Perhaps it belonged here in the open thread; I’m not experienced enough to judge that. There are also complaints that it was obvious and had no significant rationality-related issues, but I humbly invite people to consider whether these may be rationalizations—when evaluated against the relevance of posts in this open thread.
However, there are also comments that have upvotes:
“The existence of the article has potentially severe downsides for the site, and while we may wish this wasn’t so, reality is what it is.”
“taints reputation of LW”
“Writing about low-status topics is low-status. This topic is low-status. Making LW low-status goes against the goals of most readers, I guess.”
Let’s think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases—if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the “civil liberties” concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.
I speculate that what commonly comes to mind when “pedophilia” is mentioned is child sex abuse. Discrimination against (and punishment of) child sex abusers is entirely appropriate. I have ruled out that case by calling the topic “celibate pedophilia”, but after that restriction is in place I suggest these associations: a desire to change society so that adult-child sexual activity is legal and accepted (e.g. NAMBLA), a desire to inflict harm on children, looking at pictures of children being harmed, and perhaps insisting to others that they shouldn’t be disgusted by these desires.
I am opposed to all of those things, and I know there are many other celibate pedophiles like me. Some of the points seem irrelevant from a civil liberties point of view, but they are relevant from a status point of view.
So there are questions here of whether people want to personally change their status judgment based on those clarifications.
With regard to “tainting the site”, there is an issue as to whether those clarifications can be conveyed in some way to avoid the fears of harm to the site based on low status. Does anyone want to clarify the risk of harm to the site?
Perhaps the net judgment of the LessWrong community is that it should be a forbidden topic. But if so, I think it’s worth making a conscious note of that fact.
Folks, this is what “things you can’t say” looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.
Notice how different the community response is to this, versus to some of the things that are claimed by their proponents to be “things you can’t say” but which are actually merely explicit statements of common beliefs in the cultural mainstream.
When someone triggers a social taboo, the response isn’t so much “I will argue against this person!” — not even in the “someone is wrong on the Internet!” fashion. That’s just disagreement (sometimes ideological or partisan disagreement), not taboo.
When someone triggers a social taboo, the response is more to try to stifle or exclude it quickly. This sometimes ends in trying to pretend that it never happened.
(I am not asserting that the taboo response is right or wrong on this subject. I am pointing out that it is different.)
While I did not upvote the original post itself, I’ll note here my disagreement with all the comments taking issue with the post for being “off topic.” We entertain topics related only very tangentially to rationality on a regular basis, and the issue is not that this subject is off topic beyond our usual tolerances, it’s that practically any community will get the screaming heebie jeebies the moment it’s raised. This is one of our existing taboos which is still strong enough for people to be hit by social splatter damage just by being near it and not protesting.
The point is, if it were on topic, taking the status hit of exploring the subject matter might be justifiable. As it stands now its value is completely negative to the community.
I bet the exact same argument if it was in a open thread comment would have been upvoted and would on net be considered a gain.
Claims like this when well argued are welcomed even outside threads for taboo topics (and even if they where only welcomed there that still leaves room for discussion). I recall the topic being discussed on the unofficial IRC channel and other comments.
Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad (which it is not). Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).
Thanks, I think I had missed or forgotten that. That thread you linked seems awesome.
It’s hard for me to believe the difference was just that he didn’t post in the open thread. He seems monomaniacal with his cause, and planned to post more of the same. He hasn’t discussed any other topic here, even introduced himself as a pedophile in the introduction thread.
Can you think of any other ways he could have been better received?
It’s hard for me to believe the difference was just that he didn’t post in the open thread.
Well, it is a huge difference. An article has a name, it can be linked independently, and it appears on a new web page with the logo of LessWrong above it. The only context it has is “this is the article published on LessWrong”.
A comment is just a comment. Yeah, in LW software it can also be linked separately, but at least the web page starts with saying that this is just one article and you can click here to see the whole context. And that specific article says that this is the place for controversial topics, so it’s like any comment posted there is automatically labeled as controversial. (It’s like coming with a monster costume on Halloween; everyone knows it’s a monster constume for Halloween.)
Imagine how newspaper websites look like, because many people have more experience reading them. The articles are written by editors; the newspaper owner is responsible for them. The comments are written by anyone, and it is obvious they don’t represent the opinion of the newspaper owner. Criticizing a newspaper for the article they published is reasonable, but people usually don’t criticize the newspaper for a random comment below it’s article, because they understand the comment was made by someone else. -- LessWrong is not like this, but if you send a hyperlink to people used to deal with newspapers and one-person blogs, they may have similar assumptions.
He seems monomaniacal with his cause, and planned to post more of the same.
Because he has no good place to post them elsewhere and expect a reasonable discussion. :(
Unfortunately this just makes the whole things worse. If LW becomes the rare place where this topic is treated reasonably, we can expect dozens of new members coming to express the same feelings here. That’s the horrible effect that if some kind of people are unwelcome at most places, any place that becomes tolerant to them faces a huge risk to become crowded by them disproportionately.
Because he has no good place to post them elsewhere and expect a reasonable discussion. :(
Which suggests there’s a market for a web forum whose policy is that controversial topics are welcomed and discussion of those topics must be reasonable no matter how reprehensible one considers the position one is discussing, and the moderators assiduously ban/delete violations of that policy.
As you say, LW is not that forum, and does not wish to be.
Incidentally, I would be astonished if such forums didn’t exist already. Were I looking for one, I would probably ask around on someplace like FetLife.
Admittedly, there are some mainstream-controversial topics that get discussed in that way here, with that sort of social norm, and I expect that in some communities the opinion of LW is tainted by those discussions in the same way you discuss. But the consensus opinion of LW seems to be that the opinions of those communities don’t really matter very much.
there are some mainstream-controversial topics that get discussed in that way here, with that sort of social norm, and I expect that in some communities the opinion of LW is tainted by those discussions in the same way you discuss
One difference is a different degree of taboo. Another one, I suspect more important, was the timing. The controversial topics didn’t start by someone posting a full article out of the blue. They first appeared as comments in other articles, somewhat related to their topics. Only later someone would write an article about it. And at least I didn’t have an impression that someone is on LW only to talk about the taboo topics.
In other words, if you want to talk about controversial topics, don’t start by shocking everyone. (Unless it’s a “door in the face” technique, when the shocking article gets heavily downvoted, but then people feel kinda guilty and become more tolerant in the discussion.)
Well, it is a huge difference. An article has a name, it can be linked independently, and it appears on a new web page with the logo of LessWrong above it. The only context it has is “this is the article published on LessWrong”.
You convinced me. Just vividly imagining this caused an availability bias.
It’s like coming with a monster costume on Halloween; everyone knows it’s a monster constume for Halloween.)
That’s a great analogy. I’m going to steal it!
Unfortunately this just makes the whole things worse. If LW becomes the rare place where this topic is treated reasonably, we can expect dozens of new members coming to express the same feelings here.
This is a good point, and wouldn’t be limited to just pedophiles. Permitting all taboos in the name of rationality is just going to lead to more taboos being discussed. Good luck selling rationality to people after that. Then again, if rationality simply doesn’t appeal to regular citizens, perhaps attracting controversy would be a great marketing strategy ;)
A comment is just a comment. Yeah, in LW software it can also be linked separately, but at least the web page starts with saying that this is just one article and you can click here to see the whole context.
Not to mention that it is, in my experience, a huge pain to locate any individual comment via site search unless they’re either highly upvoted or found on some of the most trafficked pages.
Well, it is, and it isn’t. If I were trying to find these discussions, I would google site:http://lesswrong.com “child porn” pedophilia or something of the sort, and it would work all right. But yes, one still has to look around a little; it isn’t the same as a link to an article.
Well, when I’ve attempted that method while trying to track down old comments on the site, I’ve often found that the comments I’m looking for do not come up as results, even when a sufficiently thorough search through the archives of the site is sufficient to find them, but if the keywords match to few enough other results, it might be more effective.
I see I had a more constrained idea of selfishness in mind than you did. I’m not interested in arguing semantics (or maybe I am?). Removed the part about selfishness. It wasn’t the point anyways.
ETA: Here’s what I think is selfish: pushing your goals without concern for others. Perhaps you assumed a more general interpretation where looking for pleasure and avoiding pain is selfish. In that case, you’ve made the word useless, because it applies to everyone.
And, relatedly, is there a difference between pushing my goals without concern for others, and pushing my goals in situations where I expect others to be harmed by my doing so?
I don’t think the word selfish ever has had a positive connotation, and rarely a neutral one. I used to argue about word definitions, but then I realized it’s less frustrating to use words the way people usually do. I think self-interest is a similar word usually used in a more neutral manner.
I think a good rule of thumb is to assume people don’t mean to use words in ways that describe everything or nothing in the reference class i.e. “everyone is selfish and nobody is an altruist”, “no love is unconditional”. Don’t think people are as stupid as their language is.
pushing my goals in situations where I expect others to be harmed by my doing so?
I think people use stronger words for this, but selfish is used too. Evil comes to mind.
Both. Depends on the extent of harm, obviously. I also don’t mean to imply it’s the only way people use the word evil. I steelmanned your question a bit. I assume you mean net harm, not minor collateral damage.
The norms here are probably a bit different, and adapting to the local language is desirable.
Except, of course, if they go against my inclusive interests in any way that my social influence can hope to impact. In that case it is Wrong, Other-Tribalish, sinister, naive, uncouth, dirty and generally low status.
I recall making very similar arguments on pedophilia and generally being up voted. I think this is best explained by there being a stricter standard of avoiding taboo topics for main compared to the comment section.
I recall other controversial subjects such as the effectiveness of terrorism to stop Moore’s law (was upvoted) and racial differences in intelligence (was downvoted) in main articles. And an article where lukeprog basically took any claim of the PUAs he found plausible and could find academic backing for and presented it divorced from the subculture, that was supposed to be the beginning of a series, but was probably seen as not desirable for the site and discontinued (despite it being upvoted).
I have made arguments about as controversial as the ones in your linked article in comments on pedophilia and they have generally been well received. The same is true of my arguments in favor of there being a hereditary component to the measured racial differences in intelligence. Alas I haven’t commented on terrorism.
“this is ok to discuss, however opening it as a topic in itself on main makes the site looks bad and may attract the wrong kinds of attention”.
The lesson I think really is to bring these kinds of topics up when they are one relevant example among several. If one wants them discussed as a standalone topics, open threads seem best or discussion section topics at most (hey we need something there besides meetup threads anyway).
I think this is best explained by there being a stricter standard of avoiding taboo topics for main compared to the comment section.
The post wasn’t downvoted at first actually although it was commented on, and I didn’t downvote it, but it was sent to oblivion after the first high status commenters arrived saying he was political, low status, discussing a taboo topic to disgrace LW on purpose, a troll.
I have made arguments about as controversial as the ones in your linked article in comments on pedophilia and they have generally been well received. The same is true of my arguments in favor of there being a hereditary component to the measured racial differences in intelligence.
Folks, this is what “things you can’t say” looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.
It looks to me more like what happens when someone uses “taboo” as a Power Word: Stun on a group of people with an excessive identity as rationalists. It’s this, especially item #1, translated to discussion forums.
I notice that JoshElders original posting has gone. Good.
I’ve said pretty forthrightly that I believe he’s just a troll, and I stand by that. But suppose I take him at his word. What is to be said? Sucks to be him, yay for not kiddle-fiddling (but he doesn’t get any prize for that), and—what? Certainly, there are discussions to be had about laws and mores around age, consent, and pornography. There are also places to have these discussions. LessWrong is not one of them.
LessWrong has a specific focus, without which it becomes merely MoreWrong and AveragelyWrong imagining they’re LessWrong because they’re posting on a site called LessWrong and have learned how to dress up as pretend rationalists. Nothing is made relevant to LessWrong just by being posted here. Framing discussions of whether the latest irrelevance should be here at all in terms of “exclusion”, “taboo” and “open-minded” is somewhere between clueless and Dark Arts.
I’ve said pretty forthrightly that I believe he’s just a troll, and I stand by that.
I want to say publicly that after initial disbelief (motivated by the #1 Geek Social Fallacy), I have updated towards Richard’s judgement of the situation. If you read carefully the comments, they are optimized for drawing attention to their author and prolonging the debate infinitely.
