I think this conversation could start with a good dose of Korzybski and General Semantics.
“Being creepy” does not represent the situation as well as “Person X is uncomfortable with Person Y’s overtures for an increased level of personal contact.”
The situation is improved when Person X more clearly communicates their discomfort and disinterest, and when Person Y pays more attention to how well their overtures are received, up to just moving on and avoiding contact.
But neither communication nor perception are perfect, and worse, the incentives would tend to promote a nonzero level of creepiness. The person with interest should be expected to make an overture—they’re hoping for more.
The advice I see in the first article basically tells the interested party not to make overtures. I don’t see that as helpful. Human beings touch each other. They stand close. They make sexual comments. Particularly when they are interested in someone.
Consider one piece of advice:
That person you want to touch? Put them in charge of the whole touch experience.
If they both want to touch each other, then they never will, both waiting for the other to touch them. Somebody has to make the first overture.
10) actually has some useful advice on how to spot a lack of interest, and indeed, disinterest, dislike, and aversion. That’s fine for an article on “knowing when to piss off”, but it’s not so helpful for someone trying to reach out to someone else.
What’s needed is an article “How to make an effective overture that minimizes creepy feelings in the subject of interest”.
Give an extensional description of the aspects that increase creepiness, and how those can be minimized by someone trying to make a connection.
I think this conversation could start with a good dose of Korzybski and General Semantics.
“Being creepy” does not represent the situation as well as “Person X is uncomfortable with Person Y’s overtures for an increased level of personal contact.”
Thankyou buybuy. Tabooing the term and describing the actual behaviors and circumstances specifically is exactly what is called for here!
You seem to be one of the list elders, so to speak, so I’ve got a tangential question for you.
I see occasional references to Korzybski, and the Map is Not The Territory sequence article. “Tabooing a word” is just the kind of semantic hygiene practice of which he had zillions—in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he originated “tabooing a word”.
But I don’t get the impression that a lot of people here have read his work, or if they did, few have interest. What’s your sense of the level of familiarity with and interest in Korzybski here?
But I don’t get the impression that a lot of people here have read his work, or if they did, few have interest. What’s your sense of the level of familiarity with and interest in Korzybski here?
Yours is the only reference I can recall. From the sound of it I’d like to hear more. Any other key insights of his that you think we could benefit from?
Hard to summarize a lot of stuff, and I don’t know that seeing the summary without the explanation of it is that helpful.
Instead, I’ll apply General Semantics to my response to the conversation, as an imaginary Korzybski (K). It’s been a while since I read the stuff, so my use of his terms will doubtless lack some precision, and be colored by my own attitude as well.
K: We have a discussion here. People are saying things like Joe is creepy, or Joe is a creep.
K: They are using the “is of identity”, and the “is of predication”. We know that this falsifies reality. An apple is not red, but is perceived as red by us in the proper circumstances. In other circumstances, we would not perceive it as red. Even taking a conscious being out of the equation, the apple would be measured as red by some instrument or process under certain conditions, and not red in other circumstances.
K: Now let’s look at the term “creep”. Our total evaluative response to the word “creep” contains a mass of associative (often emotive) and extensional (observable) components. We have many negative and unpleasant emotional associations with the term. If we are going to properly evaluate Joe and his behavior instead of merely letting our reactions to words that we chose to apply to Joe dictate our response to Joe, we should limit our discussion to extensional terms.
K: Unfortunately, it seems to me that even the implied extensional usage of the word is highly variable in this discussion, with creep_you <> creep_me <> creep_him <> creep_her, to a degree that impacts effective communication. The same is likely true even of creep_him_1, creep_him_2, creep_him_3 - people aren’t being consistent in their own usage of the term.
K: So let’s make an explicit extensional definition of the word “creep” to test whether we have been communicating at all.
ME: I would add that the various comments on blame/responsibility that try to get around blame by resorting to causality don’t get us anywhere. Joe’s behavior no more caused Jane’s reaction than Jane’s emotional and perceptual makeup. Change either sufficiently, and Jane does not perceive Joe as creepy. I think this is implicit in K’s method, but I don’t recall him this particular discussion on causality. Although it’s starting to ring a few bells in some musty old neurons.
There’s a lot of other stuff. I consider General Semantics as semantic hygiene, seeing how certain semantic practices encourage bad habits of thought, and having specific counter practices for avoiding the poor habits of thought. Purell for the mind.
