People generally treat criticisms of one’s own group differently from criticisms of other groups, though which is considered to be more acceptable varies. …
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don’t mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
“I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?”
Right?
I’m sorry, but the genetic argument is ridiculous. Even 500 years would be a preposterously short amount of time for a selection pressure this weak to have a significant effect, …
Phrasing my point in terms of a gene pool might be imprecise, but there are relevant effects at all the relevant levels.
For one thing, the genetic effects are augmented by memetic effects. That is, it’s not that there’s just a “disrepect women” gene that is being selected for. It’s that children will learn from their parents, even if they don’t say, “Hey, you’ve got to ignore women who tell you to go away.”
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
So there are enough natural selection-related effects that even if you ignore the purely genetic effects—which as you point out, are going to be minimal—that we do have to worry about the propagation of disrespectful men as a result of respectful men not using all the effective strategies that the former use.
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
I’ve realized the same issue myself. At least, the “dating pool dominated by disrespectful men” part. It may not currently be the case that women believe that their only option is a disrespectful man. But I have noticed that some women seem to conflate high levels of care for their comfort and consent with wimpiness or a lack of masculinity.
If scrupulous men restrain themselves out of deontological moral principles, even if it’s the “right” thing to do, what is the effect on the larger system? The effect is that our good little deontologists may select themselves out of the dating pool, leaving only men who are less scrupulous. That’s good for women, how, exactly?
Silas is right that the incentive structure is broken. There are incentives for men to engage in advances that take risks with women’s comfort levels (high-risk, high-reward), to fulfill common female preferences for excitement or being “swept off their feet.” I’m not completely sold on Silas’ specific example, because I don’t think that on average there is a great benefit to pursuing past a rejection on an approach, but I think these double-binds occur in other areas (for instead, asking permission for a kiss). The problem is that for men to “disarm” themselves of such behavior, it puts them at a pragmatic disadvantage vs. men who don’t, at least with typical heterosexual women (so if you’re a geeky woman reading this, remember that this criticism is probably not about you).
Another problem is that women who respond in a way that incentivizes men taking risks with their comfort levels is that their responses “vote” for a set of norms that is counter to the interests of other women. If it’s correct that the majority of women respond this way, then we may be seeing a tyranny of the majority where their needs for certain male behaviors and outlooks dominate the needs of other women. It’s tempting to suggest that women get together for a big pow-pow, and come up with a unified set of norms for how they like to be approached, or at least with ways to signal their preference sets in advance… then get back to men. Of course, that’s impossible in the real world.
From the perspective of morality, we tend to look at the agents of a morally-questionable behavior, which are men in this case. Yet on a societal level, it’s just not going to work very well to try to persuade people to throw away utility for an above-average level of scruples that people they are interacting with don’t really seem to care about. To actually change society, it is necessary to look at the patterns of incentives that people are under, and the source of the incentives. In other words, we need to think more like economists and psychologists, and less like moral philosophers.
I like the careful way you’ve picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I’m wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says “no” once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don’t stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there’s no way for the entire female gender to go “oh, crap! We don’t like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!” Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to “succeed”. Yes, this is a horror story; but I’m not actually sure it doesn’t resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
It’s fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that’s right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population’s changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around.
Although I have said “chooser” and “chosen” wherever possible, the terms map onto female and male in most species. Male choice does occur, however, in monogamous (or quasi-monogamous) species like sea horses and humans, where both mates have a similar interest in their brood and are willing to spend time assessing, and being assessed by, potential mates. A very few species thoroughly reverse the usual pattern, making females compete for access to males. Mormon cricket females in food-poor areas actually fight to obtain males’ packages of edible sperm, while the coy males refuse about half the copulations they are offered. Among jacanas, a lily-trotting waterbird, males incubate the eggs while females fight with one another and guard their current males. Moorhen females are larger and brighter than males and more likely to fight and court. Small moorhen males are actually in better condition than big ones, and spend more time incubating. Females compete most for small fat males!
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That’s the bit that some men get so bitter about—from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the “nice guys” out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and “society” at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards “bad boys”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it’s silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion… which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
I, personally, can’t have more then a trivial effect on “the success of the ones who say ‘no’ and don’t mean it,” but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
Yup. And I’m not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it’s the only “moral” solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
Yup. And not just boycotting for “lying” (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women’s comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that’s fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
“Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn’t believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!”
