I like the idea of having a designated PUA discussion thread, and I absolutely love the idea of making that thread explicitly ethics-free. The idea seems good enough to just try it and see what happens! Do you want to write that post (in the discussion area, I guess) and lay down the rules?
I’m considering posting such a thread, but I’m thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.
Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen’t really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don’t want to cause any damage with a botched fix.
See here. I’m inclining more and more toward the opinion that this topic-cluster simply doesn’t belong here, any more than (other) controversial contemporary political issues do. It’s too fraught with (perceived) implications for tribal struggles that people (even unconsciously) feel themselves to be party to.
In all honesty, I’m not even terribly enthused about Luke’s proposed sequence being here, especially in Main. (It might well be okay in Discussion.) It sends the signal that LW is full of people who have trouble with these sorts of relationships. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not exactly something one would want to showcase, it seems to me.
I’m not quite sure what this means. I think if you start the discussion thread, you’d need to elaborate on that. (Are you sure you agree with cousin_it on understanding of these words?)
Upvoted, but… it looks like the kind of shiny clever idea nerds love and that blows up in their faces big time. “Purely factual questions discussed separately from ethics” sounds like something Paul Graham would pat you on the back for. Specific instances thereof, such as “Do people have more sex if they ignore body language expressing discomfort?” are significantly less tasteful.
The problem is that this is a public forum. In our ivory towers—inside our own heads, and with other people who like to toy with weird ideas—we can totally argue that genocide is legitimate if there’s a genetic disorder spreading whose carriers only have male children with the disorder. But we don’t expect it to be harmless to discuss that in front of the neonazis (or even ourselves, really). There are people I don’t want looking at a factual discussion of how to get away with rape.
My cursor was literally hovering over the upvote button from the first paragraph on… and then I got to the last sentence, which completely reversed my view of it. Then I went back and parsed it more carefully, and now it looks to me like there’s some pretty sketchy rhetoric in there.
Specifically: there’s mindkilling ideas and then there’s ideas which represent a physical propagation risk, and while PUA is undoubtedly the former, framing it with rape and genocide implies the latter. Now, I suppose it might look like that to some of its more extreme opponents, those who see it as not just squicky or disrespectful but actively dangerous. But that’s not the consensus, and there are substantial differences in the way we should be approaching it if it was.
On the other hand, if you’d cast your objection in terms of signaling or associational problems, I’d be right there with you. I’m pretty much neutral on PUA as such, but it’s an incredibly polarizing topic, and this isn’t a big enough site that we can discuss stuff that volatile in public and expect it not to reflect substantially on the site as a whole.
I did mean risky, not just mindkilling. Also a third category of “slight side effects that may add up to risky”.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape. For example, alcohol may be used to make people more open and sociable (both directly and because social norms change for groups of drunk people). It may also be used to make people pass out. Both of these reduce the likelihood of them turning down sex you initiate. That’s actually not a very good example because people know that so we aren’t teaching anyone how to rape, but discussion of other techniques may involve it.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless, discussing the usefulness of such a belief may allow it to leak.
Other problems: Yeah, so for a while good posters will waste time in an unproductive conversation, and onlookers will disapprove. Meh.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant. That this kind of disingenuous argument is tolerated in this context (parent was +1 when I encountered it, not −10) is why I am not against tabooing all related subject matter unilaterally. If people can get away with this something is wrong.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless
What on earth are you talking about? That’s approximately the opposite of the kind of belief that is useful for a PUA. Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant.
This is a false dichotomy, and the child post asking for clarification should not have been voted down.
PUA, if it worked, would be an excellent way for a date-rapist to get women alone in circumstances such that there might be reasonable doubt in a subsequent court case as to whether or not the victim consented to sex. Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances, specifically those circumstances where they get a woman alone, are not successful in obtaining consensual sex at that time and are not otherwise unable to commit rape safely.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning. I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Yes, PUA skills are generalizable to a certain extent. Rather than use them to seduce people you could use them to rape people, kidnap them and harvest their organs to sell on the black market or to try to convince them to buy some steak knives. But again, as you quoted: If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances
Yes, and conventional rape without the pesky hassle of pick up too—and I’m honestly not sure which kind of rape comes with the greatest risk of getting caught. But nobody has ever suggested that we discuss how to maximise sex. That is the whole point being made here—that equivocation in the great-grandparent just isn’t acceptable.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning.
I have a similar concern—at least in as much as it troubles me that sloppy thinking tends to be accepted based on the fact that it is talking about a moral/ethical/social-political position. I have made rather different observations about how the trend seems to flow.
I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
It is one thing to suggest tabooing a subject—and with the caveat that it must be relationship and dating advice that is tabooed (so as not to allow a distorted reality to remain) a lot of people agree. But it is an entirely different thing to try to declare just the opposing view (or your stereotype thereof) to be unacceptable.
Now I’m curious. The account PhilosophyTutor is a new account which has more or less contributed only via PUA-ethical debate. Yet I’m getting the impression here that you are coming from, well, a “larger LW perspective”. Is PhilosophyTutor a dummy account for more generally active member so that you can get involved in the subject without it looking bad for your primary identity or are you actually a new user who thus far has mostly been interested in dating-ethics?
This subtopic, unless I’ve gotten confused, relates specifically to one proposed method for trying to make discussion of the broader relationship topic more productive, that being the proposition that we hold a discussion of effective PUA methodology while holding off on any ethical discussion about the topic whatsoever. The argument against this proposition was that there are serious ethical issues which trying to figure out the maximally effective ways of getting sex without any regard for ethics.
Your response seems to be (and I am open to correction if I have misunderstood) that PUA methods, if indeed they worked, could be abused but that we do not need to discuss this because anything could be abused and hence discussing the potential abuse of this particular thing is a waste of time.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”. Whether that is a definition of “good” that includes manipulating women into acts they will predictably regret and which they would not have chosen to engage in were they fully informed and rational is an interesting discussion that, if the original proposal were followed, we would not be able to engage in. However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
However another possibility is that you have in mind a definition of “PUA methods” which excludes archetypal rape and most other acts which meet the legal and moral definition of rape but are not archetypal, and hence you think that a discussion of “PUA methods”, even if it taboos all ethical discourse, will thus by definition not involve anything meeting the legal and moral definition of rape. If so you need to make this definition explicit, I think, and then resolve the issue of whether obtaining sex while concealing information which you know is highly relevant and important to the other party’s decision to consent meets the legal or moral definition of rape. If needed I can cite cases where people have been imprisoned for obtaining sex by withholding information which they knew would have been highly relevant, so this is not an entirely academic concern.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”.
However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say. In fact.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say.
What you said was:
Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
Now I can’t see this discussion from your perspective, but from my perspective it looks like you are performing a manoeuvre where you cheer for ethical discussion in theory but in practice you dismiss all ethical criticism that comes from outside the PUA tent with a No True Scotsman argument.
If you think that some ethical criticisms of PUA are off the mark because they target a form of PUA which doesn’t actually exist that is of course a fair point to make. However that doesn’t move the argument forward unless you point us to the set of PUA practices and beliefs that you personally consider canonical so that we can discuss those from an ethical perspective. If your goal is an intelligent discussion we shouldn’t have to play a game with you where we try to discover by a process of elimination the subset of PUA practises and methods that you are willing to accept as PUA.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
What you say is so, however quoting the grandparent:
Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
I read that as an attack on the idea that ethical judgments about the topic should “dominate” any discussion of it. It did not specify any particular ethical prescriptions as being problematic.
I’m going to assume that despite your words you meant “obviously fallacious” to only refer to part of the first paragraph of the comment you are responding to. That would make your argument much stronger.
problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’.
Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics
Assuming your intuition about why people are voting as they are is correct, saying that something shouldn’t dominate is hardly an attack against it. The statement that it shouldn’t dominate was justified with a reason—a defeasible reason that does not apply in all contexts. When people can agree on facts, ethics based conversations can flow.
