What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the “nasty” “exclusionary” mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.
Most real-life social groups have mechanisms to exclude low-status people—from informal shunning to formal membership criteria. Since people as well as groups seek to maximize status, this evolves into a complex equilibrium. (Groucho: “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would have [a status exclusion mechanism weak enough to have] me as a member.”)
But since we at LW must have a rational explanation for things, these arbitrary criteria (of which my proposal is a pastiche) won’t do. Half of the folks here are OK with outsourcing the power and responsibility for excluding low-status folks onto the women of LW. The other half doesn’t even want that. Both sides want to consciously come up with convoluted arguments about why “creepy” [low-status male] behavior is objectively bad. That dog won’t hunt.
What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the “nasty” “exclusionary” mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.
What your comment boils down to is a statement that you intend to treat other people’s objections to your (or your friends’) nonconsensual or threatening behavior as attempts to exclude you (or them) as low-status rather than as requests for you to behave in a more consensual and nonthreatening manner towards them.
It’s entirely possible (I’m imagining being meek and social risk-averse) in the same way as it’s entirely possible to grow up poor and stay out of trouble with the law. It’s a lot easier to be creepy if you’re low-status, and much of the behavior that is deemed creepy would not be called creepy if a high-status person did the exact same thing (think “quirky,” “endearing,” “charming”).
In practice, cracking down on creepiness means excluding low-status people, except for a meek remnant.
There’s high-status creeping too (like someone putting an arm round someone who doesn’t want him to). This can be very bad for the creepee—the high status means that complaints to the group are likely to be dismissed as oversensitivity or whining.
It’s a natural human tendency to let high-status people get away with things, but I don’t think it’s so immutable that a group can’t develop a culture that reduces the damage.
And if you are the creep, there’s at least a chance that you didn’t mean to be and that you’re willing to modify your behaviour in ways that have large advantages for the creepee and only small disadvantages for you.
If male creepiness is contributing to the gender imbalance on LessWrong, I would expect high-status creepiness to be far more problematic than low-status creepiness. In a social setting, it’s a lot easier to call a low-status member out for being creepy. If a high-status member is being creepy, a newcomer might prefer to leave than to confront him/her or complain about his/her behavior to the rest of the group. Alternatively, if the newcomer does complain about the high-status member, he/she might be scoffed at by the rest of the group, who likes that individual.
Status gets wonky here, though, and online in general. One’s status doesn’t readily translate from one’s RL social network to the internet (celebrities are an obvious exception here), and the cultural makeup of the group’s members, in addition to the social norms they propagate within the group itself, will go a long way toward determining relative status.
It’s one thing if you’re talking Eliezer or Alicorn, but the run-of-the-mill LW member probably fits into this situation. Hence, we don’t need to necessarily see creepy behavior among the highest-status folks here, for it to nevertheless be a widespread norm that affects gender ratios on the site. (Frankly, all sorts of communities, online and off, encounter this in some form).
There’s high-status creeping too (like someone putting an arm round someone who doesn’t want him to).
Yes, but if you’re high-status, a much higher fraction of people do want (or are okay with) your arm around them, and so the GP is right that status affects the probability of triggering the creep classifier.
True, but it’s also entirely possible to want behavior X from person Y and still find it creepy when Y actually does X, depending on how and in what context they do it. Creepiness is often about those details.
That still wouldn’t justify the unhelpful, over-general warning of “don’t do X”, stripped of the specific (correctly-diagnosed) “how and in what context” caveats.
For at least some X’s, the real warning is not “don’t do X, ever.” It’s: “if you do X, you are responsible for anyone being creeped out by X. You might get away with it, depending on how considerate, socially aware, or charismatic you are—just don’t complain if you get it wrong and we have to kick you out so that people can feel safe and comfortable.”
AFAICT, there’s nothing wrong with this rule: in fact, it is close to optimal for the purposes of LW meetups.
Pretty much this. Also, the advice being given might more accurately be “you don’t do X, because you obviously don’t know how to judge the context and details and are therefore very likely to get it wrong”. Except, if someone actually says that, the person it’s being said to is liable to try to rope them into explaining the context-and-details thing, which 1) is very complicated, to the point where explaining it is a major project and 2) most people can’t articulate, so that’s awkward if it happens. Also, it’s often true that once a person does learn how to judge the context and details properly (on their own, generally speaking, by observation and reading many things on the topic), they will then be able to see what they were doing wrong before and how to avoid that mistake, and conclude that they can try again regardless of previous advice.
Most of what I just said isn’t relevant to meetup groups, though; bogus’ angle is much more relevant there.
For better or worse, creepiness is socially defined. WIthin a social group, most people don’t secretly resent high-status people, by definition. If only one person has a problem with it, that’s not being creepy, that’s “he’s being charming and you have a problem.”
It only becomes “creepy” when you come to LW or a group of sympathetic friends and the local balance of power shifts in your favor.
If only one person in a group is allergic to my aftershave, they are allergic to my aftershave. If only one person in a group finds my voice intolerable, they find my voice intolerable. If only one person in a group finds my behavior disturbing or frightening or alienating, they find my behavior disturbing or frightening or alienating.
Yes, that person has a problem. And the question is, what are we going to do about that problem, if anything?
The notion that because they have a problem, we therefore ought not do anything, strikes me as bizarre. It’s precisely because they have a problem that the question even arises; if they didn’t have a problem, there would be no reason to even discuss it.
So, OK. If my behavior frightens or disturbs or alienates you, or my aftershave causes you an allergic reaction, or whatever, you have a problem.The question is, what happens next?
I might decide I care about your problem, and take steps to alleviate it. Or I might decide I don’t care about your problem, and go on doing what I was doing. Or somewhere in between.
You might similarly decide to alleviate your own problem, or decide to ignore it, or something in between. Third parties might, similarly, decide they care about your problem to various degrees, or they might not.
This is not independent of status—if you’re a high-status member of the group, I might care about your problem because of your status; if you’re a low-status member I might not-care about your problem because of your status; if I’m a high-status member third parties might not-care about your problem because of my status, and so forth.
But it’s not equivalent to status, either—if we come from a culture where acknowledging the existence of body odor is taboo, the fact that you have a problem with my body odor might get ignored even if we’re all of equal status, or even if you’re higher status than I am. (Of course, you might then claim a different problem you don’t actually have in order to solve your real problem in a socially acceptable way.)
Similarly, it’s not independent of the size of the affected group, but it’s not equivalent to it either.
If only one person has a problem with it, that’s not being creepy, that’s “he’s being charming and you have a problem.”
And that, folks, is one of the ways that the ~6% of educated males (according to one study, anyway) who are rapists get to do their thing: by being “charming” to everyone but their target, so the target is isolated and feels she has nobody to turn to.
FYI: If one person in my meetup group has a problem with Person X touching them when they don’t want him/her to, I have a problem with Person X, too.
People behave differently in different social contexts, though. If person Y finds person X’s behavior creepy, and no one else finds person X’s behavior creepy, it could be that X is behaving differently towards Y than he/she is towards everyone else.
Obviously, this is relevant to the gender situation, where person X is male and behaves differently towards females than he does towards males.
It’s socially influenced, but you’re being a bit too status-deterministic about it. Take the example of Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s (probably true but not prosecuted) rape allegation. Beforehand, he was as high-status as a man can get in the United States, and a vast majority of American women who knew who he was would have found him attractive. Afterward, he seems to have regained much of his status among male Steeler fans, but he has the unmistakable tag of “creepy” (to say the least) among women who follow football.
Since it’s very low-cost to stop touching someone who doesn’t like it, compared to the cost of enduring it, a group where it’s considered “creepy” is a better group.
I’m confused by your argument. Where I live, the visibly religious are high status. Does that mean I can’t resent a religious person’s treatment of me? That’s a strange definition of high-status.
Can be, sure. The claim is still valid as a heuristic.
What’s more, people are more likely to pre-judge the high status person favorably, and thus want whatever behavior would be a “no-no” for the low-status person, and so behavior violating the supposed anti-creep rules is much less likely to be noticed and recognized as such (e.g. my example before about pushy hugs).
Anytime you find yourself saying, “How dare he do X? That’s creepy! Don’t ever do X, folks!”, ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X. If the answer is no, you’ve misdiagnosed the problem.
Anytime you find yourself saying, “How dare he do X? That’s creepy! Don’t ever do X, folks!”, ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X. If the answer is no, you’ve misdiagnosed the problem.
I think the truth of that statement depends on how you chunk the behavior.
To get back to this, Rene’s approaches to Genevieve would have been appropriate as behaviors in that sort of a relationship if you chunk them as things a person might do, and very inappropriate because she was moving away from him/not responding, etc., so that if your chunk includes what she does (not to mention that a relationship didn’t already exist) as well as what he does, you get a different answer.
I agree with the first part of your comment, but the last paragraph seems contradictory:
Anytime you find yourself saying, “How dare he do X? That’s creepy! Don’t ever do X, folks!”, ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X.
Creepiness is by definition unwelcome behavior; that’s just the meaning of the term—“that which causes someone to feel creeped out”. Of course any welcome behavior would not be labelled creepy.
But the entire problem is that its welcomeness is not known until you do it! That’s why you have to go based on general standards of acceptable behavior in judging an action, not by whether one person happened to not like it.
Imagine if Elevatorgate started from, not some elevator, but just the mere fact of Watson being “asked out”, and she went on to say, “Whoa! Creepy! Guys, don’t ever ask a woman out!”
Someone might protest, “Wait, what?”
Do you understand why it’s not a very satisfactory answer to say, “It’s okay, we’re only talking about those cases where it’s unwanted”? If so, apply it to your own answer.
I reread your first comment and I think I just misread it the first time. (And you may have misread mine). I think we were just talking past each other.