In the end, I don’t think the counter practices are necessary to keep your ideas clean and tidy as long as you’ve internalized an aversion to the poor habits of thought, but they help when confusion is afoot.
Couldn’t find the definitive “tabooing a word”, if there is such a thing, but after the taboo, I think EY recommends replacing it with what amounts to an “extensional” description.
But I don’t get the impression that a lot of people here have read his work, or if they did, few have interest. What’s your sense of the level of familiarity with and interest in Korzybski here?
I’ve seen a few references, and the impression I got is that the sequence on words overlaps a lot with Korzybski’s General Semantics.
“Being creepy” does not represent the situation as well as “Person X is uncomfortable with Person Y’s overtures for an increased level of personal contact.”
I’m not sure this is it. If I had to give a definition for “creepy”, it would be something like: “Person Y’s attitude and behavior are making Person X feel personally unsafe (to some degree) around Person Y.”
So yes, it does take two to tango, but it’s not clear that Person X can do anything about eir feelings, especially since the feelings may be functionally justified at some level (i.e. most if not all examples of ‘creepy’ behavior actually are evidence that Person Y is more likely to be a threat).
I’m not sure this is it. If I had to give a definition for “creepy”, it would be something like: “Person Y’s attitude and behavior are making Person X feel personally unsafe (to some degree) around Person Y.”
Both definitions are used, and plenty more besides. This is actually why bubuy’s point is so important. The cluster of things that are called ‘creepy’ is diverse and the most useful response to given situations varies depending on what the actual situation is rather than on whether someone calls it ‘creepy’.
Incidentally, your definition is weakened by focusing on preemptively applying judgement more than causal accuracy. While the intent is to convey that the person being labeled ‘creepy’ is responsible for the feelings of the other it actually implies that even the most lewdly inappropriate, boundary-oblivious and clingy loser is immune to being ‘creepy’ when their target is sufficiently physically secure, emotionally mature and psychologically self-determined. This is absurd, clearly not your intent and actually forces the ‘victim’ to be disempowered before they are entitled to any ‘anti-creep’ rights.
It is quite OK to keep assertions of ‘and it is right and fitting that we hold person Y responsible in this case and use some form of sanction’ out of the actual definition of ‘creepy’ and in the realm of policy advocation.
even the most lewdly inappropriate, boundary-oblivious and clingy loser is immune to being ‘creepy’ when their target is sufficiently physically secure, emotionally mature and psychologically self-determined. This is absurd
I’m not sure that it is—unless you mean that the target is unjustified in feeling physically safe, and the loser is actually posing a threat to hir. But we can still define such behavior as “creepy” by extension, since the target would actually judge themselfes as being unsafe if they were more reasonable and knowledgeable about the loser’s attitude and behavior. Definitions often perform poorly at such boundaries, but this does not imply that there isn’t a salient cluster in thingspace which is adequately captured by the above definition.
I’m not sure that it is—unless you mean that the target is unjustified in feeling physically safe, and the loser is actually posing a threat to hir.
That would also be sufficient to abandon the definition. But no, I mean she is actually are physically safe and the guy is being creepy as @#%#. Either the recipient of the creepiness or an observer can both legitimately call that behavior creepy even if the victim of it neither feels nor actually is physically unsafe.
but this does not imply that there isn’t a salient cluster in thingspace which is adequately captured by the above definition.
The above definition conveys concepts that aren’t even intended for use in ‘thingspace’ as opposed to ‘political space’. Specifically, the assignment of blame and responsibility. It can be resolved to a thing space cluster but if this is done it points to a cluster that does not, in fact, serve your purposes. If interpreted as a literal epistemic description when executing ‘creepiness’ prevention policies it would result in inferior outcomes to what you would get if you executed your actual meaning. Fortunately few would (acta as if they) interpret the definition literally and would instead interpret it as an approximate reference to a related thing in thingspace but with additional policy decisions snuck in.
That would also be sufficient to abandon the definition. But no, I mean she is actually are physically safe and the guy is being creepy as @#%#. Either the recipient of the creepiness or an observer can both legitimately call that behavior creepy even if the victim of it neither feels nor actually is physically unsafe.
I’d say that the target can legitimately state that the guy’s behavior is making her uncomfortable (assuming that this is in fact the case), and/or tell the guy to buzz off and have this enforced as necessary. Either the target or any third party can legitimately caution the guy that his behavior could be interpreted as “creepy” (i.e. at least mildly threatening) by others.
