Even if it were possible to formulate these norms based on “rational” considerations of harm and fairness in a way that wouldn’t be just a convenient rationalization for deeper intuitions—and I don’t think anything like that is possible—such norms would probably be unworkable in practice with realistic humans.
But isn’t that precisely what the west has done (not completely, of course), and what the polyamorous community has done to a much greater degree?
On the contrary—it seems to me that the modern Western societies are, by all historical standards, exceptionally obsessed with sacredness norms on sex-related issues. See my old comment I linked earlier, in which I elaborate on some particularly striking manifestations of this.
(Also, among the most amusing posts on Overcoming Bias are those where Robin Hanson elicits outrage from the respectable progressive folk by putting some sex-related issue under dispassionate scrutiny and thereby violating their sacredness intuitions.)
As for the polyamorists, I don’t have any direct insight into the inner workings of these communities except for a few occasional glimpses offered by LW posts and comments. But unless they are composed of extremely unusual self-selected outliers (which might be the case given their very small size), I would suspect that they are again just rationalizing a somewhat different (and possibly even more extreme) set of sacredness norms.
Purity is an unusual foundation, since it can apply at the object level or the meta level. On the object level, people believe things like “don’t eat pork because it’s unclean” or “don’t have premarital sex because it takes away your purity.”
On the meta level, moral purity can apply whenever people hold firmly to a principle or policy. Republicans demand ideological purity in opposing all tax increases, and Kant gets accused of valuing his own moral purity more than another person’s life for refusing to lie to the murderer at the door. More generally, any misdeed feels “dirty”, so moral purity motivates people to avoid breaking any moral rule. This does seem to involve genuine feelings of purity/sanctity/contamination/disgust—witness the the large role of sin and purification in many religions, and the Lady MacBeth effect in the general populace (i.e., college sophomores). Violating a moral rule is a stain on you, which you may or may not be able to cleanse away.
Meta-level purity supplements a moral rule which has other bases. I don’t think that moral values against taxes and lies are based primarily on purity, even if there is some purity thinking involved in treating them as sacred values and refusing to compromise or consider tradeoffs. Lady MacBeth may have become obsessed with washing her hands but that does not mean that the (felt) wrongness of murder is due to it being a purity violation.
The principle that the government should not interfere in people’s sex lives sounds like another case where purity is operating at the meta level, where the primary foundation is something else. In this case, it’s probably foundation #6, liberty/oppression, which is activated particularly strongly for liberals because sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression against women and gay people.
There are other cases where people vehemently want the government to keep its hands off (e.g. guns on the right, abortion on the left), and the common thread seems to be that the individual should have the right to control something and do with it what they want, without outside interference. The purity foundation is recruited to help make these rules absolutist (e.g., people get very suspicious of any regulation that is even loosely related). It may also play some role in determining which particular rules are the ones that became absolutist, but if it is a factor I’d guess that it comes in third (at best), after how close/personal/important the issue is to people (e.g., involving control over your own body or personal protection) and how much of a threat to autonomy there is / has been.
The principle that the government should not interfere in people’s sex lives sounds like another case where purity is operating at the meta level, where the primary foundation is something else. In this case, it’s probably foundation #6, liberty/oppression
Then why don’t they apply the liberty principal to government regulation in other aspects of their lives?
The unsatisfying answer is that moral foundations theory doesn’t explain why the foundations get applied in the ways that they do—that differs between cultures and involves a lot of path-dependence through history. But Haidt’s theory does at least provide some guidance for conjecture, so I’ll speculate about why sexual liberty became important to liberals based on the liberty/oppression foundation.
The way that Haidt describes it, for American liberals the liberty foundation is primarily about wanting to protect sympathetic victims from oppression. Telling the story from that point of view, sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression, involving shunning and other social punishments for victims like women who had sex outside of marriage or men who loved other men. With the sexual revolution, liberals threw off these arbitrary and oppressive restrictions, and brought us much closer to a world where no one can stop you from being yourself (holding your sexual identity openly without fear of reprisal) or from having sex with who you want to, how you want to (as long as you are consenting adults).
Government regulation in many other aspects of people’s lives has not involved such obvious oppression of sympathetic victims.
Now, could someone return the favor and offer their speculation about how the purity foundation led liberals to value sexual liberty? Vladimir_M mentions that people tend to apply purity-based morality to sex, which is true, but they tend to apply purity at the object level as a reason to restrict sexual activities. Sexual liberty would be applying purity at the meta level as a reason to allow sexual activities. Sex can spread disease (the purity/contamination framework originally evolved for avoiding illness), involves the body in a way that is closely related to many elicitors of disgust, and because of its evolutionary importance people are prone to having strong intuitions & emotions about sexual activities that don’t readily fit in other foundations. So it’s understandable that people would tend to get squeamish about various sexual practices and want to restrict them based on purity concerns. It’s not clear to me how those purity concerns jump to the meta level and reverse direction.
(Let’s leave aside, for now, the less thoughtful liberals and conservatives, since what they think isn’t interesting).
I don’t understand why you put autonomy in the category of sacredness. Haidt considers liberty an independent foundation, and I don’t think it requires rationalization to consider nonconsensual sex to be a case of harm!
The thing is, what determines when autonomy is absolute and inviolable, and when it should be weighed against other concerns?
When it comes to interventions in human affairs by the state and other institutions, modern liberals pride themselves on their supposed adherence to (what they see as) rational and scientific cost-benefit analysis and common-sense notions of equality and fairness. They typically assert that their opponents are being irrational, or acting out of selfish interest, when they insist that some other principle takes precedence, like for example when conservatives insist on respecting tradition and custom, or when libertarians insist on inviolable property rights. In particular, liberals certainly see it as irrational when libertarians oppose their favored measures on the grounds of individual liberty and autonomy.
However, there are issues on which liberals themselves draw absolutist lines and lose all interest for cost-benefit analysis, as well as for concerns about equality and fairness that are perfectly analogous to those they care about greatly in other cases. Sex is the principal example. Liberals argue in favor of comprehensive intervention and regulation in nearly all areas of human life, but in contrast, people’s sexual behavior is supposed to be a subject of complete laissez-faire. This despite the fact that many arguments that liberals normally use against the evils of laissez-faire and in favor of economic intervention, wealth redistribution, and paternalistic regulation, would apply with equal (or even greater) force to sex as well. Yet an attempt to argue in favor of more restrictive sexual norms on any of these grounds will be met with immediate hostility by liberals—often so fierce that you’ll be immediately dismissed as obviously crazy or malicious.
I don’t think it’s possible for liberals to salvage the situation by claiming that sexual laissez-faire is somehow entailed by the same considerations that, according to them, mandate complex and comprehensive regulation of almost everything else. This would be vanishingly improbable even a priori, and a casual look at the arguments in question definitely shows a glaring inconsistency here. The only plausible explanation I see here is that, just like everyone else in the human history, liberals base their sexual norms on a sacredness foundation—except that for them, this foundation has the peculiar form of sacralizing individual autonomy, thus making a violation of this autonomy a sacrilege that no other considerations can justify.
Ironically, the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters. (And also a complete impossibility of discussing these topics in an open and honest manner, as witnessed by the fact that they reliably destroy the discourse even in a forum like LW.)
the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters.
The unprecedented amount of hand-wringing might not be indicative of an increase in the number or magnitude of sex-related problems if it turns out that previous norms also discouraged public discussions of such problems. What are the other metrics by which we can say that the current set of norms are working badly in practice? Are there fewer people having sex, are they having less enjoyable sex, or are their sexual relationships less fulfilling and of shorter duration or are these norms destabilising society in other ways?
Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind?
Pregnancy, particularly pregnancy out of wedlock, and venereal disease are the traditional sex-related problems. Both of them are massively higher after sexual liberation. (Out of wedlock births are also exacerbated by welfare, which is part of a larger political discussion.)
Births out of wedlock are somewhat difficult to hide from government record-keepers in developed countries like the US, though they may be possible to hide socially (which is what most people care about anyway). Out of wedlock births among African Americans are currently at ~70%; in 1940, a full generation before the civil rights era, it was 19%.
Venereal disease is a bit harder to compare to last century (whereas we have out-of-wedlock rates going back quite a bit), and there are issues with diseases (like syphilis) becoming treatable and overall medical care (including reporting) increasing. But the impact of the Sixties on American gonorrhea rates is still clear. (It also seems likely that gay liberation contributed to the AIDS epidemic- but the primary comparison there is to Cuba, where those with AIDS were quarantined. Unsurprisingly, quarantine reduces transmission rates.)
Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind?
Hmm? You quoted the rest of my question which talked about other things. It really was a question. :)
In any case, I must admit that unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases (if these diseases have mostly become treatable then they’re really not as much of a problem are they?) did not really spring to mind. I was thinking of effects on marriage and the impact through that on society at large.
However, even your data speaks only about a specific class of people, and not for all of America. Which suggests that certain socioeconomic groups can deal with the change in sexual norms while others can not. So the problem may not be entirely with the change in sexual norms?
Anyway, it is time for me to confess I am not American, nor familiar with the data trends on America and the effects of the sexual revolution there. I live in a country without too much sexual freedom and its own set of problems. It is interesting to see what problems are expected to happen when things get more laissez-faire around here though. And I wanted to point out the problems of a society with far lower sexual autonomy.
