As it usually happens in the social “sciences,” it’s very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question. Even ignoring the intractable problems with disentangling all the countless non-obvious confounding variables, there is still the problem of unintended consequences—which may be unaccounted for even if the study seemingly asks all the relevant questions, and which may manifest themselves only in the longer run.
Take for example this nurse-family partnership program. Even if the study has correctly proven that these positive outcomes have occurred in the families covered by the intervention, and that they are in fact a consequence of the intervention—a big if—we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect. For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women, both by providing assistance and by lowering the stigma and fear of such an outcome, so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women, especially the least responsible, resourceful, and competent ones, eventually increasing the total measure of child poverty, neglect, abuse, etc. Of course, this may or may not be the case, but there’s no way to know it based on these studies that purport to give a definitive evaluation of the program’s success.
(Don’t be mistaken, I see single motherhood as a serious problem, although not an insurmountable one—it was high in the post-war USSR, yet that generation turned out well enough, considering all the deplorable circumstances.
What alarms me is how the proposed practical response to it is always either status punishment of, by and large, downtrodden and psychologically unwell women, or even more aggressive measures. Perhaps liberals are to blame for this. No, seriously, I mean the fact that in the West liberal movements have been neglecting the issue except for ivory-tower talk, and gave the hard Right a monopoly on proposing solutions.)
we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect
Well, it’s not like we have no evidence either way. We have weak evidence for a positive effect.
For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women [...] so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women
It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can’t count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or “red states” vs. “blue states” within the U.S. …
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior.
I found this article interesting overview of examples of unintended consequences of past changes, that makes a case for being very cynical of this particular kind of argument:
The post you linked has almost nothing to do, really, with gay marriage, but it’s bang-on about how people respond to incentives. The warning against the typical mind fallacy (in the article, phrased as thinking of how you would respond to an incentive rather than the marginal case) is also highly relevant.
I think it’s interesting that gay-friendly states in the U.S. have lower heterosexual divorce rates than gay-hostile states. Reconstructing causation here tends to be pretty tricky; there are lots of confounding factors and lots of people want to put the blame for their own circumstances on their rivals.
It’s amusing to see a libertarian suggesting that it’s probably good for the few to suffer for the sake of the many. And interesting to see that the interests of existing illegitimate children are not noticed—it’s assumed that their mothers are the only people worth mentioning.
It’s amusing to see a libertarian suggesting that it’s probably good for the few to suffer for the sake of the many.
Eh. There are two camps in libertarianism: the moral libertarians, and the technical libertarians. The moral libertarians derive their policies from principles- force is wrong, taxation implies the threat of force, and thus we need to build a society without taxation if we want to live in a moral society.
The technical libertarians derive their policies from economic arguments and history. It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s moral or immoral to lend money for profit- let’s look at societies which allow that and societies which don’t, and see which ones prosper more, and apply theoretical principles to expect which should be the case.
And so the atheist moral libertarian looks at gay marriage, and says something along the lines of “the state shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all!” or, if you’re lucky, “the state should recognize a marriage contract between any two consenting adults!”. (The Christian moral libertarian probably thinks that gay marriage is wrong for the standard Christian reasons.) The technical libertarian, though, will be willing to ask about the tradeoffs involved- sure, allowing gay marriage makes gays happier (and, if the institution of marriage alters their sexual practices, probably healthier too), but what does it do to the rest of society? When the little boy breaks a glass window, the glazier is happier too, but we need to consider both the seen and the unseen.
Which is what I thought the article was mostly about- libertarians are very quick to jump to complicated and far-seeing analyses for economic issues, and are sometimes reluctant to do them for social issues. But if you’re a libertarian because you think it’s what history and theory tell us will be best, then when considering what will be best on another issue, perhaps you should apply some history and theory!
It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can’t count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.
It seems like you’re losing focus of my point. I am merely trying to demonstrate that it’s wrong to consider studies of this sort as solid and conclusive evidence about the overall effects of the social interventions under consideration. I mentioned this scenario only as one plausible way in which one of these studies could be grossly inadequate, not as something I’m trying to prove to be the case.
I suppose I don’t find it to be particularly plausible. Moreover, it seemed that you were discounting the study as offering any evidence at all regarding long-term effects; whereas it seems to me that short-term effects offer weak evidence regarding long-term effects. If we know something is short-term beneficial, that isn’t strong evidence of it being long-term beneficial — but it isn’t evidence of it being long-term harmful either.
It’s worth it to keep looking — I certainly agree that it’s a failure of many social interventions to look at only short-term effects, especially when this failure is iterated. That’s where we get Campbell’s Law from.
(That said, it would be really surprising if deeper investigation of social reality happened to closely confirm the preconceived notions of one particular political faction. I mean, seriously, why that one?)
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or “red states” vs. “blue states” within the U.S. …
I find it very likely that they will since social shaming is among the most powerful means a culture can employ to maintain norms.
Blue state vs. Red state comparisons as well as Western Europe vs. USA are weaker than they seem because of demographics differences. The US Black population was particularly hard hit by the fallout of the sexual revolution, partially leading to the infamous circumstances in the US inner cities. Also note that the heavily shame based groups such as say the Amish or the Mormons in the US maintain very low rates of such dysfunction.
We clearly also clearly see that all Western societies used to have far fewer unwed mothers, less divorce and teen pregnancy when these where more strongly shamed before the sexual revolution. Obviously empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality.
