It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well… disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I’ve been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another.
Everything? I don’t believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.
Yes, of course, it’s not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.
I agree with you completely regarding privacy. If you feel that you must absolutely prevent some piece of information from leaking out into the world for all to see, you must treat every communication medium—and the Internet specifically—as insecure. The world is littered with dead political careers of people who did not heed this warning.
That said though (to paraphrase the old adage), are we rationalists or are we mice ? If you hold some beliefs that can get you burned at the stake (figuratively speaking… hopefully...), then isn’t it all the more important to determine if these beliefs are true ? And how are you going to do that all by yourself, with no one to critique your ideas and to expose your biases ?
This is just a quibble because I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but the traffic could conceivably be archived in its encrypted state for decryption later.
Yes, I theoretically have to consider how good people from the distant future who particularly want to know what I said now are at playing with large primes. Because there is always the possibility that a man in the middle is saving the encrypted data stream just in case it becomes possible to decipher in the future.
Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don’t think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.
(I downvoted because I saw the comment as decreasing the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio: as Nick noted, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t archive private pages or emails, and is therefore not relevant.)
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
I support this proposal and would like to join the mailing list if one becomes available. But why do you think a mailing list would fare better than a website? Because of restricted access?
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
Is 1100 enough karma? I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it.
Yes, that’s another way in which it just doesn’t look like a good idea. When you’re organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you’re doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I’m glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
What am referring to as obscurantism are (usually implied) claims that “I possess information that refutes a mainstream view, but I’m not going to share it, because most people can’t handle the truth in a nonmindkilling fashion.”
That’s not necessarily the claim (explicit or implied). It can also be that even if the information were to be handled in a non-mind-killing fashion, the resulting conclusions would be beyond the pale of what is acceptable under the current social norms.
It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. (“Offends” in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it’s smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
Well, it’s fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I’m not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was notalone in that interpretation (I see you’ve already responded to one of those comments as well).
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
In that case, I’m somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.
If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
The trouble is, I really don’t see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don’t want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I’d hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.
To take a prominent example, it’s impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman’s sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it’s usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of “prejudice” and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).
On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.
Perhaps if you started by sharing your dataset first (with names changed to protect the guilty, etc.), then the conclusions you drew from it, and only afterwards the advice you would give to a younger version of yourself?
So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you’re willing, I’d like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won’t personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?
Well, it’s a topic for a whole book, not a brief comment buried deep in a vast old thread. But for some concrete examples, see e.g. the comments I left in this subthread.
So basically, if a guy tries to have a long-term relationship with a girl who’s had a lot of partners, he better study Game or there’s a good chance she’ll get bored, because she’s used to very attractive guys? That makes sense; I wouldn’t think of that as very controversial. Of course, that ignores that some women actually do also make an effort to work on their long-term relationship skills and find ways to deal with periods where their partners seem less attractive.
I didn’t see anything about looks in that subthread; does something similar apply to dating someone very good-looking?
By “looks” I didn’t mean the level of attractiveness, but more generally, all clues available from people’s appearance. Clearly, this is going to lead to strife once people start recognizing themselves, or someone they care about, in the criteria under discussion. (This may in fact be due to understandable annoyance on part of someone who represents an actual statistical exception, but again, this makes it no less a barrier to rational discussion.)
Re: relationships with women who’ve had a lot of partners, the problem is that for a typical man, the extreme skew of the male attractiveness distribution and the asymmetry of the male-female mating strategies mean that even with some dedication to studying and practice of game, he’ll likely end up in an unfavorable position. But again, talking about this stuff in plainer and more concrete ways is hard to do without crossing the bounds that have repeatedly shown to be a trigger of discourse breakdown on LW.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
Re: looks, are we talking the “blonde = ditzy, glasses = geeky” level of stereotype? Or are you talking about the way someone’s mood, shyness, introversion, and so forth can be read from body language? Or something as straightforward as someone wearing a lot of makeup spent a lot of time on her appearance, and thus probably wants attention/cares what people think of her a lot?
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
One idea: we’ve had a thread on LW where people post their online dating profiles for feedback. I think it’d be an interesting game to post pictures of people, either ours or other random pictures, and see what kind of guesses we come up with about them based on clues from their appearance.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
That depends on what exactly you’re aiming for. Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand. Clearly, you shouldn’t worry too much if it’s really just a throwaway relationship that will soon end one way or another. (Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation, and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
In fact, the situation has gotten significantly worse on LW in this regard since I started commenting here around two years ago. Back then, it seemed to me like discussions of these topics on LW might result in interesting insight whose worth would be greater than the trouble. However, ever since then, a string of ever worse and more cringe-worthy failures that occurred whenever these topics were opened has convinced me in the opposite.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum. (Though admittedly these days none are anywhere as good as what could be found during the heyday of the contrarian blogosphere some years ago.) I really don’t see any point in trying to open them in a forum like this one, which has conclusively shown to be a bad place for them.
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
It was the first thought I had. The association in my mind went something like
girl with lots of partners ---> girl is sexually awesome ---> female partners and group sex ---> if someone thinks having multiple partners is bad, is that bad?
Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand
No, I meant long term.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
(Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
I am incredibly curious about your thoughts in these matters. You hint lots of things but don’t spell them out. I disagree with your assertions that LW’s gotten worse and is a bad place for these discussions, and I get that you don’t want to post them publicly on LW, but can you PM me? I promise to keep them private if you’d like.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum.
The ones I’ve seen either a) take weird conservative positions, b) are filled with bitterness and hatred towards women, c) deteriorate into madonna/whore complexes, slut-shaming, and name calling, without much intelligent discussion or reasoning, or d) seem sane to me, but agree with my viewpoint on things.
Besides, I want to know what you think. You’re sane, reasonable, intelligent, and have a viewpoint that’s very different from mine, but seems like it might have a lot to offer. Please PM me. You’re giving me half of thoughts that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and can’t find on fora elsewhere, and I want the other half!
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation,
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
Rather than counting things for or against the girl how about we frame it in terms of to what extent these new behaviors (female partners and group sex with you) also fit into the previously mentioned correlation cluster.
This is of course a more accurate and useful way of stating the problem in general terms.
The specific question still stands, though. Let’s say it’s true that a guy dating a girl who’s had many past partners will have certain problems, as VM suggests. Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
I would be rather surprised if this has been studied in the same way that the “sexual partners—divorce rate” correlations have been. That said, the second question seems to be equivalent to “does having group sex cause or correlate to lower expected duration of the pair bond”. An answer of “Yes, but it’s worth it!” seems plausible.
