To a certain degree, different brands of feminism could function as different parties (certainly in academic feminism they do).
You are quite correct. There are large disagreements and fissures within feminism. These disagreements might not be obvious or cared about by non-feminists (similar to how many feminists don't recognize the differences within MRAs and PUAs). See out-group homogeneity bias.
As you also observe correctly, there are some common premises (and biases) even within these different groups of feminists. Although there are widely varying f...
So, what would be an example of a "gender politics" that is "liberal" and "progressive", but not represented by any "party"?
The men's rights movement and pickup are both gender politics movements. Some segments of those movements are "progressive" (defined later), and some are not (just like feminism: some of it is progressive, some of it is not). These movements are not "parties" because they have very little political power. Feminism has quite a lot of political power.
First, some definitions....
But is feminism unusually biased for the level of its status?
I'm not sure.
If feminism weren't occupying that position of status, some other ideology would be, and I wouldn't expect this other ideology to be less biased.
An alternative is that feminism would share space with other gender political ideologies in liberal political dialogue. Just like both liberalism and conservatism share status among different parts of the population, feminism would share status with other gender political movements.
Unfortunately, in white middle/upper class, educated...
It's true that there is a lot of painfully bad epistemology in feminist discourse. However, the proportion of bad epistemology is typical of most human discourse concerned with advocacy.
That's true. As far as ideologies go, feminism isn't that bad. It's really in a similar category to men's rights, and pickup. Mainstream politics (democrat vs. republican) are at least as ideological, and religion and multi-level marketing organizations are much worse.
What makes feminism special is that in white, middle / upper class society, people often don't look on f...
Part of what's been going on is that your advocacy has left me feeling as though my fears about PUA were being completely dismissed. ... I don't know if it was unfair of me to assume that you hadn't performed a moral calculus--
On LW in general I've spilled gallons of ink engaging in moral analyses of pickup, and of potential objections to pickup techniques. In my PUA FAQ, I made a whole section on ethics. In general, I have trouble reconciling your above perceptions with my participation in pickup discussions on LW.
But my memory of those discussions isn...
Nancy, I'm a bit confused by your comment.
From my point of view, the PUA believers have the advantage at LW
What does "PUA believer" mean? Out of the folks who discuss pickup positively on LessWrong, I doubt any of them "believe" in it uncritically. However, they may feel motivated to defend pickup from inaccurate characterizations.
I do not see people who want to discuss pickup in a not-completely-negative way on LW as having an obvious advantage. The debate is not symmetrical. Anyone who can be painted as a defender of pickup is vul...
How can we reduce this polarization?
Maybe by moderates coming out of the closet, so to speak?
Hi, my name is Daenerys, and I have ambiguous views about PUA. My initial reaction was "Ew! Bad!" but after reading the debates here, talking with a friend, and learning more elsewhere, my views towards it have softened. I still do not think that all of it is 100% ok though. It is a complicated issue with many facets.
Mainly I wish it wouldn't hijack non-PUA discussions. I am seriously close to just starting a PUA discussion to keep all this stuff in one place, but I guess I feel if anyone should do it, it should be the mods.
PUA Moderates of the World, Unite!
As a contrasting data point, my contrarian group blog started during that time, and we are still going, with more readers than ever. Apparently there is a niche for people who are interested in mostly dry, slightly polemical, relatively rigorous discussion of gender politics.
There are men who chose women who mistreat them, sometimes one such woman after another, but I've never heard anyone say "men prefer bitches".
I think the hypothesis would be that women choose men who are "jerks" partly because they are jerks, while men choose women who are "jerks" because they just don't care so much about personality traits, and/or despite those women being jerks.
Examining this hypothesis would require an operationalization of "jerk."
and then dividing them into several categories:
Traits that are indeed actively attractive to women, or some subset thereof.
Traits that are neutral per se, but have a positive correlation with others that are attractive, or negative correlation with others that are unattractive.
Traits that are unattractive, but easily overshadowed by other less obvious (or less mentionable) traits, which produces striking but misleading examples where it looks like the "jerk" traits are in fact the attractive ones.
Here's a couple more:
Traits that are neutral
IOW the reason jerks are more successful might be that they cockblock other guys. It makes perfect sense to me and, in retrospect, I'm surprised that it took so long for someone to hypothesise this.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like "being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don't face a punishing gender ratio in that niche."
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn't an oversaturation of people like you that you're competing with.
This is taking the unfortunate/entitled/nice/beta/shibboleth-of-your-choice males' complaint too far at face value - i.e., that they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial.
I used to believe this, but after doing some research, and further experience, I changed my mind.
First, the available research doesn't show a disadvantage of altruism, agreeableness, and prosocial tendencies for men.
I used to experience agreeableness and altruism as disadvantages. Now I experience agreeableness as sometimes a big advantage, and sometimes a mo...