But in the light of what else we know of humans I’m pretty sure there is causality there.
Blue state vs. Red state comparisons as well as Western Europe vs. USA are weaker than they seem because of demographics differences. The US Black population was particularly hard hit by the fallout of the sexual revolution, partially leading to the infamous circumstances in the US inner cities.
This doesn’t seem to be a relevant response.
For instance, take divorce. This paper notes that “[t]he red states have residents with lower mean levels of education, younger ages at marriage, quicker transitions to the first birth, higher hazards for subsequent births, lower rates of maternal labor force participation, and lower family incomes” — all traits which correlate with divorce risk. But even after controlling for race, age, income, age at first marriage, and Southern ethnicity (!), areas with a higher proportion of conservative Protestants still have higher divorce rates. “The average county would almost double its divorce rate as its proportion [of conservative Protestants] moved from 0 to 100 percent.”
At least in the case of divorce, it sure looks like sex-shaming culture produces the dysfunctions that it shames. As you note, we can’t be sure — and it’s easy to mistake hypotheses that are raised to attention by our preconceptions (confirmation bias) for hypotheses that are actually compelled by the data. A racist conservative is inclined to see racist conservative patterns; a progressive libertarian is inclined to see progressive libertarian patterns. We have to actually care about reality to find out what reality says.
We clearly also clearly see that all Western societies used to have far fewer unwed mothers, less divorce and teen pregnancy when these where more strongly shamed before the sexual revolution.
It seems that would be kind of difficult to measure. I am reminded of the claims by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran does not have any gay people.
We clearly also clearly see that all Western societies used to have far fewer unwed mothers, less divorce and teen pregnancy when these where more strongly shamed before the sexual revolution.
It seems that would be kind of difficult to measure.
Difficult not only to measure, but even to bring the meanings behind these measurements to consistency. Were there many couples who’d get divorced nowdays, but lived in a formal marriage while not being on speaking terms? Were there many fathers and stepfathers (forced into marriage after unintended pregnancy, etc) whose parenting had a worse effect than unwed motherhood would?
I suspect all that, and more, but I have no way to prove it. A society’s facade—especially that of a shame-based, traditionalist culture—can be practically impenetrable once the witnesses fade away. We only have a strong image of Victorian philistinism and hypocrisy because a Victorian (and, mostly, Edwardian) elite attacked it vigorously. Today, most people have a cached belief that the Edo-era samurai were an uniformly honorable aristocracy obsessed with Bushido—but I’ve heard from several sources that it was mostly propaganda (both contemporary and Imperial one), and that most samurai behaved like glorified thugs whenever they could get away with it.
[Dear downvoters, how about a rebuttal? Use a sockpuppet if you want, just tell me whether you do, in fact, have a reason to punish this comment on its own weight. I do want more skill at epistemic rationality, and would really benefit from being showed a flaw where I thought there were none.]
For that matter, I’ve read claims that if you read diaries by Victorian women, you find that a lot of them liked sex and didn’t feel bad about liking it.
I’ve been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.
I’d like to think that it’s just someone who doesn’t approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don’t seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)
So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating “race realism”, sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around −1 to +1.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I’d be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they’re not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I’m just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is “contrarian” really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it’s worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it’s the latter, well, I suppose all I can do is mention that I don’t downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.
(I don’t mind if this comment gets downvoted, by the way. I feel uncomfortable with discussions of the voting system, as they can become a meta rathole.)
EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU’RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.
I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to −3 to −4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I’d be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they’re not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I’m just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is “contrarian” really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it’s worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it’s the latter, well,
I don’t think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I will elaborate later may have some truth to it. Explanation ③ seem far fetched considering social conservatives are such a tiny minority of the readership and can be discounted as an explanation for what you say you experience. Of these explanations I think ① is the most likely. I think any of us talking about politics regardless of our positions probably eventually catch the attention of someone who feels like throwing a hissy fit. Right leaning posters have complained of people going through their comment history and down voting every post they’ve ever made. I’ve experienced such karmassasiantions in the past too.
Now having said this there have been signs of escalating tensions. Posters have been saying they feel more and moreunwelcome and I can totally see why since there are more and more posts that signal “liberal” tribal affiliations. Some like the article criticized by the links I gave are pretty blatant about this. Even some old time well respected posters like Yvain have recently been called out on not being bothered to avoid dog-whistling affiliations.
Now obviously you have some right wing digs like that in recent articles and they may be escalating too, but they are of a more alt-right not conservative nature. And yes any kind of alternative right sentiment, be it Moldbugian Neoreaction or consistent Paleoconservatism is basically being an intellectual hipster. This brings us back to ③ and I think also explains why left leaning users like Multiheaded fear they are losing the battle of ideas.
But it’s like I said before—it might be the wisest and most truth-seeking 3% (Vladimir_M alone has more life experience and practical wisdom than many other folks here combined, I’d say), the rest of us might be lagging behind in the race of ideas! I wouldn’t have gotten so worked up if I didn’t fear that might be the case.
If due to such superior intellectual fire power LessWrong ever got even 10% of conservative readership (still a tiny minority), the metacontrarians would probably cycle back to an exotic form of liberalism. And if that exotic form reached 10%, I’m betting some kind of libertarianism would be back in vogue… I need to again emphasise for the reader who didn’t follow the link that where something lands on the metacontrarian ladder does not tell us its truth value.
