Yes, I do believe it is quite likely that some people who did not want to discuss the topic of rape down voted.
I mentioned the formatting thing more as a joke as well as an acknowledgement about many different factors going into how people feel about the post and reasons to up/down vote. I would hope that few of the people who didn’t like the formatting down voted specifically because of that, but I was surprised by how many cared enough to up vote the comment speaking to this point.
Of the people I have personally spoken to who did not want to discuss the topic of rape, most seemed to have an aversion reaction. They will often literally physically flinch away as they say it. From the things they say, my impression is that they find the topic painful, and don’t want to believe that rape actually happens, especially unreported rape to someone they might know, or that they could have at some point in their lives had a friendly conversation with someone who beat and verbally degraded his child. My guess is that these people would have a very strong aversion response to what I just wrote.
It is my belief, that while these people really don’t want to talk or think about these things, they also don’t have a strong incentive to stop other people from having such conversations. People who are feeling avoidant generally just flinch away and go do something else.
As an example of a group of down voters who are probably not being avoidant, there were several instances (probably about 5?) where my karma very quickly dropped by 10-20 points over the past day or so after my post was moved to discussion, which was reflected by 10-20 of my comments being downvoted—given the time frame and speed at which down voting typically happens and at which this particular down voting happened, I’m inclined to think that this was probably one person who just went down the line and down voted everything I wrote with only skimming if they read at all.
Since people who are being avoidant generally want to avoid, while I could potentially see them down voting the main post, going and down voting several comments in a row does not seem like the behavior of someone who is flinching away. To me, this is the behavior of someone who cares a lot about something related to the post, and is actively trying to accomplish something. I don’t know how much the psychology of the people who down voted groups of comments reflects the down voting of the post itself. I would be surprised if this group of people did not also down vote the post, but I don’t know how many people felt similarly to them and down voted only the post.
Lastly, think about this from a numbers perspective. The article I cited said that in a college study of 1882 college students, 120 admitted to having attempted or succeeded in having non-consensual sex—roughly 6%.
If you were one of those men, wouldn’t you have a strong opinion on this matter? Do you think you’d feel inclined to down vote this article if you were one of them?
Here are some of the arguments I can think of to assume that men who have attempted to have non-consensual sex (and especially the ones who do it repeatedly) are not a significant part of the anonymous voting population:
Less Wrong, unlike college, is a collection of exceptionally enlightened individuals, and of the thousands of people who read this blog, they are specifically filtered to not be the sorts of people who would do such a thing.
People who have had non-consensual sex don’t care enough to down vote. They care much less than people who want to avoid the topic.
The article is flawed—non-consensual sex doesn’t actually happen anywhere nearly as much as these supposed self reports suggest.
I believe there’s another category—men who believe that if it’s made easier for women to accuse men of rape, then their risk of being falsely accused goes up. Some of them are at least pushing the limits of consent, and some of them are frightened of blatantly false accusation.
How about this: If you want to discuss a topic (systems that require changing multiple variables to improve), don’t choose a sensitive example, if other examples are available, because it is distracting from the original topic.
In other words, the downvote means: The article used an inappropriate example, which ruined the chance of having a reasonable discussion about the original topic.
(Uhm, I am guilty about sidetracking the discussion below this article, but I guess that also kind of proves the point. My reactions were not about “changing multiple variables”, but related to the example in the article.)
Okay, yes, I can believe that some people may have down voted for this reason.
Personally I think the side track has been very interesting and am glad it has happened. While it was not my intent to talk about rape as more than a removed example of a complex issue, I think it is a very important topic where most people are ignorant even regarding what is known, and that there is a lot unknown about, where really awful things happen to many people in the present. What the study I linked reports fits with my personal observations as I have learned more and more about what goes on behind closed doors from being part of the psych world. I’ve been pretty blown away as I’ve come to realize the scope of what is going on, how it is silenced, in this present day and age, etc.
Getting it actually discussed in nuance with multiple viewpoints present has been awesome, and I would not object to my posts continuing to go off topic so productively. 1 I would expect this group you describe of people who don’t like going off-topic to be one of many voting blocks.
Do you have any idea of how much people usually down vote when a post goes off topic in a similar way, especially any examples that are not emotionally charged?
I suppose I have just pointed at another potential group, which is one that just hates emotional charge and down votes anything that is likely to become heated for the sake of not liking emotion regardless of topic. I can certainly believe that this group exists and may account for enough to be a voting population as well—despite the impressive low volume of flame on this post, this group may even stop reading and click the down button at my first line giving the warning.
