Pjeby’s working on akrasia? I’ll have to check out his site.
That brings up a related question that I think Eliezer hinted at: what pre-existing bodies of knowledge can we search through for powerful techniques so that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel? Entrepreneurship stuff is one. Lots of people have brought up pick-up artists and poker, so those might be others.
I nominate a fourth that may be controversial: mysticism. Not the “summon demons” style of mysticism, but yoga and Zen and related practices. These people have been learning how to examine/quiet/rearrange their minds and sort out the useful processes from the useless processes for the past three thousand years. Even if they’ve been working off crazy metaphysics, it’d be surprising if they didn’t come up with something. Eliezer talks in mystical language sometimes, but I don’t know whether that’s because he’s studied and approves of mysticism or just likes the feel of it.
What all of these things need is a testing process combined with people who are already high-level enough that they can sort through all the dross and determine which techniques are useful without going native or opening themselves up to the accusation that they’re doing so; ie people who can sort through the mystical/pick-up artist/whatever literature and separate out the things that are useful to rationalists from the things specific to a certain worldview hostile to our own. I’ve seen a few good people try this, but it’s a mental minefield and they tend to end up “going native”.
In the case of pickup literature, there is a lot to attract rationalists, but also a lot to inspire their ire.
The first thing rationalists should notice about pickup is that it wins. There are no other resources in mainstream culture or psychology that are anywhere near as effective. Yet even after witnessing the striking ability of pickup theories to win, I am hesitant to say that they are actually true. For example, I acknowledge the fantastic success of notions like “women are attracted to Alpha Males,” even though I don’t believe that they are literally true, and I know that they are oversimplifications of evolutionary psychology. Consequently, I am an instrumentalist, not a realist, about pickup theories.
If we started a project from scratch where we applied rationality to the domain of sex and relationships, and developed heuristics to improve ourselves in those areas, this project would have a considerable overlap with the teachings of the seduction community. At its best, pickup is “applied evolutionary psychology.” Many of the common criticisms of pickup demonstrate an anger against the use of rationality and scientific thinking in the supposedly sacred and mystical area of sex and romance. Yet it falls prey to certain ideological notions that limit its general innovativeness and empirical exploration, and some of its techniques are morally questionable.
I would be happy to say more on the relationship between pickup and rationality at some point, and you can tell me how much I’ve “gone native.”
Also, since this particular community leans altruistic, I’d hope that such a project would emphasize the future happiness of potential partners more than does (correct me if I’m wrong) the current pickup community.
For example, I acknowledge the fantastic success of notions like “women are attracted to Alpha Males,” even though I don’t believe that they are literally true, and I know that they are oversimplifications of evolutionary psychology.
I tune out wherever I hear the term ‘alpha male’ in that sort of context. The original scientific concept has been butchered and abused beyond all recognition. Even more so the ‘beta’ concept. Beta males are the ones standing right behind the alpha ready to overthrow him and take control themselves. ‘Omega’ should be the synonym for ‘pussy’.
But I must admit the theory is at least vaguely in the right direction and works. Reasonably good as popular science for the general public. Better than what people believe about diet, showering, and dental hygene.
Many of the common criticisms of pickup demonstrate an anger against the use of rationality and scientific thinking in the supposedly sacred and mystical area of sex and romance.
Actually, the best (and most common) criticisms I see are more due to the use of lies and manipulation in the area of sex and romance.
The evo-psych stuff (and thereby any science and rationality) is perfectly fine by me.
You seem to be suggesting that lies and manipulation in pickup serve to lead the target to a desirable outcome they would not deliberately choose, as in humor. I and many others have repeatedly asserted here that this is not the case. There are pickup techniques that are simply not acceptable—attacking self-esteem, manufacturing breakups, etc.
You seem to be suggesting that lies and manipulation in pickup serve to lead the target to a desirable outcome they would not deliberately choose, as in humor. I and many others have repeatedly asserted here that this is not the case.
I assume you mean to include ‘all’ in there. Some pickup practitioners (and pickup strategies) do use lies and manipulation without consideration of whether the outcome is desirable (and the means appropriate.) That is a legitimate concern. It would certainly not be reasonable to assert this is the norm, which you didn’t make clear in your declaration of repeated assertion.
There are pickup techniques that are simply not acceptable—attacking self-esteem
Here it is important not to beware of other optimising. For the average Joe and Jane a courtship protocol that involves attacking each other’s self esteem would just be obnoxious and unpleasant. So I wouldn’t ‘accept’ in that sense self esteem lowering tactics to that kind of target. Yet for particularly high status folks within that kind of social game self-esteem attacks are just how it is played—by both sexes. They attack the heck out of each other with social weapons to assure each other that they have the social prowess to handle each other. And they both love every minute of it. Of course even if you take away 90% of their self esteem they probably still have more that enough left!
The biggest problem with self esteem attacking as a strategy come when clumsy PUAs try to use a tactic that is appropriate for 10s on 6s and 7s (in terms of approximate rank in the dating social hierarchy). That is just unpleasant (not to mention ineffective.) A related problem is confusing gender atypical girl with a gender typical girl (often due to complete ignorance of the possibility of that kind of difference). Again that will be unpleasant for the target in question—instead of exactly what she needs to facilitate a satisfying sexual encounter.
Rather than being ‘simply not acceptable’, pickup techniques that involve attacking self esteem are complexly not acceptable, depending on the context and parties involved.
manufacturing breakups
I am comfortable in labelling individuals who do this as assholes and do anything possible to keep them out of my social circle and generally undermine their status.
You (collectively) need to abandon this soldier.
You collectively? Exactly which collective are you referring to here? It would be reasonable to level the gist of your objection at Vaniver—or at least his specific comment here. But if you mean to level it at the ancestor (by HughRistik) then you are totally missing the mark.
The biggest opportunity to improve discourse on these kind of subjects—and to actually potentially benefit those participating in the dating game—is to abandon judgements on collectives.
I assume you mean to include ‘all’ in there. Some pickup practitioners (and pickup strategies) do use lies and manipulation without consideration of whether the outcome is desirable (and the means appropriate.) That is a legitimate concern. It would certainly not be reasonable to assert this is the norm, which you didn’t make clear in your declaration of repeated assertion.
In context, I was responding to a generalization with a counter based on exceptions to a proposed rule. I agree there is variety within the pickup community. I disagree that it is uniformly a force for good—and thus that opposition to it is based on dislike for science.
Here it is important not to beware of other optimising. For the average Joe and Jane a courtship protocol that involves attacking each other’s self esteem would just be obnoxious and unpleasant. [...]
You’re right. I meant to indicate the case of attacking someone’s self-esteem in order to make them feel bad (and become pliable), rather than to engage them in a duel of wits.
You collectively? Exactly which collective are you referring to here?
The posters on lesswrong who claim that opposition to pickup on lesswrong is due to women being uncomfortable with explicit analysis of social reality, or (relatedly) that pickup is a uniformly altruistic enterprise (wrt sexual partners).
It’s only a judgment on a collective because it’s a judgment on a position, and the collective is people who hold that position.
You’re right. I meant to indicate the case of attacking someone’s self-esteem in order to make them feel bad (and become pliable), rather than to engage them in a duel of wits.
No, I don’t mean duels of wits in that sense. I really do refer to the case of attacking someone’s self esteem to make them become pliable. Not bad per se (that doesn’t help), but less secure and less confident and in general that which is lowering self esteem. The judgement you make of all instances of that behaviour is actually narrowminded in as much as enforcing the judgement would worsen the experiences of life of a whole class of people. And I do not refer to a class denominated by sex.
The posters on lesswrong who claim that opposition to pickup on lesswrong is due to women being uncomfortable with explicit analysis of social reality,
or (relatedly) that pickup is a uniformly altruistic enterprise (wrt sexual partners).
Everyone who does make the claim that pickup is uniformly altruistic is clearly and obviously mistaken. And can look forward to a world of disappointment when they realise their fairytale ideas about romance are absurdly naive. Most people learn the hard way during their teens. (Although nerds tend to take longer on average.)
I’m perfectly willing to abandon this soldier, because I defy the premise that makes it necessary. The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim. If I wanted to make women feel better, I’d just buy them flowers instead of doing pickup.
After asking that cousin_it abandon charged words like “victim” that I suspect he is just using for shock value, I am actually going to rewrite his statement seriously and examine it seriously:
The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the other participant.
On the face of it, this statement might make pickup sound zero-sum, but that’s not the only interpretation. Pickup is about attempting to bring about the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it creates an undesirable outcome for the other person (from their perspective). I would propose a slightly altered summary:
“The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, without harming the other participant.”
You have a comparative advantage for advocating for your own preferences. Social interaction (of which sexuality is only a subset) works best when people advocate for their own preferences, attempting to align others’ preferences with theirs, and without harming others.
Of course, this process is bilateral (which is why I changed “victim” to “participant”), so both participants are actually trying to engineer the outcome towards their preferences at the same time (and also engineer each other’s preferences to align with theirs!). With two people of similar ability, the result will be some sort of intersection or union of their preferences.
But this compromise only comes about when both people mainly advocate for their own preferences. Sexuality and romance are a form of negotiation. Pickup teaches negotiation skills, but it is hardly the only source of them. Many people already have sexual negotiation skills, and certain segments of men may be deficient, which is why pickup is necessary for them.
So yes, the goal is pickup is to advance towards your most desirable outcome… and if you are a decent person, then your most desirable outcome won’t include absolutely trampling over the other person if they are a crappy negotiator and can’t handle you. Simultaneously, the other person’s goal is to advance towards their most desirable outcome.
Unfortunately, the cultural bias towards villainous men abusive damsels in distress makes male sexual negotiation skills seem a lot more suspect than women’s. As I pointed out recently, nobody worries about innocent, insecure beginner PUAs getting used by women for sex and validation… thanks to the unwarranted assumption that PUAs are so far ahead of women in negotiation skill that they are performing some kind of black magic or mind control on women.
If I wanted to make women feel better, I’d just buy them flowers instead of doing pickup.
Personally, I find it much easier to make women feel good through pickup than through flowers.
Social interaction (of which sexuality is only a subset) works best when people advocate for their own preferences, attempting to align others’ preferences with theirs, and without harming others.
This is exactly the kind of argument that I wanted to shoot down.
IMO we shouldn’t have a norm of requiring people to give altruistic justifications whenever they discuss better ways of maximizing their own utility function, even if that utility function may be repugnant to some. Discussions of morality (ends) should not intrude on discussions of rationality (means), especially not here on LW! If you allow a field to develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in, you get something awesome like Schelling, or PUA, or pretty butterflies. If you get stuck discussing morals, you get… nothing much.
If you allow a field to develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in, you get something awesome like Schelling, or PUA, or pretty butterflies. If you get stuck discussing morals, you get… nothing much.
You may be on to something here; this may be a very useful heuristic against which to check our moral intuitions.
On the other hand, one still has to be careful: you probably wouldn’t want to encourage people to refine the art of taking over a country as a genocidal dictator, for example.
On the other hand, one still has to be careful: you probably wouldn’t want to encourage people to refine the art of taking over a country as a genocidal dictator, for example.
Although it is interesting to study in theory. For example, in the Art of War, Laws of Power, history itself or computer simulations. Just so long as it doesn’t involve much real world experimentation. :)
Just so long as it doesn’t involve much real world experimentation. :)
But this is the fundamental problem: you don’t want to let the theory in any field get too far ahead of the real world experimentation. If it does, it makes it harder for the people who eventually do good (and ethical) research to have their work integrated properly into the knowledge. And knowledge that is not based on research is likely to be false. So an important question in any field should be “is there some portion of this that can be studied ethically?”
If we “develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in”, we run the risk of letting theories run wild without sufficient evidence [evo-psych, I’m looking at you] or of relying on unethically-obtained (and therefore less-trustworthy) evidence.
How so? When scientists perform studies, they can sometimes benefit (money, job, or simply reputation) by inventing data or otherwise skipping steps in their research. At other times, they can benefit by failing to publish a result when they can benefit by refraining to publish. A scientist who is willing to violate certain ethical principles (lying, cheating, etc) is surely more willing to act unethically in publishing (or declining to publish) their studies.
Possibly more willing. They might be willing to sacrifice moral standards for the sake of furthering human knowledge that they wouldn’t break for personal gain. It would still be evidence of untrustworthiness though.
I like what you are saying in the second paragraph there… but I also agree with the quote from Hugh. So the whole ‘wanted to shoot down’ part doesn’t seem to fit in between.
I agree with this in the abstract, but in all particular situations the ‘morality’ is part of the content of the ‘utility function’ so is directly relevant to whether something really is a better way of maximizing the utility function.
If you’re talking about behaviors, morality is relevant.
I agree with this in the abstract, but if you adopt the view that morality is already factored into your utility function (as I do), then you probably don’t need to pay attention when other people say your behavior is immoral (as many critics of PUA here do). I think when Alice calls Bob’s behavior immoral, she’s not setting out to help Bob maximize his utility function more effectively, she’s trying to enforce a perceived social contract or just score points.
if you adopt the view that morality is already factored into your utility function
(You are not necessarily able to intuitively feel what your “utility function” specifies, and moral arguments can point out to you that you are not paying attention, for example, to its terms that refer to experience of specific other people.)
I disagree, especially here on Lw! When user-Bob tells user-Alice that her behavior is immoral, he’s probably setting out to help her maximize her utility function more effectively.
Or at least, that’s why I do it. A virtue is a trait of character that is good for the person who has it.
ETA: Otherwise, the argument is fully general. For humanity in general, when Alice says x to Bob, she is trying to enforce a perceived social contract, or score points, or signal tribal affiliation. So, you shouldn’t listen to anybody about anything w.r.t. becoming more instrumentally effective. And that seems obviously wrong, at least here.
I disagree, especially here on Lw! When user-Bob tells user-Alice that her behavior is immoral, he’s probably setting out to help her maximize her utility function more effectively.
My historical observations do not support this prediction.
I submit that if I say, “you should x”, and it is not the case that “x is rational”, then I’m doing something wrong. Your putative observations should have been associated with downvotes, and the charitable interpretation remains that comments here are in support of rationality.
Sure, if you’re willing to hurt people non-consensually to obtain sexual favors from them, then you’re not part of this argument.
I was responding to the notion that pickup is uniformly non-harmful, and that opposition to it is based on a fear of rationality or science or whatever.
Essentially, I was arguing that your position is common.
“Hurting people non-consensually” is an awfully low bar. For example, if you dump someone, you’re hurting them non-consensually.
At this point you may try to invent some deontological rule that would say that hurting people is okay in some contexts but not okay in others. If you’re especially honest, your rule will even have equal real-life impact on men and women, though it seems to be really hard to achieve. But let’s look at the bigger picture instead. Is there any strategy of behavior in love-related matters that is “uniformly non-harmful”?
Anyway, we’re actually arguing for the same thing—the pickup community is not composed of altruists (with regards to their sexual partners).