Now this kind of cycling is I think mostly self-corrective, since it is an intellectual fashion. The real problem in my mind is how political identification can create and escalate conflict between these somewhat shifting fads.
I suppose all I can do is mention that I don’t downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.
This. Posters should be encouraged to avoid down voting just political comments they disagree with. Also I think putting more emphasis on keeping your identify small or even apolitical might do us good.
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse was a good thing that should be restored.
EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU’RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.
Don’t be freaked out. People politely complaining about being down voted seem to always get up voted on LessWrong. :)
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse wasn’t a good thing that should be restored.
I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I’ve become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn’t be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn’t hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, battle lines are immediately drawn and genuine discussion ceases, just like elsewhere. (Even if the outcome may still look very calm and polite by the usual internet standards.)
The trouble is, the only way a “no-mindkillers” rule can improve things is if it’s done in an extreme form and with ruthless severity, by reducing the permissible range of topics to strictly technical questions in some areas of math and hard science and consistently banning everything else. The worst possible outcome is to institute a partial “no-mindkillers” rule, which would work under a pretense that rational and unbiased discussion of a broad range of topics outside of math and hard sciences is possible without bringing up any controversial and charged issues, and without giving serious consideration to disreputable and low-status views. This would lead to an entrenched standard of cargo-cult “rationality” that incorporates all the biases, delusions, and taboos of the respectable opinion wholesale, under a pretense of a neutral, pragmatic, and unbiased restriction of irrelevant and distracting controversial topics.
Thus, it seems to me like the only realistic possibilities at this point are: (1) increasing ideological confrontations and mind-killing, (2) enforcement of the above-described cargo-cult rationality standards, and (3) reduction of discussion topics to strictly technical questions, backed by far stricter, MathOverflow-type standards. Neither of these looks like a fulfilment of LW’s mission statement, but (2) seems to me like the worst failure scenario from its point of view.
Uh huh. I fully endorse your analysis. Except that I’d say (1) would still leave us far better off than the typical confrontation-allowed political forum out there, because LWers would probably at least be willing to state their positions clearly, and would accept help in clarifying/refining those positions—even if the art of changing one’s mind should be lost, LW discussion would still retain some value. So I’d rather have (1) than (3).
Please consider that both Torture vs Specks and Three Worlds Collide are, as it seems to me, very much political—indeed, the latter could be construed as today’s very Blue vs Green with a touch of imagination, yet the debates on those have been quite OK.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon.
Are you concluding too hastily about the cause of deterioration? In the early days, OB had two major voices with conflicting ideologies. I think that’s what lent it greater intellectual excitement. I do not think it a matter of ideological alignments being absent in the golden age. Rather, it allowed space for discussion of fundamental differences—as opposed to the analysis down to quarks of the highly obvious that’s taken front seat today.
Consider this old posting on OB. The level of objectivity wasn’t higher, but the level of engagement with fundamental issues was.
If I remember correctly, you replied to several of my comments on fairly controversial topics recently, but for the record, I didn’t downvote any of them. I downvote direct replies to my comments only if I believe that someone is arguing in bad faith, or when I’m annoyed with some exceptionally bad failure of basic logic or good manners.
BTW… A few days ago I browsed through all comments I had posted in the past few months, and it looks like most of the comments that weren’t well received back then have since been upvoted to +1 to +3. How comes?
What’s more frustrating is getting upvotes, but they’re not for recent comments. I’d really like to know what’s attracting attention. And get notifications for comments on my posts.
Being new here, I’ve upvoted some comments on the original Sequences posts that were particularly insightful. Some of them were much more recent than the posts but probably still a year or two old. I did this under the assumption that other new people may be liable to read only the highly-rated comments on those original posts.
This is more likely to be a good model of how people’s reading habits work on newer posts than on old Sequence posts. Posts imported from Overcoming Bias have the comments in chronological order.
Aw, c’mon. I quip about it semi-seriously, and then you post all these dark suspicions in plain language! It’s no fun this way; don’t you want to feel persecuted by an evil conspiracy every once in a while? I demand that the ideological downvoting continue!
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or “red states” vs. “blue states” within the U.S. …
I find it very likely that they will since social shaming is among the most powerful means a culture can employ to maintain norms.
Maybe fear and stigmatization do work, but the less socially conservative societies use other means of maintaining cohesion, ones that are more palatable to them? The most, as they say, disfunctional groups in a society—such as ghetto youth—have rather illiberal and inegalitarian norms anyway, it’s just that those norms involve violent and parasitic behavior rather than that of a decent, productive conservative community.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior.
I’d take liberal arguments about the ineffectiveness of “stigma and fear” much more seriously if those liberals weren’t simultaneously using “stigma and fear” to promote their own agenda, e.g., suppressing discussions of race realism.
I think I’m having difficulty understanding your comment. It sounds to me as if you are morally equating threatening the lives and health of impoverished women and children, to disagreeing with (or even downvoting) someone in an Internet forum. That confuses me, so I conclude that one of my beliefs regarding your comment is fiction. Please clarify.
Also, I find it awkward that you seem to be characterizing my comments as “liberal”, since that word seems to be commonly used to mean anything from the center-right (e.g. the Democratic Party), to the Greens, to Euro-style social democrats. I think of myself as a center-libertarian, which is where the Political Compass places me as well. Unlike some anti-authoritarians, I take anti-authoritarianism as logically entailing feminism and a critical approach to gender, race, and other topics beloved by many progressives; I’d rather cheerfully identify as a progressive libertarian if I thought anyone had a chance of understanding what I meant by that.
