This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive, not a message from someone who is sympathetic to the concerns expressed or willing to examine the matter under discussion. That’s probably not your intent?
In terms of PUA discussion here, off the top of my head I’ve seen it expressed that:
If you get someone to cheat on their partner, then they were in an unhappy relationship and therefore there’s no problem.
“Manipulation” is a useless term, and there’s no use trying to distinguish if some methods of obtaining sex are problematic WRT consent. (Notable because I haven’t seen this same sentiment expressed on, say, CEV posts, so I expect it to be motivated by sex / politics.)
Women don’t like explicit discussion of social reality (and this is the only possible objection to PUA discussion here).
In terms of PUA discussion here, off the top of my head I’ve seen it expressed that:
If you get someone to cheat on their partner, then they were in an unhappy relationship and therefore there’s no problem.
Where? And was it systematically rejected or accepted as a reasonable general conclusion?
Women don’t like explicit discussion of social reality (and this is the only possible objection to PUA discussion here). (emphasis added)
This does not sound like something that would be accepted by the lesswrong community (including PUA advocates) as anything but plainly false. I expect instances of this claim to be significantly subzero in votes.
I think reading charitably leads to a less plausible but still not too unlikely somewhat legitimate purpose served by the examples as they are written.
Saying what the most extreme thing was that has been expressed without being totally shouted down sets an outer bound for what is considered normal, and adjusting inward from that would give a decent approximation of the most important thing we want to know: what mainstream LW thinks.
Nonetheless, it is bad form if so, as it is an attempt to use the dark art of the anchoring bias by starting from the most extreme thing not shouted down.
I expect instances of this claim to be significantly subzero in votes.
Likewise, but some posts are “hot topics” garnering many pluses and minuses—I’ve had a few and noticed that. Others conservatively plod along, never worth an upvote. It would be good to know not just the net vote but the numbers in each direction, knowing the net vote would be very important but it wouldn’t tell us all we want to know. A position enthusiastically supported by a large minority and opposed by a slightly larger majority is still mainstream.
The next step is clearly links, to judge what exactly we are talking about. Are we keeping slaves to pick our cotton, or are we failing to study the etymology of each word we use to ensure it has a non-racist history before we utter it? Or, where in the middle of those two extremes are we, approximately?
Saying what the most extreme thing was that has been expressed without being totally shouted down sets
Is that even the case here? I haven’t seen the claims in question made at all, whether downvoted or not. I refrained from replying with “I don’t believe you” out of politeness and because I know that I don’t have an exhaustive and perfectly indexed database of all lesswrong comments stored in my brain. All I can know is that the claims are blatant straw men to the extent that they are presented as memes actually present in lesswrong culture. So I predict with some confidence that even if they do actually exist in comments that they are treated as trolling.
I don’t have an exhaustive and perfectly indexed database of all lesswrong comments stored in my brain.
I’m likewise handicapped, so I have just googled “site:lesswrong.com cusithbell pua”, as I thought it likely that the claim, upon being seen, would be responded to.
It’s quite telling that the implication of the post is that “women don’t like explicit awareness of social reality”, rather than the (more accurate) “women don’t like PUA”.
This was something CuSithBell did see and not construct as a straw man, but it is something someone else constructed as an interpretation of what she read.
Gender ratio matters: It is no secret that rationalism suffers from a paucity of women...There is no easy answer here, but it is important to address this factor as early as possible...Work hard to find interested women, and be careful in the presence of newcomers when trying to sanely explicitly discuss hot-button gender topics
The heavily upvoted reply:
I’m a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to “being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality” … with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of “explicit awareness of social reality”.
2) It’s quite telling that the implication of the post is that “women don’t like explicit awareness of social reality”, rather than the (more accurate) “women don’t like PUA”.
I was struck how often different authors remarked on the unintended side benefits of their training: better relationships at work, better interviewing skills, more effective negotiations, more non-pickup social fun, better male friendships, more confidence, etc. These guys were able to make major strides in areas that I’ve struggled to improve at all in… without even bloody intending to! This struck me as an something worth taking very seriously!
I find it alarming that such a valuable resource would be monopolized in pursuit of orgasm; it’s rather as if a planet were to burn up its hydrocarbons instead of using them to make useful polymers. PUA ought to be a special case of a more general skill set, and it’s being wasted.
The mention of PUA drags along several associations that I want to disavow (think anything obviously “Dark Arts”). I considered omitting the fact that much of the intellectual heritage of this idea is the PUAers to avoid these associations, but I couldn’t think of another way to tie it together. This idea owes its genesis to the PUA community, but the product is not intended to be its exact replica. Undesirable elements need not be ported from the old system to the new.
