Silas explained one of the reasons this particular analogy doesn’t hold. (You also argue against a straw man.)
As for political agenda: This is not the first time you have made statements of the kind should be considered . I greatly prefer your insights into rationality over your comments on anything to do with males. The quality of reasoning is almost incomparable.
Males developing social skills is great. Social skills are wonderful, rewarding things to have, and I think anybody who would like to learn to interact with other people politely and pleasantly should.
“Social skills as possessed by men (who are attracted to women)” is a much broader category than “the ability to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women (who are attracted to men)”. You can use social skills to interact with family members, platonic friends, co-workers, neighbors, classmates, teachers, strangers, students, clients, employees, bosses, fellow members of any club or other social or hobby organization, and any other class of person you will ever interact with. Potential mates are only one of these categories, although of course there is overlap.
Social skills as used by men to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women do not consist entirely of things I would describe with “negative feminist language”. Many of these skills are, at least potentially, honest, respectful, and non-threatening.
The attitude that the “target market” of the “product” of the man attempting to pitch himself as a potential mate owes him something is the attitude that I condemn. If nobody has this attitude around here—which is what I must think you’re getting at by saying I argue against a straw man—that’s great! My heebie-jeebies are for naught! I can walk the streets of Lesswrongburgh safe in the knowledge that no one thinks they are entitled to my attention, affection, personal charms, or set of body parts.
If someone in the studio audience does think that the men who have or want to learn these social skills are owed something by the women in whom they show interest, then I contend that this thought is dangerous because it can lead to evil behaviors, up to and including rape. Among the excuses trotted out by rapists, right up there with “she had on X article of clothing and was asking for it”, are variations on “she owed me”. So when there starts to be talk about women owing anything to sexually interested men, this starts to make me feel like an Israeli hearing chitchat about how the land my house sits on is owed to Palestine. People who think they are owed something might try to take it.
I seriously doubt there is anyone here who has committed rape or felt entitled to sex, for that reason. Here, what you find is a lot of men trying to overcome the lack of knowledge about how to get into a relationship. Men in that position are not the ones out committing rape, abusing girlfriends, abandoning their children, etc. Such victimizers already know how to get to the relationship step as second nature!
Now, with that said, there is a distantly-related (though not dangerous) feeling of entitlement that arises in discussions like these that needs to be addressed. Let me explain.
Let’s say I’m told all throughout growing up, what is and is not appropriate behavior around women, and over time I internalize these rules, automatically identifying instances I see (of inappropriate behavior) as bad. This advice matches that given in popular, respected books about dating. And yet despite lots of interactions with women where I have romantic intent, I am utterly unable to generate interest in any of them.
First, let’s get a few misunderstandings out of the way: Of course women are thinking, volitional beings who are not obligated to perform for anyone’s sake and should not be viewed as slaves or property.
Even accepting all of that, one should anticipate that if I’m following the real female wants and expectations, and am an eligible, attractive male by conventional measures, that it should lead to some non-trivial fraction of these women developing interest. When none of them do, and when women flock in droves, full of desire, to the very same men who steamroll right over the rules I learned, and who appear to be extremely disrespectful toward women … well, that’s very strong evidence that I was not correctly taught what women do and don’t want.
I believe that people are entitled to be correctly taught the social “rules of engagement”. When men realize that the rules they were taught don’t remotely mesh with reality, and they have to “go underground” to get the truth, they feel that they have been deprived of something to which they are entitled—and I believe they are justified in feeling this way.
Men in that position are not the ones out committing rape, abusing girlfriends, abandoning their children, etc. Such victimizers already know how to get to the relationship step as second nature!
This feels nice (people who are like me aren’t the raping kind!), and for that reason I suspect it. What evidence is there that such men, once they do get girlfriends/women, are less abusive than the general population?
I seriously doubt there is anyone here who has committed rape or felt entitled to sex, for that reason.
I don’t see where Alicorn postulated a reason for men to feel entitled to sex – did you get the clauses reversed?
Plausibly nobody here has explicitly believed themselves to be entitled to sex, but I doubt none have implicitly held something like this attitude at some point.
I think the implicitly-held-similar belief is what I spelled out in the post: they believe they’ve “done their part to adhere to the standard they were taught”, but have been rendered ineffective because they were lied to, and in the absence of that lie, they would … have had more success. So, it follows, those others deprived them of that success.
Yes, but they may also resent women for not cooperating/rewarding them for following explicit social norms, for willfully being confusing, for cynically advocating (individually or, at least implicitly, as a unitary Matriarchy) these norms with no intent of rewarding them, and probably other similar things.
It seems to me a simpler hypothesis that these women are acting appropriately by avoiding you. Given that, it would be a disservice to potential romantic interests if you were given tools to pretend to be someone they’d want to be with.
But then, the ‘fundamental attribution error’ comes naturally to us virtue ethicists.
This doesn’t quite make sense. You seem to be arguing that women have some capacity to identify some “true nature” of potential suitors completely independent of their behaviour. It also suggests that women are acting appropriately by not avoiding PUAs. Which leads to an interesting quandary: is Joe’s “true” nature what women see before or after he learns PUA skills? Does that mean that naturally intuiting PUA skills (i.e. not having to learn them) makes a man a good catch? It’s not a simple hypothesis at all.
It’s also worth noting that not all PUA strategies are dishonest or exploitative. Some of them are nearly-common sense, and some of them are unusual but fundamentally honest.
It seems to me a simpler hypothesis that these women are acting appropriately by avoiding you. Given that, it would be a disservice to potential romantic interests if you were given tools to pretend to be someone they’d want to be with.
That hypothesis is very simple but it isn’t relevant to what Silas is saying. He is objecting to misinformation directed at guys and not even commenting on what women should be expected to do.
People who think they are owed something might try to take it.
I think this is an irrational fear, if I may say so.
While I’m not an expert on violent crime, I am fairly sure that most of it is committed by people acting on impulse, not people who have intellectually convinced themselves they are owed something. I may for instance believe and argue I am owed more money by society, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to rob a bank.
People should likewise be free to express the opinion that they are owed more sex, without that being interpreted as a threat of violence.
My understanding is that both parts are needed… to use your money example, if you feel that you’re entitled to money, and you find a wallet sitting on the sidewalk, you may impulsively decide to take the money out of it rather than return it intact, but if you don’t have that feeling of entitlement, you’re much less likely to feel the impulse in the first place to take the money out of it.
Alternately, people get an impulse to rape because their instincts drive them to reproduce. For all that it doesn’t work too well in this environment, for some reason the instincts have decided that force is the best route to reproductive success given their host’s circumstances. The rest is just noise.
But does it work well in any environment? Someone, I forget where, once argued that rape in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness—where everyone knows everyone—would just get the rapist’s skull bludgeoned in by the victim’s friends or relatives.
(Though to be fair, a number of possible circumstances where this wouldn’t be true could be imagined, I suppose...)
There are a great many circumstances where rape has low probability of retaliation. More than enough to justify it as a conditional strategy. In fact, listing out a few examples, it feels as if it’s far more often true than not! (And remember that the EEA includes the last five or ten thousand years, during which humans lived in much larger communities and genes and especially memes changed significantly.)
First, a man may rape women from another tribe—and this is ubiquitous when opportunity is present, e.g. in war. This might also contribute to behavior with total strangers in today’s society.
Second, many (older) cultures see women not as persons to be avenged but as valuable property to be guarded. If a woman is raped (and tells her relatives), and the rapist isn’t completely without connections himself, then a common outcome may be marrying the two. If a woman’s bridal value is much lowered once she is not a virgin, this is her only marriage option that brings the virginal-value. OTOH, retaliation’s only benefit is in deterrence, which isn’t immediately valuable; usually, for vengeance to take place, you need a social custom requiring vengeance—such as in ‘honor’ cultures.
Third, if the rapist is powerful enough (via relatives, money, social position), such as nobility, he can rape any lower-status woman with impunity and settle the matter with perhaps some money, or just ignore it. Some social systems explicitly allow this in law (e.g., European nobility vs. commoners).
Fourth, if there are no witnesses, many cultures’ law would not take a woman’s word over a man’s. In which case, most cultures would prevent private, illegal vengeance.
Fifth, if a man rapes his wife (or girlfriend), traditional society sees no wrong, and there is often noone to avenge her. (Most modern rapes are commited by husbands/boyfriends/dates.)
This is pretty much what I was thinking—if the societal environment is such that there’s an instinctual impression that rape is efficient, the societal environment needs to change.
People should likewise be free to express the opinion that they are owed more sex, without that being interpreted as a threat of violence.
Let us agree that neither the person interested in sex, nor any third party, may in any way compel anyone to provide sex to them. And no-one has promised to have sex and then reneged on the non-enforceable promise. Then what is the meaning of “being owed more sex”?
I’m afraid I don’t see the relevance of this… Sorry if I missed a joke or something.
If there’s any doubt, my question was genuine, not rhetorical. I could speculate on what it might mean to be owed sex but instead I’d like to hear from others. Since people defend the freedom to express the opinion that sex is owed sometimes, I thought someone here felt that this is a meaningful opinion?
“I am owed more sex” might express an attitude of entitlement, resentment, etc., not a proposition that the speaker would draw long chains of inference from, or be able to explain how to cash out. I think this is something like wedrifid’s point.
Although most crimes of battery, murder, etc. can be classified as crimes of passion, a ton of rape is “date rape”. It can take place in ambiguous circumstances, without nearly as much violence as might be anticipated. I’m therefore uncertain how well you can apply statements about violent crimes to rape in general.
Bank robbery has a higher clearance rate than rape. Many rapists are never reported, much less caught and convicted. Bank robberies are generally pretty high-profile events; it’s hard for one to go by without anyone knowing it has occurred.
The following looks like a plausible line of reasoning to me: 1. I am owed more sex from people who I’m interested in, such as Woman X. 2. Woman X will not have sex with me, and in so refraining, denies me something I am owed. 3. In general, it is appropriate to arrange to take things from people who will not give them when they are owed. For instance, if Woman X owed me five hundred dollars, I would be justified in bringing in authorities to oblige her to give me five hundred dollars. 4. The law will not compel Woman X to have sex with me. 5. When the law will not address injustices, such as failing to discharge an obligation, it is permissible for private citizens to address the injustice. 6. Compelling Woman X to have sex with me would be taking from her something that she owes me. 7. I can compel Woman X to have sex with me.
Sure, you could stop at any point in this chain of reasoning, reject some inference and avoid #7. But the subset of people who won’t, may do serious harm to poor Woman X—who never owed anyone anything.
Sure, you could stop at any point in this chain of reasoning, reject some inference and avoid #7. But the subset of people who won’t, may do serious harm to poor Woman X—who never owed anyone anything.
It is your opinion that Woman X never owed anyone anything—but the fact that you (and probably most people) feel that way is not sufficient justification for making the contrary opinion (premise #1) a thought crime.
Keep in mind that among the things we are in the business of doing here are (1) critically examining ethical intuitions, and (2) proposing and exploring potential means of (ultimately) improving the world that may not necessarily strike us immediately as “tasteful”.
My feeling is that someone ought to be permitted on LW to argue, for example, that the law should compel Woman X to have sex in some circumstances. Suppose for instance that some commenter were to float the idea of sex as a form of judicially enforced community service for those convicted of certain crimes (perhaps as an alternative to incarceration). Would you consider this idea so dangerous that it ought to be censored, for fear of encouraging rape or sexual assault? I’m guessing (hoping) you wouldn’t , even though it’s clearly an example of discussing sex as an obligation, in a way quite foreign (even opposed) to the norms of our current society.
I would consider that okay (though quite distasteful) so long as it stayed very clearly hypothetical. (I suspect that such a discussion would result in a better clarification of why we consider rape unacceptable, which I’d find useful.) The original point about it being acceptable for men to consider themselves entitled to sex was clearly not hypothetical and not obviously intended to spark such a discussion.
Personally, I think prostitution should be legal and regulated, like it is in Germany. Then the utilons would be money, not punishment. Seems strange to imagine forcing criminal women to trade sex for utilons when there already are normal women who do without coercion. I also wonder what a bored woman would do that a fleshlight don’t.
We don’t need compelled sex. We need more sex toys for men!
I’d also like to point out that in one of EY’s stories, he mentioned that rape was legalized. I have a feeling that if he had chosen to expand on that and provide more of a description or a rationalization, and even if they weren’t very good or complete, no one would have been asking to censor the whole post.
someone ought to be permitted on LW to argue, for example, that the law should compel Woman X to have sex in some circumstances.
Yes. Anyone should be permitted to argue anything, so long as there is a (new and reasonable) argument towards a desirable goal (and not, e.g., “that way I’d get more sex” [at the expense of women]). Lacking any such argument though, any idea such as your example should be modded down to the nether hells and torn apart in replies (and I believe would be).
I believe that such treatment, showing rape is very much against the social code, would improve the meme pool more than censoring/prohibiting mention of it—which tends to give rise to theories of secret unvoiced support for politically incorrect opinions.
Of course, if such baseless suggestions were posted more than once or twice, we might ban further pointless discussions because they’d be, well, pointless (as well as rather offtopic).
Wow. That is an out there ‘guess’. I would definitely expect attempts even here to censor that kind of thinking. I personally would not consider the suggestion dangerous. But while I wouldn’t desire censorship this may be an instance where I refrained from reacting to censorship demands and from refuting any emotive less-than rational objections. In fact, I would actually argue that scenario is rape.
I think one of us is mis-parsing what K said… as I understand it he was guessing that Alicorn would not demand that the proposed conversation be censored, not that she’d consider the proposed scenario an acceptable one, or something other than rape.
Not at all. I’m talking about my reactions and also saying I would have a different guess as to whether someone (be that Alicorn or not) would make moves in the direction of censorship. I would have been clearer if I quoted the particular statement which prompted my reply.
