I have a strong but not particularly sensible aversion to LW posts with weird formatting. Could you strip the font tags out of this post?
I put a reformatted version on Pastebin. If you want to use this, press the "HTML" button in the LW post editor and paste into the window that appears. (I also made a handful of small punctuation tweaks.)
I like your examples, and recognize the problem you point out, but I don't agree with your conclusion.
The problem with counter-arguments of the form "Well, if we changed this one variable of a social system to a very different value, X would break!" is that variables like that usually change slowly, with only a small number of people fully and quickly adopting any change, and the rest moving along with the gradually shifting Overton window.
Additionally, having a proposed solution that involves changing a large number of things should probably set off warning alarms in your head: such solutions are more difficult to implement and have a greater number of working parts.
Just shifting one variable and telling men to say “I only have sex when women say yes” would be very weird. If a guy tried to implement that in the current system, some people might look at him like he was crazy or even get offended.
Luckily, there's actually a culture striving towards this. My favorite framing of the desired behavior is "Enthusiastic consent".
Reinforcing the idea that consent should be enthusiastic - and that enthusiastic consent is desirable and sexy - will go a long way towards quickly shifting the system.
I'm going to talk in gender-normative terms now, since a good deal of the problem exists within those gender-normative spaces.
For men, "enthusiastic consent" isn't merely a behavioral shift; it's a values shift. It's the recognition that they actually kinda WANT enthusiastic consent from their potential partners. A lot of the current language still carries so-called "slut-shaming" baggage - "I kinda like a girl who's a whore in bed", etc. - so there's work that needs to be done to either find better terms, or 're-claim' the terms that are being used. But I think the principle is there and rooted deeply enough in the ...
Yes, ialdabaoth has clarified what ialdabaoth means, that doesn't necessitate that it's the same thing the words are intended to mean when communicated by the majority of people using them, nor does it necessitate that it's the same thing that is understood by the majority of people hearing it.
I believe that ialdabaoth has misunderstood the concept in its intended meaning by the people who invented the concept, and I believe ialdabaoth is wrong about what the word "enthusiastic" communicates to pretty much everyone.
You seriously think that what is likely a deeply embedded aspect of human nature can be changed with a little marketing?
Hmm ... consider the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years. Or, for that matter, women's economic role.
Things that people have in the past thought are "human nature" (or, more broadly, matters of "natural" and "unnatural") turn out to be quite socially malleable over just a few generations.
We shouldn't expect ourselves to be all that unusual in the course of human history; therefore, we should conclude that things that seem to us to be "human nature" — especially ones that inspire controversy and defensiveness — are likely to turn out to be socially malleable, too.
Having a Yes Means Yes social policy would change the onus of responsibility for making sure that sex is consensual from the woman - who is obligated to say no if she doesn't want to - to both parties who must say yes to proceed.
I'm in my late 40s, and in my experience women of my generation generally do not want the onus put on them in sexual or romantic matters, and prefer the onus to be on the man to make overtures. It's for the man to pursue, and the woman to say no. If a man doesn't pursue, and soon enough, the woman loses interests and will often...
Slightly OT, but I always wonder that people presume that men will be in full cognitive control to do something difficult (act out novel behaviors against prevailing norms) when women are "too drunk to consent". This seems to be bad social engineering driven by ideology. On the other hand, attempts to prevent situations where rape occurs (e.g. when drunk and horny people of the opposite sex congregate) is viewed as "blaming the victim". I believe this to be an unfortunate side-effect of feminism emerging from left-wing philosophies (edi...
Also, this is not to say that you are not correct about some cases - I'm sure there are many cases where two horny people have sex and were not in control then the woman later calls it rape. Its just that given things such as the article listed and my own observations in the world, I'm inclined to believe that it is not what is happening in the majority of cases.
This is one of those complex things getting oversimplified. Perhaps part of the problem is indeed related to over-eager feminists over-simplifying the problem, and thus turning off men who can empathize with the notion of acting overly aggressively when drunk and causing them to over-simplify the problem in return.
I just saw this post going around Facebook, and I've actually heard some really sadistic things from women who have confided to me in person things that rapists will say during or afterward. It is my belief that there are both mistakes of the sort you are talking about, and and actual sick sadistic bastards out there who intentionally use alcohol to make it easier for them to have power over someone else and violate them. And many other scenarios as well.
Seems to me there is a lot of confusion and/or miscommunication about this topic (and the manner this topic is typically discussed, is also not helpful).
From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.
I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.