As for correlations between bulk female-female liaisons in the history of the female partner of a heterosexual pair bond and pair bond duration and level of social game required by the male partner—the only direct evidence I have been exposed to is in the form of anecdotal evidence from my own experience and that of reports. My prediction must be based primarily on what I know about human psychology in general—things like conservativeness and the ‘openness’ personality trait. The prediction I would give is “makes less difference than if all those liaisons were with males but still makes a difference in the same direction”.
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
(I might be joking now, but my jimmies are overall quite rustled with his entire soap opera; moreso when I consider how clear-headed and constructive he can be with simple and ideology-free comments.)
Based on the comments you’ve left so far in response to what I’ve been writing, I estimate a low probability that you are genuinely intrigued by what I might think about certain questions, and a much higher probability that you are baiting.
However, just in case the less probable hypothesis is true, I will for once respond to you. Namely, if you want me to talk about things that I’m reluctant to discuss because I’m not sure if it’s worth the controversy it will cause, then I’d first like to see that you’re making some effort to understand the arguments that I have already made on related topics. So far, I’ve seen zero indication of this, which makes it likely that you are indeed baiting.
Now, this may be a misunderstanding on my part, but honestly, I can hardly see how it might be so. Someone who is genuinely curious about my contrarian opinions would make some effort to respond intelligently to those comments where I have already discussed them, even if I’ve done it only in a cautious and indirect way. You, on the other hand, have shown absolutely no inclination to do so. Rather, you are behaving as if you are eager to get some juicy soundbites that would be a convenient target for attack. And you can’t possibly claim that my writings so far have been devoid of substance, since dozens of other people have evidently found enough substance in them to write well-thought-out responses.
Sorry, but I’m just stunned by such an interpretation. Okay, I’ll try to assess some of your more outstanding and upvoted comments as fairly as I can and respond to the best of my ability, if that’s what it takes to initiate a dialogue. I was, however, quite unaware that my remarks could’ve been taken to express any disrespect of your intelligence and epistemic virtue, or disregard for your viewpoints.
Indeed, if you take a look at the enormous thread that was LW’s response to my query in this fascinating direction, you’ll see that I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why). I honestly don’t understand why my desire to learn new perspectives, to consider their implications—and, yes, argue about them, but without aiming for their suppression or vilification of their holders—has now been met with such derision.
If you feel that the above is just so much self-congratulation and platitude, go ahead and tell me so, but, now at least, I really believe that I tried my best and sparked off valuable, constructive discussion with that post.
I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why).
I’m trying to abstain from posting, but, in brief, I suspect it’s the same thing that prompted e.g. my (over)reaction to reading Three Worlds Collide, the infanticide thread by Bakkot and some other stuff here. When encountering strong arguments against some element of ordinary, mainstream, liberal commonsense ethics (alongside with guilt for hardly living up to those in the first place), I tend to feel morally imperiled, disgusted by aspects of my own character, unsure of my worth as a person and easy to turn to “evil”. I know how wild and unhealthy this sounds, but such things always appear so personal and not-abstract to me, I just can’t help it.
Someone here once told me that this might be not unusual for people who perceive sociopathic tendencies within themselves and repress them; they view all such tricky problems through the prism of their own perceived moral deficiencies. Sigh, I wish I could explain in a less obtuse manner.
Hmm. I think I understand. I’m the opposite in some ways: I get a wild thrill of excitement and happiness at “taboo” thoughts or ideas, and I’m biased towards them. I remember first discovering Holocaust revisionists and being amazingly awed at the daring and conviction and wrongness of what they were saying.
I don’t know what this says about my personality.
That said, I get somewhat annoyed at overly cynical or oversimplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as when people say that the educational system or the legal system is all about status signaling, or the PUA theory that everything is a test and it’s all about dominance and social value.
What “evil” bothers you the most? And what was your reaction to TWC? You can probably guess what mine was.
Jokes aside, in a properly arranged duel this would probably work; when directly attempting to persuade his audience of something, Eliezer is among the most convincing writers I’ve ever read (I was similarly impressed by e.g. George Orwell and Hannah Arendt).
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
You had me convinced that Vladimir really was all talk and bluff until other links in recent comments lead me to some rather detailed explanations by Vladimir of his position.
I have an even stronger dislike than normal for cheap rhetoric when I realize that I have been taken in by it. All future anti-Vladimir_M claims by yourself will now be treated with extreme skepticism.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy, the point is the same—just by talking here. Maybe it’s all out of my league, and maybe I’m operating under a massive self-deception. I’ll take a couple days off LW at least and won’t think about the whole matter at all. Maybe I’ll have to take a longer break.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy
Without trying to condescend too much—Something to keep in mind when managing your own sense of adequacy and inclusion is that personal challenges are much more controversial (and likely to be challenged and counterattacked) than more straightforward positions. While direct challenges are sometimes appropriate it is almost always always more practical to avoid them unless you are already feeling entirely secure in your position and not especially vulnerable to potential disagreement.
The above applies both here and elsewhere and even when you are being entirely reasonable.
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Is 1100 enough karma?
I have over 1500 karma as of today; I think 1100 ought to be enough.
I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
I think the mailing list should be set up as invitation only, with some place where one can request an invitation. Then current members could look at their posts, and if the person has a lot of contributions and looks open-minded enough, they can be allowed on. There wouldn’t have to be a hard-and-fast karma cutoff if every new member was “previewed” and disruptive members could be banned easily.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members. The LW moderators and/or Lukeprog* is an obvious Schelling point, but they may not have the time or inclination. Conversely, I could probably figure out how to create a mailing list and would be willing to do so, but I don’t have the reputation here to be seen as a valid judge of who’s non-ideological enough to join.
*Lukeprog would presumably have a significant amount to post to such a list, and is widely respected by the community despite not having moderator powers.
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Those are more literally correct, but the acronyms don’t work out as ironically.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members.
Well, given that the idea is to create a place where certain norm-violating ideas can be discussed, it seems like the ones with veto power ought to be the ones who have come up with the idea but are reluctant to discuss it in public (I admit I’ve rather lost track of who this is, in this instance). If nothing else, the veto would be exercised by simply not discussing the topic.
