There is a difference between strong emotion and typical biases and directly combating the discussion by taking things to the personal level. The historical record of LW posts tells me that this political intervention is at times escalated to the level of outright bullying. When expressing certain positions are associated with the threat of reputation sabotage we cannot expect the discussion to be especially well correlated with non-political reality.
And sex in particular requires deep understanding of both men’s and women’s psychology and socialization to make headway on, so there may be a limit to how much a discussion involving only one sex could accomplish.
Sex doesn’t seem to be the distinguishing factor on whether a given participant is able to usefully engage on the subject, especially once the selection effect of ‘people who like lesswrong type discussions’ is applied. It is a political vs epistemic divide, not a male vs female one.
“Sex doesn’t seem to be the distinguishing factor on whether a given participant is able to usefully engage on the subject, especially once the selection effect of ‘people who like lesswrong type discussions’ is applied. It is a political vs epistemic divide, not a male vs female one.”
And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post—but not the men. This saps cognitive energy and limits how much they can contribute. You may want to consider why this is, and whether there are any minimal changes you would consider making in order to make both genders feel safe enough to post freely.
“Strive to only make utilitarian calculations that take into account both men’s and women’s best interests” is a good place to start.
This discussion has also given me a lot of insight into why the proportion of women on this site is so atypically small even for computer programming crowds. Some that like lesswrong-type discussions may find dealing with the PUA-related talk here too mentally and emotionally draining for the site to be a net positive in experience. I’ve changed my mind and now also support moving all PUA-related discussions to another site, if for different reasons than yours.
And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post—but not the men.
The part in bold could not be further from the truth. A not insignificant number of men here are terrified of contributing on this subject, due to their previous discussions. It reached the stage where people making a point that touched on human mating patterns apologised, asked for permission and generally supplicated and grovelled in an attempt to avoid reprisal. It nauseated me.
This saps cognitive energy and limits how much they can contribute.
Precisely, and I hate this effect, as it applies to either sex and people of every conceivable sexual sexual orientation. This is why I hope XFrequentist (or whomever) creates a spin off site where the topics can be discussed without fear of reputation sabotage.
You may want to consider why this is, and whether there are any minimal changes you would consider making in order to make both genders feel safe enough to post freely.
My comments here are targeted towards exactly that ultimate goal, with no small measure of thought behind which intermediate steps I consider useful for reaching that target. There is also a specific class of behaviours that I consider a harm to the community and a violation of the rights which I like to proscribe to individuals. These behaviours I don’t want people to be comfortable engaging in.
“Strive to only make utilitarian calculations that take into account both men’s and women’s best interests” is a good place to start.
I don’t make utilitarian calculations of any kind and while I do make consequentialist calculations they are significantly tempered by ethical injunctions when considering topics such as this. I note that Alicorn takes this a step further—she explicitly professes subscription to deontological ethics.
A not insignificant number of men here are terrified of contributing on this subject, due to their previous discussions. It reached the stage where people making a point that touched on human mating patterns apologised, asked for permission and generally supplicated and grovelled in an attempt to avoid reprisal. It nauseated me.
(emphasis added)
I’m curious what sorts of comments you have in mind here, although I understand if you don’t want to single anyone out specifically. This pattern is not something I have noticed, although it could be that we have just reacted to the same comments/commenters in different ways. For example, I have found HughRistik’s consistently measured tone in discussing mating patterns very refreshing. It’s my impression that his comments are generally well-received not only because of their intelligent content, but also because of their thoughtfulness and tact. Nor do I have the sense that HughRistik, in making the choice to use this sort of tone, has had to obfuscate his meaning or avoid making any points that he would like to make. But it could be that you have different sorts of comments in mind.
Let me add myself as a data point. Having seen how these conversations go, I made a conscious decision to tread very carefully around them, basically only engaging with peripheral issues that look safe. As a result, I have left things unsaid that I think would be relevant, true and interesting, but also controversial. Even when I have something to say that seems safe, I feel like this topic requires me to put so much more effort into verifying that than a blog comment is normally worth, so I don’t bother.
I’m curious what sorts of comments you have in mind here
I’m not going to go through and trawl the paper trail but it is something that myself and others have commented on as it happens. I suspect I could find a hit or two via searches for “don’t need to ask for permission”, “If you think it is relevant then post it”, “the line you speak of is imaginary” and almost certainly “quit F@#% grovelling!”
More generally I note that you seem to talking about a different issue to the one that my comment was replying to. In the immediate context we were discussing fear and discomfort held by an alleged “a large proportion of the women” and “a not insignificant number of men”.
The part in bold could not be further from the truth. A not insignificant number of men here are terrified of contributing on this subject, due to their previous discussions. It reached the stage where people making a point that touched on human mating patterns apologised, asked for permission and generally supplicated and grovelled in an attempt to avoid reprisal.
A few men here fear being criticized. Some women here fear perpetuating ideas that increase the social acceptability and incidence of rape and other actions which ignore female agenthood. Regardless of how “reasonable” you consider each fear, they are not of equal magnitude. And then consider that the women here are women who have already been self selected for interest in rationality, and then further selected for ability to deal with potentially threatening comments regarding sex relations in the past. Something is wrong when they feel threatened by a subset of the talk here—and it isn’t “they’re just too PC.”
I don’t make utilitarian calculations of any kind and while I do make consequentialist calculations they are significantly tempered by ethical injunctions when considering topics such as this. I note that Alicorn takes this a step further—she explicitly professes subscription to deontological ethics.
Take out the word “utilitarian” if you wish. It’s the “ignoring of women’s interests” that I find disturbing. See this comment and this comment for a better expression of my concerns.
A few men here fear being criticized. Some women here fear perpetuating ideas that increase the social acceptability and incidence of rape and other actions which ignore female agenthood. Regardless of how “reasonable” you consider each fear, they are not of equal magnitude.
That doesn’t seem to be an accurate or appropriate dichotomy to construct here. No comments here advocate the incidence of rape or other actions which ignore female agenthood. Is the advocacy of such atrocities a crime so abhorrent that even innocence is no excuse?
There is a reason that most countries have laws against libel as well as against other more direct violations of the person.
No comments here advocate the incidence of rape or other actions which ignore female agenthood.
It’s a matter of implication. If it’s suggested that women should be less picky—for the sake of men, and no implication that it’s for the sake of women—and one of the reasons women are picky is regard for their own safety, but this is not considered relevant—then it isn’t unreasonable for a woman to conclude that her safety is considered unimportant. This isn’t the same thing as intentional advocacy of rape, but the emotional effect may be somewhat similar.
If it’s suggested that women should be less picky—for the sake of men, and no implication that it’s for the sake of women—and one of the reasons women are picky is regard for their own safety, but this is not considered relevant—then it isn’t unreasonable for a woman to conclude that her safety is considered unimportant.
I can’t quite follow you on this chain. Even if women are asked to be less picky, that doesn’t mean that she is being asked to change the safety-related elements of her preferences. That’s a possible implication which understandably evokes a negative reaction, and deserves being pointed out. But it’s just too big a leap to “conclude” that the speaker believes that women’s safety is unimportant.
I will also note that komponisto’s original problematic quote talked about women “granting” sexual favors less conservatively. “Grant” implies agency. It’s not a reasonable assumption to conclude that komponisto wants women to engage in sexuality in ways that compromise their safety. That’s just not the kind of belief a decent person would hold, so concluding that he might consider women’s safety unimportant communicates that he is a bad person. Now he’s been made to feel he’s such a bad person that he can’t even emotionally participate in this topic anymore.
Was there a whole host of problems with his original comment? Yes. Do those problems deserve to be pointed out, including the negative reactions they caused? Yes. But I find the insinuations about komponisto’s beliefs and the supposed entailments of what he is saying (like the idea that women’s determinations about their safety being considered unimportant) to be overboard, only tenuously connected to his actual words, and unduly shaming.
EDIT: The karma of this post has been fluctuating. Check out my follow-up for a better explanation of my views.
That’s just not the kind of belief a decent person would hold, so concluding that he might consider women’s safety unimportant communicates that he is a bad person. Now he’s been made to feel he’s such a bad person that he can’t even emotionally participate in this topic anymore.
At least two people on the other side of the discussion have assured komponisto that they don’t consider him a “bad person” here and here. Besides saying this upfront before each criticism, can you think of some other ways that we might minimize the real or perceived implication that harsh judgment on someone’s ideas implies harsh judgment on his/her character?
How many hours a week of mercy fucks would you say that women owe to the world?
Yet komponisto has never argued that women should give men “mercy fucks.” After he clarified his comment, it’s clear that he doesn’t want women to have sex with guys they aren’t into (i.e. “mercy fucks”), he wants to evaluate the basis by which women decide what they are into in the first place.
Asking him this question implies that he is a bad person.
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.
Similarly, Alicorn said the following (though it was before komponisto’s clarification, so it makes more sense):
People are not entitled to get things for free from people who don’t want to give them, even if you think their reasons for not wanting to give are dumb.
The conceptualization of sexuality as women “granting sexual favors” is problematic, but it’s not the same thing as feeling that men have some sort of “entitlement” to sex.
The idea that men are entitled to sex is something a bad person believes.
Since you failed to mention any specific benefit to the women so altered, it sounds like coercion and is extremely offensive.
Except that komponisto clearly talked about women “granting” sexual favors. “Grant” implies agency. komponisto saying “Obviously, given that someone already doesn’t want to give something, then their giving it would be bad, all else being equal” is not consistent with the notion of coercion.
Entitlement, coercion, and “mercy fucks” are simply not implications of komponisto’s full views. They are associations with particular sentences of what he wrote. If anyone disagrees, tell me why you think I’m wrong.
Yes, some people who think women should have sex with a wider range of men believe this because they think men are entitled to sexual attention from women who are ambivalent about them. But the relationship of these views is correlation, not implication.
I can understand getting offended over a problematic view that komponisto raised, but I don’t understand getting offended at his comment for an idea that he didn’t say, which is correlated with his view. Personally, I would like to have seen the problematic correlations of komponisto’s statements to be raised to him. But I would have preferred to see it done in a way that didn’t suggest that what he said actually entailed or assumed these problematic correlations. Instead, these problematic correlations (that only a bad person would believe) of komponisto’s statements were treated as assumed or implied by him, which resulted in treating him like a bad guy, despite any explicit assurances otherwise.
Several women brought up the point that komponisto didn’t originally mention potential female benefits in less sexually selective with men. But just because he doesn’t mention it, doesn’t meant that there aren’t potential female benefits, or that he doesn’t believe that they exist! We could have always asked him to clarify. (Unless he is a bad person, who doesn’t deserve charity in interpretation of his arguments.)
Just as many people (not just women) reading this thread called up problematic correlations with some of komponisto’s statements, other people have heard similar points made by people who do consider women’s interests important. See my response to Vladimir_M here.
In my view, the more appropriate response would have been something like “You may not be aware that lots of people who criticize women’s preferences seem to consider themselves, or men in general, entitled to female sexual attention, and they show insufficient regard for women’s body sovereignty and self-determination. If you want to evaluate women’s preferences, could you explain how we can do this in a way that respects women’s autonomy? What kind of benefits might women accrue from attempting to change their preferences, and if not, they why should they attempt to do so merely to satisfy men’s preferences?” I liked pjeby’s response a lot, and he also offered the charity of seeking an alternative interpretation of komponisto’s comment.
I feel uncomfortable about making this post. Just like some women here have expressed apprehension at being pattern-matched with the stereotype of the irrational, complaining woman, I’m uncomfortable being pattern-matched with the stodgy guy who doesn’t get women’s feelings and is unfairly telling women to stop being so hysterical and listen to reason.
For the most part, I find the critical comments towards certain parts of komponisto’s posts to make a lot of sense, and I think some excellent points were raised in response, like this one by Alicorn:
To the extent that sex is like a gift, you have to be in a relationship with someone that warrants the exchange of such gifts. I don’t expect birthday presents from people who aren’t in a birthday-present-exchanging relationship with me. To the extent that sex is like a commodity, guess what—it’s for sale! No, you can’t buy it from every person who might have it to offer, but not everybody who bakes cupcakes sells them either—you have to go to a cupcake store. If you want homemade cupcakes, you’ll have to make friends with somebody who bakes.
You ask:
Besides saying this upfront before each criticism, can you think of some other ways that we might minimize the real or perceived implication that harsh judgment on someone’s ideas implies harsh judgment on his/her character?
Distinguish between someone’s actual ideas, and problematic ideas of other people that are correlated by those ideas. Avoid criticizing that person’s ideas in ways indicating that they believe things that only bad people would believe, unless you can actually show why such a belief is entailed by what they actually wrote.
You may well be on to something. I’ve read a good bit of the bad-tempered attribution-of-bad-motives stuff, and I was horrified by it, but I think more of it has rubbed off on me than I realized. In particular, I don’t usually have an inclination to punish and keep punishing, but it’s showed up in this discussion with komponisto and in my take on how MOR-Hermione was characterized.
You may not be aware that lots of people who criticize women’s preferences seem to consider themselves, or men in general, entitled to female sexual attention, and they show insufficient regard for women’s body sovereignty and self-determination. If you want to evaluate women’s preferences, could you explain how we can do this in a way that respects women’s autonomy? What kind of benefits might women accrue from attempting to change their preferences, and if not, they why should they attempt to do so merely to satisfy men’s preferences?
I like this response! While I expect that in the heat of the moment most people (on all sides) won’t always be able to word themselves this carefully and explicitly, it’s a good general outline for future comments on controversial topics. Upvoted for thoughtfulness.
Thanks. Rather than pooh-poohing from the peanut gallery how other people critiqued komponisto, I wanted to show what I think should have been done instead. I wanted to show that I understand at least some of their concerns.
Nancy actually raised some similar questions here, though I wish they had been raised in an initial response to komponisto before jumping on him, rather than to me when I started defending him.
In case anyone wonders why I didn’t make that sort of response to komponisto in the first place, it’s because by the time I saw his comment, the thread had already started blowing up. It triggered the pattern-match of “guy getting unfairly made into the bad guy,” which resulted in all sorts of negative emotional reactions of my own that made my first priority attempting to mitigate the perceived unfairness.
Besides saying this upfront before each criticism, can you think of some other ways that we might minimize the real or perceived implication that harsh judgment on someone’s ideas implies harsh judgment on his/her character?
When arguing against an idea, avoid conveying indignation that the idea was suggested.
But why? Don’t you deserve to know that we are indignant? Don’t you find that sort of information useful?
However, it seems to me that replying with indignation is a failure of rationality, the way this term is normally used here. Ever since I started reading this site, I’ve always thought that if it lived up to its ideal perfectly, one would be able to post arbitrarily outrageous, offensive, and inflammatory ideas, and get back nothing except calm replies detailing the factual and logical errors contained in them. (And indeed, I must commend the extent to which many people here are willing to engage the substance of various unconventional ideas, including many disreputable-sounding ones, instead of brushing them off reflexively.)
While this perfect ideal is clearly unattainable, I do believe that people here should encourage comments that address exactly what’s been said, and don’t yield to the usual human temptation to make moral judgments against individuals just for their willingness to give rational consideration to disreputable (and perhaps even evil) ideas.
Ever since I started reading this site, I’ve always thought that if it lived up to its ideal perfectly, one would be able to post arbitrarily outrageous, offensive, and inflammatory ideas, and get back nothing except calm replies detailing the factual and logical errors contained in them.
I very much agree with your interpretation of the ideals of rationality and I aspire to reach such a level of self-control myself someday. But it also occured to me that embracing this attitudein excess could cause people to push themselves too hard. By that I mean being unable to admit to themselves that they have fallen prey to the mind killer and should refrain from talking until they regain their calm, instead plowing on, unsuccessfully trying to write a level-headed response because that’s what a good rationalist would do.
There’s a difference between explicitly informing someone about your emotions and expressing them in the tone of your writing. And I think that the former, unlike the latter, would be good. I wonder whether it would help to stabilise emotionally volatile discussions if there was a policy of giving full explicit disclosure of your emotional reactions and automatic associations raised by others’ comments when responding to them. Something like “this part of your post made me scared, the next part angry and the epilogue inexplicably caused me to think about Hitler. Sorry about that and now to adress your points...”
There’s a difference between explicitly informing someone about your emotions and expressing them in the tone of your writing.
Yes there is. They convey different meanings.
And I think that the former, unlike the latter, would be good.
You are apparently not the only person here who thinks that. To have a community ethos which forbids one to express the meaning conveyed by tone strikes me as a little odd, particularly in a community which prides itself on willingness to discuss anything.
… a policy of giving full explicit disclosure of your emotional reactions …
A “policy”? Too strong, IMO. Other than that, I liked this part of your comment. Yes, it is often best to express emotion non-judgmentally, particularly when you are not sure of the cause or justification of the emotion.
Someone feeling indignant over something you actually said is useful. Someone feeling indignant over potential implications of something you said is useful, as long as they don’t treat you like you believe that implication. Someone feeling indignant over something someone else said that is correlated with what you’ve said (but not implied by it) is also useful, as long as they aim the indignation at the other person, not at you. Otherwise, you feel like you are being made into the bad guy instead of having your arguments treated with charity.
I think you missed my (implied) point. Let me try again. Someone feeling indignant over something I said is unfortunate. My knowing that they feel that way is probably useful. Someone feeling indignant at me over their misinterpretation of something someone else said is both unfortunate and unfair. But there is not much I can do to correct the situation until I know that the indignation exists. The knowledge that the indignation exists is useful to me. I am not victimized by it. I can do something about it.
The only soft-skills training I ever received that I thought was useful taught me that communicating emotions is often more important than communicating ideas, because until the existence of those kinds of emotional reactions becomes common knowledge, neither party can do much to address the root cause.
But there is not much I can do to correct the situation until I know that the indignation exists.
Right. It’s how the indignation is communicated that matters. I’m not saying that the indignant person should hold it in. I’m saying that there are more and less constructive ways of communicating that indignation.
But there is not much I can do to correct the situation until I know that the indignation exists.
The person feeling indignant can exercise care about how they express their indignation in the first place, and whether it is really deserved. I don’t think it’s a good practice to blast people with my indignation, and rely on them to correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not sure that’s what you are saying, but it’s my best guess). if my indignation turns out to be misplaced, then I’d feel like a jerk. There are better solutions:
Wait, and ask for clarification. If the other person explains themselves and digs themselves into an even deeper hole, then you can always get indignant at them later.
Express the fact that you are feeling indignant, but don’t aim the indignation directly at the other person. Examples:
“What you are saying reminds me of idea X, which has always pissed me off.”
“You sound like you might be saying X, which really bothers me. Could you distinguish what you are saying from X?”
“Please tell me you aren’t saying X.”
“When you said Y, it reminded me of this guy believed Y, and also believed X, which I thought was really messed up. What do you think of X?”
“X is messed up. I’m not sure that’s what you actually mean, but that’s my best guess.”
These example express the indignation, but don’t make the other person the target of it. They have a chance to get out of the way of the indignation meteor before it actually lands on them.
See this post for the type of response to komponisto that I think was due.
Do these sound like plausible solutions to you? Have I responded to your point?
Me too, including in this discussion. I’m saying that people shouldn’t categorically hold indignation in. Some types of indignation should probably be expressed: the question is when, and what evidence needs to be met before you can feel confident that the indignation is deserved, and that expressing it will further your conversational goals.
Generally, my standard is to hold indignation in unless I can see that someone is persistently doing something problematic and I think they should know better, and if my efforts at getting them to clarify or change their mind fail. And when I do show indignation, it’s mainly in the amount that I feel is deserved (people may have noticed me with a slightly more strident tone in some of my recent comments).
Sometimes, even when I’m pretty confident someone is being a jerk, I’ll wait. My view is that if I’m feeling indignant, I don’t have to blast someone with it now. I can bide my time, and continue the discussion with them trying to get them to either back down, or dig themselves into an even deeper hole. Then I can bring down the hammer, feeling confident that it’s deserved, and that observers will agree. Luckily, I rarely get pushed to this last step on LessWrong, because people here are too good at rationality: even if I never end up seeing eye-to-eye with people, I can usually get a combination of explanations or updating from them that defuses my indignation before I have to bring out the full brunt of it.
I’m not confident that everyone should follow this standard (it’s nice to have people on your “side” in an argument who get indignant sooner than you and express what you are feeling), but I do think that people should scrutinize their indignation before expressing it.
I can see expressing indignation being called for if someone is being unpleasant to other LW members, but I think expressing indignation at opinions you find unpleasant would be beyond the pale on a forum ideally suited for finding truth, especially in light of the motivating power of trivial inconveniences, and in light of the way that in a noisy world, asymmetrically suppressing falsehoods means suppressing truths, and in light of the way that when the opinions in question are unpopular, expressed indignation can be seen as carrying an implicit threat to damage the opiner’s reputation. The main thing that gives me pause here is that if LW is seen as “contaminated” with “impure” beliefs, that may harm its ability to fight the more important battles that it’s fighting; but that argues more for paranoia than indignation.
Express the fact that you are feeling indignant, but don’t aim the indignation directly at the other person.
This is a good communication technique in general. It is important to be able to express and explain feelings without having to either defend their rightness or assign blame.
You have certainly made a heroic effort to seem reasonable. At another blog I frequent, someone would be making a comment about watercress sandwiches right now.
See this post for the type of response to komponisto that I think was due.
And there is the reason why I think your efforts to be reasonable have failed. Because I think that your suggested responses are completely unreasonable. To my mind, the only reasonable response to komponisto’s comment, inserted as it was into the conversation at that point, would have been a very strong and unanimous expression of indignation. If komponisto had received that, there is the possibility that, like a cat jumping on a hot stove, he might have learned something.
However, he did not receive that, and he apparently did not learn anything. Nor did anyone else that might have shared the lesson.
I see that as a major failure of the Less Wrong community. This kind of blowup is just going to keep happening until it becomes clear either that women are not welcome here or that making women feel unwelcome here is not going to be tolerated.
I see that as a major failure of the Less Wrong community. This kind of blowup is just going to keep happening until it becomes clear either that women are not welcome here or that making women feel unwelcome here is not going to be tolerated.
In all seriousness it is displays like you have been making here that I will expend effort to make unwelcome. You behaviour appals me and I consider it somewhat trollish.
I also suspect that komponisto did learn something, particularly about the importance of tact when discussing controversial topics. I know that isn’t the lesson you want him to learn (roughly speaking, submit!) but it is the one that will be most useful for kompo in accordance to his own ethics and values (that is, kompo’s, not yours and not Alicorn’s).
If someone hits me I don’t always learn “I should give them my lunch money”. Sometimes I learn “I need to avoid that person”, “I need to seek allies to protect me” or even “I need to develop my combat skills so I can defeat would be assailants”.
The self defence skill that would may be the most benefitial for people in the kind of situation that kompo was is verbal assertiveness of the kind popularised by Marshall Rosenberg (Nonviolent communication). The techniques are particularly useful for deflecting or deflating personal attacks without sacrificing your own position via supplication. (I present this as an example of the kind of topic which I would make posts on if we had a place where we allowed discussion of social pragmatics.)
I also suspect that komponisto did learn something, particularly about the importance of tact when discussing controversial topics.
