not make sense if you changed “people” to “cars”, because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. “So-and-so is five feet six inches tall”; “that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall”.)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
Ultimately each person’s ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.
For instance, consider the sentences “if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2” and “if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2″. We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like “how long would it take me to fall from a building”—which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.
The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working “inside-out” , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered “outside-in”, starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)
Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires “person-specific” reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin—a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants—turn out to be very relevant.
The same actually goes for the “falling from a building” example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience—what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc—but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.
And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.
I still have very little idea what you mean by ‘objectification’ and ‘objectify people’.
I was momentarily off-put by Roko’s comment on the desire to have sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get. This was because of:
the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.
the connotation of ‘attractive’ which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.
the modifier ‘extremely’ which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women, especially when followed by identifying this desire as a generator for desiring high social status rather than vice versa or discussing both directions of causation. (The latter would have made more sense to me in the context of Roko saying we should value social influential power.)
I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions. However, I wouldn’t have voiced these negative associations in any phrases along the lines of ‘objectificaton’ or ‘objectifying’, or in terms of any moral concerns. The use of the word ‘get’ by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of ‘getting a girlfriend/boyfriend’.
I’m sorry you don’t understand where I’m coming from. I don’t have any bright ideas about how to make it less ambiguous.
Is there some reason you are put off when others don’t share your desires? If the desire in question was something like “I desire to behave ethically” that would be okay, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with wanting sex but no relationship. There are ethical ways to pursue that desire.
It’s certainly nice that your attraction isn’t dominated solely by physical features, but that isn’t actually what “attractive” means on a reliable enough basis that I thought it was worth bringing up. Even if “conventionally physically attractive” was what Roko meant, there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with that in light of the focus on sex over a relationship. One person can want to have no-strings-attached sex with multiple conventionally physically attractive women and I can want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a bespectacled dark-haired person with an IQ over 120 and there is no reason to think that these desires can’t both be okay simultaneously.
I don’t see this as any more problematic than the mention of attractiveness in the first place. If it’s okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 120, presumably it’d be okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 140, it’d just make a person satisfying my criteria trickier to find; the same would be true if Roko or anyone else wants to have sex with women several standard deviations above the physical attractiveness mean.
Not more than, but “getting a [girl/boy]friend” isn’t unloaded language either… (I have been known to use the word “obtain” with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that’s mostly because “marry” would sound redundant.)
Then why is “getting” objectionable? I (obviously) don’t “get” it, no pun intended.
Read Roko’s comment again and you’ll realize that Wu wei is quite justified in being put off by it. Roko was implying that people who do not adopt these specific values are setting themselves up for failure at their goals due to not being motivated enough.
In my opinion, Roko’s whole argument reeks of availability bias. People who have attained more wealth and social status are certainly more salient to us, but this doesn’t make them more influential by real-world measures. Still, money makes the world go round and having more wealthy philanthropists who can look beyond warm fuzzies to actual utilons created would be a very good thing.
This sentence was meant to explain why I was momentarily off-put. I did not mean to imply that I have any ethical problems with the desires mentioned (I don’t), though now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I do retain some knee-jerk ethical intuitions against them.
Um, that example actually fails your heuristic: “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and cars falling over themselves to be with me” makes no sense.
That appears to contradict your earlier definition:
If the applicability of a statement is limited to persons, then how can that possibly be “like a non-person”?
The entire thing sounds like bottom-line reasoning—i.e., the specific thing is something you find repulsive, therefore it’s objectification.
(I’m not even going to touch the thoughtcrime part where you’re classing speech and thoughts to be unethical in themselves, except to mention that this is the part where having such a repulsion is objectively non-useful to you or anyone else, since all it can ever do is cause you and others pain. Of course, I expect this comment to be widely downvoted for that idea, since the right to righteous indignation is itself a religious idea around here, even if it’s more usually wielded in support of Truth or Theory rather than gender sensibilities. All very on-topic for this post about atheist/rationalist denials, as it turns out!)
I feel your pain… I think I lost about 40 karma in this discussion…
Perhaps you are trying to be funny. If you’re not, I’ll just point out that I did say it was an imperfect heuristic, and anyway to apply it with some finesse means that you might have to replace a whole noun phrase (gasp, shock, alarm).
Because grammar is like that. For instance, most sentences that use gendered pronouns would be deeply strange if applied to non-boat inanimate objects, but that doesn’t stop some such sentences from being objectifying.
No, sometimes things I find repulsive are non-objectifying, and are bad for some other reason. Occasionally, I’m even repulsed by things that are not unethical.
Not so. By having and announcing this repulsion I can influence anyone who happens to care about my opinion.
...and how is that useful?!
That’s like saying that it’s good to dislike chocolate because then you can make sure nobody gives you any, or that banging your head on the wall is a pleasure because it feels good when you stop. It’d be more useful to just not bang your head, unless there’s something else you’re getting from the activity.
Then kindly point out what noun phrase you would have replaced. Or in the alternative, please provide a definition of “objectification” that doesn’t boil down to, “I know it when I see it.”