1 The discussion can also be tied back into the initial point I was trying to make although I hadn’t done this yet—now that the nuances on this topic are starting to get unpacked in the comments, think about how changing any single variable would create an uproar in current culture. With so many strong and conflicting opinions, you’ve got to address the overall culture before you can do anything and not have it result in a lot of grief—even if your proposed change is one that would be an improvement if other variables shift.
I agree that the “I don’t want to talk about this” reaction can be further decomposed into people who don’t want to talk about it primarily because they are themselves rapists and people who don’t want to talk about it for other reasons.
I agree that people who have what you’re calling “aversive” reactions to the topic might potentially downvote the main post; indeed, I expect many of them actually have done so. (I’d be inclined to also call the reaction of people who don’t want to talk about it primarily because they are themselves rapists “aversive”, for what that’s worth.)
I agree that there’s an important distinction between those who downvote the post and move on, and those who engage in the kind of retaliatory downvoting you describe (sometimes referred to here as “karmassassination”). I generally assume that retaliatory downvoting (which, incidentally, I disapprove of) is an expression of hostility. We could have a whole psychoanalytic armchair discussion here about whether that hostility in this case is more likely to be a function of what you’re calling “aversion” here, or of being oneself a rapist, or of various other things, but I don’t have strong opinions about that.
You may be right that the hostility gender-related discussions generally elicit is not sufficient to explain the reaction to your post; you may additionally be right in your (implicit) suggestion that the reactions of LW rapists specifically account for the difference. I don’t have a strong opinion about this over and above my general skepticism about privileged hypotheses.
I find it likely that the percentage of rapists on LessWrong is roughly comparable to the percentage of rapists in U.S. colleges. Maybe a little lower, maybe a little higher, but not significantly different. In general, I expect that rapists (as we’re using the term here) are present in any large group, and that I have no way of distinguishing them from non-rapists.
I find it likely that flaws in the article do very little to motivate the downvoting in and of themselves (that is, I expect that an equally flawed article about a less emotionally charged topic would receive far fewer downvotes) but much as with formatting, they might do a lot to make downvoting permissible.
If you were one of those men, wouldn’t you have a strong opinion on this matter? Do you think you’d feel inclined to down vote this article if you were one of them?
Incidentally: do you assume I’m not one of those men? If so, on what basis? In any case: were I one of those men, I suspect my inclination to downvote the article would be greater than if I weren’t.
Does that answer your questions (both explicit and implicit)?
I find it likely that the percentage of rapists on LessWrong is roughly comparable to the percentage of rapists in U.S. colleges. Maybe a little lower, maybe a little higher, but not significantly different.
Given a base rate of 6%, I’d be astounded if the rate among male Less Wrong commenters were lower than 3% or higher than 8%; and I would dismiss out of hand a claim that it was lower than 1% or higher than 10%.
In general, I expect that rapists (as we’re using the term here) are present in any large group, and that I have no way of distinguishing them from non-rapists.
It’s to the benefit of women and normal men to develop accurate heuristics to distinguish rapist men from normal men. The “Schrödinger’s Rapist” situation results from such heuristics being absent, or unavailable due to lack of information.
(Yes, I feel okay saying that the 94% of men who are not rapists are “normal men” … and that rapists are not.)
One of the bigger heuristics suggested by the Lisak & Miller study is that repeat rapists commit (on average) about ten times as many non-rape violent crimes as normal men do.
Some other studies suggest other heuristics: rapists have more anger and hostility toward women than normal men do, and rapists have less empathy toward women who have been sexually assaulted than normal men do.
Basically agreed with all of this, though I consider non-male-on-female rape more important than you seem to, which may simply reflect the greater saliency of non-heterosexual relationships to my life more generally.
One of the bigger heuristics suggested by the Lisak & Miller study is that repeat rapists commit (on average) about ten times as many non-rape violent crimes as normal men do.
Which definition of “rapist” was the study using?
Edit: also that reminds me of the argument against acceptance of gays based on statistics showing male homosexuals being ten times more to engage in pedophilia than male heterosexuals.
Here it is. The interesting part is that they ask men whether they have committed particular acts (see the study for which) that legally constitute rape; they don’t ask whether the men think of themselves as rapists.
