Do we even want to stop giving attractive people all manner of advantages in all domains of life? Sure, sometimes it may be in your best interest to claim you do, but that’s a whole different matter.
Caperu_Wesperizzon
Karma: 77
Of course, the number of entries in a dictionary is more important than whether it has a torn cover, at least if you ever plan on using it for anything.
If you plan on using it to decorate your shelf, the cover is essential.
This may sound rational—why not pay more to protect the more valuable object?—until you realize that the insurance doesn’t protect the clock, it just pays if the clock is lost, and pays exactly the same amount for either clock. (And yes, it was stated that the insurance was with an outside company, so it gives no special motive to the movers.)
There’s always the hope that, if enough customers pay the outside company enough, it’ll be zealous and make the movers an offer they can’t refuse.
That is odd, actually. Everyone I’ve met that I would describe as “creepy” is male.
Is it even theoretically possible to be creepy to a man? In my—very limited—experience, if a man is afraid of anything, you don’t condemn the object of his fear for frightening him; you deem him a coward and a pussy, lose all respect for him and basically stop regarding him as a man. You’d better be ready for him to challenge you to a duel, or some other culturally appropriate, less formal kind of fight, though.
As far as I know, the ancestral, sexist rule is that showing fear as a man is like showing sexual desire as a woman: you never ever do it, on pain of losing everyone’s respect.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Some women have an especially intense “you pathetic loser better stay the hell away from me” seemingly permanent look on their faces, to the point that it’s actually readable to me. It can be rather uncomfortable when you have responsibilities that involve interacting with them anyway.
That’s as silly as suggesting that men should be more conservative in granting those favors.
They should—they should not force those “favors” on women who don’t want them.
That would probably help women be less anxious about granting the wrong sexual favor to the wrong person. I’m pretty sure normal, non-socially-stunted people already do this in their own private environments, access to which is a privilege.
It is not intuitively clear to my why would be the AIDS stigma completely unjust, I was pounded into me from the age of 13 to never leave the house without carrying condoms, to me not using them is the equivalent of not using seat belts.
Are there actually parents who do that?
As far as I know, basically everyone agrees their children should be prevented from having sex for as long as possible. No, I don’t know how this makes any sense, given that for as long as possible is forever—unless you get raped, I guess. At any rate, giving you condoms implies you might have sex, so it should be unthinkable.
At the end of the day, the best remedy against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, as well as all kinds of social ills like drug use, is social isolation. As a bonus, the lack of social pressures to keep some personal hygiene and not become a fat slob, and generally a disgusting loser, helps you stay isolated. This will become a huge problem for you as an adult, of course, but then it’s your problem alone—it’s no longer anyone else’s responsibility.
she could have “won” by making the first moves to date an attractive but passive/malleable and socially clueless boy.
Assuming one of those could even begin to compete with a jock, which I greatly doubt.
She could have really “won” by stringing along several passive/malleable/clueless boys.
That could work if she gets them to support her while she cheats on them with Elliot and he’s her children’s biological father, yeah.
I’ve promised to shut up in the comments to the other post, but since that story’s been brought up here, too …
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it.
Is it, though? Is there any possible tone that would make it acceptable?
After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn’t she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her?
So the message is redundant. Therefore, the appropriate way to express it is to say nothing at all. Anything else, regardless of its tone, forces her to pay needless attention to an obvious fact and is therefore an aggression. Especially if the speaker is not so attractive that considering potential partners of his attractiveness level is actually worth her time. Especially if he’s not just insufficiently attractive, but net repulsive, i.e., she’d rather not have sex ever again than have it with him. Of course, a nerdier and less sporty male classmate would be even more repulsive.
Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
Or a way to test him, and he obviously failed.
No, certainly not merely.
I wonder what counts as not merely.
But the whole “Flowers for Algernon” ending seemed a bit extreme...and out of place.
I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be a horror story. She basically did what should have been expected from biology: she chose a high-quality mate who can afford to profess irrational nonsense on the handicap principle, and will most likely breed with him and be happy. It’s only sad to those who would like her to be prevented from doing what she wants, for whatever selfish reasons.
I think the vast majority of people will gladly slash your tyres or lobotomize you without a second thought if the alternative is to go to the effort of debating you for any length of time with a genuinely truth-seeking attitude. Only if they fear you may they attempt to fake the latter.
Ignore the entire machinery of rationality. Treat all human interaction as nothing more than social grooming or status games in a tribe of apes.
Is there actually anything else to human interaction?
It makes no sense to expect people to engage the machinery of rationality when they don’t believe it’ll further their goals. Even if they benefit from being privately rational, it’s not necessarily in their interest to share their rationality with you. Hence, if you haven’t earned their respect, they’ll conceal their wisdom from you, like the Spartans.
In fact, pretty much everything in Eliezer’s post seems to apply only to the rare situation of two or more people who respect each other enough to actually feel a need to appear logically consistent and make their lies plausible. Usually at least one of the people is in no real need to convince the other of anything (i.e., they have higher status), so they won’t waste any time or energy trying to. Therefore, their statements serve other purposes; mainly, to display their high status and to warn the underling when they’re getting too close to a line they won’t let them cross unpunished. Conspicuously wasting the interlocutor’s time with nonsense serves this purpose very well.
