How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy

Okay. But what is the content of "whee, I'm a narrative"?

Well, for example, if more than a third of the women responding reported never experiencing any unpleasant experiences of the sort described, that would surprise me.

Have heard that some parts of Europe have very large problems with sexual harassment of an agressive form beyond creepyness.

It does! Want to clone it for the Singularity Summit?

Is being vague with who it's directed at and counting on something like the bystander effect a good hack for that?

Which bit do you find challenging?

I mean, I was kinda being snarky (I don't think what I suggested is all that hard or unusual at all, though it obviously varies. I've noticed a few reasons for that:

-The person is failing to model the other as an agent, as a center of perspective. Their model of the person starts and stops at their own feelings and reactions; hence, if they find the person attractive, "X is attractive to me" becomes way more salient than it would otherwise be, in determining how they'll attempt interaction. Men do this to women a lot, in general, but there are plenty of other dynamics or situations which can lead to it. Autism or similar psychological variance is massively overstated as an explanation for it; it's way too prevalent a behavior in the general population for that.

-The person has no sense of whether something is appropriate or not, even though they've modelled the other party accurately ("is agent, has preferences"). This is very common among people who, for whatever reason, have had socialization issues. They usually know there's a bewildering array of possible rules or at least broad patterns that might theoretically bear on the answer, but it's not obvious which ones apply, or that they haven't even thought of. To be honest, even socially-successful people sometimes have trouble navigating that, as soon as they're in circumstances that are unfamiliar to them -- another culture's norms, or when dealing with a known charged dynamic and they're concerned about signalling and how they come off. The trick is that there's usually not any one right answer; it can be as specific as the nonverbal communication between two parties. Is asking for a hug creepy or unnecessary? Sometimes, if you can't read the cues, you really can't know short of asking. This means there's always some subjective sense of risk; the problem is they don't know how to calibrate that to the situation, don't have a model of likely prior probabilities. All they really have is a sense of the variance on the options, which is incredibly wide.

-They're failing to not-assume-yes. This is related to the first problem; the person is failing to be aware of, or consider, the pressure their request creates, or is equivocating the risk of being told "no" or declared "creepy" to be symmetrical with the worst-case scenario on the other person's chart. For one reason or another, it just seems to them that if there's no obvious reason not to, no compelling objection in particular, then obviously the thing they want should happen. "No" isn't heard as a good answer in and of itself, not a sufficient report of the other party's preference; it's felt as somehow keeping them at arm's length, denying them the information they need to know how to get what they want. This sort of thing is very obvious from outside, because it leads to different behaviors and responses, and body language tells, when confronted with a "no."

Some women? And you're Irish? This behaviour is practically tattooing "I have poor social skills or severe confidence issues" on your forehead in any guess culture. Odd is about as positive a description as it's going to get outside of people who've not read a good deal of woman's studies stuff.

It's almost like there is no one magic rule set for interacting with us or something! ;p

You have to follow some extra links to reach the "do" advice., but it's there.

We're trying to assign a static attribute to explain behaviors which shake out to a particular (and highly individual) emotional response. That's not quite the Worst Argument -- though it is related -- but it is a very bad habit of argument.

We're never going to find a "creepyp" type predicate attached to anyone. It may be that some subset of LWers exhibit behavior which reliably tends to alienate certain groups we'd be interested in hearing more from, though, and if so it should be possible for us to describe this behavior and try to develop group norms to exclude it: as a community we're pretty good at analyzing that sort of thing, and it certainly beats spiraling further into semantic fail.

On the other hand, I can see some potential for close examination of the problem to lead into gender fail -- something that we've historically been very poor at dealing with.

"Creepy" is a natural category - it describes behaviors that are likely to cause a certain emotion. This emotion is triggered by things that are obviously bad, by things that are subtly bad and often announce worse things when the group isn't looking, and by non-bad things.

Our aim is to combat the first two while allowing the last one. Anti-creepy action ("Stop all creepy behavior, get out if you can't") acts against all three. Banning obviously bad things ("Ask before you touch") acts only against the first one.