The problem with setting up such a society is that it’s about as secure as a house of cards. If I was a potential attacker, all I’d need to do would be,
Create a new account on Less Wrong (or just use my existing one if I was willing to burn it)
Act really open-minded and gain a lot of karma
Join the Contrarian Conspiracy
Archive all its messages for a few months, then publish them on Slashdot, 4chan, and the National Enquirer
In fact, the first three steps aren’t even necessary, if you assume that instead of being an outside attacker, I’m an internal member who’d gone rogue. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping a person like that.
Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.
One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.
The needed barriers to entry are basically taken care of in who gets invited in the first place. On the list itself I don’t actually see that strong a reason to even know which mail address is who, in fact since many people don’t really have all that recognisable a style this might work to improve rationality by breaking up existing sympathies and antipathies.
I saw it as a way of messing up the apparent signal-to-noise ratio for outside observers. However, if one were to wish to do so, there are probably better ways.
This is a good idea, but it does not guarantee security; and I’m not sure how effective it would be against a determined attacker. It would be relatively easy to collect a large enough corpus of text and then use it to match up “46233782482@gmail.com″ with “Bugmaster of LessWrong”. And, of course, this assumes that Google won’t roll over and surrender all of Mr. 46233782482′s contact information to the authorities when said authorities come knocking.
How determined an attacker are we planning for, here? The original goal was to just meliorate the damage that a theoretical rogue member could cause (as it seems hopeless to try to prevent that). Are you really anticipating “the authorities” getting involved?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way. On the other hand, our authorities have been getting quite jumpy lately; for example, merely having an Arabic-sounding last name is already enough for the FBI to attach a tracking device to your car. When you put the two factors together, it seems reasonable to expect said authorities to take an interest in the membership of the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way.
Where on Earth did you read anything like that anywhere in my comments? Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
This, by the way, is another way in which expressing opinions about controversial and charged topics can be more dangerous than one might assume. Already in the second- or third-hand retelling, your opinion is not at all unlikely to be distorted and amplified into a caricatured soundbite that sounds far more crude and awful than anything you ever meant to say or actually said. If such things happen even on the “meta” level, what can one expect to happen when concrete topics are broached?
Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
Ok, I tried doing just that right now, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thread at all at any capacity. So, firstly, I have to withdraw my comment for lack of evidence; my apologies. But secondly, can you offer some advice for navigating gigantic threads on Less Wrong ? For example, is there a way to search just a single thread for comments with certain keywords, or to flatten the thread, or something ?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way.
Such a belief does not exist! Vladimir_M is a liar. A dirty, dirty liar!
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly, unless it is intended to force the assailant into a particularly dangerous form of confrontation.
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly
It could also work as a curse of the gods that keeps the poor soul forever hiding in fear for its life.
The first thing that comes to mind is a bit of a stretch, but:
10 The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. 11 Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” 13 Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear. 14 Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
(From Genesis 4.)
So, the curse doesn’t directly cause anyone to attack him, but it does indirectly create a situation in which Cain has to expose himself to attackers. Of course, this version of the curse lasts for all of one verse; in the next, God revises it into the Mark of Cain, which is perhaps even more cruel than the original curse.
I like this idea, but since I have very little karma, I would be a bit sad to see it happen. Could an email list be contrived in such a way that users with lower karma could read the correspondences of the group without having the ability to post messages? If possible, it seems like that would maintain the integrity of discussion while also allowing interested parties to learn new things.
If you don’t have a lot of karma, and the requisite posting history of being nonpartisan, how could the Conspirators trust you not to spread around the Deep Dark Secrets that would give the site a bad reputation?
(If I seem to be giving off mixed signals, it’s because I’m not sure how I feel about this idea myself yet. I’m having a really hard time imagining what could be somehow so beyond the pale as to be impossible to allude to in public.)
Good question. I don’t have an answer, but I guess there could be tiers? Like, if a person* has a couple hundred karma, has been active on the site for a while, and has conducted him/herself well then that person could receive low level access. With the concern you brought up it’s hard to choose criteria that would make a user trustworthy but that wouldn’t warrant just letting them in completely. I guess I would advocate less stringent requirements. Like, nobody with negative karma and to be accepted you need to have been on the site for x amount of time and have been polite/non-inflammatory/thoughtful in all previous discussions. If a person has low karma because they rarely comment, they likely won’t post much in the email list anyway.
If we need a way to find out if someone’s trustworthy, can’t we just ask them to raise their right hand?
To take an attested example, discussion of the beliefs and tactics of the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community was either heavily discouraged or banned, I forget which, because of the unpleasant air it seemed to give to this site.
Apolitical Conspiracy could be abbreviated as APC, a vehicle useful to well-resourced partisans who want to decide when and where to engage without resorting to sneaking about dressed as civilians.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
[09:05] Eliezer: what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don’t have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they’re going to misinterpret something then you shouldn’t say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head
[09:06] Eliezer: often you are just screwed unless you want to go back and teach them rationality from scratch, and in a case like that, all you can do is say whatever creates the least inaccurate image
[09:06] X: 10 to 1000 is misleading when you say it to a nonrationalist?
[09:06] Eliezer: “I don’t know” is a good way to duck when you say it to someone who doesn’t know about probability distributions
[09:07] Eliezer: if they thought I was certain, or that my statement implied actual knowledge of the tree
[09:07] Eliezer: then the statement would mislead them
[09:07] Eliezer: and if I knew this, and did it anyway for my own purposes, it would be a lie
[09:08] Eliezer: if I just couldn’t think of anything better to say, then it would be honest but not true, if you can see the distinction
[09:08] Eliezer: honest for me, but the statement that formed in their minds would still not be true
[09:09] X: most people will say to you.… but you said....10-1000 apples
[09:09] Eliezer: then you’re just screwed
[09:10] Eliezer: nothing you can do will create in their minds a true understanding, not even “I don’t know”
[09:10] X: why bother, why not say i don’t know?
[09:10] Eliezer: honesty therefore consists of misleading them the least and telling them the most
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
Observe, however the comment section of certain horribly non PC blogs. By and large. they are very smart, and remarkably well informed. Censorship is never necessary, whereas in more politically correct environments, censorship is essential, because when non PC views are spoken, commenters take it upon themselves to silence the heretic by any means necessary, disrupting communication.
If the blog owner posts fairly heretical views, and himself refrains from censoring or intemperately and rudely attacking views in the comments that are even more heretical than his own, then no one in the comments intemperately or rudely attacks any views that anyone expresses in the comments or on the blog.