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don’t have problematic preferences sets, doesn’t make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I’d want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don’t lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer “never” I say “never”, and if I mean “not now” I will say “not now”. This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of “never” but later behave as if they’d said “not now”, and vice versa.
I can see why that would be troubling as well. While User:Alicorn has provided clear reasoning why a human could reasonably turn down apey things—just as I might turn down paperclips in the right circumstances—it still does not make sense to claim you desire no paperclips, when you simply want to take possession of the paperclips later.
Apes often use words to achieve their goals, not just to make true information known. Claiming a falsehood may be beneficial. The ape may not even understand that it’s making a false claim. For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it). But even though such behavior is advantageous for individual female apes, ape society as a whole could benefit from denouncing it.
For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it).
The antecedent doesn’t seem likely to be true to me: wouldn’t a high value male have lots of opportunities for mating, and thus not bother wasting time persisting in the face of someone who doesn’t seem interested?
Grossly simplified, it works like this. If you’re a low-value woman, you won’t be testing a high-value man for persistence. If you’re a high-value woman, a high-value man will still need persistence to get you. So being persistent doesn’t hurt the man in either case.
Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it was in the middle of manufacturing a larger batch via a process that could not safely be interrupted, but want the opportunity to recur when it was finished; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that the offerer would, contingent on its acceptance, destroy a larger number of paperclips, but want the opportunity to recur when the destroyable paperclips were in the safe zone; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that, by acting unpredictably/as though it has high standards for numbers of paperclips an offer must include to be accepted, it would be offered more paperclips.
All of these scenarios have analogues to primate acceptance of offers to mate. (“I’m taken”; “he looks like he’d cause negative utility to me”; “I can’t just take every offer that comes by or people will think I’m a slut and nobody decent will want me”.)
The most relevant scenario, however, is not one that would cause Clippy to reject paperclips under analogous circumstances. Clippy values paperclips qua paperclips and is less picky about them than the typical human is about romantic/sexual relationships. I can’t think of a reason Clippy would reject an offer of paperclips when accepting wouldn’t result in other paperclips being destroyed or not made and when the transfer of paperclips could be kept a secret. However, primates are often acting in accordance with their values in turning down clandestine, low-risk sexual relationships while single.
Please regard this as responsive to the substance of Alicorn’s sibling post:
“The reason that men (who care about women) can’t ‘just’ obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren’t as respectful to women … as I’ve said about six times now.
“The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more. This suffices to prevent disrespectful men from saturating the dating pool. Women, for their part, can ‘opt out’ of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons).”
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Silas, if you can’t address Alicorn directly, then it’s probably not best to address her indirectly by asking me to pass an argument along to her. (Update: Thanks for changing your language to make your post more clearly directed towards me.)
However, I’m planning my own reply to Alicorn, and if you think there is a point that I am leaving out, or something that needs to be emphasized, I invite you to reply to me personally either in the thread (if your reply is framed as a communication to me rather than to Alicorn) or by PM. If I agree with an argument that you pose to me, or convince me that a certain point needs more emphasis, then such an argument might naturally find it’s way into my discourse not just with Alicorn, but in general.
The reason that men (who care about women) can’t ‘just’ obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren’t as respectful to women … as I’ve said about six times now.
Agreed. Well, there are ways to be successful while acting consistently with the stated preferences of some women, but it still requires a bunch of work-arounds and a greater level of attraction.
The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more.
Well, in the short term, yes. But if more men start pursuing in an aggressive way, then there is more competition, which could create incentive to pursue more aggressively than other men. On the other hand, there could be a ceiling on how much aggressiveness in advances can be successful. This sounds like an empirical question.
There are some cultures where men pursue women very aggressively in ways easily cause street harassment, and it’s plausible that these norms occurred through a run-away process where men had to one-up each other in terms of aggressiveness.
Women, for their part, can ‘opt out’ of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons).”
Theoretically, yes. But there are some additional practical considerations given that women have preferences for masculine, culturally successful men. It could be that in a certain culture, what is considered “masculine” mating behavior also risks making women uncomfortable a large proportion of the time. Unattractive men who exhibit that behavior are considered an annoyance. Attractive men who exhibit that behavior are accepted as mates. Men who do not exhibit that behavior in the first place are considered unattractive, and end up as rejected and invisible, because the women don’t see they as appropriately masculine and attractive in the first place. This is truly a lose-lose situation for both genders.
