Your sex determines whether you benefit from side A winning, or from side B winning.
No. This sounds like you assume egoistic values, which are often incorrect. As a decision-maker, you benefit to the extent your decisions (in this case, goals about female status) are right. Which decisions are right in this situation is a nontrivial moral and factual question, on the moral question side particularly where egoistic motives can be in conflict with altruistic motives.
Hm, I don’t think my argument requires assuming any values. If you have anatomical feature X, and someone pushes a button to increase the utility of all people having feature X, then you win. Altruism or egoism is just a detail of your utility function.
Based on your comment and this exchange, it’s not clear to anyone what exactly are we talking about (my first question was “What do you mean?” for a reason). The conflict I took as the topic of the conversation is generally the direction of change in balance of influence (i.e. status) between partners or potential partners in a relationship from the default established by social status quo.
If you reason in CDT style, then the only effect of increasing your own influence is improvement of your experience in your present relationship. (Incidentally, I don’t see how your sex is relevant to the character of this activity, the salient category seems to be simply your own person.) This way of thinking seems to explain your discussion in this thread best (correct me if you were in fact assuming something else).
Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex. It would be obvious that the result of such shift is beneficial overall only if you focus primarily on egoistic value effects of its consequences, ignoring the effect lowered background status has on all of women (which is huge scope). This is essentially the sense which I assumed in making this comment. (This works the other way as well, i.e. the effect worsened relationship experience would have on all of men.)
The reason the first looks like the second to me is that from TDT perspective even the personal decisions you make in influencing the course of your own relationship, without intentionally meddling with the global status war, have global effects through decisions made by other people for similar reasons. If you decide to pursue greater influence in your own relationship, this allows you to infer that other people would behave similarly, which makes for a greater damage to opposite sex’s values than just your partner’s.
So even if we make the reasonable assumption that you hold your own immediate preferences in greater value than other people’s, and so you’d be inclined to bargain in your own direction, the combination of possibly greater marginal value of improvement for the other sex with nontrivial scope of the decision makes it non-obvious.
The rest rests on the factual and moral questions of who gets how much greater marginal benefit from shifts in the current default status quo influence. There seem to be convincing arguments for both sexes.
Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex
This is true to the extent that status is your criteria of winning. But while status is an extremely good indicator of what we will act like we wish to maximize it is not always what most satisfies our preferences. In the case of sex, for example, higher relative status tends to reduce interest in sex and makes orgasm more difficult to achieve. (Citation needed—anyone recall the studies in question? Likely also an OB post.)
The background status is not uniform. When females made progress in terms of ability to be seen as good employees/employers, it reduced the relative status of certain male employers/employees, but also increased the relative status of male stay-at-home husbands.
Even in the status game, it doesn’t break down on strict gender lines.
When other factors are looked at, the divisions are even less gender-based. If we have a more formal vs less formal consent process, the winners and losers are probably nearly-evenly divided male/female.
Even in the status game, it doesn’t break down on strict gender lines.
In fact breaking down on strict gender lines is more of an exception than a rule. It is status relative to the others within the same gender that is the most valuable resource.
Yes, I very much agree with this. Changing the status of males vs females is unlikely to change my life much at all. Few (if any) people are likely to change sexual orientation due to that kind of status; the effects on promotion/pay are greatly overemphasized. In contrast, changing the status of various professions, or taking certain people out of the dating pool is extremely relevant.
In third-world countries there is more at stake, of course.
It’s not that simple. For example if taking care about consent means that there’s less sex, but also less drama and trauma among your associates, you might come out ahead.
So, just to unpack this a bit… looking at your comment at the top of this thread, I infer that the sides are “the user of pickup” and “the victim,” and I presume that the user is male and the victim female, and I infer therefore that I (being male) gain a benefit from the user of pickup winning (which I presume means having sex) but no benefit from the victim of pickup winning (which I presume means not having sex).
Did I get that right?
Can you clarify what benefit it is that I’m getting here?
If it matters: I’m fairly certain that all my female sexual partners were setting out to have sex, I’m not quite so certain of that for all of my male sexual partners, and in any case I’m fairly certain of it for all of my partners in the last 15 years or so.
I infer that the sides are “the user of pickup” and “the victim,”
That makes no sense in this context (as established by Nancy’s first mention of sides and cousin_it’s response.) The sides are “those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup” and “those who see nothing wrong with pickup”. With those definitions of the sides, ones sex definitely does not determine which side one is on, but it does have an influence. And “winning” in this war takes the form of marshaling arguments that convince the soldiers of the other side to defect.
