Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
Upvoted for saying the only thing in this whole thread that makes my inner animal go “aaaaugh I must fight against people who say that”. I didn’t know I had it in me.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy, but this version less likely to sting because it isn’t about something specific.
Just for fun, flip it over. People aren’t nearly sensitive enough about their status. If people cared more about their rankings, they’d do a lot more, and enough of it would be worthwhile (by those entirely rational geek standards which are opposed to the bad mainstream standards) that there’d be a net gain.
One more: You can’t tell anything important about a person by their taste in art, fiction, music, etc.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I’d adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I’m inviting into my home that way.)
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
Why not take it another step further? Why have random non-licensed people raise children? We usually don’t let just anyone adopt kids, in my country one needs to go through a lot of hoops and be financially capable of supporting a child before getting on the list. In practice one demonstrates conscientiousness, a strong desire to have children and financial independence. If all children are adopted children, why not do this? Surely this should only be done by teams of qualified experts in tandem with carefully chosen adoptive parents?
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I’d adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I’m inviting into my home that way.)
Choosing how a child turns out at five as a basis of which kid you want is clearly something that produces a non-trivial eugenic effect. Not in the societal sense (since what kind of kids a society gets are mostly already set), but in the sense of shaping the child you get to have according to one’s own preferences. It is perfectly comparable to choosing the foetus with the right genes for implantation.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
Terrible idea to try actually implement in a multicultural society, since for visible minorities it amounts to cultural genocide. What are the odds the child they get actually assimilate to their culture if he can easily pass in greater society as a member of the privileged one?
Unless one factors in ethnicity in who gets who… which is just a horrible can of worms.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance. If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Stolen generation isn’t relevant here since it wasn’t reciprocal—the children were taken, not replaced by white children who were then raised in Aboriginal commmunities.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance.
Not really, just that for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal (by the UN definition of the legal terms rather than colloquial use) levels of assimilation. It does a community little good if only 0.5 or 1 or 1.5 child per generation would choose to remain part of it.
If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Good point, but what if the minority culture’s values differ on this? Much like I prefer to exist than my carbon being used for the construction of a perfect orgasmium human. Members of minority cultures might prefer to put costs on each other to prevent them from leaving the community.
Also it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. “Genocide” has really strong negative moral valence in most people’s minds because the last time somebody tried it, it involved killing millions of people. Throwing it around in situations that don’t involve death seems… not inaccurate per se, but still disingenuous.
I use it in the technical legal sense and made that explicit too.
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Article 2 CPPCG)
People are really inconsistent however in colloquial usage and moral reasoning. I partially agree with your objection. Communist crimes are basically whitewashed because “Mao killed Chinese and he was Chinese so it wasn’t genocide so Hitler is still worse”. Isn’t a life a life? Shouldn’t whatever the term one uses, the negative feeling be the same?
for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal levels of assimilation
I’m with Alicorn on this one: if your members don’t want to be in your community, sucks to be your community.
what if the minority culture’s values differ on this?
Maybe they should make more of an effort to convince their members that their community is worth being a part of rather than using mechanisms like shunning and mainstream stigmatism to enforce membership.
it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews
Somehow I can’t bring myself to be bothered by this
Good point, but what if the minority culture’s values differ on this?
For some reason my brain decided to recast this question as though the minority culture were a corporation selling a product at a price (non-full-inclusion in majority culture translated into money). If people don’t want to buy it, sucks to be you! I don’t care if your values say they ought to or if it will make you sad. Change product or market product but do not force its purchase on anyone.
You do realize we are talking about retention of children raised in a culture right? Orgasmium cults and brainwashing indoctrinators would tend to out compete most others by such measures. A cult worshipping a baslisk that hacks your brain into absolute loyalty would also win out.
Optimizing for allure will not optimize for welfare. At least not under these mechanisms of “choice”. It also means our value sets can be out competed by really convincing paperclippers.
From the perspective of many traditional cultures Westerners may as well be Supper Happy people.
The problem with ‘orgasmium cults’ is, they have a hard time producing anything valuable enough to outsiders to be able to maintain economic power proportionate to their nominal population. Eventually it’s just a heap of functionally insensate larvae starving themselves into irrelevance.
The above holds for either. Erratio’s formulation was:
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance.
I think it would be trivial by a superinteligence to design a culture that no one would choose any other culture over, yet wouldn’t be a very pleasant place to live. And if superinteligence can do this, why could something like this arise due to memetic evolution? Religious and ideological memeplexes are already examples of weaker but dangerous beasts of this kind.
