If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
(Ok, not always. Of the people that know me well, I’m sure they trust me because they witness me be a good person. Actually, I think people 80% process this subconsciously purely off vibes, like they find me funny and amicable and not creepy. )
I guess my objection is that people’s priors are actually wrong. Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women. (Yes, it’s a bit unfair of me to refer to unverifiable claims. Also there’s some bias since my close social circle is mostly women. I am saying my position is not purely ideological but empirical.)
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
(But I get that people are reasoning off of base rates vibing off of stereotypes so maybe it’s strategic.)
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
The streets of SF can be pretty dangerous late at night, lots of homeless people high on drugs, and I’ve had friends mugged in SF. Depending on which streets they are, I could easily prefer to sleep in the house of some random rationalist I met at a Berkeley event than walk half an hour through some scary SF streets at midnight.
Your assessment implies that the 17 year-old woman wouldn’t have made the same request if she’d read your gender as being a man, and that seems possible, but I personally don’t think it’d be that surprising to hear the same story from a 23 year-old guy (instead of from you).
Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women.
If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
I think Ben’s point is that you don’t know that.
But insofar as this is what is going on, I suspect that one dynamic is roughly something like this: for their safety(?), women(?) don’t just want to directly evade threats, they also want to be seen as able to police threats. This is how someo receiving sexual info about you, or having certain sexual thoughts about you, are constructed as violations of you, as opposed to risk factors for future violations. For that, Schelling gender is what matters, which is why as your Schelling gender changes, you observe people acting differently towards you in a seemingly irrational way.
The way that they know is that they got to see the diff between how they were treated when they were presented as a man, and how they were treated when they presented as a woman?
As they say in the comment you’re responding to?
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
And definitely that’s not an ironclad inference: it’s possible in principle that people started treating Sinclair differently for reasons independent of their shift in gender-presentation. But that’s pretty implausible on the face of it.
Your comment assumes that gender presentation translates directly into perception of gender (or, even, perception of sex, which is the vastly more important variable here!), but there is no reason at all for that assumption; indeed, it is precisely what I am questioning in the grandparent!
What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn’t?
(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that’s what happened?
Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that’s what happened?)
She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
(which I think is still not quite enough to make it obvious he’s less dangerous than complete strangers on her way from the metro station back home unless she’s in a third-world country, but still)
If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
(Ok, not always. Of the people that know me well, I’m sure they trust me because they witness me be a good person. Actually, I think people 80% process this subconsciously purely off vibes, like they find me funny and amicable and not creepy. )
I guess my objection is that people’s priors are actually wrong. Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women. (Yes, it’s a bit unfair of me to refer to unverifiable claims. Also there’s some bias since my close social circle is mostly women. I am saying my position is not purely ideological but empirical.)
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
(But I get that people are
reasoning off of base ratesvibing off of stereotypes so maybe it’s strategic.)The streets of SF can be pretty dangerous late at night, lots of homeless people high on drugs, and I’ve had friends mugged in SF. Depending on which streets they are, I could easily prefer to sleep in the house of some random rationalist I met at a Berkeley event than walk half an hour through some scary SF streets at midnight.
Your assessment implies that the 17 year-old woman wouldn’t have made the same request if she’d read your gender as being a man, and that seems possible, but I personally don’t think it’d be that surprising to hear the same story from a 23 year-old guy (instead of from you).
If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.
I think Ben’s point is that you don’t know that.
But insofar as this is what is going on, I suspect that one dynamic is roughly something like this: for their safety(?), women(?) don’t just want to directly evade threats, they also want to be seen as able to police threats. This is how someo receiving sexual info about you, or having certain sexual thoughts about you, are constructed as violations of you, as opposed to risk factors for future violations. For that, Schelling gender is what matters, which is why as your Schelling gender changes, you observe people acting differently towards you in a seemingly irrational way.
(Note that I’m being coy about something here)
How do you know?
Did these women say that they perceive you as harmless because you’re a woman?
Perhaps they simply perceive you as a harmless man.
(And maybe that’s what upsets you about this whole thing?)
The way that they know is that they got to see the diff between how they were treated when they were presented as a man, and how they were treated when they presented as a woman?
As they say in the comment you’re responding to?
And definitely that’s not an ironclad inference: it’s possible in principle that people started treating Sinclair differently for reasons independent of their shift in gender-presentation. But that’s pretty implausible on the face of it.
Your comment assumes that gender presentation translates directly into perception of gender (or, even, perception of sex, which is the vastly more important variable here!), but there is no reason at all for that assumption; indeed, it is precisely what I am questioning in the grandparent!
Sinclair:
Yourself:
I think you’re on a frolic of your own here.
.
What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn’t?
(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that’s what happened? Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that’s what happened?)
Examples of info she might have had:
She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
e.g. his demeanor, and the way other people at the meetups who’ve known him for longer than she has treat him
(which I think is still not quite enough to make it obvious he’s less dangerous than complete strangers on her way from the metro station back home unless she’s in a third-world country, but still)
the story is intentionally vague to not leak personal info
but yes, I did think and continue to think that she enjoyed spending time with me.