Actually, the importance of tact is something I was already convinced of; the lesson here was more about the nature of tact, i.e. what constitutes tact and what doesn’t.
As hard as it may be to believe now with hindsight, when I was actually writing the infamous comment I thought I was being tactful.
The techniques are particularly useful for deflecting or deflating personal attacks without sacrificing your own position via supplication. (I present this as an example of the kind of topic which I would make posts on if we had a place where we allowed discussion of social pragmatics.)
I don’t think that’s a “banned topic”. I think it would, in fact, be well received.
In all seriousness it is displays like you have been making here that I will expend effort to make unwelcome. Your behaviour appalls me and I consider it somewhat trollish.
In all sincerity, I appreciate your honesty. You have repeatedly warned me that I was (at least) pushing the envelope of community practice. I am doing so again with full awareness that many (most?) people here might consider it borderline trollish. Perhaps if more of those people had your honesty, I might be shamed into either shutting up or conforming.
I also suspect that komponisto did learn something, particularly about the importance of tact when discussing controversial topics.
“Tact”??? You think the issue is one of tact? Komponisto practically oozed tact. He was apologizing for himself in every other paragraph. The issue is one of content, of deliberately trying to creep people out. He was saying that women’s fear of rape is unfair to teh men. He, for no particular reason, brought up the Amanda Knox case. He suggested (with tactful apologies for making a controversial suggestion) that the world would be a better place if women granted more sexual favors.
I haven’t had much if any interaction with komponisto, but if he has acquired the level of karma he has in this forum, he is certainly not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing.
that isn’t the lesson you want him to learn (roughly speaking, submit!)
Oh, please. Submit to what? I want him to submit in exactly the same sense that you want me to submit. Except that you want me to submit to some rather strict community standards of behavior. I want komponisto to submit to standards that are expected in Western society as a whole.
but it [the lesson to be tactful] is the one that will be most useful for kompo in accordance to his own ethics and values (that is, kompo’s, not yours and not Alicorn’s).
No, as I already said, I doubt that that lesson would be helpful. In fact, I don’t recall that that lesson was even suggested by any of the (very few, actually) people who criticized him. If he really wants to learn a lesson from this, let him review what was said, and try to take what was said at face value rather than as further evidence of some kind of anti-male double standard.
As for his own ethics and values being different than mine and Alicorn, I would be very curious as to what you think the differences are. Or, if you would be understandably reluctant to speak for komponisto’s ethics, please tell us how you think that the ethics and values of komponisto’s critics seem to differ from your own. A discussion on this subtopic might well be the most productive way for this conversation to proceed.
If you wish, I will start by speculating about the differences among the ethics of yourself, myself, and Alicorn. My guess is that the three ethical systems are pretty similar—all a bit more deontological than utilitarian. Regarding specific moral and immoral actions, I suspect that our viewpoints are also very similar. But I see (imagine?) one pretty salient difference in the strength of our negative attitudes toward the immoral act of rape. Of the three of us, I suspect that Alicorn has the strongest negative opinion and you the least strong. I am somewhere in the middle, I think. Probably closer to Alicorn. But, based on some things you have said, and on your defense of komponisto, it seems possible to me that you are quite distant from the two of us on this judgment. What is your estimate on this?
The issue is one of content, of deliberately trying to creep people out.
You have now officially accused me of being a bad person.
Not, for example, of having underestimated the cost to Group X of a certain proposal to help Group Y—or any other error that a decent person might make. No, you have now made it explicit that you think I have bad—indeed “creepy”—intentions.
Do you stand by this, or do you want to reconsider?
That was my impression of Perplexed’s comment, also. I think it makes far too many assumptions about your state of mind and views, and is also directly contradicted by your own words (“grant” implies agency). Perplexed’s comment makes you sound like a passive-aggressive schemer using a veneer of tact to implement your sinister female-unfriendly agenda. I can’t reconcile his impression with what you’ve actually said, and I can’t even reconcile it with the most strident responses you’ve received from women, which at least don’t accuse you of intentionally trying to be a creep and even explicitly disclaim that accusation.
To satisfy my own curiosity, could you clarify you original thoughts when making the comment you got jumped on for? What did you think might make it controversial? What do you now think of the comment, and what have you learned from the responses to it?
I’m tired of folks projecting motives and views onto you that aren’t entailed by what you’ve actually said merely because your words triggered an association with people who do have bad motives who’ve said somewhat similar things. The fact that some people may have trouble imagining any charitable explanations of what you said could be due to undue cynicism or errors of reasoning, but it could also be partly due to a lot of inferential distance, which isn’t their fault or yours.
Similarly, I think a big part of the reason you made the original comment was because of your own inferential distance from those who were upset by it. You understood that people could have problems with it, but you didn’t understand exactly the nature of those problems. I also wonder whether you were aware of the history of Bad People saying stuff that sounds similar to what you said, and if so, how distinct you thought your argument was from theirs. Also, I don’t think you fully anticipated some of the inferences could be drawn. If you had realized these things, I think you would have made your original comment differently, and included disclaimers like the one you made later (that you think it would be bad to encourage people to do things they don’t want to do).
Of course, I’m speculating here, and you are inviting to fill me in. But I think my speculation is a much more parsimonious explanation for your comments than Perplexed’s. It’s also more charitable, and would have provided a better foundation for a dialogue with you to change your mind.
Even intelligent, tactful, thoughtful people such as yourself can not know things, not know that Bad People exist who say similar things, not anticipate all the potential implications of their words, and fail to anticipate the reactions of different people with different life experiences. That does not make them Bad People, or even bad rationalists. It’s called inferential distance, folks!
a much more parsimonious explanation for your comments than Perplexed’s.
Perplexed’s explanation is more parsimonious, given a much higher prior for trolling. My intentions at this site, combined with my experiences here, lead me to expect a near-complete lack of attempts to generate controversy for its own sake. Perplexed’s experiences and intentions may lead him to expect otherwise.
That last paragraph was a disingenuous jab at Perplexed, but after reading through the comments on this post I feel indignant at his take on the proper use of indignation, and I’m going to signal that.
Perplexed’s explanation is more parsimonious, given a much higher prior for trolling.
Yeah, I agree that it would make more sense if there was a different history with Komponisto, and some evidence to think he was trolling. None of the women in the thread seemed to think he was trolling, and Alicorn explicitly acknowledged in her initial response that she considered him a decent person. That’s why I’m wondering whether Perplexed is reading the same thread that everyone else is reading.
Perplexed’s explanation is more parsimonious, given a much higher prior for trolling.
My initial “gut feel” explanation, and the one which I think justifies community indignation, is more parsimonious. But Hugh’s is probably more parsimonious than my current hypothesis that the behavior was part of an act.
Your point regarding priors for trolling is a valid one. I should probably take my unfamiliarity with the mores here into account much more when estimating probabilities as to what is really happening.
I’m tired of folks projecting motives and views onto you that aren’t entailed by what you’ve actually said merely because your words triggered an association with people who do have bad motives who’ve said somewhat similar things.
Yes indeed—it’s the phenomenon of pattern-completion, the same thing that Eliezer talks about all the time in the context of his views on the Singularity. People expect certain opinions or characteristics to go together, so that when a person exhibits a subset of these, people’s brains complete the pattern and automatically fill in the rest, regardless of whether or not the rest is actually there.
It’s incredibly frustrating, but also predictable. I should have seen it coming.
To satisfy my own curiosity, could you clarify you original thoughts when making the comment you got jumped on for? What did you think might make it controversial? What do you now think of the comment, and what have you learned from the responses to it?
There’s a limit to how much I can say without breaking my vow to never again discuss the underlying topic. Basically, it was an honest passing thought that should have been censored. In the context of explaining specific reservations about a portion of a comment by SarahC, I briefly took a broader view, focused on a more general human problem, and more-or-less offhandedly wondered whether a solution could be found by tweaking in a certain direction.
I expected it to be controversial in the sense that I thought people would be strongly inclined to reject the proposal. It sounds incredibly naïve now, but I thought people would reply by saying “no, that wouldn’t work” or “that’s not the real source of the problem” or “you won’t find a solution by going down that particular path”. I had little or no notion that I was at risk of being treated like the next Sexist Villain. If I had to verbalize my unconscious, automatic thought processes, I suppose what I thought was that I had built up too much of a reputation here as a reasonable person for that!
I had forgotten how many different people read this site, and how little of a detailed model of me they have.
I would like to discuss my hypothesis. Which is, I suppose, a form of reconsideration. I have some questions regarding your motivation for the wording and timing of some of the things you said. We can do this publicly or privately—your choice. I’ve already admitted I was wrong about the Amanda Knox thing. I am open to being corrected about the rest.
At the end, I may well apologize.
Incidentally, let me clarify my current opinion. I don’t think you were trying to creep women out from some kind of malice or general love of being creepy. I think you were trying to deliberately draw criticism so as to fake being wounded by it with the ultimate aim of making some point—perhaps a point about double standards. That kind of bad person.
I don’t know if that makes you feel better.
And to respond also to Hugh and also, I think, Nancy, my apology, if komponisto convinces me I’m wrong, will include an apology for attributing motive with too little evidence.
I have some questions regarding your motivation for the wording and timing of some of the things you said. We can do this publicly or privately—your choice.
I’m inclined to keep it public for now, for the benefit of curious onlookers.
I think you were trying to deliberately draw criticism
That is something I never do. I am terrified of criticism and social disapproval generally (including downvotes on LW by the way). When I express an opinion that I know may subject me to criticism, I do so either because I feel so strongly about the issue that I judge it a worthwhile tradeoff (a very high bar), or because I believe the environment is “safe” for expressing such opinions without fear of judgmental criticism or other social punishment. In this instance, it was the latter; my safeness detector failed.
so as to fake being wounded by it with the ultimate aim of making some point—perhaps a point about double standards.
I had no point to make about double standards. I think I was explicit in at least one comment about allowing for symmetry. I happened to be discussing one side, with no implication whatsoever about the other. At least, no logical implication. But here I was the victim of pattern-completion.
I don’t think you’ll find anything I said that was inconsistent with the possibility of an analogous reversed situation—even, interestingly enough, anything inconsistent with the existence of the exactly reversed situation (i.e. men being too selective, resulting in sex-starved women)! I don’t think anyone noticed this.
Me: I have some questions regarding your motivation for the wording and timing of some of the things you said. We can do this publicly or privately—your choice.
You: I’m inclined to keep it public for now, for the benefit of curious onlookers.
Great.
I think you were trying to deliberately draw criticism
That is something I never do. I am terrified of criticism and social disapproval generally...
Ok, if that is true, then it is very likely that I am going to be proven wrong. So the only substantive question I want to ask in this comment is this: Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
Here is how I would like to proceed. Tomorrow morning (here) - roughly 12 hrs from now—I will post a list of (~20) short questions. Most will take simple yes or no answers; a few may ask you to state your motivation for doing X. The style of the questions may be something like what happens in the taking of a deposition in an American legal case. Not particularly friendly questions, but not particularly hostile either. I doubt that I will be asking anything that would force you to break that vow not to further discuss sexual politics.
After receiving your answers, I may ask a much smaller number of follow-up questions in a second posting. After this I will do one of two things.
One possibility is that I may announce that I still don’t believe you and explain why. At this point, it is your turn to question me. When you are done, I’m sure other people will want a shot at me.
The other possibility is that I will sincerely apologize for having impugned your integrity. I will ask that you, or some member of the community, “penalize” me to the amount of 100 karma points. If you wish, you can question me in this case too. And then when that is done, I’m sure other people will have things to say to me as well.
Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
Here is how I would like to proceed....Are these ground rules satisfactory?
I’m willing to give it a try; but please keep in mind what you’re asking here: you, who have been here for (as you say) little over a month, are asking me to demonstrate my good faith to you. If I can do this easily, I’m willing to, but you should realize that there is a limit on the extent of my obligations in this regard.
I will ask that you, or some member of the community, “penalize” me to the amount of 100 karma points.
This is unnecessary, it seems to me, and I’m not sure how it would be implemented anyway.
Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
See here, here, here, and here. No claim of exhaustiveness.
Ok, it certainly looks at this stage that I am going to owe you, and the community, an apology. But before I do that, I wonder if you could remove any lingering doubts by answering these questions, as I had originally proposed. The overwhelming majority are simple yes-or-no questions. I see them as pretty low-stress. If they don’t seem that way to you, decline to answer.
Yes or no answers are fine, but feel free to provide a line or two of explanation where it seems appropriate. Refusing to answer is acceptable too, but a short explanation of the reason for the refusal would be helpful.
The first three questions deal with conspiracy theories (mine). For this group of questions, to “privately discuss” means to communicate with any LW commenter by email, personal contact, telephone, or internet forums other than this one.
-- Within the day or so before the incident, did you privately discuss your intention to make an LW comment on the topics touched on in the opening comment?
-- During the course of the incident, did you privately discuss the incident?
-- Since the incident, have you privately discussed the incident with anyone other than participants in the public discussion related to the incident?
Your opening comment begins by criticizing SarahC’s comment “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down”. Later in the comment, you segue into your “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion”.
The following questions deal with your motivation in the opening comment.
-- Had you already formed the intention to make the “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion” at some point before seeing SarahC’s comment?
-- When you saw SarahC’s comment, did it immediately occur to you that this was a good opportunity to make the “suggestion”?
-- Did you decide to make the “suggestion” only after you had already begun writing your criticism of SarahC’s comment?
-- Prior to the incident, had you read any novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land” might be an example) which includes the premise of a world or subculture in which women are less “conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors”? If so, what did you think about the desirability of the situation and the realism of the depiction of the situation?
-- Prior to the incident, had you heard of or read the book “Against our Will”?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding feminism?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding an unwarranted obsession with rape in feminist discussion?
The following questions deal with the way the incident unfolded.
-- Did you notice that most of the strong criticism of the opening comment was coming from women?
-- If you can recall, at what point in incident did you become aware of this?
-- Had you expected, when you wrote the opening comment, that this gender pattern would occur?
-- Have you seen this gender pattern before, in responses to any of your previous LW comments prior to the incident?
-- During the incident, what significance, if any, did you attach to this gender pattern? I.e. what hypotheses did this pattern suggest?
-- During the incident, you expressed distress that your critics were making you out to be a bad person. However, an alternative interpretation might be that they were saying you had, perhaps by not fully understanding the implications, done a bad thing. Did you consider this alternative interpretation during the incident?
-- Do you think that these interpretations are different enough to be worth making the distinction?
The first three questions deal with conspiracy theories (mine). For this group of questions, to “privately discuss” means to communicate with any LW commenter by email, personal contact, telephone, or internet forums other than this one.
-- Within the day or so before the incident, did you privately discuss your intention to make an LW comment on the topics touched on in the opening comment?
No.
-- During the course of the incident, did you privately discuss the incident?
No
-- Since the incident, have you privately discussed the incident with anyone other than participants in the public discussion related to the incident?
Yes, with exactly one such person (i.e. someone not involved in the incident or the discussion). The person in question is a female who had/shared the impression that the second paragraph of my comment (the “controversial suggestion” part) subjected women-in-general to an unfair level of scrutiny, but agreed with the implication of the first paragraph (and disagreed with Alicorn) about the desirability of treating sex differently from other forms of interaction.
Your opening comment begins by criticizing SarahC’s comment “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down”. Later in the comment, you segue into your “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion”.
The following questions deal with your motivation in the opening comment.
-- Had you already formed the intention to make the “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion” at some point before seeing SarahC’s comment?
No, although the fact that SarahC’s comment (and the composition of my reply) so easily prompted me to make the suggestion implies that this was not the first time a thought of this sort had crossed my mind.
-- When you saw SarahC’s comment, did it immediately occur to you that this was a good opportunity to make the “suggestion”?
Not for any definition of “immediately” that is limited to the time period before I had begun composing my reply. (I should insert a caveat here about the reliability of memory with respect to distinctions like this.)
-- Did you decide to make the “suggestion” only after you had already begun writing your criticism of SarahC’s comment?
Yes (see above).
-- Prior to the incident, had you read any novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land” might be an example) which includes the premise of a world or subculture in which women are less “conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors”? If so, what did you think about the desirability of the situation and the realism of the depiction of the situation?
While I would not want to make a categorical denial stretching over my entire life, it is nevertheless almost certainly the case that I have significantly less familiarity with this type of literature than is typical among readers of LW.
-- Prior to the incident, had you heard of or read the book “Against our Will”?
No. My brain treated your mention of it as the first time I had heard of it.
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding feminism?
If the word “particular” in interpreted to mean “strong” (which I suspect is the intended meaning), and “feminism” is taken to mean a contemporary, as opposed to historical, stance (so that e.g. a strong belief that women should be allowed to vote in elections would not automatically require a “yes” answer), the answer is no.
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding an unwarranted obsession with rape in feminist discussion?
Subject to similar interpretive conventions, my answer to this question is logically entailed by my answer to the previous one.
The following questions deal with the way the incident unfolded.
-- Did you notice that most of the strong criticism of the opening comment was coming from women?
Without checking the record, my memory of the dialectic pattern (which will reveal my perception) was as follows: I received approval from wedrifid and SilasBarta (both males, as I understand), strong criticism from Alicorn (female) which developed into a vigorous argument, mild criticism from pjeby (male), feedback from SarahC (female) not concerning the most controversial part which led to the approximate reconciliation of our opinions on the main point, and some noticeable (though not especially severe) criticism from NancyLebovitz (female). HughRistik (male) provided helpful commentary from a position not specifically aligned with either me or my critics, but which I would expect my critics to regard as slightly closer to mine. At some point later in the discussion, I recall learning with mild surprise that datadataeverywhere is female, which seemed to occur at around the same time my mind began to identify her specifically as a critic.
I do not recall any female commenter who was as strongly critical as you (evidently male) were.
-- If you can recall, at what point in incident did you become aware of this?
I regard this question as superseded by my previous answer.
-- Had you expected, when you wrote the opening comment, that this gender pattern would occur?
If queried beforehand, I would have responded with an expectation that females would be more likely to be critical of my remarks than males. This isn’t to say that my brain performed this particular query.
-- Have you seen this gender pattern before, in responses to any of your previous LW comments prior to the incident?
No. Having participated only minimally in such threads prior to the incident, I considered myself neutral on LW’s gender controversies, and would have expected other readers to regard me this way also.
-- During the incident, what significance, if any, did you attach to this gender pattern? I.e. what hypotheses did this pattern suggest?
I did not devote any significant attention in my thoughts to the gender patterns of the discussion.
-- During the incident, you expressed distress that your critics were making you out to be a bad person. However, an alternative interpretation might be that they were saying you had, perhaps by not fully understanding the implications, done a bad thing. Did you consider this alternative interpretation during the incident?
I will omit this question due to the premise being false. It was others, intervening on my behalf (HughRistik in particular, as I recall) who characterized my critics in this way. I did not employ such a characterization until after the incident as you have defined it, and I did so with respect to only one critic: you.
-- Do you think that these interpretations are different enough to be worth making the distinction?
Instead of answering this question directly (which presupposes the coherence of the previous one), I will state my current point of view on my critics’ reactions. My critics have communicated to me that it is not socially acceptable (to a sufficient degree for my temperament), even on LW, to express a thought such as the “controversial suggestion” in my comment. I disagree with them about whether such expressions ought to be acceptable; however I do not desire their acceptability so strongly that I would be willing to sacrifice additional status in a likely-futile struggle to bring about that outcome. Sex and gender as such are not particular interests or priorities of mine here (or really, anywhere else I might happen to be). As a human, I have some nominal degree of interest in them, just as I have some nominal degree of interest in topics relating to food; however that interest pales in comparison to my interest in e.g. mathematics, music, or epistemic rationality in the abstract (or concrete).
Thank you for submitting to this interrogation. I realize that you had not placed yourself under any obligation to satisfy my curiosity on these points.
Ok, I have no follow up questions. Since you have given me no reason to doubt your veracity, I clearly owe both you, and the community, an apology.
I apologize to you, komponisto, and you all, Less Wrong, for publicly jumping to a conclusion based on hunch and intuition. That was simply a wrong thing to do, an unfair thing to do. That my conclusions were, not only unjustified, but also incorrect, is simply icing on the cake.
I apologize to komponisto for suggesting he was a devious person. I apologize if my overstated opinions that the “opening comment” deserved condemnation brought him distress.
I made several specific mistakes in the course of the incident, but mostly in the “post-mortem”. I have already admitted to some of them, others I have forgotten. If anyone wishes to bring them to my attention, I will be happy to do a mea culpa on them too, if I feel they warrant them.
Again, and in conclusion, I apologize.
Well, that felt good. I’m happy to have it (mostly) behind me. I also want to thank some of my critics who were very helpful to me in leading me to see the errors I had made. I will try to justify your efforts by trying not to repeat those errors.
If anyone has questions for me, or post mortem analysis, I will do my best to be accomodating.
Ok, it certainly looks at this stage that I am going to owe you, and the community, an apology. But before I do that, I wonder if you could remove any lingering doubts by answering these questions
You appear to be making your apology conditional on answering a questionnaire, which is both long enough that it represents a significant time commitment, and personal enough that it likely contain questions which he would prefer not to answer. Withholding an apology as leverage for anything comes across as very hostile and defeats the point of the apology if it’s eventually given. Additionally, a heuristic I can’t quite identify is telling me it smells like a trap, designed to elucidate answers which could be used out of context in an attack.
Withholding an apology as leverage for anything comes across as very hostile and defeats the point of the apology if it’s eventually given.
It did cross my mind that apologizing first, and then saying “could you answer some questions to help me figure out how far off my initial intuitions about you were, and how they went wrong” might be more interpersonally effective. Perplexed could always resurrect a critical opinion after hearing komponisto’s answers.
Additionally, a heuristic I can’t quite identify is telling me it smells like a trap, designed to elucidate answers which could be used out of context in an attack.
Maybe, but I think a more parsimonious and charitable explanation is that Perplexed is trying to find a way to update in a phased way while still saving face. I think the first goal is laudable (and I hope I don’t jinx it by making this comment), but the means may still be a little frustrating for komponisto.
Veracity, mostly. I had a conspiracy theory in my mind. The “evil perpetrator” could get away with it, simply by lying. But he would have to be careful not to lie about anything that could be checked.
The questions really only make sense if my conspiracy theory is true. Since it is false, the questions look odd. He would have still “passed” with the same answers and less explanation.
The only reason I went through with it, even after the “fear of criticism” evidence, was that in my original conspiracy theory, the conspirators would (of course) want a front man with a publicly known sensitivity of this kind.
A real comedy of errors and I end up with well earned egg on my face.
I applaud you for reconsidering. I look forward to seeing any dialogue between you and komponisto, if he is comfortable with it. I still think that this hypothesis is a bit tenuous:
I think you were trying to deliberately draw criticism so as to fake being wounded by it with the ultimate aim of making some point—perhaps a point about double standards.
I’m much more inclined to take komponisto’s own explanation of his words at face value, which I’m not sure if you’ve seen yet. I think he’s already answered some of your questions. He says:
I expected it to be controversial in the sense that I thought people would be strongly inclined to reject the proposal. It sounds incredibly naïve now, but I thought people would reply by saying “no, that wouldn’t work” or “that’s not the real source of the problem” or “you won’t find a solution by going down that particular path”.
