I don’t understand what “objectification” means. Even pickup artists can’t think of women as objects, since the only way they can be successful is by interacting with women in accordance with a certain model of the female psyche. Objects don’t have psyches.
If the pickup artist somehow deceives a woman to achieve his goal, then what is morally wrong is the deception. How does objectification fit into this?
The more significant issue is the lack of respect for autonomy and the other individual’s goals. It is, shall we say, “unFriendly”.
It’s perfectly possible to have excellent models of other people’s psyches but no respect for their autonomy; in fact it’s a useful skill in sales and marketing. In the pathological extreme, it’s popularly called “sociopathy”.
I suggest that unFriendly is a hugely more useful general concept than “objectifying”. I often find myself frustrated I can’t use it in conversation with strangers.
The more I think about it the more I suspect that it’s actually the best description yet of the underlying complaint, at least from my perspective.
The term “objectifying” has a lot of additional implications and connotations that distract, cf. the “I objectify supermarket cashiers all the time” type remarks with the “yes but that’s not really wrong” replies.
I’d say it’s entire denotation is useless. Which explains the problems: we’re fighting over denotation when all the data is in the connotation (and ought to be extracted to stand alone).
Also, ‘unFriendly’ is supposed to be a technical term involving AI ‘behavior’, and as Eliezer points out, it’s hard to see how it applies to human behavior.
“UnFriendly” is supposed to be a technical term covering a tremendous range of AIs. What do you mean by it in this context? Flawed fun theory? Disregard for volition?
In this specific case, the disregard for volition. In the more general sense, stretching the term by analogy to describe any behavior from an agent with a significant power advantage that wouldn’t be called “Friendly” if done by an AI with a power advantage over humans.
The implicit step here, I think, is that whatever value system an FAI would have would also make a pretty good value system for any agent in a position of power, allowing for limitations of cognitive potential.
I think the idea of objectification has more to do with considering instances to be fungible. The typical PUA thinking about how to “bang the next hot chick” (which he phrases as “get a woman”) is considering a small subset of women as completely interchangeable for his purposes, as if they were completely fungible entities like dollar bills or bars of gold-pressed latinum.
But as has been talked about recently, it’s not the objectification alone that makes it icky, because we probably agree that there’s nothing wrong with “we need to get a gardener”. What makes the latter okay is why you want to get one: for a mutually beneficial business relationship. When we hear people talk about “getting a woman”, it is usually not in the sense of entering into a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather in the sense of deceiving the woman into believing what they think will make her more likely to sleep with them (and then discarding them).
So to summarize, bad objectification is objectification for malevolent ends (simple test: does the object object to the objectification? In the case of the gardener or cook, probably not; in the case of a woman, almost certainly yes).
The typical PUA thinking about how to “bang the next hot chick” (which he phrases as “get a woman”) is considering a small subset of women as completely interchangeable for his purposes, as if they were completely fungible entities like dollar bills or bars of gold-pressed latinum.
I can’t speak about the “typical” PUA, but I will note that there are a fair number of PUG’s (pickup gurus) who speak in the opposite way: that every woman is unique, and they love each and every one as a unique individual. Daniel Rose, Johnny Soporno, and Juggler are a few that come to mind right off. I was also under the impression that this is the attitude of many “naturals” as well.
My point about all this is that if you’re going to complain about people speaking of general characteristics of a group that don’t apply to all of that group, it’d be a good idea not to try to justify it by speaking in generalities about another group, when those generalities also don’t apply to all its members. It sort of undermines your point.
Thanks for calling me out. What I should have said, and what I meant, instead of PUA is the womanizers that I’ve known in real life who value sleeping with as many different conventionally attractive women as possible and who have no scruples about how they do so and no concern for the women they sleep with that extend past sleeping with them once. They would say that every woman is unique, but words are cheap, and actions speak louder. In terms of behavior, what I’ve observed is that when they are in a large crowded bar, any of many, many different women is interchangeable to them. If it doesn’t work out with woman#7, they just go immediately to #8 or #17 without missing a beat. Such is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique. Maybe I’m completely mistaken by believing that this sort of attitude is common in the PU community? [And to say it is common is not of course to say that is everywhere present and that there aren’t exceptions.]
I have no idea about the PUA community; but from my own experience of times when I was single, there were moments when my desire for a relationship was a 2-place function (i.e. I was pining for this particular woman) and times when it was a 1-place function (i.e. I wanted to have a relationship with some desirable woman). Of course, I’d probably bomb with any girl if I’d admitted to being in the latter state, so there was some level of repressing my awareness of this.
I think that the things pick-up artists convince themselves they believe are kind of irrelevant to actual male psychology; to the extent that my experience is typical and honestly perceived, there are times and places when actual male desire is quite depersonalized, along with times and places when one can be more proud of what one feels.
I can identify too with the 1-place versus 2-place function analogy. Where I part company from the womanizers I’ve known though and that I had in mind with my comment is that even if I think of a generic “desirable woman”, that’s just a placeholder for a real, living, breathing autonomous agent. The womanizers, or the more sociopathic ones, at least, think of it as a placeholder for something to have sex with, which brings us back to the question of objectification and not respecting the agency of other people. I won’t say that I don’t sometimes succumb to what I’m deploring, but I try to catch myself and to do it less frequently.
In a trivial sense of unique, of course every person—woman or not—is unique because they do not occupy the same location in time-space. Just as obviously, we are not talking about uniqueness in that sense.
Just as obviously, we are not talking about uniqueness in that sense.
We seem to be talking past each other. I am saying that each person offers a unique experience of interaction. Some more preferable than others, of course.
Thus, the PUGs who profess to “love all women” state that they wish to have as many of those experiences as possible, and extend their contact with the women who their lifestyle is compatible with.
And AFAICT, their behavior is consistent with this. Soporno claims to have around 30 girlfriends at any one time—all of whom are required to know and accept this fact, or else aren’t allowed to be his girlfriend in the first place.
Rose states that so-called PUAs who only do one-night stands are depriving themselves of the depth and intensity of sexual and emotional intimacy possible in a longer-term relationship… and he also has been involved in “multi LTRs”, though not to the same extent as Soporno.
There’s a British PUG who talks about having dozens of female friends he doesn’t sleep with, but goes clubbing with.. and they help him “chat up” the women he does intend to sleep with. Many other PUGs lecture guys on the importance of genuinely being interested in women and wanting to spend time on them, because if you don’t , then it’s sort of a waste to spend time learning how to talk to them.
Meanwhile, PUG Eben Pagan (stage name “David DeAngelo”, author of the “Double Your Dating” product line) has spoken in his marketing classes about his typical customer really just wanting to know how to talk to a woman and ask her out without being embarrassed… and since his is probably the largest internet dating advice business out there (at $20million annual gross), I would guess that means that most guys buying “pickup” training just want to learn how to talk to someone they’re attracted to without feeling like an idiot… not how to say some magic words and get laid. Other gurus have also noted that most of the men in their classes are looking for “the one”—they just want to know what to say when they meet her, and they know they’re not going to meet her by sitting at home and not talking to anybody.
So, all of this strikes me as a considerable amount of evidence in favor of the proposition that there are a significant number of men who actually do believe each woman is unique, are not primarily interested in one-night stands, and yet also believe in knowing what they’re doing, and/or meeting more than one woman.