When people make ethical condemnations of caricatures that don’t exist and refer to them with labels used for their political enemies, forcing the accusers to detach their claims from their subjective values hopefully keeps them honest.
Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily
Arguments aren’t voted on. Posts are. Posts with multiple aspects. “It’d be kind of redundant,” is wrong. Obviously fallacious, as you said. ” If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA,” would approach being a non sequitur except for that the post responded to was so detached from reality that it may have had to have been said in that context.
The rest of the post is good, and worth upvoting. You are overconfident in attributing the worst possible motives to those voting for a post you disagree with.
One final distinction: the argument that ethical considerations should not dominate discussions is an argument against discussing ethics to a certain extent, at most it attacks discussing ethics, and the contextual posts show that ethical considerations were not being disregarded. This is in addition to the argument that there should be somewhat less of something being a mild one.
It looks like you are trying to soften wedrifid’s stated position for them, and presenting a new version where wedrifid was really saying that ethical discussion is great up until some demarcating point at which point it becomes bad. I can’t see any support in the original text for such a view.
If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant.
What I’m talking about is techniques that get people to let you stick your dick in them. Many of these techniques grow more effective as they are intensified, but also less ethical after a certain point. “Get them drunk” is an example, but not PUA. Better examples would be persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex), and intermittent reinforcement (ranging from not being a spineless, clingy sycophant, to emotional abuse).
What on earth are you talking about?
Consider the difference between the slut and the quality girl. Also the phrase “pumped and dumped”.
This belief is useful because if a woman agrees to sex early, you can think that you’re worth more than her, and display related behaviors (making her chase you and fear competition); moreover, if you get sex by promising to call the next day but don’t, you don’t have to feel guilty because she’s just a slut anyway.
(..., but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex)
I have a very hard time imagining this working. Women and men of high social status have very effective ways of getting rid of people that fall short of sex. Also constant “nagging” signals horrible things about you in pure fitness terms, it much reduces one’s attractiveness, I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
In my mind, “nagging” in this context meant repeating a request such that the other person changed their response to the request rather than be subjected to further pestering, not pulling down a girl’s pants time and time again until she stopped saying no and said neither yes nor no.
I have a very hard time imagining this working. … I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
And yet it happens. People get pressured into sex.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you missed this, you should become less confident in your ability to make accurate judgments in this arena.
I am simply saying its not a good tactic in the context of situations that PUA usually focuses on.
Note that pressure =/= nagging. For it to be pressure you need to have some social or physical leverage over the other person. Nagging dosen’t imply you have either and in their absence the word brings up associations of begging. It is hard to gain great leverage on people of high social status.
nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex
I have a very hard time imagining this working… I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex. Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
You also talked about PUA, but the above is a simple claim of fact which is incorrect.
persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex)
This was given as a better example of a potential PUA tactic that could be unethical. I was implicitly taking and critiquing the course of action as a tactic a PUA would or would not adopt based on how effective or ineffective it was. I thought it obvious, but looking back I see I should have made an explicit mention of PUA in the comment.
I think the point here isn’t that people don’t get pressured into sex but rather that the specific strategy mentioned isn’t one that PUAs would use because it is both pathetic and a highly ineffective strategy for them to be using. So if a completely amoral PUA was using unethical tactics to get laid he would still not use this one because he wouldn’t expect this one to work.
nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex
I have a very hard time imagining this working… I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex. Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
This is NOT me saying “evil PUAs do this”, it’s “orthogonal to your points about PUA, you have made a simple factual claim backed by personal incredulity which is, in fact, false”.
I think you need to give us the definition of PUA you are using, because you seem to be using one that excludes a lot of actions or strategies which one might think would be advantageous to a person who wants to get laid, and unethical persons who want to get laid seem highly likely to be a subgroup of people perusing and participating in a hypothetical discussion of PUA that tabooed all ethical criticism.
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category and saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
Here, the question of “Is PUA really rape?” is entirely useless, even if the questioner is referring a clearly delineated subset of it, because we are already told to assume states of the world and consequences are true in the hypotheticals (about Alice, Carol, etc.).
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
For abortion opponents, woman X aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age). For proponents, woman X aborted “A two month old fetus.” For abortion opponents, woman Y aborted “A nine month old fetus.” For proponents, woman Y aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age).
“Women who are 41 are “41”. Women who are 49 are “in their forties”.
Relevant LW posts: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Diseased Thinking. Kudos for noticing that the dangling categorization mistake sometimes also serves as a rhetorical trick. Do other biases also double as rhetorical tricks?
I’m going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren’t prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I’m writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn’t find will be more meaningful.
Wish me luck, I’m going in!
ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I’ll elaborate later.
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
Thanks for this short phrasing for something I often want to say.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category an saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
I agree with your connotation etc. - but I think the question “Is waterboarding really torture?” does have moral implications beyond presidential candidates: whether or not it is torture can determine whether or not waterboarding goes against a preexisting law or even informal promise (“No ma, I promise I won’t torture anybody in Iraq”), and breach of agreement is morally relevant.
More generally, categorizing things even after they are fully described can still be a gain of information if the category label is mentioned in some outside agreement.
For another example, if Professor Witkins the Mineralogist told you “I’ll give you $10 for each blegg you bring back from the mine, but nothing for rube.”, and you’re considering whether to put a purplish weird-shaped rock in your bag, even if you have full information on it you might still wonder if a Mineralogist would classify it as a blegg or a rube (Even if you know Witkins wants the bleggs for their vanadium, you still expect him to pay you for vanadiumless bleggs).
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
I guess I Agree Denotationally But Disagree Connotationally. As in, that is technically true in a hypothetical situation wherein you can fully describe a situation, but a human is unlikely to find themself in such a situation (at least for the time being), and my question was not an attempt to categorize a described thing—rather, it was an attempt to elicit a description for a categorized thing.
It is relevant to a discussion with wedrifid, regarding rape, what wedrifid means by the term.
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
To say that PUA techniques and theories regarding persuasion necessarily count as rape is, to me, absurd. To say that they could not be used in a coercive manner seems equally absurd (like saying “if you’re going to trick people you don’t need psychology” (and therefore the study of psychology, divorced from ethical concerns, would not teach people how to trick others)).
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)
“Torture” is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you’re making a disguised query but you can’t get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label “torture” to don’t exist.
If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn’t make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.
This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn’t make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set’s boundaries aren’t arbitrary and sharp.
What I was thinking was that if it’s true that pain is much more likely to elicit answers that the pain-giver wants to hear than anything else (an argument against torture for the purpose of getting information), then it’s worth establishing which sorts of treatment supply sufficient pain to get that sort of reaction.
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
“If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.”
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.
In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.
However unless you believe that pick-up targets’ relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target’s free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.
…it’s well-established in general societal morals that obtaining sex by deception is a form of non-violent rape. If you’re having sex with someone knowing that they are ignorant of relevant facts which if they knew them would stop them having sex with you, then you are not having sex with their free and informed consent.
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.
This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places.
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
The law usually treats force and fraud symmetrically in the sense of punishing both, though the latter more leniently. It is a crime to take money at gunpoint. It is also a crime, though normally a lesser one, to take it by false pretenses. But generally it is not a crime to use false pretenses to entice a person into a sexual relationship. Seduction, even when honeycombed with lies that would convict the man of fraud if he were merely trying to obtain money, is not rape.
In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion.
Almost certainly not.
Back in July, it was reported that the two met in a Jerusalem street in 2008, had consensual sex within 10 minutes of meeting each other...
It was also reported at the time that Kashur was charged with rape and indecent assault, and the conviction of rape by deception was a result of a plea bargain.
New details in the case emerged when the woman’s testimony, which had been kept secret, was declassified last week.
It shows an emotionally disturbed woman who had been sexually abused by her father from the age of six, forced into prostitution, and lived in a women’s shelter at the time of the encounter with Kashur.
