Opponents of gay marriage make it clear that they do not object to gay marriage based on a long-range utilitarian calculation; they directly value not allowing gays to marry.
Well, most of them do so in part out of their deity telling them that that’s a value. If the extrapolated CEV takes into account that they are just wrong about there being such a deity, it should respond accordingly. (I’m working under the what should not be controversial assumption that the AGI isn’t going to find out that in fact there is such a deity hanging around.)
There’s a chicken and egg issue here. Were pre-existing anti-homosexuality values co-opted into early Judaism? Or did the Judeo-Chiristian ideology spread the values beyond their “natural” spread? The only empirical evidence for this question I can think of is non-Judeo-Christian attitudes. What are the historical attitudes towards homosexuality among East Asians and South Asians?
More broadly, people’s attitudes towards women and nerds are just as much expressions of values, not long-ranged utilitarian calculations.
What are the historical attitudes towards homosexuality among East Asians and South Asians?
Man, that’s variable. Especially in South Asia, where “Hinduism” is more like a nice box for outsiders to describe a huge body of different practices and theoretical approaches, some of them quite divergent. Chastity in general was and is a core value in many cases; where that’s not the case, or where the particular sect deals pragmatically with the human sex drive despite teaching chastity as a quicker path to moksha, there might be anything from embrace of erotic imagery and sexual diversity to fairly strict rules about that sort of conduct. Some sects unabashedly embrace sexuality as a good thing, including same-sex sexuality. Islam has historically been pretty doctrinally down on it, but even that has its nuances—sodomy was often considered a grave sin and still is in many places, while non-penetrative same-sex contact might well be seen as simply a minor thing, not strictly appropriate but hardly anything to get worked up about.
“East Asia” has a very large number of religions as well, and the influence of Confucianism and Buddhism hasn’t been uniform in this regard. One vague generality that I might suggest as a rough guideline is that traditionally, homosexuality is sort of tolerated in the closet—sure, it happens, but as long as everyone keeps up appearances and doesn’t make a scene or get caught doing something inappropriate, it’s no big deal. Some strains within Mahayana Buddhism have a degree of deprecation of sexual or gender-variant behavior; others don’t. Theravada varies as well, but in different ways.
In both cases, cultures vary tremendously. If you widen the scope, many cultures, including many of the foregoing, have traditionally been a lot more accepting of sex and gender variance. There are and were some cultures that were extremely permissive about it.
If you want more on the subject of how people think about sexuality, try Straight by Hanne Blank. She tracks the invention of heterosexuality (a concept which she says is less than a century old) in the west.
If part of CEV is finding out how much of what we think is obviously true is just stuff that people made up, life could get very strange.
She tracks the invention of heterosexuality (a concept which she says is less than a century old) in the west.
The word is likely that recent, but is she claiming that the idea of being interested in members of the other sex but not in members of the same sex as sexual partners was unheard-of before that? Or what does she mean exactly?
It’s a somewhat complex book, but part of her meaning is that the idea that there are people who are only sexually interested in members of the other sex, and that this is an important category, is recent.
There’s more historical data than you might think—for example, the way the Catholic Church defined sexual sin in terms of actions rather certain sins being associated with types of people who were especially tempted to engage in them.
There’s also some history of how sexual normality became more and more narrowly defined (Freud has a lot to answer for), and then the definitions shifted.
The introduction is a catalog of ambiguities about sex, gender, and sexual orientation:
My partner was diagnosed male at birth because he was born with, and indeed still has, a fully functioning penis … My partner’s DNA has a pattern that is simultaneously male, female and neither. This particular genetic pattern, XXY, is the signature of Kleinfelter syndrome …
We’ve known full well since Kinsey that a large minority...37 percent...of men have hat at least one same-sex sexual experience in their lives.
No act of Congress of Parliament exists anywhere that defines exactly what heterosexuality is or regulates exactly how it is to be enacted.
Historians have tracked major shifts in other aspects of what was considered common or “normal” in sex and relationships: was marriage ideally an emotional relationship, or an economic and pragmatic one? Was romantic love desirable, and did it even really exist? Should young people choose their own spouses, or should marriage partners be selected by family and friends?
As unnumbered sailors, prisoners, and boarding-school boys have demonstrated, whether one behaves heterosexually or homosexually sometimes seems like little more than a matter of circumstance.
Masculinity does not look, sound, dress, or act the same for a rapper as for an Orthodox Jewish rabbinical student; a California surfer chick does femininity very differently from a New York City lady-who-lunches.
All of these are fair enough, and I’ve only read the introduction, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that she goes on to resolve these contradictions in Less Wrong tree-falls-in-a-forest style. Instead of trying to clarify what people mean when they something like “most people are heterosexual,” I get the feeling she only wants to muddy the waters enough to say “no they aren’t.”
I think her point is closer to “people make things up, and keep repeating those things until they seem like laws of the universe”.
A possible conclusion is that once people make a theory about how something ought to be, it’s very hard to go back to the state of mind of not having an opinion about that thing.
The amazon preview includes the last couple of chapters of the book.
The book could be viewed as a large expansion of two Heinlein quotes: “Everybody lies about sex” and “Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to fly a kite”.
I think her point is closer to “people make things up, and keep repeating those things until they seem like laws of the universe”.
If so, then her point is more specific: “people made heterosexuality up.” But I don’t see how this can be supported. Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
The amazon preview includes the last couple of chapters of the book.
I’ll check it out.
Edit: By the way what I can see of the amazon preview is pretty heavily redacted, and doesn’t include any complete chapter.
Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
The abstract property that people we categorize as heterosexual have in common has existed, as you imply, for as long a members of bisexual species have been preferentially seeking out opposite-sex sex partners.
The explicit category in people’s brains is more recent than that.
I mean, every human being who has ever lived came from a sex act between two people who were in close physical proximity, but that doesn’t mean that the category of “people who prefer to have sex in close physical proximity to one another, rather than at a distance” has been explicitly represented. Indeed, I may have just made it up.
The explicit category in people’s brains is more recent than that.
What do you mean by this? It’s incorrect to say that people haven’t noticed until recently that it’s very common for men to seek out women for sex and vice versa. It’s also incorrect to say that people haven’t noticed until recently the exceptions to this practice.
Neither is it correct to say that people haven’t noticed that it’s very common for people to have sex with people who are physically adjacent to them. But that’s not to say that people often think “I’m the sort of person who has sex with people physically adjacent to me.”
There’s a difference between eating meat from time to time, being aware that I eat meat from time to time, and explicitly thinking of myself as a “meat eater,” or as an “omnivore,” or as a “carnivore”. There’s a difference between being really smart, being aware of how well I do at various cognitive tasks, and thinking of myself as “a really smart person”.
More generally, there’s a difference between having the property X, being aware of evidence of X and acting accordingly, and having formed a mental structure in my mind that represents me as having X.
There’s also a difference between all of those and being part of a culture that has “people who have X” as a social construct.
In most cases, someone who thinks of themselves as “a meat eater” really does eat meat. On the other hand, there are very many people who think of themselves as “a really smart person” but who are not really smart.
Which case is more similar to heterosexuality, in your view?
The categories get really fuzzy, really fast, which causes a lot of confusion.
For the sake of concreteness, I’ll define my terms as follows (1):
A meat eater is someone who reliably experiences the desire to eat meat, and would sometimes be willing to eat meat if offered, and would not necessarily feel that eating that meat was problematic.
A heterosexual is someone who reliably experiences the desire to have sex with opposite-gendered people, and would sometimes be willing to do so if offered, and would not necessarily feel that having that sex was problematic.
A really smart person is someone who would reliably perform well on certain kinds of real-world problems that I don’t know how to define in a noncircular way but I can point to examples of.
Given those definitions, I agree that someone who identifies themselves as a meat eater typically is a meat eater and that someone who identifies themselves as a really smart person frequently is not a really smart person, and I would say that someone who identifies themselves as heterosexual typically is heterosexual.
