This is perhaps the best reason for creating some kind of spin-off or sub-community along the lines of that suggested in the post.
I disagree. This is exactly the sort of discussion that needs to happen between rationalists with different sorts of life experiences (e.g. male and female rationalists). The controversial nature of these subjects shows why it needs to be hashed out, not that these subjects need to be avoided. Of course, individuals are free to bow out of these discussions.
Nancy said:
Does what the women are upset about make any sense to you?
Yes, put particular details about the exchange don’t quite make sense to me.
Originally, SarahC made the point that pickup won’t guarantee men success with women, and women are still free to reject PUAs. I don’t quite understand why she brought up this point in the first place, and I’m not sure why she speculated about a potential for violence. PUAs know very well that their methods don’t guarantee success with any particular woman, and they work very hard on coping strategies to deal with rejection. She said:
It can get creepy when men think they’re entitled to a quota of women, and that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence.
This quote made me wonder if SarahC thinks that any complaint of unfairness by men in the dating world is evidence of “entitlement” and “creepiness.” I didn’t get on her case about this, because I know that she has run into some of the more icky PUA stuff, which could well give her the impression that PUAs hold such attitudes. Instead, I asked her why she might not believe that PUAs recognize the validity of women rejecting them.
Yet I think komponisto asked a good question: whether SarahC would judge complaints in other domains (like getting hired for a job) by the same standard, and consider frustration and complaints of unfairness to be evidence of “entitlement” and “creepiness.”
Unfortunately, in the same comment, komponisto made this point:
I wonder if it’s time someone made the bound-to-be-controversial suggestion that women in modern society are excessively conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors.
More on that comment, later.
Alicorn pointed out that sexual interaction is qualitatively different from other forms of interaction, such as hiring. Furthermore, she observed that given the prevalence of sexual violence, we should have higher priors that men might react to rejection with violence, that we should have for job-seekers.
While granting the distinctions Alicorn observes between men trying to date women, and job hunters, I’m still not sure why we got on the subject of sexual violence. The reason is because Alicorn’s priors may apply to the reference class of all men, but with PUAs, we have a different reference class. We know that PUAs are interested in figuring out and fulfilling women’s criteria, which seems at odds with PUAs feeling “entitled” and that women’s rejections of them are “unfair.”
Alicorn may have some other reference classes that influence her priors about PUAs. Still, I don’t think it was appropriate for SarahC to jump from the observation of PUAs claiming methods that consistent attract women, to the notion that PUAs might get frustrated if these methods don’t work, hold a sense of creepy entitlement, and potentially respond with violence. I fully acknowledge that SarahC might have good reasons to hold such suspicions, but she hasn’t yet shared what they are.
Now, let’s return to reactions to komponisto’s comment.
I fully understand why this comment pattern-matches so many negative things. It does sound like komponisto might be advocating that women be sexual with men in situations where they aren’t sure they want to be sexual (or don’t want to be sexual). I had the same reaction as pjeby.
It’s useful for komponisto to know the problematic interpretations of his comment. It’s understandable that Alicorn wasn’t able to read it charitably, but that doesn’t mean that a more charitable interpretation doesn’t exist. pjeby suggested one, for instance:
OTOH, if what you really meant was, “people (of either gender) should be more sympathetic/less judgmental to the plight of the unattractive (of either gender)”, then sure, that makes sense.
The charitable interpretation: komponisto wasn’t suggesting that women should do things they don’t want with men; he was suggesting that they be less conservative in what they want with men in the first place. He explains in his next post:
Secondly, yes, the issue is precisely at the level of “wanting”. Obviously, given that someone already doesn’t want to give something, then their giving it would be bad, all else being equal. The question is, what to do about this problem of their not wanting, since their lack of wanting causes pain for others.
After he said this, I was kinda wanting one of the women in the thread to say “OK, now I see what you mean.”
Reading your post gives me the impression that you think topics related to sex just blow up for no particular reason, but I may be wrong.
In my view, discussions about sex on LW blow up for many reasons, and only one of those reasons is men being insensitive.
I’ve often noticed that women seem to be running a “creepiness detection routine” towards men’s sexuality. In real life, there are good reasons for them to do so. In internet conversations, it’s useful for men to know what kind of arguments trigger that routine, because those arguments potentially sound like their aren’t respectful of women’s bodily autonomy, self-determination, and consent.
Simultaneously, it’s also useful for women to know that many men are sick of negative associations with their sexuality, and the expansive application of the word “creepy.” Note MC_Echerischia’s brusque response:
I wish everyone would extend to the unattractive people of the world, of either sex, our right to feel bitter. This does not make us rapists. Thank you for your attention.
I think that women having a “creeped out” response triggered is useful data for discussion on LessWrong, but I don’t want to see it running the discourse here. If such a reaction is presented, it’s probably most useful to try to explain where it’s coming from. Clarification of the creepy statement can always be requested.
I find it a shame that Alicorn isn’t currently willing to discuss possible criticisms of women’s preferences, and that komponisto subsequently bowed out of the discussion. I respect the preference of both those individuals to not want to engage in such a discussion at this time, but I think that those discussions are important, and I wish they could occur here.
Personally, I’m not very interested in criticizing women’s preferences because I’m skeptical about how malleable people’s preferences are, yet since (as mattnewport points out ) it’s culturally acceptable to critique the basis for men’s preferences in women, I think it should be an open question what level of choice people have over their mating preferences, and what could be reasons for them to change their preferences.