Status, status, status. It gets (some of) us every time. There seems to be very little to life but status to a normal person.
Examples include [...] politically incorrect
Ideas are also often dismissed for being politically correct, by concluding the speaker is a hypocrite. I suppose you can count that as a particular case of cowardly.
I’d say rules against necro-commenting are a good tool for the Dark Side, ensuring no discussion progresses beyond a single burst of activity and wasting a lot of time repeating the same arguments again and again.
Any chance of an update? Did Crete win?
For some of those experiences, the attitude of the society is “for fuck’s sake, grow up and stop whining”, for others, it is “this is a horrible thing that should have never happened to you”.
Let’s not forget that, to a normally socialized man, the latter carries an implicit “and you alone are at fault for not having been strong enough to stop your assailant in their tracks. You should be ashamed forever and have no business being alive”. Therefore, it may be more damning than the former.
The default way to ensure future people are wealthy and technologically advanced is to let those who are not die.
Saying “People who buy dangerous products deserve to get hurt!” is not tough-minded. It is a way of refusing to live in an unfair universe. Real tough-mindedness is saying, “Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death, and no, that mother of five children didn’t deserve it, but we’re going to keep the shops open anyway because we did this cost-benefit calculation.” Can you imagine a politician saying that? Neither can I.
There’s another reason to say the former rather than the latter. Most people will hear the latter this way:
“Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death …”
“TLDR. Okay, you’re for regulation.”
I didn’t suggest saying this out of the blue! My recommended riposte borrows the story protagonist’s vocabulary and tone.
I understood that much the first time.
If a woman asks you:
“What you’re saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn’t I react with revulsion precisely as though you’d said the latter?”
then, it may be appropriate to discuss, optionally using the word “fuck”, why she’d react that way if you’d asked that question, which you didn’t, having instead (as in the story) made a much more innocuous suggestion, neither culturally inappropriate nor abrupt and crass.
I think the protagonist makes an excellent point. In fact, she understates it. She mentions plenty of reasons to expect essentially any heterosexual male classmate to be interested in having sex with her if given the chance, so if she’s going to be revolted by that, she might as well go ahead and be revolted without waiting for anyone to tell her anything.
The obvious way out of this conundrum, as you pointed out, is to question the premise that she should be revolted by her male peers’ sexual desires toward her. This doesn’t seem to stop people in general from agreeing with that premise and deeming it self-evident.
As Ilyssa herself argues, how is focusing on the first domino any more innocuous than admitting the hundredth will fall, too? Is there anything to what you call socially appropriate behavior, not abrupt or crass, beyond a lame attempt to deceive her? In fact, since he’s probably well aware she won’t be fooled, I don’t even know which simulacrum level he’s trying to operate at; likely 4.
I wish I’d been asked that kind of questions, including the ones in the few following paragraphs, while being both young enough for them to make sense and the situation not to be too disgusting, and mature enough to understand them and know my true answers. At Eric and Ilyssa’s age, I’m sure I would have enjoyed and come to crave an unbounded amount of physical intimacy with almost any of my female classmates, provided we got along and could trust each other, but I didn’t really know it. I just knew I wanted to get to know them, necessarily slowly, much like I found out, half a decade later, that women tend to emphasize. Funny; in my case, it probably comes from being perpetually isolated and vulnerable. Also, I didn’t have the vocabulary to know what “if I offered myself to you” means, so I’d just be puzzled by the question and probably look like a hypocrite to everyone. Also, my parents would have put a stop to that kind of relationship sooner rather than later, and I guess hers would have, too. Also, I was no “one of the more desirable seniors”. Okay, I’ll shut up.
Uh, … I’ve wondered since about four years before this post was published why women seem so universally offended by any signs that a man would like to have sex with them, with the possible exception of a man they’re already very very very much into. Especially considering those signs seem to be redundant, since most of the time a man and a woman meet, he’ll want to have sex with her, unless, of course, his sex drive is being satisfied to the point of exhaustion elsewhere.
I’ve never been able to discuss this rationally with anyone. Women usually imply it should be obvious to everyone why they’re offended and there’s nothing else to say about it. Besides, everyone knows I’m talking to the woman only because I’d like to have sex with her, which makes the topic, and me, doubly disgusting.
I find it therefore amazing, though still puzzling, to see a woman suggesting that question.
On the other hand, does anyone here actually frequent environments where you can get away with such a long reply, in an ordinary conversation, without the other person interrupting you, walking away, slapping you or anything like that? I find it hard enough to believe among mature adults, let alone a teenage boy talking to a haughty and exceptionally attractive and smart female peer. That’s yet another reason for me to deeply envy all of you.
I only learned it at an embarrassingly late age, but the canonical counter to such an argument is to challenge the arguer to tell that to the invulnerable guy to his face.