So, to answer your question: if I look at just those cases, the meat-eater case is more like the heterosexual case than the smart-person case is
===============
(1) I have no particular fondness for those definitions, I picked them as my best approximations to what I thought you probably had in mind. If you would prefer different definitions let me know. Different definitions might change my answer.
Leaving terms like these in their normally fuzzy state causes lots of confusion when trying to have precise discussions of them … is a prepubescent child who has never been sexually attracted to anyone heterosexual? Is a man who is sexually attracted to other men, has never had sex with one, would refuse to have sex with one if offered (assuming etc.), and regularly has sex with women despite not really being sexually attracted to them heterosexual? Etc. Etc. Etc.
There’s nothing especially interesting about these questions, they’re just labeling questions… but if we don’t agree on the labels, it’s easy to confuse labeling questions with actual questions about the underlying states of the world, including states of people’s minds.
I agree with all of this. But I think it all casts Blank’s thesis in a bad light: “heterosexuality dates to the 1860s and not earlier” can only be supported if those labeling questions are resolved in a deliberately misleading way. I had the impression you thought differently but perhaps not.
Not having read the book, I can’t speak to Blank’s thesis.
I will point out, though, that just because I’m a meat-eater doesn’t mean that I ever think of myself as a meat eater, that I ever talk about myself as a meat-eater, or that I live in a culture in which being a meat-eater exists as a social construct.
Similarly, just because I’m heterosexual (which, by the definition above, I am, despite being in a 19-year same-sex relationship) it doesn’t follow that I ever think of myself as heterosexual (which I haven’t in a little over 20 years), that I talk about myself as heterosexual (which I usually don’t), or that I live in a culture where heterosexuality exists as a social construct (which I have for my entire life). Depending on the context I’m working in, different definitions become appropriate.
If I’m talking about social constructs, for example, the statement “heterosexuality dates to the 1860s and not earlier” might be true, or might not… beats me. It certainly isn’t true if I’m talking about mate-selection behavior… in that context “heterosexuality” refers to something that predates the evolution of the human race. There are other contexts in which the statement “heterosexuality is about as old as humanity, but not significantly older” might be true.
You seem to be saying that speaking in some of those contexts, or speaking in a way that fails to clarify what context I’m operating in, is necessarily deliberately misleading; if you’re saying that, then yes, I think differently. But, again, I haven’t read Blank’s book, so it’s entirely possible that Blank in particular is being deliberately misleading.
I withdraw “deliberately”, after all how would I know. But “social construct” is technical jargon from a controversial theory in a controversial academic discipline. Almost every English-speaking adult knows what straight and gay are, but hardly any of them know what a social construct is. So I do believe that it’s misleading to speak of “heterosexuality” when you mean “the social construct of heterosexuality.”
Whether someone knows what the term “social construct” refers to has nothing to do with the matter. Most people don’t know what the term “pheromone” refers to, but it would be mistaken to infer from that that sexual attraction has nothing to do with pheromones, or that discussions of sexual orientation in terms of pheromones is necessarily misleading.
That said, though, sure, if social constructs don’t exist at all, then there certainly isn’t such a thing as a social construct of heterosexuality, in which case any discussion of same (including my own comments in this thread) is misleading, albeit (as you admit) not necessarily deliberately so.
I don’t know what TheOtherDave means, but I have heard it said before that the notion of treating sexual preference as identity is relatively recent. In the past—or so the claim goes—people did of course recognize that some people prefer to have intercourse with members the opposite sex, whereas others did not. But this was seen as merely a preference, similar to disliking broccoli or liking the color red or whatever. A person wouldn’t identify as “a heterosexual” or “a homosexual”, no more than one would identify as “an anti-broccolist” or a “red-ist” or whatever.
That brings up some interesting questions about the way people thought about identity. An awful lot of identity groups got launched around the same time, including some of the first ones I can think of that’re based around behavior—the temperance movement originated in the mid-1830s, for example. I wonder if some shift in the political climate in the early-to-mid 1800s suddenly made it practical to advocate for some behavior or lack thereof by adopting it into a group identity and then using that to argue for a protected category?
Insofar as there’s a point to such distinctions, I expect the frontlines of that shift to have been cultural and scientific rather than political. “Advocating a behavior by adopting it into a group identity and using that to argue for a protected category” sounds awfully meta; I expect the crucial changes were simpler, more fundamental and centered around what enabled people to argue for a protected category in the first place. I’m thinking along lines like this:
A number of technological advances were made around that time that made setting up movements far easier. The proliferation of various movements coincides nicely with such stuff as improved methods of agriculture (leading to population growth and urbanization), the invention of the telegraph (bridging distances), better transportation in the form of railways and ever faster ships (mobilization, etc.) and probably others that escape me at the moment. A bit later on Darwin and the theory of evolution paved the way for eugenics-style thinking and concepts of inherent superiority between races and nations, and around the turn of the century the rise of scientific (or semi-scientific) psychology opened the doors for minting all kinds of novel ingroup-outgroup divisions. I expect identity-builders had a field day with the concept of the subconscious mind in particular. “You can’t help it, those people are just made that way. Fortunately not us, though, haw haw.”
On the non-scientific side, there are a number of converging cultural trends and phenomena to take into account.
The decline of the church was an example of how a firmly established institution wasn’t necessarily a permanent feature of society.
There’s been a general decline in violence throughout society, which made resisting the establishment less scary.
Western Romanticism and the advent of nationalism were a fairly clear case of deliberate identity-building, and it set a precedent for doing the same on a smaller scale.
Not all movements appeared from nowhere; workers’ unions had been around for centuries in the form of guilds and such, so all those movements springing up wasn’t so much groundbreaking novelty as it was just more of the same.
These aren’t exhaustive lists, but I hope the gist is clear.
If so, then her point is more specific: “people made heterosexuality up.” But I don’t see how this can be supported. Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
When giraffes mate in such a manner as to produce viable offspring, is that “heterosexuality?”
If yes, why do male giraffes frequently engage in same-sex behavior when nearby females are not in oestrus and receptive to their advances?
To clarify: the term “heterosexuality” doesn’t necessarily mean simply “male/female sexual contact.” Humans have been doing that for as long as there have been humans. Humans have also been doing same-sex sexual contact for as long as there have been humans (this is not a controversial idea given the huge number of animal species that do, inclusive of our near relatives), but the phenomenon of people being defined as, or identifying with the terms “heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual” is quite recent and cultural-contextual.
Mating such that offspring may be viably produced is a piece of the territory. “Heterosexuality” is a label on one particular map of that territory, and its boundaries and name don’t necessarily represent the reality accurately.
It normally comes up when claims are made of the form “homosexuality is unnatural!” with the implied or explicit “therefore it is wrong/sinful/evil/yucky”. Pointing to same-sex pairings in animals is intended as a response to this. The people making the response either don’t understand the naturalistic fallacy or consider it to be sufficiently abstract or harder to explain that they don’t bother with that line of response.
It is also interesting from a biological standpoint in that it isn’t that easy to explain from an ev bio perspective, so studying it makes sense.
It has to do with the fact that it was essentially ignored throughout most of the history of biology as a discipline. It’s not like this behavior is new; it’s been there the whole time, and so have the observations of the behavior, but the reaction within scientific culture has changed dramatically.
Stuff like interpreting active vs passive animals in a copulatory act as male and female respectively, assuming the animals had simply misidentified the sex of the other party, or assuming that the observing party was necessarily mistaken, publication and citation biases, and the frequently-opaque titles, abstracts and contents of those published studies that did manage to make it into the journals (“A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera”, W.J. Tenant, 1987, Entemologists Record and Journal of Variation).
It’s news to a whole lot of people, in other words.
When giraffes mate in such a manner as to produce viable offspring, is that “heterosexuality?”
