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How tough can it be to act all brave and courageous when you’re pretty much invulnerable?
—Adam Warren, Empowered, Vol. 1
I only learned it at an embarrassingly late age, but the canonical counter to such an argument is to challenge the arguer to tell that to the invulnerable guy to his face.
Do we even want to stop giving attractive people all manner of advantages in all domains of life? Sure, sometimes it may be in your best interest to claim you do, but that's a whole different matter.
Of course, the number of entries in a dictionary is more important than whether it has a torn cover, at least if you ever plan on using it for anything.
If you plan on using it to decorate your shelf, the cover is essential.
This may sound rational—why not pay more to protect the more valuable object?—until you realize that the insurance doesn’t protect the clock, it just pays if the clock is lost, and pays exactly the same amount for either clock. (And yes, it was stated that the insurance was with an outside company, so it gives no special motive to the movers.)
There's always the hope that, if enough customers pay the outside company enough, it'll be zealous and make the movers an offer they can't refuse.
That is odd, actually. Everyone I've met that I would describe as "creepy" is male.
Is it even theoretically possible to be creepy to a man? In my—very limited—experience, if a man is afraid of anything, you don't condemn the object of his fear for frightening him; you deem him a coward and a pussy, lose all respect for him and basically stop regarding him as a man. You'd better be ready for him to challenge you to a duel, or some other culturally appropriate, less formal kind of fight, though.
As far as I know, the ancestral, sexist rule is that showing fear as a man is like showing sexual desire as a woman: you never ever do it, on pain of losing everyone's respect.
Do heterosexual men ever have the experience of being extremely uncomfortable around women who are superficially be not that much different from other women that the men would find at least tolerable?
Some women have an especially intense "you pathetic loser better stay the hell away from me" seemingly permanent look on their faces, to the point that it's actually readable to me. It can be rather uncomfortable when you have responsibilities that involve interacting with them anyway.
That's as silly as suggesting that men should be more conservative in granting those favors.
They should—they should not force those "favors" on women who don't want them.
That would probably help women be less anxious about granting the wrong sexual favor to the wrong person. I'm pretty sure normal, non-socially-stunted people already do this in their own private environments, access to which is a privilege.
It is not intuitively clear to my why would be the AIDS stigma completely unjust, I was pounded into me from the age of 13 to never leave the house without carrying condoms, to me not using them is the equivalent of not using seat belts.
Are there actually parents who do that?
As far as I know, basically everyone agrees their children should be prevented from having sex for as long as possible. No, I don't know how this makes any sense, given that for as long as possible is forever—unless you get raped, I guess. At any rate, giving you condoms implies you might have sex, so it should be unthinkable.
At the end of the day, the best remedy against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, as well as all kinds of social ills like drug use, is social isolation. As a bonus, the lack of social pressures to keep some personal hygiene and not become a fat slob, and generally a disgusting loser, helps you stay isolated. This will become a huge problem for you as an adult, of course, but then it's your problem alone—it's no longer anyone else's responsibility.
she could have "won" by making the first moves to date an attractive but passive/malleable and socially clueless boy.
Assuming one of those could even begin to compete with a jock, which I greatly doubt.
She could have really "won" by stringing along several passive/malleable/clueless boys.
That could work if she gets them to support her while she cheats on them with Elliot and he's her children's biological father, yeah.
I've promised to shut up in the comments to the other post, but since that story's been brought up here, too ...
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it.
Is it, though? Is there any possible tone that would make it acceptable?
After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn't she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her?
So the message is redundant. Therefore, the appropriate way to express it is to say nothing at all. Anything else, regardless of its tone, forces her to pay needless attention to an obvious fact and is therefore an aggression. Especially if the speaker is not so attractive that considering potential partners of his attractiveness level is actually worth her time. Especially if he's not just insufficiently attractive, but net repulsive, i.e., she'd rather not have sex ever again than have it with him. Of course, a nerdier and less sporty male classmate would be even more repulsive.
Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
Or a way to test him, and he obviously failed.
No, certainly not merely.
I wonder what counts as not merely.
But the whole "Flowers for Algernon" ending seemed a bit extreme...and out of place.
I didn't even realize it was supposed to be a horror story. She basically did what should have been expected from biology: she chose a high-quality mate who can afford to profess irrational nonsense on the handicap principle, and will most likely breed with him and be happy. It's only sad to those who would like her to be prevented from doing what she wants, for whatever selfish reasons.
I think the vast majority of people will gladly slash your tyres or lobotomize you without a second thought if the alternative is to go to the effort of debating you for any length of time with a genuinely truth-seeking attitude. Only if they fear you may they attempt to fake the latter.
Ignore the entire machinery of rationality. Treat all human interaction as nothing more than social grooming or status games in a tribe of apes.
Is there actually anything else to human interaction?
It makes no sense to expect people to engage the machinery of rationality when they don't believe it'll further their goals. Even if they benefit from being privately rational, it's not necessarily in their interest to share their rationality with you. Hence, if you haven't earned their respect, they'll conceal their wisdom from you, like the Spartans.
