IAWYC but this gets you the conjugate problem of allowing some asshole who finds things like partial loss of speech creepy to evict people from the group.
That doesn’t seem a very plausible problem. In the majority of cases I’d guess that someone declaring themselves creeped are actually creeped out—and in the few cases where they’re just obviously trying to make trouble, I expect the group’s common sense will prevail in order to evict them instead.
As a sidenote, isn’t it just as easy to write “Agreed” instead of IAWYC”? I had to look up what that meant...
Being creeped out by some manifestations of disability seems quite plausible to me. If not “partial loss of speech”, we could go with something like stereotypical Tourette’s.
Some people are creeped out by sex-related behavior described in the post. We agree that this creepy behavior is wrong and want to reduce it, so we talk about norms and actions against creeping.
Some people are creeped out by disabilities, or by minorities, race, disfigurement, and a host of other things. We think (some of) these creepy things are not wrong and want to encourage or legitimize them, so we talk about not allowing anti-creepy action.
This seems indeed like the worst argument in the world. The problem seems to be that the behavior discussed in the post has no precise name of its own, so it appropriates the term “creepy” which was originally much wider in application. Then others react against the new norms being applied to all “creepy” behavior.
We’re trying to assign a static attribute to explain behaviors which shake out to a particular (and highly individual) emotional response. That’s not quite the Worst Argument—though it is related—but it is a very bad habit of argument.
We’re never going to find a “creepyp” type predicate attached to anyone. It may be that some subset of LWers exhibit behavior which reliably tends to alienate certain groups we’d be interested in hearing more from, though, and if so it should be possible for us to describe this behavior and try to develop group norms to exclude it: as a community we’re pretty good at analyzing that sort of thing, and it certainly beats spiraling further into semantic fail.
On the other hand, I can see some potential for close examination of the problem to lead into gender fail—something that we’ve historically been very poor at dealing with.
“Creepy” is a natural category—it describes behaviors that are likely to cause a certain emotion. This emotion is triggered by things that are obviously bad, by things that are subtly bad and often announce worse things when the group isn’t looking, and by non-bad things.
Our aim is to combat the first two while allowing the last one. Anti-creepy action (“Stop all creepy behavior, get out if you can’t”) acts against all three. Banning obviously bad things (“Ask before you touch”) acts only against the first one.
I’m reminded of the Diseased Thinking post. If you can’t successfully discourage someone with Tourette’s from inappropriate swearing but you can successfully discourage a neurotypical male from exhibiting inappropriate sexual-like behaviour, then it makes sense to attempt the latter but not the former.
I thought the issue was creep behavior, not sexual-like behavior (the latter of which I assume nerds are permitted, from time to time!). And that makes it harder, since a person can also seem weird for erring in the opposite direction, in which they don’t start conversations or make eye contact (outside of conversations).
I was mentioning swearing and sexual-like behaviour as two different examples of behaviours which might creep people out. (Edited the grandparent to say “inappropriate swearing” and “inappropriate sexual-like behaviour”.)
Also, people who are prejudiced against certain groups (or against specific behaviors by those groups) might claim to be creeped out by those people, while giving a reason that seems entirely distinct from their prejudice. It might not even be at all conscious.
E.g. if a woman is assertive and has strong opinions, people are more likely to say that the woman is being rude than if a man had exactly the same behaviors. In a man, they might even consider those traits admirable. It’s not at all a given that the complainers even realize that they have a double standard—to them, the woman simply comes off as rude while the man comes off as strong-willed and charismatic.
No, it doesn’t, because it’s talking about the responsibility of the individual, not the group. If someone tells me I’m behaving inappropriately, that’s for me to deal with. It’s only if and when I don’t deal with it that it becomes a problem for a group—and one would hope that any group confronted with such a person would dismiss their complaints.
He recommends bringing it to the group in this comment, but says in the other comment that even if the entire group disagrees with the creeped out person they are still in the right.
Only as a last resort, and he didn’t prescribe a particular action for the group to take. The whole point was that individual people should take responsibility for addressing problems if they can, but that individuals don’t have sole power to evict people from the group, which was the argument he was responding to.
This approach of listing possible excuses for perpetrators, and accusing hypothetical victims of making it all up, is a big part of the culture of support for creeps that the linked articles are complaining about.
Your comment, and ones like it, are part of the problem.
Wow, sweeping dismissal of legit concern. Sometimes people do creepy things. When they do, it’s very important to the people they’re creeping on that they be believed. This doesn’t mean sentences of the form “X is creepy” have some kind of sacredness property that immunizes them from ever being false or used for goals they shouldn’t be.