I said that womanizers I have known consider women interchangeable, because in their plot to sleep with as many women as possible, they ever so easily substitute one for another when their moves fail on the current target. I said that is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique.
You said of course they consider all women to be unique, because “If every one is unique, then surely you’d want to meet them all. ”
I pointed out that you’re equivocating on unique, and now you’re changing the topic again.
You said of course they consider all women to be unique
No, I said that the behavior you described is consistent with considering all women to be unique. And it is. It just also happens to be consistent with the behavior of a jerk.
The topic change is that when I made the uniqueness comment, I was talking about womanizers I’ve known, not PUA or famous PUA gurus. Secondly, you keep equivocating on unique. Of course every person offers a unique experience of interaction. They are also all made out of utterly unique particles in utterly different configurations and no two of them have ever precisely occupied the same locations in time-space. That’s all irrelevant for the sense of uniqueness I explained, which has do with behavior and interchangeability.
The way in which I’ve said that womanizers I’ve known do not behave as if women are unique is that when they go out clubbing, if they’re with a bunch of friends, they’re quite willing to draw straws to see which of the potential women they get to chat up, and they hardly care which of many attractive women they get to go home with, as long as they go home with one of them, for they consider them not to be unique in the requisite sense of being attractive and willing to sleep with them. Sure they’re all different, but the differences are irrelevant to them, except possibly as a strategy to use for seducing the woman in question.
That’s all irrelevant for the sense of uniqueness I explained, which has do with behavior and interchangeability.
And you’re still missing my point: the behavior you describe can be generated by many different beliefs or perceptions internal to the person generating the behavior, and you cannot know (unless you ask, or at least perform a more detailed test than the one you’ve desribed) whether the person is willing to meet many different women because he does—or does not—consider them unique.
That is, until you ask, you can’t know whether his thought process is, “Every woman is unique, so no matter who I meet it will be a fun and interesting experience to discover what she’s like,” or else something so crude I won’t render it into actual words here.
What I have been pointing out is that there are people who state, teach, and promote the mindset I have spelled out here. Certainly, there are people of the other mindset, and disagreeable as it might be, I don’t argue with the fact that mindset also exists. You seem to be denying, however, that the more enlightened mindset also exists.
My original point was about particular individuals, womanizers that I’ve had conversations with and one of whom I knew very well.
I’ll agree that womanizing might arise out of thinking every woman is unique in a non-trivial (albeit not necessarily benign) sense, as you have suggested, but my point was that there is a tension between maintaining uniqueness and considering them fungible (even if they’re not totally incompatible). I’m not in the slightest interested in PUA and dating/seduction techniques and related topics, so I don’t have anything more to say on this topic.
Maybe I’m completely mistaken by believing that this sort of attitude is common in the PU community?
No you are not mistaken, but there are good, empirical reasons for this attitude.
So, this comment got downvoted, why? I provided a piece of valuable empirical data which constrains our model of reality to the group mind, and then I got punished for doing so. Maybe I should stop optimizing my comments for informativeness, and start trying to just optimize for whatever people vote up?
No you are not mistaken, but there are good, empirical reasons for this attitude.
I don’t think so. The behavior of “if at first you don’t succeed” has obvious empirical backing, but there is more than one attitude that can generate that same behavior.
Some of those attitudes (like, “I’m a fun person and I like to meet a lot of new and interesting people”, or “women are fascinating and I want to meet them all”) have MUCH better effects on the person holding them, as well as better effects on the people they come into contact with.
You provided no empirical data. You made a rather vague claim about some supposed empirical data, and its reason-providing nature. Did you have, say, a study or something to back you up?
I didn’t vote you down, but I did just vote up to correct what I think was an inappropriate downvote, but perhaps the person downvoted for alluding to “good, empirical” reasons but not spelling them out. I’ve noticed comments that allude to things without elaborating giving any detail whatsoever often get voted down.
Even pickup artists can’t think of women as objects, since the only way they can be successful is by interacting with women in accordance with a certain model of the female psyche.
I would also hazard a guess that people who are “naturally good with women” objectify women more than people who use PUA techniques. Without the benefit of careful analysis, respect for the “goals or interests or personhood” of the picked-up turns out to be detrimental: many “naturals” flounder when they have to abandon their “tried and tested” rules-of-thumb and seek an intimate relationship.
Deception is wrong too. It’s certainly possible to do things that are morally wrong without objectifying anyone. However, “modeling the female psyche” does not mean that no objectification is going on. That modeling is a prerequisite for achieving the goals of the pickup artist, which don’t typically seem to include respect for the goals or interests or personhood of the picked-up (except inasmuch as knowledge of these things serves the success of the pickup attempt). It’s no more personalizing than modeling the behavior of an AI opponent in a video game, who must be defeated to win the game.
So to objectify someone is to think of him in a way that doesn’t include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood?
According to this definition, I objectify the bus driver, the cashier at the local Walmart, and just about everybody I interact with on an average day.
To that degree, yes, just as they objectify you as ‘passenger’, or ‘customer’.
But even as we interact as ‘passenger’ and ‘bus driver’, and probably don’t have any desire but to do what we have to do as efficiently as possible, we do generally keep in mind that we are both people with concerns about our respect and we don’t casually devalue each other for playing out the roles we have. There’s still an assumption of basic personhood going on.
But I think that when people start talking about getting sex from a woman with the same degree of respect and mutuality as is required when getting a can of cola from a vending machine, then they’ve gone an extra step on the road to objectification. And adding on a “well that’s what women want too” as an afterthought when questioned about it doesn’t really convince.
I’ll concede that the “pick up artist” is to some extent a role that is played by guys who aren’t necessarily so entirely cynical in reality, but I’m not sure that means it’s non-issue.
OK, well given this clarification, it seems to me just fine to objectify people, and in fact I recommend doing so when what one is trying to do is neutral analysis about the facts of some matter. Objectify your teacher when deciding if school is worth the effort, and objectify your doctor when deciding if medicine is worth the cost.
It’s important to note that neither of those scenarios include interacting with the person being so objectified. Also note the point about the ethical considerations being different in economic transactions, e.g. thomblake’s comment.
What about objectifying a job candidate in an interview? Do you choose the candidate with experience, who will feel dead-ended but perform a better job? You might interpret this as a deliberate stunting of their volition (the sense of objectification I’m using), interfering with their actual goals despite their outward actions.
Any overqualified candidate that gets hired is objectified in an arguably worse way than the target of a PUA, despite the potential mitigations the economic transaction may bring about.
(Edit: Rereading this, I’m worried that I sound confrontational; I don’t mean to be, but I’m not sure how else to edit without becoming too prolix.)
Well, I actually do find this sort of thing ethically objectionable to some level, but defensible on consequentialist grounds because of the social benefits of economic efficiency. So I don’t know that I can give you a satisfying answer.
For what it’s worth, I hold a lot of sales and marketing in even lower regard than PUA silliness.
Maybe this definition is more isomorphic to the “objectification of women” than it first appears. For example, the other day my family was going to get our photograph taken. After about seven pictures were taken, we were lead to another room where a man showed us our photographs in turn so we could decide on the one we liked. It occurred to me that we probably could have operated the computer that did this ourselves, in which case he would have been out of a job. I objectified him, and I’m quite certain he would have been offended if I’d said my thoughts aloud.
So. Objectification is a good thing for the person who does it, but it’s quite normal for the person on the receiving end to be offended.
