I remember as an high school kid PUA seemed sensible. (I had a nerdy straight male friend into it, and no personal interest since if I wanted to get laid I could use boobies.) I mostly took home “People, especially women, dig confidence, and will chase rather than be chased. ‘Bitches ain’t shit’ is therefore a desirable mindset.”.
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious. Not because I’m supposed to want sex with hot women and nothing else, but because their idea of “hot women” isn’t hot at all. Why would I ever want that?
I get that liking androgyny and brains and being neutral to fat and small breasts are rather idiosyncratic traits. But what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn? That’s not a person. That’s what you get if you ask RealDoll’s research department for a toy that reconciles your horror of sluts with your hatred of prudes.
...also, the hot photo is supposed to be the one on the left, right?
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious.
That’s because it’s a “blue line” test. At the beginning, it explicitly points out it’s orienting on averages, and defining market value in terms of breadth of appeal. It doesn’t mean lots of people will like a high scorer, it means lots of people won’t rule out the high scorer.
In other words, the person who scores perfectly on this test will probably not be hideously offensive to anyone—which means they don’t get ruled out early in the selection process. But a low score just means they’re more likely to need a “red line” strategy, aiming at strong appeal to a narrower audience, at the cost of turning more people off. (i.e., emphasizing one’s supposed “defects” would attract people who like those qualities, while turning away more of those who don’t)
(Ugh. I can’t believe I’m defending that misogynist a*hole, but I don’t see anything wrong with the test itself, just the conclusions/connotations being drawn from it.)
what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn?
An exaggeration of a real , very common type. The better the description fits the less common the type. Practically no one who reads this site would fall in that category (I think/hope) if only because boring people are boring.
I will respect properly written articles on almost any subject. Not these.
One thing I demand from authors claiming to be supported by “science” is that they won’t make me stop thinking in mid read. The articles behind these links do not respect the reader’s opinion. Instead of making you think, they seek to shock, trump and convince. I’ve seen this style and these patterns before in articles about climate denial, xenophobia and religious fundamentalists. (Seriously, a lifestyle article is not a valid citation.)
I’m not saying the author has not done his fair share of reading. I’m saying he should stop waving the “this is science”-sign with one hand and be clubbing down his readers with the other.
While it’s definitely interesting to point out the correlation between egg-bank and attractiveness, I have to say that my god but that site is chauvanistic! Apparently, after “hitting the wall” a woman is “sexually worthless” o_O
I do not agree.
Hmmm—my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I’d like to know why.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the “sexually worthless” comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader… ?
After all, he didn’t say “Due to my own personal predilections, i find that a woman over the age of 40 is no longer at all sexually attractive for me”, but instead made his value judgment and considers it to be some kind of inherent value of the woman (ie value == 0) completely oblivious to the fact that other men (and possibly women) may have a different value-judgment of that woman.
I disagree with his assessment because her worth is not 0… just his own personal map-value for that woman.
I don’t take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I’ve never understood him as comparing women’s value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by “the sexual marketplace”. Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person… which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from… well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal—but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time… therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective—and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the “sexual appeal” rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can “get anybody”—that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them… but for anybody not an alpha male… (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like “being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don’t face a punishing gender ratio in that niche.”
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn’t an oversaturation of people like you that you’re competing with.
Hmmm—my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I’d like to know why.
It’s not the content of what you said (though, given the topic we’re on, people are getting offended, this being one of the things LessWrong can’t really discuss without exploding and drawing battle lines) but the way in which you said it; your online habitus automatically marks you as an outsider. Lurk a bit more and you’ll get an idea of how to phrase things.
Firstly—can you define “online habitus” in this context? the dictionary gives me “physical characteristics”, but I’m not sure exactly how that relates here, but I’ve taken a stab at it:
ie that it was the emotive content of my comment that was objected to. I’, surprised that the reaction against my personal expression of shock was disliked so much so that I was downvoted. Surely rational people are allowed to be offended too? :)
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
How should I have expressed my reaction in a way that would not have offended?
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than “it isn’t true”.
If someone tells me “Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans,” I don’t have to try and refute that by saying “that’s racist,” because I have available the refutation “that’s false”. When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that’s unpopular, and can’t say “that’s false,” I will have to say something else, such as “that’s racist”. Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:
1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect—they want to live in a society that respects their elders.
2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.
3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.
4.) Any number of other things.
You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone’s preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person’s core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.
But a person’s core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world.
That’s why people usually use other things to object with if they are available. I don’t object to a critic’s value judgement that an opinion is bad if spread, but the most convenient way for the critic to encourage me to disfavor the opinion is to convince me it is false. If the critic does something else, perhaps that is because the truth of the opinion is not contested.
Actually, my point is that an opinion = facts + preferences. First, you form a belief about the state of the world, and then you may assign a value to that state and decide on an action. Two people may have identical beliefs about a certain fact in the world, but may not assign identical value to that state. If this is the case, there is no point in trying to prove the fact being considered wrong. Sometimes it is the preferences themselves that differ. This can sometimes be resolved, but it does require thinking about the thought processes behind those preferences, and not just focusing on the facts we are assigning value to. Your last two sentences imply that opinions have a truth value. I am saying that they don’t. Only the facts that opinions are based on have a truth value.
Agreement on opinions requires not just agreement on facts, but also agreement on preferences. I feel a high degree of confidence that people’s preferences are not identical. Therefore, I suspect that agreeing on the facts alone rarely solves the problem. If we verify the fact that one person has one preference, and another person an opposing preference, the verification of that alone will not resolve their disagreement. The only approach is to try to understand the similarities and differences in the preferences involved, and see if anything can be worked out from there.
Your last two sentences imply that opinions have a truth value.
I only intended that in the sense that someone’s opinion may be based on a misconception. If someone in fact enjoys eating cheese, and thinks the moon is made of cheese, I’ll tend to just call his opinion that he would enjoy eating a piece of the moon “wrong”.
Therefore, I suspect that agreeing on the facts alone rarely solves the problem.
Disagreeing on facts is often sufficient to cause a problem.
The only approach is to try to understand the similarities and differences in the preferences involved, and see if anything can be worked out from there.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion. If we don’t understand each other’s preferences, we can still negotiate, if poorly. But if we are trading items it helps to establish common understanding of what me giving you an apple and you giving me an orange even mean.
If someone in fact enjoys eating cheese, and thinks the moon is made of cheese, I’ll tend to just call his opinion that he would enjoy eating a piece of the moon “wrong”.
Certainly. As I said in my first post, you can have objections to a fact stated if you believe it is incorrect.
Disagreeing on facts is often sufficient to cause a problem.