I'm reminded of the Diseased Thinking post. If you can't successfully discourage someone with Tourette's from inappropriate swearing but you can successfully discourage a neurotypical male from exhibiting inappropriate sexual-like behaviour, then it makes sense to attempt the latter but not the former.

He recommends bringing it to the group in this comment, but says in the other comment that even if the entire group disagrees with the creeped out person they are still in the right.

I didn't say that. You can do what you want. But if someone made you feel uncomfortable, you already feel uncomfortable. Should they not have made you feel uncomfortable? Yes. Is it fair? No.

What are you going to do about it? That's the only question you get to answer.

Great! Now speak in non-code when people are approaching the line, not five miles past it.

This says that people understand indirect refusals the same in sexual and non-sexual contexts. It doesn't say that everyone understands them.

A person who never thinks "Shit, are they bored, or are they just making sure I'm not bored?" will never think "Shit, are they turning down sex, or are they just making sure I really want it?". A person who has trouble with the former may well run into the latter. (Still not an excuse though.)

I suspect the denial doesn't come so much from "determined to do things despite consent" as much as "determined to preserve one's own self esteem." But it comes off creepy anyway.

They're totally applying it inconsistently. But they don't know that. Hence, the social ineptitude.

Of course. But it destroys excuses, which I've found to be the best motivation for action, both in myself and others

Falling back on vagueness misses the entire point of the rules, which is simultaneously to provide a guideline for well-meaning but oblivious people and to allow your group to expel people for clearcut reasons. If you are worried about being creepy and bad at reading social signals, the rules do you the favor of allowing you to be good nonetheless, whereas a vague exception-filled guideline is almost useless as telling someone to not be creepy. If you are a bad person, the rules mean you can't defend yourself by saying you're well-meaning or whatever, because if you touch people without permission a bunch, we can point to the rules and say "Go away".

I find your point of view creepy, and want you to stop talking about it. Take responsibility for your actions, and stop creeping me out.

I interpreted your comment to mean something like "talking about creepiness might make women leave faster."

I will now attempt to thoroughly dissect what I said after I thought you said that. Because why not :P

"Security through obscurity" is a model of security where talking about security makes you less secure - it's generally agreed to be pretty suboptimal. Drawing the analogy between not talking about creepiness to have people not leave and not talking about security to be secure is the surface point of my post.

But there are several flaws in the analogy between not talking about security and not talking about creepiness, which I refer to pretty subtly and form the main point of the post.

The first word is ambiguous: "security" for who? The analogy-ey interpretation would be for LW users, but the problem the "creepy obscurity" is directed at isn't keeping people secure, it's not making people leave, so the analogy breaks down. If we look at the part of reality where the analogy breaks down, the security that would be granted by not talking about problematic behavior is actually the "security" of the people who don't want to have to deal with the problem or worry about their community getting smaller, not the security of LW users in general.

Also, "creepy obscurity" serves two purposes. The first is to modify "security through obscurity" to talk about creepiness, thus drawing the analogy. The second is to be a little threatening by referring to the obscurity that gets granted to creepy people, and also referring to literal creepy obscurity. This second interpretation turns the sentence into a bit of an oxymoron, since "creepy obscurity" doesn't sound very secure at all. The oxymoron here could be considered a joke, like "jumbo shrimp" or "anarchy rules." But calling this an oxymoron also contains a rhetorical claim that keeping creepy people in the community obscure could not actually be secure.

And, of course the ", eh?" is there to imply that there's a joke. This is mostly just to say that I'm willfully misunderstanding you a little, but that I think it's fun to draw the connection from your post to "security through creepy obscurity."

... well, that bit is a p.r.r.f.i. only in the same way as things like "Are you really as stupid as you sound?" are. I repeat: Douglas_Reay's post contains no blank-slatey attempts to explain anything and makes no claims that anyone's discriminating against anyone else. It just doesn't.