If yes, why do male giraffes frequently engage in same-sex behavior when nearby females are not in oestrus and receptive to their advances?
Your second question is very interesting! I don’t know why asking it is contingent on a “yes” answer to your first question, which is tiresome.
the phenomenon of people being defined as, or identifying with the terms “heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual” is quite recent and cultural-contextual.
If you like, I’d be interested to hear what you mean by these phrases in more detail:
In the United States, dog meat is defined as “not food.” In other cultures, the definition of “food” includes dog meat. The meaning of “food” depends on context, specifically, the cultural context. Just to be clear, I think the brouhaha about whether it is acceptable to eat dog is strong proof that “food” is more narrowly defined than “material capable of being consumed for sustenance by humans.”
The assertion is that “homosexuality” is a word whose meaning is as culturally dependent as the word “food.”
Just to be clear, I think the brouhaha about whether it is acceptable to eat dog is strong proof that “food” is more narrowly defined than “material capable of being consumed for sustenance by humans.”
I don’t agree. I think “food” has a broad definition that is context dependent, not culturally dependent.
Every human culture has language for food. Yes sometimes people say “that’s not food” when they mean “there’s a taboo against eating that” and sometimes they say “that’s not food” when they mean “that’s not edible.” Perhaps sometimes they mean something else. But to tell what they mean depends on context, not culture.
Of course taboos vary across cultures, as does knowledge about what is and isn’t edible.
I’m not trying to play games with definitions—if taboo is a more intuitive label for you, then that’s the word I’ll use. The modern usage of the label “homosexual” invokes a substantial number of social taboos.
Those taboos vary from culture to culture. Because cultures change over time, that statement implies that the relevant taboos have changed over time. In short, the concepts intended to be invoked by the word “homosexuality” depend on the cultural context.
Further, the historical record isn’t clear that any cluster of taboos related to the current homosexuality cluster existed until fairly recently in history.
Further, the historical record isn’t clear that any cluster of taboos related to the current homosexuality cluster existed until fairly recently in history.
This doesn’t sound right to me, but maybe only because it’s vague. Famously, ancient jews forbade each other from male-male sex. I agree with the rest.
And the Bulgarian Cathars gave us the word “buggery”, which was a slur even back then. But the thing that keeps me from dismissing this all as wishful thinking on the part of queer-friendly sociology professors is that all those old prohibitions that I’ve been able to find refer to same-sex intercourse, the act (and usually only male-male intercourse at that), rather than homosexuality, the state. That doesn’t exactly prove that sexual identity as such is a modern invention—frank discussions of sexuality are rather thin on the ground in European culture between the Romans and the early modern period—but it does seem to point in that direction: if a concept of sexual identity existed, I’d expect homosexual identities to be condemned if homosexual acts were.
Yeah I suppose you’re right. I wasn’t really trying to nitpick your statement, but instead to express my admiration of modern technology. We’ve come pretty far since the days of Ancient Greece.
Even before modern IVF, I’m pretty sure it’s medically possible for a woman to become pregnant with sperm donated by a man she’s never been within arm’s reach of, kept on e.g. a damp cloth. I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out the possibility of such a thing having happened in Ancient Greece at some point.
The quotes are from Heinlein’s “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” which were sections in Time Enough for Love. In theory, they’re the wisdom of a man who’s thousands of years old. If you pay attention to the details, it turns out that they’re selections by a computer (admittedly, a sentient computer) from hours of talk in which Lazarus Long was encouraged to say whatever he wanted. He could be mistaken or lying. He’s none too pleased to be kept alive for his wisdom when he’d intended to commit suicide.
Oh, so her thesis is that in the west, orientation-as-identity dates back to 1860-ish. I can imagine that being defensible. That’s way different from what you originally wrote, though.
You see, the first thing that came to mind was Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, which explicitly recognizes orientation-as-identity and predates the Catholic Church by a couple centuries.
The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky is a favorite of mine, wich focuses on the Eveny people of Siberia.
The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, by Anna Read, is a good overview of SIberian peoples.
Marshall Sahlins’ entire corpus is pretty good, although his style puts some lay readers off.
Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Branislaw Malinowski deals with Melanesian trade and business ventures. It’s rather old at this point, but Malinowski had a fair influence on the development of anthropology thereafter.
Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso, which deals with an Apache group.
The Nuer by EE Evans Pritchard is older, and very dry, but widely regarded as a classic in the field. It deals with the Nuer people of Sudan.
The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman is not strictly an ethnography, but it’s very relevant to anthropological mindsets and is often required reading in first-year courses in the field.
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho, is pretty much what it says in the title, and a bit more contemporary.
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber mixes in history and economics, but it’s generally relevant.
Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer focuses on the poor in Haiti.
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Ana Tsing is kind of complicated to explain. Short version: it takes a look at events in Indonesia and traces out actors, groups, their motivating factors, and so on.
It made me a lot more comfortable dealing with people who might be seen as “regressive”, “bland”, “conservative” or just who seem otherwise not very in-synch with my own social attitudes and values. Getting to understand that culture and culturally-transmitted worldviews do constitute umbrella groups, but that people vary within them to similar degrees across such umbrellas, made it easier to just deal with people and adapt my own social responses to the situation, and where I feel like the person has incorrect, problematic or misguided ideas, it made it easier to choose my responses and present them effectively.
It made me more socially-conscious and a bit more socially-successful. I have some considerable obstacles there, but just having cultural details available was huge in informing my understanding of certain interactions. When I taught ESL, many of my students were Somali and Muslim. I’m also trans, and gender is a very big thing in many Islam-influenced societies (particularly ones where men and women for the most part don’t socialize). I learned a bit about fashion sense and making smart choices just by noticing how the men reacted to what I wore, particularly on hot days. I learned a lot about gender-marked social behavior and signifiers from my interactions with the older women in the class and the degree to which they accepted me (which I could gauge readily by their willingness to engage in casual touch, say to get my attention or when thanking me, or the occasional hug from some of my students).
It made me a far better worldbuilder than I was before, because I have some sense of just how variable human cultures really are, and how easy it is to construct a superficially-plausible theory of human cultures, history or behavior while missing out on the incredible variance that actually exists.
It made me far less interested in evolutionary psychology as an explanation for surface-level behaviors, let alone broad social patterns of behavior, because all too often cited examples turn out to be culturally-contingent. I think the average person in Western society has a very confused idea of just how different other cultures can be.
It made me skeptical of CEV as a thing that will return an output. I’m not sure human volition can be meaningfully extrapolated, and even if it can, I’m far from persuaded that the bits of it that cohere add up to anything you’d base FAI on.
It convinced me that the sort of attitudes I see expressed on LW towards “tradition” and traditional culture (especially where that experiences conflict with global capitalism) are so hopelessly confused about the thing they’re trying to address that they essentially don’t have anything meaningful to say about it, or at best only cover a small subset of the cases that they’re applied to. It didn’t make me a purist or instill some sort of half-baked Prime Directive or anything; cultures change and they’ll do that no matter what.
It helped me grasp my own cultural background and influences better. It gave me some insight into the ways in which that can lock in your perceptions and decisions, and how hard that is to change that, and how easy it is to confuse that with something “innate” (and how easy it is to confuse “innate” with “genetic”). It helped me grasp how I could substitute or reprogram bits of that, and with a bit of time and practice it helped me understand the limitations on that.
There’s...probably a whole ton more, but I’m running out of focus right now.
EDIT: Oh! It made me hugely more competent at navigating, interpreting and understanding art, especially from other cultures. Literary modes, aesthetics, music and styles; also narrative and its uses.
Fascinating, but… my Be Specific detector is going off and asking, not just for the abstract generalizations you concluded, but the specific examples that made you conclude them. Filling in at least one case of “I thought I should dress like X, but then Y happened, now I dress like Z”, even—my detector is going off because all the paragraphs are describing the abstract conclusions.