I wish to point out that there is an important difference between censorship and saying that something ought not to be said. Censorship is taking steps to prevent the saying of a thing, or prevent it from being readily heard by interested audience members. Saying that a thing ought to be said does not call for censorship, nor imply that censorship is called for. For instance, I do not think that people ought to tell strangers on the street to smile, and I encourage people to refrain from doing that. I do not advocate preventing anyone who wishes to ignore this encouragement from telling others to smile, nor do I want to somehow protect all possible recipients of the smiling instruction from exposure thereto.
There is a difference there and I’d like to clarify that I have been referring to the broader concept here. When I refer to ‘censorship’ I am referring to attempts to control what people are free to be speaking through political manoeuvring. I include suggestions that people should be shamed for making statements on particular topics along with suggestions that said statements should be removed from view. If there was a word that emphasised the former category rather than the latter then I would use it instead. That sort of censorship is most relevant on lesswrong and far more insidious.
At the same time, we need to be able to have this kind of discussion without censoring (by your definition) people in Alicorn’s position, either. To the best of my memory (and I’ve had a lot going on for the last few days, so I could easily have lost track of a relevant part of the conversation), Alicorn never called for anyone to be socially censured for voicing an opinion, just for us to, as we’re discussing certain topics, keep in mind that our discussions have real effects in the world.
We wouldn’t discuss the nuts and bolts of building AI here, because we consider that risky. Alicorn considers this kind of discussion to be similarly risky in some ways. She may be wrong, but until it’s actually been established that she is, I suggest the possibility be taken into consideration.
I don’t think the difference is important in this context. If you advocate that something not be said by someone who thinks it, you are advocating that the flow of accurate information be restricted, and thus—effectively—that honesty be traded off in favor of some other value. The tradeoff may or may not be worth it, but it hardly matters whether it is initiated by a commenter or by a webmaster.
I disagree. I think self-regulation is very different in character from restriction imposed from without. I also think that honesty can better be interpreted to mean “saying only true things” than “saying all true things that pop into a speaker’s head”. Saying that I think people ought not to say Q doesn’t mean that I think people ought to assert ~Q.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have used a loaded word like “honesty”. Let’s just stick with “restriction of the flow of information”. If someone believes that people should be more indulgent in granting sexual favors, or that society should address the problem (if it is a problem) of inequality in access to sex, exactly why should they refrain from saying so on this forum?
Phrased like that, no reason. Those are pretty general, safe statements. Phrased in a more one-gendered way (e.g. “women in particular should be...” “women as a group should address...”), or refined into narrower, scarier views, they shouldn’t be said for the same sorts of reasons we shouldn’t threaten to torch each other’s homes or choose this venue to express supernatural beliefs: because those ideas are frightening, disruptive, and/or sufficiently widely discredited not to be worth our time.
Interesting. So your problem seems to be with generalizing into large categories (“women”), and then perhaps putting the matter in in-group vs. out-group terms, as in “we men are owed more sex from you women”. Am I right?
As for “scary”/”frightening”, I guess I just think that the quality of this site is high enough that people ought to be given the benefit of the doubt. Certain views may be “scary” when expressed “out there”, because they signal an intention to do something bad. Here, I think we ought to be able to take more things at face value, without disclaimers.
As for “scary”/”frightening”, I guess I just think that the quality of this site is high enough that people ought to be given the benefit of the doubt.
That’s the entrance to a death spiral.
A major part of the problem in discussing these things anywhere is people saying, “But we’re smart! We’re rational! We can’t mean the nasty things you read us as saying!” But that cuts both ways. How about, “We’re rational! Therefore you should reexamine your own words!”
When everyone imagines they’re rational, rationality has left the building.
Oh come now. I didn’t say anything about our alleged superior rationality. My claim is simply that participants in this forum are statistically unlikely to be dangerous people. This is mainly a consequence of (what I perceive to be) the small size of the community . (I could be wrong about this of course.)
But the discussion has become far too abstract by now, given that what I think this comes down to is that Alicorn and I have different mental images (caricatures) of “the person who says women owe more sex to men”. I wonder if maybe Alicorn pictures some type of shady misogynist character willing to blurt the statement out loud in public (perhaps while drunk), whereas I picture a shy misunderstood “nerd” who would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community. What I was trying to say was that I thought my image was more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace.
I didn’t say anything about our alleged superior rationality.
I don’t know what else “the quality of this site” could refer to. And now you’re saying it’s the size, though I don’t see how that changes the per-individual probability of being dangerous. Collectively, my impression is that larger communities are safer, because there’s room to avoid the few nasty individuals.
I wonder if maybe Alicorn pictures some type of shady misogynist character willing to blurt the statement out loud in public (perhaps while drunk), whereas I picture a shy misunderstood “nerd” who would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community.
Well now. Both of these imaginary characters believe that women owe them sex. The first is being blatant about it, so at least women know in advance to avoid him. The second, that you think “more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace” is the dangerous one. And you think of him as “misunderstood”. I think of him as “wrong”. As in, believing false things, things that are the opposite of true. And dangerously wrong.
If that type is indeed “more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace”, no wonder there are so few women in it.
Please note that nobody on this site has actually stated that men are owed sex from women as a group. As with any such dispute as to who is ethically owed what, this would clearly be a cause of conflict; and we’re trying to avoid having such “mind-killer” discussions on Less Wrong.
It was Alicorn who made the leap (see this post), which is evidence that this meme is floating around in mainstream culture. What people were saying is that men with romantic aspirations should be empathized with, given the difficulties they may face.
Is this a “dangerously wrong” notion? Why aren’t you objecting to mainstream culture, where the kinds of implied obligations and entitlements Alicorn refers to seem to be widespread?
Please note that nobody on this site has actually stated that men are owed sex from women as a group.
Well, that wouldn’t be a meaningful statement. Under the usual meanings of owing, someone has got to pay up. But women as a class can’t pay up, even if coerced, only individual women can. So this is the wrong way to describe the situation in any case.
This whole discussion started, I believe, with Robin Hanson’s recent posts on Overcoming Bias. He presented a problem (some men want, even need more sex than they can get; and society is generally unsympathetic with them) but not a solution.
However, the notions of “owing” and suggestions of influencing or coercing women were very much present in the posts Robin linked to and in various comments there. That’s not to say Robin agreed with them, of course.
Why aren’t you objecting to mainstream culture
Of course we’re also objecting to that part of mainstream culture. When it’s discussed here, we mention those objections here. After all the original topic was how to change mainstream culture for the better, not just our corner of it here.
However, the notions of “owing” and suggestions of influencing or coercing women were very much present in the posts Robin linked to and in various comments there.
No comments here have stated that men are owed sex from women as a group. The introduction of the concept was a straw man rebuttal to quoted claims and nobody has deigned to play advocate for the position, once included in the discussion. I cannot speak for the contents of posts on OvercomingBias.com.
The introduction of the concept was a straw man rebuttal to quoted claims
For the record, I don’t think this is accurate. In my opinion, the concerns raised by Alicorn and others were genuine and partially justified. Sex and gender relations are contentious topics in mainstream culture; we should keep this in mind and approach them cautiously.
I don’t know what else “the quality of this site” could refer to.
A somewhat greater ability (and tendency) to make statements for purposes other than signalling. I for example, often point out fallacies in comments even when they argue for positions that I support. In many cases these rebuttals could be labelled ‘frightening/scary’. If participants on LessWrong are closer in nature to myself than those in the general population are then I am less likely to take epistemic claims to be evidence of threat.
I support Kompos suggestion that significant benefit of the doubt should be given to posters when it comes to inferring danger from speaking on ‘scary/frightening’ topics. I do not believe I am owed more sex from anyone. The chain of inference ‘Wedrifid supports people being allowed to say scary things → Wedrifid believes scary things → Wedrifid is likely to do scary things → Wedrifid is dangerous’ would not be a reasonable one to make in this circumstance.
I for example, often point out fallacies in comments even when they argue for positions that I support.
Thus signaling your rationality, which confers value in this community :-)
I support Kompos suggestion that significant benefit of the doubt should be given to posters when it comes to inferring danger from speaking on ‘scary/frightening’.
I do agree with this. This being a rationality discussion site, we should absolutely be allowed to argue in support of any positions we actually hold, which may turn out to be scary or not. Only when the argument has taken place can the taboo option be (in theory) considered.
Thus signaling your rationality, which confers value in this community :-)
The status consequences are certainly lower here than elsewhere. However, my observations suggest that this the payoff is still negative, particularly when topics of any moral significance are being discussed in the context. We aren’t that much Less Wrong.
I think a major reason why the LW community works and can derive useful insights, is that once we make rationality and objective truth our goals and deliberately associate them with higher status (via karma for instance), status seeking works in our favor.
It is certainly makes a noticeable difference compared to other communities I have been involved in with similar emphasis on intellectual pursuits (MENSA and university faculties).
As in, believing false things, things that are the opposite of true.
The opposite of true would imply that the position makes enough sense for falsehood to neatly imply. The position is far more scrambled than that (not even wrong).
What’s your prior probability that someone reading this thread (during, say, October 2009) has committed or will commit rape or sexual assault within ten years?
The second, that you think “more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace” is the dangerous one
I think you are being extremely judgmental. I described my hypothetical character as “misunderstood”, and indeed, here you are misunderstanding him. He’s not dangerous; you can add that to the description: “shy, misunderstood, non-dangerous...” The fact that he “would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community” was intended to illustrate his kindness and sensitivity as a human being in contrast to the boorish brute I placed him in opposition to.
What’s your prior probability that someone reading this thread (during, say, October 2009) has committed or will commit rape or sexual assault within ten years?
And if it’s different from the probability for a randomly selected person, then why? (We should restrict selection to adult males, in both cases, for a fair comparison.) komponisto, you’ve said you think the fact someone is an LW participant reduces the probability he has or will rape. Why? Are there statistics negatively correlating rapes with IQ or something else relevant? (Not that I know, but I haven’t checked thoroughly.)
As for your misunderstood character. What does he mean when he says women owe more sex to men? What does owing mean for a class, unless there are individuals who can be said to owe?
Are there statistics negatively correlating rapes with IQ or something else relevant? (Not that I know, but I haven’t checked thoroughly.)
There are negative correlations between violent crime and IQ, and also positive ones between IQ and self-control, as well as any number of other relevant factors (being well-off, for example). I’d look up some citations for you, but really, those correlations are what you would expect and are easy to find.
(To play the devil’s advocate, we could postulate that perhaps only bright male maladjusted losers post here, and the latter 2 attributes outweigh the former 2.)
I know the correlations with violent crime in general exist. We should still check the correlation for sexual assault in particular, because I don’t know how different it may be from crime in general.
Playing devil’s advocate, we assume here that some sexual assault is driven by feelings of entitlement, and rich, powerful, intelligent males tend to feel more entitled than average (and society supports those feelings in them). The powerful boss sexually assaulting his female secretary is practically a stereotype.
What’s your prior probability that someone reading this thread (during, say, October 2009) has committed or will commit rape or sexual assault within ten years?
I haven’t the slightest idea. I also have no reason to think that it is higher, lower, or the same as the number for the members of a similarly sized SF convention, trainspotters club, or firm of chartered accountants.
I think you are being extremely judgmental.
You bet I am.
I described my hypothetical character as “misunderstood”, and indeed, here you are misunderstanding him. He’s not dangerous; you can add that to the description: “shy, misunderstood, non-dangerous...”
The fact that he “would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community” was intended to illustrate his kindness and sensitivity as a human being in contrast to the boorish brute I placed him in opposition to.
He thinks women owe him sex, but is “kind and sensitive” enough not to say so. I seem to feel another judgement coming on.
This imaginary geek: let us suppose he is twenty. One day he will be thirty. Fifty. Eighty, which by then may not be forty, and perhaps he can expect another half century more. Imagine for me this geek in the prime of life at eighty. What has he done in the last sixty years? Is he still whining about not getting any?
I consider your attitude dangerous. Judgement is not without consequence and a readiness to do so based on very weak evidence is a trait I consider undesirable.
My claim is simply that participants in this forum are statistically unlikely to be dangerous people. Mainly a consequence of (what I perceive to be) the small size of the community .
Why? How is this supposed to work?
I wonder if maybe Alicorn pictures some type of shady misogynist character willing to blurt the statement out loud in public (perhaps while drunk), whereas I picture a shy misunderstood “nerd” who would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community.
So you’re saying that the only relevant difference, and the reason men in this community are less likely to actually rape women, is that they’re more shy? And maybe don’t get drunk in public?
I’m aware that’s probably not what you meant, but it’s the literal meaning of your words. You need a better argument in favor of what seems to be your actual position—“people interested and/or adept in rationality are less likely to rape out of a sense of entitlement”.
It’s the mental leap from “aw, I feel bad that you are having trouble selling your product” to “aw, someone should take pity on you to the point of buying your product” that presents the problem....That kind of thinking scares the crap out of me, because that is the kind of thinking that leads to various evil behaviors up to and including rape.
My position, if position I have, is that Alicorn is wrong to be frightened by that line of thinking. In general (that is, not necessarily with regard to sex), it’s a perfectly reasonable leap to make, whether or not we ourselves would make it. Compare:
-Person to beggar: “Aw, I feel bad that you have trouble obtaining money.”
⇒ “Aw, someone should give you money”/”Aw, people should give more to charity”.
In a case like that, we don’t usually consider the drawing of that implication to be dangerous or frightening. We may consider it incorrect, for example if we think that giving money to beggars has a net negative impact on society; but even so we usually consider the person making the leap a (misguided) bleeding-heart liberal, not a promoter of “evil behaviors, up to and including armed robbery”.