The blog owner can say that left wing views are held by fools and scoundrels, but because left wing views are high prestige, a left commenter will not be called a fool and a scoundrel. If the blog owner refrains from saying that views more right wing than his own are held by fools and scoundrels, then commenters with views more right wing than his own will not be called fools and scoundrels in the comments.
Because right wing views are low prestige, it requires only the slightest encouragement from the blog owner to produce a dog fight in the comments, should someone further right than the blog owner comment, but not so easy to produce a dog fight when someone lefter than the blog owner comments.
This was previously discussed here. Right now, it’s sounding like whatever (if anything) comes out of this will fail by being overly inclusive. My guess is that if this sort of thing ends up working well, it will be because some small group of people who happen to have good taste end up making decisions on a “trust me” basis, rather than because LessWrong as a community successfully applies some attempt at a transparently fair algorithm.
It’d be interesting to see some sort of dumping ground of allegedly useful, but socially unacceptable ideas, which may or may not be true, and then have a group of people discuss and test them. Doesn’t seem completely outside the territority of lesswrong, but if you think these subjects are that hazardous, and that lesswrong is too useful to be risked, then a different site that did something along those lines is something I’d like to see.
A invitation based mailing list of a group of high karma non-ideological LWers seems the better route.
A site devoted to discussing impolite but probable ideas will well… disappoint very quickly. Have you ever seen the comment section of a major news site?
A non-archived mailing list, I think, to greatly reduce the potential cost of adding new members.
Trouble is, everything transported over the internet is archived one way or another. That is actually the main reason why I’ve been reluctant to push forward with this initiative lately.
Everything? I don’t believe that. I am highly confident that I have transported plenty of things over the internet that were never archived and could not have been archived without my knowledge. Unless someone is a whole lot better with large primes than I believe possible.
Yes, of course, it’s not literally true. But working under that assumption is a useful heuristic for avoiding all sorts of trouble, unless you have very detailed and reliable technical knowledge of what exactly is going on under the hood.
I agree with you completely regarding privacy. If you feel that you must absolutely prevent some piece of information from leaking out into the world for all to see, you must treat every communication medium—and the Internet specifically—as insecure. The world is littered with dead political careers of people who did not heed this warning.
That said though (to paraphrase the old adage), are we rationalists or are we mice ? If you hold some beliefs that can get you burned at the stake (figuratively speaking… hopefully...), then isn’t it all the more important to determine if these beliefs are true ? And how are you going to do that all by yourself, with no one to critique your ideas and to expose your biases ?
This is just a quibble because I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but the traffic could conceivably be archived in its encrypted state for decryption later.
Yes, I theoretically have to consider how good people from the distant future who particularly want to know what I said now are at playing with large primes. Because there is always the possibility that a man in the middle is saving the encrypted data stream just in case it becomes possible to decipher in the future.
Do you mean in users’ inboxes, or something else?
Yes, in this case the inboxes would be the obvious problem, but there might be others too, depending on the implementation. In any case, I don’t think it would be possible to assume lack of permanent record, the way it would be possible with non-recorded private conversation.
The Wayback Machine?
Edit: Or not.
Not relevant to email, or even an access-controlled site.
Oh. Oops. (I don’t know much about that sort of thing, obviously.)
Honest question: why was this downvoted?
(I downvoted because I saw the comment as decreasing the thread’s signal-to-noise ratio: as Nick noted, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t archive private pages or emails, and is therefore not relevant.)
I support this proposal and would like to join the mailing list if one becomes available. But why do you think a mailing list would fare better than a website? Because of restricted access?
I guess it has more of a “secret society” vibe to it. Oooh, ooh, can we call it the Political Conspiracy?
Is 1100 enough karma? I’ve tried to stay out of ideological debates, but I don’t know precisely what the criteria would be. (And who would decide, anyway?)
Yes, that’s another way in which it just doesn’t look like a good idea. When you’re organizing people in a way that has a secret society vibe, chances are you’re doing something either really childish or really dangerous.
Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
I’m glad you agree. So does this mean you support the idea of just, you know, coming out and saying it in public?
Edit: No? Okay then. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to discuss it at all if you disapprove of both doing it in public and doing it in secret, though.
Coming out and saying what exactly?
Is this a joke? I don’t know what exactly. That’s the point.
OK, then to phrase it in purely grammatical terms, what exactly is the antecedent of the pronoun “it” in your question above?
You write as if there is some particular horrible truth that I’d like to be able to shout from the rooftops but I’m afraid to do so. There’s nothing like that. (Not about this topic, anyway.)
What does exist, however, is that real, no-nonsense advice about this topic breaks the social norms of polite discourse and offends various categories of people. (“Offends” in the sense that it lowers their status in a way that, according to the present mainstream social norms, constitutes a legitimate grievance.) This leads straight to at least three possible failure modes: (1) the discourse breaks down and turns into a quarrel over the alleged offenses, (2) the discourse turns into a pseudo-rational discussion that incorporates heavy biases that are necessary to steer it away from the unacceptable territory, or (3) the discourse accurately converges onto the correct but offensive ideas, but makes the forum look to the outsiders like a low-status breeding ground for offensive and evil ideas.
Concrete examples are easy to think of even without getting into the traditionally controversial PUA stuff. For example, one sort of advice I wish my younger self had followed is about what sorts of women it’s smart to avoid entangling oneself with due to all kinds of potential trouble. (In fact, this is an extremely important issue for men who undertake some sort of self-improvement to become more attractive to women, since in their new-found success they may rush to hurl themselves into various kinds of imprudent entanglements.)
However, if you state openly and frankly that women displaying trait X are likely to exhibit behavior Y that in turn highly increases the probability of trouble Z, you may well be already into the unacceptably offensive territory. Women who have the trait X will be offended, or others may decide to signal enlightened caring by getting offended on their behalf. Those who exhibit, or have exhibited, behavior Y may defend it and be offended by its condemnation, and so on. All this will likely be framed as a protest against prejudice, a rhetorical tactic that tends to be very effective even if no evidence has been given against the conditional probabilities that constitute the prejudice in question. (Though of course there may be plenty of fallacious but rhetorically effective disproofs offered.)
It’s this kind of thing that I have in mind, i.e. stuff that’s offensive and insensitive in quite mundane ways, not some frightful “Soylent Green is people” bombshells.
Well, it’s fair to say I wrote that way, as that was indeed the impression I was operating under. Looking back on your actual posts, I’m not quite sure precisely where I got that idea, though apparently I was not alone in that interpretation (I see you’ve already responded to one of those comments as well).