With regard to examples about clothing, one handy one would be:
I’d been generally aware that while the Muslim women’s reactions to me seemed to be more or less constant for a while, it had stood out to me that the men’s reactions were considerably more volatile. At the time I gauged this in terms of body language: the apparent tension of the facial muscles, the set of the shoulders, the extension of the arms, what the hands are doing, gestural or expressive mirroring… I don’t have formal training in this stuff, and being fairly autistic I don’t seem to have the same reactions to it that neurotypical people do, but on some perceptual level it just clicks that this person is relaxed or curious or uncomfortable or very uncomfortable.
Anyway, so I hadn’t really put thought into how I should dress before, in that context. I just wore the clothes I was comfy with the first day I started teaching, and didn’t notice any issues that stood out to me. I kept doing that until summer arrived. My usual fashion sense is fairly covering and drapey (I like cardigans, skirts and “big billowy hippie pants”). At the time I also had a penchant for wearing a head scarf (not a full wrap like the Muslim women in class wore, though—just fancy bandanas), more on that later.
On warmer days, I’d avoid wearing my hoodie or jacket and just do short-sleeve shirts. Some days I’d wear the hoodie but have shorts instead of pants or skirt. I was mostly busy with the teaching so it took a while for the pattern to reach conscious awareness, but gradually it dawned on me that the men displayed more signs of discomfort on these days. It didn’t seem like such a big deal that I was worried, though; it was a noticeable element but didn’t really interfere with the flow of class, and the bulk of the class (non-Muslim men and women plus Muslim women) didn’t seem to care.
Then one day I wore a tank top plus shorts. This was during the height of summer, and it didn’t strike me as particularly unusual. Suddenly the reaction difference was very marked. None of the Muslim students, men or women, felt comfortable looking at me at all. They tensed up in reaction to me getting closer. They entirely avoided asking for help during computer time (which necessitates me getting pretty close since I’d have to peer over their shoulders at the laptop, in a crowded classroom—on a related note, this was a huge test case for how my “gendered socialization” cues were doing, since when the women were comfy with me their body language was VERY clear on that point), and no matter how obviously they were struggling with the material they said they were fine. They wouldn’t actually breach etiquette and tell me to leave them alone with it, but they also clearly weren’t comfortable with me there. They wouldn’t make eye contact, they wouldn’t even look at me directly, and they certainly weren’t okay with me entering their personal space distance. This even applied to the women who’d treated me like a friend, not just a teacher—all the informality was gone.
Through all of this, my non-Muslim students (men and women both) remained more or less consistent about their body language; whether or not they liked me personally seemed a whole lot more relevant to their comfort (always erring on the side of polite in any case). My clothing choices didn’t seem to faze them.
I decided the very next day to compromise. I wore something a bit more covering...and blasted the air conditioner in the room. It took a while to find an equilibrium that really worked for people (differing temperature comfort zones), but negotiating settings on a thermostat was a whole lot easier, than trying to teach a class full of students who were too uncomfortable to focus. After a week, the Muslim women students were acting like it had never happened, the Muslim men were comfy enough to function in class (if a little more politely-distant than they had been) and the non-Muslim men and women remained pretty consistent throughout.
(Mind, once winter came around, we had the opposite problem—all of my students were from hot places, I can’t stand heat, and to preserve social comfort I had to keep them from blasting the heat all day...)
EDIT: Oh right, the headscarf thing. I noticed that it seemed to make a small but positive difference as well, mostly with newly-arrived Muslim women students. It wasn’t a huge effect, but after about eight months I’d elected to wear a scarf every day for the first week or two after we got a new student matching those labels, especially during one-on-one pullouts and interactions between class. It seemed to make affective mirroring go smoother during the get-to-know-you period, although it was a subtle thing, and didn’t seem to make a difference at all with anyone who’d been there for more than a couple months as of when I met them.
I suspect humans are a lot better at remembering abstract generalizations about what occurs than specific instances. (And probably with good reason; abstract generalizations probably take up less space.)
As a child, arguing with siblings, I had lots of arguments of the form “You’re accusing me of X? But you always do it yourself!” / “Oh yeah? Name one example!” / “I can’t think of any, but you still always do it!” But even if I was on the side asking for examples, I kind of knew in the back of my head that I was being dishonest, because I remembered the abstract generalization myself as well.
Of course being specific is still a good idea. It may be that the habit of being specific only helps you going forward, as you begin to get in the habit of storing specific instances.
For politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons, specifics in this instance run a substantial chance of being downvoted. If Jandila wants, for politeness sake, to avoid starting a fight, that’s a rational choice.
Nonetheless, I agree that be more specific would be valuable, both intrinsically and because specifics would show that Jandila has a deeper grasp of rationality (Talk is cheap, and such-like). To restate my point, I agree that specifics would make “an interesting and valuable top-level post”
If Jandila wants, for politeness sake, to avoid starting a fight, that’s a rational choice.
More like “Am feeling low confidence about own ability to express this in a way such that intended point will come through with sufficient signal to seperate it from the noise of other possible readings.” This is not simply confusing “has understood my point” with “agrees with my point”; I actually have a bit of a difficult time unpacking things like this because of how low-level perceptual it gets for me. I have conceptual synaesthesia, so I can glimpse distinctions and nuances pretty clearly, but it’s very difficult to translate “It’s that curly bit of the shape over there” back into argument-speak. Makes downvoting easy; even when I know what I mean and can tell the other party hasn’t understood what I said, I can’t really argue that my presentation sucked.
Since there seems to be an interest in me making a go at it, I’ll give this some thought.
It convinced me that the sort of attitudes I see expressed on LW towards “tradition” and traditional culture [...] are so hopelessly confused about the thing they’re trying to address that they essentially don’t have anything meaningful to say about it
(I think this could make an interesting and valuable top-level post.)
Maybe. I’m not sure I’m able to write on that particular topic well enough to sit at the top-level, but it does get weird. Partly it’s my own perspective as a person with cultural backgrounds that are not common here (mixed in with some cultural backgrounds that are) and perspectives on those; I can see what’s bugging me but it’s hard to construct it into any kind of overarching thesis (other than “LW is collectively bad at this”).
Like most of Leviticus, the edicts against homosexuality were an attempt to belatedly change ‘have no gods before me’ into ‘don’t have any other gods, period’ by banning all of the specific religious practices of the competing local religions, which involved things like, say, eating shellfish, wearing sacred garb composed of mixed fibers, etc.
So maybe some of them were homophobes, but it’s not necessary; and if they’d all been homophobes there wouldn’t have been a need to establish the rule.
That’s a good point. It fairly strongly suggests that Judeo-Christian anti-homosexuality values would not survive coherent extrapolation because it provides an explanation for why the value was included originally. As JoshuaZ stated, I don’t expect religious values whose sole function was religious in-group-ism to persist after a CEV process.
Well, if Christian anti-homosexuality was just a religious in-group-ism, they wouldn’t be outraged by non-Christians having sex with members of the other sex any more than by (say) non-Christians eating meat on Lent Fridays. Are they?
I don’t know the history in East Asia, but closer to where the Abrahamic religions arose one had the ancient Greeks who were ok with most forms of homosexuality. The only reservations they had about homosexuality as I understand it had to do with issues of honor if one were a male who was penetrated.
Edit: I get the impression from this article that the attitudes of ancient Indians to homosexuality has become so bogged down in modern politics that it may be difficult for non-experts to tell. I’ll try to look into this more later.
I’m working under the what should not be controversial assumption that the AGI isn’t going to find out that in fact there is such a deity hanging around.
Just as helpfully, if the FAI concludes that there is a deity around who we should please and who would prefer objecting to gay marriage, it will properly regard that as a value.
Or, presumably, if it concludes that there might some day come to be a deity, or other vastly powerful entity, who would prefer having objected to gay marriage.
