What, exactly, is your objection to attempting to influence the behavior of others by means of social disapproval?
If I were to be more precise, I would say that I disapprove of people attempting to use a claimed victim status as a way to target behaviors they personally dislike, by:
Implying that the weight of societal disapproval or true “ought”-ness is allied with their position, and
Implying that all those people who fail to join them in denouncing or punishing the offenders are themselves worthy of disapproval.
IMO, in a rationalist community, if you dislike something, you bloody well ought to be able to say you dislike it and why, without needing to claim you represent a class of people and calling for people to announce/signal their factional alliances. That’s divisive and unhelpful, no matter how “right” your position might be.
Or, maybe is it that, in these cases, you are not in sympathy with the behavior-modification objectives, so naturally you don’t care for the methods?
It’s possible that I’m biased, but I don’t think that it’s in the way you describe. For one thing, if komponisto’s real objective were to influence women’s preferences towards “granting sexual favors”, then the obvious thing to do would be to promote the decriminalization and destigmatization of prostitution—something I’d wholeheartedly support as well. So in that case at least, it’s not about a lack of sympathy with the stated objective.
On the flip side, I think that some LW commenters are insensitive to their readers (male and female on both sides) and that it’s occasionally annoying and/or offensive to many, and that it would be better if those parties got better at communicating without projecting their stereotypes onto others.
So, I’m not entirely out of sympathy there either… I just think there are better ways to address it, by engaging and educating, and giving people an option to be the “good guy” by changing, rather than casting them in the “bad guy” role that just creates polarization.
Could you suggest a more positive/egalitarian way in which komponisto could influence Alicorn, or Alicorn influence komponisto other than expressions of disapproval?
Find out what the other person wants, and then find a way to give them what they want so you can get what you want. Isn’t that the very essence of the PUA concept being discussed here?
To the extent that people on either side of the debate fail to look into what people on the other side actually want—as opposed to projecting their own negative stereotypes in the other side’s direction—no actual communication will take place.
A very good response. Thank you. I agree with much of it, but I would like to continue a bit further regarding the stuff near the top about claimed victim status. Let us all return in our minds to those idyllic days of childhood:
Younger sibling: “Quit picking on me!”
Older sibling: “Me? I’m no picking on you.”
Younger sibling: “Mama!”
Now, as you visualize this scene, ask yourself whether younger sibling is “attempting to use a claimed victim status as a way to target behaviors they personally dislike”. Ask whether she is implying that the weight of parental disapproval or true “ought”-ness is allied with her position. Whether she is implying that a parent who fails to join in denouncing or punishing the offender is not carrying out the parental responsibilities of protection and fair arbitration?
By analogy, it would seem that your advice to younger sibling would be “If you dislike something, you bloody well ought to be able to say you dislike it and why, without needing to call for a parent to announce/signal a factional alliance. That’s divisive and unhelpful, no matter how “right” your position might be.” Well, that just might be good advice, even to a child.
But what if the advice is followed and it doesn’t work? Doesn’t work repeatedly. Older sibling simply gets a kick out of tormenting his younger sister. What then?
The problem here, IMO, is not lack of communication of wants and needs, and it is not a matter of stereotyping. It is a matter of deliberate, well-informed, hostility. Hostility which shields itself with the argument “Ah, you are imagining things. See, no one else thinks I am doing any thing wrong.”
In those circumstances, I think that for you to disapprove of “claimed victim status”, to disapprove of seeking allies, is to give your approval to the victimizer.
Older sibling simply gets a kick out of tormenting his younger sister. What then?
You haven’t described what the “tormenting” consists of here. My answer is different depending on where it falls on the scale from consensual (“mom, he keeps looking at me!”) to nonconsensual (e.g. striking).
It is a matter of deliberate, well-informed, hostility
If it were (and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything I would consider an example of such in this thread; perhaps you could point one out), then I’d say that there’s a “Vote Down” button, and the ability to hide subthreads on a post that one does not wish to read.