I really have no clue what you’re talking about in the first bit. Do you think that having ethical opinions is useless because if one didn’t have them it would save one a headache? Do you think being repelled is not an appropriate response to detecting an ethical violation? Are you even trying to understand what I’m typing?
Second bit:
“If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me.” → “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and real silverware and crystal dishes.”
What I was saying was that I think considering people’s words and thoughts (as opposed to their behaviors) about their goals and opinions as having ethical weight is ludicrously unuseful.
I also think repulsion is not an appropriate response to “detecting an ethical violation”, since that emotion motivates signaling behavior rather than useful behavior. For example, it encourages one to communicate one’s beliefs in a judgmental way that communicates entitlement, and discourages co-operation from others.
So, how do you arrive at this substitution? You keep removing the part that only a person can do, so if that rule is applied consistently, you end up with any statement being objectification.
Words are verbal behavior. If you don’t think people can be held ethically responsible for verbal behavior, I’m sure I could come up with some persuasive examples, but I’m no longer sure this discussion is worth my attention, as you’re very persistent in missing the point.
Please reread:
Sure, there are unethical verbal behaviors. Truthfully expressing opinions or discussing one’s goals are not among them, however.
Even if somebody opines that their goal is to do something awful to me, then if that is a true statement, it is actually ethically good for them to give me advance warning! So considering someone’s (truthful) verbal behavior about their goals or opinions as unethical is simply not useful to me, regardless of what opinion I may hold about what behavior may result from that opinion or goal.
But what if somebody, in opining that their goal is to do something awful to you, solicits ideas on what awful things to do and how to accomplish them, and encourages others to do awful things to you themselves?
I think that situation is closer to what Alicorn is objecting to.
People can phrase things in many ways. There is a difference which may be ethically relevant between:
“So-and-so is a [profanity] and I’m going to lose it and [threats of violence] if he doesn’t leave me alone!”
and
“I don’t like so-and-so and I wish he’d go away. I might do something really regrettable if he doesn’t; he just gets on my nerves that much.”
Even though the goals and opinions might be just alike. That is verbal behavior that goes above and beyond just truthfully stating things.
How so? If the first one is what the person actually means, then blowing smoke up my ass about it doesn’t help me.
AFAICT, you are still arguing a bottom line: that truthful verbalization about one’s internal state can be ethically bad. I won’t claim that NO such verbalization can exist as a mathematical absolute, but I haven’t yet seen you offer an example that’s bad by anything other than your own definition of “ethics”—i.e., what makes you feel bad.
So, how can something be wrong that has no bad results, probabilistically OR actually?
I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”?
I’m not sure if a gardener is “objectified” (I find that an confusing word). He or she certainly is a substitutable unit of gardening skill. Another gardener with the same skill would be just as good. Similar does apply to “attractive woman”. Another attractive woman would fit the job just as well. Leaving aside “objectified”, it’s certainly impersonal.
You make a very good point. I’m tempted to draw a distinction between referring to a hypothetical member of a profession as opposed to a hypothetical member of a gender, but until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener”.
It is perhaps a salient distinction that people choose their profession, but not their gender.
However, I disagree; both are objectifying to some degree, but it is considered socially acceptable to objectify people in the context of employment, presumably because both parties are getting some explicit value out of the transaction.
It’s certainly something that mid-20th-century radicals would object to. The language of ‘objectification’ that we’ve inherited primarily from radical feminists grew out of the intellectual framework of the Marxists, who were explicitly objecting to that sort of treatment of employees; cf Marx (or better yet Hagel)’s notion of alienation.
That said, I don’t think we have any radicals here in that sense, and I agree with Alicorn’s characterization that it would have probably been fine for OP to say (roughly speaking) “get lots of prostitutes”.
Marx’s equivalent to objectification is actually called “commodity fetishism” (seriously—no pun intended). It corresponds to replacing social relations between human beings with mere exchange of commodities. In Marxian analysis, this obscures the social and exchange relations between producers and consumers, since e.g. a worker becomes utterly unaware of the people who will consume his products, except to the extent that his “labor-power” is valued as a commodity.
Of course, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek observed, commodity fetishism (or the “commercial production process”) is what makes modern-day specialization and complex supply chains possible: even something as humble as a cotton shirt might incorporate designs sketched out in Italy, cotton grown in Africa and plastic buttons made in China. Requiring human contact or conscious agreements between so many agents would clearly be infeasible.
The benefits of sexual objectification are far less clear, except to the extent that (as some empirical evidence bears out) some people are positive towards being objectified in a sexual context.
Well, it is somewhat tacky to blatantly objectify employees—it tends to make one sound like a pompous, entitled jerk. But that’s a much shallower sort of objection than what Alicorn is raising. At a general social level, objectifying in the context of employement is on the “acceptable” side, whereas objectifying in the context of personal relationships, especially sexual relationships, straddles the line and is probably drifting toward “unacceptable”.
As for me, since I figure it’s heading that way, I’m getting in on the ground floor on avoiding such language, so that when I’m 70 years old I don’t embarrass younger family members with quaint objectifying language.
Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile’s question if we replace “gardener” with “butler”?
Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.