I have made the mistake of feeding the troll, thereby decreasing the quality of this website. It’s even more embarassing to realize that it is a mistake most readers avoided. I have learned my lesson, and hopefully it will make me stronger in future internet debates.
The substantive posts I brought up are about matters of fact under conditions of great uncertainty—for instance, drawing conclusions about a largely invisible group. I brought up the ideas of “civil rights”, “taboo”, etc. only in response to people saying it shouldn’t be discussed here—that wasn’t my idea. And it looks like the predominant view among the regulars is that it isn’t irrelevant to the mission of rationality, it isn’t off topic, and that I am making cogent arguments. It’s to be downplayed because it’s too hot to handle, due to the expected reactions (quite possibly very much at odds with rationality) of the general reading public. I think there’s considerable benefit on being clear about that.
I brought up the ideas of “civil rights”, “taboo”, etc. only in response to people saying it shouldn’t be discussed here—that wasn’t my idea.
It was your idea to bring up “civil rights” as a response to “this does not belong here”. An idea as old as the Internet.
It’s to be downplayed because it’s too hot to handle, due to the expected reactions (quite possibly very much at odds with rationality) of the general reading public. I think there’s considerable benefit on being clear about that.
I have just reread this entire thread, from which it appears to me that this has been clear to all from the start. I agree that there would be considerable benefit from you, also, being clear about that.
Well, if any of those 5 or more people who upvoted this think it’s interesting enough to kick it up the chain rather than erasing the issue, you’ll have to be the ones to do it. I couldn’t even if I wanted to with my current karma ranking, and I don’t really have the standing to, being a new member and being a member of the taboo group.
The community could end up deciding that it is a taboo topic, that’s the way it is, end of story. Or perhaps there is fear that it could create a damaging controversy that would hurt the community? Or various other things that I can’t predict.
But something feels wrong with a conclusion that “A public discussion about whether it’s OK to talk about celibate pedophilia is taboo”.
I’d rather it be erased. The potential for social ‘splash damage’ to LW is high, and the gain is very low (or possibly negative.) Further, I believe that your agenda is to push this topic to your preferred conclusion, not to use it as an example which can aid in the core mission of LW.
But something feels wrong with a conclusion that “A public discussion about whether it’s OK to talk about celibate pedophilia is taboo”.
First, this is kind of misleading. The question is not whether it’s “OK to talk about celibate pedophilia”, but rather whether LessWrong is the proper place for this discussion. I am okay with this topic, I just think it would be a huge PR damage for LessWrong to have it here.
As an analogy, I have absolutely no problem with celibate pedophiles meeting in person and discussing their problems. But if you asked me whether you could organize this meetup at my home, I would certainly say no. It’s not because I want to take away your right of free speech or whatever. I just don’t want to be publicly associated with this cause.
Second, the discussion about whether we want to discuss celibate pedophilia here isn’t “taboo”. You just didn’t ask this question before posting the article. You didn’t ask it even in the top comment in this thread; at least not directly. The only sentence ending with question mark is: “Does anyone want to clarify the risk of harm to the site?”. Okay, I admit it is related. So, let’s break the taboo and ask openly here:
Dear readers of LessWrong, do you want to have celibate pedophilia discussions on LessWrong, and how specifically?
[pollid:560]
Third, I think the votes on the article and comments already express the opinions of the community.
I am interested in perceptions of the damage expected to be caused to LW from discussion of this topic and wonder if people can be more precise in their thinking about this. Here are some other scenarios:
If some established members discussed pedophilia and their opinions were within the commonly accepted range of views on the topic, would that reflect poorly on LW? For instance, suppose there was a debate where one pole of opinion was the status quo, and others were that child sex abusers should never be released from prison, or that execution would be an inappropriate punishment.
If some established community members who swore they were not pedophiles held a discussion where they expressed views similar to what I have been presenting, would that be damaging to the community? I gather people have now and then questioned whether adult-child sexual activity always causes harm.
In the above cases, would tagging posts “pedophilia” or “childsexabuse” cause damage?
Suppose a member made posts on ordinary LW topics that were of high quality, but noted now and then that they were a celibate pedophile and would like to remind people that such people are among us all the time, would that cause damage?
Typically in a community the people who care about a subject discuss it and those who don’t do not. If a poll revealed that 90% of the community did not want the topic discussed but a small group kept discussing it, would that insulate the community from damage to any extent?
Typically in a community the people who care about a subject discuss it and those who don’t do not. If a poll revealed that 90% of the community did not want the topic discussed but a small group kept discussing it, would that insulate the community from damage to any extent?
To an extent, but not enough to matter. The topic of child porn is one of the most socially toxic subjects out there, and even being peripherally associated with it can be a life-ending event. Careers have been destroyed, men have been unmade, and Bad Stuff Has Happened in the name of this topic. It does not have to make sense; it does not matter why. What matters is that it is so.
If for no other reason than self defense, I feel these discussions should be blackholed and discouraged with prejudice. We are a rationalist forum, with a specific goal, and the very presence of this topic risks our work. Again, it does not matter that it is unfair, it does not matter that it does not make sense: what matters is that it risks our work, in a nontrivial way.
Your goal is to discuss these topics. Our goal is to spread rationality. These two goals are in conflict for reasons beyond the control of either party, reasons which may or may not make sense but which nevertheless are powerful enough to unmake both of us.
I will not help you in your goal, as it conflicts with mine. I will encourage LW against helping you with your goal, as I feel it conflicts with and is damaging to theirs.
And finally, I recommend you push your agenda on a different forum. I would prefer you not return until you are willing to contribute positively to the core mission of LW—that core mission being the spread and improvement of rational thought processes in the general population. As it stands right now, I feel you have contributed net negative utility to the core mission of LW with your posts, and it disturbs me that you seem unable to see that or understand why.
It seems we have one key difference. Some of you believe that having this topic discussed in the open thread risks serious damage to LW because of the danger of a poor reputation. I am not convinced of this.
If it is not true, then I don’t think anyone has suggested any other reason for harm. If this is true, then my participation may have been harmful, though the marginal harm from a little more discussion seems very small.
So far I made one post in the discussion thread suggesting some pedophiles do not molest children. Following advice there, I made my next post in the open thread, which is this current post. I made one more post in the open thread titled “Assertion: Child porn availability does not increase child sex abuse”. I have responded to comments in all of these threads. My current plan, in response to community concerns, is to reply in these threads but not open any new ones. (I note that because of my low karma, I can’t see the results of the poll, a side effect of the entirely reasonably restriction that I can’t vote in it.)
The topic of child porn is one of the most socially toxic subjects out there, and even being peripherally associated with it can be a life-ending event. Careers have been destroyed, men have been unmade, and Bad Stuff Has Happened in the name of this topic.
For possession this is most assuredly so. Conceivably it’s so for arguing in favor of looser restrictions on it. It’s hard for me to believe that it is so for arguing against such changes or for being a contributor on the same forum where it is discussed. If anyone has such cases, I’d love to hear about them—by private message is fine.
Your goal is to discuss these topics.
I have raised two specific cases where facts aren’t clear and there are issues of different kinds of evidence to weigh in reaching a factual determination under conditions of uncertainty. Others have characterized this as my dressing up my concern for the topic in the guise of rationality. I disagree, and suggest that the reason may be mind-killer reactions—but on your side only. It’s hard to tell if they are representative opinions. There are many, many other ways I could have discussed this topic not related to rationality, and I didn’t, and wouldn’t.
Our goal is to spread rationality.
It would seem that your goal would be advanced by seeing how rationality considerations apply to any area of human endeavor, especially where they have not been widely discussed before. If rationality considerations could apply to the debate on incarceration policies for drug offenders, for instance, it would advance the goals of LW to discuss them. If this isn’t true for celibate pedophilia, it is only because it is a taboo topic. That may be a sufficient reason, but I think it’s worth being clear about that.
The results of the poll, at this moment… rot-13′d to prevent spoilers...
V cersre n frdhrapr bs negvpyrf—mreb; mreb creprag V cersre bar negvpyr bayl—bar; frira creprag V cersre ab negvpyrf, bayl n qvfphffvba va bcra guernq—svir; guveglfvk creprag V cersre abg gb qvfphff guvf gbcvp ng nyy—svir; guveglfvk creprag Fbzrguvat ryfr (cyrnfr rkcynva va n pbzzrag) - mreb; mreb creprag V ershfr gb ibgr ba guvf gnobb gbcvp, whfg fubj zr gur erfhygf—guerr; gjraglbar creprag
That’s very interesting. At what point can one start talking about implications of a poll without it being a spoiler?
I don’t know the actual reasons why my original Discussion post “Assertion: a large proportion of pedophiles are celibate” was deleted—I figure the community has its methods of operation and assume it was all done according to regulations. I am aware of reasons that were given in this thread for wanting it removed—though I don’t know the relationship of those reasons to why it was actually removed.
Survey results suggest considerable support in the community for discussing the topic in the Open Thread. A reasonable person might think it would be appropriate to repost that topic in the Open thread (I have the text of my original post). Such a person would also want to make sure that would not be considered hostile behavior, in the absence of knowing the actual reasons it was removed. I also don’t know what is supposed to happen here when half a community thinks something shouldn’t be discussed and the other half is OK with it.
At what point can one start talking about implications of a poll without it being a spoiler?
I don’t know about any specific rule. The general idea is that people should see the poll first (so that they are not influenced how to vote), but I guess three days later it’s fair game.
I don’t know the actual reasons why my original Discussion post (...) was deleted
Voting means deciding whether members want the article or don’t want the article. Your article was extremely downvoted. Like, one of the most downvoted articles ever; probably in the bottom 2%. So if there was any obvious community consensus about removing an article, it was about this one.
Meta: I think it would be more proper to become familiar with norms of a community first, and publish articles later. Comments like this seem to provide further evidence that you are actually not interested in LessWrong per se, just see it as a platform for your topic.
Survey results suggest considerable support in the community for discussing the topic in the Open Thread.
If you interpret “half of members don’t want to disuss it at all, and the other half prefers keeping it in the open thread only” as a considerable support… well, I guess you were going to interpret almost any result positively.
A reasonable person might think it would be appropriate to repost that topic in the Open thread (I have the text of my original post).
I guess you are going to do it anyway; just let me say there is nothing “reasonable” about reposting a text that got karma below −20.
I also don’t know what is supposed to happen here when half a community thinks something shouldn’t be discussed and the other half is OK with it.
Well, if people have a strong desire to discuss something, they will. And each comment is upvoted or downvoted on its merits. Knowing that a large part of community does not want some topic either makes people comment less on it, or become extra careful when writing about it.
At this point I am no longer interested even in meta-discussions of this topic. Tapping out.
You raise interesting points. One could hypothesize that the downvoting of the original article was due to its placement in the prominent Discussion thread, and seeing it in the open thread people would have not objected to it there. It seems an unlikely interpretation of the bulk of the votes, I agree. The serious downvoting of the original article does weigh heavily on this.
I think those who answered the poll were probably a biased sample in a serious way. Who read it? People who were interested in discussing this topic, and people who were not AND who were still motivated enough to be here to continue arguing for not discussing it. Those who didn’t want it discussed were probably underrerepresented.
How my reputation went from −13 to −40 overnight is intriguing. It had been quite stable, and I made a few posts yesterday that were not especially controversial. I speculate that the tapped-out Viliam-Bur in his review of my posts downvoted them all. I guess that’s fine, but maybe considered at a meta level gives one individual more power than is ideal? It is of course just speculation. I’m interested in alternative hypotheses.
I wrote one of the comments you quote, and I also downvoted your article. Originally I felt I shouldn’t upvote it, because it is a PR suicide, but I also shouldn’t downvote it, because it is essentially correct. At that moment the article karma was zero, so maybe other people had similar thoughts. So instead of voting I wrote the comment. But then I saw that you also added the tags to the article, and that was the last straw. It felt like one article was just a one-time incident that could be left ignored, but creating tags felt like saying: this is one of the official topics of this website. Also the fact that you announced your intention to write more articles like this. At that moment it wasn’t a vote about one specific article, but about whether I want this topic to be regularly discussed on LW. Which I don’t.