So it sounds like he had an intuition he was unsure about, and decided to toss it out to LessWrong to figure out how to evaluate it. This behavior reminds me of the following INTP profile based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:
Where the extraversion of the iNtuition function becomes obvious is during discussions, especially heated ones. In contrast to INTJs, an INTP will often make controversial, speculative points of argument, often annoying the discussion-partner, and make them in such a way as to leave the impression that he is very serious about what he says. In reality, the INTP is not actually even certain himself whether he really stands by what he is saying, but his Ne strongly suggests that there must be a core of truth there. The purpose then of his outspoken style of argument is to sharpen his own intuitive understanding by testing the reaction of the listener, and indeed to examine the logic of his own arguments in real time while speaking them out. On occasion, INTPs may seem brash and tactless, but for themselves it is part of their way of getting closer to the truth. This is another aspect of the Ne grappling with the external world (in this case discussion with another) to understand it. The Ne provides the raw material for the Ti core to analyse. The INTJ, on the other hand, with Ni dominant and Te as secondary, tends to avoid letting uncertain speculative ideas out in the open: he presents a more considered structured viewpoint to the world while holding his private thoughts free for intuitive reasoning.
Since I engage in this behavior all the time, I instantly suspected that komponisto might be operating out of a similar psychology. In fact, his acknowledgment that his statements were controversial could have been read as acknowledging valid reasons for controversy (of course, acknowledging controversy can also be a way of trying to attract attention and imply that people who disagree are idiots, but that didn’t fit the overall tone of his comment). If so, then his comment could be understood as something like “here’s an uncomfortable thought I’m having… other people think it’s wrong, but I’m not entirely sure exactly why it’s wrong and what is wrong with it, so please help me figure it out.” Given what I know of komponisto’s attitudes, and given my own proclivity to suggest controversial ideas to help me make up my mind about them, that’s pretty much how I read his initial comment.
I understand that your experience with internet discussions may have led you to start with different priors, and I’m glad you’ve begun to question whether they apply in this case on this website. And if you’re not familiar with the psychology I describe above or can’t relate to it yourself, then it’s not your fault for not considering it as a possible explanation for komponisto’s words.
I find “raising uncomfortable intuition to figure out if there’s any grain of truth involved, or if it deserves to be debunked” to be a more parsimonious explanation than “deliberately drawing criticism so as to fake being wounded by it.” I do think it’s a good thing for rational discussion on LessWrong if people can raise controversial issues they are grappling with and try to use the resulting discussions to figure out their positions.
Would it be better for men (or anyone) with a highly controversial intuition to just sit on it, and have it constantly niggling away at their psyche? No. The only way to handle that belief is to put it out in the open and discuss it with other people.
Of course, people should be tactful and consider how their audience will feel when they express that intution. But like in this case, they can’t always anticipate every sort of reaction they will get, especially in subjects with great inferential distance. komponisto says he did his best to be tactful, and he still got jumped on; the reactions he got were simply different from what he anticipated. That difference isn’t because he is a bad person of any sort who is trying to prove that people here have double standards, but because there are things he simply did not realize.
The notion “don’t raise any controversial issue you are grappling with that someone with great inferential distance from you might find offensive despite your best attempts to be tactful” is not a good principle for a rationalist community. It would shut down too many discussions, and it’s already doing so to komponisto now that he’s been driven to vows of self-censorship.
And to respond also to Hugh and also, I think, Nancy, my apology, if komponisto convinces me I’m wrong, will include an apology for attributing motive with too little evidence.
That’s great… but I will note what I said before: “here’s my negative opinion of what you say, and it’s your job to prove it misplaced” may not be the most interpersonally effective mode of communication.
As always, Hugh, your comments are long, reasonable, and well worth reading. I will just be responding to a few points, though.
...komponisto’s own explanation of his words … which I’m not sure if you’ve seen yet. I think he’s already answered some of your questions.
Yes, I have seen. Yes, he has answered some.
So it sounds like [komponisto] had an intuition he was unsure about, and decided to toss it out to LessWrong to figure out how to evaluate it. This behavior reminds me of the following INTP profile based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:
… In contrast to INTJs, an INTP will often make controversial, speculative points of argument, often annoying the discussion-partner, and make them in such a way as to leave the impression that he is very serious about what he says. In reality, the INTP is not actually even certain himself whether he really stands by what he is saying, but his Ne strongly suggests that there must be a core of truth there. The purpose then of his outspoken style of argument is to sharpen his own intuitive understanding by testing the reaction of the listener, and indeed to examine the logic of his own arguments in real time while speaking them out. …
Since I engage in this behavior all the time, I instantly suspected that komponisto might be operating out of a similar psychology.
Interesting. I am an INTP myself. I will be sure to avail myself of that excuse the next time my intuition and impulsiveness get me into trouble. ;)
I do think it’s a good thing for rational discussion on LessWrong if people can raise controversial issues they are grappling with and try to use the resulting discussions to figure out their positions.
I agree. And I certainly have little to complain about regarding the help I have received in this thread. (That is not sarcasm, by the way. Something more like sincere sardonic irony. I remain impressed with the level of rationality and civility).
Would it be better for men (or anyone) with a highly controversial intuition to just sit on it, and have it constantly niggling away at their psyche? No. The only way to handle that belief is to put it out in the open and discuss it with other people.
I’m so glad to have you on my side! (Now that was a more pure irony.)
… I will note what I said before: “here’s my negative opinion of what you say, and it’s your job to prove it misplaced” may not be the most interpersonally effective mode of communication.
True, but I honestly don’t think I have deviated all that far from your ideals here. If I recall, my first direct communication with komponisto on this thread was a request that he clarify some things that he had said. He declined to do so.
I want komponisto to submit to standards that are expected in Western society as a whole.
So in other words, if there exists a near-consensus on something in the contemporary Western society, this should be considered as holy writ which it is unacceptable to question, no matter how arbitrary, unjustified, and irrational it might turn out to be under scrutiny?
Or do you actually believe that the current state of mainstream Western opinion is such a magnificent edifice of rationality, objectivity, and moral perfection that only evil or deluded people could ever wish to discuss propositions that run contrary to it?
We are both talking about a standard of behavior here, right? So my answer is that, no, that standard should not be considered holy writ which is unacceptable to question.
Incidentally, I realize I am maybe using some cheap rhetorical tricks here, and people are entitled to respond in kind, but have I really so far set up such a blatant strawman as that holy writ thing?
It is quite acceptable to question the standard. It is not acceptable to ignore it while the
standard is in place. I like to hang out on a nude beach in the French Caribbean when on vacation, but that doesn’t mean I dress that way when swimming in Lake Erie at the city park.
Or do you actually believe …
Spare me. No I don’t. But if you were just practicing expressing your indignation, keep working on it. A bit more direct is good. Fewer rhetorical questions. Those rarely work.
It is quite acceptable to question the standard. It is not acceptable to ignore it while the standard is in place.
That is a very fine principle to abide by in most cases, but the trouble is that it runs into a contradiction with standards that specify not only that certain beliefs and attitudes are unacceptable, but also that it is unacceptable to merely bring them up for open discussion. In such cases, questioning the standard ipso facto involves breaking it. It is undeniable that many such standards are near-universally accepted in the mainstream respectable institutions of the contemporary West, and by insisting that they should be adhered to here, you imply that the corresponding limits on propositions that may be legitimately discussed should be enforced.
In this concrete case, you are denouncing the actions of a commentator whose only alleged transgression, to the best of my understanding, consists of bringing up for discussion certain propositions that arguably violate some of the above mentioned standards. Therefore, while my above comment might have been a bit too florid rhetorically, I honestly see no strawman-like misrepresentation of your expressed views in it.
In this concrete case, you are denouncing the actions of a commentator whose only alleged transgression, to the best of my understanding, consists of bringing up for discussion certain propositions that arguably violate some of the above mentioned standards.
Something a bit more than that has been alleged, at least by me. If I accepted your characterization of the situation, I would not have been so vehement in denouncing.
I honestly see no strawman-like misrepresentation of your expressed views in it.
I believe you that you don’t see it, since you have just finished doing it again.
Something a bit more than that has been alleged, at least by me. If I accepted your characterization of the situation, I would not have been so vehement in denouncing.
Then would you be so kind to specify precisely what this additional part of the allegations consists of? I would be really grateful to see it spelled out, not least because, assuming you are correct, it would rectify some of my own misconceptions.
(In the interest of avoiding a confrontational tone, perhaps I should also add that I am not among the people who have downvoted your recent comments.)
Then would you be so kind to specify precisely what this additional part of the allegations consists of? I would be really grateful to see it spelled out.
Why certainly. I have nothing better to do than to repeat allegations which I am coming to regret making. :)
Here I alleged that komponisto deliberately tried to “creep people out”, the people in question being women, and the “creepiness” being allusions to sexual violence—definitely not threats, but disturbing all the same. Before my allegation, various other people reported in passing that his comments had a “creepy” character, though, so far as I know, they did not allege intent.
I also hinted at and then later made explicit, my belief that his motive for seeming creepy was to draw criticism, fake being emotionally damaged by the criticism, and then use this charade to make some point about gender politics.
So, as you see, I, at least, was not making a big deal about his having advocated unusual and unpopular ideas. As far as I can see, whenever he was asked to fill in some of the details regarding those ideas, he declined.
(In the interest of avoiding a confrontational tone, perhaps I should also add that I am not among the people who have downvoted your recent comments.)
Go ahead and downvote any comments you disapprove of. It is your right and perhaps even your duty. Besides, as a result of the intervention of some angel, I currently have more karma than I deserve.
Just curious. Your interest in “avoiding a confrontational tone”. Is that something you have come by recently? Something I said?
Now you present speculations about someone’s motives that go far beyond what was actually written in his comments. Yet, it remains the case that the only (arguable) offense he actually committed was bringing up (arguably) objectionable propositions for discussion. Notice the contrast with truly incontrovertible offenses that can be committed in writing, such as threats, lies, insults, libel, plagiarism, etc. In this case, a mere instance of bringing up an undesirable proposition was enough to motivate your accusations, with no such incontrovertible malicious behaviors accompanying it.
If you’re going to treat bringing up objectionable discussion topics as prima facie evidence of underhanded bad intentions, note that others can play that same game too. To take the most relevant example, there is just as much, if not even more, justification to interpret protestations of offense as an underhanded ploy for making ideological points and seeking emotional satisfaction instead of rational debate.
Therefore, if you want to judge people and enforce standards of discourse based on implicit judgments of their motives, rather than just the plain content of what they’ve written, you should be aware that such interpretations and the resulting judgments will be necessarily subjective and a matter of disagreement—and there is no rational reason why your particular criteria should be favored over others’.
Now you present speculations about someone’s motives that go far beyond what was actually written in his comments.
Yes. I am happy that you are now finally criticizing me for what I actually did rather than for some straw man caricature you have made up. You will find you have lots of company in your criticism.
Yet, it remains the case that the only (arguable) offense he actually committed was bringing up (arguably) objectionable propositions for discussion.
Uh oh. We are now back to that old “bringing up propositions for discussion” thing. Even though I have repeatedly said that that was not part of my thinking at all. I foresee trouble ahead. …
If you’re going to treat bringing up objectionable discussion topics as prima facie evidence of underhanded bad intentions …
Excuse me. The “objectionable topic” was whether women should grant “sexual favors” more freely. It was brought up in a comment which began by criticizing a woman’s observation that “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence....”. Why does the commenter think this observation deserves criticism? Because it shows “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men”. That is the context within which the “discussion topic” was introduced. Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
Great, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
It was brought up in a comment which began by criticizing a woman’s observation that “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence....”.
The original problem I had with this comment was that it triggered a certain schema of men trying to figure out ways of interacting with women sexually, and then women accusing them of bad things.It kind of looked to me something like this:
PUAs: Let’s do a lot of work fulfilling women’s criteria and figure out some more reliable ways of being successful with them.
SarahC: Wait, if you guys do that, you could think that you are guaranteed success with women, and then if you get turned down… it could turn into RAPE!
That perceived reaction is not quite what SarahC said (and my version of what PUAs say is not quite what she has heard). And it’s not her full reasoning. But until she clarified and explained more about her priors (e.g. George Sodini), there seemed to be some sort of slippery slope going on in her comment, which the above is an exaggeration of.
There is quite a gap between getting turned down and becoming violent. Yes, even for men. Although men being violent is highly visible, the base rate of rejections that men respond violently or punitively to is very low (in Western middle-class Anglo-American culture, at least). That’s because since men typically have to make the advances and women are more selective, men get rejected a lot. Some PUAs approach hundreds or thousands of women in the space of years; there just isn’t time to be violent or make a stink with every woman who rejects them. The fact that PUAs can even approach so many women indicates that they have some abilities to handle rejection.
Now, what about the feeling of some men that it’s unfair when women turn them down, and whether this view should be linked to creepiness or violence?
Again, this is an issue of inferential distance. I’ll try to spell out a scenario where men might feel it’s unfair when women turn them down, yet nevertheless not be bad people with bad intentions:
Let’s examine the case of shyness (EDIT: It’s interesting that I picked this example when drafting this post… I couldn’t post it last night due to a 500 error, and then I wake up this morning and see that komponisto admits to having experienced social anxiety disorder). You know the percentage of women who say that shyness is attractive in men? 2% (the study is by Burger & Cosby, but I’ll have to dig up the cite later). Shyness is extremely damning of the attractiveness of men in the eyes of most women, but it really doesn’t seem to hurt the chances of women so badly unless we are talking about something like full-blown clinical like social phobia (and if anyone has some reasons to believe that shyness in women is more of a dating handicap than I do, I would like to hear it).
So if you are a shy, awkward guy in college who has trouble getting dates, but you see shy, awkward women getting dates, you might feel a little frustrated at the situation (especially since the shy, awkward woman probably don’t consider you a viable date). Why is a trait, such as shyness treated unequally based on gender?, you might ask. You might start start feeling that this unequal treatment is a little unfair.
Now, fairness can be conceptualized in different ways. “Fair” is often relative to a certain standard of how things should be. When fairness is used as a synonym for justice, then unfairness entitles the “wronged” party to redress, perhaps by violence or state-enforced violence. That’s not the type of fairness I’m thinking of. The kind of fairness I’m thinking of is more like a sense of equality. You might feel that in an ideal world, shy men wouldn’t be systematically disadvantaged relative to non-shy men and shy women for a psychological condition that isn’t their fault and is difficult to change. Of course, you can recognize that we don’t live in this ideal world, and abhor any attempt to create it by force or coercion.
Btw, I’m not convinced by this ideal world argument; I just present it as a plausible example of how a man could feel that doesn’t make him a Bad Person. Feeling an abstract sense of unfairness, even a misplaced one, isn’t the same thing as feeling a sense of injustice that you are entitled to recompense for from some particular individual.
I think women’s preferences for certain personality traits are so intimately woven into their sexual psychology that to try to change them would be to re-engineer women’s psychology from the ground up. It’s a lot easier to imagine this ideal world “fairness” argument applying to men’s preferences for looks in women, actually. Discriminating against potential mates due to physical appearance seems a lot more arbitrary than discriminating based on personality traits.
Unfortunately, our culture encourages naive notions of “fairness” and nondiscrimination, so it’s easy to see how as this hypothetical shy guy, you could believe that they apply in dating, especially after hearing arguments that men shouldn’t judge women’s dating potential based on looks so much. You simply don’t realize that many women feel the same way towards shy guys that you feel towards [insert type of women you are least attracted to here]. The reason for not making those connections might partly be a failure of empathy or imagination, but I think it’s really a failure of knowledge, because society propagates a lot of ignorance and falsehoods about the relative importance of certain male personality traits to women on average.
If you are a shy guy who wants to better understand women’s perspective on what they value, people in our culture will systematically lie to you that “oh plenty of women like shy guys,” or “every woman wants something different,” or “don’t change yourself for anyone, eventually you will find the one for you” (note the horrible rationality of all these platitudes). The bias in our culture is that men and women go for the same things until proven otherwise, except for admitting that men care more about looks. When even the men who try to understand women’s dating criteria are lied to and silenced, there is a limit to how much we can blame men for not knowing the finer points of female sexual psychology, and thinking that certain aspects of women’s preferences are arbitrary (like men’s preferences for looks), capricious, or otherwise unfair.
SarahC didn’t exactly show “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men,” but her original post, and others in the discussion, did show a lack of knowledge of the potential psychology of unattractive men, leading to the slippery slope from notions of “guaranteed success” to men feeling “unfairness” when they are turned down, to “violence.” That procession only makes sense with a limited model of the minds of romantically frustrated men.
Women are not experts on the mindsets of unattractive, romantically frustrated men (and many men are not, either). In fact, women may have the most biased notions of those mindsets, because their impression of those men is dominated by the subset of them who are creepy, entitled jerks. Romantically frustrated men who are entitled jerks make themselves and their mindsets known to women. Romantically frustrated men who are decent people suffer in silence, and nobody cares. Unfortunately, when the second group of romantically frustrated men air their concerns on the internet, sometimes they trigger pattern matches with the creepy group of romantically frustrated guys. (Ironically, the guys who care most about avoiding such pattern matches may learn to self-censor themselves, leaving only guys without such sensitivity doing the complaining.)
It’s not women’s fault that creepy romantically frustrated men and the things they believe are so cognitively available. There are very good reasons for that. It also leads to bias which needs to be watched out for in discussions with men they care about communicating with.
The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences to a woman in real life may be nontrivial. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he secretly feels, but does not express, frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences: probably much lower, because there are all sorts of decent men that feel those things and suffer in silence. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration over women’s preferences on LessWrong: that’s probably closer to the second lower probability than the first, because LW is known as a place where people often talk about uncomfortable things that they wouldn’t say in other contexts.
This has gotten messy, but I think your insights have been accurate throughout.
I am sympathetic to romantically frustrated men. I’m a shy woman, and I recognize that I can get away with it because I’m female—that if I had been born male, society would have punished me more for aspects of my personality.
I kind of regret yelling “Rape!” in a crowded theater by now, because by now I’ve been shown that the nastier side of PUA is unrepresentative. Folks here are obviously not the people I need to be concerned about, and the people who actually do endanger women probably wouldn’t listen to me or anyone. :(
Btw, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on SarahC in this comment; I don’t have any beef with her clarified view. Actually, in general her level of open-mindedness and updating in discussions on gender on LW is extremely impressive.
Great, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
To be brutally honest, I think you are missing the point here.
You have produced a fine critical analysis of SarahC’s comment, the same that komponisto criticized so clumsily. If komponisto had produced the analysis you just did, this blowup might not have happened.
I think it would be more productive if you were to analyze this comment of mine responding to komponisto. Admittedly, I now know it was not his intention to be abusive, but what I said there pretty much explains my reasons for believing it should be condemned.
Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness? And the significance is, what… that komponisto willfully triggered a woman’s express worry about violence instead of being sensitive?
That would make sense, if komponisto’s whole post hadn’t been about how the jump from rejection to violence is premature. He was sensitive to that worry, he just disagreed with its basis and explained why.
SarahC’s original post: Complaint X could lead to Y, and Y is bad.
komponisto: Actually, X doesn’t lead to Y so strongly as you think. And it might be controversial to say so, but X!
That’s how it looks to me, and I don’t see anything wrong with the form of komponisto’s argument. Having to tiptoe around slippery slopes that other people link to bad things would be a bad practice on a rationalist forum. Of course, you may not think that SarahC’s initial post was a slippery slope. But komponisto and I do. I revised my impression when SarahC gave me more information on where she was coming from and made me change my impression that her overall argument is a slippery slope, but komponisto didn’t have access to this information when he wrote his post.
I would just like to propose that if you are a woman (or anyone else) who is bringing up violence against women or rape (of women) in a discussion of sexuality with men, please consider showing the full inferential path that led you to that notion… if your goal is to have a dialogue with the men involved, rather than protect yourself or cause them to run into self-censorship. This is not a claim about how women (or anyone else) is obligated to approach such topics; it is a speculation about what I think will help me (and perhaps other men) be cognitively and emotionally able to consider them in a minimally-biased manner.
Unfortunately, decent men in our culture often get unfairly lumped in with misogynistic jerks and other male miscreants unfairly, which leads to the development of an “unfair accusation of rape/violence/sexual harassment/being a jerk/being a creep” set of psychological triggers, which can bias the same decent men against being able to properly hear views on those subjects that are fair. While it’s not the responsibility of women (or anyone else) to tiptoe around those triggers, it is useful to know they are there for discussions aimed to promote understanding.
It is also possible to talk about women’s sexual autonomy and self-determination without bringing up sexual violence. The focus on rape can also obscure other issues of sexual ethics with less harmfulness but more prevalence. For instance, people consenting to unwanted sexual situations they aren’t terribly enthusiastic about. Not raping people is a low bar in sexual ethics. There are clearly more fundamental principles about sexual ethics and choice at work here in addition to not raping people that include that moral principle; I feel many discussions about sexuality and “seduction” would be better by talking about what those principles are and how they should be respected, rather immediately bringing in the word “rape.”
I’ve been meaning to drop this into the discussion, and this seems like a good place.
It’s a discussion of studies which conclude that a great deal of rape isn’t done by typical men who aren’t clear about signals and consent, it’s done by a small percentage of men with a conscious strategy of predation, frequently against intoxicated women.
That is interesting. I find one of the main points compelling: that true serial rapists exist and are much more likely to employ intoxication strategies that have plausible defenses rather than stereo-typical violent assault strategies.
That being said, I have issues with some of the quantative conclusions and the unsupported generalizations. There are serious methodological limitations in these studies that place large uncertainty bounds on trying to get any estimate of occurence for undetected rapists in the population.
One of the conclusion she seems to support (quoting Lisak), is simply not supported by the data:
This picture conflicts sharply with the widely-held view that rapes committed on university campuses are typically the result of a basically “decent” young man who, were it not for too much alcohol and too little communication, would never do such a thing. While some campus rapes do fit this more benign view, the evidence points to a far less benign reality, in which the vast majority of rapes are committed by serial, violent predators.
For starters, the data discussed shows most rapes are not of the violent type, and the data is not strong enough to support anything along the lines of “the vast majority of rapes” are X.
While serial rapists do exist and this is a real issue, there is a great danger in turning this into a moral panic where one views all men as potential rapists and 10% of men as actual rapists (as some of the comments in her blog suggested). That is simply a moral panic response.
Rape in the real world is complex. We like stories that simplify the world into a realm of clear black and white morality with villains, victims, and heroes. The word rape itself conjures up the image of the violent serial rapist like we see in horror films. Do such people exist—certainly, and they are something we must protect against.
But I am reasonably sure that most cases in the real world are much less TV-drama worthy and painted a shade of grey. Most cases involve two people who willingly intoxicate themselves with varying degrees of alchohol and have some idea that this lowers their standards and decreases responsibility. Essentially all cases of sexual intercourse involve some level of influence or manipulation by one or both parties. At some point you have to draw a line around fuzzy borders, but it’s never simple.