Edit: also that reminds me of the argument against acceptance of gays based on statistics showing male homosexuals being ten times more to engage in pedophilia than male heterosexuals.
I doubt that claim — and I’m assuming you’re using a folk sense of “pedophilia”, since clinically that term refers to a predilection rather than an act that a person can engage in.
It seems more likely to me that gay sexual relationships which straddle the legal age of consent (in some states, this can mean an 18-year-old boy with a 17-year-old boyfriend) are many, many times more likely to be treated as a criminal issue than straight sexual relationships with the same age gap.
I notice they didn’t bother separating out their data by which of the “rape” questions they answered yes to.
Including the ‘statutory’ kind? If so the study is approximately worthless. (ie. Whatever potential benefit it could have is likely offset by the equivocation it encourages.)
This is by far not the only example of a trait correlated with crime that I suspect you’d rather not act on. I chose homosexuality as the closest analogy since both can be interpreted either as an act or as a predilection and thus a property of the person.
It seems more likely to me that gay sexual relationships which straddle the legal age of consent (in some states, this can mean an 18-year-old boy with a 17-year-old boyfriend) are many, many times more likely to be treated as a criminal issue than straight sexual relationships with the same age gap.
I’m not convinced that’s actually true these days.
Well, the statistic in question is based on data I heard from gay rights advocates. They were saying that only 30% of pedophilia cases are committed by gays and counting on their audience not being Bayesians.
I find it likely that the percentage of rapists on LessWrong is roughly comparable to the percentage of rapists in U.S. colleges. Maybe a little lower, maybe a little higher, but not significantly different. In general, I expect that rapists (as we’re using the term here) are present in any large group, and that I have no way of distinguishing them from non-rapists.
Why? The demographics of LW are unusual in all kinds of way. e.g., a sex ratio of about 9 males per female (and males tend to rape more), average IQ probably in the 130s (and high-IQ people are less likely to have any sex, let alone non-consensual one), etc. OTOH, given that there are effects with different signs, I’m not sure what the sign of the total effect would be.
Nothing brilliant: given no reason to systematically shift my local expectation in one direction or another, my local expectation defaults to my global expectation.
For me, it’s more like “the overall evidence probably strongly points some way, but I can’t be bothered to do the maths and figure out which way it points”.
Does that answer your questions (both explicit and implicit)?
Yes, thank you.
Incidentally: do you assume I’m not one of those men? If so, on what basis?
I assume you are most likely not one of those men based on the assumption that they are only somewhere around 6% of the population. I’d put the odds slightly higher since you are interested enough in the topic to write in the comments and initially said something dismissive, but not a whole lot higher. Most likely you’re a nice and respectful guy in control of your impulses in as much as the rest of the population, and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, I do believe it is quite likely that some people who did not want to discuss the topic of rape down voted.
I mentioned the formatting thing more as a joke as well as an acknowledgement about many different factors going into how people feel about the post and reasons to up/down vote. I would hope that few of the people who didn’t like the formatting down voted specifically because of that, but I was surprised by how many cared enough to up vote the comment speaking to this point.
Of the people I have personally spoken to who did not want to discuss the topic of rape, most seemed to have an aversion reaction. They will often literally physically flinch away as they say it. From the things they say, my impression is that they find the topic painful, and don’t want to believe that rape actually happens, especially unreported rape to someone they might know, or that they could have at some point in their lives had a friendly conversation with someone who beat and verbally degraded his child. My guess is that these people would have a very strong aversion response to what I just wrote.
It is my belief, that while these people really don’t want to talk or think about these things, they also don’t have a strong incentive to stop other people from having such conversations. People who are feeling avoidant generally just flinch away and go do something else.
As an example of a group of down voters who are probably not being avoidant, there were several instances (probably about 5?) where my karma very quickly dropped by 10-20 points over the past day or so after my post was moved to discussion, which was reflected by 10-20 of my comments being downvoted—given the time frame and speed at which down voting typically happens and at which this particular down voting happened, I’m inclined to think that this was probably one person who just went down the line and down voted everything I wrote with only skimming if they read at all.
Since people who are being avoidant generally want to avoid, while I could potentially see them down voting the main post, going and down voting several comments in a row does not seem like the behavior of someone who is flinching away. To me, this is the behavior of someone who cares a lot about something related to the post, and is actively trying to accomplish something. I don’t know how much the psychology of the people who down voted groups of comments reflects the down voting of the post itself. I would be surprised if this group of people did not also down vote the post, but I don’t know how many people felt similarly to them and down voted only the post.
