Excellent; I was going to ask that myself. Clearly Eliezer wanted an example to support his oft-repeated contention that the future like the past will be filled with people whose values seem abhorrent to us. But why he chose that particular example I’d like to know. Was it the most horrific(-sounding) thing he could come up with some kind of reasonable(-sounding) justification for?
It’s not at all clear to me that coming up with a reasonable-sounding justification was part of the project. One isn’t provided in the story, one wasn’t presented as part of an answer to an earlier question of mine, etc. etc.
I confess that a hidden motive behind this in-passing conversation is that I have an entirely different story in progress where this is a central plot point, and I wanted to see to what degree I could get away with it. The fact that it’s taken over the comments is not as good as I hoped, but neither was the reaction as bad as I feared. Albeit that in this case I was able to go to some length to insert the disclaimer that “rape” in their world just doesn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to us, and that rape in our world is a very bad thing of which I disapprove; I wouldn’t be able to do that, to the same degree, in the other story I was working on.
The purpose was to test the waters for another story he was developing; there probably wasn’t an in-story purpose to it beyond the obvious one of making it clear that the younger people had a very different worldview than the one we have now. He’s been unwilling to give more detail because the reaction to the concept’s insertion in that story was too negative to allow him to safely (without reputational consequence, I assume) share the apparently much more questionable other story, or, seemingly, any details about it.
I did upvote your question, by the way. I want to hear more about that other story.
He’s been unwilling to give more detail because the reaction to the concept’s insertion in that story was too negative to allow him to safely (without reputational consequence, I assume) share the apparently much more questionable other story, or, seemingly, any details about it.
I don’t see it doing much good to his reputation to stay silent either, given the inflammatory nature of the remark. Sure, people will be able to quote that part to trash Eliezer, but that’s a lot worse than if someone could link a reasonable clarification in his defense.
Yes, I voted Alicorn’s question up. I want to know too.
Okay, after reading the thread and more of Eliezer’s comments on the issue, it makes more sense. If I understand it correctly, in the story world, women normally initiate sex, and so men would view female-initiated sex as the norm and—understandably—not see what’s wrong with non-consensual sex, since they wouldn’t even think of the possibility of male-initiated sex. Akon, then, is speaking from the perspective of someone who wouldn’t understand why men would have a problem with sex being forced on them, and not considering rape of women as a possibility at all.
Is that about right?
ETA: I still can’t make sense of all the business about redrawing of boundaries of consent.
ETA2: I also can’t see how human nature could change so that women normally initate sex, AND men continue to have the same permissive attitude toward sex being forced upon them. It seems that the severity of being raped is part and parcel of being the gender that’s choosier about who they have sex with.
Regarding the first part, I don’t think we were given enough information, either in the story or in the explanation, to determine how exactly the 3WC society differs from ours in that respect—and the point wasn’t how it’s different so much as that it’s different, so I don’t consider that a problem. I could be wrong, though, about having enough information—I’m apparently wired especially oddly in ways that are relevant to understanding this aspect of the story, so there’s a reasonable chance that I’m personally missing one or more pieces of information that Eliezer assumed that the readers would be bringing to the story to make sense of it.
Regarding ‘boundaries of consent’, I’m working on an explanation of how I understood Eliezer’s explanation. This is a tricky area, though, and my explanation necessarily involves some personal information that I want to present carefully, so it may be another few hours. (I’ve been out for the last four, or it would have been posted already.)
My understanding was that any society has things that are considered consented to by default, and things that need explicit permission. For instance, among the upper class in England in the last century, it was considered improper to start a conversation with someone unless you had been formally introduced. In modern-day America, it’s appropriate to start a conversation with someone you see in public, or tap someone on the shoulder, but not to grope their sexual organs, for instance.
I think this is what EY meant by “boundaries of consent”: for instance, imagine a society where initiating sex was the equivalent of asking the time. You could decline to answer, but it would seem odd.
Even so, there’s a difference between changing the default for consent, and actually allowing non-consensual behavior. For instance, if someone specifically tells me not to tap her shoulder (say she’s an Orthodox Jew) it would then not be acceptable for me to do so, and in fact would legally be assault. But if a young child doesn’t want to leave a toy store, it’s acceptable for his parent to forcibly remove him.
So there’s actually two different ideas: changing the boundaries of what’s acceptable, and changing the rules for when people are allowed to proceed in the face of an explicit “no”.
It’s also possible that people in that society have a fetish about being taken regardless of anything they do to try and stop it… Like maybe it’s one of the only aspects of their lives they don’t have any control over, and they like it that way. Of course, I think your explanation is more likely, but either could work.
I’m not confused at Eliezer’s linked comments; I’m confused at your confusion. I think the linked comments clarified things because I learned relevant information from them, the following points in particular:
The rape comment was not intended to be a plot point, or even major worldbuilding, for 3WC. The fact that we don’t have enough in-story context to understand the remark may have been purposeful (though the purpose was not 3WC-related if so), and whether it was purposeful or not, 3WC is intended to be able to work without such an explanation.
Eliezer believes that he understands the psychology behind rape well enough to construct a plausible alternative way for a society to handle the issue. He attempted to support the assertion that he does by explaining how our society handles the issue. I found his explanation coherent and useful—it actually helped solve a related problem I’d been working on—so I believe that he does understand it. I understand that you didn’t find his explanation coherent and/or useful, but I don’t know why, so I don’t know if it’s an issue of you not having some piece of information that Eliezer and I have and take for granted, or you noticing a problem with the explanation that Eliezer and I both missed, or perhaps some other issue. My method of solving this kind of problem is to give more information, which generally either solves the problem directly or leads the other person to be able to pinpoint the problem they’ve found in my (or in this case, Eliezer’s) logic, but on such a touchy subject I’m choosing to do that carefully.
Here’s my attempt at explaining Eliezer’s explanation. It’s based heavily on my experiences as someone who’s apparently quite atypical in a relevant way. This may require a few rounds of back-and-forth to be useful—I have more information about the common kind of experience (which I assume you share) than you have about mine, but I don’t know if I have enough information about it to pinpoint all the interesting differences. Note that this information is on the border of what I’m comfortable sharing in a public area, and may be outside some peoples’ comfort zones even to read about: If anyone reading is easily squicked by sexuality talk, they may want to leave the thread now.
I’m asexual. I’ve had sex, and experienced orgasms (anhedonically, though I’m not anhedonic in general), but I have little to no interest in either. However, I don’t object to sex on principle—it’s about as emotionally relevant as any other social interaction, which can range from very welcome to very unwelcome depending on the circumstances and the individual(s) with whom I’m socializing*. Sex tends to fall on the ‘less welcome’ end of that scale because of how other people react to it—I’m aware that others get emotionally entangled by it, and that’s annoying to deal with, and potentially painful for them, when I don’t react the same way—but if that weren’t an issue, ‘let’s have sex’ would get about the same range of reactions from me as ‘let’s go to the movies’ - generally in the range of ‘sure, why not?’ to ‘nope, sorry, what I’m doing now is more interesting’, or ‘no, thanks’ if I’m being asked by someone I prefer not to spend time with.
Now, I don’t generally talk about this next bit at all, because it tends to freak people out (even though I’m female and fairly pacifistic and strongly support peoples’ right to choose what to do with their bodies in general, and my cluelessness on the matter is unlikely to ever have any effect on anything), but until recently—until I read that explanation by Eliezer, actually—it made no sense to me why someone would consider being raped more traumatic than being kidnapped and forced to watch a really crappy movie with a painfully loud audio track. (Disregarding any injuries, STDs, loss of social status, and chance of pregnancy, of course.) Yeah, being forced to do something against your will is bad, but rape seems to be pretty universally considered one of the worst things that can happen to someone short of being murdered. People even consider rape that bad when the raped person was unconscious and didn’t actually experience it!
According to Eliezer—and this makes sense of years’ worth of data I gathered while trying to figure this out on my own—this seemingly irrational reaction is because people in our society tend to have what he calls ‘sexual selves’. As you may have picked up from the above text, I don’t appear to have a ‘sexual self’ at all, so I’m rather fuzzy on this part, but what he seems to be describing is the special category that people put ‘how I am about sex’ information into, and most people consider the existence and contents of that category to be an incredibly important part of their selves**. The movie metaphor could be extended to show some parallels in this way, but in the interests of showing a plausible emotional response that’s at least close to the same ballpark of intensity, I’ll switch to a food metaphor: Vegans, in particular, have a reputation for considering their veganism a fundamental part of their selves, and would theoretically be likely to consider their ‘food selves’ to have been violated if they discovered that someone had hidden an animal product in something that they ate—even if the animal product would have been discarded otherwise, resulting in no difference in the amount of harm done to any animal. (I know exactly one vegan, and he’s one of the least mentally stable people I know in general, so this isn’t strong evidence, but the situation I described is the only one other than complete mental breakdown in which I’d predict that that otherwise strict pacifist might become violent.) Even omnivores tend to have a ‘food self’ in our society—I know few people who wouldn’t be disconcerted to discover that they’d eaten rat meat, or insects, or human flesh.***
The rules that we set for ourselves, that define our ‘food selves’, ‘sexual selves’, ‘movie-watching selves’, etc., are what Eliezer was talking about when he mentioned ‘boundaries of consent’ (which is a specific example of one of those rules). They describe not just what we consider acceptable or unacceptable to do or have done to us, but more fundamentally what we consider related to a specific aspect of our selves. For example, while a google search informs me that this may not be an accurate piece of trivia, I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s implausible that people in Victorian England considered ankles sexual, even though we don’t now. Another example that I vaguely remember reading about, in a different area, is that some cultures considered food that’d been handled by a menstruating woman to be ‘impure’ and unfit to eat—again, something we don’t care about. Sometimes, these rules serve a particular purpose—I’ve heard the theory that the Kosher prohibition on eating pork was perhaps started because pork was noticed as a disease vector, for example—but the problems that are solved by those rules can sometimes be solved in other ways (in the given example, better meat-processing and cooking technology, I assume), making the rule superfluous and subject to change as the society evolves. It’s obvious from my own personal situation that it’s also possible—though Eliezer never claimed that this was the case for 3WC—for certain ‘selves’ that our society considers universal not to develop at all. (Possibly interesting example for this group: Spiritual/religious self.)
Eliezer didn’t share with us the details of how the 3WC society solved the relevant underlying problems and allowed the boundaries of sexuality and consent to move so dramatically, but he did indicate that he’s aware that those boundaries exist and currently solve certain problems, and that he needed to consider those issues in order to create a plausible alternative way for a society to approach the issue. I don’t see any reason to believe that he didn’t actually do so.
* I am, notably, less welcoming of being touched in general than most people, but this is not especially true of sex.