I agree that this sentence of komponisto’s is where things blew up.
I wonder if it’s time someone made the bound-to-be-controversial suggestion that women in modern society are excessively conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors.
Too conservative for who? Who gains under the new system? He frames it as women “granting sexual favors”, not, for example, as women having more fun or a larger selection of potential mates or anything else they might want. I think that’s where the entitlement issues showed up.
I think everyone would be better off if men were less picky about women’s appearances. If you optimize for that one thing, it’s harder to optimize for anything else, including various sorts of compatibility.
However, I think it would be rude to push that point of view—it seems so clear that men want what they want, and generally don’t want to want to be different. (I think there was someone here who did want to want to have broader tastes in women, but couldn’t manage it.)
There might be some binary thinking going on—“should be less conservative about granting sexual favors” may be apt to trigger memories of the least attractive men who wanted them rather than the men who just barely didn’t make the cut. “Granting sexual favors” does suggest a high-to-low status situation.
When I suggested men being less picky about women’s appearance, did that seem to imply being attracted to somewhat less currently physically attractive women, or being attracted to women you currently find physically very unattractive?
More komponisto:
The question is, what to do about this problem of their not wanting, since their lack of wanting causes pain for others.
What is to be done by who? Why should they care? And, for that matter, how much work would it take for women to adjust their desires, and by what means?
I don’t know if I should be blaming anyone for not getting this aspect of things since it’s taken me this long to drag it into consciousness, but I think this is why the creep-o-meter and physical danger alarms are going off.
In a previous discussion, someone was making a utilitarian calculation which seemed to ignore women’s interests—and when I asked him about it, it turned out that he had. I didn’t underline it at the time, but it’s really unnerving to be that much of a blank spot.
I think everyone would be better off if men were less picky about women’s appearances. If you optimize for that one thing, it’s harder to optimize for anything else, including various sorts of compatibility.
Very true.
However, I think it would be rude to push that point of view—it seems so clear that men want what they want, and generally don’t want to want to be different.
It would be interesting if this were something that was subject to chemical modification. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing one could verbally persuade a man about—but if there was something that reduced pickiness with say the same side effect profile that caffeine has towards increasing alertness I think it would be a good addition to our culture.
It might be possible to verbally persuade some men that this was worth working on—but it might also take considerable work just to find usable methods.
I’ve read one account of a man who found that pornography was giving him irrational standards about what women ought to look like and do, and that staying away from pornography for a while (months?) recalibrated his standards towards actual women.
For a science fictional look at the possible effects of not being able to see facial beauty, see Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary”.
But for sure if he abstained from pornography, he was also reducing his masturbation, and therefore more biologically driven to have sexual desire for the women actually available to him in reality.
I do agree that porn is a visual superstimulus and at least momentarily distorting.
but if there was something that reduced pickiness with say the same side effect profile that caffeine has towards increasing alertness I think it would be a good addition to our culture.
I’ve often noticed that women seem to be running a “creepiness detection routine” towards men’s sexuality. In real life, there are good reasons for them to do so. In internet conversations, it’s useful for men to know what kind of arguments trigger that routine, because those arguments potentially sound like their aren’t respectful of women’s bodily autonomy, self-determination, and consent.
I found that part of komponisto’s comment creepy, and I’m neither a woman, nor do I have anything against men wanting more sex.
The suggestion in the comment, though, was creepy for precisely the same reason that the “this could lead to violence” arguments are creepy: both are attempts to influence others to change their actions via social disapproval, rather than through more positive/egalitarian means.
I find this sort of victim-rhetoric (i.e., “I’m helpless so YOU should change”) to be equally offensive, regardless of the kind of victimhood claimed, or the gender of the self-described victim.
(Of course, since I own my offense, I don’t project this back into the world to say that either komponisto or Alicorn are therefore bad people who should be punished or prevented from speaking. IOW, I am not a victim.)
attempts to influence others to change their actions via social disapproval, rather than through more positive/egalitarian means.
I would like to move at least one branch of this conversation to a more abstract level.
What, exactly, is your objection to attempting to influence the behavior of others by means of social disapproval? How is it non-egalitarian? Do you disapprove only of negative social pressure, or do you also deplore positive social pressures?
Are you perhaps of the opinion that all forms of disapproval should be kept to oneself? Or is it only organized campaigns of disapproval that draw your ire? 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?
Could you suggest a more positive/egalitarian way in which komponisto could influence Alicorn, or Alicorn influence komponisto other than expressions of disapproval?
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.
I find it a shame that Alicorn isn’t currently willing to discuss possible criticisms of women’s preferences
Altering one’s preferences, especially ones as deeply lodged as ones about sexuality, is a difficult project. I expect I could accomplish certain hacks in myself because self-modification is something I practice and have developed good instincts about. I don’t expect women in general to share this ability. So what would it accomplish to hammer out a new set of ideal preferences that it would be better if women had instead? They can’t adopt them on purpose even if they see the logic indicating that they should. At best, they can follow a norm that has them act as though they adopt these new preferences, and that just has them acting contrary to their own real preferences to suit those of men.
If there’s some point to entertaining criticism of women’s preferences (as opposed to my own atypical preferences which are unlikely to percolate out into the population) that I have missed, do please let me know.