From a practical standpoint, women can demand that men make advances in less aggressive ways, and reject them for displaying too much aggression. Yet from a psychological perspective, it might be harder to get mainstream heterosexual women to do that, because it would mean going for guys who don’t display culturally masculine courtship behaviors that those women may associate with attractiveness, and it would mean rejecting guys who are attractive to them.
Maybe mainstream heterosexual women can just “get over” this psychology if they are educated about the effect of their aggregate choices on cultural norms… but maybe it’s not that easy.
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Please just reply directly, instead of making these kinds of comments. No one (except Eliezer) has the authority to tell you not to reply to someone’s comment on an open comment section.
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don’t mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
“I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?”
Right?
You’re right, I don’t mean that. I would say, rather, that the burden of conscientiousness is greater when one is criticizing a group to which one does not belong; dangerous thoughts and all that. My problem was not with what you were saying, necessarily, but that the manner in which you said it ignored this burden of conscientiousness. If you had said, “I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?” I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
Why do you make the bolded assumption? In cultures where long-term monogamous relationships are the norm, dating capability annihilates itself by taking those who possess it off the market.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. And yet the past fifty years have displayed the opposite trend: there is much more belief now that women should expect/demand a certain level of respect from their romantic partners. Whether or not this is acted upon proportionately (and while I suspect that it is, I have neither scientific nor personal evidence that this is so), I’m not sure how your model explains what evidence I do have.
If you had said, “I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?” I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Okay, but that’s exactly my complaint. Now what?
Why do you make the bolded assumption?
I’m referring to confidence effects: i.e. the more success you have earlier, the more you have later.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. …
We do—hence the widespread phenomenon, noticed even among women, of women being attracted to “bad boy” types, which was attenuated in more conservative eras. Plus, the increasing frequency of divorce and domestic violence.
Divorce has been on a steady upward trend. If fraction that are due to domestic violence is constant, that’s all that’s necessary for my point. If not, you’re right, I don’t have e.g. battered women’s shelter stats handy, but even if you ignore that part, the divorce rate alone is strong enough evidence.
The divorce rate increasing is not good evidence that domestic violence is increasing. It can be explained by divorce becoming easier legally (no fault divorce), less stigmatized socially and less financially crippling for women (they have more opportunity to generate their own income and arguably divorce has become more favourable to women when it comes to dividing up assets).
Increased social awareness and decreasing tolerance of domestic violence could also lead to increased divorce rates without the domestic violence rate increasing. Women are less likely to feel trapped in abusive relationships by social and economic pressures than they were in the past.
I had the same reaction. I’d be surprised if this is true since violent crime generally has been on a downward trend. I did some googling and couldn’t turn up much data, though a couple of hits seemed to support my suspicion that this is a difficult question to answer due to historical widespread under-reporting of domestic violence and a suspected increase in frequency of reporting more recently.
I’m not sure why this is evidence that women increasingly believe that disrespectful men are their only option or that respectful men are almost entirely marginalized. Is the argument that the increased number of divorces largely affect respectful men, in that when divorces were more difficult to obtain, women could only obtain divorces when their spouses were demonstrably problematic (and therefore, more likely to be disrespectful), and that easier divorce procedures allow women to divorce respectful men more easily?
I’m not an expert on either current or historic divorce law, but it’s my understanding that under earlier regimes, in many instances, women could not obtain divorces easily even with abusive husbands, because of proof difficulties. Perhaps more easily obtainable divorces just allowed more women to divorce disrespectful men.
To everyone making this same brilliant point: the divorce rate continued to increase after the relaxation of these restrictions on it, which would mean we’re not just seeing the conversion of “would have divorced” cases. And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
But assuming there is more domestic violence, and that women are initially marrying more abusive and/or disrespectful men, if there’s also more divorce, this could mean that women are less tolerant of these abusive disrespectful men. So does it provide evidence for women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option or respectful men being almost entirely marginalized?
Alright, point taken. Because I can’t reliably document a trend of men becoming more disrespectful, obviously there’s nothing to worry about with an incentive structure that penalizes men for being respectful, and women should keep using “doesn’t listen to me” as a standard for which men they like, and also complain that men don’t respect them enough.
