This is very much a first attempt at answering these matters.
I’m tired of defending pickup. I want to have a turn criticizing it! But I can’t take my turn yet, because so much of my energy discussing pickup is getting consumed by correcting all the biased and wrong stuff that is written about it. If I wrote critical stuff about pickup, then biased people would just use it selectively as part of their hatchet job, rather than promoting a complete understanding of the subject.
How can we reduce this polarization?
I think more honesty on both sides (and you’ve made a good start) will help.
Part of what’s been going on is that your advocacy has left me feeling as though my fears about PUA were being completely dismissed. On the other hand, when you’ve occasionally mentioned some doubts about aspects of PUA, I’ve felt better, but generally not posted anything about it.
I may have said something in favor when the idea of “atypical women” (more straightforward than the average and tending to be geeky) was floated. I’m pretty sure I didn’t when someone (probably you) said something about some PUA techniques being unfair (certainly not the word used, but I don’t have a better substitute handy) to women who aren’t very self-assured, even though that’s the sort of thing I’m concerned about.
Thanks for posting more about what’s going on at your end.
As for stigma, I actually think it’s funny that both of us feel sufficiently like underdogs that we’re defensive. From my point of view, posting against PUA here leads to stigma not just for being close-minded and opposed to rational efforts to improve one’s life (rather heavier stigmas here than in most places), but also for unkindness to men who would otherwise be suffering because they don’t know how to attract women.
I don’t know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn’t performed a moral calculus—from my point of view, the interests of women were being pretty much dismissed, or being assumed (by much lower standards of proof) to be adequately served by what was more convenient for men. Part of what squicks me about PUA is that it seems as though there’s very careful checking about its effects (at least in the short term) on men, but, in the nature of things, much less information about its effects on women.
Part of what’s been going on is that your advocacy has left me feeling as though my fears about PUA were being completely dismissed.
…
I don’t know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn’t performed a moral calculus--
On LW in general I’ve spilled gallons of ink engaging in moral analyses of pickup, and of potential objections to pickup techniques. In my PUA FAQ, I made a whole section on ethics. In general, I have trouble reconciling your above perceptions with my participation in pickup discussions on LW.
But my memory of those discussions isn’t perfect, so it’s possible that I’ve been lax in replying to you personally. If you raised an issue that I didn’t satisfactorily respond to, that’s probably because I missed it, or left the thread, or had already talked about it elsewhere on LW, not because I didn’t think it was important.
On the other hand, when you’ve occasionally mentioned some doubts about aspects of PUA, I’ve felt better, but generally not posted anything about it.
I’m glad that you noticed, even if you didn’t comment much. Perhaps I’ll talk more about those doubts when people engage me more about them.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t when someone (probably you) said something about some PUA techniques being unfair (certainly not the word used, but I don’t have a better substitute handy) to women who aren’t very self-assured, even though that’s the sort of thing I’m concerned about.
Yes, I believe that pickup can be harsh towards women who aren’t very self-assured, and who don’t have good boundaries. Yet that fact has to be taken in context.
Particular sexual norms and sexual cultures (e.g. high status, extraverted, and/or gender-traditional cultures) are harsh towards people of both sexes who aren’t very self-assured, and who don’t have good boundaries. Pickup is merely one example.
I have a shortlist of particular behaviors and mindsets that I find especially objectionable about pickup. Yet when trying to assess PUAs, who is the control group? Who are we comparing them to? Over the years, my ethical opinion of PUAs (on average) has fallen, but my ethical opinion of non-PUAs has been falling perhaps even faster. Criticizing PUAs for doing what everyone else is doing turns PUAs into scapegoats, and lets the rest of the culture off the hook.
As for stigma, I actually think it’s funny that both of us feel sufficiently like underdogs that we’re defensive. From my point of view, posting against PUA here leads to stigma not just for being close-minded and opposed to rational efforts to improve one’s life (rather heavier stigmas here than in most places), but also for unkindness to men who would otherwise be suffering because they don’t know how to attract women.
