Now that this thread has gathered around a thousand comments, and with presumably two more such threads ahead of us, let’s have a poll to help us figure out whether deciding to discuss such subjects as gender and politics was a good idea.
All things considered, has this comment thread made LessWrong more or less valuable to you? (ETA: This is excluding Luke’s original post, and relative to what you would have expected the site to be like if the comment thread had not taken place, not relative to what it would be like if the comment thread disappeared now.)
See the child comments for the poll options. If neither applies, don’t vote.
All things considered, has this comment thread made LessWrong more or less valuable to you? (ETA: This is excluding Luke’s original post, and relative to what you would have expected the site to be like if the comment thread had not taken place, not relative to what it would be like if the comment thread disappeared now.)
Less. A bunch of bickering about ethics with almost no actual practical content describing the world. Basically it is embarrassing to be associated with.
I agree that this whole thread, while admittedly I have been following it myself, is a net negative for LW.
It’s my contention that (1) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely negative outlook regarding women, (2) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely positive outlook regarding women (3) some people will just organically figure it out without any significant use of literature and (4) people that enjoy reading/writing/debating about this will continue to do that and may or may not actually pursue relationships.
I don’t think lukeprog’s writing is going to substantially change anyone’s inclinations or abilities in this area because relationships and dating are something one learns by doing and becoming, not talking and thinking.
Less. A bunch of bickering about ethics with almost no actual practical content describing the world. Basically it is embarrassing to be associated with.
Rational romantic relationships is a topic inextricably linked to ethics, in a universe where it’s a fact of human nature that human happiness is immediately and radically affected by our love lives.
I do agree that it’s disappointing that the pro-PUA posters here have not presented any hard evidence that the PUA community has something to offer an evidence-based analysis of rational romantic relationships. That would have been interesting and valuable.
I would like to endorse an idea that there should be a separate PUA discussion post. It’s acceptable if LW-ers want to discuss PUA at length, but the main disutility I get from it, is that it seems to constantly rear its head in posts that aren’t explicitly about PUA (such as this one.)
I would have loved to have been involved in a discussion on the original post topic, and do not at all think that the subjects of gender and relationships should be discouraged. I just think it would make more sense if there were a separate thread for PUA-related discussion, and any time someone tried to bring up PUA in a non-PUA post they were referred to the PUA post.
I would post it myself, but I doubt I have the karma to handle the inevitable downvoting that would ensue without going deep into the negatives.
I got to agree here. having a single discussion thread with PUA would let out some steam, and if some people feel wierded out/ threatened by it, they can just not read the thread. As it is, avoiding the topic seems very hard, since it comes up almost every time relationships, polyamory. dark arts, or rational social skills are mentioned. This makes the tabooing of PUA pretty moot.
I’m pretty okay with modding posts with PUA outside of the designated area, though, if only because it’s so damn mindkilling.
got to agree here. having a single discussion thread with PUA would let out some steam, and if some people feel wierded out/ threatened by it, they can just not read the thread. As it is, avoiding the topic seems very hard, since it comes up almost every time relationships, polyamory. dark arts, or rational social skills are mentioned. This makes the tabooing of PUA pretty moot.
Indeed PUA discussion has proven impossible to avoid without tabooing relationship/romance to the same extent as politics (which is something I advocated should be done in a different comment here).
I like this suggestion. One thread where the beliefs, practice and theory of PUA can be discussed. Actually to make any progress whatsoever, I think we need to go further, lets make that thread explicitly devoid of any ethical recommendations implied or explicit.
A thread that just discusses the theories, practices and beliefs of the PUA community. First establish what they are, then how well they map to reality.
Only after this is done open a separate thread where we discuss ethical implications and recommendations related to PUA. It has been demonstrated time and time again since at least 2008, that LW/OB blow up when this is discussed. “Is” is constantly interpreted as should and vice versa. I am convinced that quarantining and breaking up the debate in two such threads would drastically improve the signal to noise ratio on the comment sections of all romance and relationships discussions and might even eventually allow us to begin making progress on something we have systematically failed on as a community for years.
First establish what they are, then how well they map to reality. … Only after this is done open a separate thread where we discuss ethical implications and recommendations related to PUA
I’d almost as soon we just banned the ethical discussion entirely; as that’s the part that’s actually mindkilling. People with “PUA=bad” or “PUA=good” labels basically trash the place over that argument, and neither are particularly interested in listening to the “PUA=lots of different stuff with varying levels of good, bad, and effective-ness” folks.
All in all, we might get rid of some of the need for the “PUA=evil misogynist manipulation” rants by banning the “PUA=good, righteous savior of downtrodden oppressed men” ones (and vice versa). There are plenty enough people here who’ve shown themselves capable of avoiding either trap; we just need someone who can be trusted to swing the banhammer hard on comments that are more about signaling who they’re for and against, than they are about informing or problem-solving.
Actually, I suppose it’s not really a problem of ethics discussion per se, just that ethics is a useful wedge topic for partisans on either side to get their foot in the door.
Hm. Maybe we’d be better off just not answering partisan posts. I suspect that (counter to my intention), trying to moderate partisans on either side just prolongs the amount of ranting the forum is subjected to. If I’d just downvoted people (instead of trying to educate them), it might’ve been better for all concerned.
I like the idea of having a designated PUA discussion thread, and I absolutely love the idea of making that thread explicitly ethics-free. The idea seems good enough to just try it and see what happens! Do you want to write that post (in the discussion area, I guess) and lay down the rules?
I’m considering posting such a thread, but I’m thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.
Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen’t really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don’t want to cause any damage with a botched fix.
See here. I’m inclining more and more toward the opinion that this topic-cluster simply doesn’t belong here, any more than (other) controversial contemporary political issues do. It’s too fraught with (perceived) implications for tribal struggles that people (even unconsciously) feel themselves to be party to.
In all honesty, I’m not even terribly enthused about Luke’s proposed sequence being here, especially in Main. (It might well be okay in Discussion.) It sends the signal that LW is full of people who have trouble with these sorts of relationships. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not exactly something one would want to showcase, it seems to me.
I’m not quite sure what this means. I think if you start the discussion thread, you’d need to elaborate on that. (Are you sure you agree with cousin_it on understanding of these words?)
Upvoted, but… it looks like the kind of shiny clever idea nerds love and that blows up in their faces big time. “Purely factual questions discussed separately from ethics” sounds like something Paul Graham would pat you on the back for. Specific instances thereof, such as “Do people have more sex if they ignore body language expressing discomfort?” are significantly less tasteful.
The problem is that this is a public forum. In our ivory towers—inside our own heads, and with other people who like to toy with weird ideas—we can totally argue that genocide is legitimate if there’s a genetic disorder spreading whose carriers only have male children with the disorder. But we don’t expect it to be harmless to discuss that in front of the neonazis (or even ourselves, really). There are people I don’t want looking at a factual discussion of how to get away with rape.
My cursor was literally hovering over the upvote button from the first paragraph on… and then I got to the last sentence, which completely reversed my view of it. Then I went back and parsed it more carefully, and now it looks to me like there’s some pretty sketchy rhetoric in there.
Specifically: there’s mindkilling ideas and then there’s ideas which represent a physical propagation risk, and while PUA is undoubtedly the former, framing it with rape and genocide implies the latter. Now, I suppose it might look like that to some of its more extreme opponents, those who see it as not just squicky or disrespectful but actively dangerous. But that’s not the consensus, and there are substantial differences in the way we should be approaching it if it was.
On the other hand, if you’d cast your objection in terms of signaling or associational problems, I’d be right there with you. I’m pretty much neutral on PUA as such, but it’s an incredibly polarizing topic, and this isn’t a big enough site that we can discuss stuff that volatile in public and expect it not to reflect substantially on the site as a whole.
I did mean risky, not just mindkilling. Also a third category of “slight side effects that may add up to risky”.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape. For example, alcohol may be used to make people more open and sociable (both directly and because social norms change for groups of drunk people). It may also be used to make people pass out. Both of these reduce the likelihood of them turning down sex you initiate. That’s actually not a very good example because people know that so we aren’t teaching anyone how to rape, but discussion of other techniques may involve it.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless, discussing the usefulness of such a belief may allow it to leak.
Other problems: Yeah, so for a while good posters will waste time in an unproductive conversation, and onlookers will disapprove. Meh.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant. That this kind of disingenuous argument is tolerated in this context (parent was +1 when I encountered it, not −10) is why I am not against tabooing all related subject matter unilaterally. If people can get away with this something is wrong.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless
What on earth are you talking about? That’s approximately the opposite of the kind of belief that is useful for a PUA. Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant.
This is a false dichotomy, and the child post asking for clarification should not have been voted down.
PUA, if it worked, would be an excellent way for a date-rapist to get women alone in circumstances such that there might be reasonable doubt in a subsequent court case as to whether or not the victim consented to sex. Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances, specifically those circumstances where they get a woman alone, are not successful in obtaining consensual sex at that time and are not otherwise unable to commit rape safely.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning. I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Yes, PUA skills are generalizable to a certain extent. Rather than use them to seduce people you could use them to rape people, kidnap them and harvest their organs to sell on the black market or to try to convince them to buy some steak knives. But again, as you quoted: If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances
Yes, and conventional rape without the pesky hassle of pick up too—and I’m honestly not sure which kind of rape comes with the greatest risk of getting caught. But nobody has ever suggested that we discuss how to maximise sex. That is the whole point being made here—that equivocation in the great-grandparent just isn’t acceptable.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning.
I have a similar concern—at least in as much as it troubles me that sloppy thinking tends to be accepted based on the fact that it is talking about a moral/ethical/social-political position. I have made rather different observations about how the trend seems to flow.
I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
It is one thing to suggest tabooing a subject—and with the caveat that it must be relationship and dating advice that is tabooed (so as not to allow a distorted reality to remain) a lot of people agree. But it is an entirely different thing to try to declare just the opposing view (or your stereotype thereof) to be unacceptable.
Now I’m curious. The account PhilosophyTutor is a new account which has more or less contributed only via PUA-ethical debate. Yet I’m getting the impression here that you are coming from, well, a “larger LW perspective”. Is PhilosophyTutor a dummy account for more generally active member so that you can get involved in the subject without it looking bad for your primary identity or are you actually a new user who thus far has mostly been interested in dating-ethics?
This subtopic, unless I’ve gotten confused, relates specifically to one proposed method for trying to make discussion of the broader relationship topic more productive, that being the proposition that we hold a discussion of effective PUA methodology while holding off on any ethical discussion about the topic whatsoever. The argument against this proposition was that there are serious ethical issues which trying to figure out the maximally effective ways of getting sex without any regard for ethics.
Your response seems to be (and I am open to correction if I have misunderstood) that PUA methods, if indeed they worked, could be abused but that we do not need to discuss this because anything could be abused and hence discussing the potential abuse of this particular thing is a waste of time.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”. Whether that is a definition of “good” that includes manipulating women into acts they will predictably regret and which they would not have chosen to engage in were they fully informed and rational is an interesting discussion that, if the original proposal were followed, we would not be able to engage in. However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
However another possibility is that you have in mind a definition of “PUA methods” which excludes archetypal rape and most other acts which meet the legal and moral definition of rape but are not archetypal, and hence you think that a discussion of “PUA methods”, even if it taboos all ethical discourse, will thus by definition not involve anything meeting the legal and moral definition of rape. If so you need to make this definition explicit, I think, and then resolve the issue of whether obtaining sex while concealing information which you know is highly relevant and important to the other party’s decision to consent meets the legal or moral definition of rape. If needed I can cite cases where people have been imprisoned for obtaining sex by withholding information which they knew would have been highly relevant, so this is not an entirely academic concern.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”.
However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say. In fact.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say.
What you said was:
Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
Now I can’t see this discussion from your perspective, but from my perspective it looks like you are performing a manoeuvre where you cheer for ethical discussion in theory but in practice you dismiss all ethical criticism that comes from outside the PUA tent with a No True Scotsman argument.
If you think that some ethical criticisms of PUA are off the mark because they target a form of PUA which doesn’t actually exist that is of course a fair point to make. However that doesn’t move the argument forward unless you point us to the set of PUA practices and beliefs that you personally consider canonical so that we can discuss those from an ethical perspective. If your goal is an intelligent discussion we shouldn’t have to play a game with you where we try to discover by a process of elimination the subset of PUA practises and methods that you are willing to accept as PUA.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
What you say is so, however quoting the grandparent:
Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
I read that as an attack on the idea that ethical judgments about the topic should “dominate” any discussion of it. It did not specify any particular ethical prescriptions as being problematic.
I’m going to assume that despite your words you meant “obviously fallacious” to only refer to part of the first paragraph of the comment you are responding to. That would make your argument much stronger.
problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’.
Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics
Assuming your intuition about why people are voting as they are is correct, saying that something shouldn’t dominate is hardly an attack against it. The statement that it shouldn’t dominate was justified with a reason—a defeasible reason that does not apply in all contexts. When people can agree on facts, ethics based conversations can flow.
When people make ethical condemnations of caricatures that don’t exist and refer to them with labels used for their political enemies, forcing the accusers to detach their claims from their subjective values hopefully keeps them honest.
Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily
Arguments aren’t voted on. Posts are. Posts with multiple aspects. “It’d be kind of redundant,” is wrong. Obviously fallacious, as you said. ” If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA,” would approach being a non sequitur except for that the post responded to was so detached from reality that it may have had to have been said in that context.
The rest of the post is good, and worth upvoting. You are overconfident in attributing the worst possible motives to those voting for a post you disagree with.