The commenter later says:
Yes—and I find that the “Women hate the dark arts because they can’t deal with reality” trope is a very common one (perhaps less common on LW, but common in general). It may be that the OP didn’t intend to imply that, but it may also not be an unreasonable implication to draw given the frequency the argument is made.
I’m going to temporarily limit my editorialization to the framing of the quotations due to time constraints.
So I predict with some confidence that even if they do actually exist in comments that they are treated as trolling.
There was a third alternative: someone else interpreted quite uncharitably, it is arguable whether that interpretation identified the most likely implication of an actual comment, and unarguable that fairly probable benign interpretations exist, but the cited claim did in fact play a prominent role in the discussion and is certainly not CuSithBell’s straw man.
I’m likewise handicapped, so I have just googled “site:lesswrong.com cusithbell pua”, as I thought it likely that the claim, upon being seen, would be responded to.
It’s quite telling that the implication of the post is that “women don’t like explicit awareness of social reality”, rather than the (more accurate) “women don’t like PUA”.
CuSith responding as though such claims were made here is something that is in my mental database. It is the claims themselves that I hadn’t seen.
There was a third alternative
(That’s not a third alternative in any false-dichotamy sense—it’s a subset of “not existing”. I do agree that it is worth mentioning and making more distinct!)
someone else interpreted quite uncharitably, it is arguable whether that interpretation identified the most likely implication of an actual comment, and unarguable that fairly probable benign interpretations exist, but the cited claim did in fact play a prominent role in the discussion and is certainly not CuSithBell’s straw man.
This seems likely and it is also something I consider a real problem. The commenter that you left nameless is no doubt well meaning, as is CuSith. Yet via “interpretation” mentioned by the unnamed then some added overgeneralizations by CuSith we end up with a rather brutal false accusation directed at lesswrongians. That’s just not-ok. Even though it is not malicious or even dishonest (beyond typical creative exaggeration) it is negligent and a harsh enough misrepresentation that it could legitimately be considered offensive.
A lot of conflict could be avoided if allegations about beliefs and expressions thereof were backed up by links or citations. Then we could actually tackle any remaining offensive beliefs or misconceptions rather than getting worked up over Chineese Whipsers! (Is that term considered politically incorrect yet or is China too ‘outgroup’ to have gained careful-word-use privileges? If I used the variant ‘broken telephone’ would people still understand the meaning?)
One stopgap solution would be to have a standardized response for accusations like that.
“You accused but did not provide evidence, which does not show supporting evidence does not exist, though it is evidence supporting evidence does not exist, so your unsubstantiated argument makes me think your position less likely to be true than I had originally.”
YABDNPE
I think we need to think seriously about how to think about interpretations. Right now, I think most people (I might be projecting) try to first figure out what was most likely meant, and then adjust that a bit as their duty of reading others charitably, and take the output of that as their tentative interpretation.
I think we should break it down. We should automatically produce a most charitable interpretation we can think of, as well as a distinct estimate of the most likely original intent, and we should be well-calibrated to accurately estimate the chance that the circumstance has an explanation unlike any we’re thinking of. As important features of interpreting charitably, we need to 1) bear in mind that others’ charitable readings are according to different value sets than ours and 2) bear in mind our imaginations that are attempting to come up with most charitable interpretations with is limited.
An example of 1) would be for the woman who sued the airline over its flight attendant using a variant on a popular nursery rhyme that has an original racist, if obscure, version. For me, judging favorably means seriously considering how she might not believe a word of the philosophy underlying her case, and just have made it in an attempt to get money. For others, my saying this might sound indicting—how dare you accuse her of dishonesty and greed! To me, actually believing she had been wronged would be more unflattering.. This is very important if we try to foster a community of charitable interpretation by perhaps addressing others’ possible non-charitable interpretation but not accusing others of poor interpretation..
I think it corrects for why political correctness can become a lost purpose: to ensure we don’t wrongly think unduly badly of others, a system of criticizing people who appear to do so is put in place that encourages us to call out people when a plausible, if perhaps unintended, interpretation of their words is that they judge people unfairly.
The solution of judging others favorably can’t survive as a meme by slapping down other modes of interpretation, if it tries it will be subverted, so it will take positive good will and praise, not condemnation, to spread it.
Item 2) deals with unknown unknowns, the argument from ignorance we tell ourselves. Smart people who are used to being right are vulnerable to not seriously realizing they might be wrong, or that though they can’t think of how something could be, it actually is.