Thanks for filling me in on some of the stigmas on your end… I hadn’t thought of the “unkind to men” one. Still, do you think those stigma as symmetrical in impact to charges of misogyny and not caring about women?
I don’t know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn’t performed a moral calculus—from my point of view, the interests of women were being pretty much dismissed, or being assumed (by much lower standards of proof) to be adequately served by what was more convenient for men.
I am skeptical that you have sufficient data about people’s view of pickup on LW to be able to make those judgments. I don’t think people’s views have had a chance to unfold yet. Or maybe your perception of past discussions is different, or we are both talking about different discussions, or your priors are just very different from mine.
Ultimately, I do consider it premature to suspect that I, or anyone else posting about pickup on LW, is so morally illiterate that they haven’t performed a moral calculus of some sort about pickup. If we were off LW, that might be a different story.
They can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it unlikely that people interested in pickup on LW are so ethically naive that they support pickup out of some form of egoism, or have a utility function that categorically places men’s preferences above women’s.
It’s much more likely that they consider pickup (or more, a subset of pickup that appeals to them) consistent with their own moral theories and intuitions. Likewise, I don’t agree that men discussing pickup on LW are mainly just checking its effects on men, but not on women. Perhaps I’m biased by my own views, but it seems more likely that they have thought about the effects on women. LW is not privy to their thought process, because nobody has asked the right questions. Actually, it’s quite possible that they don’t use, or even forgot about, some of the very things that outsiders might find objectionable about pickup.
Likewise, while I have a lot of problems with feminism, I would expect that a feminist on LW would have come to feminism through a cognitively sophisticated route (unless they proved otherwise), and that there are enough good things in feminism for a rationalist to believe that there is some value in it. I’m sure that feminists on LW would find it off-putting to have to articulate their moral calculus about how their activism treats men as a precondition to being considered reasonable. That doesn’t mean that I expect to fully agree with the moral calculus of LW feminists, but it does mean that I would assume a basic level of moral sophistication on their part.
Part of what squicks me about PUA is that it seems as though there’s very careful checking about its effects (at least in the short term) on men, but, in the nature of things, much less information about its effects on women.
You talk about checking the effects of pickup as if it’s some sort of novel drug, but I don’t see it that way. Most pickup behaviors are isomorphic to what people are already doing.
So it’s not necessarily that we are being lax about checking; I think a lot of this stuff is already checked. Pickup techniques are not not as unique and special as PUA marketers or PUA critics make them sound, so they deserve the same level of consideration that anyone should do in their dating behavior, but they aren’t so powerful or novel that they require some special moral scrutiny… at least, not separate from a larger moral debate about consent and sexual ethics that should examine the culture in general.
It is frustrating that pickup practitioners are getting held to a much higher moral standard than anyone else in the population, when they are simply doing a more systematized version of what large segments of the population are already doing.
I’m all for engaging in moral calculus about dating behavior. I do it all the time with mine, and I don’t agree with all of the conclusions of the calculus of some people who practice pickup. But outside of (some) feminists and people who practice BDSM, who exactly does a rigorous moral calculus about the effects of their dating and sexual behavior? Most people don’t calculate their dating ethics, they operate on cached ideas.
While it’s understandable that critics of pickup focus on the most worrying aspects, that focus may not leave pickup practitioners on LW feeling like they are being treated as complex human beings who at least might have coherent ethical views supporting the subset of pickup that they practice.
I think more honesty on both sides (and you’ve made a good start) will help.
We are already supposed to be honest here most of the time. I think something needs to be changed to facilitate such a debate, if we wish to have it.
I just think that while there are hopeful signs that we will chew through this with our usual set of tools and norms, but those hopeful signs have been around for years, and the situation dosen’t seem to be improving.
Honestly I think our only hope of addressing this is having a farm more robust debating style, far more limited in scope than we are used to since tangents often peter out without follow up or any kind of synthesis or even a clear idea of what is and what isn’t agreed upon in these debates.