One final distinction: the argument that ethical considerations should not dominate discussions is an argument against discussing ethics to a certain extent, at most it attacks discussing ethics, and the contextual posts show that ethical considerations were not being disregarded. This is in addition to the argument that there should be somewhat less of something being a mild one.
It looks like you are trying to soften wedrifid’s stated position for them, and presenting a new version where wedrifid was really saying that ethical discussion is great up until some demarcating point at which point it becomes bad. I can’t see any support in the original text for such a view.
If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant.
What I’m talking about is techniques that get people to let you stick your dick in them. Many of these techniques grow more effective as they are intensified, but also less ethical after a certain point. “Get them drunk” is an example, but not PUA. Better examples would be persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex), and intermittent reinforcement (ranging from not being a spineless, clingy sycophant, to emotional abuse).
What on earth are you talking about?
Consider the difference between the slut and the quality girl. Also the phrase “pumped and dumped”.
This belief is useful because if a woman agrees to sex early, you can think that you’re worth more than her, and display related behaviors (making her chase you and fear competition); moreover, if you get sex by promising to call the next day but don’t, you don’t have to feel guilty because she’s just a slut anyway.
(..., but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex)
I have a very hard time imagining this working. Women and men of high social status have very effective ways of getting rid of people that fall short of sex. Also constant “nagging” signals horrible things about you in pure fitness terms, it much reduces one’s attractiveness, I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
In my mind, “nagging” in this context meant repeating a request such that the other person changed their response to the request rather than be subjected to further pestering, not pulling down a girl’s pants time and time again until she stopped saying no and said neither yes nor no.
I have a very hard time imagining this working. … I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
And yet it happens. People get pressured into sex.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you missed this, you should become less confident in your ability to make accurate judgments in this arena.
I am simply saying its not a good tactic in the context of situations that PUA usually focuses on.
Note that pressure =/= nagging. For it to be pressure you need to have some social or physical leverage over the other person. Nagging dosen’t imply you have either and in their absence the word brings up associations of begging. It is hard to gain great leverage on people of high social status.
nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex
I have a very hard time imagining this working… I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex. Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
You also talked about PUA, but the above is a simple claim of fact which is incorrect.
persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex)
This was given as a better example of a potential PUA tactic that could be unethical. I was implicitly taking and critiquing the course of action as a tactic a PUA would or would not adopt based on how effective or ineffective it was. I thought it obvious, but looking back I see I should have made an explicit mention of PUA in the comment.
I think the point here isn’t that people don’t get pressured into sex but rather that the specific strategy mentioned isn’t one that PUAs would use because it is both pathetic and a highly ineffective strategy for them to be using. So if a completely amoral PUA was using unethical tactics to get laid he would still not use this one because he wouldn’t expect this one to work.
nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex
I have a very hard time imagining this working… I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex. Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
This is NOT me saying “evil PUAs do this”, it’s “orthogonal to your points about PUA, you have made a simple factual claim backed by personal incredulity which is, in fact, false”.
I think you need to give us the definition of PUA you are using, because you seem to be using one that excludes a lot of actions or strategies which one might think would be advantageous to a person who wants to get laid, and unethical persons who want to get laid seem highly likely to be a subgroup of people perusing and participating in a hypothetical discussion of PUA that tabooed all ethical criticism.
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category and saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
Here, the question of “Is PUA really rape?” is entirely useless, even if the questioner is referring a clearly delineated subset of it, because we are already told to assume states of the world and consequences are true in the hypotheticals (about Alice, Carol, etc.).
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
For abortion opponents, woman X aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age). For proponents, woman X aborted “A two month old fetus.” For abortion opponents, woman Y aborted “A nine month old fetus.” For proponents, woman Y aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age).
“Women who are 41 are “41”. Women who are 49 are “in their forties”.
Relevant LW posts: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Diseased Thinking. Kudos for noticing that the dangling categorization mistake sometimes also serves as a rhetorical trick. Do other biases also double as rhetorical tricks?
I’m going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren’t prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I’m writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn’t find will be more meaningful.
Wish me luck, I’m going in!
ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I’ll elaborate later.
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
Thanks for this short phrasing for something I often want to say.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category an saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
I agree with your connotation etc. - but I think the question “Is waterboarding really torture?” does have moral implications beyond presidential candidates: whether or not it is torture can determine whether or not waterboarding goes against a preexisting law or even informal promise (“No ma, I promise I won’t torture anybody in Iraq”), and breach of agreement is morally relevant.
More generally, categorizing things even after they are fully described can still be a gain of information if the category label is mentioned in some outside agreement.
For another example, if Professor Witkins the Mineralogist told you “I’ll give you $10 for each blegg you bring back from the mine, but nothing for rube.”, and you’re considering whether to put a purplish weird-shaped rock in your bag, even if you have full information on it you might still wonder if a Mineralogist would classify it as a blegg or a rube (Even if you know Witkins wants the bleggs for their vanadium, you still expect him to pay you for vanadiumless bleggs).
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
I guess I Agree Denotationally But Disagree Connotationally. As in, that is technically true in a hypothetical situation wherein you can fully describe a situation, but a human is unlikely to find themself in such a situation (at least for the time being), and my question was not an attempt to categorize a described thing—rather, it was an attempt to elicit a description for a categorized thing.
It is relevant to a discussion with wedrifid, regarding rape, what wedrifid means by the term.
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
To say that PUA techniques and theories regarding persuasion necessarily count as rape is, to me, absurd. To say that they could not be used in a coercive manner seems equally absurd (like saying “if you’re going to trick people you don’t need psychology” (and therefore the study of psychology, divorced from ethical concerns, would not teach people how to trick others)).
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)
“Torture” is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you’re making a disguised query but you can’t get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label “torture” to don’t exist.
If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn’t make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.
This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn’t make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set’s boundaries aren’t arbitrary and sharp.
What I was thinking was that if it’s true that pain is much more likely to elicit answers that the pain-giver wants to hear than anything else (an argument against torture for the purpose of getting information), then it’s worth establishing which sorts of treatment supply sufficient pain to get that sort of reaction.
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
“If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.”
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.
In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.
However unless you believe that pick-up targets’ relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target’s free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.
…it’s well-established in general societal morals that obtaining sex by deception is a form of non-violent rape. If you’re having sex with someone knowing that they are ignorant of relevant facts which if they knew them would stop them having sex with you, then you are not having sex with their free and informed consent.
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.
This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places.
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
The law usually treats force and fraud symmetrically in the sense of punishing both, though the latter more leniently. It is a crime to take money at gunpoint. It is also a crime, though normally a lesser one, to take it by false pretenses. But generally it is not a crime to use false pretenses to entice a person into a sexual relationship. Seduction, even when honeycombed with lies that would convict the man of fraud if he were merely trying to obtain money, is not rape.
In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion.
Almost certainly not.
Back in July, it was reported that the two met in a Jerusalem street in 2008, had consensual sex within 10 minutes of meeting each other...
It was also reported at the time that Kashur was charged with rape and indecent assault, and the conviction of rape by deception was a result of a plea bargain.
New details in the case emerged when the woman’s testimony, which had been kept secret, was declassified last week.
It shows an emotionally disturbed woman who had been sexually abused by her father from the age of six, forced into prostitution, and lived in a women’s shelter at the time of the encounter with Kashur.
During her initial testimony, she repeatedly broke down in court as she accused Kashur of rape.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind.
Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.
Either “Nonconsentual (or coerced) sex” or “Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the universal approval of internet critics before having sex”. Seems to depend on who you are talking with and what they are trying to prove.
“Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the unilateral approval of internet critics before having sex”
No no no wedrifid, the date’s mother is clearly not objective.
You need to approach a local sociology or woman’s studies professor, for preliminary consultation. After that schedule an appointment with your lawyer to set up a proper contract (since an informal written agreement wouldn’t stand up to later scrutiny if parties are dissatisfied with the outcomes) that is then reviewed, supplemented by hearings of all involved, by an ethics committee that includes legal experts, psychologists, doctors, philosophers and social workers.
I strongly urge you to reconsider this entire argument. I’m really worried about the sorts of reactions and arguments flying in this thread / topic. I don’t think MixedNuts’ post was based on cynical disingenuous argumentation, but rather an honest disagreement with you, a differing view of reality, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
The umbrella of PUA encompasses harmless advice that seems to have helped a lot of people, as well as vicious misanthropy. Some techniques focus on improving oneself, others on harming others. There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others. There are (different) parts that should be analyzed here.
I’m not attacking you. I’m asking you to be careful. There are vivid warning signs in an alarming proportion of posts on this topic. I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others, especially when they could benefit from hiding from themselves the harm they could do. More to the point, in such situations, we should not trust ourselves.
If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
I’m pretty sure the question was rhetorical.
I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others,
Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.
...and I’m probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.
I have a policy of not commenting on the “underlying issue(s)”, but I will permit myself the meta-level remark that the topic in question really does apparently amount to a hot-button dispute in contemporary social politics. In which case, quite frankly, it should be avoided as far as possible on Less Wrong.
I do have a stance. Stances. I’m arguing here that 1) wedrifid and MixedNuts are talking past each other, 2) we need to be more careful about PUA than many think. In particular, the idea of somehow just diving in while avoiding any discussion of ethics seems awfully ill-advised, if it’s even possible. It does seem like a valuable topic for some of LW to pull apart, if it can be done properly (on the one hand, how likely is it that sex & sexual politics is a mindkiller topic? on the other, if LW can’t handle a little sex & politics, I’d like to know.)
And branching off of your comment about factions—to whom it may concern, I wish to explicitly distance myself from any given LW faction, real or illusory. Yes, even yours, even if I may agree with you on some / many topics.
Indeed. It’s a figure of speech that I didn’t even consider when using. I suppose it could be replaced with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!”—but the question seems to be a bit milder.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing. I don’t think you and MixedNuts are on the same page. Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different. The sort of rhetorical equivocation Mixed used is not accepted here no matter the subject and when it comes to something as important as rape it is something I consider offensive.
I gave my example because it is the closest related ethical consideration that is, in fact, sane. I assumed that at very least it is something you would agree with and could possibly be similar to what you had resolved Mixed’s words to. This was to establish that I was rejecting any and all arguments along the lines of “PUA means rape” but not rejecting questions of whether certain social practices are or not ethical in their own right.
Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
To be frank it was disgust, not surprise that I experienced.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different.
?? Can we be a little more explicit about what exactly we’re referring to? I meant that your replacement of “What on earth are you talking about?” with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!” still indicates an acknowledgement on your part that your interpretation of MixedNuts’ post seems wildly incongruous, and therefore that said interpretation should be subject to closer scrutiny.
Similarly, when you say
I gave my example [...]
is that “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!”
If so then I think we pretty much agree except WRT MixedNuts’ meaning, and our other apparent disagreements flow from that issue.
To me it seems clear that MixedNuts was NOT saying “PUA means rape” or similar. My reading was more along the lines of “PUA is concerned, to a large extent, with methods of obtaining sex. If you’re discussing PUA sans ethics, then you are likely to discuss ‘methods of obtaining sex’ sans ethics, which conspicuously includes rape—a problematic situation if you’re banning ethical objections.” You appear extremely confident in your reading—could you point to something in particular that convinces you?
Of course if MixedNuts could resolve our disagreement that would be quite helpful.
Rather than trying to resurrect this one particular argument may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates. Because there are valid arguments to be made and ethical questions to be considered. But that particular argument is sloppy thinking of the kind we don’t accept here and offensive—both to the actual victims of rape who are having their experience trivialized and to the group that is being vilified as rapists.
This highlights a further problem that is sometimes encountered when ethical questions come up. When people are moralizing they often make terrible arguments—and in the wild terrible arguments about moral questions tend to suffice. But here terrible arguments and sloppy thinking tends to be brutally rejected. This means observers are going to see a whole lot of obnoxious, incoherent arguing in the general direction of a perceived virtuous moral positions rejected. Naturally that leads people to believe that the community is totally in support of the opposite side to whatever the nonsense comments are.
There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others.
If someone were to, say, argue “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!” then I suspect it would meet with overwhelming support. Some would enjoy fleshing out the related concepts and details.
Um. I think I perhaps was unclear? I have added more posts, which may explain my position better. I almost certainly read MixedNuts in a very different way than you did.
may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics? That argument, as I understand it, wasn’t trying to highlight an actual ethical problem with respect to seducing mates; rather, it was an argument in favor of including ethics in the discussion.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics?
The topic was whether we should have a separate thread for ethics and for discussing models of how the world actually works. MixedNuts was arguing against that proposal by alleging one ethical problem it would cause (“Rape”). Regardless of whether CuSeth is intending to argue that seperating ‘is’ from ‘should’ is bad because of ethical problem that are caused by the split or intending to talk about an ethical problem for its own sake it is better off using her own argument than MixdNuts’. Because if she used her own I would be able to take her seriously.
For onlookers wondering about the genetic disorder thing, it was discussed in Evolving to Extinction. The relevant part:
Segregation-distorters subvert the mechanisms that usually guarantee fairness of sexual reproduction. For example, there is a segregation-distorter on the male sex chromosome of some mice which causes only male children to be born, all carrying the segregation-distorter. Then these males impregnate females, who give birth to only male children, and so on. You might cry “This is cheating!” but that’s a human perspective; the reproductive fitness of this allele is extremely high, since it produces twice as many copies of itself in the succeeding generation as its nonmutant alternative. Even as females become rarer and rarer, males carrying this gene are no less likely to mate than any other male, and so the segregation-distorter remains twice as fit as its alternative allele.