** I find this bizarre.
*** I have a toothache. The prescription pain meds I took just kicked in. If the rest of this post is less insightful than the earlier part, or I fail to tie them together properly, it’s because I’m slightly out of my head. This may be an ongoing problem until Tuesday or Wednesday.
One of the adverse effects of pain pills is temporarily to take away the ability of the person’s emotions to inform decision-making, particularly, avoidance of harms.
According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, for most people, the person’s ability to avoid making harmful decisions depends on the ability of the person to have an emotional reaction to the consequences of a decision—particularly an emotional reaction to imagined or anticipated consequences—that is, a reaction that occurs before the decision is made.
When on pain pills, a person tends not to have (or not to heed) these emotional reactions to consequences of decisions that have not been made yet, if I understand correctly.
The reason I mention this is that you might want to wait till you are off the pain pills to continue this really, really interesting discussion of your sexuality. I do not mean to imply that your decision to comment will harm you—I just thought a warning about pain pills might be useful to you.
I noticed this issue myself, last night—I’d been nervous about posting the information in the second and third paragraphs before I took the meds, and wasn’t, afterwards, which was unusual enough to be slightly alarming. (I did write both paragraphs before my visit to the dentist, and didn’t edit them significantly afterwards.) The warning is appreciated, though.
I’ve spent enough time thinking about this kind of thing, though, that I’m confident I can rely on cached judgments of what is and isn’t wise to share, even in my slightly impaired state. I’ll wait on answering anything questionable, but I suspect that that’s unlikely to be an issue—I am really very open about this kind of thing in general, when I’m not worrying about making others uncomfortable with my oddness. It’s a side-effect of not having a sexual self to defend.
One of the adverse effects of pain pills is temporarily to take away the ability of the person’s emotions to inform decision-making, particularly, avoidance of harms.
I assume that by “pain pills” you mean opioids and other narcotics? I suspect that asprin and other non-narcotic painkillers wouldn’t impair emotional reactions...
I’m taking an opioid, but I suspect that the effect would be seen with anything that affects sensory impressions, since it’ll also affect your ability to sense your emotions.
Bit of a repeat warning: if you don’t want to read about sex stuff, don’t read this.
You know, given my own experiences, reading this post makes me wonder if sexual anhedonia and rationality are correlated for some reason. (Note, if you wish, that I’m a 17-year-old male, and I’ve never had a sexual partner. I do know what orgasm is.)
This makes me wonder how I would be different if I weren’t apparently anhedonic. Note that I don’t remember whether I first found out about that or stumbled upon Eliezer Yudkowsky; it’s possible that my rationality-stuff came before my knowledge.
Thinking again, I have been a religious skeptic all my life (and a victim of Pascal’s wager for a short period, during which I managed to read some of the Pentateuch), I’ve never taken a stand on abortion, and I’ve been mostly apolitical, though I did have a mild libertarian period after learning how the free market works, and I never figured out what was wrong with homosexuality. I don’t know whether I, before puberty, was rational or just apathetic.
“For example, while a google search informs me that this may not be an accurate piece of trivia, I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s implausible that people in Victorian England considered ankles sexual, even though we don’t now.”
FWIW, I think people don’t find it implausible because they know, even if only vaguely, that there are people out there with fetishes for everything, and I have the impression that in heavily Islamic countries with full-on burkha-usage/purdah going, things like ankles are supposed to be erotic and often are.
That interpretation sounds odd to me, so I checked wikipedia, which says:
Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual arousal brought on by any object, situation or body part not conventionally viewed as being sexual in nature.
‘Conventional’ seems to be the sticking point. Ankles are conventionally considered sexual in that culture, so it’s not a fetish, in that context; it’s a cultural difference.
It seems to make the most sense to think of it as a kind of communication—letting someone see your ankle, in that culture, is a communication about your thoughts regarding that person (though what exactly it communicates, I don’t know enough to guess on), and the content of that communication is the turn-on. In our culture, the same thing might be communicated by, say, kissing, with similar emotional results. In either case, it’s not the form of the communication that seems to matter, but the meaning, whereas in the case of a fetish, the form does matter, and what the action means to the other party (if there’s another person involved) doesn’t appear to. (Yes, I have some experience in this area. The fetish in question wasn’t actually very interesting, and I don’t think talking about it specifically will add to the conversation.)
I’m… not quite following. I gave 2 examples of why an educated modern person would not be surprised at Victorian ankles and their reception: that fetishes are known to be arbitrary and to cover just about everything, and that contemporary cultures are close or identical to the Victorians. These were 2 entirely separate examples. I wasn’t suggesting that your random Saudi Arabian (or whatever) had a fetish for ankles or something, but that such a person had a genuine erotic response regardless of whether the ankle was exposed deliberately or not.
A Western teenage boy might get a boner at bare breasts in porn (deliberate but not really communicating), his girlfriend undressing for him (deliberate & communicative), or—in classic high school anime fashion—a bra/swimsuit getting snagged (both not deliberate & not communicative).
It seems like we’re using the word ‘fetish’ differently, and I’m worried that that might lead to confusion. My original point was about how the cultural meanings of various things can change over time—including but not limited to what would or would not be considered a fetish (i.e. ‘unusual to be aroused by’). If nearly everyone in a given culture is aroused by a certain thing, then it’s not unusual in that culture, and it’s not a fetish for people in that culture to be aroused by that thing, at least given how I’m using the word. (Otherwise, any arousing trait would be considered a fetish if at least one culture doesn’t or didn’t share our opinion of it, and I suspect that idea wouldn’t sit well with most people.)
I propose that the useful dividing line between a fetish and an aspect of a given person’s culture is whether or not the arousing thing is universal enough in that culture that it can be used communicatively—that appears to be a good indication that people in that culture are socialized to be aroused by that thing when they wouldn’t naturally be aroused by it without the socialization. I also suspect that that socialization is accomplished by teaching people to see the relevant things as communication, automatically, as a deep heuristic—so that that flash of ankle or breast is taken as a signal that the flasher is sexually receptive, without any thought involved on the flashee’s part.
It makes much more sense to me that thinking that someone was sexually receptive would be arousing than that somehow nearly everyone in a given culture somehow wound up with an attraction to ankles for their own sake, for no apparent reason, and without other cultures experiencing the same thing. There may be another explanation, though—were you considering some other theory?
It makes much more sense to me that thinking that someone was sexually receptive would be arousing than that somehow nearly everyone in a given culture somehow wound up with an attraction to ankles for their own sake, for no apparent reason, and without other cultures experiencing the same thing.
This seems true to me. No American male would deny that he is attracted to at least one of the big three (breasts, buttocks, face), and attracted for their own sake, and for no apparent reason. (Who instructed them to like those?)
Yet National Geographic is famous for all its bare-breasted photos of women who seem to neither notice nor care, and ditto for the men. The simplest explanation to me is just that cultures have regions of sexiness, with weak ties to biological facts like childbirth, and fetishes are any assessment of sexiness below a certain level of prevalence. Much simpler than all your communication.
Well, the awareness that there are people who have a fetish for X in this culture might make it less surprising that there is a whole culture that finds X sexy.
You’re at least partly right about the communication theory. One big turn on for most people is that someone is sexually interested in them, as communicated by revealing normally hidden body parts. Supposedly in Victorian times legs were typically hidden, so revealing them would be communicative.
Another part of this is that the idea of a taboo is itself sexy, whether or not there is communicative intent. Just the idea of seeing something normally secret or forbidden is arousing to many people.
I’m curious about your example that came up in your life, if you’re willing to share.
Well, the awareness that there are people who have a fetish for X in this culture might make it less surprising that there is a whole culture that finds X sexy.
I suppose that’s true, though it’s not obvious to me that something would have to start as a fetish to wind up considered sexual by a culture.
Another part of this is that the idea of a taboo is itself sexy, whether or not there is communicative intent. Just the idea of seeing something normally secret or forbidden is arousing to many people.
This appears to be true—I’ve heard it before, anyway—but it doesn’t make sense, to me, at least as a sexual thing.
Except, as I’m thinking of it now, it does seem to make sense in the context of communicating. Sharing some risky (in the sense that if it were made public knowledge, you’d take a social-status hit) bit of information is a hard-to-fake signal that you’re serious about the relationship, and doing something risky together is a natural way of reciprocating with each other regarding that. It seems like it’d serve more of a pair-bonding purpose than strictly a sexual one, but the two are so intertwined in humans that it’s not really surprising that it’d do both.
I’m curious about your example that came up in your life, if you’re willing to share.
My first boyfriend had a thing for walking through puddles while wearing tennis shoes without socks. Pretty boring, as fetishes go.
I suppose that’s true, though it’s not obvious to me that something would have to start as a fetish to wind up considered sexual by a culture.
It wouldn’t. That’s not what I meant: I meant that someone considering Victorian culture, say, where it was allegedly commonplace to find ankles sexy, might not find it too surprising if he knew about people with an ankle fetish in this culture. As in “I know someone who finds ankles sexy in this culture, so it’s not that weird for ankles to be considered sexy in a completely different culture.”
Communicating risky information is more of a pair-bonding thing than a sexual one. I was thinking about seeing something taboo or hidden as sexual. Say it’s in a picture or it’s unintentional, so there’s no communicative intent. A lot of sexuals find it exciting just because it’s “forbidden”. You might be able to relate if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something and that just made you want it more.
A lot of sexuals find it exciting just because it’s “forbidden”. You might be able to relate if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something and that just made you want it more.
That sounds bizarre. I understand assuming that something that a higher-ranking person is allowed to have, that you’re not allowed, is a good thing to try to get. It sounds like the cause and effect part of it what you described is backwards from the way that makes sense to me: ‘This is good because it’s not allowed’, not ‘this is not allowed because it’s good and in limited supply’. What could being wired that way possibly accomplish besides causing you grief?
ETA: I have heard of that particular mental quirk before, and probably even seen it in action. I’m not saying that it’s unusual to have it, just that it seems incomprehensible and potentially harmful, to me.
Well, you’re really asking two questions: why is it useful, and how to comprehend it.
As far as comprehending it… well, I had thought it was a human universal to be drawn to forbidden things. Have you really never felt the urge to do something forbidden, or the desire to break rules? Maybe it’s just because I tend to be a thrill-seeker and a risk-taker.
I think you might be misunderstanding. I don’t make a logical deduction that something is a good thing because it’s not allowed. I do feel emotionally drawn towards things that are forbidden. It’s got nothing to do with “higher-ranking” people.
