Agreed in full 

The problem there isn't the Econ-101, it's the fool in the arm chair.

You can't just say "I have a simple armchair argument that no one could ever demand sexual favors", because that's not even a valid prediction of Econ-101. Maybe the person does want to provide sexual favors. Maybe they even want to provide sexual favors and then also claim purity and victimhood status to gullible people. That's entirely consistent with Econ-101.

Or maybe they aren't productive enough to earn their wage otherwise, and their job is better conceptualized as half prostitute. That's also entirely consistent with Econ-101.

If we have situations that look like "This person didn't want it"+"this person is productive enough to earn their wage", then if we also have Econ-101 we notice a contradiction. We can't just assume the bottom line that Econ-101 is somehow wrong without finding an identifiable error and be justified in our assumptions. Neither can we assume people will necessarily do what's in their best interest and assume "This person wanted it, actually", without finding an identifiable error in the perception that they didn't.

There's an actual puzzle to be solved here, and we can't write the bottom line first and also get to the right answer on anything but chance.

I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they're so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.

I don't teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions. 

At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don't want our children to grow up with sexual shame that continues into marriage, but if the kindergarten teacher starts teaching kids about how great sex is and offering to show them, then do you take a stance of "well, I don't want my five year old to think sex is bad..." or do you say "Absolutely not."?

Information sharing and force are both useful tools, and while it's better to lean on the former as much as possible it is important to be able to fall back on the latter. People just don't have a good idea of how to do the former (and are kinda 'sinful' themselves) so they over-rely on the latter.

Using force (including social shame) is a symmetric weapon so it is more easily (even unintentionally) corrupted into serving less pure motivations, but it also serves pure motivations when necessary.

The question of "Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?" is important, but messy.

Which people? Which pressure? If I know two people who grew up in Christian households, and one of them grew up in a strict household, married a virgin and is happy and without sexual shame, and another grew up in a less strict household and had premarital sex but felt bad about it, then how do we judge Christianities "anti sex" norms here?

I'd say we can notice which are more effective at bringing about good outcomes, and which have more pure intent and are heavier on the information to pressure ratio. But we cannot separate them. I know some people who absolutely reject the pressure -- and then come to learn on their own the value it was pointing at -- and other people who are handled delicately with pure information and then shame themselves for not learning to like sweets in the optimal way instantly. 

It's kinda a mess.

You're arguing that attempts to decrease candy consumption are coercive rather than informative, and are in ways counterproductive. I agree with this. You take this to mean it's not a "good faith attempt", but as a general rule people don't know how to do any better than this. 

It's true that people can appeal to "sinfully delicious" to sell you their dessert, but why don't broccoli salesmen do the same? Why not toothbrush salesmen? If "Sinful" means "good", actually, and it originates with salesmen, then why isn't everything "sinful"?

The answer is that it didn't originate with salesmen. Dessert salesmen are leaning on the preexisting "Anything that feels this good must be a sin", so the question is where that came from. One obvious explanation is that things that feel that good tend to be pursued a lot, and there are contexts in which those pursuits are less desirable than it may seem.

I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he's asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won't either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.

Even you notice that he will ask for sweets for the wrong reasons and that you don't always expect him to learn efficiently from experience. That's where the pressure to coerce your kid into eating less sweets comes from.

You're smarter and wiser than most, and so you're able to teach your kid these things more effectively and with transmission of neuroses, and that's great.  I try at that as well, and have noticed some of the same things (though not all; I'll have to play with the 'appetizer' bit).

I'm not arguing that the things you're pointing at don't exist, just pointing at the fact that people don't know how to do any better. We can flip the sign on this and look at how people handle teaching their kids about getting their shots at the doctor. People want their kids to be okay with it because it's an "anti-sin" in that it in reality it is better than it feels. That's why they try to tell kids "It's okay! It just feels like a little pinch!"

And these attempts are equally counterproductive, because as a general rule people don't know how to avoid teaching their own neuroses. I told my two year old that shots are bad and scary and that I was too scared so she needed to go first. She had fun showing me how to be brave, and only cried when she couldn't get a second shot.