Lastly, think about this from a numbers perspective. The article I cited said that in a college study of 1882 college students, 120 admitted to having attempted or succeeded in having non-consensual sex—roughly 6%.
If you were one of those men, wouldn’t you have a strong opinion on this matter? Do you think you’d feel inclined to down vote this article if you were one of them?
Here are some of the arguments I can think of to assume that men who have attempted to have non-consensual sex (and especially the ones who do it repeatedly) are not a significant part of the anonymous voting population:
Less Wrong, unlike college, is a collection of exceptionally enlightened individuals, and of the thousands of people who read this blog, they are specifically filtered to not be the sorts of people who would do such a thing.
People who have had non-consensual sex don’t care enough to down vote. They care much less than people who want to avoid the topic.
The article is flawed—non-consensual sex doesn’t actually happen anywhere nearly as much as these supposed self reports suggest.
Do you have a better one?
I believe there’s another category—men who believe that if it’s made easier for women to accuse men of rape, then their risk of being falsely accused goes up. Some of them are at least pushing the limits of consent, and some of them are frightened of blatantly false accusation.
Yes, agreed.
How about this: If you want to discuss a topic (systems that require changing multiple variables to improve), don’t choose a sensitive example, if other examples are available, because it is distracting from the original topic.
In other words, the downvote means: The article used an inappropriate example, which ruined the chance of having a reasonable discussion about the original topic.
(Uhm, I am guilty about sidetracking the discussion below this article, but I guess that also kind of proves the point. My reactions were not about “changing multiple variables”, but related to the example in the article.)
Okay, yes, I can believe that some people may have down voted for this reason.
Personally I think the side track has been very interesting and am glad it has happened. While it was not my intent to talk about rape as more than a removed example of a complex issue, I think it is a very important topic where most people are ignorant even regarding what is known, and that there is a lot unknown about, where really awful things happen to many people in the present. What the study I linked reports fits with my personal observations as I have learned more and more about what goes on behind closed doors from being part of the psych world. I’ve been pretty blown away as I’ve come to realize the scope of what is going on, how it is silenced, in this present day and age, etc.
Getting it actually discussed in nuance with multiple viewpoints present has been awesome, and I would not object to my posts continuing to go off topic so productively. 1 I would expect this group you describe of people who don’t like going off-topic to be one of many voting blocks.
Do you have any idea of how much people usually down vote when a post goes off topic in a similar way, especially any examples that are not emotionally charged?
I suppose I have just pointed at another potential group, which is one that just hates emotional charge and down votes anything that is likely to become heated for the sake of not liking emotion regardless of topic. I can certainly believe that this group exists and may account for enough to be a voting population as well—despite the impressive low volume of flame on this post, this group may even stop reading and click the down button at my first line giving the warning.
1 The discussion can also be tied back into the initial point I was trying to make although I hadn’t done this yet—now that the nuances on this topic are starting to get unpacked in the comments, think about how changing any single variable would create an uproar in current culture. With so many strong and conflicting opinions, you’ve got to address the overall culture before you can do anything and not have it result in a lot of grief—even if your proposed change is one that would be an improvement if other variables shift.
I see comments of people stating that they did that all the time on Discussion.
I agree that the “I don’t want to talk about this” reaction can be further decomposed into people who don’t want to talk about it primarily because they are themselves rapists and people who don’t want to talk about it for other reasons.
I agree that people who have what you’re calling “aversive” reactions to the topic might potentially downvote the main post; indeed, I expect many of them actually have done so. (I’d be inclined to also call the reaction of people who don’t want to talk about it primarily because they are themselves rapists “aversive”, for what that’s worth.)
I agree that there’s an important distinction between those who downvote the post and move on, and those who engage in the kind of retaliatory downvoting you describe (sometimes referred to here as “karmassassination”).
I generally assume that retaliatory downvoting (which, incidentally, I disapprove of) is an expression of hostility.
We could have a whole psychoanalytic armchair discussion here about whether that hostility in this case is more likely to be a function of what you’re calling “aversion” here, or of being oneself a rapist, or of various other things, but I don’t have strong opinions about that.
You may be right that the hostility gender-related discussions generally elicit is not sufficient to explain the reaction to your post; you may additionally be right in your (implicit) suggestion that the reactions of LW rapists specifically account for the difference. I don’t have a strong opinion about this over and above my general skepticism about privileged hypotheses.