I completely agree with fubarobfusco that this is what a real social taboo looks like. Quoting Paul Graham’s “What You Can’t Say”:
When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as “yellowist”, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you’ll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you’re mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
(...) I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. (...) The problem is, there are so many things you can’t say. If you said them all you’d have no time left for your real work. You’d have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [By this I mean you’d have to become a professional controversialist, not that Noam Chomsky’s opinions = what you can’t say.]
And this is it. Here is the difference, that for you it is very important to “rehabilitate the color yellow”, but for most of the LW community, even if they would agree with your ideas, “being labelled as a yellowist would just be a distraction”. The cost seems to be too high, in this case.
Please note that some of us use our real names here. Any bad reputation LW gets, has a risk to be connected with our identities; and for example I really don’t volunteer to be connected with this specific cause. Let’s say that for people like me, being non-anonymous on LW was perhaps a stupid decision; I could have easily done otherwise. But there are other people, who didn’t have the choice: people who are employed or otherwise cooperate with MIRI and CFAR. [EDIT: Removed specific examples.] Their publicity is a tool to get their tasks done more efficiently. Again, I don’t know what opinions these people may have on your topic, but as far as I know they didn’t volunteer to be publicly associated with it. I want to protect them just as I want to protect myself.
You do have a point. But there are social consequences, and we do have to make a trade-off. I promise to downvote any future article about this topic. [EDIT: Removed some words of encouragement, because I updated towards the author merely trolling.]
If LW has any value for you even without discussing this specific topic, I’d recommend creating a new username and starting again, never linking to the old one. If no, then please leave.
Perhaps the net judgment of the LessWrong community is that it should be a forbidden topic. But if so, I think it’s worth making a conscious note of that fact.
I would advise against making too specific list of the forbidden topics. But making a vague notion would just invite more questions. Not sure what kind of a “conscious note” we can have here. I guess we should just remember having this conversation, and move on.
This is a good point. I do have one thought about the specific topic under consideration, though. Culturally, there’s a general inability to talk rationally and sensibly about many sexual topics. Given the importance of sex to human life and human happiness, this seems like a serious problem, and many members of the less wrong community have shown an interest in trying to do something about it. Since the inability to discuss pedophilia rationally seems to be connected to this general difficulty in discussing sexual topics rationally, it seems to be a less than perfect match to the “yellow” example. Strategic questions seem to be relevant; is the general cause of talking more rationally about sex helped or hindered by bringing up the extreme cases? I admit that I find it somewhat plausible that the answer is the latter, that it is more productive to focus on less extreme examples, but plausible is different from definitely true. Thus, there might be some value in trying to investigate the strategic questions, while in the hypothetical “yellow” example there seem to be fewer strategic questions worth asking.
Perhaps it belonged here in the open thread; I’m not experienced enough to judge that. There are also complaints that it was obvious and had no significant rationality-related issues, but I humbly invite people to consider whether these may be rationalizations—when evaluated against the relevance of posts in this open thread.
Most off-topic discussions here are relatively harmless to LW image. You pretty much chose the most taboo subject available, and you didn’t even try to justify that by making it relevant to rationality. You could have tested the waters by making comments first, and actually participating in discussions available, but no, you just had to start by pushing your political agenda.
Let’s think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases—if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the “civil liberties” concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.
I feel bad for the oppressed group in question, but pushing a singular political cause is bottom priority. LW doesn’t exist to fight for any specific group’s civil rights, especially if it happens at the expense of its other goals.
So there are questions here of whether people want to personally change their status judgment based on those clarifications.
The status judgement is based on people in general, outsiders and potential newcomers. LW isn’t an isolated bubble.
With regard to “tainting the site”, there is an issue as to whether those clarifications can be conveyed in some way to avoid the fears of harm to the site based on low status. Does anyone want to clarify the risk of harm to the site?
You could talk about civil liberties in general, and why pushing rights for marginal groups is more important for rationalists than other things. If you can’t do that, then all your other efforts are futile.
I think this probably should be a taboo topic because a) the number of people possibly helped by better legislation about this issue is fairly low b) Reputational hazard is extremely high c) it’s not actually something that we can easily get RIGHT. I think the balance between protection of children and the happiness of pedophiles is not something this where we’ll find the right balance on in a discussion here, which lowers the potential benefit even further. The stigmatization of people who have certain feelings they can’t control is likely to be harsher than is good but I can’t actually picture reasonable policy changes that will help the situation.
On the other hand I hate having taboo topics. I downvoted your original post because it was poorly argued and also something I think should probably not be a top-level post but I upvoted this comment for reasonability and because I think the issue is somewhat interesting.
I think this probably should be a taboo topic because a) the number of people possibly helped by better legislation about this issue is fairly low
Estimates of pedophilia in the male population are in the 1-5% range. That’s a lot of people.
c) it’s not actually something that we can easily get RIGHT.
I’m not sure why not. Of course the community doesn’t seem eager to do so, but it’s because of reputational hazard. Few people may believe me, but the reason I brought this subject up here is because I was genuinely interested in at least a few members of this relatively clear-thinking community here considering the facts and inferences around this issue; it’s an issue where as I see it incorrect beliefs about matters of fact play a large role.
I think the balance between protection of children and the happiness of pedophiles is not something this where we’ll find the right balance on in a discussion here,
IF one took an interest in this issue, it is a case where a little effort could have a magnified effect. A single voice can have more effect moving from 2% to 4% tolerance for celibate pedophiles than an issue where the issues are widely known and we’re trying to move from 40% to 51%.
The stigmatization of people who have certain feelings they can’t control is likely to be harsher than is good but I can’t actually picture reasonable policy changes that will help the situation.
I can. For starters:
Elimination of mandated reporter laws
Elimination of sex offender registries and residency restrictions
Public education on distinguishing sex abuse from pedophilia—get to the point where when someone says “He’s a pedophile” the question that comes to mind is, “Is he an abuser or a celibate pedophile?”
Decriminalization of child pornography possession.
The first three would help protect children—I’m not saying it’s obvious why, but I think I have arguments that would convince a lot of people. The fourth would save a whole lot of money in criminal justice costs.
I’m not agitating for people doing these things in this community. I’m responding to your assertion that there is nothing that could be done if someone wanted to.
all of your examples are tradeoffs, which was my entire point. Each punishes pedophiles in order to (presumably) protect children. Making each of your changes would obviously be better for you and other pedophiles, and you haven’t actually made these arguments you say you have so I don’t see any reason to think they would protect children rather than put them in more danger.
Second: 1-5 percent of men is 0.5-2.5 percent of humans and there are a lot more PSAs about rationality that I think would help a lot more than that many people. What percentage of people are children? If there are a lot more children than pedophiles doesn’t the math say it’s fine to ruin some pedophiles lives?
Third: Multiply all these relatively unconvincing arguments by their likelihood of ever being implemented based on them being discussed here. If we spent a long time talking about this and campaigning for it we MIGHT get a legal change that would help a small percentage of the population but we definitely completely ruin our reputation, not to mention it would distract from anything else we want to talk about.
all of your examples are tradeoffs, which was my entire point. … you haven’t actually made these arguments you say you have …
Mandated reporter laws and the sex offender registry were intended to be trade-offs, but unexpected consequences have made them bad for kids too.
The discussion here doesn’t even mention the effect on pedophiles. Pedophiles who are concerned they might offend against children with low probability know that if they tell a therapist about their attraction, they might be reported, if the therapist decides they are an imminent danger. Most pedophiles don’t know what criteria their therapist would use, they don’t want to risk it, so they do not seek help.
In some cases victims are discouraged from reporting too. Suppose a girl is being abused by her uncle. She doesn’t experience it as terrible but she wants it to stop. But she doesn’t want to face a formal investigation, which involves endless interrogations for her, embarrassing publicity, family strife, and perhaps sending her uncle to prison for 10 years. If she knew there could be a way of handling the situation privately in accord with her needs and wishes, she may be more likely to report it and get it to stop.
Sex offender registries often make it very difficult for an ex-offender to find a place to live. Here is Wikipedia’s take on it. Here is a specific in-depth example. Once ex-offenders are breaking the law by going underground and feeling maltreated by society, there is less reason to obey other laws too, including ones against molesting children.
Pedophiles who are concerned they might offend against children with low probability know that if they tell a therapist about their attraction, they might be reported, if the therapist decides they are an imminent danger. Most pedophiles don’t know what criteria their therapist would use, they don’t want to risk it, so they do not seek help.
Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky made a post on this, with terrorism substituted for pedophilia. The benefit of having a therapist able to apply influence to the individual would come from the commitment to privacy. As with priests confessionals, etc.
If the choice is between a potential perpetrator talking to a therapist and having a chance of being influenced but not reported and a potential perpetrator speaking to no one then the consequences are in favour of mandated silence… unless most perpetrators are somehow stupid enough to effectively confess to their impulses to the police for the hell of it.
Suppose a girl is being abused by her uncle. She doesn’t experience it as terrible but she wants it to stop. But she doesn’t want to face a formal investigation, which involves endless interrogations for her, embarrassing publicity, family strife, and perhaps sending her uncle to prison for 10 years. If she knew there could be a way of handling the situation privately in accord with her needs and wishes, she may be more likely to report it and get it to stop.
This scenario sounds a bit fantastical; the rape survivor who doesn’t go to the cops isn’t doing it because they “[didn’t] experience it as terrible” and want to protect their rapist, it’s because doing so puts them on the firing line and brings back all the trauma with the added benefit of a negligible chance of actually seeing justice. I would know here; one of my childhood friends was raped by some freak when she was a little girl, and even though she managed to grow up healthy despite it that single attack still left a lot of deep psychological scars. And that is a best-case scenario; a girl like you describe is trapped with their rapist and is unlikely to even be willing to tell their parents what happened, which means they will be raped over and over while being forced to pretend nothing is wrong.
It’s not the stigma against pedophiles which hurts these children… it’s the pedophiles who rape them.
I realize you claim not to have hurt a child, and if it’s true I’m certainly glad about that, but there really is no comparison between the inconvenience of sexual frustration / possible police investigation and being raped. “Coming out” and making sure that society can protect itself is the only moral thing to do if you really are sincere here; the cost of raping children or providing demand for pornography in which children are raped is so much higher than any price a person can pay socially or legally that you would absolutely come out ahead no matter what happened. The highest ideal of a civilized person is to do the right thing even if it’s painful, and that means having the courage to accept the consequences of your actions.
In the discussion of mandated reporter laws, I was thinking not one iota of the interests of the perpetrators of the crime. I was thinking only of the best interests of the children.
There are awful situations, that’s for sure. All I’m trying to address here is the differential between having a mandated reporter law and not having one. Reporting is of course very often the right thing to do, and it will of course be done a lot of the time without a mandated reporter law as well.
“Coming out” and making sure that society can protect itself is the only moral thing to do if you really are sincere here
This is pretty bewildering. I guess you are assuming that I pose a risk of hurting a child even if I am sure I don’t. Or that I am providing demand for child pornography that I’ve never seen or sought out. For those of you who thought it was obvious that some pedophiles don’t abuse children, I guess you’ve now found someone who doesn’t think it’s obvious at all.
The highest ideal of a civilized person is to do the right thing even if it’s painful, and that means having the courage to accept the consequences of your actions.
The law says a doctor has the right to report if he deems he could prevent certain serious crimes by doing so. Rape wouldn’t fit the bill, but aggravated rape would. He isn’t allowed to report any crimes that have already happened, with the exception of child abuse. Concerning child abuse, even a suspicion obligates the doctor to report. This means social workers investigate the issue first, and a report rarely involves the law enforcement.
Any laws concerning professional confidentiality are easy enough to circumvent by making anonymous calls, and obviously cops want to protect their witnesses anyway and are enthusiastic to put “the bad guys” behind bars. There are also tricks to break the confidentiality without technically breaking the law. I think it’s also pretty easy just not to report without facing any consequences in most situations, and this actually happens very often because the current law leads to absurd situations and overloads the system.
All this being said, I don’t think changing the reporting laws would change the issue much, and it comes down to personal ethics of the professionals involved.
