On the overall note of the post:
I claim that most women have a “deep” preference for nonconsent in dating/mating. It’s not just a kink; from the first approach to a date to sex, women typically want to not have to consent to what’s happening.
...I would like to say that, in my capacity as just-some-guy, this has not been my lived experience interacting with women, and I disagree with a lot of the framing in this post. (I don't mean to contest what you've experienced; I would interpret these events pretty differently though.)
I'm writing this mostly because I'm finding it horrifying that it appears the LessWrong consensus reality is treating "nonconsent" stuff as a cornerstone of how it views women. This somehow seems to increasingly to be the case, seems wrong to me, and contributes to the erasure of some things I consider important.
5Definitely hasn't felt like a part of any of my relationships either. Though I have heard various women and people I have dated say things like this resonated with them, so who knows. My guess is there is definitely something real here, but I feel pretty confused about the centrality people ascribe to it.
Maybe it's related to being on the autistic spectrum, or something like that? Normies have their complicated social games; aspies complain about people "playing mind games" and would prefer to communicate things explicitly. Then people form bubbles where they find their opinions "obvious".
There are bubbles where women upvote/retweet things like "if he stops when you say 'no', he clearly doesn't care about you". I was never in such bubble, but my wife was horrified to find similar things when she randomly checked some profiles of her former classmates.
Maybe it would be useful to discuss a variation on the claim from the OP? Something like: "Given the choice between a smooth, slow, gradual escalation, where a woman feels comfortable pausing or stopping at any point in time, vs being put on the spot with a yes-or-no question, most women prefer the former."
If the objective is to minimize her discomfort, one could argue that a yes-or-no question is less than ideal. If she says "no", she might have an unhappy man on her hands. If she says "yes", changing her mind later may become awkward. Communicating that you behave in a predictable way, and can be trusted to continuously check in for discomfort, creates ongoing optionality for her.
This hypothesis could explain some of the observations in the OP, while being less vulnerable to harmful misinterpretation. It's still potentially controversial, insofar as the approach conflicts with verbal-consent absolutism which is trendy in some circles. But in terms of minimizing female discomfort, this approach might work better than verbal-consent absolutism in practice. It also accords with conventional dating wisdom to some degree (successful guys tend to be men who "make women feel safe", who are "smooth").
Another way to frame this is that you should aim for lots of micro-consents rather than one big consent. The most successful guys are said to have an incredible ability to read their partner, combining masculine leadership with emotional safety which allows her to collapse into her feminine. Perhaps best to scaffold with a lot of discussion as this becomes more intuitive?
A related idea from Mark Manson is that women deeply want to be desired, and both rape fantasies and marriage proposal fantasies are facets of this. If you're going to carry a man's child for 9 months, you'd like him to be sufficiently obsessed with you that he won't get bored with you during that time. The takeaway for guys would be to focus on the women that you truly desire most, and let her know what you like about her in a way that is suave, contextually appropriate, and forthright without being threatening, overbearing, pathetic, or unpredictable.
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1To elaborate on this, I think one of the arguments for verbal consent was along these lines: "Some women panic freeze and become silent when they're uncomfortable, they aren't capable of saying no in that state."
I think it's worth considering the needs of such women. However, I suspect they are a minority of the population, and it seems like common sense to stop if your partner is unresponsive. I feel we may have prematurely decided that verbal consent is the best way to address this situation. Maybe a better approach, especially with subdued women, would be asking something like: "Can I trust you to let me know if you're becoming uncomfortable?", then adjust going forward depending on her answer. This approach doesn't put her on the spot in the same way the "big consent" approach does.
Another thing. I think consent discussion is hotter when framed in terms of desire. Either "Do you want to make out?", or "I want to make out with you" (and waiting for her verbal reply/nonverbal makeout initiation). Asking "May I make out with you?" puts the man in a subservient petitioner position which is not as erotic in my view. (Of course, if that's what you're into, then go ahead.)
I've also heard it claimed that the "big consent" approach can actually be a bit of a masculine power play. I think the idea is that a typical man will say something like: "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" But if instead you say: "Would you like to come up and have sex?" That's hot because you're being direct, assertive, virile, and demonstrating a willingness to violate a (mild) taboo. This approach seems best to me if you feel fairly certain she will either assent in some manner ("maybe let's see"), or be comfortable rejecting you. It seems like a worse fit for subdued or anxious women.
Very interested to hear feedback on all my thoughts in this thread, especially from women.
To elaborate on this, I think one of the arguments for verbal consent was along these lines: "Some women panic freeze and become silent when they're uncomfortable, they aren't capable of saying no in that state."
This should be an argument for affirmative consent, which isn't the same as verbal consent (like, you mention "waiting for... nonverbal makeout initiation"). I do see people conflate them or background-assume that the one must be the other, which I think makes these conversations a lot worse.
I'm writing this mostly because I'm finding it horrifying that it appears the LessWrong consensus reality is treating "nonconsent" stuff as a cornerstone of how it views women.
Can you elaborate/give examples of this?
A fair portion of the most visible bits are John downstream of I think something like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qGMonyLRXFRnCWSj6/generalized-coming-out-of-the-closet. From what I gather from a distance the bay has a pretty intense BDSM scene, which I'm sure is great for many people, but it's something with sharp edges that don't look like they're being sufficiently respected or understood by all participants.
Almost every woman I have known well enough that they would have told me about it has showed psychological harm from previous unwanted sexual advances or, very often, worse. This is regularly the largest trauma they have, and some of the stories are pretty shocking and consistent in a way that lets you trace it the way minds in general are shaped around this.
One of the core cultural adaptations to the fact that the male sex drive can be expressed destructively is normalising consent as a required feature of sexuality. @johnswentworth's arranging language here seems to reduce the potency of that bright line in a way which looks to me likely to increase the rate of serious harm and generate legitimate feelings of unsafety in a large number of women.