While that may be the same conte_n_t it seems to be missing valuable conte_x_t. The pickup community is not composed of altruists, but it seems likely to me that anyone who considers themselves an altruist when it comes to romance is self-deceiving.
I can’t speak for the pickup community, but I’m only interested in win/win relationships, which seems to me to be your primary concern. Do either lies or manipulation preclude win-win relationships? No, of course not. Thus, any unqualified complaints about lies or manipulation do not interest me.
I share your low opinion of people who pursue win/lose relationships, and hope they change their ways. But I think that’s where the real issue is.
I’d agree—if one “side” doesn’t have all the facts—it’s harder for them to make an accurate prediction and an effective negotiation and thereby come to an optimal “win”.
There are many kinds of lies, and many kinds of manipulation. Some are healthy, some are unhealthy, and it takes a fair measure of skill and knowledge of the other person to tell them apart. Honesty is the first order approximation to the best policy, but is not the best policy.
Okay, I think that’s simply a definitional disagreement—by altruism I meant “interested in win/win relationships”, basically.
What I take issue with is the idea that
PUA doesn’t prominently involve techniques that preclude win/win or are unconcerned with the difference between win/lose and win/win (e.g. sabotaging existing relationships). That is, manipulation in the “on-net harmful” sense.
therefore, people who have a problem with PUA are just not able to deal with science / analysis.
PUA doesn’t prominently involve techniques that preclude win/win or are unconcerned with the difference between win/lose and win/win (e.g. sabotaging existing relationships). That is, manipulation in the “on-net harmful” sense.
This seems true as an independent premise. (I agree that it does not lead to the conclusion in the second bullet.)
One thing that came up quickly on a cursory search:
http://www.pualingo.com/pua-definitions/boy-friend-destroyer-bfd/
I suppose I should correct myself though—I intended to refer to techniques and attitudes etc. (based on the descriptions of people familiar with the culture, I expect that mysogyny is fairly common, even if not in the majority).
Pardon me Cu. It seems you caught the reply before I deleted it. I had reread the premise in question and noticed it said ‘prominently’ rather than ‘predominantly’. Those two letters make a big difference!
While it is not unlikely that I still disagree on the degree to which kind of behavior is popular within the relevant subculture it certainly wouldn’t be enough to quibble over whether it counts as ‘prominent’. I can just agree that to the extent that such behaviors exist they are undesirable.
A philosophy I hold dear is that it is important not to judge a whole subculture based on the worst traits of those within it. The pickup arts and feminism both have features (and acolytes) that we would do well to be wary of and reject. We don’t want self-centered manipulative misogyny and we don’t want hypocritical sexist judgementalness either (which refers not to the behavior of anyone here but to the analogous extreme fringe in feminism to the extreme fringe in PUA). Instead we want to take the lessons of practical rationality, personal development, overcoming of emotional biases, sexual liberation, social justice, equality and empowerment from both. Perhaps one of the most desirable feature common to both of those subcultures is that they cut through bullshit cultural traditions that serve to hold people back from experiencing life to the fullest.
You mentioned before the necessity to abandon a ‘soldier’ - and that is an important point. There really are bad things related to pickup arts—and one of those is certain behaviors that basically amount to being a bitchy asshole. If someone is so caught up with advocating PUA that they aren’t even willing to admit the legitimate problems that are there then the conversation is doomed and their own cause may be undermined. For this reason it disheartens me when discourse reverts to ‘sides’. Nothing good is likely to come.
The above is why I feel no dissonance at all as I disapprove of and reject the use of bitchy relationship sabotaging tactics and the use of particularly powerful persuasion techniques on vulnerable women while at the same time appreciating and advocating the use of PUA training as a form of healthy personal development that is a net benefit to society in general.
I agree quibbling about precise levels would be pointless, particularly because I couldn’t give good estimates for those precise levels. I emphatically agree that we shouldn’t judge groups by the worst traits they hold within their borders—and in fact, in my research job I am planning to look into some basic pickup literature to see if there’s anything useful (regarding first impressions, specifically), as it is (or so I am told) one of the few places where social interactions are subjected to numerical analysis. (The sociological and psychological research I’ve read has been frustratingly qualitative! It’s almost like it wasn’t intended for use by robots.)
What I am resisting here is the notion, repeated several times in the LW PUA discussion, that the only reason people (or, alternately, women) are uncomfortable with PUA is discomfort with applying analysis to sex and romance.
It sounds like you agree that this isn’t the case (and I imagine you’d agree that it’s dismissive, simplistic, and possibly misogynistic), but it comes up disturbingly often (frequently accompanied by arguments like “manipulation isn’t a precise or universally negative concept → dismiss all claims that some form of manipulation is bad”).
What I am resisting here is the notion, repeated several times in the LW PUA discussion, that the only reason people (or, alternately, women) are uncomfortable with PUA is discomfort with applying analysis to sex and romance.
Just to clarify, who has said that this is the only reason that some people may be uncomfortable with pickup?
manipulation isn’t a precise or universally negative concept → dismiss all claims that some form of manipulation is bad
Many important concepts aren’t precisely defined, yet they are still meaningful (e.g. status). We shouldn’t throw out these concepts. Yet sometimes we should try to nail them down a bit more precisely and examine the intuitions behind them.
I’ve been trying to figure out what people actually mean by “manipulation” on LW, and the ethical theory behind it, but I haven’t had much success. I don’t want to make people abandon it, because I think that it is a meaningful concept. I’ve proposed my own definition: “unethical social influence.” But I am a bit disappointed that people constantly fling it around without examining it.
My worry is that it is used overbroadly, constraining the personal development of people who need to intentionally learn social skills. Furthermore, I feel that some behaviors get tagged as “manipulation” when they are analogous to other behaviors that are considered ethical: it’s just that people are accustomed to one, and not the other.
And I think people just intentional social influence too harshly when calling it manipulation, and/or don’t judge unintentional social influence harshly enough. (Didn’t learn social skills by age 18? Too bad… if you try now, you’ll be manipulating people, so stop trying to get above your station, and return to the back of the bus.)
Finally, the charge of “manipulation” often seems directed to social influence that is framed in a way that triggers a disgust heuristic. I’m not claiming that the disgust heuristic is the entire reason that people use the word manipulation, and disgust can be a pointer to a valid argument, but I do see people getting icked out by social influence around sex, intentional social influence, or social influence that they haven’t seen before or don’t understand very well.
Just to clarify, who has said that this is the only reason that some people may be uncomfortable with pickup?
Vaniver did, at least by negligence when making oversimplified replies. The rest of this group seems to be populated by straw men. Conveniently demonstrated as a reply to you here by taryneast. That is one issue that is mentioned at times by yourself and others but certainly never as ‘the only’ - which is what you would be being condemned for. Chances are I have mentioned the subject myself—and it is so in keeping with the entirety of OvercomingBias that I don’t even recall whether Robin Hanson has said anything directly.
Didn’t learn social skills by age 18? Too bad… if you try now, you’ll be manipulating people, so stop trying to get above your station, and return to the back of the bus.
Of course, back when I was in school the back of the bus was where all the cool kids got to sit. In fact, when I managed to get myself to the back seat of the bus it was much easier to flirt with my female fellow passengers. I was the impressive senior back-seat-sitting cool guy after all!
Just to clarify, who has said that this is the only reason that some people may be uncomfortable with pickup?
Um… you did. See the comment that I originally replied to. I quote:
Many of the common criticisms of pickup demonstrate an anger against the use of rationality and scientific thinking in the supposedly sacred and mystical area of sex and romance.
and also
I’ve been trying to figure out what people actually mean by “manipulation” on LW, and the ethical theory behind it, but I haven’t had much success.
Well, in response to one of cousin_it’s comments, I’ve given my own definition:
“deliberately doing something with the intent to hurt a person (without their consent) and thereby to gain advantage over them”
It’s pretty clear cut what does and does not count as “unethical” here.
Furthermore, I feel that some behaviors get tagged as “manipulation” when they are analogous to other behaviors that are considered ethical: it’s just that people are accustomed to one, and not the other.
Can you give me some examples of these behaviours?
Please note: I am quite interested in a lot of the analysis-side of PUA—I am totally unopposed to guys gaining more confidence, understanding and social skill—especially through analysis of what actually makes women happy and how guys can go about gaining it. I just don’t like the Dark Arts parts of it. I think it can be performed with win-win in mind. No manipulation necessary.
I’d love to hear the opposite side too. Is there an equivalent PUA community for women? if not—why not?
What I am resisting here is the notion, repeated several times in the LW PUA discussion, that the only reason people (or, alternately, women) are uncomfortable with PUA is discomfort with applying analysis to sex and romance.
Just to clarify, who has said that this is the only reason that some people may be uncomfortable with pickup?
Um… you did. See the comment that I originally replied to. I quote:
Many of the common criticisms of pickup demonstrate an anger against the use of rationality and scientific thinking in the supposedly sacred and mystical area of sex and romance.
(emphasis added)
That comment does not state that it is the only reason some people are uncomfortable with pickup—rather, it says that it is demonstrated in many of the common criticisms, which is quite different.
ETA: BTW, that’s an American ‘quite’ - I meant “which is very different”.
Ok I’ll restate the actual point that I believe CuSithBell was trying to make:
What I am resisting here is the notion, repeated several times in the LW PUA discussion, that the main reason people (or, alternately, women) are uncomfortable with PUA is discomfort with applying analysis to sex and romance.
Emphasis added to make the point.
And I might point out that I feel it’s a case of Logical Rudeness (on the part of HughRistik) to jump on the single word “only” and totally ignore the rest of the point being made here. Which is why I countered with a quote directly from his own previous comment.
When you use a word like ‘only’, you’re inviting that sort of interpretation. I read your statement and it seemed like you meant it literally, that is, “I’m resisting the interpretation that there are not other reasons at all...”, and I read the response as confused because nobody said anything about there being no other reasons.
Even if HughRistik was being in some way uncharitable, I fail to see how it’s an instance of Logical Rudeness, as it was a matter of correctly parsing your statement, rather than changing his position in the middle of an argument.
Whether somebody says “only” or says “mainly” shouldn’t matter too much, if the main point is actually something else entirely. In this case—the main point was about “what it is that upsets people about PUA”, not whether it’s the main point, or the only point that upsets people.
From my reading of CuSithBell’s comment—I think she said “only” but probably meant “mainly”—and thus jumping on the word “only” makes HughRistik’s comment seem like he was jumping on a side-point to avoid the main issue
Yes, on this site, using “only” to mean “mainly” opens you up to the kind of jumping-on that is common on this site… but I believe Logical Rudeness includes the situation where you jump onto a side-point at the expense of the main point. That’s why I mentioned it.
That said, I totally believe that we all should use the more correct word. If CuSithBell really meant “mainly” instead of “only” then that’s what she should have said to be more precise.
I restated and re-worded what she said because what I am most interested in is exactly what she said… with only one word of difference that does not (in my view) change anything from the Main Point.
Because they are busy being feminists instead? (But more serious factors are the relative ease at finding a willing mate and qualitatively different consequences for being a poor player at the social game.)
Just to clarify, who has said that this is the only reason that some people may be uncomfortable with pickup?
Well, let’s see. This seems to be an argument against the notion that there are other considerations. This comment regards removing such a claim from the top-level post, and repeats the claim. Here is another one.
I know that earlier in this thread you pointed out this aspect of distaste with PUA, but acknowledged more legitimate criticisms as well.
I’ve been trying to figure out what people actually mean by “manipulation” on LW [...]
Suppose someone said that people are uncomfortable with discussions on how to rape people on lesswrong because of discomfort with science, I explained that that wasn’t the part that bothered me, and they replied by saying that consent is sort of a thorny issue, one that’s imprecisely defined and entangled with other complex concepts. Sure, fine, but that’s missing the point.
In these contexts, I use ‘manipulation’ the same way you suggest, and often qualify it with additional terms - ‘harmful’, ‘dark arts’, etc. - to clarify.
The wider meaning of manipulation I take to mean a collection of behaviors of varying levels of sinister-ness which may or may not be deliberate. In this less serious sense, both learned and innate social skills involve some level of manipulation.
I still think, just as you do if I recall correctly, that some aspects of pickup practice and culture are extremely undesirable—my main point is that attributing people’s discomfort with this to unrelated matters is disingenuous and unhelpful.
Does this sound fair and reasonable?
Edit: My choice of analogy was poor, and I withdraw it completely. In its place, consider “People ( / Women) don’t become card counters because they don’t like math.”
Suppose someone said that people are uncomfortable with discussions on how to rape people on lesswrong because of discomfort with science, I explained that that wasn’t the part that bothered me, and they replied by saying that consent is sort of a thorny issue, one that’s imprecisely defined and entangled with other complex concepts. Sure, fine, but that’s missing the point.
I don’t accept this analogy, because it places pickup techniques as analogous to rape. Your analogy shows more about the potential ugh fields that people may have around pickup.
What actually occurs is that pickup is mentioned, and someone says that pickup (or some pickup techniques) are “manipulative.” In that case, it is perfectly reasonable to attempt to approach an agreed upon conceptualization of “manipulation.”
In these contexts, I use ‘manipulation’ the same way you suggest, and often qualify it with additional terms - ‘harmful’, ‘dark arts’, etc. - to clarify.
I still think, just as you do if I recall correctly, that some aspects of pickup practice and culture are extremely undesirable
Yes.
my main point is that attributing people’s discomfort with this to unrelated matters is disingenuous and unhelpful.
I’m not sure that some critics of pickup are only uncomfortable with the parts of pickup that I would stipulate as undesirable; their views seem to be broader and more sweeping.
I would simply maintain that some people’s discomfort with a scientific/rational approach to dating underlies some criticisms of pickup. Does that sound fair?
For instance, I’ve seen many criticisms that are uncomfortable with analysis used as the foundation for an intentional approach (though I’m not sure if I’ve seen that particular one on LW). Edit: example:
By moving from incidental to intentional you’re changing the dynamic. You’re no longer pursuing the relationship between two people but a specific agenda designed around realizing the needs and desires of one.
That person believe that as soon as you start being intentional, you are suddenly being selfish… which makes absolutely no sense.
As another example, I think that some women here are uncomfortable that certain default pickup behaviors are counter to their own preferences… while not recognizing that the priors of PUAs (acting on limited information) are highly influenced by the preferences of other women with dramatically different phenotypes.
I don’t accept this analogy, because it places pickup techniques as analogous to rape. Your analogy shows more about the potential ugh fields that people may have around pickup.
The analogy is accurate, you’re just being irrational as an emotional reaction to its content.
[Only, that sort of response is condescending and insulting.]
What actually occurs is...
I’m sure that does happen. It’s not the topic under discussion. Yes, there are nuances and shades of gray and people with incorrect opinions and people uncomfortable with explicit analysis of social phenomena.
There are also people here on lesswrong who say that the reason people in general (or women in general) are uncomfortable with pickup is because of such discomfort with analysis. That is also “what actually happens”, and it is explicitly what I have been talking about this whole time.