Of course, all of this further presumes that there aren’t/won’t be other vastly powerful entities whose preferences have equal weight in opposite directions.
Extrapolated CEV would be working from observable evidence + a good prior. Whereas lots of people insist it’s very important to them to believe in a deity through faith, despite any contrary evidence (let alone lack of evidence). How are you going to tell the CEV to ignore such values?
If CEV is allowed to stomp theistic values as you describe, it might also stomp some values that people hold because they believe too much in human equality.
Well, most of them do so in part out of their deity telling them that that’s a value. If the extrapolated CEV takes into account that they are just wrong about there being such a deity, it should respond accordingly. (I’m working under the what should not be controversial assumption that the AGI isn’t going to find out that in fact there is such a deity hanging around.)
There’s a chicken and egg issue here. Were pre-existing anti-homosexuality values co-opted into early Judaism? Or did the Judeo-Chiristian ideology spread the values beyond their “natural” spread? The only empirical evidence for this question I can think of is non-Judeo-Christian attitudes. What are the historical attitudes towards homosexuality among East Asians and South Asians?
More broadly, people’s attitudes towards women and nerds are just as much expressions of values, not long-ranged utilitarian calculations.
Man, that’s variable. Especially in South Asia, where “Hinduism” is more like a nice box for outsiders to describe a huge body of different practices and theoretical approaches, some of them quite divergent. Chastity in general was and is a core value in many cases; where that’s not the case, or where the particular sect deals pragmatically with the human sex drive despite teaching chastity as a quicker path to moksha, there might be anything from embrace of erotic imagery and sexual diversity to fairly strict rules about that sort of conduct. Some sects unabashedly embrace sexuality as a good thing, including same-sex sexuality. Islam has historically been pretty doctrinally down on it, but even that has its nuances—sodomy was often considered a grave sin and still is in many places, while non-penetrative same-sex contact might well be seen as simply a minor thing, not strictly appropriate but hardly anything to get worked up about.
“East Asia” has a very large number of religions as well, and the influence of Confucianism and Buddhism hasn’t been uniform in this regard. One vague generality that I might suggest as a rough guideline is that traditionally, homosexuality is sort of tolerated in the closet—sure, it happens, but as long as everyone keeps up appearances and doesn’t make a scene or get caught doing something inappropriate, it’s no big deal. Some strains within Mahayana Buddhism have a degree of deprecation of sexual or gender-variant behavior; others don’t. Theravada varies as well, but in different ways.
In both cases, cultures vary tremendously. If you widen the scope, many cultures, including many of the foregoing, have traditionally been a lot more accepting of sex and gender variance. There are and were some cultures that were extremely permissive about it.
If you want more on the subject of how people think about sexuality, try Straight by Hanne Blank. She tracks the invention of heterosexuality (a concept which she says is less than a century old) in the west.
If part of CEV is finding out how much of what we think is obviously true is just stuff that people made up, life could get very strange.
The word is likely that recent, but is she claiming that the idea of being interested in members of the other sex but not in members of the same sex as sexual partners was unheard-of before that? Or what does she mean exactly?
It’s a somewhat complex book, but part of her meaning is that the idea that there are people who are only sexually interested in members of the other sex, and that this is an important category, is recent.
How could such a thesis be viable, when so much of the historical data has been lost?
There’s more historical data than you might think—for example, the way the Catholic Church defined sexual sin in terms of actions rather certain sins being associated with types of people who were especially tempted to engage in them.
There’s also some history of how sexual normality became more and more narrowly defined (Freud has a lot to answer for), and then the definitions shifted.
A good bit of the book is available for free at amazon, and I think that would be the best way for you to see whether Blank’s approach is reasonable.
The introduction is a catalog of ambiguities about sex, gender, and sexual orientation:
All of these are fair enough, and I’ve only read the introduction, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that she goes on to resolve these contradictions in Less Wrong tree-falls-in-a-forest style. Instead of trying to clarify what people mean when they something like “most people are heterosexual,” I get the feeling she only wants to muddy the waters enough to say “no they aren’t.”
I think her point is closer to “people make things up, and keep repeating those things until they seem like laws of the universe”.
A possible conclusion is that once people make a theory about how something ought to be, it’s very hard to go back to the state of mind of not having an opinion about that thing.
The amazon preview includes the last couple of chapters of the book.
The book could be viewed as a large expansion of two Heinlein quotes: “Everybody lies about sex” and “Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to fly a kite”.
I don’t recognize the quotes.
If so, then her point is more specific: “people made heterosexuality up.” But I don’t see how this can be supported. Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
I’ll check it out.
Edit: By the way what I can see of the amazon preview is pretty heavily redacted, and doesn’t include any complete chapter.
The abstract property that people we categorize as heterosexual have in common has existed, as you imply, for as long a members of bisexual species have been preferentially seeking out opposite-sex sex partners.
The explicit category in people’s brains is more recent than that.
I mean, every human being who has ever lived came from a sex act between two people who were in close physical proximity, but that doesn’t mean that the category of “people who prefer to have sex in close physical proximity to one another, rather than at a distance” has been explicitly represented. Indeed, I may have just made it up.
What do you mean by this? It’s incorrect to say that people haven’t noticed until recently that it’s very common for men to seek out women for sex and vice versa. It’s also incorrect to say that people haven’t noticed until recently the exceptions to this practice.
Neither is it correct to say that people haven’t noticed that it’s very common for people to have sex with people who are physically adjacent to them. But that’s not to say that people often think “I’m the sort of person who has sex with people physically adjacent to me.”
There’s a difference between eating meat from time to time, being aware that I eat meat from time to time, and explicitly thinking of myself as a “meat eater,” or as an “omnivore,” or as a “carnivore”. There’s a difference between being really smart, being aware of how well I do at various cognitive tasks, and thinking of myself as “a really smart person”.
More generally, there’s a difference between having the property X, being aware of evidence of X and acting accordingly, and having formed a mental structure in my mind that represents me as having X.
There’s also a difference between all of those and being part of a culture that has “people who have X” as a social construct.
In most cases, someone who thinks of themselves as “a meat eater” really does eat meat. On the other hand, there are very many people who think of themselves as “a really smart person” but who are not really smart.
Which case is more similar to heterosexuality, in your view?
The categories get really fuzzy, really fast, which causes a lot of confusion.
For the sake of concreteness, I’ll define my terms as follows (1):
A meat eater is someone who reliably experiences the desire to eat meat, and would sometimes be willing to eat meat if offered, and would not necessarily feel that eating that meat was problematic.
A heterosexual is someone who reliably experiences the desire to have sex with opposite-gendered people, and would sometimes be willing to do so if offered, and would not necessarily feel that having that sex was problematic.
A really smart person is someone who would reliably perform well on certain kinds of real-world problems that I don’t know how to define in a noncircular way but I can point to examples of.
Given those definitions, I agree that someone who identifies themselves as a meat eater typically is a meat eater and that someone who identifies themselves as a really smart person frequently is not a really smart person, and I would say that someone who identifies themselves as heterosexual typically is heterosexual.
So, to answer your question: if I look at just those cases, the meat-eater case is more like the heterosexual case than the smart-person case is
===============
(1) I have no particular fondness for those definitions, I picked them as my best approximations to what I thought you probably had in mind. If you would prefer different definitions let me know. Different definitions might change my answer.
Leaving terms like these in their normally fuzzy state causes lots of confusion when trying to have precise discussions of them … is a prepubescent child who has never been sexually attracted to anyone heterosexual? Is a man who is sexually attracted to other men, has never had sex with one, would refuse to have sex with one if offered (assuming etc.), and regularly has sex with women despite not really being sexually attracted to them heterosexual? Etc. Etc. Etc.
There’s nothing especially interesting about these questions, they’re just labeling questions… but if we don’t agree on the labels, it’s easy to confuse labeling questions with actual questions about the underlying states of the world, including states of people’s minds.