Additionally, normalising nonconsent as a way to get sex tilts desperate or inexperienced men towards terrible, life ruining, mistakes when the person they advance on doesn't have this specific kink AND the unstated consent to not need verbal consent with this person at this time.
3I'm also curious about other observations, from James or others who agreed. (I'm not against the claim, but haven't noticed it, and can't think of examples. Bad if true.)
(... I guess there is a social-and-memetic cluster around Aella that rubs me the wrong way, for reasons that kinda rhyme with this? But I wouldn't describe it the way James did, and definitely don't see that cluster on LW itself much or see it as LW consensus reality.)
Have you seen my post Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers (3 hypotheses)? I think it’s related but not identical. In particular, the way I would put it is that “feeling safe” (i.e. like an interaction is low-stakes, or more specifically feeling low physiological arousal) tends to be a turnoff [at least for typical straight cis women, not sure about other cases]. And this explains many other things too, not mentioned by your post, e.g. rich / famous / powerful men do well in the dating market because interactions with them is high-stakes by default, simply because they have the power to make another person’s life much better or worse depending on how the interaction goes, and the other person knows that.
HOWEVER, if “feeling safe” is a turn-off, feeling genuinely terrified is a turnoff too. So I think your title “nonconsent preference” is an importantly misleading description. I think it’s an inverted-U thing, not monotonic. Laughter has an analogous inverted-U relation to physiological arousal—e.g. in physical play, a kid will laugh more as the apparent threat goes up, but past some point they’ll stop laughing and switch to screaming.
Generalizing just a little bit beyond rape fantasies: AFAICT, being verbally asked for consent is super-duper a turn off for most women. Same with having to initiate sex;
Neither of these links contain statistics about what fraction of women like being verbally asked for consent or dislike having to initiate sex. They're literally just one woman talking about her experience. I don't think this is very good evidence for your claim which is pretty central to your post.
I don't have a strong guess about what fraction of women strongly dislike being verbally asked for sex (especially if it's done reasonably skillfully and non-robotically); just to add another anecdote since we're apparently trading anecdotes around, I am a woman who would strongly dislike not being asked verbally before having sex with someone for the first time.
I would guess that more than half dislike having to initiate sex, based on vibes, but I'm pretty uncertain what fraction would say this is the case
So let’s start with some statistics from Lehmiller[1]: roughly two thirds of women and half of men have some fantasy of being raped.
Could you include more details about these statistics? "X% of people have ever had some fantasy." is extremely different from "the same X% of people have that fantasy most times when they masturbate" or whatever the case might be. I also care about how careful they were to distinguish between "x% of people have imagined rape occurring vividly" vs. "the same x% of people have actually fantasized about it as a pleasurable, sexually arousing experience."
It includes a much higher percent of people having rape fantasies than other statistics I've seen (e.g. here) (including, if you worded this correctly, half of men having fantasies about being raped, which would actually surprise me even more than the two-thirds of women statistic)
Do not confuse what you think you see as common CNC kink with women wanting to be raped (the crime everyone is familiar with and considers horrible).
Separately, men who say the things you have on this topic typically end up later turning out to have been violating actually important boundaries repeatedly. I hope that has not already been you.
edit: In terms of the beginning of aella's post, which was good as far as I got into it but I didn't read the whole thing, I seem to usually be +L +H, and they're great friends. In case that's relevant for evaluations of my stance here.
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1To be clear, I would currently mildly bet against john having already been a significant danger to others in sexual ways; I currently update in total, considering both +realdanger and -realdanger intuitions, about -0.2 bits vs population prior on him being an actual danger. but he's setting off a lot of my alarm bells, which is keeping him near the high-risk baseline, despite intuition he might be actually just a kinkster rather than a danger, But kinksters are high variance, so I've updated at least dozens of bits towards him being in a very high variance part of possibility-space. I've only seen him from a distance, and certainly can't promise the gals that he's actually fine or anything, but also don't know more than someone who's read all of his posts on whether he's safe. But his model-building seems flawed in ways that concern me, and his interest in this particular subset of model-building is concerning too. High variance. Could be pretty bad. Could be fine. Usually people who do this much model building in this way, and say these things about it, turn out to be concerning, but sometimes they don't. Might be trying to appear high variance because he thinks that's a good idea, for example.
More directly on topic: I'm not ready to agree or disagree with most of the substance of the post. I think John misunderstood some things that make him unnecessarily risky, but without picking through what I think of each claim: I do agree that some specific kinds of risky can be fun! ...in very specific ways that I don't think he has a good enough model of. I worry I'm going to hear about it as a retrospective about the people who got injured near him in three years[1]. I hope he chews on the replies until the differences click and he stops putting off a radioactive vibe.
John, I worry you're going to take bad models too seriously because you're systematically unable to see some kind of disconfirming evidence. On the other hand, notice what I haven't claimed as much as what I have! I think I'm actually a person who would produce evidence you'd misunderstand, if you were attracted to me, though I'm a bit noncentral in some ways due to being highly introspective. And given that, I still think you've misunderstood in many important ways that Aella and Steven haven't.
Like, okay, let's put it this way - if it were to turn out to have been true the entire time, what other generator could produce this evidence that also would produce evidence incompatible with this model? Or, in what way could "nonconsent" be missing the point about the generator? I'd sure like to see a slightly more ladybrain discussion, if that's available.
- ^
Well, I mean, I don't actually expect that, because I think we'll probably all be dead any time now unless someone (eg john) pulls a very particular kind of rabbit out of a hat, but that's neither here nor there.
4Look, I don't like dealing with the sort of stuff I called "deep nonconsent" in this post. Sure, I'm quite kinky in bed, but in the rest of the mating process? When someone who's interested won't send any goddamn signals, or sends negative signals while hoping that I pursue, it's just incredibly obnoxious. I strongly prefer to deal with women who actually send signals when interested, or better yet just ask me out. I want to date and fuck women who are, like, "on my team", not trying to make everything pointlessly difficult all the time.