In fact, pretty much everything in Eliezer's post seems to apply only to the rare situation of two or more people who respect each other enough to actually feel a need to appear logically consistent and make their lies plausible. Usually at least one of the people is in no real need to convince the other of anything (i.e., they have higher status), so they won't waste any time or energy trying to. Therefore, their statements serve other purposes; mainly, to display their high status and to warn the underling when they're getting too close to a line they won't let them cross unpunished. Conspicuously wasting the interlocutor's time with nonsense serves this purpose very well.
Status, status, status. It gets (some of) us every time. There seems to be very little to life but status to a normal person.
Examples include [...] politically incorrect
Ideas are also often dismissed for being politically correct, by concluding the speaker is a hypocrite. I suppose you can count that as a particular case of cowardly.
I'd say rules against necro-commenting are a good tool for the Dark Side, ensuring no discussion progresses beyond a single burst of activity and wasting a lot of time repeating the same arguments again and again.
Any chance of an update? Did Crete win?
For some of those experiences, the attitude of the society is "for fuck's sake, grow up and stop whining", for others, it is "this is a horrible thing that should have never happened to you".
Let's not forget that, to a normally socialized man, the latter carries an implicit "and you alone are at fault for not having been strong enough to stop your assailant in their tracks. You should be ashamed forever and have no business being alive". Therefore, it may be more damning than the former.
The default way to ensure future people are wealthy and technologically advanced is to let those who are not die.
Saying “People who buy dangerous products deserve to get hurt!” is not tough-minded. It is a way of refusing to live in an unfair universe. Real tough-mindedness is saying, “Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death, and no, that mother of five children didn’t deserve it, but we’re going to keep the shops open anyway because we did this cost-benefit calculation.” Can you imagine a politician saying that? Neither can I.
There's another reason to say the former rather than the latter. Most people will hear the latter this way:
"Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death ..."
"TLDR. Okay, you're for regulation."
I didn't suggest saying this out of the blue! My recommended riposte borrows the story protagonist's vocabulary and tone.
I understood that much the first time.
If a woman asks you:
"What you're saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn't I react with revulsion precisely as though you'd said the latter?"
then, it may be appropriate to discuss, optionally using the word "fuck", why she'd react that way if you'd asked that question, which you didn't, having instead (as in the story) made a much more innocuous suggestion, neither culturally inappropriate nor abrupt and crass.
I think the protagonist makes an excellent point. In fact, she understates it. She mentions plenty of reasons to expect essentially any heterosexual male classmate to be interested in having sex with her if given the chance, so if she's going to be revolted by that, she might as well go ahead and be revolted without waiting for anyone to tell her anything.
The obvious way out of this conundrum, as you pointed out, is to question the premise that she should be revolted by her male peers' sexual desires toward her. This doesn't seem to stop people in general from agreeing with that premise and deeming it self-evident.
As Ilyssa herself argues, how is focusing on the first domino any more innocuous than admitting the hundredth will fall, too? Is there anything to what you call socially appropriate behavior, not abrupt or crass, beyond a lame attempt to deceive her? In fact, since he's probably well aware she won't be fooled, I don't even know which simulacrum level he's trying to operate at; likely 4.
I wish I'd been asked that kind of questions, including the ones in the few following paragraphs, while being both young enough for them to make sense and the situation not to be too disgusting, and mature enough to understand them and know my true answers. At Eric and Ilyssa's age, I'm sure I would have enjoyed and come to crave an unbounded amount of physical intimacy with almost any of my female classmates, provided we got along and could trust each other, but I didn't really know it. I just knew I wanted to get to know them, necessarily slowly, much like I found out, half a decade later, that women tend to emphasize. Funny; in my case, it probably comes from being perpetually isolated and vulnerable. Also, I didn't have the vocabulary to know what "if I offered myself to you" means, so I'd just be puzzled by the question and probably look like a hypocrite to everyone. Also, my parents would have put a stop to that kind of relationship sooner rather than later, and I guess hers would have, too. Also, I was no "one of the more desirable seniors". Okay, I'll shut up.
Uh, ... I've wondered since about four years before this post was published why women seem so universally offended by any signs that a man would like to have sex with them, with the possible exception of a man they're already very very very much into. Especially considering those signs seem to be redundant, since most of the time a man and a woman meet, he'll want to have sex with her, unless, of course, his sex drive is being satisfied to the point of exhaustion elsewhere.
I've never been able to discuss this rationally with anyone. Women usually imply it should be obvious to everyone why they're offended and there's nothing else to say about it. Besides, everyone knows I'm talking to the woman only because I'd like to have sex with her, which makes the topic, and me, doubly disgusting.
I find it therefore amazing, though still puzzling, to see a woman suggesting that question.
On the other hand, does anyone here actually frequent environments where you can get away with such a long reply, in an ordinary conversation, without the other person interrupting you, walking away, slapping you or anything like that? I find it hard enough to believe among mature adults, let alone a teenage boy talking to a haughty and exceptionally attractive and smart female peer. That's yet another reason for me to deeply envy all of you.
Let's not forget the other side of the coin: can the chain hold you again—and, this time, forever? Unless you've managed to become immortal, that is.