It’s a pretty natural human urge to go exploring and messing around in forbidden areas. It’s useful because it’s what helps topple dictatorships, encourages scientific inquiry, and stirs up revolutions.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt the need to break a rule just for the sake of doing so. I vaguely remember being curious enough about the supposed draw of doing forbidden things to try it in some minor way, out of curiosity, as a teenager, but it’s pretty obvious how that worked out. (My memory of my teenage years is horrible, so I don’t have details, and could actually be incorrect altogether.) My reaction to rules in general is fairly neutral: I tend to assume that they have (or at least, were intended to have) good reasons behind them, but have no objection to breaking rules whose reasons don’t seem relevant to the issue at hand.
I did understand that you were talking about something different, but that different thing doesn’t make sense.
I am typically only drawn to forbidden things when I do not know why they are forbidden, or know that they are forbidden for stupid reasons and find the forbidden thing a desideratum for other reasons. In the first case, it’s a matter of curiosity—why has someone troubled to forbid me this thing? In the second, it’s just that the thing is already a desideratum and the forbiddance provides no successfully countervailing reason to avoid seeking it.
What could being wired that way possibly accomplish besides causing you grief?
Like the ‘prestige’ metric that has been discussed recently ‘things that the powerful want to stop me from doing’ is a strong indicator of potential value to someone even though it is intrinsically meaningless. Obviously having this generalised wiring leads them to desire irrelevant or even detrimental things sometimes.
It depends how you define ‘romantic’. I have a lot of trouble with the concept of monogamy, too, so if you’re asking if I pair-bond, no. I do have deeply meaningful personal relationships that involve most of the same kinds of caring-about, though. On the other hand, I don’t see a strong disconnect between that kind of relationship and a friendship—the difference in degree of closeness definitely changes how things work, but it’s a continuum, not different categories, and people do wind up in spots on that continuum that don’t map easily to ‘friends’ or ‘romantic partners’. (I do have names for different parts of that continuum, to make it easier to discuss the resulting issues, but they don’t seem to work the same as most peoples’ categories.)
From your response, I’d have to guess that, no, you don’t “fall in love” either. My personal experience is that there’s a sharp, obvious difference in the emotions involved in romantic relationships and in friendships, although the girls I’ve had crushes on have never felt similarly about me.
Yep, limerence is foreign to me, though not as incomprehensible as some emotions.
The wikipeida entry on love styles may be useful. I’m very familiar with storge, and familiar with agape. Ludus and pragma make sense as mental states (pragma more so than ludus), but it’s unclear to me why they’re considered types of love. I can recognize mania, but doubt that there’s any situation in which I’d experience it, so I consider it foreign. Eros is simply incomprehensible—I don’t even recognize when others are experiencing it.
That said, it seems completely accurate to me to describe myself as being in love with the people I’m closest with—the strength and closeness and emotional attachment of those relationships seems to be at least comparable with relationships established through more traditional patterns, once the traditional-pattern relationships are out of the initial infatuation stage.
In a genetic study of 350 lovers, the Eros style was found to be present more often in those bearing the TaqI A1 allele of the DRD2 3′ UTR sequence and the overlapping ANKK1 exon 8. This allele has been proposed to influence a wide range of behaviors, favoring obesity and alcoholism but opposing neuroticism-anxiety and juvenile delinquency.[3] This genetic variation has been hypothesized to cause a reduced amount of pleasure to be obtained from a given action, causing people to indulge more frequently.[4]
Okay, sounds plausible. Now, I ask that you do a check. Compare the length of your explanation to the length of the confusion-generating passage in 3WC. Call this the “backpedal ratio”. Now, compare this backpedal ratio to that of, say, typical reinterpretations of the Old Testament that claim it doesn’t really have anything against homosexuals.
If yours is about the same or higher, that’s a good reason to write off your explanation with “Well, you could pretty much read anything into the text, couldn’t you?”
I don’t think the length in words is a good thing to measure by, especially given the proportion of words I used offering metaphors to assist people in understanding the presented concepts or reinforcing that I’m not actually dangerous vs. actually presenting new concepts. I also think that the strength (rationality, coherency) of the explanation is more important than the number of concepts used, but it’s your heuristic.
Fine. Don’t count excess metaphors or disclaimers toward your explanation, and then compute the backpedal ratio. Would that be a fair metric? Even with this favorable counting, it still doesn’t look good.
I don’t think that evaluating the length of the explanation—or the number of new concepts used—is a useful heuristic at all, as I mentioned. I can go into more detail than I have regarding why, but that explanation would also be long, so I assume you’d disregard it, therefore I don’t see much point in taking the time to do so. (Unless someone else wants me to, or something.)
Given unlimited space, I can always outline plausible-sounding scenarios where someone’s outlandish remarks were actually benign. This is an actual cottage industry among people who want to show adherence to the Bible while assuring others they don’t actually want to murder homosexuals.
For this reason, the fact that you can produce a plausible scenario where Eliezer meant something benign is weak evidence he actually meant that. And it is the power of elaborate scenarios that implies we should be suspicious of high backpedal ratios. To the extent that you find length a bad measure, you have given sceanarios where length doesn’t actually correlate with backpedaling.
It’s a fair point, so I suggested you clip out such false positives for purposes of calculating the ratios, yet you still claim you have a good reason to ignore the backpedal ratio. That I don’t get.
More generally, I am still confused in that I don’t see a clean, simple reason why someone in the future would be confused as to why lots of rape would be a bad thing back in the 20th century, given that he’d have historical knowledge of what that society was like.
I wasn’t trying to explain how Eliezer’s world works—I upvoted the original comment specifically because I don’t know how it works, and I’m curious. If you were taking my explanation as an attempt to provide that information, I’m sure it came across as a poor attempt, because I was in fact specifically avoiding speculating about the world Eliezer created. What I was attempting to do was show—from an outsider’s perspective, since that’s the one I have, and it’s obviously more useful than an insider’s perspective in this case—the aspects how humans determine selfhood and boundaries that make such a change possible (yes, just ‘possible’), and also that Eliezer had shown understanding of the existence of those aspects.
If I had been trying to add more information to the story—writing fanfiction, or speculating on facts about the world itself—applying your backpedal-ratio heuristic would make some sense (though I’d still object to your use of length-in-words as a measurement, and there are details of using new-concepts as a measurement that I’m not sure you’ve noticed), but I wasn’t. I was observing facts about the real world, specifically about humans and how dramatically different socialization can affect us.
As to why the character didn’t understand why people from our time react so strongly to rape, the obvious (to me) answer is a simple lack of explanation by us. There’s a very strong assumption in this society that everyone shares the aspects of selfhood that make rape bad (to the point where I often have to hide the fact that I don’t share them, or suffer social repercussions), and very little motivation to even to consider why it’s considered bad, much less leave a record of such thoughts. Even living in this society, with every advantage but having the relevant trait in understanding why people react that way, I haven’t found an explanation that really makes sense of the issue, only one that does a coherent job of organizing the reactions that I’ve observed on my own.
So does your lack of a sexual self make it so you can’t see rape as bad at all, or “only” as bad as beating someone up? Presumably someone without a sexual self could still see assault as bad, and rape includes assault and violence.
Disregarding the extra physical and social risks of the rape (STDs, pregnancy, etc.), I expect that I wouldn’t find assault-plus-unwelcome-sex more traumatic than an equivalent assault without the sex. I do agree that assault is traumatic, and I understand that most people don’t agree with me about how traumatic assault-with-rape is compared to regular assault.
A note, for my own personal safety: The fact that I wouldn’t find it as traumatic means I’m much more likely to report it, and to be able to give a coherent report, if I do wind up being raped. It’s not something I’d just let pass, traumatic or no; people who are unwilling to respect others’ preferences are dangerous and should be dealt with as such.
Assault by itself is pretty traumatic. Not just the physical pain, but the stress, fear, and feeling of loss of control. I was mugged at knifepoint once, and though I wasn’t physically hurt at all, the worst part was just feeling totally powerless and at the mercy of someone else. I was so scared I couldn’t move or speak.
I don’t think your views on rape are as far from the norm as you seem to think. They make sense to me.
Rape can happen without assault, though—I know someone to whom such a rape happened, and she found it very traumatic, to the point where it still affects her life decades later.
There are also apparently other things that can evoke the same kind of traumatized reaction without involving physical contact at all; Eliezer gave ‘having nude photos posted online against your will’ as an example. (I mentioned that example in a discussion with the aforementioned friend, and she agreed with Eliezer that it’d be similarly traumatic, in both type and degree, for whatever one data-point might be worth.)
You seem confused about several things here. Unlike Biblical exegesis, in this conversation we are trying to elaborate and discuss possibilities for the cultural features of a world that was only loosely sketched out. You realize this is a fictional world we’re discussing, not a statement of morality, or a manifesto that would require “backpedaling”?
The point of introducing socially acceptable non-consensual sex was to demonstrate huge cultural differences. Neither EY nor anyone else is claiming this would be a good thing, or “benign” : it’s just a demonstration of cultural change over time.
Someone in the future, unless he was a historian, might not be familiar with history books discussing 20th century life. He might think lots of rape in the 20th century would be good (incorrectly) because non-consensual sex is a good thing by his cultural standards. He’d be wrong, but he wouldn’t realize it.
Your question is analogous to “I don’t see why someone now couldn’t see that slavery was a good thing back in the 17th century, given that he’d have historical knowledge of what that society was like.” Well, yes, slavery was seen (by some people) as a good thing back then, but it’s not now. In the story, non-consensual sex is seen (incorrectly) as a good thing in the future, so people in the future interpret the past through those biases.
Maybe it’s just my experience with Orthodox Judaism, but the backpedal exegesis ratio—if, perhaps, computed as a sense of mental weight, more than a number of words—seems to me like a pretty important quantity when explaining others.
I could see it being important in some situations, definitely, if I’m understanding the purpose of the measurement correctly.
My understanding is that it’s actually intended to measure how much the new interpretation is changing the meaning of the original passage from the meaning it was originally intended to have. That’s difficult to measure, in most cases, because the original intended meaning is generally at least somewhat questionable in cases where people attempt to reinterpret a passage at all.
In this case, I’m trying not to change your stated meaning (which doesn’t seem ambiguous to me: You’re indicating that far-future societies are likely to have changed dramatically from our own, including changing in ways that we would find offensive, and that they can function as societies after having done so) at all, just to explain why your original meaning is more plausible than it seems at first glance. If I’ve succeeded—and if my understanding of your meaning and my understanding of the function of the form of measurement are correct—then the ratio should reflect that.
The former. It actually took some research for me to determine that I was experiencing them at all, because most descriptions focus so heavily on the pleasure aspect.
It seems that the severity of being raped is part and parcel of being the gender that’s choosier about who they have sex with.