Now, what I would want to fight against, so to speak, is the imposition of a taboo on making analogous arguments in the realm of sex (presumably because of a special human anxiety about that subject). Let those arguments be right or wrong, let the analogy hold or fail to hold, let sex be different or the same; but the thoughts should not be discouraged from being spoken.
That’s a tangent. You said it was more wrong to be frightened here on LW, than in general; that the people here were more trustworthy. That’s the claim you need to substantiate. I’m not expressing any opinion on the taboo discussion, it’s been talked about enough in other comment sub-threads.
we usually consider the person making the leap a (misguided) bleeding-heart liberal, not a promoter of “evil behaviors, up to and including armed robbery”.
I hear that in the US there are some people who view government-mandated redistribution of money from the rich to the poor (i.e. social support) very much like evil, armed robbery...
That’s a tangent. You said it was more wrong to be frightened here on LW, than in general
No, that was the tangent, actually. I didn’t expect that remark to be picked up and seized upon as a controversial claim. I expected the contrary arguments to run “Yes, of course no one here is a rapist, but even so we still shouldn’t have people saying X because...”
If you don’t share my intuition that proportionally fewer rapes occur in the context of academic conferences and philosophy club meetings than sporting events and bars, then we’ll just have to refer to statistical data to find out who is right.
But in either case, I consider the taboo discussion to be more interesting/important, belabored though it may be.
I don’t share your intuition, but it wouldn’t matter if I did. We LW should be frightened of having intuitions for which we can’t, on reflection, give any supporting evidence! And automatically considering your in-group to be of higher virtue or above suspicion is a very well known and widespread human bias. That’s why we picked on your claim.
You do not. The demand for proof was not consistent with the flow of the discussion. Your reasoning was clear in your initial post and sufficient for purposes of conversation. Furthermore, accepting the burden of proof to be on your point would be innapropriate.
For the original discussion about taboos, I agree completely. My requests for proof were about komponisto’s comment that
My claim is simply that participants in this forum are statistically unlikely to be dangerous people.
That was in the other subthread so perhaps this is my fault for replying to the wrong comment. The two threads have been referencing each other quite a lot though.
Thanks for that clarification. It seems the more Kompo refines these claims the less I agree with them.
I would argue that people on this forum are significantly more likely to be dangerous. For my part I consider myself to be far more resourceful than the average person and would take offence at a claim that I am not dangerous. Furthermore, I suggest the people here are much more likely to form their morals for reasons other than whatever works best in their social environment. That more or less means “off the rails”.
I would argue that people on this forum are significantly more likely to be dangerous
Maybe you’re right. But, as I indicated elsewhere, I don’t think that that was the most important issue. I’m more interested in the censorship/taboo discussion.
we usually consider the person making the leap a (misguided) bleeding-heart liberal, not a promoter of “evil behaviors, up to and including armed robbery”.
Really? How are government tax collectors any different than armed robbers, on the relevant dimensions? After all, governments love to trot out “giving money to the poor” as a rationale for taking your money, don’t they?
(And no, the fact that the requirement to pay taxes is imposed by statute, or that the IRS labels your compliance with their policies as “voluntary” are not relevant dimensions)
I would like it if I could stop people having (or at least expressing) an attitude of entitlement. Unfortunately it is easier to condemn such thoughts in low status people than high. It’s the high status people with entitlement that are the real danger. They’ll, say, take over the country. That sort of thing.
I do not believe that most rapists stop, before the act, to justify it by an elaborate rational chain. Even if they come up with it afterwards, when accused, I don’t think it can be called the cause of the rape. At most you could say it’s an enabler, but I’m not even convinced of that.
The real problem that I see is that people saying things like this may effectively support publicly accused rapists, in the courts and in public debates. (Which does not mean that’s what these people mean or want!) And this effect on “public” opinion causes an increases in rapes. (Or prevents a decrease, rather.)
As far as I can see (and in line with Hansonian explanation styles :-), a better and simpler explanation of rapes is that rapists don’t expect to be condemned or punished by others. And not that they can prove to themselves it’s a permissible act under some ethical system.
Further, false accusations of rape give cover to actual rapists. Because it’s credible that Kobe Bryant was falsely accused, he can buy off his accuser for (to him) a small amount of money.
You don’t see too many false accusations of bank robbery :)
While I’m not an expert on violent crime, I am fairly sure that most of it is committed by people acting on impulse, not people who have intellectually convinced themselves they are owed something.
This isn’t a clean dichotomy. Verbal argument might help to maintain and strengthen someone’s feelings of entitlement, resentment, and rage, until these feelings reach the point of motivating a rape (or any kind of violent act) that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred.
People should likewise be free to express the opinion that they are owed more sex, without that being interpreted as a threat of violence.
Unless I missed it, this is a claim no one has made. There is a very clear distinction between spreading memes that increase the likelihood of violence and making a threat. Obviously claims of desert don’t necessarily entail a threatening violence to take the deserts- but that doesn’t mean popularizing some memes doesn’t have bad consequences. This is fairly basic memetics and how we account for a great deal of behavior. There might also be some positive consequence to spreading such memes but so far no one has argued that claiming loveless men are owed more sex will actually lead to any kind of beneficial change.
This is a very good clarification. Something can be dangerous without actually being a threat, and in fact the response here has been what I’d expect for an indirect danger—I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t usually stick around to try to educate someone who’s actually threatening me, or causing me to be in immediate danger.
Think of it as the difference between teaching people to hotwire cars, and actually stealing them—the former might not actually harm the car owners in question, but they’re unlikely to think kindly of someone who does it.
Unless I missed it, this is a claim no one has made.
Let me again quote from Alicorn’s comment:
People who think they are owed something might try to take it.
The comment clearly expresses the fear that someone who says or thinks they are owed more sex from women—and, keep in mind, that could be something along the lines of “I don’t think that women are doing their part in alleviating the suffering I feel as a result of not having access to sex”—may be led to “evil behaviors, up to and including rape”. I think that -- at least in the context of this site—that fear is unfounded, perhaps even slightly on the paranoid side. (Of course I hesitate to say a thing like that, as an anxiety sufferer, throwing stones from my glass house!) In any case I feel reasonably confident in asserting that neither Alicorn nor anyone else stands more than an infinitesimally small chance of being raped by a lonely Less Wrong participant holding the above misguided opinion. Indeed (and to answer some other commenters), I suspect that the proportion of potential rapists among the people who hold that opinion is probably so small that even if all rapes were attributable to the holding of that opinion by the perpetrator, that still wouldn’t justify censoring the opinion itself (and thereby failing to even consider the question of whether lack of access to sex is a legitimate ethical problem worth solving).
but that doesn’t mean popularizing some memes doesn’t have bad consequences. This is fairly basic memetics and how we account for a great deal of behavior.
This is also a larger debate (about whether and how to stop the spread of memes which may have harmful effects) which transcends the specific issues here. It applies even to memes that are definitely good in some contexts, e.g. atheism.
There might also be some positive consequence to spreading such memes but so far no one has argued that claiming loveless men are owed more sex will actually lead to any kind of beneficial change.
Robin Hanson implies this—or at least raises the question—quite regularly. See here for the most recent example.
Social skills as used by men to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women do not consist entirely of things I would describe with “negative feminist language”.
Do you mean social skills which are used (almost) exclusively for these purposes? Most social skills are general, and in fact are more important to have than narrowly applicable ones.
this thought is dangerous because it can lead to evil behaviors, up to and including rape.
More to the point, this thought is wrong. (I agree that it feels unpleasant, but I don’t know how much it actually leads to such behavior vs. being used to explain it afterwards.)
Do you mean social skills which are used (almost) exclusively for these purposes? Most social skills are general, and in fact are more important to have than narrowly applicable ones.
Good point, to be extent that the insights I’ve gained from resources intended for developing dating skills have been far more useful for life in general than specifically with women.
I like what you say here and agree that people believing they are ‘owed’ something in social interactions and particularly those related to mating is absurd.
I don’t know how much such ungranted feelings of entitlement encourage rape. Honestly, I’ve a great faith in the ability of humans to rationalise whatever they do and suspect other claims would flow just as easily. But I do know that belief that you are owed something by the universe is a recipe for failure in general. More so from women who quite reasonably feel this as ‘creepy’ and guys as ‘pathetic’.
people believing they are ‘owed’ something in social interactions and particularly those related to mating is absurd.
I think it is justifiable in some interactions (not in mating). I feel that people owe it to me to behave with a minimum of politeness towards me. Certain social interactions impose a much higher standard, e.g. salesmen who walk up to me uninvited owe it to me to be very polite indeed and never to argue with me (“customer is always right”).
I agree with what you’re saying. The way I like to frame it is that I have expectations that people behave with a minimum of politeness towards me. I don’t so much bother with considering other parts of the universe to ‘owe me something’ since that is futile. Instead I consider my social boundaries to be part of myself and something I am responsible for enforcing for no other reason than because I want to.
an Israeli hearing chitchat about how the land my house sits on is owed to Palestine.
I’m not expressing an opinion on the actual issue, but this is somewhat a strawman. The more defensible version of the argument is that some land is owned by particular, sometimes identifiable Palestinians.
Yeah, I know. As I typed the example, I was thinking “this is a lousy example but I have no superior ones at the moment”. Any suggestions for a replacement?
A wealthy person being told he owes money to the government, or to the poor? It could even be someone who won the lottery (the way attractive people won the genetic lottery). But then is taxing lottery winners analogous to forcing women into sex? There’s another implication here as well, in that if taxation isn’t theft then forced promiscuity doesn’t seem to be rape. In retrospect, a most unpleasant analogy that thankfully breaks down under a more nuanced view of property (wish I had more time to refine this comment).
Well, if Alicorn was an Israeli settler in the Gaza Strip, then people around her might well feel entitled to the land beneath her house. And she might definitely have some reason to worry about it. That’s kind of a “tribal” attitude really, but it’s what the issue is all about.
That might be analogous, but I have never lived in any location that drafts women and I have an unusually strong negative reaction to the idea of military service in general, and so I can’t know for sure.
Military service is generally understood to be coercive, so you’re right to have a negative reaction to it (and so do I). Volunteer-only armies are extremely rare exceptions—far more rare than rape is compared to sex.
Military service is generally understood to be coercive
Really? I suspect a lot of young Americans would view the idea of coerced military service as another one of those bizarre practices from the distant past.
Well, then, the analogy should describe more explicitly the idea of coercive military service. That should serve to scare people as intended :-)
Incidentally, we have on-and-off political and media wrangles about abolishing the draft here in Israel. Service in actual combat units is already volunteer only anyway, everyone else goes to “battlefield support” and desk jobs.
The biggest argument, sometimes the only argument, brought out in favor of keeping the draft is that it’s good for us (the young soldiers) to suffer for a few years. Creates strong character, and so on. Or as the (old male) politicians sometimes put it, “we did it, why shouldn’t they?”
This reminds me a lot of all those people who try their best to find an explanation of why universal death is in fact a good thing and necessary for us to remain “truly human” and it would be evil to try and become immortal. They, too, currently rule the media and perhaps the popular consensuses on the subject.
Of course the real explanation is simpler. We’ll have the draft for as long as the parliament and government is made up in large part of retired generals; and the army’s high command is made up almost entirely of elite (volunteer) combat unit veterans; and people actually being drafted cannot influence the decision, not even by voting in the general elections. (Right to vote is granted at age 18. The draft is also at age 18, or when you finish highschool. General elections are every four years, so almost everyone votes for the first time during or after their army service.)
The biggest argument, sometimes the only argument, brought out in favor of keeping the draft is that it’s good for us (the young soldiers) to suffer for a few years. Creates strong character, and so on. Or as the (old male) politicians sometimes put it, “we did it, why shouldn’t they?”
You know, I once saw someone argue that the single greatest tool the Mormons have for their legendary retention rates is their policy of having everyone go overseas or somewhere to do missionary work for a couple years; the idea being that spending years dealing with hostile or apathetic infidels will, by sheer cognitive dissonance, turn the missionary into a fanatic. Somewhat like those psychology experiments where the more you argue for a position & hear arguments against it, the more you brainwash yourself into believing it.
This would seem to be a useful tool for anyone wishing to preserve the military state of Israel.
Mormon missions do not always take place overseas, and they aren’t required of everyone. (It’s a social expectation of men, but still optional even for them, and very much a voluntary thing for women.)
Point taken; should I have said ‘policy of having many or most Mormon men and some women go far away’? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that materially weakens the ‘Stockholm syndrome effect’, as it were, the possible utility of making everyone serve in the military.
(And it may be a social expectation but I wonder how important the distinction between expectation and policy/law is; when I was a Catholic, we were told clearly that confirmation was optional—yet not one of us felt that we had the genuine option to not be confirmed, and so all of us were.)
Confirmation in Catholicism is administered to children, who are less free to reject social expectations than most adults. Mormon missionaries have all reached the age of majority, and while there may be social consequences, they’re a bit farther removed than “disappointment of parents on whom one is unavoidably materially dependent”. I personally know multiple adult Mormon men who never went on a mission.
Which only goes to show that they don’t read their own history books about drafts, or newspapers about stop-loss policies and the National Guard deployments.
Some may not read history, but it doesn’t follow from what I said. They may know very well that the draft existed in the past.
(I’ve noticed that a lot of people old enough to remember e.g. Vietnam have trouble accepting that we’re in a different historical era now; they often speak in a way that suggests they think the draft could easily be brought back, when in fact the political reality is such that that’s extremely unlikely.)
National Guard service is voluntary, and stop-loss concerns people already signed up.
As for how difficult it would be to put it back into operation, that’s hard to say; consider how many people thought a black man would not be president this side of 2100. The right question is how difficult it would be to get into a war or other national emergency which could make use of the draft; in such situations, the preferences of young people are irrelevant.