But this is tangential to Vladimir_M’s point about some sort of double standards among liberals vis-a-vis sexual norms. For what its worth I don’t consider autonomy as absolute and inviolable, and although I do place a high value on individual autonomy in sexual matters, I am not averse to a cost-benefit analysis either.
Since we’re on the topic, I’ll link one analysis that I’d found interesting:
the very tendencies which make adherence to traditional norms somewhat discomforting on an individual level are necessary in other contexts. Love is an inconvenience when it comes to arranging marriages for your offspring optimally on a social dimension, but it may be necessary for men and women to invest in their offspring due to the love they feel for them so that they live and flourish. In other words, psychological impulses which were inconvenient in one domain were necessary and adaptive on others. Phenotypically I’m implying that there was functional constraint, and genetically it would manifest as pleiotropy. I suspect that a strong tendency toward developing loving bonds with children is a much more important characteristic in these elite lineages than dampening the initial discomfort that may occur when one is paired off with someone with whom one is not particularly enamoured. In a social and biological evolutionary sense romantic love is less important than we might think in our individualist age. But, romantic love remains hard-wired within us because it is biologically impossible to suppress its manifestation so long as we need the emotion of love more importantly to bind us together with children.
Finally, let’s go back to Johnson’s treatment of the disjunction between idealized polyamory and realized polygyny in the ancient environment (at least to a mild extent). By this, he points to the reality that some of the Y chromosomal data point to a reproductive skew, where a few males tend to give rise to a disproportionate number in the next generation. In extreme polygyny you have a Genghis Khan situation, where males of one narrow lineage have an enormous reproductive advantage. The scenario sketched out in Johnson’s post is that females may have had relationships with several males (and the inverse), but there was a tendency toward favoring reproduction with one focal male or female. This does not seem to negate the reality of jealousy and drama. We see this among common chimpanzees, who have a classic mating system in the extreme sense outlined by Johnson (this species has huge testicles to generate viscous sperm the competition is so extreme). And modern polygamorists who have formal relationships all tell tales of enormous time investments necessary to maintain proper relationship equilibrium. This is I think the reason that elite lineages in mass agricultural societies turned toward simpler relationship networks. The older model was simply not sufficiently stable for the purposes of maintaining the social and cultural systems necessary for the proper functioning of the older Malthusian civilizations. This is evident when conflicts within elite lineages are often rooted in questions of paternity and maternity (half siblings; Charles Martel was the bastard son of his father, who superseded the legitimate line), or accusations of false paternity (the first Chinese Emperor was subject to this rumors due to his bad reputation in later generations).
(It also seems likely that gay liberation contributed to the AIDS epidemic- but the primary comparison there is to Cuba, where those with AIDS were quarantined. Unsurprisingly, quarantine reduces transmission rates.)
What about Africa? Sure, there are all sorts of problems making that comparison, but it shows that anti-gay attitudes aren’t particularly protective. Also, of course, attitudes were much more conservative in late-15th and 16th century Europe, but syphilis did pretty well. Looking at the rates of HIV infection by state, Cook’s PVI only accounts for about 6% of the variance, about the same as urban density (the two are themselves somewhat more correlated). If we take PVI as a rough proxy for conservative attitudes about sexuality, it seems like conservatism isn’t particularly protective.
That’s probably because illiberal attitudes towards homosexuality probably don’t reduce homosexual sex all that much. They just drive it underground. That makes epidemics harder to trace and harder to stop. Also, these attitudes tend to preclude education about condoms and STDs (since it’s hard to teach “don’t do this but if you do, be safe”). Sex ed actually does seem to increase condom use, and thus reduce the spread of HIV.
Rayhawk, largely because he talks about more important things than does Vladimir_M. I sorta wish Vladimir_M would do more speculative reasoning outside the spheres of game theory, social psychology, economics, politics, and so on—I would trust him to be less biased than most when considering strange ideas, e.g. the Singularity Institute’s mission.
I’m not sure that is a good heuristic, spending a lot of time in somewhere might mean he considers the ideas or at least debating them fun, which is not quite the same as important. If someone was studying my online habits they’d be better off assuming I optimize for fun rather than impact. (^_^’)
More like an endorsement of a campaign for mayorhood of a Floridian city circa 1920. Remember that the Klan had five million members not too long ago.
I like the institution of comparing people to Hitler, Lenin, &c., so long as people know just how reasonable and well-intentioned those people were. Hypocrites, cast out the beams in your own eyes before assessing the damage caused by the motes in theirs.
Also, you’re trolling wrong; but maybe that’s just meta-trolling, i.e., you’re trying to troll me by being apparently incompetent at trolling. I doubt it.
...I wonder if this “accuse Will Newsome of sockpuppeting” thing is some sort of LessWrong tradition now. You should know that the last time someone bet I was a sockpuppet, specifically AspiringKnitter, they nominally lost a hundred bucks.
(Also under the most straightforward interpretation you’re implicitly saying siodine is “purposefully stupid and incoherent” by his own lights, and that’s kinda mean.)
Under the most straightforward interpretation I think the convolution is only growing linearly? …Maybe someone should write a paper on the time complexity of meta-trolling in various fora as a gauge of the intellectual worthwhileness of said fora.
‘Using the purity foundation’ =/= ‘Unable to think about it rationally and genuinely consider both benefits and costs.’
The purity foundation involves specific patterns of thought & feeling including the emotion of disgust and modeling the world in terms of purity and contamination, or elevation and degradation. People can be absolutist and unwilling to consider tradeoffs for moral views that come from any of the foundations (including harm/care, e.g. not wanting to torture a child no matter how big the benefit).
Liberals argue in favor of comprehensive intervention and regulation in nearly all areas of human life, but in contrast, people’s sexual behavior is supposed to be a subject of complete laissez-faire.
This is a wild exaggeration. There are large domains of life where liberals favor a large amount of freedom. See the 1st amendment, for instance. The standard distinction puts liberals higher on social liberty but lower on economic liberty; Haidt has used the term “lifestyle liberty” to describe the kind of liberty that liberals support. Liberals are relatively consistently opposed to legal restrictions on self-expression, for example, and they generally have social norms encouraging it (with some exceptions where it runs afoul of other norms).
The only plausible explanation I see here is that, just like everyone else in the human history, liberals base their sexual norms on a sacredness foundation
I don’t see a very plausible story of how the purity pattern of thinking would form the basis for norms of sexual permissiveness (maybe you could fill in some of the details?). The simplest explanation that I see is that sexual restrictions became tagged, in liberals’ minds (and in liberal culture) as traditionalist/oppressive/sexist/bad. (Because a lot of sexual restrictions did fit that pattern.) So, by pattern matching, now any proposed sexual restriction sounds bad, like something they support and we oppose. There are various particular psychological and cultural mechanisms that contributed to making this stick. For instance, it probably helped that sex can fit within the social/lifestyle/self-expressive category where liberals tend to be more laissez-faire. And it helps that they (the people who want to restrict human sexuality based on their retrograde puritanism) continue to exist (rather prominently, in many liberals’ minds), because that makes it easy to associate proposed sexual restrictions with them and to be suspicious of people who propose such restrictions.
we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters.
Do we actually see this hand-wringing from liberals, though? I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, unless it’s gay marriage, in which case most liberals don’t seem to be hand-wringing so much as pushing forward along the same path as ever: towards more sexual freedom. There’s hand-wringing from conservatives, but I don’t see how this is relevant to your point.
I would guess—things like “less desirable” men not being able to find a mate, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, STDs, rape …
But yes, those don’t seem to be things liberals complain about more than conservatives; I’m not sure if Vladimir was implying they did, or talking about something else.
(Personally, I can’t tell if there really is “unprecedented amount of hand-wringing” or if it’s just availability bias—it’s easier to think of examples of people complaining now than of people complaining 50 years ago)
Looking back at my comment, I did perhaps use a very broad brush at certain points, which is unfortunately hard to avoid if one wishes to keep one’s comments at reasonable length. However, I’d still be curious to hear where exactly you think my description diverges from reality.
I think part of the difference between my experience and your statement, is that the liberals I know tend towards the libertarian end of the spectrum. At least on the drug issue, this might be a function of age.
The liberal argument against libertarianism is not that it is irrational to have a preference for liberty, but that (a) liberty is a more complicated concept than libertarians say it is (see Amartya Sen, for instance), (b) that libertarians often equivocated between the moral and practical arguments for libertarianism (see Yvain’s non-libertarian FAQ, for instance), and (c) that the practical benefits are often not as-claimed (ibid).
Similarly, many liberals are in favor of certain sorts of regulations on sexual autonomy—many oppose prostitution and traditional polygyny, for instance (there are, of course, a number of complications here, as well as variance among liberals). Some liberals also oppose the burqa and would criminalize clitoridectomy (this is more of a live issue in Europe). Finally, liberals tend to favor regulations against sexual harassment, which, defined broadly, could include some consensual conduct such as a consensual boss-subordinate relationship. In each of these cases, their arguments in these cases are similar to their arguments in the other cases where they favor regulation.
