But what does it have to do with the problem I raised with the word access?
The point is that from what I heard Hungary is a culture where someone whose “interest in women is loving them, being loved by them, and making love, in that order” has a chance of winding up with a woman.
The problem I raised is that it is a dehumanizing term that ignores the romantic and loving aspects of relationships, even ignores how sex is a mutual pleasing participating act, it objectifies women as something passive and handing out sex as rewards,
What do you mean by “objectifies”. I’ve yet to see a coherent explanation of the concept that doesn’t boil down to “applying Baysian (or any) reasoning to humans is evil”.
basically it has something akin to a prostitution vibe.
Now you’re just resembling the semi-marxist/semi-aristocratic “how dare you reduce what I do to something as banal as trade!”
Yes, but the motives would be entirely different—and yes, they matter.
Care to explain what you think the two sets of motives are?
You have to be at least the same tribe, in the sense of shared motives and goals.
Rather you have to be running good epistomology rather than anti-epistomology.
The point is that from what I heard Hungary is a culture where someone whose “interest in women is loving them, being loved by them, and making love, in that order” has a chance of winding up with a woman.
This IMHO works in every culture, Anglo ones including, you just have to ignore the party b...es and go for the intelligent and non-crazy. Usually it means training yourself to be not too focused on cover-girl looks and be okay with stuff like no makeup. As a theoretical example, consider how would you pick up Megan McArdle—she writes, sounds and looks a lot like my past girlfriends, and Suderman looks and sounds broadly like the same kind of guy I am. This just a hunch, though.
However I fully agree that my dating experience in the UK was worse than in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia or Serbia. (Lived in some places and went to all kinds of meditation camps in the others.) And perhaps it would be worse in the US too. This is largely because I can tolerate things like no make-up, no heels, body hair etc. but I cannot really deal with obesity, and that means playing in a shrinking and increasingly competitive market. Yet, on the whole, my UK experience was not so bad either. On speed dating events in Birmingham, there was a non-fat, intelligent, friendly, considerate 15-20% always.
What do you mean by “objectifies”. I’ve yet to see a coherent explanation of the concept that doesn’t boil down to “applying Baysian (or any) reasoning to humans is evil”.
This is that simple basic Kantian thinking that got deeply incorporated into the cultural DNA of the West centuries ago, this why I don’t understand what is in not to understand about. It is about primarily treating people as ends and only secondarily and cautiously as means. It is about understanding humans have a faculty of reason and thus autonomy. What follows from this? Autonomy means people can decide to be different from each other, and thus be really cautious with generalizations and stereotypes—perhaps, cultural ones are still okay, because socialization is a powerful thing, but gender is not a culture. Second, and more important, the ends not means stuff means not seeing sex as a prize to be won by an active, driven men and women just passively hand it out as a reward for the effort, but as an mutually initiated, mutually desired interaction between two autonomous beings with their own desires. It would be useful to read a bit around on the Pervocracy blog about this.
Objectification is not necessarily sexual and it is really an old idea, not some later day SJW fashion. It is treating people as means. Marx argued that in a 19. century factory the proletarian is objectified into being treated like a human machine. This may or may not be true, but an example of the idea. Or if you look at how people realized maybe slavery is not such a good idea, a large part of this was this old Kantian idea that a human should not use a human as a mere tool, without regard to the will of the other human. Rather if we want people to work for us, we should negotiate with them a price on an equal level, acquire consent, and make sure both got our will satisfied in the transaction. This is the same idea. But objectification is gradual, it is not a binary switch—one could argue employment in a hierarchical business is still more so than being an entrepreneur.
An object is simply something that does not have own goals, it is the object of desire, or the tool to achieve other desires with, of other people. If you understand what being a person, what personhood means, well, objectification is just a denial of it.
Similarly, I would not say objectifying people is a traditional, conservative thing. Just because feminists fight it it does not mean it is so—reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed progressivism is not traditionalism. If you look up Roger Scruton’s Right-Hegelian philosophy of sex, it is very decently non-objectifying.
I would say objectification is largely a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon in an age where machines and processes are so predominant that we tend to see people like them, too, and the essence of personhood—intellect and will—gets ignored.
I would also say mass gunpowder armies played an important role in objectifying people.
Sexual objectification is simply a subset of this generic trend.
Another useful resource is existentialists like Sartre, “The Other”.
Care to explain what you think the two sets of motives are?
The intelligent asshole will perhaps present a bogus physical theory to gain status—but the arguments will be about a commonly understood, verifiable thing outside himself. But a social theory will not be about a thing, it will be essentially about himself, something only he really knows and we can just guess.
Running good epistemology on human concerns, social concerns is highly desirable but incredibly hard becasue we cannot separate the observer from the observed.
Interestingly, Rothbard and Austrian Economics have something interesting to say here, the limitations of empiricism about people’s behavior. You need repeatable experiments. But if you repeat it with different people, that is not really valid because people are far, far too diverse—remember, autonomy. It is simply wrong in principle to treat beings with intellect and will fungible. If I repeat a behavior experiment with two different groups of people and get something like 62% an 65% do X then of course that means something, but it is not, strictly speaking, the repetition of the experiment. If you repeat it with the same people, you find they learned from the previous experiment rendering the experiment less valid, because not really repeated the same way. So basically we cannot, without brainwashing, repeat experiments in human behavior. Nevertheless at the end of the day we still run experiments with human behavior because just what else can one do? We work with what we have. But the confidence in these things should always necessarily be far lower, for these reasons. The strict repetition criteria is never satisfied.
As a theoretical example, consider how would you pick up Megan McArdle—she writes, sounds and looks a lot like my past girlfriends, and Suderman looks and sounds broadly like the same kind of guy I am. This just a hunch, though.
(..)
On speed dating events in Birmingham, there was a non-fat, intelligent, friendly, considerate 15-20% always.
Just a hunch but I suspect Megan McArdle would not be doing speed dating.
Autonomy means people can decide to be different from each other, and thus be really cautious with generalizations and stereotypes
Except the generalizations are frequently correct and have enormous predictive power.
perhaps, cultural ones are still okay, because socialization is a powerful thing, but gender is not a culture.
Why? Yes, socialization is powerful, but so is genetics, including the difference between XX and XY. In particular the SRY gene has much more influence than a typical gene.
Second, and more important, the ends not means stuff means not seeing sex as a prize to be won by an active, driven men and women just passively hand it out as a reward for the effort, but as an mutually initiated, mutually desired interaction between two autonomous beings with their own desires.
You see to be confusing is and ought there. However, you think sex ought to be obtained, being active and driven (among other things) makes a man more likely to get it. Whether, you consider the women’s behavior here “passive” or “actively seeking driven men” is irrelevant, and probably doesn’t correspond to any actual distinction in reality.
Objectification is not necessarily sexual and it is really an old idea, not some later day SJW fashion. It is treating people as means. Marx argued that in a 19. century factory the proletarian is objectified into being treated like a human machine.
So you’re saying its not just SJW because it was also used by their leftist predecessors?
An object is simply something that does not have own goals, it is the object of desire, or the tool to achieve other desires with, of other people. If you understand what being a person, what personhood means, well, objectification is just a denial of it.