I agree with all of this. But I think it all casts Blank’s thesis in a bad light: “heterosexuality dates to the 1860s and not earlier” can only be supported if those labeling questions are resolved in a deliberately misleading way. I had the impression you thought differently but perhaps not.
Not having read the book, I can’t speak to Blank’s thesis.
I will point out, though, that just because I’m a meat-eater doesn’t mean that I ever think of myself as a meat eater, that I ever talk about myself as a meat-eater, or that I live in a culture in which being a meat-eater exists as a social construct.
Similarly, just because I’m heterosexual (which, by the definition above, I am, despite being in a 19-year same-sex relationship) it doesn’t follow that I ever think of myself as heterosexual (which I haven’t in a little over 20 years), that I talk about myself as heterosexual (which I usually don’t), or that I live in a culture where heterosexuality exists as a social construct (which I have for my entire life). Depending on the context I’m working in, different definitions become appropriate.
If I’m talking about social constructs, for example, the statement “heterosexuality dates to the 1860s and not earlier” might be true, or might not… beats me. It certainly isn’t true if I’m talking about mate-selection behavior… in that context “heterosexuality” refers to something that predates the evolution of the human race. There are other contexts in which the statement “heterosexuality is about as old as humanity, but not significantly older” might be true.
You seem to be saying that speaking in some of those contexts, or speaking in a way that fails to clarify what context I’m operating in, is necessarily deliberately misleading; if you’re saying that, then yes, I think differently. But, again, I haven’t read Blank’s book, so it’s entirely possible that Blank in particular is being deliberately misleading.
I withdraw “deliberately”, after all how would I know. But “social construct” is technical jargon from a controversial theory in a controversial academic discipline. Almost every English-speaking adult knows what straight and gay are, but hardly any of them know what a social construct is. So I do believe that it’s misleading to speak of “heterosexuality” when you mean “the social construct of heterosexuality.”
Whether someone knows what the term “social construct” refers to has nothing to do with the matter. Most people don’t know what the term “pheromone” refers to, but it would be mistaken to infer from that that sexual attraction has nothing to do with pheromones, or that discussions of sexual orientation in terms of pheromones is necessarily misleading.
That said, though, sure, if social constructs don’t exist at all, then there certainly isn’t such a thing as a social construct of heterosexuality, in which case any discussion of same (including my own comments in this thread) is misleading, albeit (as you admit) not necessarily deliberately so.
I don’t know what TheOtherDave means, but I have heard it said before that the notion of treating sexual preference as identity is relatively recent. In the past—or so the claim goes—people did of course recognize that some people prefer to have intercourse with members the opposite sex, whereas others did not. But this was seen as merely a preference, similar to disliking broccoli or liking the color red or whatever. A person wouldn’t identify as “a heterosexual” or “a homosexual”, no more than one would identify as “an anti-broccolist” or a “red-ist” or whatever.
That brings up some interesting questions about the way people thought about identity. An awful lot of identity groups got launched around the same time, including some of the first ones I can think of that’re based around behavior—the temperance movement originated in the mid-1830s, for example. I wonder if some shift in the political climate in the early-to-mid 1800s suddenly made it practical to advocate for some behavior or lack thereof by adopting it into a group identity and then using that to argue for a protected category?
Insofar as there’s a point to such distinctions, I expect the frontlines of that shift to have been cultural and scientific rather than political. “Advocating a behavior by adopting it into a group identity and using that to argue for a protected category” sounds awfully meta; I expect the crucial changes were simpler, more fundamental and centered around what enabled people to argue for a protected category in the first place. I’m thinking along lines like this:
A number of technological advances were made around that time that made setting up movements far easier. The proliferation of various movements coincides nicely with such stuff as improved methods of agriculture (leading to population growth and urbanization), the invention of the telegraph (bridging distances), better transportation in the form of railways and ever faster ships (mobilization, etc.) and probably others that escape me at the moment. A bit later on Darwin and the theory of evolution paved the way for eugenics-style thinking and concepts of inherent superiority between races and nations, and around the turn of the century the rise of scientific (or semi-scientific) psychology opened the doors for minting all kinds of novel ingroup-outgroup divisions. I expect identity-builders had a field day with the concept of the subconscious mind in particular. “You can’t help it, those people are just made that way. Fortunately not us, though, haw haw.”
On the non-scientific side, there are a number of converging cultural trends and phenomena to take into account.
The decline of the church was an example of how a firmly established institution wasn’t necessarily a permanent feature of society.
There’s been a general decline in violence throughout society, which made resisting the establishment less scary.
Western Romanticism and the advent of nationalism were a fairly clear case of deliberate identity-building, and it set a precedent for doing the same on a smaller scale.
Not all movements appeared from nowhere; workers’ unions had been around for centuries in the form of guilds and such, so all those movements springing up wasn’t so much groundbreaking novelty as it was just more of the same.
These aren’t exhaustive lists, but I hope the gist is clear.
When giraffes mate in such a manner as to produce viable offspring, is that “heterosexuality?”
If yes, why do male giraffes frequently engage in same-sex behavior when nearby females are not in oestrus and receptive to their advances?
To clarify: the term “heterosexuality” doesn’t necessarily mean simply “male/female sexual contact.” Humans have been doing that for as long as there have been humans. Humans have also been doing same-sex sexual contact for as long as there have been humans (this is not a controversial idea given the huge number of animal species that do, inclusive of our near relatives), but the phenomenon of people being defined as, or identifying with the terms “heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual” is quite recent and cultural-contextual.
Mating such that offspring may be viably produced is a piece of the territory. “Heterosexuality” is a label on one particular map of that territory, and its boundaries and name don’t necessarily represent the reality accurately.
The map itself is part of a larger territory. Handshakes only occur in certain cultures; that does not mean there is no such thing as a handshake.
It does imply that assigning handshakes to the reference class of “things made up by humans,” is reasonable though.
Money is made up, but you can still starve to death without it. “Made up” doesn’t mean “fake and with no lasting impact.”
One more question: Why do people find it so interesting that some animals form same-sex pairings?
It normally comes up when claims are made of the form “homosexuality is unnatural!” with the implied or explicit “therefore it is wrong/sinful/evil/yucky”. Pointing to same-sex pairings in animals is intended as a response to this. The people making the response either don’t understand the naturalistic fallacy or consider it to be sufficiently abstract or harder to explain that they don’t bother with that line of response.
It is also interesting from a biological standpoint in that it isn’t that easy to explain from an ev bio perspective, so studying it makes sense.
It has to do with the fact that it was essentially ignored throughout most of the history of biology as a discipline. It’s not like this behavior is new; it’s been there the whole time, and so have the observations of the behavior, but the reaction within scientific culture has changed dramatically.
Stuff like interpreting active vs passive animals in a copulatory act as male and female respectively, assuming the animals had simply misidentified the sex of the other party, or assuming that the observing party was necessarily mistaken, publication and citation biases, and the frequently-opaque titles, abstracts and contents of those published studies that did manage to make it into the journals (“A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera”, W.J. Tenant, 1987, Entemologists Record and Journal of Variation).
It’s news to a whole lot of people, in other words.
Wild mass guessing: animals are incapable of sin?
Your second question is very interesting! I don’t know why asking it is contingent on a “yes” answer to your first question, which is tiresome.
If you like, I’d be interested to hear what you mean by these phrases in more detail:
“defined as, or identifying with”
“cultural-contextual”
In the United States, dog meat is defined as “not food.” In other cultures, the definition of “food” includes dog meat. The meaning of “food” depends on context, specifically, the cultural context.
Just to be clear, I think the brouhaha about whether it is acceptable to eat dog is strong proof that “food” is more narrowly defined than “material capable of being consumed for sustenance by humans.”
The assertion is that “homosexuality” is a word whose meaning is as culturally dependent as the word “food.”