It just occurred to me that such a situation can rectify itself without the need for genocide :-) If females can detect males carrying the segregation-distorter, they will avoid mating with such males, because having female children is a reproductive advantage in a population where males outnumber females. Or am I getting confused again?
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
If mothers made a habit of snacking on (each other’s) litters of all sons, that would counteract the problem. That wouldn’t require being able to differentiate among adult males, just between male and female children.
If the species takes a long time to wean children and doesn’t reproduce until that process ends, this works better.
Mice, pigs, rabbits etc. (animals with large litters) already eat weak children fairly often, so this is somewhat plausible.
Rather than rely on females recognizing things about males, what about genes that capitalize on the difference between regular males and those with the disorder—sisters!
Females could more greatly than presently value aggression (this would only need a boost, the trait already exists), and a gene could make females intervene to break up their brothers’ fights. Young males with the disorder would tear each other to shreds or be too timid to reproduce, and males without the disorder would have sisters preventing them from killing each other.
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
“Strong” for sure. Unfortunately for the species it would have to emerge fully functional in the time it takes for the species to evolve to extinction. Not so easy.
Now I wonder why Eliezer’s post calls the original problem unsolved. Surely such elementary solutions couldn’t have evaded the experts in the field? I’m guessing that I made a mistake somewhere...
Unfortunately, this will only work in a population with a weak segregation distorter. Remember, mutations that do a specific thing are rare, and detecting the presence of a specific allele that doesn’t have large-scale phenotypic effects is tough. By the time the segregation distorting allele is a large fraction of the population it is almost too late for the population.
I am convinced that quarantining and breaking up the debate in two such threads would drastically improve the signal to noise ratio on the comment sections of all romance and relationships discussions
Certainly something to keep in mind if Luke goes and posts a “Part 2” on the subject. He (or someone else) should also post a corresponding “trolling about morals” thread so as to minimize the damage.
I’m indifferent to the primary point, but curious about a tangent—do you believe that LW is capable of creating that first thread? Or only that, if it did so, that would help?
do you believe that LW is capable of creating that first thread?
I belive most LWers are capable of this. However those who aren’t make this in my opinion very difficult for the community to pull off. And then there are the signalling concerns, one big reason behind the politics taboo was for LW to not look bad. This is why I previously proposed tabooing the subject (romance ect.) in the same way we did for that other problematic topic. I also found someone’s proposal to set up a rather elitist and private mailing list for certain delicate and difficult discussion appealing.
Or only that, if it did so, that would help?
If LW did that we might actually make some progress on the issue for a change in that we would at least unambiguously establish what people’s maps of reality are (allowing everyone involved to update accordingly) and engage in a, you know, dialogue instead of speaking past each other and slipping into factionalism.
Actually to make any progress whatsoever, I think we need to go further, lets make that thread explicitly devoid of any ethical recommendations implied or explicit.
That sounds completely impossible to me. Surely PUA is primarily about what one should do.
For example, if we have the background assumption that Billy is trying to achieve X, and we note that stabbing 10 people would make him 20% more likely to achieve X, then it is not an unwarranted inferential leap that Billy should stab 10 people. To prohibit anyone from replying that Billy should not stab people for other reasons doesn’t prohibit implied ethical recommendations, it just heavily biases them.
If you think I’m wrong, I’d like to see an explanation of how this could work.
ETA: Explanation given—it’s not impossible. See subthread.
That sounds completely impossible to me. Surely X is primarily about what one should do.
For example, if we have the background assumption that Billy is trying to do X, and we note that stabbing 10 people would make him 20% more likely to acheive X, then it is not an unwarranted inferential leap that Billy should stab 10 people. To prohibit anyone from replying that Billy should not stab people for other reasons doesn’t prohibit implied ethical recommendations, it just heavily biases them.
If you think I’m wrong, I’d like to see an explanation of how this could work.
Can I thus generalize your objection that the optimal course of action for achieving X is impossible to discuss sans ethics in the first analysis? Or do you think that PUA is something special in this regard? And if so, why?
Can I thus generalize your objection that the optimal course of action for achieving X is impossible to discuss sans ethics in the first analysis?
Yes. Discussing the optimal course of action for achieving X is absolutely under the purview of ethics. Else you’re not really finding what’s optimal. Editing grandparent.
ETA: Leaving the first ‘PUA’ since that it is about courses of action motivates the rest.
I agree that finding the optimal course of action for humans dosen’t mean much if it dosen’t include ethics. But humans in order to do that often construct and reason within systems that don’t include ethics in their optimization criteria.
There is a sometimes subtle but important difference between thinking and and considering “this is the optimal course of action optimizing for X and only X” and discussing it and between saying “you obviously should be optimizing for X and only X.”
I argue that this is former is sometimes a useful tool for the latter, because it allows one to survey how possible action space differs taking away or adding axiom to your goals. It is impossible to think about what people who might have such axioms do, or how dangerous or benign to your goals the development of such goals seeking systems might be. You need to in essence know the opportunity costs of many of your axioms and how you will measure up either in a game theoretic sense (because you may find yourself in a conflict with such an agent and need to asses it capabilities and strategic options) or in a evolutionary sense (where you wish to understand how much fitness your values have in the set of all possible values and how much you need to be concerned with evolution messing up your long term plans).
In short I think that: generally It is not unethical to think about how a specific hypothetical unethical mind would think. It may indeed perhaps be risky for some marginal cases, but also very potentially rewarding in expected utility.
One can say that while this is theoretically fine but in practice actually quite risky in people with their poor quality minds. But let me point out that people are generally biased against stabbing 10 people and similar unpleasant courses of action. One can perhaps say that a substantial minority isn’t, and using self-styled ethical agents cognitive capacity to emulate thinking of (in their judgement) unethical agents and sharing that knowledge willy-nilly with others will lead to unethical agents having lower enough costs and greater enough efficiency that it cancels out or overwhelms the gains of the “ethical agents”.
This however seems to lead towards a generalize argument against all rationality and sharing of knowledge, because all of it involves “morally constrained” agents potentially sharing the fruits of their cognitive work with less constrained agents who then out compete them in the struggle to order the universe into certain states. I maintain this is a meaningless fear unless there is good evidence that sharing particular knowledge (say schematics for a nuclear weapon or death ray) or rationality enhancing techniques will cause more harm than good one can rely on more people being biased against doing harmful things than not and thus using the knowledge for non-harmful purposes. But this is a pretty selected group. I would argue the potential for abuse among the readers of this forum is much lower than average. Also how in the world are we supposed to be concerned about nuclear weapons or death rays if we don’t have any good ideas if they are even possible? Can you ethically strongly condemn the construction of non-functioning death ray? Is it worth invading a country to stop the construction of a non-functioning death ray?
And note that at this point I’m already basically blowing the risks way out of proportion because quite honestly the disutility from a misused death ray is orders of magnitude larger than anything that can arise from what amounts to some unusually practical tips on improving one’s social life.
But humans in order to do that often construct and reason within systems that don’t include ethics in their optimization criteria.
How can something not include “ethics” in its “optimization criteria”? Do you just mean that you’re looking at a being with a utility function that does not include the putative human universals?
ETA: Confusion notwithstanding, I generally agree with the parent.
EDIT: (responding to edits)
This however seems to lead towards a generalize argument against all rationality and sharing of knowledge, because all of it involves “morally constrained” agents potentially sharing the fruits of their cognitive work with less constrained agents who then out compete them in the struggle to order the universe into certain states.
I actually wasn’t thinking anything along those lines.
people are generally biased against stabbing 10 people and similar unpleasant courses of action
Sure, but people do unhealthy / bad things all the time, and are biased in favor of many of them. I’m not supposing that someone might “use our power for evil” or something like that. Rather, I think we should include our best information.
A discussion of how best to ingest antifreeze should not go by without someone mentioning that it’s terribly unhealthy to ingest antifreeze, in case a reader didn’t know that. Antifreeze is very tasty and very deadly, and children will drink a whole bottle if they don’t know any better.
Sure, but people do unhealthy / bad things all the time, and are biased in favor of many of them. I’m not supposing that someone might “use our power for evil” or something like that. Rather, I think we should include our best information.
Our disagreement seems to boil down to:
A … net cost of silly biased human brains letting should cloud their assessment of is. B … net cost of silly biased human brains letting is cloud their assessment of should.
Statement: Among Lesswrong readers: P(A>B) > P(B>A)
I say TRUE.
You say FALSE.
Do you (and the readers) agree with this interpretation of the debate?
Do you (and the readers) agree with this interpretation of the debate?
I don’t.
My point is that a discussion of PUA, by its nature, is a discussion of “should”. The relevant questions are things like “How does one best achieve X?” Excluding ethics from that discussion is wrong, and probably logically inconsistent.
I’m actually still a bit unclear on what you are referring to by this “letting should cloud their assessment of is” and its reverse.
Aha. I agree. Do people really make that mistake a lot around here?
Also note that ‘should’ goes on the map too. Not just in the “here be dragons” sense, but also indicated by the characterization that the way is “best”.
Do people really make that mistake a lot around here?
There is a whole host of empirically demonstrated biases in humans that work in these two directions under different circumstances. LWers may be aware of many of them, but they are far from immune.
Also note that ‘should’ goes on the map too. Not just in the “here be dragons” sense, but also indicated by the characterization that the way is “best”.
Agreed but, should is coloured in with different ink on the map than is. I admit mapping should can prove to be as much of a challenge as is.
I see my proposal of two quarantined threads, as a proposal to lets stop messing up the map by all of us drawing with the same color at the same time, and first draw out “is” in black and then once the colour is dry add in should with red so we don’t forget where we want to go. Then use that as our general purpose map and update both red and black as we along our path and new previously unavailable empirical evidence meets our eyes.
I see my proposal of two quarantined threads, as a proposal to lets stop messing up the map by all of us drawing with the same color at the same time, and first draw out “is” in black and then once the colour is dry add in should with red so we don’t forget where we want to go. Then use that as our general purpose map and update both red and black as we along our path and new previously unavailable empirical evidence meets our eyes.
I didn’t point this out before, but this is actually a good argument in favor of the ‘ethics later’ approach. It makes no sense to start drawing paths on your map before you’ve filled in all of the nodes. (Counterargument: assume stochasticity / a non-fully-observable environment).
Also, if this technique actually works, it should be able to be applied to political contexts as well. PUA is a relatively safer area to test this, since while it does induce mind-killing (a positive feature for purposes of this test) it does not draw in a lot of negative attention from off-site, which is one of the concerns regarding political discussion.
I am majorly in favor of researching ways of reducing/eliminating mind-killing effects.
I see my proposal of a two quarantined threads, as a proposal to lets stop messing up the colours, and first draw out is in black and then once the colour is dry add in should with red so we don’t forget where we want to go. Then use that as our general purpose map.
So an analogous circumstance would be: if we were constructing a weighted directed graph representing routes between cities, we’d first put in all the nodes and connections and weights in black ink, and then plan the best route and mark it in red ink?
If so, that implies the discussion of “PUA” would include equal amounts of “X results in increased probability of the subject laughing at you” and “Y results in increased probability of the subject slapping you” and “Z results in increased probability of the subject handing you an aubergine”.
If the discussion is not goal-directed, I don’t see how it could be useful, especially for such a large space as human social interaction.
But it would be goal directed: “To catalogue beliefs and practices of PUAs and how well they map to reality.”
Without breaking the metaphor, we are taking someone else’s map and comparing it to our own map. Our goal being to update our map where their map of reality (black ink) is clearly better or at the very least learn if their map sucks. And to make this harder we aren’t one individual but a committee comparing the two maps. Worse some of us love their black ink more than their red one and vice versa, and can’t shut up about them. Let’s set up separate work meetings for the two issues so we know that black ink arguments have no place on meeting number 2. and the person is indulging his interests at the expense of good map making.
The reason why I favour black first is that going red first we risk drawing castles in clouds rather than a realizable destinations.
To catalogue beliefs and practices of PUAs and how well they map to reality.
Oops.
Yes, that’s absolutely possible, and is (on reflection) what we have been talking about this whole time.
So the challenge, then, would be to distinguish the black from red ink in PUA, and make sure we’re only talking about the black ink in the ‘no ethics’ thread.
I have no intuitions about how feasible that is, but I withdraw my assertion it is ‘impossible’, as I was clearly talking about something else.
So the challenge, then, would be to distinguish the black from red ink in PUA, and make sure we’re only talking about the black ink in the ‘no ethics’ thread.
Yes! We can’t take PUA’s at their word. Even when they believe with unwavering certainty they are talking black ink, they are in the best of cases as confused as we are and in the worst quite a bit more confused. Also some people just like to lie to others to get to the red destination faster (heh).
It is hard, but apparently enough posters think we can make a decent map of the reality of romance that they try and write up posts and start discussions about them. Limiting ourselves to the more popular PUAs I think we can also get a pretty good idea of what their idea of reality is.
Comparing the two and seeking evidence to prove or disprove our speculations about reality seems like a worthy exercise.
I think this is a horrendously bad idea—“more popular” is not always positively correlated with “more correct”. ;-)
Also, “more popular” isn’t always positively correlated with “more useful”, either. The most popular PUA material is about indirect game, social tricks, and the like… and that’s why it’s popular. That doesn’t mean those things are the most useful ways to get into relationships.