It’s true that liberals often oppose regulations on sex which are either (a) based more-or-less solely on tradition, or (b) which affect only consensual conduct (I recognized that consent is a complex issue). I don’t think case (a) is really an argument for liberal hypocrisy, because it is rare to find other cases where liberals support laws based solely on tradition (historical preservation districts might be one, although I have no idea whether liberals on average actually support them). Case (b) is the important one, and I can think of a couple of other cases where liberal views are similar to their views on sex. The first is drugs, where liberals are far more likely than conservatives (though of course less likely than libertarians) to want to reduce or remove regulations; the second is freedom of speech (although this varies dramatically by country, and liberal views on laws differ from their views on institutional rules). Some liberals also oppose most regulations on immigration.
Which supposedly-liberal arguments in favor of regulation do you think apply to which proposed regulation of sex?
And what particular bad effects do you see from the individual autonomy view of sex?
Liberals (myself included) tend to very much like the idea of using regulation to transfer some wealth from the strongest players to the weakest in society. We like to try to set up the rules of the game so that nobody would be economically very poor, and so that things in general were fair and equitable.
In the case of sex and relationships, the argument could also be made for regulation that would transfer “sexual wealth” and “relationship wealth” from the strongest players to those who are not so well off. In fact, it seems to me that very many traditional conservative societies have tried to do just that, by strongly promoting e.g. such values that one should have only one sexual partner (along with marriage) during one’s life. Rock stars and other sorts of alpha males who take many hot girls for themselves would be strongly disapproved of by typical traditional conservative societies. The underlying reason may be that traditional monogamy produces a sexually more equal society, and that this has been one contributing factor why societies with such values have been so successful throughout much of human history.
Most liberals, however, would be unwilling to engage in a rational discussion and cost-benefit analysis of whether conservative sexual morals (or some modified version thereof) would in fact create a more equal and strong society. Liberals are ok with the strongest players amassing as much sexual wealth as they can, at the expense of the weaker competitors, which strongly contrasts with their ideas about regulating economic activity and limitless acquisition of monetary wealth.
Serial monogomy, rather than polygyny, constitutes the vast majority of all Western relationships. So I just don’t think it’s true that there’s unequal access.
I should also reiterate that “traditional” covers a wide range of practices, including polygyny and non-monogamy (the latter particularly among non-agricultural societies).
One might uncharitably describe this as the “nerds whining about not having a girlfriend” argument.
I know! Its like those icky poor people whining about material inequality.
Serial monogomy, rather than polygyny, constitutes the vast majority of all Western relationships. So I just don’t think it’s true that there’s unequal access.
This might shatter your brains, serial monogamy in practice basically is soft polygamy. You badly need to read some of Roissy’s writing on how sexual attraction seems to work if your own IRL observations haven’t sufficed. Once there do a search for “hypergamy”.
One might uncharitably describe this as the “nerds whining about not having a girlfriend” argument.
I know! Its like those icky poor people whining about material inequality.
The difference, of course, is that there is in fact no shortage of available partners. (Also, I am a nerd myself—it’s just that this particular argument tends to descend rather quickly into Nice-Guyism).
This might shatter your brains, serial monogamy in practice basically is soft polygamy. Sexually 5 minutes of
alpha is worth 5 years of beta.
Serial monogamy is not equivalent to polygamy, because at any time, there are in fact plenty of partners to go around. I have no idea why you would think there is any similarity at all.
Also, of course, the term “alpha” does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.
The difference, of course, is that there is in fact no shortage of available partners.
There is no shortage of available wealth either! I don’t know why those Africans go on starving when we clearly have enough food for everyone on the planet. I mean all they have to do is arrange to get hired by someone and then buying some food!
There is in fact no shortage of people employing desirable employees.
The argument that there is a shortage of available women (as though women were a commodity) relies on assumptions that just aren’t true. In a mostly-monogamous (including serial monogamy), mostly-straight society, for every man who does not have a partner, there is a woman who does not have a partner.
There is no shortage of available employers either!
A man being desired by other women is intrinsically sexy to women. Consider what this means if you take a laissez-faire approach to the sexual marketplace.
CharlieSheen is making a bad case for what he’s making a case for.
Simply because the distribution of men and women without partners is equivalent between the genders doesn’t mean the history of men and women is equivalent. Every child must have a male and a female parent, generally speaking; it doesn’t follow that parentage is equally distributed among men and women. Every woman could have one child and 80% of men could have none, simply if the 20% of men have on average five children. Similarly, it doesn’t follow from “Men and women lack partners in equal number” that “Men and women have equal relationship opportunity.” The median man could have 1 relationship in his entire life, and the median woman could have 5, at the same time; the means/averages must be the same, but the distribution doesn’t.
That doesn’t resolve the issue; relationship hours can be unevenly distributed as well. Take five men and five women; one man can have ten relationship-hours, four can have zero, and all five women can have two.
The idea of hypergamy can be loosely summed up thus: Women have higher expectations than men.
Which implies, in a more connotation heavy manner, that the average man is less attractive to the average woman than the average woman is to the average man.
I’m not sure that hypergamy is strictly necessary, even presuming the phenomenon (uneven romantic/sexual opportunity distribution) it attempts to explain. Men having higher variability of attractiveness would produce the same phenomenon.
Yes, relationship hours are of course unevenly distributed—but in this case, there would still be forty available female relationship-hours, to the forty available male relationship-hours.
This sounds like saying that wealth is of course unevenly distributed, but the set of people whose height in inches is an even number has the same amount of wealth as the set of people whose height in inches is an odd number. Which is probably true, but also completely irrelevant for any discussion about inequality of wealth. You can always define two groups using some criteria that makes them come out the same, but the point isn’t to compare arbitrarily defined groups, it’s to compare indviduals.
The complaint is typically phrased in terms of mens’ sexual access to women. If you missed the bit where CharlieSheen mentioned the PUA community, well, I guess I’ll agree with him that you should read Roissy. You’ll find it very enlightening about what that community thinks.
As an individual problem, as I note elsewhere, it just doesn’t seem to be much of a problem in practice, and in the sorts of cases where it is a problem (traditional polygyny; places with sex-selective abortion), liberals do tend to object.
His claim, since you seem to have missed it, is precisely that they are unevenly distributed; that the distribution is closer to the “One man with 10 hours, four with 0, five with 2” than to “Five men and women each with two hours.”
In fact, however, marriage (and other monogamous relationships) are quite common, so the distribution is not really much like that.
And even though it was claimed that liberals don’t have a problem with some males getting an unfair amount of the relationship-hours, it seems that liberals really strongly dislike PUAs. There are a number of reasons for this, but in many cases, the underlying reason is probably actually a fairness concern (in the “why don’t I get any?” sense, rather than the abstract sense). And if PUAs are correct that nonconsensual touching is a competitive advantage, then indeed liberals are consistent in that they attempt to regulate this.
Finally, as noted, liberals tend to oppose traditional polygyny, which is another case of uneven distribution.
Marriage is getting less common. I don’t know the statistics for monogamous relationships in general over the last thirty years, but in the 1960′s and 1970′s, the trend definitely shifted to more relationships, which permits Charlie’s position, although it obviously doesn’t prove it. (Searching “mean relationships men women” didn’t provide any useful evidence as to whether his position holds.)
I don’t particularly care to get into the color politics. I wasn’t attempting to prove anything, I was trying to explain what Charlie’s position was, because you didn’t seem to be catching it.
Marriage rates have basically collapsed among lower SES African Americans in the US and dropped significantly for all other classes as well. In addition to this the number of relationship hours one can expect from a marriage is that the average age of marriage is getting higher and higher for women.. In addition to this divorce rates are high and mostly driven by women, for example:
Evidence is given that among college-educated couples, the percentages of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%.
Both also speak of a probably lower quality of relationship hours as does a lower satisfaction with marriage than in the past.
I’m also not particularly into color politics; as noted, I don’t fit easily into Haidt’s dichotomy, and I suspect that most of Less Wrong also doesn’t.
Also, of course, the term “alpha” does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.
There are social groups within which there is a one clear, overwhelmingly dominant individual. That individual is referred to as the ‘alpha’. Describing that kind of group/tribe/pack role is what the letter was adopted for in the first place.
(I would agree that alpha and especially beta are being misused in the grandparent.)
Do these terms have a scientific meaning in PUA to begin with? I always thought they were just used as shorthand for vague (often self-contradictory) categories of behavior.
Do these terms have a scientific meaning in PUA to begin with?
Yes, a misleading one that diverged rather significantly from the term) they originally adopted and still refer to. (It is all too often used for any kind of dominance, including groups who think of themselves as all alpha males—which can’t make sense.)
I always thought they were just used as shorthand for vague (often self-contradictory) categories of behavior.
Disagreement among users or communities, perhaps. Different (jargonised) usage to the scientific one? Often. Self-contradictory? Not especially. The models of reality being described seem for most part to be internally coherent.
Your move is rejected. (Almost all demands for evidence by one party attempting to debate another are logically rude and I tend to reject this kind of tactic in general.)