An example from a doctor from Finland: [...] All this being said, I don’t think changing the reporting laws would change the issue much, and it comes down to personal ethics of the professionals involved.
I don’t know the exact laws in the US but I could imaging that changing them to the Finish ones could be an improvement.
Suppose a girl is being abused by her uncle. She doesn’t experience it as terrible but she wants it to stop. But she doesn’t want to face a formal investigation, which involves endless interrogations for her, embarrassing publicity, family strife, and perhaps sending her uncle to prison for 10 years.
Most young children wouldn’t understand the implications of a formal investigation. Children are not mature enough to decide what the correct way to handle the situation is.
ETA: I’d like to understand the thought process behind the downvotes.
I’ll confess that in this case I was thinking of a 14-year-old girl, and I’ve been mostly focusing on prepubescents in other places. For younger children, their parents are of course much more likely to be involved and key players. They too should be able to get outside help without automatic triggering of mandated reporter laws.
Perhaps the net judgment of the LessWrong community is that it should be a forbidden topic. But if so, I think it’s worth making a conscious note of that fact.
Strategic observation: It wasn’t forbidden, it didn’t need to be. It was something that could be (and was) mentioned occasionally. Now it is forbidden (from what I can tell, practically speaking). It needs to be, because frequent posting on the subject would be toxic. In particular frequent high personal and politically motivated advocacy would be a terrible influence, all things considered.
Maximising the impact you personally can have in influencing whatever socially environment you find for yourself requires tact and strategic thinking. Speaking loudly from a soap box doesn’t work unless you are advocating for a group that already has sympathy or status.
Without commenting directly on your topic, I’d like to congratulate you on remaining thoughtful and civil in spite of censure, and not—so far—escalating your interest in discussing this on LW to the point of spam.
Thanks. I try. It is discouraging to get so much negative feedback, and when it gets personal it hurts, but I try to steel myself for it. I feel more than a bit like a sheep in wolves’ clothing, though I realize others will suspect the opposite.
It’s only personal because you’ve made this topic part of your identity. That’s why other posters were recommending you read through the sequences on identity, and why it may be worth reconsidering what you base your identity on.
When people say with some heat that they don’t believe what I say about my own actions and motivations, that seems pretty personal and has nothing I can see to do with identity.
“Celibate pedophile” is a pretty unusual identity. I think of it more as a description. It’s hardly a bandwagon one jumps on. If (as seems true) a fair number of people have never heard of it before, then it doesn’t seem like something that reinforces tired old patterns of thought. A far more common identity is more or less “NAMBLA”—believing adult-child sex is just fine if only it was legalized. I decisively reject that identity.
Let’s think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases—if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the “civil liberties” concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.
If you think that celibate pedophiles might be more in the category of “leper” than “someone down on his luck”, then this article could be taken as suggesting that celibate pedophiles are the very sort of people you might be trying to help, if you’re so inclined to help anyone. Maybe people in general have poor intuitions about who needs help. People in general have poor intuitions about a whole lot of things, but we don’t throw up our hands and not try to make anything better.
I’m wasn’t implying that they are the loveable loser of the parable, rather than the leper. Indeed if I had to bet I would bet on the latter. I am invoking the article to point out the language of civil rights or social justice will likely not work for them precisely for this reason. Unless the argument is mistaken in some grave way.
I can’t imagine a post that starts out with “Note: If you think the assertion is obvious, then this post may well not interest you.” to be a good post on Lesswrong.
I can’t imagine a post that starts out with “Note: If you think the assertion is obvious, then this post may well not interest you.” to be a good post on Lesswrong.
Most of the ones that I can think of are math-heavy. For example, I might write a post about “Value of Information is asymmetric because the different possible worlds are asymmetric,” and I would not expect the body of that post to interest someone who thinks that assertion is obvious.
For example, I might write a post about “Value of Information is asymmetric because the different possible worlds are asymmetric,” and I would not expect the body of that post to interest someone who thinks that assertion is obvious.
I think that there might be people who think that the assertion is probably true. If I’m however interested in math I care not only about whether the assertion is true but also about whether your proof of the assertion is correct.
P!=NP is in some sense an obvious assertion but it’s still very interesting to search for the proof. Proofs are interesting.
I have ruled out that case by calling the topic “celibate pedophilia”
You have done nothing of the sort. You have merely drawn a line around the class (a class of unknown size) of those who have such urges but have never acted on them. But is this concept a natural kind? Does it carve reality at a joint? Does this line on the map correspond to any line in the territory? Is it an empirical cluster in thingspace?
I believe the answer is no. The reality appears to be that there are people who, alas, have urges of this sort, some of whom act on them and are caught, some who act on them and have not been caught, and an unknown number who have not acted. Is there anything to distinguish the latter class from the first two that is predictive of whether or not they will offend in future?
Would you hire as a shop assistant a professed non-practicing kleptomaniac? As an accountant, a professed non-practicing fraudster? For childcare, a professed “celibate pedophile”?
The rest is blatant concern trolling. “Ooh, is this a forbidden topic? Help, help, I’m being discriminated against! Shouldn’t we have a rational discussion about this? Are we only thinking about status? Think of the civil liberties. Poor little me, all those downvotes, how could I possibly tell what they mean? Does anyone want to clarify this?”
Alicorn gives you far too much credit for “remaining thoughtful and civil”. Yes, you are being polite and well-spoken, I’m sure your discourse goes down very well over after-dinner coffee and cigars with like-minded friends, but it’s an empty shell. As C.S. Lewis might have said, it is hard work to make a reasoned argument, but effortless to act as though one has just been made.
You have done nothing of the sort. You have merely drawn a line around the class (a class of unknown size) of those who have such urges but have never acted on them. But is this concept a natural kind? Does it carve reality at a joint? Does this line on the map correspond to any line in the territory? Is it an empirical cluster in thingspace?
I believe the answer is no. The reality appears to be that there are people who, alas, have urges of this sort, some of whom act on them and are caught, some who act on them and have not been caught, and an unknown number who have not acted. Is there anything to distinguish the latter class from the first two that is predictive of whether or not they will offend in future?
These are reasonable questions.
Let’s consider a parallel plan for dividing the world: men attracted to women who have raped them and been caught, men who have raped them and not been caught, and men who have not raped women.
It seems like the more natural way of dividing the world is into concentric circles. A large group feels an attraction, a subset commits a crime, and a subset of that has been caught for the crime. Whether we can identify traits that might make men rape women isn’t the point. The point is that as a matter of human rights, we assume people are innocent until proven guilty. In the case of pedophilia, the immediate goal is to let people entertain the possibility that they are innocent, even if vigilance remains.
Would you hire as a shop assistant a professed non-practicing kleptomaniac? As an accountant, a professed non-practicing fraudster? For childcare, a professed “celibate pedophile”?
I’m not suggesting anyone hire a celibate pedophile as a babysitter. The tolerance that celibate pedophiles seek is far more basic than that. Would you still be friends with one? Keep him on in his office job? Let him go to your church, even if he never goes near the kids? Invite him to the family dinner where there are children? (You are perfectly welcome to make him agree to never go off alone with one of the kids.)
The point is that as a matter of human rights, we assume people are innocent until proven guilty.
That is a common saying, repeated more often than understood. The police can hardly do their job by actually assuming that everyone is innocent. What the slogan actually means is that they have the burden of proof, and even that only applies to the processes of formal justice. Law enforcement can suspect who they please, for any reason whatever, and direct their enquiries accordingly. And outside of the justice system, everyone is free to use whatever data they have to update their beliefs and actions in whatever way seems justified by the data.
A fundamental theme of this site, if you hadn’t noticed. But you’re not actually interested in the matter of LessWrong, are you?
In the present context, “innocent until proven guilty” is an irrelevance, another Power Word: Stun. It does not mean that as a matter of human rights (Power Word: Stun again) I must believe that someone avowing their attraction to children has never acted on it and is never going to. I have no reason to assign them to the “celibate” pseudo-category.
The tolerance that celibate pedophiles seek is far more basic than that. Would you still be friends with one?
I would very much keep at least at arms length from any such character, and to the extent it were in my control, keep them away from children. You see, where do I get this supposed knowledge that they are a “celibate pedophile”? Their own word? Why should I believe it? Why should I believe you? The supposed class of “celibate pedophiles” makes about as much sense as “drunk drivers who have never had an accident”.
And outside of the justice system, everyone is free to use whatever data they have to update their beliefs and actions in whatever way seems justified by the data.
No they aren’t. It happens to be legal to act on prejudice against celibate pedophiles. It is not legal to act on prejudice against people for their sex, race or the aspect of their sexual preference specific to whether they are attracted to males or females.
Be as prejudiced as you like. It’s almost certainly socially beneficial to you. But you cannot pretend (here) that it is an obvious and natural implication of a generic legal right to do so. The right to discriminate is allowed in some cases (such as this one) but not others.
You see, where do I get this supposed knowledge that they are a “celibate pedophile”? Their own word? Why should I believe it? Why should I believe you?
Presumably you get the knowledge about the second word in the phrase from the same place you got the knowledge about the first word in the phrase. It does not seem to be a particularly unbelievable claim.
The supposed class of “celibate pedophiles”
Supposed class? What? The connotative claim here is that there are exactly zero people with a primary sexual attraction to prepubescent humans who have not and will not rape children.
makes about as much sense as “drunk drivers who have never had an accident”.
Note to JoshElders: I have a personal aversion to conversations riddled with the type of expression described by Frankfurt in the above linked essay. It seems abundantly clear to me that you directly engaging here with RichardKennaway or anyone similarly mindkilled will result in my exposure to such distasteful reasoning. It is likely that I would downvote both sides of such a conversation according to a “do not feed the moralizer” policy. I give you this information so you know the reason you would be getting downvoted is nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with the choice to provoke easily avoidable bullshit.
And outside of the justice system, everyone is free to use whatever data they have to update their beliefs and actions in whatever way seems justified by the data.
No they aren’t.
You are referring to the contingencies of this and that legal system. I am referring to the rational obligation to properly update on observations. As I said, a theme of this site on occasion, but apparently not on the occasion of your post.
Presumably you get the knowledge about the second word in the phrase from the same place you got the knowledge about the first word in the phrase. It does not seem to be a particularly unbelievable claim.
I am quite willing to believe that there are those with pedophile inclinations who have never acted on them. What I am taking issue with it the idea that “celibate pedophile” is a natural cluster of things, any more than “drunk drivers who have not had accidents”. That is why I have called it a supposed class, not because I think it is empty.
Thanks for the explanation. I was formulating a reply shortly after he made the post. At the time, Richard’s post had a −4 karma, so I was actually prohibited from doing so (with my lowly karma ranking). I guess that is the system working as it should. As a newcomer in a situation where most reactions have been negative and none that I recall has moved beyond “grudging tolerance” to “friendly tolerance”, it’s easy to assume that any given opinion might be shared by lots of others.
I think it is important to remember that the current strong sentiments against pedophilia are somewhat anomalous. I wrote several comments touching the subject on Yvain’s blog.
I in the past when discussing this with Athrelon proposed that in the 1970s it was not at all obvious Transsexuals would make the ingroup and that Pedophiles wouldn’t.
The ongoing anti-pedophile hysteria, which has now reached the point where adult men talking with children are considered suspect and pedophiles lie why they got into prison lest they be murdered or raped, clouds our view of the past. It can be hard to alieve that traditional society saw this as one sexual perversion among many and that for a short window in the 1970s many respectable people considered a legitimate orientation.
The “between consenting adults all is allowed in sex” coalition cementing deontological law hadn’t yet solidified at the start of the sexual revolution. The now mostly sidelined “free love” one was the key point for coordination.
It was only 1994 that NAMBLA was expelled from “the International Lesbian and Gay Association, having been the first US based organization to be a member.”
Dawkin’s recent gaffe ( http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article3858647.ece ) on the subject is a window into how this recent but alien social reality. I call it a gaffe, because those are in the eye of the beholder (the media), if you don’t think it caused on net bad PR for him do a search or two online and then come back.