This is also true. Whether two people disagree only on the facts or only on preferences, the same amount of trouble can be had. Also if people disagree on both.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion.
This is itself an opinion, so I cannot assign a truth value to it. The assignment of importance can only be done if preferences exist. For example, a preference may exist to gain benefit from a certain fact, but not necessarily to satisfy the preference of another person. Given such a preference, it would not, of course, be important to know what the other person’s preferences are. On the other hand, if a person wanted to satisfy another person’s preferences (or to go against them), then it would be very important. Are you saying that you generally prefer to discover facts about the world over facts about the preferences of other people, or that you think the statement you made is itself some fact about the world? If it is the first, then I assume you have more knowledge of your preferences than I do. If it is the second, then I think I have to disagree.
if a person wanted to satisfy another person’s preferences (or to go against them), then it would be very important.
Practically speaking, I don’t think it ((ETA for clarity) doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve. If I’m trading you ice cream for flour, what we really need to nail down is that the ice cream has been in the freezer and not out in the sun, the flour is from wheat and isn’t dirt or cocaine, it’s not soaked in water etc. Then, we can negotiate a trade without knowing each other’s preferences.
In contrast, if we only know each other’s preferences, we won’t get very far. I will use the word “rectangle” (which in my language would refer to what you call “ice cream”) and offer you melted ice cream, etc.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion.
Are you saying that...you think the statement you made is itself some fact about the world?
Not logically so—there are possible minds whose only desire is to only know the other person’s opinions. I meant it as an assertion of what’s generally true in human interactions. Knowing the other person’s preferences is far less often necessary than knowing other facts, it’s never sufficient for a realistic human scenario I can think of. So as I intended it “less important” applies in a stronger sense than “I disapprove” since compared to the other type of knowledge those facts are less often necessary and less often sufficient.
Practically speaking, I don’t think it is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.
Okay. You are telling me something about your preferences then.
If I’m trading you ice cream for flour, what we really need to nail down...
And why is that? Why are those facts more important than, say, that the ice cream is bubblegum-flavored or blue-colored or sweetened with aspartame or made from coconut milk? Knowing the temperature of the ice cream or the composition of the flour is important only in the sense that there can be human preferences in this direction.
Then, we can negotiate a trade without knowing each other’s preferences.
Your example is not about people negotiating without knowing each other’s preferences. Your example is about people negotiating with a few assumptions of the other person’s preferences. Here is an example of people negotiating without knowing the other person’s preferences:
Person A: Would you like some flour?
Person B: No. Would you like ice cream?
Person A: No. I have some fruit fly eggs here...
Person B: Not interested. Would you like a computer?
Person A: Why, yes. What do you have here? Never mind—I won’t buy anything over ten years old.
In contrast, if we only know each other’s preferences, we won’t get very far.
True. If we only know the other person’s preferences but not any relevant facts for achieving them, we cannot expect a mutually satisfying interaction. However, if we know the relevant facts for achieving various preferences, but not which of those preferences the other person has, the same is true.
there are possible minds whose only desire is to only know the other person’s opinions.
True, but not what I’m discussing. I am discussing how to satisfy both people’s preferences in an interaction between two people.
I meant it as an assertion of what’s generally true in human interactions.
Since you state this is not a logical assertion but generally true, I assume you mean to say that it is true in the world we live in but would not have to be true in all possible worlds. However, what I am saying is that this statement does not have a truth value in any logically possible world since it does not specify the preference the importance relates to. Using the word important in this way is like leaving off the ‘if’ condition in an ‘if’-‘then’ statement, but not leaving out the if as well. The ‘then’ condition has a truth value by itself, but the ‘if’-‘then’ statement can only be evaluated if both conditions can be evaluated.
So as I intended it “less important” applies in a stronger sense than “I disapprove” since compared to the other type of knowledge those facts are less often necessary and less often sufficient.
And I disagree that it can. Less important to achieve what objective? The only way a statement of importance has meaning is to relate it to the goal it is meant to achieve. That goal is a preference.
You have been trying to argue that facts are important but that knowing another person’s preferences is not very important. But important for what purpose? One possibility is that you mean that knowing other facts is more important for the goal of achieving that person’s preferences than knowing that person’s preferences. Another is that you mean that knowing facts are more important for achieving your preferences than knowing what the other person’s preferences are (since you state you don’t consider goals humans generally want to achieve as important, it seems reasonable to assume this is also a possibility). In order to say whether your statement is true, I need to know the specific preferences involved. As you have stated it here, it has no truth value.
My position is that knowing a person’s preferences and the facts about how to achieve those preferences are both necessary, but by themselves insufficient, to achieve those preferences. I do not know which I find more tragic, the person who knows the goal but not the path to get there, or the person who knows perfectly all the paths, but not which one to take.
Practically speaking, I don’t think it is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.
You are telling me something about your preferences then.
Should be read as “Practically speaking, I don’t think it (doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.”
English permitted me to exclude that clause and have the same wording as a phrase that conveys the exact opposite of my point. Sorry. I can imagine your confusion reading that and seeing me follow it with an example that illustrates a point opposite of how you read that.
But no, I am not saying anything about my preferences, but am describing a relationship between what people want and the world, the relationship is that in general knowing about preferences doesn’t help people achieve their goals, but knowing about states of the world does.
Knowing the temperature of the ice cream or the composition of the flour is important only in the sense that there can be human preferences in this direction.
But I don’t need to know them if you do and we share knowledge about states of the world.
Your example is about people negotiating with a few assumptions of the other person’s preferences.
A very, very hazy idea of others’ preferences is sufficient, so improved knowledge beyond that isn’t too useful. Alternatively, with no idea of them, we can still trade by saying what we want and giving a preference ranking rather than trying to guess what the other wants.
Since you state (“There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion,”) is not a logical assertion but generally true, I assume you mean to say that it is true in the world we live in but would not have to be true in all possible worlds.
I did not mean it is always true in this universe but not like that in other universes. Instead I meant it is almost always true in this universe. If you are in a situation in this world, such as a financial one or one in which you disagree over a joint action to take, it will almost always be better to get a unit of relevant information about consequences of actions than a unit of relevant information about the other person’s preferences, particularly if you can communicate half-decently or better. Also, for random genies or whatever with random amounts of information about each other and the world, they will each usually be better able to achieve their goals by knowing more about the world.
This depends heavily on an intuitive comparison of what “random relevant” information of a certain quantity looks like. That might not be intelligible, more likely a formal treatment of “relevant” would clash with intuition to settle this decisively as tru or false, but it wouldn’t fail to have a truth value.
