Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way!

I put a reformatted version on Pastebin. If you want to use this, press the "HTML" button in the LW post editor and paste into the window that appears. (I also made a handful of small punctuation tweaks.)

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"Enthusiasm" doesn't mean exuberance. It means unequivocal agreement. You don't need to jump up and down, but you at least need to give unambiguous signals. Does that make sense?

You seriously think that what is likely a deeply embedded aspect of human nature can be changed with a little marketing?

Hmm ... consider the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years. Or, for that matter, women's economic role.

Things that people have in the past thought are "human nature" (or, more broadly, matters of "natural" and "unnatural") turn out to be quite socially malleable over just a few generations.

We shouldn't expect ourselves to be all that unusual in the course of human history; therefore, we should conclude that things that seem to us to be "human nature" — especially ones that inspire controversy and defensiveness — are likely to turn out to be socially malleable, too.

How likely is it for there to be a misunderstanding about whether something constituted "enthusiastic consent" or not?

Pretty unlikely. Being self-consciously dishonest is unpleasant and worth avoiding. People like to think of themselves as being good and honest. Most social dishonesty is less conscious and explicit than that, and hinges on maintaining ambiguity and deniability to oneself as well as to others.

However, we're disproportionately likely to hear of situations like that, because of narrative bias: that sort of thing, while rare, creates dramatic stories which people are unusually likely to repeat to each other and get each other emotionally involved in. Moreover, since we acquire a lot of our beliefs about society from fiction, if we haven't done careful sociological research, our models of social behavior are likely to be riven with narrative bias: ideas that tell us that the social world acts like movies, dramas, sitcoms, and soap operas much more than it actually does.

(Put another way: People have to be pretty honest much of the time, otherwise we wouldn't have a society that made any kind of sense. But good fiction about social interactions is more engaging if it's got as many levels of deceit as our little brains can handle. Since we acquire a lot of our model of society — especially parts of society that we're not personally familiar with — from fiction, we're likely to think of them as being more dramatic and deceptive than they really are.)

How easy would it be for a woman who did give "enthusiastic consent" to deny having done so after the fact because she doesn't what the stigma of having cheated on her boyfriend/having slept with a low status guy/etc.?

It seems to me that it would be a very curious theory of human sexual interaction which modeled women as scheming Machiavellian agents and men as disarmingly forthright chumps.

I find attitudes around mating rituals surprisingly traditional even among people otherwise ideologically opposed to anything traditional, and supposedly beyond old fashioned gender roles.

I find it puzzling and extremely alien the way many women who I find quite reasonable otherwise rather unreasonably, in my mind, refuse to make a move, instead hoping that their desired man will. But that's the way it is. This rule has barely budged compared to other sexual rules, which have changed enormously in the last 40 years.

We should consider separately whether a situation A could be improved by changing into a situation B (by changing multiple variables), and how to realistically get from A to B.

Because, I can talk about all the variables that should be changed... but the only variable I can change is my own behavior. (Technically, my own behavior is also a set of variables, but that is important for different kind of decisions.) So we sometimes get into a multi-player Prisonners' Dilemma. (For example, I can wait until women start showing their interest in me first, but... some other guy may just move faster; and the punchline is that at the end most of those women will appreciate that he did.)

There is also a technical risk in changing multiple variables. What if we succeed in changing some of them, but fail in changing others of them, and end up with a situation C which may be even worse than A? And that's actually pretty likely, because you often can't change many variables at the same time, and when you change only half of them, you may get a worse situation, which may make people say: "OK, this is just getting worse, let's stop."

Also, the more variables we change, the harder it is to predict the consequences. There is a big chance that something unexpected happens, and the reality will look differently than the B we predicted. And if it happens to be worse than A, now what? Change all the variables back? How politically likely is that?

Uhm... it's complicated. I don't want to make it a fully general counterargument against multi-variable changes, but it should increase the burden of proof significantly.

I'm sure that's what you'd prefer, all other things being equal. And if you could order up women from Dell, custom designed to your specs, you'd check that box.

But in practice, the very nice gal you've taken an interest in turns out not to be like that. And the next one. And the next after that. Is this single feature so important that you'd rather be alone than consider a woman not "up to spec"?