Something somewhat similar to “This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive, not a message from someone who is sympathetic to the concerns expressed or willing to examine the matter under discussion. That’s probably not your intent?” could be an ideal. It might be productive if people were used to beginning certain posts with: here is what I think is the most likely interpretation, although this is not an accusation, because I also think other interpretations are fairly plausible given the context, how I usually agree with you, etc.
I discuss this in greater depth in this reply. I hope this clarifies my position! I don’t believe that LW-majority-position is misogynistic, self-serving nihilism (probably something more along the lines of happy-fun-times-nihilism). I do think that some of these topics can be dangerous-like-politics, and that this danger manifests as I describe in the other post.
This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive
I’d like to think different parts of it come off differently. To be specific, I hope it’s the mostly just last line of the post that gives that impression.
To a large extent I am dismissive, but not of the topic or its importance, I just despise vague and nebulous criticism in general, and I saw it in “the attitudes I’ve stumbled over here re. PUA, gender and privilege in general”.
I’m confused as to how it would naturally come up discussing CEV, such that its absence would be noteworthy. In my mind, the significant problems for CEV crop up before the subject of manipulation would arise, specifically, I’m thinking of how as an updating agent who is human I am a different person with different anticipations about the future if I first read page 30 in a book and then page 45, than if I had read page 45 and then 30. This seems to de-cohere extrapolated volition even under optimal circumstances of being changed (i.e. being reasoned with rather than have my brain hacked directly). Since the most benign influences are so problematic, I haven’t seen reason to extensively consider unwilling updating in that context.
If you get someone to cheat on their partner, then they were in an unhappy relationship and therefore there’s no problem.
Women don’t like explicit discussion of social reality (and this is the only possible objection to PUA discussion here).
These views, if held, disturb me. Your post differs from the one I was perhaps too scornful of insofar as yours takes a real stand on issues, and names some specific opinions with which I can agree or disagree!
It’s still not quite perfect, because I haven’t seen those views expressed, not that I’ve looked for them, so links would be nice, but you have provided the basis for a legitimate conversation about the issue by taking it from “attitudes around here are off-putting” to “Here are some views I oppose. Can we agree to oppose them? Can we get an idea of their prevalence on LW?” It’s not passive aggressive!
PUA is obviously a very ‘political’ topic on LW, and I expect that many readers / posters have initial reactions along the lines of “this is icky and I don’t care to examine any further”, “it is obviously bad to try to ‘fake’ charisma if you’re not inherently charismatic like me”, “anyone who has a problem with this hates me personally”… that sort of thing.
I don’t necessarily think these or the comments in my earlier post are majority positions on LessWrong. I do think that there is a problematic component to some aspects of PUA (some areas of the field are overtly misogynistic, some techniques are problematic WRT consent), but the most common issue I’ve seen here is in failing to acknowledge that these are real problems. So it’s less “these are what LW believes about PUA”, and more “there are some dangerous meme-strains related to PUA that we should be careful about, and here are some ways in which they have struck”.
“Manipulation” is a useless term
Something like this, or different?
Here is one relevant discussion. This is more specifically the sort of thing I’m talking about.
I’m confused as to how it would naturally come up discussing CEV, such that its absence would be noteworthy.
It seems that manipulation is, approximately, influence that you “would prefer not to go along with” in a CEV-ish sense. I would expect that a generally held belief that this is a useless distinction would motivate criticisms of CEV along the same lines. The specificity of the confusion seems too conveniently self-serving.
If you get someone to cheat on their partner, then they were in an unhappy relationship and therefore there’s no problem.
This was, admittedly, a one-off remark that was denounced by none other than Eliezer (“A few seconds of thought should convince you this is obviously false”, or something, but I can’t seem to find the link).
Women don’t like explicit discussion of social reality (and this is the only possible objection to PUA discussion here).
The discussion you found in another comment, this’n is the one I had in mind. The original post was edited, however, initially it said something much closer to what clarissethorn is reacting to.
This comment thread features a few posts wherein it seems I or someone else will say “this isn’t about explicit analysis” and the response will be “of course not, but really it is.”
So, uh. In conclusion? I think that these are views / traps that have at least a small but non-negligible presence here, that are difficult to think rationally about, that we should be aware of, denounce, and oppose rather than deny when we’re discussing PUA and explicit social reality (which is a thing that we should do).
I apologize for the long and rambling post, I hope I have expressed myself clearly and accurately. And I apologize as well if I am mistaken! I realize that the emotional coloration of the facts effects me as well, but I don’t think I’m completely deluded about this. I’m glad we can have a reasonable meta-discussion about this! Thanks.