If you mean that humans are game-theoretic agents, I agree. However, I don’t see how “therefore we can’t or shouldn’t apply probability theory to them” follows.
I would say objectification is largely a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon in an age where machines and processes are so predominant that we tend to see people like them, too, and the essence of personhood—intellect and will—gets ignored.
Doesn’t this seem to contradict your earlier claim that anti-objectification was responsible for the abolition of slavery?
The intelligent asshole will perhaps present a bogus physical theory to gain status—but the arguments will be about a commonly understood, verifiable thing outside himself. But a social theory will not be about a thing, it will be essentially about himself, something only he really knows and we can just guess.
Well, in this case the social theory in question is indeed about a verifiable thing outside the person, namely the dynamics of human romantic interaction.
Interestingly, Rothbard and Austrian Economics have something interesting to say here, the limitations of empiricism about people’s behavior. You need repeatable experiments. But if you repeat it with different people, that is not really valid because people are far, far too diverse—remember, autonomy.
Quote please. I’m guessing you’re badly misinterpreting what they wrote. Probably something about how since people respond to incentives, empirically observed behavior will change when the incentives change. Something like a proto-version of Goodhart’s law. This is not the same thing as the claim that the laws of probability don’t apply to humans, which is the claim you seem to be making.
If I repeat a behavior experiment with two different groups of people and get something like 62% an 65% do X then of course that means something, but it is not, strictly speaking, the repetition of the experiment.
If you mean there is a lot of variance among humans, I agree. However, you seem to be arguing that we should worship and/or ignore this variance rather then studying it.
I know what you mean, but I think there is a coherent notion in there, along the following lines: 1. Human beings are people, with hopes and fears and plans and preferences and ideas and so forth. 2. Inevitably, some of our thoughts about, and actions toward, other human beings involve more attention to these features of them than others. 3. Something is “objectification” to the extent that we would change it if we attended more to the specifically person-ish features of the other people involved: their hopes, fears, plans, preferences, ideas, etc. (Or: that a decent person would, or that we should. These framings make the value-ladenness of the notion more explicit. Or, and actually this may be a better version than the other three, that they would prefer you to. The fact that on my account there are these different notions of “objectification” isn’t, I think, a weakness; words have ranges of meaning.)
So, e.g., consider “treating someone as a sex object”, which for present purposes we may take to mean ignoring aspects of them not relevant to sex. If you are currently engaged in having sex with them, this is probably a good thing; on careful consideration of their wants and needs as a person you would probably conclude that when having sex they would prefer you to focus on those aspects of them that are relevant to having sex. On the other hand, if you are in the audience of a seminar they are presenting, you should probably be attending to their ideas about fruit fly genetics or whatever rather than to how they’d look right now with no clothes on; at any rate, that would probably be their preference.
Something is “objectification” to the extent that we would change it if we attended more to the specifically person-ish features of the other people involved: their hopes, fears, plans, preferences, ideas, etc. (Or: that a decent person would, or that we should. These framings make the value-ladenness of the notion more explicit. Or, and actually this may be a better version than the other three, that they would prefer you to.
I *would prefer it” if you sent me a million dollars. By this definition it would seem that you’re objectifying me by not sending me the money?
Only in so far as the reason why I don’t is that I’m not paying attention to the fact that you have preferences.
If I’m perfectly well aware of that but don’t give you the money because I don’t have it, because I think you would waste it, because I would rather spend it on enlarging my house, or because I have promised my gods that I will never give anything to someone who uses the name of their rival, then I may or may not be acting rightly but it’s got nothing to do with “objectification” in the sense I described.
Only in so far as the reason why I don’t is that I’m not paying attention to the fact that you have preferences.
Did you think of the fact that I wanted a million dollars until I told you?
If I’m perfectly well aware of that but don’t give you the money because I don’t have it, because I think you would waste it, because I would rather spend it on enlarging my house, or because I have promised my gods that I will never give anything to someone who uses the name of their rival, then I may or may not be acting rightly but it’s got nothing to do with “objectification” in the sense I described.
OK, if you allow excuses like that, i.e., “I know your preferences and don’t care”, then I don’t see how PUA stuff counts as “objectification”.
Did you think of the fact that I wanted a million dollars until I told you?
Explicitly? No, but I don’t think that’s relevant. I’m aware that people generally prefer having more money, and giving someone else $1M would be difficult enough for me that it seems vanishingly unlikely that explicitly generating the thought “X would be better off with an extra $1M” for everyone I interact with would change my behaviour in any useful way. If in the course of talking to you it became apparent that you had a need so extraordinary as to give a near-stranger reason for mortgaging his house and liquidating a big chunk of his retirement savings, then I’m pretty sure I would explicitly generate that thought. (I still might not act on it, of course.)
OK, if you allow excuses like that, i.e., “I know your preferences and don’t care”, then I don’t see how PUA stuff counts as “objectification”.
The borderline between objectification and mere selfishness is sometimes fuzzy, no doubt. On reflection, I think “nothing to do with objectification” in my earlier comment was an overstatement; if A treats B just as he would if he were largely ignoring the fact that B has preferences and opinions and skills and hopes and fears and so forth, then that has something to do with objectification, namely the fact that it generates the same behaviours. Let’s introduce some ugly terminology: “cobjectification” (c for cognitive) is thinking about someone in a way that neglects their personhood; “bobjectification” (b for behaviour, and also for broad) is treating them in the same sort of way as you would if you were cobjectifying them.
I am very far from being an expert on PUA and was not commenting on PUA. But if you are approaching an encounter with someone and the only thing on your mind is what you can do that maximizes the probability that they will have sex with you tonight, that’s a clear instance of bobjectification. It’s probably easier to do if you cobjectify them too, but I don’t know whether doing so is an actual technique adopted by PUA folks. And I guess that when anti-PUA folks say “PUA is objectifying” they are making two separate claims: (1) that PUA behaviour is bobjectifying, which is harmful to the people it’s applied to, and (2) that people practising PUA are (sometimes? always?) cobjectifying, which is a character flaw or a cognitive error or a sin or something. It seems hard to argue with #1. #2 is much harder to judge because it involves guessing at the internal states of the PUAs, but it seems kinda plausible.
Now: perhaps objectification in the broad (“bobjectification”) sense is just the same thing as, say, selfishness. They certainly overlap a lot. But I think (1) they’re not quite the same—e.g., if you treat someone as an object for the benefit of some other person you’re objectifying them without being selfish, and (2) even when they describe the same behaviours they focus on different possible explanations. Probably a lot of selfishness is made easier by not attending fully to the personhood of the victim, and probably a lot of objectification is motivated by selfishness, but “X isn’t paying (much/enough) attention to Y’s personhood” and “X is (strongly/too) focused on his own wants” are different statements and, e.g., might suggest different approaches if you happen to want X to stop doing that.
Ok, let’s apply these terms to the million dollar example. You didn’t know or care whether I wanted the money (cobjectification) and once you found out you wouldn’t send it to me (bobjectification). So it appears your new terminology applies just as well to the refusing to send money example.
