I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual. I am not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are reasons why most intellectual forums explicitly (or implicitly) prohibit explicit sexual discussion.
I suggest we drill down on this question — some LessWrongers have the intuition that explicit sexual discussion just “doesn’t fit” in intellectual discussion — and get curious about why that is, exploring various hypotheses. Then after we feel like we have a better grasp on the underlying reasons/causes here, we can get into the question of how those should relate to posting norms and policies on LessWrong.
As a start, I think there are a few different sides to this phenomenon that we should disentangle:
1. [Blah] produces really strong emotional reactions in some readers, which makes it harder to think about the issues involved in a lucid, critical way.
2. [Blah] feels vaguely unprofessional/informal/casual, and we want the LW frontpage to look more dry and scholarly in tone so that it attracts new top contributors who have to initially rely on tone and signals of intellectual quality in their initial attempts to gauge LW’s actual intellectual quality.
3. [Blah] is against the prevailing sexual mores in some countries/regions we want using LW, and we should conform to those mores on the frontpage in order to either attract more users from those countries/regions, or just in order to avoid stirring up unproductive highly politicized debates.
4. [Blah] is illegal, against workplace norms, etc. in various countries/regions, and we want people to feel they can visit LW’s frontpage without their boss getting mad at them or (in more regressive parts of the world) without getting into legal trouble.
5. [Blah] is information that’s directly net-harmful to teenagers (or to some other group), and we shouldn’t host material that harms teenagers because we want teenagers to use LW.
On the face of it, I think 1 and 5 are the kinds of considerations that are relatively good reasons to be wary of hosting particular content on LW; but I don’t think 1 and 5 apply to explicit sexual content in full generality.
On the other hand, 2 and 3 strike me as clearly applicable to explicit sexual content, but I think 2 and 3 are inherently much weaker reasons to exclude things from LW, and we should be very wary of establishing norms based on these criteria.
Even if 2 and 3 are worth it in some isolated cases, I would be worried about slippery-slope considerations. LW’s identity is in some ways defined by its willingness to take issues and topics seriously that normally get neglected or excluded from mainstream scholarly discussion, and we should be wary of trading that away in significant ways for mainstream acceptability, even though failing to signal intellectual quality is a real cost and does genuinely cause some people to glance at LW and then not stick around. We can’t get away with literally no “we’re good at epistemics” signaling; but we can find more benign ways to do it than banning topics wholesale.
4 is the one item on the list I was able to come up with that strikes me as both obviously relevant and obviously important. I think 1 and 4 are good reasons to recommend tags for things like “nsfw” once tagging is implemented. I don’t think 4 is a sufficient reason to outright ban discussions of sexuality from LW, though, if they otherwise meet LW’s discussion standards.
One intuition that might be harder to capture with this decomposition of the problem is something like “when a frontpage post is in the bottom decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-topic-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis, it should try to be in the top decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-substance-and-style-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis”.
This is the kind of rule/guideline that’s almost impossible to enforce and might be harmful to regularly discuss, but it might get at some people’s intuition that there’s an “emotion budget” for frontpage posts, and if you make a frontpage post that’s unusually emotional-reaction-provoking on one dimension (e.g., it’s criticizing a particular group of people), it’s useful to try to make it unusually non-emotional-reaction-provoking on other dimensions (e.g., by being extra careful to avoid calls to action, forceful language, vivid/emotive examples, and informality/colloquialisms).
Hm. I intuitively view level of informality as more-or-less irrelevant to how much a post promotes careful lucid analysis. When I query my intuitions more closely, it suggests that formal writing may not promote careful analysis because it is dry and boring and people get tired of reading it, or because it is hard to understand; conversely, formal writing may be a strong signal that high epistemic standards are expected. Informal writing may be flippant about things others take seriously, causing them to react less usefully; on the other hand, informal writing may signal equality and make people feel more comfortable disagreeing.
Of course, sex jokes mostly serve the purpose of making the post more entertaining, and so “generally informal but no sex jokes because they make people uncomfortable” is a pretty reasonable norm which doesn’t in any way inhibit clear thinking. Forbidding curse words can make certain concepts harder to convey, but I think probably the right norm there is “when in doubt leave them out”.
actually, yeah, when you point it out like that—going back and looking at EY’s posts, they’re very informal language. kind of talking down at people, too, which signals a particular tribe, but very informal.
I think there’s a place for explicit sexual discussion, and think that place is tumblr and personal blogs.
However, I am quite new (joined this year), and may have misconceptions about Lesswrong. I don’t think I have anything more to add. I think you guys should come to a consensus regarding explicit sexual discussion.
One thing though, I view Lesswrong as the workplace—how do you perceive Lesswrong,
I think 1 is true, but not a hinderance LW should care about. That’s already true of large parts of LW-style content.