IAWYC but this gets you the conjugate problem of allowing some asshole who finds things like partial loss of speech creepy to evict people from the group.
That doesn’t seem a very plausible problem. In the majority of cases I’d guess that someone declaring themselves creeped are actually creeped out—and in the few cases where they’re just obviously trying to make trouble, I expect the group’s common sense will prevail in order to evict them instead.
As a sidenote, isn’t it just as easy to write “Agreed” instead of IAWYC”? I had to look up what that meant...
Being creeped out by some manifestations of disability seems quite plausible to me. If not “partial loss of speech”, we could go with something like stereotypical Tourette’s.
Some people are creeped out by sex-related behavior described in the post. We agree that this creepy behavior is wrong and want to reduce it, so we talk about norms and actions against creeping.
Some people are creeped out by disabilities, or by minorities, race, disfigurement, and a host of other things. We think (some of) these creepy things are not wrong and want to encourage or legitimize them, so we talk about not allowing anti-creepy action.
This seems indeed like the worst argument in the world. The problem seems to be that the behavior discussed in the post has no precise name of its own, so it appropriates the term “creepy” which was originally much wider in application. Then others react against the new norms being applied to all “creepy” behavior.
We’re trying to assign a static attribute to explain behaviors which shake out to a particular (and highly individual) emotional response. That’s not quite the Worst Argument—though it is related—but it is a very bad habit of argument.
We’re never going to find a “creepyp” type predicate attached to anyone. It may be that some subset of LWers exhibit behavior which reliably tends to alienate certain groups we’d be interested in hearing more from, though, and if so it should be possible for us to describe this behavior and try to develop group norms to exclude it: as a community we’re pretty good at analyzing that sort of thing, and it certainly beats spiraling further into semantic fail.
On the other hand, I can see some potential for close examination of the problem to lead into gender fail—something that we’ve historically been very poor at dealing with.
“Creepy” is a natural category—it describes behaviors that are likely to cause a certain emotion. This emotion is triggered by things that are obviously bad, by things that are subtly bad and often announce worse things when the group isn’t looking, and by non-bad things.
Our aim is to combat the first two while allowing the last one. Anti-creepy action (“Stop all creepy behavior, get out if you can’t”) acts against all three. Banning obviously bad things (“Ask before you touch”) acts only against the first one.
I’m reminded of the Diseased Thinking post. If you can’t successfully discourage someone with Tourette’s from inappropriate swearing but you can successfully discourage a neurotypical male from exhibiting inappropriate sexual-like behaviour, then it makes sense to attempt the latter but not the former.
I thought the issue was creep behavior, not sexual-like behavior (the latter of which I assume nerds are permitted, from time to time!). And that makes it harder, since a person can also seem weird for erring in the opposite direction, in which they don’t start conversations or make eye contact (outside of conversations).
I was mentioning swearing and sexual-like behaviour as two different examples of behaviours which might creep people out. (Edited the grandparent to say “inappropriate swearing” and “inappropriate sexual-like behaviour”.)
Also, people who are prejudiced against certain groups (or against specific behaviors by those groups) might claim to be creeped out by those people, while giving a reason that seems entirely distinct from their prejudice. It might not even be at all conscious.
E.g. if a woman is assertive and has strong opinions, people are more likely to say that the woman is being rude than if a man had exactly the same behaviors. In a man, they might even consider those traits admirable. It’s not at all a given that the complainers even realize that they have a double standard—to them, the woman simply comes off as rude while the man comes off as strong-willed and charismatic.
No, it doesn’t, because it’s talking about the responsibility of the individual, not the group. If someone tells me I’m behaving inappropriately, that’s for me to deal with. It’s only if and when I don’t deal with it that it becomes a problem for a group—and one would hope that any group confronted with such a person would dismiss their complaints.
This directly contradicts your comment in response to Douglas_Reay lower down
How so?
He recommends bringing it to the group in this comment, but says in the other comment that even if the entire group disagrees with the creeped out person they are still in the right.
Only as a last resort, and he didn’t prescribe a particular action for the group to take. The whole point was that individual people should take responsibility for addressing problems if they can, but that individuals don’t have sole power to evict people from the group, which was the argument he was responding to.
Exactly,
This approach of listing possible excuses for perpetrators, and accusing hypothetical victims of making it all up, is a big part of the culture of support for creeps that the linked articles are complaining about.
Your comment, and ones like it, are part of the problem.
Wow, sweeping dismissal of legit concern. Sometimes people do creepy things. When they do, it’s very important to the people they’re creeping on that they be believed. This doesn’t mean sentences of the form “X is creepy” have some kind of sacredness property that immunizes them from ever being false or used for goals they shouldn’t be.