Incorrect. I didn’t know whether you wanted the money, but not because I was thinking of you as an object without preferences; simply because the question “should I send VoR a million dollars?” never occurs to me. Just as the parallel questions never occur to me in day-to-day interactions with friends, colleagues, family, etc. It’s got nothing to do with cobjectification, and everything to do with the fact that for obvious reasons giving someone $1M isn’t the kind of thing there’s much point in contemplating unless some very obvious and cogent reason has arisen.
It is, indeed, true that not sending you $1M is a thing I might do if I didn’t think of you as a person with preferences and all the other paraphernalia of personhood. But it’s also a thing I might do (indeed, almost certainly would do) if I did think of you as a person. Therefore, it is not a good example of bobjectification. (We could say, in the sort of terms the LW tradition might approve of, that something is bobjectification precisely in so far as it constitutes (Bayesian) evidence of cobjectification. In this case, perhaps Pr(not send $1M | cobjectify) might be 1-10^-9 and Pr(not send $1M | not cobjectify) might be 1-10^-8, or something. So the log of the odds ratio is something like 10^-8: very little bobjectification
I didn’t know whether you wanted the money, but not because I was thinking of you as an object without preferences; simply because the question “should I send VoR a million dollars?” never occurs to me. Just as the parallel questions never occur to me in day-to-day interactions with friends, colleagues, family, etc. It’s got nothing to do with cobjectification, and everything to do with the fact that for obvious reasons giving someone $1M isn’t the kind of thing there’s much point in contemplating unless some very obvious and cogent reason has arisen.
So you’re actual definition of “cobjectification” amounts to “ignoring people’s preferences except where there’s a gjm!‘obvious reason’ to ignore them”.
BTW, I’m not making fun of you. I seriously can’t see how this case is different from the case of PUA.
It is, indeed, true that not sending you $1M is a thing I might do if I didn’t think of you as a person with preferences and all the other paraphernalia of personhood.
Except you weren’t thinking of me as a person with preferences. You were thinking of me, if at all, as “just another person I interact with”.
Note: I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this, but I don’t see how it’s different from a PUA thinging of a girl as “just another girl I banged” or “just another girl I can’t get”.
So your actual definition of “cobjectification” amounts to [...]
Nope. (Nor do I see how what I wrote leads to that conclusion. As an aside, I have this problem quite frequently in discussions with you, and I have the impression that some other people do too. My impression is that you are adopting a sort of opposite of the “principle of charity”: when there are two interpretations of what someone else has said, pick whichever is less sensible. Perhaps that’s not what’s going on, but in any case it doesn’t make for constructive discussion.)
By “cobjectification” I mean, as I have already said, not thinking of someone else as a person with preferences etc. This is not at all the same thing as thinking of them as a person with preferences etc., but not being at all times consciously aware of all their preferences.
If I am talking to someone, then—as I already said—the question of whether they would like me to give them $1M generally doesn’t cross my mind, perhaps because there’d be no point in its doing so. And also because there are countless different things someone might want me to do, and I am several orders of magnitude short of enough brainpower to think about them all explicitly. Which is to say that not considering whether to send VoR $1M is simply business as usual, it’s about equally likely whoever I’m talking to and however I think about them, and none of that applies to thinking about someone only in terms of how I can get them to have sex with me.
Except you weren’t thinking of me as a person with preferences.
By “cobjectification” I mean, as I have already said, not thinking of someone else as a person with preferences etc. This is not at all the same thing as thinking of them as a person with preferences etc., but not being at all times consciously aware of all their preferences.
So in it’s not cobjectification if you abstractly know the person has preferences? Well, the PUA certainly abstractly knows the women has preferences. I don’t see how this is different from say only thinking of a Batista in terms of getting coffee.
if you abstractly know the person has preferences?
No, the point isn’t abstractly knowing, it’s how (if at all) those preferences (and other distinctly “personal” features of the person in question) affect your thinking and speaking and action. There’s a lot of interaction where the answer is “scarcely at all, for anyone” and such interaction is therefore not a very good measure of objectification. (Though your example is an interesting one; if A and B but coffee from the same barista, and A notices that she looks harassed, takes extra trouble to be polite to her, and maybe remarks “you look rushed off your feet—has it been a long day?” while B is brusque and rude, that might in fact reflect a difference in the extent to which A and B see her as a person. But this is a very noisy signal.)
It’s not (in the usage I’m proposing) cobjectification if the way in which you are thinking about the person does not pay markedly less attention to their preferences, personality, hopes, fears, etc., than some baseline expectation. Exactly where that baseline is will change what counts as cobjectification (and hence indirectly what counts as bobjectification) for a given person: objectification is an expectation-dependent notion just like “stupid”, “strong”, or “beautiful”.
In the case of PUA, I suppose a reasonable baseline might be “other somewhat-personal face-to-face conversations between two people in a social setting”. And if someone claims that PUA commonly involves objectifying women, they mean some combination of (1) would-be pickup artists are attending less to the personhood of their interlocutors than they would to that of other people (especially other men) in other contexts and (2) they behave as if #1 were true.
Perhaps an analogy might be helpful. Suppose that instead of “personhood-neglect” we think about “danger-neglect”. You might claim that sometimes people fail to recognize others as dangerous when they should, or behave as if they do. An objection exactly parallel to your million-dollar objection to “objectification” would go like this: “We had a conversation the other day, and I bet it never once occurred to you during it that I might have 20kg of TNT in my backpack and set it off while we were talking. So you’re engaging in danger-neglect all the time, which shows what a silly notion it is.” And the answer is also exactly parallel: “Yes, that’s a possibility in principle, but experience shows that that’s a really unlikely danger, and there’s not much I can realistically do about it, and if you were likely to blow us both up with a large quantity of TNT then there’d probably be some indication of it in advance. Danger-neglect doesn’t mean not thinking consciously of every possible danger—no one could do that, so that would be a useless notion—it means paying less attention than normal to genuine threats posed by particular people.”
If you agree that this objection would be bad and the response reasonable, where does the analogy with objectification break down?
(I don’t think danger-neglect is a terribly useful notion in practice, not least because in practice most people don’t actually pose much threat. This is a respect in which it fails to resemble objectification, since in practice most people do have beliefs and personality and preferences and so forth.)
Exactly where that baseline is will change what counts as cobjectification (and hence indirectly what counts as bobjectification) for a given person:
So if we’re going by social baseline, that means blacks weren’t cobjectified in the ante-bellum south since treating them as property was the baseline.
In the case of PUA, I suppose a reasonable baseline might be “other somewhat-personal face-to-face conversations between two people in a social setting”.
Except by that standard PUA isn’t objectifying. Robin Hanson analyzes all kinds of personal interactions in terms of status games and no one calls that objectification unless it involves gender (or race or some other protected category).
“We had a conversation the other day, and I bet it never once occurred to you during it that I might have 20kg of TNT in my backpack and set it off while we were talking. So you’re engaging in danger-neglect all the time, which shows what a silly notion it is.” And the answer is also exactly parallel: “Yes, that’s a possibility in principle, but experience shows that that’s a really unlikely danger, and there’s not much I can realistically do about it, and if you were likely to blow us both up with a large quantity of TNT then there’d probably be some indication of it in advance. Danger-neglect doesn’t mean not thinking consciously of every possible danger—no one could do that, so that would be a useless notion—it means paying less attention than normal to genuine threats posed by particular people.”