During her initial testimony, she repeatedly broke down in court as she accused Kashur of rape.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind.
Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.
Either “Nonconsentual (or coerced) sex” or “Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the universal approval of internet critics before having sex”. Seems to depend on who you are talking with and what they are trying to prove.
“Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the unilateral approval of internet critics before having sex”
No no no wedrifid, the date’s mother is clearly not objective.
You need to approach a local sociology or woman’s studies professor, for preliminary consultation. After that schedule an appointment with your lawyer to set up a proper contract (since an informal written agreement wouldn’t stand up to later scrutiny if parties are dissatisfied with the outcomes) that is then reviewed, supplemented by hearings of all involved, by an ethics committee that includes legal experts, psychologists, doctors, philosophers and social workers.
I strongly urge you to reconsider this entire argument. I’m really worried about the sorts of reactions and arguments flying in this thread / topic. I don’t think MixedNuts’ post was based on cynical disingenuous argumentation, but rather an honest disagreement with you, a differing view of reality, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
The umbrella of PUA encompasses harmless advice that seems to have helped a lot of people, as well as vicious misanthropy. Some techniques focus on improving oneself, others on harming others. There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others. There are (different) parts that should be analyzed here.
I’m not attacking you. I’m asking you to be careful. There are vivid warning signs in an alarming proportion of posts on this topic. I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others, especially when they could benefit from hiding from themselves the harm they could do. More to the point, in such situations, we should not trust ourselves.
If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
I’m pretty sure the question was rhetorical.
I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others,
Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.
...and I’m probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.
I have a policy of not commenting on the “underlying issue(s)”, but I will permit myself the meta-level remark that the topic in question really does apparently amount to a hot-button dispute in contemporary social politics. In which case, quite frankly, it should be avoided as far as possible on Less Wrong.
I do have a stance. Stances. I’m arguing here that 1) wedrifid and MixedNuts are talking past each other, 2) we need to be more careful about PUA than many think. In particular, the idea of somehow just diving in while avoiding any discussion of ethics seems awfully ill-advised, if it’s even possible. It does seem like a valuable topic for some of LW to pull apart, if it can be done properly (on the one hand, how likely is it that sex & sexual politics is a mindkiller topic? on the other, if LW can’t handle a little sex & politics, I’d like to know.)
And branching off of your comment about factions—to whom it may concern, I wish to explicitly distance myself from any given LW faction, real or illusory. Yes, even yours, even if I may agree with you on some / many topics.
Indeed. It’s a figure of speech that I didn’t even consider when using. I suppose it could be replaced with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!”—but the question seems to be a bit milder.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing. I don’t think you and MixedNuts are on the same page. Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different. The sort of rhetorical equivocation Mixed used is not accepted here no matter the subject and when it comes to something as important as rape it is something I consider offensive.
I gave my example because it is the closest related ethical consideration that is, in fact, sane. I assumed that at very least it is something you would agree with and could possibly be similar to what you had resolved Mixed’s words to. This was to establish that I was rejecting any and all arguments along the lines of “PUA means rape” but not rejecting questions of whether certain social practices are or not ethical in their own right.
Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
To be frank it was disgust, not surprise that I experienced.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different.
?? Can we be a little more explicit about what exactly we’re referring to? I meant that your replacement of “What on earth are you talking about?” with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!” still indicates an acknowledgement on your part that your interpretation of MixedNuts’ post seems wildly incongruous, and therefore that said interpretation should be subject to closer scrutiny.
Similarly, when you say
I gave my example [...]
is that “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!”
If so then I think we pretty much agree except WRT MixedNuts’ meaning, and our other apparent disagreements flow from that issue.
To me it seems clear that MixedNuts was NOT saying “PUA means rape” or similar. My reading was more along the lines of “PUA is concerned, to a large extent, with methods of obtaining sex. If you’re discussing PUA sans ethics, then you are likely to discuss ‘methods of obtaining sex’ sans ethics, which conspicuously includes rape—a problematic situation if you’re banning ethical objections.” You appear extremely confident in your reading—could you point to something in particular that convinces you?
Of course if MixedNuts could resolve our disagreement that would be quite helpful.
Rather than trying to resurrect this one particular argument may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates. Because there are valid arguments to be made and ethical questions to be considered. But that particular argument is sloppy thinking of the kind we don’t accept here and offensive—both to the actual victims of rape who are having their experience trivialized and to the group that is being vilified as rapists.
This highlights a further problem that is sometimes encountered when ethical questions come up. When people are moralizing they often make terrible arguments—and in the wild terrible arguments about moral questions tend to suffice. But here terrible arguments and sloppy thinking tends to be brutally rejected. This means observers are going to see a whole lot of obnoxious, incoherent arguing in the general direction of a perceived virtuous moral positions rejected. Naturally that leads people to believe that the community is totally in support of the opposite side to whatever the nonsense comments are.
There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others.
If someone were to, say, argue “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!” then I suspect it would meet with overwhelming support. Some would enjoy fleshing out the related concepts and details.
Um. I think I perhaps was unclear? I have added more posts, which may explain my position better. I almost certainly read MixedNuts in a very different way than you did.
may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics? That argument, as I understand it, wasn’t trying to highlight an actual ethical problem with respect to seducing mates; rather, it was an argument in favor of including ethics in the discussion.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics?
The topic was whether we should have a separate thread for ethics and for discussing models of how the world actually works. MixedNuts was arguing against that proposal by alleging one ethical problem it would cause (“Rape”). Regardless of whether CuSeth is intending to argue that seperating ‘is’ from ‘should’ is bad because of ethical problem that are caused by the split or intending to talk about an ethical problem for its own sake it is better off using her own argument than MixdNuts’. Because if she used her own I would be able to take her seriously.
For onlookers wondering about the genetic disorder thing, it was discussed in Evolving to Extinction. The relevant part:
Segregation-distorters subvert the mechanisms that usually guarantee fairness of sexual reproduction. For example, there is a segregation-distorter on the male sex chromosome of some mice which causes only male children to be born, all carrying the segregation-distorter. Then these males impregnate females, who give birth to only male children, and so on. You might cry “This is cheating!” but that’s a human perspective; the reproductive fitness of this allele is extremely high, since it produces twice as many copies of itself in the succeeding generation as its nonmutant alternative. Even as females become rarer and rarer, males carrying this gene are no less likely to mate than any other male, and so the segregation-distorter remains twice as fit as its alternative allele.
It just occurred to me that such a situation can rectify itself without the need for genocide :-) If females can detect males carrying the segregation-distorter, they will avoid mating with such males, because having female children is a reproductive advantage in a population where males outnumber females. Or am I getting confused again?
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
If mothers made a habit of snacking on (each other’s) litters of all sons, that would counteract the problem. That wouldn’t require being able to differentiate among adult males, just between male and female children.
If the species takes a long time to wean children and doesn’t reproduce until that process ends, this works better.
Mice, pigs, rabbits etc. (animals with large litters) already eat weak children fairly often, so this is somewhat plausible.
Rather than rely on females recognizing things about males, what about genes that capitalize on the difference between regular males and those with the disorder—sisters!
Females could more greatly than presently value aggression (this would only need a boost, the trait already exists), and a gene could make females intervene to break up their brothers’ fights. Young males with the disorder would tear each other to shreds or be too timid to reproduce, and males without the disorder would have sisters preventing them from killing each other.
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
“Strong” for sure. Unfortunately for the species it would have to emerge fully functional in the time it takes for the species to evolve to extinction. Not so easy.
Now I wonder why Eliezer’s post calls the original problem unsolved. Surely such elementary solutions couldn’t have evaded the experts in the field? I’m guessing that I made a mistake somewhere...
Unfortunately, this will only work in a population with a weak segregation distorter. Remember, mutations that do a specific thing are rare, and detecting the presence of a specific allele that doesn’t have large-scale phenotypic effects is tough. By the time the segregation distorting allele is a large fraction of the population it is almost too late for the population.