We seem to agree on the important bits, namely that:
“Creepiness” is defined and measured by the “creeped out” response of recipients.
Therefore it depends not just on the action, but on the recipient and on how they perceive the actor.
Therefore an action is not definitely creepy or noncreepy until carried out; it is hard to predict reactions.
To the extent that the same action is perceived as creepy or not coming from different people, we shouldn’t be talking about the action itself sometimes being creepy, but about the relevant differences between people.
I don’t think we agree, in particular, because I don’t agree that the particulars of how a specific event was perceived are relevant for general rules of condemnation. That is, I’m fine with saying “Don’t do X” if X really is widely disliked, regardless of the person, but not with giving the same advice, while actually predicating it on people’s ability to know others’ reaction in advance.
Moreover, when a low-status person creeps on me, I feel like I have more freedom to express nicely to them that I was creeped out and offer to explain why. When a high-status person creeps on me, I feel like they have too much power to want to stop or listen to me, and nobody else will listen to me either, because this person has social command.
Yeah, same here. Creepy behavior from people with high status is a big red flag on a group or social situation for me; it implies that at least in some cases they can get away with that, and I categorically don’t feel emotionally safe in those environments.
See also: The Missing Stair. Source has a history of overusing feminist memes with the result of obfuscating their point, but I think this piece was particularly well-written.
“Status” is not quite the right term here — social rank correlates with the kind of charm that can make an ambiguous behavior be not-creepy, but isn’t the same.
It’s probably quite difficult for a creepy person to stop being creepy.
For this reason (and others) I much prefer to focus on specific behaviors for the purpose of determining what is acceptable behavior versus a valid target for social sanction.
What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the “nasty” “exclusionary” mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account, and low status (this is also a bad thing) can prevent the target from being heard.
Actually, “unwelcome” means that the definition sometimes depends almost exclusively on status. In the extreme situation that a guy is so high status I wouldn’t mind anything he did and would always say yes, he couldn’t possibly be creepy.
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like “you’re beautiful” or “your hair looks amazing” depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy was sufficiently low status that my intuition doesn’t process the statement as sincere.
Similarly I mentally flinch violently when touched by males who are too low status for my intuition to classify as attractive, have no such reaction for moderately attractive guys, and get a jolt of pleasure if the guy is very attractive. This effect is consistent and something I have no conscious control over.
I think people dismissing status are underestimating either the degree to which people’s unconscious can control their conscious, or the degree to which status interactions controls the unconscious.
Status is not an extremely clear thing to begin with, the same criticism could probably be applied to most uses of the term on LessWrong. I just mentally reparse what you write as
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like “you’re beautiful” or “your hair looks amazing” depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy has certain negative characteristics so that my intuition doesn’t process the statement as sincere.
You’re basically talking about how attractive you find him, but using “status” adds the connotations that it’s not just about the looks, and that how others judge him comes into the equation; both those connotations seem true.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
Or did you think people would never get the C-word for doing just that?
For further enlightenment, see, for example, here.
I missed the enlightenment you were expecting me to get from learning of a case where a high-status person got surprisingly little punishment (and no effective loss to social life) from doing creep things.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger’s netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
Though I don’t think its that simple because both sides are claiming that the other side is not reporting how they truly feel. One side claims that people are calling things creepy semi-arbitrarily to raise their own status, and the other claims that people are intentionally refusing to recognize creepy behavior as creepy so they don’t have to stop it (or being slightly more charitable, so they don’t take a status hit for being creepy).
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger’s netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
Upvoted for an excellent link which caused me to update my intuition regarding the nature and frequency of various types of public harassment of women. I didn’t update so far as to regard the XKCD cartoon as “promoting rape culture” (which I still think is going overboard), but after reading the (very very long) comment thread with all the subway/public/other harassment stories, I can totally see where they’re coming from.
That thread gives an important overview of a sort. It’s got its limits because women who talk about not having it that bad from men are not kindly treated in the discussion.
I’m not denying any of those stories about behavior ranging from intrusive to seriously threatening and it’s obviously fairly common, just saying that it’s not a overview of the whole situation. I’ve never seen an overview of the whole situation for women.
People who frequently fall into patterns of behavior that others regard as “creepy” tend to be those who do not find this easy.
Could you create a set of instructions that can easily be followed by people with low levels of social fluency, which would allow them to make this judgment with low levels of false positives and false negatives? If so, you’d be doing a big favor both to people who’re frequently exposed to “creepy” behavior, and people who frequently engage in that behavior. It would also probably be unique in the world.
The arrogant vulgarity doesn’t fit well with the demonstration of naivety (come to think of it “The fuck it does” wouldn’t be be appropriate here even if well informed). Creepiness is significantly about status. Typically it refers to something along the lines of “low status male attempting interaction”.
This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing any particular instance of creepiness but it is useful to understand what it is that prompts the perception ‘creepy’.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account
High status can also make the identical behaviors not creepy in the first place. Even if unwelcome the perception of the high status ‘unwelcome’ will feel different to the creepy low-status ‘unwelcome’.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn’t like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously—why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?), and (especially if “someone” is male and “you” are female), whether you would like to have sex with them correlates with their status. But would that still hold to the same extent if you could change the “status” variable while holding the “attractiveness” (broadly construed) variable constant?
Tabooing “status” might be necessary. I couldn’t compute your last sentence… Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status. (They might not be the same thing as far as hormones are concerned, but they arise from the same mechanisms.)
What you call a less “attractive”, higher “status” man, I call a lower “status” man who has motivating factors to have incorrect beliefs about his “status”.
Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status.
There’s your problem right there!
I’m usually not a big fan of the “look it up on Wikipedia” approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you’re viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
I’m usually not a big fan of the “look it up on Wikipedia” approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you’re viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
Synonymous—clearly not. “Largely so” is more of an exaggeration than a fundamental incomprehension.
Huh. Ok. What do you call the ape status-instinct then? That’s thing that you get by cleverly body-language and verbally sparring with people. I’ve managed to end up on top of a number of authority figures doing that.
Edit: the human version of the behaviour that Wikipedia describes as “dominance hierarchies”.
Double edit: would it make more sense to distinguish the terms as system-1-status and system-2-status?
I...think you’re confused. I didn’t say social status doesn’t exist; I also didn’t say that “social status” was a bad term for it. What I said was that you have an extremely nonstandard set of word associations here, such that what you mean when you’re saying “social status” is...well, not intuitive from the more usual use of that word.
I’m not saying instincts for status don’t exist; I’m saying that “attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status” is a baffling definition of “status” (reinforcing my point by linking to a general overview of the concept and the things the word applies to). It would be like meaning only “penguins” whenever you say “birds”, and then trying to generalize that use whenever someone else talks about ornithology.
I think you’re misinterpreting my point again, and I also think it’s more of a “what do you mean by “melon”″ issue (ever order a melon smoothie from a place without pictures on the menu and been surprised?) than a “penguin” issue, but the definitions themselves have been adequately dissolved in this thread so there’s no point in continuing to pursue something off-topic.
Consider interaction among heterosexual people of the same sex (men with men, women with women). This is probably a majority of all social interaction, and it strongly influences status in mixed-sex social groups. While attractiveness is generally helpful here too, it’s less important than other factors.
Imagine two men who have the same socio-economical position, the same amount of social skills, wear similar clothes, behave the same way, etc., etc., but one is 5′6″ (1.68 m) and one is 6′ (1.83 m). Most women will likely be more attracted to the latter; would you say he has higher status?
Yes, minorly: halo effect. Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren’t the same thing, they’re just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it’s very easy to think of them as the same thing. Having more women be attracted to you usually leads to better social skills. Having more height usually means more self-confidence, etcetc.
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn’t.
Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren’t the same thing, they’re just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it’s very easy to think of them as the same thing.
Take it from someone with rather low basic social status (multiple forms of visible minority, many of which are still thought of mainly as “deviant” rather than just “other”, who can’t can’t hide it out and about in daily life): the fact that you see it this way has more to do with your own situation and your own unfulfilled preferences, than with it being a basic feature of how status works. Status is not primarily about your sexual attractiveness to people. Low-status people get laid all the time. Low-status people get into lasting relationships. Low-status people have children. Low-status people even make ethical nonmonogamy work for them. (Low status people who fit all of the above can even be sexually frustrated!)
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn’t.
Suppose you’re standing on a staircase. The taller man stands on a step below you, while the shorter man stands on a step above you, and the steps are of such height that each would be looking you directly in the eye. Is that a sufficiently inconvenient world?
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
C’mon. There’s a difference between looking down (physically) because you’re shorter and looking down at you (physically) because I’m looking down (metaphorically). (I’m 1.87 m (6′2″) myself so I have to do the former all the time.) In the latter case, I will stand up straight with my shoulders back and only tilt my eyes and (to a lower extent) my head down. In the former case, I will (say) sit on a stool while you’re on a higher chair/walk on the edge of the carriageway while you’re walking on the sidewalk/stand on a lower step of a stairway than you, and/or bend my whole upper body downwards.
(Why does this comment looks to me as if there are unbalanced parentheses even though I know there aren’t?)
Of course, but it still has an effect. And also the tall guy standing a step below me is definitely not behaving the same as the short guy standing a step above me.
Anyway, the difference in this case is negligible and doesn’t help the situation at hand. As far as I can see, to have a guy who was more physically attractive score lower on status would require lowering some other type of attractiveness, like behaviour or signalling. The actions you describe are signalling.
Come to think of it, maybe we just mean different things when we say “attractiveness”.
Of course, but it still has an effect. And also the tall guy standing a step below me is definitely not behaving the same as the short guy standing a step above me.