Things should be called “manipulatory” because they are bad, things should not be called “bad” because they are manipulatory.
Like, for example, “with women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”, or “bayes tells us we should all bang hot chicks”.
A google search for each of those phrases only found your comment; you should provide links.
Untruths differ in plausibility, and it is expected that someone “taking sides” in an argument speak dishonestly to put one side in the best light. The reason I feel almost no negative reactions to your statements like this while others such as wedrifid does is not that I think them more plausible than he does, but that I think they are transparently exaggerations by an advocate. You have broken free of something like the uncanny valley, such that I think your statements barely imply they are what a neutral observer might think. I say this to be upfront because you might not think this a respectful reason for not feeling disagreement. That last sentence doesn’t say what I want it to but I can’t figure out how to say what I mean, I hope you can figure it out.
some areas of the field are overtly misogynistic, some techniques are problematic WRT consent
1) People mean different things by “the field of PU”, so it’s helpful to be explicit and at least name the area.
2) Techniques don’t have the property of being problematic, being problematic is a relationship between the technique and a value system. If you aren’t trusted by someone to know their value system, and they don’t know your value system, those kinds of accusations are of limited use, so the technique should be explicitly described, its problem explained (if it isn’t obvious), and its link to PUA established. All of this can be done by providing a citation, so the work is in finding it, but it spares you the trouble of having to paraphrase it accurately. At least name the technique.
I think your generalizations about PU are useful and better than nothing or even most things for an understanding of it, but not great, with about the same relationship to PU that PU has to women.
I think I’m fairly tolerant of your intolerance of intolerance, as well as PUA’s intolerance. This might make me inconsistent, as against other guys who are intolerant of intolerance of intolerance, though I doubt it. But I don’t have a problem with the community’s relationship with PUA (I consider myself part of this community and not that one, rather than the other way around, or neither, or both), it’s good enough by my value system, and I feel motivated to defend that value system much more than PU.
It seems that manipulation is, approximately, influence that you “would prefer not to go along with” in a CEV-ish sense.
What you prefer is a property not just of you, but of your environment. What you’d prefer to prefer is a property not just of you, but of your environment. What you’d prefer to prefer to prefer...If I’m looking at a hungry kitten, I have different preferences than if I’m in a crowded bus, or reading a paper about meta-morality. To privilege where I happen to be seems arbitrary, in any case it means my CEV from minute to minute would be subject to vast swings due to the butterfly effect (I think).
I have said (in a comment elsewhere in the internet that I can’t find) that there is a continuum—but not one with influence and manipulation as its poles. Rather, to get one’s interlocutor’s molecules into a state accepting a proposition, there is a continuum between influencing someone with level speech and feeding them to a child and teaching the child the proposition is true, and that these aren’t different in kind. Manipulation with drugs or body language or torture or verbal intonation etc. are each more to the middle of that scale, some practically next to influence! So I, for one, can’t be said to ignore an important difference between influence and manipulation except when convenient for political purposes, whatever else one might say about me!
I think the answer has to do with fully understanding the nature of hypothetical alternatives, and very little to do with understanding utility functions. I don’t know how to do it, but the present is a single place and the best hope for non-arbitrariness, however difficult it is to make it non-arbitrary from a moral perspective. Utility functions are maps of map-makers, ignorance compounded upon ignorance, not a platonic form to aspire to. Somehow reality has to be specially important, the reality in which I’d pay the same to save 1,000 birds as 1,000,000, etc.
Like, for example, “with women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes (unlike with us tough-minded rational men)”
It’s not obvious that what you added in the parentheticals is actually meant, though it may be. Imagine the following conversation:
PUA: “With women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes.”
LW Feminist: “Women and men are equally rational!”
PUA:”I’m not bisexual!”
LWF:”I didn’t say you were!”
PUA:”Well I didn’t say women were less rational than men!”
LWF:”You implied it by only mentioning the rationality, or lack of it, in women!”
PUA:”You implied it! I’m talking about how to use social cues and biases to sleep with people. People, meaning women!”