And maybe that will change at some point. It's the sort of thing which sometimes seems less obnoxious as one understands it better. But man, for now, I sure prefer to just avoid women who do that shit.
Like, okay, let's put it this way - if it were to turn out to have been true the entire time, what other generator could produce this evidence that also would produce evidence incompatible with this model? Or, in what way could "nonconsent" be missing the point about the generator? I'd sure like to see a slightly more ladybrain discussion, if that's available.
I totally agree that there are other possible generators which look very similar to "deep nonconsent preference". Another I played with was e.g. "blame avoidance", i.e. something-like-ladybrain really wants any dating/sex to happen in a way which is "not her fault". That seems to mostly generate the same predictions.
So yeah, I am totally ready to believe there's some other nearby generator, and if you have one which also better explains some additional things then please state it I want to know it. I have not found it on my own, and one of the main points of posting this stuff online is that sometimes people come along and tell me what I'm missing. That's what I want. If you have clean examples where the model in the post would produce incorrect interpretations of what's going on, I also want to hear those. What I don't want is people being like "this is problematic and missing important things" without actually saying a single thing that it's wrong about or presenting any alternative model.
5What I don't want is people being like "this is problematic and missing important things" without actually saying a single thing that it's wrong about or presenting any alternative model.
Reading this gave me the same feeling I used to get reading Brent's stuff: you're pointing at a real phenomenon but also pushing a bunch of data out of frame so it's really hard to challenge the model. If you want counterarguments, I think you need to relax that, and especially not insist on a single explanation for every member of a set that was selected for being best explained by your favorite explanation.
31Relatedly, like, you're (OP) drawing a picture from a partial set of facts about a complicated thing - yeah, there has been some growing awareness that nonconsent fetishes are pretty common, but also, like, you're setting that against the "consent is very important" as understood social context - do you think that context was always there? Who do you think valued that context and made it widespread? It wasn't nervous men.
Reading this gave me the same feeling I used to get reading Brent's stuff
FWIW, while I can see this if I try, it feels very different to me that I haven't seen John do anything like be hostile to out-of-frame data once presented, or play games to dismiss it, or send what I read as signals that he will do so.
2A big one would be that...
When I look at the women I know who actually ask guys out, they are consistently the ones landing especially desirable guys. For women, explicitly asking a guy out buys an absolutely enormous amount of value; it completely dwarfs any other change a typical woman can consider in terms of dating impact
...isn't the experience of me or women I know. Asking men out leads to boyfriends who are generally passive and offload a bunch of work onto you (even when they're BSDM tops). But I found myself not wanting to comment with this initially because I couldn't immediately explain CNC fantasies with it.
Here are some other models that explain part of your data. None of them explain all of it, but they each explain something additional that deep nonconsent preferences don't. Also as I typed them up I realized they explained more than I thought, but again, your initial strong frame pushed out that knowledge.
- women are scared men will get angry if they go from "yes" to "no", in a way they won't if the woman goes from "----" to "no", so women delay being explicit until they have all the information
- "I would like to submit a formal request to touch your boob" is the lowest possible skill way to ask for consent. High skill ways are appreciated, in part because the space of boob-touching is large and you will never manage to convey sufficient detail verbally.
- A partner who is good at reading you is valuable in lots of ways- perhaps valuable enough to give up a bunch of guys who would have been merely okay.
- people are scared of rejection at every stage and women don't have the same push to get over it
- Gen Z men seem to have more fear/less push to get over it and indeed, AIUI aren't asking women out very much.
- this can also explain CNC fantasies- there's no risk of owning a desire and seeing it rejected
- women are disincentivized to express desire
(all models are possibilities and generalities, people are complicated, etc)
11I think one thing I didn't communicate in the post is that I don't necessarily intend to hypothesize deep nonconsent as a terminal preference. So, for instance,
women are scared men will get angry if they go from "yes" to "no", in a way they won't if the woman goes from "----" to "no", so women delay being explicit until they have all the information
sounds to me like one of many possible generators of deep nonconsent preference - i.e. it's directly explaining why women would typically have a deep-in-the-sense-of-appearing-in-lots-of-places preference for nonconsent behavior. It therefore sounds not-at-all at odds with the post, or at least what I had in mind when writing the post.
I don't necessarily intend to hypothesize deep nonconsent as a terminal preference [...] deep-in-the-sense-of-appearing-in-lots-of-places preference
I think you should have chosen a different word than deep ("Inner, underlying, true; relating to one’s inner or private being rather than what is visible on the surface.").
"Pervasive", "recurrent", "systematic" ...?
1I definitely took the original post to be describing a terminal value rather than manifestation of something deeper, if you meant instrumental that handles a lot of my objections.
But while I'm here, another data point: I've heard multiple young women say they won't make explicit requests in bed because what they mean is "weight this action moderately higher among your list of options" but the dude hears "keep doing this on rote until I give you another instruction". I haven't heard this from anyone over 30, hopefully it means someone learned something.
Just one data point: to me your post feel shallow in a good way. I can say: "I can't help but note how all this annoying behaviour suddenly become endearing to me when I am in love." but it feels like I am deepening your post, not contradicting it. Am I gesturing at non-terminal property you mentioned?
P.S. just noticed I am using "shallow" when there is literally "deep" in headline. Yet this is my impression.
"...isn't the experience of me or women I know. Asking men out leads to boyfriends who are generally passive and offload a bunch of work onto you (even when they're BSDM tops). "
This is very interesting and a perspective I haven't considered. Now that I think about it, the women I know who are asking man out have a mixture of outcomes, and while tend to move towards high quality partners long term (especially if they are polyamorous), they indeed complain about having had very passive exes. I suspect asking out removes the filter for proactivity and they are falling back to the base rate with higher chance of getting passive partners due to prevalence in the population. Actually even worse if we assume proactive males are sorting themselves out from the available population. (There may be some additional factor potentially contributing to passivity, but haven't thought it through yet).