Except this analogy doesn’t work. Most people aren’t carrying around TNT, but most people would in fact like a million dollars.
No, it means typical antebellum Southerners, if they’d had the word “objectified” and used it roughly as I describe, might well not have considered that black people were being objectified.
(Although if you’re asking “is group X being objectified by group Y?” then surely the relevant baseline has to involve victims not in group X, or perpetrators not in group Y, or both. So an antebellum Southerner aware that they treated black people differently from white people, or that the dirty race-traitors up north treated black people differently from how they did, might instead say: Yeah, sure, we objectify them, but that’s because they’re not persons in the full sense, any more than little children or animals are.)
Robin Hanson
I’m not sure which of two arguments you’re making. (Maybe neither. My probabilities: 70% #2, 20% #1, 10% something else.) (1) “Robin Hanson does all this dispassionate analysis and no one claims he’s objectifying anyone. So dispassionate analysis is OK and what PUAs do is no different.” (2) “Robin Hanson’s analysis shows that most of us, most of the time, treat people as means rather than ends and ignore their preferences and hopes and fears and personalities and beliefs and so forth. So if PUAs do that too, they’re doing nothing different from anyone else.”
To #1, I say: scientific and economic analysis of people’s behaviour is a context in which we expect some aspects of their personhood to get neglected; when we study things we can’t attend to everything. And if Robin Hanson analyses behaviour like mine in a particular way, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg; there’s no actual personal interaction in which I could be harmed or annoyed or anything. This is all very different from the PUA situation.
To #2, I say: Robin Hanson certainly makes a lot of claims about how people think and feel and act that suggest we’re less “nice” than we like to think we are. I don’t think he’s given very good evidence for those claims, and taking a leaf from his book I only-half-jokingly suggest that cynical psychological analysis is not about psychology and that some people endorse his claims because being cynical about human motives makes them feel good.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that a lot of those claims are right. It is none the less clear that different people on different occasions attend more or less to any particular characteristic of others. (Someone attacks you in the street, beats you up and steals your wallet. Someone else sees you lying on the ground moaning in pain, takes you to the hospital to get you fixed up, and gives you some money so you don’t run out before the bank can issue you with new cards etc. It may be that, underneath, the second person is “really” trying to improve his self-image, impress any women who may be watching, or something, but isn’t it clear that there is a difference in how these two people are thinking about your needs and preferences?) If Robin Hanson is right then underlying “nice” attitudes (caring about other’s wants, etc.) there are “not-so-nice” mental processes. Fair enough, but that’s an analysis of the “nice” attitudes, not a demonstration that they’re completely nonexistent.
So suppose one man (actuated by evolutionarily-programmed behaviours whose underlying purpose is to impress women) sees a woman looking unhappy, thinks “oh, what a shame; I wonder whether I can help”, asks her about her problems, listens intently and when asked offers advice that, so far as he can work out, will make things better for her. And suppose another (actuated by a conscious intention of getting into her pants and taking advice from PUA gurus) thinks “oh, what an opportunity; maybe I can get her to have sex with me”, asks her about her problems, and offers comments designed to make her think he’s trying to help while keeping her upset and unbalanced in the hope that she’ll feel she needs him more. (I have no idea whether this specific thing is an actual PUA technique.) Perhaps you can explain the first guy’s thoughts and actions as cynically as the second, if you look at the right level of explanation. For that matter, in principle you can explain both of them in purely impersonal terms by looking at them as complicatedly interacting systems of molecules. But there is a level of explanation—and one that it seems obviously reasonable to care about—at which there is a big difference, and part of that difference is exactly one of “objectification”.
The difference in higher-level explanations matters despite the similarity in lower-level ones. For instance, if you know about that difference then you will (correctly) predict different future behaviour for the two men.
this analogy doesn’t work
The analogy isn’t between “VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “VoR would like $1M”. It’s between “there is a genuine threat to my safety because VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “there is a genuine opportunity for me to be helpful because VoR would like $1M”. If I am not extremely rich then the fact that you would like $1M is no more relevant to me than the fact that you would like to live for ever; I am not in a position to help you with either of those things. (If I am well off but not very rich and you desperately need $1M, then in exceptional circumstances that might become relevant to me. But that’s about as likely as it is that you are carrying around 20kg of TNT and intend to blow me up with it.)
No, it means typical antebellum Southerners, if they’d had the word “objectified” and used it roughly as I describe, might well not have considered that black people were being objectified.
So objectification is a 2-place word now. So why should I care about gjm!objectification?
(Although if you’re asking “is group X being objectified by group Y?” then surely the relevant baseline has to involve victims not in group X, or perpetrators not in group Y, or both.
I was asking about individual actions, not groups of people.
I’m not sure which of two arguments you’re making. (Maybe neither. My probabilities: 70% #2, 20% #1, 10% something else.) (1) “Robin Hanson does all this dispassionate analysis and no one claims he’s objectifying anyone. So dispassionate analysis is OK and what PUAs do is no different.” (2) “Robin Hanson’s analysis shows that most of us, most of the time, treat people as means rather than ends and ignore their preferences and hopes and fears and personalities and beliefs and so forth. So if PUAs do that too, they’re doing nothing different from anyone else.”
Yes, I meant (1).
To #1, I say: scientific and economic analysis of people’s behaviour is a context in which we expect some aspects of their personhood to get neglected; when we study things we can’t attend to everything.
The same applies to the book about dating behavior DVH was talking about.
And if Robin Hanson analyses behaviour like mine in a particular way, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg;
And PUA’s don’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg either.
there’s no actual personal interaction in which I could be harmed or annoyed or anything.
A closer analogy to PUA would be if someone reads Hanson’s (or someone else’s) analysis and started applying it in his day-to-day interactions.
This is all very different from the PUA situation.
Do you just automatically write that phrase now without regard to whether it’s actually true? It sure seems that way.
The analogy isn’t between “VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “VoR would like $1M”. It’s between “there is a genuine threat to my safety because VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “there is a genuine opportunity for me to be helpful because VoR would like $1M”.
Well, assuming your rich enough to afford $1M, there is a genuine opportunity for you to help me.
Always has been, and I thought I already said so fairly explicitly. (… Yup, I did.)
why should I care about gjm!objectification?
I don’t say that you should. The question I thought we were discussing was whether any useful meaning can be attached to “objectification”. I say it can; I have described how I would do it; the fact that the word has some subjectivity to it is (so far as I can see) no more damning than the fact that “clever” and “beautiful” and “extravagant” have subjectivity to them.
(So can a PUA accused of objectifying women just say: Not according to my notion of objectification? Yeah, in the same way as a sociopath accused of being callous and selfish can say something parallel. That doesn’t make it useless for other people with different notions of callousness and selfishness from his to describe his behaviour that way.)
I was asking about individual actions, not groups of people.
But the complaint that I thought formed the context for this whole discussion is that PUA, or some particular version of PUA, is objectifying. That’s a group-level claim.
And PUA’s don’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg either.