I think what I’m going to wind up saying to both the gardener and butler examples is that those individuals are explicitly selling their work, so it’s okay to refer to the profession as a stand-in for a semi-objectified human representation of that work. I’ve said elsewhere that when people want to have sex with women, it’s “at least honest” to purchase it outright from prostitutes who are selling it; I imagine it’s no less honest to purchase the work of a gardener or a butler. It’s when random “attractive women”/”girls”/whatever are said to be taking action other than the actual, literal sale of some sort of work as a result of hypothetical millionaire-ness that it stops being acceptable.
I think the problem is that you need to think though what it is you’re protesting. Objectification, to me, doesn’t mean wanting to get, acquire or obtain a girl. Buying a girl, raping a girl—that’s objectification, because the rapist ignores the fact that the girl has free will. It’s still true that she is ALSO an object, though. And a chordate animal. And an ultra-feminist.
Buying women, kidnapping women, shotgun wedding, buying off the cops to cover up your rape—these are no-nos. But what’s wrong with attracting girls by being more awesome?
(Also, it is immoral to abuse bugs in people’s decision-making algorithms.)
Nothing, unless by “more awesome” you mean “more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish”.
Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things. Don’t make me invoke Godwinski’s Law.
It seems to me that you’re saying that merely wanting sex is dehumanizing.
The first Google result for this is the parent comment. I have no idea what you mean. From what I gather, it’s supposed to be invoked when someone calls one’s opponent a Communist. Did that happen?
It’s a term that was proposed on TV Tropes, but I forgot that, apparently, it wasn’t launched.
Is thomblake’s definition correct, then?
Yep.
Thanks!
It’s not.
What?
No.
“Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things.
It’s not.”
Then what DO you mean? Minutae of phrasing?
When I said “more awesome”, I meant “richer”. That is also what Roko said—that money gets you girls. He didn’t say that money gets you girls on the black market. Money gets you all sorts of girls—from sex slaves to true love. Not being a jerk is a separate problem.
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
I assume here that by “wrong” you intend to ascribe some higher form of wrongness than merely your own disgust. But even if it’s just your personal disgust, I find it hard to see how that disgust is any different from say, homophobia.
If you’re talking about the ilk of BDSM, I do not think those desires or their enactments are wrong, but there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they’re going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner—even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names. By a similar token, battery is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on a masochist; murder is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on someone who was about to commit suicide; etc. Information, not luck.
The next logical thing to bring up is 24⁄7 BDSM relationships, but responsibly conducted those at least begin with a personal and consensual ceding of control.
The question was, is it then “wrong” (as you suggested it was) for person B to think person A is “more awesome” in situation Y?
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome, at least not at being ethical people (I suppose they could be awesome at something else, like curling or origami). To think an abuser is awesome at being an ethical person is to be mistaken and, probably, to be mistaken about facts of morality.
The comment of yours I’m referring to is the one where you said:
And it was in reply to a comment asking what was wrong with attracting people via awesomeness, so switching it to “being ethical people” now is a complete red herring.
You still haven’t said what it is that’s “wrong” here with someone having a different definition of awesomeness than you.
So when you say:
My question to you is, what are you saying about person B thinking person A is awesome, in the sense of being attractive? (as was the context of this thread) You implied that it is “wrong”. How so?
I don’t know what you’re talking about again, and probably shouldn’t have re-engaged with you in the first place.
I’m asking you simple, straightforward questions about your comments.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I give a personal example.
When I was a lot younger, I was in a relationship with a woman who, well, largely held me in contempt, except as a vehicle for satisfying certain of her sexual desires. Was I wrong to find this depersonalizing piggishness of hers awesome, despite the fact that her contempt was not part of a negotiated BDSM scene, nor any sort of playacting on her part? Was her attitude somehow morally wrong? Was mine?
My point here is that this sort of bright-line moralism invariably ends up depriving other people of choice, or framing them as second-class humans. The very attempt to codify objective criteria for “objectification” ends up objectifying and oppressing people.
We can be considerate of individuals, but trying to be considerate of classes of people doesn’t scale: just segregating people into classes in the first place is half the problem! (e.g. stereotype priming)
Edit to add clarification: one reason defining classes and labeling people members of them is depersonalizing is because it downplays their individuality to merely a set of footnotes on the ways in which they are or are not like the class they are being seen as a member of. For example, saying that a woman is a good programmer “for a woman” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent to compliment. In the same way, Alicorn’s classing other people’s activity as “abuse” or “wrong” is depersonalizing, despite the superficial positive intent of that labeling.
For example, it labels me as a victim of abuse, regardless of how I choose to see myself. By Alicorn’s own definitions (as I understand them) this is morally “wrong” for her to do—which appears to me to demonstrate the self-contradictory (or at least inconsistent) nature of her definitions.
My own resolution to such a paradox is to assume that it’s good to be considerate to individuals, but also to accept that others do not have a corresponding obligation to be considerate to me. I don’t expect that Alicorn must refrain from stating her opinions about my past relationship, just because it might be inconsiderate of her to do so, nor do I feel a need to make her feel bad for implying something bad about me. And if I did feel bad about it, that would be my responsibility to fix, not hers.