The next year, she watched some cartoon made by incompetent but well meaning people that was aimed at showing kids that shots are okay, and relearned a fear of needles. Because all these people know how to teach is their own perspective, and that perspective is "Needles are terrifying but we mustn't admit it because we need to get our shots". So I had to start over.

As a society we notice things. We just suck at teaching them, and even our most good faith attempts are still counterproductively coercive and lacking in actionable information.

Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both "not be ill e.g. with diabetes" and "eat tasty things".

That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I'm pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like "liver treats".

Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.

I think that's right, but also "more distance to failure" doesn't help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It's easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.

I'll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they're not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn't a combination I'm a fan of.

With respect to the "why do you believe this" question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I'm not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can't tell you which studies I've seen, but here's what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600089
https://unews.utah.edu/u-researcher-more-sex-partners-before-marriage-doesnt-necessarily-lead-to-divorce/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/testing-common-theories-on-the-relationship-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
https://www.proquest.com/openview/46b66af73b830380aca0e6fbc3b597e3/1

I don't actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don't remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.

I object to the framing of society being all-wise,

Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks "Trying heroin seems like a good idea", and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it's the most important thing in the universe.

Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I'd bet on "both" before either.

Consequently, I'd prefer "bunch of candy and no diabetes still" outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.

This isn't the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.

Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn't do before, and that's great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!

The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a "sin". It's not a "thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences" where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn't all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn't trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.

Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It's something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn't be so tempting because you'd know from experience that heroin ain't great. But you haven't, so you don't, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.

Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You're not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You're after how it makes you feel. You're after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you're wire-heading.

Pills that reduce the consequences for "sins" -- whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex -- can be good. If you're going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you'll learn your lesson instead of just dying.

But if you think "Syphilis is treatable!" justifies all nonmarital sex, then you're gonna need a new type of pill soon.

And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you're on track for a statistically less happy marriage.

It's not that options aren't often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren't good. I'm also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don't open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you're one of them.

But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn't exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.

As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife -- whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a "I like you and would have sex with you" level of attraction into a "I will do whatever it takes to marry you" level of attraction. It's hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I'm quite confident that he wouldn't have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It's hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn't have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.

that seems already solved with the concept of "commitment"?

You mean like... marriage? :p

In all seriousness, I'm not taking a "in marriage only!" stance here.

The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict "in marriage only!" stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of "in marriage only" which has been lost in what the norm has become.

He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional "in marriage only", and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn't agree with. You can't get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor's clumsy interpretation of them.

The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I'm saying. It's not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it's also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.

"Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure" is very difficult to actually measure, so it's more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong -- especially since "absence of coercive pressure" can't actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we're going to include in our hypothetical.

I don't think it's so simple at all.

If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don't think that's a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of "something more"), but it certainly doesn't work for all preferences and it's generally not so clear.

Let's look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it's unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide "Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great" -- and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.

However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What's happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they'll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.

So which preferences are "real"? The preference for candy or the preference for no candy and no diabetes? What you are calling "intrinsic preferences" is often just shallow preferences, which haven't yet been trained to reflect nuances of reality like "more of a good thing isn't always better" and "here's where it's good and here's where it's not good". There's preferences declared, preferences acted on, and preferences that will be regressed to in absence of guiding pressure. The declared preferences are generally going to align better with the coercive forces than the preferences that will be regressed to in absence of said pressure, but the preferences acted on can easily be more reflectively stable than those regressed to -- because all that takes is for the culture to be wiser than the individual, and the individual to not have caught up yet.

Returning to the case of nonmarital sex, of course it feels good -- just like candy feels good. There is something there that we need (namely "sex", and "calories"), but the question is over whether naïve indulgence across all contexts will result in blowing past Goodhart's warnings into more harm than good, and whether the "oppressive society" is actually forming you into a closer approximation of the reflectively sensible thing to do.

Societies pressures can end up perverted, but individual's intrinsic preferences start out perverted. Who is closer to reflectively stable, society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets, or the kid who wants to eat all the sweets? Society who aggressively shames nonmarital sex, or the teenager who wants to bone everyone?