Are you saying that you don’t? Or that you do, but that this kind of objectification is somehow different from the kind you condemn? If so, what’s the difference?
The major difference is that it’s more socially acceptable. Yes, I realize this is a non-answer. The answer you probably want is “they’re getting paid for it”. There’s no expectation of social relationship between peers.
Furthermore, as I said elsewhere, wanton disregard for the autonomy of such people is still frowned upon in the extreme cases. Noone likes the boss who treats employees like cogs, or the demanding customer who pushes around customer service staff because they know they can.
The answer you probably want is “they’re getting paid for it”.
Well, no. I happened to pick a bus driver and cashier as my examples, but I could just as easily have picked my next door neighbor. I don’t dislike him, but I couldn’t care less about his goals or interests or personality.
Furthermore, as I said elsewhere, wanton disregard for the autonomy of such people is still frowned upon in the extreme cases. Noone likes the boss who treats employees like cogs, or the demanding customer who pushes around customer service staff because they know they can.
Treating people in a certain way goes beyond mere objectification as Alicorn has defined it:
“Thinking of a person in a way that doesn’t include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood.”
I’m still trying to obtain a coherent definition of “objectification” that is both morally reprehensible and independent from any harmful action, such as deceiving a woman to get her into bed or treating one’s employees like cogs.
I’m not sure that it needs to be independent of harmful action. The way I tend to think about it is that thinking of others as tools to one’s own ends, with no regard for their ends, is something that increases the risk of harmful action, which is bad.
The thing is, this risk also depends crucially on context, so on this theory, we would expect the social acceptability of objectification to increase where the risk of leading to harm is lowest. This seems to roughly fit my intuitions at least: objectifying teachers when deciding on what school to attend seems ok (there’s little risk of harm to them, and whatever harm there is seems justified on efficiency grounds); but treating other parties to intimate relationships as simply means to your own ends is bad (because it’s much more likely to end up hurting someone); meanwhile, treating, say waitstaff as simply a means to getting a meal is probably somewhere in between (it increases the chance that you might be a complete ass in the course of your personal interactions, but this may only manifest itself if something goes wrong).
ETA: as additional examples, we could also consider: treating consumers as people whose needs you are trying to fulfil vs. people you just want to get money out of, whether they really want what you’re selling or not; and treating staff as engines to pump out products, vs. actual human beings.
If it helps any, instances of ‘thinking’ that don’t go beyond that will probably not appear on this website. They at least need to go as far as ‘writing’.
See this comment—there are some contexts where treating people as objects is at least socially expected, and arguably fine, and economic transactions are one of them.
Am I right in thinking you don’t respect the goals, interests, or personhood of the pickup artist? Consider a scenario in which there is a PUA who desires sex and a woman who does not. Which outcome do you prefer, one where the PUA changes her mind and they engage in consensual sex, or the woman turns him down and he goes home alone? If you think the first outcome is negative, why? Would your answer be the same if it was a woman trying to pick up a man? Is it morally objectionable to change someone’s mind? Is it only so if manipulative techniques are used? Is it possible to change most people’s minds without using manipulative techniques to some degree? If you asked someone to help you move a sofa, would you do so in a monotone voice or would you do so cheerfully with a smile? If these questions seem unnecessarily antagonistic, I apologize. I simply want to understand your position.
For the record, I have a deep personal dislike of pickup artists, especially those who employ NLP. I do not, however, find their methods morally questionable.
Am I right in thinking you don’t respect the goals, interests, or personhood of the pickup artist?
We are in grave danger of equivocating the word “respect” here, so let me clarify: when I define objectification, the kind of “respect” I mean is an acknowledgment of those things and recognition of commensurability with one’s own corresponding goals, interests, and personhood, not an approval. I acknowledge the goals, interests, and personhood of pickup artists, and recognize them as similar to my own in many ways (in structure, not content). I don’t approve of the goals and interests they seem to share as a group (although I do approve of their personhood).
Your question is vastly too broad for me to say which outcome I prefer. If you made it more specific—if I knew something about the method of the PUA, the reasons behind the woman’s initial reluctance, her typical dispositions with regards to casual sex, etc., then I might be able to answer you. The same goes for the situation where the woman is attempting to pick up the man.
Is it morally objectionable to change someone’s mind? Is it only so if manipulative techniques are used? Is it possible to change most people’s minds without using manipulative techniques to some degree?
There are ways to change people’s minds without doing anything morally objectionable. My favored method is usually just transparent, bald-faced announcement of all my intentions. I actually go about saying things like “I did work today and seek praise!” or “I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I’m probably going to talk about my ex in a minute” or “I don’t like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt” or “I’m going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn’t take that long”. Of course I accompany these things with either actual smiles or emoticons because I like to project an air of adorable friendliness, but of course I’m actually adorable and friendly so that’s okay ;)
I don’t approve of the goals and interests they seem to share as a group (although I do approve of their personhood).
Isn’t it actually their methods you disapprove of? Disapproving of a pretty innate male desire to engage in frequent intercourse seems unfair at best and Puritan at worst. Their goals do not involve manipulating women any more than my goal of driving to the store is also a goal to drive my car. If a man can pick up a woman simply by talking honestly to her about his romantic feelings, do you still disapprove of his actions because he may share the same goal as the pickup artist?
My favored outcome is usually just transparent, bald-faced announcement of all my intentions. I actually go about saying things like “I did work today and seek praise!” or “I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I’m probably going to talk about my ex in a minute” or “I don’t like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt” or “I’m going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn’t take that long”. Of course I accompany these things with either actual smiles or emoticons because I like to project an air of adorable friendliness, but of course I’m actually adorable and friendly so that’s okay ;)
Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? “I did work today and seek praise” is an extraordinarily manipulative (and clever) statement. It, and the others, are obviously intended to subvert cached thought, catching off guard the recipient who may not rise to the bait of responding positively to the more common, “Today was a tough day” or “I hope I did okay, what do you think?” By using unusual and unexpectedly honest phrasing and presenting yourself as “adorable and friendly”, are you really being transparent, or are you actually employing a manipulative method of your own? After all, if it never worked, surely you would self-update to a better technique. And wouldn’t claiming you are actually being transparent be a defense against your own cached representation of in order to preserve your internal belief that you are not being manipulative?
Isn’t it actually their methods you disapprove of?
I guess in addition to defining “respect” I should have defined “goal”. In attempting to fully describe a goal, I’d usually be inclined to include caveats about what methods wouldn’t be okay for me to use to achieve that goal. For instance, it’s my goal to watch the entirety of Stargate SG-1, but not if I have to steal the DVDs from WalMart to do it.
Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? “I did work today and seek praise” is an extraordinarily manipulative (and clever) statement.
I’m… sorry you feel that way? I am genuinely going for “clear and honest”, not “manipulative and clever”.
After all, if it never worked, surely you would self-update to a better technique.
If saying “I did work today and request praise” (an example of something I actually said today) doesn’t promptly yield praise, I (actually did) follow up with “You are not fulfilling my request. You should fix that.” If that hadn’t “worked”, I probably would have gone and talked to somebody else, and refrained from seeking praise from that person in the future, on the assumption that they had no interest in praising me for doing work. I wouldn’t have moved to a less clear and honest strategy to get the uncooperative individual to give me what I wanted.