I think I’m having difficulty understanding your comment. It sounds to me as if you are morally equating
Who said anything about moral equating? I’m trying to determine the effect of social pressure, what you called “stigma and fear” on behavior.
(Edit: Another way to phrase this is that you may be confusing the statements ‘I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior.’ and ‘We shouldn’t attempt to use “stigma and fear” to reduce such behavior.’)
to disagreeing with (or even downvoting) someone in an Internet forum.
Try advocating race realism or some other politically incorrect position outside an anonymous internet forum and you’ll quickly discover the consequences are much more serious and you’re likely to loose your job at the very least.
My main point is that while left-wingers claim to believe that stigmatizing undesirable behaviors is ineffective, they don’t act like they believe it.
(Edit: Another way to phrase this is that you may be confusing the statements ‘I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior.’ and ‘We shouldn’t attempt to use “stigma and fear” to reduce such behavior.’)
That’s a good point.
I’m curious what sort of procedures might use “stigma and fear” to reduce unwed teen pregnancy in poor women. If we take seriously the article CronoDAS posted regarding the rational motivations for young poor women having babies, then presumably addressing those specific motivations might do it.
(Notably, we would not expect preaching traditionalist views via religion, or other means that did not change the material utility landscape, to work. If, as the article holds, young women choose to have babies on the basis of their material expected outcomes, then the procedures would have to alter the young women’s material expected outcomes; and — to qualify as relevant here — would have to do so using stigma and fear.)
After thinking about it for a bit and coming up with some possible procedures for doing so, I’ve decided not to post most of them because they’re really quite unpleasant; they’re the sort of things that would occur in dystopian fiction. I’ll just give one example: changing the landscape for infant mortality by making it illegal for physicians to attend births to unwed mothers.
On second thought, I don’t think I am confusing those statements you mention — I think they’re both true. First, using stigma and fear to change the motivations for teen mothers would not work, primarily for political reasons (e.g. physicians would not put up with it; people would revolt; etc.) And second, it would be immoral to try; especially given that the same motivations could be addressed in non-dystopian ways.
Try advocating race realism or some other politically incorrect position outside an anonymous internet forum and you’ll quickly discover the consequences are much more serious and you’re likely to loose your job at the very least.
The same could be said for a lot of other views; that’s scarcely unique to one end of a political spectrum. For instance, there is a long history of people losing their jobs for advocating labor unionization, even in the presence of laws forbidding employers from firing workers for doing so.
Outside of explicitly political views: Advocating pederasty would probably not get you a whole heck of a lot of friends or willing coworkers either; nor would advocating for the right of parents to kill disobedient children, as found in various ancient civilizations. In both cases people might reasonably conclude that they (or their children, etc.) were unsafe around a person who held such views. Might that be the case with racialism, too?
I’m curious what sort of procedures might use “stigma and fear” to reduce unwed teen pregnancy in poor women. If we take seriously the article CronoDAS posted regarding the rational motivations for young poor women having babies, then presumably addressing those specific motivations might do it.
While the motivations described to the article are in some sense rational, they’re rational in an adaptation executor kind of way. Thus, other adaptations, e.g., the desire to avoid social shaming, can be used to contract them.
(Notably, we would not expect preaching traditionalist views via religion, or other means that did not change the material utility landscape, to work. If, as the article holds, young women choose to have babies on the basis of their material expected outcomes, then the procedures would have to alter the young women’s material expected outcomes; and — to qualify as relevant here — would have to do so using stigma and fear.)
Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn’t different.
The same could be said for a lot of other views; that’s scarcely unique to one end of a political spectrum.
So you agree that “stigma and fear” is in fact an effective way to change people’s behavior.
Thus, other adaptations, e.g., the desire to avoid social shaming, can be used to contract them.
It’s an interesting thought. How would you control for the baseline levels of social shame that racial minorities, poor people, and teen mothers are already subjected to?
Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn’t different.
All sorts of things. There’s a lot less lead paint on the walls, for instance; a lot more black men in prison for victimless crimes, too; “the situation” is hardly simple. What leads you to single out your particular claim?
So you agree that “stigma and fear” is in fact an effective way to change people’s behavior.
Running a power drill through the eyeballs of people you dislike might “change people’s behavior” too, but that doesn’t make it a policy proposal rather than a psychopathy symptom.
In other words, it isn’t clear that this is the same sort of thing at all. And specifically, the reasons certain proposals wouldn’t work have to do with political realities — e.g. if you try to generate “stigma and fear” by forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers, the doctors are not likely to cooperate.
Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn’t different.
All sorts of things.
Specifically, I was referring to the fact that Blacks were even poorer back than so following the argument CronoDAS’s link was making we would expect there to be more unwed motherhood among them. On the other hand unwed motherhood was much more stigmatized (and no it didn’t involve laws forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers).
As it usually happens in the social “sciences,” it’s very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question.
This sounds like the fallacy of gray. You can seem sophisticated by saying that it is naive to take any research at face value—that there are always limitations to the studies, and possible unmeasured effects. But there are some cases where the evidence is stronger than others, and where the existence of large unmeasured effects in the opposite direction is less plausible. Paying attention to that evidence is updating.