As we mature, our desires change, and the degree to which reversion in absence of external pressures brings us closer to something truly reflectively stable depends on how much we've learned to separate overconsumption of sweets from appropriate consumption of sweets, and overconsumption of nonmarital sex to appropriate consumption. I think the answer depends too much on the specific (sub)culture and the specific individual at a specific time in their life to make any sweeping generalizations.
 

What are the failure rates? So, I would love to share data on the cases I haven’t (yet) been able to help… but I don’t know how?

1) How many cumulative hours have you spent on things where there has been no success and you guys aren't working together anymore on the issue? How does this compare to the number of hours which have resulted in success, and the number where the result is tbd? How many hours have resulted in partial or incremental success, without meeting agreed upon win criteria?

2) Of those where someone bailed how many times did they bail and how many times did you bail? There's some ambiguity here, but probably manageable. If you don't expect to hear back (e.g. because it's been two months), then count it as a bail. If you suggest that their problem isn't in your wheel house and they say "okay" rather than asking to try anyway, I'd count that one as on you.

3) To what extent have you "failed" because the initial goal turned out to be meaningfully mis-specified? E.g. someone wants to be more socially active in a certain group, only to realize their aversion to socializing in that group is actually well grounded, and they no longer want to achieve their initial goal?

4) To what extent have you caused problems by being too successful for the specified goal? E.g. The person actually ends up active in that social circle before realizing that they've been wasting their time doing so. Or maybe you help someone be more secure and they're happy for it, but it did lead to them losing a relationship when they spoke a little too freely.

I think there's not much to update. "Exploitation" is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. [...] *Before you red-flag 'unfair' as well: Again, I'm simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.

This is where I disagree. I don't think it is simple, partly because I don't think "unfair" is simple. People's perceptions of what is "unfair", like people's perceptions of anything else that means anything at all, can be wrong. If you better inform people and notice that their perceptions of what is "fair" changes, then you have to start keeping track of the distinction between "people's econ101 illiterate conceptions of fairness" and "the actual underlying thing that doesn't dissolve upon clear seeing".

For example, if we have a pie and we ask someone to judge if it's fair to split it two ways and give the third person no pie, then that person might say it's an unfair distribution because the fair distribution is 1/3,1/3,1/3. But then if we inform the judge that the third person was invited to help make the pie and declined to do so while the other people did all the work, then all of a sudden that 1/3,1/3,1/3 distribution starts to look less fair and more like a naïve person's view of what fairness is. The aversion isn't defined away, it dissolves once you realize that it was predicated on nonsense.

Another reason I don't think it's simple is because I don't think "exploitation" is just something people are just "unhappy about". It's a blaming thing. If I say you're exploiting me, that's an accusation of wrongdoing, and a threat of getting you lynched if people side with me strongly enough and you don't cave to the threats. I claim that if you say "exploitation is happening, but it's no one's fault and the employers aren't doing anything morally wrong" then you're doing something very different than what other people are doing when they talk about exploitation.

If there's a situation where a bunch of poor orphans are employed for 50c per grueling 16 hour work day plus room and board, then the fact that it might be better than starving to death on the street doesn't mean it's as great as we might wish for them. We might be sad about that, and wish they weren't forced to take such a deal. Does that make it "exploitation?" in the mind of a lot of people, yeah. Because a lot of people never make it further than "I want them to have a better deal, so you have to give it to them" -- even if it turns out they're only creating 50.01c/day worth of value, the employer got into the business out of the goodness of his heart, and not one of the people crying "exploitation!" cares enough about the orphans to give them a better deal or even make they're not voting them out of a living. I'd argue that this just isn't exploitation, and anyone thinking it is just hasn't thought things through.

On the other hand, if an employer demands sexual favors from his poor young woman employees, that rubs us the wrong way morally in a way that is easier to square with Econ 101. For one, if he's not demanding sexual favors from his male or ugly female employees, it suggests that maybe the work they do is enough to pay them for, and if we collectively say "Hey knock it off. You can't demand sexual favors from your employees" he might keep employing them and giving them a better deal. Maybe "this guy is doing something wrong by demanding sexual favors" actually holds up in a way that "this guy is doing something morally wrong by paying market wages" does not.

I think "what validity is left in our concept of 'exploitation' once we realize that people can't be obligated to pay whatever wage we'd like to close our eyes and believe is fair?" is a nontrivial question.