(LW doesn’t currently have a way to add a new feature to suppress all posts/comments by a particular user or within a particular subthread, but it would make a nice addition.)
In those circumstances, I think that for you to disapprove of “claimed victim status”, to disapprove of seeking allies, is to give your approval to the victimizer.
It’s really difficult for me to consider posting comments on LessWrong as “victimizing” in any sense (barring personal threats, either direct or implied).
Even the most annoying of deliberate trolls can be downvoted and ignored, and usually are.
I consider my reactions to anything posted online as being solely my responsibility, so it is not possible, AFAICT, for someone to “victimize” me here.
Someone can be annoying or disagreeable or I can even find their statements offensive, but if I continue to engage with them, that’s my problem, not anybody else’s.
But again—I’m talking about speech here (and again, barring personal threats, either direct or implied), in a place where avoiding the speaker is pretty easy, and there’s a mechanism for directly punishing the undesired speech. Your sibling analogy doesn’t apply, since most of us here on LW do not live under the same roof or have to see each other daily. ;-)
So my counterpoint to your “approval to the victimizer” rhetoric would be to say that if you think LW discussions are victimization, you must have been lucky enough to not ever have really been victimized in your life. (For that matter, if you think they’re harassment or bullying, then you’ve probably never really been harassed or bullied!)
This is why the “men are poor victims of conniving women and society” rhetoric is just as repulsive to me as the reverse is. I reject victim rhetoric for the same reason CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) does: it’s irrational and untrue, as well as both a symptom of and reinforcement/re-priming of learned helplessness.
If Harry/Eliezer’s true Nemesis is Death, mine is Learned Helplessness. It is far more evil and terrible a thing than any mere human victimizer, because it not only stops people from taking effective action, it also continues to work its damage 24⁄7, long after the original victimizer has come and gone.
You ask for examples of deliberate, well-informed hostility on this thread. If you don’t mind, I would like to keep this branch of the discussion at a more hypothetical level. Let’s stick to my hypothetical of the obnoxious big brother and the annoyed little sister. I agree with what you point out; that my example doesn’t match the situation here because here the supposed victim has less to fear and far more ways to escape. More power in general. But I want to hold onto my made-up example to ask one more question below.
You wrote:
If Harry/Eliezer’s true Nemesis is Death, mine is Learned Helplessness. It is far more evil and terrible a thing than any mere human victimizer, because it not only stops people from taking effective action, it also continues to work its damage 24⁄7, long after the original victimizer has come and gone.
I had never heard that term before (not being particularly interested in psychology). From the Wikipedia article, it looks interesting. I intend to read more. Thank you. I have long had the political belief that groups mythologizing their own victimhood are victimizers in training. And I have close personal friends whose lives have been ruined by their own self-constructed history of victimhood and definition of self as past-victim.
But it occurs to me, that if helplessness can be learned (but shouldn’t be), then it can also be taught (but shouldn’t be). And it also occurs to me that the brother in my story, if coupled with a mother who counsels the daughter to work out the problem for herself with the brother, … these two are effectively conspiring to teach helplessness to little sister. Personally, I think that is evil. Maybe I don’t yet understand LH theory, but I would guess that maybe you would too. And that is my question. If little sister learns helplessness in this situation, who is at fault—the brother (who after all, is just a kid), the mother, or the sister?
If little sister learns helplessness in this situation, who is at fault—the brother (who after all, is just a kid), the mother, or the sister?
How about the person who taught the mother that? Her mother? Her mother’s mother? Evolution? The universe?
What makes you assume that somebody has to be “at fault” here, and how is it helpful to make that assumption?
But it occurs to me, that if helplessness can be learned (but shouldn’t be), then it can also be taught (but shouldn’t be). And it also occurs to me that the brother in my story, if coupled with a mother who counsels the daughter to work out the problem for herself with the brother, … these two are effectively conspiring to teach helplessness to little sister.
Please note that my advice is for adults, not children. For a parent to give their child only the bare advice, and not the listening, support, and assistance needed to carry it out, would indeed be cultivating a sense of helplessness along the lines of, e..g “what happens to me doesn’t matter/my preferences don’t count”, or some variation thereof.