Evolutionarily, it would seem that the severity of women being raped is due to the possibility of involuntary impregnation. Do we have good data on truly inborn gender differences on the severity of rape, without cultural interference?
“rape” in their world just doesn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to us
I just figured that these humans have been biologically altered to have a different attitude towards sex. Perhaps, for them, initiating sex with someone is analogous to initiating a conversation. Sure, you wish that some people wouldn’t talk to you, but you wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone needed your permission before initiating a conversation. Think of all the interesting conversations you’d miss!
And if that’s what’s going on, that would constitute a (skeezy) answer to my question, but I’d like to hear it from the story’s author. Goodness knows it would annoy me if people started drawing inaccurate conclusions about my constructed worlds when they could have just asked me and I would have explained.
Alicorn: On the topic of your constructed worlds, I would be fascinated to read how your background in world-building (which, iirc, was one focus of your education?) might contribute to our understanding of this one.
Yes, worldbuilding was my second major (three cheers for my super-cool undergrad institution!). My initial impression of Eliezer’s skills in this regard from his fiction overall are not good, but that could be because he tends not to provide very much detail. It’s not impossible that the gaps could be filled in with perfectly reasonable content, so the fact that these gaps are so prevalent, distracting, and difficult to fill in might be a matter of storytelling prowess or taste rather than worldbuilding abilities. (It’s certainly possible to create a great world and then do a bad job of showcasing it.) I should be able to weigh in on this one in more detail if and when I get an answer to the above question, which is a particularly good example of a distracting and difficult-to-fill-in gap.
If I understand EY’s philosophy of predicting the future correctly, the gaps in the world are intentional.
Suppose that you are a futurist, and you know how hard it is to predict the future, but you’re convinced that the future will be large, complicated, weird, and hard to connect directly to the present. How can you provide the reader with the sensation of a large, complicated, weird, and hard-to-connect-to-the-present future?
Note that as a futurist, the conjunction fallacy (more complete predictions are less likely to be correct) is extremely salient in your thinking.
You put deliberate gaps into your stories, any resolution of which would require a large complicated explanation—that way the reader has the desired (distracting and difficult-to-fill-in) sensation, without committing the author to any particular resolution.
The author still has to know what’s inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent—they can’t appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won’t create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I’ve never published anything that I would’ve considered sending in to a science fiction magazine—maybe I’m holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it’s not like I’m outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn’t suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author’s proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer’s fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it’s unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.
Maybe he’s a good futurist. That does not make him a good worldbuilder, even if he’s worldbuilding about the future. Does it come as any surprise that the skills needed to write good fiction in well-thought-out settings aren’t the exact same skills needed to make people confused about large, complicated, weird, disconnected things?
Taking your question as rhetorical, with the presumed answer “no”, I agree with you—of course the skills are different. However, I hear an implication (and correct me if I’m wrong) that good fiction requires a well-thought-out setting. Surely you can think of good writers who write in badly-constructed or deeply incomplete worlds.
Good fiction does not strictly require a well-built setting. A lot of fiction takes place in a setting so very like reality that the skill necessary to provide a good backdrop isn’t worldbuilding, but research. Some fiction that isn’t set in “the real world” still works with little to no sense of place, history, culture, or context, although this works mostly in stories that are very simple, very short, or (more typically) both. Eliezer writes speculative fiction (eliminating the first excuse), and his stories typically depend heavily on backdrop elements (eliminating the second excuse, except when he’s writing fanficiton and can rely on prior reading of others’ works to do this job for him).
I agree with you regarding the quality of his writing, but your generalizations regarding worldbuilding’s relationship to quality may be overbroad or overstrong. Worldbuilding is fun and interesting and I like it in my books, but lack of worldbuilding, or deep difficult holes in the world are not killing flaws. Almost nothing cannot be rescued by a sufficient quality in other areas. Consider Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad.
The only one of the books you mention that I’ve read is Wrinkle in Time, so I’ll address that one. It isn’t world-driven! It’s a strongly character-driven story. The planets she invents, the species she imagines, the settings she dreams up—these do not supply the thrust of the story. The people populating the book do that, and pretty, emotionally-charged prose does most of the rest. Further, L’Engle’s worldbuilding isn’t awful, and moreover, its weaknesses aren’t distracting. It has an element of whimsy to it and it’s colored by her background values, but there’s nothing much in there that is outrageous and important and unexplained.
Eliezer’s stories, meanwhile—I’d have to dislike them even more if I were interpreting them as being character-driven. His characters tend to be ciphers with flat voices, clothed in cliché and propped up by premise. And it’s often okay to populate your stories with such characters if they aren’t the point—if the point is world or premise/conceit or plot or even just raw beautiful writing. I actually think that Eliezer’s fiction tends to be premise/conceit driven, not setting driven, but he backs up his premises with setting, and his settings do not appear to be up to the task. So to summarize:
A bad story element (such as setting, characterization, plot, or writing quality) may be forgivable, and not preclude the work it’s found in from being good, if:
The bad element is not the point of the story
The bad element isn’t indispensable to help support whatever element is the point of the story (for instance, you might get away with bad writing in a character-driven story only if you don’t depend on your character’s written voice to convey their personality)
And it is not so bad as to distract from the point of the story.
Eliezer’s subpar worldbuilding slips by according to the first criterion. I don’t think his stories are truly setting-driven. But it fails the second two. His settings are indispensably necessary to back up his premises. (“Three Worlds Collide” could not have been plausibly set during some encounter between three boats full of humans on Earth.) And—this one is a matter of taste to some extent, I’ll grant—the settings are poor enough to be distracting. (The non-consensual sex thing is just a particularly easy target. It’s hardly the only bizarre, unexplained thing he’s ever dropped in.)
Wouldn’t cannibalism be an equally horrific thing to come up with? I can envision a future world in which Cannibalism is just as accepted as non-consensual sex in The Worlds Collide. I mean, with the recent invention of pork on a petri dish, it would be just as easy to grow human on a petri dish.
Or, if like in the movie(s) Surrogate and Avatar, if we have bodies that we drive from a distance, and these bodies can be replaced by just growing/building a new one, might not some people kill and eat others as a type of social comment (in the same way that some sub-cultures engage in questionable behavior in order to make a social comment. The Goth/Vampire thing for instance, or some shock artists like Karen Finley or GG Allin. I had to leave the GG Allin show(s) I attended as a kid, but sat in rapt fascination through Karen’s song Yam Jam, and was really interested in just how she was going to remove those yams afterward or what might had driven her to explore that particular mode of expression to begin with)
Wouldn’t cannibalism be an equally horrific thing to come up with? … human on a petri dish.
I would not have any problems with eating human-on-a-petri-dish, as long as it never had any neurons. The problem with cannibalism is eating a person, not some cells with the wrong DNA. And cells in a petri dish are not a person.
If a group of people donated their bodies to cannibalism when they die for a group of cannibals to then consume them, I would have no problem with that. (I submit myself as an example of someone with moderate rather than extremely liberal views.)
I think the moral repugnance only comes in when people might be killed for food: the value of life and person-hood is so much greater than the value of an immediate meal.
Someone speculated earlier about a civilization of humans that had nothing to consume but other humans. Has it been mentioned yet that this population would shrink exponentially, because humans are heterotrophs, and there’s something like only 10% efficiency from one step in the food chain to the next?
That’s what was disappointing about The Matrix. If the aliens wanted to generate energy there would have been more efficient ways to do so (say, one which actually generated more energy than it required). I pretend the aliens were just farming CPU and the director got it wrong.
I think the moral repugnance only comes in when people might be killed for food: the value of life and person-hood is so much greater than the value of an immediate meal.
We already have moral repugnance towards the act of killing itself. I suspect that any feelings towards already-dead bodies exist independently of this. They may be rooted in feelings of disgust which evolved in part to protect from contamination (recently dead bodies can spread disease and also provide breeding ground for flies and parasites).
I don’t locate feelings of disgust. Perhaps we are just genetically or culturally different with respect to this sensitivity?
I recall when my parakeet died, I felt a sense of awe while holding the body; and a moral obligation to be respectful and careful with its body. I suppose I wouldn’t have enjoyed eating him, but only because I identified him as more of a person than food. If I thought he would have wanted me to eat him, I would. Except then I would worry about parasites, so I would have to weigh my wishes to make a symbolic gesture verses my wishes to stay healthy.
That was me who discussed a civilization that had nothing to consume but other humans. Thanks for bringing it up, but I had already dealt with that in the stories as soon as someone pointed out that problem when I was much younger (turned out to be easier to fix that I thought), but telling what the solution is would give away too much, and since I might actually be able to get these published now that cannibalism is not nearly so taboo as it was back in the 80s when I first tried to submit them (Zombie movies were not nearly so prevalent then as now). Once the solution is revealed… It makes for another grim and, some have said, twisted surprise.
I too have wondered about the whole matrix thing. There are some very good arguments against it, which I tend to give more weight to than the arguments in favor. Yet, the arguments in favor did not take into account the waste generated by the humans being used to support the generation of power, nor did they take into account any possible superconducting tech the AIs may have had. I cannot recall if any of them took into account that the AIs were also not using every human farmed as a battery, but were using many of the farmed humans as food for the living humans. There is also some evidence from the games that the AIs were also using algae as a supplement for the human batteries.
Also, on the point about people donating their bodies to cannibals when they die… I have often thought that it would be a horrible joke for some cranky rich old guy to play on his heirs to make them eat him if they wished to inherit any of his fortune.
Sod that, start a religion in which people have to symbolically eat your body and drink your blood once a week. Better yet, tell them that when they do it, it magically becomes the real thing!
I would love to stop caring. It is indeed a wonderful suggestion.
However, many of those people who would be offended by such things, also get offended by many, much less offensive things, things which often may cause a loss of liberty to others… And they vote.
I do think it would behoove me to maybe turn up my apathy just a bit, as my near term future will have a lot more to say about my survival and ultimate value than worrying about a bunch of human cattle who like to get all bothered about things as trivial as the shape of the moon (absurd example)
Most of the general population is incensed about most things, most of the time. I’ve stopped caring. Why don’t you?
I would love to stop caring. It is indeed a wonderful suggestion.
However, many of those people who would be offended by such things, also get offended by many, much less offensive things, things which often may cause a loss of liberty to others… And they vote.
Does your worrying about and discussing what other people believe contribute more to changing the outcome of their voting, or to other things, like personal payoff of social interaction while having the discussions about people of lower status according to this metric? Overestimating importance of personally discussing politics for policy formation is a classical mistake.
“Though it’s a side issue, what’s even more… interesting.… is the way that our brains simply haven’t updated to their diminished power in a super-Dunbarian world. We just go on debating politics, feverishly applying our valuable brain time to finding better ways to run the world, with just the same fervent intensity that would be appropriate if we were in a small tribe where we could persuade people to change things.”