I like the idea of having a designated PUA discussion thread, and I absolutely love the idea of making that thread explicitly ethics-free. The idea seems good enough to just try it and see what happens! Do you want to write that post (in the discussion area, I guess) and lay down the rules?
You’ve got the karma for it. Why not you?
Thanks for the offer! Konkvistador has a prior claim to the idea, so I’ll do that if he/she prefers me to do that.
I’m considering posting such a thread, but I’m thinking very very carefully if this is a good idea. It seems best to me to wait a few days, perhaps even consider a meta thread or two in preparation.
Discussion in the absence of ethics, dosen’t really cover discussion that may hurt the community image or the image of posters, at least not explicitly. And while the current situation is intolerable I don’t want to cause any damage with a botched fix.
See here. I’m inclining more and more toward the opinion that this topic-cluster simply doesn’t belong here, any more than (other) controversial contemporary political issues do. It’s too fraught with (perceived) implications for tribal struggles that people (even unconsciously) feel themselves to be party to.
In all honesty, I’m not even terribly enthused about Luke’s proposed sequence being here, especially in Main. (It might well be okay in Discussion.) It sends the signal that LW is full of people who have trouble with these sorts of relationships. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not exactly something one would want to showcase, it seems to me.
Thanks for replying. I think you’re right.
I’m not quite sure what this means. I think if you start the discussion thread, you’d need to elaborate on that. (Are you sure you agree with cousin_it on understanding of these words?)
Seriously now. Konkvistador?
I didn’t know! (Though my guess would have been accurate.) I went wading through old comments:
Konkvistador: he
cousin_it: he
lessdazed: No pronoun stated, but you’re Jewish!
RomanDavis: No pronoun stated, but the first name makes “he” likely.
Upvoted, but… it looks like the kind of shiny clever idea nerds love and that blows up in their faces big time. “Purely factual questions discussed separately from ethics” sounds like something Paul Graham would pat you on the back for. Specific instances thereof, such as “Do people have more sex if they ignore body language expressing discomfort?” are significantly less tasteful.
The problem is that this is a public forum. In our ivory towers—inside our own heads, and with other people who like to toy with weird ideas—we can totally argue that genocide is legitimate if there’s a genetic disorder spreading whose carriers only have male children with the disorder. But we don’t expect it to be harmless to discuss that in front of the neonazis (or even ourselves, really). There are people I don’t want looking at a factual discussion of how to get away with rape.
My cursor was literally hovering over the upvote button from the first paragraph on… and then I got to the last sentence, which completely reversed my view of it. Then I went back and parsed it more carefully, and now it looks to me like there’s some pretty sketchy rhetoric in there.
Specifically: there’s mindkilling ideas and then there’s ideas which represent a physical propagation risk, and while PUA is undoubtedly the former, framing it with rape and genocide implies the latter. Now, I suppose it might look like that to some of its more extreme opponents, those who see it as not just squicky or disrespectful but actively dangerous. But that’s not the consensus, and there are substantial differences in the way we should be approaching it if it was.
On the other hand, if you’d cast your objection in terms of signaling or associational problems, I’d be right there with you. I’m pretty much neutral on PUA as such, but it’s an incredibly polarizing topic, and this isn’t a big enough site that we can discuss stuff that volatile in public and expect it not to reflect substantially on the site as a whole.
I did mean risky, not just mindkilling. Also a third category of “slight side effects that may add up to risky”.
Risky: If we’re going to discuss “how to stick your dick in people”, which is an important subtopic of PUA, and completely ignore ethics, we’re going to discuss rape. For example, alcohol may be used to make people more open and sociable (both directly and because social norms change for groups of drunk people). It may also be used to make people pass out. Both of these reduce the likelihood of them turning down sex you initiate. That’s actually not a very good example because people know that so we aren’t teaching anyone how to rape, but discussion of other techniques may involve it.
Potentially risky: A core part of PUA is creating and signalling high status. This is often done by lowering one’s opinion of women. While LWers are unlikely to start endorsing the verbal belief that women who have sex on the first date are worthless, discussing the usefulness of such a belief may allow it to leak.
Other problems: Yeah, so for a while good posters will waste time in an unproductive conversation, and onlookers will disapprove. Meh.
If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t. If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA. It’d be kind of redundant. That this kind of disingenuous argument is tolerated in this context (parent was +1 when I encountered it, not −10) is why I am not against tabooing all related subject matter unilaterally. If people can get away with this something is wrong.
What on earth are you talking about? That’s approximately the opposite of the kind of belief that is useful for a PUA. Which illustrates the problem with having the majority of any discussion dominated by ‘ethics’. It is roughly speaking an excuse for people who are completely ill informed to throw opinions around that are based on an almost entirely fictional reality.
This is a false dichotomy, and the child post asking for clarification should not have been voted down.
PUA, if it worked, would be an excellent way for a date-rapist to get women alone in circumstances such that there might be reasonable doubt in a subsequent court case as to whether or not the victim consented to sex. Hence the idea that if you are going to rape people then PUA is of no use to you is trivially false.
Also it should go without saying that an agent whose goal is to maximise the amount of sex they get disregarding all ethical concerns is an agent that will date-rape under some circumstances, specifically those circumstances where they get a woman alone, are not successful in obtaining consensual sex at that time and are not otherwise unable to commit rape safely.
I think what this actually illustrates is the mind-killing power of the PUA topic. Obviously fallacious arguments are getting voted up heavily because they defend PUA and attack ethics, which is extremely concerning. I am moving towards the opinion that this is not a fixable problem and that it’s indeed the utility-maximising move from the larger LW perspective to sweep the PUA community and their views back under a rug and taboo them from emerging.
Yes, PUA skills are generalizable to a certain extent. Rather than use them to seduce people you could use them to rape people, kidnap them and harvest their organs to sell on the black market or to try to convince them to buy some steak knives. But again, as you quoted: If the subject was “How to stick your dick in people” then rape would come into it. But it isn’t.
Yes, and conventional rape without the pesky hassle of pick up too—and I’m honestly not sure which kind of rape comes with the greatest risk of getting caught. But nobody has ever suggested that we discuss how to maximise sex. That is the whole point being made here—that equivocation in the great-grandparent just isn’t acceptable.
I have a similar concern—at least in as much as it troubles me that sloppy thinking tends to be accepted based on the fact that it is talking about a moral/ethical/social-political position. I have made rather different observations about how the trend seems to flow.
It is one thing to suggest tabooing a subject—and with the caveat that it must be relationship and dating advice that is tabooed (so as not to allow a distorted reality to remain) a lot of people agree. But it is an entirely different thing to try to declare just the opposing view (or your stereotype thereof) to be unacceptable.
Now I’m curious. The account PhilosophyTutor is a new account which has more or less contributed only via PUA-ethical debate. Yet I’m getting the impression here that you are coming from, well, a “larger LW perspective”. Is PhilosophyTutor a dummy account for more generally active member so that you can get involved in the subject without it looking bad for your primary identity or are you actually a new user who thus far has mostly been interested in dating-ethics?
This subtopic, unless I’ve gotten confused, relates specifically to one proposed method for trying to make discussion of the broader relationship topic more productive, that being the proposition that we hold a discussion of effective PUA methodology while holding off on any ethical discussion about the topic whatsoever. The argument against this proposition was that there are serious ethical issues which trying to figure out the maximally effective ways of getting sex without any regard for ethics.
Your response seems to be (and I am open to correction if I have misunderstood) that PUA methods, if indeed they worked, could be abused but that we do not need to discuss this because anything could be abused and hence discussing the potential abuse of this particular thing is a waste of time.