The particular case of Nurse-Family Partnership looks like one of more strongly supported programs. It has been studied extensively using randomized controlled trials, with data collected on a variety of outcomes (including a follow-up study looking at 19-year-olds who had been through the program as infants). GiveWell named it a top-rated US organization in 2010 (they now say that it is outstanding but lacks room for more funding). Your story about a possible hidden cost does not sound very plausible, and I imagine that some of the studies include data which speak to some of the steps in your story (e.g., whether women who take part end up having more additional children than those who do not).
I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to imply with this comment. You have complained that I was reading your comments too uncharitably in the past, so I’m trying to interpret it as something other than a taunt, but without success.
As it usually happens in the social “sciences,” it’s very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question. Even ignoring the intractable problems with disentangling all the countless non-obvious confounding variables, there is still the problem of unintended consequences—which may be unaccounted for even if the study seemingly asks all the relevant questions, and which may manifest themselves only in the longer run.
Take for example this nurse-family partnership program. Even if the study has correctly proven that these positive outcomes have occurred in the families covered by the intervention, and that they are in fact a consequence of the intervention—a big if—we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect. For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women, both by providing assistance and by lowering the stigma and fear of such an outcome, so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women, especially the least responsible, resourceful, and competent ones, eventually increasing the total measure of child poverty, neglect, abuse, etc. Of course, this may or may not be the case, but there’s no way to know it based on these studies that purport to give a definitive evaluation of the program’s success.
(Don’t be mistaken, I see single motherhood as a serious problem, although not an insurmountable one—it was high in the post-war USSR, yet that generation turned out well enough, considering all the deplorable circumstances.
What alarms me is how the proposed practical response to it is always either status punishment of, by and large, downtrodden and psychologically unwell women, or even more aggressive measures. Perhaps liberals are to blame for this. No, seriously, I mean the fact that in the West liberal movements have been neglecting the issue except for ivory-tower talk, and gave the hard Right a monopoly on proposing solutions.)
Well, it’s not like we have no evidence either way. We have weak evidence for a positive effect.
It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can’t count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or “red states” vs. “blue states” within the U.S. …
I found this article interesting overview of examples of unintended consequences of past changes, that makes a case for being very cynical of this particular kind of argument:
A Really, Really, Really Long Post About Gay Marriage That Does Not, In The End, Support One Side Or The Other
The post you linked has almost nothing to do, really, with gay marriage, but it’s bang-on about how people respond to incentives. The warning against the typical mind fallacy (in the article, phrased as thinking of how you would respond to an incentive rather than the marginal case) is also highly relevant.
Oh yes I fully agree. I wasn’t trying to start a discussion on gay marriage after all! Its just the title the author chose.
I think it’s interesting that gay-friendly states in the U.S. have lower heterosexual divorce rates than gay-hostile states. Reconstructing causation here tends to be pretty tricky; there are lots of confounding factors and lots of people want to put the blame for their own circumstances on their rivals.
It’s amusing to see a libertarian suggesting that it’s probably good for the few to suffer for the sake of the many. And interesting to see that the interests of existing illegitimate children are not noticed—it’s assumed that their mothers are the only people worth mentioning.
Eh. There are two camps in libertarianism: the moral libertarians, and the technical libertarians. The moral libertarians derive their policies from principles- force is wrong, taxation implies the threat of force, and thus we need to build a society without taxation if we want to live in a moral society.
The technical libertarians derive their policies from economic arguments and history. It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s moral or immoral to lend money for profit- let’s look at societies which allow that and societies which don’t, and see which ones prosper more, and apply theoretical principles to expect which should be the case.
And so the atheist moral libertarian looks at gay marriage, and says something along the lines of “the state shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all!” or, if you’re lucky, “the state should recognize a marriage contract between any two consenting adults!”. (The Christian moral libertarian probably thinks that gay marriage is wrong for the standard Christian reasons.) The technical libertarian, though, will be willing to ask about the tradeoffs involved- sure, allowing gay marriage makes gays happier (and, if the institution of marriage alters their sexual practices, probably healthier too), but what does it do to the rest of society? When the little boy breaks a glass window, the glazier is happier too, but we need to consider both the seen and the unseen.
Which is what I thought the article was mostly about- libertarians are very quick to jump to complicated and far-seeing analyses for economic issues, and are sometimes reluctant to do them for social issues. But if you’re a libertarian because you think it’s what history and theory tell us will be best, then when considering what will be best on another issue, perhaps you should apply some history and theory!
On a related note: For Many Poor Black Girls, Teen Pregnancy is a Rational Choice
It seems like you’re losing focus of my point. I am merely trying to demonstrate that it’s wrong to consider studies of this sort as solid and conclusive evidence about the overall effects of the social interventions under consideration. I mentioned this scenario only as one plausible way in which one of these studies could be grossly inadequate, not as something I’m trying to prove to be the case.
I suppose I don’t find it to be particularly plausible. Moreover, it seemed that you were discounting the study as offering any evidence at all regarding long-term effects; whereas it seems to me that short-term effects offer weak evidence regarding long-term effects. If we know something is short-term beneficial, that isn’t strong evidence of it being long-term beneficial — but it isn’t evidence of it being long-term harmful either.
It’s worth it to keep looking — I certainly agree that it’s a failure of many social interventions to look at only short-term effects, especially when this failure is iterated. That’s where we get Campbell’s Law from.