Huh, yeah. He’s also wearing larger clothes, and curving spacetime by a larger amount. But “all other things” in “all other things being equal” doesn’t usually literally mean all other things—otherwise any counterfactual will involve logical inconsistencies.
By “attractiveness” I meant the set of all things about me that determine how likely you are to be attracted to me, not just handsomeness. It seems like you might be using “status” the same way I’m using “attractiveness”, whereas I’m using it only for “social” (FLOABW) features. IOW, as I’m using the words, I can have higher or lower status in a given social group but higher or lower attractiveness for a given person. Given that not all women in the same group will be attracted to exactly the same features in men, and given that one can be higher- or lower-status even in an all-straight-male group, the two are not synonymous.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. I agree that status has a wider social meaning, but I was specifically referring to status in the context of one man approaching one woman, and saying that in that case it is usually at least monotonic with attraction. A well-respected academic has status within his field, but is still low-status in male-female interaction terms if he is sufficiently uncharismatic.
Edit: oops. My earlier comments didn’t make this at all clear.
Fair enough. Guess I was arguing a completely different point then.
Now, where did that thread go which was about the better way to fix creepiness being how to teach people to get/signal more status, rather than what not to do… Pretty sure there they’re using this definition.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn’t like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously—why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?)
In answer to the second question—If done so awkwardly, in a way that violates local norms or expectations or in a way that makes you look bad in public. (These are all things other than being low status that seem to play a part in the ‘creepiness’.)
I was about to answer “Well, if they behaved like that then you’d most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)”, then I realised that if we interpret counterfactuals this way, my comment would be nearly tautological.
I was about to answer “Well, if they behaved like that then you’d most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)”
Those are certainly unattractive traits and would often be sufficient to remove the desire. But no, the effect isn’t anywhere near strong enough to make the potential tautological definition valid.
Huh, yeah. I had in mind a sense of “creep” according to which it’d be logically contradictory to simultaneously be creeped out by someone and want to have sex with them, but now I realise i had no good reason to think that.
I guess I’ll tap out now (at least for a couple days), both because I feel like I’m borderline mind-killed and likely to get more so if I continue, and because I’ve already already procrastinated away way too much RL stuff.
attempts at (unwelcome intimacy) = naked aggression.
unwelcome (attempts at intimacy) = failure to anticipate rejection. both sides lost.
asking for harsher penalties for the second (which is already quite painful) is like asking cops to beat up panhandlers—the price you pay for a place you want to live.
That Readercon example points out an irrationality in the thinking of some creeps, rapists, or PUAs: “sex is a need.” Related to that fallacy is the sense of entitlement that sex with desired sex objects should be a reward for being “nice,” even though real nice persons avoid using sentient beings as tools and may avoid short-lived pleasures like sex altogether (e.g. Paul Erdos, Nikola Tesla). [And I can tell you from experience, women fawn over good guys. I even had a crush on Tesla. But being good guys, they focus on doing good and may not even notice women fawning over them.] Another fallacy in the minds of some creeps is that their behavior is good for their targets, e.g. “she needs a dicking.”
Basically, what we’re dealing with are persons who need some luminosity, or awareness and control, over their lusty wants, so they no longer act on those wants as “needs,” spending more resources on satisfying those wants over other wants (their own or others’) or other beings’ real needs, like humans’ need to feel safe enough to socialize.
High-status creeps are the worst because they’re allowed to be repeat offenders (e.g. Jerry Sandusky).
In my experience with a low-status creep, he excluded himself after not getting what he “needed” from his target. That is, he was welcome at meetings but didn’t want to go without the prospect of his “need” being met by his desired sex object. That was several years ago, with a freethought group, before I developed this understanding and ability to counteract that irrationality.
Simply saying “sex is not a need; you can live well without it” actually worked in one case. A case that’s been difficult for me to crack is where the person, somewhat high-status, is committed to irrationalities and harasses people (sexually harassing females, verbally harassing whomever does something he doesn’t like). I might break of his icon of Mercy, taking away his method for reducing his guilt, which he should feel to avoid harming others.
[Edit replacing backslashes with commas. Not that it changes the meaning to me, having known creeps, rapists, and literature by PUAs.]
See “Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships.” Apologetics or confabulations are part of the process of passion escalating into aggression or violence. A rational person would avoid the costs and risks of continuing interactions with someone interested in sex and who’s brain, like most brains, could rationalize or delude itself, with such fallacies as I noted above (another example: “blue balls”) or with thinking that the woman wants sexual relations with him when she doesn’t. Hence, avoidance of “creeps.” Women poor at detecting and avoiding such dynamics may be more likely to get abused (http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/12/2199.full.pdf+html).
Evidence of what I said about lack of illumination: “Results indicate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between victims of physical violence and offenders over time and that certain covariates including school commitment, parental monitoring, low self-control, and sex significantly discriminate victim and offender groups. Furthermore, low self-control appears to be the most salient risk factor for distinguishing both victimization and delinquency trajectories” 2010 Longitudinal Assessment of the Victim-Offender Overlap.
What do you know about them that makes them like apples and oranges in your mind? If you can’t give me a reason for why they’re not comparable in any way, I’m gonna have to give your a kick in the ass for being so dismissive of what another person knows.
What do you know about them [creeps, rapists, PUAs] that makes them like apples and oranges in your mind?
I was originally going to argue with wedrifid and say he was being uncharitable in interpreting your statement as considering all three groups to be basically the same: my interpretation was that you meant “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs”, and your statement could then be read in a meaningful light.
However, this new question suggests that you did in fact mean to lump all three groups of people together as a single category, so I’m now downvoting both comments.
If you can’t give me a reason for why they’re not comparable in any way, I’m gonna have to give your a kick in the ass for being so dismissive of what another person knows.
Ironically, you are threatening wedrifid with violence for doing something which you yourself are doing, i.e, dismissing others’ knowledge as irrelevant. I don’t think either the dismissal or the threat are appropriate discourse for LW.
Thank you for being able to not take words too literally.
pjeby, obviously I couldn’t possibly know all creeps, rapists & PUAs; so you were correct in your first interpretation that I meant: “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs.” Give me one example where I’ve dismissed others’ knowledge, rather than their knee-jerk reactions based on wrong interpretations of my words meaning what they couldn’t possibly mean. Apparently, there are some readers here who’ve identified with being a creep or PUA and some wouldn’t want them to be associated with rapists, hence your downvoting. But the fact is we’re talking about humans, not apples and oranges. (Are you gonna downvote this now because you think I’m “lumping”? What a BS excuse for downvoting.) Fallacious justifications of un-illuminated thoughts & behaviors is a problem we all have to face. I was pointing out specifics of this problem to address this thread, giving abstractions of cases I’ve known. Instead of offering counter-examples or counterarguments, some have written blunt rejections or simply downvoted. If I am wrong, why can’t someone make me less wrong? Instead, what I’m getting here is not unlike how abuse victims get dismissed when they accuse liked persons as abusers. How do I know this? Cuz I was abused and tried to make the truth known and got similar knee-jerk denials. Feeling rational, I think it’s appropriate discourse for LW to say: “Fuck you deniers.” Now do you get how my talking about ass-kicking was an expression of emotion [specifically, indignation], not an actual threat?
Even if by “Creeps/rapists/PUAs” you meant to point at points along a continuum, and the connotation that said points are close together was unintentional, you got the order wrong, as rapists ought to be at one extreme rather than in the middle.
Why assume I was using a continuum? Is a continuum necessary? Even if we must put them on a continuum, why assume the order you’ve assumed? We could, for example, base the continuum on how wrong their theories of humans are, in which case, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to lump the individuals into those three categories and place them on the continuum.
Any more excuses or unnecessary assumptions for me to dispel? I have yet to see a better theory or counter-evidence not accounted for by my theory. Instead, I see just-so theories pigeon-holing humans as just “fundamentally” sex-driven or creeps as just “desperate” or “low-status.” Now, given what I know about how brains work and assuming some readers’ brains here have absorbed evo psy terminology, it’s understandable why brains are spouting such overly-narrow views of humans. I took a course on evo psy with Gordon Gallup where he taught a little about our ancestors living in trees and moving onto land, but mostly the course was on mating. Even Eleizer’s article on evo psy has a story revolving around modern humans mating.
But one’s theory would have to include more than data on mating to be less wrong about humans. It would have to include a theory of fun, for example, to account for how persons could enjoy their lives without sex, like Tesla or Erdos did. Even the fact that you guys enjoy being on LessWrong, which isn’t the best activity for getting laid, says something about the inadequacy of some of the stupid theories posited on this thread, which started off being about how to improve “creepy” persons’ theories using information from the suggested articles.
Some of you guys have work to do for your brains to develop a theory of everything, with which you may be less likely to form ad hoc, just-so theories and discount data that don’t fit your theories.
(Disclosure & “help wanted ad:” My brain developed a theory of everything, which I’m working on sharing with others. I’m calling it the Enlightenment project, b/c I can’t simply tell people what the theory is—”Information won’t set you free by itself”. We have to help brains develop their own less wrong ToEs. I’m looking for brain-hackers who can help create a wiki, videos, and whatever other materials could be used to help most people. And I have some specific ideas that require a digital graphics artist to become something outside of my head for people to use. If you want to help, message me.)
Taboo “need”. Yes, it’s not necessary for survival; but homeless people can survive too, and still not many people say stuff like “shelter is not a need” or “stop acting like you’re entitled to shelter”. (But I still agree no-one is expected to give you a sleeping place solely because you think you are a decent person.)
I mean, Maslow put it in the bottom layer of his pyramid… (Though the fact that he separately lists “sexual intimacy” higher up means that by “sex” in the bottom layer he likely meant the kind of sex that even prostitutes can give.)
Off-topic: your model of prostitution is wrong. Social skills, putting people at ease, listening, and acting are big parts of the job. Look up “girlfriend experience”.
