Um. On re-reading, my response to ikrase is pretty incoherent. D’oh. To try again:
A certain population of men is noticing a problem, and trying to solve that problem. The first attempted solution makes members of the population very unhappy, and doesn’t seem to solve the problem.
I read your original comment as saying that we should stop trying to highlight the problem to those men because it will cause more people to try to implement the failed solution. Instead, I suggest we should identify what is wrong with the attempted solution.
To cash that out explicitly: Some folks are treating their social deficits as an inherent trait, similar to a grotesque deformity on one side of their face. Their response is to try to hide the deficit, as if they were turning their head so that the deformity doesn’t show. But that solution is very uncomfortable, because it effectively denies a part of their life (sexual desire) actually exists. Thus, it’s a really bad solution. Instead, folks with social deficits should recognize socializing is a skill, which can be improved with practice.
Not worrying about the existence of creepy behavior just allows actual creeps to hide in the tall grass of people who aren’t creepy but don’t care about creepiness. There’s nothing wrong with worrying about coming off as creepy, any more than there is something wrong with worrying about making some other bad impression. That worry will affect what sorts of things one does to practice social skills, but is not a reason to abandon social skills improvement.
Negative self-talk of the form “I’m bad at socializing, so there’s no way that practice will make me better” is JerkBrain talk, and can be safely ignored. Emotionally, it’s really hard to deal with negative self-talk, but that is incredibly weak evidence that the negative self-talk is true.
I read your original comment as saying that we should stop trying to highlight the problem to those men because it will cause more people to try to implement the failed solution.
I definitely didn’t mean to say we should stop trying to highlight the problem at all. My concern is the problem being presented a) to a general audience instead of specific individuals who are actually known to come off as creepy b) in a way that seems to inflate how common it is, c) in way the imputes creepiness to behaviors that aren’t generally understood to be creepy and d) unaccompanied by any other socializing advice.
So I’m totally okay with going up to someone and saying, “Hey, you’re coming off as really creepy because you’re doing x under conditions y. In general, try to avoid doing things that have characteristic z and make sure to do p and q.” Similarly, any kind of socializing manual ought to include something about it. But the way creepiness was dealt with in the post, at least how I saw it was more, “Creepiness is this awful thing women have to deal with. It happens whenever people (generally men) do things that meet this vague criteria. Here are some examples that I think meet this criteria. Please don’t act like this men.” It seems really plausible that inexperienced men with poor social skills who aren’t creepy at all read posts like this and think “Oh my God, am I creepy? I really don’t want to be creepy. Let me try really hard to avoid being creepy at any point in my interactions with women.” The above is totally counterproductive to good socializing and I think a net negative. Most men of the Less Wrong demographic, in my experience, don’t have a problem of worrying insufficiently about being creepy.
So I generally agree that socializing is a skill and can be improved. But the post read to me not as socializing advice but as an admonition.
It seems really plausible that inexperienced men with poor social skills who aren’t creepy at all read posts like this and think “Oh my God, am I creepy? I really don’t want to be creepy. Let me try really hard to avoid being creepy at any point in my interactions with women.” The above is totally counterproductive to good socializing and I think a net negative.
This seems to be a general problem with psychological “self-medication”.
Imagine that a standard medicine would practiced in the following way: There would exist a pill to cure almost any problem. Those pills would be freely available in shops. The only missing part would be the diagnosis. So you could go to a shop and buy a pill for increasing blood pressure, or a pill for decreasing blood pressure. But you would not have information about which of these pills (if any) you need.
Even worse, imagine that people would have a bias to medicate themselves the wrong way. For example, people with high blood pressure would be more likely to choose the pill for increasing blood pressure, and vice versa. So despite having a magic pill for almost anything, the medicine practiced this way would be mostly harming people.
Seems to me that psychological “self-medication” works exactly this way. (Except that unlike the reliable magical pill, the therapy is less reliable.) People are often out of their optimal mental state, because their perception of the world and themselves is wrong. So if they choose a therapy, they choose something to move them even more towards their wrongly perceived goal.