(First, just to be clear, I wasn’t only referring to literal pocket-picking and leg-breaking but alluding to this. I’m going to assume that was understood, but if not then we may be at cross purposes and I apologize.)
I think those who complain that PUA is objectifying would say that its practitioners are picking pockets and breaking legs: that they are manipulating women in ways the women would be very unhappy about if they knew, and (if successful) getting them to do things that they are likely to regret later.
if someone reads Hanson’s [...] analysis and started applying it in his day-to-day interactions.
If the way they applied it was to try to manipulate me using their understanding of my low-level cognitive processes into doing things that I would not want to do if I considered the matter at my leisure without their ongoing manipulations, and that I would likely regret later—then I would have a problem with that, and what-I’m-calling-objectification would be part of my analysis of the problem.
(The actual primary harm would be getting me to make bad decisions. Objectification is a vice rather than a sin, if I may repurpose some unfashionable terminology: it doesn’t, in itself and as such, harm anyone, but practising it tends to result in actions that do harm.)
Do you just automatically write that phrase now without regard to whether it’s actually true?
Er, no. I gave two specific things that appear to me to be relevant differences between PUA practise and Hansonian analysis (1: the former occurs in a personal-interaction context where attention to personhood is expected, the latter doesn’t; 2: the former is alleged to cause harm, the latter isn’t) and, having done so, said explicitly that those things seem to me to be differences.
I can understand if you disagree with me about whether they are differences or whether the differences are relevant. But your comment seems to indicate that you simply didn’t understand the structure of the paragraph in which those words appeared. Perhaps I haven’t been clear enough, in which case I apologize, but please consider the possibility that the problem here is that you are not reading charitably enough.
assuming you’re rich enough to afford $1M, there is a genuine opportunity for you to help me.
Depends where you draw the boundary line for “genuine opportunity”. I am, as it happens, rich enough that I probably could get $1M together to give to you. I am not, as it happens, rich enough that I could do it without major damage to my family’s lifestyle, my prospects for a comfortable retirement, our robustness against financial shocks (job loss, health crisis, big stock-market crash), etc. It is hard for me to imagine any situation a near-stranger could be in that would justify that for the benefits they’d get from an extra $1M.
So—and I think this is the relevant notion of “genuine opportunity”—it is far from being a likely enough opportunity to justify giving the matter any thought at all in the absence of a compelling reason to do so.
I should add that the choice of the rather large sum of $1M has made your case weaker than it needed to be. Make it $10 instead; I would guess that at least 95% of LW participants could send you that much without any pain to speak of, so the “no genuine opportunity” objection doesn’t apply in the same way. And it would still be to your benefit. So, is my not having found a way to send you $10 as soon as we began this discussion evidence of “objectification”—is it a thing much more likely if I don’t see you as fully a person, than if I do? Nope, because “I should give this person $10” is not a thought that occurs to me (or, I think, to most people) when interacting with someone who hasn’t shown or stated a specific need. So even though I can very easily afford $10, much the same reasons that make my not giving you $1M very weak evidence for objectification apply to my not giving you $10.
(If you were obviously very poor and had poor prospects of getting less poor on your own—e.g., if your other comments indicated a life of miserable poverty on account of some disability—then not sending you money might indicate objectification. For what it’s worth, I am not aware of any reason to think you are very poor, and my baseline assumption for a random LW participant is that they are probably younger than me and hence have had less time to accumulate money, but that on average they probably have prospects broadly similar to mine.)
The point is that from what I heard Hungary is a culture where someone whose “interest in women is loving them, being loved by them, and making love, in that order” has a chance of winding up with a woman.
What do you mean by “objectifies”. I’ve yet to see a coherent explanation of the concept that doesn’t boil down to “applying Baysian (or any) reasoning to humans is evil”.
Now you’re just resembling the semi-marxist/semi-aristocratic “how dare you reduce what I do to something as banal as trade!”
Care to explain what you think the two sets of motives are?
Rather you have to be running good epistomology rather than anti-epistomology.
This IMHO works in every culture, Anglo ones including, you just have to ignore the party b...es and go for the intelligent and non-crazy. Usually it means training yourself to be not too focused on cover-girl looks and be okay with stuff like no makeup. As a theoretical example, consider how would you pick up Megan McArdle—she writes, sounds and looks a lot like my past girlfriends, and Suderman looks and sounds broadly like the same kind of guy I am. This just a hunch, though.
However I fully agree that my dating experience in the UK was worse than in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia or Serbia. (Lived in some places and went to all kinds of meditation camps in the others.) And perhaps it would be worse in the US too. This is largely because I can tolerate things like no make-up, no heels, body hair etc. but I cannot really deal with obesity, and that means playing in a shrinking and increasingly competitive market. Yet, on the whole, my UK experience was not so bad either. On speed dating events in Birmingham, there was a non-fat, intelligent, friendly, considerate 15-20% always.
This is that simple basic Kantian thinking that got deeply incorporated into the cultural DNA of the West centuries ago, this why I don’t understand what is in not to understand about. It is about primarily treating people as ends and only secondarily and cautiously as means. It is about understanding humans have a faculty of reason and thus autonomy. What follows from this? Autonomy means people can decide to be different from each other, and thus be really cautious with generalizations and stereotypes—perhaps, cultural ones are still okay, because socialization is a powerful thing, but gender is not a culture. Second, and more important, the ends not means stuff means not seeing sex as a prize to be won by an active, driven men and women just passively hand it out as a reward for the effort, but as an mutually initiated, mutually desired interaction between two autonomous beings with their own desires. It would be useful to read a bit around on the Pervocracy blog about this.
Objectification is not necessarily sexual and it is really an old idea, not some later day SJW fashion. It is treating people as means. Marx argued that in a 19. century factory the proletarian is objectified into being treated like a human machine. This may or may not be true, but an example of the idea. Or if you look at how people realized maybe slavery is not such a good idea, a large part of this was this old Kantian idea that a human should not use a human as a mere tool, without regard to the will of the other human. Rather if we want people to work for us, we should negotiate with them a price on an equal level, acquire consent, and make sure both got our will satisfied in the transaction. This is the same idea. But objectification is gradual, it is not a binary switch—one could argue employment in a hierarchical business is still more so than being an entrepreneur.
An object is simply something that does not have own goals, it is the object of desire, or the tool to achieve other desires with, of other people. If you understand what being a person, what personhood means, well, objectification is just a denial of it.
I must stress it is not some kind of a far-left ideology, it is something a traditional gentleman from 1900 would understand. Persoonhood is a through and through traditional Christian idea, one of the central concepts of Christian philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood#Christianity and objectification is just whatever denies it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectification
Similarly, I would not say objectifying people is a traditional, conservative thing. Just because feminists fight it it does not mean it is so—reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed progressivism is not traditionalism. If you look up Roger Scruton’s Right-Hegelian philosophy of sex, it is very decently non-objectifying.
I would say objectification is largely a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon in an age where machines and processes are so predominant that we tend to see people like them, too, and the essence of personhood—intellect and will—gets ignored.
I would also say mass gunpowder armies played an important role in objectifying people.
Sexual objectification is simply a subset of this generic trend.
Another useful resource is existentialists like Sartre, “The Other”.