And if I couldn’t simply fix the problem by changing my feelings, and chose to ask Alicorn or anyone else to be more considerate in their speech, I certainly wouldn’t do it by starting out with the implication that they were morally wrong and that it was unquestionably a good idea that they should take my feelings into consideration! If I was going to ask at all, I’d ask for it as what it is: a favor to a specific person.
What double standard? Did anyone here claim that using language that teats men as objects is fine? Is Cosmo now supposed to be our standard of excellence?
what is the substantive difference between
?
Depending on whether you and I have the same working definition of “substantive”, the following:
In the first statement, but not the second, the women are not “gotten” as an open-and-shut act of obtainment. They are only attracted (and that’s assuming that the empirical claim is true).
In the first statement but not the second, the improvement to the person’s attractiveness is described only as an improvement, not as a binary switch from not having extremely attractive women to having them.
In the second statement but not the first, the women singled out are a particular narrow group selected for that are implied to be the only ones of interest or import.
Related:
Envy Up and Contempt Down: Neural and Emotional Signatures of Social Hierarchies, presented by Susan T. Fiske, co-authors Mina Cikara and Ann Marie Russell, in the “Social Emotion and the Brain” session of the 2009 AAAS Meeting in Chicago (The Independent, Scientific American podcast, The Guardian, The Daily Princetonian, National Geographic, CNN, The Neurocritic)
The Independent:
Scientific American:
The Independent:
Scientific American:
Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups, by Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske:
This is interesting, but I fear that the authors and the media are over-interpreting the data. There is a whole lot of research that basically goes from “the same area of the brain lights up!” to a shaky conclusion.
This sounds like highly motivated research. I’m curious about their test for scoring sexism, and how they established validity for that. Also, that isn’t really how brain scanners work. It’s not really possible to make those kinds of high-level determinations.
Do you want me to stop seeking sex with attractive women or to stop signaling that I like sex with attractive women?
Neither. I’d like you to be thoughtful of the independent personhood of attractive women when you think or talk about them, which would affect the structure and phrasing of your desires but not make much of a substantive change in them.
He sees the shape of the mesh, you see the fish caught in it. “Attractive” is a selection criterion, not yet a group of persons.
The whole “must have sex with attractive women” thing is just a catch phrase used in the pick-up community. Actually, most of the people who read such forums/blogs, and even the PUAs themselves are normal people who just want a normal relationship with a normal girl. I think this is especially true of the “beta males”. It’s just that some of these people are full of cynicism and frustration, which explains why it may all sound like an insult to some women (women viewed as objects, etc).
I would suggest that every time you see women or sex being discussed here, just interpret it as a discussion on how to solve a problem one might have with women, or as a general discussion on how one can improve with women. Which is what it actually means. The exact words used shouldn’t bother you as long as you understand what underlies them.
Since you’ve been so generous with advice about how I should read such conversations, I’ll return the favor. I suggest that every time you see a woman complain about how her gender is being discussed, you interpret it as (most likely) an identification of an actual problem that actually hurts an actual person, which identification you were unable to make because you are not a member of the victimized group, and too insensitive to pick up on such issues when they don’t apply to you. Also, when I call you insensitive, you should understand that I only mean that you don’t have the capacity to pick up on this one thing and I’m not making a sweeping statement about your personality—the exact word I use shouldn’t bother you as long as you understand what underlies it.
I’m surprised by this response. What I suggested is that most guys here don’t really want to have random sex with random women, they don’t view women as objects that they can just use, or anything to that effect. And that the pick up community jargon and writings generally do not reflect what the average guy wants either.
Does this strike you as wrong?
I realize now that my “suggestion” may have sounded as if I’m denying that there is a problem or that I’m ignoring it. I’m not, I was just pointing out the above.
If they don’t really want that and don’t really view women that way, why do they persist in talking as though they do? I’d chalk it up to a simple error of linguistic expression if they didn’t get so defensive when called on it.
Men are not broken women, so the way we speak is not actually an “error”.
Don’t get me wrong, though: a man who thinks that women’s language around mating matters is repulsive or in “error” is making exactly the same mistake: women aren’t broken men either.
Both men and women are certainly better off trying to translate their language when specifically speaking to the other, as well as trying to translate the language of others when listening.
However, neither language has some sort of blessed status that makes the other one an “error”, simply because someone is repulsed as a result of having mistaken what language an utterance was made in.
You’re just not trying anymore, are you. Lightwave said that some people did not mean to say the things they appeared to be saying. I said that I would think that the disparity between the things said and the things meant was a simple mistake of expression if people did not consistently defend their statements as originally phrased. And now you’re bringing in irrelevant nonsense about men not being broken women? What did I say that remotely resembled that?
You said:
and further referred to it as an “error of linguistic expression”.
I am saying that it’s not an error. That women would generally use different words to describe the same thing does not mean that the man was in error to use those words. Those are the most correct and concise words in male language for what was said.
Many things that are said by men in few words must be said in many words for a woman to understand them, just as the reverse is true for things that women can say briefly to each other but require a lengthier explanation for a man to understand. This is normal and expected, since each gender has different common reference experiences, and therefore different shorthand.
