When I read this, it made me wonder how much of my staunch insistence on obedience to stated preferences has to do with my identification of myself as unreadable. (People trying to guess what I want by looking at me do not do appreciably better than I would expect them to if they were presented with a written summary of the immediate context. Some people do worse than that.) But if I am unusually hard to read—and I may well be—then I should be cautious in generalizing my preferences to others with different relevant traits.
It seems that you are capable and interested in explicit discussions of your preferences, and that you think analytically about them. What do you think is the link between your emphasis on stated preferences and identification as unreadable? Do you think, “hey, I know I’m unreadable, so I’ll give you the information you need to know explicitly instead of expecting you to make guesses? Or do you think it is part of a general social orientation towards explicit communication, and away from implicit communication?
I agree that you are probably atypical in this regard. As far as I can tell, the preferences of mainstream heterosexual women (MHW) have the following features:
MHW are consciously unaware of the majority of their preferences.
MHW have difficulty articulated their preferences in ways that match up with their choices and responses, according to observers.
The portion of their preferences that MHW articulate and are aware of is like the tip of the iceberg of their actual preferences.
One of the preferences of MHW is that men guess their other preferences.
MHW select men on their ability to satisfy preferences that they don’t/can’t articulate or that they aren’t even aware of.
If someone doesn’t like explicit analysis and discussion of their preferences, then this is actually quite a reasonable strategy. It just has negative externalities on men, and on women like you who don’t share those preferences, by training men to behave in ways that are counter to what you would prefer.
As far as I can tell, the preferences of mainstream heterosexual women (MHW) have the following features:
I’d actually say that all of the ones you listed apply to most, if not all, human beings (replacing “MHW select men… ” with “People value people”… ). I’d also say that this is human nature and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to modify.
They definitely apply to people, but they seem to apply more to mainstream heterosexual women. See this article on my blog for some research.
Women’s preferences for male behavior (e.g. masculinity) has more potential collisions with ethical behaviors (e.g. asking someone preferences) than men’s preferences in women do, since men just don’t care so much about behavior. Men are under more behavioral constraints.
Hope you find it interesting. It’s a group blog, so not all of it is written by me, and it’s written in a slightly more polemical style than I use for LW. Here are some of the posts which have some of my best arguments (though they are most a couple years old, and I could probably articulate some things better nowadays):
Your coauthors seem cool too. It’s all so… so sane. I realize I sometimes come off as LW’s resident screamy feminist/ethicist/footstomping engine of disapproval, but I have my own issues with anti-discrimination type movements in general and can extrapolate to how men poking at gender issues might feel. Your blog (I just read all the posts you linked and am on page three of the general archive) is thoughtful and seems to handily avoid kneejerk reactions in any direction, so yay for it. :)
P.S. I love the quote by Mystery about “comfort”. I still have the impression that pickup material in general is some nice things in a big box of nastiness, but I am pleased that you have gone to trouble of sifting out some nice things so I can be aware of them and enjoy their niceness.
I really enjoyed your blog post on “Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large” (TAPAICAL). I think that wherever one’s sympathies and experiences lie, it will be obvious to a rationalist that TAPAICAL has some very bad epistemic hygiene.
You captured some of the biggest problems here:
Hell yes! You are ignorant and evil and so swaddled in privilege it’s a wonder you know how to brush your own teeth! That means we can’t learn anything from you about our specialty topics because we have valuable first-person experiences that you can never understand. Ever. They are forever out of your reach. You will always be an ignorant outsider to most of our discussions because you can’t touch these intrinsic, special parts of our identities. And because of that, you must take at face-value everything that we say about how to deal with us and people like us, and then sit there and take it when the general guidelines we propose don’t work on someone else (because we’re not all the same yanno) and they yell at you (as is their right because you didn’t treat them appropriately!), OR YOU CAN BE EVIL.
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that Oppressed People have valid moral claims. I’m not willing to concede that just because Oppressed People deal with shitty, unfair things, that their conceptual analysis about those shitty, unfair things must be correct.
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that, on average, Oppressed People have some special insight into society and the fairness about how they are treated. I’m not willing to concede that such insight is so absolute that allies to Oppressed People should just turn off their brains and follow TAPAICAL blindly.