And wherever you draw that line, make sure it cuts both ways. For instance if you believe that one person initating sex with another who is unconscious at the time is automatically rape (no matter how they feel when they wakeup or later), then be aware that this would suddenly make a large number of women rapists. Clearly consent signaled before or after has some relevance.
That being said, the Yarbrough case looks like an example of some shade of a serial rapist, but I’m not convinced you can generalize from that single example across the rest of the datapoints.
For instance if you believe that one person initating sex with another who is unconscious at the time is automatically rape (no matter how they feel when they wakeup or later), then be aware that this would suddenly make a large number of women rapists.
Sadly, it’s only recently that rape other than male-raping-female has begun to be criminalized, and there are still many places where rape by a female is not illegal. In Scotland, for instance, rape was a gender-specific crime until just 2009.
Very interesting. While some PUAs have messed up attitudes, the guys in that link just sound like a fundamentally different phenotype. If PUAs were as uncaring and hateful as some people think they are, then PUAs would probably be doing what these guys are doing and working on alcohol and coercion skills, rather than obsessing over the minutiae of body language and signaling.
Another interesting part of account in that thread is the level of self-deception in the perpetrator interview, assuming that it’s not simply insincere. The strategy seems to be something like “figure out the way to get what you want without caring about the law/morality and only care about avoiding getting caught/prosecuted, then self-deceive yourself into thinking that it’s OK.”
I found this paragraph from Nancy’s article interesting for why PUA may be getting a worse reputation than they deserve.
Many of the motivational factors that were identified in incarcerated rapists have been shown to apply equally to undetected rapists. When compared to men who do not rape, these undetected rapists are measurably more angry at women, more motivated by the need to dominate and control women, more impulsive and disinhibited in their behavior, more hyper-masculine in their beliefs and attitudes, less empathic and more antisocial.
Since a lot of what PUA teach is that women like to be controlled, it probably sets off warning bells that PUA in general might be overly controlling and fit in this category.
The fact that the vast majority are likely to be less controlling than average, because they aren’t naturally good at it, can’t be ascertained by the language used.
This is probably largely to blame for the negative reactions many women have to PUA. It fits this pattern completion that many men are undetected manipulation rapists.
PUA’s fit a handful of these patterns, but some are so broad so as to fit most anyone. For example; everyone is at least somewhat motivated by a need to dominate and control—to varying degrees and men more on average. Alchohol makes people more impulsive and disinhibited—that is one of the main reasons we so enjoy it.
PUAs, like most men, are not angry at women (quite the opposite), are not generally impulsive, and are certainly not antisocial.
Told by who? This doesn’t match my impressions of typical PUA psychology.
Generalized anger towards women is, I believe, a pretty rare trait for men to have in general. And the psychology of a typical guy who PUA appeals to is more likely to be overly academic, cerebral and introspective. These types of guys have over-active pre-frontal-cortices—the exact opposite of impulsive angry types. They are overly concerned about what people think, overly concerned about the minute details of social interactions, and over think and over analyze everything they say in social contexts.
Typically speaking, they aren’t angry at women, they are afraid of them. This psychological profile is also less prone to anger in general—more mild, reserved, shy, nerdy, etc etc.
Behavioral inhibition to the unfamiliar is a temperamental construct that refers to a characteristic propensity to react to both social and nonsocial novelty with inhibition.
Yes, PUAs tend to be shifted in the directions you describe. Though as the movement becomes more and more popular, we will start seeing different male phenotypes in it.
These types of guys have over-active pre-frontal-cortices—the exact opposite of impulsive angry types.
Yes. My pre-frontal cortex is like a maze. It took me years to learn to be able to do things that I want to do without my cortex choking the impulse. This is a great psychology for careful, high-precision tasks, but it’s a horrible psychology for social interaction.
This psychology is part of my posting style that a few people have noted lately. It’s not as easy as it looks, but in general my brain is massively wired for “look before you leap.”
Yes. My pre-frontal cortex is like a maze. It took me years to learn to be able to do things that I want to do without my cortex choking the impulse. This is a great psychology for careful, high-precision tasks, but it’s a horrible psychology for social interaction.
Yea, i’m the same. Perhaps it’s a universal brain phenotype variant that gives one a prediliction and edge for intellectual careers and endevours.
But I really do wish I could easily just switch to the more social brain phenotype some people have on a whim. Alcohol of course can do this to some extent, but it’s far from perfect and has so many side effects.
Long ago I tried prozac for a couple of months and it had a dramatic effect on my personality—I became naturally more extroverted. It is vaguely like a milder, saner version of the MDMA enthogen effect but made permanent. I don’t think it made me actually less intelligent, but the personality shift made me effectively less intelligent—it just naturally changes what you are interested in and how you actually think. It is not the best state of mind for everyday intellectual work. It would be much better if they had a quick acting version with low side effects, but unfortunately it takes weeks to take effect, has a long half-life, side effects, and tolerance/dependence issues.
PUA practice and techniques, especially inner-game stuff, can help a good deal, but it seems like it can never really actually make one more extroverted in the way that some drugs can. I wonder if there are techniques that could enduce more extroverted states of mind with sufficient time and training.
Long ago I tried prozac for a couple of months and it had a dramatic effect on my personality—I became naturally more extroverted. It is vaguely like a milder, saner version of the MDMA enthogen effect but made permanent. I don’t think it made me actually less intelligent, but the personality shift made me effectively less intelligent—it just naturally changes what you are interested in and how you actually think. It is not the best state of mind for everyday intellectual work. It would be much better if they had a quick acting version with low side effects, but unfortunately it takes weeks to take effect, has a long half-life, side effects, and tolerance/dependence issues.
Rhodilia_rosea. It has similar but milder effects and is far better suited to intermittent usage.
Alcohol of course can do this to some extent, but it’s far from perfect and has so many side effects.
If alcohol gives you the desired effect then phenibut will most likely do so more effectively and without alcohol’s deleterious effects on cognition judgement and liver health. The unfortunate thing is that it builds up tolerance relatively quickly so is best used just once or twice a week rather than every day.
I’ve become more extroverted as a result of a lot of Alexander Technique and such—I think a lot of the ability to be comfortable with people is the ability to physically get into sync with them.
I didn’t go into the bodywork with the intent of becoming more comfortable with people—I was trying to stop feeling so disconnected from myself.
I’ve heard about Alexander Technique having those types of effects from other people—do you think it is because of the subconscious effects of better posture itself, or better awareness of body language and mirroring?
I learned about body language and mirroring through PUA reading, and it is eye-opening once you become aware of it. It’s strange and alarming how often it works (how conscious mirroring results in the other reciprocating—presumably unconsciously).
I hadn’t thought about the effects of more free/efficient movement [1], but I wouldn’t be surprised if it helps. Subjectively, it seems like more pleasure, less anxiety, and more awareness when I’m around people. Logically, I think mirroring and entraining are a part of it, but I don’t feel it that way.
[1] Alexander Technique is not about posture. It produces results which look something like “good posture”, but without the stiffness.
AT is about getting out of the way of your kinesthetic sense rather than adding more conscious control to the details of what you’re doing.
Do they talk about end-gaining? A big part of the challenge of Alexander Technique (as I understand it) is to let/tell yourself to release, and then not try to force results.
If becoming PUAs reduces their anger in the later stages, it seems much better than nothing (where they would presumably stay angry). Are you saying that PUA communities should devote more resources to reducing the anger of new members? Or are you suggesting that PUA communities increase the anger of new members before reducing it?
Disclaimer: My whole understanding of PUAs comes from HughRistik (on this site and elsewhere) and other people on this site.
This reminds me of the movie “Anger Management” where the coach deliberately makes the student angry and then asks “why so angry”. If we adopt the axiom that anger is always wrong no matter what other people do to you, we’ve already lost. Please judge people by the consequences of their actions, not by the emotions they feel.
The focus on rape can also obscure other issues of sexual ethics with less harmfulness but more prevalence. For instance, people consenting to unwanted sexual situations they aren’t terribly enthusiastic about.
That’s pretty much what’s disturbed me from the beginning about PUA, though I think you’re underestimating the effects of niceness training.
Ahh, I see and I share your loathing of that kind of niceness.
It took me a while to work out how you were relating this to pickup arts—because I associate the kind of behaviors that rely on exploiting weak boundaries (and in particular exploiting them) to get sex with manipulative ‘nice guys’ and not pickup artists. Pickup arts are more or less all targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness. Not out of any ideological purity but simply because they are targeted at gendter typical women with high self esteem who, approximately by how those terms are defined in the culture, are emphatically not nice when it comes to sex. Manipulative ‘nice guys’ on the other hand notorious for being masters at throwing around feelings of guilt and obligation.
That said, I can see how PUAs could be frustrating or even threatening to women who do not appreciate sexual persistence.
Bizarrely, my initial reaction to your post was to feel tired and angry—that’s why I took some time to chill. I think what was going on at my end might have been effort shock—it’s hard work to be clear and reasonable when I’m trying to explain something that has me frightened and angry to people who don’t seem to have any understanding of what I’m talking about, and kind of shocking that it took that much work to get to a moderate amount of understanding. You may be feeling the same way some of the time.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and I’m wondering how you distinguish between women who have weak boundaries and those who don’t.
And also whether you guys have anything about noticing if a woman is trying to signal that she’s attracted to you. I’m not saying it’s the most common thing, but I’ve heard enough from both men and women about that sort of signal failing that I don’t think it’s totally rare.
More generally, it bothers that you make claims that PUA is a net gain for women when there hasn’t been (and probably can’t be) a way to really check on the total effect.
The funny thing is that it’s been quite a while since I figured out that women typically get much more sexual attention than they want [1], and men typically get much less, and that this leads to drastic difficulties in mutual comprehension. That was the abstraction—the current discussion is trying to actually do the work of figuring out what highly emotionally charged prototypes are in play and whether they’re relevant.
Something which gave me more sympathy for you guys: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—a very funny memoir by a British man with oppositional disorder (or, you prefer, a wild talent for saying and doing the wrong thing) who gets a job at Vanity Fair, a high end fashion and gossip magazine. The book (get the paperback if you’re interested—it’s got an epilogue) includes his very convoluted courtship, and it does include ignoring some ‘go away’ messages in a very high stakes game. It would be interesting to see his wife’s version of the interactions which led up to their marriage.
[1] One of my female friends finds this formulation annoying because it leaves out the non-trivial number of sexually frustrated women. However, I’m talking about attention, as well as sex.
targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness
For the most part, I would say that this is true, and that targeting “want” is the general principle of PU. I do think it is a legitimate worry that some particular techniques might lead a small segment of the audience to go along with things they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about. That probably is not the intent of those techniques, and it’s an accidental result when the PUA misperceives the assertiveness or vulnerability of the person he is dealing with. In all forms of influence and sales, it’s just a difficult feat to maximize the ability of the other person to say “yes” at the same time as maximizing their ability to say “no.”
This is why I’m such a big of Juggler Method, which involves encouraging the other person to show commitment to the interaction and how it unfolds.
Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness?
No, you are not getting it at all. The combination of:
Criticising someone for raising the fear of rape issue
Giving a reason for the criticism that raising this fear shows an insensitivity to unattractive men
And then raising the infamous suggestion.
ETA: And to frost the cake, next came the nonchalant observation that “There is apparently no greater female nightmare scenario than mating with a less-than-optimally-attractive male.”
Again, if you’re going to condemn people based on such far-fetched inferences about their motives, you should note that you don’t have the monopoly on this strategy.
When it comes to controversial topics, a rational discussion can be had only if the participants discipline themselves to address the substance of what’s been written, and nothing more than that. If instead it is permitted to throw moral accusations at people based on indirect inferences about their supposed underhanded motives and personality defects, everyone can easily start playing that same game, and the discussion will inevitably degenerate into a mindless flame-war and propaganda contest.
Believe me, if I were so inclined, I could use an approach very similar to yours to concoct equally convincing (though perhaps to different people) attacks on many other participants in these controversies, and I’m sure many others reading this would be up to that task. When you make such arguments, you are not bringing insight; you are making propaganda.
That said, I think this particular conversation has reached the point where we might as well rest our disagreements, so I’ll let you have the last word if you wish.
Believe me, if I were so inclined, I could use an approach very similar to yours to concoct equally convincing (though perhaps to different people) attacks on many other participants in these controversies, and I’m sure many others reading this would be up to that task.
I would, and I’ve certainly considered it. The problem is that the main people who are potential targets are doing too good a job as rationalists to deserve it… so for now, I’m saying to myself “Don’t go there, girlfriend!.” I did bring up some political issues here and here, but I did my best to not make them attacks.
That’s the problem with LessWrong… people often start updating just when you’re gearing up to deliver your indignant beatdown.
You may be right about the truth. You are definitely right that it shouldn’t have been made so lightly. I regret that I was so quick to jump publicly to a conclusion.
He, for no particular reason, brought up the Amanda Knox case.
There’s history there: …
Whoops. My bad. That knocks one of the legs out of my claim that he was deliberately trying to be creepy. It still appears to me that he was, but the case is less strong now.
Incidentally, could we not have a flamewar—please!
I’m de-escalating, I think, but I have to expect to have more people speak up. This may last a bit, but I’m hoping it doesn’t get any hotter.
This comment isn’t even intelligible. I can’t tell whether or not you’re being sarcastic when you write
Whoops. My bad. That knocks one of the legs out of my claim that he was deliberately trying to be creepy. It still appears to me that he was, but the case is less strong now.
I have no idea what my allusion to the Knox case could possibly have had to do with this. Maybe that was your (sarcastic) point, but, like I said, I can’t tell.
In any event, the reasons I mentioned it were: (1) it provides my stock example of a belief of mine with credence on the order of 1/1000; (2) my writing on it is important priming for any discussion touching the subject of what kind of person I am, including the extent of my sympathies with other human beings (particularly women).
If your familiarity with me was really so low that you were actually unaware of those posts of mine, then your credibility on the issue of my motives is … beyond nonexistent (since it was already pretty much nonexistent).
This comment isn’t even intelligible. I can’t tell whether or not you’re being sarcastic when you write
Whoops. My bad. That knocks one of the legs out of my claim that he was deliberately trying to be creepy. It still appears to me that he was, but the case is less strong now.
I have no idea what my allusion to the Knox case could possibly have had to do with this. Maybe that was your (sarcastic) point, but, like I said, I can’t tell.
No sarcasm here at all. As to what the Knox allusion meant to me, I was totally unaware that the case had been a topic of discussion here. (I’ve only been here for a little over a month.) So, when the context was choosing an example of a small probability, and your choice of example happened to be a case of gruesome violence against a woman with sexual overtones, it certainly seemed to me to be just one more example of creepiness. A glaring example, since I could see no reason for it to have been chosen.
Boy, was I wrong! I sincerely apologize for thinking that this was evidence of creepiness when, quite clearly, there was another explanation.
Edit: Just something that bothered me.
If your familiarity with me was really so low that you were actually unaware of those posts of mine, then your credibility on the issue of my motives is … beyond nonexistent.
My credibility regarding your motive is zero and it has always been zero. You are the only person with credibility regarding your own motivation. All I can do is point to evidence of your motivation in your own writings. That doesn’t require me to have credibility, authority, or anything else. I have no power to convince anyone. All I can do is to point to the evidence that is out there, describe my analysis, and see if anyone else analyzes it the same way I do. If someone else analyzes it differently and explains it better, or if someone with credibility (that could only be you) corrects my assumptions, then I convince no one, not even myself.
To my mind, the only reasonable response to komponisto’s comment, inserted as it was into the conversation at that point, would have been a very strong and unanimous expression of indignation.
You have switched from talking about communicating individual feelings of indignation to demanding unanimous community indignation. This seems to cast your earlier comments as deceitful.
You have switched from talking about communicating individual feelings of indignation to demanding unanimous community indignation.
It wasn’t exactly a demand. A wish maybe. Yet, even as a wish, unanimity is a bit ridiculous. I apologize for at least that bit of hyperbole.
This seems to cast your earlier comments as deceitful.
I may be missing a connection here. How deceitful?
And which earlier comments? My most recent earlier comments were to the effect that actually signaling emotional state, rather than hiding it, is frequently useful to both signaler and signaled. Useful to the signaled because it warns of a problem which maybe ought to be dealt with. Useful to the signaler because it pretty much commits the socialized signaler to providing clarification and suggestions, if such are requested.
(How is that useful to signaler? Well, I think that pretty much anything that keeps you honest is useful.)
So, if expressing indignation is a good thing for an individual to do, it is an even better thing for lots of individuals to do.
My most recent earlier comments were to the effect that actually signaling emotional state, rather than hiding it, is frequently useful to both signaler and signaled. Useful to the signaled because it warns of a problem which maybe ought to be dealt with. Useful to the signaler because it pretty much commits the socialized signaler to providing clarification and suggestions, if such are requested. (How is that useful to signaler? Well, I think that pretty much anything that keeps you honest is useful.)
When you put it this way, I agree with you. I just think that there are ways of signaling emotional state that work better than others for actually helping the other person change their mind, rather than (a) blindly submit, or (b) dig in their heels.
Is the other blog also somewhat inclined to poetry?
No, I don’t believe anyone has ever accused it of that. The focus is on philosophy of biology but when it occasionally shifts to politics, this gentleman will offer metaphoric watercress sandwiches whenever euphemistic language grows too sparse in the comments. Clever fellows, those Brits.
A problem with the storm of indignation approach is that it can be unclear to people on the receiving end just what is unacceptable.
It sure can. However, it is quite clear to the person receiving the indignation that something was really unacceptable. Whereupon, the person notices that the problem is quite possibly in himself, rather than in a few people with weird chromosomes who just can’t seem to see things from a male point of view, so he takes off his preachers collar, dispenses his martyr’s cloak, puts on a student’s sandals, and asks a simple question, “WTF just happened?”
It is at that point in the process, when someone is actually listening, that a reasonable community provides explanation. The same explanations, incidentally, which had been provided a half dozen times before, only to be ignored or discounted.
Speaking from experience of watching the storm of indignation approach (on a much larger and more elaborate scale than happened here), the actual effect can be fear of speaking at all. About anything.
I didn’t post to livejournal at all for months after Racefail got started, and I still don’t do reviews. I may start doing reviews in the forseeable future.
I feel as though I might be a refugee from a damaged culture who brought some of the bad practices to a new home.
It sure can. However, it is quite clear to the person receiving the indignation that something was really unacceptable. Whereupon, the person notices that the problem is quite possibly in himself, rather than in a few people with weird chromosomes who just can’t seem to see things from a male point of view, so he takes off his preachers collar, dispenses his martyr’s cloak, puts on a student’s sandals, and asks a simple question, “WTF just happened?”
In my experience, this only happens when a person is already unsure of themselves, otherwise they just dig in harder and listen less, not more.
(Also, in scientific experiments, people are generally shown to become more certain of their opinions when met with resistance.)
This line of reasoning used to justify the shaming of an individual and an excuse to grant powers of suppressing ideas scares me. Or outrages me. The evoked emotional response is somewhere in between those two.
That doesn’t seem to be an accurate or appropriate dichotomy to construct here. No comments here advocate the incidence of rape or other actions which ignore female agenthood. Is the advocacy of such atrocities a crime so abhorrent that even innocence is no excuse?
“Perpetuating ideas that increase the social acceptability” of ignoring female agenthood isn’t the same as “advocating” ignoring female agenthood. To clarify: I don’t think anyone on this site wants to advocate ignoring female agenthood. I don’t think most people in the PUA community want to advocate that either. Perhaps not even Roissy wants to advocate that—although I’m less certain in his case. But to use him as an extreme example: is it not possible that people exposed to his ideas become less likely to respect female agenthood than they were before, even if he didn’t intend that to be the message? It’s a conjecture about possible causation, not about intent to harm.
And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post—but not the men.
That’s not a realistic appraisal of the situation. Generally speaking, when it comes to sensitive topics that cannot be discussed openly and objectively without arousing ideological passions, appeasing the parties who claim to be shocked and offended can only lead to shutting down the discussion altogether, or reducing it to a pious recital of politically correct platitudes. It’s a classic Schellingian conflict situation: by yielding to this strategy today instead of drawing a firm line, you only incentivize its further use the next time around.
That said, there are of course occasional situations here where people blurt out something stupid that their interlocutor might reasonably get angry at. But the idea that the general spirit of discussion of these topics here is somehow creating a hostile environment for women is just outlandish.
This discussion has also given me a lot of insight into why the proportion of women on this site is so atypically small even for computer programming crowds.
You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You’re basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, instinctively reacting with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.
In any case, if you believe that an online community has to bend over backwards to accommodate its womenfolk’s sensitivities lest they run away in terror, how do you explain the fact that you’ll find far more women at Roissy’s blog, whose author goes out of his way to shock and offend in ways that nobody here would ever even think of putting in writing? Just a glance at his comment sections is enough to see that women actually aren’t scared away that easily.
Ok, we’ve got three (declared) women on this thread. Alicorn and Nancy seem to be (roughly) within the world of contemporary feminism—I’m not, but then again I also don’t have experience with rape or abuse. So I feel compelled to keep driving at the centrist line here.
Yes, you can shut down a dialogue all too easily by claiming to be hurt. But I don’t want to discount the possibility that Alicorn actually is hurt—in which case why do you want to hurt her? Let’s not, please.
I read Roissy for a while. In one way it was a good experience: it taught me to seriously entertain views that I was previously disposed not to like. I consider that a strength. But in another way it was a bad experience: Roissy would insult classes of people in which I’m included, and my response to being belittled is to believe what I hear. That ain’t good. I can see the value in overcoming my fear to enter a hostile environment and cope; I can’t see the value in spending my time there indefinitely.
No, women aren’t fragile. But this is simply not a tough-love, hostile environment. It isn’t that kind of blog. It doesn’t fit with the posts—it certainly doesn’t fit with Eliezer’s writing. The norm around here seems to be that suffering and fear are real and that we ought to help people who endure such things. (Isn’t that humanism in a nutshell?) There are plenty of places on the internet where people like to shock and offend. This site does something different, something less common, and perhaps more valuable. Can we keep it that way?
But this is simply not a tough-love, hostile environment. It isn’t that kind of blog. It doesn’t fit with the posts—it certainly doesn’t fit with Eliezer’s writing. The norm around here seems to be that suffering and fear are real and that we ought to help people who endure such things. (Isn’t that humanism in a nutshell?) There are plenty of places on the internet where people like to shock and offend. This site does something different, something less common, and perhaps more valuable. Can we keep it that way?
You write as if a rational discussion must end up in conclusions that are pleasant, calming, and reassuring, and if some claims in a discussion disturb and offend, they cannot simply follow from a straightforward and open-minded inquiry into a sensitive topic, and there must be some malice involved. But this is clearly not so. Just imagine how billions of religious folks on this planet would react if you threw the anti-religious diatribes regularly written here, by Eliezer Yudkowsky as well as many others, into their faces.
Now, you can argue that in some areas of inquiry, the truth is so awful and inflammatory that it’s better to stay away from them because it keeps the website a better place to discuss other interesting things. However, if you’re going to argue that, then you must admit that some people’s idiosyncratic sensitivities and propensities for offense should be privileged over others. Mind you, I think that it is a defensible position, but it’s absolutely fallacious to advocate such limitations while denying this fact.