What doesn’t make any bloody sense is to insist that men (OR women) translate their every utterance into the other gender’s language in advance of any question, then treat it as some terrible faux pas or “ethical violation” to fail to do so, or to classify the (correct-in-its-own-langauge) utterance as “linguistic error”.
(Because to do so is basically to take the position that men are broken women (or vice versa).)
Instead, the reasonable/rational thing to do is, if you understand what was meant, then leave it alone. If you don’t understand, ask politely. If you accidentally misunderstand and get into an argument, stop when you do understand, instead of blaming the other person for not having thought to translate their language to use another gender’s reference experiences.
Is that clearer now?
That’s funny, as about half of the comments on this thread that thought the language was inappropriate were by males. Hiding behind your gender is no excuse for being insensitive and offensive. Use “I support talking this way because I’m a rude person”, not “I support talking this way because I am male”. Leave the rest of us out of it.
Actually, I said I support being tolerant of people who express their thoughts as they think them, even if they happen to sound offensive at first.
A guy who makes a statement about “getting” women is no more insensitive than a woman who speaks of “getting” a man; they’re simply using the language that is natural to them and at an appropriate level of specificity given their goals. We should applaud their truthfulness, not encourage them to be indirect, since if we don’t like their goals, then knowing about them is a good thing! (It’s also good if we DO like their goals, but that of course should be obvious.)
This has zero to do with my own opinions or lack thereof on the language itself—something I have scrupulously avoided endorsing or condemning. This is not a forum for sharing opinions, it’s a forum for advancing rationality… and one where the importance of Truth (with a capital-T) is bandied about regularly. It should be pretty fucking basic rationality to observe that people telling you true things you don’t like is useful information, if only because it’s a minimally basic sanity check on your own untrustworthy brain!
If I didn’t think people telling me things I don’t like is useful, I’d have been gone from this place in days! (For that matter, I wouldn’t have spent the tens of thousands of dollars on training from marketing gurus, some of whom absolutely infuriate me at times.) The fact that I encounter information that offends me or pisses me off is a helpful signal: it means I’m learning something new.
In particular, it means I have the opportunity to expand my range of useful choices, by dropping whatever mental rules are triggering me to be offended or pissed off, instead of paying attention to whether there’s anything useful in the information I’ve been offered, whether or not I think it’s “True” with a capital T.
So all in all, I think perhaps you’re having a different conversation than I am. I’m not arguing that people should be intentionally rude or offensive—I’m arguing that trying to cleanse the world of things that offend you is an irrational dead end, not only because it’s a fool’s errand, but because it will actively HURT you, by depriving you of learning opportunities and locking you into an affective spiral of your own making.
Actually, you said: (emphasis added)
I’m saying that the person speaking offensively was not doing so merely because he was a male, and the people taking offense were not only females. Gender does not seem to factor heavily into the problem. I don’t see how appeal to ‘gendered language’ helps, and I take offense to you implicitly associating me with such people.
Did I ever say that all women only ever speak or comprehend female-specific language, or that men only ever speak or comprehend male-specific language? If language is based on reference experiences, then not all men and all women will share precisely the same language, even if there are general tendencies by gender (whether cultural or genetic).
That is, not all men share the same reference experiences—and geeky guys in particular are more likely to share certain classes of reference experience with women. Hell, I used to find the same sort of talk offensive, myself.
If you take offense to implicit associations every time somebody omits to adequately delineate their generalizations, you’re going to be offended a LOT around here. ;-)
(Personally, I just didn’t feel the need to disclaim each and every instance of a gendered term with “sombunall” or “BOCTAOE”—it’s more than a little tedious, especially since ANY gender-based generalization should be considered to have sombunalls and BOCTAOE’s liberally sprinkled throughout.)
You are always talking about NLP, so I expect you to know that the meaning of a statement is the reaction it gets in the person you are talking to. So if you are making statements that drive away women then either you mean to drive away women or you are making an error.
That’s not the type of error Alicorn was talking about, AFAICT. Making a statement that doesn’t advance your goals is a different class of error than a linguistic one.
What. The. Heck. You do not get your own language. If people use language that is hurtful, objectifying, and sexist, they do not get the excuse that they have an idiolect in which those things are magically no longer hurtful, objectifying, and sexist (all of which are bad things to be). It just does not work that way.
Okay, I’ll try it on you. I think I understand what you meant, so it’s not okay for me to feel any way at all about how you said it, or to care if you were rude, or to think that it reflects on your character if you go about saying hurtful things… hm, that doesn’t seem to be the right thing to do. Maybe I didn’t understand you. But when I have tried in the past to ask you what you mean, you have not been helpful. Perhaps what happened was that I accidentally misunderstood you and got into an argument. I should chalk that up to you being male, even though I know plenty of males who do not say such things—wait, that doesn’t make sense either. Do you have other, less patronizing recommendations in your bag of tricks?
There is no such thing as hurtful(language). There is only considered_hurtful_by(language, person). See Eliezer’s post about movie posters with swamp creatures carrying off “sexy” women for explanation, aka the “mind projection fallacy”.
I didn’t say it was “not okay”—I said it was “not useful”. HUGE difference.
You are perfectly free to feel any way you like, but that doesn’t make it useful, nor grant you any rights regarding whether others should agree with your feelings.