I see that I may be caught up in this mistake a bit. Some of my discussing is simply to gather information about what a typical person of a demographic might believe. It’s mostly confirming what I might have read about in a poll, or that data from a website shows.
Some times the discussion gets to the point where I try to change an attitude, and I keep tripping over myself when I do this, as few people will change their attitudes, political and/or religious without some form of emotional connection with the reason to change.
This is sort of why I am here. I wish to stop using my valuable brain time to convince people of things which I haven’t a hope of changing, and do something else which may contribute to the good of society in a more direct way.
I am a mess of paranoid contradictions gathered from a mis-spent youth, and I wish to untangle some of that irrationality, as it is an intellectual drag on my progress.
Excellent; I was going to ask that myself. Clearly Eliezer wanted an example to support his oft-repeated contention that the future like the past will be filled with people whose values seem abhorrent to us. But why he chose that particular example I’d like to know. Was it the most horrific(-sounding) thing he could come up with some kind of reasonable(-sounding) justification for?
It’s not at all clear to me that coming up with a reasonable-sounding justification was part of the project. One isn’t provided in the story, one wasn’t presented as part of an answer to an earlier question of mine, etc. etc.
here
Perhaps see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination
This isn’t an explanation at all.
The purpose was to test the waters for another story he was developing; there probably wasn’t an in-story purpose to it beyond the obvious one of making it clear that the younger people had a very different worldview than the one we have now. He’s been unwilling to give more detail because the reaction to the concept’s insertion in that story was too negative to allow him to safely (without reputational consequence, I assume) share the apparently much more questionable other story, or, seemingly, any details about it.
I did upvote your question, by the way. I want to hear more about that other story.
I don’t see it doing much good to his reputation to stay silent either, given the inflammatory nature of the remark. Sure, people will be able to quote that part to trash Eliezer, but that’s a lot worse than if someone could link a reasonable clarification in his defense.
Yes, I voted Alicorn’s question up. I want to know too.
Actually, there’s a very good clarification of his views on rape in the context of our current society later in that same comment thread that could be linked to. It didn’t seem to be relevant to this conversation, though.
That’s certainly an explanation. “Very good” and “clarifying” are judgment calls here...
How could it be better? What parts still need clarifying?
Okay, after reading the thread and more of Eliezer’s comments on the issue, it makes more sense. If I understand it correctly, in the story world, women normally initiate sex, and so men would view female-initiated sex as the norm and—understandably—not see what’s wrong with non-consensual sex, since they wouldn’t even think of the possibility of male-initiated sex. Akon, then, is speaking from the perspective of someone who wouldn’t understand why men would have a problem with sex being forced on them, and not considering rape of women as a possibility at all.
Is that about right?
ETA: I still can’t make sense of all the business about redrawing of boundaries of consent.
ETA2: I also can’t see how human nature could change so that women normally initate sex, AND men continue to have the same permissive attitude toward sex being forced upon them. It seems that the severity of being raped is part and parcel of being the gender that’s choosier about who they have sex with.
Regarding the first part, I don’t think we were given enough information, either in the story or in the explanation, to determine how exactly the 3WC society differs from ours in that respect—and the point wasn’t how it’s different so much as that it’s different, so I don’t consider that a problem. I could be wrong, though, about having enough information—I’m apparently wired especially oddly in ways that are relevant to understanding this aspect of the story, so there’s a reasonable chance that I’m personally missing one or more pieces of information that Eliezer assumed that the readers would be bringing to the story to make sense of it.
Regarding ‘boundaries of consent’, I’m working on an explanation of how I understood Eliezer’s explanation. This is a tricky area, though, and my explanation necessarily involves some personal information that I want to present carefully, so it may be another few hours. (I’ve been out for the last four, or it would have been posted already.)
My understanding was that any society has things that are considered consented to by default, and things that need explicit permission. For instance, among the upper class in England in the last century, it was considered improper to start a conversation with someone unless you had been formally introduced. In modern-day America, it’s appropriate to start a conversation with someone you see in public, or tap someone on the shoulder, but not to grope their sexual organs, for instance.
I think this is what EY meant by “boundaries of consent”: for instance, imagine a society where initiating sex was the equivalent of asking the time. You could decline to answer, but it would seem odd.
Even so, there’s a difference between changing the default for consent, and actually allowing non-consensual behavior. For instance, if someone specifically tells me not to tap her shoulder (say she’s an Orthodox Jew) it would then not be acceptable for me to do so, and in fact would legally be assault. But if a young child doesn’t want to leave a toy store, it’s acceptable for his parent to forcibly remove him.
So there’s actually two different ideas: changing the boundaries of what’s acceptable, and changing the rules for when people are allowed to proceed in the face of an explicit “no”.
It’s also possible that people in that society have a fetish about being taken regardless of anything they do to try and stop it… Like maybe it’s one of the only aspects of their lives they don’t have any control over, and they like it that way. Of course, I think your explanation is more likely, but either could work.
I’m still working on my explanation, but I’m going to wait and see if this comment does the job before I post it.
It seems you’re still about as confused as I am. Why do you think the linked comment clarified anything?
I’m not confused at Eliezer’s linked comments; I’m confused at your confusion. I think the linked comments clarified things because I learned relevant information from them, the following points in particular:
The rape comment was not intended to be a plot point, or even major worldbuilding, for 3WC. The fact that we don’t have enough in-story context to understand the remark may have been purposeful (though the purpose was not 3WC-related if so), and whether it was purposeful or not, 3WC is intended to be able to work without such an explanation.
Eliezer believes that he understands the psychology behind rape well enough to construct a plausible alternative way for a society to handle the issue. He attempted to support the assertion that he does by explaining how our society handles the issue. I found his explanation coherent and useful—it actually helped solve a related problem I’d been working on—so I believe that he does understand it. I understand that you didn’t find his explanation coherent and/or useful, but I don’t know why, so I don’t know if it’s an issue of you not having some piece of information that Eliezer and I have and take for granted, or you noticing a problem with the explanation that Eliezer and I both missed, or perhaps some other issue. My method of solving this kind of problem is to give more information, which generally either solves the problem directly or leads the other person to be able to pinpoint the problem they’ve found in my (or in this case, Eliezer’s) logic, but on such a touchy subject I’m choosing to do that carefully.
Here’s my attempt at explaining Eliezer’s explanation. It’s based heavily on my experiences as someone who’s apparently quite atypical in a relevant way. This may require a few rounds of back-and-forth to be useful—I have more information about the common kind of experience (which I assume you share) than you have about mine, but I don’t know if I have enough information about it to pinpoint all the interesting differences. Note that this information is on the border of what I’m comfortable sharing in a public area, and may be outside some peoples’ comfort zones even to read about: If anyone reading is easily squicked by sexuality talk, they may want to leave the thread now.
I’m asexual. I’ve had sex, and experienced orgasms (anhedonically, though I’m not anhedonic in general), but I have little to no interest in either. However, I don’t object to sex on principle—it’s about as emotionally relevant as any other social interaction, which can range from very welcome to very unwelcome depending on the circumstances and the individual(s) with whom I’m socializing*. Sex tends to fall on the ‘less welcome’ end of that scale because of how other people react to it—I’m aware that others get emotionally entangled by it, and that’s annoying to deal with, and potentially painful for them, when I don’t react the same way—but if that weren’t an issue, ‘let’s have sex’ would get about the same range of reactions from me as ‘let’s go to the movies’ - generally in the range of ‘sure, why not?’ to ‘nope, sorry, what I’m doing now is more interesting’, or ‘no, thanks’ if I’m being asked by someone I prefer not to spend time with.
Now, I don’t generally talk about this next bit at all, because it tends to freak people out (even though I’m female and fairly pacifistic and strongly support peoples’ right to choose what to do with their bodies in general, and my cluelessness on the matter is unlikely to ever have any effect on anything), but until recently—until I read that explanation by Eliezer, actually—it made no sense to me why someone would consider being raped more traumatic than being kidnapped and forced to watch a really crappy movie with a painfully loud audio track. (Disregarding any injuries, STDs, loss of social status, and chance of pregnancy, of course.) Yeah, being forced to do something against your will is bad, but rape seems to be pretty universally considered one of the worst things that can happen to someone short of being murdered. People even consider rape that bad when the raped person was unconscious and didn’t actually experience it!
According to Eliezer—and this makes sense of years’ worth of data I gathered while trying to figure this out on my own—this seemingly irrational reaction is because people in our society tend to have what he calls ‘sexual selves’. As you may have picked up from the above text, I don’t appear to have a ‘sexual self’ at all, so I’m rather fuzzy on this part, but what he seems to be describing is the special category that people put ‘how I am about sex’ information into, and most people consider the existence and contents of that category to be an incredibly important part of their selves**. The movie metaphor could be extended to show some parallels in this way, but in the interests of showing a plausible emotional response that’s at least close to the same ballpark of intensity, I’ll switch to a food metaphor: Vegans, in particular, have a reputation for considering their veganism a fundamental part of their selves, and would theoretically be likely to consider their ‘food selves’ to have been violated if they discovered that someone had hidden an animal product in something that they ate—even if the animal product would have been discarded otherwise, resulting in no difference in the amount of harm done to any animal. (I know exactly one vegan, and he’s one of the least mentally stable people I know in general, so this isn’t strong evidence, but the situation I described is the only one other than complete mental breakdown in which I’d predict that that otherwise strict pacifist might become violent.) Even omnivores tend to have a ‘food self’ in our society—I know few people who wouldn’t be disconcerted to discover that they’d eaten rat meat, or insects, or human flesh.***
The rules that we set for ourselves, that define our ‘food selves’, ‘sexual selves’, ‘movie-watching selves’, etc., are what Eliezer was talking about when he mentioned ‘boundaries of consent’ (which is a specific example of one of those rules). They describe not just what we consider acceptable or unacceptable to do or have done to us, but more fundamentally what we consider related to a specific aspect of our selves. For example, while a google search informs me that this may not be an accurate piece of trivia, I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s implausible that people in Victorian England considered ankles sexual, even though we don’t now. Another example that I vaguely remember reading about, in a different area, is that some cultures considered food that’d been handled by a menstruating woman to be ‘impure’ and unfit to eat—again, something we don’t care about. Sometimes, these rules serve a particular purpose—I’ve heard the theory that the Kosher prohibition on eating pork was perhaps started because pork was noticed as a disease vector, for example—but the problems that are solved by those rules can sometimes be solved in other ways (in the given example, better meat-processing and cooking technology, I assume), making the rule superfluous and subject to change as the society evolves. It’s obvious from my own personal situation that it’s also possible—though Eliezer never claimed that this was the case for 3WC—for certain ‘selves’ that our society considers universal not to develop at all. (Possibly interesting example for this group: Spiritual/religious self.)