TAPAICAL doesn’t just seem motivated to be right, TAPAICAL is also motivated by power. As you observe, even though TAPAICAL is willing to admit in principle that it is fallible, it responds negatively to any challenges to its core ideas from outsiders. Even insiders need to be careful challenging TAPAICAL’s doctrines, lest they be accused of “internalized oppression” or “collaboration.” As a result, conceptual trash builds up in TAPAICAL, and nobody, either inside or outside, can clear it out.
It’s especially frustrating dealing with TAPAICAL when you agree with many of its moral claims, but you just have a problem with some of the exclusionary concepts it is using. If TAPAICAL would just fix the obvious problem, or respond satisfactorily to your criticism, then you could hope right on board. But since TAPAICAL is motivated by political power, it won’t. Instead, TAPAICAL treats an attempt at criticism as an act of war that must be retaliated against, rather than responding to criticism the way a rationalist would.
If you aren’t with TAPAICAL, you are against it. You can’t change TAPAICAL, except in very incremental ways once you’ve built up appropriate creds.
Although TAPAICAL may be mostly associated with the highest profile anti-ism movements, I think it’s really an example of broader human psychology. It’s similar to how every cause wants to become a cult. I hypothesize that any anti-oppression movement will try to enforce the discursive hierarchy you describe if it is given enough power. You can see elements of TAPAICAL outside leftist movements, such as in the Men’s Rights Movement, and the seduction community.
Unfortunately, TAPAICAL’s intellectual authoritarianism makes it very difficult to whole-heartedly ally with it, especially if you aren’t in the relevant Oppressed Group. Are we really to believe once the Oppressed Group gains equality, TAPAICAL is going say “Ok, now that we’re equal, we’re going to stop being so dogmatic and power-hungry, and we’ll listen to all your criticisms now.”
If you ever feel motivated to do something like a top-level post on TAPAICAL, I would be quite interested to read it.
P.S. I love the quote by Mystery about “comfort”. I still have the impression that pickup material in general is some nice things in a big box of nastiness, but I am pleased that you have gone to trouble of sifting out some nice things so I can be aware of them and enjoy their niceness.
Yes, it’s definitely a mixed bag. There are a lot of really good ideas in the community (such as Mystery’s analysis of comfort) that are stated much better than anywhere else.
I think the link goes like your first guess. Also, I find that one of the things I am most interested in learning about the people around me is whether they are disposed to respect my preferences. If I rely in their ability to read me—which I expect, for good reasons, to approach nil—then what they do isn’t informative about that disposition. They might be trying to do exactly what they think I prefer, and be annoying me because they have bad information, not because they choose to act at cross purposes. If I tell them what I want (and that I’m unreadable, etc. etc.), then their behavior becomes informative about their disposition to respect my preferences. Then, if they demonstrate that they have this disposition, I can choose to be around them more, and if they demonstrate that they don’t, I can avoid them and try to limit their influence on my life.
I agree with all of your numbered remarks and the summary at the end, except for a small caveat about (2). While it is true that MHW will articulate preferences that may not resemble the ones they reveal through behavior, and true that their articulated preferences are suspect, I think their revealed preferences are suspect too. The most obvious case of this is the known tendency of abuse victims to re-create the patterns that have been characteristic of their prior relationships. This looks like a revealed preference to be an abuse victim. I consider this little to no evidence in favor of the conclusion that the people exhibiting this behavior prefer to be abuse victims.
This leaves a bit of a muddle the question of where reliable information about common MHW preferences might be obtained. It looks sort of grim. You could try to extrapolate from people more likely to have accurate articulated preferences (like me), but the very factors that make me more likely to have accurate articulations probably also affect what it is that I prefer. (For instance, I prefer that people take my articulations at face value, which someone without good articulations might well not!)
Some avenues of possible investigation:
Try different ways of requesting preference articulation. (The question “what do you want?” is apt to get a cached list of social-circle-approved adjectival criteria. I think one might have better luck asking a MHW to say what her favorite scene in her favorite romance story is; or what three things she’d like to change about her current/most recent boyfriend; or an example of a couple she’s friends with being adorable/compatible/mutually supportive/something like that.)
Extrapolate from some subset of the MHW population likely to have especially… revealing… revealed preferences. (People with very high subjective happiness ratings; people with long-lasting relationships that don’t exhibit signs of abuse; there are probably other categories I’m not thinking of.)