Of course today, here where we are calm and in Far Mode and have certain LWian norms, we can safely sketch out the basic harm-based explanation. While both Pedophiles and Transsexuals probably don’t chose their feelings and yes we clearly should treat pedophilia, the idea that we would accept children “consenting” to sex with adult men on an alternative earth instead of contributing money so some men are allowed to cut off their penis and have a vagina fashioned is clearly absurd.
I think the question isn’t absurd at all, once you notice just how post-hoc this reasoning is. After all the why would the people in the 1970s not understand the very simple harm based argument I’m sure conservatives made?
Now maybe Pedophiles will make the coalition some day. Perhaps in 20 years. But this doesn’t change they where thrown off the Prog bus and lost the sexual revolution they helped launch. And in line with the linked article, I’m pretty sure their inclusion or exclusion isn’t going to be decided based on any kind of “harm accounting” that is claimed by many intellectuals to guide modern moral change.
In an add on comment I make the basic harm based argument I’m referring to here explicit
“Children are greatly harmed by sex with adults in nearly all circumstances. Thus this should be taboo for their good.”
So I’m making the likely controversial case that this argument is the result of post-hoc reasoning that would not convince us in the alternative timeline I also tried to make alievable, not only believable, with my language.
I should also append this follow up comment to avoid this being understood as an on attack or insult to transexuals per se:
People asked for a plausible example despite being controversial, I gave one.
Now the debate is about pedophilia, sex with teenagers and transexuals. This would not be a problem if people directly used it either to attack or support the argument I advanced.
Some seem to want to have simplified it and are engaging the comment as if I just said “Pedophilia is not bad, transsexuals are bad.” This isn’t what I was saying, nor was it something I wasn’t saying. It isn’t what the argument is about. Indeed I for now refuse to comment on this in the hopes this thread can be salvaged. Or does everyone simply agree with the point I was making as plausible and only debates on this nearby topic remain?
...
Sure the meta arguments often change our opinion on object level political positions… but engaging just the political positions themselves without addressing the arguments for the meta is not a productive conversation for me.
This was in the context of me using it as an example of the the capricious nature of what is sometimes termed Moral Progress, the ongoing process of value drift in our civilization.
Extensive research about the harm based argument and transsexual happiness has been done and would have been done regardless of initial political decisions. This would have and probably has affected policy. Now that we have this research, why is wild speculation of historical political trajectories relevant?
Extensive research about the harm based argument and transsexual happiness has been done and would have been done regardless of initial political decisions. This would have and probably has affected policy.
I don’t think that the primary reason for giving rights to transsexuals is because of real research. It’s rather the result of political activisim by a certain coaltion of social justice thinkers.
Primary reason or not, I bet the activism is easier with some research to back it. In Finland, sex change is done with taxpayer money after extensive screening for other mental disorders. It’s done because it helps, not because of political advocacy.
There are hypothetical treatments that would reduce harm (“it helps”) in this sense that we would not use because of our current set of ideology/values. Indeed I think it likely this is the case.
I think I finally updated in your direction, just had to let the argument sink in a bit and think of other examples. Abortion laws would be fertile ground for some likely true but controversial arguments.
I think there are also lots of hypothetical disorders that could be treated, but most people would think of it as “medicalization” because it wouldn’t fit their values.
So I’m making the likely controversial case that this argument is the result of post-hoc reasoning that would not convince us in the alternative timeline I also tried to make alievable, not only believable, with my language.
There’s very probably extensive research on the subject, so wild speculation about historical political trajectories isn’t necessary. Have you read any?
I recall making very similar arguments on pedophilia and generally being up voted. I think this is best explained by there being a stricter standard of avoiding taboo topics for main and open thread compared to the comment section.
I recall other controversial subjects such as the effectiveness of terrorism to stop Moore’s law (was upvoted) and racial differences in intelligence (was downvoted) in main articles. And an upvoted article where lukeprog basically took any claim of the PUAs he found plausible and could find academic backing for and presented it divorced from the subculture, that was supposed to be the beginning of a series, but was probably seen as not desirable for the site and discontinued (despite it being upvoted).
I have made arguments about as controversial as the ones in your linked article in comments on pedophilia and have been generally upvoted for them. The same is true of my arguments in favor of there being a hereditary component to the measured racial differences in intelligence. And arguments over some PUA claims. Alas I haven’t commented on terrorism.
“this is ok to discuss, however opening it as a topic in itself on main makes the site looks bad and may attract the wrong kinds of attention”.
The lesson I think really is to bring these kinds of topics up when they are one relevant example among several. If one wants them discussed as a standalone topics, open threads seem best or discussion section topics at most (hey we need something there besides meetup threads anyway).
Candidate for a forbidden topic: Celibate pedophilia
I saw a post somewhere (can’t find it again) asking if there were forbidden topics on LessWrong, with the implication that this would be undesirable.
This post I made to the Discussion section was seriously downvoted: http://lesswrong.com/lw/it3/assertion_a_large_proportion_of_pedophiles_are/ There is no attribution behind downvotes, so the reasons can’t be determined.
Perhaps it belonged here in the open thread; I’m not experienced enough to judge that. There are also complaints that it was obvious and had no significant rationality-related issues, but I humbly invite people to consider whether these may be rationalizations—when evaluated against the relevance of posts in this open thread.
However, there are also comments that have upvotes:
“The existence of the article has potentially severe downsides for the site, and while we may wish this wasn’t so, reality is what it is.”
“taints reputation of LW”
“Writing about low-status topics is low-status. This topic is low-status. Making LW low-status goes against the goals of most readers, I guess.”
Let’s think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases—if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the “civil liberties” concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.
I speculate that what commonly comes to mind when “pedophilia” is mentioned is child sex abuse. Discrimination against (and punishment of) child sex abusers is entirely appropriate. I have ruled out that case by calling the topic “celibate pedophilia”, but after that restriction is in place I suggest these associations: a desire to change society so that adult-child sexual activity is legal and accepted (e.g. NAMBLA), a desire to inflict harm on children, looking at pictures of children being harmed, and perhaps insisting to others that they shouldn’t be disgusted by these desires.
I am opposed to all of those things, and I know there are many other celibate pedophiles like me. Some of the points seem irrelevant from a civil liberties point of view, but they are relevant from a status point of view.
So there are questions here of whether people want to personally change their status judgment based on those clarifications.
With regard to “tainting the site”, there is an issue as to whether those clarifications can be conveyed in some way to avoid the fears of harm to the site based on low status. Does anyone want to clarify the risk of harm to the site?
Perhaps the net judgment of the LessWrong community is that it should be a forbidden topic. But if so, I think it’s worth making a conscious note of that fact.
Folks, this is what “things you can’t say” looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.
Notice how different the community response is to this, versus to some of the things that are claimed by their proponents to be “things you can’t say” but which are actually merely explicit statements of common beliefs in the cultural mainstream.
When someone triggers a social taboo, the response isn’t so much “I will argue against this person!” — not even in the “someone is wrong on the Internet!” fashion. That’s just disagreement (sometimes ideological or partisan disagreement), not taboo.
When someone triggers a social taboo, the response is more to try to stifle or exclude it quickly. This sometimes ends in trying to pretend that it never happened.
(I am not asserting that the taboo response is right or wrong on this subject. I am pointing out that it is different.)
While I did not upvote the original post itself, I’ll note here my disagreement with all the comments taking issue with the post for being “off topic.” We entertain topics related only very tangentially to rationality on a regular basis, and the issue is not that this subject is off topic beyond our usual tolerances, it’s that practically any community will get the screaming heebie jeebies the moment it’s raised. This is one of our existing taboos which is still strong enough for people to be hit by social splatter damage just by being near it and not protesting.
The point is, if it were on topic, taking the status hit of exploring the subject matter might be justifiable. As it stands now its value is completely negative to the community.
I bet the exact same argument if it was in a open thread comment would have been upvoted and would on net be considered a gain.
Claims like this when well argued are welcomed even outside threads for taboo topics (and even if they where only welcomed there that still leaves room for discussion). I recall the topic being discussed on the unofficial IRC channel and other comments.
Thanks, I think I had missed or forgotten that. That thread you linked seems awesome.
It’s hard for me to believe the difference was just that he didn’t post in the open thread. He seems monomaniacal with his cause, and planned to post more of the same. He hasn’t discussed any other topic here, even introduced himself as a pedophile in the introduction thread.
Can you think of any other ways he could have been better received?
Well, it is a huge difference. An article has a name, it can be linked independently, and it appears on a new web page with the logo of LessWrong above it. The only context it has is “this is the article published on LessWrong”.
A comment is just a comment. Yeah, in LW software it can also be linked separately, but at least the web page starts with saying that this is just one article and you can click here to see the whole context. And that specific article says that this is the place for controversial topics, so it’s like any comment posted there is automatically labeled as controversial. (It’s like coming with a monster costume on Halloween; everyone knows it’s a monster constume for Halloween.)
Imagine how newspaper websites look like, because many people have more experience reading them. The articles are written by editors; the newspaper owner is responsible for them. The comments are written by anyone, and it is obvious they don’t represent the opinion of the newspaper owner. Criticizing a newspaper for the article they published is reasonable, but people usually don’t criticize the newspaper for a random comment below it’s article, because they understand the comment was made by someone else. -- LessWrong is not like this, but if you send a hyperlink to people used to deal with newspapers and one-person blogs, they may have similar assumptions.
Because he has no good place to post them elsewhere and expect a reasonable discussion. :(
Unfortunately this just makes the whole things worse. If LW becomes the rare place where this topic is treated reasonably, we can expect dozens of new members coming to express the same feelings here. That’s the horrible effect that if some kind of people are unwelcome at most places, any place that becomes tolerant to them faces a huge risk to become crowded by them disproportionately.
Which suggests there’s a market for a web forum whose policy is that controversial topics are welcomed and discussion of those topics must be reasonable no matter how reprehensible one considers the position one is discussing, and the moderators assiduously ban/delete violations of that policy.
As you say, LW is not that forum, and does not wish to be.
Incidentally, I would be astonished if such forums didn’t exist already. Were I looking for one, I would probably ask around on someplace like FetLife.
Admittedly, there are some mainstream-controversial topics that get discussed in that way here, with that sort of social norm, and I expect that in some communities the opinion of LW is tainted by those discussions in the same way you discuss. But the consensus opinion of LW seems to be that the opinions of those communities don’t really matter very much.
One difference is a different degree of taboo. Another one, I suspect more important, was the timing. The controversial topics didn’t start by someone posting a full article out of the blue. They first appeared as comments in other articles, somewhat related to their topics. Only later someone would write an article about it. And at least I didn’t have an impression that someone is on LW only to talk about the taboo topics.
In other words, if you want to talk about controversial topics, don’t start by shocking everyone. (Unless it’s a “door in the face” technique, when the shocking article gets heavily downvoted, but then people feel kinda guilty and become more tolerant in the discussion.)
Yes, those are two differences, agreed. My suspicion is that the importance ranks the other way, but you might be right.
Agreed, including the caveat and a few other caveats in the same vein.
You convinced me. Just vividly imagining this caused an availability bias.
That’s a great analogy. I’m going to steal it!
This is a good point, and wouldn’t be limited to just pedophiles. Permitting all taboos in the name of rationality is just going to lead to more taboos being discussed. Good luck selling rationality to people after that. Then again, if rationality simply doesn’t appeal to regular citizens, perhaps attracting controversy would be a great marketing strategy ;)
Not to mention that it is, in my experience, a huge pain to locate any individual comment via site search unless they’re either highly upvoted or found on some of the most trafficked pages.
Well, it is, and it isn’t. If I were trying to find these discussions, I would google site:http://lesswrong.com “child porn” pedophilia or something of the sort, and it would work all right. But yes, one still has to look around a little; it isn’t the same as a link to an article.
Well, when I’ve attempted that method while trying to track down old comments on the site, I’ve often found that the comments I’m looking for do not come up as results, even when a sufficiently thorough search through the archives of the site is sufficient to find them, but if the keywords match to few enough other results, it might be more effective.
There’s nothing wrong with selfish intent. Most of my intents are selfish.
I see I had a more constrained idea of selfishness in mind than you did. I’m not interested in arguing semantics (or maybe I am?). Removed the part about selfishness. It wasn’t the point anyways.