Eliezer didn’t share with us the details of how the 3WC society solved the relevant underlying problems and allowed the boundaries of sexuality and consent to move so dramatically, but he did indicate that he’s aware that those boundaries exist and currently solve certain problems, and that he needed to consider those issues in order to create a plausible alternative way for a society to approach the issue. I don’t see any reason to believe that he didn’t actually do so.
* I am, notably, less welcoming of being touched in general than most people, but this is not especially true of sex.
** I find this bizarre.
*** I have a toothache. The prescription pain meds I took just kicked in. If the rest of this post is less insightful than the earlier part, or I fail to tie them together properly, it’s because I’m slightly out of my head. This may be an ongoing problem until Tuesday or Wednesday.
One of the adverse effects of pain pills is temporarily to take away the ability of the person’s emotions to inform decision-making, particularly, avoidance of harms.
According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, for most people, the person’s ability to avoid making harmful decisions depends on the ability of the person to have an emotional reaction to the consequences of a decision—particularly an emotional reaction to imagined or anticipated consequences—that is, a reaction that occurs before the decision is made.
When on pain pills, a person tends not to have (or not to heed) these emotional reactions to consequences of decisions that have not been made yet, if I understand correctly.
The reason I mention this is that you might want to wait till you are off the pain pills to continue this really, really interesting discussion of your sexuality. I do not mean to imply that your decision to comment will harm you—I just thought a warning about pain pills might be useful to you.
I noticed this issue myself, last night—I’d been nervous about posting the information in the second and third paragraphs before I took the meds, and wasn’t, afterwards, which was unusual enough to be slightly alarming. (I did write both paragraphs before my visit to the dentist, and didn’t edit them significantly afterwards.) The warning is appreciated, though.
I’ve spent enough time thinking about this kind of thing, though, that I’m confident I can rely on cached judgments of what is and isn’t wise to share, even in my slightly impaired state. I’ll wait on answering anything questionable, but I suspect that that’s unlikely to be an issue—I am really very open about this kind of thing in general, when I’m not worrying about making others uncomfortable with my oddness. It’s a side-effect of not having a sexual self to defend.
I assume that by “pain pills” you mean opioids and other narcotics? I suspect that asprin and other non-narcotic painkillers wouldn’t impair emotional reactions...
I’m taking an opioid, but I suspect that the effect would be seen with anything that affects sensory impressions, since it’ll also affect your ability to sense your emotions.
Bit of a repeat warning: if you don’t want to read about sex stuff, don’t read this.
You know, given my own experiences, reading this post makes me wonder if sexual anhedonia and rationality are correlated for some reason. (Note, if you wish, that I’m a 17-year-old male, and I’ve never had a sexual partner. I do know what orgasm is.)
I would be shocked if they weren’t. The most powerful biasses are driven by hard-wired sexual signalling mechanisms.
This makes me wonder how I would be different if I weren’t apparently anhedonic. Note that I don’t remember whether I first found out about that or stumbled upon Eliezer Yudkowsky; it’s possible that my rationality-stuff came before my knowledge.
Thinking again, I have been a religious skeptic all my life (and a victim of Pascal’s wager for a short period, during which I managed to read some of the Pentateuch), I’ve never taken a stand on abortion, and I’ve been mostly apolitical, though I did have a mild libertarian period after learning how the free market works, and I never figured out what was wrong with homosexuality. I don’t know whether I, before puberty, was rational or just apathetic.
This was a fascinating comment; thank you.
By the way, the Bering at Mind blog over at Scientific American had a recent, rather lengthy post discussing asexual people.
That is really, really interesting—thanks!
(P.S. I do think that this is a fair elaboration on Eliezer’s comment, insofar as I understood either.)
You’re welcome. :)
FWIW, I think people don’t find it implausible because they know, even if only vaguely, that there are people out there with fetishes for everything, and I have the impression that in heavily Islamic countries with full-on burkha-usage/purdah going, things like ankles are supposed to be erotic and often are.
That interpretation sounds odd to me, so I checked wikipedia, which says:
‘Conventional’ seems to be the sticking point. Ankles are conventionally considered sexual in that culture, so it’s not a fetish, in that context; it’s a cultural difference.
It seems to make the most sense to think of it as a kind of communication—letting someone see your ankle, in that culture, is a communication about your thoughts regarding that person (though what exactly it communicates, I don’t know enough to guess on), and the content of that communication is the turn-on. In our culture, the same thing might be communicated by, say, kissing, with similar emotional results. In either case, it’s not the form of the communication that seems to matter, but the meaning, whereas in the case of a fetish, the form does matter, and what the action means to the other party (if there’s another person involved) doesn’t appear to. (Yes, I have some experience in this area. The fetish in question wasn’t actually very interesting, and I don’t think talking about it specifically will add to the conversation.)
I’m… not quite following. I gave 2 examples of why an educated modern person would not be surprised at Victorian ankles and their reception: that fetishes are known to be arbitrary and to cover just about everything, and that contemporary cultures are close or identical to the Victorians. These were 2 entirely separate examples. I wasn’t suggesting that your random Saudi Arabian (or whatever) had a fetish for ankles or something, but that such a person had a genuine erotic response regardless of whether the ankle was exposed deliberately or not.
A Western teenage boy might get a boner at bare breasts in porn (deliberate but not really communicating), his girlfriend undressing for him (deliberate & communicative), or—in classic high school anime fashion—a bra/swimsuit getting snagged (both not deliberate & not communicative).
It seems like we’re using the word ‘fetish’ differently, and I’m worried that that might lead to confusion. My original point was about how the cultural meanings of various things can change over time—including but not limited to what would or would not be considered a fetish (i.e. ‘unusual to be aroused by’). If nearly everyone in a given culture is aroused by a certain thing, then it’s not unusual in that culture, and it’s not a fetish for people in that culture to be aroused by that thing, at least given how I’m using the word. (Otherwise, any arousing trait would be considered a fetish if at least one culture doesn’t or didn’t share our opinion of it, and I suspect that idea wouldn’t sit well with most people.)
I propose that the useful dividing line between a fetish and an aspect of a given person’s culture is whether or not the arousing thing is universal enough in that culture that it can be used communicatively—that appears to be a good indication that people in that culture are socialized to be aroused by that thing when they wouldn’t naturally be aroused by it without the socialization. I also suspect that that socialization is accomplished by teaching people to see the relevant things as communication, automatically, as a deep heuristic—so that that flash of ankle or breast is taken as a signal that the flasher is sexually receptive, without any thought involved on the flashee’s part.
It makes much more sense to me that thinking that someone was sexually receptive would be arousing than that somehow nearly everyone in a given culture somehow wound up with an attraction to ankles for their own sake, for no apparent reason, and without other cultures experiencing the same thing. There may be another explanation, though—were you considering some other theory?
This seems true to me. No American male would deny that he is attracted to at least one of the big three (breasts, buttocks, face), and attracted for their own sake, and for no apparent reason. (Who instructed them to like those?)
Yet National Geographic is famous for all its bare-breasted photos of women who seem to neither notice nor care, and ditto for the men. The simplest explanation to me is just that cultures have regions of sexiness, with weak ties to biological facts like childbirth, and fetishes are any assessment of sexiness below a certain level of prevalence. Much simpler than all your communication.
It seems I was trying to answer a question that you weren’t asking, then; sorry about that.
Well, the awareness that there are people who have a fetish for X in this culture might make it less surprising that there is a whole culture that finds X sexy.
You’re at least partly right about the communication theory. One big turn on for most people is that someone is sexually interested in them, as communicated by revealing normally hidden body parts. Supposedly in Victorian times legs were typically hidden, so revealing them would be communicative.
Another part of this is that the idea of a taboo is itself sexy, whether or not there is communicative intent. Just the idea of seeing something normally secret or forbidden is arousing to many people.
I’m curious about your example that came up in your life, if you’re willing to share.
I suppose that’s true, though it’s not obvious to me that something would have to start as a fetish to wind up considered sexual by a culture.
This appears to be true—I’ve heard it before, anyway—but it doesn’t make sense, to me, at least as a sexual thing.
Except, as I’m thinking of it now, it does seem to make sense in the context of communicating. Sharing some risky (in the sense that if it were made public knowledge, you’d take a social-status hit) bit of information is a hard-to-fake signal that you’re serious about the relationship, and doing something risky together is a natural way of reciprocating with each other regarding that. It seems like it’d serve more of a pair-bonding purpose than strictly a sexual one, but the two are so intertwined in humans that it’s not really surprising that it’d do both.
My first boyfriend had a thing for walking through puddles while wearing tennis shoes without socks. Pretty boring, as fetishes go.
It wouldn’t. That’s not what I meant: I meant that someone considering Victorian culture, say, where it was allegedly commonplace to find ankles sexy, might not find it too surprising if he knew about people with an ankle fetish in this culture. As in “I know someone who finds ankles sexy in this culture, so it’s not that weird for ankles to be considered sexy in a completely different culture.”
Communicating risky information is more of a pair-bonding thing than a sexual one. I was thinking about seeing something taboo or hidden as sexual. Say it’s in a picture or it’s unintentional, so there’s no communicative intent. A lot of sexuals find it exciting just because it’s “forbidden”. You might be able to relate if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something and that just made you want it more.
That sounds bizarre. I understand assuming that something that a higher-ranking person is allowed to have, that you’re not allowed, is a good thing to try to get. It sounds like the cause and effect part of it what you described is backwards from the way that makes sense to me: ‘This is good because it’s not allowed’, not ‘this is not allowed because it’s good and in limited supply’. What could being wired that way possibly accomplish besides causing you grief?
ETA: I have heard of that particular mental quirk before, and probably even seen it in action. I’m not saying that it’s unusual to have it, just that it seems incomprehensible and potentially harmful, to me.
Well, you’re really asking two questions: why is it useful, and how to comprehend it.
As far as comprehending it… well, I had thought it was a human universal to be drawn to forbidden things. Have you really never felt the urge to do something forbidden, or the desire to break rules? Maybe it’s just because I tend to be a thrill-seeker and a risk-taker.
I think you might be misunderstanding. I don’t make a logical deduction that something is a good thing because it’s not allowed. I do feel emotionally drawn towards things that are forbidden. It’s got nothing to do with “higher-ranking” people.