(That said, it would be really surprising if deeper investigation of social reality happened to closely confirm the preconceived notions of one particular political faction. I mean, seriously, why that one?)
I find it very likely that they will since social shaming is among the most powerful means a culture can employ to maintain norms.
Blue state vs. Red state comparisons as well as Western Europe vs. USA are weaker than they seem because of demographics differences. The US Black population was particularly hard hit by the fallout of the sexual revolution, partially leading to the infamous circumstances in the US inner cities. Also note that the heavily shame based groups such as say the Amish or the Mormons in the US maintain very low rates of such dysfunction.
We clearly also clearly see that all Western societies used to have far fewer unwed mothers, less divorce and teen pregnancy when these where more strongly shamed before the sexual revolution. Obviously empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality.
But in the light of what else we know of humans I’m pretty sure there is causality there.
This doesn’t seem to be a relevant response.
For instance, take divorce. This paper notes that “[t]he red states have residents with lower mean levels of education, younger ages at marriage, quicker transitions to the first birth, higher hazards for subsequent births, lower rates of maternal labor force participation, and lower family incomes” — all traits which correlate with divorce risk. But even after controlling for race, age, income, age at first marriage, and Southern ethnicity (!), areas with a higher proportion of conservative Protestants still have higher divorce rates. “The average county would almost double its divorce rate as its proportion [of conservative Protestants] moved from 0 to 100 percent.”
At least in the case of divorce, it sure looks like sex-shaming culture produces the dysfunctions that it shames. As you note, we can’t be sure — and it’s easy to mistake hypotheses that are raised to attention by our preconceptions (confirmation bias) for hypotheses that are actually compelled by the data. A racist conservative is inclined to see racist conservative patterns; a progressive libertarian is inclined to see progressive libertarian patterns. We have to actually care about reality to find out what reality says.
It seems that would be kind of difficult to measure. I am reminded of the claims by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran does not have any gay people.
Difficult not only to measure, but even to bring the meanings behind these measurements to consistency. Were there many couples who’d get divorced nowdays, but lived in a formal marriage while not being on speaking terms? Were there many fathers and stepfathers (forced into marriage after unintended pregnancy, etc) whose parenting had a worse effect than unwed motherhood would?
I suspect all that, and more, but I have no way to prove it. A society’s facade—especially that of a shame-based, traditionalist culture—can be practically impenetrable once the witnesses fade away. We only have a strong image of Victorian philistinism and hypocrisy because a Victorian (and, mostly, Edwardian) elite attacked it vigorously. Today, most people have a cached belief that the Edo-era samurai were an uniformly honorable aristocracy obsessed with Bushido—but I’ve heard from several sources that it was mostly propaganda (both contemporary and Imperial one), and that most samurai behaved like glorified thugs whenever they could get away with it.
[Dear downvoters, how about a rebuttal? Use a sockpuppet if you want, just tell me whether you do, in fact, have a reason to punish this comment on its own weight. I do want more skill at epistemic rationality, and would really benefit from being showed a flaw where I thought there were none.]
For that matter, I’ve read claims that if you read diaries by Victorian women, you find that a lot of them liked sex and didn’t feel bad about liking it.
Why was this downvoted?
I’ve been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.
I’d like to think that it’s just someone who doesn’t approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don’t seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)
So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating “race realism”, sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around −1 to +1.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I’d be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they’re not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I’m just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is “contrarian” really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it’s worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it’s the latter, well, I suppose all I can do is mention that I don’t downvote interesting comments that I reply to, and ask them to extend the same courtesy.
(I don’t mind if this comment gets downvoted, by the way. I feel uncomfortable with discussions of the voting system, as they can become a meta rathole.)
EDIT: OH GHODS, PEOPLE, STOP UPVOTING THIS. YOU’RE CREEPING ME THE FUCK OUT.
I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to −3 to −4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.
I don’t think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I will elaborate later may have some truth to it. Explanation ③ seem far fetched considering social conservatives are such a tiny minority of the readership and can be discounted as an explanation for what you say you experience. Of these explanations I think ① is the most likely. I think any of us talking about politics regardless of our positions probably eventually catch the attention of someone who feels like throwing a hissy fit. Right leaning posters have complained of people going through their comment history and down voting every post they’ve ever made. I’ve experienced such karmassasiantions in the past too.
Now having said this there have been signs of escalating tensions. Posters have been saying they feel more and more unwelcome and I can totally see why since there are more and more posts that signal “liberal” tribal affiliations. Some like the article criticized by the links I gave are pretty blatant about this. Even some old time well respected posters like Yvain have recently been called out on not being bothered to avoid dog-whistling affiliations.
Now obviously you have some right wing digs like that in recent articles and they may be escalating too, but they are of a more alt-right not conservative nature. And yes any kind of alternative right sentiment, be it Moldbugian Neoreaction or consistent Paleoconservatism is basically being an intellectual hipster. This brings us back to ③ and I think also explains why left leaning users like Multiheaded fear they are losing the battle of ideas.
If due to such superior intellectual fire power LessWrong ever got even 10% of conservative readership (still a tiny minority), the metacontrarians would probably cycle back to an exotic form of liberalism. And if that exotic form reached 10%, I’m betting some kind of libertarianism would be back in vogue… I need to again emphasise for the reader who didn’t follow the link that where something lands on the metacontrarian ladder does not tell us its truth value.