Hah, I think about this solution almost every time that women test my nerves! But then I look at the gay/bi people I know, and their lives seem to have even more drama than mine. (That could be some selection effect though...)
They can’t adopt them on purpose even if they see the logic indicating that they should
In a nutshell-of-simplification, I believe this statement is false.
I think people’s preferences—or apparent preferences—are more malleable than that. As people learn more—about the world, themselves, and other people—and learn to think—if not faster, then at least more powerfully—they may become susceptible to arguments they wouldn’t have been susceptible to before, and the suboptimal game-theoretic equilibrium inherited from the past may begin to break down. At the very least, people are diverse enough that there are bound to be some for whom this is true more than for others. As a result, there is no reason that I can see not to entertain discussion of possible preference-modifications. An individual may find that a particular proposed modification is too difficult to implement, or would even perhaps conflict with deeper, more important preferences; but it is not reasonable in my view for such an individual to thereby conclude that the possibility was not worth considering, or that there won’t be a significant number, now or in the future, of other individuals for whom the outcome of this kind introspection will be different.
Still less do I think it reasonable for anyone to attempt to suppress such discussions by means of psychological bullying tactics such as implying—against all plausibility—that having such a discussion will noticeably increase the risk to the personal safety of participants on this forum. Such an attempt at suppression may be pardonable, if the fear is genuine, and especially if it comes from somebody whom one has met and likes; but the mere fact that it is pardonable does not make it reasonable, when one’s own prior for such fears being rationally justified is somewhere between the probability of a summer snowstorm in Miami and the probability (speaking of sex and violence) that a certain American exchange student and her boyfriend of one week got together with a local drifter to end the life of her friend and roommate in the course of a sadistic orgy held under the influence of cannabis. Exaggeration in the previous sentence is minimal; and no, before anyone asks (or pounces), such a low prior does not derive from beliefs about the statistical incidence of certain kinds of violence, but rather from beliefs about their causal mechanisms.
Thank you for your attention, as it is said by some.
… attempt to suppress such discussions by means of psychological bullying tactics such as implying—against all plausibility—that having such a discussion will noticeably increase the risk to the personal safety of participants on this forum.
I don’t think that the safety concern was limited to the safety of participants in this forum? Why ever would you come to the conclusion that it was? If anything, personal anecdote has been used only to demonstrate prior thought about the subject matter.
And I am also wondering why you think that criticism of such discussion, even if it verges on “psychological bullying”, can be called “suppression” without engaging in exaggeration which is far beyond the “minimal”.
There are certain ideas, the expression of which is protected by the ideals of liberty and by the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. That protection does not extend to protection from being criticized. There are some ideas that have been expressed here that should be criticized. In an ideal community, they would be widely criticized.
The reason for criticizing them is similar in some ways to criticism of use of the “N word”. It is not so much that the word or the idea is offensive to someone. It is that if that kind of aggressive and abusive verbal behavior is tolerated, then more people will engage in it, and the aggression and abuse will simply escalate to something more physical. Because, make no mistake about it, the behavior I am seeing is exactly analogous that of an adolescent boy testing to see how much he can get away with.
Such an attempt at suppression may be pardonable, if the fear is genuine, and especially if it comes from somebody whom one has met and likes; but the mere fact that it is pardonable does not make it reasonable, when one’s own prior for such fears being rationally justified is...
It is reasonable to take precautions even against small risks, when those risks are the sort you run into again and again and must develop habits about. I wear seatbelts even during short car trips with safe drivers in good weather in daylight with minimal traffic at low speed. It is costly to evaluate those factors of risk separately each time I get into a car. It is costly to evaluate the factors that lead you to see this thread as definitely not harmful to me.
Perhaps it is harmless. I’ve never been injured in a car accident, either (although I’ve been wearing seatbelts each time I’ve been in one). But I put on my seatbelt as a reflex which it is unsafe to tamper with, and I ask for protective conventions in conversations on this subject as a reflex which it is unsafe for me to tamper with. Inviting me to take off my metaphorical seatbelt, without a reason other than it being inconvenient for you, demonstrates a willingness to take my concerns lightly and to substitute your judgment for mine. Interestingly, that doesn’t make me feel safer.
Inviting me to take off my metaphorical seatbelt, without a reason other than it being inconvenient for you, demonstrates a willingness to take my concerns lightly and to substitute your judgment for mine. Interestingly, that doesn’t make me feel safer
Despite your use of the trivializing word “inconvenient”, the fact is that your personal anxieties do not automatically trump my desires, including my desire (if it exists) to have a discussion about certain topics. You are not the only one with preferences and wishes, and your feeling as safe as possible is not the only concern in the universe.
(I find it notable that while you accuse me of a “willingness to take [your] concerns lightly”, you have, so far as I can tell, yet to show any sympathy for “my” concerns as expressed in this thread.)
It would not be costly to evaluate whether or not to put on a seatbelt. What would be costly is a general policy of evaluating every such “reflexive” act. Much less costly, however, would be a general policy of evaluating those reflexive acts whose usefulness has been called into question by intelligent rational people who don’t wish you harm. If someone on LW proposed that seatbelts are harmful, I would pay attention. I may or may not end up agreeing, but I would listen to the argument and open that particular “reflex” up to questioning.