I recently figured out how to keep dog owners from picking up their dogs or pulling them away from me when I’m out walking my pit bull. I had been having little luck at all with “He’s friendly.” “He doesn’t bite, he’s never bitten anyone!” etc. Yet my new method, inspired by PUA, almost never fails. I say “Is your dog friendly?” while holding back my dag as if I were protecting him. This works astoundingly well, even with people walking tiny yorkies! Now my dog can get to have social interactions with nearly all other dogs we come across. I change the other person’s frame of reference from “Is that large-jawed monster going to eat my dog/me?” to “Is my dog qualified to interact with that dog, or is its personality not good enough?” If I make it all about whether or not they are good enough, so they forget to ask themselves if I am good enough, is this wrong? How would speaking by uttering reassurances or choosing not to speak be more neutral than using the “dark arts”? Saying nothing isn’t doing nothing, and something must be done, and being as underhanded as I am, no more no less, is working out for me.
I don’t think this post deserves being downvoted. Granted that the absence of links is a big flaw, the previous somewhat similar post didn’t even make any specific claims at all, and I am heavily inclined to overlook even severe weaknesses in rough drafts when they improve greatly upon the old drafts. This counteracts perfectionist tendencies, encourages social discussion at a rawer stage of thought in which disagreement is suborned to dialogue, gives opportunities to say “oops”, and generally gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling (halo alert! There are advantages to having high standards, the coin of LW that it would behoove us not to debase).
I will nonetheless add a criticism that hasn’t been raised before. The phrasing “Women don’t like” is problematically equivocal, not just for the original speakers, but for those citing them. If one means to say (or to say that someone said) “All women X”, or “most women X”, or “women X more than men X, etc., one should be clear.
If one intends to say that the original speaker was using equivocation (for instance, by not modifying “women” with “Some” or “More so than men”, the speaker may have been (inadvertently?) saying something true in a restricted interpretation but false and overly stereotyping in an expansive plausible interpretation. Those citing such cases should explicitly label the problem rather than faithfully transposing the equivocations present.
This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive, not a message from someone who is sympathetic to the concerns expressed or willing to examine the matter under discussion. That’s probably not your intent?
In terms of PUA discussion here, off the top of my head I’ve seen it expressed that:
If you get someone to cheat on their partner, then they were in an unhappy relationship and therefore there’s no problem.
“Manipulation” is a useless term, and there’s no use trying to distinguish if some methods of obtaining sex are problematic WRT consent. (Notable because I haven’t seen this same sentiment expressed on, say, CEV posts, so I expect it to be motivated by sex / politics.)
Women don’t like explicit discussion of social reality (and this is the only possible objection to PUA discussion here).
Where? And was it systematically rejected or accepted as a reasonable general conclusion?
This does not sound like something that would be accepted by the lesswrong community (including PUA advocates) as anything but plainly false. I expect instances of this claim to be significantly subzero in votes.
Links would be useful.
I think reading charitably leads to a less plausible but still not too unlikely somewhat legitimate purpose served by the examples as they are written.
Saying what the most extreme thing was that has been expressed without being totally shouted down sets an outer bound for what is considered normal, and adjusting inward from that would give a decent approximation of the most important thing we want to know: what mainstream LW thinks.
Nonetheless, it is bad form if so, as it is an attempt to use the dark art of the anchoring bias by starting from the most extreme thing not shouted down.
Likewise, but some posts are “hot topics” garnering many pluses and minuses—I’ve had a few and noticed that. Others conservatively plod along, never worth an upvote. It would be good to know not just the net vote but the numbers in each direction, knowing the net vote would be very important but it wouldn’t tell us all we want to know. A position enthusiastically supported by a large minority and opposed by a slightly larger majority is still mainstream.
The next step is clearly links, to judge what exactly we are talking about. Are we keeping slaves to pick our cotton, or are we failing to study the etymology of each word we use to ensure it has a non-racist history before we utter it? Or, where in the middle of those two extremes are we, approximately?
Is that even the case here? I haven’t seen the claims in question made at all, whether downvoted or not. I refrained from replying with “I don’t believe you” out of politeness and because I know that I don’t have an exhaustive and perfectly indexed database of all lesswrong comments stored in my brain. All I can know is that the claims are blatant straw men to the extent that they are presented as memes actually present in lesswrong culture. So I predict with some confidence that even if they do actually exist in comments that they are treated as trolling.
I’m likewise handicapped, so I have just googled “site:lesswrong.com cusithbell pua”, as I thought it likely that the claim, upon being seen, would be responded to.
This was something CuSithBell did see and not construct as a straw man, but it is something someone else constructed as an interpretation of what she read.
An OP said:
The heavily upvoted reply:
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of “explicit awareness of social reality”.
2) It’s quite telling that the implication of the post is that “women don’t like explicit awareness of social reality”, rather than the (more accurate) “women don’t like PUA”.