It might help to state clearly what “addressing this” would actually comprise… that is, how could you tell if a discussion had done so successfully?
It might also help if everyone involved in that discussion (should such a discussion occur) agreed to some or all of the following guidelines:
I will, when I reject or challenge a conclusion, state clearly why I’m doing so. E.g.: is it incoherent? Is it dangerous? Is it hurtful? Is it ambiguous? Is it unsupported? Does it conflict with my experience? Etc.
I will “taboo” terms where I suspect people in the conversation have significantly different understandings of those terms (for example, “pickup”), and will instead unpack my understanding.
I will acknowledge out loud when a line of reasoning supports a conclusion I disagree with. This does not mean I agree with the conclusion.
I will, insofar as I can, interpret all comments without reference to my prior beliefs about what the individual speaker (as opposed to a generic person) probably meant. Where I can’t do that, and my prior beliefs about the speaker are relevantly different from my beliefs about a generic person, I will explicitly summarize those beliefs before articulating conclusions based on them.
Honestly I think our only hope of addressing this is having a farm more robust debating style, far more limited in scope than we are used to since tangents often peter out without follow up or any kind of synthesis or even a clear idea of what is and what isn’t agreed upon in these debates.
I don’t know what you mean by that—could you expand on the details or supply an example of a place that has the sort of style you have in mind?
My instincts are to go for something less robust. I know that part of what drives my handling of the subject is a good bit of fear, and I suspect there was something of the sort going on for HughRustik.
I’m not sure what would need to change at LW to make people more comfortable with talking about their less respectable emotions.
I’m contemplating using a pseudonym, but that might not be useful—a number of people have told me that I write the way I talk.
You’ve probably got a point about synthesis. It might help if people wrote summaries of where various debates stand. I bet that such summaries would get upvoted.
I’m not sure what would need to change at LW to make people more comfortable with talking about their less respectable emotions.
I doubt talking about the emotions, specifically about individual’s emotions, or even how each “side” (ugh tribalism) may feel about the matter, will improve the situation. If anything I suspect it will result in status games around signalling good tactically usefull emotions and people resenting others for their emotions.
You’ve probably got a point about synthesis. It might help if people wrote summaries of where various debates stand. I bet that such summaries would get upvoted.
I doubt talking about the emotions, specifically about individuals emotions, or even how each “side” (ugh tribalism) will improve the situation. If anything I suspect it will result in status games around that and people resenting others for their emotions.
I think the last clause of the first sentence is missing some words.
Emotions are part of what’s going on, and it’s at least plausible that respect for truth includes talking about them.
Discussion which includes talk about emotions can blow up, but it doesn’t have to. I suggest that there are specific premises that make talk about emotion go bad—the idea that emotions don’t change, that some people’s emotions should trump other people’s emotions, and that some emotions should trump other emotions. This list is probably not complete.
The challenge would be to allow territorial emotions to be mentioned, but not letting them take charge.
I think the crucial thing is to maintain an attitude of “What’s going on here?” rather than “This is an emergency—the other person must be changed or silenced”.
I think the last clause of the first sentence is missing some words.
Correct, I was writing at a late hour. I’ve fixed the missing bits now.
Emotions are part of what’s going on, and it’s at least plausible that respect for truth includes talking about them.
Discussion which includes talk about emotions can blow up, but it doesn’t have to. I suggest that there are specific premises that make talk about emotion go bad—the idea that emotions don’t change, that some people’s emotions should trump other people’s emotions, and that some emotions should trump other emotions. This list is probably not complete.
The challenge would be to allow territorial emotions to be mentioned, but not letting them take charge
I think the crucial thing is to maintain an attitude of “What’s going on here?” rather than “This is an emergency—the other person must be changed or silenced”.
This has shifted my opinion more in favour of such a debate, I remain sceptical however. First identifying what exactly are the preconditions for such a debate (completing that list in other words) and second the sheer logistics of making it happen that way seem to me daunting challenges.
More for the list, based on your point about groups: It’s important to label speculations about the ill effects of actions based on stated emotions as speculations, and likewise for speculations about the emotions of people who aren’t in the discussion.