You are free to hold irrational beliefs about the dangers posed to you by threads such as this. You are even—perhaps especially—free to attempt to convince others that the beliefs you hold are in fact not irrational. You should however not expect others to be intimidated into self-censorship by your claims to special status.
There is a genuine problem here. Like so many other things in our current world, the sexual status quo is not optimal. I have the impression that there are people out there who are very unhappy, but whose unhappiness is not considered a problem by almost anyone other than themselves. I find it regrettable that you are seeking to enforce taboos that prevent the open discussion of this. In principle, this is something I feel I ought to fight. Unfortunately, the costs may be too high for me. The more I engage in these discussions, the more risk I run of being associated with a particular “side” in the “sex wars”, not necessarily a side that I want to be associated with. This isn’t something I have much of a personal stake in, except insofar as it engages my unusually active empathic tendencies; so it might be best for me to leave it to other people, more willing to take the status hit. I would however like to make at least the following point: even “victimizers” are not innately evil. I have the strong suspicion that lurking behind many a “misogynistic” smirk or scowl is a sad face with authentic tears.
I disagree. This is exactly the sort of discussion that needs to happen between rationalists with different sorts of life experiences (e.g. male and female rationalists). The controversial nature of these subjects shows why it needs to be hashed out, not that these subjects need to be avoided. Of course, individuals are free to bow out of these discussions.
I agree with this. The problem I seek to avoid by having an alternate place for such discussions is that of having the vast majority of discussion effort diverted to ‘meta’ discussion. Currently discussion of what human sexual preferences (gender typical and otherwise) are and what techniques are most useful in social interactions are extremely diluted. Most actually interesting material that can be used to enhance our models of the world ends up only included as footnotes and tangents among justifications and criticisms of stereotypes.
I would like people to make posts and comments on the actual subject matter. I’d like it if the majority of replies to be agreement, disagreement, elaboration and general discussion of the ideas contained therein. Because then I’d have a chance to learn something new.
Why did I bring it up? Because I was worried about this George Sodini business, and because the promotional material you showed me seemed excessively optimistic in its promises of success with women, and because I think the kind of man having enough trouble that he’s willing to pay for a seduction course might be less astute and less realistic than average. I do think desperate guys can get suckered in by promises, and by an ideology that makes seduction look like victory. I think bad things can happen when you tell unhappy people “Here is a way for you to triumph over all the [insert bad word, maybe “political correctness police”] who are keeping you down.” That pattern has played out many times and sometimes the results are undesirable. It’s just something to be careful about.
On the other hand, you (HughRistic) have been very reasonable, and I’m pretty sure your kind of PUA is a good thing, and you obviously aren’t a desperate person in the grip of an ideology. Maybe that kind of thing is rare; I’ve seen it on the internet but obviously that doesn’t tell me if it’s common.
I don’t think “any complaint of unfairness in the dating world” is creepy. I just don’t. I don’t think anybody around here is creepy. I think creeps are creepy. I thought we might be able to agree to be anti-creep.
You come up with a system like PUA, I think it’s fair to ask you to disclaim unethical use of it. It must get tiring after a while, but that’s the way things work. People who make and play video games have to say, over and over again, “No, games do not make people go on shooting sprees, and we’re doing our best not to encourage that.” I’m sure they’re sick of it, but they’ve made themselves the ambassadors of their art, like it or not. People will judge your art based on its ambassadors.
I think the kind of man having enough trouble that he’s willing to pay for a seduction course might be less astute and less realistic than average.
Wow. Just… wow.
So… anyone with poor social skills is “less astute and less realistic than average”?
I suspect that your estimation of how much “trouble” is “enough” is way off, and consequently, your estimation of how many men end up in the “willing to pay” category… and hence, whether you can reasonably compare those folks to the “average”.
I know a guy with a $20 million/year training business, that sells many products at $20 and under. That’s one guy, in a business with literally dozens of big names, and maybe a hundred small ones.
And that’s with his (and everybody else’s) products being massively pirated. Even men who aren’t willing to pay, are still getting the material. Especially since there is tons of it available for free as well via internet forums (though the free stuff is not always of the best quality).
Ironically, it is the men who are willing to pay the most, who are most likely to be exposed to high-quality, low-deception, maximally self-improvement oriented material. Sadly, this is because it’s (comparatively speaking) a niche market.
IOW, the average guy wants a quick fix—the dating equivalent of the little blue pill. And the only reason that more guys don’t buy the products (that I’ve heard from internet marketing discussions with the guys who sell them) is that their main point of sales resistance is admitting they “have enough trouble” to need the product!
In other words, the average guy wishes he were better at meeting/relating to women, but thinks (since all his friends are signaling that they’re studs) that he’s the only one having any trouble, and therefore must be a loser.
(Note: this is the average guy, meaning “most of the male population”, not “average guy that women already relate to”, which might explain why you think the average guy is below-average.)
Neil Strauss’s book (and Mystery’s show) have actually done men an enormous service by making it less “weird” to be interested in improving one’s skills at meeting or relating to women, so that interest in the subject isn’t necessarily signaling to your peers that you’re not as good as they’re all pretending to be.
In short, it’s only above average men (in success with women) who don’t wish, at some point in their lives, that they were better at meeting or relating to women.
(Do remember that while the marketing rhetoric tends to “have any woman/as many women you want”, this is so that the average purchaser will say to themselves, “well, I just want to be able to meet/talk to The One, so that ought to be really easy if I get this product, and if I can do more that’s just a bonus”.)