Well, if you bring up a a bunch of links about learning how not to come off as creepy, and pose it as a salient topic of discussion to the community, you're tacitly implying that people coming off as creepy is a problem of particular relevance to the community.

The connotations are such that, rather than having to make explicit that there have been cases where people at Less Wrong meetups have been offended by behavior they've found creepy, it could reasonably be taken as implied, unless explicitly disavowed.

If there is evidence of such a pattern, then it is certainly worth knowing about. But posing it as an explanation, or even a contributing factor, in the gender imbalance of the community, is something that could reasonably be taken as insulting.

Suppose you have an online acquaintance who's rather unpopular. Your only information on why they might be unpopular comes from your online interactions with them and what they tell you themself, and you're unsure why they have so little social success based on that information. So, you suggest "Maybe you should try showering more often."

Now, if the person does in fact have poor personal hygiene, this could be the exact behavior modification they need to achieve better social success. But this is not gently suggesting that one possible contributing factor to their lack of social success is poor personal hygiene. In terms of ordinary human communication, it amounts to a tacit accusation that they're a smelly person.

I parse Filipe's comment as being something along the lines of "Do we have evidence that this is a pervasive pattern in this community? If so, I acknowledge this as as being a potentially valuable contribution. If not, I find the tacit assumption that it is somewhat offensive." If no such assumption is intended, then the post would do well to disclaim it.

I think a few mutually-reinforcing things are going on, and the narcissistic pattern you describe is a big one. Another is feeling socially unsafe, in a way that's hard for me to summarize, but easier to describe some features of:

• Talk of how women are underrepresented at LW meetups (or whatever) pattern-matches to a moral demand that there be more women at LW meetups, otherwise LWers are bad sexist people. As is often the case with perceived moral demands, this feels threatening and defending oneself by attacking premises and identifying the demander as the Enemy is a really tempting response.
  • The perceived moral demand is seen as vague, which makes it feel more threatening — it feels like one can never know whether or not they're subject to criticism.
    • The OP's first link, for instance, says "no one’s required to inform you that you’re creeping" and "Not a complete instruction set on how not to be a creeper." Even if these are true, saying them in that piece's aggressive tone without indicating that doing something simple gets you a lot of the way ('you don't get cookies for being a decent person') causes me, at least, to feel gut-level fear of doing Something Wrong without knowing it and being blamed. (This fear is easy for me now to ignore, not as easy for everyone.)
• I think people often feel like "sexist" is only ever a term of extreme opprobrium, don't distinguish/feel that other people distinguish between "behaving in a sexist way" and "being sexist", and don't feel like it's possible/other people see it as possible for behaving in a sexist way to be slightly and forgivably bad, so they must defend themselves from arguments that might imply that they're sexist. (This seems easier to illustrate for "racist"; the prototype racist in most(?) people's minds is a Nazi or something equally awful, which makes the claim that it's "racist" to, e.g., be more afraid of a black person on the street at night less thinkable.)
• It is not obviously false that there are biological reasons that women would be less likely to be interested in LW absent any discrimination.
  • This possibility is a good way to claim that one isn't or might not be subject to perceived moral demands, which makes endorsing it more attractive.
  • If this is true and the people making the perceived moral demand wouldn't believe it if it were true (which it's perceived that they certainly wouldn't), then the demand will continue to be there forever even if all actual discrimination is addressed. This feels more threatening.
  • A common response (it feels to me like the most common by far on the Internet as a whole; this isn't necessarily true but the feeling is a relevant data point) to this idea, by the people perceived as making the moral demand, is that it is obviously false and considering the hypothesis makes you a bad sexist person. Independent of anything else, for X to say this about a hypothesis Y thinks might be true is likely to make Y feel threatened and (if Y identifies as a truth-seeker) offended. This leads to polarization and increases Y's identification with the hypothesis.
• This point about 'privilege' language.
• Even if none of this sort of crap is present in a particular discussion, if someone has seen it before, they're likely to pattern-match to it and become more defensive.