IOW, “not_helpful_to(pjeby_answers, Alicorn_understanding)”… but note that this does not equate to “not_helpful(pjeby)” or “not_trying_to_help(pjeby)”, just as “repulsive_to(X, Alicorn)” does not equate to “repulsive(X)” or “unethical(X)”.
Perhaps. I actually see it more as that people are trying to tell you things that are outside your current frame of reference, and you’re telling them they’re unethical or in error, when they are actually trying to be clear and helpful and say what they mean, and are puzzled why you’re labeling them and their statements. (Even when someone knows male-female idiom translation inside and out, they don’t always notice what they’re doing, just like most people aren’t aware of their own accent.)
Meanwhile, AFAICT, you are taking other people’s words and translating them to what you would mean if you used those words, instead of graciously accepting others explanation of what they meant by those words.
Once you get to the point where you’re arguing about the definitions of the words, there isn’t really an argument any more—something that also should be clear from Eliezer’s past posts.
In short, none of the stuff I’m bringing up is “about” gender issues—or I wouldn’t even have bothered with this conversation in the first place.
I brought this up only because it’s directly relevant to core Yudkowskian principles like the mind projection fallacy, arguing over definitions, and not treating one class of human being as a broken version of another class of human being.
In other words, it’s about rationality.
That would be if—and only if—we had successfully reached understanding, and the misunderstanding was rooted in a gender-based language difference. (i.e., the context of my comments)
Do you have any evidence for the male-language/female-language thing? Isn’t it at least as likely that men talk about concepts that offend women, and women talk about concepts that elude men? (I speak as a male)
The stuff you’re talking about here is mainly communication problems. I’m not convinced you and alicorn are having a communication problem...
As she’s pointed out, we’ve been having at least one, and probably several. However, my comments about language were in relation to a different communication problem. (i.e., the one between Alicorn and others)
I don’t think so, because the key is unexpressed connotations.
A non-sexist man can talk about “getting” women without this having (in his mind) any negative connotation, because “of course” he wants something more than just sex, expects to settle down with only one partner after a bit of field-playing, and would never intentionally hurt or manipulate anyone. IME, however, women tend to prefer that all of these things be explicitly stated or disclaimed… just like there are plenty of things women expect to be obvious to men, but which men would much rather hear explicitly stated.
For example, Alicorn was trying to be polite to me during our thread, by NOT directly stating how rude she thought I was being, because from her POV, that idea was a clear and obvious implication of something that she said in a meta-example nested within a comment of hers. (This completely escaped me until she pointed it out in email later.)
Anyway, the gender distinctions here are really secondary—the key point is that people with different reference experiences expect different things to be “obvious”, and are very likely to think you clueless or socially miscalibrated when you don’t pick up on them without it being spelled out.
That’s why Alicorn ends up wanting to know why guys “don’t just say that”—they think that the rest “goes without saying”, just as she expected her oblique implications to me to be understood without being made explicit.
(And I would find it difficult to list all the times in the history of my marriage where a conflict boiled down to, “So why didn’t you just say that?”—i.e., one person expecting the other to pick up on an “obvious” connotation, where the other person would’ve highly valued an explicit statement of such.)
Anyway, my point was simply that it’s not reasonable to demand that everybody go around explaining all the connotations of their statements, all the time, just because your personal connotations for those statements result in a negative emotional reaction. It’s more useful (and less stressful) to translate that person or group’s statements in future. That is, to do the expansion internal to yourself, rather than insist on other people doing the translation for you.
(I wish I could’ve stated all this as clearly yesterday, but I was operating with only 3 hours sleep and probably should’ve stayed away from the computer altogether.)
Really, I agree with everything you say here.
However, I tend to take Alicorn’s point of view; given that some (many?) men really do think of women in objectifying ways, there’s no way for Alicorn (or anyone) to know if a given offensive phrase is male-speak, or if it ought to be literally interpreted. If one actually knows the speaker well, one could probably tell if such a sentiment is consistent with their personality, but it seems like you’d have to know someone very well to make a reliable judgment there.
Therefore, I do think it is worth the effort to avoid speaking of women in ways that are objectifying. I don’t think it really takes that much effort once one is aware of it...
One could say that Alicorn ought to just assume the best about transgressors, and perhaps she should, but I think there’s some value in enforcing the concept that it’s Not Ok to treat human beings as objects.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t object to being considerate. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to try to enforce being considerate. It tends to backfire, for one thing, as people generally don’t like being told what to do, thereby creating perverse incentives. It also tends to make people on both sides of the discussion “flip the bozo bit” and assume the people on the other side are just jerks, instead of any increased understanding being reached.
(Of course, in that respect, there’s an extent to which I did the exact same thing I criticized Alicorn for! Mea culpa.)
And more to the point, we’ve already had a similar conversation and I thought it was apparent at that time that there’s a certain way we want to avoid writing around here, in the interest of inclusivity.
Is it really the case that women would respond positively towards this kind of “full disclosure”? If we are to take dating experts seriously, men are much better off if they leave such things unsaid. I agree with Steve Rayhawk that what most people really object to is depersonalization, i.e. the absence of empathy: as long as it is known with certainty that this is not your intent, you are in practice free to objectify as much as you want.