ETA: Here’s what I think is selfish: pushing your goals without concern for others. Perhaps you assumed a more general interpretation where looking for pleasure and avoiding pain is selfish. In that case, you’ve made the word useless, because it applies to everyone.
your definition of selfishness does not seem to apply here, as he seems to want to help everyone else in his own situation.
So he says. He belongs to the group he’s trying to help. He seems to have no concern for LWers. Was I correct about your definition?
Pretty much. I think the use of the word selfish as a pejorative is usually bad.
I used to think so too.
What changed your mind?
And, relatedly, is there a difference between pushing my goals without concern for others, and pushing my goals in situations where I expect others to be harmed by my doing so?
I don’t think the word selfish ever has had a positive connotation, and rarely a neutral one. I used to argue about word definitions, but then I realized it’s less frustrating to use words the way people usually do. I think self-interest is a similar word usually used in a more neutral manner.
I think a good rule of thumb is to assume people don’t mean to use words in ways that describe everything or nothing in the reference class i.e. “everyone is selfish and nobody is an altruist”, “no love is unconditional”. Don’t think people are as stupid as their language is.
I think people use stronger words for this, but selfish is used too. Evil comes to mind.
Agreed.
Do you mean to imply that you consider this evil, in addition to being selfish? Or do you just mean to make a statement about how people use words?
Both. Depends on the extent of harm, obviously. I also don’t mean to imply it’s the only way people use the word evil. I steelmanned your question a bit. I assume you mean net harm, not minor collateral damage.
The norms here are probably a bit different, and adapting to the local language is desirable.
Except, of course, if they go against my inclusive interests in any way that my social influence can hope to impact. In that case it is Wrong, Other-Tribalish, sinister, naive, uncouth, dirty and generally low status.
I recall making very similar arguments on pedophilia and generally being up voted. I think this is best explained by there being a stricter standard of avoiding taboo topics for main compared to the comment section.
I recall other controversial subjects such as the effectiveness of terrorism to stop Moore’s law (was upvoted) and racial differences in intelligence (was downvoted) in main articles. And an article where lukeprog basically took any claim of the PUAs he found plausible and could find academic backing for and presented it divorced from the subculture, that was supposed to be the beginning of a series, but was probably seen as not desirable for the site and discontinued (despite it being upvoted).
I have made arguments about as controversial as the ones in your linked article in comments on pedophilia and they have generally been well received. The same is true of my arguments in favor of there being a hereditary component to the measured racial differences in intelligence. Alas I haven’t commented on terrorism.
I think there is a general norm for things you can’t talk about:
The lesson I think really is to bring these kinds of topics up when they are one relevant example among several. If one wants them discussed as a standalone topics, open threads seem best or discussion section topics at most (hey we need something there besides meetup threads anyway).
The post wasn’t downvoted at first actually although it was commented on, and I didn’t downvote it, but it was sent to oblivion after the first high status commenters arrived saying he was political, low status, discussing a taboo topic to disgrace LW on purpose, a troll.
You have a reputation. I bet it helped.
It looks to me more like what happens when someone uses “taboo” as a Power Word: Stun on a group of people with an excessive identity as rationalists. It’s this, especially item #1, translated to discussion forums.
I notice that JoshElders original posting has gone. Good.
I’ve said pretty forthrightly that I believe he’s just a troll, and I stand by that. But suppose I take him at his word. What is to be said? Sucks to be him, yay for not kiddle-fiddling (but he doesn’t get any prize for that), and—what? Certainly, there are discussions to be had about laws and mores around age, consent, and pornography. There are also places to have these discussions. LessWrong is not one of them.
LessWrong has a specific focus, without which it becomes merely MoreWrong and AveragelyWrong imagining they’re LessWrong because they’re posting on a site called LessWrong and have learned how to dress up as pretend rationalists. Nothing is made relevant to LessWrong just by being posted here. Framing discussions of whether the latest irrelevance should be here at all in terms of “exclusion”, “taboo” and “open-minded” is somewhere between clueless and Dark Arts.
I want to say publicly that after initial disbelief (motivated by the #1 Geek Social Fallacy), I have updated towards Richard’s judgement of the situation. If you read carefully the comments, they are optimized for drawing attention to their author and prolonging the debate infinitely.
I have made the mistake of feeding the troll, thereby decreasing the quality of this website. It’s even more embarassing to realize that it is a mistake most readers avoided. I have learned my lesson, and hopefully it will make me stronger in future internet debates.
The substantive posts I brought up are about matters of fact under conditions of great uncertainty—for instance, drawing conclusions about a largely invisible group. I brought up the ideas of “civil rights”, “taboo”, etc. only in response to people saying it shouldn’t be discussed here—that wasn’t my idea. And it looks like the predominant view among the regulars is that it isn’t irrelevant to the mission of rationality, it isn’t off topic, and that I am making cogent arguments. It’s to be downplayed because it’s too hot to handle, due to the expected reactions (quite possibly very much at odds with rationality) of the general reading public. I think there’s considerable benefit on being clear about that.
It was your idea to bring up “civil rights” as a response to “this does not belong here”. An idea as old as the Internet.
I have just reread this entire thread, from which it appears to me that this has been clear to all from the start. I agree that there would be considerable benefit from you, also, being clear about that.
Well, if any of those 5 or more people who upvoted this think it’s interesting enough to kick it up the chain rather than erasing the issue, you’ll have to be the ones to do it. I couldn’t even if I wanted to with my current karma ranking, and I don’t really have the standing to, being a new member and being a member of the taboo group.
The community could end up deciding that it is a taboo topic, that’s the way it is, end of story. Or perhaps there is fear that it could create a damaging controversy that would hurt the community? Or various other things that I can’t predict.
But something feels wrong with a conclusion that “A public discussion about whether it’s OK to talk about celibate pedophilia is taboo”.
I’d rather it be erased. The potential for social ‘splash damage’ to LW is high, and the gain is very low (or possibly negative.) Further, I believe that your agenda is to push this topic to your preferred conclusion, not to use it as an example which can aid in the core mission of LW.
First, this is kind of misleading. The question is not whether it’s “OK to talk about celibate pedophilia”, but rather whether LessWrong is the proper place for this discussion. I am okay with this topic, I just think it would be a huge PR damage for LessWrong to have it here.
As an analogy, I have absolutely no problem with celibate pedophiles meeting in person and discussing their problems. But if you asked me whether you could organize this meetup at my home, I would certainly say no. It’s not because I want to take away your right of free speech or whatever. I just don’t want to be publicly associated with this cause.
Second, the discussion about whether we want to discuss celibate pedophilia here isn’t “taboo”. You just didn’t ask this question before posting the article. You didn’t ask it even in the top comment in this thread; at least not directly. The only sentence ending with question mark is: “Does anyone want to clarify the risk of harm to the site?”. Okay, I admit it is related. So, let’s break the taboo and ask openly here:
Dear readers of LessWrong, do you want to have celibate pedophilia discussions on LessWrong, and how specifically?
[pollid:560]
Third, I think the votes on the article and comments already express the opinions of the community.
I am interested in perceptions of the damage expected to be caused to LW from discussion of this topic and wonder if people can be more precise in their thinking about this. Here are some other scenarios:
If some established members discussed pedophilia and their opinions were within the commonly accepted range of views on the topic, would that reflect poorly on LW? For instance, suppose there was a debate where one pole of opinion was the status quo, and others were that child sex abusers should never be released from prison, or that execution would be an inappropriate punishment.
If some established community members who swore they were not pedophiles held a discussion where they expressed views similar to what I have been presenting, would that be damaging to the community? I gather people have now and then questioned whether adult-child sexual activity always causes harm.
In the above cases, would tagging posts “pedophilia” or “childsexabuse” cause damage?
Suppose a member made posts on ordinary LW topics that were of high quality, but noted now and then that they were a celibate pedophile and would like to remind people that such people are among us all the time, would that cause damage?
Typically in a community the people who care about a subject discuss it and those who don’t do not. If a poll revealed that 90% of the community did not want the topic discussed but a small group kept discussing it, would that insulate the community from damage to any extent?
To an extent, but not enough to matter. The topic of child porn is one of the most socially toxic subjects out there, and even being peripherally associated with it can be a life-ending event. Careers have been destroyed, men have been unmade, and Bad Stuff Has Happened in the name of this topic. It does not have to make sense; it does not matter why. What matters is that it is so.
If for no other reason than self defense, I feel these discussions should be blackholed and discouraged with prejudice. We are a rationalist forum, with a specific goal, and the very presence of this topic risks our work. Again, it does not matter that it is unfair, it does not matter that it does not make sense: what matters is that it risks our work, in a nontrivial way.
Your goal is to discuss these topics. Our goal is to spread rationality. These two goals are in conflict for reasons beyond the control of either party, reasons which may or may not make sense but which nevertheless are powerful enough to unmake both of us.
I will not help you in your goal, as it conflicts with mine. I will encourage LW against helping you with your goal, as I feel it conflicts with and is damaging to theirs.
And finally, I recommend you push your agenda on a different forum. I would prefer you not return until you are willing to contribute positively to the core mission of LW—that core mission being the spread and improvement of rational thought processes in the general population. As it stands right now, I feel you have contributed net negative utility to the core mission of LW with your posts, and it disturbs me that you seem unable to see that or understand why.
It seems we have one key difference. Some of you believe that having this topic discussed in the open thread risks serious damage to LW because of the danger of a poor reputation. I am not convinced of this.
If it is not true, then I don’t think anyone has suggested any other reason for harm. If this is true, then my participation may have been harmful, though the marginal harm from a little more discussion seems very small.
So far I made one post in the discussion thread suggesting some pedophiles do not molest children. Following advice there, I made my next post in the open thread, which is this current post. I made one more post in the open thread titled “Assertion: Child porn availability does not increase child sex abuse”. I have responded to comments in all of these threads. My current plan, in response to community concerns, is to reply in these threads but not open any new ones. (I note that because of my low karma, I can’t see the results of the poll, a side effect of the entirely reasonably restriction that I can’t vote in it.)
For possession this is most assuredly so. Conceivably it’s so for arguing in favor of looser restrictions on it. It’s hard for me to believe that it is so for arguing against such changes or for being a contributor on the same forum where it is discussed. If anyone has such cases, I’d love to hear about them—by private message is fine.
I have raised two specific cases where facts aren’t clear and there are issues of different kinds of evidence to weigh in reaching a factual determination under conditions of uncertainty. Others have characterized this as my dressing up my concern for the topic in the guise of rationality. I disagree, and suggest that the reason may be mind-killer reactions—but on your side only. It’s hard to tell if they are representative opinions. There are many, many other ways I could have discussed this topic not related to rationality, and I didn’t, and wouldn’t.
It would seem that your goal would be advanced by seeing how rationality considerations apply to any area of human endeavor, especially where they have not been widely discussed before. If rationality considerations could apply to the debate on incarceration policies for drug offenders, for instance, it would advance the goals of LW to discuss them. If this isn’t true for celibate pedophilia, it is only because it is a taboo topic. That may be a sufficient reason, but I think it’s worth being clear about that.
The results of the poll, at this moment… rot-13′d to prevent spoilers...
V cersre n frdhrapr bs negvpyrf—mreb; mreb creprag
V cersre bar negvpyr bayl—bar; frira creprag
V cersre ab negvpyrf, bayl n qvfphffvba va bcra guernq—svir; guveglfvk creprag
V cersre abg gb qvfphff guvf gbcvp ng nyy—svir; guveglfvk creprag
Fbzrguvat ryfr (cyrnfr rkcynva va n pbzzrag) - mreb; mreb creprag
V ershfr gb ibgr ba guvf gnobb gbcvp, whfg fubj zr gur erfhygf—guerr; gjraglbar creprag
That’s very interesting. At what point can one start talking about implications of a poll without it being a spoiler?
I don’t know the actual reasons why my original Discussion post “Assertion: a large proportion of pedophiles are celibate” was deleted—I figure the community has its methods of operation and assume it was all done according to regulations. I am aware of reasons that were given in this thread for wanting it removed—though I don’t know the relationship of those reasons to why it was actually removed.