All of this is true or not independently of how justified the feeling of unsafety is. Any actual risk is almost always small and the mature thing to do is to feel its smallness, but rolling a saving throw for Not Trying to Please Everyone Unless They're Tagged as an Enemy — at least, that's what not being triggered by this feels like to me — is really hard for some people.

If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what's going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.

I do! Filipe wrote:

Is there an actual history of people complaining about 'creepy behavior' in LW meetups?

I would genuinely like to know the answer to that question, so I upvoted it.

It is absolutely beyond my understanding why Filipe's comment has been voted up to +13 since what Douglas wrote was not an "attempt to explain" anything and he didn't assert that anyone was discriminating against anyone. Filipe's comment is based on two gross misrepresentations of what Douglas wrote, and on the basis of those gross misrepresentations he's made an entirely unreasonable accusation, and apparently the consensus of the Less Wrong community is that this deserves to be at +13.

In what possible world is Filipe's grotesque misrepresentation reasonable (and indeed worthy of all those upvotes) and gently pointing out its errors unreasonable (and deserving of drive-by downvotes)?

Personally, I upvoted Filipe's comment for the reason Emile gave here, I agree with Manfred's comment here, and while the second part of Filipe's comment could be taken as overly politicizing, I feel that your comments have acted to degenerate the situation further. For reasons Nick Tarleton has outlined in this comment, "blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence" are something that some people in this community have become rather sensitive to.

If you had responded by saying, for example, "I don't think that this article is arguing that the gender disparity in this community rests primarily on behavioral issues of the members, but considering the self-confessed social fluency issues many of our members have, I think it's likely there are people here who would benefit from it," I think you could have de-escalated hostility in the discussion. The reply you gave to Manfred, though, appears far more hostile to me than Filipe's original comment, and it looks to me like you're doing more to blow out of proportion a possible cause for offense.

I upvoted Filipe's comment because it asked a question the answer to which I was also interested in, and I have downvoted a number of yours because I feel that you have done an inappropriately poor job assuming good faith.

Well, honestly. Douglas_Reay posts something saying "if people attending LW meetings are creepy then that might be bad for the community's gender balance", and Filipe responds by suggesting that it's "just one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some sort of discrimination, without any evidence".

Douglas_Reay didn't provide any evidence for his theory. Not even what one would expect to be the minimal standard, i.e., an assertion that creepy behaviors do in fact take place at LW meetups.

Filipe was pointing this out and presented the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay's action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad. How is this any different from what you just did in your comment?

If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what's going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.

No, I think you pretty much nailed it. It's been going on from Day 1, it was endemic in LWs founder population, it's very common within the cultural core demographics that LW attracts, and even folks here who are aware of it and find it a little unseemly often underestimate the extent and significance of the issue.

(May be worth editing your comment and replacing all instances of "_" with "\_".)

Couldn't find the definitive "tabooing a word", if there is such a thing, but after the taboo, I think EY recommends replacing it with what amounts to an "extensional" description.

That would also be sufficient to abandon the definition. But no, I mean she is actually are physically safe and the guy is being creepy as @#%#. Either the recipient of the creepiness or an observer can both legitimately call that behavior creepy even if the victim of it neither feels nor actually is physically unsafe.

I'd say that the target can legitimately state that the guy's behavior is making her uncomfortable (assuming that this is in fact the case), and/or tell the guy to buzz off and have this enforced as necessary. Either the target or any third party can legitimately caution the guy that his behavior could be interpreted as "creepy" (i.e. at least mildly threatening) by others.

However, I would not use "creepy" to describe all instances where someone is being merely bothered by someone else; nor would I want to have a fixed cluster of behaviors be regarded as "creepy", regardless of the target's actual feelings and reactions. Thus, I'd say that defining the above as not-creepy is in fact very reasonable.

The above definition conveys concepts that aren't even intended for use in 'thingspace' as opposed to 'political space'. Specifically, the assignment of blame and responsibility.