Different context. First, what dating experts say about creating relationships doesn’t always apply to sustaining them. Try being married for 13 years without ever explicitly telling your partner how much you love them!
Second, almost everything I’ve been saying is very strictly grounded in the context of a specific statement made here, and the subsequent discussion. So when I said “prefer that all of these things be explicitly stated or disclaimed”, I meant in the social context of a man stating an intention to “get” a woman, that is not specifically directed at the subject of his statement, and which occurs in the presence of persons other than that man, and the woman. (A very narrow context, in other words.)
Also, “respond positively” does not equal “prefer”. Someone can “prefer” one thing, and yet respond positively to another… which is the usual point being made by those dating experts.
Rest assured, there is some communication problem. I’m sufficiently convinced that pjeby doesn’t get my point that I have given up. Whether I understand him or not, I couldn’t tell you for sure.
Alicorn:
What if I told you that talking about “getting a woman” was a direct and honest expression of my most inner desires, that I really did view her in that objectifying way, and that I considered this attitude perfectly natural and healthy, and that, furthermore, I find it objectionable for others to consider it their perogative to correct me on this?
And that I very often find “being offended” to be an offensive behavior in its own right?
And that I heavily discount verbal contradiction from other males because it signals a very well-established mating posture, that of the helpful and supplicant beta male?
If, as you say, a man is unable to identify and insensitive to the problem reflected in his statement, and you point it out in a way that comes across primarily as an accusation of bad character (when his statement seems to be weak evidence that he has this form of bad character), it’s not surprising that he would get defensive.
Disregard.
The comment is three years old, and is parent to a giant thread detailing Alicorn’s position in painstaking detail.
Damn it, I always forget to check the dates on these things. Ah well, nevermind.
A slightly different angle—it’s not just that attractive women (or their sexual favors) are presented as objects, it’s that this sort of discussion seems to be set in a world where people at the same level of attractiveness are fungible. It seems like a world where no one likes anyone, or at least no one likes anyone they’re in a sexual relationship with enough to be interested in the difference between one person of equivalent attractiveness and another.
Probably not.
(It might be worth noting that people often do talk this way about other classes of people. Employer-employee relations tend to be treated similarly; “How to get a job” discussion is as often as impersonal as “how to get laid” discussion. It’s still a bigger problem when the topic is the sexual favors of women with conventionally attractive bodies, though.)
(You might want to ignore the preceding comment. I just feel compelled to nitpick everything I can. Assume good faith, and all that.)
Alicorn writes,
I want you to continue to participate here, Alicorn. And I want to increase the female: male ratio in the rationalist/ altruistic/ selfless/ global-situation community. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.
seconded.
How do you – or how does anyone – think Roko’s sentiment could have been rephrased to not come across as objectifying? The only change obvious to me is making it clear that money and status are not sufficient conditions for sexual success, but I doubt that’s a significant part of the problem.
See here.
ok, I see your issue. You’re OK with
but not
Do I understand you correctly? It’s the “get” that bothers you?
“Get” is a large part of what bothers me. I don’t like your first statement—“women are attracted to rich men” is still a disturbing generalization even if this attraction isn’t supposed to lead to “getting” anybody, and I’m not terribly comfortable with the implied goal of just “sleeping with attractive women” (although I won’t ethically condemn that goal as long as it’s pursued honestly). But the second statement is definitely worse.
Well, the goal could be to cause it to be the case that one has an unusually attractive wife, as in my case.
So having concluded that talk of “getting” women is a big part of why I don’t like the things you say, you go on to use it again immediately?
Oh no! I’m really sorry, I didn’t realize I had done that!
Ugh. Did you edit the word “get” to “cause it to be the case that one has”?
I am curious: do you think it is rational to taboo all discussion that involves treating women as physical systems that can be manipulated by providing appropriate sensory input to their sense organs?
Do you think that all discussion that involves treating men as physical systems that can be manipulated by providing appropriate sensory input to their sense organs should be similarly stopped? Like, if I have a business idea that involves selling particularly manipulative pornographic material to men which will cause them to give me money which I can donate to an efficient charity and save millions of lives, that such an idea should not even be discussed?
I think it is unethical (not necessarily “irrational”) to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation. If you had been actually talking about the production and sale of porn, I’d be more forgiving; porn (like purchasing the services of prostitutes, which I’ve also acknowledged as non-manipulative) is at least honest, in the sense that everybody knows what porn is for.
oh dear. Now you are accusing me of a thought crime! You may actually be deluded at the same level as Catholics who tell each other that even thinking about the possibility of God not existing is a sin…
Alicorn, I like you a lot, but you are deluded.
...Thought crime? Really? That’s what you get from me saying that it’s unethical to think of people as suitable objects of manipulation? Yes, I used the word “think”, but the emphasis was really on “suitable”. I could have used the phrasing “it’s inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people”, or “the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong” or “the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false”, or “to speak of people as suitable objects of manipulation reflects an ethically abhorrent facet of the speaker’s personality”—and meant more or less the same thing. Is that clearer?
I’d phrase it a little bit differently, but overall, yeah, I’d accept that position. That is, I basically agree with you here.
