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.
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.