Ironically, it is the men who are willing to pay the most, who are most likely to be exposed to high-quality, low-deception, maximally self-improvement oriented material. Sadly, this is because it’s (comparatively speaking) a niche market.
I’m trying to imagine a marketing campaign—maybe “good sense at reasonable prices”. Seriously, is it that small a niche?
I’m trying to imagine a marketing campaign—maybe “good sense at reasonable prices”. Seriously, is it that small a niche?
High prices are a signal, in both directions. On the purchasing end, it signals commitment, and on the selling end, it signals good results.
(Btw, internet marketers routinely advise that charging more money means you get fewer customers, but there will be far fewer problem customers and you will enjoy working with them more. My own experiences support this hypothesis.)
Thanks, Sarah, that answers my question. If you said this stuff in the first place, it would have helped me understand why you brought up the issue of violence. I still think it’s a bit of a stretch to connect George Sodini to pickup (he did actually take a pickup seminar at one point, but obviously had deeper problems) to pickup, though I do grant some of what PUAs write sounds adverserial towards women.
and because I think the kind of man having enough trouble that he’s willing to pay for a seduction course might be less astute and less realistic than average.
I agree with pjeby’s response on this point.
People will judge your art based on its ambassadors.
I realize that, and I know it’s not your fault or my fault that so many of the ambassadors of pickup suck. That’s why I’m trying to talk about it in a way that sounds reasonable and morally neutral, so I can see what people think of it whens it’s translated into a language that isn’t so off-putting.
wedrifid said:
I disagree. This is exactly the sort of discussion that needs to happen between rationalists with different sorts of life experiences (e.g. male and female rationalists). The controversial nature of these subjects shows why it needs to be hashed out, not that these subjects need to be avoided. Of course, individuals are free to bow out of these discussions.
Nancy said:
Yes, put particular details about the exchange don’t quite make sense to me.
Originally, SarahC made the point that pickup won’t guarantee men success with women, and women are still free to reject PUAs. I don’t quite understand why she brought up this point in the first place, and I’m not sure why she speculated about a potential for violence. PUAs know very well that their methods don’t guarantee success with any particular woman, and they work very hard on coping strategies to deal with rejection. She said:
This quote made me wonder if SarahC thinks that any complaint of unfairness by men in the dating world is evidence of “entitlement” and “creepiness.” I didn’t get on her case about this, because I know that she has run into some of the more icky PUA stuff, which could well give her the impression that PUAs hold such attitudes. Instead, I asked her why she might not believe that PUAs recognize the validity of women rejecting them.
Yet I think komponisto asked a good question: whether SarahC would judge complaints in other domains (like getting hired for a job) by the same standard, and consider frustration and complaints of unfairness to be evidence of “entitlement” and “creepiness.”
Unfortunately, in the same comment, komponisto made this point:
More on that comment, later.
Alicorn pointed out that sexual interaction is qualitatively different from other forms of interaction, such as hiring. Furthermore, she observed that given the prevalence of sexual violence, we should have higher priors that men might react to rejection with violence, that we should have for job-seekers.
While granting the distinctions Alicorn observes between men trying to date women, and job hunters, I’m still not sure why we got on the subject of sexual violence. The reason is because Alicorn’s priors may apply to the reference class of all men, but with PUAs, we have a different reference class. We know that PUAs are interested in figuring out and fulfilling women’s criteria, which seems at odds with PUAs feeling “entitled” and that women’s rejections of them are “unfair.”
Alicorn may have some other reference classes that influence her priors about PUAs. Still, I don’t think it was appropriate for SarahC to jump from the observation of PUAs claiming methods that consistent attract women, to the notion that PUAs might get frustrated if these methods don’t work, hold a sense of creepy entitlement, and potentially respond with violence. I fully acknowledge that SarahC might have good reasons to hold such suspicions, but she hasn’t yet shared what they are.
Now, let’s return to reactions to komponisto’s comment.
I fully understand why this comment pattern-matches so many negative things. It does sound like komponisto might be advocating that women be sexual with men in situations where they aren’t sure they want to be sexual (or don’t want to be sexual). I had the same reaction as pjeby.
It’s useful for komponisto to know the problematic interpretations of his comment. It’s understandable that Alicorn wasn’t able to read it charitably, but that doesn’t mean that a more charitable interpretation doesn’t exist. pjeby suggested one, for instance:
The charitable interpretation: komponisto wasn’t suggesting that women should do things they don’t want with men; he was suggesting that they be less conservative in what they want with men in the first place. He explains in his next post:
After he said this, I was kinda wanting one of the women in the thread to say “OK, now I see what you mean.”
In my view, discussions about sex on LW blow up for many reasons, and only one of those reasons is men being insensitive.
I’ve often noticed that women seem to be running a “creepiness detection routine” towards men’s sexuality. In real life, there are good reasons for them to do so. In internet conversations, it’s useful for men to know what kind of arguments trigger that routine, because those arguments potentially sound like their aren’t respectful of women’s bodily autonomy, self-determination, and consent.
Simultaneously, it’s also useful for women to know that many men are sick of negative associations with their sexuality, and the expansive application of the word “creepy.” Note MC_Echerischia’s brusque response:
I think that women having a “creeped out” response triggered is useful data for discussion on LessWrong, but I don’t want to see it running the discourse here. If such a reaction is presented, it’s probably most useful to try to explain where it’s coming from. Clarification of the creepy statement can always be requested.