Seems to me there is a lot of confusion and/or miscommunication about this topic (and the manner this topic is typically discussed, is also not helpful).

From the links at your article and this comment, I get an idea that there are many violent rapes done by relatively few men, repeatedly. From a typical online discussion with a feminist, I get an idea that every man is a rapist, and that men constructed the whole society to help each other get away with their crimes. -- These two ideas seem rather contradictory. Or at least have opposite connotations.

I suspect that what really happened is this: There are some horrible crimes that almost everyone (except the offenders) would like to prevent, or at least punish. But we fail to do that, and that makes us feel frustrated. So in the absence of a proper solution, we want to find at least something, anything, to make us feel that we did something useful, that we are not completely helpless. Which invites all kinds of irrationality.

As an analogy, imagine that we live in a large village with wooden houses, and once in a few months, a house is set on fire. It is obviously caused by a human, but it has been happening for years, and we never succeeded to catch anyone. We can't watch everything and everyone all the time, so the arsonist has all the opportunity they need. (We are not even sure it was the same arsonist all the time, but the experience from other villages suggests that it is usually only a person or two per village.) We are desperate, and we are helpless.

In the absence of a proper solution, random pseudosolutions appear naturally. For example, whenever someone shows some anger (whether justified by circumstances, or not), people start saying that this is the kind of personality that could make one become an arsonist. Or when someone lights a cigarette, they are accused of "enjoying fire".

Sometimes political coalitions are built on common interests. For example an organization against smoking adopted the "smokers enjoy fire, which makes them dangerous to their neighbors" as their slogan, first because it instrumentally helped their goals, but gradually the slogan attracted new members who sincerely believed it. A huge theory about a "fire culture" is developed, theorizing that the ancient arsonists invented bonfires to make burning down of their neighbors' houses more socially acceptable; some people make a tenure studying this.

A few years later, smoking is banned, people are taught never to display anger in public, etc. Yet, the arsonist remains uncaught, and once in a few months, another house is set on fire. Which is seen as a proof that we have to be more tough on fire, perhaps remove all positive mentions of fire from books, or something. Because obviously, having a house set on fire every few months, is not how we imagine a decent society where we want to live.

EDIT: I also agree with ialdabaoth's analysis.

That it is the same guys doing it repeatedly implies that it is not a mistake.

nod one problem that occurs, though, is that the 'false positive' problem can be REALLY nasty for the people who DON'T fit the actual behavioral pattern, but who wind up in a situation or have an aspect of their personality that trips the sensors anyways.

It is true that the vast majority of rapes are committed by a small group of high-status predators who have a very effective schtick which is supported by our culture, and a smaller minority of rapes are committed as blatant predatory acts by low-status desperados, and an even SMALLER minority of rapes are actually committed due to a non-deliberate breakdown of communication by median-to-low status schlubs.

The thing is, the high-status predators are VERY GOOD at using culture to hide their predations, and to shift blame onto the desperados. This is why "stranger danger" is so much more engrained in the narrative than the actual statistics should bear out. And as the feminist community begins recognizing how rare the desperado is and shifting their focus to the predator, note that the next trick in the predator's arsenal is to shift focus onto the schlub.

Schlub-shaming (i.e., constructing a narrative about Nice Guys and focussing more on Nice Guy shaming than you do on fighting frat boy dickishness) helps support the predators. The schlubs need education, not shaming. I've seen far too many social networks where the fight is between the schlubs and the feminists, because the predators are REALLY GOOD at telling the schlubs that the feminists are out to get them, and egging the schlubs into making themselves obvious targets (i.e.: the PUA community).

Instead of treating the schlubs as "easy targets" to vent their rage against the socially untouchable predators, a lot of positive gain could be made if the feminist community instead explained to the schlubs that the main thing keeping them from getting laid is the predators running around making the entire environment too dangerous and hostile, and hiding behind the schlubs to do it. (EDIT: I acknowledge that this will be hard to do in practice, because the predators are so much higher-status and more powerful than the schlubs, and our social instincts say to always attack the socially weakest targets.)