And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
I’m sure we all appreciate the basic math lesson but you haven’t provided any evidence that the proportions have remained constant and given all the cultural and legal changes affecting the divorce rate there is very little reason to expect that they would.
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don’t mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
“I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?”
Right?
Phrasing my point in terms of a gene pool might be imprecise, but there are relevant effects at all the relevant levels.
For one thing, the genetic effects are augmented by memetic effects. That is, it’s not that there’s just a “disrepect women” gene that is being selected for. It’s that children will learn from their parents, even if they don’t say, “Hey, you’ve got to ignore women who tell you to go away.”
Second, there’s the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
So there are enough natural selection-related effects that even if you ignore the purely genetic effects—which as you point out, are going to be minimal—that we do have to worry about the propagation of disrespectful men as a result of respectful men not using all the effective strategies that the former use.
I’ve realized the same issue myself. At least, the “dating pool dominated by disrespectful men” part. It may not currently be the case that women believe that their only option is a disrespectful man. But I have noticed that some women seem to conflate high levels of care for their comfort and consent with wimpiness or a lack of masculinity.
If scrupulous men restrain themselves out of deontological moral principles, even if it’s the “right” thing to do, what is the effect on the larger system? The effect is that our good little deontologists may select themselves out of the dating pool, leaving only men who are less scrupulous. That’s good for women, how, exactly?
Silas is right that the incentive structure is broken. There are incentives for men to engage in advances that take risks with women’s comfort levels (high-risk, high-reward), to fulfill common female preferences for excitement or being “swept off their feet.” I’m not completely sold on Silas’ specific example, because I don’t think that on average there is a great benefit to pursuing past a rejection on an approach, but I think these double-binds occur in other areas (for instead, asking permission for a kiss). The problem is that for men to “disarm” themselves of such behavior, it puts them at a pragmatic disadvantage vs. men who don’t, at least with typical heterosexual women (so if you’re a geeky woman reading this, remember that this criticism is probably not about you).
Another problem is that women who respond in a way that incentivizes men taking risks with their comfort levels is that their responses “vote” for a set of norms that is counter to the interests of other women. If it’s correct that the majority of women respond this way, then we may be seeing a tyranny of the majority where their needs for certain male behaviors and outlooks dominate the needs of other women. It’s tempting to suggest that women get together for a big pow-pow, and come up with a unified set of norms for how they like to be approached, or at least with ways to signal their preference sets in advance… then get back to men. Of course, that’s impossible in the real world.
From the perspective of morality, we tend to look at the agents of a morally-questionable behavior, which are men in this case. Yet on a societal level, it’s just not going to work very well to try to persuade people to throw away utility for an above-average level of scruples that people they are interacting with don’t really seem to care about. To actually change society, it is necessary to look at the patterns of incentives that people are under, and the source of the incentives. In other words, we need to think more like economists and psychologists, and less like moral philosophers.
I like the careful way you’ve picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I’m wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says “no” once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don’t stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there’s no way for the entire female gender to go “oh, crap! We don’t like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!” Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to “succeed”. Yes, this is a horror story; but I’m not actually sure it doesn’t resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we’re talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say “no” and don’t mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
It’s fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that’s right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population’s changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
It’s almost that absolute, but not quite. Regarding role reversal in sexual selection, Alison Jolly writes in Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution, page 88-89:
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That’s the bit that some men get so bitter about—from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the “nice guys” out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and “society” at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards “bad boys”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it’s silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion… which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
So, I take HughRistik’s point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn’t “make sense.”
I, personally, can’t have more then a trivial effect on “the success of the ones who say ‘no’ and don’t mean it,” but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn’t be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say “no” (as opposed to “not now” or “maybe”) and don’t mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don’t absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn’t mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all—the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Yup. And I’m not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it’s the only “moral” solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
Yup. And not just boycotting for “lying” (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women’s comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that’s fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
“Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn’t believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!”
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don’t have problematic preferences sets, doesn’t make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Hmmm… If someone offered me paperclips, and I turned down the offer, I would want the being to keep offering.
I don’t know how this applies to apes, but it’s something to think about.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I’d want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don’t lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer “never” I say “never”, and if I mean “not now” I will say “not now”. This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of “never” but later behave as if they’d said “not now”, and vice versa.