I don’t ever modify them after reading someone else’s statements. It is just that I often post and then reread my comment and find a point is in need of clarification and immediately hit edit and start fixing it. Most of the time no one notices since responses come 5 or 15 or 200 minutes later.
But if you’d like to keep this more real-timeish, I have no problem from with waiting longer before hitting “comment” and then leaving them unchanged. Sorry for any inconvenience. In any case weren’t the above two comments last modified before you posted yours?
I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising.
I think folk morality only says that if you adopt kids, you should treat them equally to your biological kids. It doesn’t say that people who have biological kids instead of adopting are bad people.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy
Why do you single out status-lowering events? You could go further and say that anything that doesn’t cause physical pain is okay, e.g. stealing someone’s car is okay because the victim theoretically could brainwash themselves to not care about material belongings.
My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.
Considering that there’s some variation in how people react to physical pain, I don’t know why that (at least below some threshold) should be off-limits.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
Well, one of the main emotional objections to cuckoldry is feeling betrayed and lied to, which isn’t the case in adoption. I don’t think being lied to is only an issue due to unclear thought, even without the status issue.
Huh… I felt it (with considerable force) about some other items ITT, but not even a twitch here. I hate to ask, but you probably saw it coming anyway… any personal things in your background that might have triggered that?
Upvoted for saying the only thing in this whole thread that makes my inner animal go “aaaaugh I must fight against people who say that”. I didn’t know I had it in me.
Hot damn!
Thanks for letting me know.
The funny thing is, I think the idea that cuckoldry would be a non-issue if people were thinking clearly is pretty close to conventional ideas about adoption—that people shouldn’t use biological descent to make distinctions among the children they’re raising. See also the fairly successful efforts to reduce the stigma of bastardy.
To extend the idea, we could say that just about all the pain people feel about status-lowering events is self-fulfilling prophecy, but this version less likely to sting because it isn’t about something specific.
Just for fun, flip it over. People aren’t nearly sensitive enough about their status. If people cared more about their rankings, they’d do a lot more, and enough of it would be worthwhile (by those entirely rational geek standards which are opposed to the bad mainstream standards) that there’d be a net gain.
One more: You can’t tell anything important about a person by their taste in art, fiction, music, etc.
Why stop at cuckoldry, where the child is still genetically half one’s spouse’s? Outright cuckcooing! Swap everybody’s kids around in the hospital!
(If I lived in a world where that was regularly done and I knew it, I would not have a bio-kid; I’d adopt a five-year-old and exercise some control over what sort of person I’m inviting into my home that way.)
Why not take it another step further? Why have random non-licensed people raise children? We usually don’t let just anyone adopt kids, in my country one needs to go through a lot of hoops and be financially capable of supporting a child before getting on the list. In practice one demonstrates conscientiousness, a strong desire to have children and financial independence. If all children are adopted children, why not do this? Surely this should only be done by teams of qualified experts in tandem with carefully chosen adoptive parents?
Eugenics FTW.
Relevance?
Edit: Parent used to be much shorter.
Choosing how a child turns out at five as a basis of which kid you want is clearly something that produces a non-trivial eugenic effect. Not in the societal sense (since what kind of kids a society gets are mostly already set), but in the sense of shaping the child you get to have according to one’s own preferences. It is perfectly comparable to choosing the foetus with the right genes for implantation.
Terrible idea to try actually implement in a multicultural society, since for visible minorities it amounts to cultural genocide. What are the odds the child they get actually assimilate to their culture if he can easily pass in greater society as a member of the privileged one?
Unless one factors in ethnicity in who gets who… which is just a horrible can of worms.
It sounds very much like you’re saying that no one would choose to be part of a minority culture if they weren’t forced into it by non-acceptance. If that is what you meant, wouldn’t that imply that destroying that minority culture is better than forcing people to continue being part of it?
Stolen generation isn’t relevant here since it wasn’t reciprocal—the children were taken, not replaced by white children who were then raised in Aboriginal commmunities.
Not really, just that for some minorities implementation of such a policy would produce non-acceptance rates would result in genocidal (by the UN definition of the legal terms rather than colloquial use) levels of assimilation. It does a community little good if only 0.5 or 1 or 1.5 child per generation would choose to remain part of it.
Good point, but what if the minority culture’s values differ on this? Much like I prefer to exist than my carbon being used for the construction of a perfect orgasmium human. Members of minority cultures might prefer to put costs on each other to prevent them from leaving the community.