The sides are “those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup” and “those who see nothing wrong with pickup”.
Forgive me, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle (it’s possible you do not ascribe to there being just two sides, but you are unclear on this point).
The “sides” as I see it also include, at the very least:
“those who condemn certain common practices of pickup that deliberately harm other people, but are fine with (or even encourage) other practices that are not”
You may be right… the reason I made my inferences explicit was precisely so that we can be clear about this stuff, rather than move forward as if we were talking about the same thing when we aren’t.
That said, I was responding to the sentence: “The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim,” which seemed to be what Nancy was responding to.
If all your female partners were willing, that doesn’t change the fact that you like having sex more than not having sex. Otherwise presumably you would opt out of having sex. I’m not sure what you and Zack_M_Davis are arguing with; perhaps it’s the connotations of my remark, rather than its content? If that’s the case, I assure you I didn’t imply any of the usual connotations, I have more weird ones :-)
Actually, I quite deliberately didn’t argue anything, because I wasn’t even sure that I understood what claim you were making.
Instead, I attempted to make my inferences explicit, asked for confirmation, and asked for clarification on the piece that remained unclear to me. (I’d still sort of like those things.)
So it’s not surprising that you can’t figure out what I’m arguing with, though it’s a little puzzling that you assumed I was arguing with anything at all. Re-reading my comment I’m not sure where you got that idea from.
Anyway: I agree that the willingness of my partners doesn’t change whether I like sex more than no-sex or vice-versa.
And I’m not sure why it matters, but just to be clear: if I take “I like X more than Y” in a situation to mean that I estimate that I prefer the actual X in that situation to the counterfactual Y, then I’ve had sex I liked more than no-sex, I’ve had sex I liked less than no-sex, I’ve had no-sex I liked more than sex, and I’ve had no-sex I liked less than sex.
Edit: Um. Apparently the comment I was replying to got deleted while I was replying to it. Never mind, then?
Sorry, I deleted my comment for approximately the same reasons that you listed here. I often say stupid things and then desperately try to clean them up.
(grin) No worries. I just leave my desperately stupid things out there; I figure in the glorious future when I stop saying stupid things, the contrast will be all the more striking.
Your sex determines whether you benefit from side A winning, or from side B winning.
No. This sounds like you assume egoistic values, which are often incorrect. As a decision-maker, you benefit to the extent your decisions (in this case, goals about female status) are right. Which decisions are right in this situation is a nontrivial moral and factual question, on the moral question side particularly where egoistic motives can be in conflict with altruistic motives.
Hm, I don’t think my argument requires assuming any values. If you have anatomical feature X, and someone pushes a button to increase the utility of all people having feature X, then you win. Altruism or egoism is just a detail of your utility function.
This assumes some correlation between anatomical feature X and a term in a person’s utility function.
Based on your comment and this exchange, it’s not clear to anyone what exactly are we talking about (my first question was “What do you mean?” for a reason). The conflict I took as the topic of the conversation is generally the direction of change in balance of influence (i.e. status) between partners or potential partners in a relationship from the default established by social status quo.
If you reason in CDT style, then the only effect of increasing your own influence is improvement of your experience in your present relationship. (Incidentally, I don’t see how your sex is relevant to the character of this activity, the salient category seems to be simply your own person.) This way of thinking seems to explain your discussion in this thread best (correct me if you were in fact assuming something else).
Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex. It would be obvious that the result of such shift is beneficial overall only if you focus primarily on egoistic value effects of its consequences, ignoring the effect lowered background status has on all of women (which is huge scope). This is essentially the sense which I assumed in making this comment. (This works the other way as well, i.e. the effect worsened relationship experience would have on all of men.)
The reason the first looks like the second to me is that from TDT perspective even the personal decisions you make in influencing the course of your own relationship, without intentionally meddling with the global status war, have global effects through decisions made by other people for similar reasons. If you decide to pursue greater influence in your own relationship, this allows you to infer that other people would behave similarly, which makes for a greater damage to opposite sex’s values than just your partner’s.
So even if we make the reasonable assumption that you hold your own immediate preferences in greater value than other people’s, and so you’d be inclined to bargain in your own direction, the combination of possibly greater marginal value of improvement for the other sex with nontrivial scope of the decision makes it non-obvious.
The rest rests on the factual and moral questions of who gets how much greater marginal benefit from shifts in the current default status quo influence. There seem to be convincing arguments for both sexes.