I don’t agree. I think “food” has a broad definition that is context dependent, not culturally dependent.
Every human culture has language for food. Yes sometimes people say “that’s not food” when they mean “there’s a taboo against eating that” and sometimes they say “that’s not food” when they mean “that’s not edible.” Perhaps sometimes they mean something else. But to tell what they mean depends on context, not culture.
Of course taboos vary across cultures, as does knowledge about what is and isn’t edible.
I’m not trying to play games with definitions—if taboo is a more intuitive label for you, then that’s the word I’ll use. The modern usage of the label “homosexual” invokes a substantial number of social taboos.
Those taboos vary from culture to culture. Because cultures change over time, that statement implies that the relevant taboos have changed over time. In short, the concepts intended to be invoked by the word “homosexuality” depend on the cultural context.
Further, the historical record isn’t clear that any cluster of taboos related to the current homosexuality cluster existed until fairly recently in history.
This doesn’t sound right to me, but maybe only because it’s vague. Famously, ancient jews forbade each other from male-male sex. I agree with the rest.
And the Bulgarian Cathars gave us the word “buggery”, which was a slur even back then. But the thing that keeps me from dismissing this all as wishful thinking on the part of queer-friendly sociology professors is that all those old prohibitions that I’ve been able to find refer to same-sex intercourse, the act (and usually only male-male intercourse at that), rather than homosexuality, the state. That doesn’t exactly prove that sexual identity as such is a modern invention—frank discussions of sexuality are rather thin on the ground in European culture between the Romans and the early modern period—but it does seem to point in that direction: if a concept of sexual identity existed, I’d expect homosexual identities to be condemned if homosexual acts were.
This exactly.
(Tangentially: food is a great example of how culture impacts...well, so many things, but perception among them.)
Technically, given our modern technology, this is no longer true; though throughout most of human history this was indeed the case.
OK, but I think to say “almost every human being who has ever lived...” would be a misleading understatement.
Yeah I suppose you’re right. I wasn’t really trying to nitpick your statement, but instead to express my admiration of modern technology. We’ve come pretty far since the days of Ancient Greece.
Even before modern IVF, I’m pretty sure it’s medically possible for a woman to become pregnant with sperm donated by a man she’s never been within arm’s reach of, kept on e.g. a damp cloth. I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out the possibility of such a thing having happened in Ancient Greece at some point.
The quotes are from Heinlein’s “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” which were sections in Time Enough for Love. In theory, they’re the wisdom of a man who’s thousands of years old. If you pay attention to the details, it turns out that they’re selections by a computer (admittedly, a sentient computer) from hours of talk in which Lazarus Long was encouraged to say whatever he wanted. He could be mistaken or lying. He’s none too pleased to be kept alive for his wisdom when he’d intended to commit suicide.
He may or may not be a mouthpiece for Heinlein.
Oh, so her thesis is that in the west, orientation-as-identity dates back to 1860-ish. I can imagine that being defensible. That’s way different from what you originally wrote, though.
You see, the first thing that came to mind was Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, which explicitly recognizes orientation-as-identity and predates the Catholic Church by a couple centuries.
Thanks for the cite.
Hell, you don’t need CEV for that. A decent anthropology textbook will get you quite a distance there (even if only superficially)...
Can you recommend a book / author? (Interested outsider, no idea what the good stuff is, have read Jared Diamond and similar works.)
The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky is a favorite of mine, wich focuses on the Eveny people of Siberia. The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, by Anna Read, is a good overview of SIberian peoples. Marshall Sahlins’ entire corpus is pretty good, although his style puts some lay readers off. Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Branislaw Malinowski deals with Melanesian trade and business ventures. It’s rather old at this point, but Malinowski had a fair influence on the development of anthropology thereafter. Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso, which deals with an Apache group. The Nuer by EE Evans Pritchard is older, and very dry, but widely regarded as a classic in the field. It deals with the Nuer people of Sudan. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman is not strictly an ethnography, but it’s very relevant to anthropological mindsets and is often required reading in first-year courses in the field. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho, is pretty much what it says in the title, and a bit more contemporary. Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber mixes in history and economics, but it’s generally relevant. Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer focuses on the poor in Haiti. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Ana Tsing is kind of complicated to explain. Short version: it takes a look at events in Indonesia and traces out actors, groups, their motivating factors, and so on.
I wonder whether people who’ve studied anthropology find that it’s affected their choices.
It certainly did mine.
I’m interested in any details you’d like to share.
It made me a lot more comfortable dealing with people who might be seen as “regressive”, “bland”, “conservative” or just who seem otherwise not very in-synch with my own social attitudes and values. Getting to understand that culture and culturally-transmitted worldviews do constitute umbrella groups, but that people vary within them to similar degrees across such umbrellas, made it easier to just deal with people and adapt my own social responses to the situation, and where I feel like the person has incorrect, problematic or misguided ideas, it made it easier to choose my responses and present them effectively.
It made me more socially-conscious and a bit more socially-successful. I have some considerable obstacles there, but just having cultural details available was huge in informing my understanding of certain interactions. When I taught ESL, many of my students were Somali and Muslim. I’m also trans, and gender is a very big thing in many Islam-influenced societies (particularly ones where men and women for the most part don’t socialize). I learned a bit about fashion sense and making smart choices just by noticing how the men reacted to what I wore, particularly on hot days. I learned a lot about gender-marked social behavior and signifiers from my interactions with the older women in the class and the degree to which they accepted me (which I could gauge readily by their willingness to engage in casual touch, say to get my attention or when thanking me, or the occasional hug from some of my students).
It made me a far better worldbuilder than I was before, because I have some sense of just how variable human cultures really are, and how easy it is to construct a superficially-plausible theory of human cultures, history or behavior while missing out on the incredible variance that actually exists.
It made me far less interested in evolutionary psychology as an explanation for surface-level behaviors, let alone broad social patterns of behavior, because all too often cited examples turn out to be culturally-contingent. I think the average person in Western society has a very confused idea of just how different other cultures can be.
It made me skeptical of CEV as a thing that will return an output. I’m not sure human volition can be meaningfully extrapolated, and even if it can, I’m far from persuaded that the bits of it that cohere add up to anything you’d base FAI on.
It convinced me that the sort of attitudes I see expressed on LW towards “tradition” and traditional culture (especially where that experiences conflict with global capitalism) are so hopelessly confused about the thing they’re trying to address that they essentially don’t have anything meaningful to say about it, or at best only cover a small subset of the cases that they’re applied to. It didn’t make me a purist or instill some sort of half-baked Prime Directive or anything; cultures change and they’ll do that no matter what.
It helped me grasp my own cultural background and influences better. It gave me some insight into the ways in which that can lock in your perceptions and decisions, and how hard that is to change that, and how easy it is to confuse that with something “innate” (and how easy it is to confuse “innate” with “genetic”). It helped me grasp how I could substitute or reprogram bits of that, and with a bit of time and practice it helped me understand the limitations on that.
There’s...probably a whole ton more, but I’m running out of focus right now.
EDIT: Oh! It made me hugely more competent at navigating, interpreting and understanding art, especially from other cultures. Literary modes, aesthetics, music and styles; also narrative and its uses.
Fascinating, but… my Be Specific detector is going off and asking, not just for the abstract generalizations you concluded, but the specific examples that made you conclude them. Filling in at least one case of “I thought I should dress like X, but then Y happened, now I dress like Z”, even—my detector is going off because all the paragraphs are describing the abstract conclusions.
With regard to examples about clothing, one handy one would be:
I’d been generally aware that while the Muslim women’s reactions to me seemed to be more or less constant for a while, it had stood out to me that the men’s reactions were considerably more volatile. At the time I gauged this in terms of body language: the apparent tension of the facial muscles, the set of the shoulders, the extension of the arms, what the hands are doing, gestural or expressive mirroring… I don’t have formal training in this stuff, and being fairly autistic I don’t seem to have the same reactions to it that neurotypical people do, but on some perceptual level it just clicks that this person is relaxed or curious or uncomfortable or very uncomfortable.