You made an assertion. I just made a counter assertion. Not only do I reject games of forcing ‘burden of proofs’ on the other side you are demanding evidence of a negative, which is typically much harder. What evidence are you expecting? Perhaps:
The following is a list of all the examples I have seen of popular PUA resources that match paper-machine’s claim that the usage of alpha is self-contradictory:
If this is something that occurs often then I can reasonably expect to have seen it at least once, given my level of exposure, specific irritation at misuse of alpha and beta jargon and general sensitivity to self-contradicting claims. “I looked. What you said was there was not actually there.” is sufficient reason to deny a claim that a thing is there.
This wasn’t a “tactic,” nor was it a “debate.” This was an honest request for information that you’ve somehow pattern-matched as logical rudeness. “Disagreement among users or communities” was all I meant by “self-contradictory.”
My interest in PUA is purely academic, because as far as I can tell little work has been done to make it work in my demographic. I’ve asked other people in the community before what the link was between the meaning of alpha/beta in the biological sciences and the meaning of alpha/beta in PUA, but so far no luck.
EDIT: Also, I would really like to know why I triggered such a hostile response, because I would like to not trigger such responses in the future.
This was an honest request for information that you’ve somehow pattern-matched as logical rudeness.
I maintain the grandparent, with particular emphasis on the plausibility of finding the kind of evidence that demonstrates the negation of the kind of claim in question. It isn’t something I would expect to find a detailed analysis of lying around and so lack of observations of the claimed thing is all that can be expected—and is already implied by denying the claim.
“Disagreement among users or communities” was all I meant by “self-contradictory.”
Serial monogamy is not equivalent to polygamy, because at any time, there are in fact plenty of partners to go around. I have no idea why you would think there is any similarity at all
Also, of course, the term “alpha” does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.
Run rationalization hamster run!
Just in case there is a misunderstanding I was using PUA terminology.
Charlie, your argument style in this conversation started insightful and tactfully expressed. It has become lax and contemptuous. While the contempt happens to be warranted by the context it nevertheless serves to give the casual reader a negative impression of what you are saying, can cede some of the ‘high ground’ to the person you are arguing with and potentially changes what arguments will be accepted.
I would very much appreciate it if you would quit while you are (or were) ahead. Your early points were excellent and I really don’t want them to be undermined just because you are disgusted by the rebuttal attempts. They were what I would have said if I got there first (or so my hindsight tells me!)
I’ve since edited that out, and I regret posting it. But if you’re not interested in making an argument, and you would rather just snipe, there’s not much anyone can do about that.
BTW, I later noticed that you had edited a previous post to point out rape-apologist Roissy. I happen to prefer his many deleted posts, since they’re more psychologically honest. Also, if you want to talk about ad hominems, that seems to be almost the entirety of Roissy’s writing.
The link was there since before your responded. All I was saying that if you don’t see my argument yet I won’t be bothering with you further today since people are wrong on the internet all the time and I’m unfortunately mortal. Maybe I will write up a post in response tomorrow or maybe someone else can pick up where I ended.
I might have had more patience with you if you hadn’t so clearly displayed tribal feeling in the OP btw. Thought I must admit once you threw around “rape apologist” that made me laugh hard enough to forgive you.
Serial monogomy, rather than polygyny, constitutes the vast majority of all Western relationships.
It constitutes the vast majority of significant, formal, mid to long term Western relationships. It does not constitute the majority of sexual relations that can be described as “It’s Complicated” or “Single (but not celibate)”.
So I just don’t think it’s true that there’s unequal access.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
I’d still wager that most (i.e., more than 50%) of the sexual intercourses happening today (i.e. 13 August 2012 from 00:00 to 24:00 UTC) in the Western world (let’s define that as NATO countries, for the sake of definiteness, though it’s not a particularly natural category) are within monogamous relationships (defined as couples who have—explicitly or implicitly—promised each other not to have sex with anyone else until the relationship lasts).
Huh, how could such a bet be settled?
(No, let’s make that “this year”. I think people are less monogamous in August than they usually are.)
Even if serial means “one night at a time”, so long as each man is only going home with one woman per night, there will still be an equal number of unattached women and men.
Even if serial means “one night at a time”, so long as each man is only going home with one woman per night, there will still be an equal number of unattached women and men.
If all people were forced to be copulating at all times then your conclusion regarding equal access would follow. An acceptable weirdtopia!
All people being obliged to copulate at, and only at, specific times would also lead to the conclusion. A less acceptable weirdtopia.
As it happens it is possible for some males with exceptional attractiveness, skills and motivation to mate with a different female every day while some females do not mate every day. This allows for the possibility that there is not equal access to mates among all members of the population in question.
Nearly 3⁄4 of American adults are in relatively stable monogamous (in theory, of course) cohabiting relationships including marriage. And that’s not counting non-cohabiting relationships or casual sex at all.
Extremely promiscuous straight men are a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, and the extent to which they monopolize female attention is vastly exaggerated. If you look at India and China, where there’s a genuine difference in the number of men and women in the population, you’ll see all sorts of weird social effects
that we just don’t have in the US. True, some of that is due to general attitudes towards women, but some of it isn’t.
True on any given night; but it might well be the case that the unattached men are always the same ones, whereas each woman is unattached on certain nights but not on others. ETA: e.g., on Monday, Albert sleeps with Alice while Bob, Charles, Betty and Cathy stay unattached; on Tuesday, Albert sleeps with Betty while Alice, Bob, Charles and Cathy stay unattached; on Wednesday, Albert sleeps with Cathy while Alice, Bob, Betty and Charles stay unattached.
Liberalism can be meaningfully defined as the erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology. Rational debate is possible, to the extent that it serves to undermine privileged ontologies.*
When somebody raises a proposal, the argument that might follow typically involves participants inferring and teasing out the relevant premises, and then arguing them.
In contrast, Liberalism tries to identify the ontologies underpinning the premises, and then encourages you to recognize that ontology as arbitrary, have the self-awareness to treat that ontology as a rationalization for your motivations, and decide whether you’re willing to be a bully and acknowledge yourself as such. (I suppose OCPD creates its own motivations, allowing elegant and/or simpler models to dominate for some people.)
In the end, the policies adopted by liberals can’t be argued for. They just can’t be argued against effectively, except in a creative gut context informed by predictive models and evidence.
*(or creatively flesh out and validate/invalidate predictive models)
I would end the comment here, but I can’t resist quibbling on one point. I believe you are confusing liberalism’s erasure of the old regime with a rejection of regulation. Sex is more policed now than ever, in a state enforcement context, a social coregulation context, and a support system context – all this with dramatic consequences.
“Sacredness” is a word we use to create moral models around feelings. If liberals choose to “make way” for those feelings, does that mean they’ve bought into a sacralizing mentality? No.
Quite. The “erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology” sounds more like postmodernism, and “a creative gut context informed by predictive models and evidence”, when decoded, seems to mean “inventing the conclusion you want and selecting theories and evidence to fit it”.
In contrast, Liberalism tries to identify the ontologies underpinning the premises, and then encourages you to recognize that ontology as arbitrary, have the self-awareness to treat that ontology as a rationalization for your motivations, and decide whether you’re willing to be a bully and acknowledge yourself as such.
This is an excellent example of the sort of bullying that constitutes postmodern discourse.
You don’t even say whether you agree with any of this or not, but it doesn’t seem intended satirically.
The “erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology” sounds more like postmodernism,
An accurate characterization, although I don’t share your negative associations with the term.
and “a creative gut context informed by predictive models and evidence”, when decoded, seems to mean “inventing the conclusion you want and selecting theories and evidence to fit it”.
A reasonable decoding, which means I conveyed the point poorly. The core idea is that you recognize no particular framing as “special.” Selecting theories and evidence to fit it would contradict that.
There are a thousand framings in which to consider menial subjects like… food, plastics production, coffee consumption, pain, sexuality, population growth. These framings must be arrived at creatively. To illustrate the complexity, I will add that these framings are, in turn, framed in the context of whether people care about them; how it relates to individual experiences.
These framings often present metrics. Mapping these metrics to a decision is not a deterministic process without arbitrarily privileging one or more framings.
An example of a framing is the old LW yarn comparing torture and minor eye irritants.
Where does evidence fit into this?
Evidence is the one thing, the only thing, that can be privileged without allegations of arbitrariness. (That said, evidence of how people experience things is still evidence.)
So, under this framing, a liberal is anyone who tries to capture all these framings (impossible!) and holding that massive ball of contradiction to their aesthetic eye, makes “educated” decisions pertaining to action or inaction, probably following the lessons of rational instrumentality.
So here’s a crazy contention – people who do this tend to, in aggregate, make the same determinations. That’s actually not surprising, given ev. psych.
Is it “correct”? No. There is no “correct.” But it’s a weird thing to argue against, because you’d have to privilege a frame to do it. For example, you could argue for embracing the naturalistic fallacy, because it works, thus, without thought or conscience, privileging your frame over all the anti-rape framings.
How many people that self-identify as liberal would agree that liberalism is “the erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology”? I would guess < 1%. Also, in what way does the Ten Commandments rely on a “privileged ontology” that human rights does not?
How many people that self-identify as liberal would agree that liberalism is “the erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology”?
<1%. And that must be accepted as a criticism. However, I would contend that individual liberal battles can readily be perceived as fitting comfortably in this framing.
