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.
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.