Does this make sense?

function v = lwvotes( net, frac )
%v = lwvotes( net, frac )
%   Calculate votes for and against, given upvotes as both
%   net difference and fraction positive.  frac can be expressed
%   as a proportion or a percentage.

    if frac > 1
        frac = frac/100;
    end
    neg = net < 0;
    if neg
        net = -net;
        frac = 1-frac;
    end
    frac1 = frac-0.005;
    frac2 = frac+0.005;
    a1 = net/(2-1/frac1);
    a2 = net/(2-1/frac2);
    a = (ceil(a2):floor(a1))';
    b = a-net;
    if neg
        v = [b,a,a+b];
    else
        v = [a,b,a+b];
    end
end

Thanks for the information, I appreciate more statistics on it.

Lately I've been calling for a right-wing neovictorian form of feminism. The party culture that I witnessed at college seemed designed to put women in a compromising position: black out drunk, scantily clad, in a fraternity house. The sole attempt at sexual assault prevention is shaming sober males. Questioning the whole culture is never done, since "sexual liberation" is also part of feminism. But it really doesn't seem in women's interest.

I read a rape confession thread on reddit once and I was struck by how most of the men deeply regretted their actions and how some had even had their lives destroyed by it. Many of them got into bed drunk and horny with a woman in the same state before she withdrew consent. Few were without remorse.

Following up on your article, I think we should tell girls that 2/3rds of women are raped while they are intoxicated. But feminists would never stand for it. They believe that they have the right to make themselves drunk and vulnerable without being raped. And of course they do - but rights are flimsy things when you're counting on them for protection.

I also have the right to leave an iPad out on my carseat in downtown SF without having my car broken into. But I don't insist on my right the way feminists do.

People already take into account how much they weigh, how familiar they are with alcohol, etc. when deciding what and how much to drink.

If I'm with someone who weighs about half as much as me and they drink three half pints while I drink three pints, I wouldn't treat them as though they were much more sober than me or expect them to treat me as though I was much more drunk than them.

The exception to the general Man/Woman presumption you mention even seems to have its own stereotype that gets used in various media: A man wakes up in bed with a particularly heavy woman, is ashamed, and has no idea how that happened.

That's probably more because “heavy” is what the “various media” usually use to signify something like ‘as sexually undesirable to the median man as the median man is to the median woman’.

What you're unpacking seems to be your own understanding of cancer (which is fine, other than the "cell line"), for I have no clue how you get that from "tries to become the whole system". Then again, I also feel like I'm only guessing at what "trying to determine the optimal form of cancer, as opposed to looking at an entire entity" means, so it may be me.

In general, "start with examples" is often good advice, and I sometimes do it myself. But I think that it's somewhat problematic here, since the examples are somewhat long and, furthermore, the way they're structured makes it somewhat unclear what the reader should be focusing on.

Actually, "these examples could be clarified" is probably more useful advice for me to give than "put a summary first", given that they'd feel a little confusing even if you did have the summary first. I'll elaborate.

(Obvious caveat: the follow is just my impression, other people may have found this clearer.)

The first example is clear enough until the end of the first paragraph. Then the second paragraph starts with

To contrast, with animal training, you reinforce behavior you want in the animal, and interrupt, redirect, or completely ignore (ie: no shaming or guilting) behavior you don’t want.

We start out with "to contrast", but for me at least, it wasn't clear what the two things that were being contrasted were. Now that I know the right interpretation, I think the intended contrast was something like "eliminating guilt when you're running a guilt-based system hurts, versus, eliminating guilt while also providing an alternative positive motivator helps".

But notice that as written, the second paragraph doesn't actually talk about systems that also eliminate guilt, but rather about systems which don't increase guilt (ie. systems that do not include a guilt-increasing component). And on top of that, there is the mention of "[m]editation does not use reward during the meditative process", which makes it sound like meditation also didn't have any particular positive motivators either. You do mention that people often do add extra positive rituals to meditation, but it currently sounds like a sidenote that admits the existence of an exception to the general rule, rather than the general rule itself.