Also, in what way does the Ten Commandments rely on a “privileged ontology” that human rights does not?
I imagine you will agree that the concept of “putting presumptions under erasure” is not something that expresses itself well in dialog. You will notice that a hallmark of the occupy movement and human rights is that they are generally used vaguely.
This is because they “happen to categorize” the kinds of policies that are advocated when the rationalization of the status quo is put under erasure.
Now, I’ll acknowledge that this framing fails because clearly powerful international organizations are asserting definitions of human rights.
I will suggest that this is a tool in the service of the paradigm mentioned, and then I’ll acknowledge that this is a fully general counterargument.
And while I’ve explicitly lost the argument, allow me to ask you to hang onto it, because its corpse is still quite useful.
Except you totally do so imagine, because you could only get away with such dickish social signaling if my communication style was unacceptable in a group context.
what the polyamorous community has done to a much greater degree?
It remains to be seen whether the polyamorous community can deal with the complex issues regarding raising children and passing their memes onto them. Judging by what happened to previous attempts my guess is that they’ll fail.
But isn’t that precisely what the west has done (not completely, of course), and what the polyamorous community has done to a much greater degree?
On the contrary—it seems to me that the modern Western societies are, by all historical standards, exceptionally obsessed with sacredness norms on sex-related issues. See my old comment I linked earlier, in which I elaborate on some particularly striking manifestations of this.
(Also, among the most amusing posts on Overcoming Bias are those where Robin Hanson elicits outrage from the respectable progressive folk by putting some sex-related issue under dispassionate scrutiny and thereby violating their sacredness intuitions.)
As for the polyamorists, I don’t have any direct insight into the inner workings of these communities except for a few occasional glimpses offered by LW posts and comments. But unless they are composed of extremely unusual self-selected outliers (which might be the case given their very small size), I would suspect that they are again just rationalizing a somewhat different (and possibly even more extreme) set of sacredness norms.
Purity is an unusual foundation, since it can apply at the object level or the meta level. On the object level, people believe things like “don’t eat pork because it’s unclean” or “don’t have premarital sex because it takes away your purity.”
On the meta level, moral purity can apply whenever people hold firmly to a principle or policy. Republicans demand ideological purity in opposing all tax increases, and Kant gets accused of valuing his own moral purity more than another person’s life for refusing to lie to the murderer at the door. More generally, any misdeed feels “dirty”, so moral purity motivates people to avoid breaking any moral rule. This does seem to involve genuine feelings of purity/sanctity/contamination/disgust—witness the the large role of sin and purification in many religions, and the Lady MacBeth effect in the general populace (i.e., college sophomores). Violating a moral rule is a stain on you, which you may or may not be able to cleanse away.
Meta-level purity supplements a moral rule which has other bases. I don’t think that moral values against taxes and lies are based primarily on purity, even if there is some purity thinking involved in treating them as sacred values and refusing to compromise or consider tradeoffs. Lady MacBeth may have become obsessed with washing her hands but that does not mean that the (felt) wrongness of murder is due to it being a purity violation.
The principle that the government should not interfere in people’s sex lives sounds like another case where purity is operating at the meta level, where the primary foundation is something else. In this case, it’s probably foundation #6, liberty/oppression, which is activated particularly strongly for liberals because sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression against women and gay people.
There are other cases where people vehemently want the government to keep its hands off (e.g. guns on the right, abortion on the left), and the common thread seems to be that the individual should have the right to control something and do with it what they want, without outside interference. The purity foundation is recruited to help make these rules absolutist (e.g., people get very suspicious of any regulation that is even loosely related). It may also play some role in determining which particular rules are the ones that became absolutist, but if it is a factor I’d guess that it comes in third (at best), after how close/personal/important the issue is to people (e.g., involving control over your own body or personal protection) and how much of a threat to autonomy there is / has been.
Then why don’t they apply the liberty principal to government regulation in other aspects of their lives?
The unsatisfying answer is that moral foundations theory doesn’t explain why the foundations get applied in the ways that they do—that differs between cultures and involves a lot of path-dependence through history. But Haidt’s theory does at least provide some guidance for conjecture, so I’ll speculate about why sexual liberty became important to liberals based on the liberty/oppression foundation.
The way that Haidt describes it, for American liberals the liberty foundation is primarily about wanting to protect sympathetic victims from oppression. Telling the story from that point of view, sexual restrictions have been a form of oppression, involving shunning and other social punishments for victims like women who had sex outside of marriage or men who loved other men. With the sexual revolution, liberals threw off these arbitrary and oppressive restrictions, and brought us much closer to a world where no one can stop you from being yourself (holding your sexual identity openly without fear of reprisal) or from having sex with who you want to, how you want to (as long as you are consenting adults).
Government regulation in many other aspects of people’s lives has not involved such obvious oppression of sympathetic victims.
Now, could someone return the favor and offer their speculation about how the purity foundation led liberals to value sexual liberty? Vladimir_M mentions that people tend to apply purity-based morality to sex, which is true, but they tend to apply purity at the object level as a reason to restrict sexual activities. Sexual liberty would be applying purity at the meta level as a reason to allow sexual activities. Sex can spread disease (the purity/contamination framework originally evolved for avoiding illness), involves the body in a way that is closely related to many elicitors of disgust, and because of its evolutionary importance people are prone to having strong intuitions & emotions about sexual activities that don’t readily fit in other foundations. So it’s understandable that people would tend to get squeamish about various sexual practices and want to restrict them based on purity concerns. It’s not clear to me how those purity concerns jump to the meta level and reverse direction.
(Let’s leave aside, for now, the less thoughtful liberals and conservatives, since what they think isn’t interesting).
I don’t understand why you put autonomy in the category of sacredness. Haidt considers liberty an independent foundation, and I don’t think it requires rationalization to consider nonconsensual sex to be a case of harm!
The thing is, what determines when autonomy is absolute and inviolable, and when it should be weighed against other concerns?
When it comes to interventions in human affairs by the state and other institutions, modern liberals pride themselves on their supposed adherence to (what they see as) rational and scientific cost-benefit analysis and common-sense notions of equality and fairness. They typically assert that their opponents are being irrational, or acting out of selfish interest, when they insist that some other principle takes precedence, like for example when conservatives insist on respecting tradition and custom, or when libertarians insist on inviolable property rights. In particular, liberals certainly see it as irrational when libertarians oppose their favored measures on the grounds of individual liberty and autonomy.
However, there are issues on which liberals themselves draw absolutist lines and lose all interest for cost-benefit analysis, as well as for concerns about equality and fairness that are perfectly analogous to those they care about greatly in other cases. Sex is the principal example. Liberals argue in favor of comprehensive intervention and regulation in nearly all areas of human life, but in contrast, people’s sexual behavior is supposed to be a subject of complete laissez-faire. This despite the fact that many arguments that liberals normally use against the evils of laissez-faire and in favor of economic intervention, wealth redistribution, and paternalistic regulation, would apply with equal (or even greater) force to sex as well. Yet an attempt to argue in favor of more restrictive sexual norms on any of these grounds will be met with immediate hostility by liberals—often so fierce that you’ll be immediately dismissed as obviously crazy or malicious.
I don’t think it’s possible for liberals to salvage the situation by claiming that sexual laissez-faire is somehow entailed by the same considerations that, according to them, mandate complex and comprehensive regulation of almost everything else. This would be vanishingly improbable even a priori, and a casual look at the arguments in question definitely shows a glaring inconsistency here. The only plausible explanation I see here is that, just like everyone else in the human history, liberals base their sexual norms on a sacredness foundation—except that for them, this foundation has the peculiar form of sacralizing individual autonomy, thus making a violation of this autonomy a sacrilege that no other considerations can justify.
Ironically, the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters. (And also a complete impossibility of discussing these topics in an open and honest manner, as witnessed by the fact that they reliably destroy the discourse even in a forum like LW.)
The unprecedented amount of hand-wringing might not be indicative of an increase in the number or magnitude of sex-related problems if it turns out that previous norms also discouraged public discussions of such problems. What are the other metrics by which we can say that the current set of norms are working badly in practice? Are there fewer people having sex, are they having less enjoyable sex, or are their sexual relationships less fulfilling and of shorter duration or are these norms destabilising society in other ways?
Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind?
Pregnancy, particularly pregnancy out of wedlock, and venereal disease are the traditional sex-related problems. Both of them are massively higher after sexual liberation. (Out of wedlock births are also exacerbated by welfare, which is part of a larger political discussion.)
Births out of wedlock are somewhat difficult to hide from government record-keepers in developed countries like the US, though they may be possible to hide socially (which is what most people care about anyway). Out of wedlock births among African Americans are currently at ~70%; in 1940, a full generation before the civil rights era, it was 19%.
Venereal disease is a bit harder to compare to last century (whereas we have out-of-wedlock rates going back quite a bit), and there are issues with diseases (like syphilis) becoming treatable and overall medical care (including reporting) increasing. But the impact of the Sixties on American gonorrhea rates is still clear. (It also seems likely that gay liberation contributed to the AIDS epidemic- but the primary comparison there is to Cuba, where those with AIDS were quarantined. Unsurprisingly, quarantine reduces transmission rates.)