As an analogy, imagine that we live in a large village with wooden houses, and once in a few months, a house is set on fire. It is obviously caused by a human, but it has been happening for years, and we never s...
From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.
I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.
Alternative hypothesis: there are different phenomena that all get grouped into the category 'rape', even though they happen in different ways and for different reasons. Because the outcomes are the same (severe emotional trauma, socially stigmatizing positive feedback loops, and horrific displays of power disparity), it makes sense to group all these phenome...
socially impaired empathy
These are well-chosen words.
Once I had a short experience of teaching in a private school for high-status children, and the environment felt like a training room for sociopaths. The children were reinforced, every day, for years, that no rules apply to them, their actions have no consequences, and everything is someone else's fault and someone else's problem. (The only rule was to never cross a path of someone even more powerful than you.) Any kind of problem can be fixed, first by parents, and later I assume by powerful friends; which is why it is critical to know a lot of people in the same social class, and be ready to offer the same kind of help to them.
Approximating on what I saw there, I can well imagine that if they would later rape someone and face a trial, their sincere thoughts would be: "Why are these people making such a big deal out of nothing? Are they insane, or what? I should call my parents/friends to get me rid of this stupidity." And after the problem would be fixed, their only emotion would be an indignation about how some stupid person had the audacity to bother them over nothing; and their friends would completely agree wi...
The power disparity point for group 2 is important. My understanding and observation is that its not about sex for them, hence why the term predator is very appropriate. As the article I cited reports, there is an overlap between those who rape and those who abuse children. Its not about sex for this group, its about power and having someone helpless under your control who can do nothing to stop you while you violate them. To these people, that is hot.
There's a certain kind of man who has a lot of power, and who really, really enjoys overt displays of his power over anyone he perceives as weak. Luckily, he's pretty rare. Unfortunately, there's another kind of man who isn't very powerful, but who sees the first man as a role-model, and who will march to that first man's drum.
In a lot of cases, actually, the choice of women as the target is just a Schelling point - women are perceived as weak, so they're seen as easy prey, so they get preyed on more, so society normalizes the preying, so they're perceived as weak.
EDIT: A trivial and somewhat pathetic example of this - there is someone on this site that, every time they log in, every one of my posts that...
That it is the same guys doing it repeatedly implies that it is not a mistake.
nod one problem that occurs, though, is that the 'false positive' problem can be REALLY nasty for the people who DON'T fit the actual behavioral pattern, but who wind up in a situation or have an aspect of their personality that trips the sensors anyways.
It is true that the vast majority of rapes are committed by a small group of high-status predators who have a very effective schtick which is supported by our culture, and a smaller minority of rapes are committed as blatant predatory acts by low-status desperados, and an even SMALLER minority of rapes are actually committed due to a non-deliberate breakdown of communication by median-to-low status schlubs.
The thing is, the high-status predators are VERY GOOD at using culture to hide their predations, and to shift blame onto the desperados. This is why "stranger danger" is so much more engrained in the narrative than the actual statistics should bear out. And as the feminist community begins recognizing how rare the desperado is and shifting their focus to the predator, note that the next trick in the predator's arsenal is to shift focus onto...
As discussed in the comments, I completely agree with you that there are male victims of false rape accusations as well as victims of rape, and I would really love to see a system that does not harm one group of innocents as a way to protect another.
Well, I think part of that is a higher reliance on personal responsibility - i.e., prevention techniques need to be discussed without an accusation of "victim blaming".
This can be done better if the culture's default attitude isn't victim-blaming, of course, so now the whole damn thing looks fractal.
To make the recursion explicit: most men who try to offer advice on how not to get raped are not intending to blame the victim, but a certain subset of men are very good at creating an environment of victim-blaming that causes legitimate advice to get swallowed in the 'victim-blaming' filter. (These tend to be the same kinds of men who rape.) The biggest problem is that they have a VERY successful game rigged - the behaviors that enable their raping and shaming are all seen as high-status behaviors. If we want to build a new system, the first thing we need to do is to stop worshipping men as success-objects, in the same way that...
That makes changing policy well especially difficult - you have to really consider what is being said and not take anything at face value in public discussion about rape and other such topics.
One quick objection here: I think we absolutely have to take everything that is said at face value, AND ALSO examine the underlying subtext. This is part of what makes it so tricky.
Example: When someone says "but I respect women!", take that at face value, and assume that they actually DO have a legitimate desire to respect women; they are just confused as to how. Use that to adjust your tactic when dealing with this person, and frame your debate with them in terms of "this is how to show your respect; the way you're doing it now isn't working" rather than "you are bad and you don't actually respect women at all". If you take that at face value and they don't act in accordance with it, of course, call them on it.