Part of what makes all this hard is that people have to make guesses (on rather little evidence, really) about the trustworthiness of other people. If the assumption of good will is gone, it’s hard to get it back.
If someone gives a signal which seems to indicate that they shouldn’t be trusted, all hell can break loose very quickly. and at that point, a lesswrongian cure might be to identify the stakes, which I think are pretty low for the blog. The issues might be different for people who are actually working on FAI.
As for whether this kind of thing can be managed at LW, my answer is maybe tending towards yes. I think the social pressure which can be applied to get people to choose a far view and/or curiosity about the present is pretty strong, but I don’t know if it’s strong enough.
The paradox is that people who insist on naive territorial/status fights have to be changed or silenced.
This is up for debate. Vladimir_M and others have argued that precisely the fact that blow ups are rarer means more uninterrupted happy death spirals are occurring and we are in the processes of evaporative cooling of group beliefs on the subject.
I think they are right.
notice the population is expanding.
LessWrong actually needs either better standards of rationality or better mechanisms to sort through the ever growing number of responses as it grows in order to keep the signal to noise ratio close to something worth our time. Also I’m confused as to why a larger population of LWers, would translate into this being something LWers can more easily make progress on.
This is very much a first attempt at answering these matters.
I think more honesty on both sides (and you’ve made a good start) will help.
Part of what’s been going on is that your advocacy has left me feeling as though my fears about PUA were being completely dismissed. On the other hand, when you’ve occasionally mentioned some doubts about aspects of PUA, I’ve felt better, but generally not posted anything about it.
I may have said something in favor when the idea of “atypical women” (more straightforward than the average and tending to be geeky) was floated. I’m pretty sure I didn’t when someone (probably you) said something about some PUA techniques being unfair (certainly not the word used, but I don’t have a better substitute handy) to women who aren’t very self-assured, even though that’s the sort of thing I’m concerned about.
Thanks for posting more about what’s going on at your end.
As for stigma, I actually think it’s funny that both of us feel sufficiently like underdogs that we’re defensive. From my point of view, posting against PUA here leads to stigma not just for being close-minded and opposed to rational efforts to improve one’s life (rather heavier stigmas here than in most places), but also for unkindness to men who would otherwise be suffering because they don’t know how to attract women.
I don’t know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn’t performed a moral calculus—from my point of view, the interests of women were being pretty much dismissed, or being assumed (by much lower standards of proof) to be adequately served by what was more convenient for men. Part of what squicks me about PUA is that it seems as though there’s very careful checking about its effects (at least in the short term) on men, but, in the nature of things, much less information about its effects on women.
On LW in general I’ve spilled gallons of ink engaging in moral analyses of pickup, and of potential objections to pickup techniques. In my PUA FAQ, I made a whole section on ethics. In general, I have trouble reconciling your above perceptions with my participation in pickup discussions on LW.
But my memory of those discussions isn’t perfect, so it’s possible that I’ve been lax in replying to you personally. If you raised an issue that I didn’t satisfactorily respond to, that’s probably because I missed it, or left the thread, or had already talked about it elsewhere on LW, not because I didn’t think it was important.
I’m glad that you noticed, even if you didn’t comment much. Perhaps I’ll talk more about those doubts when people engage me more about them.
Yes, I believe that pickup can be harsh towards women who aren’t very self-assured, and who don’t have good boundaries. Yet that fact has to be taken in context.
Particular sexual norms and sexual cultures (e.g. high status, extraverted, and/or gender-traditional cultures) are harsh towards people of both sexes who aren’t very self-assured, and who don’t have good boundaries. Pickup is merely one example.
I have a shortlist of particular behaviors and mindsets that I find especially objectionable about pickup. Yet when trying to assess PUAs, who is the control group? Who are we comparing them to? Over the years, my ethical opinion of PUAs (on average) has fallen, but my ethical opinion of non-PUAs has been falling perhaps even faster. Criticizing PUAs for doing what everyone else is doing turns PUAs into scapegoats, and lets the rest of the culture off the hook.