In that case, I’m somewhat more sympathetic to your point of view. If you think it probably isn’t worth the predictable breakdown in discussion to spread around some particular piece of offensive-but-helpful-and-true advice, I’m not going to second-guess you.
But to be fair, I think the points I made in this particular branch of the conversation do apply more generally to whatever other Soylent Green-style horrible truths you (or anyone else) may or may not have, not just this one specific topic.
The trouble is, I really don’t see how any course of action would have much hope of avoiding at least one of the three listed failure modes. On the one hand, I don’t want to be the one responsible for failure (1) or (3), but on the other, I have grown fond enough of this forum that I’d hate to see it degenerate into just another place where failures of type (2) go on unnoticed. Hence my attempt to draw attention to the problem by discussing it at the meta level.
Redheads? Now I’m curious what kinds of traits X you’re talking about.
To take a prominent example, it’s impossible to discuss the inferences that can be made from a woman’s sexual history without getting into the problems described above. (Especially considering that statistically accurate criteria of this sort are, as a purely factual matter, highly asymmetrical across the sexes.) Or similarly, any sorts of inferences that can be made from looks and behavior, where it’s usually impossible to even get to a rational discussion of whether they are statistically accurate, since any such discussion will at the same time hit the ideological boo light of “prejudice” and personally aggravate those to whom these inferences apply personally (or who have important people in their lives in this category, or who will perhaps just react for signaling reasons).
On these topics, there really is no way to avoid either sounding crude and offensive or being misleading by omitting important elements of the truth.
Perhaps if you started by sharing your dataset first (with names changed to protect the guilty, etc.), then the conclusions you drew from it, and only afterwards the advice you would give to a younger version of yourself?
So basically which stereotypes are accurate? If you’re willing, I’d like to know what specific inferences can be made from sexual history, looks, or behavior: you can PM me. I assure you it won’t personally aggravate me. Are you thinking lots of partners/good looks correspond to intimacy issues, low self-esteem, or craziness?
Well, it’s a topic for a whole book, not a brief comment buried deep in a vast old thread. But for some concrete examples, see e.g. the comments I left in this subthread.
So basically, if a guy tries to have a long-term relationship with a girl who’s had a lot of partners, he better study Game or there’s a good chance she’ll get bored, because she’s used to very attractive guys? That makes sense; I wouldn’t think of that as very controversial. Of course, that ignores that some women actually do also make an effort to work on their long-term relationship skills and find ways to deal with periods where their partners seem less attractive.
I didn’t see anything about looks in that subthread; does something similar apply to dating someone very good-looking?
By “looks” I didn’t mean the level of attractiveness, but more generally, all clues available from people’s appearance. Clearly, this is going to lead to strife once people start recognizing themselves, or someone they care about, in the criteria under discussion. (This may in fact be due to understandable annoyance on part of someone who represents an actual statistical exception, but again, this makes it no less a barrier to rational discussion.)
Re: relationships with women who’ve had a lot of partners, the problem is that for a typical man, the extreme skew of the male attractiveness distribution and the asymmetry of the male-female mating strategies mean that even with some dedication to studying and practice of game, he’ll likely end up in an unfavorable position. But again, talking about this stuff in plainer and more concrete ways is hard to do without crossing the bounds that have repeatedly shown to be a trigger of discourse breakdown on LW.
The obvious question is, what about female partners, or group sex partners with the guy in question? Do they count against the girl?
I’m not seeing why the asymmetry means that the guy will end up in an unfavorable position even if he knows how to be attractive enough. Other than the girl finding the guy unattractive, I’m not sure what else you’re hinting at. Given that I like girls who have had large numbers of partners, is there anything else I need to know or do or be aware of?
Re: looks, are we talking the “blonde = ditzy, glasses = geeky” level of stereotype? Or are you talking about the way someone’s mood, shyness, introversion, and so forth can be read from body language? Or something as straightforward as someone wearing a lot of makeup spent a lot of time on her appearance, and thus probably wants attention/cares what people think of her a lot?
The only “discourse breakdown” I’ve seen is the crowd that thinks any attempt to improve dating skills is fake and evil, and I don’t really care about them. I think we’re past the reflexive “pickup = evil” by now. I’d really like to hear this stuff talked about in plainer and more concrete ways, or at least PM me with a few specifics!
One idea: we’ve had a thread on LW where people post their online dating profiles for feedback. I think it’d be an interesting game to post pictures of people, either ours or other random pictures, and see what kind of guesses we come up with about them based on clues from their appearance.
Why would it be “obvious”? Even completely ignoring these questions still leads to useful insight for the majority of cases in practice.
To answer your question, we’d need to get into a discussion of the motivational mechanisms of the behaviors you mention, but that is certain to lead to even more controversial questions, which I’d really prefer not to get into.
That depends on what exactly you’re aiming for. Saying “I like girls who [have the characteristic X]” sounds as if you like such girls for non-serious, shorter-term relationships in which you have the upper hand. Clearly, you shouldn’t worry too much if it’s really just a throwaway relationship that will soon end one way or another. (Still, you should watch for traits that indicate propensity for troublesome behaviors that can get you into unpleasant situations, or even serious problems, even in the context of such a relationship. What’s indicated by sheer partner count in this regard, independent of the mechanism I described earlier, is another can of worms I’d rather not open.)
On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a committed relationship, a woman’s high number of previous partners (which in fact doesn’t even have to be extremely high) definitely makes the deck stacked against you. This follows from the basic statistics of the situation, and “if he knows how to be attractive enough” is a can-opener assumption in this context.
In fact, the situation has gotten significantly worse on LW in this regard since I started commenting here around two years ago. Back then, it seemed to me like discussions of these topics on LW might result in interesting insight whose worth would be greater than the trouble. However, ever since then, a string of ever worse and more cringe-worthy failures that occurred whenever these topics were opened has convinced me in the opposite.
As for the specifics and straight talk, there are plenty of blogs and forums where such things can be discussed ad infinitum. (Though admittedly these days none are anywhere as good as what could be found during the heyday of the contrarian blogosphere some years ago.) I really don’t see any point in trying to open them in a forum like this one, which has conclusively shown to be a bad place for them.
It was the first thought I had. The association in my mind went something like
girl with lots of partners ---> girl is sexually awesome ---> female partners and group sex ---> if someone thinks having multiple partners is bad, is that bad?
No, I meant long term.
I am incredibly curious about your thoughts in these matters. You hint lots of things but don’t spell them out. I disagree with your assertions that LW’s gotten worse and is a bad place for these discussions, and I get that you don’t want to post them publicly on LW, but can you PM me? I promise to keep them private if you’d like.