It seems likely that what’s going on is that you have as an implicit premise in your argument that PUAs are all “good guys” or close enough to all that it doesn’t matter, and that PUA skills will mostly only ever be used “for good”. Whether that is a definition of “good” that includes manipulating women into acts they will predictably regret and which they would not have chosen to engage in were they fully informed and rational is an interesting discussion that, if the original proposal were followed, we would not be able to engage in. However if one held such an implicit premise I could see why you saw no value in discussing the relevant ethical issues, since the relevant ethical issues are all dissolved by the assumption that PUAs are good guys.
However another possibility is that you have in mind a definition of “PUA methods” which excludes archetypal rape and most other acts which meet the legal and moral definition of rape but are not archetypal, and hence you think that a discussion of “PUA methods”, even if it taboos all ethical discourse, will thus by definition not involve anything meeting the legal and moral definition of rape. If so you need to make this definition explicit, I think, and then resolve the issue of whether obtaining sex while concealing information which you know is highly relevant and important to the other party’s decision to consent meets the legal or moral definition of rape. If needed I can cite cases where people have been imprisoned for obtaining sex by withholding information which they knew would have been highly relevant, so this is not an entirely academic concern.
At this time I can neither confirm nor deny that I am a dummy account belonging to a member with vast karma, super powers, a sports car and a girlfriend who is an underwear model.
Not even remotely. That position would be the opposite of stupidity.
Have I said I have no interest in discussing ethical issues? That doesn’t sound like something I would say. In fact.
What you said was:
Now I can’t see this discussion from your perspective, but from my perspective it looks like you are performing a manoeuvre where you cheer for ethical discussion in theory but in practice you dismiss all ethical criticism that comes from outside the PUA tent with a No True Scotsman argument.
If you think that some ethical criticisms of PUA are off the mark because they target a form of PUA which doesn’t actually exist that is of course a fair point to make. However that doesn’t move the argument forward unless you point us to the set of PUA practices and beliefs that you personally consider canonical so that we can discuss those from an ethical perspective. If your goal is an intelligent discussion we shouldn’t have to play a game with you where we try to discover by a process of elimination the subset of PUA practises and methods that you are willing to accept as PUA.
Eliezer Yudkowsky drives a sports car?!?!?? ;)
Disagreeing with your specific moral prescriptions for everyone is not attacking ethics in general.
What you say is so, however quoting the grandparent:
I read that as an attack on the idea that ethical judgments about the topic should “dominate” any discussion of it. It did not specify any particular ethical prescriptions as being problematic.
I’m going to assume that despite your words you meant “obviously fallacious” to only refer to part of the first paragraph of the comment you are responding to. That would make your argument much stronger.
Assuming your intuition about why people are voting as they are is correct, saying that something shouldn’t dominate is hardly an attack against it. The statement that it shouldn’t dominate was justified with a reason—a defeasible reason that does not apply in all contexts. When people can agree on facts, ethics based conversations can flow.
When people make ethical condemnations of caricatures that don’t exist and refer to them with labels used for their political enemies, forcing the accusers to detach their claims from their subjective values hopefully keeps them honest.
Arguments aren’t voted on. Posts are. Posts with multiple aspects. “It’d be kind of redundant,” is wrong. Obviously fallacious, as you said. ” If you are going to rape people then you don’t need PUA,” would approach being a non sequitur except for that the post responded to was so detached from reality that it may have had to have been said in that context.
The rest of the post is good, and worth upvoting. You are overconfident in attributing the worst possible motives to those voting for a post you disagree with.
One final distinction: the argument that ethical considerations should not dominate discussions is an argument against discussing ethics to a certain extent, at most it attacks discussing ethics, and the contextual posts show that ethical considerations were not being disregarded. This is in addition to the argument that there should be somewhat less of something being a mild one.
It looks like you are trying to soften wedrifid’s stated position for them, and presenting a new version where wedrifid was really saying that ethical discussion is great up until some demarcating point at which point it becomes bad. I can’t see any support in the original text for such a view.
I endorse lessdazed’s interpretation as at least somewhat closer to my position than the caricature you have attributed to me.
What I’m talking about is techniques that get people to let you stick your dick in them. Many of these techniques grow more effective as they are intensified, but also less ethical after a certain point. “Get them drunk” is an example, but not PUA. Better examples would be persevering (necessary to pass simple shit-tests, but nagging too much will make people so desperate to be left alone they may well agree to sex), and intermittent reinforcement (ranging from not being a spineless, clingy sycophant, to emotional abuse).
Consider the difference between the slut and the quality girl. Also the phrase “pumped and dumped”.
This belief is useful because if a woman agrees to sex early, you can think that you’re worth more than her, and display related behaviors (making her chase you and fear competition); moreover, if you get sex by promising to call the next day but don’t, you don’t have to feel guilty because she’s just a slut anyway.
I have a very hard time imagining this working. Women and men of high social status have very effective ways of getting rid of people that fall short of sex. Also constant “nagging” signals horrible things about you in pure fitness terms, it much reduces one’s attractiveness, I can’t see why this would be rewarded with sex.
Sex with a woman might happen in spite of nagging, not because of it.
I meant that.
In my mind, “nagging” in this context meant repeating a request such that the other person changed their response to the request rather than be subjected to further pestering, not pulling down a girl’s pants time and time again until she stopped saying no and said neither yes nor no.
Yes, nagging and pulling down pants are definitely entirely different things. The latter is more ethically grey while the former is more pathetic.
And yet it happens. People get pressured into sex.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you missed this, you should become less confident in your ability to make accurate judgments in this arena.
Obviously pressured sex happens.
I am simply saying its not a good tactic in the context of situations that PUA usually focuses on.
Note that pressure =/= nagging. For it to be pressure you need to have some social or physical leverage over the other person. Nagging dosen’t imply you have either and in their absence the word brings up associations of begging. It is hard to gain great leverage on people of high social status.
My point was not about PUA. You said:
You also talked about PUA, but the above is a simple claim of fact which is incorrect.
The post was a response to:
This was given as a better example of a potential PUA tactic that could be unethical. I was implicitly taking and critiquing the course of action as a tactic a PUA would or would not adopt based on how effective or ineffective it was. I thought it obvious, but looking back I see I should have made an explicit mention of PUA in the comment.
I think the point here isn’t that people don’t get pressured into sex but rather that the specific strategy mentioned isn’t one that PUAs would use because it is both pathetic and a highly ineffective strategy for them to be using. So if a completely amoral PUA was using unethical tactics to get laid he would still not use this one because he wouldn’t expect this one to work.
Well, sure. I was taking issue specifically with Konkvistador’s post, above, and the claim:
This is NOT me saying “evil PUAs do this”, it’s “orthogonal to your points about PUA, you have made a simple factual claim backed by personal incredulity which is, in fact, false”.
I think you need to give us the definition of PUA you are using, because you seem to be using one that excludes a lot of actions or strategies which one might think would be advantageous to a person who wants to get laid, and unethical persons who want to get laid seem highly likely to be a subgroup of people perusing and participating in a hypothetical discussion of PUA that tabooed all ethical criticism.
Could you define rape, please?
The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question “Is waterboarding really torture,” tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since “torture” is a legal category and saying “Yes, it is torture,” might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
Here, the question of “Is PUA really rape?” is entirely useless, even if the questioner is referring a clearly delineated subset of it, because we are already told to assume states of the world and consequences are true in the hypotheticals (about Alice, Carol, etc.).
Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
For abortion opponents, woman X aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age). For proponents, woman X aborted “A two month old fetus.” For abortion opponents, woman Y aborted “A nine month old fetus.” For proponents, woman Y aborted “A fetus,” (of unspecified age).
“Women who are 41 are “41”. Women who are 49 are “in their forties”.
Relevant LW posts: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Diseased Thinking. Kudos for noticing that the dangling categorization mistake sometimes also serves as a rhetorical trick. Do other biases also double as rhetorical tricks?
I’m going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren’t prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I’m writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn’t find will be more meaningful.
Wish me luck, I’m going in!
ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I’ll elaborate later.
I didn’t want to say anything before you looked, but this is a classic exercise for a basic logic class. Yes, logical fallacies abound.