This is true to the extent that status is your criteria of winning. But while status is an extremely good indicator of what we will act like we wish to maximize it is not always what most satisfies our preferences. In the case of sex, for example, higher relative status tends to reduce interest in sex and makes orgasm more difficult to achieve. (Citation needed—anyone recall the studies in question? Likely also an OB post.)
The background status is not uniform. When females made progress in terms of ability to be seen as good employees/employers, it reduced the relative status of certain male employers/employees, but also increased the relative status of male stay-at-home husbands.
Even in the status game, it doesn’t break down on strict gender lines.
When other factors are looked at, the divisions are even less gender-based. If we have a more formal vs less formal consent process, the winners and losers are probably nearly-evenly divided male/female.
In fact breaking down on strict gender lines is more of an exception than a rule. It is status relative to the others within the same gender that is the most valuable resource.
Yes, I very much agree with this. Changing the status of males vs females is unlikely to change my life much at all. Few (if any) people are likely to change sexual orientation due to that kind of status; the effects on promotion/pay are greatly overemphasized. In contrast, changing the status of various professions, or taking certain people out of the dating pool is extremely relevant.
In third-world countries there is more at stake, of course.
It’s not that simple. For example if taking care about consent means that there’s less sex, but also less drama and trauma among your associates, you might come out ahead.
So if there’s both males and females on sides A and B, what makes it a war between the sexes?
So, just to unpack this a bit… looking at your comment at the top of this thread, I infer that the sides are “the user of pickup” and “the victim,” and I presume that the user is male and the victim female, and I infer therefore that I (being male) gain a benefit from the user of pickup winning (which I presume means having sex) but no benefit from the victim of pickup winning (which I presume means not having sex).
Did I get that right?
Can you clarify what benefit it is that I’m getting here?
If it matters: I’m fairly certain that all my female sexual partners were setting out to have sex, I’m not quite so certain of that for all of my male sexual partners, and in any case I’m fairly certain of it for all of my partners in the last 15 years or so.
That makes no sense in this context (as established by Nancy’s first mention of sides and cousin_it’s response.) The sides are “those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup” and “those who see nothing wrong with pickup”. With those definitions of the sides, ones sex definitely does not determine which side one is on, but it does have an influence. And “winning” in this war takes the form of marshaling arguments that convince the soldiers of the other side to defect.
Forgive me, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle (it’s possible you do not ascribe to there being just two sides, but you are unclear on this point).
The “sides” as I see it also include, at the very least:
“those who condemn certain common practices of pickup that deliberately harm other people, but are fine with (or even encourage) other practices that are not”
You may be right… the reason I made my inferences explicit was precisely so that we can be clear about this stuff, rather than move forward as if we were talking about the same thing when we aren’t.
That said, I was responding to the sentence: “The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim,” which seemed to be what Nancy was responding to.
If all your female partners were willing, that doesn’t change the fact that you like having sex more than not having sex. Otherwise presumably you would opt out of having sex. I’m not sure what you and Zack_M_Davis are arguing with; perhaps it’s the connotations of my remark, rather than its content? If that’s the case, I assure you I didn’t imply any of the usual connotations, I have more weird ones :-)
Actually, I quite deliberately didn’t argue anything, because I wasn’t even sure that I understood what claim you were making.
Instead, I attempted to make my inferences explicit, asked for confirmation, and asked for clarification on the piece that remained unclear to me. (I’d still sort of like those things.)
So it’s not surprising that you can’t figure out what I’m arguing with, though it’s a little puzzling that you assumed I was arguing with anything at all. Re-reading my comment I’m not sure where you got that idea from.
Anyway: I agree that the willingness of my partners doesn’t change whether I like sex more than no-sex or vice-versa.
And I’m not sure why it matters, but just to be clear: if I take “I like X more than Y” in a situation to mean that I estimate that I prefer the actual X in that situation to the counterfactual Y, then I’ve had sex I liked more than no-sex, I’ve had sex I liked less than no-sex, I’ve had no-sex I liked more than sex, and I’ve had no-sex I liked less than sex.
Edit: Um. Apparently the comment I was replying to got deleted while I was replying to it. Never mind, then?
Sorry, I deleted my comment for approximately the same reasons that you listed here. I often say stupid things and then desperately try to clean them up.
(grin) No worries. I just leave my desperately stupid things out there; I figure in the glorious future when I stop saying stupid things, the contrast will be all the more striking.