(I guess I shouldn’t have used rape in the analogy. The point of it was to illustrate the content of the discourse, not to compare the topics. It would work equally well if it were, say… “People who don’t move to Vegas and become card counters avoid it because they dislike math.” Or something.)
Edit: I withdraw the analogy as noted above, and apologize.
The analogy is accurate, you’re just being irrational as an emotional reaction to its content.
You said:
Suppose someone said that people are uncomfortable with discussions on how to rape people on lesswrong because of discomfort with science, I explained that that wasn’t the part that bothered me, and they replied by saying that consent is sort of a thorny issue, one that’s imprecisely defined and entangled with other complex concepts. Sure, fine, but that’s missing the point.
In a discussion on LW about how to rape people, the nuances of consent would indeed be a distraction, but only if there was a consensus that the behavior is rape. So I thought that by making pickup analogous to rape, you were presenting it an something that everyone ought to recognize as wrong, such that debating the concept of “manipulation” would be missing the point. That’s what objected to in your analogy.
If there wasn’t a consensus about whether the behavior was rape, then discussing the concept of consent actually would be a great way to approach the disagreement, and it would not be missing the point. But if that’s what you meant, then I don’t know why you made the analogy, because it proves my point, not yours.
(As an example: perhaps 24⁄7 BDSM relationships were under discussion, where the submissive partner gives consent at the beginning of the relationship. Someone might say that the submissive partner is being raped. It would then be perfectly appropriate to discuss the view of consent behind that criticism, and whether someone can consensually give away power at the beginning of a relationship.)
There are also people here on lesswrong who say that the reason people in general (or women in general) are uncomfortable with pickup is because of such discomfort with analysis. That is also “what actually happens”, and it is explicitly what I have been talking about this whole time.
To the extent that people hold this view, I disagree with them. After looking at your three links, this interpretation is only plausible for the first link, and even then I would want that poster to clarify before starting a hype train.
I apologize for my metaphor. It was poorly chosen. I let my desire to make a point forcefully overcome my sense of decency. It is retracted. Perhaps you could consider the card-counting metaphor in its place.
If there wasn’t a consensus about whether the behavior was rape, then discussing the concept of consent actually would be a great way to approach the disagreement, and it would not be missing the point.
The point is that there was a mis-attribution regarding the reasons to object. There is even what seems to be a general consensus that these reasons are legitimate (see cousin_it’s posts, or your own criticisms of PUA).
After looking at your three links, this interpretation is only plausible for the first link, and even then I would want that poster to clarify before starting a hype train.
The posts in the second and third links are part of a larger discussion. In context, the discussion goes something like—“It’s not that women don’t like analysis, it’s that they don’t like PUA” is followed by “Of course they don’t, people don’t like analysis”, then “I don’t dislike analysis” is followed by “no one dislikes analysis, they just become angry when observing it.” I made the above claim then, and no one denied it.
If you are skeptical of my point, I would like to request a summary of said point adjoining a response, if possible.
As an example: perhaps 24⁄7 BDSM relationships were under discussion, where the submissive partner gives consent at the beginning of the relationship. Someone might say that the submissive partner is being raped. It would then be perfectly appropriate to discuss the view of consent behind that criticism, and whether someone can consensually give away power at the beginning of a relationship.
Would such an arrangement typically involve safe words or would the knowledge of that power of injunction destroy the thrill the experience for the subordinate partner?
First, the technique: I don’t see a problem with the BFD. One who is satisfied cannot be seduced. The other man loses, but any success in romance is necessarily a loss for one’s competitors. (There’s even a reminder that cheating on her while she’s still dating the guy could hurt him deeply.)
Which makes me somewhat skeptical about the attitudes: I expect the prevalence of misogyny in the PUA is far above what I’d like it to be. But from everything I’ve seen, most of their rancor is pointed at the guys they feel superior to, not their targets. That they’ve attempted to put women under a microscope and figure out what they respond best to seems like it will make them interact with women better. A general improvement in the game of men should also correspond to a general improvement in the lives of women, as relationship satisfaction will increase.
That is, could this be base rate neglect? It’s unfortunate, but a lot of men are misogynists.
Erm, this statement is clearly false as soon as you reflect on it?
Personally, if I was going to come up with a clever rationalization for BFDs, it would be something like, “Any boyfriend who keeps her locked up in a closed relationship must clearly be a patriarchal bastard.”
Personally, if I was going to come up with a clever rationalization for BFDs, it would be something like, “Any boyfriend who keeps her locked up in a closed relationship must clearly be a patriarchal bastard.”
Only allowed if the BFD actually personally uses that justification in the course of persuading a woman to leave her boyfriend for him.
Erm, this statement is clearly false as soon as you reflect on it?
Are you skilled at either seduction or being satisfied?
I have reflected upon it, and it still seems to me to be true. Perhaps rewording it will reveal our disagreement; what do you think of “Satisfaction is the best defense against seduction”?
First, the technique: I don’t see a problem with the BFD. One who is satisfied cannot be seduced. The other man loses, but any success in romance is necessarily a loss for one’s competitors. (There’s even a reminder that cheating on her while she’s still dating the guy could hurt him deeply.)
As they say, ‘all is fair in love and war’. There is a lot to that sentiment and there is only so much use in judging people for acting in self interest in an inherently self interested game. But do you know another thing that has traditionally been fair in love and war? Killing anyone who is a clear threat to your territory. So challenging these guys to duels to the death isn’t legal any more but this is certainly a behavior that I would want to see prevented by cooperative collective punishment if it is possible. Because I don’t want that crap anywhere near me.
(Note: I make no distinction as to whether the perpetrators learned BFDs explicitly, whether they are naturally inclined that way or they learned it on ‘desperate housewives’. Or, for that matter, whether it is a male or female doing the aggressive seduction of the non-single target. Although I probably would be squeamish about challenging the girl to a duel to the death.)
One who is satisfied cannot be seduced.
Pffft. Nonsense. They can so. Maybe you just need to spend some more manipulative effort making them feel like they are unsatisfied. Or distracting them from that which was satisfying sufficiently. If you are going to go around seducing women who have boyfriends don’t try to sugar coating it by pretending it always means that the relationship was unsatisfying.
Killing anyone who is a clear threat to your territory.
Hence why one should attempt to induce the girl to break up with her boyfriend, rather than attempt to induce her to cheat on him. As you point out, that has a distressingly high chance of ending in murder.
If you are going to go around seducing women who have boyfriends don’t try to sugar coating it by pretending it always means that the relationship was unsatisfying.
I don’t swing that way. Regardless, I suspect our disagreements about the axiom are definitional. The terrible thing about satisfaction is that it is relative; it seems fair to say that one who willingly ends a relationship does it because it is unsatisfying. If it was made unsatisfying because one put forward a better offer, I have a hard time seeing that as villainous. (If one is fraudulent about the quality of the offer, that fraud is villainous- but that’s a separate issue from the BFD.)
“Hurting people non-consensually” is an awfully low bar. For example, if you dump someone, you’re hurting them non-consensually.
Sure thing—that can probably be easily re-phrased to “deliberately doing something with the intent to hurt a person (without their consent) and thereby to gain advantage over them”
Breakups do not fit the above as you are not generally breaking up with a person for the express purpose of hurting them—it’s kind of collateral damage, and leads to a better situation for both in the long run.
and leads to a better situation for both in the long run
This is often not true. Look at all the people who have killed themselves over a breakup.
it’s kind of collateral damage
So is hurting a woman in order to have sex with her. Hurting people is rarely a terminal goal.
In general, as a consequentialist I find it hard to care about intent. It seems you’re trying to invent a new deontological rule, but I don’t understand why it should be adopted.
You and I disagree about whether this is collateral damage, not because we have a different definition of collateral damage, but because we disagree about whether there is intent in this situation.
If the end-goal is to have sex with a woman, and you choose to hurt this woman to gain it, then her being hurt is part of the plan—and is thus intentional. It is an important sub-goal of the main plan, which is what makes it intentional.
You could have instead chosen to buy her flowers, flatter her, or to choose a different woman (one that does not need hurting for you to gain the end-goal of sex). The presence of acceptable alternatives is one reason why I consider this situation to not be a case of mere collateral damage, but of intent.
So, I realize this is completely tangential to your main point, but: if the army launches an attack against a military target that happens to be located in a civilian neighborhood, knowing perfectly well as they do so that civilians are going to be killed in the process, I’d consider that a pretty good example of both collateral and intentional damage.
Yep—I agree. It’s a classic case that covers both ends of the spectrum.
It also only tends to trip up people that fall for the fallacy of the excluded middle ;)
In this case, it matches my pattern of “intentional damage” and therefore ethically questionable, in my opinion.
That’s not to say that if more evidence came up eg information about how it’s the only alternative, or if the “greater good” outweighed the downsides… it might still be the only preferable choice… but in any case, I’d take a strong interest in the ethics involved before making the decision if I were put in that position.
“unintentionally” in my head means literally “done with intent”.
Ie, if I decide “I hate Joe Bloggs” and then I get in my car, drive until I see him walking alongside the road and intentionally choose to jump the curb and run him over—then I would say that I intentionally killed Joe Bloggs because that is the outcome that I intended to happen.
however—if instead, I get in my car, and am driving down the road, my brakes fail and I see a whole classful of schoolchildren crossing the road… and my only option to not kill them is to jump the curb, which I do… but Joe Bloggs happens to be there and I see that he’s there and choose one death over many…
Well—I would consider that him being killed was unintentional. The main intent of my action was not “I want Joe Bloggs dead” but “I want not to kill the schoolchildren”. It was unintentional to my main aim.
It does seem to—which made me think about exactly which cases I’d consider one or the other. So here goes again… :)
In the example above—I am trying avoid causing hurt to the children—therefore if I hurt one person because it’s the only way to avoid hurting multiple people, it is ethically-difficult… but, in my head, ok in the end because the re is no other option available. If you had the opportunity to choose even less collateral damage (eg slamming on the brakes) you would do so.
In the case of intentionally hurting one woman in order to gain advantage for onself—this does not apply. Especially because you are intentionally hurting another person to help onseself—the sex is the eventual goal… but the hurt is chosen as a necessary step for that goal—there are no other means being considered.
In the case of breaking up with a person—you are intending that you and they not be with one another anymore—you are not hurting them with the intent to hurt them—therefore the “collateral damage” is unintentional. - Also the expectation is that you will both be better off apart (on average). Yes, there are rare cases where an unstable person will not recover… but on average I’d say that if you were trying to have a relationship with the kind of person that was suicidal—you might be better off not being with them… that is obviously an ethical dilemma that will never be covered by a cut-and-dried rule.… but I can safely say that in my head—if I were to leave somebody whom I suspected to be suicidal—I’d be leaving them, not with the intent that they choose to commit suicide—therefore the harm would be unintentional (also, I’d make sure to call somebody that could help them with their suicidal tendencies… but that’s by-the-by).
As to the case where we’re deliberately choosing to kill people that are located in a civilian location… I’d consider it ethically questionable, because you are deliberately choosing to kill people… not just to avoid killing other people (as in the schoolchildren case).
There is intent to kill—even if these particular people are not part of the main intent.
I’d consider it less ethically questionable if they found a way to try to kill these targets without damage to the surrounding areas.
… in fact, in thinking more, I think a big differene is the actual intent itself. Are you trying to Gain by the hurt, or to Reduce a Bad Thing?
I think it’s more ok to hurt to reduce a worse Bad Thing, than it is to simply Gain something that you’d otherwise not have.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that more pain is bad, and less pain is good. (You already seem to be assuming this, which is fine, I just want to make it explicit.)
Most of these examples are cases of evaluating which available option results in less pain, and endorsing that option. This seems straightforward enough given that assumption.
The example of breaking up with someone is not clearly a case of that, which sounds like the reason you tie yourself in knots trying to account for it.
So, OK… let me approach that example from another direction. If I suffer mildly by staying with my partner, and my partner suffers massively by my leaving him, and the only rule we have is “more suffering is worse than less suffering,” then it follows that I should stay with my partner.
Would you endorse that conclusion?
If not, would you therefore agree that we need more than just that one rule?
Suffering mildly by staying one a person is one thing—but what I had in mind while thinking of that example is that breaking up is painful, but over quickly—whereas staying on in a relationship that isn’t working is bad for both partners—not just the one leaving. - and lasts for a long time (probably decades if you keep at it).
The one that would be “happy if you just suffered quietly a little” can also be not as happy as they would be if the relationship ended and they found somebody that really wanted to be with them. oh, and it isn’t always just a little suffering involved for the wanting-to-leave partner. Plus the factor that perhaps the one wanting to leave may be wanting to make a third person happy…
Of course, if it’s just a small inconvenience to one person—then I wouldn’t advocate breaking up at all. Relationships are “about” compromise on the small things to gain over the long term.
Obviously it all depends on circumstance and we cannot make a single rule to fit all possible permutations...
“unintentionally” in my head means literally “done with intent”.
I’m going to assume you mean “without,” here.
It’s not how I use the word, but yes, it makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
That said, to go back to the original example… if you consider “hurting a woman in order to have sex with her” a pretty good example of intentional damage.… it follows that the main aim in that example is not to have sex, but to cause pain?
Oh—and in any case—thanks for asking these questions. It’s helping me clear up what’s in my head at least a little. I appreciate not only that you are asking—but also that you’re asking in a way that is quite… erm approachable? not-off-putting perhaps? :)
Yep, good catch. bad (ok, non-existent) proof-reading on my part. :)
And you’re right—nutting it out a bit more has made me think more about what I consider intentional or not—and also what the main intent is or not.
In the case of “hurting a woman to have sex”—you are deliberately choosing to hurt her to gain. I think the difference is that the intentionally “hurting a woman to have sex” is more pre-meditated than having no choice but to jump the curb and kill one person instead of many.
Goals build on other goals. Your end-goal is to have sex… but if you make it your temporary goal to reduce her self-esteem to make the main goal more likely, then you are intending her to be hurt, in order to further your goal.
In the case of, say, jumping the curb to avoid children your main goal is avoiding children… jumping the curb is not something you choose as a sub-goal… if there were any other way—you’d choose that instead. It’s not a goal in and of itself, it’s your last possible resort—not your best possible choice.
Anyway—not sure I’m being very clear here—either with you, or in my head. This is the kind of thing that is difficult to extract from one’s emotions. I know there’s been some psychological research on this kind of thing—and AFA my fuzzy memory serves—it’s fairly common to see a moral difference between the “intending to hurt somebody to further a goal” vs “unintentionally having to choose to hurt somebody to help something worse not happen” situation.
I don’t think there is a clear dividing line here—because there a confounding of what’s “moral/ethical” with whats “intentional”.. I think there are two things tangled together that are difficult to separate. I get the feeling that I’m trying to define both at once.