Another observation I have is that they tend to be tops or switches with top preference. Assuming John is correct about nonconsent preference being the prevalent attribute in the general population, I would say they are the inverse, with that being the minority here.
My sample size is single digit though, so YMMV.
So yeah, I am totally ready to believe there's some other nearby generator, and if you have one which also better explains some additional things then please state it I want to know it.
My top hypothesis is that women experience much more intense negative reinforcement for rejection, both romantic and sexual, than men. This has been flagged to me by several of the most introspective women I've known. You can tell a reasonable evo-psych story, or a social norms one, or a practice/experience one, but the overall picture is going to be: being rejected as a man is going to happen a lot and is therefore not that much of a signal of your self-model should update towards things are bad, but being directly rejected as a woman is relatively rare and a stronger sign of being worthless in a way which feels more brutal.
Hence many women prefer to be advanced on without giving explicit signals of interest, because giving more of a signal of interest than the man then them turning you down just hurts a lot. It's not about consent, women generally do strongly prefer consent to be involved (other than a subpoulation with some specific kinks who you might have had an unusual sample of, given recent posts), it's about avoiding escalating in ways which might stick their neck out.
1Look, I don't like dealing with the sort of stuff I called "deep nonconsent" in this post. Sure, I'm quite kinky in bed, but in the rest of the mating process?
I believe you, but I also find the conjunction of [your kinks] and [choosing the 'nonconsent' frame/terminology] interesting, and would guess that it's not a coincidence. In particular, I believe I've observed across people that [things like the former] are associated with [biases and blind-spots-biasing toward things like the latter].
(And I feel like 'nonconsent' as frame/terminology is strained at best, and... bad, muddled in a worrying way, in a way that rhymes with what t.g.t.a. is saying.)
Another I played with was e.g. "blame avoidance", i.e. something-like-ladybrain really wants any dating/sex to happen in a way which is "not her fault". That seems to mostly generate the same predictions.
Do you think it has some disadvantage, such that you didn't choose to mention it at all in the OP?
So yeah, I am totally ready to believe there's some other nearby generator, and if you have one which also better explains some additional things then please state it I want to know it.
A very nearby guess: women tending to prefer a 'patient' role in dating/mating, and/or tending to prefer men who take and are good at an 'agent' role — this has broader explanatory power for common male/female roles and attraction patterns.
(But also all the things you're talking about, while anecdotally real, seem at least less broadly/strongly true to me than they do to you; women sending inexplicit-and-deniable-but-strong signals of interest seems more common and not a turnoff; flirting seems more symmetrical (not predicted by either of these models); etc.)
"Another I played with was e.g. "blame avoidance", i.e. something-like-ladybrain really wants any dating/sex to happen in a way which is "not her fault". That seems to mostly generate the same predictions."
Do you think it has some disadvantage, such that you didn't choose to mention it at all in the OP?
"Blame avoidance" seems like a candidate generator of deep nonconsent preference: if one never consents to anything that's going on, then one is not to blame for any of it (or so goes the story). There are other generators one could imagine as well - e.g. Elizabeth hypothesized elsethread 'women are scared men will get angry if they go from "yes" to "no", in a way they won't if the woman goes from "----" to "no", so women delay being explicit until they have all the information'. That's another hypothesis for what might generate deep nonconsent preference.
I settled on the term "deep nonconsent preference" because that seemed like the most direct description of the behavior-cluster, while assuming the least about what generates that behavior. I did not think (and still don't think) I had enough information to nail down a primary generator of the behavior.
"Usually people who do this much model building in this way, and say these things about it, turn out to be concerning, but sometimes they don't."
By this do you mean that:
John asserting that nonconsent is the baseline cis female preference in dating resembles to what is stated in openly misogynistic areas of the internet (redpilled/incel/altright), hence you feel he might be in the same category?
"John, I worry you're going to take bad models too seriously because you're systematically unable to see some kind of disconfirming evidence."
Would you be able give some more specific examples about the kind of disconfirming evidence you reckon John is missing? I think that would be the quickest way to show the weakness of his model.
Guys who care about openness and honesty should continue to be open and honest; and the women who are turned off by this are best avoided by us, tbh. Unless you (as the guy) are also into non-consent, the sex with someone who isn't visibly/legibly into you isn't great.
Is the "nonconsent" of rape(play) fantasies ('anticonsent'?) the same as the "nonconsent" of the other dynamics here ('aconsent'?)?
I went back and forth a bit on whether "nonconsent" or "anticonsent" was the right term to use for the bulk of this post. I've encountered women whose preferences look like one, and other women whose preferences look like the other, including at earlier parts of the pipeline (inconveniently). For instance, wanting a guy to pursue hard even after he's turned down seems not-uncommon, despite it being obviously very obnoxious in cases where it's actually unwanted. That would be an earlier-stage version of "anticonsent", as opposed to "nonconsent/aconsent".
I ended up going with "nonconsent" because it's a broad enough term to capture both, and I think both are relevant.
this post and the discussion in the comments makes me update against hanging out with rationalists in situations where they might try to initiate something without consent.
1See also: https://aella.substack.com/p/good-at-sex-inside-her-are-two-brains
I think your theories and Aella's line up reasonably well. Ladybrain runs the show a lot of the time.
1I wonder how ladybrain/hornybrain corresponds to other classic brain dichotomies like near/far, system 1/system 2, right/left, etc.
Honestly the idea of trying to activate hornybrain and suppress ladybrain feels a tad manipulative or ethically dubious to me, would be interested to hear how women besides Aella are thinking about this.
Honestly the idea of trying to activate hornybrain and suppress ladybrain feels a tad manipulative or ethically dubious to me
I feel Aella is just describing something that regular guys who are successful with women already intuitively/subconsciously understand. Why is us autists trying to build models to replicate what other people are already doing suddenly unethical?