Certainly, that’s what happened in my case, when my parents told me to “just ignore” the people teasing or harassing me!
However, that doesn’t mean I consider my parents “at fault” for the shame and self-hatred I developed as an indirect result of their choices. In fact, fully understanding how my feelings came about actually let me drop the resentment I previously felt towards them for this.
Ironically, it is the very idea of blaming people for things that reinforces LH in the first place. If I think it is my parent’s “fault” that I developed a particular instance of LH, then clearly, I am a helpless victim!
So, in order to drop emotional LH of this form, it is necessary to also drop judgment and blame.
When I coach people on letting go of past victimization, one of the more difficult steps tends to be letting go of the judgment of who’s “at fault”—and it doesn’t matter whether you blame someone else (e.g. your parents) or yourself (as I did in the case of my parents’ attitude about teasing). The fact that you blame anyone is like a deadbolt locking the LH itself in place.
Conversely, refusal to acknowledge hurt is also a problem: when somebody tells me something is not their parents’ fault, because of extenuating circumstances, my next job is to get them to realize that even if it’s not their parents’ fault, this doesn’t mean they didn’t still get hurt, or that they don’t have the right to feel bad about it!
In both directions, it is the very idea of “at fault” moral accounting that blocks the resolution of the person’s actual hurt, whether they are putting the blame somewhere in particular, or trying to pretend that nothing happened because someone shouldn’t be “at fault”.
That’s why I consider the notion of “fault” to be a most unhelpful red herring when one is discussing the origins of an instance of LH.
(Clarification: just in case it’s not clear, I do not try to persuade people to blame their parents for things; acknowledging a hurt is not the same as saying it’s somebody else’s fault! If you can’t say, “they did X and I felt hurt” without feeling like the other person is a perpetrator and you’re a victim, then you’re not over the LH yet. As the years go by, I myself feel an increasing compassion and understanding of my parents’ own pains and heartaches, that I wish I could’ve achieved when they were still alive. Indeed, I wish now that I could have given them all the praise, support, attention, and more, that I previously wished they’d given me!)
It is a matter of deliberate, well-informed, hostility. Hostility which shields itself with the argument “Ah, you are imagining things. See, no one else thinks I am doing any thing wrong.”
Why do you think this?
Having a different worldview and set of priors on the subject of gender is not the same thing as hostility.
If I were to be more precise, I would say that I disapprove of people attempting to use a claimed victim status as a way to target behaviors they personally dislike, by:
Implying that the weight of societal disapproval or true “ought”-ness is allied with their position, and
Implying that all those people who fail to join them in denouncing or punishing the offenders are themselves worthy of disapproval.
IMO, in a rationalist community, if you dislike something, you bloody well ought to be able to say you dislike it and why, without needing to claim you represent a class of people and calling for people to announce/signal their factional alliances. That’s divisive and unhelpful, no matter how “right” your position might be.
It’s possible that I’m biased, but I don’t think that it’s in the way you describe. For one thing, if komponisto’s real objective were to influence women’s preferences towards “granting sexual favors”, then the obvious thing to do would be to promote the decriminalization and destigmatization of prostitution—something I’d wholeheartedly support as well. So in that case at least, it’s not about a lack of sympathy with the stated objective.
On the flip side, I think that some LW commenters are insensitive to their readers (male and female on both sides) and that it’s occasionally annoying and/or offensive to many, and that it would be better if those parties got better at communicating without projecting their stereotypes onto others.
So, I’m not entirely out of sympathy there either… I just think there are better ways to address it, by engaging and educating, and giving people an option to be the “good guy” by changing, rather than casting them in the “bad guy” role that just creates polarization.
Find out what the other person wants, and then find a way to give them what they want so you can get what you want. Isn’t that the very essence of the PUA concept being discussed here?
To the extent that people on either side of the debate fail to look into what people on the other side actually want—as opposed to projecting their own negative stereotypes in the other side’s direction—no actual communication will take place.