Given that Maslow listed it separately from “sex”, I guess he had in mind a narrower sense for “sexual intimacy” than you might have. (Unless he had in mind an extremely broad sense for “sex”, which would include e.g. self-masturbation.)
By looking at the pyramid, I think he meant for “sexual intimacy” to be to “sex” as friendship is to conversation, i.e. by the former he meant what people today would call “being in a relationship” or “romance”. But I’m not fully sure.
I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Sexuality isn’t a physical need in the sense that, say, water is a physical need, but it is a pretty fundamental drive. It certainly doesn’t morally oblige any particular person to fulfill it for you (analogously, the human need for companionship doesn’t oblige random strangers to accept overtures of friendship), but it’s sufficiently potent that I’d be cautious about casually demoting it below other social considerations, let alone suggesting sexual asceticism as a viable solution in the average case; that seems like an easy way to come up with eudaemonically suboptimal prescriptions.
Nice Guy (tm) psychology is something else again. I’m not sure how much of the popular view of it is anywhere near accurate, but in isolation I’d hesitate to take it as suggesting anything more than one particular pathology of sexual politics and maybe some interesting facts about the surrounding culture.
I’m not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it’s easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It’s far better—if far harder—to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
I don’t disagree, but I do think that the existing incentive structures surrounding sexuality are pretty damned dysfunctional. I chose the wording I did because I think there’ll need to be a lot of original thought going into a better incentive structure (and because I don’t think there currently exist any really good candidate solutions), but I’m not trying to imply that we need to throw out the existing culture completely.
It’s too specific/complicated to be low level/fundamental. Actually all of them are too specific/complicated to be low level. They’re just so widely and thoroughly internalised (to the point where not being that way will likely be bad for you just because other people will dislike you for it) very few people realise they are changable, or are motivated to change them. There’s little reason to change them for most people. Not having a desire for revenge or redress grievances is a quick way to become a target/victim, status seeking gets you status if you do it right which gets you power. nepotism makes you a more attractive ally.
I think it’s more accurate to say that changing motivational structure is hard and risky than the ability is limited. There’s no hard or soft cap afaik (which is what limited makes it sound like to me) it’s just really hard to do and most people don’t care to anyway.
Also wtf is a need. Is that like a right? It means you really really want something? really really really? really really really really? nonsense on stilts. Take your fucking stilts off bro.
edit: I can’t believe I put bro at the end of that post. Kinda ruins it.
We don’t have to “casually demote” anything. Like Fox News says, “we report—you decide.”
Generally, “need” is used to refer to something perceived to be necessary in an optimization process. There are cases where a human doesn’t need companionship, let alone sex (see recluses or transcendentalists’ recommendations that persons isolate themselves from society for a while to clear their heads of irrationalities).
If “the average case” involves little luminosity of sexuality and lots of sexualization of beings, then of course sexual abstinence wouldn’t be likely. Rape occurs in epidemic proportions in such places where people are also demoralized or decommissioned from doing much good work, like on reservations.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society. Some oppose gender roles to the extent that they limit persons from doing good, esp. when they make one gender subservient to the other or make a person of one gender subservient to another person of another gender (like the promulgated view that wife should serve husband). A person or AI caring only about one person or half the human population would not be optimal.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society.
I think we’re talking past each other here. The “Nice Guy (tm)” phenomenon I was referring to is categorically not an idealized gender role within an optimal or any other society, hence the sarcasm trademark, although it has its roots in (a misinterpretation of) one idealized masculinity. Instead, it’s a shorthand way of describing the pathology you described in the ancestor: the guy in question (there are women who do similar things, but the term as I’m using it is tied up in the male gender role) performs passive masculinity really hard and expects that sexual favors will follow. When this fails, usually due to poor socialization and poor understanding of sexual politics, bitterness and frustration ensue.
I actually think the terminology’s pretty toxic as such things go, since it tends to be treated as a static attribute of the people so described instead of suggesting solutions to the underlying problems. It’s common jargon in these sorts of discussions, though, and denotationally it does describe a real dysfunction, so I’m okay with using it as shorthand. Apologies for any bad assumptions on my part.
As a low-status male, right now I’m less worried about being excluded from a meetup than I am about being publicly associated with LW at all. It already has a reputation (and not just for the things mentioned there); now it’s a place where a comment like Jade’s here isn’t just downvoted, but downvoted to a level that labels it a troll comment not worth replying to.
Since you cite it as source you should be aware Rational Wiki has a certain reputation here as well. I’m not talking about the object level disagreements such as cryonics, existential risk, many-worlds interpretation and artificial intelligence because we have some reasonable disagreement on those here as well. Even its cheeky tone while not helping its stated goals can be amusing. I’m somewhat less forgiving about their casual approach to epistemology and their vulnerability to cargo cult science, as long as it is peer reviewed cargo cult science.
While factually it is as about as accurate as Wikipedia, it is very selective about the facts that it is interested in. For example what would you expect from a site calling itself “Rational Wiki” to have on its page about charity. Do you expect information on how much good charity actually does? What kinds of charities do not do what they say on the label? How to avoid getting misled? The ethics of charity? The psychology, sociology or economics of charity?
I’m sorry to disappoint you but the article consists of some haphazardly arranged facts and stats on how much members of some religions give or are supposed to give to charity, a dig against Christianity and a non-sequitur unfavourable comparison of the US to Sweden. Contrast this with what you can find on the topic on sites like LessWrong or 80, 000 Hours. Basically the material presented is what a slightly left of centre atheist needs to win an internet debate. As is much of the rest of the site.
Now to avoid any misunderstandings there are good articles, a few LWers are contributors to the rational wiki and there is certainly nothing wrong with being a left of centre atheist! Nearly everyone on this site is an atheist, and people who identify as left wing politically form a large majority here. The tribal markers and its political agenda aren’t the biggest problem. Sites with all sorts of agendas, even political ones, promoting rationality are a good thing.
Its problem is that it is an ammunition depot to aid in winning debates. Very specific kinds of debates too. This may sound harsh, but consider: How many people reading the site that aren’t already atheists will change their mind on religion? How many people who follow a “crankish” belief won’t do so afterwards? While I’m sure it happens the site obviously isn’t optimized for this. How many people will read the wiki and try to find errors and biases in their own thinking to debug it instead of breaking if further it or using it as a club? How many will apply this knowledge to help them with any real world problems? Truth seeeking? As a source or community that could aid in that quest it is less useful and reliable than Wikipedia, which while a rather good and extensive encyclopaedia (despite snickering to the contrary) has a subtly but importantly different stated goal.
What else remains? What other plausible function does it serve?
I don’t see how any of those questions relate to my post.
(For transparency:
I initially read your post as saying that, because RationalWiki isn’t “really” rational, their opinion on LW is automatically wrong and stupid; that therefore, anyone who shares or has absorbed that opinion (since the RW link was just a conveniently available illustration) is also wrong and stupid; and that therefore, their potential opinion of me as part of it is either inconsequential or totally outside my control. Or maybe you meant that people you know don’t take RW seriously, and that therefore I shouldn’t worry about encountering RW attitudes in the wild.
I then read more closely and realized that you weren’t actually saying any of that. Furthermore, your post wasn’t even directed at me, since I never claimed that RW served some vital and unique function (though if nothing else it’s good for documenting and illustrating the beliefs and attitudes of the type of people who contribute to it). For you to take my post to mean that (I reasoned at the time) would be stupid; and steelmanning and the principle of charity obligated me to act under the assumption that you weren’t stupid until conclusively shown otherwise. Therefore, I had to consider your post a personal tangent and ignore it.
I now realize that I was committing illusion of transparency, assuming short inferential distance and neglecting connotation. I apologize if my previous post connoted that I was holding RW above reproach; and I reject your connotation that RW’s flaws mean that I’m wrong to be concerned about the consequences of loudly promoting LW and its memes wherever I go.)
This post (edit: fixed link) reminded me of this thread. 2.5 years later, I’m still not sure I understand your point or why it has a +5 score. How does what LW (which I guess I’m not part of) “wants”^W “wishes” relate to my concerns?
Almost nobody has heard of Less Wrong or Eliezer. There’s a mean article on RationalWiki (though honestly it doesn’t look that mean anymore), there’s a hostile thread on DarkLordPotter, but almost nobody has heard of those, either. This was even more true two years ago.
I’m not wedrifid. But I suspect his point is that, outside of a few incredibly narrow sub-sub-cultures, nobody knows anything about Less Wrong and no one who knows you personally will judge you by your connection to it, no matter how public or overt.
What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the “nasty” “exclusionary” mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.
Most real-life social groups have mechanisms to exclude low-status people—from informal shunning to formal membership criteria. Since people as well as groups seek to maximize status, this evolves into a complex equilibrium. (Groucho: “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would have [a status exclusion mechanism weak enough to have] me as a member.”)
But since we at LW must have a rational explanation for things, these arbitrary criteria (of which my proposal is a pastiche) won’t do. Half of the folks here are OK with outsourcing the power and responsibility for excluding low-status folks onto the women of LW. The other half doesn’t even want that. Both sides want to consciously come up with convoluted arguments about why “creepy” [low-status male] behavior is objectively bad. That dog won’t hunt.
What your comment boils down to is a statement that you intend to treat other people’s objections to your (or your friends’) nonconsensual or threatening behavior as attempts to exclude you (or them) as low-status rather than as requests for you to behave in a more consensual and nonthreatening manner towards them.
It’s easy to be low-status without being creepy.
It’s entirely possible (I’m imagining being meek and social risk-averse) in the same way as it’s entirely possible to grow up poor and stay out of trouble with the law. It’s a lot easier to be creepy if you’re low-status, and much of the behavior that is deemed creepy would not be called creepy if a high-status person did the exact same thing (think “quirky,” “endearing,” “charming”).