Um, no. Physical causality is not the same as appropriately-assigned blame and responsibility. Even then, I could easily rephrase my definition as: "Person X's experience and overall disposition causes her to feel physically unsafe to some degree, upon being exposed to some peculiar attitudes and behavors on Person Y's part" and this would not change my preferred policy.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that "n*s" were relegated to the back rows of the bus because they would give off a creeper vibe? ISTR that it had to do with legally enforced segregation.

Does the label and motive matter?

Or is the important thing whether someone is engaging in a behaviour that they have control over, that is having negative consequences, and they are failing to take steps to change this even when the negative consequences are pointed out to them?

The key is just to question whether a noncreepy person could also have reasons for engaging in behavior X, before concluding that they're creepy and then immediately proceeding to take action.

On the contrary, I think the key is to consistently label nonconsensual taking of intimacies as "creepy" regardless of who does it. Treating "creepy" as an XML tag on people is a terrible idea — both for the "creeps" and for others. Declaring, "Some people are noncreepy" is vulnerable to exploitation by people who manage to get themselves labeled "noncreepy" and then go around assaulting people with impunity, knowing that their noncreepy tag will protect them from accusations: when someone says "Hey, Joe assaulted me!" others will respond, "He couldn't have done that; he's noncreepy!" That's part of what the feminists call "rape culture".

Yes. I creeped out girls who had cold-approached me first a few times in the past.

Wow, that's impressive. :)

I'm selfishly glad my husband was late in learning that. If he'd learned sooner, he'd have been married to someone else long before we met. :-)

I myself wouldn't use LW meetups as venues for seduction. I would however guess that most of the people who act creepy on LW meetups do see them as venues for seduction. If you want to convince those people to change their behavior I think it makes sense to speak in a language that they are more likely to understand.

If you use the kind of language in which the main post of this discussion is posted, I think you are unlikely to reach the people who pose the problem. If my intended audience wouldn't be the people who pose the problem but the people who are fluent in deconstrutivist language I would speak differently.

Impro acting, maybe, or have someone point things out like "don't you see how impatient he looks?", etc. - the kind of things parents may do with their kids. Or read a book on etiquette, or hire some kind of body language coach, I'm sure it exists. Or of course a pick-up artist book.

By the way, "There's no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case" is something I often had to say when teaching French to Chinese students; or rather often it was "there may be a rule underneath all those cases, but I have no idea what it is!". Often finding the rule for your native language requires significant effort; and some rules you come up may not accurately describe the way the language actually works.

If you don't speak a language, you can buy a grammar, or ask native speakers to think up some examples and build rules from them.

You do that when you're a complete beginner, or to polish off your grammar to avoid coming off as uneducated esp. in writing, but the way you actually learn a language well enough to have a conversation without too many misunderstandings by either party is by listening to it (and, when you get a chance, speaking it) a lot. And many of the things you'll learn this way are things that few grammars will explicitly state and few native speakers will admit. No amount of theoretical study will train your ear to understand speech in real time. You cannot rely on System 2 alone to speak a natural language, as per Moravec's paradox.

The analogy would be that you learn body language by paying attention to what people who already know it. More generally, ISTM that paying attention to stuff around you (and also paying attention to what you are doing, for that matter) is an oft-neglected skill. (Dear myself-a-few-years-ago, are you listening?)

Do you find this more annoying than other patterns where people lacking X trait and thereby excluded from valuable X-having groups form their own groups, create value within those groups, and then lose control of those groups (and the associated value) to X-havers who appropriate it?

Because it seems to me there are a great many Xes like this. Wealth is an obvious one, for example.

I don't know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don't involve malice.

An alternative model is that people with social skills tend to be used to subtle and implicit modes of interaction (guess culture vs. ask culture), and the group's explicit modes of interaction makes them uncomfortable (giving rise to this thread).