Yes, you can shut down a dialogue all too easily by claiming to be hurt. But I don’t want to discount the possibility that Alicorn actually is hurt—in which case why do you want to hurt her? Let’s not, please.
Could you please be more specific? Are you saying that my above comment reads like a personal attack, or that some general claim I advanced is hurtful? I honestly didn’t mean to take a jab at any particular person, not in that comment, nor anywhere else.
Vladimir, I got my mind changed about religion, in large part by LessWrong. I learned here not to be afraid of truth. That message would not have gotten across as clearly if there were not a dominant tone of warmth and compassion on this site.
Whatever is true, is true. I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek it out. I’m not saying we should fear an awful truth or hush it up.
I’m saying we go about things differently from how Roissy goes about things, and that’s helpful. You described women as being tough enough to take a much more offensive tone—I’m saying that an offensive tone isn’t helpful. There is such a thing as honesty without snark.
No, it wasn’t your comment that reads like a personal attack. Alicorn made a previous comment when she said that asking her to change her sexual preferences made her feel less safe. I don’t think we should be using this site to frighten people. You do not reason with people by arousing those emotions.
I’m saying we go about things differently from how Roissy goes about things, and that’s helpful. You described women as being tough enough to take a much more offensive tone—I’m saying that an offensive tone isn’t helpful. There is such a thing as honesty without snark.
This is where our misunderstanding probably lies. My mention of Roissy was an argumentum a fortiori, meant to disprove the hypothesis that the tone of sex-related discussions here is so insensitive that it drives great masses of women away, by pointing out that there are places whose tone is incomparably more insensitive, and yet they have comment sections with far more women participating. I wasn’t advocating the introduction of Roissyesque style as the standard of discourse here; there is indeed a time and place for everything.
That said, it should be noted that the quality of discourse can be ruined not only by people who write with an insensitive tone, but also by people who amp up their sensitivity to eleven, and as soon as certain topics are opened, frantically look for a pretext to plead insufferable shock and offense. Honestly, would you say that this phenomenon has been altogether absent from the controversies on this site you’ve seen?
(Again, please read this only as a statement about generalities, not an implicit personal attack on whoever might come to mind.)
In any case, if you believe that an online community has to bend over backwards to accommodate its womenfolk’s sensitivities lest they run away in terror
I would strengthen that claim by replacing with ‘womenfolk’ with ‘several particularly politically active members’.
You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You’re basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, instinctively reacting with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.
I think people generally dislike and avoid spending time in environments they perceive as anywhere on the scale from unwelcoming to hostile. That’s not a trait that makes someone fearful, brittle, paranoid, or delicate, and I’m confused as to why you’d think I was implying any such thing—quite the opposite.
I think people generally dislike and avoid spending time in environments they perceive as anywhere on the scale from unwelcoming to hostile. That’s not a trait that makes someone fearful, brittle, paranoid, or delicate, and I’m confused as to why you’d think I was implying any such thing—quite the opposite.
The question is whether the usual standards of discourse practiced here are harsh and insensitive enough to qualify as “unwelcoming to hostile.” It seems quite clear to me that only extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid personalities could honestly answer yes to this. (Here I mean “honestly” as opposed to the already mentioned discourse-destroying tactic where one actively seeks flimsy pretexts for sanctimonious indignation instead of engaging the substance of the argument.)
Again, this is not meant as an attack on everyone who has ever expressed indignation about some particular statement posted here, and in the present context, I don’t want to express judgments about any such individual incident, whether in this thread or any other. Even among very smart and cultured people, occasional episodes of careless and stupid behavior are unavoidable, and in any discussion forum, people will sometimes be faced with valid reasons to feel angry and offended. However, the idea that the general standards of discussion here represent a threatening and hostile environment for women, which is supposedly the main reason why they’re few in number, seems to me completely disconnected from reality.
However, the idea that the general standards of discussion here represent a threatening and hostile environment for women, which is supposedly the main reason why they’re few in number, seems to me completely disconnected from reality.
Not the general standards of discussion, no. But the standards of discussion for some of the speculation on sex relations, especially when related to the PUA subculture, seem to create an unpleasant environment for women who are otherwise quite happy with the general standards of discussion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.
The question is whether the usual standards of discourse practiced here are harsh and insensitive enough to qualify as “unwelcoming to hostile.” It seems quite clear to me that only extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid personalities could honestly answer yes to this.
It’s fairly hyperbolic to say that only an “extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid person” could answer yes to the question of whether this site is an unwelcoming to hostile environment at times. Forget hostile, you can’t see why the label “unwelcoming” could be used by a reasonable—or at least not extraordinarily fearful, brittle, and paranoid—person to describe some subsets of discussion here?
But the standards of discussion for some of the speculation on sex relations, especially when related to the PUA subculture, seem to create an unpleasant environment for women who are otherwise quite happy with the general standards of discussion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.
There are two ways in which I could interpret this comment.
If you’re saying that some topics are inherently insensitive and unpleasant, in that a rational no-holds-barred inquiry into them will likely yield disturbing conclusions that are apt to inflame passions and hurt people’s feelings, and they should therefore be avoided because they poison the atmosphere on the entire forum due to the unavoidable human passions and weaknesses, I will agree with the former and disagree with the latter. (And I’ll grant that it’s overall a reasonable and defensible position.)
However, if you’re saying that the way these topics have been discussed here should, on the whole, be considered excessively insensitive, and that an ideally rational, objective, and open-minded discussion of these matters would produce arguments and conclusions that are more warm, fuzzy, and politically correct, then I disagree radically. Aside from a few rare outliers, the discussions here have, if anything, erred on the side of being too cautious, sensitive, and silent about ugly truths.
It’s fairly hyperbolic to say that only an “extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid person” could answer yes to the question of whether this site is an unwelcoming to hostile environment at times. Forget hostile, you can’t see why the label “unwelcoming” could be used by a reasonable—or at least not extraordinarily fearful, brittle, and paranoid—person to describe some subsets of discussion here?
Well, just observe all the innumerable places, both online and offline, in which the standards of discourse are far more insensitive than anything that ever happens here, and which still attract far more female participants than this website—and not some particularly tough-skinned ones either. Just from the usual human standards, I think it’s fair to conclude that people who find enough unwelcoming elements here to be driven away are ipso facto showing that they are unusually sensitive specimens of humanity.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.
I think you may be right. Let’s make a new site where we can have these discussions without making lesswrong unattractive to women!
You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You’re basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, who instinctively react with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.
I think he writes as though visiting this site is recreational, and maybe if it’s full of things that offend someone’s sensibilities, they won’t have fun here and will leave. I upvoted lmnop’s comment and downvoted yours.
I think he writes as though visiting this site is recreational, and maybe if it’s full of things that offend someone’s sensibilities, they won’t have fun here and will leave. I upvoted lmnop’s comment and downvoted yours.
Who, precisely, are you directing this accusation at?
I think [lmnop] writes as though visiting this site is recreational, and maybe if it’s full of things that offend someone’s sensibilities, they won’t have fun here and will leave. I upvoted lmnop’s comment and downvoted [Vladimir_M’s].
And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post—but not the men.
How do you know how the men feel in discussions like these? Have you asked them? It’s not comfortable feeling that you’re being made into the Bad Guy. Many men, including myself, base a lot of their self-image on what women think of them, and the kind of acceptance women show them. I doubt komponisto feels that great right now, and I don’t think he deserves to continue to be villified after clarifying his original problematic comment.
Some that like lesswrong-type discussions may find dealing with the PUA-related talk here too mentally and emotionally draining for the site to be a net positive in experience.
PUA-related talk is a lesswrong-type discussion. It’s the same people. We are just dealing with an amped-up level of inferential distance, biases, and disparity between priors due to different experiences.
I doubt komponisto feels that great right now, and I don’t think he deserves to continue to be villified after clarifying his original problematic comment.
From the karma scores on his clarifying comments, I think many people here understand his perspective and support it. To say that he’s been villified is a pretty severe exaggeration.
Hi Imnop, It seems from your karma that you must have been around for long enough that I missed the chance for a welcome. But welcome to lesswrong anyway. Did you find us via Harry Potter:MoR?
Note that the site implements markdown syntax for commenting. This allows for a convention of Using a “>” before any quoted paragraphs. This makes block quotes so much more readable!
There is a difference between strong emotion and typical biases and directly combating the discussion by taking things to the personal level. The historical record of LW posts tells me that this political intervention is at times escalated to the level of outright bullying. When expressing certain positions are associated with the threat of reputation sabotage we cannot expect the discussion to be especially well correlated with non-political reality.
Sex doesn’t seem to be the distinguishing factor on whether a given participant is able to usefully engage on the subject, especially once the selection effect of ‘people who like lesswrong type discussions’ is applied. It is a political vs epistemic divide, not a male vs female one.
“Sex doesn’t seem to be the distinguishing factor on whether a given participant is able to usefully engage on the subject, especially once the selection effect of ‘people who like lesswrong type discussions’ is applied. It is a political vs epistemic divide, not a male vs female one.”
And yet the current norms of discussion are ones that leave a large proportion of the women here fighting through some measure of fear and discomfort to post—but not the men. This saps cognitive energy and limits how much they can contribute. You may want to consider why this is, and whether there are any minimal changes you would consider making in order to make both genders feel safe enough to post freely.
“Strive to only make utilitarian calculations that take into account both men’s and women’s best interests” is a good place to start.
This discussion has also given me a lot of insight into why the proportion of women on this site is so atypically small even for computer programming crowds. Some that like lesswrong-type discussions may find dealing with the PUA-related talk here too mentally and emotionally draining for the site to be a net positive in experience. I’ve changed my mind and now also support moving all PUA-related discussions to another site, if for different reasons than yours.
The part in bold could not be further from the truth. A not insignificant number of men here are terrified of contributing on this subject, due to their previous discussions. It reached the stage where people making a point that touched on human mating patterns apologised, asked for permission and generally supplicated and grovelled in an attempt to avoid reprisal. It nauseated me.
Precisely, and I hate this effect, as it applies to either sex and people of every conceivable sexual sexual orientation. This is why I hope XFrequentist (or whomever) creates a spin off site where the topics can be discussed without fear of reputation sabotage.
My comments here are targeted towards exactly that ultimate goal, with no small measure of thought behind which intermediate steps I consider useful for reaching that target. There is also a specific class of behaviours that I consider a harm to the community and a violation of the rights which I like to proscribe to individuals. These behaviours I don’t want people to be comfortable engaging in.
I don’t make utilitarian calculations of any kind and while I do make consequentialist calculations they are significantly tempered by ethical injunctions when considering topics such as this. I note that Alicorn takes this a step further—she explicitly professes subscription to deontological ethics.
(emphasis added)
I’m curious what sorts of comments you have in mind here, although I understand if you don’t want to single anyone out specifically. This pattern is not something I have noticed, although it could be that we have just reacted to the same comments/commenters in different ways. For example, I have found HughRistik’s consistently measured tone in discussing mating patterns very refreshing. It’s my impression that his comments are generally well-received not only because of their intelligent content, but also because of their thoughtfulness and tact. Nor do I have the sense that HughRistik, in making the choice to use this sort of tone, has had to obfuscate his meaning or avoid making any points that he would like to make. But it could be that you have different sorts of comments in mind.
Let me add myself as a data point. Having seen how these conversations go, I made a conscious decision to tread very carefully around them, basically only engaging with peripheral issues that look safe. As a result, I have left things unsaid that I think would be relevant, true and interesting, but also controversial. Even when I have something to say that seems safe, I feel like this topic requires me to put so much more effort into verifying that than a blog comment is normally worth, so I don’t bother.
I’m not going to go through and trawl the paper trail but it is something that myself and others have commented on as it happens. I suspect I could find a hit or two via searches for “don’t need to ask for permission”, “If you think it is relevant then post it”, “the line you speak of is imaginary” and almost certainly “quit F@#% grovelling!”
More generally I note that you seem to talking about a different issue to the one that my comment was replying to. In the immediate context we were discussing fear and discomfort held by an alleged “a large proportion of the women” and “a not insignificant number of men”.
A few men here fear being criticized. Some women here fear perpetuating ideas that increase the social acceptability and incidence of rape and other actions which ignore female agenthood. Regardless of how “reasonable” you consider each fear, they are not of equal magnitude. And then consider that the women here are women who have already been self selected for interest in rationality, and then further selected for ability to deal with potentially threatening comments regarding sex relations in the past. Something is wrong when they feel threatened by a subset of the talk here—and it isn’t “they’re just too PC.”
Take out the word “utilitarian” if you wish. It’s the “ignoring of women’s interests” that I find disturbing. See this comment and this comment for a better expression of my concerns.
That doesn’t seem to be an accurate or appropriate dichotomy to construct here. No comments here advocate the incidence of rape or other actions which ignore female agenthood. Is the advocacy of such atrocities a crime so abhorrent that even innocence is no excuse?
There is a reason that most countries have laws against libel as well as against other more direct violations of the person.
It’s a matter of implication. If it’s suggested that women should be less picky—for the sake of men, and no implication that it’s for the sake of women—and one of the reasons women are picky is regard for their own safety, but this is not considered relevant—then it isn’t unreasonable for a woman to conclude that her safety is considered unimportant. This isn’t the same thing as intentional advocacy of rape, but the emotional effect may be somewhat similar.
I can’t quite follow you on this chain. Even if women are asked to be less picky, that doesn’t mean that she is being asked to change the safety-related elements of her preferences. That’s a possible implication which understandably evokes a negative reaction, and deserves being pointed out. But it’s just too big a leap to “conclude” that the speaker believes that women’s safety is unimportant.
I will also note that komponisto’s original problematic quote talked about women “granting” sexual favors less conservatively. “Grant” implies agency. It’s not a reasonable assumption to conclude that komponisto wants women to engage in sexuality in ways that compromise their safety. That’s just not the kind of belief a decent person would hold, so concluding that he might consider women’s safety unimportant communicates that he is a bad person. Now he’s been made to feel he’s such a bad person that he can’t even emotionally participate in this topic anymore.
Was there a whole host of problems with his original comment? Yes. Do those problems deserve to be pointed out, including the negative reactions they caused? Yes. But I find the insinuations about komponisto’s beliefs and the supposed entailments of what he is saying (like the idea that women’s determinations about their safety being considered unimportant) to be overboard, only tenuously connected to his actual words, and unduly shaming.
EDIT: The karma of this post has been fluctuating. Check out my follow-up for a better explanation of my views.
At least two people on the other side of the discussion have assured komponisto that they don’t consider him a “bad person” here and here. Besides saying this upfront before each criticism, can you think of some other ways that we might minimize the real or perceived implication that harsh judgment on someone’s ideas implies harsh judgment on his/her character?
Saying that you don’t consider someone a bad person is no good if you talk in a way that assumes they are a bad person.
Here, Nancy asks komponisto:
Yet komponisto has never argued that women should give men “mercy fucks.” After he clarified his comment, it’s clear that he doesn’t want women to have sex with guys they aren’t into (i.e. “mercy fucks”), he wants to evaluate the basis by which women decide what they are into in the first place.
Asking him this question implies that he is a bad person.
Here, Nancy says:
Similarly, Alicorn said the following (though it was before komponisto’s clarification, so it makes more sense):
The conceptualization of sexuality as women “granting sexual favors” is problematic, but it’s not the same thing as feeling that men have some sort of “entitlement” to sex.
The idea that men are entitled to sex is something a bad person believes.
Similarly, datadataeverywhere says:
Except that komponisto clearly talked about women “granting” sexual favors. “Grant” implies agency. komponisto saying “Obviously, given that someone already doesn’t want to give something, then their giving it would be bad, all else being equal” is not consistent with the notion of coercion.
Entitlement, coercion, and “mercy fucks” are simply not implications of komponisto’s full views. They are associations with particular sentences of what he wrote. If anyone disagrees, tell me why you think I’m wrong.
Yes, some people who think women should have sex with a wider range of men believe this because they think men are entitled to sexual attention from women who are ambivalent about them. But the relationship of these views is correlation, not implication.
I can understand getting offended over a problematic view that komponisto raised, but I don’t understand getting offended at his comment for an idea that he didn’t say, which is correlated with his view. Personally, I would like to have seen the problematic correlations of komponisto’s statements to be raised to him. But I would have preferred to see it done in a way that didn’t suggest that what he said actually entailed or assumed these problematic correlations. Instead, these problematic correlations (that only a bad person would believe) of komponisto’s statements were treated as assumed or implied by him, which resulted in treating him like a bad guy, despite any explicit assurances otherwise.
Several women brought up the point that komponisto didn’t originally mention potential female benefits in less sexually selective with men. But just because he doesn’t mention it, doesn’t meant that there aren’t potential female benefits, or that he doesn’t believe that they exist! We could have always asked him to clarify. (Unless he is a bad person, who doesn’t deserve charity in interpretation of his arguments.)
Just as many people (not just women) reading this thread called up problematic correlations with some of komponisto’s statements, other people have heard similar points made by people who do consider women’s interests important. See my response to Vladimir_M here.
In my view, the more appropriate response would have been something like “You may not be aware that lots of people who criticize women’s preferences seem to consider themselves, or men in general, entitled to female sexual attention, and they show insufficient regard for women’s body sovereignty and self-determination. If you want to evaluate women’s preferences, could you explain how we can do this in a way that respects women’s autonomy? What kind of benefits might women accrue from attempting to change their preferences, and if not, they why should they attempt to do so merely to satisfy men’s preferences?” I liked pjeby’s response a lot, and he also offered the charity of seeking an alternative interpretation of komponisto’s comment.
I feel uncomfortable about making this post. Just like some women here have expressed apprehension at being pattern-matched with the stereotype of the irrational, complaining woman, I’m uncomfortable being pattern-matched with the stodgy guy who doesn’t get women’s feelings and is unfairly telling women to stop being so hysterical and listen to reason.
For the most part, I find the critical comments towards certain parts of komponisto’s posts to make a lot of sense, and I think some excellent points were raised in response, like this one by Alicorn:
You ask:
Distinguish between someone’s actual ideas, and problematic ideas of other people that are correlated by those ideas. Avoid criticizing that person’s ideas in ways indicating that they believe things that only bad people would believe, unless you can actually show why such a belief is entailed by what they actually wrote.
You may well be on to something. I’ve read a good bit of the bad-tempered attribution-of-bad-motives stuff, and I was horrified by it, but I think more of it has rubbed off on me than I realized. In particular, I don’t usually have an inclination to punish and keep punishing, but it’s showed up in this discussion with komponisto and in my take on how MOR-Hermione was characterized.
I like this response! While I expect that in the heat of the moment most people (on all sides) won’t always be able to word themselves this carefully and explicitly, it’s a good general outline for future comments on controversial topics. Upvoted for thoughtfulness.
Thanks. Rather than pooh-poohing from the peanut gallery how other people critiqued komponisto, I wanted to show what I think should have been done instead. I wanted to show that I understand at least some of their concerns.
Nancy actually raised some similar questions here, though I wish they had been raised in an initial response to komponisto before jumping on him, rather than to me when I started defending him.
In case anyone wonders why I didn’t make that sort of response to komponisto in the first place, it’s because by the time I saw his comment, the thread had already started blowing up. It triggered the pattern-match of “guy getting unfairly made into the bad guy,” which resulted in all sorts of negative emotional reactions of my own that made my first priority attempting to mitigate the perceived unfairness.
It took me some time to think of them—they weren’t available as an initial response. And I might not have thought of them if I hadn’t been angry.
Also, I got nastier (perhaps unfairly so) when they weren’t addressed.
When arguing against an idea, avoid conveying indignation that the idea was suggested.
But why? Don’t you deserve to know that we are indignant? Don’t you find that sort of information useful?
Perplexed:
However, it seems to me that replying with indignation is a failure of rationality, the way this term is normally used here. Ever since I started reading this site, I’ve always thought that if it lived up to its ideal perfectly, one would be able to post arbitrarily outrageous, offensive, and inflammatory ideas, and get back nothing except calm replies detailing the factual and logical errors contained in them. (And indeed, I must commend the extent to which many people here are willing to engage the substance of various unconventional ideas, including many disreputable-sounding ones, instead of brushing them off reflexively.)
While this perfect ideal is clearly unattainable, I do believe that people here should encourage comments that address exactly what’s been said, and don’t yield to the usual human temptation to make moral judgments against individuals just for their willingness to give rational consideration to disreputable (and perhaps even evil) ideas.
I very much agree with your interpretation of the ideals of rationality and I aspire to reach such a level of self-control myself someday. But it also occured to me that embracing this attitudein excess could cause people to push themselves too hard. By that I mean being unable to admit to themselves that they have fallen prey to the mind killer and should refrain from talking until they regain their calm, instead plowing on, unsuccessfully trying to write a level-headed response because that’s what a good rationalist would do.
There’s a difference between explicitly informing someone about your emotions and expressing them in the tone of your writing. And I think that the former, unlike the latter, would be good. I wonder whether it would help to stabilise emotionally volatile discussions if there was a policy of giving full explicit disclosure of your emotional reactions and automatic associations raised by others’ comments when responding to them. Something like “this part of your post made me scared, the next part angry and the epilogue inexplicably caused me to think about Hitler. Sorry about that and now to adress your points...”
Yes there is. They convey different meanings.
You are apparently not the only person here who thinks that. To have a community ethos which forbids one to express the meaning conveyed by tone strikes me as a little odd, particularly in a community which prides itself on willingness to discuss anything.
A “policy”? Too strong, IMO. Other than that, I liked this part of your comment. Yes, it is often best to express emotion non-judgmentally, particularly when you are not sure of the cause or justification of the emotion.
Someone feeling indignant over something you actually said is useful. Someone feeling indignant over potential implications of something you said is useful, as long as they don’t treat you like you believe that implication. Someone feeling indignant over something someone else said that is correlated with what you’ve said (but not implied by it) is also useful, as long as they aim the indignation at the other person, not at you. Otherwise, you feel like you are being made into the bad guy instead of having your arguments treated with charity.
I think you missed my (implied) point. Let me try again. Someone feeling indignant over something I said is unfortunate. My knowing that they feel that way is probably useful. Someone feeling indignant at me over their misinterpretation of something someone else said is both unfortunate and unfair. But there is not much I can do to correct the situation until I know that the indignation exists. The knowledge that the indignation exists is useful to me. I am not victimized by it. I can do something about it.
The only soft-skills training I ever received that I thought was useful taught me that communicating emotions is often more important than communicating ideas, because until the existence of those kinds of emotional reactions becomes common knowledge, neither party can do much to address the root cause.
Right. It’s how the indignation is communicated that matters. I’m not saying that the indignant person should hold it in. I’m saying that there are more and less constructive ways of communicating that indignation.
The person feeling indignant can exercise care about how they express their indignation in the first place, and whether it is really deserved. I don’t think it’s a good practice to blast people with my indignation, and rely on them to correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not sure that’s what you are saying, but it’s my best guess). if my indignation turns out to be misplaced, then I’d feel like a jerk. There are better solutions:
Wait, and ask for clarification. If the other person explains themselves and digs themselves into an even deeper hole, then you can always get indignant at them later.