As for National Guard and stop-loss: you have a very strange idea of coercion if you think stop-loss isn’t it. There may be a clause in their contracts saying something about contracts being extended indefinitely, but that strikes me as like signing a contract to sell yourself into slavery.
you have a very strange idea of coercion if you think stop-loss isn’t it
Stop-loss itself is coercion, but it’s coercion applied to those already in the military. Citing the (current, contingent) existence of stop-loss policies doesn’t support the idea that military service is inherently coerced. You may as well cite the fact that military personnel have to follow orders (also obviously coercion).
You’re right, military enrollment is not inherently and always coercive; many countries have volunteer-only armies.
For purposes of scaring people with an analogy for “entitlement” rape, we can use the following scenario: your worst enemy, who looks a little like you when he wears a wig, has signed an 8 year irrevocable combat unit contract in your name. It “only looks like” your signature? Tell that to the military police kicking down your door...
Stop-loss was created by the United States Congress after the Vietnam War. Its use is founded on Title 10, United States Code, Section 12305(a) which states in part: ”… the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States”
Here’s a contract I’d like you to sign; you work for me for 8 years, but at any time I can change any provision in any way, and if you don’t conform to my changes exactly, I can execute you.
If this is not coercion, then apparently a contract legitimizes anything whatsoever. I’m not prepared to dive that far down the libertarian rabbit-hole, but maybe you are.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I specifically said that stop-loss is coercion. Are you trying to get me to defend stop-loss?
I am not prepared to dive down any political rabbit-hole, because this isn’t a political discussion. Whether stop-loss is an ethical policy or not is completely irrelevant; the point was that it doesn’t make the U.S. like Israel, or France (until a few years ago), or indeed the U.S. circa 1970. In those countries, people are/were forced to enter the military, not just to stay in once they’re already in.
Once we’ve clearly established that stop-loss is coercion, I’m done. You want to show that the US is not like Israel? Consider this:
the US today freely trafficks in coercion whenever it feels it is needed, with minimal public outcry, and what outcry there is is due solely to the affected parties
the infrastructure for the draft is still in place, and dissolving it has been specifically resisted by even Democratic administrations like Clinton
after 9/11, there were several public statements in support of the draft, such as this op-ed by Senator Rangels (“Bring Back the Draft”, who submitted legislation to that effect, as did Senator Hollings
‘But top lawmakers, joined by Pentagon leaders and administration officials, say that there are definitely no plans to resume the draft and that the military is much better off relying on a substantially motivated volunteer force rather than on conscripts.’
‴You have drafts when you can’t get the requisite numbers,″ said the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California. ″There is not now indications that you can’t get the requisite numbers. But we watch those numbers every month.‴
‴I don’t think we’re going to need to reinstitute the draft,″ Mr. Levin said. ″The combination of recruiting and retention is doing fairly well.‴
“Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that compulsory service will be reinstituted without mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed.”
And once stop-loss is permissible & precedent, draft is just more of the same, a point so obvious the reporter includes it:
“He and others said this could appear to those people to be nothing less than logical progression, after the military’s resorting to an extension of tours of duty and the recall of former active-duty soldiers.
″I think what is behind the current public discussion is the sense the Defense Department is using coercion to maintain the service of those who might otherwise get out,″ said James Burk, a sociology professor at Texas A&M who studies the intersection of military and public policy issues. ″That kind of coercion has a resonance of what the draft is all about.″”
So, the US is culturally accepting, has the means, has the experience—but it just doesn’t have the need (like Israel does).
To make an inflammatory analogy, if an American were to claim to not be like Israel or France in this respect, I would put as little credence in that as I would the claim of a child molester that he’s not a rapist because he just flies to Thailand and hires a child prostitute.
(As for your claim this isn’t about politics: stop-loss and the draft are politics. What a government should do to/with its citizens is the very heart of politics; I can’t imagine what else politics could be.)
This seems to be a political hobby-horse of yours; clearly you don’t like stop-loss and think it may lead to a draft in the future. But making political points like that is not what this thread is for. I simply pointed out to DanArmak that the U.S. doesn’t currently practice conscription—which is true—and thus it is a hasty claim that military service is “generally understood to be coercive”. DanArmak later acknowledged that a number of countries (not just the U.S., so you can pick another example if you like) have volunteer forces.
Again, stop-loss may be unethical or otherwise bad policy, it may even facilitate some future draft, but not all bad things are the same. Not even if one leads to another. There is no need to obscure the manifest difference between the militaries of Israel and the U.S. by rhetorical posturing about how stop-loss is in the same moral category as outright conscription. It’s an off-topic distraction.
I don’t intend to continue this political discussion further, but since I did happen to say that there was little political will in the U.S. for a draft, and since your latest comment could be read as an attempted refutation of that claim, I will make the following points before withdrawing:
There is no “Senator Rangels”. The op-ed you linked to was written by Representative (not Senator) Charles Rangel, incidentally the same man currently under investigation for tax violations. His call for a draft was widely seen at the time as pure political grandstanding against the war in Iraq (specifically an attempt to make a point about public support of the war—presumably the public would not support it to the point of tolerating a draft).
Members of Congress regularly make all kinds of public statements in support of this or that. You can no doubt find members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have made public statements in favor of reparations for slavery. That doesn’t mean the idea has any actual political traction. You would have to be very naive about American politics to regard mere pronouncements by congressmen as anything more than very weak information about what policies have a chance of being enacted. Most of it is pure signaling.
The fact that the draft was not reinstituted despite being talked about is evidence in my favor. It isn’t a politically popular idea. Yes, if it were ever necessary it would of course be brought back (essentially by definition of “necessary”), but it was not regarded as necessary after 9/11, even with two subsequent wars. By contrast, forty years ago, it was apparently regarded as necessary to draft people into fighting a war in Vietnam which was not prompted directly or indirectly by an attack on the U.S. mainland.
The quotes you cite make my case, not yours. E.g. “”Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that compulsory service will be reinstituted without mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed.”″
The infrastructure for the draft is not currently in place. What is still in place is the legal (i.e. statutory) authority, plus a list of people who are eligible to be drafted (the “Selective Service” registry). Actually implementing the draft would require significant organizational changes in the Pentagon bureaucracy, which would resist them like all bureaucracies resist all major changes. (Or so I am told by a DoD employee who should know.)
There is no “Senator Rangels”. The op-ed you linked to was written by Representative (not Senator) Charles Rangel, incidentally the same man currently under investigation for tax violations.
My mistake; I confused him with the Republican senator. (And I’d point out that if the tax violation thing is an attempt to discredit Rangel, that he can still be in office only points to his influence, even if you are unfamiliar with his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means committee.)
You would have to be very naive about American politics to regard mere pronouncements by congressmen as anything more than very weak information about what policies have a chance of being enacted.
Which is why I specifically mentioned the 2 different pieces of submitted legislation.
By contrast, forty years ago, it was apparently regarded as necessary to draft people into fighting a war in Vietnam which was not prompted directly or indirectly by an attack on the U.S. mainland.
I’m not sure what your point is here. They used the draft because that was how they got the troops they wanted: Vietnam peaked at something like 500,000 US troops deployed, while as far as I can tell, Iraq has never hosted even a third of that, peaking at 160,000. And the latter with a more populous America too (180 million in the ’60s to 300 million now).
The fact that the draft was not reinstituted despite being talked about is evidence in my favor. It isn’t a politically popular idea.
Then why has it never been repudiated? Why are the laws still effective & the registry maintained? For such a politically suicidal idea, as you seem to think it, it’s surprisingly present. The Democrats have plenty of time to pander to even tiny constituencies like paying veterans benefits to allied Filipinos from WWII, but they can’t get rid of something that is supposed to be universally despised?
Face it: what the American people opposes is the use of the draft for specific conflicts like bombing Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. The general idea is fine by them. And the quotes you think make your case, make mine: not one of them opposes the draft in general—just using it right now. Mere historical contingency. Not principles.
Face it: what the American people opposes is the use of the draft for specific conflicts like bombing Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. The general idea is fine by them. And the quotes you think make your case, make mine: not one of them opposes the draft in general—just using it right now. Mere historical contingency. Not principles.
The problem is that, after Vietnam, America will oppose the draft for pretty much any war that isn’t directly defensive, i.e. a retaliation to an attack or overt declaration of war. With the development of modern media, wars have become much, much harder to wage. The only way you’d see a draft in the US is if we waged a massive defensive ground war. This isn’t going to happen, because technology has progressed too much. The only thing you’re really going to need a lot of ground troops for is an occupation, and occupations are not defensive.
It’s not impossible, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that someone would pick a fight with the US that would require troops in numbers needed to justify a draft. Particularly when you consider that any such attack would hugely boost volunteering and thus reduce the need for a draft; look at what 9/11 did.
So compulsive military service is quite possible in the case of a rather clear national emergency. Compulsive military service in a muddier, vaguely-preventative war seems extremely unlikely, even if it could theoretically be enacted. Damn near anything could theoretically be enacted, though, so this is hardly a useful point.
[I admit I can’t quite find how this thread originated, so I may be slightly off topic; for some reason it does not show in the comments in the original post.]
The problem is that, after Vietnam, America will oppose the draft for pretty much any war that isn’t directly defensive, i.e. a retaliation to an attack or overt declaration of war.
Vietnam didn’t start with a draft either, IIRC.
With the development of modern media, wars have become much, much harder to wage.
They used to be. But institutions adapted. Do you remember the run-up to the Iraq war? You could drive a truck through the arguments for invading (I remember being particularly unimpressed by the aluminum tubes & audio recordings), yet the media was so supine that even arch-liberal papers like the New York Times drank the kool-aid so deeply they would apologize later. And then there are things like embedded reporters, or those Pentagon pundits (forgotten about them? I wouldn’t be surprised.).
No, in this Gotterdammerung for newspapers, we cannot look to them to stop wars & drafts.
So compulsive military service is quite possible in the case of a rather clear national emergency.
So you agree with me, then, that the American people philosophically accepts coercion like the draft, it’s just that we don’t observe any recent drafts because the specific circumstances that would make it useful are, due to historical & technological contingency, rare? :)
I admit I can’t quite find how this thread originated, so I may be slightly off topic; for some reason it does not show in the comments in the original post.
We’re nested too far down to appear on the main page; you’d have to click ‘more comments’.
Not to mention that signatures on a contract are easy to fake, and the (military) witnesses of signing are often not interested in a recruit walking free.
[The Armed Forces Enlistment Contract states]: “In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.”
But, yeah, it’s deceptive at best.
Back during World War 1, the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to the military. In the context of ruling about the constitutionality of the draft, they devoted one paragraph to the Thirteenth Amendment issue:
As we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement.
In other words, they said that they don’t want it to apply, so it doesn’t.
I’ve heard that lifetime incidence of being raped for women is about 3% worldwide. I expect it’s considerably less in orderly societies. I definitely consider that high enough that were I a woman, rape would come to mind when thinking of frustrated males.
That said, there are a lot of steps between approaching women out of sexual interest, and rape. I imagine anyone capable of being reached by anti-rape arguments is not a psychopath; I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
I’m also reminded of the recent woman-killer who brought a gun to his gym. Apparently he really did feel that (young?) women as a class owed him some level of sexual validation. It’s true that this is rubbish thinking.
Except for some form of therapy+prostitution that doesn’t exist except in science fiction, I don’t see any help for men who go berserk to the extent of raping+killing in response to general rejection except certainty of punishment, which is any case useless against those who’ve already decided to off themselves. Perhaps a more convenient and self-only way of killing themselves could be made available.
I’ve heard that lifetime incidence of being raped for women is about 3% worldwide.
That’s much lower than the estimates I usually see. E.g., the Wikipedia article Estimates of sexual violence quotes a self-reported rate of 14.8% lifetime incidence among U.S. women, not counting failed rape attempts. This refers to this study[1], which quotes two previous studies with similar results, and also estimates a 22% lifetime incidence rate under a broader definition of sexual assault.
There are whole countries out there where the rape incidence in any single year is far above 3%. Even putting “unstable” countries and temporary situations (those lasting one generation or less) aside, there are many societies where the structure of marriage is such that we ought to estimate a daily incidence of rape, perhaps far above 50%.
[1] Tjaden P, Thoennes N. Full report of the prevalence, incidence and consequences of violence against women: findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington, DC, National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2000 (NCJ 183781).
I wonder where I read 3% (it was very recent) - unfortunately all I can see now are order-of-magnitude higher estimates for what i presume is the broader category of “sexual assault”.
the UN gives an annual incidence for rape per 100,000 people. If we assume rapes of men or of women outside ages 15-50 are (fairly) negligible, then the victim pool is only about a third of the total pop, if that – giving a rate of 0.03% * 3 = 0.09% for the victim pool. Since women are in the pool for 35 years, that gives a lifetime prevalence of about 3.15% (leaving out the correction for a few individuals being victimized more than once). 3% is high.
That comment uses the figure quoted by the previous comment. But look at the pdf linked there for the UN report—that’s not a number of rapes, that’s a number of “crimes recorded in criminal police statistics!” No wonder it’s much lower than the real figure. (I don’t even know if it includes all reports/accusations or just counts found guilty by a court.)
Incidentally that document is missing some of the more interesting statistics for the US, while it has them for other countries. “Rape average prison sentence served” is one.
I’ve heard considerably higher quoted statistics for “sexual assault” (one in four women, it is said, will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime). I don’t know what percentage of sexual assault cases are “actual” rape, though all things that fall under the sexual assault umbrella are frightening.
I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
Don’t think that, unless in so thinking, you also think that “a psychopath” can be a functional, indistinguishable member of society who you’d never once know even through extended association unless he happened to tell you about that one time at that frat party (or whenever).