The same line of argument can probably be applied to the OP to some extent.
This is a general pattern I notice, where as soon as someone finds out that you have a more explicit model of a social situation than most people, you are suddenly tagged as manipulative. Even though you are doing the same things for the same reason as other people, they are just doing it subconsciously.
I feel Aella is just describing something that regular guys who are successful with women already intuitively/subconsciously understand. Why is us autists trying to build models to replicate what other people are already doing suddenly unethical?
I don't have an opinion on the object level, but it seems like the obvious response is "it's unethical when people do it naturally, and also unethical when the autists do it systematically (but also, doing it systematically draws attention to it, which makes it seem worse)."
I think the line between what's ethical and unethical in social interactions is really blurry.
Just talking to a friend truthfully about something object level with no hidden intentions or hidden signals seem straightforwardly fine.
The manipulative boyfriend gaslighting her girlfriend and isolating her socially from all other people seems clearly unethical, even if he is doing it subconsciously.
But is e.g. flirting unethical in general? You are sending a bunch of covert/deniable signals, and are trying to manipulate the other person into having sex with you. The object level conversation matters very little to you, it's all about the verbal and non-verbal subtext. Sounds quite manipulative to me...
In this sense you would probably be treading on very thin ice if you tried to apply John's model. How much is too much without explicit verbal consent? Can you interpret a verbal "no" differently based on whether it sounds playful? If you apply the model fully, how do you avoid accidentally raping someone? (There are a bunch stories of women getting raped without every saying "no" because they were afraid.)
I think there may be more truth in what you're saying than a lot of people would be entirely comfortable admitting... although what's a cause and what's an effect is hard to say.
... but I also think that going around looking for "compact generators" of human behavior, especially social behavior, is basically asking to be wrong. In fact, you can apply a sort of anti-parsimony: if a theory claims to compactly generate any significant set of social dynamics, that's evidence against the theory. People are constantly coming up with simple explanations, and they're constantly turning out to be wrong, and any given simple explanation has to overcome that prior.
A whole lot of things are allowed to be going on at the same time, pushing toward the same or similar results, or more likely sometimes pushing in the same direction and at other times conflicting. There are allowed to be arbitrarily complicated networks of both positive and negative feedback. Which things are most important is allowed to change not just from person to person, but from time to time.
1So, there's this thing called Solomonoff induction. It works, provably, for anything Turing computable. And human social behavior is definitely Turing computable.
"If a theory claims to compactly generate any significant set of social dynamics, that's evidence against the theory" is an anti-inductive prior. It's like saying that things which have happened less often before are more likely in the future, and therefore the sun will certainly not rise tomorrow.
Solomonoff induction gives you a weighted sum over an infinite number of programs [1] . That's not compact. And if were computable, which it isn't, or even approximable, which it probably isn't for this case, I doubt you'd be able to collect enough data in your lifetime for it to converge to speak of. Not even assuming that you were able to reliably collect all relevant data, which you're not, and that you were actually encoding or processing the data in a formal way, which you're also not.
And if you actually did somehow get your hands around a Solomonoff sum, you still wouldn't be able to just grab a single term out of it, not even the one for the shortest program, and substitute it as "the" explanation on the grounds that "Solomonoff induction works".
I can understand "compact generation" as a metaphorical allusion to Occam, but seriously, Solomoff induction isn't even useful as a metaphor for any well-chosen approach here. You can't let formalisms like that invade your thinking to the point where you seriously think in terms of them in areas where it doesn't make sense.
Also, human social behavior probably isn't deterministically Turing computable even if you model the entire universe. Probabilistically computable, probably, yes. In theory. And to be fair I'm sure Solomonoff goes through just fine to nondeterministic Turing processes. But anyway, you don't actually have, and can't actually get, a machine that computes human behavior or even a meaningful approximation to it.
There's also no anti-inductive prior involved. What I'm saying isn't about the underlying phenomena at all, and certainly doesn't say that there's no regularity in them. It's about the theory, and it has in fact happened, far more often than not in my experience, that simple, single-explanation, "compact" theories, yield really bogus results.
Which is actually capable of encoding "lots of different, interacting things are going on" in a way that a single, deterministic Turing program would not be. ↩︎
Solomonoff induction gives you a weighted sum over an infinite number of programs [1] . That's not compact
The point is that the sum is inversely weighted by compactness, not that the sum is itself compact.
A thing in the neighbourhood which sorta looks like an anti-parsimony prior is an "anti-wishful-thinking prior". That is, we might think that humans sometimes have a tendency to latch onto overly simply theories and discard some of the data they should be explaining, so when someone proposes a theory that seems overly simple relative to the expected complexity of the domain they're trying to explain, it could be rational to update that they're likely engaging in "wishful thinking", when compared to someone with a more complex theory. e.g. if someone posts a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis that's ten pages long, or a very simple analysis of a trend in the stock market purported to give huge gains, etc....
1It's not anti-inductive to believe that sets of phenomena in [some domain] are unlikely to have simple explanations at [some level of abstraction].
WRT social behavior, it does seem to me that 'a whole lot of things pushing toward the same or similar results' is remarkably common, and the OP is too dismissive of other explanations, once it's thought of one, for my priors. (At the same time, I totally think [simple theories that help explain significant sets of dynamics] are real.)
As alluded to by the name of the website, part of Solomonoff/MDL is that there doesn't necessarily have to be a unique "correct" explanation: theories are better to the extent that their predictions pay for their complexity. It's not that compact generators are necessarily "true"; it's that if a compact generator is yielding OK predictions, then more complex theories need to be making better predictions to single themselves out. You shouldn't say that looking for compact generators of a complex phenomenon is asking to be wrong unless you have a way to be less wrong.