Express the fact that you are feeling indignant, but don’t aim the indignation directly at the other person. Examples:
“What you are saying reminds me of idea X, which has always pissed me off.”
“You sound like you might be saying X, which really bothers me. Could you distinguish what you are saying from X?”
“Please tell me you aren’t saying X.”
“When you said Y, it reminded me of this guy believed Y, and also believed X, which I thought was really messed up. What do you think of X?”
“X is messed up. I’m not sure that’s what you actually mean, but that’s my best guess.”
These example express the indignation, but don’t make the other person the target of it. They have a chance to get out of the way of the indignation meteor before it actually lands on them.
See this post for the type of response to komponisto that I think was due.
Do these sound like plausible solutions to you? Have I responded to your point?
Why not? I hold in indignation at LW comments all the time. It’s a safe policy that helps prevent disasters like this entire thread has been.
Me too, including in this discussion. I’m saying that people shouldn’t categorically hold indignation in. Some types of indignation should probably be expressed: the question is when, and what evidence needs to be met before you can feel confident that the indignation is deserved, and that expressing it will further your conversational goals.
Generally, my standard is to hold indignation in unless I can see that someone is persistently doing something problematic and I think they should know better, and if my efforts at getting them to clarify or change their mind fail. And when I do show indignation, it’s mainly in the amount that I feel is deserved (people may have noticed me with a slightly more strident tone in some of my recent comments).
Sometimes, even when I’m pretty confident someone is being a jerk, I’ll wait. My view is that if I’m feeling indignant, I don’t have to blast someone with it now. I can bide my time, and continue the discussion with them trying to get them to either back down, or dig themselves into an even deeper hole. Then I can bring down the hammer, feeling confident that it’s deserved, and that observers will agree. Luckily, I rarely get pushed to this last step on LessWrong, because people here are too good at rationality: even if I never end up seeing eye-to-eye with people, I can usually get a combination of explanations or updating from them that defuses my indignation before I have to bring out the full brunt of it.
I’m not confident that everyone should follow this standard (it’s nice to have people on your “side” in an argument who get indignant sooner than you and express what you are feeling), but I do think that people should scrutinize their indignation before expressing it.
I can see expressing indignation being called for if someone is being unpleasant to other LW members, but I think expressing indignation at opinions you find unpleasant would be beyond the pale on a forum ideally suited for finding truth, especially in light of the motivating power of trivial inconveniences, and in light of the way that in a noisy world, asymmetrically suppressing falsehoods means suppressing truths, and in light of the way that when the opinions in question are unpopular, expressed indignation can be seen as carrying an implicit threat to damage the opiner’s reputation. The main thing that gives me pause here is that if LW is seen as “contaminated” with “impure” beliefs, that may harm its ability to fight the more important battles that it’s fighting; but that argues more for paranoia than indignation.
This is a good communication technique in general. It is important to be able to express and explain feelings without having to either defend their rightness or assign blame.
Thank you for spelling out some of your magical powers of minefield-navigation. I have often admired them.
You have certainly made a heroic effort to seem reasonable. At another blog I frequent, someone would be making a comment about watercress sandwiches right now.
And there is the reason why I think your efforts to be reasonable have failed. Because I think that your suggested responses are completely unreasonable. To my mind, the only reasonable response to komponisto’s comment, inserted as it was into the conversation at that point, would have been a very strong and unanimous expression of indignation. If komponisto had received that, there is the possibility that, like a cat jumping on a hot stove, he might have learned something.
However, he did not receive that, and he apparently did not learn anything. Nor did anyone else that might have shared the lesson.
I see that as a major failure of the Less Wrong community. This kind of blowup is just going to keep happening until it becomes clear either that women are not welcome here or that making women feel unwelcome here is not going to be tolerated.
In all seriousness it is displays like you have been making here that I will expend effort to make unwelcome. You behaviour appals me and I consider it somewhat trollish.
I also suspect that komponisto did learn something, particularly about the importance of tact when discussing controversial topics. I know that isn’t the lesson you want him to learn (roughly speaking, submit!) but it is the one that will be most useful for kompo in accordance to his own ethics and values (that is, kompo’s, not yours and not Alicorn’s).
If someone hits me I don’t always learn “I should give them my lunch money”. Sometimes I learn “I need to avoid that person”, “I need to seek allies to protect me” or even “I need to develop my combat skills so I can defeat would be assailants”.
The self defence skill that would may be the most benefitial for people in the kind of situation that kompo was is verbal assertiveness of the kind popularised by Marshall Rosenberg (Nonviolent communication). The techniques are particularly useful for deflecting or deflating personal attacks without sacrificing your own position via supplication. (I present this as an example of the kind of topic which I would make posts on if we had a place where we allowed discussion of social pragmatics.)
Actually, the importance of tact is something I was already convinced of; the lesson here was more about the nature of tact, i.e. what constitutes tact and what doesn’t.
As hard as it may be to believe now with hindsight, when I was actually writing the infamous comment I thought I was being tactful.
I don’t think that’s a “banned topic”. I think it would, in fact, be well received.
In all sincerity, I appreciate your honesty. You have repeatedly warned me that I was (at least) pushing the envelope of community practice. I am doing so again with full awareness that many (most?) people here might consider it borderline trollish. Perhaps if more of those people had your honesty, I might be shamed into either shutting up or conforming.
“Tact”??? You think the issue is one of tact? Komponisto practically oozed tact. He was apologizing for himself in every other paragraph. The issue is one of content, of deliberately trying to creep people out. He was saying that women’s fear of rape is unfair to teh men. He, for no particular reason, brought up the Amanda Knox case. He suggested (with tactful apologies for making a controversial suggestion) that the world would be a better place if women granted more sexual favors.
I haven’t had much if any interaction with komponisto, but if he has acquired the level of karma he has in this forum, he is certainly not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Oh, please. Submit to what? I want him to submit in exactly the same sense that you want me to submit. Except that you want me to submit to some rather strict community standards of behavior. I want komponisto to submit to standards that are expected in Western society as a whole.
No, as I already said, I doubt that that lesson would be helpful. In fact, I don’t recall that that lesson was even suggested by any of the (very few, actually) people who criticized him. If he really wants to learn a lesson from this, let him review what was said, and try to take what was said at face value rather than as further evidence of some kind of anti-male double standard.
As for his own ethics and values being different than mine and Alicorn, I would be very curious as to what you think the differences are. Or, if you would be understandably reluctant to speak for komponisto’s ethics, please tell us how you think that the ethics and values of komponisto’s critics seem to differ from your own. A discussion on this subtopic might well be the most productive way for this conversation to proceed.
If you wish, I will start by speculating about the differences among the ethics of yourself, myself, and Alicorn. My guess is that the three ethical systems are pretty similar—all a bit more deontological than utilitarian. Regarding specific moral and immoral actions, I suspect that our viewpoints are also very similar. But I see (imagine?) one pretty salient difference in the strength of our negative attitudes toward the immoral act of rape. Of the three of us, I suspect that Alicorn has the strongest negative opinion and you the least strong. I am somewhere in the middle, I think. Probably closer to Alicorn. But, based on some things you have said, and on your defense of komponisto, it seems possible to me that you are quite distant from the two of us on this judgment. What is your estimate on this?
You have now officially accused me of being a bad person.
Not, for example, of having underestimated the cost to Group X of a certain proposal to help Group Y—or any other error that a decent person might make. No, you have now made it explicit that you think I have bad—indeed “creepy”—intentions.
Do you stand by this, or do you want to reconsider?
That was my impression of Perplexed’s comment, also. I think it makes far too many assumptions about your state of mind and views, and is also directly contradicted by your own words (“grant” implies agency). Perplexed’s comment makes you sound like a passive-aggressive schemer using a veneer of tact to implement your sinister female-unfriendly agenda. I can’t reconcile his impression with what you’ve actually said, and I can’t even reconcile it with the most strident responses you’ve received from women, which at least don’t accuse you of intentionally trying to be a creep and even explicitly disclaim that accusation.
To satisfy my own curiosity, could you clarify you original thoughts when making the comment you got jumped on for? What did you think might make it controversial? What do you now think of the comment, and what have you learned from the responses to it?
I’m tired of folks projecting motives and views onto you that aren’t entailed by what you’ve actually said merely because your words triggered an association with people who do have bad motives who’ve said somewhat similar things. The fact that some people may have trouble imagining any charitable explanations of what you said could be due to undue cynicism or errors of reasoning, but it could also be partly due to a lot of inferential distance, which isn’t their fault or yours.
Similarly, I think a big part of the reason you made the original comment was because of your own inferential distance from those who were upset by it. You understood that people could have problems with it, but you didn’t understand exactly the nature of those problems. I also wonder whether you were aware of the history of Bad People saying stuff that sounds similar to what you said, and if so, how distinct you thought your argument was from theirs. Also, I don’t think you fully anticipated some of the inferences could be drawn. If you had realized these things, I think you would have made your original comment differently, and included disclaimers like the one you made later (that you think it would be bad to encourage people to do things they don’t want to do).
Of course, I’m speculating here, and you are inviting to fill me in. But I think my speculation is a much more parsimonious explanation for your comments than Perplexed’s. It’s also more charitable, and would have provided a better foundation for a dialogue with you to change your mind.
Even intelligent, tactful, thoughtful people such as yourself can not know things, not know that Bad People exist who say similar things, not anticipate all the potential implications of their words, and fail to anticipate the reactions of different people with different life experiences. That does not make them Bad People, or even bad rationalists. It’s called inferential distance, folks!
Perplexed’s explanation is more parsimonious, given a much higher prior for trolling. My intentions at this site, combined with my experiences here, lead me to expect a near-complete lack of attempts to generate controversy for its own sake. Perplexed’s experiences and intentions may lead him to expect otherwise.
That last paragraph was a disingenuous jab at Perplexed, but after reading through the comments on this post I feel indignant at his take on the proper use of indignation, and I’m going to signal that.
Yeah, I agree that it would make more sense if there was a different history with Komponisto, and some evidence to think he was trolling. None of the women in the thread seemed to think he was trolling, and Alicorn explicitly acknowledged in her initial response that she considered him a decent person. That’s why I’m wondering whether Perplexed is reading the same thread that everyone else is reading.
My initial “gut feel” explanation, and the one which I think justifies community indignation, is more parsimonious. But Hugh’s is probably more parsimonious than my current hypothesis that the behavior was part of an act.
Your point regarding priors for trolling is a valid one. I should probably take my unfamiliarity with the mores here into account much more when estimating probabilities as to what is really happening.
Signal received and noted. Thank you.
Yes indeed—it’s the phenomenon of pattern-completion, the same thing that Eliezer talks about all the time in the context of his views on the Singularity. People expect certain opinions or characteristics to go together, so that when a person exhibits a subset of these, people’s brains complete the pattern and automatically fill in the rest, regardless of whether or not the rest is actually there.
It’s incredibly frustrating, but also predictable. I should have seen it coming.
There’s a limit to how much I can say without breaking my vow to never again discuss the underlying topic. Basically, it was an honest passing thought that should have been censored. In the context of explaining specific reservations about a portion of a comment by SarahC, I briefly took a broader view, focused on a more general human problem, and more-or-less offhandedly wondered whether a solution could be found by tweaking in a certain direction.
I expected it to be controversial in the sense that I thought people would be strongly inclined to reject the proposal. It sounds incredibly naïve now, but I thought people would reply by saying “no, that wouldn’t work” or “that’s not the real source of the problem” or “you won’t find a solution by going down that particular path”. I had little or no notion that I was at risk of being treated like the next Sexist Villain. If I had to verbalize my unconscious, automatic thought processes, I suppose what I thought was that I had built up too much of a reputation here as a reasonable person for that!
I had forgotten how many different people read this site, and how little of a detailed model of me they have.
The illusion of transparency strikes again!
I would like to discuss my hypothesis. Which is, I suppose, a form of reconsideration. I have some questions regarding your motivation for the wording and timing of some of the things you said. We can do this publicly or privately—your choice. I’ve already admitted I was wrong about the Amanda Knox thing. I am open to being corrected about the rest.
At the end, I may well apologize.
Incidentally, let me clarify my current opinion. I don’t think you were trying to creep women out from some kind of malice or general love of being creepy. I think you were trying to deliberately draw criticism so as to fake being wounded by it with the ultimate aim of making some point—perhaps a point about double standards. That kind of bad person.
I don’t know if that makes you feel better.
And to respond also to Hugh and also, I think, Nancy, my apology, if komponisto convinces me I’m wrong, will include an apology for attributing motive with too little evidence.
I’m inclined to keep it public for now, for the benefit of curious onlookers.
That is something I never do. I am terrified of criticism and social disapproval generally (including downvotes on LW by the way). When I express an opinion that I know may subject me to criticism, I do so either because I feel so strongly about the issue that I judge it a worthwhile tradeoff (a very high bar), or because I believe the environment is “safe” for expressing such opinions without fear of judgmental criticism or other social punishment. In this instance, it was the latter; my safeness detector failed.
I had no point to make about double standards. I think I was explicit in at least one comment about allowing for symmetry. I happened to be discussing one side, with no implication whatsoever about the other. At least, no logical implication. But here I was the victim of pattern-completion.
I don’t think you’ll find anything I said that was inconsistent with the possibility of an analogous reversed situation—even, interestingly enough, anything inconsistent with the existence of the exactly reversed situation (i.e. men being too selective, resulting in sex-starved women)! I don’t think anyone noticed this.
Great.
Ok, if that is true, then it is very likely that I am going to be proven wrong. So the only substantive question I want to ask in this comment is this: Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
Here is how I would like to proceed. Tomorrow morning (here) - roughly 12 hrs from now—I will post a list of (~20) short questions. Most will take simple yes or no answers; a few may ask you to state your motivation for doing X. The style of the questions may be something like what happens in the taking of a deposition in an American legal case. Not particularly friendly questions, but not particularly hostile either. I doubt that I will be asking anything that would force you to break that vow not to further discuss sexual politics.
After receiving your answers, I may ask a much smaller number of follow-up questions in a second posting. After this I will do one of two things.
One possibility is that I may announce that I still don’t believe you and explain why. At this point, it is your turn to question me. When you are done, I’m sure other people will want a shot at me.
The other possibility is that I will sincerely apologize for having impugned your integrity. I will ask that you, or some member of the community, “penalize” me to the amount of 100 karma points. If you wish, you can question me in this case too. And then when that is done, I’m sure other people will have things to say to me as well.
Are these ground rules satisfactory?
See here, here, here, and here. No claim of exhaustiveness.
I’m willing to give it a try; but please keep in mind what you’re asking here: you, who have been here for (as you say) little over a month, are asking me to demonstrate my good faith to you. If I can do this easily, I’m willing to, but you should realize that there is a limit on the extent of my obligations in this regard.
This is unnecessary, it seems to me, and I’m not sure how it would be implemented anyway.
Ok, it certainly looks at this stage that I am going to owe you, and the community, an apology. But before I do that, I wonder if you could remove any lingering doubts by answering these questions, as I had originally proposed. The overwhelming majority are simple yes-or-no questions. I see them as pretty low-stress. If they don’t seem that way to you, decline to answer.
For purposes of these questions, “The Incident” is defined as the LW discussion beginning with the opening comment and running up to the “officially finished”—“strychnine” comment.
Yes or no answers are fine, but feel free to provide a line or two of explanation where it seems appropriate. Refusing to answer is acceptable too, but a short explanation of the reason for the refusal would be helpful.
The first three questions deal with conspiracy theories (mine). For this group of questions, to “privately discuss” means to communicate with any LW commenter by email, personal contact, telephone, or internet forums other than this one.
-- Within the day or so before the incident, did you privately discuss your intention to make an LW comment on the topics touched on in the opening comment?
-- During the course of the incident, did you privately discuss the incident?
-- Since the incident, have you privately discussed the incident with anyone other than participants in the public discussion related to the incident?
Your opening comment begins by criticizing SarahC’s comment “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down”. Later in the comment, you segue into your “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion”.
The following questions deal with your motivation in the opening comment.
-- Had you already formed the intention to make the “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion” at some point before seeing SarahC’s comment?
-- When you saw SarahC’s comment, did it immediately occur to you that this was a good opportunity to make the “suggestion”?
-- Did you decide to make the “suggestion” only after you had already begun writing your criticism of SarahC’s comment?
-- Prior to the incident, had you read any novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land” might be an example) which includes the premise of a world or subculture in which women are less “conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors”? If so, what did you think about the desirability of the situation and the realism of the depiction of the situation?
-- Prior to the incident, had you heard of or read the book “Against our Will”?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding feminism?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding an unwarranted obsession with rape in feminist discussion?
The following questions deal with the way the incident unfolded.
-- Did you notice that most of the strong criticism of the opening comment was coming from women?
-- If you can recall, at what point in incident did you become aware of this?
-- Had you expected, when you wrote the opening comment, that this gender pattern would occur?
-- Have you seen this gender pattern before, in responses to any of your previous LW comments prior to the incident?
-- During the incident, what significance, if any, did you attach to this gender pattern? I.e. what hypotheses did this pattern suggest?
-- During the incident, you expressed distress that your critics were making you out to be a bad person. However, an alternative interpretation might be that they were saying you had, perhaps by not fully understanding the implications, done a bad thing. Did you consider this alternative interpretation during the incident?
-- Do you think that these interpretations are different enough to be worth making the distinction?
That’s it.
No.
No
Yes, with exactly one such person (i.e. someone not involved in the incident or the discussion). The person in question is a female who had/shared the impression that the second paragraph of my comment (the “controversial suggestion” part) subjected women-in-general to an unfair level of scrutiny, but agreed with the implication of the first paragraph (and disagreed with Alicorn) about the desirability of treating sex differently from other forms of interaction.
No, although the fact that SarahC’s comment (and the composition of my reply) so easily prompted me to make the suggestion implies that this was not the first time a thought of this sort had crossed my mind.
Not for any definition of “immediately” that is limited to the time period before I had begun composing my reply. (I should insert a caveat here about the reliability of memory with respect to distinctions like this.)
Yes (see above).
While I would not want to make a categorical denial stretching over my entire life, it is nevertheless almost certainly the case that I have significantly less familiarity with this type of literature than is typical among readers of LW.
No. My brain treated your mention of it as the first time I had heard of it.
If the word “particular” in interpreted to mean “strong” (which I suspect is the intended meaning), and “feminism” is taken to mean a contemporary, as opposed to historical, stance (so that e.g. a strong belief that women should be allowed to vote in elections would not automatically require a “yes” answer), the answer is no.
Subject to similar interpretive conventions, my answer to this question is logically entailed by my answer to the previous one.
Without checking the record, my memory of the dialectic pattern (which will reveal my perception) was as follows: I received approval from wedrifid and SilasBarta (both males, as I understand), strong criticism from Alicorn (female) which developed into a vigorous argument, mild criticism from pjeby (male), feedback from SarahC (female) not concerning the most controversial part which led to the approximate reconciliation of our opinions on the main point, and some noticeable (though not especially severe) criticism from NancyLebovitz (female). HughRistik (male) provided helpful commentary from a position not specifically aligned with either me or my critics, but which I would expect my critics to regard as slightly closer to mine. At some point later in the discussion, I recall learning with mild surprise that datadataeverywhere is female, which seemed to occur at around the same time my mind began to identify her specifically as a critic.
I do not recall any female commenter who was as strongly critical as you (evidently male) were.
I regard this question as superseded by my previous answer.
If queried beforehand, I would have responded with an expectation that females would be more likely to be critical of my remarks than males. This isn’t to say that my brain performed this particular query.
No. Having participated only minimally in such threads prior to the incident, I considered myself neutral on LW’s gender controversies, and would have expected other readers to regard me this way also.
I did not devote any significant attention in my thoughts to the gender patterns of the discussion.
I will omit this question due to the premise being false. It was others, intervening on my behalf (HughRistik in particular, as I recall) who characterized my critics in this way. I did not employ such a characterization until after the incident as you have defined it, and I did so with respect to only one critic: you.
Instead of answering this question directly (which presupposes the coherence of the previous one), I will state my current point of view on my critics’ reactions. My critics have communicated to me that it is not socially acceptable (to a sufficient degree for my temperament), even on LW, to express a thought such as the “controversial suggestion” in my comment. I disagree with them about whether such expressions ought to be acceptable; however I do not desire their acceptability so strongly that I would be willing to sacrifice additional status in a likely-futile struggle to bring about that outcome. Sex and gender as such are not particular interests or priorities of mine here (or really, anywhere else I might happen to be). As a human, I have some nominal degree of interest in them, just as I have some nominal degree of interest in topics relating to food; however that interest pales in comparison to my interest in e.g. mathematics, music, or epistemic rationality in the abstract (or concrete).
Thank you for submitting to this interrogation. I realize that you had not placed yourself under any obligation to satisfy my curiosity on these points.
Ok, I have no follow up questions. Since you have given me no reason to doubt your veracity, I clearly owe both you, and the community, an apology.
I apologize to you, komponisto, and you all, Less Wrong, for publicly jumping to a conclusion based on hunch and intuition. That was simply a wrong thing to do, an unfair thing to do. That my conclusions were, not only unjustified, but also incorrect, is simply icing on the cake.
I apologize to komponisto for suggesting he was a devious person. I apologize if my overstated opinions that the “opening comment” deserved condemnation brought him distress.
I made several specific mistakes in the course of the incident, but mostly in the “post-mortem”. I have already admitted to some of them, others I have forgotten. If anyone wishes to bring them to my attention, I will be happy to do a mea culpa on them too, if I feel they warrant them.
Again, and in conclusion, I apologize.
Well, that felt good. I’m happy to have it (mostly) behind me. I also want to thank some of my critics who were very helpful to me in leading me to see the errors I had made. I will try to justify your efforts by trying not to repeat those errors.
If anyone has questions for me, or post mortem analysis, I will do my best to be accomodating.
komponisto, I applaud your honesty. It’s very impressive—a new standard to measure my own introspection by.
You appear to be making your apology conditional on answering a questionnaire, which is both long enough that it represents a significant time commitment, and personal enough that it likely contain questions which he would prefer not to answer. Withholding an apology as leverage for anything comes across as very hostile and defeats the point of the apology if it’s eventually given. Additionally, a heuristic I can’t quite identify is telling me it smells like a trap, designed to elucidate answers which could be used out of context in an attack.
jimrandomh said:
It did cross my mind that apologizing first, and then saying “could you answer some questions to help me figure out how far off my initial intuitions about you were, and how they went wrong” might be more interpersonally effective. Perplexed could always resurrect a critical opinion after hearing komponisto’s answers.
Maybe, but I think a more parsimonious and charitable explanation is that Perplexed is trying to find a way to update in a phased way while still saving face. I think the first goal is laudable (and I hope I don’t jinx it by making this comment), but the means may still be a little frustrating for komponisto.
It seemed to me that there was something “off” about the questionaire—I think it was mostly that I couldn’t tell what it was intended to discover.
Veracity, mostly. I had a conspiracy theory in my mind. The “evil perpetrator” could get away with it, simply by lying. But he would have to be careful not to lie about anything that could be checked.
The questions really only make sense if my conspiracy theory is true. Since it is false, the questions look odd. He would have still “passed” with the same answers and less explanation.