In my head now is that “intentional is generally non-ethical” “unintentional is generally less unethical… but it depends on the main goal and whether or not you are trying to gain, or reduce Bad Things...” :)
I agree with you that this discussion is unhelpfully confounding discussions of intention with discussions of right action, and it also seems to be mingling both with a deontological/consequentialist question.
For my own part, I would say that if I have the intention to perform an act and subsequently perform that act, the act was intentional. If I perform the act knowing that certain consequences are likely, and those consequences occur, then the consequences were intentional.
If the consequences are good ones and I believed at the time that I performed the act that those consequences were good ones, then the resulting good was also intentional.
All of this is completely separate from the question of what acts are good and what acts aren’t and how we tell the difference.
And just to be clear: you say that if Sam does the latter and Pat does the former, Sam has done something worse (or less permissable, or more culpable, or something like that) than Pat, even though the girl is just as hurt in both cases.
Mainly because in most RL situations, it’s a choice between: “girl might get hurt in the backlash” and “girl definitely will be hurt”.
In my head it feels like the difference between manslaughter and murder. Collateral damage versus target.
Even though the person is still dead—a person that negligently kills somebody is an idiot that really needs to clean up their act, but still might be an ok person (as long as you don’t trust them with anything important). Whereas a murderer is somebody you wouldn’t want to be alone with… ever.
Back to PU—the guy who accidentally hurts a girl while earnestly trying to have sex with her is a bit of a social klutz… but the guy who actively hurts a girl to have sex with her is somebody I would not trust and would actively un-invite from all my social dealings.
I actually think the critical issue with pick-up is where the benefits go. In the trolley problem five lives is almost tautologically worth more than one life—in pick-up, though, it’s pushing the fat man in front of trolley … to get laid. Okay, it’s not a fat man’s death in pick-up, but who can say that the girl’s suffering is worth the sexual pleasure? Well, it might be possible to determine, but all of us are culturally programmed to definitely not trust the one guy that benefits to evaluate the situation fairly.
Pick-up artists look sleazy because we don’t trust them to make the right decision with such incentives looming. I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with whether the act is wrong or whether it just causes some wrong consequences. Well, to the extent that it does, I think that this issue muddies the water. From your own post, even, actions of the permissible type in trolley problems still count as manslaughter.
Ah—you said just what I was thinking (and much better). Yes, totally agree. There’s a big difference if the action is taken for personal gain, rather than some other reason.
I certainly agree that the lower chance of causing harm is preferably to the higher chance of causing harm.
That said, I prefer to simply say that, and I mostly consider all this talk of intentionality and collateral damage to muddy the waters unnecessarily in this case.
Anyway. My social/moral intuitions are similar to yours, for what that’s worth.
That said, I also know someone who has accidentally killed (been driving a car in front of which someone walked), and I know someone who has deliberately killed (fired a bullet from a gun into another person), and when I think about those actual people I find I trust the latter person more than the former (and I trust both of them more-than-baseline).
So I don’t put a lot of confidence in my social/moral intuitions in this area.
Hmmm—interesting point with the guy who killed. As I mentioned before—I don’t think there’s one rule to rule them all”.
In my mind, “targetted” is worse than “non-targetted” but there are mitigating circumstances due to other social rules (eg “person B is a policeman killing a dangerous guy waving a loaded gun at a crowd” is less worse than “drunk-driver that killed a guy on the road”)
Was your person B killing for the purposes of personal gain? I think that may tip the balance for me. In a pure application of just the rule we’ve been discussing—if the “action” performed was purely for personal gain, then I’d hold person B more culpable than person A (though A’s not off the books entirely).
Well, so, first off, I do not have privileged access to person B’s purposes. So the most honest answer to your question is “How would I know?”
But, leaving that aside and going with inferences… well, my instinct is to assume that he wasn’t. But, thinking about that, it’s pretty clear to me that what underlies that instinct is something like “I like person B and consider him a decent chap. A priori, a decent chap would not kill someone else for the purposes of personal gain. Therefore, person B did not kill for the purposes of personal gain.”
Which makes me inclined to discard that instinct for purposes of analysis like this.
Person B was a soldier at the time, and the act was a predictable consequence of becoming a soldier. And at least one of the reasons he became a soldier in the first place was because being a soldier provided him with certain benefits he valued. But there were no particular gains that derived from the specific act of killing.
So… I dunno… you tell me? He received personal gains from being in the environment that led him to pull the trigger, and was aware that that was a plausible consequence of being in that environment, so I guess I’d say that yes, he killed for purposes of personal gain, albeit indirectly.
But I suspect you’re now going to tell me that, well, if he was a soldier in a military action, that’s different. Which it may well be.
Mostly, I think the “for purposes of personal gain” test just isn’t very useful, in that even my own purposes are cognitively impenetrable most of the time, and other people’s purposes are utterly opaque to me.
Yes, that one definitely sounds like it falls into grey area. I think the “gain” one only works well if the personal gain is clear-cut. It’s a heuristic, not a hard-edged rule
eg killing somebody to gain their money (to spend on beer and hookers) is generally considered wrong. Killing somebody to stop the performing other bad acts is generally less so. Killing somebody to gain their money to buy medicine for the sick… who knows?
I get the feeling that the rules have a fuzzy-edge so that we can deal with the human-error-margin involved. As you say—often we can only guess at the real motives behind other people’s actions—and our guesses may well be wrong. It means we’re open to interpreting things because we want them a certain way, rather than because they definitely are, but it’s possibly the best we can do with the information we have.
Sure, if we try to come up with hard-edged rules at the level of the superficial form of the act (e.g., “don’t kill people”), we wind up in a huge tangle because of the “human error margin”—that is, the complexity of behavior.
For legal purposes we have to do it that way, and law is consequently a huge tangle.
For purposes of figuring out what the right thing to do next is, I mostly think it’s the wrong way to go about it altogether.
I agree with what you say here, but think that in my mind, there is one more dividing line—that I think Marius comment has made clearer to me. that being a narrowing-down of your own definition of “intentional”, but only including those acts where you are particularly seeking to enact an action that causes harm.
Perhaps there are two uses of “intentional”—the definition you’ve given, and the extra definition that I also use (I kinda use both depending on context).
Intentional-1: In the process of my actions, I choose an act that I’m pretty sure I know of the consequences (in this case harmful).
Intentional-2: I “with intent” seek out a particular act whose consequences I know are harmful—I intend to cause those consequences.
One question that might help you clarify: Fundamentally, is the divide in your head “more interested in taking steps to promote the side effect or in taking steps to avoid it” or “seems to consider the side effect acceptable”?
I think the example of a drunk driver might be an accessible one. Your goal is to get yourself and your car home; your intention is not to hit anyone. In fact, you’d be extremely sad if you hit someone, and would be willing to take some steps to avoid doing so. You drive anyway.
Do you put the risky driving in your intentional category? If you think intentionality means “treats it as a thing to seek rather than to avoid where convenient”, the risk is unintentional. If you think intentionality means “seems to consider the side effect acceptable”, then the risk is intentional because you weren’t willing to sober up, skip drinking, or take a cab.
Thats a very good question, I think your “treats it as a thing to seek” is a good dividing line.
I will admit that I have not fully explored all the grey-areas here before, and was even unsure if there was a strict dividing line—but what you have said here rings true in the cases we’ve considered here.
In the case of hurting a woman to have sex—you are intentionally seeking to hurt her as the path to your objective. In the case of the car-jumping, you are not seeking to have the guy killed. On drunk-driving, I think you are being negligent, but not intentionally seeking to hurt somebody.
There is already a common deontological rule that one should adopt appropriate caution. “Appropriate caution” allows one to break up with people under most circumstances, but my limited understanding of pickup sounds closer to “recklessness”.
I wasn’t actually telling other people to adopt my rule, in fact it isn’t even a rule. Other people might call it a part of the social contract. I’d consider it to be an overwhelmingly useful heuristic for getting along in society. One example of a pathalogical case does not overbalance the majority of cases where it holds true.
If you are only interested in the consequences for you and haven’t figured out why it’s sometimes good for you to behave according to the social contract, then that’s your choice. But my choice is not to trust you or anybody like you… which is kind of the whole point of this argument.
The consequence for you is that other people watch your actions (or even just your words in this case) and no longer trust or respect you.
That has it’s own further consequences down the line. If those further consequences later impinge upon your utility (eg help that you need but is not extended to you), then it would be worth considering adopting “my” rule.
That doesn’t seem to be true either. To take an extreme example, being a compulsive liar who enjoys telling falsehoods for fun is one of the “dark triad” of male qualities that are exceptionally attractive for females. The reputational knock-on effects aren’t enough to balance things out.
The reputational knock-on effects aren’t enough to balance things out.
How can you be sure? You may well be noticing the successful compulsive liars (at least, the less subtle ones) and not noticing the guys who told one lie too many to the wrong people in their lives.
It is normally difficult enough to avoid selection bias, but there’s the additional difficulty here that a disproportionate number of the unsuccessful ones are located in prison.
So this brings up one of the questions I wonder if PUAs can answer: do you have any kind of metric capable of telling whether something is attractive for “females” or for “the kind of females PUAs find easy targets”? It was obvious when I did my psychiatry rotation that the Cluster B personality disorder patients found themselves drawn to one another. Is the Dark Triad good for picking up women who aren’t Cluster B, or primarily for picking up women who are? Or at least, are there tools available to actually answer that question?
Edit: this comment is in reply to wording that cousin_it has now removed from his comment. You can get the gist from the brief excerpt that I have quoted.
You are assuming that I’m trying to give you advice that benefits you?
Thats interesting—especially when you’ve made it clear that you don’t bother to consider whether your actions benefit other people (in fact you choose to actively work against the benefit of other people). I think I made it pretty clear that, due to this behaviour, I neither respect you nor have any particular reason to help you. I was replying to your stated lack of understanding: “I don’t understand why it should be adopted.” in case you happened to have anything interesting to say about it.
I never thought that on balance you would choose to adopt the rule. :)
I gave you the reasons why people do adopt this rule and let you choose for yourself if that applies to your circumstances.
If you want to give advice that benefits me, try to give advice that’s actually been proven to benefit me, not advice that oh-so-conveniently happens to benefit you.
I’m sure we can each find oh-so-convenient examples that match what we choose to believe. I also expect that one person being a defector will probably clean up pretty nicely in a society full of people that choose not to defect (on average).
On average, it looks like it works for people that I’ve met (male and female)… that’s about all I can say. Why do you expect that for my advice to be good advice that it has to be 100% true for you as well as me?
You are assuming that I’m trying to give you advice that benefits you?
Please reread the following paragraph from your own comment:
That has it’s own further consequences down the line. If those further consequences later impinge upon your utility (eg help that you need but is not extended to you), then it would be worth considering adopting “my” rule.
Cousin_it’s reply made sense. Yours does not. The context makes it incoherent.
Weird… my comment above was a reply to a completely different comment of cousin_its
I can easily see why it looks incoherent.
I’m now going to go looking for the comment that I was actually replying to.
Edit: nope, looks like cousin_it has re-edited his original comment and removed that which I was actually replying to, so that my reply appears to be no longer relevant.
I am leaving my comment in place anyhow.
Oh—and I was giving advice that may or may not benefit people in general—not specifically for cousin_it’s benefit. Thus why my reply is not entirely incoherent :)
I was mainly responding to his statement that “I don’t understand why it should be adopted.” by explaining why it’s worth considering as an option—ie why other people adopt it.
I think a war between the sexes is a misleading perspective. Social life is a war between you and everyone else. Thankfully, the war is very developed (and thus polite) and is predominately over positive-sum opportunities (like, say, mates). But it’s still a war.
(For example, many of the things that seem to be men vs. women turn out to primarily shift resources from one kind of men to another, or one kind of women to another. Monogamy vs. serial monogamy vs. polygamy is a great example; the policy of ‘one husband one wife’ has more impact on the husband side of the equation than the wife side. Fights against pornography, as far as I can tell, are a mostly internal conflict within women. Women serving in combat roles benefits female officers but hurts female enlisted. Not everything maps onto this neatly, but a surprising amount does.)
It also seems to me that, in general, a belief feeling low-status (instead of wrong) is a potent warning of bias. So I guess woo for LW?
Good post, except I disagree with your first point. I think when you say that “social life is a war” but qualify that it’s a polite war, and a positive-sum war, I think you’re stretching the analogy to the point of breaking.
In my opinion, I think economics is the better model, if you look at social interaction as a sort of market, and people are trading back and forth. People don’t like the idea of sex being a commodity, but in a very important sense, it is. Friendships and family are also commodities in this way. Acting out of duty corresponds, as I see it, as investing in your relationships with other people. There’s always disutility in acting out of duty, but it’s an important part of any relationship.
You mean you didn’t know that before? You have a sex, you have a side.
What do you mean? Given that your sex doesn’t determine which side you’re on in this conflict (that is, whether you wish to take the effort for improving status of females, which only applies to the extent and in the sense you believe there is a sufficiently uniform status difference, etc.), it doesn’t give a simple heuristic rule for this decision. And without a simple reliable heuristic, it’s a nontrivial problem to figure out your own position, and many people won’t take the effort to solve it, and of those who did, many would pick a position in significant ignorance of the underlying facts, not even mentioning moral facts.
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.
It’s actually an interesting question—to what extent it’s a war between the obvious interest groups and to what extent it’s a conflict between people who are relatively willing to cooperate and those who are relatively willing to defect.
It’s actually an interesting question—to what extent it’s a war between the obvious interest groups and to what extent it’s a conflict between people who are relatively willing to cooperate and those who are relatively willing to defect.
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I would come to the direct opposite conclusion about which ‘side’ is ‘defecting’ and which is trying to cooperate.
I would also disagree with you regarding what the sides are. There are people who have a gender focussed side, there are people who fight for there not to be sides at all and there are people who think ‘if you are not with us you are against us’. The people in the middle, as is often the case, get caught in the crossfire.
The worst thing you can do while considering a politically-colored question is make political statements, like declaring a side. It’s more productive to strive to consider such questions as intellectual curiosities, ignoring the political impact of the discussion itself, even if you do have a clear side associated with huge stakes or affect. Otherwise, the arguments will more often be chosen for reasons other than their truth and relevance.
I think you just neatly encapsulated why I cringe a little whenever I see the pickup controversy rearing its head. I strongly agree—but gender relations seem like about the hardest possible topic to approach as an intellectual curiosity, if the track record of LW and (especially) OB is anything to go by.
I believe I can reliably approach absolutely anything as an intellectual curiosity, and I don’t believe I’m so much of a mutant that this skill is not reproducible.
(This mode does slip sometimes, and I do need to focus, so it’s not purely a character trait. When it slips, I produce thoughts that I judge on reflection slightly to significantly incorrect.)
In the mainstream discourse it’s undoubtedly so, but on LW, I’m not so sure. On many occasions, I’ve seen people here make comments about topics that are seen as even more inflammatory or outlandish in respectable mainstream circles, only to get calm, rational, and well-argued responses. Certainly I can’t think of any topics that are such a reliable discourse-destroyer on LW as the gender relations/PUA issues. I find it a fascinating question why this is so.