IME in this domain, in epistemology-for-humans terms that may or may not translate easily into Solomonoff/MDL, taking a compact generator of a complex phenomenon too seriously — like, concentrating probability too strongly on its predictions, not taking anomalies seriously enough or looking hard enough for them, insufficiently expecting there to be more to say that sounds different in kind — is asking to be wrong, and not doing that is a way to be less wrong.
(Looking for compact generators but not taking them too seriously is good, but empirically seems to require more skill or experience.)
You don't need to single out a specific complex theory to say "this simple theory is concentrating probability too strongly", or to expect there to be some complex theory that pays for itself.
1i notice that it's long been dogma that compact generators for human CEV are instantly and totally distrustworthy in exactly this way, that their compactness is very strong evidence against them
this feels related, but i'm not actually willing to stick my neck out and say it's 1:1
I'd say that different people want/do different things (otherwise we probably wouldn't have this debate right now; no one makes LW posts with convincing evolutionary arguments for why people breathe), therefore you should be suspicious of theories that predict that everyone wants the same thing.
- You can get wronger faster by using complex generators than compact generators.
- Matching the complexity of the hypothesis to expected complexity given the domain seems like an interesting idea.
- "People and situations being different from one another so you should understand them carefully" seem like an important and true message, worth belabouring, even though it seems clear to me johnswentworth already knows and acknowledges this.
- This comment feels to me like it might be dancing around saying "Hey! Don't rape people! Make sure you are not raping people! You are saying some pretty rapey things!" which feels like a more useful message, but one that feels more unpleasant to be making. Please let me know if this assessment feels incorrect to you.
1You can get wronger faster by using complex generators than compact generators.
... except that you have a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations. Or at least I think both of those are true of most people.
This comment feels to me like it might be dancing around saying "Hey! Don't rape people! Make sure you are not raping people! You are saying some pretty rapey things"
Nope, that's all coming from your expectations, not from me.
If I'd wanted to say that, I'd have said it. In fact, somebody had already said that. I actually downvoted it because I didn't think the inference was particularly justified by the original text.
... except that you have a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations. Or at least I think both of those are true of most people.
It seems pretty important to me to distinguish between "heuristic X is worse than its inverse" and "heuristic X is better than its inverse, but less good than you think it is".
Your top-level comment seemed to me like it was saying that a given simple explanation is less likely to be true than a given complex explanation. Here, you seem to me like you're saying that simple explanation is more likely to be true, but people have a preference for them that is stronger than the actual effect, and so you want to push people back to having a preference that is weaker but still in the original direction.
a natural immunity (well, aversion) to adopting complex generators, and a natural affinity for simple explanations
I think this is wrong in an important way... most people find math complex, even when it describes simple things, and they find (simple) human and animal behaviours and emotions simple, even though they are some of the most complex natural phenomena I am aware of. So a more accurate statement would be "people have biases in the space of possible explanations that sometimes lead them toward overly complex explanations and sometimes lead them to overly simple explanations".
Then we could recover your original claim that in the space of explanations of human behaviour, people are more likely to look for overly simple explanations than for overly complex explanations. But I think in explaining human behaviour people often do both, and when looking for sufficiently complex explanations, it is still true that more of them are wrong than are right.
Nope, that's all coming from your expectations, not from me.
Right. Sorry if it caused any offence. People often seem motivated to misunderstand and condemn others, so I wouldn't fault anyone for not wanting to say what they truly mean when discussing topics like these.
Generalizing just a little bit beyond rape fantasies: AFAICT, being verbally asked for consent is super-duper a turn off for most women. Same with having to initiate sex; AFAICT, women typically really want sex to be someone else’ doing, something which happens to her.
This isn't about consent. From her perspective she already orchestrated the situation in which you find yourself alone with her. It's a matter of communication. You should be able to tell that she has already laid all the groundwork for what is to follow. There's no question of consent.
Generalizing further: AFAICT, having to ask a guy out is super-duper a turn off for most women. Notice the analogy here to “women typically really want sex to be someone else’ doing”. Even at a much earlier stage of courtship, women typically really want a date to be someone else’ doing, really want every step of escalation to be someone else’ doing.
Yes, because women want to be sought after. Women want the guy to pick them out of many other options. Again, nothing to do with consent.
In both these cases you are essentially making the implication that the woman's decision to sleep with the man or to go out with him, is influenced by the man's action, but this is not the case. The woman has already made up her mind and given the man the opportunity. It's up to the man to take it. But there is no question of consent here.
I would buy that if I actually observed women who are interested in me orchestrating situations in which I find myself alone with them. That is not what I observe in most cases (excluding the women who explicitly ask me out, which is technically "orchestrating a situation in which I find myself alone with her", but presumably not what you meant). Yes, there's a common narrative about how women create affordances for the men to make moves, but that sure is not what I see actually happen.
My clearest data on this comes from slutcon, because I got explicit data (afterward) telling me that a whole bunch of women were interested. Two of them explicitly asked me out. Zero of them orchestrated a situation in which we were alone together, or anything else along those lines.
It has ever happened that an interested woman orchestrated such a situation with me, but it sure does not seem to be the typical case.
Setting prevalence aside and taking your case study as representative of some subset, there are some other things that might be going on.
First, a desire to have someone else initiate maps to the Allowing quadrant of the Wheel of Consent, which minimizes effort while maximizing feeling desired. That said, true Allowing should still be compatible with giving clear responses, so this doesn't by itself explain the aversion you are seeing.
Second, emotional reactions follow the pattern: event => meaning (via priors) => affect => narrative. Suppose this woman holds strongly negative priors about men's motivations. A consent request is not simply coordination, it's an implicit demand for legibility. But if she sees the interaction as inherently adversarial, that's giving you leverage. And if you do all the right things, that can be perceived as just more manipulation.