I find it likely that the percentage of rapists on LessWrong is roughly comparable to the percentage of rapists in U.S. colleges. Maybe a little lower, maybe a little higher, but not significantly different. In general, I expect that rapists (as we’re using the term here) are present in any large group, and that I have no way of distinguishing them from non-rapists.
I find it likely that flaws in the article do very little to motivate the downvoting in and of themselves (that is, I expect that an equally flawed article about a less emotionally charged topic would receive far fewer downvotes) but much as with formatting, they might do a lot to make downvoting permissible.
Incidentally: do you assume I’m not one of those men? If so, on what basis?
In any case: were I one of those men, I suspect my inclination to downvote the article would be greater than if I weren’t.
Does that answer your questions (both explicit and implicit)?
Given a base rate of 6%, I’d be astounded if the rate among male Less Wrong commenters were lower than 3% or higher than 8%; and I would dismiss out of hand a claim that it was lower than 1% or higher than 10%.
It’s to the benefit of women and normal men to develop accurate heuristics to distinguish rapist men from normal men. The “Schrödinger’s Rapist” situation results from such heuristics being absent, or unavailable due to lack of information.
(Yes, I feel okay saying that the 94% of men who are not rapists are “normal men” … and that rapists are not.)
One of the bigger heuristics suggested by the Lisak & Miller study is that repeat rapists commit (on average) about ten times as many non-rape violent crimes as normal men do.
Some other studies suggest other heuristics: rapists have more anger and hostility toward women than normal men do, and rapists have less empathy toward women who have been sexually assaulted than normal men do.
Basically agreed with all of this, though I consider non-male-on-female rape more important than you seem to, which may simply reflect the greater saliency of non-heterosexual relationships to my life more generally.
Which definition of “rapist” was the study using?
Edit: also that reminds me of the argument against acceptance of gays based on statistics showing male homosexuals being ten times more to engage in pedophilia than male heterosexuals.
Here it is. The interesting part is that they ask men whether they have committed particular acts (see the study for which) that legally constitute rape; they don’t ask whether the men think of themselves as rapists.
I doubt that claim — and I’m assuming you’re using a folk sense of “pedophilia”, since clinically that term refers to a predilection rather than an act that a person can engage in.
It seems more likely to me that gay sexual relationships which straddle the legal age of consent (in some states, this can mean an 18-year-old boy with a 17-year-old boyfriend) are many, many times more likely to be treated as a criminal issue than straight sexual relationships with the same age gap.
I notice they didn’t bother separating out their data by which of the “rape” questions they answered yes to.
Including the ‘statutory’ kind? If so the study is approximately worthless. (ie. Whatever potential benefit it could have is likely offset by the equivocation it encourages.)
This is by far not the only example of a trait correlated with crime that I suspect you’d rather not act on. I chose homosexuality as the closest analogy since both can be interpreted either as an act or as a predilection and thus a property of the person.
I’m not convinced that’s actually true these days.
Anecdotes! I have contrary ones.
But what did you think of the Lisak & Miller study, and their definition of rape that you asked about?
That “statistics” is unlikely to be unbiased.
Well, the statistic in question is based on data I heard from gay rights advocates. They were saying that only 30% of pedophilia cases are committed by gays and counting on their audience not being Bayesians.
Why? The demographics of LW are unusual in all kinds of way. e.g., a sex ratio of about 9 males per female (and males tend to rape more), average IQ probably in the 130s (and high-IQ people are less likely to have any sex, let alone non-consensual one), etc. OTOH, given that there are effects with different signs, I’m not sure what the sign of the total effect would be.
Nothing brilliant: given no reason to systematically shift my local expectation in one direction or another, my local expectation defaults to my global expectation.
Would you expect something different?
For me, it’s more like “the overall evidence probably strongly points some way, but I can’t be bothered to do the maths and figure out which way it points”.
Yes, thank you.
I assume you are most likely not one of those men based on the assumption that they are only somewhere around 6% of the population. I’d put the odds slightly higher since you are interested enough in the topic to write in the comments and initially said something dismissive, but not a whole lot higher. Most likely you’re a nice and respectful guy in control of your impulses in as much as the rest of the population, and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt.
For certain people, being in control of one’s impulses may be easier in writing than in meatspace.