Consider Bob, who believes he is unattractive to women. Will Bob be more interested in course A which tells him there are secrets to make women like him, or course B, which teaches him how to notice which women are already attracted to him? His (quite common) belief makes course B less attractive, even if course B would be far more useful.
Of available courses that fit Bob’s existing belief structure, the ones that will be most popular will be the ones that purport to explain his unattractiveness (and the attractiveness of other men) in a way that Bob can understand. And if they offer him a solution that doesn’t sound too difficult (i.e. act like a jerk), then this will be appealing.
What’s more, because Bob is convinced of his unattractiveness and fundamental low worth where women are concerned, Bob will be most attracted to courses that involve pretending to be someone he is not: after all, if who he is is unattractive, then of course he needs to pretend to be somebody else, right?
I could go on, but my point here is that popularity is a horrible way to select what to discuss, because there’s a systematic bias towards “tricks” as being the most marketable thing. However, even companies that sell tricks on the low end of the market to get people interested, usually sell some form of self-improvement as their “advanced” training. (That is, stuff that involves people actually being a different sort of man, rather than simply pretending to be one.)
(There are probably exceptions to this, of course.)
Anyway, a better selection criterion would be goal relevance. Most PUA sales material has end-user goals explicitly or implicitly stated—why not select materials on the basis of goals that LW has use for, and evaluate them for how well they achieve those stated goals?
What popular PUA is saying matters quite a bit because it helps us understand the PUA community as a cultural phenomena it also can help us by helping expose some biases that probably exist to some degree in harder to detect form in higher quality material. Perhaps well respected or esteemed authors (within the PUA community) rather than the ones that sell the most material (where would we even get that data?), are even better for this purpose.
But overall I’m not saying we shouldn’t extend our analysis to PUA’s that are less well known but seem particularly compelling to LessWrong readers. The thing is they have to be put in context.
I think this is a horrendously bad idea—“more popular” is not always positively correlated with “more correct”. ;-)
How is that bad? The whole point is to locate actual beliefs and test them. If they’re incorrect, all the better—our job is probably easier. By focusing on the general population, we can cull down the potentially-useful beliefs without needing to ourselves bring ethics into the discussion. Thus, we only test “X results in a 20% chance of being handed an aubergine” if that is a belief some PUA practitioner actually holds.
Also, “more popular” isn’t always positively correlated with “more useful”, either. The most popular PUA material is about indirect game, social tricks, and the like… and that’s why it’s popular. That doesn’t mean those things are the most useful ways to get into relationships.
Anyway, a better selection criterion would be goal relevance. Most PUA sales material has end-user goals explicitly or implicitly stated—why not select materials on the basis of goals that LW has use for, and evaluate them for how well they achieve those stated goals?
These are all ‘red ink’ concerns. The ‘black ink’ thread is supposed to evaluate beliefs of PUAs without reference to how effective they are at achieving goals. You can’t presuppose what the goals are supposed to be or determine whether they’re optimal ways of achieving goals. Thus, we can test for the presence of aubergines, but we don’t need to know whether we actually want aubergines.
These are all ‘red ink’ concerns. The ‘black ink’ thread is supposed to evaluate beliefs of PUAs without reference to how effective they are at achieving goals.
My initial response to your comment, is, “WTF?”
My second, more polite response, is simply that your suggestion isn’t particularly compatible with finding out useful things, since your proposed selection criteria will tend to filter them out before you have anything to evaluate.
I’m talking about following the strategy laid out by Konkvistador above. Have you been following this thread?
My second, more polite response, is simply that your suggestion isn’t particularly compatible with finding out useful things, since your proposed selection criteria will tend to filter them out before you have anything to evaluate.
Possibly. But the goal was to have separate threads for non-normative and normative claims, and this is how it will be accomplished. My initial response was “That cannot be done”, probably from intuitions similar to yours, but that turned out to be false.
But the goal was to have separate threads for non-normative and normative claims,
My understanding was that the goal was to have a useful discussion, minus the mindkilling. AFAICT your proposal of the means by which to accomplish this, is to throw out the usefulness along with the mindkilling.
Different goals. The goal was indeed to have a useful discussion mins the mindkilling. The proposed subgoal was to have one thread for non-normative claims and another for normative claims. It might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if you think so then you should (at a much lower level of nesting) propose a different strategy for having the discussion minus the mindkilling. Or at least say you have a problem with that subgoal at the start of the thread, rather than the end.
I didn’t mean to misrepresent your position or the debate so far. I was just trying to communicate how I’m seeing the debate. Hope you didn’t take my question the wrong way! :)
Ethics is a whole different thing than putative human universals. Very few things that I would assert as ethics would I claim to be human universals. “Normative human essentials” might fit in that context. (By way of illustration, we all likely consider ‘Rape Bad’ as an essential ethical value but I certainly wouldn’t say that’s a universal human thing. Just that the ethics of those who don’t think Rape Is Bad suck!)
Different ethical systems are possible to implement even on “normal” human hardware (which is far from the set of all humans!). We have ample evidence in favour of this hypothesis. I think Westerners in particular seem especially apt to forget to think of this when convenient.
I think I agree with what you are saying but I can’t be sure. Could you clarify it for me a tad (seems like a word is missing or something.)
Human can and do value different things. Sometimes even when they start out valuing the same things, different experiences/cricumstances lead them to systematize this into different reasonably similarly consistent ethical systems.
Westerners certainly seem to forget this type of thing. Do others really not so much?
Modern Westerners often identify their values as being the product of reason, which must be universal.
While this isn’t exactly rare, it is I think less pronounced in most human cultures throughout history. I think a more common explanation to “they just haven’t sat down and thought about stuff and seen we are right yet” is “they are wicked” (have different values). Which obviously has its own failure modes, just not this particular one.
It would be interesting to trace the relationship between the idea of universal moral value, and the idea of universal religion. Moldbug argues that the latter pretty much spawned the former (that’s probably a rough approximation), though I don’t trust his scholarship on the history of ideas that much. I don’t know to what extent the ancient Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Arabs considered their values to be universal (though apparently Romans legal scholars had the concept of “natural law” which they got from the Greeks which seems to map pretty closely to that idea, independently of Christianity and related universal religions).
Ethics can arguably be reduced to “what is my utility function?” and “how can I best optimize for it?” So for a being not to include ethics in its optimization criteria, I’m confused what that would mean. I had guessed Konkvistador was referring to some sort of putative human universals.
I’m still not sure what you mean when you say their ethics suck, or what criteria you use when alleging something as ethics.
Ethics aren’t about putative human universals. I’m honestly not sure how to most effectively explain that since I can’t see a good reason why putative human universals came up at all!
I had guessed Konkvistador was referring to some sort of putative human universals.
Cooperative tribal norms seems more plausible. Somebody thinking their ethics are human universals requires that they, well, are totally confused about what is universal about humans.
Somebody thinking their ethics are human universals requires that they, well, are totally confused about what is universal about humans.
Not at all. Many prominent ethicists and anthropologists and doctors agree that there are human universals. And any particular fact about a being has ethical implications.
For example, humans value continued survival. There are exceptions and caveats, but this is something that occurs in all peoples and amongst nearly all of the population for most of their lives (that last bit you can just about get a priori). Also, drinking antifreeze will kill a person. Thus, “one should not drink antifreeze without a damn good reason” is a human universal.
If these people don’t frequently disagree with others about ethics, they become unemployed.
This group’s opinions on the subject are less correlated with reality than most groups’.
ETA: I have no evidence for this outside of some of their outlandish positions, the reasons for which I have some guesses for but have not looked into, and this is basically a rhetorical argument.
Actually, if anything I think I’d be more likely to believe that the actual job security ethicists enjoy tends to decrease their opinions’ correlation with reality, as compared to the beliefs about their respective fields of others who will be fired if they do a bad job.
If it was intended to be merely a formal argument, compare:
If prominent mathematicians don’t frequently disagree with others about math, they become unemployed.
This group’s opinions on the subject are less correlated with reality than most groups’.
I thought you had an overwhelming point there until my second read. Then I realized that the argument would actually be a reasonable argument if the premise wasn’t bogus. In fact it would be much stronger than the one about ethicists. If mathematicians did have to constantly disagree with other people about maths it would be far better to ask an intelligent amateur about maths than a mathemtician.
You can’t use an analogy to an argument which uses a false premise that would support a false conclusion as a reason why arguments of that form don’t work!
If mathematicians did have to constantly disagree with other people about maths it would be far better to ask an intelligent amateur about maths than a mathemtician.
The best reason I could come up with why someone would think ethicists need to disagree with each other to keep their jobs, is that they need to “publish or perish”. But that applies equally well to other academic fields, like mathematics. If it’s not true of mathematicians, then I’m left with no reason to think it’s true of ethicists.
You appear to have presented the following argument:
If prominent mathematicians don’t frequently disagree with others about math, they become unemployed.
This group’s opinions on the subject are less correlated with reality than most groups’.
… as an argument which would be a bad inference to make even if the premise was true—bad enough as to be worth using as an argument by analogy. You seem to be defending this position even when it is pointed out that the conclusion would obviously follow from the counterfactual premise. This was a time when “Oops” (or perhaps just dropping the point) would have been a better response.
I’d expect “publish or perish” to apply broadly in academic fields, but there are several
broad categories of ways in which one can publish. One can indeed come up with a
disagreement with a view that someone else is promoting, but one can also come up
with a view on an entirely different question than anyone else addresses. In a very
abstract sense, this might count as as disagreement, a kind of claim that the “interesting”
area of a field is located in a different area than existing publications have pointed to,
but this isn’t quite the same thing as claiming that the existing claims about the previously
investigated area are wrong.
Mathematicians—along with scientists—discover new things (what is a proof other than a discovery of a new mathematical property). That’s what their job is. In order for Ethicists to be comparable, wouldn’t they need to discover new ethics?
In order for Ethicists to be comparable, wouldn’t they need to discover new ethics?
Sure, and they do. One out of the three major subfields of ethics is “applied ethics”, which simply analyzes actual or potential circumstances using their expertise in ethics. The space for that is probably as big as the space for mathematical proofs.
So the premise, then, is that the institution of Ethics would come tumbling down if it were not the case that ethicists seemed to have special knowledge that the rest of the populace did not?
if so, I think it again applies equally well to any academic discipline, and is false.
So the premise, then, is that the institution of Ethics would come tumbling down if it were not the case that ethicists seemed to have special knowledge that the rest of the populace did not?
Yes.
applies equally well to any academic discipline
Other academic disciplines are tested against reality because they make “is” statements. Philosophy is in a middle ground, I suppose.
Which reality was it that the ethicists were not correlated with again? Oh, right, making factual claims about universals of human behavior. I don’t disbelieve you.
Somebody thinking their ethics are human universals requires that they, well, are totally confused about what is universal about humans.
Not at all. Many prominent ethicists and anthropologists and doctors agree that there are human universals. And any particular fact about a being has ethical implications.
Was the “Not at all.” some sort of obscure sarcasm?
No. I was disagreeing with your point, and then offering supporting evidence. You took one piece of my evidence and noted that it does not itself constitute a refutation. I don’t know how it is even helpful to point this out; if I thought that piece of evidence constituted a refutation, I would not have needed to say anything else. Also, most arguments do not contain or constitute refutations.
This does not refute. It also does not constitute an argument against the position you are contradicting in the way you seem to be thinking. The sequence of quote → ‘not at all’ → argument is non sequitur. Upon being prompted to take a second look this should be apparent to most readers.
Unless an individual had an ethical system which is “people should behave in accordance to any human universals and all other behaviors are ethically neutral” the fact that there are human universals doesn’t have any particular impact on the claim. Given that a priori humans can’t be going against human universals that particular special case is basically pointless.
I think I’m confused about what your actual claim was. It seemed to be that human universals have nothing to do with ethics. But it’s easy to show that some things that are putatively human universals have something to do with ethics, and a lot of the relevant people think putative human universals have a large role in ethics.
Was it just that ethics is not equivalent to human universals? If so, I agree.
Sorry for posting the first few paragraphs and then immediately editing to add the later ones. It was a long post and I wanted to stop at several points but I kept getting hit by “one more idea/comment/argument” moments.
It seems to me that the ethical discussion should come first, if one must have priority over the other.
After you’ve published the plans for a Death Ray it’s a bit late to have a discussion about whether or not it would be ethical to publish the plans for a Death Ray.
The plans for the Death Ray are already out there. The two possible discussions are, first, whether it’s ethical to kill someone with a Death Ray.
The second discussion asks whether the effectiveness of the Death Ray (compared to just punching someone) can be attributed to the placebo effect. Or maybe the Death Ray only works on the sort of people that evil villains want to kill, but when it comes time to protagonists, our opponents are mostly invulnerable to Death Rays. It’s also possible that the Death Ray doesn’t really work better than chance, but it gives villains the confidence to step up and shoot someone who’s about to have a heart attack, anyway. Then again, maybe a lot of people prefer to be shot with Death Rays and it’s hypocritical to say that the tried-and-true method of punching someone to death is better just because it doesn’t involve any mechanical devices...
The plans for the Death Ray are already out there.
I’m allowing for the possibility that PUA does little harm in its current inchoate, unscientific form but that with analysis and refinement it could do more harm. Establishing how well PUA beliefs map to reality could at least potentially identify a subset of PUA beliefs which did map to reality, and distinguish them from those that don’t.
If PUA as it currently exists in the wild, schisms and subgroups and all, is the most effective possible form of PUA then and only then is the invention already in the wild.
Good point. I should have phrased better. I will edit my post to say “posts that aren’t explicitly about PUA.