However, I would not use “creepy” to describe all instances where someone is being merely bothered by someone else; nor would I want to have a fixed cluster of behaviors be regarded as “creepy”, regardless of the target’s actual feelings and reactions. Thus, I’d say that defining the above as not-creepy is in fact very reasonable.
The above definition conveys concepts that aren’t even intended for use in ‘thingspace’ as opposed to ‘political space’. Specifically, the assignment of blame and responsibility.
Um, no. Physical causality is not the same as appropriately-assigned blame and responsibility. Even then, I could easily rephrase my definition as: “Person X’s experience and overall disposition causes her to feel physically unsafe to some degree, upon being exposed to some peculiar attitudes and behavors on Person Y’s part” and this would not change my preferred policy.
I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that “n*s” were relegated to the back rows of the bus because they would give off a creeper vibe? ISTR that it had to do with legally enforced segregation.
[totally offtopic] That’s ridiculous. Taking the Montgomery, AL bus system as an example, black customers were critically important to the economics of the city transit system, which is one reason the Rosa Parks bus boycott was such a big deal. Outside Montgomery, we do know of streetcar companies who refused to segregate their customers, until they were forced to do so by the government (See Roback, Jennifer (1986). “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars”. Journal of Economic History56 (4): 893–917. doi:10.1017/S0022050700050634).
Racial segregation in the U.S. South was a wholly political decision—in fact, it was politically pushed by pro-white Democrat politicians in opposition to the Republican party (which used to be pro-integration).
People can do a lot about their feelings. But whether they can or not, the issue of blame is not resolved. That X feels upset about what Y does, and even can’t help feeling upset, does not necessarily imply that X is to blame for anything.
As to “the cause” of the bad feelings, clearly it’s combination of the X’s emotional disposition and Y’s behavior, and if either were sufficiently different, the bad feelings would not have occurred.
But we’ve at least identified one problem in this conversation. You have a different definition of creepy than I do. I don’t think yours is quite so robust, because I’d just call yours “threatening” or “dangerous”, not creepy, but it does seem like a potential element of creepiness.
But then, unsafe how? What is the threat? I can see a number.
Threat of physical or sexual assault. Threat to social status by a low status male even showing interest (as if he had a chance, etc.). Threat of that in a public setting. Threat of the discomfort of dealing with him and his interest.
Finally, I wonder how much a woman perceives any unwanted sexual interest from a man she doesn’t trust as something of a threat, even when an objective review of the circumstances would say there is no real threat. That would seem natural to me, in an evolutionary sense.
THat’s a good point. I am rather upset by how much defense of creeping there is here but it might be good if the sufferers discomfort and the creeper’s self could be seperated a little.
I think this conversation could start with a good dose of Korzybski and General Semantics.
“Being creepy” does not represent the situation as well as “Person X is uncomfortable with Person Y’s overtures for an increased level of personal contact.”
The situation is improved when Person X more clearly communicates their discomfort and disinterest, and when Person Y pays more attention to how well their overtures are received, up to just moving on and avoiding contact.
But neither communication nor perception are perfect, and worse, the incentives would tend to promote a nonzero level of creepiness. The person with interest should be expected to make an overture—they’re hoping for more.
The advice I see in the first article basically tells the interested party not to make overtures. I don’t see that as helpful. Human beings touch each other. They stand close. They make sexual comments. Particularly when they are interested in someone.
Consider one piece of advice:
If they both want to touch each other, then they never will, both waiting for the other to touch them. Somebody has to make the first overture.
10) actually has some useful advice on how to spot a lack of interest, and indeed, disinterest, dislike, and aversion. That’s fine for an article on “knowing when to piss off”, but it’s not so helpful for someone trying to reach out to someone else.
What’s needed is an article “How to make an effective overture that minimizes creepy feelings in the subject of interest”.
Give an extensional description of the aspects that increase creepiness, and how those can be minimized by someone trying to make a connection.
Thankyou buybuy. Tabooing the term and describing the actual behaviors and circumstances specifically is exactly what is called for here!
You’re welcome.
You seem to be one of the list elders, so to speak, so I’ve got a tangential question for you.
I see occasional references to Korzybski, and the Map is Not The Territory sequence article. “Tabooing a word” is just the kind of semantic hygiene practice of which he had zillions—in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he originated “tabooing a word”.
But I don’t get the impression that a lot of people here have read his work, or if they did, few have interest. What’s your sense of the level of familiarity with and interest in Korzybski here?
Yours is the only reference I can recall. From the sound of it I’d like to hear more. Any other key insights of his that you think we could benefit from?