I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
Don’t think that, unless in so thinking, you also think that “a psychopath” can be a functional, indistinguishable member of society who you’d never once know even through extended association unless he happened to tell you about that one time at that frat party (or whenever).
This. I know or have known three people who survived rapes and were comfortable enough with me to tell me details of the situations. One was in a mental institution, and was raped by the staff—I don’t know much about the details in that situation, but the person or people involved were indistinguishable enough to be employed in that situation. Another friend was assaulted by her twin brother when they were teenagers; other than that, to hear her talk about him he doesn’t sound psychopathic at all. The situation I know the most about involves a friend who, as a teenager, passed out from hunger in the presence of a male acquaintance—almost a 1:1 correspondence with the ‘lost wallet’ scenario. We’ve talked at some length about him, since he tried to get back in touch with her recently, and while he has quite the sense or entitlement and is in denial about the situation, he’s pretty definitely not a psychopath. (Unless I’m very much misremembering my research on psychopathy, psychopaths don’t do denial in the same way he was doing it, if at all.)
I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
Don’t think that, unless in so thinking, you also think that “a psychopath” can be a functional, indistinguishable member of society who you’d never once know even through extended association unless he happened to tell you about that one time at that frat party (or whenever).
Completely correct. I speak not just from reading about it, but also from knowing one woman (that I know of) who was assaulted and the case quite clearly did not involve psychopaths. It involved a gang of ordinary teenage boys egging each other on when she was in their power.
Rape is (statistically) normal human male behavior, and is not correlated with any diagnosable psychological or physiological condition that I know of.
I imagine anyone capable of being reached by anti-rape arguments is not a psychopath; I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
Yeah, exactly. So these efforts are wasted on me, since after all, I’m not a psychopath. Why, if I could push a button that would KILL all the psychopaths, I’d do it!
I finally read the linked scenario. It’s fun, but I’m not sure what to take from it.
It’s scary to imagine people really believing in overarching arbitrary rules that a sane person would only consider in hypothetical philosophy play. I guess some religions encourage it, but thankfully they usually come with enough hypocrisy or compartmentalization to avoid the fearful consequence.
Heh, I was just trying to be funny, not even really trying to relate to your post.
Personally, I just think the very idea of the psychopath button scenario is funny: “Yes, I’d love to be responsible for the death of all mass-murderers … no, wait, that makes me a …”
There is certainly a degree of irony. But pushing that button out of moral concerns proves that you are not a psychopath, irrespective of whether it is an immoral act.
Silas explained one of the reasons this particular analogy doesn’t hold. (You also argue against a straw man.)
As for political agenda: This is not the first time you have made statements of the kind should be considered . I greatly prefer your insights into rationality over your comments on anything to do with males. The quality of reasoning is almost incomparable.
I will now attempt to clarify:
Males developing social skills is great. Social skills are wonderful, rewarding things to have, and I think anybody who would like to learn to interact with other people politely and pleasantly should.
“Social skills as possessed by men (who are attracted to women)” is a much broader category than “the ability to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women (who are attracted to men)”. You can use social skills to interact with family members, platonic friends, co-workers, neighbors, classmates, teachers, strangers, students, clients, employees, bosses, fellow members of any club or other social or hobby organization, and any other class of person you will ever interact with. Potential mates are only one of these categories, although of course there is overlap.
Social skills as used by men to get into sexual or romantic relationships with women do not consist entirely of things I would describe with “negative feminist language”. Many of these skills are, at least potentially, honest, respectful, and non-threatening.
The attitude that the “target market” of the “product” of the man attempting to pitch himself as a potential mate owes him something is the attitude that I condemn. If nobody has this attitude around here—which is what I must think you’re getting at by saying I argue against a straw man—that’s great! My heebie-jeebies are for naught! I can walk the streets of Lesswrongburgh safe in the knowledge that no one thinks they are entitled to my attention, affection, personal charms, or set of body parts.
If someone in the studio audience does think that the men who have or want to learn these social skills are owed something by the women in whom they show interest, then I contend that this thought is dangerous because it can lead to evil behaviors, up to and including rape. Among the excuses trotted out by rapists, right up there with “she had on X article of clothing and was asking for it”, are variations on “she owed me”. So when there starts to be talk about women owing anything to sexually interested men, this starts to make me feel like an Israeli hearing chitchat about how the land my house sits on is owed to Palestine. People who think they are owed something might try to take it.
I seriously doubt there is anyone here who has committed rape or felt entitled to sex, for that reason. Here, what you find is a lot of men trying to overcome the lack of knowledge about how to get into a relationship. Men in that position are not the ones out committing rape, abusing girlfriends, abandoning their children, etc. Such victimizers already know how to get to the relationship step as second nature!
Now, with that said, there is a distantly-related (though not dangerous) feeling of entitlement that arises in discussions like these that needs to be addressed. Let me explain.
Let’s say I’m told all throughout growing up, what is and is not appropriate behavior around women, and over time I internalize these rules, automatically identifying instances I see (of inappropriate behavior) as bad. This advice matches that given in popular, respected books about dating. And yet despite lots of interactions with women where I have romantic intent, I am utterly unable to generate interest in any of them.
First, let’s get a few misunderstandings out of the way: Of course women are thinking, volitional beings who are not obligated to perform for anyone’s sake and should not be viewed as slaves or property.
Even accepting all of that, one should anticipate that if I’m following the real female wants and expectations, and am an eligible, attractive male by conventional measures, that it should lead to some non-trivial fraction of these women developing interest. When none of them do, and when women flock in droves, full of desire, to the very same men who steamroll right over the rules I learned, and who appear to be extremely disrespectful toward women … well, that’s very strong evidence that I was not correctly taught what women do and don’t want.
I believe that people are entitled to be correctly taught the social “rules of engagement”. When men realize that the rules they were taught don’t remotely mesh with reality, and they have to “go underground” to get the truth, they feel that they have been deprived of something to which they are entitled—and I believe they are justified in feeling this way.
This feels nice (people who are like me aren’t the raping kind!), and for that reason I suspect it. What evidence is there that such men, once they do get girlfriends/women, are less abusive than the general population?
Other than that I fully agree with your comment.
I don’t see where Alicorn postulated a reason for men to feel entitled to sex – did you get the clauses reversed?
Plausibly nobody here has explicitly believed themselves to be entitled to sex, but I doubt none have implicitly held something like this attitude at some point.
I think the implicitly-held-similar belief is what I spelled out in the post: they believe they’ve “done their part to adhere to the standard they were taught”, but have been rendered ineffective because they were lied to, and in the absence of that lie, they would … have had more success. So, it follows, those others deprived them of that success.
Yes, but they may also resent women for not cooperating/rewarding them for following explicit social norms, for willfully being confusing, for cynically advocating (individually or, at least implicitly, as a unitary Matriarchy) these norms with no intent of rewarding them, and probably other similar things.
Okay, I agree with you on that, but that’s already quite far from the “feeling entitled to sex” that you suggested before.
It seems to me a simpler hypothesis that these women are acting appropriately by avoiding you. Given that, it would be a disservice to potential romantic interests if you were given tools to pretend to be someone they’d want to be with.
But then, the ‘fundamental attribution error’ comes naturally to us virtue ethicists.
This doesn’t quite make sense. You seem to be arguing that women have some capacity to identify some “true nature” of potential suitors completely independent of their behaviour. It also suggests that women are acting appropriately by not avoiding PUAs. Which leads to an interesting quandary: is Joe’s “true” nature what women see before or after he learns PUA skills? Does that mean that naturally intuiting PUA skills (i.e. not having to learn them) makes a man a good catch? It’s not a simple hypothesis at all.
It’s also worth noting that not all PUA strategies are dishonest or exploitative. Some of them are nearly-common sense, and some of them are unusual but fundamentally honest.
That hypothesis is very simple but it isn’t relevant to what Silas is saying. He is objecting to misinformation directed at guys and not even commenting on what women should be expected to do.
I think this is an irrational fear, if I may say so.
While I’m not an expert on violent crime, I am fairly sure that most of it is committed by people acting on impulse, not people who have intellectually convinced themselves they are owed something. I may for instance believe and argue I am owed more money by society, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to rob a bank.
People should likewise be free to express the opinion that they are owed more sex, without that being interpreted as a threat of violence.
My understanding is that both parts are needed… to use your money example, if you feel that you’re entitled to money, and you find a wallet sitting on the sidewalk, you may impulsively decide to take the money out of it rather than return it intact, but if you don’t have that feeling of entitlement, you’re much less likely to feel the impulse in the first place to take the money out of it.
Alternately, people get an impulse to rape because their instincts drive them to reproduce. For all that it doesn’t work too well in this environment, for some reason the instincts have decided that force is the best route to reproductive success given their host’s circumstances. The rest is just noise.
But does it work well in any environment? Someone, I forget where, once argued that rape in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness—where everyone knows everyone—would just get the rapist’s skull bludgeoned in by the victim’s friends or relatives.
(Though to be fair, a number of possible circumstances where this wouldn’t be true could be imagined, I suppose...)
Off the top of my head:
1) When the rapist has sufficient status or allies to prevent negative consequences.
2) If the victim is of a rival group to that of the rapist. Different tribe. Different ‘caste’. Different party within the same tribe.
3) The social rules don’t enforce a rape taboo strongly. In many cultures rape is defended by family vengeance and not particularly by ‘justice’.
4) The consequences to women don’t make ‘reporting and punishment’ the expected outcome.
5) When ‘rape’ is defined differently to how it is defined by us. (eg. Wives, dates, underage, those under authority.)
6) If reproductive prospects look bleak the expected payoff doesn’t need to be particularly high.
Sorry, didn’t see your comment before I posted mine! You pretty much summed it up.
There are a great many circumstances where rape has low probability of retaliation. More than enough to justify it as a conditional strategy. In fact, listing out a few examples, it feels as if it’s far more often true than not! (And remember that the EEA includes the last five or ten thousand years, during which humans lived in much larger communities and genes and especially memes changed significantly.)
First, a man may rape women from another tribe—and this is ubiquitous when opportunity is present, e.g. in war. This might also contribute to behavior with total strangers in today’s society.
Second, many (older) cultures see women not as persons to be avenged but as valuable property to be guarded. If a woman is raped (and tells her relatives), and the rapist isn’t completely without connections himself, then a common outcome may be marrying the two. If a woman’s bridal value is much lowered once she is not a virgin, this is her only marriage option that brings the virginal-value. OTOH, retaliation’s only benefit is in deterrence, which isn’t immediately valuable; usually, for vengeance to take place, you need a social custom requiring vengeance—such as in ‘honor’ cultures.
Third, if the rapist is powerful enough (via relatives, money, social position), such as nobility, he can rape any lower-status woman with impunity and settle the matter with perhaps some money, or just ignore it. Some social systems explicitly allow this in law (e.g., European nobility vs. commoners).
Fourth, if there are no witnesses, many cultures’ law would not take a woman’s word over a man’s. In which case, most cultures would prevent private, illegal vengeance.
Fifth, if a man rapes his wife (or girlfriend), traditional society sees no wrong, and there is often noone to avenge her. (Most modern rapes are commited by husbands/boyfriends/dates.)
I could go on and on...
This is pretty much what I was thinking—if the societal environment is such that there’s an instinctual impression that rape is efficient, the societal environment needs to change.
I could write more about that kind of thing, but I actually have a link to an excellent blog post on the topic, so go read what Harriet has to say about it.
Are we sure of that? Is there an analysis of the contribution of rape towards inclusive genetic fitness in modern Western society?
Let us agree that neither the person interested in sex, nor any third party, may in any way compel anyone to provide sex to them. And no-one has promised to have sex and then reneged on the non-enforceable promise. Then what is the meaning of “being owed more sex”?
People aren’t obliged to speak sense, either!
I’m afraid I don’t see the relevance of this… Sorry if I missed a joke or something.
If there’s any doubt, my question was genuine, not rhetorical. I could speculate on what it might mean to be owed sex but instead I’d like to hear from others. Since people defend the freedom to express the opinion that sex is owed sometimes, I thought someone here felt that this is a meaningful opinion?
“I am owed more sex” might express an attitude of entitlement, resentment, etc., not a proposition that the speaker would draw long chains of inference from, or be able to explain how to cash out. I think this is something like wedrifid’s point.
Oh! Of course, that looks the correct reading. I’ve been silly for not understanding :-/
I disagree for most values of “obliged”.
And for certain values of “sense”.
A couple of points:
Although most crimes of battery, murder, etc. can be classified as crimes of passion, a ton of rape is “date rape”. It can take place in ambiguous circumstances, without nearly as much violence as might be anticipated. I’m therefore uncertain how well you can apply statements about violent crimes to rape in general.
Bank robbery has a higher clearance rate than rape. Many rapists are never reported, much less caught and convicted. Bank robberies are generally pretty high-profile events; it’s hard for one to go by without anyone knowing it has occurred.
The following looks like a plausible line of reasoning to me: 1. I am owed more sex from people who I’m interested in, such as Woman X. 2. Woman X will not have sex with me, and in so refraining, denies me something I am owed. 3. In general, it is appropriate to arrange to take things from people who will not give them when they are owed. For instance, if Woman X owed me five hundred dollars, I would be justified in bringing in authorities to oblige her to give me five hundred dollars. 4. The law will not compel Woman X to have sex with me. 5. When the law will not address injustices, such as failing to discharge an obligation, it is permissible for private citizens to address the injustice. 6. Compelling Woman X to have sex with me would be taking from her something that she owes me. 7. I can compel Woman X to have sex with me.
Sure, you could stop at any point in this chain of reasoning, reject some inference and avoid #7. But the subset of people who won’t, may do serious harm to poor Woman X—who never owed anyone anything.