There are methods to make yourself less agressive, and there are methods to make yourself more assertive. Unfortunately, people who already are almost doormats, seem to prefer the methods to decrease their perceived “agressivity”, until they make themselves complete doormats, which is their “ethical” ideal. On the other hand, agressive people, who (and everyone around them) could greatly benefit from the former methods, are attracted to the methods for increasing their “assertivity”, until they become dictators.
Unfortunately, most of the feminist advice has the same effect, even when it is essentially a good advice. The man who beats his girlfriends and then rapes them, he is very unlikely to visit a feminist lecture or to read a feminist web page; their words don’t reach him; and the feminists are probably aware of this, so they try to voice their message louder and with stronger words.
Then we have a shy boy who tries to make everyone happy, he hears the lecture, reads the website, and he thinks this is all about him, that he is a horrible monster, that his sexual feelings are something to be ashamed of, that it makes him subhuman, that his mere existence hurts women, and that the whole world would greatly benefit from his suicide or at least castration. And nobody tells him that he is wrong, because simply he is not a priority for anyone. Weak males don’t get any mercy.
And in a same way, “don’t be creepy” messages are typically unheard by creepy people, but catch the attention of insecure people, who are then afraid to even say hello to a stranger, to smile at an attractive person, to ask a phone number or an e-mail, etc., because it is better to be safe than sorry, and anything can be pattern-matched to something negative, especially by an insecure person.
We need two different words for what’s been called “high-status creep” (e.g. a hypermasculine, fashionably-dressed guy who snatches your phone and dials his own number, or similar) and what’s been called “low-status creep” (e.g. someone with very poor social skills and poor personal grooming). So long as there are people using that word for the former and people using that word for the latter, confusion will keep on ensuing.
Excellent comment! If you came up with a few more examples of the psychological self-medication problem in addition to the creepiness one, I think this would make for a good LW post.
Thankyou for the effort you have been putting in to your replies in this series Viliam. You are injecting much needed balance and perspective into the the conversation.
This is a very good point. To extent your metaphor, I think the problem is that people feel ashamed to seek expert advice (or any outside advice) about what sort of pill to buy.
If we could do something to make it less shameful to seek outside advice, from either professional expert or informal expert, I think some of this problem would disappear. I think these types of posts have the potential to help in that process, but making explicit what the current rules really are, how different folks implement them, and what hypocrisies may exist within a particular set of rules. Hopefully, when one has a better sense of those things, one will be in a better position to figure out what intervention to select.
Um. On re-reading, my response to ikrase is pretty incoherent. D’oh. To try again:
A certain population of men is noticing a problem, and trying to solve that problem. The first attempted solution makes members of the population very unhappy, and doesn’t seem to solve the problem.
I read your original comment as saying that we should stop trying to highlight the problem to those men because it will cause more people to try to implement the failed solution. Instead, I suggest we should identify what is wrong with the attempted solution.
To cash that out explicitly: Some folks are treating their social deficits as an inherent trait, similar to a grotesque deformity on one side of their face. Their response is to try to hide the deficit, as if they were turning their head so that the deformity doesn’t show. But that solution is very uncomfortable, because it effectively denies a part of their life (sexual desire) actually exists. Thus, it’s a really bad solution. Instead, folks with social deficits should recognize socializing is a skill, which can be improved with practice.
Not worrying about the existence of creepy behavior just allows actual creeps to hide in the tall grass of people who aren’t creepy but don’t care about creepiness. There’s nothing wrong with worrying about coming off as creepy, any more than there is something wrong with worrying about making some other bad impression. That worry will affect what sorts of things one does to practice social skills, but is not a reason to abandon social skills improvement.
Negative self-talk of the form “I’m bad at socializing, so there’s no way that practice will make me better” is JerkBrain talk, and can be safely ignored. Emotionally, it’s really hard to deal with negative self-talk, but that is incredibly weak evidence that the negative self-talk is true.
I definitely didn’t mean to say we should stop trying to highlight the problem at all. My concern is the problem being presented a) to a general audience instead of specific individuals who are actually known to come off as creepy b) in a way that seems to inflate how common it is, c) in way the imputes creepiness to behaviors that aren’t generally understood to be creepy and d) unaccompanied by any other socializing advice.