DH7 should be kept internal, at least at first. Being misinterpreted as trying to construct a straw man when you've been trying to do the opposite can derail a conversation. To actually believe that you've made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you're arguing with would have to admit that you've created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.
This.
DH7 is of limited use in an adversarial debate, unless your opponent is open-minded. It could convince fence-sitters, but only if they are open-minded.
The problem with DH7 is that it...
I think you were on the right track with the word "quirky." It was the OkCupid article's game theoretic hypothesis that I was objected (referenced by avoiding people "inundated with messages" in your comment).
Flirting. Through painful trial and error, I've found that my hunch that a woman likes me is almost always wrong. Someone will be flirting very heavily with me, and I'll think "there is no way in the world she's not into me", and then it will turn out she will not be into me.
Another possibilities behind this, in addition to Vladimir_M's excellent hypothesis:
There is a small percentage of women who look like they are flirting with everyone, even though they are merely being friendly.
If 5% of women are flirtatious with no attraction, they could...
and rather than a supermodel who must be inundated with messages, it's someone quirky whose average rating is only a 3 (and thus approachable)
That's the hypothesis that OkCupid advanced: game-theoretically, it makes sense to go for people you are strongly into who other people aren't into. But there's a problem with this hypothesis: it could turn out to be true, but right now, it's sort of silly.
I agree. Failing to recognize sex differences in attraction (particularly greater female selectiveness and preferences for behavior and personality traits) will sabotage males, and leave females turned off and creeped out.
I think you are laboring under a slight misapprehension about personality research. Myers-Briggs isn't solid science. The eneagram isn't solid science.
Your understanding is consistent with mine. Myers-Briggs is really frustrating, because some of its ideas are anecdotally compelling (Introversion vs. Extraversion, Thinking vs. Feeling), while others are esoteric (Judging vs. Perceiving and Sensing vs. Intuition). At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW), but I don't know if any of the other type combination...
It might be possible that flirting is more useful for negotiating short term sexual encounters, but I think there are still applications for long term relationships. For example, flirting can help determine whether your senses of humor are compatible, which could important for a long-term relationship.
Although you might not care much about the information conveyed through flirting, your prospective partners very much might. Flirting will give them a lot of information about your character and social experiences, which they could find useful for determining their desire for a relationship of any length.
All long-term relationships start off being short-term.
The way I experience a distaste in flirting is that it seems annoying and counterproductive to beat around the bush.
I see flirting somewhat differently. Flirting gives an opportunity for both partners to showcase their social skills and gain information about what they each respond to sexually, and what sort of relationship they might have if they were to embark on one. It's like a mutual interview. Flirting will help your potential female partners determine what kind of guy you are, and if they are into you.
Flirting can often be direct, even though it...
And if she does understand then I will not judge her for being obnoxious, just for being obnoxious but ineffective.
Ah, but who says she is being ineffective? That depends on her goals (see my reply to the parent). If her goal is to piss off Bob, and/or make him feel guilty and/or make his start getting apologetic, then she is already doing well. She's already got him to admit that he has done something wrong without making any explicit accusations (assuming he is being sincere, not sarcastic). Who says her goal is relationship harmony? Some people prefer drama.
Humans were selected for having reproductively successful relationships, but not all successful mating strategies involve harmony.
Unfortunately, Silas' original example is under-specified, so there are many different situations that could lead to it, or potential power plays on both sides. I'm going to make a guess that the scenario (in Silas' imagination) occurred because of something Bob did or didn't do that Alice didn't like.
Alice is fuming, and she very much wants Bob to know. She feels that Bob should know better. That's why she won't tell him what it is. She wants him to figure it out for himself, and apologize to her. If he asks what is wrong as if he doesn't know, and she ha...
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of -10, but I think he isn't exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I'm a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I've run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren't publicized contradict the public st...
When any group is being sufficiently totalitarian in the name of lofty ideals, I support comparisons to other totalitarian groups, which may include the Nazis and the Soviets (among others). I believe that such comparisons can help us learn from history. Of course, the subject of such comparisons will always be both quantitatively and qualitatively different, but the Nazis and the Soviets provide intersubjective references points for certain political ideas gone wrong.
Of course, it could be more rhetorically pragmatic to swallow these analogies even when accurate depending on the audience.
This reminds me of the People's Republic of Tyranny Trope (TV Tropes warning).
All sorts of self-interest, repression, and tribalism gets justified by the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality. It seems that a large amount of aggression has been promoting by groups styling themselves as anti-oppression movements. I recently wrote an article about the modern notion of "social justice", which is beginning to show similar sorts of newspeak, in my view.
I think it's a matter of Schelling Points. For many people, their self-interest will gradually increase in an interaction with you in subtle ways (e.g. being late for things, being flaky on plans, being dramatic/insecure/tactless, etc...). They will slowly try to structure the interaction around their needs, until they run into a boundary set by you. I think this sort of behavior is totally normal for many personality types, male or female. I think the only types of people who don't do this kind of thing are some types of high-IQ nerds, introverts, and peo...