Now this kind of cycling is I think mostly self-corrective, since it is an intellectual fashion. The real problem in my mind is how political identification can create and escalate conflict between these somewhat shifting fads.
This. Posters should be encouraged to avoid down voting just political comments they disagree with. Also I think putting more emphasis on keeping your identify small or even apolitical might do us good.
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse was a good thing that should be restored.
Don’t be freaked out. People politely complaining about being down voted seem to always get up voted on LessWrong. :)
I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I’ve become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn’t be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn’t hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, battle lines are immediately drawn and genuine discussion ceases, just like elsewhere. (Even if the outcome may still look very calm and polite by the usual internet standards.)
The trouble is, the only way a “no-mindkillers” rule can improve things is if it’s done in an extreme form and with ruthless severity, by reducing the permissible range of topics to strictly technical questions in some areas of math and hard science and consistently banning everything else. The worst possible outcome is to institute a partial “no-mindkillers” rule, which would work under a pretense that rational and unbiased discussion of a broad range of topics outside of math and hard sciences is possible without bringing up any controversial and charged issues, and without giving serious consideration to disreputable and low-status views. This would lead to an entrenched standard of cargo-cult “rationality” that incorporates all the biases, delusions, and taboos of the respectable opinion wholesale, under a pretense of a neutral, pragmatic, and unbiased restriction of irrelevant and distracting controversial topics.
Thus, it seems to me like the only realistic possibilities at this point are: (1) increasing ideological confrontations and mind-killing, (2) enforcement of the above-described cargo-cult rationality standards, and (3) reduction of discussion topics to strictly technical questions, backed by far stricter, MathOverflow-type standards. Neither of these looks like a fulfilment of LW’s mission statement, but (2) seems to me like the worst failure scenario from its point of view.
Uh huh. I fully endorse your analysis. Except that I’d say (1) would still leave us far better off than the typical confrontation-allowed political forum out there, because LWers would probably at least be willing to state their positions clearly, and would accept help in clarifying/refining those positions—even if the art of changing one’s mind should be lost, LW discussion would still retain some value. So I’d rather have (1) than (3).
Please consider that both Torture vs Specks and Three Worlds Collide are, as it seems to me, very much political—indeed, the latter could be construed as today’s very Blue vs Green with a touch of imagination, yet the debates on those have been quite OK.
I don’t think so. At least I can’t figure out which side is supposed to be which.
Me neither. Maybe we lack the imagination...
Are you concluding too hastily about the cause of deterioration? In the early days, OB had two major voices with conflicting ideologies. I think that’s what lent it greater intellectual excitement. I do not think it a matter of ideological alignments being absent in the golden age. Rather, it allowed space for discussion of fundamental differences—as opposed to the analysis down to quarks of the highly obvious that’s taken front seat today.
Consider this old posting on OB. The level of objectivity wasn’t higher, but the level of engagement with fundamental issues was.
If I remember correctly, you replied to several of my comments on fairly controversial topics recently, but for the record, I didn’t downvote any of them. I downvote direct replies to my comments only if I believe that someone is arguing in bad faith, or when I’m annoyed with some exceptionally bad failure of basic logic or good manners.
Cool, thanks. Good to know.
FWIW, I can recall upvoting at least one of yours which had previously been at −1.
Aargh, meta rathole …
BTW… A few days ago I browsed through all comments I had posted in the past few months, and it looks like most of the comments that weren’t well received back then have since been upvoted to +1 to +3. How comes?
Damned if I know.
What’s more frustrating is getting upvotes, but they’re not for recent comments. I’d really like to know what’s attracting attention. And get notifications for comments on my posts.
Being new here, I’ve upvoted some comments on the original Sequences posts that were particularly insightful. Some of them were much more recent than the posts but probably still a year or two old. I did this under the assumption that other new people may be liable to read only the highly-rated comments on those original posts.
This is more likely to be a good model of how people’s reading habits work on newer posts than on old Sequence posts. Posts imported from Overcoming Bias have the comments in chronological order.
Yes. I don’t even pay attention to the last two digits in my total karma score anymore.
Aw, c’mon. I quip about it semi-seriously, and then you post all these dark suspicions in plain language! It’s no fun this way; don’t you want to feel persecuted by an evil conspiracy every once in a while? I demand that the ideological downvoting continue!
Vast right-wing conspiracy, dude. (EDIT: meant largely as self-deprecating humour!)
Maybe fear and stigmatization do work, but the less socially conservative societies use other means of maintaining cohesion, ones that are more palatable to them?
The most, as they say, disfunctional groups in a society—such as ghetto youth—have rather illiberal and inegalitarian norms anyway, it’s just that those norms involve violent and parasitic behavior rather than that of a decent, productive conservative community.
I’d take liberal arguments about the ineffectiveness of “stigma and fear” much more seriously if those liberals weren’t simultaneously using “stigma and fear” to promote their own agenda, e.g., suppressing discussions of race realism.
I think I’m having difficulty understanding your comment. It sounds to me as if you are morally equating threatening the lives and health of impoverished women and children, to disagreeing with (or even downvoting) someone in an Internet forum. That confuses me, so I conclude that one of my beliefs regarding your comment is fiction. Please clarify.