The only reason I went through with it, even after the “fear of criticism” evidence, was that in my original conspiracy theory, the conspirators would (of course) want a front man with a publicly known sensitivity of this kind.
A real comedy of errors and I end up with well earned egg on my face.
Hey, I like that phrasing. I’ll try to use it the next time I feel the urge to do something stupid. :)
More seriously, are you dissatisfied with the outcome?
It seems to have turned out pretty well. Looks like that heuristic was a misfire.
I applaud you for reconsidering. I look forward to seeing any dialogue between you and komponisto, if he is comfortable with it. I still think that this hypothesis is a bit tenuous:
I’m much more inclined to take komponisto’s own explanation of his words at face value, which I’m not sure if you’ve seen yet. I think he’s already answered some of your questions. He says:
So it sounds like he had an intuition he was unsure about, and decided to toss it out to LessWrong to figure out how to evaluate it. This behavior reminds me of the following INTP profile based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:
Since I engage in this behavior all the time, I instantly suspected that komponisto might be operating out of a similar psychology. In fact, his acknowledgment that his statements were controversial could have been read as acknowledging valid reasons for controversy (of course, acknowledging controversy can also be a way of trying to attract attention and imply that people who disagree are idiots, but that didn’t fit the overall tone of his comment). If so, then his comment could be understood as something like “here’s an uncomfortable thought I’m having… other people think it’s wrong, but I’m not entirely sure exactly why it’s wrong and what is wrong with it, so please help me figure it out.” Given what I know of komponisto’s attitudes, and given my own proclivity to suggest controversial ideas to help me make up my mind about them, that’s pretty much how I read his initial comment.
I understand that your experience with internet discussions may have led you to start with different priors, and I’m glad you’ve begun to question whether they apply in this case on this website. And if you’re not familiar with the psychology I describe above or can’t relate to it yourself, then it’s not your fault for not considering it as a possible explanation for komponisto’s words.
I find “raising uncomfortable intuition to figure out if there’s any grain of truth involved, or if it deserves to be debunked” to be a more parsimonious explanation than “deliberately drawing criticism so as to fake being wounded by it.” I do think it’s a good thing for rational discussion on LessWrong if people can raise controversial issues they are grappling with and try to use the resulting discussions to figure out their positions.
Would it be better for men (or anyone) with a highly controversial intuition to just sit on it, and have it constantly niggling away at their psyche? No. The only way to handle that belief is to put it out in the open and discuss it with other people.
Of course, people should be tactful and consider how their audience will feel when they express that intution. But like in this case, they can’t always anticipate every sort of reaction they will get, especially in subjects with great inferential distance. komponisto says he did his best to be tactful, and he still got jumped on; the reactions he got were simply different from what he anticipated. That difference isn’t because he is a bad person of any sort who is trying to prove that people here have double standards, but because there are things he simply did not realize.
The notion “don’t raise any controversial issue you are grappling with that someone with great inferential distance from you might find offensive despite your best attempts to be tactful” is not a good principle for a rationalist community. It would shut down too many discussions, and it’s already doing so to komponisto now that he’s been driven to vows of self-censorship.
That’s great… but I will note what I said before: “here’s my negative opinion of what you say, and it’s your job to prove it misplaced” may not be the most interpersonally effective mode of communication.
As always, Hugh, your comments are long, reasonable, and well worth reading. I will just be responding to a few points, though.
Yes, I have seen. Yes, he has answered some.
Interesting. I am an INTP myself. I will be sure to avail myself of that excuse the next time my intuition and impulsiveness get me into trouble. ;)
I agree. And I certainly have little to complain about regarding the help I have received in this thread. (That is not sarcasm, by the way. Something more like sincere sardonic irony. I remain impressed with the level of rationality and civility).
I’m so glad to have you on my side! (Now that was a more pure irony.)
True, but I honestly don’t think I have deviated all that far from your ideals here. If I recall, my first direct communication with komponisto on this thread was a request that he clarify some things that he had said. He declined to do so.
Perplexed:
So in other words, if there exists a near-consensus on something in the contemporary Western society, this should be considered as holy writ which it is unacceptable to question, no matter how arbitrary, unjustified, and irrational it might turn out to be under scrutiny?
Or do you actually believe that the current state of mainstream Western opinion is such a magnificent edifice of rationality, objectivity, and moral perfection that only evil or deluded people could ever wish to discuss propositions that run contrary to it?
We are both talking about a standard of behavior here, right? So my answer is that, no, that standard should not be considered holy writ which is unacceptable to question.
Incidentally, I realize I am maybe using some cheap rhetorical tricks here, and people are entitled to respond in kind, but have I really so far set up such a blatant strawman as that holy writ thing?
It is quite acceptable to question the standard. It is not acceptable to ignore it while the standard is in place. I like to hang out on a nude beach in the French Caribbean when on vacation, but that doesn’t mean I dress that way when swimming in Lake Erie at the city park.
Spare me. No I don’t. But if you were just practicing expressing your indignation, keep working on it. A bit more direct is good. Fewer rhetorical questions. Those rarely work.
Perplexed:
That is a very fine principle to abide by in most cases, but the trouble is that it runs into a contradiction with standards that specify not only that certain beliefs and attitudes are unacceptable, but also that it is unacceptable to merely bring them up for open discussion. In such cases, questioning the standard ipso facto involves breaking it. It is undeniable that many such standards are near-universally accepted in the mainstream respectable institutions of the contemporary West, and by insisting that they should be adhered to here, you imply that the corresponding limits on propositions that may be legitimately discussed should be enforced.
In this concrete case, you are denouncing the actions of a commentator whose only alleged transgression, to the best of my understanding, consists of bringing up for discussion certain propositions that arguably violate some of the above mentioned standards. Therefore, while my above comment might have been a bit too florid rhetorically, I honestly see no strawman-like misrepresentation of your expressed views in it.
Something a bit more than that has been alleged, at least by me. If I accepted your characterization of the situation, I would not have been so vehement in denouncing.
I believe you that you don’t see it, since you have just finished doing it again.
Perplexed:
Then would you be so kind to specify precisely what this additional part of the allegations consists of? I would be really grateful to see it spelled out, not least because, assuming you are correct, it would rectify some of my own misconceptions.
(In the interest of avoiding a confrontational tone, perhaps I should also add that I am not among the people who have downvoted your recent comments.)
Why certainly. I have nothing better to do than to repeat allegations which I am coming to regret making. :)
Here I alleged that komponisto deliberately tried to “creep people out”, the people in question being women, and the “creepiness” being allusions to sexual violence—definitely not threats, but disturbing all the same. Before my allegation, various other people reported in passing that his comments had a “creepy” character, though, so far as I know, they did not allege intent.
I also hinted at and then later made explicit, my belief that his motive for seeming creepy was to draw criticism, fake being emotionally damaged by the criticism, and then use this charade to make some point about gender politics.
So, as you see, I, at least, was not making a big deal about his having advocated unusual and unpopular ideas. As far as I can see, whenever he was asked to fill in some of the details regarding those ideas, he declined.
Go ahead and downvote any comments you disapprove of. It is your right and perhaps even your duty. Besides, as a result of the intervention of some angel, I currently have more karma than I deserve.
Just curious. Your interest in “avoiding a confrontational tone”. Is that something you have come by recently? Something I said?
Edit: fixed missing links.
Now you present speculations about someone’s motives that go far beyond what was actually written in his comments. Yet, it remains the case that the only (arguable) offense he actually committed was bringing up (arguably) objectionable propositions for discussion. Notice the contrast with truly incontrovertible offenses that can be committed in writing, such as threats, lies, insults, libel, plagiarism, etc. In this case, a mere instance of bringing up an undesirable proposition was enough to motivate your accusations, with no such incontrovertible malicious behaviors accompanying it.
If you’re going to treat bringing up objectionable discussion topics as prima facie evidence of underhanded bad intentions, note that others can play that same game too. To take the most relevant example, there is just as much, if not even more, justification to interpret protestations of offense as an underhanded ploy for making ideological points and seeking emotional satisfaction instead of rational debate.
Therefore, if you want to judge people and enforce standards of discourse based on implicit judgments of their motives, rather than just the plain content of what they’ve written, you should be aware that such interpretations and the resulting judgments will be necessarily subjective and a matter of disagreement—and there is no rational reason why your particular criteria should be favored over others’.
Yes. I am happy that you are now finally criticizing me for what I actually did rather than for some straw man caricature you have made up. You will find you have lots of company in your criticism.
Uh oh. We are now back to that old “bringing up propositions for discussion” thing. Even though I have repeatedly said that that was not part of my thinking at all. I foresee trouble ahead. …
Excuse me. The “objectionable topic” was whether women should grant “sexual favors” more freely. It was brought up in a comment which began by criticizing a woman’s observation that “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down. I worry about that driving men to violence....”. Why does the commenter think this observation deserves criticism? Because it shows “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men”. That is the context within which the “discussion topic” was introduced. Why is the significance of that combination so difficult for people to grasp?
Great, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
The original problem I had with this comment was that it triggered a certain schema of men trying to figure out ways of interacting with women sexually, and then women accusing them of bad things.It kind of looked to me something like this:
PUAs: Let’s do a lot of work fulfilling women’s criteria and figure out some more reliable ways of being successful with them.
SarahC: Wait, if you guys do that, you could think that you are guaranteed success with women, and then if you get turned down… it could turn into RAPE!
That perceived reaction is not quite what SarahC said (and my version of what PUAs say is not quite what she has heard). And it’s not her full reasoning. But until she clarified and explained more about her priors (e.g. George Sodini), there seemed to be some sort of slippery slope going on in her comment, which the above is an exaggeration of.
There is quite a gap between getting turned down and becoming violent. Yes, even for men. Although men being violent is highly visible, the base rate of rejections that men respond violently or punitively to is very low (in Western middle-class Anglo-American culture, at least). That’s because since men typically have to make the advances and women are more selective, men get rejected a lot. Some PUAs approach hundreds or thousands of women in the space of years; there just isn’t time to be violent or make a stink with every woman who rejects them. The fact that PUAs can even approach so many women indicates that they have some abilities to handle rejection.
Now, what about the feeling of some men that it’s unfair when women turn them down, and whether this view should be linked to creepiness or violence?
Again, this is an issue of inferential distance. I’ll try to spell out a scenario where men might feel it’s unfair when women turn them down, yet nevertheless not be bad people with bad intentions:
Let’s examine the case of shyness (EDIT: It’s interesting that I picked this example when drafting this post… I couldn’t post it last night due to a 500 error, and then I wake up this morning and see that komponisto admits to having experienced social anxiety disorder). You know the percentage of women who say that shyness is attractive in men? 2% (the study is by Burger & Cosby, but I’ll have to dig up the cite later). Shyness is extremely damning of the attractiveness of men in the eyes of most women, but it really doesn’t seem to hurt the chances of women so badly unless we are talking about something like full-blown clinical like social phobia (and if anyone has some reasons to believe that shyness in women is more of a dating handicap than I do, I would like to hear it).
So if you are a shy, awkward guy in college who has trouble getting dates, but you see shy, awkward women getting dates, you might feel a little frustrated at the situation (especially since the shy, awkward woman probably don’t consider you a viable date). Why is a trait, such as shyness treated unequally based on gender?, you might ask. You might start start feeling that this unequal treatment is a little unfair.
Now, fairness can be conceptualized in different ways. “Fair” is often relative to a certain standard of how things should be. When fairness is used as a synonym for justice, then unfairness entitles the “wronged” party to redress, perhaps by violence or state-enforced violence. That’s not the type of fairness I’m thinking of. The kind of fairness I’m thinking of is more like a sense of equality. You might feel that in an ideal world, shy men wouldn’t be systematically disadvantaged relative to non-shy men and shy women for a psychological condition that isn’t their fault and is difficult to change. Of course, you can recognize that we don’t live in this ideal world, and abhor any attempt to create it by force or coercion.
Btw, I’m not convinced by this ideal world argument; I just present it as a plausible example of how a man could feel that doesn’t make him a Bad Person. Feeling an abstract sense of unfairness, even a misplaced one, isn’t the same thing as feeling a sense of injustice that you are entitled to recompense for from some particular individual.
I think women’s preferences for certain personality traits are so intimately woven into their sexual psychology that to try to change them would be to re-engineer women’s psychology from the ground up. It’s a lot easier to imagine this ideal world “fairness” argument applying to men’s preferences for looks in women, actually. Discriminating against potential mates due to physical appearance seems a lot more arbitrary than discriminating based on personality traits.
Unfortunately, our culture encourages naive notions of “fairness” and nondiscrimination, so it’s easy to see how as this hypothetical shy guy, you could believe that they apply in dating, especially after hearing arguments that men shouldn’t judge women’s dating potential based on looks so much. You simply don’t realize that many women feel the same way towards shy guys that you feel towards [insert type of women you are least attracted to here]. The reason for not making those connections might partly be a failure of empathy or imagination, but I think it’s really a failure of knowledge, because society propagates a lot of ignorance and falsehoods about the relative importance of certain male personality traits to women on average.
If you are a shy guy who wants to better understand women’s perspective on what they value, people in our culture will systematically lie to you that “oh plenty of women like shy guys,” or “every woman wants something different,” or “don’t change yourself for anyone, eventually you will find the one for you” (note the horrible rationality of all these platitudes). The bias in our culture is that men and women go for the same things until proven otherwise, except for admitting that men care more about looks. When even the men who try to understand women’s dating criteria are lied to and silenced, there is a limit to how much we can blame men for not knowing the finer points of female sexual psychology, and thinking that certain aspects of women’s preferences are arbitrary (like men’s preferences for looks), capricious, or otherwise unfair.
SarahC didn’t exactly show “a fundamentally inadequate level of sympathy for ‘unattractive’ men,” but her original post, and others in the discussion, did show a lack of knowledge of the potential psychology of unattractive men, leading to the slippery slope from notions of “guaranteed success” to men feeling “unfairness” when they are turned down, to “violence.” That procession only makes sense with a limited model of the minds of romantically frustrated men.
Women are not experts on the mindsets of unattractive, romantically frustrated men (and many men are not, either). In fact, women may have the most biased notions of those mindsets, because their impression of those men is dominated by the subset of them who are creepy, entitled jerks. Romantically frustrated men who are entitled jerks make themselves and their mindsets known to women. Romantically frustrated men who are decent people suffer in silence, and nobody cares. Unfortunately, when the second group of romantically frustrated men air their concerns on the internet, sometimes they trigger pattern matches with the creepy group of romantically frustrated guys. (Ironically, the guys who care most about avoiding such pattern matches may learn to self-censor themselves, leaving only guys without such sensitivity doing the complaining.)
It’s not women’s fault that creepy romantically frustrated men and the things they believe are so cognitively available. There are very good reasons for that. It also leads to bias which needs to be watched out for in discussions with men they care about communicating with.
The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences to a woman in real life may be nontrivial. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he secretly feels, but does not express, frustration or unfairness about women’s preferences: probably much lower, because there are all sorts of decent men that feel those things and suffer in silence. The probability of a guy holding bad person beliefs given that he expresses frustration over women’s preferences on LessWrong: that’s probably closer to the second lower probability than the first, because LW is known as a place where people often talk about uncomfortable things that they wouldn’t say in other contexts.
This has gotten messy, but I think your insights have been accurate throughout.
I am sympathetic to romantically frustrated men. I’m a shy woman, and I recognize that I can get away with it because I’m female—that if I had been born male, society would have punished me more for aspects of my personality.
I kind of regret yelling “Rape!” in a crowded theater by now, because by now I’ve been shown that the nastier side of PUA is unrepresentative. Folks here are obviously not the people I need to be concerned about, and the people who actually do endanger women probably wouldn’t listen to me or anyone. :(
Btw, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on SarahC in this comment; I don’t have any beef with her clarified view. Actually, in general her level of open-mindedness and updating in discussions on gender on LW is extremely impressive.
To be brutally honest, I think you are missing the point here.
You have produced a fine critical analysis of SarahC’s comment, the same that komponisto criticized so clumsily. If komponisto had produced the analysis you just did, this blowup might not have happened.
I think it would be more productive if you were to analyze this comment of mine responding to komponisto. Admittedly, I now know it was not his intention to be abusive, but what I said there pretty much explains my reasons for believing it should be condemned.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness? And the significance is, what… that komponisto willfully triggered a woman’s express worry about violence instead of being sensitive?
That would make sense, if komponisto’s whole post hadn’t been about how the jump from rejection to violence is premature. He was sensitive to that worry, he just disagreed with its basis and explained why.
SarahC’s original post: Complaint X could lead to Y, and Y is bad.
komponisto: Actually, X doesn’t lead to Y so strongly as you think. And it might be controversial to say so, but X!
That’s how it looks to me, and I don’t see anything wrong with the form of komponisto’s argument. Having to tiptoe around slippery slopes that other people link to bad things would be a bad practice on a rationalist forum. Of course, you may not think that SarahC’s initial post was a slippery slope. But komponisto and I do. I revised my impression when SarahC gave me more information on where she was coming from and made me change my impression that her overall argument is a slippery slope, but komponisto didn’t have access to this information when he wrote his post.
I would just like to propose that if you are a woman (or anyone else) who is bringing up violence against women or rape (of women) in a discussion of sexuality with men, please consider showing the full inferential path that led you to that notion… if your goal is to have a dialogue with the men involved, rather than protect yourself or cause them to run into self-censorship. This is not a claim about how women (or anyone else) is obligated to approach such topics; it is a speculation about what I think will help me (and perhaps other men) be cognitively and emotionally able to consider them in a minimally-biased manner.
Unfortunately, decent men in our culture often get unfairly lumped in with misogynistic jerks and other male miscreants unfairly, which leads to the development of an “unfair accusation of rape/violence/sexual harassment/being a jerk/being a creep” set of psychological triggers, which can bias the same decent men against being able to properly hear views on those subjects that are fair. While it’s not the responsibility of women (or anyone else) to tiptoe around those triggers, it is useful to know they are there for discussions aimed to promote understanding.
It is also possible to talk about women’s sexual autonomy and self-determination without bringing up sexual violence. The focus on rape can also obscure other issues of sexual ethics with less harmfulness but more prevalence. For instance, people consenting to unwanted sexual situations they aren’t terribly enthusiastic about. Not raping people is a low bar in sexual ethics. There are clearly more fundamental principles about sexual ethics and choice at work here in addition to not raping people that include that moral principle; I feel many discussions about sexuality and “seduction” would be better by talking about what those principles are and how they should be respected, rather immediately bringing in the word “rape.”
Thank you for your attention.
I’ve been meaning to drop this into the discussion, and this seems like a good place.
It’s a discussion of studies which conclude that a great deal of rape isn’t done by typical men who aren’t clear about signals and consent, it’s done by a small percentage of men with a conscious strategy of predation, frequently against intoxicated women.
That is interesting. I find one of the main points compelling: that true serial rapists exist and are much more likely to employ intoxication strategies that have plausible defenses rather than stereo-typical violent assault strategies.
That being said, I have issues with some of the quantative conclusions and the unsupported generalizations. There are serious methodological limitations in these studies that place large uncertainty bounds on trying to get any estimate of occurence for undetected rapists in the population.
One of the conclusion she seems to support (quoting Lisak), is simply not supported by the data:
For starters, the data discussed shows most rapes are not of the violent type, and the data is not strong enough to support anything along the lines of “the vast majority of rapes” are X.
While serial rapists do exist and this is a real issue, there is a great danger in turning this into a moral panic where one views all men as potential rapists and 10% of men as actual rapists (as some of the comments in her blog suggested). That is simply a moral panic response.
Rape in the real world is complex. We like stories that simplify the world into a realm of clear black and white morality with villains, victims, and heroes. The word rape itself conjures up the image of the violent serial rapist like we see in horror films. Do such people exist—certainly, and they are something we must protect against.
But I am reasonably sure that most cases in the real world are much less TV-drama worthy and painted a shade of grey. Most cases involve two people who willingly intoxicate themselves with varying degrees of alchohol and have some idea that this lowers their standards and decreases responsibility. Essentially all cases of sexual intercourse involve some level of influence or manipulation by one or both parties. At some point you have to draw a line around fuzzy borders, but it’s never simple.
And wherever you draw that line, make sure it cuts both ways. For instance if you believe that one person initating sex with another who is unconscious at the time is automatically rape (no matter how they feel when they wakeup or later), then be aware that this would suddenly make a large number of women rapists. Clearly consent signaled before or after has some relevance.
That being said, the Yarbrough case looks like an example of some shade of a serial rapist, but I’m not convinced you can generalize from that single example across the rest of the datapoints.
Sadly, it’s only recently that rape other than male-raping-female has begun to be criminalized, and there are still many places where rape by a female is not illegal. In Scotland, for instance, rape was a gender-specific crime until just 2009.
Very interesting. While some PUAs have messed up attitudes, the guys in that link just sound like a fundamentally different phenotype. If PUAs were as uncaring and hateful as some people think they are, then PUAs would probably be doing what these guys are doing and working on alcohol and coercion skills, rather than obsessing over the minutiae of body language and signaling.
Another interesting part of account in that thread is the level of self-deception in the perpetrator interview, assuming that it’s not simply insincere. The strategy seems to be something like “figure out the way to get what you want without caring about the law/morality and only care about avoiding getting caught/prosecuted, then self-deceive yourself into thinking that it’s OK.”
I found this paragraph from Nancy’s article interesting for why PUA may be getting a worse reputation than they deserve.
Since a lot of what PUA teach is that women like to be controlled, it probably sets off warning bells that PUA in general might be overly controlling and fit in this category.
The fact that the vast majority are likely to be less controlling than average, because they aren’t naturally good at it, can’t be ascertained by the language used.
This is probably largely to blame for the negative reactions many women have to PUA. It fits this pattern completion that many men are undetected manipulation rapists.
PUA’s fit a handful of these patterns, but some are so broad so as to fit most anyone. For example; everyone is at least somewhat motivated by a need to dominate and control—to varying degrees and men more on average. Alchohol makes people more impulsive and disinhibited—that is one of the main reasons we so enjoy it.
PUAs, like most men, are not angry at women (quite the opposite), are not generally impulsive, and are certainly not antisocial.
I’ve been told here that a lot of PUAs start out angry at women.
Told by who? This doesn’t match my impressions of typical PUA psychology.
Generalized anger towards women is, I believe, a pretty rare trait for men to have in general. And the psychology of a typical guy who PUA appeals to is more likely to be overly academic, cerebral and introspective. These types of guys have over-active pre-frontal-cortices—the exact opposite of impulsive angry types. They are overly concerned about what people think, overly concerned about the minute details of social interactions, and over think and over analyze everything they say in social contexts.
Typically speaking, they aren’t angry at women, they are afraid of them. This psychological profile is also less prone to anger in general—more mild, reserved, shy, nerdy, etc etc.
See also behavioral inhibition:
Yes, PUAs tend to be shifted in the directions you describe. Though as the movement becomes more and more popular, we will start seeing different male phenotypes in it.
Yes. My pre-frontal cortex is like a maze. It took me years to learn to be able to do things that I want to do without my cortex choking the impulse. This is a great psychology for careful, high-precision tasks, but it’s a horrible psychology for social interaction.