I've seen some such discussions get quite bad but I've seen others where apparently calm rational discussion took place.
That's my experience, too. I have seen progress being made in some of the discussions about gender, even though they can be frustrating. But perhaps I'm focusing on the exchanges that I was involved in.
PUA/Feminism are inherently somewhat political, especially when they are viewed as opposites.
Arguably, they aren't opposites, because they have significant overlap on certain dimensions. I've argued that a lot of pickup techniques are actually compatible with feminist values.
Then there are folks who criticize both feminism and pickup for being overly pandering to women:
http://lifestylejourney.blogspot.com/2010/02/pua-scam.html
...PUA theory takes the extreme position that men are usually to blame for lack of success with women. This of course complements
If I was reading the thought experiment correctly, the aliens are only allowed to let people die and then eat them. So the aliens wouldn't be causing any patients to die who wouldn't have died anyway. If the aliens were allowed to eat humans before they died, then that would change the whole example and make consequentialists even more pessimistic.
Then I have an "easy" patch: let the entity that does the spotting and killing be incorruptible and infallible. Like, an AI, an army of robots, or something. With that, I don't see any obvious flaw beyond the fact that, with this level of technology, there are very probably better alternatives than transplantation. But the idea of creating a machine for the explicit purpose of killing people might be even more creepy than the police state we're vaguely familiar with.
I suspect that the space of killer organ-transplanting AIs programmed by human...
This doesn't fix the problem; it only changes the location. Giving your national medical association the power of citizens' life and death is almost as bad as giving it to the government.
People won't be afraid in hospitals, instead they'll be afraid in their homes. They will have an incentive to try to hide from anyone who might be a doctor, or to kill them preemptively.
This policy would be a declaration of war between doctors and citizens. I can't see the consequences going well.
As far as I can tell, this would have no bad effects beyond the obvious one of killing the people involved - it wouldn't make people less likely to go to hospitals or anything
No, but it would make them afraid to go outside, or at least within the vicinity of police. This law might encourage people to walk around with weapons to deter police from nabbing them, and/or to fight back. People would be afraid to get genetic screening lest they make their organs a target. They would be afraid to go to police stations to report crimes lest they come out minus a...
Within the sort of of communities where polyamory is popular, I don't think it will be a big problem for the mating market. There is some evidence that highly intelligent people are more androgynous. If so, then sex differences may be less sharp between intelligent people, which anecdotally makes sense. If intelligent people are less gender-differentiated in general, then perhaps their sexual preferences are more similar, too. If there are less sex differences in mating preferences, then there is probably less sex differences in selectiveness and less hype...
JulianMorrison:
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It's a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I've read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn't find women "marrying up,&...
Don't poly folks want to feel special to their partners?
Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me. I want my partner to be spending time with the person (or people) she is best matched with, even if it's not me. But if it is me, then I feel great, especially when I see my partner dropping one of her other options in favor of spending more time with me, or telling me that she enjoys spending time with me more.
Certainly everyone could be pigs. But are they? Moral philosophy is heavily based on human intuitions. The fact that other people feel differently from oneself is (at least weak) evidence against one's own moral theories. There are many reasons to doubt moral prohibitions that are being slung around in public discourse about sexuality.
Declaration of morals is a social act. Isn't it a jolly coincidence how our promotion of certain morals just happens to make us look and feel better than other people? Isn't it convenient that morality gives us excuses to der...
Short version:
There are patterns in human sexual behavior and preferences that are perceivable anecdotally, or discoverable through research. These patterns can be used to make useful predictions.
In order to create a certain outcome, it helps to fulfill the criteria necessary to produce that outcome. There is a strong incentive to self-modify towards traits that are attractive to the people you want to date, unless such self-modification is sufficiently costly in terms of time, money, ethics, and sense of self.
Be as pragmatic as you can let yourself
It seems like we do have some areas of agreement, and I'm going to focus on the areas where our perspectives are different.
I absolutely agree. But I don't think it was necessarily good for him or for the people he encountered...
He seems to think his exploration had positive consequences for himself and for others, given that he has written this post. His perceptions may not be correct, but they are all we have to go on.
...I can't say what the effects of his behaviour were, are, or will be. But I can say that I would be very insulted if he had tried such
It sounds like you and lukeprog are doing a lot of the same things, and have the same skills... the difference is that you managed to attain these skills without needing to study them so much. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm sure there are people who might work as hard as lukeprog, and still not attain the results in dating that either you or him achieve, because they are starting off as more unattractive and socially impaired, or they don't learn quickly.
I know fashion well enough to turn heads when I walk down the street
If you're turning hea...
That's been my observation, also. But if it's true, I wonder why?
It could be because intelligence is useful for moral reasoning. Or it could be because intelligence is correlated with some temperamental, neurological, or personality traits that influence moral behavior. In the latter case, moral behavior would be a characteristic of the substrate of intelligent human minds.