A very good response. Thank you. I agree with much of it, but I would like to continue a bit further regarding the stuff near the top about claimed victim status. Let us all return in our minds to those idyllic days of childhood:
Younger sibling: “Quit picking on me!” Older sibling: “Me? I’m no picking on you.” Younger sibling: “Mama!”
Now, as you visualize this scene, ask yourself whether younger sibling is “attempting to use a claimed victim status as a way to target behaviors they personally dislike”. Ask whether she is implying that the weight of parental disapproval or true “ought”-ness is allied with her position. Whether she is implying that a parent who fails to join in denouncing or punishing the offender is not carrying out the parental responsibilities of protection and fair arbitration?
By analogy, it would seem that your advice to younger sibling would be “If you dislike something, you bloody well ought to be able to say you dislike it and why, without needing to call for a parent to announce/signal a factional alliance. That’s divisive and unhelpful, no matter how “right” your position might be.” Well, that just might be good advice, even to a child.
But what if the advice is followed and it doesn’t work? Doesn’t work repeatedly. Older sibling simply gets a kick out of tormenting his younger sister. What then?
The problem here, IMO, is not lack of communication of wants and needs, and it is not a matter of stereotyping. It is a matter of deliberate, well-informed, hostility. Hostility which shields itself with the argument “Ah, you are imagining things. See, no one else thinks I am doing any thing wrong.”
In those circumstances, I think that for you to disapprove of “claimed victim status”, to disapprove of seeking allies, is to give your approval to the victimizer.
You haven’t described what the “tormenting” consists of here. My answer is different depending on where it falls on the scale from consensual (“mom, he keeps looking at me!”) to nonconsensual (e.g. striking).
If it were (and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything I would consider an example of such in this thread; perhaps you could point one out), then I’d say that there’s a “Vote Down” button, and the ability to hide subthreads on a post that one does not wish to read.
(LW doesn’t currently have a way to add a new feature to suppress all posts/comments by a particular user or within a particular subthread, but it would make a nice addition.)
It’s really difficult for me to consider posting comments on LessWrong as “victimizing” in any sense (barring personal threats, either direct or implied).
Even the most annoying of deliberate trolls can be downvoted and ignored, and usually are.
I consider my reactions to anything posted online as being solely my responsibility, so it is not possible, AFAICT, for someone to “victimize” me here.
Someone can be annoying or disagreeable or I can even find their statements offensive, but if I continue to engage with them, that’s my problem, not anybody else’s.
But again—I’m talking about speech here (and again, barring personal threats, either direct or implied), in a place where avoiding the speaker is pretty easy, and there’s a mechanism for directly punishing the undesired speech. Your sibling analogy doesn’t apply, since most of us here on LW do not live under the same roof or have to see each other daily. ;-)
So my counterpoint to your “approval to the victimizer” rhetoric would be to say that if you think LW discussions are victimization, you must have been lucky enough to not ever have really been victimized in your life. (For that matter, if you think they’re harassment or bullying, then you’ve probably never really been harassed or bullied!)
This is why the “men are poor victims of conniving women and society” rhetoric is just as repulsive to me as the reverse is. I reject victim rhetoric for the same reason CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) does: it’s irrational and untrue, as well as both a symptom of and reinforcement/re-priming of learned helplessness.
If Harry/Eliezer’s true Nemesis is Death, mine is Learned Helplessness. It is far more evil and terrible a thing than any mere human victimizer, because it not only stops people from taking effective action, it also continues to work its damage 24⁄7, long after the original victimizer has come and gone.
I agree with all this.
Not that it’s really something you can fix on an internet forum.
Great Scott! This looks like the work of that dastardly villain, Learned Helplessness! ;-)
Seriously though: why can’t we fix it?
Better (i.e. less victim-y) question: how can we?
PM’s. I’m a big fan of the motivational pep-talk (unfortunately I’m not quite good enough to give them.)
I assume that means private messages? If so, I’m not clear on what you suggest.