Example: When someone says, "but she was asking for it!", take that at face value, and assume that in their warped narrative they actually DO believe that consent was given, if not implied. Use that to adjust your tactic when dealing with thi...
I'm not sure that the serial rapists are high-status. I get the impression that they're mostly medium status (typical for the bars they frequent).
The lower-end ones are, but those are the ones that tend to get caught. The recent Steubenville case seems more common to me - people who are protected at every step, who are at the pinnacle of their social group, and who are taught over and over that they are untouchable and can do no wrong.
In a certain sense, we are looking at a Pareto power distribution, due to a combination of mechanisms - at higher levels of social power, you both have more opportunity and access, and more immunity to prosecution and even suspicion.
Remember, most rapes go unreported. Similarly, many rapists go uncaught their entire lives. The demographics may seem skewed low due to the fact that higher-status rapists are far less likely to get reported against or noticed as suspects, let alone caught and convicted.
To connect this to the problem of (cost) function minimization, which is important e.g. in machine learning, changing a single variable at a time is even worse than gradient descent, which is a common method there. Not only do you only look in the immediate neighborhood, you also only look along a single axis at a time. It's no wonder that you don't find a local minimum this way!
The general idea sounds right, but I think this article would benefit if the "overall summary" paragraph was put first - the examples would be easier to read if one already knew what they were going to be examples of.
This seems like a good article - could any downvoters post their rationale? (at time of posting, article is at -3)
Edit: There's also some really insightful and interesting discussion going on and a remarkable lack of flame - I'd hate to see it hidden.
A post that achieves a high number of votes in both directions strikes me as a very interesting post that should be called to attention. In other words, a post that is at +/- 1 because of 50 or so votes each way, is much more interesting than a post that is at +/-1 because of one or two votes.
I would recommend rather than showing just the sum, show the total of both +1's and -1's separately. It's strictly more information than just the sum.
Upvoted without reading for the trigger warning. Maybe I'll read it later: I suppose if it hate the article I might change my vote, but probably not. Sometimes it's in one's best interests to be a single issue voter.
Although the phrase "no strings attached" might not have quite the connotations you want.
I think a better phrasing would be "yes definitely means yes, within the boundaries explicitly negotiated".
I'm coming from the BDSM community, where explicit negotiations of consent and boundaries are kind of a Big Deal - maybe this is something that the mainstream sexual community could adopt with minor modification. (We've been beta testing it for them for at least three decades, after all)
...making it hard to consent to bondage play for example?
What you did there.
But in all seriousness, yes. A more 'vanilla' example might be: "I enthusiastically consent to sex, but only if you wear a condom."
I think it's deliberately constructed to imply both "Only Yes Means Yes" and "Yes Definitely Means Yes, no strings attached" - because both are needed for the system to function.
But... there are strings attached. Yes doesn't definitely mean yes. It means yes most of the time but if the earth hasn't gone around the sun many times since the speaker was born it can mean nothing, it can likewise not mean anything if certain other formal power differences exist. What 'Yes' means in cases when prompted by various kinds of coercion or in response to certain kinds of favours (but not others) depends on the environment and the subtlety of the participants.
Because the outcomes are the same (severe emotional trauma, socially stigmatizing positive feedback loops, and horrific displays of power disparity),
Except the outcomes are not the same, certainly not for everything feminists have been trying to get away with calling "rape" recently.
As an aside: Is there ANYTHING I could do to get you to stop this absurd retributive downvoting? It's become tiring, and it's making it difficult for me to tell whether I actually said something dumb, or whether I'm just paying my weekly "I once disagreed with Eugine Nier" tax.
Trigger warning: Discussion of rape.
Say that each morning you tell yourself that you are lazy for not wanting to get out of bed to go to work, as a way to convince yourself to get up. Perhaps if the only variable you changed was to lower your level of guilt, you might not get out of bed to go to work, and would instead take the day off. So if you are running a motivation system that uses guilt, feeling guilt may well be something you do not want to get rid of. If you got rid of the guilt but stopped going to work, that would likely be a net negative for your life.