It’s been awhile since I read the OP, and honestly I forgot about all the social interaction stuff that was posted. Being poly, I focused on the first part, and was sorta hoping there would be a discussion about different relationship styles. :)
If you’re going to conduct such a poll, I’d recommend asking a similar question about some other thread on some other topic (or possibly several) to act as a control group. (I would also recommend these be staggered in time in the hopes of simulating independent measurement, and the results reported as ratios to the number of posts in the thread.)
I dislike the loud and bad-feelings-producing retread of old topics that the comment thread appears (I have skimmed and sampled only) to have become, but I specifically wish that posts like this one are not prohibited/avoided in the future.
Apologies for cluttering up the poll area, but it seems like relevant information that I haven’t read much of the comment thread at all because I don’t think it’ll be valuable to me. If I had to break it down, I’d say that I don’t expect it to be particularly useful or interesting to me.
Right now, the poll is at 14 to 1. Poll results don’t translate straightforwardly to net harm, but these numbers are pretty clear. So shall we implement some sort of official or unofficial safeguard against it happening again, either by banning certain topics, or by imposing stricter rules on how to discuss them?
I distinctly remember it being something to 2 earlier. In any case, other options might be even worse. A new norm of approving of people posting in the middle of threads “This is a happy death spiral but it would be impolite to say why” might be a net good.
Hi, this comment caused me to vote in this poll, in protest of its validity. I do agree actually that sanctions should be made, preferably norm based ones like lessdazed suggested. The protest is what the poll is clear of exactly. Such a poll is representative of the outliers. Specifically, anyone past the threshold it takes to make a vote. If you conclusions are based on that subset of people, then I have no disagreement.
Now that this thread has gathered around a thousand comments, and with presumably two more such threads ahead of us, let’s have a poll to help us figure out whether deciding to discuss such subjects as gender and politics was a good idea.
All things considered, has this comment thread made LessWrong more or less valuable to you? (ETA: This is excluding Luke’s original post, and relative to what you would have expected the site to be like if the comment thread had not taken place, not relative to what it would be like if the comment thread disappeared now.)
See the child comments for the poll options. If neither applies, don’t vote.
Vote this comment up if this comment thread has made LessWrong less valuable to you.
Less. A bunch of bickering about ethics with almost no actual practical content describing the world. Basically it is embarrassing to be associated with.
I agree that this whole thread, while admittedly I have been following it myself, is a net negative for LW.
It’s my contention that (1) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely negative outlook regarding women, (2) some people will be attracted to PUA tenets with a largely positive outlook regarding women (3) some people will just organically figure it out without any significant use of literature and (4) people that enjoy reading/writing/debating about this will continue to do that and may or may not actually pursue relationships.
I don’t think lukeprog’s writing is going to substantially change anyone’s inclinations or abilities in this area because relationships and dating are something one learns by doing and becoming, not talking and thinking.
Rational romantic relationships is a topic inextricably linked to ethics, in a universe where it’s a fact of human nature that human happiness is immediately and radically affected by our love lives.
I do agree that it’s disappointing that the pro-PUA posters here have not presented any hard evidence that the PUA community has something to offer an evidence-based analysis of rational romantic relationships. That would have been interesting and valuable.
Thank you for this poll!
I would like to endorse an idea that there should be a separate PUA discussion post. It’s acceptable if LW-ers want to discuss PUA at length, but the main disutility I get from it, is that it seems to constantly rear its head in posts that aren’t explicitly about PUA (such as this one.)
I would have loved to have been involved in a discussion on the original post topic, and do not at all think that the subjects of gender and relationships should be discouraged. I just think it would make more sense if there were a separate thread for PUA-related discussion, and any time someone tried to bring up PUA in a non-PUA post they were referred to the PUA post.
I would post it myself, but I doubt I have the karma to handle the inevitable downvoting that would ensue without going deep into the negatives.
EDITED: see below
I got to agree here. having a single discussion thread with PUA would let out some steam, and if some people feel wierded out/ threatened by it, they can just not read the thread. As it is, avoiding the topic seems very hard, since it comes up almost every time relationships, polyamory. dark arts, or rational social skills are mentioned. This makes the tabooing of PUA pretty moot.
I’m pretty okay with modding posts with PUA outside of the designated area, though, if only because it’s so damn mindkilling.
Indeed PUA discussion has proven impossible to avoid without tabooing relationship/romance to the same extent as politics (which is something I advocated should be done in a different comment here).
I like this suggestion. One thread where the beliefs, practice and theory of PUA can be discussed. Actually to make any progress whatsoever, I think we need to go further, lets make that thread explicitly devoid of any ethical recommendations implied or explicit.
A thread that just discusses the theories, practices and beliefs of the PUA community. First establish what they are, then how well they map to reality.
Only after this is done open a separate thread where we discuss ethical implications and recommendations related to PUA. It has been demonstrated time and time again since at least 2008, that LW/OB blow up when this is discussed. “Is” is constantly interpreted as should and vice versa. I am convinced that quarantining and breaking up the debate in two such threads would drastically improve the signal to noise ratio on the comment sections of all romance and relationships discussions and might even eventually allow us to begin making progress on something we have systematically failed on as a community for years.
I’d almost as soon we just banned the ethical discussion entirely; as that’s the part that’s actually mindkilling. People with “PUA=bad” or “PUA=good” labels basically trash the place over that argument, and neither are particularly interested in listening to the “PUA=lots of different stuff with varying levels of good, bad, and effective-ness” folks.
All in all, we might get rid of some of the need for the “PUA=evil misogynist manipulation” rants by banning the “PUA=good, righteous savior of downtrodden oppressed men” ones (and vice versa). There are plenty enough people here who’ve shown themselves capable of avoiding either trap; we just need someone who can be trusted to swing the banhammer hard on comments that are more about signaling who they’re for and against, than they are about informing or problem-solving.
Actually, I suppose it’s not really a problem of ethics discussion per se, just that ethics is a useful wedge topic for partisans on either side to get their foot in the door.
Hm. Maybe we’d be better off just not answering partisan posts. I suspect that (counter to my intention), trying to moderate partisans on either side just prolongs the amount of ranting the forum is subjected to. If I’d just downvoted people (instead of trying to educate them), it might’ve been better for all concerned.
I like the idea of having a designated PUA discussion thread, and I absolutely love the idea of making that thread explicitly ethics-free. The idea seems good enough to just try it and see what happens! Do you want to write that post (in the discussion area, I guess) and lay down the rules?
You’ve got the karma for it. Why not you?
Thanks for the offer! Konkvistador has a prior claim to the idea, so I’ll do that if he/she prefers me to do that.
I’m considering posting such a thread, but I’m thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.
Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen’t really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don’t want to cause any damage with a botched fix.
See here. I’m inclining more and more toward the opinion that this topic-cluster simply doesn’t belong here, any more than (other) controversial contemporary political issues do. It’s too fraught with (perceived) implications for tribal struggles that people (even unconsciously) feel themselves to be party to.
In all honesty, I’m not even terribly enthused about Luke’s proposed sequence being here, especially in Main. (It might well be okay in Discussion.) It sends the signal that LW is full of people who have trouble with these sorts of relationships. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not exactly something one would want to showcase, it seems to me.
Thanks for replying. I think you’re right.
I’m not quite sure what this means. I think if you start the discussion thread, you’d need to elaborate on that. (Are you sure you agree with cousin_it on understanding of these words?)
Seriously now. Konkvistador?
I didn’t know! (Though my guess would have been accurate.) I went wading through old comments:
Konkvistador: he
cousin_it: he
lessdazed: No pronoun stated, but you’re Jewish!
RomanDavis: No pronoun stated, but the first name makes “he” likely.
Upvoted, but… it looks like the kind of shiny clever idea nerds love and that blows up in their faces big time. “Purely factual questions discussed separately from ethics” sounds like something Paul Graham would pat you on the back for. Specific instances thereof, such as “Do people have more sex if they ignore body language expressing discomfort?” are significantly less tasteful.
The problem is that this is a public forum. In our ivory towers—inside our own heads, and with other people who like to toy with weird ideas—we can totally argue that genocide is legitimate if there’s a genetic disorder spreading whose carriers only have male children with the disorder. But we don’t expect it to be harmless to discuss that in front of the neonazis (or even ourselves, really). There are people I don’t want looking at a factual discussion of how to get away with rape.
My cursor was literally hovering over the upvote button from the first paragraph on… and then I got to the last sentence, which completely reversed my view of it. Then I went back and parsed it more carefully, and now it looks to me like there’s some pretty sketchy rhetoric in there.
Specifically: there’s mindkilling ideas and then there’s ideas which represent a physical propagation risk, and while PUA is undoubtedly the former, framing it with rape and genocide implies the latter. Now, I suppose it might look like that to some of its more extreme opponents, those who see it as not just squicky or disrespectful but actively dangerous. But that’s not the consensus, and there are substantial differences in the way we should be approaching it if it was.
On the other hand, if you’d cast your objection in terms of signaling or associational problems, I’d be right there with you. I’m pretty much neutral on PUA as such, but it’s an incredibly polarizing topic, and this isn’t a big enough site that we can discuss stuff that volatile in public and expect it not to reflect substantially on the site as a whole.
I did mean risky, not just mindkilling. Also a third category of “slight side effects that may add up to risky”.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape. For example, alcohol may be used to make people more open and sociable (both directly and because social norms change for groups of drunk people). It may also be used to make people pass out. Both of these reduce the likelihood of them turning down sex you initiate. That’s actually not a very good example because people know that so we aren’t teaching anyone how to rape, but discussion of other techniques may involve it.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless, discussing the usefulness of such a belief may allow it to leak.
Other problems: Yeah, so for a while good posters will waste time in an unproductive conversation, and onlookers will disapprove. Meh.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant. That this kind of disingenuous argument is tolerated in this context (parent was +1 when I encountered it, not −10) is why I am not against tabooing all related subject matter unilaterally. If people can get away with this something is wrong.
What on earth are you talking about? That’s approximately the opposite of the kind of belief that is useful for a PUA. Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
This is a false dichotomy, and the child post asking for clarification should not have been voted down.
PUA, if it worked, would be an excellent way for a date-rapist to get women alone in circumstances such that there might be reasonable doubt in a subsequent court case as to whether or not the victim consented to sex. Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances, specifically those circumstances where they get a woman alone, are not successful in obtaining consensual sex at that time and are not otherwise unable to commit rape safely.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning. I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
Yes, PUA skills are generalizable to a certain extent. Rather than use them to seduce people you could use them to rape people, kidnap them and harvest their organs to sell on the black market or to try to convince them to buy some steak knives. But again, as you quoted: If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t.
Yes, and conventional rape without the pesky hassle of pick up too—and I’m honestly not sure which kind of rape comes with the greatest risk of getting caught. But nobody has ever suggested that we discuss how to maximise sex. That is the whole point being made here—that equivocation in the great-grandparent just isn’t acceptable.
I have a similar concern—at least in as much as it troubles me that sloppy thinking tends to be accepted based on the fact that it is talking about a moral/ethical/social-political position. I have made rather different observations about how the trend seems to flow.
It is one thing to suggest tabooing a subject—and with the caveat that it must be relationship and dating advice that is tabooed (so as not to allow a distorted reality to remain) a lot of people agree. But it is an entirely different thing to try to declare just the opposing view (or your stereotype thereof) to be unacceptable.
Now I’m curious. The account PhilosophyTutor is a new account which has more or less contributed only via PUA-ethical debate. Yet I’m getting the impression here that you are coming from, well, a “larger LW perspective”. Is PhilosophyTutor a dummy account for more generally active member so that you can get involved in the subject without it looking bad for your primary identity or are you actually a new user who thus far has mostly been interested in dating-ethics?
This subtopic, unless I’ve gotten confused, relates specifically to one proposed method for trying to make discussion of the broader relationship topic more productive, that being the proposition that we hold a discussion of effective PUA methodology while holding off on any ethical discussion about the topic whatsoever. The argument against this proposition was that there are serious ethical issues which trying to figure out the maximally effective ways of getting sex without any regard for ethics.
Your response seems to be (and I am open to correction if I have misunderstood) that PUA methods, if indeed they worked, could be abused but that we do not need to discuss this because anything could be abused and hence discussing the potential abuse of this particular thing is a waste of time.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”. Whether that is a definition of “good” that includes manipulating women into acts they will predictably regret and which they would not have chosen to engage in were they fully informed and rational is an interesting discussion that, if the original proposal were followed, we would not be able to engage in. However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
However another possibility is that you have in mind a definition of “PUA methods” which excludes archetypal rape and most other acts which meet the legal and moral definition of rape but are not archetypal, and hence you think that a discussion of “PUA methods”, even if it taboos all ethical discourse, will thus by definition not involve anything meeting the legal and moral definition of rape. If so you need to make this definition explicit, I think, and then resolve the issue of whether obtaining sex while concealing information which you know is highly relevant and important to the other party’s decision to consent meets the legal or moral definition of rape. If needed I can cite cases where people have been imprisoned for obtaining sex by withholding information which they knew would have been highly relevant, so this is not an entirely academic concern.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
Not even remotely. That position would be the opposite of stupidity.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say. In fact.
What you said was:
Now I can’t see this discussion from your perspective, but from my perspective it looks like you are performing a manoeuvre where you cheer for ethical discussion in theory but in practice you dismiss all ethical criticism that comes from outside the PUA tent with a No True Scotsman argument.