In practice, cracking down on creepiness means excluding low-status people, except for a meek remnant.
There’s high-status creeping too (like someone putting an arm round someone who doesn’t want him to). This can be very bad for the creepee—the high status means that complaints to the group are likely to be dismissed as oversensitivity or whining.
It’s a natural human tendency to let high-status people get away with things, but I don’t think it’s so immutable that a group can’t develop a culture that reduces the damage.
And if you are the creep, there’s at least a chance that you didn’t mean to be and that you’re willing to modify your behaviour in ways that have large advantages for the creepee and only small disadvantages for you.
If male creepiness is contributing to the gender imbalance on LessWrong, I would expect high-status creepiness to be far more problematic than low-status creepiness. In a social setting, it’s a lot easier to call a low-status member out for being creepy. If a high-status member is being creepy, a newcomer might prefer to leave than to confront him/her or complain about his/her behavior to the rest of the group. Alternatively, if the newcomer does complain about the high-status member, he/she might be scoffed at by the rest of the group, who likes that individual.
Status gets wonky here, though, and online in general. One’s status doesn’t readily translate from one’s RL social network to the internet (celebrities are an obvious exception here), and the cultural makeup of the group’s members, in addition to the social norms they propagate within the group itself, will go a long way toward determining relative status.
It’s one thing if you’re talking Eliezer or Alicorn, but the run-of-the-mill LW member probably fits into this situation. Hence, we don’t need to necessarily see creepy behavior among the highest-status folks here, for it to nevertheless be a widespread norm that affects gender ratios on the site. (Frankly, all sorts of communities, online and off, encounter this in some form).
Yes, but if you’re high-status, a much higher fraction of people do want (or are okay with) your arm around them, and so the GP is right that status affects the probability of triggering the creep classifier.
True, but it’s also entirely possible to want behavior X from person Y and still find it creepy when Y actually does X, depending on how and in what context they do it. Creepiness is often about those details.
That still wouldn’t justify the unhelpful, over-general warning of “don’t do X”, stripped of the specific (correctly-diagnosed) “how and in what context” caveats.
For at least some X’s, the real warning is not “don’t do X, ever.” It’s: “if you do X, you are responsible for anyone being creeped out by X. You might get away with it, depending on how considerate, socially aware, or charismatic you are—just don’t complain if you get it wrong and we have to kick you out so that people can feel safe and comfortable.”
AFAICT, there’s nothing wrong with this rule: in fact, it is close to optimal for the purposes of LW meetups.
Pretty much this. Also, the advice being given might more accurately be “you don’t do X, because you obviously don’t know how to judge the context and details and are therefore very likely to get it wrong”. Except, if someone actually says that, the person it’s being said to is liable to try to rope them into explaining the context-and-details thing, which 1) is very complicated, to the point where explaining it is a major project and 2) most people can’t articulate, so that’s awkward if it happens. Also, it’s often true that once a person does learn how to judge the context and details properly (on their own, generally speaking, by observation and reading many things on the topic), they will then be able to see what they were doing wrong before and how to avoid that mistake, and conclude that they can try again regardless of previous advice.
Most of what I just said isn’t relevant to meetup groups, though; bogus’ angle is much more relevant there.
For better or worse, creepiness is socially defined. WIthin a social group, most people don’t secretly resent high-status people, by definition. If only one person has a problem with it, that’s not being creepy, that’s “he’s being charming and you have a problem.”
It only becomes “creepy” when you come to LW or a group of sympathetic friends and the local balance of power shifts in your favor.
If only one person in a group is allergic to my aftershave, they are allergic to my aftershave.
If only one person in a group finds my voice intolerable, they find my voice intolerable.
If only one person in a group finds my behavior disturbing or frightening or alienating, they find my behavior disturbing or frightening or alienating.
Yes, that person has a problem.
And the question is, what are we going to do about that problem, if anything?
The notion that because they have a problem, we therefore ought not do anything, strikes me as bizarre. It’s precisely because they have a problem that the question even arises; if they didn’t have a problem, there would be no reason to even discuss it.
So, OK. If my behavior frightens or disturbs or alienates you, or my aftershave causes you an allergic reaction, or whatever, you have a problem.The question is, what happens next?
I might decide I care about your problem, and take steps to alleviate it.
Or I might decide I don’t care about your problem, and go on doing what I was doing.
Or somewhere in between.
You might similarly decide to alleviate your own problem, or decide to ignore it, or something in between.
Third parties might, similarly, decide they care about your problem to various degrees, or they might not.
This is not independent of status—if you’re a high-status member of the group, I might care about your problem because of your status; if you’re a low-status member I might not-care about your problem because of your status; if I’m a high-status member third parties might not-care about your problem because of my status, and so forth.
But it’s not equivalent to status, either—if we come from a culture where acknowledging the existence of body odor is taboo, the fact that you have a problem with my body odor might get ignored even if we’re all of equal status, or even if you’re higher status than I am. (Of course, you might then claim a different problem you don’t actually have in order to solve your real problem in a socially acceptable way.)
Similarly, it’s not independent of the size of the affected group, but it’s not equivalent to it either.
And that, folks, is one of the ways that the ~6% of educated males (according to one study, anyway) who are rapists get to do their thing: by being “charming” to everyone but their target, so the target is isolated and feels she has nobody to turn to.
FYI: If one person in my meetup group has a problem with Person X touching them when they don’t want him/her to, I have a problem with Person X, too.
People behave differently in different social contexts, though. If person Y finds person X’s behavior creepy, and no one else finds person X’s behavior creepy, it could be that X is behaving differently towards Y than he/she is towards everyone else.
Obviously, this is relevant to the gender situation, where person X is male and behaves differently towards females than he does towards males.
It’s socially influenced, but you’re being a bit too status-deterministic about it. Take the example of Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s (probably true but not prosecuted) rape allegation. Beforehand, he was as high-status as a man can get in the United States, and a vast majority of American women who knew who he was would have found him attractive. Afterward, he seems to have regained much of his status among male Steeler fans, but he has the unmistakable tag of “creepy” (to say the least) among women who follow football.
Since it’s very low-cost to stop touching someone who doesn’t like it, compared to the cost of enduring it, a group where it’s considered “creepy” is a better group.
That certainly isn’t true by definition and it isn’t even always true in practice. “It’s better to be feared than to be loved”, etc.
(The rest of your comment seems more or less accurate as a description of how social power and moralizing works.)
I’m confused by your argument. Where I live, the visibly religious are high status. Does that mean I can’t resent a religious person’s treatment of me? That’s a strange definition of high-status.
Creepiness is not down to status. High-status people can be plenty creepy.
Can be, sure. The claim is still valid as a heuristic.
What’s more, people are more likely to pre-judge the high status person favorably, and thus want whatever behavior would be a “no-no” for the low-status person, and so behavior violating the supposed anti-creep rules is much less likely to be noticed and recognized as such (e.g. my example before about pushy hugs).
Anytime you find yourself saying, “How dare he do X? That’s creepy! Don’t ever do X, folks!”, ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X. If the answer is no, you’ve misdiagnosed the problem.
I think the truth of that statement depends on how you chunk the behavior.
To get back to this, Rene’s approaches to Genevieve would have been appropriate as behaviors in that sort of a relationship if you chunk them as things a person might do, and very inappropriate because she was moving away from him/not responding, etc., so that if your chunk includes what she does (not to mention that a relationship didn’t already exist) as well as what he does, you get a different answer.
I agree with the first part of your comment, but the last paragraph seems contradictory:
Creepiness is by definition unwelcome behavior; that’s just the meaning of the term—“that which causes someone to feel creeped out”. Of course any welcome behavior would not be labelled creepy.
But the entire problem is that its welcomeness is not known until you do it! That’s why you have to go based on general standards of acceptable behavior in judging an action, not by whether one person happened to not like it.
Imagine if Elevatorgate started from, not some elevator, but just the mere fact of Watson being “asked out”, and she went on to say, “Whoa! Creepy! Guys, don’t ever ask a woman out!”
Someone might protest, “Wait, what?”
Do you understand why it’s not a very satisfactory answer to say, “It’s okay, we’re only talking about those cases where it’s unwanted”? If so, apply it to your own answer.
I reread your first comment and I think I just misread it the first time. (And you may have misread mine). I think we were just talking past each other.
We seem to agree on the important bits, namely that:
“Creepiness” is defined and measured by the “creeped out” response of recipients.
Therefore it depends not just on the action, but on the recipient and on how they perceive the actor.
Therefore an action is not definitely creepy or noncreepy until carried out; it is hard to predict reactions.
To the extent that the same action is perceived as creepy or not coming from different people, we shouldn’t be talking about the action itself sometimes being creepy, but about the relevant differences between people.
I don’t think we agree, in particular, because I don’t agree that the particulars of how a specific event was perceived are relevant for general rules of condemnation. That is, I’m fine with saying “Don’t do X” if X really is widely disliked, regardless of the person, but not with giving the same advice, while actually predicating it on people’s ability to know others’ reaction in advance.
I understood it to mean “ask myself if I can imagine someone doing X in a way I welcomed.”
Moreover, when a low-status person creeps on me, I feel like I have more freedom to express nicely to them that I was creeped out and offer to explain why. When a high-status person creeps on me, I feel like they have too much power to want to stop or listen to me, and nobody else will listen to me either, because this person has social command.
Yeah, same here. Creepy behavior from people with high status is a big red flag on a group or social situation for me; it implies that at least in some cases they can get away with that, and I categorically don’t feel emotionally safe in those environments.
See also: The Missing Stair. Source has a history of overusing feminist memes with the result of obfuscating their point, but I think this piece was particularly well-written.