I do not know which I find more tragic, the person who knows the goal but not the path to get there, or the person who knows perfectly all the paths, but not which one to take.
We’re discussing the goals of other people. Each type might be equally tragic, but if you had the opportunity to give a random actual person (or random hypothetical being) more knowledge about their goal or knowledge about the world, pick the world and it’s not a close decision!
My view on this discussion is that I have been saying “pick the world” in such a case, and not only don’t I know what you would say to pick, you are saying “pick the world” isn’t truth apt (when it fulfills my desires to fulfill others’ desires, and those desires are best fulfilled by their getting the one type of knowledge and not the other, and that second “best” is according to their desires).
Practically speaking, I don’t think it is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.
Should be read as “Practically speaking, I don’t think it (doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.”
Upvoted for clarifying this point. This changes my interpretation of this sentence considerably, so perhaps I can now address your intended meaning. This statement does have a truth value (which I believe to be false). I disagree that knowing another human’s preferences is not important to achieving most of their goals (ie. their preferences). Since you make a weaker statement below (that they only need to vaguely know the other’s preferences), I assume you intend this statement to mean something more along the lines of needing very little preference information to achieve preferences than needing no preference information to achieve preferences (and it is probably not common for humans to have zero initial information about all relevant preferences anyway).
Knowing the temperature of the ice cream or the composition of the flour is important only in the sense that there can be human preferences in this direction.
But I don’t need to know them if you do and we share knowledge about states of the world.
I disagree. If I want to buy something from you, I benefit from knowing the minimum amount of money you will sell it for. This is a preference that applies specifically to you. Indeed, other people may require more or less money than you would. It is, therefore, optimal for me to know specifically where the lower end of your preference range is. Knowing other facts about the world, such as what money looks like or how to use it, would not, by themselves, resolve this situation. Likewise, if you wish to sell me something, you must know how much money I am willing to pay for it. You must also know whether I am willing to pay for it at all.
A very, very hazy idea of others’ preferences is sufficient, so improved knowledge beyond that isn’t too useful. Alternatively, with no idea of them, we can still trade by saying what we want and giving a preference ranking rather than trying to guess what the other wants.
If I were trading with someone, I might not be inclined to believe that they would always tell me the minimum they are willing to accept for something. Nor would I typically divulge such information about myself to them. Sure, you can trade by just asking someone what they want, but if they say they want your item for free, that’s not going to help if you want them to pay.
Since you state (“There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion,”) is not a logical assertion but generally true, I assume you mean to say that it is true in the world we live in but would not have to be true in all possible worlds.
I did not mean it is always true in this universe but not like that in other universes. Instead I meant it is almost always true in this universe. If you are in a situation in this world, such as a financial one or one in which you disagree over a joint action to take, it will almost always be better to get a unit of relevant information about consequences of actions than a unit of relevant information about the other person’s preferences, particularly if you can communicate half-decently or better.
By the lack of truth value, I meant that it was not clarified what preference the word important referred to. If the preference referred to is explained, then the expanded sentence has a truth value. Perhaps this is like the other sentence, and you meant it to refer to satisfying the preferences of others. Also, the consequences of actions can only be assigned a value if the preferences are known. No preferences = No consequences.
This depends heavily on an intuitive comparison of what “random relevant” information of a certain quantity looks like. That might not be intelligible, more likely a formal treatment of “relevant” would clash with intuition to settle this decisively as tru or false, but it wouldn’t fail to have a truth value.
Yes, these statements lead me to believe that you were stating something similar to your original sentence, and meant something like “There are a lot of facts more important for satisfying the preferences of the other person than understanding the other person’s opinion”. This seems incorrect to me. Also, I believe that you will find that all pieces of relevant information relate to one or more of the preferences involved. This relation is not mutually exclusive, since these pieces of relevant information could also relate to facts external to the person. Consider your example of the unfortunate cheese-loving person who believes the moon is made of cheese. This belief gives them both a false picture of the world and a false picture of their own cheese-related preferences. A belief that Saturn was made of salami would give them a false picture of the world, but not of those same cheese-related preferences.
I do not know which I find more tragic, the person who knows the goal but not the path to get there, or the person who knows perfectly all the paths, but not which one to take.
We’re discussing the goals of other people. Each type might be equally tragic, but if you had the opportunity to give a random actual person (or random hypothetical being) more knowledge about their goal or knowledge about the world, pick the world and it’s not a close decision!
My view on this discussion is that I have been saying “pick the world”...
It sounds like there is some misunderstanding of what I mean. Let me try to restate my position in a completely different way.
Preferences are, of course, facts. They could even be thought of as facts about the world, in the sense that they refer to a part of the world (ie. a person). This is true in the same way that the color orange is a fact about the world, assuming that you clarify that it refers to the color of, say, a carrot, and not the color of everything in the world. If you remove the carrot, you remove its orange-ness with it. If you remove the person, you remove their preference with them. Similarly, if you remove the preference involved, then you remove its importance with it. The importance is a property of the preference, just as the preference is a property of the person. This was why I was saying that the statement of importance (referring to a preference) had no truth value—because the preference it was important to was not stated. As such, I read it as ′ There are a lot of facts more important for x than understanding the other person’s opinion’. Since x was unknown to me, the statement could not be evaluated to true or false any more than saying ‘x is orange’ could. The revision I posted above (based on your earlier revision of your other sentence) can be evaluated as true or false.
My position is that one should know the preferences involved with great precision if one wishes to maximally satisfy those preferences, since this eliminates time establishing irrelevant facts (of which there is an infinite number). Furthermore, one needs to know about the people involved, since the preferences are a property of the people. Therefore, many of the facts about the preferences will also be facts about people. There may, in any given case, be more numerous facts about the world that are relevant to these preferences than facts about the person. Nevertheless, one unit of information about the person which relates to the preferences to be satisfied can easily eliminate over a million items of irrelevant information from the search space of information to be dealt with.
Here is an example:
Two programmers have a disagreement about whether they should try to program a more intelligent AI. The first programmer writes a twenty page long email to the second programmer to assure them that the more intelligent AI will not be a threat to human civilization. This person employs all the facts at their disposal to explain this and their argument is airtight. The second programmer responds that they never thought that the improved program would be a threat to civilization—just that hiring the extra programmers required to improve it would cost too much money.
The less you understand a person, the less you can satisfy their preferences. Whether that decreased satisfaction is good enough for you depends on a number of factors, including the magnitude of the decrease (which may or may not vary widely for a given unit of preference information, depending on what it is), how much time you are willing to waste with irrelevant information, and your threshold for ‘good enough’.
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it’s best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it’s better for me to say “P is false, and also has bad consequences” than to say “P has bad consequences.”