I can see why that would be troubling as well. While User:Alicorn has provided clear reasoning why a human could reasonably turn down apey things—just as I might turn down paperclips in the right circumstances—it still does not make sense to claim you desire no paperclips, when you simply want to take possession of the paperclips later.
Apes often use words to achieve their goals, not just to make true information known. Claiming a falsehood may be beneficial. The ape may not even understand that it’s making a false claim. For example, if persistence is genetically determined and good for reproductive chances, female apes will start filtering male apes for persistence by telling them “no” without meaning it (and maybe without understanding that they don’t mean it). But even though such behavior is advantageous for individual female apes, ape society as a whole could benefit from denouncing it.
The antecedent doesn’t seem likely to be true to me: wouldn’t a high value male have lots of opportunities for mating, and thus not bother wasting time persisting in the face of someone who doesn’t seem interested?
Grossly simplified, it works like this. If you’re a low-value woman, you won’t be testing a high-value man for persistence. If you’re a high-value woman, a high-value man will still need persistence to get you. So being persistent doesn’t hurt the man in either case.
Yes, but you would never turn down the offer in the first place, so it’s moot.
Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it was in the middle of manufacturing a larger batch via a process that could not safely be interrupted, but want the opportunity to recur when it was finished; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that the offerer would, contingent on its acceptance, destroy a larger number of paperclips, but want the opportunity to recur when the destroyable paperclips were in the safe zone; Clippy might turn down an offer of paperclips if it believed that, by acting unpredictably/as though it has high standards for numbers of paperclips an offer must include to be accepted, it would be offered more paperclips.
All of these scenarios have analogues to primate acceptance of offers to mate. (“I’m taken”; “he looks like he’d cause negative utility to me”; “I can’t just take every offer that comes by or people will think I’m a slut and nobody decent will want me”.)
The most relevant scenario, however, is not one that would cause Clippy to reject paperclips under analogous circumstances. Clippy values paperclips qua paperclips and is less picky about them than the typical human is about romantic/sexual relationships. I can’t think of a reason Clippy would reject an offer of paperclips when accepting wouldn’t result in other paperclips being destroyed or not made and when the transfer of paperclips could be kept a secret. However, primates are often acting in accordance with their values in turning down clandestine, low-risk sexual relationships while single.
Thank you for this explanation. It makes more sense now. You’re a good human. c=@
Please regard this as responsive to the substance of Alicorn’s sibling post:
“The reason that men (who care about women) can’t ‘just’ obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren’t as respectful to women … as I’ve said about six times now.
“The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more. This suffices to prevent disrespectful men from saturating the dating pool. Women, for their part, can ‘opt out’ of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons).”
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Silas, if you can’t address Alicorn directly, then it’s probably not best to address her indirectly by asking me to pass an argument along to her. (Update: Thanks for changing your language to make your post more clearly directed towards me.)
However, I’m planning my own reply to Alicorn, and if you think there is a point that I am leaving out, or something that needs to be emphasized, I invite you to reply to me personally either in the thread (if your reply is framed as a communication to me rather than to Alicorn) or by PM. If I agree with an argument that you pose to me, or convince me that a certain point needs more emphasis, then such an argument might naturally find it’s way into my discourse not just with Alicorn, but in general.
Agreed. Well, there are ways to be successful while acting consistently with the stated preferences of some women, but it still requires a bunch of work-arounds and a greater level of attraction.
Well, in the short term, yes. But if more men start pursuing in an aggressive way, then there is more competition, which could create incentive to pursue more aggressively than other men. On the other hand, there could be a ceiling on how much aggressiveness in advances can be successful. This sounds like an empirical question.
There are some cultures where men pursue women very aggressively in ways easily cause street harassment, and it’s plausible that these norms occurred through a run-away process where men had to one-up each other in terms of aggressiveness.
Theoretically, yes. But there are some additional practical considerations given that women have preferences for masculine, culturally successful men. It could be that in a certain culture, what is considered “masculine” mating behavior also risks making women uncomfortable a large proportion of the time. Unattractive men who exhibit that behavior are considered an annoyance. Attractive men who exhibit that behavior are accepted as mates. Men who do not exhibit that behavior in the first place are considered unattractive, and end up as rejected and invisible, because the women don’t see they as appropriately masculine and attractive in the first place. This is truly a lose-lose situation for both genders.