It is your opinion that Woman X never owed anyone anything—but the fact that you (and probably most people) feel that way is not sufficient justification for making the contrary opinion (premise #1) a thought crime.
Keep in mind that among the things we are in the business of doing here are (1) critically examining ethical intuitions, and (2) proposing and exploring potential means of (ultimately) improving the world that may not necessarily strike us immediately as “tasteful”.
My feeling is that someone ought to be permitted on LW to argue, for example, that the law should compel Woman X to have sex in some circumstances. Suppose for instance that some commenter were to float the idea of sex as a form of judicially enforced community service for those convicted of certain crimes (perhaps as an alternative to incarceration). Would you consider this idea so dangerous that it ought to be censored, for fear of encouraging rape or sexual assault? I’m guessing (hoping) you wouldn’t , even though it’s clearly an example of discussing sex as an obligation, in a way quite foreign (even opposed) to the norms of our current society.
I would consider that okay (though quite distasteful) so long as it stayed very clearly hypothetical. (I suspect that such a discussion would result in a better clarification of why we consider rape unacceptable, which I’d find useful.) The original point about it being acceptable for men to consider themselves entitled to sex was clearly not hypothetical and not obviously intended to spark such a discussion.
Personally, I think prostitution should be legal and regulated, like it is in Germany. Then the utilons would be money, not punishment. Seems strange to imagine forcing criminal women to trade sex for utilons when there already are normal women who do without coercion. I also wonder what a bored woman would do that a fleshlight don’t.
We don’t need compelled sex. We need more sex toys for men!
I’d also like to point out that in one of EY’s stories, he mentioned that rape was legalized. I have a feeling that if he had chosen to expand on that and provide more of a description or a rationalization, and even if they weren’t very good or complete, no one would have been asking to censor the whole post.
Yes. Anyone should be permitted to argue anything, so long as there is a (new and reasonable) argument towards a desirable goal (and not, e.g., “that way I’d get more sex” [at the expense of women]). Lacking any such argument though, any idea such as your example should be modded down to the nether hells and torn apart in replies (and I believe would be).
I believe that such treatment, showing rape is very much against the social code, would improve the meme pool more than censoring/prohibiting mention of it—which tends to give rise to theories of secret unvoiced support for politically incorrect opinions.
Of course, if such baseless suggestions were posted more than once or twice, we might ban further pointless discussions because they’d be, well, pointless (as well as rather offtopic).
Wow. That is an out there ‘guess’. I would definitely expect attempts even here to censor that kind of thinking. I personally would not consider the suggestion dangerous. But while I wouldn’t desire censorship this may be an instance where I refrained from reacting to censorship demands and from refuting any emotive less-than rational objections. In fact, I would actually argue that scenario is rape.
I think one of us is mis-parsing what K said… as I understand it he was guessing that Alicorn would not demand that the proposed conversation be censored, not that she’d consider the proposed scenario an acceptable one, or something other than rape.
Not at all. I’m talking about my reactions and also saying I would have a different guess as to whether someone (be that Alicorn or not) would make moves in the direction of censorship. I would have been clearer if I quoted the particular statement which prompted my reply.
I wish to point out that there is an important difference between censorship and saying that something ought not to be said. Censorship is taking steps to prevent the saying of a thing, or prevent it from being readily heard by interested audience members. Saying that a thing ought to be said does not call for censorship, nor imply that censorship is called for. For instance, I do not think that people ought to tell strangers on the street to smile, and I encourage people to refrain from doing that. I do not advocate preventing anyone who wishes to ignore this encouragement from telling others to smile, nor do I want to somehow protect all possible recipients of the smiling instruction from exposure thereto.
There is a difference there and I’d like to clarify that I have been referring to the broader concept here. When I refer to ‘censorship’ I am referring to attempts to control what people are free to be speaking through political manoeuvring. I include suggestions that people should be shamed for making statements on particular topics along with suggestions that said statements should be removed from view. If there was a word that emphasised the former category rather than the latter then I would use it instead. That sort of censorship is most relevant on lesswrong and far more insidious.
At the same time, we need to be able to have this kind of discussion without censoring (by your definition) people in Alicorn’s position, either. To the best of my memory (and I’ve had a lot going on for the last few days, so I could easily have lost track of a relevant part of the conversation), Alicorn never called for anyone to be socially censured for voicing an opinion, just for us to, as we’re discussing certain topics, keep in mind that our discussions have real effects in the world.
We wouldn’t discuss the nuts and bolts of building AI here, because we consider that risky. Alicorn considers this kind of discussion to be similarly risky in some ways. She may be wrong, but until it’s actually been established that she is, I suggest the possibility be taken into consideration.
I don’t think the difference is important in this context. If you advocate that something not be said by someone who thinks it, you are advocating that the flow of accurate information be restricted, and thus—effectively—that honesty be traded off in favor of some other value. The tradeoff may or may not be worth it, but it hardly matters whether it is initiated by a commenter or by a webmaster.
I disagree. I think self-regulation is very different in character from restriction imposed from without. I also think that honesty can better be interpreted to mean “saying only true things” than “saying all true things that pop into a speaker’s head”. Saying that I think people ought not to say Q doesn’t mean that I think people ought to assert ~Q.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have used a loaded word like “honesty”. Let’s just stick with “restriction of the flow of information”. If someone believes that people should be more indulgent in granting sexual favors, or that society should address the problem (if it is a problem) of inequality in access to sex, exactly why should they refrain from saying so on this forum?
Phrased like that, no reason. Those are pretty general, safe statements. Phrased in a more one-gendered way (e.g. “women in particular should be...” “women as a group should address...”), or refined into narrower, scarier views, they shouldn’t be said for the same sorts of reasons we shouldn’t threaten to torch each other’s homes or choose this venue to express supernatural beliefs: because those ideas are frightening, disruptive, and/or sufficiently widely discredited not to be worth our time.
Interesting. So your problem seems to be with generalizing into large categories (“women”), and then perhaps putting the matter in in-group vs. out-group terms, as in “we men are owed more sex from you women”. Am I right?
As for “scary”/”frightening”, I guess I just think that the quality of this site is high enough that people ought to be given the benefit of the doubt. Certain views may be “scary” when expressed “out there”, because they signal an intention to do something bad. Here, I think we ought to be able to take more things at face value, without disclaimers.
That’s the entrance to a death spiral.
A major part of the problem in discussing these things anywhere is people saying, “But we’re smart! We’re rational! We can’t mean the nasty things you read us as saying!” But that cuts both ways. How about, “We’re rational! Therefore you should reexamine your own words!”
When everyone imagines they’re rational, rationality has left the building.
Oh come now. I didn’t say anything about our alleged superior rationality. My claim is simply that participants in this forum are statistically unlikely to be dangerous people. This is mainly a consequence of (what I perceive to be) the small size of the community . (I could be wrong about this of course.)
But the discussion has become far too abstract by now, given that what I think this comes down to is that Alicorn and I have different mental images (caricatures) of “the person who says women owe more sex to men”. I wonder if maybe Alicorn pictures some type of shady misogynist character willing to blurt the statement out loud in public (perhaps while drunk), whereas I picture a shy misunderstood “nerd” who would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community. What I was trying to say was that I thought my image was more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace.
I don’t know what else “the quality of this site” could refer to. And now you’re saying it’s the size, though I don’t see how that changes the per-individual probability of being dangerous. Collectively, my impression is that larger communities are safer, because there’s room to avoid the few nasty individuals.
Well now. Both of these imaginary characters believe that women owe them sex. The first is being blatant about it, so at least women know in advance to avoid him. The second, that you think “more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace” is the dangerous one. And you think of him as “misunderstood”. I think of him as “wrong”. As in, believing false things, things that are the opposite of true. And dangerously wrong.
If that type is indeed “more accurate, for this tiny corner of cyberspace”, no wonder there are so few women in it.
Please note that nobody on this site has actually stated that men are owed sex from women as a group. As with any such dispute as to who is ethically owed what, this would clearly be a cause of conflict; and we’re trying to avoid having such “mind-killer” discussions on Less Wrong.
It was Alicorn who made the leap (see this post), which is evidence that this meme is floating around in mainstream culture. What people were saying is that men with romantic aspirations should be empathized with, given the difficulties they may face.
Is this a “dangerously wrong” notion? Why aren’t you objecting to mainstream culture, where the kinds of implied obligations and entitlements Alicorn refers to seem to be widespread?
Well, that wouldn’t be a meaningful statement. Under the usual meanings of owing, someone has got to pay up. But women as a class can’t pay up, even if coerced, only individual women can. So this is the wrong way to describe the situation in any case.
This whole discussion started, I believe, with Robin Hanson’s recent posts on Overcoming Bias. He presented a problem (some men want, even need more sex than they can get; and society is generally unsympathetic with them) but not a solution.
However, the notions of “owing” and suggestions of influencing or coercing women were very much present in the posts Robin linked to and in various comments there. That’s not to say Robin agreed with them, of course.
Of course we’re also objecting to that part of mainstream culture. When it’s discussed here, we mention those objections here. After all the original topic was how to change mainstream culture for the better, not just our corner of it here.
No comments here have stated that men are owed sex from women as a group. The introduction of the concept was a straw man rebuttal to quoted claims and nobody has deigned to play advocate for the position, once included in the discussion. I cannot speak for the contents of posts on OvercomingBias.com.
For the record, I don’t think this is accurate. In my opinion, the concerns raised by Alicorn and others were genuine and partially justified. Sex and gender relations are contentious topics in mainstream culture; we should keep this in mind and approach them cautiously.
A somewhat greater ability (and tendency) to make statements for purposes other than signalling. I for example, often point out fallacies in comments even when they argue for positions that I support. In many cases these rebuttals could be labelled ‘frightening/scary’. If participants on LessWrong are closer in nature to myself than those in the general population are then I am less likely to take epistemic claims to be evidence of threat.
I support Kompos suggestion that significant benefit of the doubt should be given to posters when it comes to inferring danger from speaking on ‘scary/frightening’ topics. I do not believe I am owed more sex from anyone. The chain of inference ‘Wedrifid supports people being allowed to say scary things → Wedrifid believes scary things → Wedrifid is likely to do scary things → Wedrifid is dangerous’ would not be a reasonable one to make in this circumstance.
Thus signaling your rationality, which confers value in this community :-)
I do agree with this. This being a rationality discussion site, we should absolutely be allowed to argue in support of any positions we actually hold, which may turn out to be scary or not. Only when the argument has taken place can the taboo option be (in theory) considered.
The status consequences are certainly lower here than elsewhere. However, my observations suggest that this the payoff is still negative, particularly when topics of any moral significance are being discussed in the context. We aren’t that much Less Wrong.
I think a major reason why the LW community works and can derive useful insights, is that once we make rationality and objective truth our goals and deliberately associate them with higher status (via karma for instance), status seeking works in our favor.
It is certainly makes a noticeable difference compared to other communities I have been involved in with similar emphasis on intellectual pursuits (MENSA and university faculties).
The opposite of true would imply that the position makes enough sense for falsehood to neatly imply. The position is far more scrambled than that (not even wrong).
What’s your prior probability that someone reading this thread (during, say, October 2009) has committed or will commit rape or sexual assault within ten years?
I think you are being extremely judgmental. I described my hypothetical character as “misunderstood”, and indeed, here you are misunderstanding him. He’s not dangerous; you can add that to the description: “shy, misunderstood, non-dangerous...” The fact that he “would never dream of saying such a thing except anonymously in an unusually open-minded online community” was intended to illustrate his kindness and sensitivity as a human being in contrast to the boorish brute I placed him in opposition to.
And if it’s different from the probability for a randomly selected person, then why? (We should restrict selection to adult males, in both cases, for a fair comparison.) komponisto, you’ve said you think the fact someone is an LW participant reduces the probability he has or will rape. Why? Are there statistics negatively correlating rapes with IQ or something else relevant? (Not that I know, but I haven’t checked thoroughly.)
As for your misunderstood character. What does he mean when he says women owe more sex to men? What does owing mean for a class, unless there are individuals who can be said to owe?
There are negative correlations between violent crime and IQ, and also positive ones between IQ and self-control, as well as any number of other relevant factors (being well-off, for example). I’d look up some citations for you, but really, those correlations are what you would expect and are easy to find.
(To play the devil’s advocate, we could postulate that perhaps only bright male maladjusted losers post here, and the latter 2 attributes outweigh the former 2.)
I know the correlations with violent crime in general exist. We should still check the correlation for sexual assault in particular, because I don’t know how different it may be from crime in general.
Playing devil’s advocate, we assume here that some sexual assault is driven by feelings of entitlement, and rich, powerful, intelligent males tend to feel more entitled than average (and society supports those feelings in them). The powerful boss sexually assaulting his female secretary is practically a stereotype.
I haven’t the slightest idea. I also have no reason to think that it is higher, lower, or the same as the number for the members of a similarly sized SF convention, trainspotters club, or firm of chartered accountants.
You bet I am.
...invisible, inaudible, and intangible.
He thinks women owe him sex, but is “kind and sensitive” enough not to say so. I seem to feel another judgement coming on.
This imaginary geek: let us suppose he is twenty. One day he will be thirty. Fifty. Eighty, which by then may not be forty, and perhaps he can expect another half century more. Imagine for me this geek in the prime of life at eighty. What has he done in the last sixty years? Is he still whining about not getting any?
I consider your attitude dangerous. Judgement is not without consequence and a readiness to do so based on very weak evidence is a trait I consider undesirable.
Why? How is this supposed to work?
So you’re saying that the only relevant difference, and the reason men in this community are less likely to actually rape women, is that they’re more shy? And maybe don’t get drunk in public?