“Status” is not quite the right term here — social rank correlates with the kind of charm that can make an ambiguous behavior be not-creepy, but isn’t the same.
Likewise, there are times and places when creepy is not low-status.
It’s probably quite difficult for a creepy person to stop being creepy.
For this reason (and others) I much prefer to focus on specific behaviors for the purpose of determining what is acceptable behavior versus a valid target for social sanction.
The fuck it does. This is about creepiness. Actual attempts at unwelcome intimacy. Whoever from and whoever to.
It is not about status, except to the extent that high status can (this is a bad thing) protect the perpetrators of actual creepy behaviour from being called to account, and low status (this is also a bad thing) can prevent the target from being heard.
For further enlightenment, see, for example, here.
Actually, “unwelcome” means that the definition sometimes depends almost exclusively on status. In the extreme situation that a guy is so high status I wouldn’t mind anything he did and would always say yes, he couldn’t possibly be creepy.
In a less hypothetical case, my reaction to statements like “you’re beautiful” or “your hair looks amazing” depends entirely on who is saying it. It would be considered creepy only if the guy was sufficiently low status that my intuition doesn’t process the statement as sincere.
Similarly I mentally flinch violently when touched by males who are too low status for my intuition to classify as attractive, have no such reaction for moderately attractive guys, and get a jolt of pleasure if the guy is very attractive. This effect is consistent and something I have no conscious control over.
I think people dismissing status are underestimating either the degree to which people’s unconscious can control their conscious, or the degree to which status interactions controls the unconscious.
Why am I getting karma for this when it’s been established that I’m using a highly unconventional definition of status? I mean, I like karma and all, but this confuses me...
Status is not an extremely clear thing to begin with, the same criticism could probably be applied to most uses of the term on LessWrong. I just mentally reparse what you write as
You’re basically talking about how attractive you find him, but using “status” adds the connotations that it’s not just about the looks, and that how others judge him comes into the equation; both those connotations seem true.
Like how starting a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you is unwelcome, and thus creepy?
Or did you think people would never get the C-word for doing just that?
I missed the enlightenment you were expecting me to get from learning of a case where a high-status person got surprisingly little punishment (and no effective loss to social life) from doing creep things.
You seem to be underestimating how easy it is to guess beforehand whether or not a stranger would want to talk to you. See the comment thread to this. (Well, I disagree that complimenting a stranger’s netbook is necessarily creepy, but...)
This disagreement on what is creepy demonstrates precisely how hard it is to predict in advance if some behavior will be perceived as creepy or not.
I should have said/thought had said “is necessarily creepy”. (Fixed now.)
Though I don’t think its that simple because both sides are claiming that the other side is not reporting how they truly feel. One side claims that people are calling things creepy semi-arbitrarily to raise their own status, and the other claims that people are intentionally refusing to recognize creepy behavior as creepy so they don’t have to stop it (or being slightly more charitable, so they don’t take a status hit for being creepy).
Upvoted for an excellent link which caused me to update my intuition regarding the nature and frequency of various types of public harassment of women. I didn’t update so far as to regard the XKCD cartoon as “promoting rape culture” (which I still think is going overboard), but after reading the (very very long) comment thread with all the subway/public/other harassment stories, I can totally see where they’re coming from.
That thread gives an important overview of a sort. It’s got its limits because women who talk about not having it that bad from men are not kindly treated in the discussion.
I’m not denying any of those stories about behavior ranging from intrusive to seriously threatening and it’s obviously fairly common, just saying that it’s not a overview of the whole situation. I’ve never seen an overview of the whole situation for women.
People who frequently fall into patterns of behavior that others regard as “creepy” tend to be those who do not find this easy.
Could you create a set of instructions that can easily be followed by people with low levels of social fluency, which would allow them to make this judgment with low levels of false positives and false negatives? If so, you’d be doing a big favor both to people who’re frequently exposed to “creepy” behavior, and people who frequently engage in that behavior. It would also probably be unique in the world.
The arrogant vulgarity doesn’t fit well with the demonstration of naivety (come to think of it “The fuck it does” wouldn’t be be appropriate here even if well informed). Creepiness is significantly about status. Typically it refers to something along the lines of “low status male attempting interaction”.
This doesn’t mean I’m endorsing any particular instance of creepiness but it is useful to understand what it is that prompts the perception ‘creepy’.
High status can also make the identical behaviors not creepy in the first place. Even if unwelcome the perception of the high status ‘unwelcome’ will feel different to the creepy low-status ‘unwelcome’.
Well, yeah, someone you wouldn’t like to have sex with hitting on you is creepier than someone you would like to have sex with hitting on you (obviously—why the hell would the latter be creepy at all?), and (especially if “someone” is male and “you” are female), whether you would like to have sex with them correlates with their status. But would that still hold to the same extent if you could change the “status” variable while holding the “attractiveness” (broadly construed) variable constant?
Tabooing “status” might be necessary. I couldn’t compute your last sentence… Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status. (They might not be the same thing as far as hormones are concerned, but they arise from the same mechanisms.)
What you call a less “attractive”, higher “status” man, I call a lower “status” man who has motivating factors to have incorrect beliefs about his “status”.
Compare Bill Gates to Jose the charming tour guide.
There’s your problem right there!
I’m usually not a big fan of the “look it up on Wikipedia” approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you’re viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status
Synonymous—clearly not. “Largely so” is more of an exaggeration than a fundamental incomprehension.
Huh. Ok. What do you call the ape status-instinct then? That’s thing that you get by cleverly body-language and verbally sparring with people. I’ve managed to end up on top of a number of authority figures doing that.
Edit: the human version of the behaviour that Wikipedia describes as “dominance hierarchies”.
Double edit: would it make more sense to distinguish the terms as system-1-status and system-2-status?
I...think you’re confused. I didn’t say social status doesn’t exist; I also didn’t say that “social status” was a bad term for it. What I said was that you have an extremely nonstandard set of word associations here, such that what you mean when you’re saying “social status” is...well, not intuitive from the more usual use of that word.
I’m not saying instincts for status don’t exist; I’m saying that “attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status” is a baffling definition of “status” (reinforcing my point by linking to a general overview of the concept and the things the word applies to). It would be like meaning only “penguins” whenever you say “birds”, and then trying to generalize that use whenever someone else talks about ornithology.
I think you’re misinterpreting my point again, and I also think it’s more of a “what do you mean by “melon”″ issue (ever order a melon smoothie from a place without pictures on the menu and been surprised?) than a “penguin” issue, but the definitions themselves have been adequately dissolved in this thread so there’s no point in continuing to pursue something off-topic.
Consider interaction among heterosexual people of the same sex (men with men, women with women). This is probably a majority of all social interaction, and it strongly influences status in mixed-sex social groups. While attractiveness is generally helpful here too, it’s less important than other factors.
Imagine two men who have the same socio-economical position, the same amount of social skills, wear similar clothes, behave the same way, etc., etc., but one is 5′6″ (1.68 m) and one is 6′ (1.83 m). Most women will likely be more attracted to the latter; would you say he has higher status?
Yes, minorly: halo effect. Though given your example I see that status and attraction aren’t the same thing, they’re just intertwined in a ridiculous positive feedback loop, to the extent that it’s very easy to think of them as the same thing. Having more women be attracted to you usually leads to better social skills. Having more height usually means more self-confidence, etcetc.
The specific situation you describe also can’t possibly arise, because one would look down at me to speak to me and the other would look up. Then they’d be behaving differently.
ETA: I tried to think of a least convenient world, but couldn’t.
Take it from someone with rather low basic social status (multiple forms of visible minority, many of which are still thought of mainly as “deviant” rather than just “other”, who can’t can’t hide it out and about in daily life): the fact that you see it this way has more to do with your own situation and your own unfulfilled preferences, than with it being a basic feature of how status works. Status is not primarily about your sexual attractiveness to people. Low-status people get laid all the time. Low-status people get into lasting relationships. Low-status people have children. Low-status people even make ethical nonmonogamy work for them. (Low status people who fit all of the above can even be sexually frustrated!)
Suppose you’re standing on a staircase. The taller man stands on a step below you, while the shorter man stands on a step above you, and the steps are of such height that each would be looking you directly in the eye. Is that a sufficiently inconvenient world?
IAWYC but
C’mon. There’s a difference between looking down (physically) because you’re shorter and looking down at you (physically) because I’m looking down (metaphorically). (I’m 1.87 m (6′2″) myself so I have to do the former all the time.) In the latter case, I will stand up straight with my shoulders back and only tilt my eyes and (to a lower extent) my head down. In the former case, I will (say) sit on a stool while you’re on a higher chair/walk on the edge of the carriageway while you’re walking on the sidewalk/stand on a lower step of a stairway than you, and/or bend my whole upper body downwards.
(Why does this comment looks to me as if there are unbalanced parentheses even though I know there aren’t?)
Of course, but it still has an effect. And also the tall guy standing a step below me is definitely not behaving the same as the short guy standing a step above me.
Anyway, the difference in this case is negligible and doesn’t help the situation at hand. As far as I can see, to have a guy who was more physically attractive score lower on status would require lowering some other type of attractiveness, like behaviour or signalling. The actions you describe are signalling.
Come to think of it, maybe we just mean different things when we say “attractiveness”.
Huh, yeah. He’s also wearing larger clothes, and curving spacetime by a larger amount. But “all other things” in “all other things being equal” doesn’t usually literally mean all other things—otherwise any counterfactual will involve logical inconsistencies.