That’s really cool. By all means write a discussion post if you find something interesting!
Thanks for this short phrasing for something I often want to say.
I agree with your connotation etc. - but I think the question “Is waterboarding really torture?” does have moral implications beyond presidential candidates: whether or not it is torture can determine whether or not waterboarding goes against a preexisting law or even informal promise (“No ma, I promise I won’t torture anybody in Iraq”), and breach of agreement is morally relevant.
More generally, categorizing things even after they are fully described can still be a gain of information if the category label is mentioned in some outside agreement.
For another example, if Professor Witkins the Mineralogist told you “I’ll give you $10 for each blegg you bring back from the mine, but nothing for rube.”, and you’re considering whether to put a purplish weird-shaped rock in your bag, even if you have full information on it you might still wonder if a Mineralogist would classify it as a blegg or a rube (Even if you know Witkins wants the bleggs for their vanadium, you still expect him to pay you for vanadiumless bleggs).
I guess I Agree Denotationally But Disagree Connotationally. As in, that is technically true in a hypothetical situation wherein you can fully describe a situation, but a human is unlikely to find themself in such a situation (at least for the time being), and my question was not an attempt to categorize a described thing—rather, it was an attempt to elicit a description for a categorized thing.
It is relevant to a discussion with wedrifid, regarding rape, what wedrifid means by the term.
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that “acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape”. I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still “count” as rape.
To say that PUA techniques and theories regarding persuasion necessarily count as rape is, to me, absurd. To say that they could not be used in a coercive manner seems equally absurd (like saying “if you’re going to trick people you don’t need psychology” (and therefore the study of psychology, divorced from ethical concerns, would not teach people how to trick others)).
So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)
If you have strong arguments about whether torture is worth doing, than knowing what should be categorized as torture would be useful.
“Torture” is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you’re making a disguised query but you can’t get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label “torture” to don’t exist.
If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn’t make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.
This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn’t make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set’s boundaries aren’t arbitrary and sharp.
What I was thinking was that if it’s true that pain is much more likely to elicit answers that the pain-giver wants to hear than anything else (an argument against torture for the purpose of getting information), then it’s worth establishing which sorts of treatment supply sufficient pain to get that sort of reaction.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
You said this
and this
What’s the charitable interpretation of that?
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.
Coercing sexual intercourse via physical violence or the threat thereof.
This seems a lacking definition. Do you disagree that, say, drugging or blackmailing someone in order to have sex with them is rape?
Note: This post is explicitly not about PUA. I do not believe that I have heard of any PUA technique involving roofies or blackmail.
Blackmail is an interesting one. It probably depends somewhat on the nature of the blackmail and whether sex is the only option for payment provided. Since I approve of both blackmail and prostitution it would seem somewhat inconsistent of me to label a combination of the two to be either rape or immoral. But there is huge scope for abuse of power here and any abuse of power for the purpose of extracting sexual favours tends to be viscerally offensive to me.
My preferred solution here would be the same one that I would use for all instances of blackmail—strict legislation requiring contracts. Blackmail should be legal only if a contract is signed by both parties detailing what knowledge is being hidden permanently in exchange for what payment. Supplement this with extremely severe jail terms for any blackmail done without a contract and for any violation of the terms of the blackmail arrangement.
Note that here I refer to the the meaning of blackmail that excludes extortion—which is a whole different kind of moral issue whether it is in regards to money or sex.
I’m curious: if (hypothetically) I have a positive legal obligation to report a murder I witness to the authorities, is it legal under your preferred solution for me to instead enter into a blackmail contract with the murderer to hide that knowledge?
I don’t have a preference within that hypothetical—it would depend on the circumstance and on what you were planning to do with the money. However if I knew about it I would proceed to blackmail you for the crime you committed.
I would prefer it if the legal system was not set up in that manner. It would be better if there was not a legal obligation to report a murder (which is ridiculously hard to enforce) and instead had a positive incentive to blackmail—assuming an efficient system for blackmail was in place.
(nods) That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
How could a reasonable person be sure that the information would remain concealed? Not only is there the risk of accidental revelation (there’ve been many computer accidents along those lines), but blackmail information is more interesting and possibly more valuable than national security information, which cannot be said to be reliably secure.
There’s no reason to store the actual knowledge—at least, only the person who wants it hidden needs to keep a copy. You make a document containing a description of the information to be concealed—both parties get a hash and only the blackmailee gets a copy of the document. Then you just store a hash in the contract, and if the contract is ever broken, then you show the original document to prove they are liable.
Presumably, the amount a reasonable person would be willing to pay me for concealing a certain piece of information would reflect their confidence in my ability to reliably conceal that information. It isn’t guaranteed, of course, but we routinely sign contracts for delivery of service in nonguaranteed scenarios.
If a reasonable person is one that requires better information security than that used for national security information then I recommend they avoid situations pertaining to blackmail.
Thomblake described the sort of security protocol I had in mind.
Drugging I would consider physical violence, so that falls within my definition; blackmailing, no.
But we should not be having this discussion on this forum.
Okay, though you should probably be aware that those are somewhat idiosyncratic definitions of rape and violence.
It’s an idiosyncratic definition of violence but not an especially idiosyncratic definition of rape. Whether it happens to be the one you or I prefer or not it is still fairly common.
You’re right.
Perhaps I should say, modulo that definition of violence, it’s a relatively common definition of rape, but I expect it’s notably uncommon among, uh… “intellectuals”? Not sure what word to use, do you see what I’m aiming for?
FWIW, I know a number of people I might describe as intellectual who would likely agree that deliberately putting you in a situation where having sex with me is the best of a set of bad alternatives with the intention of thereby obtaining sex with you qualifies as rape, and would likely agree that blackmail can be a way of doing that.
I don’t agree that they are particularly idiosyncratic.
But, more to the point, they are chosen so that the semantic categories match the moral ones, thereby resisting “moral equivocation” of the sort that happens when people try to sneak in connotations by calling things less than the physical coercion of sex “rape”.
Another (hardly less charged) example of such moral equivocation would be the word “racism”, which is often used to subtly suggest that people guilty of far less are in a similar moral category to those who would perpetrate genocide, slavery, and de jure discrimination and oppression.
I don’t want to have a mind-killing argument, but I do want to at least make sure you are aware of the issue I raise here.
I think you will find that many people, perhaps specifically LW people, will be confused if you describe coercing sex by the threat of firing from a job as either of violence or not-rape.
I am.
Then don’t just tell us what the moral categories are without explaining how you decided this. While I think physical violence usually adds to the wrongness of a crime, I’d still call blackmail-for-sex wrong and I’d still point to the same reason that makes violent rape wrong. In fact, I’d say that true consent makes a lot of seemingly violent acts morally fine. So explain to me why I shouldn’t view this as a natural dividing line.
That is precisely the argument (read: flamewar) that I am trying to avoid! The point is I didn’t want to get into a detailed discussion of sexual ethics, how wrong rape is, and what constitutes rape. This is something that is emotionally controversial for many people. It’s what we might call a “hot-button issue”.
So would I. But there are degrees of wrongness, and in my opinion blackmail-for-sex is, if you’ll pardon the expression, less wrong than rape.
Do you see what you did there? You automatically assumed that my moral categories were “Wrong” and “Not Wrong”, when I was actually talking about “Wrong”, “Very Wrong”, “Very Very Wrong”, etc.
I view “violent rape” as a redundant pleonasm (to coin a self-describing phrase), and think that violence is most of what makes rape wrong. The getting-someone-to-do-something-they-don’t-want-to-do aspect is also bad, but it’s not 10-years-in-prison bad.
This is provided purely FYI, as a statement of my position; I do not intend it as an invitation to attack and demand that I justify myself further. This is not the right setting for this argument.
No, I didn’t. I pointed out a feature of sexual morality that you completely ignored.