If saying “I did work today and request praise” (an example of something I actually said today) doesn’t promptly yield praise, I (actually did) follow up with “You are not fulfilling my request. You should fix that.” If that hadn’t “worked”, I probably would have gone and talked to somebody else, and refrained from seeking praise from that person in the future, on the assumption that they had no interest in praising me for doing work.
Did you offer your conversation partner anything of value, other than an implied threat of disapproval if they failed to accede to your demand? Were you thinking about their goals, other than how they related to your desire to receive praise?
It seems to me that, by your definitions, one can objectify, or manipulate, but not both. If you took your conversant’s goals into consideration and offered something for what you wanted, then you manipulated. If you didn’t take them into account, then you objectified.
Or do you claim that there is a third category, in which you thought about their goals, but didn’t allow this to affect your choices in any way? Then this seems like even worse objectification, since you knew they had other goals and nonetheless chose not to act accordingly.
Or perhaps the loophole is that if you just state what you want, then other people simply “should” give it to you, and that therefore this isn’t manipulation? Is it only manipulation if you offer to give someone something they actually want, and offering veiled threats instead is just “honest” communication?
Now, let’s contrast your strategy with a pickup-artist strategy, known as the Apocalypse Opener. Like your approach, it’s based on blunt honesty and an open statement of intention. But there are a couple of key differences.
First, the PUA waits until the third sentence of the conversation (not counting “hello” or “hey”) to state his intention, treating the other person with conventional courtesy first, rather than simply stating a demand.
Second, the request is not even a request, let alone a demand. It’s framed as an invitation, an offering of something valuable.
Third, if the invitation is declined, the PUA neither pressures the other person with a threat of disapproval, nor departs the conversation. He simply continues treating them in a friendly way, leaving the invitation open and giving them time to consider it.
By your definitions, which is more manipulative? Which more objectifying? To whom?
At a first glance, yours strikes me as both more manipulative and more objectifying, since you don’t offer your conversant anything of value to them (i.e. ignoring their goals and objectifying), and you include a veiled threat (using their goals to get what you want, i.e. manipulation). In contrast, the PUA does nothing but offer things of potential value to his conversant, and does not offer even the minor threat of withholding his approval or company.
Did you offer your conversation partner anything of value, other than an implied threat of disapproval if they failed to accede to your demand? Were you thinking about their goals, other than how they related to your desire to receive praise?
This is the beginning of the conversation in question:
Alicorn: I did work and request praise!
Alicorn: You are not fulfilling my request.
Alicorn: You should fix that.
Interlocutor Mine, Name Redacted: *praise*
Alicorn: :D
Interlocutor Mine, Name Redacted: Good job, keep up the good work
Alicorn: *is pleased with self*
Prior context in an earlier conversation included an exchange about how I’ve been having trouble getting work done lately, and should be chided if I didn’t do any today. So… I guess I offered my charming company and a smiley? IMNR is my friend, we talk frequently, I usually operate under the assumption that IMNR has some desire to interact with me in a friendly manner. IMNR is free to disabuse me of this notion at any time and I will leave him alone.
If you took your conversant’s goals into consideration and offered something for what you wanted, then you manipulated. If you didn’t take them into account, then you objectified.
Explicit trades of services do not have to be objectifying. I exchange Christmas gifts with various relatives, and if I stopped giving people Christmas presents, I’d probably stop getting them; that doesn’t mean anybody is being objectified.
Or do you claim that there is a third category, in which you thought about their goals, but didn’t allow this to affect your choices in any way?
Something can be an influencing factor without being a controlling factor. For instance, when I make curry, the cayenne pepper contributes to the curry being spicy. If I left out the cayenne, it would still be spicy, because there are a half a dozen other spicy things in it.
Or perhaps the loophole is that if you just state what you want, then other people simply “should” give it to you, and that therefore this isn’t manipulation?
No, not really. Certain desires ought to be accommodated (e.g. I just asked my roommate if it’d bother her for me to have music on in a particular room when she went to bed; she said yes, so I moved to a different room). Certain desires don’t have to (I doubt I would have harbored resentment if IMNR had refrained from supplying desired praise) and satisfying them is super-erogatory.
Now, let’s contrast your strategy with a pickup-artist strategy, known as the Apocalypse Opener.
Meh. It looks honest enough; some phatic introduction and a question. There doesn’t seem anything wrong with this strategy in particular to me. It surprises me that it works, but that’s purely empirical.
If people want things of value from me, they can ask me for them. If I want things from other people, I ask for them. If I have something I think someone else would like and I like them and want them to have it, I offer it to them. People who like me and have things they think I would like and want me to have them offer them to me. These events don’t always occur simultaneously, but over the course of a friendship or other extended interpersonal association, it works well enough to suit me.
For instance, it’s my goal to watch the entirety of Stargate SG-1, but not if I have to steal the DVDs from WalMart to do it.
So to dig up an old chestnut, the ends do not justify the means. What I am still unsure about is whether or not you disapprove of the ends. Does this mean you are okay with the goal of picking up women, as long as you do not use particular techniques to do so? The stumbling block I run into on this is that there are no male-female sexual interactions entirely free of psychological modeling, signaling or predictive behaviour on both sides—or if there are, they certainly don’t exist in the human population at large. It seems to me that pickup artists are merely trying to compete with men who are naturally charismatic and charming. Is the real solution to actually handicap such men so that manipulative techniques are not necessary for competition?
By the way, I consider watching the entirety of Stargate SG-1 morally questionable, but this argument is subjective enough as it is...
I’m… sorry you feel that way? I am genuinely going for “clear and honest”, not “manipulative and clever”.
As you have pointed out, your intentions should not be confused with your methods.
You seem to think that adopting a baseline, rational approach to something like requesting praise for your work is maximally non-manipulative and honest. It certainly could be, if you were speaking to a Turing-incomplete chatbot. Unfortunately, people don’t operate that way. If you formally ask for praise and object when none is forthcoming, are you respecting the “goals, interests and personhood” of the recipient as much as you would be if you asked nothing of them? And can such a non-standard method of human communication possibly be as “clear and honest” as a standard method? Put another way, does your employment of open honesty contain other signals i.e. does it carry the signal “You should give my request for praise more weight because I am visibly being honest and not trying to bait you into it”?
Be wary of saying things that are the equivalent of “I’m not going to say ‘trust me’, because that doesn’t mean anything, but a is b.” Such a statement actually indicates that the speaker is doubly untrustworthy.
Now, I don’t believe you are being intentionally manipulative and clever, or that you are definitely being so unintentionally. This is not an argument I’m trying to win against you. I’m just asking you to consider the chance that you unaware of the possibility of it.
Does this mean you are okay with the goal of picking up women, as long as you do not use particular techniques to do so?
I have no ethical problems with the desire to have no-strings-attached sex with people of any description. I simply require that this be pursued honestly and non-coercively.
It seems to me that pickup artists are merely trying to compete with men who are naturally charismatic and charming.
I also have no ethical problem with people trying to become more charismatic and charming.
does your employment of open honesty contain other signals i.e. does it carry the signal “You should give my request for praise more weight because I am visibly being honest and not trying to bait you into it”?
No, not really. Or if it does, that’s an accident. I started doing my intention-announcement when I decided that if I was going to get annoyed at other people wanting me to read their minds, I’d better provide the courtesy I wanted to them. I did not wish to become one of the people whose interpersonal relationships were plagued with arguments that wind up culminating in “Well, why didn’t you just say so?” If I seek praise, I announce it. Other people may or may not care about my seeking, and may or may not indulge my desire. This gives me information about their dispositions towards me, instead of confused feedback that might reflect on either that or their level of telepathic ability.