Hard to summarize a lot of stuff, and I don’t know that seeing the summary without the explanation of it is that helpful.
Instead, I’ll apply General Semantics to my response to the conversation, as an imaginary Korzybski (K). It’s been a while since I read the stuff, so my use of his terms will doubtless lack some precision, and be colored by my own attitude as well.
K: We have a discussion here. People are saying things like Joe is creepy, or Joe is a creep.
K: They are using the “is of identity”, and the “is of predication”. We know that this falsifies reality. An apple is not red, but is perceived as red by us in the proper circumstances. In other circumstances, we would not perceive it as red. Even taking a conscious being out of the equation, the apple would be measured as red by some instrument or process under certain conditions, and not red in other circumstances.
K: Now let’s look at the term “creep”. Our total evaluative response to the word “creep” contains a mass of associative (often emotive) and extensional (observable) components. We have many negative and unpleasant emotional associations with the term. If we are going to properly evaluate Joe and his behavior instead of merely letting our reactions to words that we chose to apply to Joe dictate our response to Joe, we should limit our discussion to extensional terms.
K: Unfortunately, it seems to me that even the implied extensional usage of the word is highly variable in this discussion, with creep_you <> creep_me <> creep_him <> creep_her, to a degree that impacts effective communication. The same is likely true even of creep_him_1, creep_him_2, creep_him_3 - people aren’t being consistent in their own usage of the term.
K: So let’s make an explicit extensional definition of the word “creep” to test whether we have been communicating at all.
ME: I would add that the various comments on blame/responsibility that try to get around blame by resorting to causality don’t get us anywhere. Joe’s behavior no more caused Jane’s reaction than Jane’s emotional and perceptual makeup. Change either sufficiently, and Jane does not perceive Joe as creepy. I think this is implicit in K’s method, but I don’t recall him this particular discussion on causality. Although it’s starting to ring a few bells in some musty old neurons.
There’s a lot of other stuff. I consider General Semantics as semantic hygiene, seeing how certain semantic practices encourage bad habits of thought, and having specific counter practices for avoiding the poor habits of thought. Purell for the mind.
In the end, I don’t think the counter practices are necessary to keep your ideas clean and tidy as long as you’ve internalized an aversion to the poor habits of thought, but they help when confusion is afoot.
(May be worth editing your comment and replacing all instances of “_” with “\_”.)
Time and place indexing—for what times and places do you have evidence of something being true?
Now that I think about it, Eliezer’s year subscripts for his different stages of understanding may be a result of influence from Korzybski.
Couldn’t find the definitive “tabooing a word”, if there is such a thing, but after the taboo, I think EY recommends replacing it with what amounts to an “extensional” description.
I’ve seen a few references, and the impression I got is that the sequence on words overlaps a lot with Korzybski’s General Semantics.
Eliezer got some early influence from the General Semantics-inspired Null-A books by A.E. van Vogt.
(I’m leaving two versions of this comment in different threads because DeeElf also asked about Korzybski and LW.)
Thank you for the link to the other discussion. I had been assuming more familiarity Korzybski than seems to be the case.
I’m not sure this is it. If I had to give a definition for “creepy”, it would be something like: “Person Y’s attitude and behavior are making Person X feel personally unsafe (to some degree) around Person Y.”
So yes, it does take two to tango, but it’s not clear that Person X can do anything about eir feelings, especially since the feelings may be functionally justified at some level (i.e. most if not all examples of ‘creepy’ behavior actually are evidence that Person Y is more likely to be a threat).
Both definitions are used, and plenty more besides. This is actually why bubuy’s point is so important. The cluster of things that are called ‘creepy’ is diverse and the most useful response to given situations varies depending on what the actual situation is rather than on whether someone calls it ‘creepy’.
Incidentally, your definition is weakened by focusing on preemptively applying judgement more than causal accuracy. While the intent is to convey that the person being labeled ‘creepy’ is responsible for the feelings of the other it actually implies that even the most lewdly inappropriate, boundary-oblivious and clingy loser is immune to being ‘creepy’ when their target is sufficiently physically secure, emotionally mature and psychologically self-determined. This is absurd, clearly not your intent and actually forces the ‘victim’ to be disempowered before they are entitled to any ‘anti-creep’ rights.
It is quite OK to keep assertions of ‘and it is right and fitting that we hold person Y responsible in this case and use some form of sanction’ out of the actual definition of ‘creepy’ and in the realm of policy advocation.