The post linked to includes:
The commenter later says:
I’m going to temporarily limit my editorialization to the framing of the quotations due to time constraints.
There was a third alternative: someone else interpreted quite uncharitably, it is arguable whether that interpretation identified the most likely implication of an actual comment, and unarguable that fairly probable benign interpretations exist, but the cited claim did in fact play a prominent role in the discussion and is certainly not CuSithBell’s straw man.
CuSith responding as though such claims were made here is something that is in my mental database. It is the claims themselves that I hadn’t seen.
(That’s not a third alternative in any false-dichotamy sense—it’s a subset of “not existing”. I do agree that it is worth mentioning and making more distinct!)
This seems likely and it is also something I consider a real problem. The commenter that you left nameless is no doubt well meaning, as is CuSith. Yet via “interpretation” mentioned by the unnamed then some added overgeneralizations by CuSith we end up with a rather brutal false accusation directed at lesswrongians. That’s just not-ok. Even though it is not malicious or even dishonest (beyond typical creative exaggeration) it is negligent and a harsh enough misrepresentation that it could legitimately be considered offensive.
A lot of conflict could be avoided if allegations about beliefs and expressions thereof were backed up by links or citations. Then we could actually tackle any remaining offensive beliefs or misconceptions rather than getting worked up over Chineese Whipsers! (Is that term considered politically incorrect yet or is China too ‘outgroup’ to have gained careful-word-use privileges? If I used the variant ‘broken telephone’ would people still understand the meaning?)
One stopgap solution would be to have a standardized response for accusations like that.
“You accused but did not provide evidence, which does not show supporting evidence does not exist, though it is evidence supporting evidence does not exist, so your unsubstantiated argument makes me think your position less likely to be true than I had originally.”
YABDNPE
I think we need to think seriously about how to think about interpretations. Right now, I think most people (I might be projecting) try to first figure out what was most likely meant, and then adjust that a bit as their duty of reading others charitably, and take the output of that as their tentative interpretation.
I think we should break it down. We should automatically produce a most charitable interpretation we can think of, as well as a distinct estimate of the most likely original intent, and we should be well-calibrated to accurately estimate the chance that the circumstance has an explanation unlike any we’re thinking of. As important features of interpreting charitably, we need to 1) bear in mind that others’ charitable readings are according to different value sets than ours and 2) bear in mind our imaginations that are attempting to come up with most charitable interpretations with is limited.
An example of 1) would be for the woman who sued the airline over its flight attendant using a variant on a popular nursery rhyme that has an original racist, if obscure, version. For me, judging favorably means seriously considering how she might not believe a word of the philosophy underlying her case, and just have made it in an attempt to get money. For others, my saying this might sound indicting—how dare you accuse her of dishonesty and greed! To me, actually believing she had been wronged would be more unflattering.. This is very important if we try to foster a community of charitable interpretation by perhaps addressing others’ possible non-charitable interpretation but not accusing others of poor interpretation..
I think it corrects for why political correctness can become a lost purpose: to ensure we don’t wrongly think unduly badly of others, a system of criticizing people who appear to do so is put in place that encourages us to call out people when a plausible, if perhaps unintended, interpretation of their words is that they judge people unfairly.
The solution of judging others favorably can’t survive as a meme by slapping down other modes of interpretation, if it tries it will be subverted, so it will take positive good will and praise, not condemnation, to spread it.
Item 2) deals with unknown unknowns, the argument from ignorance we tell ourselves. Smart people who are used to being right are vulnerable to not seriously realizing they might be wrong, or that though they can’t think of how something could be, it actually is.
To correct for that, I propose this.
Something somewhat similar to “This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive, not a message from someone who is sympathetic to the concerns expressed or willing to examine the matter under discussion. That’s probably not your intent?” could be an ideal. It might be productive if people were used to beginning certain posts with: here is what I think is the most likely interpretation, although this is not an accusation, because I also think other interpretations are fairly plausible given the context, how I usually agree with you, etc.
I discuss this in greater depth in this reply. I hope this clarifies my position! I don’t believe that LW-majority-position is misogynistic, self-serving nihilism (probably something more along the lines of happy-fun-times-nihilism). I do think that some of these topics can be dangerous-like-politics, and that this danger manifests as I describe in the other post.
This thread illustrates my point.
I’d like to think different parts of it come off differently. To be specific, I hope it’s the mostly just last line of the post that gives that impression.
To a large extent I am dismissive, but not of the topic or its importance, I just despise vague and nebulous criticism in general, and I saw it in “the attitudes I’ve stumbled over here re. PUA, gender and privilege in general”.