It’s possible that I’m being unintentionally manipulative, and if that is the case, I would like to stop. If you have suggestions about how I can signify all and only the things I think I’m signifying in my sample statements and statements like them, I’d welcome the input.
For reference, I would find your method to be manipulative. I also don’t think you’re being manipulative on purpose (or at least I don’t have any data to think you are or aren’t).
I don’t think there is a fully general way to request praise without manipulation. It’s going to depend on each person’s life experiences and how they view you.
My favored method is usually just transparent, bald-faced announcement of all my intentions. I actually go about saying things like “I did work today and seek praise!” or “I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I’m probably going to talk about my ex in a minute” or “I don’t like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt” or “I’m going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn’t take that long”.
I actually go about saying things like “I did work today and seek praise!” or “I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I’m probably going to talk about my ex in a minute” or “I don’t like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt” or “I’m going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn’t take that long”.
You’re right, it’s hardly fair of me to want it of others if I can’t deliver it myself. I was thinking only of the many times the desire of it in others has served as an excuse for my lack of perception.
I don’t understand what “objectification” means. Even pickup artists can’t think of women as objects, since the only way they can be successful is by interacting with women in accordance with a certain model of the female psyche. Objects don’t have psyches.
If the pickup artist somehow deceives a woman to achieve his goal, then what is morally wrong is the deception. How does objectification fit into this?
The more significant issue is the lack of respect for autonomy and the other individual’s goals. It is, shall we say, “unFriendly”.
It’s perfectly possible to have excellent models of other people’s psyches but no respect for their autonomy; in fact it’s a useful skill in sales and marketing. In the pathological extreme, it’s popularly called “sociopathy”.
I suggest that unFriendly is a hugely more useful general concept than “objectifying”. I often find myself frustrated I can’t use it in conversation with strangers.
The more I think about it the more I suspect that it’s actually the best description yet of the underlying complaint, at least from my perspective.
The term “objectifying” has a lot of additional implications and connotations that distract, cf. the “I objectify supermarket cashiers all the time” type remarks with the “yes but that’s not really wrong” replies.
I’d say it’s entire denotation is useless. Which explains the problems: we’re fighting over denotation when all the data is in the connotation (and ought to be extracted to stand alone).
“unFriendly” is the more general concept, but I think “objectifying” is still an important special case.
Also, ‘unFriendly’ is supposed to be a technical term involving AI ‘behavior’, and as Eliezer points out, it’s hard to see how it applies to human behavior.
Right—the human concept is good ol’ “unfriendly”, no CamelCase.
“UnFriendly” is supposed to be a technical term covering a tremendous range of AIs. What do you mean by it in this context? Flawed fun theory? Disregard for volition?
In this specific case, the disregard for volition. In the more general sense, stretching the term by analogy to describe any behavior from an agent with a significant power advantage that wouldn’t be called “Friendly” if done by an AI with a power advantage over humans.
The implicit step here, I think, is that whatever value system an FAI would have would also make a pretty good value system for any agent in a position of power, allowing for limitations of cognitive potential.
Mostly disregard for volition, but also satisficing too early on fun.
I think the idea of objectification has more to do with considering instances to be fungible. The typical PUA thinking about how to “bang the next hot chick” (which he phrases as “get a woman”) is considering a small subset of women as completely interchangeable for his purposes, as if they were completely fungible entities like dollar bills or bars of gold-pressed latinum.
But as has been talked about recently, it’s not the objectification alone that makes it icky, because we probably agree that there’s nothing wrong with “we need to get a gardener”. What makes the latter okay is why you want to get one: for a mutually beneficial business relationship. When we hear people talk about “getting a woman”, it is usually not in the sense of entering into a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather in the sense of deceiving the woman into believing what they think will make her more likely to sleep with them (and then discarding them).
So to summarize, bad objectification is objectification for malevolent ends (simple test: does the object object to the objectification? In the case of the gardener or cook, probably not; in the case of a woman, almost certainly yes).
I can’t speak about the “typical” PUA, but I will note that there are a fair number of PUG’s (pickup gurus) who speak in the opposite way: that every woman is unique, and they love each and every one as a unique individual. Daniel Rose, Johnny Soporno, and Juggler are a few that come to mind right off. I was also under the impression that this is the attitude of many “naturals” as well.
My point about all this is that if you’re going to complain about people speaking of general characteristics of a group that don’t apply to all of that group, it’d be a good idea not to try to justify it by speaking in generalities about another group, when those generalities also don’t apply to all its members. It sort of undermines your point.
Thanks for calling me out. What I should have said, and what I meant, instead of PUA is the womanizers that I’ve known in real life who value sleeping with as many different conventionally attractive women as possible and who have no scruples about how they do so and no concern for the women they sleep with that extend past sleeping with them once. They would say that every woman is unique, but words are cheap, and actions speak louder. In terms of behavior, what I’ve observed is that when they are in a large crowded bar, any of many, many different women is interchangeable to them. If it doesn’t work out with woman#7, they just go immediately to #8 or #17 without missing a beat. Such is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique. Maybe I’m completely mistaken by believing that this sort of attitude is common in the PU community? [And to say it is common is not of course to say that is everywhere present and that there aren’t exceptions.]
I have no idea about the PUA community; but from my own experience of times when I was single, there were moments when my desire for a relationship was a 2-place function (i.e. I was pining for this particular woman) and times when it was a 1-place function (i.e. I wanted to have a relationship with some desirable woman). Of course, I’d probably bomb with any girl if I’d admitted to being in the latter state, so there was some level of repressing my awareness of this.
I think that the things pick-up artists convince themselves they believe are kind of irrelevant to actual male psychology; to the extent that my experience is typical and honestly perceived, there are times and places when actual male desire is quite depersonalized, along with times and places when one can be more proud of what one feels.
I can identify too with the 1-place versus 2-place function analogy. Where I part company from the womanizers I’ve known though and that I had in mind with my comment is that even if I think of a generic “desirable woman”, that’s just a placeholder for a real, living, breathing autonomous agent. The womanizers, or the more sociopathic ones, at least, think of it as a placeholder for something to have sex with, which brings us back to the question of objectification and not respecting the agency of other people. I won’t say that I don’t sometimes succumb to what I’m deploring, but I try to catch myself and to do it less frequently.
Huh? Of course it is. If every one is unique, then surely you’d want to meet them all. Otherwise, you’d almost certainly be missing out on something.
In a trivial sense of unique, of course every person—woman or not—is unique because they do not occupy the same location in time-space. Just as obviously, we are not talking about uniqueness in that sense.
We seem to be talking past each other. I am saying that each person offers a unique experience of interaction. Some more preferable than others, of course.
Thus, the PUGs who profess to “love all women” state that they wish to have as many of those experiences as possible, and extend their contact with the women who their lifestyle is compatible with.
And AFAICT, their behavior is consistent with this. Soporno claims to have around 30 girlfriends at any one time—all of whom are required to know and accept this fact, or else aren’t allowed to be his girlfriend in the first place.
Rose states that so-called PUAs who only do one-night stands are depriving themselves of the depth and intensity of sexual and emotional intimacy possible in a longer-term relationship… and he also has been involved in “multi LTRs”, though not to the same extent as Soporno.