I’m not sure that it is—unless you mean that the target is unjustified in feeling physically safe, and the loser is actually posing a threat to hir. But we can still define such behavior as “creepy” by extension, since the target would actually judge themselfes as being unsafe if they were more reasonable and knowledgeable about the loser’s attitude and behavior. Definitions often perform poorly at such boundaries, but this does not imply that there isn’t a salient cluster in thingspace which is adequately captured by the above definition.
That would also be sufficient to abandon the definition. But no, I mean she is actually are physically safe and the guy is being creepy as @#%#. Either the recipient of the creepiness or an observer can both legitimately call that behavior creepy even if the victim of it neither feels nor actually is physically unsafe.
The above definition conveys concepts that aren’t even intended for use in ‘thingspace’ as opposed to ‘political space’. Specifically, the assignment of blame and responsibility. It can be resolved to a thing space cluster but if this is done it points to a cluster that does not, in fact, serve your purposes. If interpreted as a literal epistemic description when executing ‘creepiness’ prevention policies it would result in inferior outcomes to what you would get if you executed your actual meaning. Fortunately few would (acta as if they) interpret the definition literally and would instead interpret it as an approximate reference to a related thing in thingspace but with additional policy decisions snuck in.
I’d say that the target can legitimately state that the guy’s behavior is making her uncomfortable (assuming that this is in fact the case), and/or tell the guy to buzz off and have this enforced as necessary. Either the target or any third party can legitimately caution the guy that his behavior could be interpreted as “creepy” (i.e. at least mildly threatening) by others.
However, I would not use “creepy” to describe all instances where someone is being merely bothered by someone else; nor would I want to have a fixed cluster of behaviors be regarded as “creepy”, regardless of the target’s actual feelings and reactions. Thus, I’d say that defining the above as not-creepy is in fact very reasonable.
Um, no. Physical causality is not the same as appropriately-assigned blame and responsibility. Even then, I could easily rephrase my definition as: “Person X’s experience and overall disposition causes her to feel physically unsafe to some degree, upon being exposed to some peculiar attitudes and behavors on Person Y’s part” and this would not change my preferred policy.
Like feeling uncomfortable and unsafe when those n*s sit next to you in the bus? Why don’t they move to the back rows? How insensitive!
I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that “n*s” were relegated to the back rows of the bus because they would give off a creeper vibe? ISTR that it had to do with legally enforced segregation.
And why do you think those laws were passed?
The legal system just backed whatever policy the bus companies had. The bus companies had a policy that maximized customer satisfaction.
[totally offtopic] That’s ridiculous. Taking the Montgomery, AL bus system as an example, black customers were critically important to the economics of the city transit system, which is one reason the Rosa Parks bus boycott was such a big deal. Outside Montgomery, we do know of streetcar companies who refused to segregate their customers, until they were forced to do so by the government (See Roback, Jennifer (1986). “The Political Economy of Segregation: The Case of Segregated Streetcars”. Journal of Economic History 56 (4): 893–917. doi:10.1017/S0022050700050634).
Racial segregation in the U.S. South was a wholly political decision—in fact, it was politically pushed by pro-white Democrat politicians in opposition to the Republican party (which used to be pro-integration).
More like “the legal system backed up the whatever impressions those in power, i.e., whites had”.
Some whites were in power, and some whites were not.
People can do a lot about their feelings. But whether they can or not, the issue of blame is not resolved. That X feels upset about what Y does, and even can’t help feeling upset, does not necessarily imply that X is to blame for anything.
As to “the cause” of the bad feelings, clearly it’s combination of the X’s emotional disposition and Y’s behavior, and if either were sufficiently different, the bad feelings would not have occurred.
But we’ve at least identified one problem in this conversation. You have a different definition of creepy than I do. I don’t think yours is quite so robust, because I’d just call yours “threatening” or “dangerous”, not creepy, but it does seem like a potential element of creepiness.
But then, unsafe how? What is the threat? I can see a number.
Threat of physical or sexual assault. Threat to social status by a low status male even showing interest (as if he had a chance, etc.). Threat of that in a public setting. Threat of the discomfort of dealing with him and his interest.
Finally, I wonder how much a woman perceives any unwanted sexual interest from a man she doesn’t trust as something of a threat, even when an objective review of the circumstances would say there is no real threat. That would seem natural to me, in an evolutionary sense.
THat’s a good point. I am rather upset by how much defense of creeping there is here but it might be good if the sufferers discomfort and the creeper’s self could be seperated a little.