The intelligent asshole will perhaps present a bogus physical theory to gain status—but the arguments will be about a commonly understood, verifiable thing outside himself. But a social theory will not be about a thing, it will be essentially about himself, something only he really knows and we can just guess.
Running good epistemology on human concerns, social concerns is highly desirable but incredibly hard becasue we cannot separate the observer from the observed.
Interestingly, Rothbard and Austrian Economics have something interesting to say here, the limitations of empiricism about people’s behavior. You need repeatable experiments. But if you repeat it with different people, that is not really valid because people are far, far too diverse—remember, autonomy. It is simply wrong in principle to treat beings with intellect and will fungible. If I repeat a behavior experiment with two different groups of people and get something like 62% an 65% do X then of course that means something, but it is not, strictly speaking, the repetition of the experiment. If you repeat it with the same people, you find they learned from the previous experiment rendering the experiment less valid, because not really repeated the same way. So basically we cannot, without brainwashing, repeat experiments in human behavior. Nevertheless at the end of the day we still run experiments with human behavior because just what else can one do? We work with what we have. But the confidence in these things should always necessarily be far lower, for these reasons. The strict repetition criteria is never satisfied.
Just a hunch but I suspect Megan McArdle would not be doing speed dating.
Except the generalizations are frequently correct and have enormous predictive power.
Why? Yes, socialization is powerful, but so is genetics, including the difference between XX and XY. In particular the SRY gene has much more influence than a typical gene.
You see to be confusing is and ought there. However, you think sex ought to be obtained, being active and driven (among other things) makes a man more likely to get it. Whether, you consider the women’s behavior here “passive” or “actively seeking driven men” is irrelevant, and probably doesn’t correspond to any actual distinction in reality.
So you’re saying its not just SJW because it was also used by their leftist predecessors?
If you mean that humans are game-theoretic agents, I agree. However, I don’t see how “therefore we can’t or shouldn’t apply probability theory to them” follows.
Doesn’t this seem to contradict your earlier claim that anti-objectification was responsible for the abolition of slavery?
Well, in this case the social theory in question is indeed about a verifiable thing outside the person, namely the dynamics of human romantic interaction.
Quote please. I’m guessing you’re badly misinterpreting what they wrote. Probably something about how since people respond to incentives, empirically observed behavior will change when the incentives change. Something like a proto-version of Goodhart’s law. This is not the same thing as the claim that the laws of probability don’t apply to humans, which is the claim you seem to be making.
If you mean there is a lot of variance among humans, I agree. However, you seem to be arguing that we should worship and/or ignore this variance rather then studying it.
I know what you mean, but I think there is a coherent notion in there, along the following lines: 1. Human beings are people, with hopes and fears and plans and preferences and ideas and so forth. 2. Inevitably, some of our thoughts about, and actions toward, other human beings involve more attention to these features of them than others. 3. Something is “objectification” to the extent that we would change it if we attended more to the specifically person-ish features of the other people involved: their hopes, fears, plans, preferences, ideas, etc. (Or: that a decent person would, or that we should. These framings make the value-ladenness of the notion more explicit. Or, and actually this may be a better version than the other three, that they would prefer you to. The fact that on my account there are these different notions of “objectification” isn’t, I think, a weakness; words have ranges of meaning.)
So, e.g., consider “treating someone as a sex object”, which for present purposes we may take to mean ignoring aspects of them not relevant to sex. If you are currently engaged in having sex with them, this is probably a good thing; on careful consideration of their wants and needs as a person you would probably conclude that when having sex they would prefer you to focus on those aspects of them that are relevant to having sex. On the other hand, if you are in the audience of a seminar they are presenting, you should probably be attending to their ideas about fruit fly genetics or whatever rather than to how they’d look right now with no clothes on; at any rate, that would probably be their preference.
I *would prefer it” if you sent me a million dollars. By this definition it would seem that you’re objectifying me by not sending me the money?
Only in so far as the reason why I don’t is that I’m not paying attention to the fact that you have preferences.
If I’m perfectly well aware of that but don’t give you the money because I don’t have it, because I think you would waste it, because I would rather spend it on enlarging my house, or because I have promised my gods that I will never give anything to someone who uses the name of their rival, then I may or may not be acting rightly but it’s got nothing to do with “objectification” in the sense I described.
Did you think of the fact that I wanted a million dollars until I told you?
OK, if you allow excuses like that, i.e., “I know your preferences and don’t care”, then I don’t see how PUA stuff counts as “objectification”.
Explicitly? No, but I don’t think that’s relevant. I’m aware that people generally prefer having more money, and giving someone else $1M would be difficult enough for me that it seems vanishingly unlikely that explicitly generating the thought “X would be better off with an extra $1M” for everyone I interact with would change my behaviour in any useful way. If in the course of talking to you it became apparent that you had a need so extraordinary as to give a near-stranger reason for mortgaging his house and liquidating a big chunk of his retirement savings, then I’m pretty sure I would explicitly generate that thought. (I still might not act on it, of course.)
The borderline between objectification and mere selfishness is sometimes fuzzy, no doubt. On reflection, I think “nothing to do with objectification” in my earlier comment was an overstatement; if A treats B just as he would if he were largely ignoring the fact that B has preferences and opinions and skills and hopes and fears and so forth, then that has something to do with objectification, namely the fact that it generates the same behaviours. Let’s introduce some ugly terminology: “cobjectification” (c for cognitive) is thinking about someone in a way that neglects their personhood; “bobjectification” (b for behaviour, and also for broad) is treating them in the same sort of way as you would if you were cobjectifying them.
I am very far from being an expert on PUA and was not commenting on PUA. But if you are approaching an encounter with someone and the only thing on your mind is what you can do that maximizes the probability that they will have sex with you tonight, that’s a clear instance of bobjectification. It’s probably easier to do if you cobjectify them too, but I don’t know whether doing so is an actual technique adopted by PUA folks. And I guess that when anti-PUA folks say “PUA is objectifying” they are making two separate claims: (1) that PUA behaviour is bobjectifying, which is harmful to the people it’s applied to, and (2) that people practising PUA are (sometimes? always?) cobjectifying, which is a character flaw or a cognitive error or a sin or something. It seems hard to argue with #1. #2 is much harder to judge because it involves guessing at the internal states of the PUAs, but it seems kinda plausible.
Now: perhaps objectification in the broad (“bobjectification”) sense is just the same thing as, say, selfishness. They certainly overlap a lot. But I think (1) they’re not quite the same—e.g., if you treat someone as an object for the benefit of some other person you’re objectifying them without being selfish, and (2) even when they describe the same behaviours they focus on different possible explanations. Probably a lot of selfishness is made easier by not attending fully to the personhood of the victim, and probably a lot of objectification is motivated by selfishness, but “X isn’t paying (much/enough) attention to Y’s personhood” and “X is (strongly/too) focused on his own wants” are different statements and, e.g., might suggest different approaches if you happen to want X to stop doing that.
Ok, let’s apply these terms to the million dollar example. You didn’t know or care whether I wanted the money (cobjectification) and once you found out you wouldn’t send it to me (bobjectification). So it appears your new terminology applies just as well to the refusing to send money example.