There’s a British PUG who talks about having dozens of female friends he doesn’t sleep with, but goes clubbing with.. and they help him “chat up” the women he does intend to sleep with. Many other PUGs lecture guys on the importance of genuinely being interested in women and wanting to spend time on them, because if you don’t , then it’s sort of a waste to spend time learning how to talk to them.
Meanwhile, PUG Eben Pagan (stage name “David DeAngelo”, author of the “Double Your Dating” product line) has spoken in his marketing classes about his typical customer really just wanting to know how to talk to a woman and ask her out without being embarrassed… and since his is probably the largest internet dating advice business out there (at $20million annual gross), I would guess that means that most guys buying “pickup” training just want to learn how to talk to someone they’re attracted to without feeling like an idiot… not how to say some magic words and get laid. Other gurus have also noted that most of the men in their classes are looking for “the one”—they just want to know what to say when they meet her, and they know they’re not going to meet her by sitting at home and not talking to anybody.
So, all of this strikes me as a considerable amount of evidence in favor of the proposition that there are a significant number of men who actually do believe each woman is unique, are not primarily interested in one-night stands, and yet also believe in knowing what they’re doing, and/or meeting more than one woman.
You’re completely changing the topic.
I said that womanizers I have known consider women interchangeable, because in their plot to sleep with as many women as possible, they ever so easily substitute one for another when their moves fail on the current target. I said that is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique.
You said of course they consider all women to be unique, because “If every one is unique, then surely you’d want to meet them all. ”
I pointed out that you’re equivocating on unique, and now you’re changing the topic again.
No, I said that the behavior you described is consistent with considering all women to be unique. And it is. It just also happens to be consistent with the behavior of a jerk.
How is that changing topic?
The topic change is that when I made the uniqueness comment, I was talking about womanizers I’ve known, not PUA or famous PUA gurus. Secondly, you keep equivocating on unique. Of course every person offers a unique experience of interaction. They are also all made out of utterly unique particles in utterly different configurations and no two of them have ever precisely occupied the same locations in time-space. That’s all irrelevant for the sense of uniqueness I explained, which has do with behavior and interchangeability.
The way in which I’ve said that womanizers I’ve known do not behave as if women are unique is that when they go out clubbing, if they’re with a bunch of friends, they’re quite willing to draw straws to see which of the potential women they get to chat up, and they hardly care which of many attractive women they get to go home with, as long as they go home with one of them, for they consider them not to be unique in the requisite sense of being attractive and willing to sleep with them. Sure they’re all different, but the differences are irrelevant to them, except possibly as a strategy to use for seducing the woman in question.
And you’re still missing my point: the behavior you describe can be generated by many different beliefs or perceptions internal to the person generating the behavior, and you cannot know (unless you ask, or at least perform a more detailed test than the one you’ve desribed) whether the person is willing to meet many different women because he does—or does not—consider them unique.
That is, until you ask, you can’t know whether his thought process is, “Every woman is unique, so no matter who I meet it will be a fun and interesting experience to discover what she’s like,” or else something so crude I won’t render it into actual words here.
What I have been pointing out is that there are people who state, teach, and promote the mindset I have spelled out here. Certainly, there are people of the other mindset, and disagreeable as it might be, I don’t argue with the fact that mindset also exists. You seem to be denying, however, that the more enlightened mindset also exists.
My original point was about particular individuals, womanizers that I’ve had conversations with and one of whom I knew very well.
I’ll agree that womanizing might arise out of thinking every woman is unique in a non-trivial (albeit not necessarily benign) sense, as you have suggested, but my point was that there is a tension between maintaining uniqueness and considering them fungible (even if they’re not totally incompatible). I’m not in the slightest interested in PUA and dating/seduction techniques and related topics, so I don’t have anything more to say on this topic.
No you are not mistaken, but there are good, empirical reasons for this attitude.
So, this comment got downvoted, why? I provided a piece of valuable empirical data which constrains our model of reality to the group mind, and then I got punished for doing so. Maybe I should stop optimizing my comments for informativeness, and start trying to just optimize for whatever people vote up?
I don’t think so. The behavior of “if at first you don’t succeed” has obvious empirical backing, but there is more than one attitude that can generate that same behavior.
Some of those attitudes (like, “I’m a fun person and I like to meet a lot of new and interesting people”, or “women are fascinating and I want to meet them all”) have MUCH better effects on the person holding them, as well as better effects on the people they come into contact with.
You provided no empirical data. You made a rather vague claim about some supposed empirical data, and its reason-providing nature. Did you have, say, a study or something to back you up?
I didn’t vote you down, but I did just vote up to correct what I think was an inappropriate downvote, but perhaps the person downvoted for alluding to “good, empirical” reasons but not spelling them out. I’ve noticed comments that allude to things without elaborating giving any detail whatsoever often get voted down.
I would also hazard a guess that people who are “naturally good with women” objectify women more than people who use PUA techniques. Without the benefit of careful analysis, respect for the “goals or interests or personhood” of the picked-up turns out to be detrimental: many “naturals” flounder when they have to abandon their “tried and tested” rules-of-thumb and seek an intimate relationship.
Deception is wrong too. It’s certainly possible to do things that are morally wrong without objectifying anyone. However, “modeling the female psyche” does not mean that no objectification is going on. That modeling is a prerequisite for achieving the goals of the pickup artist, which don’t typically seem to include respect for the goals or interests or personhood of the picked-up (except inasmuch as knowledge of these things serves the success of the pickup attempt). It’s no more personalizing than modeling the behavior of an AI opponent in a video game, who must be defeated to win the game.
So to objectify someone is to think of him in a way that doesn’t include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood?
According to this definition, I objectify the bus driver, the cashier at the local Walmart, and just about everybody I interact with on an average day.
To that degree, yes, just as they objectify you as ‘passenger’, or ‘customer’.
But even as we interact as ‘passenger’ and ‘bus driver’, and probably don’t have any desire but to do what we have to do as efficiently as possible, we do generally keep in mind that we are both people with concerns about our respect and we don’t casually devalue each other for playing out the roles we have. There’s still an assumption of basic personhood going on.
But I think that when people start talking about getting sex from a woman with the same degree of respect and mutuality as is required when getting a can of cola from a vending machine, then they’ve gone an extra step on the road to objectification. And adding on a “well that’s what women want too” as an afterthought when questioned about it doesn’t really convince.
I’ll concede that the “pick up artist” is to some extent a role that is played by guys who aren’t necessarily so entirely cynical in reality, but I’m not sure that means it’s non-issue.
Yes, you probably do.
OK, well given this clarification, it seems to me just fine to objectify people, and in fact I recommend doing so when what one is trying to do is neutral analysis about the facts of some matter. Objectify your teacher when deciding if school is worth the effort, and objectify your doctor when deciding if medicine is worth the cost.
It’s important to note that neither of those scenarios include interacting with the person being so objectified. Also note the point about the ethical considerations being different in economic transactions, e.g. thomblake’s comment.
What about objectifying a job candidate in an interview? Do you choose the candidate with experience, who will feel dead-ended but perform a better job? You might interpret this as a deliberate stunting of their volition (the sense of objectification I’m using), interfering with their actual goals despite their outward actions.
Any overqualified candidate that gets hired is objectified in an arguably worse way than the target of a PUA, despite the potential mitigations the economic transaction may bring about.