So, I think about race relations, as a somewhat obvious example.
The impression I’ve gotten is not that LW is capable of an advanced discussion of race relations but not of gender relations, but rather that race relations simply don’t come up in conversation as often as gender relations do. (Which isn’t too surprising, given how much more fundamental gender-marking is to our language than race-marking. )
But perhaps I’m not giving the community enough credit. If there have been valuable discussions here about race relations, I’d be interested to read them… pointers are welcomed.
Point taken. Its representation here is probably better explained by calling it one of the more difficult ones that we don’t have a taboo against discussing, although it’s definitely high up on my canonical list of mind-killing subjects outside of LW as well.
You’ve hit on something that I have long felt should be more directly addressed here/at OB. Full disclosure is that I have already written a lot about this myself and am cleaning up some “posts” and chipping away here to get the karma to post them.
It’s tough to talk about meditation-based rationality because (a) the long history of truly disciplined mental practice comes out of a religious context that is, as you note, comically bogged down in superstitious metaphysics, (b) it is a more-or-less strictly internal process that is very hard to articulate (c) has become a kind of catch-all category for sloppy new-age thinking about a great number of things (wrongheaded, pop quantum theory, anyone?)
Nevertheless, as Yvain notes, there is indeed a HUGE body of practice and tried-and-true advice, complete with levels of mastery and, if you have been lucky enough to know some the masters, that palpable awesomeness Eliezer speaks of. I’m sure all of this sounds pretty slippery and poppish, but it doesn’t have to be. One thing I would like to help get going here is a rigorous discussion, for my benefit and everyone’s, about how we can apply the science of cognition to the practice of meditation and vice versa.
There has been quite a bit of research in recent years on meditation, and the pace seems to be picking up. For a high level survey of recent research on the two primary forms of Buddhist meditation, I’d recommend the following article: Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. PDF Here
Yvain, do check out pjeby’s work. I have to admit I some points I found myself reading OB as a self help attempt. I’m glad I kept up, but dirtsimple.org was the blog I was actually looking for.
Your point about mysticism is interesting, because I find pjeby’s perspective on personal action and motivation has a strange isomorphism to Zen thought, even though that doesn’t seem to be main intention. In fact, his emphasis seems to be de-mystifying. One of his main criticisms of existing psychological/self-help literature is that the relatively good stuff is incomprehensible to the people who need it most, because they’d need to already be in a successful, rational action mindset in order to implement what’s being said.
Anyway, I hope pjeby chimes up so he can offer something better than my incomplete summary...
Pjeby’s working on akrasia? I’ll have to check out his site.
That brings up a related question that I think Eliezer hinted at: what pre-existing bodies of knowledge can we search through for powerful techniques so that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel? Entrepreneurship stuff is one. Lots of people have brought up pick-up artists and poker, so those might be others.
I nominate a fourth that may be controversial: mysticism. Not the “summon demons” style of mysticism, but yoga and Zen and related practices. These people have been learning how to examine/quiet/rearrange their minds and sort out the useful processes from the useless processes for the past three thousand years. Even if they’ve been working off crazy metaphysics, it’d be surprising if they didn’t come up with something. Eliezer talks in mystical language sometimes, but I don’t know whether that’s because he’s studied and approves of mysticism or just likes the feel of it.
What all of these things need is a testing process combined with people who are already high-level enough that they can sort through all the dross and determine which techniques are useful without going native or opening themselves up to the accusation that they’re doing so; ie people who can sort through the mystical/pick-up artist/whatever literature and separate out the things that are useful to rationalists from the things specific to a certain worldview hostile to our own. I’ve seen a few good people try this, but it’s a mental minefield and they tend to end up “going native”.
In the case of pickup literature, there is a lot to attract rationalists, but also a lot to inspire their ire.
The first thing rationalists should notice about pickup is that it wins. There are no other resources in mainstream culture or psychology that are anywhere near as effective. Yet even after witnessing the striking ability of pickup theories to win, I am hesitant to say that they are actually true. For example, I acknowledge the fantastic success of notions like “women are attracted to Alpha Males,” even though I don’t believe that they are literally true, and I know that they are oversimplifications of evolutionary psychology. Consequently, I am an instrumentalist, not a realist, about pickup theories.
If we started a project from scratch where we applied rationality to the domain of sex and relationships, and developed heuristics to improve ourselves in those areas, this project would have a considerable overlap with the teachings of the seduction community. At its best, pickup is “applied evolutionary psychology.” Many of the common criticisms of pickup demonstrate an anger against the use of rationality and scientific thinking in the supposedly sacred and mystical area of sex and romance. Yet it falls prey to certain ideological notions that limit its general innovativeness and empirical exploration, and some of its techniques are morally questionable.
I would be happy to say more on the relationship between pickup and rationality at some point, and you can tell me how much I’ve “gone native.”
Also, since this particular community leans altruistic, I’d hope that such a project would emphasize the future happiness of potential partners more than does (correct me if I’m wrong) the current pickup community.
I tune out wherever I hear the term ‘alpha male’ in that sort of context. The original scientific concept has been butchered and abused beyond all recognition. Even more so the ‘beta’ concept. Beta males are the ones standing right behind the alpha ready to overthrow him and take control themselves. ‘Omega’ should be the synonym for ‘pussy’.
But I must admit the theory is at least vaguely in the right direction and works. Reasonably good as popular science for the general public. Better than what people believe about diet, showering, and dental hygene.
Actually, the best (and most common) criticisms I see are more due to the use of lies and manipulation in the area of sex and romance.
The evo-psych stuff (and thereby any science and rationality) is perfectly fine by me.
This seems to me like criticizing the presence of lies in humor- that is, it’s something normal and acceptable in practice but unsettling in theory.
We disagree.
You seem to be suggesting that lies and manipulation in pickup serve to lead the target to a desirable outcome they would not deliberately choose, as in humor. I and many others have repeatedly asserted here that this is not the case. There are pickup techniques that are simply not acceptable—attacking self-esteem, manufacturing breakups, etc.
You (collectively) need to abandon this soldier.
I assume you mean to include ‘all’ in there. Some pickup practitioners (and pickup strategies) do use lies and manipulation without consideration of whether the outcome is desirable (and the means appropriate.) That is a legitimate concern. It would certainly not be reasonable to assert this is the norm, which you didn’t make clear in your declaration of repeated assertion.
Here it is important not to beware of other optimising. For the average Joe and Jane a courtship protocol that involves attacking each other’s self esteem would just be obnoxious and unpleasant. So I wouldn’t ‘accept’ in that sense self esteem lowering tactics to that kind of target. Yet for particularly high status folks within that kind of social game self-esteem attacks are just how it is played—by both sexes. They attack the heck out of each other with social weapons to assure each other that they have the social prowess to handle each other. And they both love every minute of it. Of course even if you take away 90% of their self esteem they probably still have more that enough left!
The biggest problem with self esteem attacking as a strategy come when clumsy PUAs try to use a tactic that is appropriate for 10s on 6s and 7s (in terms of approximate rank in the dating social hierarchy). That is just unpleasant (not to mention ineffective.) A related problem is confusing gender atypical girl with a gender typical girl (often due to complete ignorance of the possibility of that kind of difference). Again that will be unpleasant for the target in question—instead of exactly what she needs to facilitate a satisfying sexual encounter.
Rather than being ‘simply not acceptable’, pickup techniques that involve attacking self esteem are complexly not acceptable, depending on the context and parties involved.
I am comfortable in labelling individuals who do this as assholes and do anything possible to keep them out of my social circle and generally undermine their status.
You collectively? Exactly which collective are you referring to here? It would be reasonable to level the gist of your objection at Vaniver—or at least his specific comment here. But if you mean to level it at the ancestor (by HughRistik) then you are totally missing the mark.
The biggest opportunity to improve discourse on these kind of subjects—and to actually potentially benefit those participating in the dating game—is to abandon judgements on collectives.
In context, I was responding to a generalization with a counter based on exceptions to a proposed rule. I agree there is variety within the pickup community. I disagree that it is uniformly a force for good—and thus that opposition to it is based on dislike for science.
You’re right. I meant to indicate the case of attacking someone’s self-esteem in order to make them feel bad (and become pliable), rather than to engage them in a duel of wits.
The posters on lesswrong who claim that opposition to pickup on lesswrong is due to women being uncomfortable with explicit analysis of social reality, or (relatedly) that pickup is a uniformly altruistic enterprise (wrt sexual partners).
It’s only a judgment on a collective because it’s a judgment on a position, and the collective is people who hold that position.
No, I don’t mean duels of wits in that sense. I really do refer to the case of attacking someone’s self esteem to make them become pliable. Not bad per se (that doesn’t help), but less secure and less confident and in general that which is lowering self esteem. The judgement you make of all instances of that behaviour is actually narrowminded in as much as enforcing the judgement would worsen the experiences of life of a whole class of people. And I do not refer to a class denominated by sex.
I am expressing myself poorly, I think. I believe I am familiar with the type of interaction you are describing, and agree that it is not ‘bad’.
Everyone who does make the claim that pickup is uniformly altruistic is clearly and obviously mistaken. And can look forward to a world of disappointment when they realise their fairytale ideas about romance are absurdly naive. Most people learn the hard way during their teens. (Although nerds tend to take longer on average.)
I’m perfectly willing to abandon this soldier, because I defy the premise that makes it necessary. The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim. If I wanted to make women feel better, I’d just buy them flowers instead of doing pickup.
After asking that cousin_it abandon charged words like “victim” that I suspect he is just using for shock value, I am actually going to rewrite his statement seriously and examine it seriously:
On the face of it, this statement might make pickup sound zero-sum, but that’s not the only interpretation. Pickup is about attempting to bring about the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it creates an undesirable outcome for the other person (from their perspective). I would propose a slightly altered summary:
“The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, without harming the other participant.”
You have a comparative advantage for advocating for your own preferences. Social interaction (of which sexuality is only a subset) works best when people advocate for their own preferences, attempting to align others’ preferences with theirs, and without harming others.
Of course, this process is bilateral (which is why I changed “victim” to “participant”), so both participants are actually trying to engineer the outcome towards their preferences at the same time (and also engineer each other’s preferences to align with theirs!). With two people of similar ability, the result will be some sort of intersection or union of their preferences.
But this compromise only comes about when both people mainly advocate for their own preferences. Sexuality and romance are a form of negotiation. Pickup teaches negotiation skills, but it is hardly the only source of them. Many people already have sexual negotiation skills, and certain segments of men may be deficient, which is why pickup is necessary for them.
So yes, the goal is pickup is to advance towards your most desirable outcome… and if you are a decent person, then your most desirable outcome won’t include absolutely trampling over the other person if they are a crappy negotiator and can’t handle you. Simultaneously, the other person’s goal is to advance towards their most desirable outcome.
Unfortunately, the cultural bias towards villainous men abusive damsels in distress makes male sexual negotiation skills seem a lot more suspect than women’s. As I pointed out recently, nobody worries about innocent, insecure beginner PUAs getting used by women for sex and validation… thanks to the unwarranted assumption that PUAs are so far ahead of women in negotiation skill that they are performing some kind of black magic or mind control on women.
Personally, I find it much easier to make women feel good through pickup than through flowers.
This is exactly the kind of argument that I wanted to shoot down.
IMO we shouldn’t have a norm of requiring people to give altruistic justifications whenever they discuss better ways of maximizing their own utility function, even if that utility function may be repugnant to some. Discussions of morality (ends) should not intrude on discussions of rationality (means), especially not here on LW! If you allow a field to develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in, you get something awesome like Schelling, or PUA, or pretty butterflies. If you get stuck discussing morals, you get… nothing much.
You may be on to something here; this may be a very useful heuristic against which to check our moral intuitions.
On the other hand, one still has to be careful: you probably wouldn’t want to encourage people to refine the art of taking over a country as a genocidal dictator, for example.
Although it is interesting to study in theory. For example, in the Art of War, Laws of Power, history itself or computer simulations. Just so long as it doesn’t involve much real world experimentation. :)
But this is the fundamental problem: you don’t want to let the theory in any field get too far ahead of the real world experimentation. If it does, it makes it harder for the people who eventually do good (and ethical) research to have their work integrated properly into the knowledge. And knowledge that is not based on research is likely to be false. So an important question in any field should be “is there some portion of this that can be studied ethically?” If we “develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in”, we run the risk of letting theories run wild without sufficient evidence [evo-psych, I’m looking at you] or of relying on unethically-obtained (and therefore less-trustworthy) evidence.
“Unethically obtained evidence is less trustworthy” is the wrongest thing I’ve heard in this whole discussion :-)
How so? When scientists perform studies, they can sometimes benefit (money, job, or simply reputation) by inventing data or otherwise skipping steps in their research. At other times, they can benefit by failing to publish a result when they can benefit by refraining to publish. A scientist who is willing to violate certain ethical principles (lying, cheating, etc) is surely more willing to act unethically in publishing (or declining to publish) their studies.
Possibly more willing. They might be willing to sacrifice moral standards for the sake of furthering human knowledge that they wouldn’t break for personal gain. It would still be evidence of untrustworthiness though.
I like what you are saying in the second paragraph there… but I also agree with the quote from Hugh. So the whole ‘wanted to shoot down’ part doesn’t seem to fit in between.
I agree with this in the abstract, but in all particular situations the ‘morality’ is part of the content of the ‘utility function’ so is directly relevant to whether something really is a better way of maximizing the utility function.
If you’re talking about behaviors, morality is relevant.
I agree with this in the abstract, but if you adopt the view that morality is already factored into your utility function (as I do), then you probably don’t need to pay attention when other people say your behavior is immoral (as many critics of PUA here do). I think when Alice calls Bob’s behavior immoral, she’s not setting out to help Bob maximize his utility function more effectively, she’s trying to enforce a perceived social contract or just score points.
(You are not necessarily able to intuitively feel what your “utility function” specifies, and moral arguments can point out to you that you are not paying attention, for example, to its terms that refer to experience of specific other people.)
I disagree, especially here on Lw! When user-Bob tells user-Alice that her behavior is immoral, he’s probably setting out to help her maximize her utility function more effectively.
Or at least, that’s why I do it. A virtue is a trait of character that is good for the person who has it.
ETA: Otherwise, the argument is fully general. For humanity in general, when Alice says x to Bob, she is trying to enforce a perceived social contract, or score points, or signal tribal affiliation. So, you shouldn’t listen to anybody about anything w.r.t. becoming more instrumentally effective. And that seems obviously wrong, at least here.
My historical observations do not support this prediction.
I submit that if I say, “you should x”, and it is not the case that “x is rational”, then I’m doing something wrong. Your putative observations should have been associated with downvotes, and the charitable interpretation remains that comments here are in support of rationality.