I’m not good at them either, but I personally find that improved questions are more likely to produce lasting results, anyway.
You ask for examples of deliberate, well-informed hostility on this thread. If you don’t mind, I would like to keep this branch of the discussion at a more hypothetical level. Let’s stick to my hypothetical of the obnoxious big brother and the annoyed little sister. I agree with what you point out; that my example doesn’t match the situation here because here the supposed victim has less to fear and far more ways to escape. More power in general. But I want to hold onto my made-up example to ask one more question below.
You wrote:
I had never heard that term before (not being particularly interested in psychology). From the Wikipedia article, it looks interesting. I intend to read more. Thank you. I have long had the political belief that groups mythologizing their own victimhood are victimizers in training. And I have close personal friends whose lives have been ruined by their own self-constructed history of victimhood and definition of self as past-victim.
But it occurs to me, that if helplessness can be learned (but shouldn’t be), then it can also be taught (but shouldn’t be). And it also occurs to me that the brother in my story, if coupled with a mother who counsels the daughter to work out the problem for herself with the brother, … these two are effectively conspiring to teach helplessness to little sister. Personally, I think that is evil. Maybe I don’t yet understand LH theory, but I would guess that maybe you would too. And that is my question. If little sister learns helplessness in this situation, who is at fault—the brother (who after all, is just a kid), the mother, or the sister?
How about the person who taught the mother that? Her mother? Her mother’s mother? Evolution? The universe?
What makes you assume that somebody has to be “at fault” here, and how is it helpful to make that assumption?
Please note that my advice is for adults, not children. For a parent to give their child only the bare advice, and not the listening, support, and assistance needed to carry it out, would indeed be cultivating a sense of helplessness along the lines of, e..g “what happens to me doesn’t matter/my preferences don’t count”, or some variation thereof.
Certainly, that’s what happened in my case, when my parents told me to “just ignore” the people teasing or harassing me!
However, that doesn’t mean I consider my parents “at fault” for the shame and self-hatred I developed as an indirect result of their choices. In fact, fully understanding how my feelings came about actually let me drop the resentment I previously felt towards them for this.
Ironically, it is the very idea of blaming people for things that reinforces LH in the first place. If I think it is my parent’s “fault” that I developed a particular instance of LH, then clearly, I am a helpless victim!
So, in order to drop emotional LH of this form, it is necessary to also drop judgment and blame.
When I coach people on letting go of past victimization, one of the more difficult steps tends to be letting go of the judgment of who’s “at fault”—and it doesn’t matter whether you blame someone else (e.g. your parents) or yourself (as I did in the case of my parents’ attitude about teasing). The fact that you blame anyone is like a deadbolt locking the LH itself in place.
Conversely, refusal to acknowledge hurt is also a problem: when somebody tells me something is not their parents’ fault, because of extenuating circumstances, my next job is to get them to realize that even if it’s not their parents’ fault, this doesn’t mean they didn’t still get hurt, or that they don’t have the right to feel bad about it!
In both directions, it is the very idea of “at fault” moral accounting that blocks the resolution of the person’s actual hurt, whether they are putting the blame somewhere in particular, or trying to pretend that nothing happened because someone shouldn’t be “at fault”.
That’s why I consider the notion of “fault” to be a most unhelpful red herring when one is discussing the origins of an instance of LH.
(Clarification: just in case it’s not clear, I do not try to persuade people to blame their parents for things; acknowledging a hurt is not the same as saying it’s somebody else’s fault! If you can’t say, “they did X and I felt hurt” without feeling like the other person is a perpetrator and you’re a victim, then you’re not over the LH yet. As the years go by, I myself feel an increasing compassion and understanding of my parents’ own pains and heartaches, that I wish I could’ve achieved when they were still alive. Indeed, I wish now that I could have given them all the praise, support, attention, and more, that I previously wished they’d given me!)
Excellent answer. Thank you. I will try to learn something useful from our exchange.
Why do you think this?
Having a different worldview and set of priors on the subject of gender is not the same thing as hostility.