This is not a helpful comment. Why do you not find it interesting that religious extremism is better at motivating people to do rational goal-achievement analysis than a modern scientific culture?
This sort of propaganda is very very common; we tend to hold sexual mores very close to our hearts, so portraying the enemy as having immoral sexual practices is a very easy way to vilify them.
For example, Fox News makes articles like this about Muslim extremists using polyamory to promote anti-Americanism while more liberal news sources instead write about Muslim extremists using systemic rape to oppress women. Regardless of the factual basis of either claim, they’re each focusing on the sexual practices their readers are most likely to condemn their enemy for engaging in. It’s Dark Arts 101.
Regardless of the factual basis of either claim, they’re each focusing on the sexual practices their readers are most likely to condemn their enemy for engaging in. It’s Dark Arts 101.
This is a bit ambiguous. You could mean ‘They’re focusing on sexual practices their readers dislike, without concern for the factual basis of their accusation. Therefore it’s Dark Arts.’ Or you could mean ‘They’re focusing on these sexual practices because their readers dislike them. Therefore, regardless of the factual basis of their accusation, it’s Dark Arts.’
If the former, then I’d like some evidence that news organizations are fabricating a rape scare (or a promiscuity scare). If the latter, then I disagree; it’s not Dark Arts to criticize a group for unpopular sexual practices, if the practice in question is genuinely harmful. This is especially clear if the harmfulness is a big part of the reason it’s unpopular.
I mostly meant the later, but the former is not exactly uncommon (Satanic Ritual Abuse in 90s America, the current “Gays are raping their adopted children” thing in Russia, the exaggeration of German war crimes in the ‘Rape of Belgium’ in WWI, etc.).
The reason I call it Dark Arts is because it’s an argument where it’s validity is virtually irrelevant to its effectiveness, and in fact encourages exaggeration omission and equivocation even if no outright lies are told. It’s a rhetorical weapon; anyone can pick it up and attack anyone else with it, and the argument doesn’t actually change except on the most superficial level.
You seem to be using ‘rational’ here to just mean ‘good’. So your point is ‘It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons’. (And: ‘Sex is good.’ And: ‘Religion is bad.’) See:
You seem to be using ‘rational’ here to just mean ‘good’. So your point is ‘It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons’.
PhilGoetz’s post is pretty thin but I’m not sure he’s guilty of that specific confusion. He may have made edits since your comment, but at the moment it says
What I find so disturbing about this is that humans need to have a religious justification to act this rationally. No “reasonable” society would encourage women to use sex to seriously motivate what they think needs to be done.
which reads to me not as a use of “rational” to just mean “good”, but a use of “rational” to describe (supposedly) instrumentally rational behaviour. The point PhilGoetz is getting at (if I read him correctly) is less “It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons” and more “It’s disturbing that people need an epistemically irrational basis for being so instrumentally rational”.
Granted, PhilGoetz has shot himself in the foot here by (1) expressing that in a way that’s simultaneously provocative and easy to misinterpret; (2) implying that travelling thousands of kilometres to a war zone to screw soldiers is an efficient (and hence instrumentally rational) way to further the cause of fundamentalist Islam, which I doubt; (3) implying that a reasonable society would “encourage women to use sex to seriously motivate what they think needs to be done”, without acknowledging likely problems with such a strategy; and (4) using an example that could well be BS, since the only source here is Fox News quoting a Tunisian minister who’s vague & imprecise:
“They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100” militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly [...] He did not elaborate on how many Tunisian women had returned to the country pregnant with the children of jihadist fighters. [...] The minister also did not say how many Tunisian women were thought to have gone to Syria for such a purpose, although media reports have said hundreds have done so.
which reads to me not as a use of “rational” to just mean “good”, but a use of “rational” to describe (supposedly) instrumentally rational behaviour.
That’s what I meant by ‘good’. The articles I linked are about retaining a certain connotation for the word ‘rational’—an association with systematic and general cognitive algorithms that conduce to truth or winning, as opposed to a completely generic association with truth or winning in all its manifestations. The goal is to retain ‘rational’ as a technical term reserved for a specific subject matter, as opposed to letting it evolve into a community shibboleth for anything we like (i.e., prefer, find good, find instrumentally rational). This both makes our discussions easier to comprehend, and makes ‘rational’ more useful (because it signals a more specific topic).
This isn’t so much a point about how we define ‘rational’ as it is a point about tabooing fancy shibboleths away when their content is the same as a simpler synonym. If we just start saying ‘good job being rational!’ when we mean nothing more than ‘good job forming an accurate belief!’ or ‘good job doing something you and I wanted to have happen!’, we’ll send the wrong message and dilute useful jargon.
You lost me. I still have no idea why you think this isn’t an example of rational behavior. Goal: Get more men to become jihadists. What do young men want? Sex. Encourage young women to provide them with sex. There’s no cost to the authorities—there’s a “social cost”, but that’s the social cost as we compute it, not as a hardline mullah computes it. He doesn’t pay anything.
I’m perplexed that you imagine I think that having sex with jihadists is good. No; I mean rational: Their society wants to encourage men to become jihadists, so they encourage women to provide sex to jihadists. (Supposing that this even happens, which I doubt—I can’t find any references to it older than Dec. 2012, and the main sources are Iran and Fox News.) This is strictly rational for the religious leaders who allegedly support it, as there is zero cost to them.
No references, only source is known unreliable Fox News link. Assumption about what “reasonable” means to others, insufficient material to actually form an article worth discussing. Flame bait.
This is not high enough quality to be on LW. Downvoting.
What if its a Sigman Freid issue, and sex is the underlying motivation. Without first hand knowledge. documentation, or more information i can not make a determination.