I’m aware that’s probably not what you meant, but it’s the literal meaning of your words. You need a better argument in favor of what seems to be your actual position—“people interested and/or adept in rationality are less likely to rape out of a sense of entitlement”.
I agree with Richard—and you have yet to present an actual argument for your position. Not just that you feel the people here are “high quality”.
My position? Let’s remember what Alicorn said:
My position, if position I have, is that Alicorn is wrong to be frightened by that line of thinking. In general (that is, not necessarily with regard to sex), it’s a perfectly reasonable leap to make, whether or not we ourselves would make it. Compare:
-Person to beggar: “Aw, I feel bad that you have trouble obtaining money.” ⇒ “Aw, someone should give you money”/”Aw, people should give more to charity”.
In a case like that, we don’t usually consider the drawing of that implication to be dangerous or frightening. We may consider it incorrect, for example if we think that giving money to beggars has a net negative impact on society; but even so we usually consider the person making the leap a (misguided) bleeding-heart liberal, not a promoter of “evil behaviors, up to and including armed robbery”.
Now, what I would want to fight against, so to speak, is the imposition of a taboo on making analogous arguments in the realm of sex (presumably because of a special human anxiety about that subject). Let those arguments be right or wrong, let the analogy hold or fail to hold, let sex be different or the same; but the thoughts should not be discouraged from being spoken.
Do I really need to defend myself beyond this?
That’s a tangent. You said it was more wrong to be frightened here on LW, than in general; that the people here were more trustworthy. That’s the claim you need to substantiate. I’m not expressing any opinion on the taboo discussion, it’s been talked about enough in other comment sub-threads.
I hear that in the US there are some people who view government-mandated redistribution of money from the rich to the poor (i.e. social support) very much like evil, armed robbery...
No, that was the tangent, actually. I didn’t expect that remark to be picked up and seized upon as a controversial claim. I expected the contrary arguments to run “Yes, of course no one here is a rapist, but even so we still shouldn’t have people saying X because...”
If you don’t share my intuition that proportionally fewer rapes occur in the context of academic conferences and philosophy club meetings than sporting events and bars, then we’ll just have to refer to statistical data to find out who is right.
But in either case, I consider the taboo discussion to be more interesting/important, belabored though it may be.
That’s the controversial claim, all right.
I don’t share your intuition, but it wouldn’t matter if I did. We LW should be frightened of having intuitions for which we can’t, on reflection, give any supporting evidence! And automatically considering your in-group to be of higher virtue or above suspicion is a very well known and widespread human bias. That’s why we picked on your claim.
I’m more likely to be merely surprised. I can think of supporting evidence for just about any intuition.
You do not. The demand for proof was not consistent with the flow of the discussion. Your reasoning was clear in your initial post and sufficient for purposes of conversation. Furthermore, accepting the burden of proof to be on your point would be innapropriate.
For the original discussion about taboos, I agree completely. My requests for proof were about komponisto’s comment that
That was in the other subthread so perhaps this is my fault for replying to the wrong comment. The two threads have been referencing each other quite a lot though.
Thanks for that clarification. It seems the more Kompo refines these claims the less I agree with them.
I would argue that people on this forum are significantly more likely to be dangerous. For my part I consider myself to be far more resourceful than the average person and would take offence at a claim that I am not dangerous. Furthermore, I suggest the people here are much more likely to form their morals for reasons other than whatever works best in their social environment. That more or less means “off the rails”.
Maybe you’re right. But, as I indicated elsewhere, I don’t think that that was the most important issue. I’m more interested in the censorship/taboo discussion.
Really? How are government tax collectors any different than armed robbers, on the relevant dimensions? After all, governments love to trot out “giving money to the poor” as a rationale for taking your money, don’t they?
(And no, the fact that the requirement to pay taxes is imposed by statute, or that the IRS labels your compliance with their policies as “voluntary” are not relevant dimensions)
I have problems with generalizing over groups smaller than “people in general” and with othering, yes.
Don’t you just hate those groupgeneralizers?
I would like it if I could stop people having (or at least expressing) an attitude of entitlement. Unfortunately it is easier to condemn such thoughts in low status people than high. It’s the high status people with entitlement that are the real danger. They’ll, say, take over the country. That sort of thing.
I do not believe that most rapists stop, before the act, to justify it by an elaborate rational chain. Even if they come up with it afterwards, when accused, I don’t think it can be called the cause of the rape. At most you could say it’s an enabler, but I’m not even convinced of that.
The real problem that I see is that people saying things like this may effectively support publicly accused rapists, in the courts and in public debates. (Which does not mean that’s what these people mean or want!) And this effect on “public” opinion causes an increases in rapes. (Or prevents a decrease, rather.)
As far as I can see (and in line with Hansonian explanation styles :-), a better and simpler explanation of rapes is that rapists don’t expect to be condemned or punished by others. And not that they can prove to themselves it’s a permissible act under some ethical system.
Further, false accusations of rape give cover to actual rapists. Because it’s credible that Kobe Bryant was falsely accused, he can buy off his accuser for (to him) a small amount of money.
You don’t see too many false accusations of bank robbery :)
This isn’t a clean dichotomy. Verbal argument might help to maintain and strengthen someone’s feelings of entitlement, resentment, and rage, until these feelings reach the point of motivating a rape (or any kind of violent act) that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred.
Unless I missed it, this is a claim no one has made. There is a very clear distinction between spreading memes that increase the likelihood of violence and making a threat. Obviously claims of desert don’t necessarily entail a threatening violence to take the deserts- but that doesn’t mean popularizing some memes doesn’t have bad consequences. This is fairly basic memetics and how we account for a great deal of behavior. There might also be some positive consequence to spreading such memes but so far no one has argued that claiming loveless men are owed more sex will actually lead to any kind of beneficial change.
This is a very good clarification. Something can be dangerous without actually being a threat, and in fact the response here has been what I’d expect for an indirect danger—I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t usually stick around to try to educate someone who’s actually threatening me, or causing me to be in immediate danger.
Think of it as the difference between teaching people to hotwire cars, and actually stealing them—the former might not actually harm the car owners in question, but they’re unlikely to think kindly of someone who does it.
Let me again quote from Alicorn’s comment:
The comment clearly expresses the fear that someone who says or thinks they are owed more sex from women—and, keep in mind, that could be something along the lines of “I don’t think that women are doing their part in alleviating the suffering I feel as a result of not having access to sex”—may be led to “evil behaviors, up to and including rape”. I think that -- at least in the context of this site—that fear is unfounded, perhaps even slightly on the paranoid side. (Of course I hesitate to say a thing like that, as an anxiety sufferer, throwing stones from my glass house!) In any case I feel reasonably confident in asserting that neither Alicorn nor anyone else stands more than an infinitesimally small chance of being raped by a lonely Less Wrong participant holding the above misguided opinion. Indeed (and to answer some other commenters), I suspect that the proportion of potential rapists among the people who hold that opinion is probably so small that even if all rapes were attributable to the holding of that opinion by the perpetrator, that still wouldn’t justify censoring the opinion itself (and thereby failing to even consider the question of whether lack of access to sex is a legitimate ethical problem worth solving).
This is also a larger debate (about whether and how to stop the spread of memes which may have harmful effects) which transcends the specific issues here. It applies even to memes that are definitely good in some contexts, e.g. atheism.
Robin Hanson implies this—or at least raises the question—quite regularly. See here for the most recent example.
Do you mean social skills which are used (almost) exclusively for these purposes? Most social skills are general, and in fact are more important to have than narrowly applicable ones.
More to the point, this thought is wrong. (I agree that it feels unpleasant, but I don’t know how much it actually leads to such behavior vs. being used to explain it afterwards.)
Good point, to be extent that the insights I’ve gained from resources intended for developing dating skills have been far more useful for life in general than specifically with women.
I like what you say here and agree that people believing they are ‘owed’ something in social interactions and particularly those related to mating is absurd.
I don’t know how much such ungranted feelings of entitlement encourage rape. Honestly, I’ve a great faith in the ability of humans to rationalise whatever they do and suspect other claims would flow just as easily. But I do know that belief that you are owed something by the universe is a recipe for failure in general. More so from women who quite reasonably feel this as ‘creepy’ and guys as ‘pathetic’.
I think it is justifiable in some interactions (not in mating). I feel that people owe it to me to behave with a minimum of politeness towards me. Certain social interactions impose a much higher standard, e.g. salesmen who walk up to me uninvited owe it to me to be very polite indeed and never to argue with me (“customer is always right”).
I agree with what you’re saying. The way I like to frame it is that I have expectations that people behave with a minimum of politeness towards me. I don’t so much bother with considering other parts of the universe to ‘owe me something’ since that is futile. Instead I consider my social boundaries to be part of myself and something I am responsible for enforcing for no other reason than because I want to.
I’m not expressing an opinion on the actual issue, but this is somewhat a strawman. The more defensible version of the argument is that some land is owned by particular, sometimes identifiable Palestinians.
Yeah, I know. As I typed the example, I was thinking “this is a lousy example but I have no superior ones at the moment”. Any suggestions for a replacement?
A wealthy person being told he owes money to the government, or to the poor? It could even be someone who won the lottery (the way attractive people won the genetic lottery). But then is taxing lottery winners analogous to forcing women into sex? There’s another implication here as well, in that if taxation isn’t theft then forced promiscuity doesn’t seem to be rape. In retrospect, a most unpleasant analogy that thankfully breaks down under a more nuanced view of property (wish I had more time to refine this comment).
Well, if Alicorn was an Israeli settler in the Gaza Strip, then people around her might well feel entitled to the land beneath her house. And she might definitely have some reason to worry about it. That’s kind of a “tribal” attitude really, but it’s what the issue is all about.
People who argue that a wife owes obedience to her husband. And incidentally sex.
Using a sex example would kind of ruin the point of having an analogy at all.
You’re right. How about: people who claim I owe three years’ servitude at risk of life and limb, in the service of “my country”.
(Actually, that should be “owed”, because they did get what they wanted. But that distracts from the analogy.)
That might be analogous, but I have never lived in any location that drafts women and I have an unusually strong negative reaction to the idea of military service in general, and so I can’t know for sure.
Israel does, although it’s possible for women to get out of it if they really try.
Then the analogy serves it’s purpose, doesn’t it?
Not precisely. I don’t have an intense negative reaction to the idea of sex in general, after all.
Military service is generally understood to be coercive, so you’re right to have a negative reaction to it (and so do I). Volunteer-only armies are extremely rare exceptions—far more rare than rape is compared to sex.
Really? I suspect a lot of young Americans would view the idea of coerced military service as another one of those bizarre practices from the distant past.
Israelis have a different perspective.
I realize that. In fact I was specifically calling attention to the difference in perspectives.
Well, then, the analogy should describe more explicitly the idea of coercive military service. That should serve to scare people as intended :-)
Incidentally, we have on-and-off political and media wrangles about abolishing the draft here in Israel. Service in actual combat units is already volunteer only anyway, everyone else goes to “battlefield support” and desk jobs.
The biggest argument, sometimes the only argument, brought out in favor of keeping the draft is that it’s good for us (the young soldiers) to suffer for a few years. Creates strong character, and so on. Or as the (old male) politicians sometimes put it, “we did it, why shouldn’t they?”
This reminds me a lot of all those people who try their best to find an explanation of why universal death is in fact a good thing and necessary for us to remain “truly human” and it would be evil to try and become immortal. They, too, currently rule the media and perhaps the popular consensuses on the subject.
Of course the real explanation is simpler. We’ll have the draft for as long as the parliament and government is made up in large part of retired generals; and the army’s high command is made up almost entirely of elite (volunteer) combat unit veterans; and people actually being drafted cannot influence the decision, not even by voting in the general elections. (Right to vote is granted at age 18. The draft is also at age 18, or when you finish highschool. General elections are every four years, so almost everyone votes for the first time during or after their army service.)
You know, I once saw someone argue that the single greatest tool the Mormons have for their legendary retention rates is their policy of having everyone go overseas or somewhere to do missionary work for a couple years; the idea being that spending years dealing with hostile or apathetic infidels will, by sheer cognitive dissonance, turn the missionary into a fanatic. Somewhat like those psychology experiments where the more you argue for a position & hear arguments against it, the more you brainwash yourself into believing it.
This would seem to be a useful tool for anyone wishing to preserve the military state of Israel.
Mormon missions do not always take place overseas, and they aren’t required of everyone. (It’s a social expectation of men, but still optional even for them, and very much a voluntary thing for women.)
Point taken; should I have said ‘policy of having many or most Mormon men and some women go far away’? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that materially weakens the ‘Stockholm syndrome effect’, as it were, the possible utility of making everyone serve in the military.
(And it may be a social expectation but I wonder how important the distinction between expectation and policy/law is; when I was a Catholic, we were told clearly that confirmation was optional—yet not one of us felt that we had the genuine option to not be confirmed, and so all of us were.)
Confirmation in Catholicism is administered to children, who are less free to reject social expectations than most adults. Mormon missionaries have all reached the age of majority, and while there may be social consequences, they’re a bit farther removed than “disappointment of parents on whom one is unavoidably materially dependent”. I personally know multiple adult Mormon men who never went on a mission.
It was the “Really?” that threw me off. To me it seemed to invite a “Yes, really,” reply.
Which only goes to show that they don’t read their own history books about drafts, or newspapers about stop-loss policies and the National Guard deployments.
Some may not read history, but it doesn’t follow from what I said. They may know very well that the draft existed in the past.
(I’ve noticed that a lot of people old enough to remember e.g. Vietnam have trouble accepting that we’re in a different historical era now; they often speak in a way that suggests they think the draft could easily be brought back, when in fact the political reality is such that that’s extremely unlikely.)
National Guard service is voluntary, and stop-loss concerns people already signed up.
The draft still exists.