Thanks for filling me in on some of the stigmas on your end… I hadn’t thought of the “unkind to men” one. Still, do you think those stigma as symmetrical in impact to charges of misogyny and not caring about women?
I am skeptical that you have sufficient data about people’s view of pickup on LW to be able to make those judgments. I don’t think people’s views have had a chance to unfold yet. Or maybe your perception of past discussions is different, or we are both talking about different discussions, or your priors are just very different from mine.
Ultimately, I do consider it premature to suspect that I, or anyone else posting about pickup on LW, is so morally illiterate that they haven’t performed a moral calculus of some sort about pickup. If we were off LW, that might be a different story.
They can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it unlikely that people interested in pickup on LW are so ethically naive that they support pickup out of some form of egoism, or have a utility function that categorically places men’s preferences above women’s.
It’s much more likely that they consider pickup (or more, a subset of pickup that appeals to them) consistent with their own moral theories and intuitions. Likewise, I don’t agree that men discussing pickup on LW are mainly just checking its effects on men, but not on women. Perhaps I’m biased by my own views, but it seems more likely that they have thought about the effects on women. LW is not privy to their thought process, because nobody has asked the right questions. Actually, it’s quite possible that they don’t use, or even forgot about, some of the very things that outsiders might find objectionable about pickup.
Likewise, while I have a lot of problems with feminism, I would expect that a feminist on LW would have come to feminism through a cognitively sophisticated route (unless they proved otherwise), and that there are enough good things in feminism for a rationalist to believe that there is some value in it. I’m sure that feminists on LW would find it off-putting to have to articulate their moral calculus about how their activism treats men as a precondition to being considered reasonable. That doesn’t mean that I expect to fully agree with the moral calculus of LW feminists, but it does mean that I would assume a basic level of moral sophistication on their part.
You talk about checking the effects of pickup as if it’s some sort of novel drug, but I don’t see it that way. Most pickup behaviors are isomorphic to what people are already doing.
So it’s not necessarily that we are being lax about checking; I think a lot of this stuff is already checked. Pickup techniques are not not as unique and special as PUA marketers or PUA critics make them sound, so they deserve the same level of consideration that anyone should do in their dating behavior, but they aren’t so powerful or novel that they require some special moral scrutiny… at least, not separate from a larger moral debate about consent and sexual ethics that should examine the culture in general.
It is frustrating that pickup practitioners are getting held to a much higher moral standard than anyone else in the population, when they are simply doing a more systematized version of what large segments of the population are already doing.
I’m all for engaging in moral calculus about dating behavior. I do it all the time with mine, and I don’t agree with all of the conclusions of the calculus of some people who practice pickup. But outside of (some) feminists and people who practice BDSM, who exactly does a rigorous moral calculus about the effects of their dating and sexual behavior? Most people don’t calculate their dating ethics, they operate on cached ideas.
While it’s understandable that critics of pickup focus on the most worrying aspects, that focus may not leave pickup practitioners on LW feeling like they are being treated as complex human beings who at least might have coherent ethical views supporting the subset of pickup that they practice.
That’s one of the best sentences I’ve read today, especially given what the title of this website is.
I think I agree with this.
We are already supposed to be honest here most of the time. I think something needs to be changed to facilitate such a debate, if we wish to have it.
I just think that while there are hopeful signs that we will chew through this with our usual set of tools and norms, but those hopeful signs have been around for years, and the situation dosen’t seem to be improving.
Honestly I think our only hope of addressing this is having a farm more robust debating style, far more limited in scope than we are used to since tangents often peter out without follow up or any kind of synthesis or even a clear idea of what is and what isn’t agreed upon in these debates.
My $0.02:
It might help to state clearly what “addressing this” would actually comprise… that is, how could you tell if a discussion had done so successfully?