Sure, if you’re willing to hurt people non-consensually to obtain sexual favors from them, then you’re not part of this argument. I was responding to the notion that pickup is uniformly non-harmful, and that opposition to it is based on a fear of rationality or science or whatever. Essentially, I was arguing that your position is common.
“Hurting people non-consensually” is an awfully low bar. For example, if you dump someone, you’re hurting them non-consensually.
At this point you may try to invent some deontological rule that would say that hurting people is okay in some contexts but not okay in others. If you’re especially honest, your rule will even have equal real-life impact on men and women, though it seems to be really hard to achieve. But let’s look at the bigger picture instead. Is there any strategy of behavior in love-related matters that is “uniformly non-harmful”?
That’s not a very charitable interpretation.
Anyway, we’re actually arguing for the same thing—the pickup community is not composed of altruists (with regards to their sexual partners).
Yeah. It’s nice that we can agree.
While that may be the same conte_n_t it seems to be missing valuable conte_x_t. The pickup community is not composed of altruists, but it seems likely to me that anyone who considers themselves an altruist when it comes to romance is self-deceiving.
I can’t speak for the pickup community, but I’m only interested in win/win relationships, which seems to me to be your primary concern. Do either lies or manipulation preclude win-win relationships? No, of course not. Thus, any unqualified complaints about lies or manipulation do not interest me.
I share your low opinion of people who pursue win/lose relationships, and hope they change their ways. But I think that’s where the real issue is.
I assume that lies and/or manipulation make win-win relationships less likely. Am I missing something?
I’d agree—if one “side” doesn’t have all the facts—it’s harder for them to make an accurate prediction and an effective negotiation and thereby come to an optimal “win”.
There are many kinds of lies, and many kinds of manipulation. Some are healthy, some are unhealthy, and it takes a fair measure of skill and knowledge of the other person to tell them apart. Honesty is the first order approximation to the best policy, but is not the best policy.
Okay, I think that’s simply a definitional disagreement—by altruism I meant “interested in win/win relationships”, basically.
What I take issue with is the idea that
PUA doesn’t prominently involve techniques that preclude win/win or are unconcerned with the difference between win/lose and win/win (e.g. sabotaging existing relationships). That is, manipulation in the “on-net harmful” sense.
therefore, people who have a problem with PUA are just not able to deal with science / analysis.
This seems true as an independent premise. (I agree that it does not lead to the conclusion in the second bullet.)
One thing that came up quickly on a cursory search: http://www.pualingo.com/pua-definitions/boy-friend-destroyer-bfd/ I suppose I should correct myself though—I intended to refer to techniques and attitudes etc. (based on the descriptions of people familiar with the culture, I expect that mysogyny is fairly common, even if not in the majority).
Pardon me Cu. It seems you caught the reply before I deleted it. I had reread the premise in question and noticed it said ‘prominently’ rather than ‘predominantly’. Those two letters make a big difference!
While it is not unlikely that I still disagree on the degree to which kind of behavior is popular within the relevant subculture it certainly wouldn’t be enough to quibble over whether it counts as ‘prominent’. I can just agree that to the extent that such behaviors exist they are undesirable.
A philosophy I hold dear is that it is important not to judge a whole subculture based on the worst traits of those within it. The pickup arts and feminism both have features (and acolytes) that we would do well to be wary of and reject. We don’t want self-centered manipulative misogyny and we don’t want hypocritical sexist judgementalness either (which refers not to the behavior of anyone here but to the analogous extreme fringe in feminism to the extreme fringe in PUA). Instead we want to take the lessons of practical rationality, personal development, overcoming of emotional biases, sexual liberation, social justice, equality and empowerment from both. Perhaps one of the most desirable feature common to both of those subcultures is that they cut through bullshit cultural traditions that serve to hold people back from experiencing life to the fullest.
You mentioned before the necessity to abandon a ‘soldier’ - and that is an important point. There really are bad things related to pickup arts—and one of those is certain behaviors that basically amount to being a bitchy asshole. If someone is so caught up with advocating PUA that they aren’t even willing to admit the legitimate problems that are there then the conversation is doomed and their own cause may be undermined. For this reason it disheartens me when discourse reverts to ‘sides’. Nothing good is likely to come.
The above is why I feel no dissonance at all as I disapprove of and reject the use of bitchy relationship sabotaging tactics and the use of particularly powerful persuasion techniques on vulnerable women while at the same time appreciating and advocating the use of PUA training as a form of healthy personal development that is a net benefit to society in general.
I think we’re on the same page, then!
I agree quibbling about precise levels would be pointless, particularly because I couldn’t give good estimates for those precise levels. I emphatically agree that we shouldn’t judge groups by the worst traits they hold within their borders—and in fact, in my research job I am planning to look into some basic pickup literature to see if there’s anything useful (regarding first impressions, specifically), as it is (or so I am told) one of the few places where social interactions are subjected to numerical analysis. (The sociological and psychological research I’ve read has been frustratingly qualitative! It’s almost like it wasn’t intended for use by robots.)
What I am resisting here is the notion, repeated several times in the LW PUA discussion, that the only reason people (or, alternately, women) are uncomfortable with PUA is discomfort with applying analysis to sex and romance.
It sounds like you agree that this isn’t the case (and I imagine you’d agree that it’s dismissive, simplistic, and possibly misogynistic), but it comes up disturbingly often (frequently accompanied by arguments like “manipulation isn’t a precise or universally negative concept → dismiss all claims that some form of manipulation is bad”).
Cheers, in any case :)
Just to clarify, who has said that this is the only reason that some people may be uncomfortable with pickup?
Many important concepts aren’t precisely defined, yet they are still meaningful (e.g. status). We shouldn’t throw out these concepts. Yet sometimes we should try to nail them down a bit more precisely and examine the intuitions behind them.
I’ve been trying to figure out what people actually mean by “manipulation” on LW, and the ethical theory behind it, but I haven’t had much success. I don’t want to make people abandon it, because I think that it is a meaningful concept. I’ve proposed my own definition: “unethical social influence.” But I am a bit disappointed that people constantly fling it around without examining it.
My worry is that it is used overbroadly, constraining the personal development of people who need to intentionally learn social skills. Furthermore, I feel that some behaviors get tagged as “manipulation” when they are analogous to other behaviors that are considered ethical: it’s just that people are accustomed to one, and not the other.
And I think people just intentional social influence too harshly when calling it manipulation, and/or don’t judge unintentional social influence harshly enough. (Didn’t learn social skills by age 18? Too bad… if you try now, you’ll be manipulating people, so stop trying to get above your station, and return to the back of the bus.)
Finally, the charge of “manipulation” often seems directed to social influence that is framed in a way that triggers a disgust heuristic. I’m not claiming that the disgust heuristic is the entire reason that people use the word manipulation, and disgust can be a pointer to a valid argument, but I do see people getting icked out by social influence around sex, intentional social influence, or social influence that they haven’t seen before or don’t understand very well.
Vaniver did, at least by negligence when making oversimplified replies. The rest of this group seems to be populated by straw men. Conveniently demonstrated as a reply to you here by taryneast. That is one issue that is mentioned at times by yourself and others but certainly never as ‘the only’ - which is what you would be being condemned for. Chances are I have mentioned the subject myself—and it is so in keeping with the entirety of OvercomingBias that I don’t even recall whether Robin Hanson has said anything directly.
Of course, back when I was in school the back of the bus was where all the cool kids got to sit. In fact, when I managed to get myself to the back seat of the bus it was much easier to flirt with my female fellow passengers. I was the impressive senior back-seat-sitting cool guy after all!
Um… you did. See the comment that I originally replied to. I quote:
and also
Well, in response to one of cousin_it’s comments, I’ve given my own definition:
It’s pretty clear cut what does and does not count as “unethical” here.
Can you give me some examples of these behaviours?
Please note: I am quite interested in a lot of the analysis-side of PUA—I am totally unopposed to guys gaining more confidence, understanding and social skill—especially through analysis of what actually makes women happy and how guys can go about gaining it. I just don’t like the Dark Arts parts of it. I think it can be performed with win-win in mind. No manipulation necessary.
I’d love to hear the opposite side too. Is there an equivalent PUA community for women? if not—why not?
Jumping in here, this is not correct:
(emphasis added)
That comment does not state that it is the only reason some people are uncomfortable with pickup—rather, it says that it is demonstrated in many of the common criticisms, which is quite different.
ETA: BTW, that’s an American ‘quite’ - I meant “which is very different”.
Thanks, thomblake, you got it.
Ok I’ll restate the actual point that I believe CuSithBell was trying to make:
Emphasis added to make the point.
And I might point out that I feel it’s a case of Logical Rudeness (on the part of HughRistik) to jump on the single word “only” and totally ignore the rest of the point being made here. Which is why I countered with a quote directly from his own previous comment.
When you use a word like ‘only’, you’re inviting that sort of interpretation. I read your statement and it seemed like you meant it literally, that is, “I’m resisting the interpretation that there are not other reasons at all...”, and I read the response as confused because nobody said anything about there being no other reasons.
Even if HughRistik was being in some way uncharitable, I fail to see how it’s an instance of Logical Rudeness, as it was a matter of correctly parsing your statement, rather than changing his position in the middle of an argument.
Whether somebody says “only” or says “mainly” shouldn’t matter too much, if the main point is actually something else entirely. In this case—the main point was about “what it is that upsets people about PUA”, not whether it’s the main point, or the only point that upsets people.
From my reading of CuSithBell’s comment—I think she said “only” but probably meant “mainly”—and thus jumping on the word “only” makes HughRistik’s comment seem like he was jumping on a side-point to avoid the main issue
Yes, on this site, using “only” to mean “mainly” opens you up to the kind of jumping-on that is common on this site… but I believe Logical Rudeness includes the situation where you jump onto a side-point at the expense of the main point. That’s why I mentioned it.
That said, I totally believe that we all should use the more correct word. If CuSithBell really meant “mainly” instead of “only” then that’s what she should have said to be more precise.
I restated and re-worded what she said because what I am most interested in is exactly what she said… with only one word of difference that does not (in my view) change anything from the Main Point.
See HughRistik’s comment regarding the Playettes.
Because they are busy being feminists instead? (But more serious factors are the relative ease at finding a willing mate and qualitatively different consequences for being a poor player at the social game.)
Well, let’s see. This seems to be an argument against the notion that there are other considerations. This comment regards removing such a claim from the top-level post, and repeats the claim. Here is another one.
I know that earlier in this thread you pointed out this aspect of distaste with PUA, but acknowledged more legitimate criticisms as well.
Suppose someone said that people are uncomfortable with discussions on how to rape people on lesswrong because of discomfort with science, I explained that that wasn’t the part that bothered me, and they replied by saying that consent is sort of a thorny issue, one that’s imprecisely defined and entangled with other complex concepts. Sure, fine, but that’s missing the point.
In these contexts, I use ‘manipulation’ the same way you suggest, and often qualify it with additional terms - ‘harmful’, ‘dark arts’, etc. - to clarify.
The wider meaning of manipulation I take to mean a collection of behaviors of varying levels of sinister-ness which may or may not be deliberate. In this less serious sense, both learned and innate social skills involve some level of manipulation.
I still think, just as you do if I recall correctly, that some aspects of pickup practice and culture are extremely undesirable—my main point is that attributing people’s discomfort with this to unrelated matters is disingenuous and unhelpful.
Does this sound fair and reasonable?
Edit: My choice of analogy was poor, and I withdraw it completely. In its place, consider “People ( / Women) don’t become card counters because they don’t like math.”
I don’t accept this analogy, because it places pickup techniques as analogous to rape. Your analogy shows more about the potential ugh fields that people may have around pickup.
What actually occurs is that pickup is mentioned, and someone says that pickup (or some pickup techniques) are “manipulative.” In that case, it is perfectly reasonable to attempt to approach an agreed upon conceptualization of “manipulation.”
“Dark arts” doesn’t really help, because that term has problems of its own.
Yes.
I’m not sure that some critics of pickup are only uncomfortable with the parts of pickup that I would stipulate as undesirable; their views seem to be broader and more sweeping.
I would simply maintain that some people’s discomfort with a scientific/rational approach to dating underlies some criticisms of pickup. Does that sound fair?
For instance, I’ve seen many criticisms that are uncomfortable with analysis used as the foundation for an intentional approach (though I’m not sure if I’ve seen that particular one on LW). Edit: example:
That person believe that as soon as you start being intentional, you are suddenly being selfish… which makes absolutely no sense.
As another example, I think that some women here are uncomfortable that certain default pickup behaviors are counter to their own preferences… while not recognizing that the priors of PUAs (acting on limited information) are highly influenced by the preferences of other women with dramatically different phenotypes.
The analogy is accurate, you’re just being irrational as an emotional reaction to its content.
[Only, that sort of response is condescending and insulting.]
I’m sure that does happen. It’s not the topic under discussion. Yes, there are nuances and shades of gray and people with incorrect opinions and people uncomfortable with explicit analysis of social phenomena.
There are also people here on lesswrong who say that the reason people in general (or women in general) are uncomfortable with pickup is because of such discomfort with analysis. That is also “what actually happens”, and it is explicitly what I have been talking about this whole time.
(I guess I shouldn’t have used rape in the analogy. The point of it was to illustrate the content of the discourse, not to compare the topics. It would work equally well if it were, say… “People who don’t move to Vegas and become card counters avoid it because they dislike math.” Or something.)
Edit: I withdraw the analogy as noted above, and apologize.
You said:
In a discussion on LW about how to rape people, the nuances of consent would indeed be a distraction, but only if there was a consensus that the behavior is rape. So I thought that by making pickup analogous to rape, you were presenting it an something that everyone ought to recognize as wrong, such that debating the concept of “manipulation” would be missing the point. That’s what objected to in your analogy.
If there wasn’t a consensus about whether the behavior was rape, then discussing the concept of consent actually would be a great way to approach the disagreement, and it would not be missing the point. But if that’s what you meant, then I don’t know why you made the analogy, because it proves my point, not yours.
(As an example: perhaps 24⁄7 BDSM relationships were under discussion, where the submissive partner gives consent at the beginning of the relationship. Someone might say that the submissive partner is being raped. It would then be perfectly appropriate to discuss the view of consent behind that criticism, and whether someone can consensually give away power at the beginning of a relationship.)
To the extent that people hold this view, I disagree with them. After looking at your three links, this interpretation is only plausible for the first link, and even then I would want that poster to clarify before starting a hype train.
I apologize for my metaphor. It was poorly chosen. I let my desire to make a point forcefully overcome my sense of decency. It is retracted. Perhaps you could consider the card-counting metaphor in its place.
The point is that there was a mis-attribution regarding the reasons to object. There is even what seems to be a general consensus that these reasons are legitimate (see cousin_it’s posts, or your own criticisms of PUA).