I would compare it to off shoots of LDS Mormons (multiple wives), Catholic priest ( and boy’s), or the Amish (bring in random men to change gene pool). of course these maybe more stereotypes.
I agree in humans relying on religion to do things that most psychologist would otherwise classify as a psych disorders.
I don’t really understand. You used to write reasonably insightful things that were reasonably well researched.
This is not a helpful comment. Why do you not find it interesting that religious extremism is better at motivating people to do rational goal-achievement analysis than a modern scientific culture?
Open Thread material.
Or, here are some related topics, if you’d want to write a longer text about this social phenomenon:
Love bombing
Missionary dating
Love Jihad
Flirty Fishing
This sort of propaganda is very very common; we tend to hold sexual mores very close to our hearts, so portraying the enemy as having immoral sexual practices is a very easy way to vilify them.
For example, Fox News makes articles like this about Muslim extremists using polyamory to promote anti-Americanism while more liberal news sources instead write about Muslim extremists using systemic rape to oppress women. Regardless of the factual basis of either claim, they’re each focusing on the sexual practices their readers are most likely to condemn their enemy for engaging in. It’s Dark Arts 101.
This is a bit ambiguous. You could mean ‘They’re focusing on sexual practices their readers dislike, without concern for the factual basis of their accusation. Therefore it’s Dark Arts.’ Or you could mean ‘They’re focusing on these sexual practices because their readers dislike them. Therefore, regardless of the factual basis of their accusation, it’s Dark Arts.’
If the former, then I’d like some evidence that news organizations are fabricating a rape scare (or a promiscuity scare). If the latter, then I disagree; it’s not Dark Arts to criticize a group for unpopular sexual practices, if the practice in question is genuinely harmful. This is especially clear if the harmfulness is a big part of the reason it’s unpopular.
I mostly meant the later, but the former is not exactly uncommon (Satanic Ritual Abuse in 90s America, the current “Gays are raping their adopted children” thing in Russia, the exaggeration of German war crimes in the ‘Rape of Belgium’ in WWI, etc.).
The reason I call it Dark Arts is because it’s an argument where it’s validity is virtually irrelevant to its effectiveness, and in fact encourages exaggeration omission and equivocation even if no outright lies are told. It’s a rhetorical weapon; anyone can pick it up and attack anyone else with it, and the argument doesn’t actually change except on the most superficial level.
You seem to be using ‘rational’ here to just mean ‘good’. So your point is ‘It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons’. (And: ‘Sex is good.’ And: ‘Religion is bad.’) See:
Firewalling the optimal from the rational
Rationality: Appreciating cognitive algorithms
PhilGoetz’s post is pretty thin but I’m not sure he’s guilty of that specific confusion. He may have made edits since your comment, but at the moment it says
which reads to me not as a use of “rational” to just mean “good”, but a use of “rational” to describe (supposedly) instrumentally rational behaviour. The point PhilGoetz is getting at (if I read him correctly) is less “It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons” and more “It’s disturbing that people need an epistemically irrational basis for being so instrumentally rational”.
Granted, PhilGoetz has shot himself in the foot here by (1) expressing that in a way that’s simultaneously provocative and easy to misinterpret; (2) implying that travelling thousands of kilometres to a war zone to screw soldiers is an efficient (and hence instrumentally rational) way to further the cause of fundamentalist Islam, which I doubt; (3) implying that a reasonable society would “encourage women to use sex to seriously motivate what they think needs to be done”, without acknowledging likely problems with such a strategy; and (4) using an example that could well be BS, since the only source here is Fox News quoting a Tunisian minister who’s vague & imprecise:
he did in fact edit it
That’s what I meant by ‘good’. The articles I linked are about retaining a certain connotation for the word ‘rational’—an association with systematic and general cognitive algorithms that conduce to truth or winning, as opposed to a completely generic association with truth or winning in all its manifestations. The goal is to retain ‘rational’ as a technical term reserved for a specific subject matter, as opposed to letting it evolve into a community shibboleth for anything we like (i.e., prefer, find good, find instrumentally rational). This both makes our discussions easier to comprehend, and makes ‘rational’ more useful (because it signals a more specific topic).
This isn’t so much a point about how we define ‘rational’ as it is a point about tabooing fancy shibboleths away when their content is the same as a simpler synonym. If we just start saying ‘good job being rational!’ when we mean nothing more than ‘good job forming an accurate belief!’ or ‘good job doing something you and I wanted to have happen!’, we’ll send the wrong message and dilute useful jargon.
You lost me. I still have no idea why you think this isn’t an example of rational behavior. Goal: Get more men to become jihadists. What do young men want? Sex. Encourage young women to provide them with sex. There’s no cost to the authorities—there’s a “social cost”, but that’s the social cost as we compute it, not as a hardline mullah computes it. He doesn’t pay anything.
I’m perplexed that you imagine I think that having sex with jihadists is good. No; I mean rational: Their society wants to encourage men to become jihadists, so they encourage women to provide sex to jihadists. (Supposing that this even happens, which I doubt—I can’t find any references to it older than Dec. 2012, and the main sources are Iran and Fox News.) This is strictly rational for the religious leaders who allegedly support it, as there is zero cost to them.
No references, only source is known unreliable Fox News link. Assumption about what “reasonable” means to others, insufficient material to actually form an article worth discussing. Flame bait.
This is not high enough quality to be on LW. Downvoting.
Key word Supposedly.
What if its a Sigman Freid issue, and sex is the underlying motivation. Without first hand knowledge. documentation, or more information i can not make a determination.
I would compare it to off shoots of LDS Mormons (multiple wives), Catholic priest ( and boy’s), or the Amish (bring in random men to change gene pool). of course these maybe more stereotypes.
I agree in humans relying on religion to do things that most psychologist would otherwise classify as a psych disorders.