Hmm? You quoted the rest of my question which talked about other things. It really was a question. :)
In any case, I must admit that unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases (if these diseases have mostly become treatable then they’re really not as much of a problem are they?) did not really spring to mind. I was thinking of effects on marriage and the impact through that on society at large.
However, even your data speaks only about a specific class of people, and not for all of America. Which suggests that certain socioeconomic groups can deal with the change in sexual norms while others can not. So the problem may not be entirely with the change in sexual norms?
Anyway, it is time for me to confess I am not American, nor familiar with the data trends on America and the effects of the sexual revolution there. I live in a country without too much sexual freedom and its own set of problems. It is interesting to see what problems are expected to happen when things get more laissez-faire around here though. And I wanted to point out the problems of a society with far lower sexual autonomy.
But this is tangential to Vladimir_M’s point about some sort of double standards among liberals vis-a-vis sexual norms. For what its worth I don’t consider autonomy as absolute and inviolable, and although I do place a high value on individual autonomy in sexual matters, I am not averse to a cost-benefit analysis either.
Since we’re on the topic, I’ll link one analysis that I’d found interesting:
From Gene Expression
What about Africa? Sure, there are all sorts of problems making that comparison, but it shows that anti-gay attitudes aren’t particularly protective. Also, of course, attitudes were much more conservative in late-15th and 16th century Europe, but syphilis did pretty well. Looking at the rates of HIV infection by state, Cook’s PVI only accounts for about 6% of the variance, about the same as urban density (the two are themselves somewhat more correlated). If we take PVI as a rough proxy for conservative attitudes about sexuality, it seems like conservatism isn’t particularly protective.
That’s probably because illiberal attitudes towards homosexuality probably don’t reduce homosexual sex all that much. They just drive it underground. That makes epidemics harder to trace and harder to stop. Also, these attitudes tend to preclude education about condoms and STDs (since it’s hard to teach “don’t do this but if you do, be safe”). Sex ed actually does seem to increase condom use, and thus reduce the spread of HIV.
Out of wedlock birth rates have exploded with sexual freedom:
-http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/205/four-in-10-children-are-born-to-unwed-mothers
Marriage is way down:
-http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/105/the-annual-marriage-rate-has-declined-significantly-in-the-past-generation
“Give your listeners the facts—the Family Facts from the experts at The Heritage Foundation.” I’m completely reassured.
I’m pretty sure they are sourced from census data. I check the footnotes on websites like that.
This is probably the most insightful comment that I’ve seen on LW in a long time.
Read his entire comment history. (FWIW Vladimir_M is I think my second favorite LW commenter.)
I endorse this recommendation, but I can’t help but wonder who is your favourite? (^_^)
Rayhawk, largely because he talks about more important things than does Vladimir_M. I sorta wish Vladimir_M would do more speculative reasoning outside the spheres of game theory, social psychology, economics, politics, and so on—I would trust him to be less biased than most when considering strange ideas, e.g. the Singularity Institute’s mission.
You can get a good idea of which ideas Vladimir_M considers important, by looking at where he chooses to spend his time.
I’m not sure that is a good heuristic, spending a lot of time in somewhere might mean he considers the ideas or at least debating them fun, which is not quite the same as important. If someone was studying my online habits they’d be better off assuming I optimize for fun rather than impact. (^_^’)
My mental model of Vladimir_M has this not being the case.
This is like having the Grand Wizard of the KKK endorse your foreign policy as a political candidate.
More like an endorsement of a campaign for mayorhood of a Floridian city circa 1920. Remember that the Klan had five million members not too long ago.
I like the institution of comparing people to Hitler, Lenin, &c., so long as people know just how reasonable and well-intentioned those people were. Hypocrites, cast out the beams in your own eyes before assessing the damage caused by the motes in theirs.
Did Jesus tell you to be purposefully stupid and incoherent?
Also, you’re trolling wrong; but maybe that’s just meta-trolling, i.e., you’re trying to troll me by being apparently incompetent at trolling. I doubt it.
Are you trying to troll me by pretending that I was trolling you? This will get convoluted very quickly.
You are actually Will Newsome himself, and I claim my £5.
I confess, it was me all along.
...I wonder if this “accuse Will Newsome of sockpuppeting” thing is some sort of LessWrong tradition now. You should know that the last time someone bet I was a sockpuppet, specifically AspiringKnitter, they nominally lost a hundred bucks.
I’m actually Will Newsome’s disembodied prefrontal cortex speaking from beyond the meta.
Liar, there is no such place. The other half of your claim is sorta plausible though.
(Also under the most straightforward interpretation you’re implicitly saying siodine is “purposefully stupid and incoherent” by his own lights, and that’s kinda mean.)
Under the most straightforward interpretation I think the convolution is only growing linearly? …Maybe someone should write a paper on the time complexity of meta-trolling in various fora as a gauge of the intellectual worthwhileness of said fora.
See my article “‘I Never Met A Troll I Didn’t’: A Meta-Analysis of Meta-Troll Meta-Data in the Metaverse”.
Since when do we mention the straightforward interpretation?
Not explicitly at least, but it’s possible he somehow implied it, or said it as the Holy Ghost working within Paul.
‘Using the purity foundation’ =/= ‘Unable to think about it rationally and genuinely consider both benefits and costs.’
The purity foundation involves specific patterns of thought & feeling including the emotion of disgust and modeling the world in terms of purity and contamination, or elevation and degradation. People can be absolutist and unwilling to consider tradeoffs for moral views that come from any of the foundations (including harm/care, e.g. not wanting to torture a child no matter how big the benefit).
This is a wild exaggeration. There are large domains of life where liberals favor a large amount of freedom. See the 1st amendment, for instance. The standard distinction puts liberals higher on social liberty but lower on economic liberty; Haidt has used the term “lifestyle liberty” to describe the kind of liberty that liberals support. Liberals are relatively consistently opposed to legal restrictions on self-expression, for example, and they generally have social norms encouraging it (with some exceptions where it runs afoul of other norms).
I don’t see a very plausible story of how the purity pattern of thinking would form the basis for norms of sexual permissiveness (maybe you could fill in some of the details?). The simplest explanation that I see is that sexual restrictions became tagged, in liberals’ minds (and in liberal culture) as traditionalist/oppressive/sexist/bad. (Because a lot of sexual restrictions did fit that pattern.) So, by pattern matching, now any proposed sexual restriction sounds bad, like something they support and we oppose. There are various particular psychological and cultural mechanisms that contributed to making this stick. For instance, it probably helped that sex can fit within the social/lifestyle/self-expressive category where liberals tend to be more laissez-faire. And it helps that they (the people who want to restrict human sexuality based on their retrograde puritanism) continue to exist (rather prominently, in many liberals’ minds), because that makes it easy to associate proposed sexual restrictions with them and to be suspicious of people who propose such restrictions.
Do we actually see this hand-wringing from liberals, though? I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, unless it’s gay marriage, in which case most liberals don’t seem to be hand-wringing so much as pushing forward along the same path as ever: towards more sexual freedom. There’s hand-wringing from conservatives, but I don’t see how this is relevant to your point.
I would guess—things like “less desirable” men not being able to find a mate, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, STDs, rape …
But yes, those don’t seem to be things liberals complain about more than conservatives; I’m not sure if Vladimir was implying they did, or talking about something else.
(Personally, I can’t tell if there really is “unprecedented amount of hand-wringing” or if it’s just availability bias—it’s easier to think of examples of people complaining now than of people complaining 50 years ago)
I think you and I must know very different liberals.
Looking back at my comment, I did perhaps use a very broad brush at certain points, which is unfortunately hard to avoid if one wishes to keep one’s comments at reasonable length. However, I’d still be curious to hear where exactly you think my description diverges from reality.
I think part of the difference between my experience and your statement, is that the liberals I know tend towards the libertarian end of the spectrum. At least on the drug issue, this might be a function of age.
The liberal argument against libertarianism is not that it is irrational to have a preference for liberty, but that (a) liberty is a more complicated concept than libertarians say it is (see Amartya Sen, for instance), (b) that libertarians often equivocated between the moral and practical arguments for libertarianism (see Yvain’s non-libertarian FAQ, for instance), and (c) that the practical benefits are often not as-claimed (ibid).
Similarly, many liberals are in favor of certain sorts of regulations on sexual autonomy—many oppose prostitution and traditional polygyny, for instance (there are, of course, a number of complications here, as well as variance among liberals). Some liberals also oppose the burqa and would criminalize clitoridectomy (this is more of a live issue in Europe). Finally, liberals tend to favor regulations against sexual harassment, which, defined broadly, could include some consensual conduct such as a consensual boss-subordinate relationship. In each of these cases, their arguments in these cases are similar to their arguments in the other cases where they favor regulation.
It’s true that liberals often oppose regulations on sex which are either (a) based more-or-less solely on tradition, or (b) which affect only consensual conduct (I recognized that consent is a complex issue). I don’t think case (a) is really an argument for liberal hypocrisy, because it is rare to find other cases where liberals support laws based solely on tradition (historical preservation districts might be one, although I have no idea whether liberals on average actually support them). Case (b) is the important one, and I can think of a couple of other cases where liberal views are similar to their views on sex. The first is drugs, where liberals are far more likely than conservatives (though of course less likely than libertarians) to want to reduce or remove regulations; the second is freedom of speech (although this varies dramatically by country, and liberal views on laws differ from their views on institutional rules). Some liberals also oppose most regulations on immigration.