It’s perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than “I do not agree”, which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
Yep—this is a good point. I realise that my statement was ambiguous about how/why I disagreed. I left it up to the reader.
I did this, at the time, because I was quite angry at the things said on the website, and the way they were said. I was not in any fit state to argue my reasoning. I’ve since clarified in the followon comments… after sufficient time passed.
That wasn’t how I saw the context here, because of the statement “I do not agree”. Also, no consequences were enumerated. “I agree with the facts as stated, but think phrasing them this way has bad consequences,” is a fine way to argue against a presentation of ideas.
I am very suspicious of obscuring truth in the name of positive consequences, of applying only or mostly first-order idea utilitarianism.
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
First of all, let me say I didn’t downvote you. Or upvote you either.
Secondly, there’s some confusion of terminology here.
a) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared beliefs about the state of the world. (Epistemological agreement - (“is” statements) b) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared beliefs about how the world should be. (Moral agreement—“ought” statements) c) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared preferences. (Agreement in taste—“like” statements)
(a)s have objective truth value. (c)s are subjective. (b)s have people always debate about their objectivity/subjectivity thereof.
Now the three types aren’t always clearly distinct. If someone makes a statement about “attractiveness” it’s both a (c) statement about preferences, but it may also be a statement about what real-life people like on average—in which case it can be an (a) statement about the distribution of preferences in a population, which has a truth value.
So, if someone calls someone else “sexually worthless”, and you say you don’t agree—do you mean that you simply have different preferences—are you making a (c) statement? That you believe his statement factually false—you’re making an (a) statement about the distribution of attraction feelings towards such women in the real world?
Or do you mean that you consider it MORALLY WRONG for him to speak and behave in such a rude way?
If the last of these, then “I morally object to such an attitude” is obviously a clearer way of talking about your objection rather than “I do not agree” which is vague and imprecise.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the “sexually worthless” comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader… ?
It depends. Was the context marketplace value or value to the individual who most values that person sexually? Ifthe latter, it was the MPF. If the former (which it implicitly probably was there), then I don’t think marketplace valuations necessarily fail in that way.
I got the sense that he was actually using his personal valuation, and passing it off as a marketplace-valuation. His references to studies felt like he was trying to find facts to fit his own valuations. However—I’ll freely admit that I have not read his stuff widely. This is one of those websites where I decided it would not be a good idea for me to keep going as it simply continued to fuel my anger. It was more rational simply to stop reading.
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I’m a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It’s completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you’d read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
Remember, girls don’t operate in a logical universe; they abide their emotions first and foremost.
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW (“Remember, humans don’t operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost”) and social skills books (“Remember, humans don’t operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock”) sound as artificial when you’re not used to them?
I see the “just jealous” claim as equivalent to A attempting to lower B’s status, and when B says they don’t like it, A says “you just don’t like having your status lowered, so your point should be ignored”.
I can see why. I also note he has ready-made fully-general counterarguments for any detractors… ie “any woman that objects to what I say is just old and jealous”
Not to take a stance on any of the wider issues, but that’s not fully general: if all the women who objected were young, for example, it would be false.
Yeah but… he gets to decide how old is “old”—and from what I an tell, his idea of “old” is pretty darn young. Those women who simply cannot be manipulated into the “old” category easily fall into the “jealous” category.
The existance of an infinite sequence of arguments whose union is fully-general doesn’t mean that any given argument is.
Additionally, those counter-arguments aren’t fully general. If you admit of some objective (or inter-subjective, or whatever; collectively accessible) standard of attractiveness, all of these counterarguments would be falsified by a positive correlation between attractiveness and saying feminist things.
This isn’t to say that these counter-arguments aren’t a bad idea for other reasons; we probably want some way of getting information from ugly people, for example.
He is pretty well known around here, Robih Hanson at Overcoming Bias has him on his blogroll for exmaple.
I can see why. I also note he has ready-made fully-general counterarguments for any detractors… ie “any woman that objects to what I say is just old and jealous”
No, not necessarily. He often just says her hamster is doing overtime.
Also his main argument is basically that “boners don’t lie”. A large enough fraction of men find a specific subset of women on average more sexually desirable than others that sexual desirability may as well be a objective criteria at least when comparing averages of groups like say 20 year old vs. 50 year old women or overweight vs. slim women.
Yes—“her hamster” is an interesting way of saying “women aren’t rational, they just rationalise everything away”.
it’s an unfalsifiable proposition. Have you had a look at the list of things that he says women say?
Yep—they could indeed be rationalisations… or they could in fact be the truth… how can you tell the difference?
well—you can’t. That’s because this, as I said, is a fully-general counterargument.
No matter what his (as he says) “screechy feminist kvetches” about… he can just say “that’s just a rationalisation” and not think any further or take it into account. he never has to update on anything a woman says to him ever. Also, i note that he seem to think that female rationalisation is a totally different species to male rationalisation… and doesn’t even mention instances of the latter.
As to “boners don’t lie”—this is demonstrably untrue any time somebody is turned on by a picture.
There are no doubt objective criteria which have high correlation with the average male’s likely attraction to a woman. Studies into facial symmetry, smooth complexion etc etc have clearly shown this. yes, you can compare averages...
However—need I remind you of the alien stealing our sexy women aspect of the mind-projection fallacy?
the woman is not sexy… the men are attracted to certain types of women.
You can definitely make a case to me that “the average 40 year old woman has a reduced likelihood of finding male sexual partners”… but that does not mean “sexual worth = zero”
I might also add that as yet I have never met a woman anywhere that could find literally zero partners anywhere. She may not be interested in the men that would be likely to have sex with her… but that is a different question. There is a vanishingly small percentage of women who would literally have zero “worth” on the open market. To lump in every 35YO (and older) women is to be particularly ignorant of sexual dynamics… it is this man mistaking his own preferences for reality.
However—need I remind you of the alien stealing our sexy women aspect of the mind-projection fallacy? the woman is not sexy… the men are attracted to certain types of women.
I think you’re modus tollensing a modus ponens. Eliezer’s metaethical conclusion was that sexy is an objective criteria which does not mean “sexually attractive to aliens;” the word for that would be “kvy’ztar” or something.
Are 9 year old girls “sexy” because some humans find them sexy? Or is “sexy” in the eye of the beholder here?
Sexy is a transistive verb attached to the person who considers the other person sexy, not to the subject of said attentions. It may so happen that there’s more than one person who finds a certain subject sexy—it’s still something that attaches to the group. What can be said about the subject is “she is symmetrical, unblemished, has large breasts and a low body fat percentage” and it so happens that a large number of men find that to be high on their sexiness-scale. There’s a cluster there that has been named “sexy”—but don’t forget that this cluster is in map-space, not territory-space.