If you think that some ethical criticisms of PUA are off the mark because they target a form of PUA which doesn’t actually exist that is of course a fair point to make. However that doesn’t move the argument forward unless you point us to the set of PUA practices and beliefs that you personally consider canonical so that we can discuss those from an ethical perspective. If your goal is an intelligent discussion we shouldn’t have to play a game with you where we try to discover by a process of elimination the subset of PUA practises and methods that you are willing to accept as PUA.
Eliezer Yudkowsky drives a sports car?!?!?? ;)
Disagreeing with your specific moral prescriptions for everyone is not attacking ethics in general.
What you say is so, however quoting the grandparent:
I read that as an attack on the idea that ethical judgments about the topic should “dominate” any discussion of it. It did not specify any particular ethical prescriptions as being problematic.
I’m going to assume that despite your words you meant “obviously fallacious” to only refer to part of the first paragraph of the comment you are responding to. That would make your argument much stronger.
Assuming your intuition about why people are voting as they are is correct, saying that something shouldn’t dominate is hardly an attack against it. The statement that it shouldn’t dominate was justified with a reason—a defeasible reason that does not apply in all contexts. When people can agree on facts, ethics based conversations can flow.
When people make ethical condemnations of caricatures that don’t exist and refer to them with labels used for their political enemies, forcing the accusers to detach their claims from their subjective values hopefully keeps them honest.
Arguments aren’t voted on. Posts are. Posts with multiple aspects. “It’d be kind of redundant,” is wrong. Obviously fallacious, as you said. ” If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA,” would approach being a non sequitur except for that the post responded to was so detached from reality that it may have had to have been said in that context.
The rest of the post is good, and worth upvoting. You are overconfident in attributing the worst possible motives to those voting for a post you disagree with.
One final distinction: the argument that ethical considerations should not dominate discussions is an argument against discussing ethics to a certain extent, at most it attacks discussing ethics, and the contextual posts show that ethical considerations were not being disregarded. This is in addition to the argument that there should be somewhat less of something being a mild one.
It looks like you are trying to soften wedrifid’s stated position for them, and presenting a new version where wedrifid was really saying that ethical discussion is great up until some demarcating point at which point it becomes bad. I can’t see any support in the original text for such a view.
I endorse lessdazed’s interpretation as at least somewhat closer to my position than the caricature you have attributed to me.
What I’m talking about is techniques that get people to let you stick your dick in them. Many of these techniques grow more effective as they are intensified, but also less ethical after a certain point. “Get them drunk” is an example, but not PUA. Better examples would be persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex), and intermittent reinforcement (ranging from not being a spineless, clingy sycophant, to emotional abuse).
Consider the difference between the slut and the quality girl. Also the phrase “pumped and dumped”.
This belief is useful because if a woman agrees to sex early, you can think that you’re worth more than her, and display related behaviors (making her chase you and fear competition); moreover, if you get sex by promising to call the next day but don’t, you don’t have to feel guilty because she’s just a slut anyway.
I have a very hard time imagining this working. Women and men of high social status have very effective ways of getting rid of people that fall short of sex. Also constant “nagging” signals horrible things about you in pure fitness terms, it much reduces one’s attractiveness, I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
I meant that.
In my mind, “nagging” in this context meant repeating a request such that the other person changed their response to the request rather than be subjected to further pestering, not pulling down a girl’s pants time and time again until she stopped saying no and said neither yes nor no.
Yes, nagging and pulling down pants are definitely entirely different things. The latter is more ethically grey while the former is more pathetic.
And yet it happens. People get pressured into sex.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you missed this, you should become less confident in your ability to make accurate judgments in this arena.
Obviously pressured sex happens.
I am simply saying its not a good tactic in the context of situations that PUA usually focuses on.
Note that pressure =/= nagging. For it to be pressure you need to have some social or physical leverage over the other person. Nagging dosen’t imply you have either and in their absence the word brings up associations of begging. It is hard to gain great leverage on people of high social status.
My point was not about PUA. You said:
You also talked about PUA, but the above is a simple claim of fact which is incorrect.
The post was a response to:
This was given as a better example of a potential PUA tactic that could be unethical. I was implicitly taking and critiquing the course of action as a tactic a PUA would or would not adopt based on how effective or ineffective it was. I thought it obvious, but looking back I see I should have made an explicit mention of PUA in the comment.
I think the point here isn’t that people don’t get pressured into sex but rather that the specific strategy mentioned isn’t one that PUAs would use because it is both pathetic and a highly ineffective strategy for them to be using. So if a completely amoral PUA was using unethical tactics to get laid he would still not use this one because he wouldn’t expect this one to work.
Well, sure. I was taking issue specifically with Konkvistador’s post, above, and the claim:
This is NOT me saying “evil PUAs do this”, it’s “orthogonal to your points about PUA, you have made a simple factual claim backed by personal incredulity which is, in fact, false”.
I think you need to give us the definition of PUA you are using, because you seem to be using one that excludes a lot of actions or strategies which one might think would be advantageous to a person who wants to get laid, and unethical persons who want to get laid seem highly likely to be a subgroup of people perusing and participating in a hypothetical discussion of PUA that tabooed all ethical criticism.
Could you define rape, please?
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category and saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
Here, the question of “Is PUA really rape?” is entirely useless, even if the questioner is referring a clearly delineated subset of it, because we are already told to assume states of the world and consequences are true in the hypotheticals (about Alice, Carol, etc.).
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
For abortion opponents, woman X aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age). For proponents, woman X aborted “A two month old fetus.” For abortion opponents, woman Y aborted “A nine month old fetus.” For proponents, woman Y aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age).
“Women who are 41 are “41”. Women who are 49 are “in their forties”.
Relevant LW posts: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Diseased Thinking. Kudos for noticing that the dangling categorization mistake sometimes also serves as a rhetorical trick. Do other biases also double as rhetorical tricks?
I’m going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren’t prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I’m writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn’t find will be more meaningful.
Wish me luck, I’m going in!
ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I’ll elaborate later.
I didn’t want to say anything before you looked, but this is a classic exercise for a basic logic class. Yes, logical fallacies abound.
That’s really cool. By all means write a discussion post if you find something interesting!
Thanks for this short phrasing for something I often want to say.
I agree with your connotation etc. - but I think the question “Is waterboarding really torture?” does have moral implications beyond presidential candidates: whether or not it is torture can determine whether or not waterboarding goes against a preexisting law or even informal promise (“No ma, I promise I won’t torture anybody in Iraq”), and breach of agreement is morally relevant.
More generally, categorizing things even after they are fully described can still be a gain of information if the category label is mentioned in some outside agreement.
For another example, if Professor Witkins the Mineralogist told you “I’ll give you $10 for each blegg you bring back from the mine, but nothing for rube.”, and you’re considering whether to put a purplish weird-shaped rock in your bag, even if you have full information on it you might still wonder if a Mineralogist would classify it as a blegg or a rube (Even if you know Witkins wants the bleggs for their vanadium, you still expect him to pay you for vanadiumless bleggs).
I guess I Agree Denotationally But Disagree Connotationally. As in, that is technically true in a hypothetical situation wherein you can fully describe a situation, but a human is unlikely to find themself in such a situation (at least for the time being), and my question was not an attempt to categorize a described thing—rather, it was an attempt to elicit a description for a categorized thing.
It is relevant to a discussion with wedrifid, regarding rape, what wedrifid means by the term.
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
To say that PUA techniques and theories regarding persuasion necessarily count as rape is, to me, absurd. To say that they could not be used in a coercive manner seems equally absurd (like saying “if you’re going to trick people you don’t need psychology” (and therefore the study of psychology, divorced from ethical concerns, would not teach people how to trick others)).
So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)
If you have strong arguments about whether torture is worth doing, than knowing what should be categorized as torture would be useful.
“Torture” is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you’re making a disguised query but you can’t get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label “torture” to don’t exist.
If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn’t make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.
This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn’t make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set’s boundaries aren’t arbitrary and sharp.
What I was thinking was that if it’s true that pain is much more likely to elicit answers that the pain-giver wants to hear than anything else (an argument against torture for the purpose of getting information), then it’s worth establishing which sorts of treatment supply sufficient pain to get that sort of reaction.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
You said this
and this
What’s the charitable interpretation of that?
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.
Coercing sexual intercourse via physical violence or the threat thereof.
This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Note: This post is explicitly not about PUA. I do not believe that I have heard of any PUA technique involving roofies or blackmail.
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
(nods) That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
Drugging I would consider physical violence, so that falls within my definition; blackmailing, no.
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
Okay, though you should probably be aware that those are somewhat idiosyncratic definitions of rape and violence.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
You’re right.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I am.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
No, I didn’t. I pointed out a feature of sexual morality that you completely ignored.
Yes, you did. Here is what you said:
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
Poorly. It does not seem to be of much benefit any motives which I could plausibly attribute to you.
Downvoted for professing to be a troll.
OK, why have this comment and the next one I made garnered this many downvotes?
Two is not many. Four is not even many.
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
Almost certainly not.
BBC
Thanks for the updated data.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind. Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.
Either “Nonconsentual (or coerced) sex” or “Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the universal approval of internet critics before having sex”. Seems to depend on who you are talking with and what they are trying to prove.
No no no wedrifid, the date’s mother is clearly not objective.
You need to approach a local sociology or woman’s studies professor, for preliminary consultation. After that schedule an appointment with your lawyer to set up a proper contract (since an informal written agreement wouldn’t stand up to later scrutiny if parties are dissatisfied with the outcomes) that is then reviewed, supplemented by hearings of all involved, by an ethics committee that includes legal experts, psychologists, doctors, philosophers and social workers.
I strongly urge you to reconsider this entire argument. I’m really worried about the sorts of reactions and arguments flying in this thread / topic. I don’t think MixedNuts’ post was based on cynical disingenuous argumentation, but rather an honest disagreement with you, a differing view of reality, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
The umbrella of PUA encompasses harmless advice that seems to have helped a lot of people, as well as vicious misanthropy. Some techniques focus on improving oneself, others on harming others. There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others. There are (different) parts that should be analyzed here.
I’m not attacking you. I’m asking you to be careful. There are vivid warning signs in an alarming proportion of posts on this topic. I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others, especially when they could benefit from hiding from themselves the harm they could do. More to the point, in such situations, we should not trust ourselves.
I’m pretty sure the question was rhetorical.
Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.
...and I’m probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.
Indeed.
I have a policy of not commenting on the “underlying issue(s)”, but I will permit myself the meta-level remark that the topic in question really does apparently amount to a hot-button dispute in contemporary social politics. In which case, quite frankly, it should be avoided as far as possible on Less Wrong.
I do have a stance. Stances. I’m arguing here that 1) wedrifid and MixedNuts are talking past each other, 2) we need to be more careful about PUA than many think. In particular, the idea of somehow just diving in while avoiding any discussion of ethics seems awfully ill-advised, if it’s even possible. It does seem like a valuable topic for some of LW to pull apart, if it can be done properly (on the one hand, how likely is it that sex & sexual politics is a mindkiller topic? on the other, if LW can’t handle a little sex & politics, I’d like to know.)
And branching off of your comment about factions—to whom it may concern, I wish to explicitly distance myself from any given LW faction, real or illusory. Yes, even yours, even if I may agree with you on some / many topics.
Indeed. It’s a figure of speech that I didn’t even consider when using. I suppose it could be replaced with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!”—but the question seems to be a bit milder.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing. I don’t think you and MixedNuts are on the same page. Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different. The sort of rhetorical equivocation Mixed used is not accepted here no matter the subject and when it comes to something as important as rape it is something I consider offensive.
I gave my example because it is the closest related ethical consideration that is, in fact, sane. I assumed that at very least it is something you would agree with and could possibly be similar to what you had resolved Mixed’s words to. This was to establish that I was rejecting any and all arguments along the lines of “PUA means rape” but not rejecting questions of whether certain social practices are or not ethical in their own right.
To be frank it was disgust, not surprise that I experienced.
?? Can we be a little more explicit about what exactly we’re referring to? I meant that your replacement of “What on earth are you talking about?” with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!” still indicates an acknowledgement on your part that your interpretation of MixedNuts’ post seems wildly incongruous, and therefore that said interpretation should be subject to closer scrutiny.
Similarly, when you say
is that “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!”
If so then I think we pretty much agree except WRT MixedNuts’ meaning, and our other apparent disagreements flow from that issue.
To me it seems clear that MixedNuts was NOT saying “PUA means rape” or similar. My reading was more along the lines of “PUA is concerned, to a large extent, with methods of obtaining sex. If you’re discussing PUA sans ethics, then you are likely to discuss ‘methods of obtaining sex’ sans ethics, which conspicuously includes rape—a problematic situation if you’re banning ethical objections.” You appear extremely confident in your reading—could you point to something in particular that convinces you?
Of course if MixedNuts could resolve our disagreement that would be quite helpful.
Rather than trying to resurrect this one particular argument may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates. Because there are valid arguments to be made and ethical questions to be considered. But that particular argument is sloppy thinking of the kind we don’t accept here and offensive—both to the actual victims of rape who are having their experience trivialized and to the group that is being vilified as rapists.
This highlights a further problem that is sometimes encountered when ethical questions come up. When people are moralizing they often make terrible arguments—and in the wild terrible arguments about moral questions tend to suffice. But here terrible arguments and sloppy thinking tends to be brutally rejected. This means observers are going to see a whole lot of obnoxious, incoherent arguing in the general direction of a perceived virtuous moral positions rejected. Naturally that leads people to believe that the community is totally in support of the opposite side to whatever the nonsense comments are.