Alternately (probably a bit more general but, I think, capturing the main relevant offensive bits) “goal systems which do not assign inherent terminal value to persons, but only see them in terms of instrumental value are immoral goal systems.”
“it’s inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people” “the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong” “the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false”
Ahem… Why? To me, these claims seem baseless and to some great degree, false.
It would seem that you and I disagree on matters of ethics, then—probably on an awfully basic level.
I suspect you’re using the word “manipulation” to mean different things.
For that matter, a lot of “manipulation” goes on in Brennan’s world, it’s expected on all sides, they don’t think of themselves as immoral because of it, and I would go ahead and endorse that aspect of their fictional existence. I think that it’s manipulation of someone who isn’t expecting manipulation which is the main ethical problem.
What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that’s a very different matter). I don’t think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I’m sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
well, it could be and often is harmful to someone, if and only if you act upon it. But We should not place an injunction upon even considering the possibility and working out its implications; I think that this much is pretty clear. That is the route to religious-level delusion.
I would be the first to emphasize that thinking of people as manipulable physical systems and acting to naively maximize your own goals based upon that conceptualization is a path to disaster much of the time.
I should have made clear that I am advocating thinking about the possibility and working out its implications quite carefully, and then perhaps adopting a new decision procedure as the result of this meta-analysis.
For example, one way this could work is as follows: you consider (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, do a utilitarian analysis and then work out a decision procedure for your social interactions based upon this analysis. In the spirit of Toby Ord’s consequentialism and decision procedures, this decision procedure might not involve considering (wo)men as manipulable physical systems, but might instead involve re-wiring your own brain to reconceptualize (wo)men as people again, but people who stand in a different relation to you than before you did the utilitarian meta-analysis. In the particular case of pick-up, this “different relation to you” is “they have lower status than me” and “they really like me!” and “Human sexual interaction is a positive sum game!”
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can’t observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn’t think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow “acting” on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).
Actually the accusation was not of a ‘thought crime’, but rather of doing something unethical with your thoughts.
If you believe that there are some actions that are unethical, I fail to see how some of those actions can’t be thoughts, unless you think thoughts are metaphysically different from other actions.
Actually I think we’re dealing in virtue ethics here.
That seems very unlikely on the face of it (I hadn’t meant it in a specifically virtue ethics context, and Alicorn isn’t necessarily a fan), though I’d also gotten that impression from some of the phrasings in Alicorn’s recent comment. Surely though it’s an empirical question whether thinking of people in a particular way predisposes one to behave differently about them.
But what did you mean by that?
define: “thought crime” finds “labeling disapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime”
WARNING We are now arguing about definitions of words. This indicates that we are no longer in the rational part of human-interaction phase-space. /WARNING
No, it’s OK. If you go off of his source, women want to be objectified, so it’s no harm, no foul. You just don’t know it yet. Brilliant, right?
Seriously, though, he’s deriving his theory from someone who evaluates the worth of men by their ability to score with attractive women [Edit: phrase removed]. The theory is more complicated than that, but, really, it’s not that much more complicated.
(In case it’s not entirely clear from the above, I emphatically don’t endorse this view.)
I don’t think Roissy claims women want to be objectified. He agrees with the majority opinion that they like to be treated like human beings, appreciated for the qualities particular to them as individuals etc.
He just adds the coda that giving women what they like is a very poor strategy for sleeping with as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible*. Roissy doesn’t really care what women want except insofar as knowing it furthers his aims, so this doesn’t create a great deal of cognitive dissonance for him.
It was in fact reading him that inspired me to write this comment yesterday.
*In fact, he claims it makes women disdain you and calls it “supplication”. The Roissy way is never explain, never apologise.
evidence?
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/defining-the-alpha-male/
Note that number of affairs is a descriptor of all alphas and no betas, and it increases with rank. Thus, infidelity reflects a man’s worth positively.
If you’re not going off Roissy, I apologize for misinterpreting you, but your language and his matched up almost exactly, and I’ve seen him linked a bit here and on OB, so I figured that’s where the ideas came from.
Ok, so I don’t go off Roissy, and I don’t think that cheating on your partner is a good thing. I am more a fan of the people at Real Social Dynamics, e.g. Tyler Durden. Sure, there are plenty of people in the seduction world who have what we would call a “subgoal stomp” problem: being a little bit more alpha is a subgoal of a good life, but if you optimize that subgoal you end up with problems.
Folks here seem to buy into the folk anthropology notion that successful men become successful specifically in order to attract a mate, presumably the most conventionally attractive one. I’m not sure that idea is going to go away, regardless of how disgusting it sounds to those of us who married for love.
I’m quite sure that the idea won’t go away, if only because in at least some cases, it’ll be flagrantly true- season with a dash of confirmation bias and serve hot.
In particular, I think it’s not going to go away as long as powerful politicians keep having extramarital affairs.
The idea deserves some objective light shedding on it. It’s easy to pick out cases where beautiful women and high-status (not necessarily rich) men choose to affiliate, but are the two groups really more likely to hang out together? Or is this a sort of male-evolutionary-psyche mirage, which is always over the next status hill?
Disregard.