I think we’re still in agreement. The reference post makes it clear that “sexy” is a different word for a bug-eyed monster, a normal heterosexual male, and a paedophile.
Firstly—I hadn’t read that article yet, thanks. Still making my way through the backlog.
Secondly—I don’t think we are in agreement on this. You are claiming that I was making a 1-place argument.
In fact I was pointing out that roissy seems to be under the incorrect impression that his 1-place, curryed algorithm is the algorithm for determining the “sexual worth” of a woman. In my (admittedly brief) time on his site, I didn’t see any reference to alternative algorithms for evaluating the sexual worth of women (based, say, on alternative preferences).
My understanding on how he sees women predicts that he would be quite surprised to find a man that honestly finds a woman to be attractive that he considers to not be attractive. ie he would be truly astonished to find that some men really and honestly find 40 YO old women perfectly good bedmates. ie he would find it hard to accept that other men used a different sexiness function than what he uses.
Of course my other understandings about him mean that I predict that if he found a man that claimed the above—roissy would think the man was not being honest and was simply “settling” for what he could get.
Seems relevant.
I remember as an high school kid PUA seemed sensible. (I had a nerdy straight male friend into it, and no personal interest since if I wanted to get laid I could use boobies.) I mostly took home “People, especially women, dig confidence, and will chase rather than be chased. ‘Bitches ain’t shit’ is therefore a desirable mindset.”.
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious. Not because I’m supposed to want sex with hot women and nothing else, but because their idea of “hot women” isn’t hot at all. Why would I ever want that?
I get that liking androgyny and brains and being neutral to fat and small breasts are rather idiosyncratic traits. But what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn? That’s not a person. That’s what you get if you ask RealDoll’s research department for a toy that reconciles your horror of sluts with your hatred of prudes.
...also, the hot photo is supposed to be the one on the left, right?
That’s because it’s a “blue line” test. At the beginning, it explicitly points out it’s orienting on averages, and defining market value in terms of breadth of appeal. It doesn’t mean lots of people will like a high scorer, it means lots of people won’t rule out the high scorer.
In other words, the person who scores perfectly on this test will probably not be hideously offensive to anyone—which means they don’t get ruled out early in the selection process. But a low score just means they’re more likely to need a “red line” strategy, aiming at strong appeal to a narrower audience, at the cost of turning more people off. (i.e., emphasizing one’s supposed “defects” would attract people who like those qualities, while turning away more of those who don’t)
(Ugh. I can’t believe I’m defending that misogynist a*hole, but I don’t see anything wrong with the test itself, just the conclusions/connotations being drawn from it.)
An exaggeration of a real , very common type. The better the description fits the less common the type. Practically no one who reads this site would fall in that category (I think/hope) if only because boring people are boring.
Yes.
I will respect properly written articles on almost any subject. Not these.
One thing I demand from authors claiming to be supported by “science” is that they won’t make me stop thinking in mid read. The articles behind these links do not respect the reader’s opinion. Instead of making you think, they seek to shock, trump and convince. I’ve seen this style and these patterns before in articles about climate denial, xenophobia and religious fundamentalists. (Seriously, a lifestyle article is not a valid citation.)
I’m not saying the author has not done his fair share of reading. I’m saying he should stop waving the “this is science”-sign with one hand and be clubbing down his readers with the other.
The latter trait doesn’t seem all that closely linked to ‘science’. It is a quality of good authorship not science.
While it’s definitely interesting to point out the correlation between egg-bank and attractiveness, I have to say that my god but that site is chauvanistic! Apparently, after “hitting the wall” a woman is “sexually worthless” o_O I do not agree.
Hmmm—my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I’d like to know why.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the “sexually worthless” comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader… ?
After all, he didn’t say “Due to my own personal predilections, i find that a woman over the age of 40 is no longer at all sexually attractive for me”, but instead made his value judgment and considers it to be some kind of inherent value of the woman (ie value == 0) completely oblivious to the fact that other men (and possibly women) may have a different value-judgment of that woman.
I disagree with his assessment because her worth is not 0… just his own personal map-value for that woman.
I don’t take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I’ve never understood him as comparing women’s value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by “the sexual marketplace”. Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person… which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from… well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal—but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time… therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective—and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the “sexual appeal” rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can “get anybody”—that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them… but for anybody not an alpha male… (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
Her “value” on the marketplace is not zero.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like “being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don’t face a punishing gender ratio in that niche.”
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn’t an oversaturation of people like you that you’re competing with.
It’s not the content of what you said (though, given the topic we’re on, people are getting offended, this being one of the things LessWrong can’t really discuss without exploding and drawing battle lines) but the way in which you said it; your online habitus automatically marks you as an outsider. Lurk a bit more and you’ll get an idea of how to phrase things.
Thank you for responding. :)
Firstly—can you define “online habitus” in this context? the dictionary gives me “physical characteristics”, but I’m not sure exactly how that relates here, but I’ve taken a stab at it:
ie that it was the emotive content of my comment that was objected to. I’, surprised that the reaction against my personal expression of shock was disliked so much so that I was downvoted. Surely rational people are allowed to be offended too? :)
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
How should I have expressed my reaction in a way that would not have offended?
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than “it isn’t true”.
If someone tells me “Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans,” I don’t have to try and refute that by saying “that’s racist,” because I have available the refutation “that’s false”. When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that’s unpopular, and can’t say “that’s false,” I will have to say something else, such as “that’s racist”. Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:
1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect—they want to live in a society that respects their elders.
2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.
3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.
4.) Any number of other things.
You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone’s preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person’s core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.
That’s why people usually use other things to object with if they are available. I don’t object to a critic’s value judgement that an opinion is bad if spread, but the most convenient way for the critic to encourage me to disfavor the opinion is to convince me it is false. If the critic does something else, perhaps that is because the truth of the opinion is not contested.
Actually, my point is that an opinion = facts + preferences. First, you form a belief about the state of the world, and then you may assign a value to that state and decide on an action. Two people may have identical beliefs about a certain fact in the world, but may not assign identical value to that state. If this is the case, there is no point in trying to prove the fact being considered wrong. Sometimes it is the preferences themselves that differ. This can sometimes be resolved, but it does require thinking about the thought processes behind those preferences, and not just focusing on the facts we are assigning value to. Your last two sentences imply that opinions have a truth value. I am saying that they don’t. Only the facts that opinions are based on have a truth value.