It might also help if everyone involved in that discussion (should such a discussion occur) agreed to some or all of the following guidelines:
I will, when I reject or challenge a conclusion, state clearly why I’m doing so. E.g.: is it incoherent? Is it dangerous? Is it hurtful? Is it ambiguous? Is it unsupported? Does it conflict with my experience? Etc.
I will “taboo” terms where I suspect people in the conversation have significantly different understandings of those terms (for example, “pickup”), and will instead unpack my understanding.
I will acknowledge out loud when a line of reasoning supports a conclusion I disagree with. This does not mean I agree with the conclusion.
I will, insofar as I can, interpret all comments without reference to my prior beliefs about what the individual speaker (as opposed to a generic person) probably meant. Where I can’t do that, and my prior beliefs about the speaker are relevantly different from my beliefs about a generic person, I will explicitly summarize those beliefs before articulating conclusions based on them.
I don’t know what you mean by that—could you expand on the details or supply an example of a place that has the sort of style you have in mind?
My instincts are to go for something less robust. I know that part of what drives my handling of the subject is a good bit of fear, and I suspect there was something of the sort going on for HughRustik.
I’m not sure what would need to change at LW to make people more comfortable with talking about their less respectable emotions.
I’m contemplating using a pseudonym, but that might not be useful—a number of people have told me that I write the way I talk.
You’ve probably got a point about synthesis. It might help if people wrote summaries of where various debates stand. I bet that such summaries would get upvoted.
I doubt talking about the emotions, specifically about individual’s emotions, or even how each “side” (ugh tribalism) may feel about the matter, will improve the situation. If anything I suspect it will result in status games around signalling good tactically usefull emotions and people resenting others for their emotions.
Perhaps this should be a start.
I think the last clause of the first sentence is missing some words.
Emotions are part of what’s going on, and it’s at least plausible that respect for truth includes talking about them.
Discussion which includes talk about emotions can blow up, but it doesn’t have to. I suggest that there are specific premises that make talk about emotion go bad—the idea that emotions don’t change, that some people’s emotions should trump other people’s emotions, and that some emotions should trump other emotions. This list is probably not complete.
The challenge would be to allow territorial emotions to be mentioned, but not letting them take charge.
I think the crucial thing is to maintain an attitude of “What’s going on here?” rather than “This is an emergency—the other person must be changed or silenced”.
Correct, I was writing at a late hour. I’ve fixed the missing bits now.
This has shifted my opinion more in favour of such a debate, I remain sceptical however. First identifying what exactly are the preconditions for such a debate (completing that list in other words) and second the sheer logistics of making it happen that way seem to me daunting challenges.
More for the list, based on your point about groups: It’s important to label speculations about the ill effects of actions based on stated emotions as speculations, and likewise for speculations about the emotions of people who aren’t in the discussion.
Part of what makes all this hard is that people have to make guesses (on rather little evidence, really) about the trustworthiness of other people. If the assumption of good will is gone, it’s hard to get it back.
If someone gives a signal which seems to indicate that they shouldn’t be trusted, all hell can break loose very quickly. and at that point, a lesswrongian cure might be to identify the stakes, which I think are pretty low for the blog. The issues might be different for people who are actually working on FAI.
As for whether this kind of thing can be managed at LW, my answer is maybe tending towards yes. I think the social pressure which can be applied to get people to choose a far view and/or curiosity about the present is pretty strong, but I don’t know if it’s strong enough.
The paradox is that people who insist on naive territorial/status fights have to be changed or silenced.
We could have a pidgin language pseudonym thread.
What exactly do you mean? If the situation is getting no worse, notice the population is expanding.
It is not improving.
This is up for debate. Vladimir_M and others have argued that precisely the fact that blow ups are rarer means more uninterrupted happy death spirals are occurring and we are in the processes of evaporative cooling of group beliefs on the subject.
I think they are right.
LessWrong actually needs either better standards of rationality or better mechanisms to sort through the ever growing number of responses as it grows in order to keep the signal to noise ratio close to something worth our time. Also I’m confused as to why a larger population of LWers, would translate into this being something LWers can more easily make progress on.