By “attractiveness” I meant the set of all things about me that determine how likely you are to be attracted to me, not just handsomeness. It seems like you might be using “status” the same way I’m using “attractiveness”, whereas I’m using it only for “social” (FLOABW) features. IOW, as I’m using the words, I can have higher or lower status in a given social group but higher or lower attractiveness for a given person. Given that not all women in the same group will be attracted to exactly the same features in men, and given that one can be higher- or lower-status even in an all-straight-male group, the two are not synonymous.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. I agree that status has a wider social meaning, but I was specifically referring to status in the context of one man approaching one woman, and saying that in that case it is usually at least monotonic with attraction. A well-respected academic has status within his field, but is still low-status in male-female interaction terms if he is sufficiently uncharismatic.
Edit: oops. My earlier comments didn’t make this at all clear.
I don’t think Athrelon in the comment that started this thread meant “status” in the latter sense.
Fair enough. Guess I was arguing a completely different point then.
Now, where did that thread go which was about the better way to fix creepiness being how to teach people to get/signal more status, rather than what not to do… Pretty sure there they’re using this definition.
(Gah, words are hard.)
In answer to the second question—If done so awkwardly, in a way that violates local norms or expectations or in a way that makes you look bad in public. (These are all things other than being low status that seem to play a part in the ‘creepiness’.)
I was about to answer “Well, if they behaved like that then you’d most likely not want to have sex with them (any longer)”, then I realised that if we interpret counterfactuals this way, my comment would be nearly tautological.
Those are certainly unattractive traits and would often be sufficient to remove the desire. But no, the effect isn’t anywhere near strong enough to make the potential tautological definition valid.
Huh, yeah. I had in mind a sense of “creep” according to which it’d be logically contradictory to simultaneously be creeped out by someone and want to have sex with them, but now I realise i had no good reason to think that.
I guess I’ll tap out now (at least for a couple days), both because I feel like I’m borderline mind-killed and likely to get more so if I continue, and because I’ve already already procrastinated away way too much RL stuff.
attempts at (unwelcome intimacy) = naked aggression.
unwelcome (attempts at intimacy) = failure to anticipate rejection. both sides lost.
asking for harsher penalties for the second (which is already quite painful) is like asking cops to beat up panhandlers—the price you pay for a place you want to live.
That Readercon example points out an irrationality in the thinking of some creeps, rapists, or PUAs: “sex is a need.” Related to that fallacy is the sense of entitlement that sex with desired sex objects should be a reward for being “nice,” even though real nice persons avoid using sentient beings as tools and may avoid short-lived pleasures like sex altogether (e.g. Paul Erdos, Nikola Tesla). [And I can tell you from experience, women fawn over good guys. I even had a crush on Tesla. But being good guys, they focus on doing good and may not even notice women fawning over them.] Another fallacy in the minds of some creeps is that their behavior is good for their targets, e.g. “she needs a dicking.”
Basically, what we’re dealing with are persons who need some luminosity, or awareness and control, over their lusty wants, so they no longer act on those wants as “needs,” spending more resources on satisfying those wants over other wants (their own or others’) or other beings’ real needs, like humans’ need to feel safe enough to socialize.
High-status creeps are the worst because they’re allowed to be repeat offenders (e.g. Jerry Sandusky). In my experience with a low-status creep, he excluded himself after not getting what he “needed” from his target. That is, he was welcome at meetings but didn’t want to go without the prospect of his “need” being met by his desired sex object. That was several years ago, with a freethought group, before I developed this understanding and ability to counteract that irrationality.
Simply saying “sex is not a need; you can live well without it” actually worked in one case. A case that’s been difficult for me to crack is where the person, somewhat high-status, is committed to irrationalities and harasses people (sexually harassing females, verbally harassing whomever does something he doesn’t like). I might break of his icon of Mercy, taking away his method for reducing his guilt, which he should feel to avoid harming others.
[Edit replacing backslashes with commas. Not that it changes the meaning to me, having known creeps, rapists, and literature by PUAs.]
See “Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships.” Apologetics or confabulations are part of the process of passion escalating into aggression or violence. A rational person would avoid the costs and risks of continuing interactions with someone interested in sex and who’s brain, like most brains, could rationalize or delude itself, with such fallacies as I noted above (another example: “blue balls”) or with thinking that the woman wants sexual relations with him when she doesn’t. Hence, avoidance of “creeps.” Women poor at detecting and avoiding such dynamics may be more likely to get abused (http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/12/2199.full.pdf+html).
Evidence of what I said about lack of illumination: “Results indicate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between victims of physical violence and offenders over time and that certain covariates including school commitment, parental monitoring, low self-control, and sex significantly discriminate victim and offender groups. Furthermore, low self-control appears to be the most salient risk factor for distinguishing both victimization and delinquency trajectories” 2010 Longitudinal Assessment of the Victim-Offender Overlap.
Seriously? Creeps/rapists/PUAs. People kept reading after that introduction?
What do you know about them that makes them like apples and oranges in your mind? If you can’t give me a reason for why they’re not comparable in any way, I’m gonna have to give your a kick in the ass for being so dismissive of what another person knows.
I was originally going to argue with wedrifid and say he was being uncharitable in interpreting your statement as considering all three groups to be basically the same: my interpretation was that you meant “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs”, and your statement could then be read in a meaningful light.
However, this new question suggests that you did in fact mean to lump all three groups of people together as a single category, so I’m now downvoting both comments.
Ironically, you are threatening wedrifid with violence for doing something which you yourself are doing, i.e, dismissing others’ knowledge as irrelevant. I don’t think either the dismissal or the threat are appropriate discourse for LW.
“Threatening with violence”? Seriously?
Thank you for being able to not take words too literally.
pjeby, obviously I couldn’t possibly know all creeps, rapists & PUAs; so you were correct in your first interpretation that I meant: “some creeps, some rapists, and some PUAs.” Give me one example where I’ve dismissed others’ knowledge, rather than their knee-jerk reactions based on wrong interpretations of my words meaning what they couldn’t possibly mean. Apparently, there are some readers here who’ve identified with being a creep or PUA and some wouldn’t want them to be associated with rapists, hence your downvoting. But the fact is we’re talking about humans, not apples and oranges. (Are you gonna downvote this now because you think I’m “lumping”? What a BS excuse for downvoting.) Fallacious justifications of un-illuminated thoughts & behaviors is a problem we all have to face. I was pointing out specifics of this problem to address this thread, giving abstractions of cases I’ve known. Instead of offering counter-examples or counterarguments, some have written blunt rejections or simply downvoted. If I am wrong, why can’t someone make me less wrong? Instead, what I’m getting here is not unlike how abuse victims get dismissed when they accuse liked persons as abusers. How do I know this? Cuz I was abused and tried to make the truth known and got similar knee-jerk denials. Feeling rational, I think it’s appropriate discourse for LW to say: “Fuck you deniers.” Now do you get how my talking about ass-kicking was an expression of emotion [specifically, indignation], not an actual threat?
Even if by “Creeps/rapists/PUAs” you meant to point at points along a continuum, and the connotation that said points are close together was unintentional, you got the order wrong, as rapists ought to be at one extreme rather than in the middle.
Why assume I was using a continuum? Is a continuum necessary? Even if we must put them on a continuum, why assume the order you’ve assumed? We could, for example, base the continuum on how wrong their theories of humans are, in which case, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to lump the individuals into those three categories and place them on the continuum.
Any more excuses or unnecessary assumptions for me to dispel? I have yet to see a better theory or counter-evidence not accounted for by my theory. Instead, I see just-so theories pigeon-holing humans as just “fundamentally” sex-driven or creeps as just “desperate” or “low-status.” Now, given what I know about how brains work and assuming some readers’ brains here have absorbed evo psy terminology, it’s understandable why brains are spouting such overly-narrow views of humans. I took a course on evo psy with Gordon Gallup where he taught a little about our ancestors living in trees and moving onto land, but mostly the course was on mating. Even Eleizer’s article on evo psy has a story revolving around modern humans mating.
But one’s theory would have to include more than data on mating to be less wrong about humans. It would have to include a theory of fun, for example, to account for how persons could enjoy their lives without sex, like Tesla or Erdos did. Even the fact that you guys enjoy being on LessWrong, which isn’t the best activity for getting laid, says something about the inadequacy of some of the stupid theories posited on this thread, which started off being about how to improve “creepy” persons’ theories using information from the suggested articles.
Some of you guys have work to do for your brains to develop a theory of everything, with which you may be less likely to form ad hoc, just-so theories and discount data that don’t fit your theories.
(Disclosure & “help wanted ad:” My brain developed a theory of everything, which I’m working on sharing with others. I’m calling it the Enlightenment project, b/c I can’t simply tell people what the theory is—”Information won’t set you free by itself”. We have to help brains develop their own less wrong ToEs. I’m looking for brain-hackers who can help create a wiki, videos, and whatever other materials could be used to help most people. And I have some specific ideas that require a digital graphics artist to become something outside of my head for people to use. If you want to help, message me.)
Taboo “need”. Yes, it’s not necessary for survival; but homeless people can survive too, and still not many people say stuff like “shelter is not a need” or “stop acting like you’re entitled to shelter”. (But I still agree no-one is expected to give you a sleeping place solely because you think you are a decent person.)
I mean, Maslow put it in the bottom layer of his pyramid… (Though the fact that he separately lists “sexual intimacy” higher up means that by “sex” in the bottom layer he likely meant the kind of sex that even prostitutes can give.)
Off-topic: your model of prostitution is wrong. Social skills, putting people at ease, listening, and acting are big parts of the job. Look up “girlfriend experience”.
Well, I was thinking more about street prostitutes than escorts, but what in my comment suggests anything about “my model of prostitution”, anyway?
“Sexual intimacy” is a thing prostitutes (including low-end ones) provide, which is why they’re more expensive than fleshlights.