Yet another model that skips step 1): small groups with a homogenous membership will have simple norms; as the group gets successful it grows and attracts more people and more diversity (in age, sex, nationality, and interests), and the simple norms don't work as well, and "success" in the group depends more and more on being able to handle social complexity ("social skills" and "politics" in the office politics meaning).

I find really annoying

Whining about it doesn't strike me as the thing to do. Trying to adapt to it in the short term and/or to fix it in the long term would be better IMO.

That's actually a really interesting thought. I am white and male and straight and am very aware of my privilege, and also am very interested in heuristics and biases and how they are part of our thought patterns. I consider myself very much a feminist, and also a realist in terms of how people actually work compared with how people would like each other to work. I might brood on this for a bit and write about it.

There's also the fundamental attribution error ("they're not doing a good job because they're just lazy").

I would love to see a discussion of privilege in terms of biases.

So do I, as long as it doesn't start from the subtle assumption that men have privilege(s) while women don't.

Putting this as charitably as possible, even if in fact there is nothing misogynistic or unjust in PUA, there is a vast amount of feminist distrust of it, and PUA doesn't seem to have responded well to those critiques (or even particularly to think they need to be responded to, as far as I can tell).

Here are a few quick counterexamples to your comments about zero-sum, lack of agency, lack of response to feminism, etc::

• http://www.authenticmanprogram.com/authenticity/authentic-outer-game-impossible/
• http://www.authenticmanprogram.com/attraction/why-sharking-for-girls-will-always-leave-you-hungry/
• http://johnnysoporno.com/workshops/philosophy/reframing-rejection-overcoming-misogyny/
• http://johnnysoporno.com/workshops/philosophy/converting-girl-friends-into-girlfriends/

I think these should be sufficient to provide a shift in your opinion regarding what the field of "PUA" includes, even if you view these schools of thought as isolated examples. (They aren't the only such schools, of course; they just happen to be ones it was easy for me to find representative links for.)

PUA doesn't seem to have responded well to those critiques (or even particularly to think they need to be responded to, as far as I can tell).

Why would they find that worth their time?

"What specific memes to treat as central" is very important part. I would say this is the part where many memetic wars are won or lost.

If you allow pro-X people to design the official definition of X, every time you use the definition you automatically provide applause lights to X. If you allow anti-X people to design the official definition of X, every time you use the definition you automacally provide boo lights to X.

A typical pro-X definition of X is something like: "X is a movement of people who want happiness and cookies for everyone". Far-mode applause lights; omitting the controversial details.

A typical anti-X definition of X is something like: "X is a movement containing evil low-status people (here are some extreme examples)".

For any group consisting of humans, you can create both definitions, and then pro-X and anti-X people will disagree on which definition is the correct one. The group more successful in popularizing their message has essentially already won.

I'd love to see Yvain's blog post you linked turned into a top-level LW post. I found it more elucidating that the Worst Argument in the World post, say.

Interesting perspective. I think the grandparent should make it fairly clear that I disapprove of this state of affairs and feel that entrenched members of both camps are, at best, wasting their time; on the other hand, I also feel that most of the cultural mass of the problem is out of our hands. This isn't an endogenous squabble of LW's; it's a wider cultural dispute that just tends to instantiate itself here because of our demographic placement (and our taste for metacontrarianism). And since for whatever reason it doesn't seem to partake of our norm of political detachment, I think we'll have a very hard time with it unless and until the conventional wisdom shifts one way or another.

I could be wrong. I hope I am.

If someone is routinely stepping on feet, it would make more sense to find out why, and offer non-destructive ways of accomplishing that. For example, if they're stepping on feet to get attention, then offering the general rule of "don't step on feet" is just setting yourself up to write an unending list of articles about "... or lift people in the air", "... or play airhorns", "...or dress as a clown", etc.

(And I know, "you're not obligated to fix other people's problems", but once you've decided to go that route, you should take into account which methods are most effective, and "don't [do this specific failure mode]" isn't it.)

I'm not saying he has any such reason. But neither does anyone else have a reason to go along with his preferences.