Also, I find it awkward that you seem to be characterizing my comments as “liberal”, since that word seems to be commonly used to mean anything from the center-right (e.g. the Democratic Party), to the Greens, to Euro-style social democrats. I think of myself as a center-libertarian, which is where the Political Compass places me as well. Unlike some anti-authoritarians, I take anti-authoritarianism as logically entailing feminism and a critical approach to gender, race, and other topics beloved by many progressives; I’d rather cheerfully identify as a progressive libertarian if I thought anyone had a chance of understanding what I meant by that.
Who said anything about moral equating? I’m trying to determine the effect of social pressure, what you called “stigma and fear” on behavior.
(Edit: Another way to phrase this is that you may be confusing the statements ‘I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing “stigma and fear” will reduce such behavior.’ and ‘We shouldn’t attempt to use “stigma and fear” to reduce such behavior.’)
Try advocating race realism or some other politically incorrect position outside an anonymous internet forum and you’ll quickly discover the consequences are much more serious and you’re likely to loose your job at the very least.
My main point is that while left-wingers claim to believe that stigmatizing undesirable behaviors is ineffective, they don’t act like they believe it.
That’s a good point.
I’m curious what sort of procedures might use “stigma and fear” to reduce unwed teen pregnancy in poor women. If we take seriously the article CronoDAS posted regarding the rational motivations for young poor women having babies, then presumably addressing those specific motivations might do it.
(Notably, we would not expect preaching traditionalist views via religion, or other means that did not change the material utility landscape, to work. If, as the article holds, young women choose to have babies on the basis of their material expected outcomes, then the procedures would have to alter the young women’s material expected outcomes; and — to qualify as relevant here — would have to do so using stigma and fear.)
After thinking about it for a bit and coming up with some possible procedures for doing so, I’ve decided not to post most of them because they’re really quite unpleasant; they’re the sort of things that would occur in dystopian fiction. I’ll just give one example: changing the landscape for infant mortality by making it illegal for physicians to attend births to unwed mothers.
On second thought, I don’t think I am confusing those statements you mention — I think they’re both true. First, using stigma and fear to change the motivations for teen mothers would not work, primarily for political reasons (e.g. physicians would not put up with it; people would revolt; etc.) And second, it would be immoral to try; especially given that the same motivations could be addressed in non-dystopian ways.
The same could be said for a lot of other views; that’s scarcely unique to one end of a political spectrum. For instance, there is a long history of people losing their jobs for advocating labor unionization, even in the presence of laws forbidding employers from firing workers for doing so.
Outside of explicitly political views: Advocating pederasty would probably not get you a whole heck of a lot of friends or willing coworkers either; nor would advocating for the right of parents to kill disobedient children, as found in various ancient civilizations. In both cases people might reasonably conclude that they (or their children, etc.) were unsafe around a person who held such views. Might that be the case with racialism, too?
While the motivations described to the article are in some sense rational, they’re rational in an adaptation executor kind of way. Thus, other adaptations, e.g., the desire to avoid social shaming, can be used to contract them.
Compare the situation today with the situation 60 years ago. Notice what is and isn’t different.
So you agree that “stigma and fear” is in fact an effective way to change people’s behavior.
It’s an interesting thought. How would you control for the baseline levels of social shame that racial minorities, poor people, and teen mothers are already subjected to?
All sorts of things. There’s a lot less lead paint on the walls, for instance; a lot more black men in prison for victimless crimes, too; “the situation” is hardly simple. What leads you to single out your particular claim?
Running a power drill through the eyeballs of people you dislike might “change people’s behavior” too, but that doesn’t make it a policy proposal rather than a psychopathy symptom.
In other words, it isn’t clear that this is the same sort of thing at all. And specifically, the reasons certain proposals wouldn’t work have to do with political realities — e.g. if you try to generate “stigma and fear” by forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers, the doctors are not likely to cooperate.
Specifically, I was referring to the fact that Blacks were even poorer back than so following the argument CronoDAS’s link was making we would expect there to be more unwed motherhood among them. On the other hand unwed motherhood was much more stigmatized (and no it didn’t involve laws forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers).
This is unrelated to the main argument, but I’m not sure the crimes in question are truly victimless for reasons given in these two posts.
This is getting too political, best stop now or re-frame in a non-divisive way.
This sounds like the fallacy of gray. You can seem sophisticated by saying that it is naive to take any research at face value—that there are always limitations to the studies, and possible unmeasured effects. But there are some cases where the evidence is stronger than others, and where the existence of large unmeasured effects in the opposite direction is less plausible. Paying attention to that evidence is updating.
The particular case of Nurse-Family Partnership looks like one of more strongly supported programs. It has been studied extensively using randomized controlled trials, with data collected on a variety of outcomes (including a follow-up study looking at 19-year-olds who had been through the program as infants). GiveWell named it a top-rated US organization in 2010 (they now say that it is outstanding but lacks room for more funding). Your story about a possible hidden cost does not sound very plausible, and I imagine that some of the studies include data which speak to some of the steps in your story (e.g., whether women who take part end up having more additional children than those who do not).
But somehow I can guess that you do trust the negative results shown… right?
I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to imply with this comment. You have complained that I was reading your comments too uncharitably in the past, so I’m trying to interpret it as something other than a taunt, but without success.
I found this an interesting overview of examples of unintended consequences.
A Really, Really, Really Long Post About Gay Marriage That Does Not, In The End, Support One Side Or The Other