Survey results suggest considerable support in the community for discussing the topic in the Open Thread. A reasonable person might think it would be appropriate to repost that topic in the Open thread (I have the text of my original post). Such a person would also want to make sure that would not be considered hostile behavior, in the absence of knowing the actual reasons it was removed. I also don’t know what is supposed to happen here when half a community thinks something shouldn’t be discussed and the other half is OK with it.
I don’t know about any specific rule. The general idea is that people should see the poll first (so that they are not influenced how to vote), but I guess three days later it’s fair game.
Voting means deciding whether members want the article or don’t want the article. Your article was extremely downvoted. Like, one of the most downvoted articles ever; probably in the bottom 2%. So if there was any obvious community consensus about removing an article, it was about this one.
Meta: I think it would be more proper to become familiar with norms of a community first, and publish articles later. Comments like this seem to provide further evidence that you are actually not interested in LessWrong per se, just see it as a platform for your topic.
If you interpret “half of members don’t want to disuss it at all, and the other half prefers keeping it in the open thread only” as a considerable support… well, I guess you were going to interpret almost any result positively.
I guess you are going to do it anyway; just let me say there is nothing “reasonable” about reposting a text that got karma below −20.
Well, if people have a strong desire to discuss something, they will. And each comment is upvoted or downvoted on its merits. Knowing that a large part of community does not want some topic either makes people comment less on it, or become extra careful when writing about it.
At this point I am no longer interested even in meta-discussions of this topic. Tapping out.
EDIT: Must… resist… trolling.
You raise interesting points. One could hypothesize that the downvoting of the original article was due to its placement in the prominent Discussion thread, and seeing it in the open thread people would have not objected to it there. It seems an unlikely interpretation of the bulk of the votes, I agree. The serious downvoting of the original article does weigh heavily on this.
I think those who answered the poll were probably a biased sample in a serious way. Who read it? People who were interested in discussing this topic, and people who were not AND who were still motivated enough to be here to continue arguing for not discussing it. Those who didn’t want it discussed were probably underrerepresented.
How my reputation went from −13 to −40 overnight is intriguing. It had been quite stable, and I made a few posts yesterday that were not especially controversial. I speculate that the tapped-out Viliam-Bur in his review of my posts downvoted them all. I guess that’s fine, but maybe considered at a meta level gives one individual more power than is ideal? It is of course just speculation. I’m interested in alternative hypotheses.
I wrote one of the comments you quote, and I also downvoted your article. Originally I felt I shouldn’t upvote it, because it is a PR suicide, but I also shouldn’t downvote it, because it is essentially correct. At that moment the article karma was zero, so maybe other people had similar thoughts. So instead of voting I wrote the comment. But then I saw that you also added the tags to the article, and that was the last straw. It felt like one article was just a one-time incident that could be left ignored, but creating tags felt like saying: this is one of the official topics of this website. Also the fact that you announced your intention to write more articles like this. At that moment it wasn’t a vote about one specific article, but about whether I want this topic to be regularly discussed on LW. Which I don’t.
I completely agree with fubarobfusco that this is what a real social taboo looks like. Quoting Paul Graham’s “What You Can’t Say”:
And this is it. Here is the difference, that for you it is very important to “rehabilitate the color yellow”, but for most of the LW community, even if they would agree with your ideas, “being labelled as a yellowist would just be a distraction”. The cost seems to be too high, in this case.
Please note that some of us use our real names here. Any bad reputation LW gets, has a risk to be connected with our identities; and for example I really don’t volunteer to be connected with this specific cause. Let’s say that for people like me, being non-anonymous on LW was perhaps a stupid decision; I could have easily done otherwise. But there are other people, who didn’t have the choice: people who are employed or otherwise cooperate with MIRI and CFAR. [EDIT: Removed specific examples.] Their publicity is a tool to get their tasks done more efficiently. Again, I don’t know what opinions these people may have on your topic, but as far as I know they didn’t volunteer to be publicly associated with it. I want to protect them just as I want to protect myself.
You do have a point. But there are social consequences, and we do have to make a trade-off. I promise to downvote any future article about this topic. [EDIT: Removed some words of encouragement, because I updated towards the author merely trolling.]
If LW has any value for you even without discussing this specific topic, I’d recommend creating a new username and starting again, never linking to the old one. If no, then please leave.
I would advise against making too specific list of the forbidden topics. But making a vague notion would just invite more questions. Not sure what kind of a “conscious note” we can have here. I guess we should just remember having this conversation, and move on.
This is a good point. I do have one thought about the specific topic under consideration, though. Culturally, there’s a general inability to talk rationally and sensibly about many sexual topics. Given the importance of sex to human life and human happiness, this seems like a serious problem, and many members of the less wrong community have shown an interest in trying to do something about it. Since the inability to discuss pedophilia rationally seems to be connected to this general difficulty in discussing sexual topics rationally, it seems to be a less than perfect match to the “yellow” example. Strategic questions seem to be relevant; is the general cause of talking more rationally about sex helped or hindered by bringing up the extreme cases? I admit that I find it somewhat plausible that the answer is the latter, that it is more productive to focus on less extreme examples, but plausible is different from definitely true. Thus, there might be some value in trying to investigate the strategic questions, while in the hypothetical “yellow” example there seem to be fewer strategic questions worth asking.
Most off-topic discussions here are relatively harmless to LW image. You pretty much chose the most taboo subject available, and you didn’t even try to justify that by making it relevant to rationality. You could have tested the waters by making comments first, and actually participating in discussions available, but no, you just had to start by pushing your political agenda.
I feel bad for the oppressed group in question, but pushing a singular political cause is bottom priority. LW doesn’t exist to fight for any specific group’s civil rights, especially if it happens at the expense of its other goals.
The status judgement is based on people in general, outsiders and potential newcomers. LW isn’t an isolated bubble.
You could talk about civil liberties in general, and why pushing rights for marginal groups is more important for rationalists than other things. If you can’t do that, then all your other efforts are futile.
I think this probably should be a taboo topic because a) the number of people possibly helped by better legislation about this issue is fairly low b) Reputational hazard is extremely high c) it’s not actually something that we can easily get RIGHT. I think the balance between protection of children and the happiness of pedophiles is not something this where we’ll find the right balance on in a discussion here, which lowers the potential benefit even further. The stigmatization of people who have certain feelings they can’t control is likely to be harsher than is good but I can’t actually picture reasonable policy changes that will help the situation.
On the other hand I hate having taboo topics. I downvoted your original post because it was poorly argued and also something I think should probably not be a top-level post but I upvoted this comment for reasonability and because I think the issue is somewhat interesting.
Estimates of pedophilia in the male population are in the 1-5% range. That’s a lot of people.
I’m not sure why not. Of course the community doesn’t seem eager to do so, but it’s because of reputational hazard. Few people may believe me, but the reason I brought this subject up here is because I was genuinely interested in at least a few members of this relatively clear-thinking community here considering the facts and inferences around this issue; it’s an issue where as I see it incorrect beliefs about matters of fact play a large role.
The happiness of pedophiles in certain respects may work in favor of the protection of children. Being able to find a supportive community is likely to reduce offending. Consider http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/what-can-be-done-about-pedophilia/279024/
IF one took an interest in this issue, it is a case where a little effort could have a magnified effect. A single voice can have more effect moving from 2% to 4% tolerance for celibate pedophiles than an issue where the issues are widely known and we’re trying to move from 40% to 51%.
I can. For starters:
Elimination of mandated reporter laws
Elimination of sex offender registries and residency restrictions
Public education on distinguishing sex abuse from pedophilia—get to the point where when someone says “He’s a pedophile” the question that comes to mind is, “Is he an abuser or a celibate pedophile?”
Decriminalization of child pornography possession.
The first three would help protect children—I’m not saying it’s obvious why, but I think I have arguments that would convince a lot of people. The fourth would save a whole lot of money in criminal justice costs.
I’m not agitating for people doing these things in this community. I’m responding to your assertion that there is nothing that could be done if someone wanted to.
all of your examples are tradeoffs, which was my entire point. Each punishes pedophiles in order to (presumably) protect children. Making each of your changes would obviously be better for you and other pedophiles, and you haven’t actually made these arguments you say you have so I don’t see any reason to think they would protect children rather than put them in more danger.
Second: 1-5 percent of men is 0.5-2.5 percent of humans and there are a lot more PSAs about rationality that I think would help a lot more than that many people. What percentage of people are children? If there are a lot more children than pedophiles doesn’t the math say it’s fine to ruin some pedophiles lives?
Third: Multiply all these relatively unconvincing arguments by their likelihood of ever being implemented based on them being discussed here. If we spent a long time talking about this and campaigning for it we MIGHT get a legal change that would help a small percentage of the population but we definitely completely ruin our reputation, not to mention it would distract from anything else we want to talk about.
Mandated reporter laws and the sex offender registry were intended to be trade-offs, but unexpected consequences have made them bad for kids too.
The discussion here doesn’t even mention the effect on pedophiles. Pedophiles who are concerned they might offend against children with low probability know that if they tell a therapist about their attraction, they might be reported, if the therapist decides they are an imminent danger. Most pedophiles don’t know what criteria their therapist would use, they don’t want to risk it, so they do not seek help.
In some cases victims are discouraged from reporting too. Suppose a girl is being abused by her uncle. She doesn’t experience it as terrible but she wants it to stop. But she doesn’t want to face a formal investigation, which involves endless interrogations for her, embarrassing publicity, family strife, and perhaps sending her uncle to prison for 10 years. If she knew there could be a way of handling the situation privately in accord with her needs and wishes, she may be more likely to report it and get it to stop.
Sex offender registries often make it very difficult for an ex-offender to find a place to live. Here is Wikipedia’s take on it. Here is a specific in-depth example. Once ex-offenders are breaking the law by going underground and feeling maltreated by society, there is less reason to obey other laws too, including ones against molesting children.
Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky made a post on this, with terrorism substituted for pedophilia. The benefit of having a therapist able to apply influence to the individual would come from the commitment to privacy. As with priests confessionals, etc.
If the choice is between a potential perpetrator talking to a therapist and having a chance of being influenced but not reported and a potential perpetrator speaking to no one then the consequences are in favour of mandated silence… unless most perpetrators are somehow stupid enough to effectively confess to their impulses to the police for the hell of it.
This scenario sounds a bit fantastical; the rape survivor who doesn’t go to the cops isn’t doing it because they “[didn’t] experience it as terrible” and want to protect their rapist, it’s because doing so puts them on the firing line and brings back all the trauma with the added benefit of a negligible chance of actually seeing justice. I would know here; one of my childhood friends was raped by some freak when she was a little girl, and even though she managed to grow up healthy despite it that single attack still left a lot of deep psychological scars. And that is a best-case scenario; a girl like you describe is trapped with their rapist and is unlikely to even be willing to tell their parents what happened, which means they will be raped over and over while being forced to pretend nothing is wrong.
It’s not the stigma against pedophiles which hurts these children… it’s the pedophiles who rape them.
I realize you claim not to have hurt a child, and if it’s true I’m certainly glad about that, but there really is no comparison between the inconvenience of sexual frustration / possible police investigation and being raped. “Coming out” and making sure that society can protect itself is the only moral thing to do if you really are sincere here; the cost of raping children or providing demand for pornography in which children are raped is so much higher than any price a person can pay socially or legally that you would absolutely come out ahead no matter what happened. The highest ideal of a civilized person is to do the right thing even if it’s painful, and that means having the courage to accept the consequences of your actions.
Or non-actions, as the case may be.
In the discussion of mandated reporter laws, I was thinking not one iota of the interests of the perpetrators of the crime. I was thinking only of the best interests of the children.
There are awful situations, that’s for sure. All I’m trying to address here is the differential between having a mandated reporter law and not having one. Reporting is of course very often the right thing to do, and it will of course be done a lot of the time without a mandated reporter law as well.
This is pretty bewildering. I guess you are assuming that I pose a risk of hurting a child even if I am sure I don’t. Or that I am providing demand for child pornography that I’ve never seen or sought out. For those of you who thought it was obvious that some pedophiles don’t abuse children, I guess you’ve now found someone who doesn’t think it’s obvious at all.
What actions do you have in mind here?