Agreement on opinions requires not just agreement on facts, but also agreement on preferences. I feel a high degree of confidence that people’s preferences are not identical. Therefore, I suspect that agreeing on the facts alone rarely solves the problem. If we verify the fact that one person has one preference, and another person an opposing preference, the verification of that alone will not resolve their disagreement. The only approach is to try to understand the similarities and differences in the preferences involved, and see if anything can be worked out from there.
I only intended that in the sense that someone’s opinion may be based on a misconception. If someone in fact enjoys eating cheese, and thinks the moon is made of cheese, I’ll tend to just call his opinion that he would enjoy eating a piece of the moon “wrong”.
Disagreeing on facts is often sufficient to cause a problem.
There are a lot of facts more important than understanding the other’s opinion. If we don’t understand each other’s preferences, we can still negotiate, if poorly. But if we are trading items it helps to establish common understanding of what me giving you an apple and you giving me an orange even mean.
Certainly. As I said in my first post, you can have objections to a fact stated if you believe it is incorrect.
This is also true. Whether two people disagree only on the facts or only on preferences, the same amount of trouble can be had. Also if people disagree on both.
This is itself an opinion, so I cannot assign a truth value to it. The assignment of importance can only be done if preferences exist. For example, a preference may exist to gain benefit from a certain fact, but not necessarily to satisfy the preference of another person. Given such a preference, it would not, of course, be important to know what the other person’s preferences are. On the other hand, if a person wanted to satisfy another person’s preferences (or to go against them), then it would be very important. Are you saying that you generally prefer to discover facts about the world over facts about the preferences of other people, or that you think the statement you made is itself some fact about the world? If it is the first, then I assume you have more knowledge of your preferences than I do. If it is the second, then I think I have to disagree.
Practically speaking, I don’t think it ((ETA for clarity) doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve. If I’m trading you ice cream for flour, what we really need to nail down is that the ice cream has been in the freezer and not out in the sun, the flour is from wheat and isn’t dirt or cocaine, it’s not soaked in water etc. Then, we can negotiate a trade without knowing each other’s preferences.
In contrast, if we only know each other’s preferences, we won’t get very far. I will use the word “rectangle” (which in my language would refer to what you call “ice cream”) and offer you melted ice cream, etc.
Not logically so—there are possible minds whose only desire is to only know the other person’s opinions. I meant it as an assertion of what’s generally true in human interactions. Knowing the other person’s preferences is far less often necessary than knowing other facts, it’s never sufficient for a realistic human scenario I can think of. So as I intended it “less important” applies in a stronger sense than “I disapprove” since compared to the other type of knowledge those facts are less often necessary and less often sufficient.
Okay. You are telling me something about your preferences then.
And why is that? Why are those facts more important than, say, that the ice cream is bubblegum-flavored or blue-colored or sweetened with aspartame or made from coconut milk? Knowing the temperature of the ice cream or the composition of the flour is important only in the sense that there can be human preferences in this direction.
Your example is not about people negotiating without knowing each other’s preferences. Your example is about people negotiating with a few assumptions of the other person’s preferences. Here is an example of people negotiating without knowing the other person’s preferences:
Person A: Would you like some flour?
Person B: No. Would you like ice cream?
Person A: No. I have some fruit fly eggs here...
Person B: Not interested. Would you like a computer?
Person A: Why, yes. What do you have here? Never mind—I won’t buy anything over ten years old.
True. If we only know the other person’s preferences but not any relevant facts for achieving them, we cannot expect a mutually satisfying interaction. However, if we know the relevant facts for achieving various preferences, but not which of those preferences the other person has, the same is true.
True, but not what I’m discussing. I am discussing how to satisfy both people’s preferences in an interaction between two people.
Since you state this is not a logical assertion but generally true, I assume you mean to say that it is true in the world we live in but would not have to be true in all possible worlds. However, what I am saying is that this statement does not have a truth value in any logically possible world since it does not specify the preference the importance relates to. Using the word important in this way is like leaving off the ‘if’ condition in an ‘if’-‘then’ statement, but not leaving out the if as well. The ‘then’ condition has a truth value by itself, but the ‘if’-‘then’ statement can only be evaluated if both conditions can be evaluated.
And I disagree that it can. Less important to achieve what objective? The only way a statement of importance has meaning is to relate it to the goal it is meant to achieve. That goal is a preference.
You have been trying to argue that facts are important but that knowing another person’s preferences is not very important. But important for what purpose? One possibility is that you mean that knowing other facts is more important for the goal of achieving that person’s preferences than knowing that person’s preferences. Another is that you mean that knowing facts are more important for achieving your preferences than knowing what the other person’s preferences are (since you state you don’t consider goals humans generally want to achieve as important, it seems reasonable to assume this is also a possibility). In order to say whether your statement is true, I need to know the specific preferences involved. As you have stated it here, it has no truth value.
My position is that knowing a person’s preferences and the facts about how to achieve those preferences are both necessary, but by themselves insufficient, to achieve those preferences. I do not know which I find more tragic, the person who knows the goal but not the path to get there, or the person who knows perfectly all the paths, but not which one to take.
Should be read as “Practically speaking, I don’t think it (doing the thing we are talking about, knowing others’ preferences) is important to achieve the sort of goals humans generally want to achieve.”
English permitted me to exclude that clause and have the same wording as a phrase that conveys the exact opposite of my point. Sorry. I can imagine your confusion reading that and seeing me follow it with an example that illustrates a point opposite of how you read that.
But no, I am not saying anything about my preferences, but am describing a relationship between what people want and the world, the relationship is that in general knowing about preferences doesn’t help people achieve their goals, but knowing about states of the world does.
But I don’t need to know them if you do and we share knowledge about states of the world.
A very, very hazy idea of others’ preferences is sufficient, so improved knowledge beyond that isn’t too useful. Alternatively, with no idea of them, we can still trade by saying what we want and giving a preference ranking rather than trying to guess what the other wants.
I did not mean it is always true in this universe but not like that in other universes. Instead I meant it is almost always true in this universe. If you are in a situation in this world, such as a financial one or one in which you disagree over a joint action to take, it will almost always be better to get a unit of relevant information about consequences of actions than a unit of relevant information about the other person’s preferences, particularly if you can communicate half-decently or better. Also, for random genies or whatever with random amounts of information about each other and the world, they will each usually be better able to achieve their goals by knowing more about the world.
This depends heavily on an intuitive comparison of what “random relevant” information of a certain quantity looks like. That might not be intelligible, more likely a formal treatment of “relevant” would clash with intuition to settle this decisively as tru or false, but it wouldn’t fail to have a truth value.