Incorrect. I didn’t know whether you wanted the money, but not because I was thinking of you as an object without preferences; simply because the question “should I send VoR a million dollars?” never occurs to me. Just as the parallel questions never occur to me in day-to-day interactions with friends, colleagues, family, etc. It’s got nothing to do with cobjectification, and everything to do with the fact that for obvious reasons giving someone $1M isn’t the kind of thing there’s much point in contemplating unless some very obvious and cogent reason has arisen.
It is, indeed, true that not sending you $1M is a thing I might do if I didn’t think of you as a person with preferences and all the other paraphernalia of personhood. But it’s also a thing I might do (indeed, almost certainly would do) if I did think of you as a person. Therefore, it is not a good example of bobjectification. (We could say, in the sort of terms the LW tradition might approve of, that something is bobjectification precisely in so far as it constitutes (Bayesian) evidence of cobjectification. In this case, perhaps Pr(not send $1M | cobjectify) might be 1-10^-9 and Pr(not send $1M | not cobjectify) might be 1-10^-8, or something. So the log of the odds ratio is something like 10^-8: very little bobjectification
So you’re actual definition of “cobjectification” amounts to “ignoring people’s preferences except where there’s a gjm!‘obvious reason’ to ignore them”.
BTW, I’m not making fun of you. I seriously can’t see how this case is different from the case of PUA.
Except you weren’t thinking of me as a person with preferences. You were thinking of me, if at all, as “just another person I interact with”.
Note: I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this, but I don’t see how it’s different from a PUA thinging of a girl as “just another girl I banged” or “just another girl I can’t get”.
Nope. (Nor do I see how what I wrote leads to that conclusion. As an aside, I have this problem quite frequently in discussions with you, and I have the impression that some other people do too. My impression is that you are adopting a sort of opposite of the “principle of charity”: when there are two interpretations of what someone else has said, pick whichever is less sensible. Perhaps that’s not what’s going on, but in any case it doesn’t make for constructive discussion.)
By “cobjectification” I mean, as I have already said, not thinking of someone else as a person with preferences etc. This is not at all the same thing as thinking of them as a person with preferences etc., but not being at all times consciously aware of all their preferences.
If I am talking to someone, then—as I already said—the question of whether they would like me to give them $1M generally doesn’t cross my mind, perhaps because there’d be no point in its doing so. And also because there are countless different things someone might want me to do, and I am several orders of magnitude short of enough brainpower to think about them all explicitly. Which is to say that not considering whether to send VoR $1M is simply business as usual, it’s about equally likely whoever I’m talking to and however I think about them, and none of that applies to thinking about someone only in terms of how I can get them to have sex with me.
What makes you think that?
So in it’s not cobjectification if you abstractly know the person has preferences? Well, the PUA certainly abstractly knows the women has preferences. I don’t see how this is different from say only thinking of a Batista in terms of getting coffee.
No, the point isn’t abstractly knowing, it’s how (if at all) those preferences (and other distinctly “personal” features of the person in question) affect your thinking and speaking and action. There’s a lot of interaction where the answer is “scarcely at all, for anyone” and such interaction is therefore not a very good measure of objectification. (Though your example is an interesting one; if A and B but coffee from the same barista, and A notices that she looks harassed, takes extra trouble to be polite to her, and maybe remarks “you look rushed off your feet—has it been a long day?” while B is brusque and rude, that might in fact reflect a difference in the extent to which A and B see her as a person. But this is a very noisy signal.)
It’s not (in the usage I’m proposing) cobjectification if the way in which you are thinking about the person does not pay markedly less attention to their preferences, personality, hopes, fears, etc., than some baseline expectation. Exactly where that baseline is will change what counts as cobjectification (and hence indirectly what counts as bobjectification) for a given person: objectification is an expectation-dependent notion just like “stupid”, “strong”, or “beautiful”.
In the case of PUA, I suppose a reasonable baseline might be “other somewhat-personal face-to-face conversations between two people in a social setting”. And if someone claims that PUA commonly involves objectifying women, they mean some combination of (1) would-be pickup artists are attending less to the personhood of their interlocutors than they would to that of other people (especially other men) in other contexts and (2) they behave as if #1 were true.
Perhaps an analogy might be helpful. Suppose that instead of “personhood-neglect” we think about “danger-neglect”. You might claim that sometimes people fail to recognize others as dangerous when they should, or behave as if they do. An objection exactly parallel to your million-dollar objection to “objectification” would go like this: “We had a conversation the other day, and I bet it never once occurred to you during it that I might have 20kg of TNT in my backpack and set it off while we were talking. So you’re engaging in danger-neglect all the time, which shows what a silly notion it is.” And the answer is also exactly parallel: “Yes, that’s a possibility in principle, but experience shows that that’s a really unlikely danger, and there’s not much I can realistically do about it, and if you were likely to blow us both up with a large quantity of TNT then there’d probably be some indication of it in advance. Danger-neglect doesn’t mean not thinking consciously of every possible danger—no one could do that, so that would be a useless notion—it means paying less attention than normal to genuine threats posed by particular people.”
If you agree that this objection would be bad and the response reasonable, where does the analogy with objectification break down?
(I don’t think danger-neglect is a terribly useful notion in practice, not least because in practice most people don’t actually pose much threat. This is a respect in which it fails to resemble objectification, since in practice most people do have beliefs and personality and preferences and so forth.)
So if we’re going by social baseline, that means blacks weren’t cobjectified in the ante-bellum south since treating them as property was the baseline.
Except by that standard PUA isn’t objectifying. Robin Hanson analyzes all kinds of personal interactions in terms of status games and no one calls that objectification unless it involves gender (or race or some other protected category).
Except this analogy doesn’t work. Most people aren’t carrying around TNT, but most people would in fact like a million dollars.
No, it means typical antebellum Southerners, if they’d had the word “objectified” and used it roughly as I describe, might well not have considered that black people were being objectified.
(Although if you’re asking “is group X being objectified by group Y?” then surely the relevant baseline has to involve victims not in group X, or perpetrators not in group Y, or both. So an antebellum Southerner aware that they treated black people differently from white people, or that the dirty race-traitors up north treated black people differently from how they did, might instead say: Yeah, sure, we objectify them, but that’s because they’re not persons in the full sense, any more than little children or animals are.)
I’m not sure which of two arguments you’re making. (Maybe neither. My probabilities: 70% #2, 20% #1, 10% something else.) (1) “Robin Hanson does all this dispassionate analysis and no one claims he’s objectifying anyone. So dispassionate analysis is OK and what PUAs do is no different.” (2) “Robin Hanson’s analysis shows that most of us, most of the time, treat people as means rather than ends and ignore their preferences and hopes and fears and personalities and beliefs and so forth. So if PUAs do that too, they’re doing nothing different from anyone else.”
To #1, I say: scientific and economic analysis of people’s behaviour is a context in which we expect some aspects of their personhood to get neglected; when we study things we can’t attend to everything. And if Robin Hanson analyses behaviour like mine in a particular way, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg; there’s no actual personal interaction in which I could be harmed or annoyed or anything. This is all very different from the PUA situation.