The ones I’ve seen either a) take weird conservative positions, b) are filled with bitterness and hatred towards women, c) deteriorate into madonna/whore complexes, slut-shaming, and name calling, without much intelligent discussion or reasoning, or d) seem sane to me, but agree with my viewpoint on things.
Besides, I want to know what you think. You’re sane, reasonable, intelligent, and have a viewpoint that’s very different from mine, but seems like it might have a lot to offer. Please PM me. You’re giving me half of thoughts that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and can’t find on fora elsewhere, and I want the other half!
I don’t see how this stacks the deck.
Rather than counting things for or against the girl how about we frame it in terms of to what extent these new behaviors (female partners and group sex with you) also fit into the previously mentioned correlation cluster.
This is of course a more accurate and useful way of stating the problem in general terms.
The specific question still stands, though. Let’s say it’s true that a guy dating a girl who’s had many past partners will have certain problems, as VM suggests. Do those problems apply to the same extent if, say, half or more were female? Or if they were all during group sex with the guy?
I would be rather surprised if this has been studied in the same way that the “sexual partners—divorce rate” correlations have been. That said, the second question seems to be equivalent to “does having group sex cause or correlate to lower expected duration of the pair bond”. An answer of “Yes, but it’s worth it!” seems plausible.
As for correlations between bulk female-female liaisons in the history of the female partner of a heterosexual pair bond and pair bond duration and level of social game required by the male partner—the only direct evidence I have been exposed to is in the form of anecdotal evidence from my own experience and that of reports. My prediction must be based primarily on what I know about human psychology in general—things like conservativeness and the ‘openness’ personality trait. The prediction I would give is “makes less difference than if all those liaisons were with males but still makes a difference in the same direction”.
A better way to go about it would be slipping Vlad some drug that will overwhelm his barriers and make him blabber out the horrible truth. Look at his comment history and you’ll see that no-one ever got anything serious out of him after him dropping such hints with just talk.;)
(I might be joking now, but my jimmies are overall quite rustled with his entire soap opera; moreso when I consider how clear-headed and constructive he can be with simple and ideology-free comments.)
Based on the comments you’ve left so far in response to what I’ve been writing, I estimate a low probability that you are genuinely intrigued by what I might think about certain questions, and a much higher probability that you are baiting.
However, just in case the less probable hypothesis is true, I will for once respond to you. Namely, if you want me to talk about things that I’m reluctant to discuss because I’m not sure if it’s worth the controversy it will cause, then I’d first like to see that you’re making some effort to understand the arguments that I have already made on related topics. So far, I’ve seen zero indication of this, which makes it likely that you are indeed baiting.
Now, this may be a misunderstanding on my part, but honestly, I can hardly see how it might be so. Someone who is genuinely curious about my contrarian opinions would make some effort to respond intelligently to those comments where I have already discussed them, even if I’ve done it only in a cautious and indirect way. You, on the other hand, have shown absolutely no inclination to do so. Rather, you are behaving as if you are eager to get some juicy soundbites that would be a convenient target for attack. And you can’t possibly claim that my writings so far have been devoid of substance, since dozens of other people have evidently found enough substance in them to write well-thought-out responses.
......
Sorry, but I’m just stunned by such an interpretation. Okay, I’ll try to assess some of your more outstanding and upvoted comments as fairly as I can and respond to the best of my ability, if that’s what it takes to initiate a dialogue. I was, however, quite unaware that my remarks could’ve been taken to express any disrespect of your intelligence and epistemic virtue, or disregard for your viewpoints.
Indeed, if you take a look at the enormous thread that was LW’s response to my query in this fascinating direction, you’ll see that I’ve been striving to consider opinions carefully, avoid knee-jerk reactions and associate with “far out” viewpoints first before judging them (that last one is especially challenging for me—if anyone’s interested, I’ll try to outline why). I honestly don’t understand why my desire to learn new perspectives, to consider their implications—and, yes, argue about them, but without aiming for their suppression or vilification of their holders—has now been met with such derision.
If you feel that the above is just so much self-congratulation and platitude, go ahead and tell me so, but, now at least, I really believe that I tried my best and sparked off valuable, constructive discussion with that post.
I’m interested. Why?
I’m trying to abstain from posting, but, in brief, I suspect it’s the same thing that prompted e.g. my (over)reaction to reading Three Worlds Collide, the infanticide thread by Bakkot and some other stuff here. When encountering strong arguments against some element of ordinary, mainstream, liberal commonsense ethics (alongside with guilt for hardly living up to those in the first place), I tend to feel morally imperiled, disgusted by aspects of my own character, unsure of my worth as a person and easy to turn to “evil”. I know how wild and unhealthy this sounds, but such things always appear so personal and not-abstract to me, I just can’t help it. Someone here once told me that this might be not unusual for people who perceive sociopathic tendencies within themselves and repress them; they view all such tricky problems through the prism of their own perceived moral deficiencies.
Sigh, I wish I could explain in a less obtuse manner.
Hmm. I think I understand. I’m the opposite in some ways: I get a wild thrill of excitement and happiness at “taboo” thoughts or ideas, and I’m biased towards them. I remember first discovering Holocaust revisionists and being amazingly awed at the daring and conviction and wrongness of what they were saying.
I don’t know what this says about my personality.
That said, I get somewhat annoyed at overly cynical or oversimplified explanations of complex phenomena, such as when people say that the educational system or the legal system is all about status signaling, or the PUA theory that everything is a test and it’s all about dominance and social value.
What “evil” bothers you the most? And what was your reaction to TWC? You can probably guess what mine was.
Naaaah, let’s just have Eliezer try to get Vlad’s ideas out of the box. :-)
Jokes aside, in a properly arranged duel this would probably work; when directly attempting to persuade his audience of something, Eliezer is among the most convincing writers I’ve ever read (I was similarly impressed by e.g. George Orwell and Hannah Arendt).
You had me convinced that Vladimir really was all talk and bluff until other links in recent comments lead me to some rather detailed explanations by Vladimir of his position.
I have an even stronger dislike than normal for cheap rhetoric when I realize that I have been taken in by it. All future anti-Vladimir_M claims by yourself will now be treated with extreme skepticism.
...maybe. Okay.