We’re discussing the goals of other people. Each type might be equally tragic, but if you had the opportunity to give a random actual person (or random hypothetical being) more knowledge about their goal or knowledge about the world, pick the world and it’s not a close decision!
My view on this discussion is that I have been saying “pick the world” in such a case, and not only don’t I know what you would say to pick, you are saying “pick the world” isn’t truth apt (when it fulfills my desires to fulfill others’ desires, and those desires are best fulfilled by their getting the one type of knowledge and not the other, and that second “best” is according to their desires).
Upvoted for clarifying this point. This changes my interpretation of this sentence considerably, so perhaps I can now address your intended meaning. This statement does have a truth value (which I believe to be false). I disagree that knowing another human’s preferences is not important to achieving most of their goals (ie. their preferences). Since you make a weaker statement below (that they only need to vaguely know the other’s preferences), I assume you intend this statement to mean something more along the lines of needing very little preference information to achieve preferences than needing no preference information to achieve preferences (and it is probably not common for humans to have zero initial information about all relevant preferences anyway).
I disagree. If I want to buy something from you, I benefit from knowing the minimum amount of money you will sell it for. This is a preference that applies specifically to you. Indeed, other people may require more or less money than you would. It is, therefore, optimal for me to know specifically where the lower end of your preference range is. Knowing other facts about the world, such as what money looks like or how to use it, would not, by themselves, resolve this situation. Likewise, if you wish to sell me something, you must know how much money I am willing to pay for it. You must also know whether I am willing to pay for it at all.
If I were trading with someone, I might not be inclined to believe that they would always tell me the minimum they are willing to accept for something. Nor would I typically divulge such information about myself to them. Sure, you can trade by just asking someone what they want, but if they say they want your item for free, that’s not going to help if you want them to pay.
By the lack of truth value, I meant that it was not clarified what preference the word important referred to. If the preference referred to is explained, then the expanded sentence has a truth value. Perhaps this is like the other sentence, and you meant it to refer to satisfying the preferences of others. Also, the consequences of actions can only be assigned a value if the preferences are known. No preferences = No consequences.
Yes, these statements lead me to believe that you were stating something similar to your original sentence, and meant something like “There are a lot of facts more important for satisfying the preferences of the other person than understanding the other person’s opinion”. This seems incorrect to me. Also, I believe that you will find that all pieces of relevant information relate to one or more of the preferences involved. This relation is not mutually exclusive, since these pieces of relevant information could also relate to facts external to the person. Consider your example of the unfortunate cheese-loving person who believes the moon is made of cheese. This belief gives them both a false picture of the world and a false picture of their own cheese-related preferences. A belief that Saturn was made of salami would give them a false picture of the world, but not of those same cheese-related preferences.
It sounds like there is some misunderstanding of what I mean. Let me try to restate my position in a completely different way.
Preferences are, of course, facts. They could even be thought of as facts about the world, in the sense that they refer to a part of the world (ie. a person). This is true in the same way that the color orange is a fact about the world, assuming that you clarify that it refers to the color of, say, a carrot, and not the color of everything in the world. If you remove the carrot, you remove its orange-ness with it. If you remove the person, you remove their preference with them. Similarly, if you remove the preference involved, then you remove its importance with it. The importance is a property of the preference, just as the preference is a property of the person. This was why I was saying that the statement of importance (referring to a preference) had no truth value—because the preference it was important to was not stated. As such, I read it as ′ There are a lot of facts more important for x than understanding the other person’s opinion’. Since x was unknown to me, the statement could not be evaluated to true or false any more than saying ‘x is orange’ could. The revision I posted above (based on your earlier revision of your other sentence) can be evaluated as true or false.
My position is that one should know the preferences involved with great precision if one wishes to maximally satisfy those preferences, since this eliminates time establishing irrelevant facts (of which there is an infinite number). Furthermore, one needs to know about the people involved, since the preferences are a property of the people. Therefore, many of the facts about the preferences will also be facts about people. There may, in any given case, be more numerous facts about the world that are relevant to these preferences than facts about the person. Nevertheless, one unit of information about the person which relates to the preferences to be satisfied can easily eliminate over a million items of irrelevant information from the search space of information to be dealt with.
Here is an example: Two programmers have a disagreement about whether they should try to program a more intelligent AI. The first programmer writes a twenty page long email to the second programmer to assure them that the more intelligent AI will not be a threat to human civilization. This person employs all the facts at their disposal to explain this and their argument is airtight. The second programmer responds that they never thought that the improved program would be a threat to civilization—just that hiring the extra programmers required to improve it would cost too much money.
The less you understand a person, the less you can satisfy their preferences. Whether that decreased satisfaction is good enough for you depends on a number of factors, including the magnitude of the decrease (which may or may not vary widely for a given unit of preference information, depending on what it is), how much time you are willing to waste with irrelevant information, and your threshold for ‘good enough’.
You don’t think it’s acceptable to argue against things by saying various forms of “it has bad consequences”?
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it’s best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it’s better for me to say “P is false, and also has bad consequences” than to say “P has bad consequences.”
It’s perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than “I do not agree”, which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
Yep—this is a good point. I realise that my statement was ambiguous about how/why I disagreed. I left it up to the reader.
I did this, at the time, because I was quite angry at the things said on the website, and the way they were said. I was not in any fit state to argue my reasoning. I’ve since clarified in the followon comments… after sufficient time passed.
That wasn’t how I saw the context here, because of the statement “I do not agree”. Also, no consequences were enumerated. “I agree with the facts as stated, but think phrasing them this way has bad consequences,” is a fine way to argue against a presentation of ideas.
I am very suspicious of obscuring truth in the name of positive consequences, of applying only or mostly first-order idea utilitarianism.
First of all, let me say I didn’t downvote you. Or upvote you either.
Secondly, there’s some confusion of terminology here.
a) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared beliefs about the state of the world. (Epistemological agreement - (“is” statements)
b) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared beliefs about how the world should be. (Moral agreement—“ought” statements)
c) There’s “agreement” in the sense of shared preferences. (Agreement in taste—“like” statements)
(a)s have objective truth value.
(c)s are subjective.
(b)s have people always debate about their objectivity/subjectivity thereof.
Now the three types aren’t always clearly distinct. If someone makes a statement about “attractiveness” it’s both a (c) statement about preferences, but it may also be a statement about what real-life people like on average—in which case it can be an (a) statement about the distribution of preferences in a population, which has a truth value.
So, if someone calls someone else “sexually worthless”, and you say you don’t agree—do you mean that you simply have different preferences—are you making a (c) statement? That you believe his statement factually false—you’re making an (a) statement about the distribution of attraction feelings towards such women in the real world?