Well, the OP was about the first and not the second.

Ah, I misinterpreted your original comment and did not realize you were the OP. Re-reading the top-level post, I now realize that you did in fact intend this to be aimed not just at the perpetrators but at the community as a whole.

I now feel slightly confused about something, but it's hard to point to what exactly. So instead of trying to figure it out, let me just re-iterate that I approve of the point that if anyone feels uncomfortable it is the group's responsibility to fix that. I also approve of global over local (i.e. this person is here to hang out with all the other people here, not for my sole benefit). I suspect that a large portion of the people on this thread would also approve of both of these. The issue seems to be more the part where the links are also framed as social advice, where I now (I think?) see that they were not intended as such, but instead as a set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons.

I am probably at fault for this, but I did not understand any of that until I reread the OP. I interpreted it in the context of intended social advice. If other people did as well, I think that explains some of the reactions (but not all of them --- I think some of it results from having previously had bad experiences with feminist memespace, in the same way that some of the anti-FAI / anti-SingInst discussion results from having had bad experiences with the FAI/SingInst memespace). If it is not too late, your cause may be helped by unambiguously reframing it in the way you intended (if I am correct about what you intended).

Status gets wonky here, though, and online in general. One's status doesn't readily translate from one's RL social network to the internet (celebrities are an obvious exception here), and the cultural makeup of the group's members, in addition to the social norms they propagate within the group itself, will go a long way toward determining relative status.

It's one thing if you're talking Eliezer or Alicorn, but the run-of-the-mill LW member probably fits into this situation. Hence, we don't need to necessarily see creepy behavior among the highest-status folks here, for it to nevertheless be a widespread norm that affects gender ratios on the site. (Frankly, all sorts of communities, online and off, encounter this in some form).

True, but it's also entirely possible to want behavior X from person Y and still find it creepy when Y actually does X, depending on how and in what context they do it. Creepiness is often about those details.

If only one person in a group is allergic to my aftershave, they are allergic to my aftershave.
If only one person in a group finds my voice intolerable, they find my voice intolerable.
If only one person in a group finds my behavior disturbing or frightening or alienating, they find my behavior disturbing or frightening or alienating.

Yes, that person has a problem.
And the question is, what are we going to do about that problem, if anything?

The notion that because they have a problem, we therefore ought not do anything, strikes me as bizarre. It's precisely because they have a problem that the question even arises; if they didn't have a problem, there would be no reason to even discuss it.

So, OK. If my behavior frightens or disturbs or alienates you, or my aftershave causes you an allergic reaction, or whatever, you have a problem.The question is, what happens next?

I might decide I care about your problem, and take steps to alleviate it.
Or I might decide I don't care about your problem, and go on doing what I was doing.
Or somewhere in between.

You might similarly decide to alleviate your own problem, or decide to ignore it, or something in between.
Third parties might, similarly, decide they care about your problem to various degrees, or they might not.

This is not independent of status -- if you're a high-status member of the group, I might care about your problem because of your status; if you're a low-status member I might not-care about your problem because of your status; if I'm a high-status member third parties might not-care about your problem because of my status, and so forth.

But it's not equivalent to status, either -- if we come from a culture where acknowledging the existence of body odor is taboo, the fact that you have a problem with my body odor might get ignored even if we're all of equal status, or even if you're higher status than I am. (Of course, you might then claim a different problem you don't actually have in order to solve your real problem in a socially acceptable way.)

Similarly, it's not independent of the size of the affected group, but it's not equivalent to it either.

If only one person has a problem with it, that's not being creepy, that's "he's being charming and you have a problem."

And that, folks, is one of the ways that the ~6% of educated males (according to one study, anyway) who are rapists get to do their thing: by being "charming" to everyone but their target, so the target is isolated and feels she has nobody to turn to.

FYI: If one person in my meetup group has a problem with Person X touching them when they don't want him/her to, I have a problem with Person X, too.