I find it a shame that Alicorn isn’t currently willing to discuss possible criticisms of women’s preferences, and that komponisto subsequently bowed out of the discussion. I respect the preference of both those individuals to not want to engage in such a discussion at this time, but I think that those discussions are important, and I wish they could occur here.
Personally, I’m not very interested in criticizing women’s preferences because I’m skeptical about how malleable people’s preferences are, yet since (as mattnewport points out ) it’s culturally acceptable to critique the basis for men’s preferences in women, I think it should be an open question what level of choice people have over their mating preferences, and what could be reasons for them to change their preferences.
I agree that this sentence of komponisto’s is where things blew up.
Too conservative for who? Who gains under the new system? He frames it as women “granting sexual favors”, not, for example, as women having more fun or a larger selection of potential mates or anything else they might want. I think that’s where the entitlement issues showed up.
I think everyone would be better off if men were less picky about women’s appearances. If you optimize for that one thing, it’s harder to optimize for anything else, including various sorts of compatibility.
However, I think it would be rude to push that point of view—it seems so clear that men want what they want, and generally don’t want to want to be different. (I think there was someone here who did want to want to have broader tastes in women, but couldn’t manage it.)
There might be some binary thinking going on—“should be less conservative about granting sexual favors” may be apt to trigger memories of the least attractive men who wanted them rather than the men who just barely didn’t make the cut. “Granting sexual favors” does suggest a high-to-low status situation.
When I suggested men being less picky about women’s appearance, did that seem to imply being attracted to somewhat less currently physically attractive women, or being attracted to women you currently find physically very unattractive?
More komponisto:
What is to be done by who? Why should they care? And, for that matter, how much work would it take for women to adjust their desires, and by what means?
I don’t know if I should be blaming anyone for not getting this aspect of things since it’s taken me this long to drag it into consciousness, but I think this is why the creep-o-meter and physical danger alarms are going off.
In a previous discussion, someone was making a utilitarian calculation which seemed to ignore women’s interests—and when I asked him about it, it turned out that he had. I didn’t underline it at the time, but it’s really unnerving to be that much of a blank spot.
Very true.
It would be interesting if this were something that was subject to chemical modification. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing one could verbally persuade a man about—but if there was something that reduced pickiness with say the same side effect profile that caffeine has towards increasing alertness I think it would be a good addition to our culture.
It might be possible to verbally persuade some men that this was worth working on—but it might also take considerable work just to find usable methods.
I’ve read one account of a man who found that pornography was giving him irrational standards about what women ought to look like and do, and that staying away from pornography for a while (months?) recalibrated his standards towards actual women.
For a science fictional look at the possible effects of not being able to see facial beauty, see Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary”.
But for sure if he abstained from pornography, he was also reducing his masturbation, and therefore more biologically driven to have sexual desire for the women actually available to him in reality.
I do agree that porn is a visual superstimulus and at least momentarily distorting.
Don’t we call this substance ‘beer’?
I found that part of komponisto’s comment creepy, and I’m neither a woman, nor do I have anything against men wanting more sex.
The suggestion in the comment, though, was creepy for precisely the same reason that the “this could lead to violence” arguments are creepy: both are attempts to influence others to change their actions via social disapproval, rather than through more positive/egalitarian means.
I find this sort of victim-rhetoric (i.e., “I’m helpless so YOU should change”) to be equally offensive, regardless of the kind of victimhood claimed, or the gender of the self-described victim.
(Of course, since I own my offense, I don’t project this back into the world to say that either komponisto or Alicorn are therefore bad people who should be punished or prevented from speaking. IOW, I am not a victim.)
I would like to move at least one branch of this conversation to a more abstract level. What, exactly, is your objection to attempting to influence the behavior of others by means of social disapproval? How is it non-egalitarian? Do you disapprove only of negative social pressure, or do you also deplore positive social pressures?
Are you perhaps of the opinion that all forms of disapproval should be kept to oneself? Or is it only organized campaigns of disapproval that draw your ire? 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?
Could you suggest a more positive/egalitarian way in which komponisto could influence Alicorn, or Alicorn influence komponisto other than expressions of 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.
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.
Altering one’s preferences, especially ones as deeply lodged as ones about sexuality, is a difficult project. I expect I could accomplish certain hacks in myself because self-modification is something I practice and have developed good instincts about. I don’t expect women in general to share this ability. So what would it accomplish to hammer out a new set of ideal preferences that it would be better if women had instead? They can’t adopt them on purpose even if they see the logic indicating that they should. At best, they can follow a norm that has them act as though they adopt these new preferences, and that just has them acting contrary to their own real preferences to suit those of men.
If there’s some point to entertaining criticism of women’s preferences (as opposed to my own atypical preferences which are unlikely to percolate out into the population) that I have missed, do please let me know.
If altering preferences is so easy then the men could alter themselves to be bisexual and solve the problem...
Not advocating that, but if we talk about altered preferences, that is the simplest solution.
Obligatory SMBC link.
Summoned Demon: Any wish you have is yours, for the price of your soul!
Angel: Don’t do it! No wish could justify an eternity of suffering.
Demon Summoner: I want to be bisexual, immune to STDs and have absolutely no standards.
Angel: S@#T
Demon: whistles.
Angel: That’s good.