Yes, you did. Here is what you said:
This clearly implies that you didn’t think I would call it wrong; you were setting up what you perceived as a contrast between your view and mine. If you disagreed with me but correctly understood my position, you would have written “I’d still call blackmail-for-sex as wrong as violent rape” or something similar.
How do you think the link in the grandparent fits into my motives?
ETA: People, if you downvote me and I can’t tell why I may give you more of the same just to annoy you.
In this case, I’d feel surprised if anon259 considered knife-play wrong after thinking about it. And I’d feel downright shocked if said user called it “10-years-in-prison bad”. This seems inconsistent.
Please don’t say this, that will just encourage people to downvote you because they’ll feel like you’re taunting them.
If you get downvoted and don’t know why, then the standard thing to do is to respond to your own comment asking “Why was my comment downvoted? I’m genuinely curious.”
Oh my! You freaked me out with your knife-play link. I opened it and didn’t look at it immediately, so later came to find I had a tab that had googled knife play. I was like “omg!!! I swear I didn’t google knife play!!!”. I am happy to discover that google isn’t reading my mind, it is just you linking to unexpected things.
But it does bring up a point that there are many puritanical holdovers (besides just mono/poly/swing/etc, which was brought up in the OP) that even the most rationalist thinker may still have, especially in regards to sex and romance. I think it would make a good post if someone wanted to do it.
I don’t think that feeling an aversion to the idea of knife play (or masochism more generally) is a “puritanical holdover” in the same sense as an objection to deviations from traditional western monogamy. Most people really do dislike pain for self-evident evolutionary reasons.
Bloodless knife-play looks like an application of misattribution of arousal, but with a lot more potential for something to go seriously wrong if somebody miscalculates a bit than there is, say, standing on a swaying bridge.
I think consenting adults should pretty much be able to do whatever they want in the bedroom, but no one is ever going to interest me in knife play, and I would strenuously object to my aversion being labelled “puritanism.” I prefer the term “self-preservation instinct.”
I think you made some really good points, and I agree that I surely would never want to say that people who don’t participate in thing x or y have puritanical beliefs.
Let me see if I can re-word better: Some things that we grew up with, we tend to accept. They seem so natural that we often don’t question them rationally. It would be interesting if someone else (not me because as you can tell, I suck at writing a lot of this stuff) made a post about more things that even rationalists might not generally think to question.
The types of puritanical holdovers that I was personally thinking about deal more with things like “slut shaming” or body issues. On the flip-side there is the equally harmful idea that men will chase anything and have no self-control, etc.
Did you know that for much of history people actually believed the reverse; You kept women locked up because they are ruled by their passions and would go run off and sleep with any young thing, while the males could control their desires.
Thank you for the wikipedia link. I had not heard of that study before.
Another history BA here, so yes. Blame the Cistercian monks for the pre-Victorian view of male and female libido. I mean, who better to rely on for accounts of sexual psychology than a bunch of cloistered celibates?
Poorly. It does not seem to be of much benefit any motives which I could plausibly attribute to you.
Downvoted for professing to be a troll.
OK, why have this comment and the next one I made garnered this many downvotes?
Two is not many. Four is not even many.
..Well, two is not enough to hide the discussion. Nor is the number of downvotes on the great-great-grandparent. But this just makes me more confused. It greatly reduces the chance that the downvoters (or all of them except one) mainly object to the topic of discussion. Yet when I look at my two comments they still seem accurate and on-topic. (Technically I should say the second one is accurate if you accept one object-level moral claim, which I think my interlocutor does.)
The question is an interesting one to me. At least the aspect that relates to the ethics of blackmail and how the abuse of some kinds of power relates to the ethics of sex.
Legally speaking this is far off the mark in most jurisdictions. I would call this “archetypal rape”.
However lots of other things still qualify as rape, although they typically attract lighter sentences, in exactly the same way that different things that qualify as murder typically attract different sentences.
Obtaining sex by deception, or bullying which does not involve physical violence or the threat thereof, for example, is still going to get you charged with rape in most places. In a recent case a man was jailed for obtaining sex by deceiving a woman about his religion. I’ve got no problem with that.
(I do have a problem with the likelihood that there would have been no conviction if a Jewish woman had obtained sex by deception from a Palestinian man, but that’s a separate issue touching on sexism and racism).
This is not an accurate statement of the law in common-law jurisdictions, nor, I suspect, of the law in most other Western countries. With some narrow exceptions—such as impersonating the victim’s husband, performing sexual acts under a false pretense of medical treatment, or failing to disclose a sexually transmitted disease—enticing people into sex by false pretenses is usually perfectly legal in these jurisdictions. In the past seduction was a common-law tort in its own right (and sometimes even a statutory offense), but seduction by lies was never considered as a form of rape.
As Richard Posner writes in his Sex and Reason (which I can’t really recommend otherwise, but whose statements about law are reliable given the author’s position):
Almost certainly not.
BBC
Thanks for the updated data.
Reading closely however it’s not clear that the man did not misrepresent himself as being a Jewish bachelor, merely that charging him with that rather than outright rape was a compromise. The fact that he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge is not watertight proof that he did not in fact commit that lesser offence and the article does not as far as I can see address that issue.
It also seems to me that the point that such conduct is illegal is the point of interest, and whether or not the man in question turns out to be factually innocent or guilty is not relevant as far as the topic we are concerned with goes. It could turn out tomorrow that the complainant had made the whole thing up out of whole cloth, or it could turn out tomorrow that there was unimpeachable video evidence showing that the accused did indeed do it, and neither outcome would be relevant to the issue of whether the acts he was accused of are criminal, nor whether they should be criminal.
Not that I think it would save this thread at this point, but I suggest that you and everyone you are arguing with here would benefit from dropping the question of “Are some PUA tactics rape” and sticking to the question “Are some PUA tactics wrong”. This conversation has totally derailed (if it hadn’t already) on semantic issues about rape. You can argue that obtaining sex by deception or bullying is immoral regardless of whether or not it is rape.
You clearly know something of the law. Then why would you try to learn from a case in an israeli jurisdiction!? They still use relgious law there. Which is the most obvious kind of appeal to authority fallacy the law produces. Clearly the verdict, case and even police cannot be trusted to be unbiased.
There are no shortage of cases from other jurisdictions of people convicted for obtaining sex by pretending to be someone else, and obtaining sex by threats not involving violence is specifically listed on this Australian government web site (see “The perpetrator bullied them, for example, by threatening to leave them in a deserted area at night”).
It’s also worth pointing out that the domain of what is legally considered rape is one that has expanded substantially over time, and does not seem likely to stop expanding. As one example, raping one’s spouse was a contradiction in terms, legally speaking, until relatively recently even in the developed world. The criminalisation of spousal rape is generally seen as moral progress. Currently in most of the developed world you will only be charged with rape by deception if you mislead the victim about your identity or tell them to have sex with you for medical reasons (I guess that must have been way more of a problem than I would have guessed since it’s addressed specifically), but there seems no fundamental reason to single out those forms of deception.
Myself I agree with High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein of Israel who argued that it should be a crime if a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.” Currently many men believe that misleading women to obtain sex is “just how it is”, and that it’s not immoral to do so. I suspect that in the medium term this view will go the way of the view that spousal rape is “just how it is”.
“No, I never raped that woman. I did lie to her about certain matters, as a result of which she chose to have sex with me, but she was clearly unreasonable.”
“person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”
First of all, how in the hell would you decide what is and isnt a critical matter. Its an appeal to authority of the most crazy kind. Now we cant even lie to protect ourselves for the reason that the law would always find in the favour of the plaintiff.
And what happens to omissions? Pretty soon we wont be able to have privacy atall, and instead, have state approved truths and security cameras on every street… but, we allready know that israel is a police state.
No amount of force results in logic. Science needs to hurry its ass and replace law.
Either “Nonconsentual (or coerced) sex” or “Not getting written permission from your date’s mother and the universal approval of internet critics before having sex”. Seems to depend on who you are talking with and what they are trying to prove.