Now consider the internal conflict. She feels good about you initiating, then has a negative reaction to the consent request...while also consciously endorsing the belief that asking for consent is a Good Thing. Add the background tension of wanting to interact with men while viewing them as partially adversarial...and social advice to “trust your intuition” combined with long-term dissatisfaction with her relationship status and wanting to change it. That’s substantial cognitive dissonance with no widely shared conceptual handles. Hence the shutdown.
So the behavior you describe may be better explained by Allowing plus aversion to legibility (under distrust), rather than by a desire for nonconsent.
Other, non-substantive notes:
LessWrong may have high decoupling norms, but on charged topics like this, disclaimers may help prevent contextualizers from inferring views you likely don’t endorse.
Watch for selection effects! Women who give clear signals and are comfortable with explicit consent often pair off quickly. The women who remain visible in dating contexts—and thus command more of your attention—are disproportionately those who communicate more ambiguously.
11Alternative hypothesis: it's all about status. Or more specifically, the markers of status, similar to how beauty is a marker of health and fertility in women. Traits like bravery and confidence are markers of high status, which is required to ask women out, escalate, initiate sex, etc.
Evolution didn't settle on something robustly aligned to maximize fitness, but it does seem somewhat robust. That is, if people are consciously aware that status/health is being "faked" with confidence/makeup, that seems to have some negative effect if it's taken too far, but it's also respected in and of itself if done in moderation, which is interesting.
(This is ofc generalizing, and there are surely many data points that don't align with the overall statistical trend as I understand it.)
Reality could ofc be some combination of the hypotheses, or nonconsent could be swallowed up by status. That is, nonconsent is itself a signal of high status because high-status men tend to be more ambitious/driven, are unfortunately more able to get away with such things, etc.
The premise appears to conflate a report of people ever experiencing a fantasy (even once) to ongoing, primary desire, which renders the conclusion unsound.
However, even if the premise were true, wouldn't such a measurement of non-consensual preference reflect a culture of non-consent? Ie, a 'rape culture'?
Ability to engage in healthy consensual sexual relationships becomes a learned skill in such a culture. Over time, such skill becomes both more rare, and more valued. This makes even normative biological behavior, like consensual relations in humans, appear 'weird' or 'strange'; out of alignment with modern social norms.
I disagree with this but I think the reasoning is interesting
(Kind of reasoning by invariant it feels like)
I think that “deep nonconsent preference”, is messy, not as compact as it could be. I think a better explanation is that women select for men who could protect them (Not exclusively of course), and an important part of protecting is the capacity for violence, decisiveness, initiative-taking, and being comfortable with tension. These traits match up with your observations.
Running an encounter with a mindset of “deep nonconsent preference” could look the same as one with a "deep demonstrated capacity to protect preference" mindset, but has an important failure case if, as it turns out, she wasn't actually interested in you.
Steamrolling over consent issues is certainty one way to demonstrate "capacity to protect", but its rather risky and there are other better ways to indicate your fitness.
Every time I see someone mention statistics on nonconsent kink online, someone else is surprised by how common it is. So let’s start with some statistics from Lehmiller[1]: roughly two thirds of women and half of men have some fantasy of being raped. A lot of these are more of a rapeplay fantasy than an actual rape fantasy, but for purposes of this post we don’t need to get into those particular weeds. The important point is: the appeal of nonconsent is the baseline, not the exception, especially for women.
But this post isn’t really about rape fantasies. I claim that the preference for nonconsent typically runs a lot deeper than a sex fantasy, mostly showing up in ways less extreme and emotionally loaded. I also claim that “deep nonconsent preference”, specifically among women, is the main thing driving the apparent “weirdness” of dating/mating practices compared to other human matching practices (like e.g. employer/employee matching).
Let’s go through a few examples, to illustrate what I mean by “deep nonconsent preference”, specifically for (typical) women.
Generalizing just a little bit beyond rape fantasies: AFAICT, being verbally asked for consent is super-duper a turn off for most women. Same with having to initiate sex; AFAICT, women typically really want sex to be someone else’ doing, something which happens to her.
Generalizing further: AFAICT, having to ask a guy out is super-duper a turn off for most women. Notice the analogy here to “women typically really want sex to be someone else’ doing”. Even at a much earlier stage of courtship, women typically really want a date to be someone else’ doing, really want every step of escalation to be someone else’ doing.
Alternative Hypotheses
For all of these phenomena, people will happily come up with other explanations.
If you ask people to explain why being asked for consent is such a turn-off, they’ll often say things like “asking for consent is a signal that he can’t already tell and is therefore not attuned”. And sure, that would be a plausible explanation for that one thing in isolation. But then why are women typically turned off by asking a guy out? There’s plenty of reasons that even a very attuned guy might not make the first move.
If you ask people why having to make the first move in courtship is such a turn-off, they’ll often say things like “it’s sexier for a guy to know what he wants and pursue it”. And again, that would be a plausible explanation for that one thing in isolation. But then why are women typically turned off by being asked for consent? Even a guy who knows what he wants and pursues it might, y’know, ask nicely.
Stack these sorts of things together, and “deep preference for nonconsent” (or something pretty similar) starts to look like a more compact generator of more different things, compared to all those other explanations. It’s a model which better compresses the observations.
Hypothesis: Being Asked Out Is A Turn Off
Complete the analogy: (asking someone for sex) is to (being asked for sexual consent) as (asking someone out) is to (???).
Answer: being asked out. And since all three of those items are things which (I claim) turn off most women, one might reasonably hypothesize that… being asked out is a turn off. Specifically the “asking” part. A deep nonconsent preference means she wants to somehow end up dating, having sex, what have you, without her at any point having to explicitly consent to it.
And now we start to see how deep nonconsent preference shapes the “weirdness” of dating/mating practices.
Standard modern courtship story: man and woman meet in some social setting, and spend an hour or two “flirting”, which involves sending gradually escalating signals of romantic/sexual interest without ever explicitly stating that interest. But why though? Why does one person not just ask if the other is interested (presumably after interacting enough to have some data), and if not, be done with it in like 30 seconds?