You know what, I’m currently feeling impostor syndrome—or just plain old inadequacy, the point is the same—just by talking here. Maybe it’s all out of my league, and maybe I’m operating under a massive self-deception. I’ll take a couple days off LW at least and won’t think about the whole matter at all. Maybe I’ll have to take a longer break.
Without trying to condescend too much—Something to keep in mind when managing your own sense of adequacy and inclusion is that personal challenges are much more controversial (and likely to be challenged and counterattacked) than more straightforward positions. While direct challenges are sometimes appropriate it is almost always always more practical to avoid them unless you are already feeling entirely secure in your position and not especially vulnerable to potential disagreement.
The above applies both here and elsewhere and even when you are being entirely reasonable.
Well, he has expressed the reluctance to go into further specifics a few times.
He did rather play up the “it’s taboo” angle.
That would be cool. I’d prefer the Apolitical Conspiracy, or perhaps the Contrarian Conspiracy.
I have over 1500 karma as of today; I think 1100 ought to be enough.
I think the mailing list should be set up as invitation only, with some place where one can request an invitation. Then current members could look at their posts, and if the person has a lot of contributions and looks open-minded enough, they can be allowed on. There wouldn’t have to be a hard-and-fast karma cutoff if every new member was “previewed” and disruptive members could be banned easily.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an initial trustworthy person or group to start the mailing list and preview the first batch of new members. The LW moderators and/or Lukeprog* is an obvious Schelling point, but they may not have the time or inclination. Conversely, I could probably figure out how to create a mailing list and would be willing to do so, but I don’t have the reputation here to be seen as a valid judge of who’s non-ideological enough to join.
*Lukeprog would presumably have a significant amount to post to such a list, and is widely respected by the community despite not having moderator powers.
Those are more literally correct, but the acronyms don’t work out as ironically.
Well, given that the idea is to create a place where certain norm-violating ideas can be discussed, it seems like the ones with veto power ought to be the ones who have come up with the idea but are reluctant to discuss it in public (I admit I’ve rather lost track of who this is, in this instance). If nothing else, the veto would be exercised by simply not discussing the topic.
“Contrarian Conspiracy for Correcting Politics”
“New Association for Apolitically Criticizing Politics”
“New Society for Discussing, Apolitically, Politics”
The problem with setting up such a society is that it’s about as secure as a house of cards. If I was a potential attacker, all I’d need to do would be,
Create a new account on Less Wrong (or just use my existing one if I was willing to burn it)
Act really open-minded and gain a lot of karma
Join the Contrarian Conspiracy
Archive all its messages for a few months, then publish them on Slashdot, 4chan, and the National Enquirer
In fact, the first three steps aren’t even necessary, if you assume that instead of being an outside attacker, I’m an internal member who’d gone rogue. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping a person like that.
Possible solutions: wear cloaks and masks, i.e. have the membership of the mailing list be composed of anonymized gmail accounts (46233782482@gmail.com). Also, of course, denydenydeny.
One also could create a social norm of writing under false identities. That is, have several individuals who are each claiming the same Lesswrong identity.
I don’t see why hypothetical conspiratorial mailing list (HCML) identities and LW identities have to be linked at all, really.
The needed barriers to entry are basically taken care of in who gets invited in the first place. On the list itself I don’t actually see that strong a reason to even know which mail address is who, in fact since many people don’t really have all that recognisable a style this might work to improve rationality by breaking up existing sympathies and antipathies.
I saw it as a way of messing up the apparent signal-to-noise ratio for outside observers. However, if one were to wish to do so, there are probably better ways.
This is a good idea, but it does not guarantee security; and I’m not sure how effective it would be against a determined attacker. It would be relatively easy to collect a large enough corpus of text and then use it to match up “46233782482@gmail.com″ with “Bugmaster of LessWrong”. And, of course, this assumes that Google won’t roll over and surrender all of Mr. 46233782482′s contact information to the authorities when said authorities come knocking.
How determined an attacker are we planning for, here? The original goal was to just meliorate the damage that a theoretical rogue member could cause (as it seems hopeless to try to prevent that). Are you really anticipating “the authorities” getting involved?
Well, on the one hand, Vladimir_M believes that his beliefs are so heretical that they can cause society—any society, if I understand him correctly—to turn against him in a really intense way. On the other hand, our authorities have been getting quite jumpy lately; for example, merely having an Arabic-sounding last name is already enough for the FBI to attach a tracking device to your car. When you put the two factors together, it seems reasonable to expect said authorities to take an interest in the membership of the Contrarian Conspiracy.
Where on Earth did you read anything like that anywhere in my comments? Please provide a citation. (Which you should be able to do if you assert it as a known fact that person X believes Y.)
This, by the way, is another way in which expressing opinions about controversial and charged topics can be more dangerous than one might assume. Already in the second- or third-hand retelling, your opinion is not at all unlikely to be distorted and amplified into a caricatured soundbite that sounds far more crude and awful than anything you ever meant to say or actually said. If such things happen even on the “meta” level, what can one expect to happen when concrete topics are broached?
Ok, I tried doing just that right now, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thread at all at any capacity. So, firstly, I have to withdraw my comment for lack of evidence; my apologies. But secondly, can you offer some advice for navigating gigantic threads on Less Wrong ? For example, is there a way to search just a single thread for comments with certain keywords, or to flatten the thread, or something ?
Such a belief does not exist! Vladimir_M is a liar. A dirty, dirty liar!
(Prove me wrong? :P)
There’s no such thing as a hate-speech basilisk! Don’t be sill-
whisperwhisper
RAARGH DIE YOU FOUL HERETIC
Now I’m wondering if there there are any mythical creatures who are known to cause anyone who sets eyes upon them to attack them. It doesn’t seem like a survival trait exactly, unless it is intended to force the assailant into a particularly dangerous form of confrontation.
There’s the Troll, obviously.
If only those were mythological!
Not exactly mythological, but SCP-053 springs to mind.
It could also work as a curse of the gods that keeps the poor soul forever hiding in fear for its life.
Ahh, good idea. That has almost certainly come up in mythology somewhere.
The first thing that comes to mind is a bit of a stretch, but:
(From Genesis 4.)
So, the curse doesn’t directly cause anyone to attack him, but it does indirectly create a situation in which Cain has to expose himself to attackers. Of course, this version of the curse lasts for all of one verse; in the next, God revises it into the Mark of Cain, which is perhaps even more cruel than the original curse.
This would be a mistake analogous to the mind projection fallacy. I do not so understand.
Trivial inconvenience to protect against a trivial danger.
I find the scenario very low probability if high impact.