If someone were to, say, argue “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!” then I suspect it would meet with overwhelming support. Some would enjoy fleshing out the related concepts and details.
Um. I think I perhaps was unclear? I have added more posts, which may explain my position better. I almost certainly read MixedNuts in a very different way than you did.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics? That argument, as I understand it, wasn’t trying to highlight an actual ethical problem with respect to seducing mates; rather, it was an argument in favor of including ethics in the discussion.
The topic was whether we should have a separate thread for ethics and for discussing models of how the world actually works. MixedNuts was arguing against that proposal by alleging one ethical problem it would cause (“Rape”). Regardless of whether CuSeth is intending to argue that seperating ‘is’ from ‘should’ is bad because of ethical problem that are caused by the split or intending to talk about an ethical problem for its own sake it is better off using her own argument than MixdNuts’. Because if she used her own I would be able to take her seriously.
For onlookers wondering about the genetic disorder thing, it was discussed in Evolving to Extinction. The relevant part:
It just occurred to me that such a situation can rectify itself without the need for genocide :-) If females can detect males carrying the segregation-distorter, they will avoid mating with such males, because having female children is a reproductive advantage in a population where males outnumber females. Or am I getting confused again?
It seems easier to evolve a preference for incest.
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
A modest proposal:
If mothers made a habit of snacking on (each other’s) litters of all sons, that would counteract the problem. That wouldn’t require being able to differentiate among adult males, just between male and female children.
If the species takes a long time to wean children and doesn’t reproduce until that process ends, this works better.
Mice, pigs, rabbits etc. (animals with large litters) already eat weak children fairly often, so this is somewhat plausible.
I love lesswrong!
Rather than rely on females recognizing things about males, what about genes that capitalize on the difference between regular males and those with the disorder—sisters!
Females could more greatly than presently value aggression (this would only need a boost, the trait already exists), and a gene could make females intervene to break up their brothers’ fights. Young males with the disorder would tear each other to shreds or be too timid to reproduce, and males without the disorder would have sisters preventing them from killing each other.
“Strong” for sure. Unfortunately for the species it would have to emerge fully functional in the time it takes for the species to evolve to extinction. Not so easy.
Nice!
Now I wonder why Eliezer’s post calls the original problem unsolved. Surely such elementary solutions couldn’t have evaded the experts in the field? I’m guessing that I made a mistake somewhere...
Unfortunately, this will only work in a population with a weak segregation distorter. Remember, mutations that do a specific thing are rare, and detecting the presence of a specific allele that doesn’t have large-scale phenotypic effects is tough. By the time the segregation distorting allele is a large fraction of the population it is almost too late for the population.
Almost certainly not! That’s valuable information needed to calibrate optimal seduction technique, even for a PUA of perfect soullessness.
Certainly something to keep in mind if Luke goes and posts a “Part 2” on the subject. He (or someone else) should also post a corresponding “trolling about morals” thread so as to minimize the damage.
I’m indifferent to the primary point, but curious about a tangent—do you believe that LW is capable of creating that first thread? Or only that, if it did so, that would help?
I belive most LWers are capable of this. However those who aren’t make this in my opinion very difficult for the community to pull off. And then there are the signalling concerns, one big reason behind the politics taboo was for LW to not look bad. This is why I previously proposed tabooing the subject (romance ect.) in the same way we did for that other problematic topic. I also found someone’s proposal to set up a rather elitist and private mailing list for certain delicate and difficult discussion appealing.
If LW did that we might actually make some progress on the issue for a change in that we would at least unambiguously establish what people’s maps of reality are (allowing everyone involved to update accordingly) and engage in a, you know, dialogue instead of speaking past each other and slipping into factionalism.
That sounds completely impossible to me. Surely PUA is primarily about what one should do.
For example, if we have the background assumption that Billy is trying to achieve X, and we note that stabbing 10 people would make him 20% more likely to achieve X, then it is not an unwarranted inferential leap that Billy should stab 10 people. To prohibit anyone from replying that Billy should not stab people for other reasons doesn’t prohibit implied ethical recommendations, it just heavily biases them.
If you think I’m wrong, I’d like to see an explanation of how this could work.
ETA: Explanation given—it’s not impossible. See subthread.
Can I thus generalize your objection that the optimal course of action for achieving X is impossible to discuss sans ethics in the first analysis? Or do you think that PUA is something special in this regard? And if so, why?
Yes. Discussing the optimal course of action for achieving X is absolutely under the purview of ethics. Else you’re not really finding what’s optimal. Editing grandparent.
ETA: Leaving the first ‘PUA’ since that it is about courses of action motivates the rest.
I agree that finding the optimal course of action for humans dosen’t mean much if it dosen’t include ethics. But humans in order to do that often construct and reason within systems that don’t include ethics in their optimization criteria.
There is a sometimes subtle but important difference between thinking and and considering “this is the optimal course of action optimizing for X and only X” and discussing it and between saying “you obviously should be optimizing for X and only X.”
I argue that this is former is sometimes a useful tool for the latter, because it allows one to survey how possible action space differs taking away or adding axiom to your goals. It is impossible to think about what people who might have such axioms do, or how dangerous or benign to your goals the development of such goals seeking systems might be. You need to in essence know the opportunity costs of many of your axioms and how you will measure up either in a game theoretic sense (because you may find yourself in a conflict with such an agent and need to asses it capabilities and strategic options) or in a evolutionary sense (where you wish to understand how much fitness your values have in the set of all possible values and how much you need to be concerned with evolution messing up your long term plans).
In short I think that: generally It is not unethical to think about how a specific hypothetical unethical mind would think. It may indeed perhaps be risky for some marginal cases, but also very potentially rewarding in expected utility.
One can say that while this is theoretically fine but in practice actually quite risky in people with their poor quality minds. But let me point out that people are generally biased against stabbing 10 people and similar unpleasant courses of action. One can perhaps say that a substantial minority isn’t, and using self-styled ethical agents cognitive capacity to emulate thinking of (in their judgement) unethical agents and sharing that knowledge willy-nilly with others will lead to unethical agents having lower enough costs and greater enough efficiency that it cancels out or overwhelms the gains of the “ethical agents”.
This however seems to lead towards a generalize argument against all rationality and sharing of knowledge, because all of it involves “morally constrained” agents potentially sharing the fruits of their cognitive work with less constrained agents who then out compete them in the struggle to order the universe into certain states. I maintain this is a meaningless fear unless there is good evidence that sharing particular knowledge (say schematics for a nuclear weapon or death ray) or rationality enhancing techniques will cause more harm than good one can rely on more people being biased against doing harmful things than not and thus using the knowledge for non-harmful purposes. But this is a pretty selected group. I would argue the potential for abuse among the readers of this forum is much lower than average. Also how in the world are we supposed to be concerned about nuclear weapons or death rays if we don’t have any good ideas if they are even possible? Can you ethically strongly condemn the construction of non-functioning death ray? Is it worth invading a country to stop the construction of a non-functioning death ray?
And note that at this point I’m already basically blowing the risks way out of proportion because quite honestly the disutility from a misused death ray is orders of magnitude larger than anything that can arise from what amounts to some unusually practical tips on improving one’s social life.
How can something not include “ethics” in its “optimization criteria”? Do you just mean that you’re looking at a being with a utility function that does not include the putative human universals?
ETA: Confusion notwithstanding, I generally agree with the parent.
EDIT: (responding to edits)
I actually wasn’t thinking anything along those lines.
Sure, but people do unhealthy / bad things all the time, and are biased in favor of many of them. I’m not supposing that someone might “use our power for evil” or something like that. Rather, I think we should include our best information.
A discussion of how best to ingest antifreeze should not go by without someone mentioning that it’s terribly unhealthy to ingest antifreeze, in case a reader didn’t know that. Antifreeze is very tasty and very deadly, and children will drink a whole bottle if they don’t know any better.
Our disagreement seems to boil down to:
A … net cost of silly biased human brains letting should cloud their assessment of is.
B … net cost of silly biased human brains letting is cloud their assessment of should.
Statement: Among Lesswrong readers: P(A>B) > P(B>A)
I say TRUE. You say FALSE.
Do you (and the readers) agree with this interpretation of the debate?
I don’t.
My point is that a discussion of PUA, by its nature, is a discussion of “should”. The relevant questions are things like “How does one best achieve X?” Excluding ethics from that discussion is wrong, and probably logically inconsistent.
I’m actually still a bit unclear on what you are referring to by this “letting should cloud their assessment of is” and its reverse.
Should and is assessed as they should be:
I have a good map, it shows the best way to get from A to B and … also C. I shouldn’t go to C, it is a nasty place.
Should and is assessed as they unfortunately often are:
I don’t want to go to C so I shouldn’t draw out that part around C on my map. I hope I still find a good way to B and don’t get lost.
I have a good map, it shows the best way to get from A to B and … also C. Wow C’s really nearby, lets go there!
Aha. I agree. Do people really make that mistake a lot around here?
Also note that ‘should’ goes on the map too. Not just in the “here be dragons” sense, but also indicated by the characterization that the way is “best”.
There is a whole host of empirically demonstrated biases in humans that work in these two directions under different circumstances. LWers may be aware of many of them, but they are far from immune.
Agreed but, should is coloured in with different ink on the map than is. I admit mapping should can prove to be as much of a challenge as is.
I see my proposal of two quarantined threads, as a proposal to lets stop messing up the map by all of us drawing with the same color at the same time, and first draw out “is” in black and then once the colour is dry add in should with red so we don’t forget where we want to go. Then use that as our general purpose map and update both red and black as we along our path and new previously unavailable empirical evidence meets our eyes.
I didn’t point this out before, but this is actually a good argument in favor of the ‘ethics later’ approach. It makes no sense to start drawing paths on your map before you’ve filled in all of the nodes. (Counterargument: assume stochasticity / a non-fully-observable environment).
Also, if this technique actually works, it should be able to be applied to political contexts as well. PUA is a relatively safer area to test this, since while it does induce mind-killing (a positive feature for purposes of this test) it does not draw in a lot of negative attention from off-site, which is one of the concerns regarding political discussion.
I am majorly in favor of researching ways of reducing/eliminating mind-killing effects.
So an analogous circumstance would be: if we were constructing a weighted directed graph representing routes between cities, we’d first put in all the nodes and connections and weights in black ink, and then plan the best route and mark it in red ink?
If so, that implies the discussion of “PUA” would include equal amounts of “X results in increased probability of the subject laughing at you” and “Y results in increased probability of the subject slapping you” and “Z results in increased probability of the subject handing you an aubergine”.
If the discussion is not goal-directed, I don’t see how it could be useful, especially for such a large space as human social interaction.
But it would be goal directed: “To catalogue beliefs and practices of PUAs and how well they map to reality.”
Without breaking the metaphor, we are taking someone else’s map and comparing it to our own map. Our goal being to update our map where their map of reality (black ink) is clearly better or at the very least learn if their map sucks. And to make this harder we aren’t one individual but a committee comparing the two maps. Worse some of us love their black ink more than their red one and vice versa, and can’t shut up about them. Let’s set up separate work meetings for the two issues so we know that black ink arguments have no place on meeting number 2. and the person is indulging his interests at the expense of good map making.
The reason why I favour black first is that going red first we risk drawing castles in clouds rather than a realizable destinations.
Oops.
Yes, that’s absolutely possible, and is (on reflection) what we have been talking about this whole time.
So the challenge, then, would be to distinguish the black from red ink in PUA, and make sure we’re only talking about the black ink in the ‘no ethics’ thread.
I have no intuitions about how feasible that is, but I withdraw my assertion it is ‘impossible’, as I was clearly talking about something else.
Yes! We can’t take PUA’s at their word. Even when they believe with unwavering certainty they are talking black ink, they are in the best of cases as confused as we are and in the worst quite a bit more confused. Also some people just like to lie to others to get to the red destination faster (heh).
It is hard, but apparently enough posters think we can make a decent map of the reality of romance that they try and write up posts and start discussions about them. Limiting ourselves to the more popular PUAs I think we can also get a pretty good idea of what their idea of reality is.
Comparing the two and seeking evidence to prove or disprove our speculations about reality seems like a worthy exercise.
I think this is a horrendously bad idea—“more popular” is not always positively correlated with “more correct”. ;-)
Also, “more popular” isn’t always positively correlated with “more useful”, either. The most popular PUA material is about indirect game, social tricks, and the like… and that’s why it’s popular. That doesn’t mean those things are the most useful ways to get into relationships.
Consider Bob, who believes he is unattractive to women. Will Bob be more interested in course A which tells him there are secrets to make women like him, or course B, which teaches him how to notice which women are already attracted to him? His (quite common) belief makes course B less attractive, even if course B would be far more useful.
Of available courses that fit Bob’s existing belief structure, the ones that will be most popular will be the ones that purport to explain his unattractiveness (and the attractiveness of other men) in a way that Bob can understand. And if they offer him a solution that doesn’t sound too difficult (i.e. act like a jerk), then this will be appealing.
What’s more, because Bob is convinced of his unattractiveness and fundamental low worth where women are concerned, Bob will be most attracted to courses that involve pretending to be someone he is not: after all, if who he is is unattractive, then of course he needs to pretend to be somebody else, right?
I could go on, but my point here is that popularity is a horrible way to select what to discuss, because there’s a systematic bias towards “tricks” as being the most marketable thing. However, even companies that sell tricks on the low end of the market to get people interested, usually sell some form of self-improvement as their “advanced” training. (That is, stuff that involves people actually being a different sort of man, rather than simply pretending to be one.)