It’s a pretty natural human urge to go exploring and messing around in forbidden areas. It’s useful because it’s what helps topple dictatorships, encourages scientific inquiry, and stirs up revolutions.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt the need to break a rule just for the sake of doing so. I vaguely remember being curious enough about the supposed draw of doing forbidden things to try it in some minor way, out of curiosity, as a teenager, but it’s pretty obvious how that worked out. (My memory of my teenage years is horrible, so I don’t have details, and could actually be incorrect altogether.) My reaction to rules in general is fairly neutral: I tend to assume that they have (or at least, were intended to have) good reasons behind them, but have no objection to breaking rules whose reasons don’t seem relevant to the issue at hand.
I did understand that you were talking about something different, but that different thing doesn’t make sense.
I am typically only drawn to forbidden things when I do not know why they are forbidden, or know that they are forbidden for stupid reasons and find the forbidden thing a desideratum for other reasons. In the first case, it’s a matter of curiosity—why has someone troubled to forbid me this thing? In the second, it’s just that the thing is already a desideratum and the forbiddance provides no successfully countervailing reason to avoid seeking it.
Like the ‘prestige’ metric that has been discussed recently ‘things that the powerful want to stop me from doing’ is a strong indicator of potential value to someone even though it is intrinsically meaningless. Obviously having this generalised wiring leads them to desire irrelevant or even detrimental things sometimes.
I haven’t been reading that. I’ll go check it out. Maybe it’ll help.
This is interesting to know and read about. Are you a-romantic as well as asexual?
It depends how you define ‘romantic’. I have a lot of trouble with the concept of monogamy, too, so if you’re asking if I pair-bond, no. I do have deeply meaningful personal relationships that involve most of the same kinds of caring-about, though. On the other hand, I don’t see a strong disconnect between that kind of relationship and a friendship—the difference in degree of closeness definitely changes how things work, but it’s a continuum, not different categories, and people do wind up in spots on that continuum that don’t map easily to ‘friends’ or ‘romantic partners’. (I do have names for different parts of that continuum, to make it easier to discuss the resulting issues, but they don’t seem to work the same as most peoples’ categories.)
Well, I was mostly referring to this feeling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence
From your response, I’d have to guess that, no, you don’t “fall in love” either. My personal experience is that there’s a sharp, obvious difference in the emotions involved in romantic relationships and in friendships, although the girls I’ve had crushes on have never felt similarly about me.
Yep, limerence is foreign to me, though not as incomprehensible as some emotions.
The wikipeida entry on love styles may be useful. I’m very familiar with storge, and familiar with agape. Ludus and pragma make sense as mental states (pragma more so than ludus), but it’s unclear to me why they’re considered types of love. I can recognize mania, but doubt that there’s any situation in which I’d experience it, so I consider it foreign. Eros is simply incomprehensible—I don’t even recognize when others are experiencing it.
That said, it seems completely accurate to me to describe myself as being in love with the people I’m closest with—the strength and closeness and emotional attachment of those relationships seems to be at least comparable with relationships established through more traditional patterns, once the traditional-pattern relationships are out of the initial infatuation stage.
Thanks for the link. This part was fascinating:
Okay, sounds plausible. Now, I ask that you do a check. Compare the length of your explanation to the length of the confusion-generating passage in 3WC. Call this the “backpedal ratio”. Now, compare this backpedal ratio to that of, say, typical reinterpretations of the Old Testament that claim it doesn’t really have anything against homosexuals.
If yours is about the same or higher, that’s a good reason to write off your explanation with “Well, you could pretty much read anything into the text, couldn’t you?”
I don’t think the length in words is a good thing to measure by, especially given the proportion of words I used offering metaphors to assist people in understanding the presented concepts or reinforcing that I’m not actually dangerous vs. actually presenting new concepts. I also think that the strength (rationality, coherency) of the explanation is more important than the number of concepts used, but it’s your heuristic.
Fine. Don’t count excess metaphors or disclaimers toward your explanation, and then compute the backpedal ratio. Would that be a fair metric? Even with this favorable counting, it still doesn’t look good.
I don’t think that evaluating the length of the explanation—or the number of new concepts used—is a useful heuristic at all, as I mentioned. I can go into more detail than I have regarding why, but that explanation would also be long, so I assume you’d disregard it, therefore I don’t see much point in taking the time to do so. (Unless someone else wants me to, or something.)
Given unlimited space, I can always outline plausible-sounding scenarios where someone’s outlandish remarks were actually benign. This is an actual cottage industry among people who want to show adherence to the Bible while assuring others they don’t actually want to murder homosexuals.
For this reason, the fact that you can produce a plausible scenario where Eliezer meant something benign is weak evidence he actually meant that. And it is the power of elaborate scenarios that implies we should be suspicious of high backpedal ratios. To the extent that you find length a bad measure, you have given sceanarios where length doesn’t actually correlate with backpedaling.
It’s a fair point, so I suggested you clip out such false positives for purposes of calculating the ratios, yet you still claim you have a good reason to ignore the backpedal ratio. That I don’t get.
More generally, I am still confused in that I don’t see a clean, simple reason why someone in the future would be confused as to why lots of rape would be a bad thing back in the 20th century, given that he’d have historical knowledge of what that society was like.
I wasn’t trying to explain how Eliezer’s world works—I upvoted the original comment specifically because I don’t know how it works, and I’m curious. If you were taking my explanation as an attempt to provide that information, I’m sure it came across as a poor attempt, because I was in fact specifically avoiding speculating about the world Eliezer created. What I was attempting to do was show—from an outsider’s perspective, since that’s the one I have, and it’s obviously more useful than an insider’s perspective in this case—the aspects how humans determine selfhood and boundaries that make such a change possible (yes, just ‘possible’), and also that Eliezer had shown understanding of the existence of those aspects.
If I had been trying to add more information to the story—writing fanfiction, or speculating on facts about the world itself—applying your backpedal-ratio heuristic would make some sense (though I’d still object to your use of length-in-words as a measurement, and there are details of using new-concepts as a measurement that I’m not sure you’ve noticed), but I wasn’t. I was observing facts about the real world, specifically about humans and how dramatically different socialization can affect us.
As to why the character didn’t understand why people from our time react so strongly to rape, the obvious (to me) answer is a simple lack of explanation by us. There’s a very strong assumption in this society that everyone shares the aspects of selfhood that make rape bad (to the point where I often have to hide the fact that I don’t share them, or suffer social repercussions), and very little motivation to even to consider why it’s considered bad, much less leave a record of such thoughts. Even living in this society, with every advantage but having the relevant trait in understanding why people react that way, I haven’t found an explanation that really makes sense of the issue, only one that does a coherent job of organizing the reactions that I’ve observed on my own.
So does your lack of a sexual self make it so you can’t see rape as bad at all, or “only” as bad as beating someone up? Presumably someone without a sexual self could still see assault as bad, and rape includes assault and violence.
Disregarding the extra physical and social risks of the rape (STDs, pregnancy, etc.), I expect that I wouldn’t find assault-plus-unwelcome-sex more traumatic than an equivalent assault without the sex. I do agree that assault is traumatic, and I understand that most people don’t agree with me about how traumatic assault-with-rape is compared to regular assault.
A note, for my own personal safety: The fact that I wouldn’t find it as traumatic means I’m much more likely to report it, and to be able to give a coherent report, if I do wind up being raped. It’s not something I’d just let pass, traumatic or no; people who are unwilling to respect others’ preferences are dangerous and should be dealt with as such.
Assault by itself is pretty traumatic. Not just the physical pain, but the stress, fear, and feeling of loss of control. I was mugged at knifepoint once, and though I wasn’t physically hurt at all, the worst part was just feeling totally powerless and at the mercy of someone else. I was so scared I couldn’t move or speak.
I don’t think your views on rape are as far from the norm as you seem to think. They make sense to me.
Rape can happen without assault, though—I know someone to whom such a rape happened, and she found it very traumatic, to the point where it still affects her life decades later.
There are also apparently other things that can evoke the same kind of traumatized reaction without involving physical contact at all; Eliezer gave ‘having nude photos posted online against your will’ as an example. (I mentioned that example in a discussion with the aforementioned friend, and she agreed with Eliezer that it’d be similarly traumatic, in both type and degree, for whatever one data-point might be worth.)
You seem confused about several things here. Unlike Biblical exegesis, in this conversation we are trying to elaborate and discuss possibilities for the cultural features of a world that was only loosely sketched out. You realize this is a fictional world we’re discussing, not a statement of morality, or a manifesto that would require “backpedaling”?
The point of introducing socially acceptable non-consensual sex was to demonstrate huge cultural differences. Neither EY nor anyone else is claiming this would be a good thing, or “benign” : it’s just a demonstration of cultural change over time.
Someone in the future, unless he was a historian, might not be familiar with history books discussing 20th century life. He might think lots of rape in the 20th century would be good (incorrectly) because non-consensual sex is a good thing by his cultural standards. He’d be wrong, but he wouldn’t realize it.
Your question is analogous to “I don’t see why someone now couldn’t see that slavery was a good thing back in the 17th century, given that he’d have historical knowledge of what that society was like.” Well, yes, slavery was seen (by some people) as a good thing back then, but it’s not now. In the story, non-consensual sex is seen (incorrectly) as a good thing in the future, so people in the future interpret the past through those biases.
Maybe it’s just my experience with Orthodox Judaism, but the backpedal exegesis ratio—if, perhaps, computed as a sense of mental weight, more than a number of words—seems to me like a pretty important quantity when explaining others.
I could see it being important in some situations, definitely, if I’m understanding the purpose of the measurement correctly.
My understanding is that it’s actually intended to measure how much the new interpretation is changing the meaning of the original passage from the meaning it was originally intended to have. That’s difficult to measure, in most cases, because the original intended meaning is generally at least somewhat questionable in cases where people attempt to reinterpret a passage at all.
In this case, I’m trying not to change your stated meaning (which doesn’t seem ambiguous to me: You’re indicating that far-future societies are likely to have changed dramatically from our own, including changing in ways that we would find offensive, and that they can function as societies after having done so) at all, just to explain why your original meaning is more plausible than it seems at first glance. If I’ve succeeded—and if my understanding of your meaning and my understanding of the function of the form of measurement are correct—then the ratio should reflect that.
Does this mean you’ve experienced orgasms without enjoying them, or experienced orgasms without setting out to do so for pleasure, or something else?
The former. It actually took some research for me to determine that I was experiencing them at all, because most descriptions focus so heavily on the pleasure aspect.
Evolutionarily, it would seem that the severity of women being raped is due to the possibility of involuntary impregnation. Do we have good data on truly inborn gender differences on the severity of rape, without cultural interference?
I don’t see the need for more than this:
I just figured that these humans have been biologically altered to have a different attitude towards sex. Perhaps, for them, initiating sex with someone is analogous to initiating a conversation. Sure, you wish that some people wouldn’t talk to you, but you wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone needed your permission before initiating a conversation. Think of all the interesting conversations you’d miss!