(Edit: Rereading this, I’m worried that I sound confrontational; I don’t mean to be, but I’m not sure how else to edit without becoming too prolix.)
Well, I actually do find this sort of thing ethically objectionable to some level, but defensible on consequentialist grounds because of the social benefits of economic efficiency. So I don’t know that I can give you a satisfying answer.
For what it’s worth, I hold a lot of sales and marketing in even lower regard than PUA silliness.
Maybe this definition is more isomorphic to the “objectification of women” than it first appears. For example, the other day my family was going to get our photograph taken. After about seven pictures were taken, we were lead to another room where a man showed us our photographs in turn so we could decide on the one we liked. It occurred to me that we probably could have operated the computer that did this ourselves, in which case he would have been out of a job. I objectified him, and I’m quite certain he would have been offended if I’d said my thoughts aloud.
So. Objectification is a good thing for the person who does it, but it’s quite normal for the person on the receiving end to be offended.
...
Are you saying that you don’t? Or that you do, but that this kind of objectification is somehow different from the kind you condemn? If so, what’s the difference?
The major difference is that it’s more socially acceptable. Yes, I realize this is a non-answer. The answer you probably want is “they’re getting paid for it”. There’s no expectation of social relationship between peers.
Furthermore, as I said elsewhere, wanton disregard for the autonomy of such people is still frowned upon in the extreme cases. Noone likes the boss who treats employees like cogs, or the demanding customer who pushes around customer service staff because they know they can.
Well, no. I happened to pick a bus driver and cashier as my examples, but I could just as easily have picked my next door neighbor. I don’t dislike him, but I couldn’t care less about his goals or interests or personality.
Treating people in a certain way goes beyond mere objectification as Alicorn has defined it: “Thinking of a person in a way that doesn’t include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood.”
I’m still trying to obtain a coherent definition of “objectification” that is both morally reprehensible and independent from any harmful action, such as deceiving a woman to get her into bed or treating one’s employees like cogs.
I’m not sure that it needs to be independent of harmful action. The way I tend to think about it is that thinking of others as tools to one’s own ends, with no regard for their ends, is something that increases the risk of harmful action, which is bad.
The thing is, this risk also depends crucially on context, so on this theory, we would expect the social acceptability of objectification to increase where the risk of leading to harm is lowest. This seems to roughly fit my intuitions at least: objectifying teachers when deciding on what school to attend seems ok (there’s little risk of harm to them, and whatever harm there is seems justified on efficiency grounds); but treating other parties to intimate relationships as simply means to your own ends is bad (because it’s much more likely to end up hurting someone); meanwhile, treating, say waitstaff as simply a means to getting a meal is probably somewhere in between (it increases the chance that you might be a complete ass in the course of your personal interactions, but this may only manifest itself if something goes wrong).
ETA: as additional examples, we could also consider: treating consumers as people whose needs you are trying to fulfil vs. people you just want to get money out of, whether they really want what you’re selling or not; and treating staff as engines to pump out products, vs. actual human beings.
If it helps any, instances of ‘thinking’ that don’t go beyond that will probably not appear on this website. They at least need to go as far as ‘writing’.
disregard for the autonomy of people =/= thinking of someone in a way that doesn’t include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood
I am reading the latter rather literally in much the same way RobinHanson seems to and as I think the author intended.
Sorry, I thought it clear I meant some flavor of “all of the above”, shortened for readability.
See SoullessAutomaton’s comment; he has it right.
See this comment—there are some contexts where treating people as objects is at least socially expected, and arguably fine, and economic transactions are one of them.
Am I right in thinking you don’t respect the goals, interests, or personhood of the pickup artist? Consider a scenario in which there is a PUA who desires sex and a woman who does not. Which outcome do you prefer, one where the PUA changes her mind and they engage in consensual sex, or the woman turns him down and he goes home alone? If you think the first outcome is negative, why? Would your answer be the same if it was a woman trying to pick up a man? Is it morally objectionable to change someone’s mind? Is it only so if manipulative techniques are used? Is it possible to change most people’s minds without using manipulative techniques to some degree? If you asked someone to help you move a sofa, would you do so in a monotone voice or would you do so cheerfully with a smile? If these questions seem unnecessarily antagonistic, I apologize. I simply want to understand your position.
For the record, I have a deep personal dislike of pickup artists, especially those who employ NLP. I do not, however, find their methods morally questionable.
We are in grave danger of equivocating the word “respect” here, so let me clarify: when I define objectification, the kind of “respect” I mean is an acknowledgment of those things and recognition of commensurability with one’s own corresponding goals, interests, and personhood, not an approval. I acknowledge the goals, interests, and personhood of pickup artists, and recognize them as similar to my own in many ways (in structure, not content). I don’t approve of the goals and interests they seem to share as a group (although I do approve of their personhood).
Your question is vastly too broad for me to say which outcome I prefer. If you made it more specific—if I knew something about the method of the PUA, the reasons behind the woman’s initial reluctance, her typical dispositions with regards to casual sex, etc., then I might be able to answer you. The same goes for the situation where the woman is attempting to pick up the man.
There are ways to change people’s minds without doing anything morally objectionable. My favored method is usually just transparent, bald-faced announcement of all my intentions. I actually go about saying things like “I did work today and seek praise!” or “I have the inexplicable urge to make you jealous, so I’m probably going to talk about my ex in a minute” or “I don’t like your friend and you should probably take anything bad I say about her with a grain of salt” or “I’m going to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince you to help us move next week unless it doesn’t take that long”. Of course I accompany these things with either actual smiles or emoticons because I like to project an air of adorable friendliness, but of course I’m actually adorable and friendly so that’s okay ;)
Isn’t it actually their methods you disapprove of? Disapproving of a pretty innate male desire to engage in frequent intercourse seems unfair at best and Puritan at worst. Their goals do not involve manipulating women any more than my goal of driving to the store is also a goal to drive my car. If a man can pick up a woman simply by talking honestly to her about his romantic feelings, do you still disapprove of his actions because he may share the same goal as the pickup artist?
Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? “I did work today and seek praise” is an extraordinarily manipulative (and clever) statement. It, and the others, are obviously intended to subvert cached thought, catching off guard the recipient who may not rise to the bait of responding positively to the more common, “Today was a tough day” or “I hope I did okay, what do you think?” By using unusual and unexpectedly honest phrasing and presenting yourself as “adorable and friendly”, are you really being transparent, or are you actually employing a manipulative method of your own? After all, if it never worked, surely you would self-update to a better technique. And wouldn’t claiming you are actually being transparent be a defense against your own cached representation of in order to preserve your internal belief that you are not being manipulative?
I guess in addition to defining “respect” I should have defined “goal”. In attempting to fully describe a goal, I’d usually be inclined to include caveats about what methods wouldn’t be okay for me to use to achieve that goal. For instance, it’s my goal to watch the entirety of Stargate SG-1, but not if I have to steal the DVDs from WalMart to do it.
I’m… sorry you feel that way? I am genuinely going for “clear and honest”, not “manipulative and clever”.
If saying “I did work today and request praise” (an example of something I actually said today) doesn’t promptly yield praise, I (actually did) follow up with “You are not fulfilling my request. You should fix that.” If that hadn’t “worked”, I probably would have gone and talked to somebody else, and refrained from seeking praise from that person in the future, on the assumption that they had no interest in praising me for doing work. I wouldn’t have moved to a less clear and honest strategy to get the uncooperative individual to give me what I wanted.