(There are probably exceptions to this, of course.)
Anyway, a better selection criterion would be goal relevance. Most PUA sales material has end-user goals explicitly or implicitly stated—why not select materials on the basis of goals that LW has use for, and evaluate them for how well they achieve those stated goals?
What popular PUA is saying matters quite a bit because it helps us understand the PUA community as a cultural phenomena it also can help us by helping expose some biases that probably exist to some degree in harder to detect form in higher quality material. Perhaps well respected or esteemed authors (within the PUA community) rather than the ones that sell the most material (where would we even get that data?), are even better for this purpose.
But overall I’m not saying we shouldn’t extend our analysis to PUA’s that are less well known but seem particularly compelling to LessWrong readers. The thing is they have to be put in context.
How is that bad? The whole point is to locate actual beliefs and test them. If they’re incorrect, all the better—our job is probably easier. By focusing on the general population, we can cull down the potentially-useful beliefs without needing to ourselves bring ethics into the discussion. Thus, we only test “X results in a 20% chance of being handed an aubergine” if that is a belief some PUA practitioner actually holds.
These are all ‘red ink’ concerns. The ‘black ink’ thread is supposed to evaluate beliefs of PUAs without reference to how effective they are at achieving goals. You can’t presuppose what the goals are supposed to be or determine whether they’re optimal ways of achieving goals. Thus, we can test for the presence of aubergines, but we don’t need to know whether we actually want aubergines.
My initial response to your comment, is, “WTF?”
My second, more polite response, is simply that your suggestion isn’t particularly compatible with finding out useful things, since your proposed selection criteria will tend to filter them out before you have anything to evaluate.
I’m talking about following the strategy laid out by Konkvistador above. Have you been following this thread?
Possibly. But the goal was to have separate threads for non-normative and normative claims, and this is how it will be accomplished. My initial response was “That cannot be done”, probably from intuitions similar to yours, but that turned out to be false.
My understanding was that the goal was to have a useful discussion, minus the mindkilling. AFAICT your proposal of the means by which to accomplish this, is to throw out the usefulness along with the mindkilling.
Different goals. The goal was indeed to have a useful discussion mins the mindkilling. The proposed subgoal was to have one thread for non-normative claims and another for normative claims. It might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if you think so then you should (at a much lower level of nesting) propose a different strategy for having the discussion minus the mindkilling. Or at least say you have a problem with that subgoal at the start of the thread, rather than the end.
I didn’t mean to misrepresent your position or the debate so far. I was just trying to communicate how I’m seeing the debate. Hope you didn’t take my question the wrong way! :)
Not at all (I think).
Ethics is a whole different thing than putative human universals. Very few things that I would assert as ethics would I claim to be human universals. “Normative human essentials” might fit in that context. (By way of illustration, we all likely consider ‘Rape Bad’ as an essential ethical value but I certainly wouldn’t say that’s a universal human thing. Just that the ethics of those who don’t think Rape Is Bad suck!)
Different ethical systems are possible to implement even on “normal” human hardware (which is far from the set of all humans!). We have ample evidence in favour of this hypothesis. I think Westerners in particular seem especially apt to forget to think of this when convenient.
I think I agree with what you are saying but I can’t be sure. Could you clarify it for me a tad (seems like a word is missing or something.)
Westerners certainly seem to forget this type of thing. Do others really not so much?
Human can and do value different things. Sometimes even when they start out valuing the same things, different experiences/cricumstances lead them to systematize this into different reasonably similarly consistent ethical systems.
Modern Westerners often identify their values as being the product of reason, which must be universal. While this isn’t exactly rare, it is I think less pronounced in most human cultures throughout history. I think a more common explanation to “they just haven’t sat down and thought about stuff and seen we are right yet” is “they are wicked” (have different values). Which obviously has its own failure modes, just not this particular one.
It would be interesting to trace the relationship between the idea of universal moral value, and the idea of universal religion. Moldbug argues that the latter pretty much spawned the former (that’s probably a rough approximation), though I don’t trust his scholarship on the history of ideas that much. I don’t know to what extent the ancient Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Arabs considered their values to be universal (though apparently Romans legal scholars had the concept of “natural law” which they got from the Greeks which seems to map pretty closely to that idea, independently of Christianity and related universal religions).
Thankyou. And yes, I wholeheartedly agree!
I suspect you meant “I certainly wouldn’t say”… confirm?
Confirm.
What would be an example of a “Normative human essential”?
Killing young children is bad.
My guess is you wanted another example?
Yea, Konkvistador supplied well.
Raping folks is bad!
That’s not very helpful to me.
Ethics can arguably be reduced to “what is my utility function?” and “how can I best optimize for it?” So for a being not to include ethics in its optimization criteria, I’m confused what that would mean. I had guessed Konkvistador was referring to some sort of putative human universals.
I’m still not sure what you mean when you say their ethics suck, or what criteria you use when alleging something as ethics.
Ethics aren’t about putative human universals. I’m honestly not sure how to most effectively explain that since I can’t see a good reason why putative human universals came up at all!
Cooperative tribal norms seems more plausible. Somebody thinking their ethics are human universals requires that they, well, are totally confused about what is universal about humans.
Not at all. Many prominent ethicists and anthropologists and doctors agree that there are human universals. And any particular fact about a being has ethical implications.
For example, humans value continued survival. There are exceptions and caveats, but this is something that occurs in all peoples and amongst nearly all of the population for most of their lives (that last bit you can just about get a priori). Also, drinking antifreeze will kill a person. Thus, “one should not drink antifreeze without a damn good reason” is a human universal.
If these people don’t frequently disagree with others about ethics, they become unemployed.
This group’s opinions on the subject are less correlated with reality than most groups’.
ETA: I have no evidence for this outside of some of their outlandish positions, the reasons for which I have some guesses for but have not looked into, and this is basically a rhetorical argument.
Actually, if anything I think I’d be more likely to believe that the actual job security ethicists enjoy tends to decrease their opinions’ correlation with reality, as compared to the beliefs about their respective fields of others who will be fired if they do a bad job.
I don’t believe this, and am not aware of any evidence that it’s the case.
If it was intended to be merely a formal argument, compare:
ETA: Note that many prominent ethicists are tenured, and so don’t get fired for anything short of overt crime.
I thought you had an overwhelming point there until my second read. Then I realized that the argument would actually be a reasonable argument if the premise wasn’t bogus. In fact it would be much stronger than the one about ethicists. If mathematicians did have to constantly disagree with other people about maths it would be far better to ask an intelligent amateur about maths than a mathemtician.
You can’t use an analogy to an argument which uses a false premise that would support a false conclusion as a reason why arguments of that form don’t work!
The best reason I could come up with why someone would think ethicists need to disagree with each other to keep their jobs, is that they need to “publish or perish”. But that applies equally well to other academic fields, like mathematics. If it’s not true of mathematicians, then I’m left with no reason to think it’s true of ethicists.
You appear to have presented the following argument:
… as an argument which would be a bad inference to make even if the premise was true—bad enough as to be worth using as an argument by analogy. You seem to be defending this position even when it is pointed out that the conclusion would obviously follow from the counterfactual premise. This was a time when “Oops” (or perhaps just dropping the point) would have been a better response.
The premise wasn’t present. Yes, it would be formally valid given some counterfactual premise, but then so would absolutely every possible argument.
I’d expect “publish or perish” to apply broadly in academic fields, but there are several broad categories of ways in which one can publish. One can indeed come up with a disagreement with a view that someone else is promoting, but one can also come up with a view on an entirely different question than anyone else addresses. In a very abstract sense, this might count as as disagreement, a kind of claim that the “interesting” area of a field is located in a different area than existing publications have pointed to, but this isn’t quite the same thing as claiming that the existing claims about the previously investigated area are wrong.
Mathematicians—along with scientists—discover new things (what is a proof other than a discovery of a new mathematical property). That’s what their job is. In order for Ethicists to be comparable, wouldn’t they need to discover new ethics?
Sure, and they do. One out of the three major subfields of ethics is “applied ethics”, which simply analyzes actual or potential circumstances using their expertise in ethics. The space for that is probably as big as the space for mathematical proofs.
I don’t think they need to disagree with each other, only with outsiders.
So the premise, then, is that the institution of Ethics would come tumbling down if it were not the case that ethicists seemed to have special knowledge that the rest of the populace did not?
if so, I think it again applies equally well to any academic discipline, and is false.
Or am I still missing something?
Yes.
Other academic disciplines are tested against reality because they make “is” statements. Philosophy is in a middle ground, I suppose.
Which reality was it that the ethicists were not correlated with again? Oh, right, making factual claims about universals of human behavior. I don’t disbelieve you.
This does not refute!
No duh. Though it does suggest.
Was the “Not at all.” some sort of obscure sarcasm?
EDIT: At time of this comment the quote was entirety of parent—although I would have replied something along those lines anyway I suppose.
No. I was disagreeing with your point, and then offering supporting evidence. You took one piece of my evidence and noted that it does not itself constitute a refutation. I don’t know how it is even helpful to point this out; if I thought that piece of evidence constituted a refutation, I would not have needed to say anything else. Also, most arguments do not contain or constitute refutations.
It seems necessary to strengthen my reply to
Unless an individual had an ethical system which is “people should behave in accordance to any human universals and all other behaviors are ethically neutral” the fact that there are human universals doesn’t have any particular impact on the claim. Given that a priori humans can’t be going against human universals that particular special case is basically pointless.
I think I’m confused about what your actual claim was. It seemed to be that human universals have nothing to do with ethics. But it’s easy to show that some things that are putatively human universals have something to do with ethics, and a lot of the relevant people think putative human universals have a large role in ethics.
Was it just that ethics is not equivalent to human universals? If so, I agree.
Sorry for posting the first few paragraphs and then immediately editing to add the later ones. It was a long post and I wanted to stop at several points but I kept getting hit by “one more idea/comment/argument” moments.
It seems to me that the ethical discussion should come first, if one must have priority over the other.
After you’ve published the plans for a Death Ray it’s a bit late to have a discussion about whether or not it would be ethical to publish the plans for a Death Ray.
The plans for the Death Ray are already out there. The two possible discussions are, first, whether it’s ethical to kill someone with a Death Ray.
The second discussion asks whether the effectiveness of the Death Ray (compared to just punching someone) can be attributed to the placebo effect. Or maybe the Death Ray only works on the sort of people that evil villains want to kill, but when it comes time to protagonists, our opponents are mostly invulnerable to Death Rays. It’s also possible that the Death Ray doesn’t really work better than chance, but it gives villains the confidence to step up and shoot someone who’s about to have a heart attack, anyway. Then again, maybe a lot of people prefer to be shot with Death Rays and it’s hypocritical to say that the tried-and-true method of punching someone to death is better just because it doesn’t involve any mechanical devices...
I’m allowing for the possibility that PUA does little harm in its current inchoate, unscientific form but that with analysis and refinement it could do more harm. Establishing how well PUA beliefs map to reality could at least potentially identify a subset of PUA beliefs which did map to reality, and distinguish them from those that don’t.
If PUA as it currently exists in the wild, schisms and subgroups and all, is the most effective possible form of PUA then and only then is the invention already in the wild.
We’re not the only rationalists in the world.
A post entitled “[censored] Romantic Relationships” is non-PUA? That’s assuming conclusions to all kinds of open questions.
At the least all non-PUA relationship posts would require giant Happy Death Spiral warnings atop them.
Good point. I should have phrased better. I will edit my post to say “posts that aren’t explicitly about PUA.
It’s been awhile since I read the OP, and honestly I forgot about all the social interaction stuff that was posted. Being poly, I focused on the first part, and was sorta hoping there would be a discussion about different relationship styles. :)
Meh. It’s not like anyone forced me to read the whole thread (which I haven’t done).
Vote this comment up if this comment thread has made LessWrong more valuable to you.
If you’re going to conduct such a poll, I’d recommend asking a similar question about some other thread on some other topic (or possibly several) to act as a control group. (I would also recommend these be staggered in time in the hopes of simulating independent measurement, and the results reported as ratios to the number of posts in the thread.)
I dislike the loud and bad-feelings-producing retread of old topics that the comment thread appears (I have skimmed and sampled only) to have become, but I specifically wish that posts like this one are not prohibited/avoided in the future.
Apologies for cluttering up the poll area, but it seems like relevant information that I haven’t read much of the comment thread at all because I don’t think it’ll be valuable to me. If I had to break it down, I’d say that I don’t expect it to be particularly useful or interesting to me.
More valuable because it’s the weekend and I will read most but not all of it, but bad for signal/noise ratio overall.
Right now, the poll is at 14 to 1. Poll results don’t translate straightforwardly to net harm, but these numbers are pretty clear. So shall we implement some sort of official or unofficial safeguard against it happening again, either by banning certain topics, or by imposing stricter rules on how to discuss them?
I distinctly remember it being something to 2 earlier. In any case, other options might be even worse. A new norm of approving of people posting in the middle of threads “This is a happy death spiral but it would be impolite to say why” might be a net good.
Hi, this comment caused me to vote in this poll, in protest of its validity. I do agree actually that sanctions should be made, preferably norm based ones like lessdazed suggested. The protest is what the poll is clear of exactly. Such a poll is representative of the outliers. Specifically, anyone past the threshold it takes to make a vote. If you conclusions are based on that subset of people, then I have no disagreement.
Karma balance. Vote this down if you voted up one of the sibling comments.