Sometimes people will answer “well, flirtation is a costly signal of social competence”. But that could explain any complicated social norm; successfully memorizing lots of random social rules is also a signal of social competence. Why this particular norm? It sure doesn’t look random!
Other times people will answer “well, both people want to avoid the potential embarrassment of being turned down”. And sure, true, but again, it’s not hard to come up with lots of other norms or mechanisms which would achieve that. Why this particular norm?
Again, deep nonconsent preferences seem like a compact, sufficient generator. If she wants to end up dating or having sex or whatever without ever explicitly consenting to it, and he wants to somehow ensure that she’s actually on board but without turning her off by asking… then yeah, this whole dance of subtle/deniable escalating signals seems like the obvious norm which pops out.
… almost.
Subtle Signals and Blindspots
Story time!
So this one time I was naked in a hot tub with a bunch of people, and I said to a girl I hadn’t previously talked to “What’s your deal? It seems like your brain turns off when someone touches you.”. She replied that wasn’t the case at all… and later, well after that encounter, wrote that by “not the case at all” she intended to mean “yes, exactly!” and in fact she felt quite surprised and flattered to be seen. She totally failed to convey any playfulness with that reply, but fortunately my priors were strong enough that I just didn’t believe her denial anyway. So a few minutes later, I asked if she wanted to cuddle, and she gave a non-answer. After the encounter, she wrote that she “tried to communicate yes as clearly as [she] could with [her] body”. Which, apparently, meant… looking like she was falling asleep. Just kind of out of it.
Now, that situation did eventually physically escalate. It worked out. At one point she even gave a very clear signal that she wanted her boobs groped, so she did have some ability to communicate. But I want to focus on that early part of the exchange, because it’s such a clear case where (1) I know from the later report that she intended to send a signal, but (2) she just completely, ridiculously failed to send the intended signal at that stage. What’s notable is that it wasn’t, like, “oh I can see where she might think she conveyed the thing but it didn’t really work”. No. She tried to convey “yes” to an opener with an unplayful denial. She tried to convey “yes” to marginal sexual escalation by looking like she was falling asleep. That’s a “where does Sally think the marble is?” level of theory-of-mind failure. Just a complete failure to think from the other person’s perspective at all.
… which screams “motivated blindspot”.
People have this story that flirting involves two people going back-and-forth, sending escalating signals of interest to each other. And yet, that is basically never what I see in practice, even in cases where I later learned that she was interested. What I actually see in typical flirtatious practice is that it’s the guy’s job to send escalating signals, and the only signal the girl sends is to not leave. Sometimes the girl is convinced she’s responding with signals of her own, but it’s usually like that hot tub case, at least in the early stages: she’s clearly funny in the head about subtle signals, telling herself that she’s “sending a signal” when it should be very obvious that she’s not if she considers his perspective at all. Again, it screams “motivated blindspot”.[2]
I think the motivation behind that blindspot is roughly deep nonconsent preference. It’s not just that most women are turned off by being explicitly asked for consent. Most women are turned off (though to a lesser extent) by even having to hint at their own interest. It damages the illusion that this is happening to her independent of what she wants. But the standard story involves mutual signalling, and if she fails to send any signal then it’s clearly her own damn fault when guys she likes don’t bite, so she’s expected to send signals. And that’s where the motivated blindspot comes in: she’s expected to send signals, but is turned off by sending signals, so what actually happens is that she doesn’t send any actual signals but somehow tells herself that she does.
… But Then Reality Hits Back
Motivated blindspots can only survive so much feedback from reality. But in some environments, women have enough opportunity that the blindspot can survive.
Gender ratios matter a lot for dating/mating experiences. I personally recently spent a week in notoriously female-heavy New York City and had a meetcute while there: I ended up sitting next to a cute girl at a ramen place, she was also there alone, we flirted, it was adorable. Meanwhile, back home in notoriously male-heavy San Francisco, that has never happened in ten years of living here.
I would guess that, in New York City, most women are forced to learn to send actual signals. That motivated blindspot can’t survive. Similarly, I have noticed that older women are much more likely to send actual signals - whether due to gender ratios or just having had a lot more time to learn.
Hypothesis: in practice, probably-mostly-unintentionally, most women spend most of their spare bits of dating-optimization on deep nonconsent preferences early in the pipeline. When I look at the women I know who actually ask guys out, they are consistently the ones landing especially desirable guys. For women, explicitly asking a guy out buys an absolutely enormous amount of value; it completely dwarfs any other change a typical woman can consider in terms of dating impact. Sending clear, unambiguous signals of interest is almost as good. But the reason so much value is available is because most women do not do that.
The less slack women have in dating/mating, i.e. the fewer attractive guys available, the more they’re forced to make a first move, and the sooner that blindspot gets removed.
The Weirdness of Dating/Mating
Let’s put all that together.
I claim that most women have a “deep” preference for nonconsent in dating/mating. It’s not just a kink; from the first approach to a date to sex, women typically want to not have to consent to what’s happening.
That’s why guys usually have to make the first approach, despite women being far pickier than men. That’s why flirtation involves gradual escalation of nonexplicit signals, rather than just asking. That’s why rape fantasies are so common, and why asking for sexual consent is such a turn off.
People have other explanations for each of these, but taken together, deep nonconsent preferences are much more compact generator. They explain more different patterns in more different places.
This is why dating/mating practices are so weird, compared to other parts of the human experience. We need to negotiate interactions which both people like, with (at least) one person offering as few clues as possible about whether they like it.
From the book Tell Me What You Want, which is based on a survey of just over 4000 people with pretty decent demographic cross section.
Separate from this, some women will just directly ask guys out. That’s a whole different thing from typical flirtation; no blindspot involved there. Also those same women who actually ask guys out some times tend to also be the ones who can actually send signals of interest.