Or do you mean that you consider it MORALLY WRONG for him to speak and behave in such a rude way?
If the last of these, then “I morally object to such an attitude” is obviously a clearer way of talking about your objection rather than “I do not agree” which is vague and imprecise.
It depends. Was the context marketplace value or value to the individual who most values that person sexually? Ifthe latter, it was the MPF. If the former (which it implicitly probably was there), then I don’t think marketplace valuations necessarily fail in that way.
They can still be wrong valuations.
I got the sense that he was actually using his personal valuation, and passing it off as a marketplace-valuation. His references to studies felt like he was trying to find facts to fit his own valuations. However—I’ll freely admit that I have not read his stuff widely. This is one of those websites where I decided it would not be a good idea for me to keep going as it simply continued to fuel my anger. It was more rational simply to stop reading.
This dosen’t deserve down votes. Roissy’s style (aesthetically pleasing but quite outrageous) and persona are hard to stomach (at first?).
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I’m a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It’s completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you’d read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW (“Remember, humans don’t operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost”) and social skills books (“Remember, humans don’t operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock”) sound as artificial when you’re not used to them?
Agreed. There’s a sense of futility in life there that doesn’t really have an upside, or even a non-downside
Forever.. Ok, probability one minus epsilon.
I see the “just jealous” claim as equivalent to A attempting to lower B’s status, and when B says they don’t like it, A says “you just don’t like having your status lowered, so your point should be ignored”.
You haven’t heard of Roissy before have you?
Nope.
He is pretty famous for his offensive and rude style.
I can see why. I also note he has ready-made fully-general counterarguments for any detractors… ie “any woman that objects to what I say is just old and jealous”
Not to take a stance on any of the wider issues, but that’s not fully general: if all the women who objected were young, for example, it would be false.
Yeah but… he gets to decide how old is “old”—and from what I an tell, his idea of “old” is pretty darn young. Those women who simply cannot be manipulated into the “old” category easily fall into the “jealous” category.
Just call them fat. If they’re skinny enough to disprove that, resort to calling them ugly.
The existance of an infinite sequence of arguments whose union is fully-general doesn’t mean that any given argument is.
Additionally, those counter-arguments aren’t fully general. If you admit of some objective (or inter-subjective, or whatever; collectively accessible) standard of attractiveness, all of these counterarguments would be falsified by a positive correlation between attractiveness and saying feminist things.
This isn’t to say that these counter-arguments aren’t a bad idea for other reasons; we probably want some way of getting information from ugly people, for example.
He is pretty well known around here, Robih Hanson at Overcoming Bias has him on his blogroll for exmaple.
No, not necessarily. He often just says her hamster is doing overtime.
Also his main argument is basically that “boners don’t lie”. A large enough fraction of men find a specific subset of women on average more sexually desirable than others that sexual desirability may as well be a objective criteria at least when comparing averages of groups like say 20 year old vs. 50 year old women or overweight vs. slim women.
Yes—“her hamster” is an interesting way of saying “women aren’t rational, they just rationalise everything away”.
it’s an unfalsifiable proposition. Have you had a look at the list of things that he says women say? Yep—they could indeed be rationalisations… or they could in fact be the truth… how can you tell the difference? well—you can’t. That’s because this, as I said, is a fully-general counterargument.
No matter what his (as he says) “screechy feminist kvetches” about… he can just say “that’s just a rationalisation” and not think any further or take it into account. he never has to update on anything a woman says to him ever. Also, i note that he seem to think that female rationalisation is a totally different species to male rationalisation… and doesn’t even mention instances of the latter.
As to “boners don’t lie”—this is demonstrably untrue any time somebody is turned on by a picture. There are no doubt objective criteria which have high correlation with the average male’s likely attraction to a woman. Studies into facial symmetry, smooth complexion etc etc have clearly shown this. yes, you can compare averages...
However—need I remind you of the alien stealing our sexy women aspect of the mind-projection fallacy? the woman is not sexy… the men are attracted to certain types of women.
You can definitely make a case to me that “the average 40 year old woman has a reduced likelihood of finding male sexual partners”… but that does not mean “sexual worth = zero”
I might also add that as yet I have never met a woman anywhere that could find literally zero partners anywhere. She may not be interested in the men that would be likely to have sex with her… but that is a different question. There is a vanishingly small percentage of women who would literally have zero “worth” on the open market. To lump in every 35YO (and older) women is to be particularly ignorant of sexual dynamics… it is this man mistaking his own preferences for reality.
Yes he is saying that. About as sound as the argument you characterised.
Thanks for letting me rant about it a bit :)
AWYC, but
I think you’re modus tollensing a modus ponens. Eliezer’s metaethical conclusion was that sexy is an objective criteria which does not mean “sexually attractive to aliens;” the word for that would be “kvy’ztar” or something.
I’m not sure that I am.
Are 9 year old girls “sexy” because some humans find them sexy? Or is “sexy” in the eye of the beholder here?
Sexy is a transistive verb attached to the person who considers the other person sexy, not to the subject of said attentions. It may so happen that there’s more than one person who finds a certain subject sexy—it’s still something that attaches to the group. What can be said about the subject is “she is symmetrical, unblemished, has large breasts and a low body fat percentage” and it so happens that a large number of men find that to be high on their sexiness-scale. There’s a cluster there that has been named “sexy”—but don’t forget that this cluster is in map-space, not territory-space.
I think we’re still in agreement. The reference post makes it clear that “sexy” is a different word for a bug-eyed monster, a normal heterosexual male, and a paedophile.
Firstly—I hadn’t read that article yet, thanks. Still making my way through the backlog.
Secondly—I don’t think we are in agreement on this. You are claiming that I was making a 1-place argument.
In fact I was pointing out that roissy seems to be under the incorrect impression that his 1-place, curryed algorithm is the algorithm for determining the “sexual worth” of a woman. In my (admittedly brief) time on his site, I didn’t see any reference to alternative algorithms for evaluating the sexual worth of women (based, say, on alternative preferences).
My understanding on how he sees women predicts that he would be quite surprised to find a man that honestly finds a woman to be attractive that he considers to not be attractive. ie he would be truly astonished to find that some men really and honestly find 40 YO old women perfectly good bedmates. ie he would find it hard to accept that other men used a different sexiness function than what he uses.
Of course my other understandings about him mean that I predict that if he found a man that claimed the above—roissy would think the man was not being honest and was simply “settling” for what he could get.
Freudian slip?
Heh, obviously.
Why did you link to Roissy rather than laying out his argument in more neutral terms?
The comment was clearly something user CharlieSheen picked up from Roissy.