To contrast, with animal training, you reinforce behavior you want in the animal, and interrupt, redirect, or completely ignore (ie: no shaming or guilting) behavior you don't want. It's also a similar methodology that meditation uses. When you meditate, you are told to focus on a meditative object such as the breath. When your mind wanders from the meditative object, you are instructed to just return your attention to the meditative object, and to not in any way punish yourself for having wandered. Also, you are instructed to not punish yourself for punishing yourself for having your mind wander. Meditation does not use reward during the meditative process, although it's common to sound a beautiful chime which will give hedons at the end of a session, and people often perform a pleasant ritual before and/or after meditation that builds positive association with the activity of meditating. Example page of meditation instructions.
So, if you switch to a positive reinforcement motivational system, such as that which animal trainers use to train dogs, then guilt is counter-productive for motivation, because it is a form of punishment.
If you only change one variable from a motivation system that uses guilt, then it may break the system, and be a net negative. However, there is likely a way to get a net utility gain by changing several variables of the system, such as by switching to a positive reinforcement based system where you add instant rewards that increase hedons and remove guilt and other punishments.
As it stands, there are many unreported rapes in American society. This excellent article debunks many myths about rape, including the classic myth that rapes are generally done by strangers using force:
A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape. None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.
The author goes on to explain how most rapes are from repeat offenders who by a median age of 26.5, on average rape around 5-6 women each, and that it is almost always someone who was part of the woman's social circle, and intoxicants are usually used.
The suggestion of change of system that I got from this post is actually in the title of the blog: "Yes Means Yes."
If the social rules for consent are changed from "if a woman does not say no, then it may or may not be okay" to "it is only okay if a woman says yes," then the boundary becomes a lot more clear to both parties. It would be a pretty radical system change, that would make a lot of people uncomfortable.
To be more clear - with a "Yes Means Yes" system, you don't need to have "No Means No", because sex is only had when there is a Yes. If a woman is too drunk to say or enforce no, then she is also too drunk to say yes, and sex is not had unless there is explicit consent. Having a Yes Means Yes social policy would change the onus of responsibility for making sure that sex is consensual from the woman - who is obligated to say no if she doesn't want to - to both parties who must say yes to proceed. This would not stop all rape by any means, but if implemented in a system where people were taught good communication and assertiveness, it would cut down on it. For example, instead of feeling that it was her fault because she got drunk and didn't say no aggressively enough, a woman would realize quickly, "hey, I didn't say yes!" and a predatorial guy who was one of the small percentage of men who rape women would also realize that the woman would be less likely to just feel ashamed and keep quiet and would be more likely to take action to defend herself.
Perhaps some people would be afraid that they'd remain virgins for life in this system - some men might be afraid that they'd be too shy to ever ask, some women might not feel comfortable actually admitting that they want sex. And therefore, people of both genders might be resistant to switching systems because they would imagine the switch without a complete social system switch or training. And as it stands, perhaps a lot less sex would happen at first. A system like that would require retraining a lot of society to be more assertive.
Just shifting one variable and telling men to say "I only have sex when women say yes" would be very weird. If a guy tried to implement that in the current system, some people might look at him like he was crazy or even get offended.
I think the "Yes Means Yes" system would work beautifully in a society that functioned based on a different system - where the social norm, which people were trained in, was to identify and state one's desires, and to not proceed without clarity. I do think it would cut down on rape, and unreported rape.
I've discovered that when talking to people about potential novel systems, that the most common response I get is for them to say why the alternative system won't work, based on what would happen if you changed one variable of the current system to be more like the novel system. Examples: "If I didn't feel guilty, I'd never get anything done," or "In a system where you always had to have a clear yes before having sex, people would feel really awkward and uncomfortable and opt out." (Alternatively I will often hear people justify alternative systems using similar arguments about single-variable changes.)
The examples above are a couple of the more simple examples of this general principle I've been observing quite a lot lately.
Consider how this applies to government systems, and other social systems. There are so many parts dependent on each other, that it is very hard to shift any single one without creating a domino effect of other shifts. So making any argument about how changing a single variable would fix or destroy a complex system like government is usually a huge oversimplification.
To quote Einstein:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
My thoughts on making large-scale change, are that you need to be thinking large scale. If you want to be a change maker, it is best to start small in your actions, study and experiment a lot. Focus your studies on success and failure scenarios as close as possible to what it is you want to effect, while as diverse as possible from each other.
Running single-variable experiments is important - it is just that it is only how you understand a little corner of the problem to be solved - that's not how you find the solution itself to a problem involving a complex system.
To give a biological analogy: Cancer is what happens when a single type of cell tries to become the whole system. Running a single-variable controlled experiment to determine what type of complex system you want to choose is like trying to determine the optimal form of cancer, as opposed to looking at an entire entity. Life is complicated.