Also it would really upset groups like say Haredim Jews.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. “Genocide” has really strong negative moral valence in most people’s minds because the last time somebody tried it, it involved killing millions of people. Throwing it around in situations that don’t involve death seems… not inaccurate per se, but still disingenuous.
I use it in the technical legal sense and made that explicit too.
People are really inconsistent however in colloquial usage and moral reasoning. I partially agree with your objection. Communist crimes are basically whitewashed because “Mao killed Chinese and he was Chinese so it wasn’t genocide so Hitler is still worse”. Isn’t a life a life? Shouldn’t whatever the term one uses, the negative feeling be the same?
I’m with Alicorn on this one: if your members don’t want to be in your community, sucks to be your community.
Maybe they should make more of an effort to convince their members that their community is worth being a part of rather than using mechanisms like shunning and mainstream stigmatism to enforce membership.
Somehow I can’t bring myself to be bothered by this
Haredim can be a real pain in the ass when they decide they want to be.
For some reason my brain decided to recast this question as though the minority culture were a corporation selling a product at a price (non-full-inclusion in majority culture translated into money). If people don’t want to buy it, sucks to be you! I don’t care if your values say they ought to or if it will make you sad. Change product or market product but do not force its purchase on anyone.
You do realize we are talking about retention of children raised in a culture right? Orgasmium cults and brainwashing indoctrinators would tend to out compete most others by such measures. A cult worshipping a baslisk that hacks your brain into absolute loyalty would also win out.
Optimizing for allure will not optimize for welfare. At least not under these mechanisms of “choice”. It also means our value sets can be out competed by really convincing paperclippers.
From the perspective of many traditional cultures Westerners may as well be Supper Happy people.
The problem with ‘orgasmium cults’ is, they have a hard time producing anything valuable enough to outsiders to be able to maintain economic power proportionate to their nominal population. Eventually it’s just a heap of functionally insensate larvae starving themselves into irrelevance.
I thought we’d drifted away from that particular spin on the scenario as of erratio’s comment.
The above holds for either. Erratio’s formulation was:
I think it would be trivial by a superinteligence to design a culture that no one would choose any other culture over, yet wouldn’t be a very pleasant place to live. And if superinteligence can do this, why could something like this arise due to memetic evolution? Religious and ideological memeplexes are already examples of weaker but dangerous beasts of this kind.
You keep editing your comments after you post them and then my replies look really poorly targeted.
I don’t ever modify them after reading someone else’s statements. It is just that I often post and then reread my comment and find a point is in need of clarification and immediately hit edit and start fixing it. Most of the time no one notices since responses come 5 or 15 or 200 minutes later.
But if you’d like to keep this more real-timeish, I have no problem from with waiting longer before hitting “comment” and then leaving them unchanged. Sorry for any inconvenience. In any case weren’t the above two comments last modified before you posted yours?
Before I posted mine, maybe—I didn’t check—but I was on a static page referring to an unedited parent when I wrote my replies.
Ok from now on I won’t modify comments after posting for this debate.
Edit: Starting after this one!
Or you can just include edits as “Edited to add: X” Then it’s perfectly clear, and you can edit freely. You just can’t prove that’s all you did.
From what kind of a position are people choosing to buy? The veil of ignorance? Lol.
You can’t choose to buy or not buy a spot somewhere in mind-space without already being somewhere in mind-space.
A sufficiently dedicated group could just keep childbirthing in-house rather than trusting hospitals.
It seems very likley that that would be illegal in such a society.
I think folk morality only says that if you adopt kids, you should treat them equally to your biological kids. It doesn’t say that people who have biological kids instead of adopting are bad people.
Why do you single out status-lowering events? You could go further and say that anything that doesn’t cause physical pain is okay, e.g. stealing someone’s car is okay because the victim theoretically could brainwash themselves to not care about material belongings.
My first thought was that people are pushed to take status-raising events more seriously than they naturally would.
Considering that there’s some variation in how people react to physical pain, I don’t know why that (at least below some threshold) should be off-limits.
Taboo “naturally”.
Well, one of the main emotional objections to cuckoldry is feeling betrayed and lied to, which isn’t the case in adoption. I don’t think being lied to is only an issue due to unclear thought, even without the status issue.
Have heard it claimed that that is partly true of statutory rape.
Did that for me too.
Huh… I felt it (with considerable force) about some other items ITT, but not even a twitch here. I hate to ask, but you probably saw it coming anyway… any personal things in your background that might have triggered that?
No, I think I always felt that way.