Forget about learning MHW preferences and adopt conservative, general rulesets designed at minimizing risk to vulnerable people. (This is what I’ve advocated historically. I still think it has the best chance of avoiding the worst failure modes; but it is probably possible to do better on net.)
When I read this, it made me wonder how much of my staunch insistence on obedience to stated preferences has to do with my identification of myself as unreadable. (People trying to guess what I want by looking at me do not do appreciably better than I would expect them to if they were presented with a written summary of the immediate context. Some people do worse than that.) But if I am unusually hard to read—and I may well be—then I should be cautious in generalizing my preferences to others with different relevant traits.
It seems that you are capable and interested in explicit discussions of your preferences, and that you think analytically about them. What do you think is the link between your emphasis on stated preferences and identification as unreadable? Do you think, “hey, I know I’m unreadable, so I’ll give you the information you need to know explicitly instead of expecting you to make guesses? Or do you think it is part of a general social orientation towards explicit communication, and away from implicit communication?
I agree that you are probably atypical in this regard. As far as I can tell, the preferences of mainstream heterosexual women (MHW) have the following features:
MHW are consciously unaware of the majority of their preferences.
MHW have difficulty articulated their preferences in ways that match up with their choices and responses, according to observers.
The portion of their preferences that MHW articulate and are aware of is like the tip of the iceberg of their actual preferences.
One of the preferences of MHW is that men guess their other preferences.
MHW select men on their ability to satisfy preferences that they don’t/can’t articulate or that they aren’t even aware of.
If someone doesn’t like explicit analysis and discussion of their preferences, then this is actually quite a reasonable strategy. It just has negative externalities on men, and on women like you who don’t share those preferences, by training men to behave in ways that are counter to what you would prefer.
I’d actually say that all of the ones you listed apply to most, if not all, human beings (replacing “MHW select men… ” with “People value people”… ). I’d also say that this is human nature and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to modify.
They definitely apply to people, but they seem to apply more to mainstream heterosexual women. See this article on my blog for some research.
Women’s preferences for male behavior (e.g. masculinity) has more potential collisions with ethical behaviors (e.g. asking someone preferences) than men’s preferences in women do, since men just don’t care so much about behavior. Men are under more behavioral constraints.
I didn’t know you had a blog. It looks nifty. Reading the archives now.
Hope you find it interesting. It’s a group blog, so not all of it is written by me, and it’s written in a slightly more polemical style than I use for LW. Here are some of the posts which have some of my best arguments (though they are most a couple years old, and I could probably articulate some things better nowadays):
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/01/04/are-men-oppressed-part-1-double-standards/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/01/08/are-men-oppressed-part-2-systematic-mistreatment/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/01/04/do-nice-guys-finish-last-noh/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/02/24/pickup-and-seduction-techniques-for-feminists-noh/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/11/09/sifting-through-the-feminist-sand-castle/
Your coauthors seem cool too. It’s all so… so sane. I realize I sometimes come off as LW’s resident screamy feminist/ethicist/footstomping engine of disapproval, but I have my own issues with anti-discrimination type movements in general and can extrapolate to how men poking at gender issues might feel. Your blog (I just read all the posts you linked and am on page three of the general archive) is thoughtful and seems to handily avoid kneejerk reactions in any direction, so yay for it. :)
P.S. I love the quote by Mystery about “comfort”. I still have the impression that pickup material in general is some nice things in a big box of nastiness, but I am pleased that you have gone to trouble of sifting out some nice things so I can be aware of them and enjoy their niceness.
Thanks, I’m glad you got something out of it.
I really enjoyed your blog post on “Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large” (TAPAICAL). I think that wherever one’s sympathies and experiences lie, it will be obvious to a rationalist that TAPAICAL has some very bad epistemic hygiene.
You captured some of the biggest problems here:
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that Oppressed People have valid moral claims. I’m not willing to concede that just because Oppressed People deal with shitty, unfair things, that their conceptual analysis about those shitty, unfair things must be correct.
I’m willing to concede to TAPAICAL that, on average, Oppressed People have some special insight into society and the fairness about how they are treated. I’m not willing to concede that such insight is so absolute that allies to Oppressed People should just turn off their brains and follow TAPAICAL blindly.