Something like this, or different?
I’m confused as to how it would naturally come up discussing CEV, such that its absence would be noteworthy. In my mind, the significant problems for CEV crop up before the subject of manipulation would arise, specifically, I’m thinking of how as an updating agent who is human I am a different person with different anticipations about the future if I first read page 30 in a book and then page 45, than if I had read page 45 and then 30. This seems to de-cohere extrapolated volition even under optimal circumstances of being changed (i.e. being reasoned with rather than have my brain hacked directly). Since the most benign influences are so problematic, I haven’t seen reason to extensively consider unwilling updating in that context.
These views, if held, disturb me. Your post differs from the one I was perhaps too scornful of insofar as yours takes a real stand on issues, and names some specific opinions with which I can agree or disagree!
It’s still not quite perfect, because I haven’t seen those views expressed, not that I’ve looked for them, so links would be nice, but you have provided the basis for a legitimate conversation about the issue by taking it from “attitudes around here are off-putting” to “Here are some views I oppose. Can we agree to oppose them? Can we get an idea of their prevalence on LW?” It’s not passive aggressive!
PUA is obviously a very ‘political’ topic on LW, and I expect that many readers / posters have initial reactions along the lines of “this is icky and I don’t care to examine any further”, “it is obviously bad to try to ‘fake’ charisma if you’re not inherently charismatic like me”, “anyone who has a problem with this hates me personally”… that sort of thing.
I don’t necessarily think these or the comments in my earlier post are majority positions on LessWrong. I do think that there is a problematic component to some aspects of PUA (some areas of the field are overtly misogynistic, some techniques are problematic WRT consent), but the most common issue I’ve seen here is in failing to acknowledge that these are real problems. So it’s less “these are what LW believes about PUA”, and more “there are some dangerous meme-strains related to PUA that we should be careful about, and here are some ways in which they have struck”.
Here is one relevant discussion. This is more specifically the sort of thing I’m talking about.
It seems that manipulation is, approximately, influence that you “would prefer not to go along with” in a CEV-ish sense. I would expect that a generally held belief that this is a useless distinction would motivate criticisms of CEV along the same lines. The specificity of the confusion seems too conveniently self-serving.
This was, admittedly, a one-off remark that was denounced by none other than Eliezer (“A few seconds of thought should convince you this is obviously false”, or something, but I can’t seem to find the link).
The discussion you found in another comment, this’n is the one I had in mind. The original post was edited, however, initially it said something much closer to what clarissethorn is reacting to.
This comment thread features a few posts wherein it seems I or someone else will say “this isn’t about explicit analysis” and the response will be “of course not, but really it is.”
So, uh. In conclusion? I think that these are views / traps that have at least a small but non-negligible presence here, that are difficult to think rationally about, that we should be aware of, denounce, and oppose rather than deny when we’re discussing PUA and explicit social reality (which is a thing that we should do).
I apologize for the long and rambling post, I hope I have expressed myself clearly and accurately. And I apologize as well if I am mistaken! I realize that the emotional coloration of the facts effects me as well, but I don’t think I’m completely deluded about this. I’m glad we can have a reasonable meta-discussion about this! Thanks.
“Manipulate” isn’t a useless term. “Manipulatory” is a useless category, or as the other guy said, not a “natural kind”.
I communicate, you influence, he manipulates.
Things should be called “manipulatory” because they are bad, things should not be called “bad” because they are manipulatory.
A google search for each of those phrases only found your comment; you should provide links.
Untruths differ in plausibility, and it is expected that someone “taking sides” in an argument speak dishonestly to put one side in the best light. The reason I feel almost no negative reactions to your statements like this while others such as wedrifid does is not that I think them more plausible than he does, but that I think they are transparently exaggerations by an advocate. You have broken free of something like the uncanny valley, such that I think your statements barely imply they are what a neutral observer might think. I say this to be upfront because you might not think this a respectful reason for not feeling disagreement. That last sentence doesn’t say what I want it to but I can’t figure out how to say what I mean, I hope you can figure it out.
1) People mean different things by “the field of PU”, so it’s helpful to be explicit and at least name the area. 2) Techniques don’t have the property of being problematic, being problematic is a relationship between the technique and a value system. If you aren’t trusted by someone to know their value system, and they don’t know your value system, those kinds of accusations are of limited use, so the technique should be explicitly described, its problem explained (if it isn’t obvious), and its link to PUA established. All of this can be done by providing a citation, so the work is in finding it, but it spares you the trouble of having to paraphrase it accurately. At least name the technique.