So I’m totally okay with going up to someone and saying, “Hey, you’re coming off as really creepy because you’re doing x under conditions y. In general, try to avoid doing things that have characteristic z and make sure to do p and q.” Similarly, any kind of socializing manual ought to include something about it. But the way creepiness was dealt with in the post, at least how I saw it was more, “Creepiness is this awful thing women have to deal with. It happens whenever people (generally men) do things that meet this vague criteria. Here are some examples that I think meet this criteria. Please don’t act like this men.” It seems really plausible that inexperienced men with poor social skills who aren’t creepy at all read posts like this and think “Oh my God, am I creepy? I really don’t want to be creepy. Let me try really hard to avoid being creepy at any point in my interactions with women.” The above is totally counterproductive to good socializing and I think a net negative. Most men of the Less Wrong demographic, in my experience, don’t have a problem of worrying insufficiently about being creepy.
So I generally agree that socializing is a skill and can be improved. But the post read to me not as socializing advice but as an admonition.
This seems to be a general problem with psychological “self-medication”.
Imagine that a standard medicine would practiced in the following way: There would exist a pill to cure almost any problem. Those pills would be freely available in shops. The only missing part would be the diagnosis. So you could go to a shop and buy a pill for increasing blood pressure, or a pill for decreasing blood pressure. But you would not have information about which of these pills (if any) you need.
Even worse, imagine that people would have a bias to medicate themselves the wrong way. For example, people with high blood pressure would be more likely to choose the pill for increasing blood pressure, and vice versa. So despite having a magic pill for almost anything, the medicine practiced this way would be mostly harming people.
Seems to me that psychological “self-medication” works exactly this way. (Except that unlike the reliable magical pill, the therapy is less reliable.) People are often out of their optimal mental state, because their perception of the world and themselves is wrong. So if they choose a therapy, they choose something to move them even more towards their wrongly perceived goal.
There are methods to make yourself less agressive, and there are methods to make yourself more assertive. Unfortunately, people who already are almost doormats, seem to prefer the methods to decrease their perceived “agressivity”, until they make themselves complete doormats, which is their “ethical” ideal. On the other hand, agressive people, who (and everyone around them) could greatly benefit from the former methods, are attracted to the methods for increasing their “assertivity”, until they become dictators.
Unfortunately, most of the feminist advice has the same effect, even when it is essentially a good advice. The man who beats his girlfriends and then rapes them, he is very unlikely to visit a feminist lecture or to read a feminist web page; their words don’t reach him; and the feminists are probably aware of this, so they try to voice their message louder and with stronger words.
Then we have a shy boy who tries to make everyone happy, he hears the lecture, reads the website, and he thinks this is all about him, that he is a horrible monster, that his sexual feelings are something to be ashamed of, that it makes him subhuman, that his mere existence hurts women, and that the whole world would greatly benefit from his suicide or at least castration. And nobody tells him that he is wrong, because simply he is not a priority for anyone. Weak males don’t get any mercy.
And in a same way, “don’t be creepy” messages are typically unheard by creepy people, but catch the attention of insecure people, who are then afraid to even say hello to a stranger, to smile at an attractive person, to ask a phone number or an e-mail, etc., because it is better to be safe than sorry, and anything can be pattern-matched to something negative, especially by an insecure person.
We need two different words for what’s been called “high-status creep” (e.g. a hypermasculine, fashionably-dressed guy who snatches your phone and dials his own number, or similar) and what’s been called “low-status creep” (e.g. someone with very poor social skills and poor personal grooming). So long as there are people using that word for the former and people using that word for the latter, confusion will keep on ensuing.
Excellent comment! If you came up with a few more examples of the psychological self-medication problem in addition to the creepiness one, I think this would make for a good LW post.
Thankyou for the effort you have been putting in to your replies in this series Viliam. You are injecting much needed balance and perspective into the the conversation.
Hear, hear!
This is a very good point. To extent your metaphor, I think the problem is that people feel ashamed to seek expert advice (or any outside advice) about what sort of pill to buy.
If we could do something to make it less shameful to seek outside advice, from either professional expert or informal expert, I think some of this problem would disappear. I think these types of posts have the potential to help in that process, but making explicit what the current rules really are, how different folks implement them, and what hypocrisies may exist within a particular set of rules. Hopefully, when one has a better sense of those things, one will be in a better position to figure out what intervention to select.
This is very well put.