As for how difficult it would be to put it back into operation, that’s hard to say; consider how many people thought a black man would not be president this side of 2100. The right question is how difficult it would be to get into a war or other national emergency which could make use of the draft; in such situations, the preferences of young people are irrelevant.
As for National Guard and stop-loss: you have a very strange idea of coercion if you think stop-loss isn’t it. There may be a clause in their contracts saying something about contracts being extended indefinitely, but that strikes me as like signing a contract to sell yourself into slavery.
Stop-loss itself is coercion, but it’s coercion applied to those already in the military. Citing the (current, contingent) existence of stop-loss policies doesn’t support the idea that military service is inherently coerced. You may as well cite the fact that military personnel have to follow orders (also obviously coercion).
You’re right, military enrollment is not inherently and always coercive; many countries have volunteer-only armies.
For purposes of scaring people with an analogy for “entitlement” rape, we can use the following scenario: your worst enemy, who looks a little like you when he wears a wig, has signed an 8 year irrevocable combat unit contract in your name. It “only looks like” your signature? Tell that to the military police kicking down your door...
Here’s a contract I’d like you to sign; you work for me for 8 years, but at any time I can change any provision in any way, and if you don’t conform to my changes exactly, I can execute you.
If this is not coercion, then apparently a contract legitimizes anything whatsoever. I’m not prepared to dive that far down the libertarian rabbit-hole, but maybe you are.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I specifically said that stop-loss is coercion. Are you trying to get me to defend stop-loss?
I am not prepared to dive down any political rabbit-hole, because this isn’t a political discussion. Whether stop-loss is an ethical policy or not is completely irrelevant; the point was that it doesn’t make the U.S. like Israel, or France (until a few years ago), or indeed the U.S. circa 1970. In those countries, people are/were forced to enter the military, not just to stay in once they’re already in.
Once we’ve clearly established that stop-loss is coercion, I’m done. You want to show that the US is not like Israel? Consider this:
the US today freely trafficks in coercion whenever it feels it is needed, with minimal public outcry, and what outcry there is is due solely to the affected parties
the infrastructure for the draft is still in place, and dissolving it has been specifically resisted by even Democratic administrations like Clinton
after 9/11, there were several public statements in support of the draft, such as this op-ed by Senator Rangels (“Bring Back the Draft”, who submitted legislation to that effect, as did Senator Hollings
the sole justification offered by mainstream draft opponents is that it’s not needed, which is obviously not a repudiation of the draft at all (see http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/us/military-draft-official-denials-leave-skeptics.html ):
And once stop-loss is permissible & precedent, draft is just more of the same, a point so obvious the reporter includes it:
So, the US is culturally accepting, has the means, has the experience—but it just doesn’t have the need (like Israel does).
To make an inflammatory analogy, if an American were to claim to not be like Israel or France in this respect, I would put as little credence in that as I would the claim of a child molester that he’s not a rapist because he just flies to Thailand and hires a child prostitute.
(As for your claim this isn’t about politics: stop-loss and the draft are politics. What a government should do to/with its citizens is the very heart of politics; I can’t imagine what else politics could be.)
This seems to be a political hobby-horse of yours; clearly you don’t like stop-loss and think it may lead to a draft in the future. But making political points like that is not what this thread is for. I simply pointed out to DanArmak that the U.S. doesn’t currently practice conscription—which is true—and thus it is a hasty claim that military service is “generally understood to be coercive”. DanArmak later acknowledged that a number of countries (not just the U.S., so you can pick another example if you like) have volunteer forces.
Again, stop-loss may be unethical or otherwise bad policy, it may even facilitate some future draft, but not all bad things are the same. Not even if one leads to another. There is no need to obscure the manifest difference between the militaries of Israel and the U.S. by rhetorical posturing about how stop-loss is in the same moral category as outright conscription. It’s an off-topic distraction.
I don’t intend to continue this political discussion further, but since I did happen to say that there was little political will in the U.S. for a draft, and since your latest comment could be read as an attempted refutation of that claim, I will make the following points before withdrawing:
There is no “Senator Rangels”. The op-ed you linked to was written by Representative (not Senator) Charles Rangel, incidentally the same man currently under investigation for tax violations. His call for a draft was widely seen at the time as pure political grandstanding against the war in Iraq (specifically an attempt to make a point about public support of the war—presumably the public would not support it to the point of tolerating a draft).
Members of Congress regularly make all kinds of public statements in support of this or that. You can no doubt find members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have made public statements in favor of reparations for slavery. That doesn’t mean the idea has any actual political traction. You would have to be very naive about American politics to regard mere pronouncements by congressmen as anything more than very weak information about what policies have a chance of being enacted. Most of it is pure signaling.
The fact that the draft was not reinstituted despite being talked about is evidence in my favor. It isn’t a politically popular idea. Yes, if it were ever necessary it would of course be brought back (essentially by definition of “necessary”), but it was not regarded as necessary after 9/11, even with two subsequent wars. By contrast, forty years ago, it was apparently regarded as necessary to draft people into fighting a war in Vietnam which was not prompted directly or indirectly by an attack on the U.S. mainland.
The quotes you cite make my case, not yours. E.g. “”Neither Mr. Korb nor Professor Burk believes that compulsory service will be reinstituted without mobilization of a scale far beyond anything now needed.”″
The infrastructure for the draft is not currently in place. What is still in place is the legal (i.e. statutory) authority, plus a list of people who are eligible to be drafted (the “Selective Service” registry). Actually implementing the draft would require significant organizational changes in the Pentagon bureaucracy, which would resist them like all bureaucracies resist all major changes. (Or so I am told by a DoD employee who should know.)
This is all I have to say on this topic.
My mistake; I confused him with the Republican senator. (And I’d point out that if the tax violation thing is an attempt to discredit Rangel, that he can still be in office only points to his influence, even if you are unfamiliar with his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means committee.)
Which is why I specifically mentioned the 2 different pieces of submitted legislation.
I’m not sure what your point is here. They used the draft because that was how they got the troops they wanted: Vietnam peaked at something like 500,000 US troops deployed, while as far as I can tell, Iraq has never hosted even a third of that, peaking at 160,000. And the latter with a more populous America too (180 million in the ’60s to 300 million now).
Then why has it never been repudiated? Why are the laws still effective & the registry maintained? For such a politically suicidal idea, as you seem to think it, it’s surprisingly present. The Democrats have plenty of time to pander to even tiny constituencies like paying veterans benefits to allied Filipinos from WWII, but they can’t get rid of something that is supposed to be universally despised?
Face it: what the American people opposes is the use of the draft for specific conflicts like bombing Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. The general idea is fine by them. And the quotes you think make your case, make mine: not one of them opposes the draft in general—just using it right now. Mere historical contingency. Not principles.
The problem is that, after Vietnam, America will oppose the draft for pretty much any war that isn’t directly defensive, i.e. a retaliation to an attack or overt declaration of war. With the development of modern media, wars have become much, much harder to wage. The only way you’d see a draft in the US is if we waged a massive defensive ground war. This isn’t going to happen, because technology has progressed too much. The only thing you’re really going to need a lot of ground troops for is an occupation, and occupations are not defensive.
It’s not impossible, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that someone would pick a fight with the US that would require troops in numbers needed to justify a draft. Particularly when you consider that any such attack would hugely boost volunteering and thus reduce the need for a draft; look at what 9/11 did.
So compulsive military service is quite possible in the case of a rather clear national emergency. Compulsive military service in a muddier, vaguely-preventative war seems extremely unlikely, even if it could theoretically be enacted. Damn near anything could theoretically be enacted, though, so this is hardly a useful point.
[I admit I can’t quite find how this thread originated, so I may be slightly off topic; for some reason it does not show in the comments in the original post.]
Vietnam didn’t start with a draft either, IIRC.
They used to be. But institutions adapted. Do you remember the run-up to the Iraq war? You could drive a truck through the arguments for invading (I remember being particularly unimpressed by the aluminum tubes & audio recordings), yet the media was so supine that even arch-liberal papers like the New York Times drank the kool-aid so deeply they would apologize later. And then there are things like embedded reporters, or those Pentagon pundits (forgotten about them? I wouldn’t be surprised.).
No, in this Gotterdammerung for newspapers, we cannot look to them to stop wars & drafts.
So you agree with me, then, that the American people philosophically accepts coercion like the draft, it’s just that we don’t observe any recent drafts because the specific circumstances that would make it useful are, due to historical & technological contingency, rare? :)
We’re nested too far down to appear on the main page; you’d have to click ‘more comments’.
Prediction: no military draft in the United States before 2020 (>= 95% confidence).
Not to mention that signatures on a contract are easy to fake, and the (military) witnesses of signing are often not interested in a recruit walking free.
Wikipedia has more.
But, yeah, it’s deceptive at best.
Back during World War 1, the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to the military. In the context of ruling about the constitutionality of the draft, they devoted one paragraph to the Thirteenth Amendment issue:
In other words, they said that they don’t want it to apply, so it doesn’t.
I’ve heard that lifetime incidence of being raped for women is about 3% worldwide. I expect it’s considerably less in orderly societies. I definitely consider that high enough that were I a woman, rape would come to mind when thinking of frustrated males.
That said, there are a lot of steps between approaching women out of sexual interest, and rape. I imagine anyone capable of being reached by anti-rape arguments is not a psychopath; I also imagine that only psychopaths actually rape.
I’m also reminded of the recent woman-killer who brought a gun to his gym. Apparently he really did feel that (young?) women as a class owed him some level of sexual validation. It’s true that this is rubbish thinking.
Except for some form of therapy+prostitution that doesn’t exist except in science fiction, I don’t see any help for men who go berserk to the extent of raping+killing in response to general rejection except certainty of punishment, which is any case useless against those who’ve already decided to off themselves. Perhaps a more convenient and self-only way of killing themselves could be made available.
I really doubt this; surely acculturation against (or for) rape has an effect.
Agreed; implicit context was a society where rape is punished.
That’s much lower than the estimates I usually see. E.g., the Wikipedia article Estimates of sexual violence quotes a self-reported rate of 14.8% lifetime incidence among U.S. women, not counting failed rape attempts. This refers to this study[1], which quotes two previous studies with similar results, and also estimates a 22% lifetime incidence rate under a broader definition of sexual assault.
There are whole countries out there where the rape incidence in any single year is far above 3%. Even putting “unstable” countries and temporary situations (those lasting one generation or less) aside, there are many societies where the structure of marriage is such that we ought to estimate a daily incidence of rape, perhaps far above 50%.
[1] Tjaden P, Thoennes N. Full report of the prevalence, incidence and consequences of violence against women: findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington, DC, National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2000 (NCJ 183781).
I wonder where I read 3% (it was very recent) - unfortunately all I can see now are order-of-magnitude higher estimates for what i presume is the broader category of “sexual assault”.
You’re right.
I found my “source”—it was a blog comment
I’ve seen 4-10% elsewhere.
That comment uses the figure quoted by the previous comment. But look at the pdf linked there for the UN report—that’s not a number of rapes, that’s a number of “crimes recorded in criminal police statistics!” No wonder it’s much lower than the real figure. (I don’t even know if it includes all reports/accusations or just counts found guilty by a court.)
Incidentally that document is missing some of the more interesting statistics for the US, while it has them for other countries. “Rape average prison sentence served” is one.
I’ve heard considerably higher quoted statistics for “sexual assault” (one in four women, it is said, will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime). I don’t know what percentage of sexual assault cases are “actual” rape, though all things that fall under the sexual assault umbrella are frightening.
Don’t think that, unless in so thinking, you also think that “a psychopath” can be a functional, indistinguishable member of society who you’d never once know even through extended association unless he happened to tell you about that one time at that frat party (or whenever).
This. I know or have known three people who survived rapes and were comfortable enough with me to tell me details of the situations. One was in a mental institution, and was raped by the staff—I don’t know much about the details in that situation, but the person or people involved were indistinguishable enough to be employed in that situation. Another friend was assaulted by her twin brother when they were teenagers; other than that, to hear her talk about him he doesn’t sound psychopathic at all. The situation I know the most about involves a friend who, as a teenager, passed out from hunger in the presence of a male acquaintance—almost a 1:1 correspondence with the ‘lost wallet’ scenario. We’ve talked at some length about him, since he tried to get back in touch with her recently, and while he has quite the sense or entitlement and is in denial about the situation, he’s pretty definitely not a psychopath. (Unless I’m very much misremembering my research on psychopathy, psychopaths don’t do denial in the same way he was doing it, if at all.)
Completely correct. I speak not just from reading about it, but also from knowing one woman (that I know of) who was assaulted and the case quite clearly did not involve psychopaths. It involved a gang of ordinary teenage boys egging each other on when she was in their power.
Rape is (statistically) normal human male behavior, and is not correlated with any diagnosable psychological or physiological condition that I know of.
I do indeed think psychopaths aren’t readily detected.
Yeah, exactly. So these efforts are wasted on me, since after all, I’m not a psychopath. Why, if I could push a button that would KILL all the psychopaths, I’d do it!
Wait...
I finally read the linked scenario. It’s fun, but I’m not sure what to take from it.
It’s scary to imagine people really believing in overarching arbitrary rules that a sane person would only consider in hypothetical philosophy play. I guess some religions encourage it, but thankfully they usually come with enough hypocrisy or compartmentalization to avoid the fearful consequence.
Heh, I was just trying to be funny, not even really trying to relate to your post.
Personally, I just think the very idea of the psychopath button scenario is funny: “Yes, I’d love to be responsible for the death of all mass-murderers … no, wait, that makes me a …”
There is certainly a degree of irony. But pushing that button out of moral concerns proves that you are not a psychopath, irrespective of whether it is an immoral act.
Sadly, this is not true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_surrogate
That seems entirely off-base to me.