I think your generalizations about PU are useful and better than nothing or even most things for an understanding of it, but not great, with about the same relationship to PU that PU has to women.
I think I’m fairly tolerant of your intolerance of intolerance, as well as PUA’s intolerance. This might make me inconsistent, as against other guys who are intolerant of intolerance of intolerance, though I doubt it. But I don’t have a problem with the community’s relationship with PUA (I consider myself part of this community and not that one, rather than the other way around, or neither, or both), it’s good enough by my value system, and I feel motivated to defend that value system much more than PU.
What you prefer is a property not just of you, but of your environment. What you’d prefer to prefer is a property not just of you, but of your environment. What you’d prefer to prefer to prefer...If I’m looking at a hungry kitten, I have different preferences than if I’m in a crowded bus, or reading a paper about meta-morality. To privilege where I happen to be seems arbitrary, in any case it means my CEV from minute to minute would be subject to vast swings due to the butterfly effect (I think).
I have said (in a comment elsewhere in the internet that I can’t find) that there is a continuum—but not one with influence and manipulation as its poles. Rather, to get one’s interlocutor’s molecules into a state accepting a proposition, there is a continuum between influencing someone with level speech and feeding them to a child and teaching the child the proposition is true, and that these aren’t different in kind. Manipulation with drugs or body language or torture or verbal intonation etc. are each more to the middle of that scale, some practically next to influence! So I, for one, can’t be said to ignore an important difference between influence and manipulation except when convenient for political purposes, whatever else one might say about me!
I think the answer has to do with fully understanding the nature of hypothetical alternatives, and very little to do with understanding utility functions. I don’t know how to do it, but the present is a single place and the best hope for non-arbitrariness, however difficult it is to make it non-arbitrary from a moral perspective. Utility functions are maps of map-makers, ignorance compounded upon ignorance, not a platonic form to aspire to. Somehow reality has to be specially important, the reality in which I’d pay the same to save 1,000 birds as 1,000,000, etc.
It’s not obvious that what you added in the parentheticals is actually meant, though it may be. Imagine the following conversation:
PUA: “With women, you have to pretend that they don’t have cheat codes.” LW Feminist: “Women and men are equally rational!” PUA:”I’m not bisexual!” LWF:”I didn’t say you were!” PUA:”Well I didn’t say women were less rational than men!” LWF:”You implied it by only mentioning the rationality, or lack of it, in women!” PUA:”You implied it! I’m talking about how to use social cues and biases to sleep with people. People, meaning women!”
I recently figured out how to keep dog owners from picking up their dogs or pulling them away from me when I’m out walking my pit bull. I had been having little luck at all with “He’s friendly.” “He doesn’t bite, he’s never bitten anyone!” etc. Yet my new method, inspired by PUA, almost never fails. I say “Is your dog friendly?” while holding back my dag as if I were protecting him. This works astoundingly well, even with people walking tiny yorkies! Now my dog can get to have social interactions with nearly all other dogs we come across. I change the other person’s frame of reference from “Is that large-jawed monster going to eat my dog/me?” to “Is my dog qualified to interact with that dog, or is its personality not good enough?” If I make it all about whether or not they are good enough, so they forget to ask themselves if I am good enough, is this wrong? How would speaking by uttering reassurances or choosing not to speak be more neutral than using the “dark arts”? Saying nothing isn’t doing nothing, and something must be done, and being as underhanded as I am, no more no less, is working out for me.
I don’t think this post deserves being downvoted. Granted that the absence of links is a big flaw, the previous somewhat similar post didn’t even make any specific claims at all, and I am heavily inclined to overlook even severe weaknesses in rough drafts when they improve greatly upon the old drafts. This counteracts perfectionist tendencies, encourages social discussion at a rawer stage of thought in which disagreement is suborned to dialogue, gives opportunities to say “oops”, and generally gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling (halo alert! There are advantages to having high standards, the coin of LW that it would behoove us not to debase).
I will nonetheless add a criticism that hasn’t been raised before. The phrasing “Women don’t like” is problematically equivocal, not just for the original speakers, but for those citing them. If one means to say (or to say that someone said) “All women X”, or “most women X”, or “women X more than men X, etc., one should be clear.
If one intends to say that the original speaker was using equivocation (for instance, by not modifying “women” with “Some” or “More so than men”, the speaker may have been (inadvertently?) saying something true in a restricted interpretation but false and overly stereotyping in an expansive plausible interpretation. Those citing such cases should explicitly label the problem rather than faithfully transposing the equivocations present.