To #2, I say: Robin Hanson certainly makes a lot of claims about how people think and feel and act that suggest we’re less “nice” than we like to think we are. I don’t think he’s given very good evidence for those claims, and taking a leaf from his book I only-half-jokingly suggest that cynical psychological analysis is not about psychology and that some people endorse his claims because being cynical about human motives makes them feel good.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that a lot of those claims are right. It is none the less clear that different people on different occasions attend more or less to any particular characteristic of others. (Someone attacks you in the street, beats you up and steals your wallet. Someone else sees you lying on the ground moaning in pain, takes you to the hospital to get you fixed up, and gives you some money so you don’t run out before the bank can issue you with new cards etc. It may be that, underneath, the second person is “really” trying to improve his self-image, impress any women who may be watching, or something, but isn’t it clear that there is a difference in how these two people are thinking about your needs and preferences?) If Robin Hanson is right then underlying “nice” attitudes (caring about other’s wants, etc.) there are “not-so-nice” mental processes. Fair enough, but that’s an analysis of the “nice” attitudes, not a demonstration that they’re completely nonexistent.
So suppose one man (actuated by evolutionarily-programmed behaviours whose underlying purpose is to impress women) sees a woman looking unhappy, thinks “oh, what a shame; I wonder whether I can help”, asks her about her problems, listens intently and when asked offers advice that, so far as he can work out, will make things better for her. And suppose another (actuated by a conscious intention of getting into her pants and taking advice from PUA gurus) thinks “oh, what an opportunity; maybe I can get her to have sex with me”, asks her about her problems, and offers comments designed to make her think he’s trying to help while keeping her upset and unbalanced in the hope that she’ll feel she needs him more. (I have no idea whether this specific thing is an actual PUA technique.) Perhaps you can explain the first guy’s thoughts and actions as cynically as the second, if you look at the right level of explanation. For that matter, in principle you can explain both of them in purely impersonal terms by looking at them as complicatedly interacting systems of molecules. But there is a level of explanation—and one that it seems obviously reasonable to care about—at which there is a big difference, and part of that difference is exactly one of “objectification”.
The difference in higher-level explanations matters despite the similarity in lower-level ones. For instance, if you know about that difference then you will (correctly) predict different future behaviour for the two men.
The analogy isn’t between “VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “VoR would like $1M”. It’s between “there is a genuine threat to my safety because VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “there is a genuine opportunity for me to be helpful because VoR would like $1M”. If I am not extremely rich then the fact that you would like $1M is no more relevant to me than the fact that you would like to live for ever; I am not in a position to help you with either of those things. (If I am well off but not very rich and you desperately need $1M, then in exceptional circumstances that might become relevant to me. But that’s about as likely as it is that you are carrying around 20kg of TNT and intend to blow me up with it.)
So objectification is a 2-place word now. So why should I care about gjm!objectification?
I was asking about individual actions, not groups of people.
Yes, I meant (1).
The same applies to the book about dating behavior DVH was talking about.
And PUA’s don’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg either.
A closer analogy to PUA would be if someone reads Hanson’s (or someone else’s) analysis and started applying it in his day-to-day interactions.
Do you just automatically write that phrase now without regard to whether it’s actually true? It sure seems that way.
Well, assuming your rich enough to afford $1M, there is a genuine opportunity for you to help me.
Always has been, and I thought I already said so fairly explicitly. (… Yup, I did.)
I don’t say that you should. The question I thought we were discussing was whether any useful meaning can be attached to “objectification”. I say it can; I have described how I would do it; the fact that the word has some subjectivity to it is (so far as I can see) no more damning than the fact that “clever” and “beautiful” and “extravagant” have subjectivity to them.
(So can a PUA accused of objectifying women just say: Not according to my notion of objectification? Yeah, in the same way as a sociopath accused of being callous and selfish can say something parallel. That doesn’t make it useless for other people with different notions of callousness and selfishness from his to describe his behaviour that way.)
But the complaint that I thought formed the context for this whole discussion is that PUA, or some particular version of PUA, is objectifying. That’s a group-level claim.
(First, just to be clear, I wasn’t only referring to literal pocket-picking and leg-breaking but alluding to this. I’m going to assume that was understood, but if not then we may be at cross purposes and I apologize.)
I think those who complain that PUA is objectifying would say that its practitioners are picking pockets and breaking legs: that they are manipulating women in ways the women would be very unhappy about if they knew, and (if successful) getting them to do things that they are likely to regret later.
If the way they applied it was to try to manipulate me using their understanding of my low-level cognitive processes into doing things that I would not want to do if I considered the matter at my leisure without their ongoing manipulations, and that I would likely regret later—then I would have a problem with that, and what-I’m-calling-objectification would be part of my analysis of the problem.
(The actual primary harm would be getting me to make bad decisions. Objectification is a vice rather than a sin, if I may repurpose some unfashionable terminology: it doesn’t, in itself and as such, harm anyone, but practising it tends to result in actions that do harm.)
Er, no. I gave two specific things that appear to me to be relevant differences between PUA practise and Hansonian analysis (1: the former occurs in a personal-interaction context where attention to personhood is expected, the latter doesn’t; 2: the former is alleged to cause harm, the latter isn’t) and, having done so, said explicitly that those things seem to me to be differences.
I can understand if you disagree with me about whether they are differences or whether the differences are relevant. But your comment seems to indicate that you simply didn’t understand the structure of the paragraph in which those words appeared. Perhaps I haven’t been clear enough, in which case I apologize, but please consider the possibility that the problem here is that you are not reading charitably enough.
Depends where you draw the boundary line for “genuine opportunity”. I am, as it happens, rich enough that I probably could get $1M together to give to you. I am not, as it happens, rich enough that I could do it without major damage to my family’s lifestyle, my prospects for a comfortable retirement, our robustness against financial shocks (job loss, health crisis, big stock-market crash), etc. It is hard for me to imagine any situation a near-stranger could be in that would justify that for the benefits they’d get from an extra $1M.
So—and I think this is the relevant notion of “genuine opportunity”—it is far from being a likely enough opportunity to justify giving the matter any thought at all in the absence of a compelling reason to do so.
I should add that the choice of the rather large sum of $1M has made your case weaker than it needed to be. Make it $10 instead; I would guess that at least 95% of LW participants could send you that much without any pain to speak of, so the “no genuine opportunity” objection doesn’t apply in the same way. And it would still be to your benefit. So, is my not having found a way to send you $10 as soon as we began this discussion evidence of “objectification”—is it a thing much more likely if I don’t see you as fully a person, than if I do? Nope, because “I should give this person $10” is not a thought that occurs to me (or, I think, to most people) when interacting with someone who hasn’t shown or stated a specific need. So even though I can very easily afford $10, much the same reasons that make my not giving you $1M very weak evidence for objectification apply to my not giving you $10.
(If you were obviously very poor and had poor prospects of getting less poor on your own—e.g., if your other comments indicated a life of miserable poverty on account of some disability—then not sending you money might indicate objectification. For what it’s worth, I am not aware of any reason to think you are very poor, and my baseline assumption for a random LW participant is that they are probably younger than me and hence have had less time to accumulate money, but that on average they probably have prospects broadly similar to mine.)