Hah, I think about this solution almost every time that women test my nerves! But then I look at the gay/bi people I know, and their lives seem to have even more drama than mine. (That could be some selection effect though...)
In a nutshell-of-simplification, I believe this statement is false.
I think people’s preferences—or apparent preferences—are more malleable than that. As people learn more—about the world, themselves, and other people—and learn to think—if not faster, then at least more powerfully—they may become susceptible to arguments they wouldn’t have been susceptible to before, and the suboptimal game-theoretic equilibrium inherited from the past may begin to break down. At the very least, people are diverse enough that there are bound to be some for whom this is true more than for others. As a result, there is no reason that I can see not to entertain discussion of possible preference-modifications. An individual may find that a particular proposed modification is too difficult to implement, or would even perhaps conflict with deeper, more important preferences; but it is not reasonable in my view for such an individual to thereby conclude that the possibility was not worth considering, or that there won’t be a significant number, now or in the future, of other individuals for whom the outcome of this kind introspection will be different.
Still less do I think it reasonable for anyone to attempt to suppress such discussions by means of psychological bullying tactics such as implying—against all plausibility—that having such a discussion will noticeably increase the risk to the personal safety of participants on this forum. Such an attempt at suppression may be pardonable, if the fear is genuine, and especially if it comes from somebody whom one has met and likes; but the mere fact that it is pardonable does not make it reasonable, when one’s own prior for such fears being rationally justified is somewhere between the probability of a summer snowstorm in Miami and the probability (speaking of sex and violence) that a certain American exchange student and her boyfriend of one week got together with a local drifter to end the life of her friend and roommate in the course of a sadistic orgy held under the influence of cannabis. Exaggeration in the previous sentence is minimal; and no, before anyone asks (or pounces), such a low prior does not derive from beliefs about the statistical incidence of certain kinds of violence, but rather from beliefs about their causal mechanisms.
Thank you for your attention, as it is said by some.
I don’t think that the safety concern was limited to the safety of participants in this forum? Why ever would you come to the conclusion that it was? If anything, personal anecdote has been used only to demonstrate prior thought about the subject matter.
And I am also wondering why you think that criticism of such discussion, even if it verges on “psychological bullying”, can be called “suppression” without engaging in exaggeration which is far beyond the “minimal”.
There are certain ideas, the expression of which is protected by the ideals of liberty and by the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. That protection does not extend to protection from being criticized. There are some ideas that have been expressed here that should be criticized. In an ideal community, they would be widely criticized.
The reason for criticizing them is similar in some ways to criticism of use of the “N word”. It is not so much that the word or the idea is offensive to someone. It is that if that kind of aggressive and abusive verbal behavior is tolerated, then more people will engage in it, and the aggression and abuse will simply escalate to something more physical. Because, make no mistake about it, the behavior I am seeing is exactly analogous that of an adolescent boy testing to see how much he can get away with.
It is reasonable to take precautions even against small risks, when those risks are the sort you run into again and again and must develop habits about. I wear seatbelts even during short car trips with safe drivers in good weather in daylight with minimal traffic at low speed. It is costly to evaluate those factors of risk separately each time I get into a car. It is costly to evaluate the factors that lead you to see this thread as definitely not harmful to me.
Perhaps it is harmless. I’ve never been injured in a car accident, either (although I’ve been wearing seatbelts each time I’ve been in one). But I put on my seatbelt as a reflex which it is unsafe to tamper with, and I ask for protective conventions in conversations on this subject as a reflex which it is unsafe for me to tamper with. Inviting me to take off my metaphorical seatbelt, without a reason other than it being inconvenient for you, demonstrates a willingness to take my concerns lightly and to substitute your judgment for mine. Interestingly, that doesn’t make me feel safer.
Despite your use of the trivializing word “inconvenient”, the fact is that your personal anxieties do not automatically trump my desires, including my desire (if it exists) to have a discussion about certain topics. You are not the only one with preferences and wishes, and your feeling as safe as possible is not the only concern in the universe.
(I find it notable that while you accuse me of a “willingness to take [your] concerns lightly”, you have, so far as I can tell, yet to show any sympathy for “my” concerns as expressed in this thread.)
It would not be costly to evaluate whether or not to put on a seatbelt. What would be costly is a general policy of evaluating every such “reflexive” act. Much less costly, however, would be a general policy of evaluating those reflexive acts whose usefulness has been called into question by intelligent rational people who don’t wish you harm. If someone on LW proposed that seatbelts are harmful, I would pay attention. I may or may not end up agreeing, but I would listen to the argument and open that particular “reflex” up to questioning.
You are free to hold irrational beliefs about the dangers posed to you by threads such as this. You are even—perhaps especially—free to attempt to convince others that the beliefs you hold are in fact not irrational. You should however not expect others to be intimidated into self-censorship by your claims to special status.
There is a genuine problem here. Like so many other things in our current world, the sexual status quo is not optimal. I have the impression that there are people out there who are very unhappy, but whose unhappiness is not considered a problem by almost anyone other than themselves. I find it regrettable that you are seeking to enforce taboos that prevent the open discussion of this. In principle, this is something I feel I ought to fight. Unfortunately, the costs may be too high for me. The more I engage in these discussions, the more risk I run of being associated with a particular “side” in the “sex wars”, not necessarily a side that I want to be associated with. This isn’t something I have much of a personal stake in, except insofar as it engages my unusually active empathic tendencies; so it might be best for me to leave it to other people, more willing to take the status hit. I would however like to make at least the following point: even “victimizers” are not innately evil. I have the strong suspicion that lurking behind many a “misogynistic” smirk or scowl is a sad face with authentic tears.