So, at least to me, by the second paragraph my idea of the contrast you were trying to make was something like "eliminating guilt when you're running a guilt-based system hurts, versus, there exist systems that don't care about guilt" - which isn't really a clear contrast, and it felt obvious that I was missing something.

The next paragraph helped a little, though again its connection to the previous paragraph felt unclear - "So, if you..." sounded like it would be a straight follow-up to what had been just said, but it was referring to animal training, which had only been discussed for one sentence a while back, with the (seemingly unrelated, since it didn't seem to talk about rewards or positive reinforcement) meditation discussion in between.

Then there came the example summary, which made me go, "oh, okay", but it still felt confusing since the summary of the example didn't seem to be talking about the same thing as the actual text of the example.

Then we got to example two. It was still unclear to me what the most important gist of the first example had been, and now we seemed to jump to an entirely different subject. It was also structured differently from the first example - unlike the first example, it didn't start by giving a single paragraph's worth of description of a system that failed when a single variable was changed. Instead, the first four paragraphs were basically an introduction, then it suggested changing a single variable in the fifth, and aside for a brief "that would make a lot people comfortable", it didn't even say anything about the negative effect of only having a single-variable change until we were already in the seventh paragraph. And unlike in the first example, where we contrasted two different techniques (one guilt-based vs. one reward-based), this example contrasted a partial and full technique (only switch to "yes means yes" vs. switch to "yes means yes" and also make people more assertive), again making the structure of the example more dissimilar to the previous one.

If you have two examples from very different domains, it helps a lot to have them follow a similar structure - that way, the reader can at least pick up on the structure and let that guide their interpretation of what the relevant similarities and dissimilarities in the examples are. The more different the structure, the larger the risk that the reader gets confused about what they're expected to pay attention to - like happened to me.

I don't know how common my reaction was, but on my part the problem was also exacerbated by the fact that "let's switch to yes means yes" didn't seem like a particularly obvious example of something where you'd need to change several variables in order to make it work well. I first ran into the idea that we should rather be promoting a norm of "yes means yes" rather than "no means no" some months back, and then it seemed to me like a clear and obvious improvement. It didn't occur to me before reading your post that such a change would also require any major adjustments to people's assertiveness - and in fact this still doesn't feel particularly clear to me, and feels more like the kind of minor change that would occur automatically and which would be just a minor hassle at most. So that also made it harder to intuitively grasp what the example was trying to say.

If you want to start with two examples, by the time the reader has read them, that person should already have at least a vague idea of what those examples were about. For me that didn't happen, and the examples actually felt disconnected with the overall thesis even after the thesis had been presented in the "overall summary" paragraph.

But the examples are long, and with no introduction whatsoever, I can't tell what they're examples of, so I don't know what to do as I'm reading the examples. (I confess I didn't read this post, and this is the other reason why aside from the formatting.)

The article is currently at 52% positive, with one upvote showing. I think the smallest number of votes which could produce that exact result is 51 positive, 50 negative.

There has to be rounding, but (looking for vaguely plausible numbers), it has to be between 67 positive, 66 negative and possibly as low as 41 positive, 40 negative, depending on how the rounding is done.

Given my druthers, I'd like to see a graph showing the votes over time.

I wonder if that's why there's so much downvoting in the comments here?

Although the phrase "no strings attached" might not have quite the connotations you want.

I think a better phrasing would be "yes definitely means yes, within the boundaries explicitly negotiated".

I'm coming from the BDSM community, where explicit negotiations of consent and boundaries are kind of a Big Deal - maybe this is something that the mainstream sexual community could adopt with minor modification. (We've been beta testing it for them for at least three decades, after all)

I think it's deliberately constructed to imply both "Only Yes Means Yes" and "Yes Definitely Means Yes, no strings attached" - because both are needed for the system to function.

But... there are strings attached. Yes doesn't definitely mean yes. It means yes most of the time but if the earth hasn't gone around the sun many times since the speaker was born it can mean nothing, it can likewise not mean anything if certain other formal power differences exist. What 'Yes' means in cases when prompted by various kinds of coercion or in response to certain kinds of favours (but not others) depends on the environment and the subtlety of the participants.