Given that Maslow listed it separately from “sex”, I guess he had in mind a narrower sense for “sexual intimacy” than you might have. (Unless he had in mind an extremely broad sense for “sex”, which would include e.g. self-masturbation.)
Maybe he was just moralizing and wanted to label short or paid-for sexual intimacy as “mere sex”.
By looking at the pyramid, I think he meant for “sexual intimacy” to be to “sex” as friendship is to conversation, i.e. by the former he meant what people today would call “being in a relationship” or “romance”. But I’m not fully sure.
You mean the function of guaranteeing availability? Having friends provides good conversation. Being in a relationship provides good sex.
And being free from worry about having to provide conversation or sex for tomorrow satisfies a psychological need for security. That makes sense.
I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Sexuality isn’t a physical need in the sense that, say, water is a physical need, but it is a pretty fundamental drive. It certainly doesn’t morally oblige any particular person to fulfill it for you (analogously, the human need for companionship doesn’t oblige random strangers to accept overtures of friendship), but it’s sufficiently potent that I’d be cautious about casually demoting it below other social considerations, let alone suggesting sexual asceticism as a viable solution in the average case; that seems like an easy way to come up with eudaemonically suboptimal prescriptions.
Nice Guy (tm) psychology is something else again. I’m not sure how much of the popular view of it is anywhere near accurate, but in isolation I’d hesitate to take it as suggesting anything more than one particular pathology of sexual politics and maybe some interesting facts about the surrounding culture.
Some have argued the same regarding revenge, nepotism, and various other “drives” that we might expect people to learn how to express in a moral way.
I’m not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it’s easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It’s far better—if far harder—to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
I don’t disagree, but I do think that the existing incentive structures surrounding sexuality are pretty damned dysfunctional. I chose the wording I did because I think there’ll need to be a lot of original thought going into a better incentive structure (and because I don’t think there currently exist any really good candidate solutions), but I’m not trying to imply that we need to throw out the existing culture completely.
It’s too specific/complicated to be low level/fundamental. Actually all of them are too specific/complicated to be low level. They’re just so widely and thoroughly internalised (to the point where not being that way will likely be bad for you just because other people will dislike you for it) very few people realise they are changable, or are motivated to change them. There’s little reason to change them for most people. Not having a desire for revenge or redress grievances is a quick way to become a target/victim, status seeking gets you status if you do it right which gets you power. nepotism makes you a more attractive ally.
I think it’s more accurate to say that changing motivational structure is hard and risky than the ability is limited. There’s no hard or soft cap afaik (which is what limited makes it sound like to me) it’s just really hard to do and most people don’t care to anyway.
Also wtf is a need. Is that like a right? It means you really really want something? really really really? really really really really? nonsense on stilts. Take your fucking stilts off bro.
edit: I can’t believe I put bro at the end of that post. Kinda ruins it.
edit2: no it doesn’t, stop pandering.
I’m having trouble making sense of this in context. Did you mean to reply to this post?
i typed it out as a response to that post and copy pasted it to this post (adding the /fundamental) because it is higher up. So kinda.
We don’t have to “casually demote” anything. Like Fox News says, “we report—you decide.”
Generally, “need” is used to refer to something perceived to be necessary in an optimization process. There are cases where a human doesn’t need companionship, let alone sex (see recluses or transcendentalists’ recommendations that persons isolate themselves from society for a while to clear their heads of irrationalities).
If “the average case” involves little luminosity of sexuality and lots of sexualization of beings, then of course sexual abstinence wouldn’t be likely. Rape occurs in epidemic proportions in such places where people are also demoralized or decommissioned from doing much good work, like on reservations.
Nice Guy and Nice Gal are idealized gender roles for an optimal society. Some oppose gender roles to the extent that they limit persons from doing good, esp. when they make one gender subservient to the other or make a person of one gender subservient to another person of another gender (like the promulgated view that wife should serve husband). A person or AI caring only about one person or half the human population would not be optimal.
I think we’re talking past each other here. The “Nice Guy (tm)” phenomenon I was referring to is categorically not an idealized gender role within an optimal or any other society, hence the sarcasm trademark, although it has its roots in (a misinterpretation of) one idealized masculinity. Instead, it’s a shorthand way of describing the pathology you described in the ancestor: the guy in question (there are women who do similar things, but the term as I’m using it is tied up in the male gender role) performs passive masculinity really hard and expects that sexual favors will follow. When this fails, usually due to poor socialization and poor understanding of sexual politics, bitterness and frustration ensue.
I actually think the terminology’s pretty toxic as such things go, since it tends to be treated as a static attribute of the people so described instead of suggesting solutions to the underlying problems. It’s common jargon in these sorts of discussions, though, and denotationally it does describe a real dysfunction, so I’m okay with using it as shorthand. Apologies for any bad assumptions on my part.
You might want to link “Nice Guy (tm)” in the grandparent to, er..., somewhere.
I’m open to suggestions.
I found this on Google but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a way better one before.
This might be better.
Edited.
Do you want to taboo “want” and “need”?
This comment is the first that has ever made me want to build an army of sock puppets for downvoting purposes, not that I shall do so.
I’m not sure what you are using status to mean. Would you be willing to restate your argument with ‘status’ tabbooed?
As a low-status male, right now I’m less worried about being excluded from a meetup than I am about being publicly associated with LW at all. It already has a reputation (and not just for the things mentioned there); now it’s a place where a comment like Jade’s here isn’t just downvoted, but downvoted to a level that labels it a troll comment not worth replying to.
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
The Problem With Rational Wiki
Since you cite it as source you should be aware Rational Wiki has a certain reputation here as well. I’m not talking about the object level disagreements such as cryonics, existential risk, many-worlds interpretation and artificial intelligence because we have some reasonable disagreement on those here as well. Even its cheeky tone while not helping its stated goals can be amusing. I’m somewhat less forgiving about their casual approach to epistemology and their vulnerability to cargo cult science, as long as it is peer reviewed cargo cult science.
While factually it is as about as accurate as Wikipedia, it is very selective about the facts that it is interested in. For example what would you expect from a site calling itself “Rational Wiki” to have on its page about charity. Do you expect information on how much good charity actually does? What kinds of charities do not do what they say on the label? How to avoid getting misled? The ethics of charity? The psychology, sociology or economics of charity?
I’m sorry to disappoint you but the article consists of some haphazardly arranged facts and stats on how much members of some religions give or are supposed to give to charity, a dig against Christianity and a non-sequitur unfavourable comparison of the US to Sweden. Contrast this with what you can find on the topic on sites like LessWrong or 80, 000 Hours. Basically the material presented is what a slightly left of centre atheist needs to win an internet debate. As is much of the rest of the site.
Indeed some entries have a clear ideological bias that is quite startling to behold on a “rational wiki” and it has been noted by some.
Now to avoid any misunderstandings there are good articles, a few LWers are contributors to the rational wiki and there is certainly nothing wrong with being a left of centre atheist! Nearly everyone on this site is an atheist, and people who identify as left wing politically form a large majority here. The tribal markers and its political agenda aren’t the biggest problem. Sites with all sorts of agendas, even political ones, promoting rationality are a good thing.
Its problem is that it is an ammunition depot to aid in winning debates. Very specific kinds of debates too. This may sound harsh, but consider: How many people reading the site that aren’t already atheists will change their mind on religion? How many people who follow a “crankish” belief won’t do so afterwards? While I’m sure it happens the site obviously isn’t optimized for this. How many people will read the wiki and try to find errors and biases in their own thinking to debug it instead of breaking if further it or using it as a club? How many will apply this knowledge to help them with any real world problems? Truth seeeking? As a source or community that could aid in that quest it is less useful and reliable than Wikipedia, which while a rather good and extensive encyclopaedia (despite snickering to the contrary) has a subtly but importantly different stated goal.
What else remains? What other plausible function does it serve?
I find it quite entertaining.
I don’t see how any of those questions relate to my post.
(For transparency:
I initially read your post as saying that, because RationalWiki isn’t “really” rational, their opinion on LW is automatically wrong and stupid; that therefore, anyone who shares or has absorbed that opinion (since the RW link was just a conveniently available illustration) is also wrong and stupid; and that therefore, their potential opinion of me as part of it is either inconsequential or totally outside my control. Or maybe you meant that people you know don’t take RW seriously, and that therefore I shouldn’t worry about encountering RW attitudes in the wild.
I then read more closely and realized that you weren’t actually saying any of that. Furthermore, your post wasn’t even directed at me, since I never claimed that RW served some vital and unique function (though if nothing else it’s good for documenting and illustrating the beliefs and attitudes of the type of people who contribute to it). For you to take my post to mean that (I reasoned at the time) would be stupid; and steelmanning and the principle of charity obligated me to act under the assumption that you weren’t stupid until conclusively shown otherwise. Therefore, I had to consider your post a personal tangent and ignore it.
I now realize that I was committing illusion of transparency, assuming short inferential distance and neglecting connotation. I apologize if my previous post connoted that I was holding RW above reproach; and I reject your connotation that RW’s flaws mean that I’m wrong to be concerned about the consequences of loudly promoting LW and its memes wherever I go.)
lesswrong wishes it had a reputation!
This post (edit: fixed link) reminded me of this thread. 2.5 years later, I’m still not sure I understand your point or why it has a +5 score. How does what LW (which I guess I’m not part of) “wants”^W “wishes” relate to my concerns?
Almost nobody has heard of Less Wrong or Eliezer. There’s a mean article on RationalWiki (though honestly it doesn’t look that mean anymore), there’s a hostile thread on DarkLordPotter, but almost nobody has heard of those, either. This was even more true two years ago.
I’m not wedrifid. But I suspect his point is that, outside of a few incredibly narrow sub-sub-cultures, nobody knows anything about Less Wrong and no one who knows you personally will judge you by your connection to it, no matter how public or overt.