I think 2 is actively false. We should be showing off our good epistemics as the signal that we have good epistemics, because people who are excited about good epistemics will go “omg you’re doing it right!” even—or possibly especially—if it still happens when applied to taboo topics.
I think 3 is partially true, and therefore a concern. It’s the one that leads me to request the changes I did of Ozy.
I don’t know what to think about 4. I suspect I don’t care about it, and in looking for an english serialization of my beliefs about why, I generated the sentences “we already do things that are illegal in regressive countries”, and “it would be fine if we weren’t allowed in regressive countries”. I’m not sure if either of those are actually true or what I endorse, but I think they represent at least part of why I don’t care.
I think 5 is usually false. It’s possible for good advice to be bad to share; there are certain things about understanding how social interaction work that, when a nerd first learns of them, tends to make that person dramatically worse at getting good social interaction for a while (though I think it improves their social interaction on net after they’ve had time to learn how to use it).
6. [Blah] is content some users or prospective users really don’t want to look at, and even scrolling past it makes the front page an unpleasant place for them to visit.
That’s sort of 3 and 4, but if it’s a common preference it doesn’t need to be justified with prevailing sexual mores, illegality, or workplace norms IMO.
My impression is that (in general population) sexual debates often contain status moves, exaggerations and lies, and sometimes are aimed at other people present which may be very uncomfortable for them. That stuff we don’t need here. We should not discuss here whether we consider specific people sexually attractive or not. We should also not brag about our sexual (in)experience. Neither of that would invite a rational debate.
On the other end of the scale, debates such as “are aspies more likely to be trans”, especially when supported by scientific evidence, feel completely legit to me. No specific people, possible rational approach.
Somewhere in the middle of the scale are things like promoting polyamory or debating specific sexual techniques. I can imagine having a norm of either allowing or not allowing this, and both norms would make sense. My personal decision would probably depend a lot on how the specific topic was described. It seems like a good idea to avoid “juicy” titles, and start the article with a content warning, so that people reading LW at work can avoid clicking on the article.
EDIT: Yet another possible problem is when some sexual issue is related to some political issue, so people will use opinions on sexuality as weapons in a culture war. For example, statements “gender G is on average (not) attracted to trait T” are often politically sensitive.
I suggest we drill down on this question — some LessWrongers have the intuition that explicit sexual discussion just “doesn’t fit” in intellectual discussion — and get curious about why that is, exploring various hypotheses. Then after we feel like we have a better grasp on the underlying reasons/causes here, we can get into the question of how those should relate to posting norms and policies on LessWrong.
As a start, I think there are a few different sides to this phenomenon that we should disentangle:
1. [Blah] produces really strong emotional reactions in some readers, which makes it harder to think about the issues involved in a lucid, critical way.
2. [Blah] feels vaguely unprofessional/informal/casual, and we want the LW frontpage to look more dry and scholarly in tone so that it attracts new top contributors who have to initially rely on tone and signals of intellectual quality in their initial attempts to gauge LW’s actual intellectual quality.
3. [Blah] is against the prevailing sexual mores in some countries/regions we want using LW, and we should conform to those mores on the frontpage in order to either attract more users from those countries/regions, or just in order to avoid stirring up unproductive highly politicized debates.
4. [Blah] is illegal, against workplace norms, etc. in various countries/regions, and we want people to feel they can visit LW’s frontpage without their boss getting mad at them or (in more regressive parts of the world) without getting into legal trouble.
5. [Blah] is information that’s directly net-harmful to teenagers (or to some other group), and we shouldn’t host material that harms teenagers because we want teenagers to use LW.
On the face of it, I think 1 and 5 are the kinds of considerations that are relatively good reasons to be wary of hosting particular content on LW; but I don’t think 1 and 5 apply to explicit sexual content in full generality.
On the other hand, 2 and 3 strike me as clearly applicable to explicit sexual content, but I think 2 and 3 are inherently much weaker reasons to exclude things from LW, and we should be very wary of establishing norms based on these criteria.
Even if 2 and 3 are worth it in some isolated cases, I would be worried about slippery-slope considerations. LW’s identity is in some ways defined by its willingness to take issues and topics seriously that normally get neglected or excluded from mainstream scholarly discussion, and we should be wary of trading that away in significant ways for mainstream acceptability, even though failing to signal intellectual quality is a real cost and does genuinely cause some people to glance at LW and then not stick around. We can’t get away with literally no “we’re good at epistemics” signaling; but we can find more benign ways to do it than banning topics wholesale.