Anyway, so I hadn’t really put thought into how I should dress before, in that context. I just wore the clothes I was comfy with the first day I started teaching, and didn’t notice any issues that stood out to me. I kept doing that until summer arrived. My usual fashion sense is fairly covering and drapey (I like cardigans, skirts and “big billowy hippie pants”). At the time I also had a penchant for wearing a head scarf (not a full wrap like the Muslim women in class wore, though—just fancy bandanas), more on that later.
On warmer days, I’d avoid wearing my hoodie or jacket and just do short-sleeve shirts. Some days I’d wear the hoodie but have shorts instead of pants or skirt. I was mostly busy with the teaching so it took a while for the pattern to reach conscious awareness, but gradually it dawned on me that the men displayed more signs of discomfort on these days. It didn’t seem like such a big deal that I was worried, though; it was a noticeable element but didn’t really interfere with the flow of class, and the bulk of the class (non-Muslim men and women plus Muslim women) didn’t seem to care.
Then one day I wore a tank top plus shorts. This was during the height of summer, and it didn’t strike me as particularly unusual. Suddenly the reaction difference was very marked. None of the Muslim students, men or women, felt comfortable looking at me at all. They tensed up in reaction to me getting closer. They entirely avoided asking for help during computer time (which necessitates me getting pretty close since I’d have to peer over their shoulders at the laptop, in a crowded classroom—on a related note, this was a huge test case for how my “gendered socialization” cues were doing, since when the women were comfy with me their body language was VERY clear on that point), and no matter how obviously they were struggling with the material they said they were fine. They wouldn’t actually breach etiquette and tell me to leave them alone with it, but they also clearly weren’t comfortable with me there. They wouldn’t make eye contact, they wouldn’t even look at me directly, and they certainly weren’t okay with me entering their personal space distance. This even applied to the women who’d treated me like a friend, not just a teacher—all the informality was gone.
Through all of this, my non-Muslim students (men and women both) remained more or less consistent about their body language; whether or not they liked me personally seemed a whole lot more relevant to their comfort (always erring on the side of polite in any case). My clothing choices didn’t seem to faze them.
I decided the very next day to compromise. I wore something a bit more covering...and blasted the air conditioner in the room. It took a while to find an equilibrium that really worked for people (differing temperature comfort zones), but negotiating settings on a thermostat was a whole lot easier, than trying to teach a class full of students who were too uncomfortable to focus. After a week, the Muslim women students were acting like it had never happened, the Muslim men were comfy enough to function in class (if a little more politely-distant than they had been) and the non-Muslim men and women remained pretty consistent throughout.
(Mind, once winter came around, we had the opposite problem—all of my students were from hot places, I can’t stand heat, and to preserve social comfort I had to keep them from blasting the heat all day...)
EDIT: Oh right, the headscarf thing. I noticed that it seemed to make a small but positive difference as well, mostly with newly-arrived Muslim women students. It wasn’t a huge effect, but after about eight months I’d elected to wear a scarf every day for the first week or two after we got a new student matching those labels, especially during one-on-one pullouts and interactions between class. It seemed to make affective mirroring go smoother during the get-to-know-you period, although it was a subtle thing, and didn’t seem to make a difference at all with anyone who’d been there for more than a couple months as of when I met them.
(Bows.) Thank you for Being Specific!
I suspect humans are a lot better at remembering abstract generalizations about what occurs than specific instances. (And probably with good reason; abstract generalizations probably take up less space.)
As a child, arguing with siblings, I had lots of arguments of the form “You’re accusing me of X? But you always do it yourself!” / “Oh yeah? Name one example!” / “I can’t think of any, but you still always do it!” But even if I was on the side asking for examples, I kind of knew in the back of my head that I was being dishonest, because I remembered the abstract generalization myself as well.
Of course being specific is still a good idea. It may be that the habit of being specific only helps you going forward, as you begin to get in the habit of storing specific instances.
For politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons, specifics in this instance run a substantial chance of being downvoted. If Jandila wants, for politeness sake, to avoid starting a fight, that’s a rational choice.
Nonetheless, I agree that be more specific would be valuable, both intrinsically and because specifics would show that Jandila has a deeper grasp of rationality (Talk is cheap, and such-like). To restate my point, I agree that specifics would make “an interesting and valuable top-level post”
More like “Am feeling low confidence about own ability to express this in a way such that intended point will come through with sufficient signal to seperate it from the noise of other possible readings.” This is not simply confusing “has understood my point” with “agrees with my point”; I actually have a bit of a difficult time unpacking things like this because of how low-level perceptual it gets for me. I have conceptual synaesthesia, so I can glimpse distinctions and nuances pretty clearly, but it’s very difficult to translate “It’s that curly bit of the shape over there” back into argument-speak. Makes downvoting easy; even when I know what I mean and can tell the other party hasn’t understood what I said, I can’t really argue that my presentation sucked.
Since there seems to be an interest in me making a go at it, I’ll give this some thought.
See my reply to Tim S below—you’re right that it’s vague, and I’m thinking it might be worthwhile to go to the trouble of laying it out a bit more.
(I think this could make an interesting and valuable top-level post.)
Maybe. I’m not sure I’m able to write on that particular topic well enough to sit at the top-level, but it does get weird. Partly it’s my own perspective as a person with cultural backgrounds that are not common here (mixed in with some cultural backgrounds that are) and perspectives on those; I can see what’s bugging me but it’s hard to construct it into any kind of overarching thesis (other than “LW is collectively bad at this”).
Me too.
Like most of Leviticus, the edicts against homosexuality were an attempt to belatedly change ‘have no gods before me’ into ‘don’t have any other gods, period’ by banning all of the specific religious practices of the competing local religions, which involved things like, say, eating shellfish, wearing sacred garb composed of mixed fibers, etc.
So maybe some of them were homophobes, but it’s not necessary; and if they’d all been homophobes there wouldn’t have been a need to establish the rule.
That’s a good point. It fairly strongly suggests that Judeo-Christian anti-homosexuality values would not survive coherent extrapolation because it provides an explanation for why the value was included originally. As JoshuaZ stated, I don’t expect religious values whose sole function was religious in-group-ism to persist after a CEV process.
Well, if Christian anti-homosexuality was just a religious in-group-ism, they wouldn’t be outraged by non-Christians having sex with members of the other sex any more than by (say) non-Christians eating meat on Lent Fridays. Are they?
I don’t know the history in East Asia, but closer to where the Abrahamic religions arose one had the ancient Greeks who were ok with most forms of homosexuality. The only reservations they had about homosexuality as I understand it had to do with issues of honor if one were a male who was penetrated.
Edit: I get the impression from this article that the attitudes of ancient Indians to homosexuality has become so bogged down in modern politics that it may be difficult for non-experts to tell. I’ll try to look into this more later.
IIRC, in pre-Christian Rome/Greece, homosexuality was considered OK only if the receiving partner was young enough.
Just as helpfully, if the FAI concludes that there is a deity around who we should please and who would prefer objecting to gay marriage, it will properly regard that as a value.
Or, presumably, if it concludes that there might some day come to be a deity, or other vastly powerful entity, who would prefer having objected to gay marriage.
Of course, all of this further presumes that there aren’t/won’t be other vastly powerful entities whose preferences have equal weight in opposite directions.
Extrapolated CEV would be working from observable evidence + a good prior. Whereas lots of people insist it’s very important to them to believe in a deity through faith, despite any contrary evidence (let alone lack of evidence). How are you going to tell the CEV to ignore such values?
If CEV is allowed to stomp theistic values as you describe, it might also stomp some values that people hold because they believe too much in human equality.