This psychology is part of my posting style that a few people have noted lately. It’s not as easy as it looks, but in general my brain is massively wired for “look before you leap.”
Yea, i’m the same. Perhaps it’s a universal brain phenotype variant that gives one a prediliction and edge for intellectual careers and endevours.
But I really do wish I could easily just switch to the more social brain phenotype some people have on a whim. Alcohol of course can do this to some extent, but it’s far from perfect and has so many side effects.
Long ago I tried prozac for a couple of months and it had a dramatic effect on my personality—I became naturally more extroverted. It is vaguely like a milder, saner version of the MDMA enthogen effect but made permanent. I don’t think it made me actually less intelligent, but the personality shift made me effectively less intelligent—it just naturally changes what you are interested in and how you actually think. It is not the best state of mind for everyday intellectual work. It would be much better if they had a quick acting version with low side effects, but unfortunately it takes weeks to take effect, has a long half-life, side effects, and tolerance/dependence issues.
PUA practice and techniques, especially inner-game stuff, can help a good deal, but it seems like it can never really actually make one more extroverted in the way that some drugs can. I wonder if there are techniques that could enduce more extroverted states of mind with sufficient time and training.
Rhodilia_rosea. It has similar but milder effects and is far better suited to intermittent usage.
If alcohol gives you the desired effect then phenibut will most likely do so more effectively and without alcohol’s deleterious effects on cognition judgement and liver health. The unfortunate thing is that it builds up tolerance relatively quickly so is best used just once or twice a week rather than every day.
I’ve become more extroverted as a result of a lot of Alexander Technique and such—I think a lot of the ability to be comfortable with people is the ability to physically get into sync with them.
I didn’t go into the bodywork with the intent of becoming more comfortable with people—I was trying to stop feeling so disconnected from myself.
I’ve heard about Alexander Technique having those types of effects from other people—do you think it is because of the subconscious effects of better posture itself, or better awareness of body language and mirroring?
I learned about body language and mirroring through PUA reading, and it is eye-opening once you become aware of it. It’s strange and alarming how often it works (how conscious mirroring results in the other reciprocating—presumably unconsciously).
You sure you aren’t a PUA nancy?
I hadn’t thought about the effects of more free/efficient movement [1], but I wouldn’t be surprised if it helps. Subjectively, it seems like more pleasure, less anxiety, and more awareness when I’m around people. Logically, I think mirroring and entraining are a part of it, but I don’t feel it that way.
[1] Alexander Technique is not about posture. It produces results which look something like “good posture”, but without the stiffness.
AT is about getting out of the way of your kinesthetic sense rather than adding more conscious control to the details of what you’re doing.
PUAs love the Alexander Technique. It’s right there in Neil Strauss’ book.
Do they talk about end-gaining? A big part of the challenge of Alexander Technique (as I understand it) is to let/tell yourself to release, and then not try to force results.
A lot of AA members start out as alcoholics, but lets make sure we understand how the causality works.
A lot of men start out angry at women and by learning how the game works and gaining some skills in playing it they eliminate the source of the anger.
I have some concern for how they treat women when they (the PUAs) are still in the early stages.
If becoming PUAs reduces their anger in the later stages, it seems much better than nothing (where they would presumably stay angry). Are you saying that PUA communities should devote more resources to reducing the anger of new members? Or are you suggesting that PUA communities increase the anger of new members before reducing it?
Disclaimer: My whole understanding of PUAs comes from HughRistik (on this site and elsewhere) and other people on this site.
This reminds me of the movie “Anger Management” where the coach deliberately makes the student angry and then asks “why so angry”. If we adopt the axiom that anger is always wrong no matter what other people do to you, we’ve already lost. Please judge people by the consequences of their actions, not by the emotions they feel.
That’s pretty much what’s disturbed me from the beginning about PUA, though I think you’re underestimating the effects of niceness training.
Are you talking about the positive or toxic effects of niceness training?
Toxic. Sufficient niceness can get women into sex they don’t want, and also into pretending to want it.
Ahh, I see and I share your loathing of that kind of niceness.
It took me a while to work out how you were relating this to pickup arts—because I associate the kind of behaviors that rely on exploiting weak boundaries (and in particular exploiting them) to get sex with manipulative ‘nice guys’ and not pickup artists. Pickup arts are more or less all targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness. Not out of any ideological purity but simply because they are targeted at gendter typical women with high self esteem who, approximately by how those terms are defined in the culture, are emphatically not nice when it comes to sex. Manipulative ‘nice guys’ on the other hand notorious for being masters at throwing around feelings of guilt and obligation.
That said, I can see how PUAs could be frustrating or even threatening to women who do not appreciate sexual persistence.
Bizarrely, my initial reaction to your post was to feel tired and angry—that’s why I took some time to chill. I think what was going on at my end might have been effort shock—it’s hard work to be clear and reasonable when I’m trying to explain something that has me frightened and angry to people who don’t seem to have any understanding of what I’m talking about, and kind of shocking that it took that much work to get to a moderate amount of understanding. You may be feeling the same way some of the time.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and I’m wondering how you distinguish between women who have weak boundaries and those who don’t.
And also whether you guys have anything about noticing if a woman is trying to signal that she’s attracted to you. I’m not saying it’s the most common thing, but I’ve heard enough from both men and women about that sort of signal failing that I don’t think it’s totally rare.
More generally, it bothers that you make claims that PUA is a net gain for women when there hasn’t been (and probably can’t be) a way to really check on the total effect.
The funny thing is that it’s been quite a while since I figured out that women typically get much more sexual attention than they want [1], and men typically get much less, and that this leads to drastic difficulties in mutual comprehension. That was the abstraction—the current discussion is trying to actually do the work of figuring out what highly emotionally charged prototypes are in play and whether they’re relevant.
Something which gave me more sympathy for you guys: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—a very funny memoir by a British man with oppositional disorder (or, you prefer, a wild talent for saying and doing the wrong thing) who gets a job at Vanity Fair, a high end fashion and gossip magazine. The book (get the paperback if you’re interested—it’s got an epilogue) includes his very convoluted courtship, and it does include ignoring some ‘go away’ messages in a very high stakes game. It would be interesting to see his wife’s version of the interactions which led up to their marriage.
[1] One of my female friends finds this formulation annoying because it leaves out the non-trivial number of sexually frustrated women. However, I’m talking about attention, as well as sex.
For the most part, I would say that this is true, and that targeting “want” is the general principle of PU. I do think it is a legitimate worry that some particular techniques might lead a small segment of the audience to go along with things they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about. That probably is not the intent of those techniques, and it’s an accidental result when the PUA misperceives the assertiveness or vulnerability of the person he is dealing with. In all forms of influence and sales, it’s just a difficult feat to maximize the ability of the other person to say “yes” at the same time as maximizing their ability to say “no.”
This is why I’m such a big of Juggler Method, which involves encouraging the other person to show commitment to the interaction and how it unfolds.
Then you should frown on men who start their own businesses and make money, because it potentially has the same toxic effect on women. Wait, what?
If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean the combination between someone suggesting that feeling unfairness about rejection could lead to violence, and then someone responding by expressing such unfairness?
No, you are not getting it at all. The combination of:
Criticising someone for raising the fear of rape issue
Giving a reason for the criticism that raising this fear shows an insensitivity to unattractive men
And then raising the infamous suggestion.
ETA: And to frost the cake, next came the nonchalant observation that “There is apparently no greater female nightmare scenario than mating with a less-than-optimally-attractive male.”
Again, if you’re going to condemn people based on such far-fetched inferences about their motives, you should note that you don’t have the monopoly on this strategy.
When it comes to controversial topics, a rational discussion can be had only if the participants discipline themselves to address the substance of what’s been written, and nothing more than that. If instead it is permitted to throw moral accusations at people based on indirect inferences about their supposed underhanded motives and personality defects, everyone can easily start playing that same game, and the discussion will inevitably degenerate into a mindless flame-war and propaganda contest.
Believe me, if I were so inclined, I could use an approach very similar to yours to concoct equally convincing (though perhaps to different people) attacks on many other participants in these controversies, and I’m sure many others reading this would be up to that task. When you make such arguments, you are not bringing insight; you are making propaganda.
That said, I think this particular conversation has reached the point where we might as well rest our disagreements, so I’ll let you have the last word if you wish.
I would, and I’ve certainly considered it. The problem is that the main people who are potential targets are doing too good a job as rationalists to deserve it… so for now, I’m saying to myself “Don’t go there, girlfriend!.” I did bring up some political issues here and here, but I did my best to not make them attacks.
That’s the problem with LessWrong… people often start updating just when you’re gearing up to deliver your indignant beatdown.
Last word: watch this space
That is not a charge that should be made lightly, and I don’t think it’s true.
You may be right about the truth. You are definitely right that it shouldn’t have been made so lightly. I regret that I was so quick to jump publicly to a conclusion.
There’s history there:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1j7/the_amanda_knox_test_how_an_hour_on_the_internet/
Incidentally, could we not have a flamewar—please!
Whoops. My bad. That knocks one of the legs out of my claim that he was deliberately trying to be creepy. It still appears to me that he was, but the case is less strong now.
I’m de-escalating, I think, but I have to expect to have more people speak up. This may last a bit, but I’m hoping it doesn’t get any hotter.
This comment isn’t even intelligible. I can’t tell whether or not you’re being sarcastic when you write
I have no idea what my allusion to the Knox case could possibly have had to do with this. Maybe that was your (sarcastic) point, but, like I said, I can’t tell.
In any event, the reasons I mentioned it were: (1) it provides my stock example of a belief of mine with credence on the order of 1/1000; (2) my writing on it is important priming for any discussion touching the subject of what kind of person I am, including the extent of my sympathies with other human beings (particularly women).
If your familiarity with me was really so low that you were actually unaware of those posts of mine, then your credibility on the issue of my motives is … beyond nonexistent (since it was already pretty much nonexistent).
EDIT: This was written before I saw this.
No sarcasm here at all. As to what the Knox allusion meant to me, I was totally unaware that the case had been a topic of discussion here. (I’ve only been here for a little over a month.) So, when the context was choosing an example of a small probability, and your choice of example happened to be a case of gruesome violence against a woman with sexual overtones, it certainly seemed to me to be just one more example of creepiness. A glaring example, since I could see no reason for it to have been chosen.
Boy, was I wrong! I sincerely apologize for thinking that this was evidence of creepiness when, quite clearly, there was another explanation.
Edit: Just something that bothered me.
My credibility regarding your motive is zero and it has always been zero. You are the only person with credibility regarding your own motivation. All I can do is point to evidence of your motivation in your own writings. That doesn’t require me to have credibility, authority, or anything else. I have no power to convince anyone. All I can do is to point to the evidence that is out there, describe my analysis, and see if anyone else analyzes it the same way I do. If someone else analyzes it differently and explains it better, or if someone with credibility (that could only be you) corrects my assumptions, then I convince no one, not even myself.
You have switched from talking about communicating individual feelings of indignation to demanding unanimous community indignation. This seems to cast your earlier comments as deceitful.
It wasn’t exactly a demand. A wish maybe. Yet, even as a wish, unanimity is a bit ridiculous. I apologize for at least that bit of hyperbole.
I may be missing a connection here. How deceitful?
And which earlier comments? My most recent earlier comments were to the effect that actually signaling emotional state, rather than hiding it, is frequently useful to both signaler and signaled. Useful to the signaled because it warns of a problem which maybe ought to be dealt with. Useful to the signaler because it pretty much commits the socialized signaler to providing clarification and suggestions, if such are requested. (How is that useful to signaler? Well, I think that pretty much anything that keeps you honest is useful.)
So, if expressing indignation is a good thing for an individual to do, it is an even better thing for lots of individuals to do.
When you put it this way, I agree with you. I just think that there are ways of signaling emotional state that work better than others for actually helping the other person change their mind, rather than (a) blindly submit, or (b) dig in their heels.
Is the other blog also somewhat inclined to poetry?
A problem with the storm of indignation approach is that it can be unclear to people on the receiving end just what is unacceptable.
No, I don’t believe anyone has ever accused it of that. The focus is on philosophy of biology but when it occasionally shifts to politics, this gentleman will offer metaphoric watercress sandwiches whenever euphemistic language grows too sparse in the comments. Clever fellows, those Brits.
It sure can. However, it is quite clear to the person receiving the indignation that something was really unacceptable. Whereupon, the person notices that the problem is quite possibly in himself, rather than in a few people with weird chromosomes who just can’t seem to see things from a male point of view, so he takes off his preachers collar, dispenses his martyr’s cloak, puts on a student’s sandals, and asks a simple question, “WTF just happened?”
It is at that point in the process, when someone is actually listening, that a reasonable community provides explanation. The same explanations, incidentally, which had been provided a half dozen times before, only to be ignored or discounted.
Speaking from experience of watching the storm of indignation approach (on a much larger and more elaborate scale than happened here), the actual effect can be fear of speaking at all. About anything.
I didn’t post to livejournal at all for months after Racefail got started, and I still don’t do reviews. I may start doing reviews in the forseeable future.
I feel as though I might be a refugee from a damaged culture who brought some of the bad practices to a new home.
In my experience, this only happens when a person is already unsure of themselves, otherwise they just dig in harder and listen less, not more.
(Also, in scientific experiments, people are generally shown to become more certain of their opinions when met with resistance.)
This line of reasoning used to justify the shaming of an individual and an excuse to grant powers of suppressing ideas scares me. Or outrages me. The evoked emotional response is somewhere in between those two.
“Perpetuating ideas that increase the social acceptability” of ignoring female agenthood isn’t the same as “advocating” ignoring female agenthood. To clarify: I don’t think anyone on this site wants to advocate ignoring female agenthood. I don’t think most people in the PUA community want to advocate that either. Perhaps not even Roissy wants to advocate that—although I’m less certain in his case. But to use him as an extreme example: is it not possible that people exposed to his ideas become less likely to respect female agenthood than they were before, even if he didn’t intend that to be the message? It’s a conjecture about possible causation, not about intent to harm.
lmnop:
That’s not a realistic appraisal of the situation. Generally speaking, when it comes to sensitive topics that cannot be discussed openly and objectively without arousing ideological passions, appeasing the parties who claim to be shocked and offended can only lead to shutting down the discussion altogether, or reducing it to a pious recital of politically correct platitudes. It’s a classic Schellingian conflict situation: by yielding to this strategy today instead of drawing a firm line, you only incentivize its further use the next time around.
That said, there are of course occasional situations here where people blurt out something stupid that their interlocutor might reasonably get angry at. But the idea that the general spirit of discussion of these topics here is somehow creating a hostile environment for women is just outlandish.
You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You’re basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, instinctively reacting with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.
In any case, if you believe that an online community has to bend over backwards to accommodate its womenfolk’s sensitivities lest they run away in terror, how do you explain the fact that you’ll find far more women at Roissy’s blog, whose author goes out of his way to shock and offend in ways that nobody here would ever even think of putting in writing? Just a glance at his comment sections is enough to see that women actually aren’t scared away that easily.
(ETA: fixed a typo.)
Ok, we’ve got three (declared) women on this thread. Alicorn and Nancy seem to be (roughly) within the world of contemporary feminism—I’m not, but then again I also don’t have experience with rape or abuse. So I feel compelled to keep driving at the centrist line here.
Yes, you can shut down a dialogue all too easily by claiming to be hurt. But I don’t want to discount the possibility that Alicorn actually is hurt—in which case why do you want to hurt her? Let’s not, please.
I read Roissy for a while. In one way it was a good experience: it taught me to seriously entertain views that I was previously disposed not to like. I consider that a strength. But in another way it was a bad experience: Roissy would insult classes of people in which I’m included, and my response to being belittled is to believe what I hear. That ain’t good. I can see the value in overcoming my fear to enter a hostile environment and cope; I can’t see the value in spending my time there indefinitely.
No, women aren’t fragile. But this is simply not a tough-love, hostile environment. It isn’t that kind of blog. It doesn’t fit with the posts—it certainly doesn’t fit with Eliezer’s writing. The norm around here seems to be that suffering and fear are real and that we ought to help people who endure such things. (Isn’t that humanism in a nutshell?) There are plenty of places on the internet where people like to shock and offend. This site does something different, something less common, and perhaps more valuable. Can we keep it that way?
SarahC:
Here I must point to another highly pertinent comment of mine:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/2g3z
You write as if a rational discussion must end up in conclusions that are pleasant, calming, and reassuring, and if some claims in a discussion disturb and offend, they cannot simply follow from a straightforward and open-minded inquiry into a sensitive topic, and there must be some malice involved. But this is clearly not so. Just imagine how billions of religious folks on this planet would react if you threw the anti-religious diatribes regularly written here, by Eliezer Yudkowsky as well as many others, into their faces.
Now, you can argue that in some areas of inquiry, the truth is so awful and inflammatory that it’s better to stay away from them because it keeps the website a better place to discuss other interesting things. However, if you’re going to argue that, then you must admit that some people’s idiosyncratic sensitivities and propensities for offense should be privileged over others. Mind you, I think that it is a defensible position, but it’s absolutely fallacious to advocate such limitations while denying this fact.
Could you please be more specific? Are you saying that my above comment reads like a personal attack, or that some general claim I advanced is hurtful? I honestly didn’t mean to take a jab at any particular person, not in that comment, nor anywhere else.
Vladimir, I got my mind changed about religion, in large part by LessWrong. I learned here not to be afraid of truth. That message would not have gotten across as clearly if there were not a dominant tone of warmth and compassion on this site.
Whatever is true, is true. I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek it out. I’m not saying we should fear an awful truth or hush it up.
I’m saying we go about things differently from how Roissy goes about things, and that’s helpful. You described women as being tough enough to take a much more offensive tone—I’m saying that an offensive tone isn’t helpful. There is such a thing as honesty without snark.
No, it wasn’t your comment that reads like a personal attack. Alicorn made a previous comment when she said that asking her to change her sexual preferences made her feel less safe. I don’t think we should be using this site to frighten people. You do not reason with people by arousing those emotions.
SarahC:
This is where our misunderstanding probably lies. My mention of Roissy was an argumentum a fortiori, meant to disprove the hypothesis that the tone of sex-related discussions here is so insensitive that it drives great masses of women away, by pointing out that there are places whose tone is incomparably more insensitive, and yet they have comment sections with far more women participating. I wasn’t advocating the introduction of Roissyesque style as the standard of discourse here; there is indeed a time and place for everything.
That said, it should be noted that the quality of discourse can be ruined not only by people who write with an insensitive tone, but also by people who amp up their sensitivity to eleven, and as soon as certain topics are opened, frantically look for a pretext to plead insufferable shock and offense. Honestly, would you say that this phenomenon has been altogether absent from the controversies on this site you’ve seen?
(Again, please read this only as a statement about generalities, not an implicit personal attack on whoever might come to mind.)
Maybe we should have a norm of just ROT13ing anything potentially offensive?
Good point, lets create a new place where we can have these conversations without Alicorn or anyone else being hurt!
I would strengthen that claim by replacing with ‘womenfolk’ with ‘several particularly politically active members’.
I think people generally dislike and avoid spending time in environments they perceive as anywhere on the scale from unwelcoming to hostile. That’s not a trait that makes someone fearful, brittle, paranoid, or delicate, and I’m confused as to why you’d think I was implying any such thing—quite the opposite.
lmnop:
The question is whether the usual standards of discourse practiced here are harsh and insensitive enough to qualify as “unwelcoming to hostile.” It seems quite clear to me that only extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid personalities could honestly answer yes to this. (Here I mean “honestly” as opposed to the already mentioned discourse-destroying tactic where one actively seeks flimsy pretexts for sanctimonious indignation instead of engaging the substance of the argument.)
Again, this is not meant as an attack on everyone who has ever expressed indignation about some particular statement posted here, and in the present context, I don’t want to express judgments about any such individual incident, whether in this thread or any other. Even among very smart and cultured people, occasional episodes of careless and stupid behavior are unavoidable, and in any discussion forum, people will sometimes be faced with valid reasons to feel angry and offended. However, the idea that the general standards of discussion here represent a threatening and hostile environment for women, which is supposedly the main reason why they’re few in number, seems to me completely disconnected from reality.
Not the general standards of discussion, no. But the standards of discussion for some of the speculation on sex relations, especially when related to the PUA subculture, seem to create an unpleasant environment for women who are otherwise quite happy with the general standards of discussion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.
It’s fairly hyperbolic to say that only an “extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid person” could answer yes to the question of whether this site is an unwelcoming to hostile environment at times. Forget hostile, you can’t see why the label “unwelcoming” could be used by a reasonable—or at least not extraordinarily fearful, brittle, and paranoid—person to describe some subsets of discussion here?
lmnop:
There are two ways in which I could interpret this comment.
If you’re saying that some topics are inherently insensitive and unpleasant, in that a rational no-holds-barred inquiry into them will likely yield disturbing conclusions that are apt to inflame passions and hurt people’s feelings, and they should therefore be avoided because they poison the atmosphere on the entire forum due to the unavoidable human passions and weaknesses, I will agree with the former and disagree with the latter. (And I’ll grant that it’s overall a reasonable and defensible position.)
However, if you’re saying that the way these topics have been discussed here should, on the whole, be considered excessively insensitive, and that an ideally rational, objective, and open-minded discussion of these matters would produce arguments and conclusions that are more warm, fuzzy, and politically correct, then I disagree radically. Aside from a few rare outliers, the discussions here have, if anything, erred on the side of being too cautious, sensitive, and silent about ugly truths.
Well, just observe all the innumerable places, both online and offline, in which the standards of discourse are far more insensitive than anything that ever happens here, and which still attract far more female participants than this website—and not some particularly tough-skinned ones either. Just from the usual human standards, I think it’s fair to conclude that people who find enough unwelcoming elements here to be driven away are ipso facto showing that they are unusually sensitive specimens of humanity.
I think you may be right. Let’s make a new site where we can have these discussions without making lesswrong unattractive to women!
I think he writes as though visiting this site is recreational, and maybe if it’s full of things that offend someone’s sensibilities, they won’t have fun here and will leave. I upvoted lmnop’s comment and downvoted yours.
Who, precisely, are you directing this accusation at?
How do you know how the men feel in discussions like these? Have you asked them? It’s not comfortable feeling that you’re being made into the Bad Guy. Many men, including myself, base a lot of their self-image on what women think of them, and the kind of acceptance women show them. I doubt komponisto feels that great right now, and I don’t think he deserves to continue to be villified after clarifying his original problematic comment.
PUA-related talk is a lesswrong-type discussion. It’s the same people. We are just dealing with an amped-up level of inferential distance, biases, and disparity between priors due to different experiences.
From the karma scores on his clarifying comments, I think many people here understand his perspective and support it. To say that he’s been villified is a pretty severe exaggeration.
Hi Imnop, It seems from your karma that you must have been around for long enough that I missed the chance for a welcome. But welcome to lesswrong anyway. Did you find us via Harry Potter:MoR?
Note that the site implements markdown syntax for commenting. This allows for a convention of Using a “>” before any quoted paragraphs. This makes block quotes so much more readable!
Thank you for the pointer! Yes, I started using the site after reading HP:MoR, although I’d read some articles from it before that.