I agree with this. The problem I seek to avoid by having an alternate place for such discussions is that of having the vast majority of discussion effort diverted to ‘meta’ discussion. Currently discussion of what human sexual preferences (gender typical and otherwise) are and what techniques are most useful in social interactions are extremely diluted. Most actually interesting material that can be used to enhance our models of the world ends up only included as footnotes and tangents among justifications and criticisms of stereotypes.
I would like people to make posts and comments on the actual subject matter. I’d like it if the majority of replies to be agreement, disagreement, elaboration and general discussion of the ideas contained therein. Because then I’d have a chance to learn something new.
Why did I bring it up? Because I was worried about this George Sodini business, and because the promotional material you showed me seemed excessively optimistic in its promises of success with women, and because I think the kind of man having enough trouble that he’s willing to pay for a seduction course might be less astute and less realistic than average. I do think desperate guys can get suckered in by promises, and by an ideology that makes seduction look like victory. I think bad things can happen when you tell unhappy people “Here is a way for you to triumph over all the [insert bad word, maybe “political correctness police”] who are keeping you down.” That pattern has played out many times and sometimes the results are undesirable. It’s just something to be careful about.
On the other hand, you (HughRistic) have been very reasonable, and I’m pretty sure your kind of PUA is a good thing, and you obviously aren’t a desperate person in the grip of an ideology. Maybe that kind of thing is rare; I’ve seen it on the internet but obviously that doesn’t tell me if it’s common.
I don’t think “any complaint of unfairness in the dating world” is creepy. I just don’t. I don’t think anybody around here is creepy. I think creeps are creepy. I thought we might be able to agree to be anti-creep.
You come up with a system like PUA, I think it’s fair to ask you to disclaim unethical use of it. It must get tiring after a while, but that’s the way things work. People who make and play video games have to say, over and over again, “No, games do not make people go on shooting sprees, and we’re doing our best not to encourage that.” I’m sure they’re sick of it, but they’ve made themselves the ambassadors of their art, like it or not. People will judge your art based on its ambassadors.
Wow. Just… wow.
So… anyone with poor social skills is “less astute and less realistic than average”?
I suspect that your estimation of how much “trouble” is “enough” is way off, and consequently, your estimation of how many men end up in the “willing to pay” category… and hence, whether you can reasonably compare those folks to the “average”.
I know a guy with a $20 million/year training business, that sells many products at $20 and under. That’s one guy, in a business with literally dozens of big names, and maybe a hundred small ones.
And that’s with his (and everybody else’s) products being massively pirated. Even men who aren’t willing to pay, are still getting the material. Especially since there is tons of it available for free as well via internet forums (though the free stuff is not always of the best quality).
Ironically, it is the men who are willing to pay the most, who are most likely to be exposed to high-quality, low-deception, maximally self-improvement oriented material. Sadly, this is because it’s (comparatively speaking) a niche market.
IOW, the average guy wants a quick fix—the dating equivalent of the little blue pill. And the only reason that more guys don’t buy the products (that I’ve heard from internet marketing discussions with the guys who sell them) is that their main point of sales resistance is admitting they “have enough trouble” to need the product!
In other words, the average guy wishes he were better at meeting/relating to women, but thinks (since all his friends are signaling that they’re studs) that he’s the only one having any trouble, and therefore must be a loser.
(Note: this is the average guy, meaning “most of the male population”, not “average guy that women already relate to”, which might explain why you think the average guy is below-average.)
Neil Strauss’s book (and Mystery’s show) have actually done men an enormous service by making it less “weird” to be interested in improving one’s skills at meeting or relating to women, so that interest in the subject isn’t necessarily signaling to your peers that you’re not as good as they’re all pretending to be.
In short, it’s only above average men (in success with women) who don’t wish, at some point in their lives, that they were better at meeting or relating to women.
(Do remember that while the marketing rhetoric tends to “have any woman/as many women you want”, this is so that the average purchaser will say to themselves, “well, I just want to be able to meet/talk to The One, so that ought to be really easy if I get this product, and if I can do more that’s just a bonus”.)
I’m trying to imagine a marketing campaign—maybe “good sense at reasonable prices”. Seriously, is it that small a niche?
High prices are a signal, in both directions. On the purchasing end, it signals commitment, and on the selling end, it signals good results.
(Btw, internet marketers routinely advise that charging more money means you get fewer customers, but there will be far fewer problem customers and you will enjoy working with them more. My own experiences support this hypothesis.)
Thanks, Sarah, that answers my question. If you said this stuff in the first place, it would have helped me understand why you brought up the issue of violence. I still think it’s a bit of a stretch to connect George Sodini to pickup (he did actually take a pickup seminar at one point, but obviously had deeper problems) to pickup, though I do grant some of what PUAs write sounds adverserial towards women.
I agree with pjeby’s response on this point.
I realize that, and I know it’s not your fault or my fault that so many of the ambassadors of pickup suck. That’s why I’m trying to talk about it in a way that sounds reasonable and morally neutral, so I can see what people think of it whens it’s translated into a language that isn’t so off-putting.