Which supposedly-liberal arguments in favor of regulation do you think apply to which proposed regulation of sex?
And what particular bad effects do you see from the individual autonomy view of sex?
In response to your final questions:
Liberals (myself included) tend to very much like the idea of using regulation to transfer some wealth from the strongest players to the weakest in society. We like to try to set up the rules of the game so that nobody would be economically very poor, and so that things in general were fair and equitable.
In the case of sex and relationships, the argument could also be made for regulation that would transfer “sexual wealth” and “relationship wealth” from the strongest players to those who are not so well off. In fact, it seems to me that very many traditional conservative societies have tried to do just that, by strongly promoting e.g. such values that one should have only one sexual partner (along with marriage) during one’s life. Rock stars and other sorts of alpha males who take many hot girls for themselves would be strongly disapproved of by typical traditional conservative societies. The underlying reason may be that traditional monogamy produces a sexually more equal society, and that this has been one contributing factor why societies with such values have been so successful throughout much of human history.
Most liberals, however, would be unwilling to engage in a rational discussion and cost-benefit analysis of whether conservative sexual morals (or some modified version thereof) would in fact create a more equal and strong society. Liberals are ok with the strongest players amassing as much sexual wealth as they can, at the expense of the weaker competitors, which strongly contrasts with their ideas about regulating economic activity and limitless acquisition of monetary wealth.
[edit: removed pointless sniping]
Serial monogomy, rather than polygyny, constitutes the vast majority of all Western relationships. So I just don’t think it’s true that there’s unequal access.
I should also reiterate that “traditional” covers a wide range of practices, including polygyny and non-monogamy (the latter particularly among non-agricultural societies).
I know! Its like those icky poor people whining about material inequality.
This might shatter your brains, serial monogamy in practice basically is soft polygamy. You badly need to read some of Roissy’s writing on how sexual attraction seems to work if your own IRL observations haven’t sufficed. Once there do a search for “hypergamy”.
The difference, of course, is that there is in fact no shortage of available partners. (Also, I am a nerd myself—it’s just that this particular argument tends to descend rather quickly into Nice-Guyism).
Serial monogamy is not equivalent to polygamy, because at any time, there are in fact plenty of partners to go around. I have no idea why you would think there is any similarity at all.
Also, of course, the term “alpha” does not in any way describe human behavior in Western society.
There is no shortage of available wealth either! I don’t know why those Africans go on starving when we clearly have enough food for everyone on the planet. I mean all they have to do is arrange to get hired by someone and then buying some food!
There is in fact no shortage of people employing desirable employees.
The argument that there is a shortage of available women (as though women were a commodity) relies on assumptions that just aren’t true. In a mostly-monogamous (including serial monogamy), mostly-straight society, for every man who does not have a partner, there is a woman who does not have a partner.
You are missing the point.
There is no shortage of available employers either!
A man being desired by other women is intrinsically sexy to women. Consider what this means if you take a laissez-faire approach to the sexual marketplace.
CharlieSheen is making a bad case for what he’s making a case for.
Simply because the distribution of men and women without partners is equivalent between the genders doesn’t mean the history of men and women is equivalent. Every child must have a male and a female parent, generally speaking; it doesn’t follow that parentage is equally distributed among men and women. Every woman could have one child and 80% of men could have none, simply if the 20% of men have on average five children. Similarly, it doesn’t follow from “Men and women lack partners in equal number” that “Men and women have equal relationship opportunity.” The median man could have 1 relationship in his entire life, and the median woman could have 5, at the same time; the means/averages must be the same, but the distribution doesn’t.
Ah, I see. You and CharlieSheen think that the unit is one relationship, while I think the unit is one relationship-hour.
That doesn’t resolve the issue; relationship hours can be unevenly distributed as well. Take five men and five women; one man can have ten relationship-hours, four can have zero, and all five women can have two.
The idea of hypergamy can be loosely summed up thus: Women have higher expectations than men.
Which implies, in a more connotation heavy manner, that the average man is less attractive to the average woman than the average woman is to the average man.
I’m not sure that hypergamy is strictly necessary, even presuming the phenomenon (uneven romantic/sexual opportunity distribution) it attempts to explain. Men having higher variability of attractiveness would produce the same phenomenon.
Yes, relationship hours are of course unevenly distributed—but in this case, there would still be forty available female relationship-hours, to the forty available male relationship-hours.
This sounds like saying that wealth is of course unevenly distributed, but the set of people whose height in inches is an even number has the same amount of wealth as the set of people whose height in inches is an odd number. Which is probably true, but also completely irrelevant for any discussion about inequality of wealth. You can always define two groups using some criteria that makes them come out the same, but the point isn’t to compare arbitrarily defined groups, it’s to compare indviduals.
The complaint is typically phrased in terms of mens’ sexual access to women. If you missed the bit where CharlieSheen mentioned the PUA community, well, I guess I’ll agree with him that you should read Roissy. You’ll find it very enlightening about what that community thinks.
As an individual problem, as I note elsewhere, it just doesn’t seem to be much of a problem in practice, and in the sorts of cases where it is a problem (traditional polygyny; places with sex-selective abortion), liberals do tend to object.
His claim, since you seem to have missed it, is precisely that they are unevenly distributed; that the distribution is closer to the “One man with 10 hours, four with 0, five with 2” than to “Five men and women each with two hours.”
In fact, however, marriage (and other monogamous relationships) are quite common, so the distribution is not really much like that.
And even though it was claimed that liberals don’t have a problem with some males getting an unfair amount of the relationship-hours, it seems that liberals really strongly dislike PUAs. There are a number of reasons for this, but in many cases, the underlying reason is probably actually a fairness concern (in the “why don’t I get any?” sense, rather than the abstract sense). And if PUAs are correct that nonconsensual touching is a competitive advantage, then indeed liberals are consistent in that they attempt to regulate this.
Finally, as noted, liberals tend to oppose traditional polygyny, which is another case of uneven distribution.
Marriage is getting less common. I don’t know the statistics for monogamous relationships in general over the last thirty years, but in the 1960′s and 1970′s, the trend definitely shifted to more relationships, which permits Charlie’s position, although it obviously doesn’t prove it. (Searching “mean relationships men women” didn’t provide any useful evidence as to whether his position holds.)
I don’t particularly care to get into the color politics. I wasn’t attempting to prove anything, I was trying to explain what Charlie’s position was, because you didn’t seem to be catching it.
Marriage rates have basically collapsed among lower SES African Americans in the US and dropped significantly for all other classes as well. In addition to this the number of relationship hours one can expect from a marriage is that the average age of marriage is getting higher and higher for women.. In addition to this divorce rates are high and mostly driven by women, for example:
Both also speak of a probably lower quality of relationship hours as does a lower satisfaction with marriage than in the past.
They have animal models of everything now!
Thanks for the explanation.
I’m also not particularly into color politics; as noted, I don’t fit easily into Haidt’s dichotomy, and I suspect that most of Less Wrong also doesn’t.
Again in the modern marketplace every desirable employee has an employer who would love to hire them!
There are social groups within which there is a one clear, overwhelmingly dominant individual. That individual is referred to as the ‘alpha’. Describing that kind of group/tribe/pack role is what the letter was adopted for in the first place.
(I would agree that alpha and especially beta are being misused in the grandparent.)
In animal groups, alphas control mating (which is what this whole discussion is about). That is rarely true in Western human groups.
Do these terms have a scientific meaning in PUA to begin with? I always thought they were just used as shorthand for vague (often self-contradictory) categories of behavior.
Yes, a misleading one that diverged rather significantly from the term) they originally adopted and still refer to. (It is all too often used for any kind of dominance, including groups who think of themselves as all alpha males—which can’t make sense.)
Disagreement among users or communities, perhaps. Different (jargonised) usage to the scientific one? Often. Self-contradictory? Not especially. The models of reality being described seem for most part to be internally coherent.
Under what evidence?
Your move is rejected. (Almost all demands for evidence by one party attempting to debate another are logically rude and I tend to reject this kind of tactic in general.)
You made an assertion. I just made a counter assertion. Not only do I reject games of forcing ‘burden of proofs’ on the other side you are demanding evidence of a negative, which is typically much harder. What evidence are you expecting? Perhaps:
The following is a list of all the examples I have seen of popular PUA resources that match paper-machine’s claim that the usage of alpha is self-contradictory:
If this is something that occurs often then I can reasonably expect to have seen it at least once, given my level of exposure, specific irritation at misuse of alpha and beta jargon and general sensitivity to self-contradicting claims. “I looked. What you said was there was not actually there.” is sufficient reason to deny a claim that a thing is there.
This wasn’t a “tactic,” nor was it a “debate.” This was an honest request for information that you’ve somehow pattern-matched as logical rudeness. “Disagreement among users or communities” was all I meant by “self-contradictory.”
My interest in PUA is purely academic, because as far as I can tell little work has been done to make it work in my demographic. I’ve asked other people in the community before what the link was between the meaning of alpha/beta in the biological sciences and the meaning of alpha/beta in PUA, but so far no luck.