How it works in Finland:
The law says a doctor has the right to report if he deems he could prevent certain serious crimes by doing so. Rape wouldn’t fit the bill, but aggravated rape would. He isn’t allowed to report any crimes that have already happened, with the exception of child abuse. Concerning child abuse, even a suspicion obligates the doctor to report. This means social workers investigate the issue first, and a report rarely involves the law enforcement.
Any laws concerning professional confidentiality are easy enough to circumvent by making anonymous calls, and obviously cops want to protect their witnesses anyway and are enthusiastic to put “the bad guys” behind bars. There are also tricks to break the confidentiality without technically breaking the law. I think it’s also pretty easy just not to report without facing any consequences in most situations, and this actually happens very often because the current law leads to absurd situations and overloads the system.
All this being said, I don’t think changing the reporting laws would change the issue much, and it comes down to personal ethics of the professionals involved.
I don’t know the exact laws in the US but I could imaging that changing them to the Finish ones could be an improvement.
She can privately tell her uncle: “If you don’t stop, I will tell someone.”
What exactly is the problem here? The possibility that the poor uncle doesn’t care and won’t stop...?
Most young children wouldn’t understand the implications of a formal investigation. Children are not mature enough to decide what the correct way to handle the situation is.
ETA: I’d like to understand the thought process behind the downvotes.
I’ll confess that in this case I was thinking of a 14-year-old girl, and I’ve been mostly focusing on prepubescents in other places. For younger children, their parents are of course much more likely to be involved and key players. They too should be able to get outside help without automatic triggering of mandated reporter laws.
Strategic observation: It wasn’t forbidden, it didn’t need to be. It was something that could be (and was) mentioned occasionally. Now it is forbidden (from what I can tell, practically speaking). It needs to be, because frequent posting on the subject would be toxic. In particular frequent high personal and politically motivated advocacy would be a terrible influence, all things considered.
Maximising the impact you personally can have in influencing whatever socially environment you find for yourself requires tact and strategic thinking. Speaking loudly from a soap box doesn’t work unless you are advocating for a group that already has sympathy or status.
Without commenting directly on your topic, I’d like to congratulate you on remaining thoughtful and civil in spite of censure, and not—so far—escalating your interest in discussing this on LW to the point of spam.
Thanks. I try. It is discouraging to get so much negative feedback, and when it gets personal it hurts, but I try to steel myself for it. I feel more than a bit like a sheep in wolves’ clothing, though I realize others will suspect the opposite.
It’s only personal because you’ve made this topic part of your identity. That’s why other posters were recommending you read through the sequences on identity, and why it may be worth reconsidering what you base your identity on.
When people say with some heat that they don’t believe what I say about my own actions and motivations, that seems pretty personal and has nothing I can see to do with identity.
“Celibate pedophile” is a pretty unusual identity. I think of it more as a description. It’s hardly a bandwagon one jumps on. If (as seems true) a fair number of people have never heard of it before, then it doesn’t seem like something that reinforces tired old patterns of thought. A far more common identity is more or less “NAMBLA”—believing adult-child sex is just fine if only it was legalized. I decisively reject that identity.
Athrelon’s argument Against Social Justice Warrioring seems relevant.
If you think that celibate pedophiles might be more in the category of “leper” than “someone down on his luck”, then this article could be taken as suggesting that celibate pedophiles are the very sort of people you might be trying to help, if you’re so inclined to help anyone. Maybe people in general have poor intuitions about who needs help. People in general have poor intuitions about a whole lot of things, but we don’t throw up our hands and not try to make anything better.
I’m wasn’t implying that they are the loveable loser of the parable, rather than the leper. Indeed if I had to bet I would bet on the latter. I am invoking the article to point out the language of civil rights or social justice will likely not work for them precisely for this reason. Unless the argument is mistaken in some grave way.
I can’t imagine a post that starts out with “Note: If you think the assertion is obvious, then this post may well not interest you.” to be a good post on Lesswrong.
Most of the ones that I can think of are math-heavy. For example, I might write a post about “Value of Information is asymmetric because the different possible worlds are asymmetric,” and I would not expect the body of that post to interest someone who thinks that assertion is obvious.
I think that there might be people who think that the assertion is probably true. If I’m however interested in math I care not only about whether the assertion is true but also about whether your proof of the assertion is correct.
P!=NP is in some sense an obvious assertion but it’s still very interesting to search for the proof. Proofs are interesting.
Still at it. Well.
You have done nothing of the sort. You have merely drawn a line around the class (a class of unknown size) of those who have such urges but have never acted on them. But is this concept a natural kind? Does it carve reality at a joint? Does this line on the map correspond to any line in the territory? Is it an empirical cluster in thingspace?
I believe the answer is no. The reality appears to be that there are people who, alas, have urges of this sort, some of whom act on them and are caught, some who act on them and have not been caught, and an unknown number who have not acted. Is there anything to distinguish the latter class from the first two that is predictive of whether or not they will offend in future?
Would you hire as a shop assistant a professed non-practicing kleptomaniac? As an accountant, a professed non-practicing fraudster? For childcare, a professed “celibate pedophile”?
The rest is blatant concern trolling. “Ooh, is this a forbidden topic? Help, help, I’m being discriminated against! Shouldn’t we have a rational discussion about this? Are we only thinking about status? Think of the civil liberties. Poor little me, all those downvotes, how could I possibly tell what they mean? Does anyone want to clarify this?”
Alicorn gives you far too much credit for “remaining thoughtful and civil”. Yes, you are being polite and well-spoken, I’m sure your discourse goes down very well over after-dinner coffee and cigars with like-minded friends, but it’s an empty shell. As C.S. Lewis might have said, it is hard work to make a reasoned argument, but effortless to act as though one has just been made.
These are reasonable questions.
Let’s consider a parallel plan for dividing the world: men attracted to women who have raped them and been caught, men who have raped them and not been caught, and men who have not raped women.
It seems like the more natural way of dividing the world is into concentric circles. A large group feels an attraction, a subset commits a crime, and a subset of that has been caught for the crime. Whether we can identify traits that might make men rape women isn’t the point. The point is that as a matter of human rights, we assume people are innocent until proven guilty. In the case of pedophilia, the immediate goal is to let people entertain the possibility that they are innocent, even if vigilance remains.
I’m not suggesting anyone hire a celibate pedophile as a babysitter. The tolerance that celibate pedophiles seek is far more basic than that. Would you still be friends with one? Keep him on in his office job? Let him go to your church, even if he never goes near the kids? Invite him to the family dinner where there are children? (You are perfectly welcome to make him agree to never go off alone with one of the kids.)
That is a common saying, repeated more often than understood. The police can hardly do their job by actually assuming that everyone is innocent. What the slogan actually means is that they have the burden of proof, and even that only applies to the processes of formal justice. Law enforcement can suspect who they please, for any reason whatever, and direct their enquiries accordingly. And outside of the justice system, everyone is free to use whatever data they have to update their beliefs and actions in whatever way seems justified by the data.
A fundamental theme of this site, if you hadn’t noticed. But you’re not actually interested in the matter of LessWrong, are you?
In the present context, “innocent until proven guilty” is an irrelevance, another Power Word: Stun. It does not mean that as a matter of human rights (Power Word: Stun again) I must believe that someone avowing their attraction to children has never acted on it and is never going to. I have no reason to assign them to the “celibate” pseudo-category.
I would very much keep at least at arms length from any such character, and to the extent it were in my control, keep them away from children. You see, where do I get this supposed knowledge that they are a “celibate pedophile”? Their own word? Why should I believe it? Why should I believe you? The supposed class of “celibate pedophiles” makes about as much sense as “drunk drivers who have never had an accident”.
No they aren’t. It happens to be legal to act on prejudice against celibate pedophiles. It is not legal to act on prejudice against people for their sex, race or the aspect of their sexual preference specific to whether they are attracted to males or females.
Be as prejudiced as you like. It’s almost certainly socially beneficial to you. But you cannot pretend (here) that it is an obvious and natural implication of a generic legal right to do so. The right to discriminate is allowed in some cases (such as this one) but not others.
Presumably you get the knowledge about the second word in the phrase from the same place you got the knowledge about the first word in the phrase. It does not seem to be a particularly unbelievable claim.
Supposed class? What? The connotative claim here is that there are exactly zero people with a primary sexual attraction to prepubescent humans who have not and will not rape children.
Bullshit.
Note to JoshElders: I have a personal aversion to conversations riddled with the type of expression described by Frankfurt in the above linked essay. It seems abundantly clear to me that you directly engaging here with RichardKennaway or anyone similarly mindkilled will result in my exposure to such distasteful reasoning. It is likely that I would downvote both sides of such a conversation according to a “do not feed the moralizer” policy. I give you this information so you know the reason you would be getting downvoted is nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with the choice to provoke easily avoidable bullshit.
You are referring to the contingencies of this and that legal system. I am referring to the rational obligation to properly update on observations. As I said, a theme of this site on occasion, but apparently not on the occasion of your post.
I am quite willing to believe that there are those with pedophile inclinations who have never acted on them. What I am taking issue with it the idea that “celibate pedophile” is a natural cluster of things, any more than “drunk drivers who have not had accidents”. That is why I have called it a supposed class, not because I think it is empty.
Thanks for the explanation. I was formulating a reply shortly after he made the post. At the time, Richard’s post had a −4 karma, so I was actually prohibited from doing so (with my lowly karma ranking). I guess that is the system working as it should. As a newcomer in a situation where most reactions have been negative and none that I recall has moved beyond “grudging tolerance” to “friendly tolerance”, it’s easy to assume that any given opinion might be shared by lots of others.
I think it is important to remember that the current strong sentiments against pedophilia are somewhat anomalous. I wrote several comments touching the subject on Yvain’s blog.
In an add on comment I make the basic harm based argument I’m referring to here explicit
So I’m making the likely controversial case that this argument is the result of post-hoc reasoning that would not convince us in the alternative timeline I also tried to make alievable, not only believable, with my language.
I should also append this follow up comment to avoid this being understood as an on attack or insult to transexuals per se:
This was in the context of me using it as an example of the the capricious nature of what is sometimes termed Moral Progress, the ongoing process of value drift in our civilization.
Extensive research about the harm based argument and transsexual happiness has been done and would have been done regardless of initial political decisions. This would have and probably has affected policy. Now that we have this research, why is wild speculation of historical political trajectories relevant?
I don’t think that the primary reason for giving rights to transsexuals is because of real research. It’s rather the result of political activisim by a certain coaltion of social justice thinkers.
Primary reason or not, I bet the activism is easier with some research to back it. In Finland, sex change is done with taxpayer money after extensive screening for other mental disorders. It’s done because it helps, not because of political advocacy.
There are hypothetical treatments that would reduce harm (“it helps”) in this sense that we would not use because of our current set of ideology/values. Indeed I think it likely this is the case.
I think I finally updated in your direction, just had to let the argument sink in a bit and think of other examples. Abortion laws would be fertile ground for some likely true but controversial arguments.
I think there are also lots of hypothetical disorders that could be treated, but most people would think of it as “medicalization” because it wouldn’t fit their values.
There’s very probably extensive research on the subject, so wild speculation about historical political trajectories isn’t necessary. Have you read any?
I recall making very similar arguments on pedophilia and generally being up voted. I think this is best explained by there being a stricter standard of avoiding taboo topics for main and open thread compared to the comment section.
I recall other controversial subjects such as the effectiveness of terrorism to stop Moore’s law (was upvoted) and racial differences in intelligence (was downvoted) in main articles. And an upvoted article where lukeprog basically took any claim of the PUAs he found plausible and could find academic backing for and presented it divorced from the subculture, that was supposed to be the beginning of a series, but was probably seen as not desirable for the site and discontinued (despite it being upvoted).
I have made arguments about as controversial as the ones in your linked article in comments on pedophilia and have been generally upvoted for them. The same is true of my arguments in favor of there being a hereditary component to the measured racial differences in intelligence. And arguments over some PUA claims. Alas I haven’t commented on terrorism.
I think there is a general norm for things you can’t talk about:
The lesson I think really is to bring these kinds of topics up when they are one relevant example among several. If one wants them discussed as a standalone topics, open threads seem best or discussion section topics at most (hey we need something there besides meetup threads anyway).