From a practical standpoint, women can demand that men make advances in less aggressive ways, and reject them for displaying too much aggression. Yet from a psychological perspective, it might be harder to get mainstream heterosexual women to do that, because it would mean going for guys who don’t display culturally masculine courtship behaviors that those women may associate with attractiveness, and it would mean rejecting guys who are attractive to them.
Maybe mainstream heterosexual women can just “get over” this psychology if they are educated about the effect of their aggregate choices on cultural norms… but maybe it’s not that easy.
Please just reply directly, instead of making these kinds of comments. No one (except Eliezer) has the authority to tell you not to reply to someone’s comment on an open comment section.
I appreciate you having the courage to voice that opinion openly. (This was a very contentious issue, if you can believe it...)
You’re right, I don’t mean that. I would say, rather, that the burden of conscientiousness is greater when one is criticizing a group to which one does not belong; dangerous thoughts and all that. My problem was not with what you were saying, necessarily, but that the manner in which you said it ignored this burden of conscientiousness. If you had said, “I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?” I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Why do you make the bolded assumption? In cultures where long-term monogamous relationships are the norm, dating capability annihilates itself by taking those who possess it off the market.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. And yet the past fifty years have displayed the opposite trend: there is much more belief now that women should expect/demand a certain level of respect from their romantic partners. Whether or not this is acted upon proportionately (and while I suspect that it is, I have neither scientific nor personal evidence that this is so), I’m not sure how your model explains what evidence I do have.
Okay, but that’s exactly my complaint. Now what?
I’m referring to confidence effects: i.e. the more success you have earlier, the more you have later.
We do—hence the widespread phenomenon, noticed even among women, of women being attracted to “bad boy” types, which was attenuated in more conservative eras. Plus, the increasing frequency of divorce and domestic violence.
[citation needed]
Divorce has been on a steady upward trend. If fraction that are due to domestic violence is constant, that’s all that’s necessary for my point. If not, you’re right, I don’t have e.g. battered women’s shelter stats handy, but even if you ignore that part, the divorce rate alone is strong enough evidence.
The divorce rate increasing is not good evidence that domestic violence is increasing. It can be explained by divorce becoming easier legally (no fault divorce), less stigmatized socially and less financially crippling for women (they have more opportunity to generate their own income and arguably divorce has become more favourable to women when it comes to dividing up assets).
Increased social awareness and decreasing tolerance of domestic violence could also lead to increased divorce rates without the domestic violence rate increasing. Women are less likely to feel trapped in abusive relationships by social and economic pressures than they were in the past.
Also, changes in social attitudes would also have increased the reporting of domestic violence.
I had the same reaction. I’d be surprised if this is true since violent crime generally has been on a downward trend. I did some googling and couldn’t turn up much data, though a couple of hits seemed to support my suspicion that this is a difficult question to answer due to historical widespread under-reporting of domestic violence and a suspected increase in frequency of reporting more recently.
I’m not sure why this is evidence that women increasingly believe that disrespectful men are their only option or that respectful men are almost entirely marginalized. Is the argument that the increased number of divorces largely affect respectful men, in that when divorces were more difficult to obtain, women could only obtain divorces when their spouses were demonstrably problematic (and therefore, more likely to be disrespectful), and that easier divorce procedures allow women to divorce respectful men more easily?
I’m not an expert on either current or historic divorce law, but it’s my understanding that under earlier regimes, in many instances, women could not obtain divorces easily even with abusive husbands, because of proof difficulties. Perhaps more easily obtainable divorces just allowed more women to divorce disrespectful men.
To everyone making this same brilliant point: the divorce rate continued to increase after the relaxation of these restrictions on it, which would mean we’re not just seeing the conversion of “would have divorced” cases. And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
But assuming there is more domestic violence, and that women are initially marrying more abusive and/or disrespectful men, if there’s also more divorce, this could mean that women are less tolerant of these abusive disrespectful men. So does it provide evidence for women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option or respectful men being almost entirely marginalized?
Alright, point taken. Because I can’t reliably document a trend of men becoming more disrespectful, obviously there’s nothing to worry about with an incentive structure that penalizes men for being respectful, and women should keep using “doesn’t listen to me” as a standard for which men they like, and also complain that men don’t respect them enough.
I’m sure we all appreciate the basic math lesson but you haven’t provided any evidence that the proportions have remained constant and given all the cultural and legal changes affecting the divorce rate there is very little reason to expect that they would.