The posts in the second and third links are part of a larger discussion. In context, the discussion goes something like—“It’s not that women don’t like analysis, it’s that they don’t like PUA” is followed by “Of course they don’t, people don’t like analysis”, then “I don’t dislike analysis” is followed by “no one dislikes analysis, they just become angry when observing it.” I made the above claim then, and no one denied it.
If you are skeptical of my point, I would like to request a summary of said point adjoining a response, if possible.
I think we are just agreeing violently, at this point.
I suppose that’s a good call. See you in another thread, then.
Would such an arrangement typically involve safe words or would the knowledge of that power of injunction destroy the thrill the experience for the subordinate partner?
First, the technique: I don’t see a problem with the BFD. One who is satisfied cannot be seduced. The other man loses, but any success in romance is necessarily a loss for one’s competitors. (There’s even a reminder that cheating on her while she’s still dating the guy could hurt him deeply.)
Which makes me somewhat skeptical about the attitudes: I expect the prevalence of misogyny in the PUA is far above what I’d like it to be. But from everything I’ve seen, most of their rancor is pointed at the guys they feel superior to, not their targets. That they’ve attempted to put women under a microscope and figure out what they respond best to seems like it will make them interact with women better. A general improvement in the game of men should also correspond to a general improvement in the lives of women, as relationship satisfaction will increase.
That is, could this be base rate neglect? It’s unfortunate, but a lot of men are misogynists.
Erm, this statement is clearly false as soon as you reflect on it?
Personally, if I was going to come up with a clever rationalization for BFDs, it would be something like, “Any boyfriend who keeps her locked up in a closed relationship must clearly be a patriarchal bastard.”
Only allowed if the BFD actually personally uses that justification in the course of persuading a woman to leave her boyfriend for him.
(’cuz I like the mental image, that’s all.)
Are you skilled at either seduction or being satisfied?
I have reflected upon it, and it still seems to me to be true. Perhaps rewording it will reveal our disagreement; what do you think of “Satisfaction is the best defense against seduction”?
As they say, ‘all is fair in love and war’. There is a lot to that sentiment and there is only so much use in judging people for acting in self interest in an inherently self interested game. But do you know another thing that has traditionally been fair in love and war? Killing anyone who is a clear threat to your territory. So challenging these guys to duels to the death isn’t legal any more but this is certainly a behavior that I would want to see prevented by cooperative collective punishment if it is possible. Because I don’t want that crap anywhere near me.
(Note: I make no distinction as to whether the perpetrators learned BFDs explicitly, whether they are naturally inclined that way or they learned it on ‘desperate housewives’. Or, for that matter, whether it is a male or female doing the aggressive seduction of the non-single target. Although I probably would be squeamish about challenging the girl to a duel to the death.)
Pffft. Nonsense. They can so. Maybe you just need to spend some more manipulative effort making them feel like they are unsatisfied. Or distracting them from that which was satisfying sufficiently. If you are going to go around seducing women who have boyfriends don’t try to sugar coating it by pretending it always means that the relationship was unsatisfying.
Hence why one should attempt to induce the girl to break up with her boyfriend, rather than attempt to induce her to cheat on him. As you point out, that has a distressingly high chance of ending in murder.
I don’t swing that way. Regardless, I suspect our disagreements about the axiom are definitional. The terrible thing about satisfaction is that it is relative; it seems fair to say that one who willingly ends a relationship does it because it is unsatisfying. If it was made unsatisfying because one put forward a better offer, I have a hard time seeing that as villainous. (If one is fraudulent about the quality of the offer, that fraud is villainous- but that’s a separate issue from the BFD.)
Sure thing—that can probably be easily re-phrased to “deliberately doing something with the intent to hurt a person (without their consent) and thereby to gain advantage over them”
Breakups do not fit the above as you are not generally breaking up with a person for the express purpose of hurting them—it’s kind of collateral damage, and leads to a better situation for both in the long run.
This is often not true. Look at all the people who have killed themselves over a breakup.
So is hurting a woman in order to have sex with her. Hurting people is rarely a terminal goal.
In general, as a consequentialist I find it hard to care about intent. It seems you’re trying to invent a new deontological rule, but I don’t understand why it should be adopted.
Nope—collateral damage is damage done unintentionally. “hurting a woman in order to have sex with her” is a pretty good example of intentional damage.
My definition is pretty clear about which is the unethical of these two.
You are using the word incorrectly. This is independent of what behavior is ethically acceptable.
All damage that is incidental to the primary purpose of an action is collateral damage.
Additional note: Calling Bob collateral damage when you run him over so that you don’t kill lots of children is a correct usage.
You and I disagree about whether this is collateral damage, not because we have a different definition of collateral damage, but because we disagree about whether there is intent in this situation.
If the end-goal is to have sex with a woman, and you choose to hurt this woman to gain it, then her being hurt is part of the plan—and is thus intentional. It is an important sub-goal of the main plan, which is what makes it intentional.
You could have instead chosen to buy her flowers, flatter her, or to choose a different woman (one that does not need hurting for you to gain the end-goal of sex). The presence of acceptable alternatives is one reason why I consider this situation to not be a case of mere collateral damage, but of intent.
So, I realize this is completely tangential to your main point, but: if the army launches an attack against a military target that happens to be located in a civilian neighborhood, knowing perfectly well as they do so that civilians are going to be killed in the process, I’d consider that a pretty good example of both collateral and intentional damage.
Yep—I agree. It’s a classic case that covers both ends of the spectrum.
It also only tends to trip up people that fall for the fallacy of the excluded middle ;)
In this case, it matches my pattern of “intentional damage” and therefore ethically questionable, in my opinion.
That’s not to say that if more evidence came up eg information about how it’s the only alternative, or if the “greater good” outweighed the downsides… it might still be the only preferable choice… but in any case, I’d take a strong interest in the ethics involved before making the decision if I were put in that position.
Huh.
I agree with you here, but I now have no idea what you meant by “collateral damage is damage done unintentionally.”
Yes, this doesn’t seem consistent with how you drew the distinction earlier.
“unintentionally” in my head means literally “done with intent”.
Ie, if I decide “I hate Joe Bloggs” and then I get in my car, drive until I see him walking alongside the road and intentionally choose to jump the curb and run him over—then I would say that I intentionally killed Joe Bloggs because that is the outcome that I intended to happen.
however—if instead, I get in my car, and am driving down the road, my brakes fail and I see a whole classful of schoolchildren crossing the road… and my only option to not kill them is to jump the curb, which I do… but Joe Bloggs happens to be there and I see that he’s there and choose one death over many…
Well—I would consider that him being killed was unintentional. The main intent of my action was not “I want Joe Bloggs dead” but “I want not to kill the schoolchildren”. It was unintentional to my main aim.
Does that make sense?
It makes sense on its own but it contradicts what you said earlier about the cases cousin_it suggested.
It does seem to—which made me think about exactly which cases I’d consider one or the other. So here goes again… :)
In the example above—I am trying avoid causing hurt to the children—therefore if I hurt one person because it’s the only way to avoid hurting multiple people, it is ethically-difficult… but, in my head, ok in the end because the re is no other option available. If you had the opportunity to choose even less collateral damage (eg slamming on the brakes) you would do so.
In the case of intentionally hurting one woman in order to gain advantage for onself—this does not apply. Especially because you are intentionally hurting another person to help onseself—the sex is the eventual goal… but the hurt is chosen as a necessary step for that goal—there are no other means being considered.
In the case of breaking up with a person—you are intending that you and they not be with one another anymore—you are not hurting them with the intent to hurt them—therefore the “collateral damage” is unintentional. - Also the expectation is that you will both be better off apart (on average). Yes, there are rare cases where an unstable person will not recover… but on average I’d say that if you were trying to have a relationship with the kind of person that was suicidal—you might be better off not being with them… that is obviously an ethical dilemma that will never be covered by a cut-and-dried rule.… but I can safely say that in my head—if I were to leave somebody whom I suspected to be suicidal—I’d be leaving them, not with the intent that they choose to commit suicide—therefore the harm would be unintentional (also, I’d make sure to call somebody that could help them with their suicidal tendencies… but that’s by-the-by).
As to the case where we’re deliberately choosing to kill people that are located in a civilian location… I’d consider it ethically questionable, because you are deliberately choosing to kill people… not just to avoid killing other people (as in the schoolchildren case).
There is intent to kill—even if these particular people are not part of the main intent. I’d consider it less ethically questionable if they found a way to try to kill these targets without damage to the surrounding areas.
… in fact, in thinking more, I think a big differene is the actual intent itself. Are you trying to Gain by the hurt, or to Reduce a Bad Thing?
I think it’s more ok to hurt to reduce a worse Bad Thing, than it is to simply Gain something that you’d otherwise not have.
This really does seem unnecessarily complicated.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that more pain is bad, and less pain is good. (You already seem to be assuming this, which is fine, I just want to make it explicit.)
Most of these examples are cases of evaluating which available option results in less pain, and endorsing that option. This seems straightforward enough given that assumption.
The example of breaking up with someone is not clearly a case of that, which sounds like the reason you tie yourself in knots trying to account for it.
So, OK… let me approach that example from another direction. If I suffer mildly by staying with my partner, and my partner suffers massively by my leaving him, and the only rule we have is “more suffering is worse than less suffering,” then it follows that I should stay with my partner.
Would you endorse that conclusion?
If not, would you therefore agree that we need more than just that one rule?
We certainly need more than just one rule. :)
Less pain frequently seems better than more pain.
Suffering mildly by staying one a person is one thing—but what I had in mind while thinking of that example is that breaking up is painful, but over quickly—whereas staying on in a relationship that isn’t working is bad for both partners—not just the one leaving. - and lasts for a long time (probably decades if you keep at it).
The one that would be “happy if you just suffered quietly a little” can also be not as happy as they would be if the relationship ended and they found somebody that really wanted to be with them. oh, and it isn’t always just a little suffering involved for the wanting-to-leave partner. Plus the factor that perhaps the one wanting to leave may be wanting to make a third person happy…
Of course, if it’s just a small inconvenience to one person—then I wouldn’t advocate breaking up at all. Relationships are “about” compromise on the small things to gain over the long term.
Obviously it all depends on circumstance and we cannot make a single rule to fit all possible permutations...
I’m going to assume you mean “without,” here.
It’s not how I use the word, but yes, it makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
That said, to go back to the original example… if you consider “hurting a woman in order to have sex with her” a pretty good example of intentional damage.… it follows that the main aim in that example is not to have sex, but to cause pain?
Oh—and in any case—thanks for asking these questions. It’s helping me clear up what’s in my head at least a little. I appreciate not only that you are asking—but also that you’re asking in a way that is quite… erm approachable? not-off-putting perhaps? :)
You’re welcome.
Yep, good catch. bad (ok, non-existent) proof-reading on my part. :)
And you’re right—nutting it out a bit more has made me think more about what I consider intentional or not—and also what the main intent is or not.
In the case of “hurting a woman to have sex”—you are deliberately choosing to hurt her to gain. I think the difference is that the intentionally “hurting a woman to have sex” is more pre-meditated than having no choice but to jump the curb and kill one person instead of many.
Goals build on other goals. Your end-goal is to have sex… but if you make it your temporary goal to reduce her self-esteem to make the main goal more likely, then you are intending her to be hurt, in order to further your goal.
In the case of, say, jumping the curb to avoid children your main goal is avoiding children… jumping the curb is not something you choose as a sub-goal… if there were any other way—you’d choose that instead. It’s not a goal in and of itself, it’s your last possible resort—not your best possible choice.
Anyway—not sure I’m being very clear here—either with you, or in my head. This is the kind of thing that is difficult to extract from one’s emotions. I know there’s been some psychological research on this kind of thing—and AFA my fuzzy memory serves—it’s fairly common to see a moral difference between the “intending to hurt somebody to further a goal” vs “unintentionally having to choose to hurt somebody to help something worse not happen” situation.
Edit: Looks like PhilGoetz mentions it in his comment about trolley problems
I don’t think there is a clear dividing line here—because there a confounding of what’s “moral/ethical” with whats “intentional”.. I think there are two things tangled together that are difficult to separate. I get the feeling that I’m trying to define both at once.
In my head now is that “intentional is generally non-ethical” “unintentional is generally less unethical… but it depends on the main goal and whether or not you are trying to gain, or reduce Bad Things...” :)
OK, I think I’m kinda following this.
I agree with you that this discussion is unhelpfully confounding discussions of intention with discussions of right action, and it also seems to be mingling both with a deontological/consequentialist question.
For my own part, I would say that if I have the intention to perform an act and subsequently perform that act, the act was intentional. If I perform the act knowing that certain consequences are likely, and those consequences occur, then the consequences were intentional.
If the consequences are good ones and I believed at the time that I performed the act that those consequences were good ones, then the resulting good was also intentional.
All of this is completely separate from the question of what acts are good and what acts aren’t and how we tell the difference.
Looks like Shokwave has formulated the distinction a bit better with his comment here
To reinterpret based on cousin_it’s example, the difference is:
“Say something → girl is hurt, get sex” vs “hurt girl → get sex”
I take issue with the latter as I consider it intentional(my definition) damage. The former is unintentional(my definition).
OK.
And just to be clear: you say that if Sam does the latter and Pat does the former, Sam has done something worse (or less permissable, or more culpable, or something like that) than Pat, even though the girl is just as hurt in both cases.
Yes?
Yep.
Mainly because in most RL situations, it’s a choice between: “girl might get hurt in the backlash” and “girl definitely will be hurt”.
In my head it feels like the difference between manslaughter and murder. Collateral damage versus target.
Even though the person is still dead—a person that negligently kills somebody is an idiot that really needs to clean up their act, but still might be an ok person (as long as you don’t trust them with anything important). Whereas a murderer is somebody you wouldn’t want to be alone with… ever.
Back to PU—the guy who accidentally hurts a girl while earnestly trying to have sex with her is a bit of a social klutz… but the guy who actively hurts a girl to have sex with her is somebody I would not trust and would actively un-invite from all my social dealings.
I actually think the critical issue with pick-up is where the benefits go. In the trolley problem five lives is almost tautologically worth more than one life—in pick-up, though, it’s pushing the fat man in front of trolley … to get laid. Okay, it’s not a fat man’s death in pick-up, but who can say that the girl’s suffering is worth the sexual pleasure? Well, it might be possible to determine, but all of us are culturally programmed to definitely not trust the one guy that benefits to evaluate the situation fairly.
Pick-up artists look sleazy because we don’t trust them to make the right decision with such incentives looming. I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with whether the act is wrong or whether it just causes some wrong consequences. Well, to the extent that it does, I think that this issue muddies the water. From your own post, even, actions of the permissible type in trolley problems still count as manslaughter.
Ah—you said just what I was thinking (and much better). Yes, totally agree. There’s a big difference if the action is taken for personal gain, rather than some other reason.
I certainly agree that the lower chance of causing harm is preferably to the higher chance of causing harm.
That said, I prefer to simply say that, and I mostly consider all this talk of intentionality and collateral damage to muddy the waters unnecessarily in this case.