And if that’s what’s going on, that would constitute a (skeezy) answer to my question, but I’d like to hear it from the story’s author. Goodness knows it would annoy me if people started drawing inaccurate conclusions about my constructed worlds when they could have just asked me and I would have explained.
Alicorn: On the topic of your constructed worlds, I would be fascinated to read how your background in world-building (which, iirc, was one focus of your education?) might contribute to our understanding of this one.
Yes, worldbuilding was my second major (three cheers for my super-cool undergrad institution!). My initial impression of Eliezer’s skills in this regard from his fiction overall are not good, but that could be because he tends not to provide very much detail. It’s not impossible that the gaps could be filled in with perfectly reasonable content, so the fact that these gaps are so prevalent, distracting, and difficult to fill in might be a matter of storytelling prowess or taste rather than worldbuilding abilities. (It’s certainly possible to create a great world and then do a bad job of showcasing it.) I should be able to weigh in on this one in more detail if and when I get an answer to the above question, which is a particularly good example of a distracting and difficult-to-fill-in gap.
If I understand EY’s philosophy of predicting the future correctly, the gaps in the world are intentional.
Suppose that you are a futurist, and you know how hard it is to predict the future, but you’re convinced that the future will be large, complicated, weird, and hard to connect directly to the present. How can you provide the reader with the sensation of a large, complicated, weird, and hard-to-connect-to-the-present future?
Note that as a futurist, the conjunction fallacy (more complete predictions are less likely to be correct) is extremely salient in your thinking.
You put deliberate gaps into your stories, any resolution of which would require a large complicated explanation—that way the reader has the desired (distracting and difficult-to-fill-in) sensation, without committing the author to any particular resolution.
The author still has to know what’s inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent—they can’t appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won’t create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I’ve never published anything that I would’ve considered sending in to a science fiction magazine—maybe I’m holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it’s not like I’m outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn’t suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author’s proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer’s fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it’s unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.
Maybe he’s a good futurist. That does not make him a good worldbuilder, even if he’s worldbuilding about the future. Does it come as any surprise that the skills needed to write good fiction in well-thought-out settings aren’t the exact same skills needed to make people confused about large, complicated, weird, disconnected things?
Taking your question as rhetorical, with the presumed answer “no”, I agree with you—of course the skills are different. However, I hear an implication (and correct me if I’m wrong) that good fiction requires a well-thought-out setting. Surely you can think of good writers who write in badly-constructed or deeply incomplete worlds.
Good fiction does not strictly require a well-built setting. A lot of fiction takes place in a setting so very like reality that the skill necessary to provide a good backdrop isn’t worldbuilding, but research. Some fiction that isn’t set in “the real world” still works with little to no sense of place, history, culture, or context, although this works mostly in stories that are very simple, very short, or (more typically) both. Eliezer writes speculative fiction (eliminating the first excuse), and his stories typically depend heavily on backdrop elements (eliminating the second excuse, except when he’s writing fanficiton and can rely on prior reading of others’ works to do this job for him).
I agree with you regarding the quality of his writing, but your generalizations regarding worldbuilding’s relationship to quality may be overbroad or overstrong. Worldbuilding is fun and interesting and I like it in my books, but lack of worldbuilding, or deep difficult holes in the world are not killing flaws. Almost nothing cannot be rescued by a sufficient quality in other areas. Consider Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad.
The only one of the books you mention that I’ve read is Wrinkle in Time, so I’ll address that one. It isn’t world-driven! It’s a strongly character-driven story. The planets she invents, the species she imagines, the settings she dreams up—these do not supply the thrust of the story. The people populating the book do that, and pretty, emotionally-charged prose does most of the rest. Further, L’Engle’s worldbuilding isn’t awful, and moreover, its weaknesses aren’t distracting. It has an element of whimsy to it and it’s colored by her background values, but there’s nothing much in there that is outrageous and important and unexplained.
Eliezer’s stories, meanwhile—I’d have to dislike them even more if I were interpreting them as being character-driven. His characters tend to be ciphers with flat voices, clothed in cliché and propped up by premise. And it’s often okay to populate your stories with such characters if they aren’t the point—if the point is world or premise/conceit or plot or even just raw beautiful writing. I actually think that Eliezer’s fiction tends to be premise/conceit driven, not setting driven, but he backs up his premises with setting, and his settings do not appear to be up to the task. So to summarize:
A bad story element (such as setting, characterization, plot, or writing quality) may be forgivable, and not preclude the work it’s found in from being good, if:
The bad element is not the point of the story
The bad element isn’t indispensable to help support whatever element is the point of the story (for instance, you might get away with bad writing in a character-driven story only if you don’t depend on your character’s written voice to convey their personality)
And it is not so bad as to distract from the point of the story.
Eliezer’s subpar worldbuilding slips by according to the first criterion. I don’t think his stories are truly setting-driven. But it fails the second two. His settings are indispensably necessary to back up his premises. (“Three Worlds Collide” could not have been plausibly set during some encounter between three boats full of humans on Earth.) And—this one is a matter of taste to some extent, I’ll grant—the settings are poor enough to be distracting. (The non-consensual sex thing is just a particularly easy target. It’s hardly the only bizarre, unexplained thing he’s ever dropped in.)
Wouldn’t cannibalism be an equally horrific thing to come up with? I can envision a future world in which Cannibalism is just as accepted as non-consensual sex in The Worlds Collide. I mean, with the recent invention of pork on a petri dish, it would be just as easy to grow human on a petri dish.
Or, if like in the movie(s) Surrogate and Avatar, if we have bodies that we drive from a distance, and these bodies can be replaced by just growing/building a new one, might not some people kill and eat others as a type of social comment (in the same way that some sub-cultures engage in questionable behavior in order to make a social comment. The Goth/Vampire thing for instance, or some shock artists like Karen Finley or GG Allin. I had to leave the GG Allin show(s) I attended as a kid, but sat in rapt fascination through Karen’s song Yam Jam, and was really interested in just how she was going to remove those yams afterward or what might had driven her to explore that particular mode of expression to begin with)
I would not have any problems with eating human-on-a-petri-dish, as long as it never had any neurons. The problem with cannibalism is eating a person, not some cells with the wrong DNA. And cells in a petri dish are not a person.
The other problem with cannibalism is that you can get diseases that way far more easily than you can from eating non-human meat.
I know that, and you know that… But, what would the general population say about eating meat that was the product of Human DNA?
It seems to me that some of the general population would be horribly incensed about it.
Most of the general population is incensed about most things, most of the time. I’ve stopped caring. Why don’t you?
If a group of people donated their bodies to cannibalism when they die for a group of cannibals to then consume them, I would have no problem with that. (I submit myself as an example of someone with moderate rather than extremely liberal views.)
I think the moral repugnance only comes in when people might be killed for food: the value of life and person-hood is so much greater than the value of an immediate meal.
Someone speculated earlier about a civilization of humans that had nothing to consume but other humans. Has it been mentioned yet that this population would shrink exponentially, because humans are heterotrophs, and there’s something like only 10% efficiency from one step in the food chain to the next?
That’s what was disappointing about The Matrix. If the aliens wanted to generate energy there would have been more efficient ways to do so (say, one which actually generated more energy than it required). I pretend the aliens were just farming CPU and the director got it wrong.
We already have moral repugnance towards the act of killing itself. I suspect that any feelings towards already-dead bodies exist independently of this. They may be rooted in feelings of disgust which evolved in part to protect from contamination (recently dead bodies can spread disease and also provide breeding ground for flies and parasites).
I don’t locate feelings of disgust. Perhaps we are just genetically or culturally different with respect to this sensitivity?
I recall when my parakeet died, I felt a sense of awe while holding the body; and a moral obligation to be respectful and careful with its body. I suppose I wouldn’t have enjoyed eating him, but only because I identified him as more of a person than food. If I thought he would have wanted me to eat him, I would. Except then I would worry about parasites, so I would have to weigh my wishes to make a symbolic gesture verses my wishes to stay healthy.
That was me who discussed a civilization that had nothing to consume but other humans. Thanks for bringing it up, but I had already dealt with that in the stories as soon as someone pointed out that problem when I was much younger (turned out to be easier to fix that I thought), but telling what the solution is would give away too much, and since I might actually be able to get these published now that cannibalism is not nearly so taboo as it was back in the 80s when I first tried to submit them (Zombie movies were not nearly so prevalent then as now). Once the solution is revealed… It makes for another grim and, some have said, twisted surprise.
I too have wondered about the whole matrix thing. There are some very good arguments against it, which I tend to give more weight to than the arguments in favor. Yet, the arguments in favor did not take into account the waste generated by the humans being used to support the generation of power, nor did they take into account any possible superconducting tech the AIs may have had. I cannot recall if any of them took into account that the AIs were also not using every human farmed as a battery, but were using many of the farmed humans as food for the living humans. There is also some evidence from the games that the AIs were also using algae as a supplement for the human batteries.
Also, on the point about people donating their bodies to cannibals when they die… I have often thought that it would be a horrible joke for some cranky rich old guy to play on his heirs to make them eat him if they wished to inherit any of his fortune.
Sod that, start a religion in which people have to symbolically eat your body and drink your blood once a week. Better yet, tell them that when they do it, it magically becomes the real thing!
I would love to stop caring. It is indeed a wonderful suggestion.
However, many of those people who would be offended by such things, also get offended by many, much less offensive things, things which often may cause a loss of liberty to others… And they vote.
I do think it would behoove me to maybe turn up my apathy just a bit, as my near term future will have a lot more to say about my survival and ultimate value than worrying about a bunch of human cattle who like to get all bothered about things as trivial as the shape of the moon (absurd example)
Does your worrying about and discussing what other people believe contribute more to changing the outcome of their voting, or to other things, like personal payoff of social interaction while having the discussions about people of lower status according to this metric? Overestimating importance of personally discussing politics for policy formation is a classical mistake.
See also: Dunbar’s Function
I see that I may be caught up in this mistake a bit. Some of my discussing is simply to gather information about what a typical person of a demographic might believe. It’s mostly confirming what I might have read about in a poll, or that data from a website shows.
Some times the discussion gets to the point where I try to change an attitude, and I keep tripping over myself when I do this, as few people will change their attitudes, political and/or religious without some form of emotional connection with the reason to change.
This is sort of why I am here. I wish to stop using my valuable brain time to convince people of things which I haven’t a hope of changing, and do something else which may contribute to the good of society in a more direct way.
I am a mess of paranoid contradictions gathered from a mis-spent youth, and I wish to untangle some of that irrationality, as it is an intellectual drag on my progress.