People behave differently in different social contexts, though. If person Y finds person X's behavior creepy, and no one else finds person X's behavior creepy, it could be that X is behaving differently towards Y than he/she is towards everyone else.

Obviously, this is relevant to the gender situation, where person X is male and behaves differently towards females than he does towards males.

It's socially influenced, but you're being a bit too status-deterministic about it. Take the example of Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's (probably true but not prosecuted) rape allegation. Beforehand, he was as high-status as a man can get in the United States, and a vast majority of American women who knew who he was would have found him attractive. Afterward, he seems to have regained much of his status among male Steeler fans, but he has the unmistakable tag of "creepy" (to say the least) among women who follow football.

Since it's very low-cost to stop touching someone who doesn't like it, compared to the cost of enduring it, a group where it's considered "creepy" is a better group.

WIthin a social group, most people don't secretly resent high-status people, by definition.

That certainly isn't true by definition and it isn't even always true in practice. "It's better to be feared than to be loved", etc.

(The rest of your comment seems more or less accurate as a description of how social power and moralizing works.)

I'm confused by your argument. Where I live, the visibly religious are high status. Does that mean I can't resent a religious person's treatment of me? That's a strange definition of high-status.

Anytime you find yourself saying, "How dare he do X? That's creepy! Don't ever do X, folks!", ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X. If the answer is no, you've misdiagnosed the problem.

I think the truth of that statement depends on how you chunk the behavior.

To get back to this, Rene's approaches to Genevieve would have been appropriate as behaviors in that sort of a relationship if you chunk them as things a person might do, and very inappropriate because she was moving away from him/not responding, etc., so that if your chunk includes what she does (not to mention that a relationship didn't already exist) as well as what he does, you get a different answer.

I agree with the first part of your comment, but the last paragraph seems contradictory:

Anytime you find yourself saying, "How dare he do X? That's creepy! Don't ever do X, folks!", ask yourself if you would have the same reaction if you liked this person and welcomed X.

Creepiness is by definition unwelcome behavior; that's just the meaning of the term - "that which causes someone to feel creeped out". Of course any welcome behavior would not be labelled creepy.

Yeah, same here. Creepy behavior from people with high status is a big red flag on a group or social situation for me; it implies that at least in some cases they can get away with that, and I categorically don't feel emotionally safe in those environments.

I should have said/thought had said "is necessarily creepy". (Fixed now.)

Though I don't think its that simple because both sides are claiming that the other side is not reporting how they truly feel. One side claims that people are calling things creepy semi-arbitrarily to raise their own status, and the other claims that people are intentionally refusing to recognize creepy behavior as creepy so they don't have to stop it (or being slightly more charitable, so they don't take a status hit for being creepy).

That thread gives an important overview of a sort. It's got its limits because women who talk about not having it that bad from men are not kindly treated in the discussion.

I'm not denying any of those stories about behavior ranging from intrusive to seriously threatening and it's obviously fairly common, just saying that it's not a overview of the whole situation. I've never seen an overview of the whole situation for women.

Compare Bill Gates to Jose the charming tour guide.

Apparently my word-space is so constructed that attractiveness of a man to a woman basically equates to status.

There's your problem right there!

I'm usually not a big fan of the "look it up on Wikipedia" approach to amending skewed perception (it has the failure mode of encouraging an excessively topical, definition-driven understanding of a term), but if you perceive status and attractiveness to others as basically synonymous, or even largely so, then you're viewing the world through a seriously-distorted lens and should really start at the ground level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_status

Consider interaction among heterosexual people of the same sex (men with men, women with women). This is probably a majority of all social interaction, and it strongly influences status in mixed-sex social groups. While attractiveness is generally helpful here too, it's less important than other factors.

Imagine two men who have the same socio-economical position, the same amount of social skills, wear similar clothes, behave the same way, etc., etc., but one is 5'6" (1.68 m) and one is 6' (1.83 m). Most women will likely be more attracted to the latter; would you say he has higher status?