TAPAICAL doesn’t just seem motivated to be right, TAPAICAL is also motivated by power. As you observe, even though TAPAICAL is willing to admit in principle that it is fallible, it responds negatively to any challenges to its core ideas from outsiders. Even insiders need to be careful challenging TAPAICAL’s doctrines, lest they be accused of “internalized oppression” or “collaboration.” As a result, conceptual trash builds up in TAPAICAL, and nobody, either inside or outside, can clear it out.
It’s especially frustrating dealing with TAPAICAL when you agree with many of its moral claims, but you just have a problem with some of the exclusionary concepts it is using. If TAPAICAL would just fix the obvious problem, or respond satisfactorily to your criticism, then you could hope right on board. But since TAPAICAL is motivated by political power, it won’t. Instead, TAPAICAL treats an attempt at criticism as an act of war that must be retaliated against, rather than responding to criticism the way a rationalist would.
If you aren’t with TAPAICAL, you are against it. You can’t change TAPAICAL, except in very incremental ways once you’ve built up appropriate creds.
Although TAPAICAL may be mostly associated with the highest profile anti-ism movements, I think it’s really an example of broader human psychology. It’s similar to how every cause wants to become a cult. I hypothesize that any anti-oppression movement will try to enforce the discursive hierarchy you describe if it is given enough power. You can see elements of TAPAICAL outside leftist movements, such as in the Men’s Rights Movement, and the seduction community.
Unfortunately, TAPAICAL’s intellectual authoritarianism makes it very difficult to whole-heartedly ally with it, especially if you aren’t in the relevant Oppressed Group. Are we really to believe once the Oppressed Group gains equality, TAPAICAL is going say “Ok, now that we’re equal, we’re going to stop being so dogmatic and power-hungry, and we’ll listen to all your criticisms now.”
If you ever feel motivated to do something like a top-level post on TAPAICAL, I would be quite interested to read it.
Yes, it’s definitely a mixed bag. There are a lot of really good ideas in the community (such as Mystery’s analysis of comfort) that are stated much better than anywhere else.
I think the link goes like your first guess. Also, I find that one of the things I am most interested in learning about the people around me is whether they are disposed to respect my preferences. If I rely in their ability to read me—which I expect, for good reasons, to approach nil—then what they do isn’t informative about that disposition. They might be trying to do exactly what they think I prefer, and be annoying me because they have bad information, not because they choose to act at cross purposes. If I tell them what I want (and that I’m unreadable, etc. etc.), then their behavior becomes informative about their disposition to respect my preferences. Then, if they demonstrate that they have this disposition, I can choose to be around them more, and if they demonstrate that they don’t, I can avoid them and try to limit their influence on my life.
I agree with all of your numbered remarks and the summary at the end, except for a small caveat about (2). While it is true that MHW will articulate preferences that may not resemble the ones they reveal through behavior, and true that their articulated preferences are suspect, I think their revealed preferences are suspect too. The most obvious case of this is the known tendency of abuse victims to re-create the patterns that have been characteristic of their prior relationships. This looks like a revealed preference to be an abuse victim. I consider this little to no evidence in favor of the conclusion that the people exhibiting this behavior prefer to be abuse victims.
This leaves a bit of a muddle the question of where reliable information about common MHW preferences might be obtained. It looks sort of grim. You could try to extrapolate from people more likely to have accurate articulated preferences (like me), but the very factors that make me more likely to have accurate articulations probably also affect what it is that I prefer. (For instance, I prefer that people take my articulations at face value, which someone without good articulations might well not!)
Some avenues of possible investigation:
Try different ways of requesting preference articulation. (The question “what do you want?” is apt to get a cached list of social-circle-approved adjectival criteria. I think one might have better luck asking a MHW to say what her favorite scene in her favorite romance story is; or what three things she’d like to change about her current/most recent boyfriend; or an example of a couple she’s friends with being adorable/compatible/mutually supportive/something like that.)
Extrapolate from some subset of the MHW population likely to have especially… revealing… revealed preferences. (People with very high subjective happiness ratings; people with long-lasting relationships that don’t exhibit signs of abuse; there are probably other categories I’m not thinking of.)
Forget about learning MHW preferences and adopt conservative, general rulesets designed at minimizing risk to vulnerable people. (This is what I’ve advocated historically. I still think it has the best chance of avoiding the worst failure modes; but it is probably possible to do better on net.)