Did you offer your conversation partner anything of value, other than an implied threat of disapproval if they failed to accede to your demand? Were you thinking about their goals, other than how they related to your desire to receive praise?
It seems to me that, by your definitions, one can objectify, or manipulate, but not both. If you took your conversant’s goals into consideration and offered something for what you wanted, then you manipulated. If you didn’t take them into account, then you objectified.
Or do you claim that there is a third category, in which you thought about their goals, but didn’t allow this to affect your choices in any way? Then this seems like even worse objectification, since you knew they had other goals and nonetheless chose not to act accordingly.
Or perhaps the loophole is that if you just state what you want, then other people simply “should” give it to you, and that therefore this isn’t manipulation? Is it only manipulation if you offer to give someone something they actually want, and offering veiled threats instead is just “honest” communication?
Now, let’s contrast your strategy with a pickup-artist strategy, known as the Apocalypse Opener. Like your approach, it’s based on blunt honesty and an open statement of intention. But there are a couple of key differences.
First, the PUA waits until the third sentence of the conversation (not counting “hello” or “hey”) to state his intention, treating the other person with conventional courtesy first, rather than simply stating a demand.
Second, the request is not even a request, let alone a demand. It’s framed as an invitation, an offering of something valuable.
Third, if the invitation is declined, the PUA neither pressures the other person with a threat of disapproval, nor departs the conversation. He simply continues treating them in a friendly way, leaving the invitation open and giving them time to consider it.
By your definitions, which is more manipulative? Which more objectifying? To whom?
At a first glance, yours strikes me as both more manipulative and more objectifying, since you don’t offer your conversant anything of value to them (i.e. ignoring their goals and objectifying), and you include a veiled threat (using their goals to get what you want, i.e. manipulation). In contrast, the PUA does nothing but offer things of potential value to his conversant, and does not offer even the minor threat of withholding his approval or company.
This is the beginning of the conversation in question:
Alicorn: I did work and request praise!
Alicorn: You are not fulfilling my request.
Alicorn: You should fix that.
Interlocutor Mine, Name Redacted: *praise*
Alicorn: :D
Interlocutor Mine, Name Redacted: Good job, keep up the good work
Alicorn: *is pleased with self*
Prior context in an earlier conversation included an exchange about how I’ve been having trouble getting work done lately, and should be chided if I didn’t do any today. So… I guess I offered my charming company and a smiley? IMNR is my friend, we talk frequently, I usually operate under the assumption that IMNR has some desire to interact with me in a friendly manner. IMNR is free to disabuse me of this notion at any time and I will leave him alone.
Explicit trades of services do not have to be objectifying. I exchange Christmas gifts with various relatives, and if I stopped giving people Christmas presents, I’d probably stop getting them; that doesn’t mean anybody is being objectified.
Something can be an influencing factor without being a controlling factor. For instance, when I make curry, the cayenne pepper contributes to the curry being spicy. If I left out the cayenne, it would still be spicy, because there are a half a dozen other spicy things in it.
No, not really. Certain desires ought to be accommodated (e.g. I just asked my roommate if it’d bother her for me to have music on in a particular room when she went to bed; she said yes, so I moved to a different room). Certain desires don’t have to (I doubt I would have harbored resentment if IMNR had refrained from supplying desired praise) and satisfying them is super-erogatory.
Meh. It looks honest enough; some phatic introduction and a question. There doesn’t seem anything wrong with this strategy in particular to me. It surprises me that it works, but that’s purely empirical.
If people want things of value from me, they can ask me for them. If I want things from other people, I ask for them. If I have something I think someone else would like and I like them and want them to have it, I offer it to them. People who like me and have things they think I would like and want me to have them offer them to me. These events don’t always occur simultaneously, but over the course of a friendship or other extended interpersonal association, it works well enough to suit me.
So to dig up an old chestnut, the ends do not justify the means. What I am still unsure about is whether or not you disapprove of the ends. Does this mean you are okay with the goal of picking up women, as long as you do not use particular techniques to do so? The stumbling block I run into on this is that there are no male-female sexual interactions entirely free of psychological modeling, signaling or predictive behaviour on both sides—or if there are, they certainly don’t exist in the human population at large. It seems to me that pickup artists are merely trying to compete with men who are naturally charismatic and charming. Is the real solution to actually handicap such men so that manipulative techniques are not necessary for competition?
By the way, I consider watching the entirety of Stargate SG-1 morally questionable, but this argument is subjective enough as it is...
As you have pointed out, your intentions should not be confused with your methods.
You seem to think that adopting a baseline, rational approach to something like requesting praise for your work is maximally non-manipulative and honest. It certainly could be, if you were speaking to a Turing-incomplete chatbot. Unfortunately, people don’t operate that way. If you formally ask for praise and object when none is forthcoming, are you respecting the “goals, interests and personhood” of the recipient as much as you would be if you asked nothing of them? And can such a non-standard method of human communication possibly be as “clear and honest” as a standard method? Put another way, does your employment of open honesty contain other signals i.e. does it carry the signal “You should give my request for praise more weight because I am visibly being honest and not trying to bait you into it”?
Be wary of saying things that are the equivalent of “I’m not going to say ‘trust me’, because that doesn’t mean anything, but a is b.” Such a statement actually indicates that the speaker is doubly untrustworthy.
Now, I don’t believe you are being intentionally manipulative and clever, or that you are definitely being so unintentionally. This is not an argument I’m trying to win against you. I’m just asking you to consider the chance that you unaware of the possibility of it.
I have no ethical problems with the desire to have no-strings-attached sex with people of any description. I simply require that this be pursued honestly and non-coercively.
I also have no ethical problem with people trying to become more charismatic and charming.
No, not really. Or if it does, that’s an accident. I started doing my intention-announcement when I decided that if I was going to get annoyed at other people wanting me to read their minds, I’d better provide the courtesy I wanted to them. I did not wish to become one of the people whose interpersonal relationships were plagued with arguments that wind up culminating in “Well, why didn’t you just say so?” If I seek praise, I announce it. Other people may or may not care about my seeking, and may or may not indulge my desire. This gives me information about their dispositions towards me, instead of confused feedback that might reflect on either that or their level of telepathic ability.
It’s possible that I’m being unintentionally manipulative, and if that is the case, I would like to stop. If you have suggestions about how I can signify all and only the things I think I’m signifying in my sample statements and statements like them, I’d welcome the input.
For reference, I would find your method to be manipulative. I also don’t think you’re being manipulative on purpose (or at least I don’t have any data to think you are or aren’t).
I don’t think there is a fully general way to request praise without manipulation. It’s going to depend on each person’s life experiences and how they view you.
For reference, I didn’t find it particularly manipulative, though I also don’t appreciate attempts at telepathy.
Under what conditions do you normally find it necessary to attempt to fully describe a goal?
Usually when I’m very, very bored.
That’s awesome.
I have to start doing that, myself.
I like your style.
At the risk of making people of all genders feel uncomfortable, I’ll add that this is also a fantasy of mine.
You mean talking like that is something you fantasize about doing, or fantasize about other people doing?
You’re right, it’s hardly fair of me to want it of others if I can’t deliver it myself. I was thinking only of the many times the desire of it in others has served as an excuse for my lack of perception.
Haha, I would set my watch beeper for nine minutes, and read a book until it went off, then say “you have sixty seconds, go”.