4 is the one item on the list I was able to come up with that strikes me as both obviously relevant and obviously important. I think 1 and 4 are good reasons to recommend tags for things like “nsfw” once tagging is implemented. I don’t think 4 is a sufficient reason to outright ban discussions of sexuality from LW, though, if they otherwise meet LW’s discussion standards.
One intuition that might be harder to capture with this decomposition of the problem is something like “when a frontpage post is in the bottom decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-topic-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis, it should try to be in the top decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-substance-and-style-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis”.
This is the kind of rule/guideline that’s almost impossible to enforce and might be harmful to regularly discuss, but it might get at some people’s intuition that there’s an “emotion budget” for frontpage posts, and if you make a frontpage post that’s unusually emotional-reaction-provoking on one dimension (e.g., it’s criticizing a particular group of people), it’s useful to try to make it unusually non-emotional-reaction-provoking on other dimensions (e.g., by being extra careful to avoid calls to action, forceful language, vivid/emotive examples, and informality/colloquialisms).
Hm. I intuitively view level of informality as more-or-less irrelevant to how much a post promotes careful lucid analysis. When I query my intuitions more closely, it suggests that formal writing may not promote careful analysis because it is dry and boring and people get tired of reading it, or because it is hard to understand; conversely, formal writing may be a strong signal that high epistemic standards are expected. Informal writing may be flippant about things others take seriously, causing them to react less usefully; on the other hand, informal writing may signal equality and make people feel more comfortable disagreeing.
Yeah, I agree with this. Rationality and the English Language talks some about ways that unnecessarily formal writing can inhibit clear thinking.
Of course, sex jokes mostly serve the purpose of making the post more entertaining, and so “generally informal but no sex jokes because they make people uncomfortable” is a pretty reasonable norm which doesn’t in any way inhibit clear thinking. Forbidding curse words can make certain concepts harder to convey, but I think probably the right norm there is “when in doubt leave them out”.
actually, yeah, when you point it out like that—going back and looking at EY’s posts, they’re very informal language. kind of talking down at people, too, which signals a particular tribe, but very informal.
I think there’s a place for explicit sexual discussion, and think that place is tumblr and personal blogs.
However, I am quite new (joined this year), and may have misconceptions about Lesswrong. I don’t think I have anything more to add. I think you guys should come to a consensus regarding explicit sexual discussion.
One thing though, I view Lesswrong as the workplace—how do you perceive Lesswrong,
I view lesswrong as something like fight club for epistemics.
I think 1 is true, but not a hinderance LW should care about. That’s already true of large parts of LW-style content.
I think 2 is actively false. We should be showing off our good epistemics as the signal that we have good epistemics, because people who are excited about good epistemics will go “omg you’re doing it right!” even—or possibly especially—if it still happens when applied to taboo topics.
I think 3 is partially true, and therefore a concern. It’s the one that leads me to request the changes I did of Ozy.
I don’t know what to think about 4. I suspect I don’t care about it, and in looking for an english serialization of my beliefs about why, I generated the sentences “we already do things that are illegal in regressive countries”, and “it would be fine if we weren’t allowed in regressive countries”. I’m not sure if either of those are actually true or what I endorse, but I think they represent at least part of why I don’t care.
I think 5 is usually false. It’s possible for good advice to be bad to share; there are certain things about understanding how social interaction work that, when a nerd first learns of them, tends to make that person dramatically worse at getting good social interaction for a while (though I think it improves their social interaction on net after they’ve had time to learn how to use it).
I think it’s worth adding:
6. [Blah] is content some users or prospective users really don’t want to look at, and even scrolling past it makes the front page an unpleasant place for them to visit.
That’s sort of 3 and 4, but if it’s a common preference it doesn’t need to be justified with prevailing sexual mores, illegality, or workplace norms IMO.
This is true (at least for me).
My impression is that (in general population) sexual debates often contain status moves, exaggerations and lies, and sometimes are aimed at other people present which may be very uncomfortable for them. That stuff we don’t need here. We should not discuss here whether we consider specific people sexually attractive or not. We should also not brag about our sexual (in)experience. Neither of that would invite a rational debate.
On the other end of the scale, debates such as “are aspies more likely to be trans”, especially when supported by scientific evidence, feel completely legit to me. No specific people, possible rational approach.
Somewhere in the middle of the scale are things like promoting polyamory or debating specific sexual techniques. I can imagine having a norm of either allowing or not allowing this, and both norms would make sense. My personal decision would probably depend a lot on how the specific topic was described. It seems like a good idea to avoid “juicy” titles, and start the article with a content warning, so that people reading LW at work can avoid clicking on the article.
EDIT: Yet another possible problem is when some sexual issue is related to some political issue, so people will use opinions on sexuality as weapons in a culture war. For example, statements “gender G is on average (not) attracted to trait T” are often politically sensitive.