Anyway. My social/moral intuitions are similar to yours, for what that’s worth.
That said, I also know someone who has accidentally killed (been driving a car in front of which someone walked), and I know someone who has deliberately killed (fired a bullet from a gun into another person), and when I think about those actual people I find I trust the latter person more than the former (and I trust both of them more-than-baseline).
So I don’t put a lot of confidence in my social/moral intuitions in this area.
Hmmm—interesting point with the guy who killed. As I mentioned before—I don’t think there’s one rule to rule them all”.
In my mind, “targetted” is worse than “non-targetted” but there are mitigating circumstances due to other social rules (eg “person B is a policeman killing a dangerous guy waving a loaded gun at a crowd” is less worse than “drunk-driver that killed a guy on the road”)
Was your person B killing for the purposes of personal gain? I think that may tip the balance for me. In a pure application of just the rule we’ve been discussing—if the “action” performed was purely for personal gain, then I’d hold person B more culpable than person A (though A’s not off the books entirely).
Well, so, first off, I do not have privileged access to person B’s purposes. So the most honest answer to your question is “How would I know?”
But, leaving that aside and going with inferences… well, my instinct is to assume that he wasn’t. But, thinking about that, it’s pretty clear to me that what underlies that instinct is something like “I like person B and consider him a decent chap. A priori, a decent chap would not kill someone else for the purposes of personal gain. Therefore, person B did not kill for the purposes of personal gain.”
Which makes me inclined to discard that instinct for purposes of analysis like this.
Person B was a soldier at the time, and the act was a predictable consequence of becoming a soldier. And at least one of the reasons he became a soldier in the first place was because being a soldier provided him with certain benefits he valued. But there were no particular gains that derived from the specific act of killing.
So… I dunno… you tell me? He received personal gains from being in the environment that led him to pull the trigger, and was aware that that was a plausible consequence of being in that environment, so I guess I’d say that yes, he killed for purposes of personal gain, albeit indirectly.
But I suspect you’re now going to tell me that, well, if he was a soldier in a military action, that’s different. Which it may well be.
Mostly, I think the “for purposes of personal gain” test just isn’t very useful, in that even my own purposes are cognitively impenetrable most of the time, and other people’s purposes are utterly opaque to me.
Yes, that one definitely sounds like it falls into grey area. I think the “gain” one only works well if the personal gain is clear-cut. It’s a heuristic, not a hard-edged rule eg killing somebody to gain their money (to spend on beer and hookers) is generally considered wrong. Killing somebody to stop the performing other bad acts is generally less so. Killing somebody to gain their money to buy medicine for the sick… who knows?
I get the feeling that the rules have a fuzzy-edge so that we can deal with the human-error-margin involved. As you say—often we can only guess at the real motives behind other people’s actions—and our guesses may well be wrong. It means we’re open to interpreting things because we want them a certain way, rather than because they definitely are, but it’s possibly the best we can do with the information we have.
Sure, if we try to come up with hard-edged rules at the level of the superficial form of the act (e.g., “don’t kill people”), we wind up in a huge tangle because of the “human error margin”—that is, the complexity of behavior.
For legal purposes we have to do it that way, and law is consequently a huge tangle.
For purposes of figuring out what the right thing to do next is, I mostly think it’s the wrong way to go about it altogether.
I agree with what you say here, but think that in my mind, there is one more dividing line—that I think Marius comment has made clearer to me. that being a narrowing-down of your own definition of “intentional”, but only including those acts where you are particularly seeking to enact an action that causes harm.
Perhaps there are two uses of “intentional”—the definition you’ve given, and the extra definition that I also use (I kinda use both depending on context).
Intentional-1: In the process of my actions, I choose an act that I’m pretty sure I know of the consequences (in this case harmful).
Intentional-2: I “with intent” seek out a particular act whose consequences I know are harmful—I intend to cause those consequences.
Intentional-2 is a sub-set of Intentional-1
One question that might help you clarify: Fundamentally, is the divide in your head “more interested in taking steps to promote the side effect or in taking steps to avoid it” or “seems to consider the side effect acceptable”?
I think the example of a drunk driver might be an accessible one. Your goal is to get yourself and your car home; your intention is not to hit anyone. In fact, you’d be extremely sad if you hit someone, and would be willing to take some steps to avoid doing so. You drive anyway.
Do you put the risky driving in your intentional category? If you think intentionality means “treats it as a thing to seek rather than to avoid where convenient”, the risk is unintentional. If you think intentionality means “seems to consider the side effect acceptable”, then the risk is intentional because you weren’t willing to sober up, skip drinking, or take a cab.
Thats a very good question, I think your “treats it as a thing to seek” is a good dividing line.
I will admit that I have not fully explored all the grey-areas here before, and was even unsure if there was a strict dividing line—but what you have said here rings true in the cases we’ve considered here.
In the case of hurting a woman to have sex—you are intentionally seeking to hurt her as the path to your objective. In the case of the car-jumping, you are not seeking to have the guy killed. On drunk-driving, I think you are being negligent, but not intentionally seeking to hurt somebody.
yep—sounds about right to me.
There is already a common deontological rule that one should adopt appropriate caution. “Appropriate caution” allows one to break up with people under most circumstances, but my limited understanding of pickup sounds closer to “recklessness”.
I wasn’t actually telling other people to adopt my rule, in fact it isn’t even a rule. Other people might call it a part of the social contract. I’d consider it to be an overwhelmingly useful heuristic for getting along in society. One example of a pathalogical case does not overbalance the majority of cases where it holds true.
If you are only interested in the consequences for you and haven’t figured out why it’s sometimes good for you to behave according to the social contract, then that’s your choice. But my choice is not to trust you or anybody like you… which is kind of the whole point of this argument.
The consequence for you is that other people watch your actions (or even just your words in this case) and no longer trust or respect you.
That has it’s own further consequences down the line. If those further consequences later impinge upon your utility (eg help that you need but is not extended to you), then it would be worth considering adopting “my” rule.
That doesn’t seem to be true either. To take an extreme example, being a compulsive liar who enjoys telling falsehoods for fun is one of the “dark triad” of male qualities that are exceptionally attractive for females. The reputational knock-on effects aren’t enough to balance things out.
How can you be sure? You may well be noticing the successful compulsive liars (at least, the less subtle ones) and not noticing the guys who told one lie too many to the wrong people in their lives.
It is normally difficult enough to avoid selection bias, but there’s the additional difficulty here that a disproportionate number of the unsuccessful ones are located in prison.
So this brings up one of the questions I wonder if PUAs can answer: do you have any kind of metric capable of telling whether something is attractive for “females” or for “the kind of females PUAs find easy targets”? It was obvious when I did my psychiatry rotation that the Cluster B personality disorder patients found themselves drawn to one another. Is the Dark Triad good for picking up women who aren’t Cluster B, or primarily for picking up women who are? Or at least, are there tools available to actually answer that question?
Edit: this comment is in reply to wording that cousin_it has now removed from his comment. You can get the gist from the brief excerpt that I have quoted.
You are assuming that I’m trying to give you advice that benefits you?
Thats interesting—especially when you’ve made it clear that you don’t bother to consider whether your actions benefit other people (in fact you choose to actively work against the benefit of other people). I think I made it pretty clear that, due to this behaviour, I neither respect you nor have any particular reason to help you. I was replying to your stated lack of understanding: “I don’t understand why it should be adopted.” in case you happened to have anything interesting to say about it.
I never thought that on balance you would choose to adopt the rule. :) I gave you the reasons why people do adopt this rule and let you choose for yourself if that applies to your circumstances.
I’m sure we can each find oh-so-convenient examples that match what we choose to believe. I also expect that one person being a defector will probably clean up pretty nicely in a society full of people that choose not to defect (on average).
On average, it looks like it works for people that I’ve met (male and female)… that’s about all I can say. Why do you expect that for my advice to be good advice that it has to be 100% true for you as well as me?
Please reread the following paragraph from your own comment:
Cousin_it’s reply made sense. Yours does not. The context makes it incoherent.
Weird… my comment above was a reply to a completely different comment of cousin_its
I can easily see why it looks incoherent.
I’m now going to go looking for the comment that I was actually replying to.
Edit: nope, looks like cousin_it has re-edited his original comment and removed that which I was actually replying to, so that my reply appears to be no longer relevant.
I am leaving my comment in place anyhow.
Oh—and I was giving advice that may or may not benefit people in general—not specifically for cousin_it’s benefit. Thus why my reply is not entirely incoherent :)
I was mainly responding to his statement that “I don’t understand why it should be adopted.” by explaining why it’s worth considering as an option—ie why other people adopt it.
I used to feel as though it was low status to believe in a war between the sexes.
Less Wrong convinced me that not only is there a war, I have a side.
I think a war between the sexes is a misleading perspective. Social life is a war between you and everyone else. Thankfully, the war is very developed (and thus polite) and is predominately over positive-sum opportunities (like, say, mates). But it’s still a war.
(For example, many of the things that seem to be men vs. women turn out to primarily shift resources from one kind of men to another, or one kind of women to another. Monogamy vs. serial monogamy vs. polygamy is a great example; the policy of ‘one husband one wife’ has more impact on the husband side of the equation than the wife side. Fights against pornography, as far as I can tell, are a mostly internal conflict within women. Women serving in combat roles benefits female officers but hurts female enlisted. Not everything maps onto this neatly, but a surprising amount does.)
It also seems to me that, in general, a belief feeling low-status (instead of wrong) is a potent warning of bias. So I guess woo for LW?
Good post, except I disagree with your first point. I think when you say that “social life is a war” but qualify that it’s a polite war, and a positive-sum war, I think you’re stretching the analogy to the point of breaking.
In my opinion, I think economics is the better model, if you look at social interaction as a sort of market, and people are trading back and forth. People don’t like the idea of sex being a commodity, but in a very important sense, it is. Friendships and family are also commodities in this way. Acting out of duty corresponds, as I see it, as investing in your relationships with other people. There’s always disutility in acting out of duty, but it’s an important part of any relationship.
You mean you didn’t know that before? You have a sex, you have a side.
You may wish that there were no war. I wish that too. But there’s no use denying the war (except for status reasons, as you point out).
What do you mean? Given that your sex doesn’t determine which side you’re on in this conflict (that is, whether you wish to take the effort for improving status of females, which only applies to the extent and in the sense you believe there is a sufficiently uniform status difference, etc.), it doesn’t give a simple heuristic rule for this decision. And without a simple reliable heuristic, it’s a nontrivial problem to figure out your own position, and many people won’t take the effort to solve it, and of those who did, many would pick a position in significant ignorance of the underlying facts, not even mentioning moral facts.
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.
It’s actually an interesting question—to what extent it’s a war between the obvious interest groups and to what extent it’s a conflict between people who are relatively willing to cooperate and those who are relatively willing to defect.
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I would come to the direct opposite conclusion about which ‘side’ is ‘defecting’ and which is trying to cooperate.
I would also disagree with you regarding what the sides are. There are people who have a gender focussed side, there are people who fight for there not to be sides at all and there are people who think ‘if you are not with us you are against us’. The people in the middle, as is often the case, get caught in the crossfire.
EDIT: never mind
The worst thing you can do while considering a politically-colored question is make political statements, like declaring a side. It’s more productive to strive to consider such questions as intellectual curiosities, ignoring the political impact of the discussion itself, even if you do have a clear side associated with huge stakes or affect. Otherwise, the arguments will more often be chosen for reasons other than their truth and relevance.
I think you just neatly encapsulated why I cringe a little whenever I see the pickup controversy rearing its head. I strongly agree—but gender relations seem like about the hardest possible topic to approach as an intellectual curiosity, if the track record of LW and (especially) OB is anything to go by.
I believe I can reliably approach absolutely anything as an intellectual curiosity, and I don’t believe I’m so much of a mutant that this skill is not reproducible.
(This mode does slip sometimes, and I do need to focus, so it’s not purely a character trait. When it slips, I produce thoughts that I judge on reflection slightly to significantly incorrect.)
Oh, there are many more difficult. Gender relations are just a difficult one that comes up.
In the mainstream discourse it’s undoubtedly so, but on LW, I’m not so sure. On many occasions, I’ve seen people here make comments about topics that are seen as even more inflammatory or outlandish in respectable mainstream circles, only to get calm, rational, and well-argued responses. Certainly I can’t think of any topics that are such a reliable discourse-destroyer on LW as the gender relations/PUA issues. I find it a fascinating question why this is so.
So, I think about race relations, as a somewhat obvious example.
The impression I’ve gotten is not that LW is capable of an advanced discussion of race relations but not of gender relations, but rather that race relations simply don’t come up in conversation as often as gender relations do. (Which isn’t too surprising, given how much more fundamental gender-marking is to our language than race-marking. )
But perhaps I’m not giving the community enough credit. If there have been valuable discussions here about race relations, I’d be interested to read them… pointers are welcomed.
Point taken. Its representation here is probably better explained by calling it one of the more difficult ones that we don’t have a taboo against discussing, although it’s definitely high up on my canonical list of mind-killing subjects outside of LW as well.
You’re right.
Yvain:
You’ve hit on something that I have long felt should be more directly addressed here/at OB. Full disclosure is that I have already written a lot about this myself and am cleaning up some “posts” and chipping away here to get the karma to post them.
It’s tough to talk about meditation-based rationality because (a) the long history of truly disciplined mental practice comes out of a religious context that is, as you note, comically bogged down in superstitious metaphysics, (b) it is a more-or-less strictly internal process that is very hard to articulate (c) has become a kind of catch-all category for sloppy new-age thinking about a great number of things (wrongheaded, pop quantum theory, anyone?)
Nevertheless, as Yvain notes, there is indeed a HUGE body of practice and tried-and-true advice, complete with levels of mastery and, if you have been lucky enough to know some the masters, that palpable awesomeness Eliezer speaks of. I’m sure all of this sounds pretty slippery and poppish, but it doesn’t have to be. One thing I would like to help get going here is a rigorous discussion, for my benefit and everyone’s, about how we can apply the science of cognition to the practice of meditation and vice versa.
Think you’ve got enough karma to post already.
There has been quite a bit of research in recent years on meditation, and the pace seems to be picking up. For a high level survey of recent research on the two primary forms of Buddhist meditation, I’d recommend the following article: Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. PDF Here
Yvain, do check out pjeby’s work. I have to admit I some points I found myself reading OB as a self help attempt. I’m glad I kept up, but dirtsimple.org was the blog I was actually looking for.
Your point about mysticism is interesting, because I find pjeby’s perspective on personal action and motivation has a strange isomorphism to Zen thought, even though that doesn’t seem to be main intention. In fact, his emphasis seems to be de-mystifying. One of his main criticisms of existing psychological/self-help literature is that the relatively good stuff is incomprehensible to the people who need it most, because they’d need to already be in a successful, rational action mindset in order to implement what’s being said.
Anyway, I hope pjeby chimes up so he can offer something better than my incomplete summary...