This might be useful.
I like this idea, but since I have very little karma, I would be a bit sad to see it happen. Could an email list be contrived in such a way that users with lower karma could read the correspondences of the group without having the ability to post messages? If possible, it seems like that would maintain the integrity of discussion while also allowing interested parties to learn new things.
If you don’t have a lot of karma, and the requisite posting history of being nonpartisan, how could the Conspirators trust you not to spread around the Deep Dark Secrets that would give the site a bad reputation?
(If I seem to be giving off mixed signals, it’s because I’m not sure how I feel about this idea myself yet. I’m having a really hard time imagining what could be somehow so beyond the pale as to be impossible to allude to in public.)
Good question. I don’t have an answer, but I guess there could be tiers? Like, if a person* has a couple hundred karma, has been active on the site for a while, and has conducted him/herself well then that person could receive low level access. With the concern you brought up it’s hard to choose criteria that would make a user trustworthy but that wouldn’t warrant just letting them in completely. I guess I would advocate less stringent requirements. Like, nobody with negative karma and to be accepted you need to have been on the site for x amount of time and have been polite/non-inflammatory/thoughtful in all previous discussions. If a person has low karma because they rarely comment, they likely won’t post much in the email list anyway.
If we need a way to find out if someone’s trustworthy, can’t we just ask them to raise their right hand?
*This hypothetical person happens to be me.
You’d have to ask the people who know what’s going on and why it should be kept secret.
(I am not one of them.)
To take an attested example, discussion of the beliefs and tactics of the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community was either heavily discouraged or banned, I forget which, because of the unpleasant air it seemed to give to this site.
I’m lost. Isn’t that exactly what started this discussion upthread?
That is not really discussion about PUA, but rather about what is problematic about discussing PUA.
Except, you know. It’s being alluded to in public. So it doesn’t seem to qualify.
Apolitical Conspiracy could be abbreviated as APC, a vehicle useful to well-resourced partisans who want to decide when and where to engage without resorting to sneaking about dressed as civilians.
I’d like to request an invite, if this is still a thing.
The comment sections on iSteve and Roissy are not great places either.
In the period roughly from 2006 until 2009, there was a flourishing scene of a number of loosely connected contrarian blogs with excellent comment sections. This includes the early years of Roissy’s blog. (Curiously, the golden age of Overcoming Bias also occurred within this time period, although I don’t count it as a part of this scene.)
All of these blogs, however, have shut down or gone completely downhill since then (or, at best, become nearly abandoned), and I can’t think of anything remotely comparable nowadays. I can also only speculate on what lucky confluence led to their brief flourishing and whether all such places on the internet are doomed to a fairly quick decay and disintegration. I can certainly think of some plausible reasons why this might be so.
I’m inclined to think that unusual goodness in social groups is very fragile, partly because it takes people being unhabitual so that there’s freshness to the interactions.
I can believe that this is more fragile online than in person—a happy family has more incentives and more kinds of interaction to help maintain itself.
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
I’ve looked at your blog. You seem to be spending a lot of effort to bend over backwards to PC orthodoxy, the “No Hostility” threads being the most blatant examples of this. Also, your posts also have an almost apologetic undertone, as if you believe you need to apologize to feminists for criticizing them.
From I Don’t Know:
If I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t think politics, the mind killer, requires an effort towards calm and careful thought, and has beliefs primarily as attire rather than anticipation controllers, and who doesn’t understand that policy debates should not be one sided, and who is dealing with non-allied interlocutors by assuming they are innately evil and pattern matching them to evil groups with heavily motivated cognition, and sometimes reasons that enemies are innately evil in violation of conservation of evidence, and sees a negative halo around any concept within shooting distance of the point I am trying to make, and doesn’t strive to think non-cached thoughts, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he’s wrong.
The truth is not enough; if one were to use the words that best represent these ideas to one’s self, a significant portion of the audience would believe things less aligned with truth than they do after one does one’s best to accommodate their thought patterns, as the blog is now.
Agreed, one must be careful when dealing with non-rationalists. However, Vladimir_M was talking about blogs where people who were already sufficiently rational not to get mind-killed by the topic got together in an attempt to find the truth, as opposed to blogs like HughRistik’s that focus more on appealing to people who aren’t yet rational.
I didn’t see myself as responding to his point, just to yours.
There’s a hypothesis I’ve seen tossed around that good blogs during that period existed because lots of people were blogging, and fewer people are blogging now because of microblogging. I haven’t seen whether the relevant facts cited there are even true, and I can’t find a reference to the hypothesis.
My own pet hypothesis is that after blogs became a popular and mainstream phenomenon sometime around the early-to-mid-oughts, there was a huge outburst of enthusiasm by a lot of smart contrarians with interesting ideas, who though this would be a new medium capable of breaking the monopoly on significant and respectable public discourse held by the mainstream media and academia. This enthusiasm was naive and misguided for a number of reasons that now seem obvious in retrospect, and faced with reality it petered out fairly quickly. But while it lasted, it resulted in some very interesting output.
Indeed, that’s my point.
Observe, however the comment section of certain horribly non PC blogs. By and large. they are very smart, and remarkably well informed. Censorship is never necessary, whereas in more politically correct environments, censorship is essential, because when non PC views are spoken, commenters take it upon themselves to silence the heretic by any means necessary, disrupting communication.
If the blog owner posts fairly heretical views, and himself refrains from censoring or intemperately and rudely attacking views in the comments that are even more heretical than his own, then no one in the comments intemperately or rudely attacks any views that anyone expresses in the comments or on the blog.
The blog owner can say that left wing views are held by fools and scoundrels, but because left wing views are high prestige, a left commenter will not be called a fool and a scoundrel. If the blog owner refrains from saying that views more right wing than his own are held by fools and scoundrels, then commenters with views more right wing than his own will not be called fools and scoundrels in the comments.
Because right wing views are low prestige, it requires only the slightest encouragement from the blog owner to produce a dog fight in the comments, should someone further right than the blog owner comment, but not so easy to produce a dog fight when someone lefter than the blog owner comments.
You have to be kidding, you can’t really believe that. Either that or I haven’t ever read a PC free blog.
This was previously discussed here. Right now, it’s sounding like whatever (if anything) comes out of this will fail by being overly inclusive. My guess is that if this sort of thing ends up working well, it will be because some small group of people who happen to have good taste end up making decisions on a “trust me” basis, rather than because LessWrong as a community successfully applies some attempt at a transparently fair algorithm.