No no no wedrifid, the date’s mother is clearly not objective.
You need to approach a local sociology or woman’s studies professor, for preliminary consultation. After that schedule an appointment with your lawyer to set up a proper contract (since an informal written agreement wouldn’t stand up to later scrutiny if parties are dissatisfied with the outcomes) that is then reviewed, supplemented by hearings of all involved, by an ethics committee that includes legal experts, psychologists, doctors, philosophers and social workers.
I strongly urge you to reconsider this entire argument. I’m really worried about the sorts of reactions and arguments flying in this thread / topic. I don’t think MixedNuts’ post was based on cynical disingenuous argumentation, but rather an honest disagreement with you, a differing view of reality, as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. If you don’t know “what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about”, this should make you less sure of your footing.
The umbrella of PUA encompasses harmless advice that seems to have helped a lot of people, as well as vicious misanthropy. Some techniques focus on improving oneself, others on harming others. There are parts of PUA that are problematic wrt consent, and that could help to coerce sex from others. There are (different) parts that should be analyzed here.
I’m not attacking you. I’m asking you to be careful. There are vivid warning signs in an alarming proportion of posts on this topic. I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others, especially when they could benefit from hiding from themselves the harm they could do. More to the point, in such situations, we should not trust ourselves.
I’m pretty sure the question was rhetorical.
Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.
...and I’m probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.
Indeed.
I have a policy of not commenting on the “underlying issue(s)”, but I will permit myself the meta-level remark that the topic in question really does apparently amount to a hot-button dispute in contemporary social politics. In which case, quite frankly, it should be avoided as far as possible on Less Wrong.
I do have a stance. Stances. I’m arguing here that 1) wedrifid and MixedNuts are talking past each other, 2) we need to be more careful about PUA than many think. In particular, the idea of somehow just diving in while avoiding any discussion of ethics seems awfully ill-advised, if it’s even possible. It does seem like a valuable topic for some of LW to pull apart, if it can be done properly (on the one hand, how likely is it that sex & sexual politics is a mindkiller topic? on the other, if LW can’t handle a little sex & politics, I’d like to know.)
And branching off of your comment about factions—to whom it may concern, I wish to explicitly distance myself from any given LW faction, real or illusory. Yes, even yours, even if I may agree with you on some / many topics.
Indeed. It’s a figure of speech that I didn’t even consider when using. I suppose it could be replaced with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!”—but the question seems to be a bit milder.
I assert that the replacement means basically the same thing. I don’t think you and MixedNuts are on the same page. Your surprise is a blinking warning light.
You are mistaken. The meanings are entirely different. The sort of rhetorical equivocation Mixed used is not accepted here no matter the subject and when it comes to something as important as rape it is something I consider offensive.
I gave my example because it is the closest related ethical consideration that is, in fact, sane. I assumed that at very least it is something you would agree with and could possibly be similar to what you had resolved Mixed’s words to. This was to establish that I was rejecting any and all arguments along the lines of “PUA means rape” but not rejecting questions of whether certain social practices are or not ethical in their own right.
To be frank it was disgust, not surprise that I experienced.
?? Can we be a little more explicit about what exactly we’re referring to? I meant that your replacement of “What on earth are you talking about?” with “That’s utter nonsense and it is amazing that something so nonsensical appeared in a context where it doesn’t seem to fit!” still indicates an acknowledgement on your part that your interpretation of MixedNuts’ post seems wildly incongruous, and therefore that said interpretation should be subject to closer scrutiny.
Similarly, when you say
is that “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!”
If so then I think we pretty much agree except WRT MixedNuts’ meaning, and our other apparent disagreements flow from that issue.
To me it seems clear that MixedNuts was NOT saying “PUA means rape” or similar. My reading was more along the lines of “PUA is concerned, to a large extent, with methods of obtaining sex. If you’re discussing PUA sans ethics, then you are likely to discuss ‘methods of obtaining sex’ sans ethics, which conspicuously includes rape—a problematic situation if you’re banning ethical objections.” You appear extremely confident in your reading—could you point to something in particular that convinces you?
Of course if MixedNuts could resolve our disagreement that would be quite helpful.
Rather than trying to resurrect this one particular argument may I suggest that it would be better to make a new argument about an ethical problem with respect to particular strategies for seducing mates. Because there are valid arguments to be made and ethical questions to be considered. But that particular argument is sloppy thinking of the kind we don’t accept here and offensive—both to the actual victims of rape who are having their experience trivialized and to the group that is being vilified as rapists.
This highlights a further problem that is sometimes encountered when ethical questions come up. When people are moralizing they often make terrible arguments—and in the wild terrible arguments about moral questions tend to suffice. But here terrible arguments and sloppy thinking tends to be brutally rejected. This means observers are going to see a whole lot of obnoxious, incoherent arguing in the general direction of a perceived virtuous moral positions rejected. Naturally that leads people to believe that the community is totally in support of the opposite side to whatever the nonsense comments are.
If someone were to, say, argue “Persuading people to do stuff (like shag you) that you know damn well they really don’t want to do is totally a dick move!” then I suspect it would meet with overwhelming support. Some would enjoy fleshing out the related concepts and details.
Um. I think I perhaps was unclear? I have added more posts, which may explain my position better. I almost certainly read MixedNuts in a very different way than you did.
Wasn’t the topic of the thread whether we should discuss ethics? That argument, as I understand it, wasn’t trying to highlight an actual ethical problem with respect to seducing mates; rather, it was an argument in favor of including ethics in the discussion.
The topic was whether we should have a separate thread for ethics and for discussing models of how the world actually works. MixedNuts was arguing against that proposal by alleging one ethical problem it would cause (“Rape”). Regardless of whether CuSeth is intending to argue that seperating ‘is’ from ‘should’ is bad because of ethical problem that are caused by the split or intending to talk about an ethical problem for its own sake it is better off using her own argument than MixdNuts’. Because if she used her own I would be able to take her seriously.
For onlookers wondering about the genetic disorder thing, it was discussed in Evolving to Extinction. The relevant part:
It just occurred to me that such a situation can rectify itself without the need for genocide :-) If females can detect males carrying the segregation-distorter, they will avoid mating with such males, because having female children is a reproductive advantage in a population where males outnumber females. Or am I getting confused again?
It seems easier to evolve a preference for incest.
There would also be strong selective pressure for any genes which can override the segregation-distorter, even if the females can’t recognize the males which carry it.
A modest proposal:
If mothers made a habit of snacking on (each other’s) litters of all sons, that would counteract the problem. That wouldn’t require being able to differentiate among adult males, just between male and female children.
If the species takes a long time to wean children and doesn’t reproduce until that process ends, this works better.
Mice, pigs, rabbits etc. (animals with large litters) already eat weak children fairly often, so this is somewhat plausible.
I love lesswrong!
Rather than rely on females recognizing things about males, what about genes that capitalize on the difference between regular males and those with the disorder—sisters!
Females could more greatly than presently value aggression (this would only need a boost, the trait already exists), and a gene could make females intervene to break up their brothers’ fights. Young males with the disorder would tear each other to shreds or be too timid to reproduce, and males without the disorder would have sisters preventing them from killing each other.
“Strong” for sure. Unfortunately for the species it would have to emerge fully functional in the time it takes for the species to evolve to extinction. Not so easy.
Nice!
Now I wonder why Eliezer’s post calls the original problem unsolved. Surely such elementary solutions couldn’t have evaded the experts in the field? I’m guessing that I made a mistake somewhere...
Unfortunately, this will only work in a population with a weak segregation distorter. Remember, mutations that do a specific thing are rare, and detecting the presence of a specific allele that doesn’t have large-scale phenotypic effects is tough. By the time the segregation distorting allele is a large fraction of the population it is almost too late for the population.
Almost certainly not! That’s valuable information needed to calibrate optimal seduction technique, even for a PUA of perfect soullessness.