EDIT: Also, I would really like to know why I triggered such a hostile response, because I would like to not trigger such responses in the future.
I maintain the grandparent, with particular emphasis on the plausibility of finding the kind of evidence that demonstrates the negation of the kind of claim in question. It isn’t something I would expect to find a detailed analysis of lying around and so lack of observations of the claimed thing is all that can be expected—and is already implied by denying the claim.
That matches my observations. Violent agreement.
Run rationalization hamster run!
Just in case there is a misunderstanding I was using PUA terminology.
Quite an impressive argument there.
I wasn’t familiar with the PUA term. Googling reveals some variance of usage, but I don’t think any definition does anything to improve your argument.
You get the kinds of arguments you deserve brah. But I know it kind of sucks, its like when someone sneaks in an ad hominem or something like that.
At this rate I don’t think I’ll be able to cure your brain today.
My condolences.
Charlie, your argument style in this conversation started insightful and tactfully expressed. It has become lax and contemptuous. While the contempt happens to be warranted by the context it nevertheless serves to give the casual reader a negative impression of what you are saying, can cede some of the ‘high ground’ to the person you are arguing with and potentially changes what arguments will be accepted.
I would very much appreciate it if you would quit while you are (or were) ahead. Your early points were excellent and I really don’t want them to be undermined just because you are disgusted by the rebuttal attempts. They were what I would have said if I got there first (or so my hindsight tells me!)
I can see that now, I was tired and went emotional. Sent an apology to novalis and I’ll retract the ones that now seem inappropriate.
Insufficient tiger blood?
I’ve since edited that out, and I regret posting it. But if you’re not interested in making an argument, and you would rather just snipe, there’s not much anyone can do about that.
BTW, I later noticed that you had edited a previous post to point out rape-apologist Roissy. I happen to prefer his many deleted posts, since they’re more psychologically honest. Also, if you want to talk about ad hominems, that seems to be almost the entirety of Roissy’s writing.
The link was there since before your responded. All I was saying that if you don’t see my argument yet I won’t be bothering with you further today since people are wrong on the internet all the time and I’m unfortunately mortal. Maybe I will write up a post in response tomorrow or maybe someone else can pick up where I ended.
I might have had more patience with you if you hadn’t so clearly displayed tribal feeling in the OP btw. Thought I must admit once you threw around “rape apologist” that made me laugh hard enough to forgive you.
It constitutes the vast majority of significant, formal, mid to long term Western relationships. It does not constitute the majority of sexual relations that can be described as “It’s Complicated” or “Single (but not celibate)”.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
I’d still wager that most (i.e., more than 50%) of the sexual intercourses happening today (i.e. 13 August 2012 from 00:00 to 24:00 UTC) in the Western world (let’s define that as NATO countries, for the sake of definiteness, though it’s not a particularly natural category) are within monogamous relationships (defined as couples who have—explicitly or implicitly—promised each other not to have sex with anyone else until the relationship lasts).
Huh, how could such a bet be settled?
(No, let’s make that “this year”. I think people are less monogamous in August than they usually are.)
Even if serial means “one night at a time”, so long as each man is only going home with one woman per night, there will still be an equal number of unattached women and men.
If all people were forced to be copulating at all times then your conclusion regarding equal access would follow. An acceptable weirdtopia!
All people being obliged to copulate at, and only at, specific times would also lead to the conclusion. A less acceptable weirdtopia.
As it happens it is possible for some males with exceptional attractiveness, skills and motivation to mate with a different female every day while some females do not mate every day. This allows for the possibility that there is not equal access to mates among all members of the population in question.
Right, and the women who are not mating that day, are available to mate with someone else.
Yet, somehow that doesn’t seem to happen in practice.
Nearly 3⁄4 of American adults are in relatively stable monogamous (in theory, of course) cohabiting relationships including marriage. And that’s not counting non-cohabiting relationships or casual sex at all.
Extremely promiscuous straight men are a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, and the extent to which they monopolize female attention is vastly exaggerated. If you look at India and China, where there’s a genuine difference in the number of men and women in the population, you’ll see all sorts of weird social effects that we just don’t have in the US. True, some of that is due to general attitudes towards women, but some of it isn’t.
Typo?
Well, I suppose if we take that into account there is arbitrary amounts of access for everyone if they look hard enough.
True on any given night; but it might well be the case that the unattached men are always the same ones, whereas each woman is unattached on certain nights but not on others. ETA: e.g., on Monday, Albert sleeps with Alice while Bob, Charles, Betty and Cathy stay unattached; on Tuesday, Albert sleeps with Betty while Alice, Bob, Charles and Cathy stay unattached; on Wednesday, Albert sleeps with Cathy while Alice, Bob, Betty and Charles stay unattached.
I believe you misframe the liberal position.
Liberalism can be meaningfully defined as the erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology. Rational debate is possible, to the extent that it serves to undermine privileged ontologies.*
When somebody raises a proposal, the argument that might follow typically involves participants inferring and teasing out the relevant premises, and then arguing them.
In contrast, Liberalism tries to identify the ontologies underpinning the premises, and then encourages you to recognize that ontology as arbitrary, have the self-awareness to treat that ontology as a rationalization for your motivations, and decide whether you’re willing to be a bully and acknowledge yourself as such. (I suppose OCPD creates its own motivations, allowing elegant and/or simpler models to dominate for some people.)
In the end, the policies adopted by liberals can’t be argued for. They just can’t be argued against effectively, except in a creative gut context informed by predictive models and evidence.
*(or creatively flesh out and validate/invalidate predictive models)
I would end the comment here, but I can’t resist quibbling on one point. I believe you are confusing liberalism’s erasure of the old regime with a rejection of regulation. Sex is more policed now than ever, in a state enforcement context, a social coregulation context, and a support system context – all this with dramatic consequences.
“Sacredness” is a word we use to create moral models around feelings. If liberals choose to “make way” for those feelings, does that mean they’ve bought into a sacralizing mentality? No.
I feel like I’m getting a communal “No. Just.… no.” here.
Quite. The “erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology” sounds more like postmodernism, and “a creative gut context informed by predictive models and evidence”, when decoded, seems to mean “inventing the conclusion you want and selecting theories and evidence to fit it”.
This is an excellent example of the sort of bullying that constitutes postmodern discourse.
You don’t even say whether you agree with any of this or not, but it doesn’t seem intended satirically.
Cogently put.
An accurate characterization, although I don’t share your negative associations with the term.
A reasonable decoding, which means I conveyed the point poorly. The core idea is that you recognize no particular framing as “special.” Selecting theories and evidence to fit it would contradict that.
There are a thousand framings in which to consider menial subjects like… food, plastics production, coffee consumption, pain, sexuality, population growth. These framings must be arrived at creatively. To illustrate the complexity, I will add that these framings are, in turn, framed in the context of whether people care about them; how it relates to individual experiences.
These framings often present metrics. Mapping these metrics to a decision is not a deterministic process without arbitrarily privileging one or more framings.
An example of a framing is the old LW yarn comparing torture and minor eye irritants.
Where does evidence fit into this?
Evidence is the one thing, the only thing, that can be privileged without allegations of arbitrariness. (That said, evidence of how people experience things is still evidence.)
So, under this framing, a liberal is anyone who tries to capture all these framings (impossible!) and holding that massive ball of contradiction to their aesthetic eye, makes “educated” decisions pertaining to action or inaction, probably following the lessons of rational instrumentality.
So here’s a crazy contention – people who do this tend to, in aggregate, make the same determinations. That’s actually not surprising, given ev. psych.
Is it “correct”? No. There is no “correct.” But it’s a weird thing to argue against, because you’d have to privilege a frame to do it. For example, you could argue for embracing the naturalistic fallacy, because it works, thus, without thought or conscience, privileging your frame over all the anti-rape framings.
How many people that self-identify as liberal would agree that liberalism is “the erosion of the presumption of a privileged ontology”? I would guess < 1%. Also, in what way does the Ten Commandments rely on a “privileged ontology” that human rights does not?
<1%. And that must be accepted as a criticism. However, I would contend that individual liberal battles can readily be perceived as fitting comfortably in this framing.
I imagine you will agree that the concept of “putting presumptions under erasure” is not something that expresses itself well in dialog. You will notice that a hallmark of the occupy movement and human rights is that they are generally used vaguely.
This is because they “happen to categorize” the kinds of policies that are advocated when the rationalization of the status quo is put under erasure.
Now, I’ll acknowledge that this framing fails because clearly powerful international organizations are asserting definitions of human rights.
I will suggest that this is a tool in the service of the paradigm mentioned, and then I’ll acknowledge that this is a fully general counterargument.
And while I’ve explicitly lost the argument, allow me to ask you to hang onto it, because its corpse is still quite useful.
It appears to me that you are not someone who expresses themselves well in dialog.
I shall refrain from imagining that anyone agrees with me.
Except you totally do so imagine, because you could only get away with such dickish social signaling if my communication style was unacceptable in a group context.
Well, I for one agree with you.
It remains to be seen whether the polyamorous community can deal with the complex issues regarding raising children and passing their memes onto them. Judging by what happened to previous attempts my guess is that they’ll fail.