It also doesn't tell us whether people who grew up relying on police would be able to adapt to a police-free society.
Do people who want to get rid of the police even care about that? Isn't the whole implied idea that if you can't survive without police, you don't deserve to survive at all?
Typo nitpicking:
- Day One – "When you wake up at see me not dead" instead of "when you wake up and see me not dead". I think "and they knew I knew I knew" should be "and they knew I knew they knew".
- Day Two – Missing period between "but we’ve got to do it" and "if we don’t kill ourselves tonight".
How can Bob not get it? Is he crazy or stupid or what?
It looks to me like Bob doesn't respect Alice enough to fully listen to her, and much prefers the sound of his own voice. As a consequence, he truly doesn't understand her. A combination of status dynamics and not-concentrating humans not being general intelligences.
I find it very puzzling how people can get used to so much lying and casual disrespect for each other's intelligence. I'm looking at it from the "privileged" viewpoint of someone who never entered the world of dating or sex, nor would've had much to offer in it, and thus didn't bear its costs, but I expect a lot of people to consider the very fact that you feel the need to give someone a fake phone number, as opposed to simply refusing, or to pretend you don't have your phone with you, a gigantic red flag and a sign that there are an awful lot of much better things you could be doing than being in that place interacting with that person.
Measly pieces of knowledge I've gathered so far:
- The man probably just wants to get into the woman's pants and to show and defend his masculinity and his status. He needs to look tough, and hence can't let his lack of mutual trust with the woman visibly bother him; that's why he doesn't appear to think twice if given the chance before inserting a pretty vulnerable part of his body into an orifice whose unenthusiastic owner could've set up any number of nasty surprises in the way. This also probably implies he can't afford to respect the woman very much.
- The woman..., well, I have no idea what she wants in the first place. If asked, she'll probably say she just wants to have a good time, making a point to look down on all those sex-starved men who fall dismally short of her standards, as if they don't know there's more to life than sex. Of course, her own sexual drive is not contemptible at all, and neither is that of the men she does find attractive. She obviously has no respect for the man she's interacting with. She might fear him, and—unlike in a man—this fear may be high-status, since it signals her desirability and her ability to summon allies eager to mop the floor with any lowlife who distresses her.
I read the great-great-grandparent as giving your number so the other person can ring you at any time if they so wish, not as pressuring them to ring you immediately. I think this removes any incentive to give you a fake number, unless, of course, the other person wants to mess with you by getting you to call someone you really, really don't want to call—perhaps to get back at you for wasting their time with a long interaction they didn't dare stop?
I'm definitely not the first person in history with these thoughts, so it's extremely likely that measures have been taken all the time to enable people to get to know one another without so many barriers to honest communication. Access to such an environment is itself a privilege, of course; therefore, if you're not desirable enough, any difficulty to get into those environments, or even to learn they exist, is a feature, not a bug.
I wonder what a normal person would do in a slightly trickier situation.
You and someone you're only slightly acquainted with (I'm not sure the relationship I've ever had with anyone can be described as more than a slight acquaintance) start walking off along one, broad street both your destinations happen to lie close to, so deliberately avoiding that street is rather impractical and time- and energy-consuming, and you don't exactly have the latter to spare. You've made the trip together once before, the preceding day, uneventfully, and you faintly hoped that might be a chance to break out of your lifelong social isolation. The other person is younger than you, but not to the point that you clearly have no business socializing with them.
Surprise! Someone else quickly catches up with you both. They're half your age and just about the most popular and high-status person in the group you're leaving for the day. It goes without saying their social bonds to everyone else in the group are orders of magnitude stronger than any you can dream of ever establishing, including to the person you were walking with. As naturally as they breathe, the third person says goodbye to you and starts talking lively to the other, who, surely enough, reciprocates and forgets about you. They don't look the slightest bit interested in halting their chat to hear "Actually, I'm heading in the same direction" from you. Hence, you're stuck with only a few unpleasant options:
- Keep walking next to them, quietly and creepily. I suppose crossing the street and walking along the other side may reduce a bit the creepiness, but it'll still be awkward if they ever notice.
- Walk faster to leave them comfortably behind. Oh, if only you were young and fit like them!
- Wait for them to leave you comfortably behind. Well, that sucks, because you're tired, aching and in pressing need of reaching your bed and collapsing on it. You're not sure you'll have the energy left to take a shower first. With a fresher mind, you could at least use the wait to read or study a bit, but this is certainly not the case now.
- Waste even more time and energy taking a detour.
Of course, the last two options are also massively awkward if they ever find out you did that only to avoid them.
On second thought, my initial question doesn't make sense: a normal person will never let themself fall into this predicament, will they?
Yes, I know I'm replying to a nine-year-old comment.
Needless to say, a lot of people won't simply vote reflecting their own agreement or disagreement, but aim at the net amount of agreement minus disagreement they think the comment should have.
To me it seems like all interactions with another person are opt-in, and the baseline should be "leave me completely alone, don't touch me, don't speak to me, don't even acknowledge my presence." I find basically all human interaction overwhelming and more or less boundary violating, and I didn't realize until reading this post that my experience of life could be described that way.
Is it just me or does this policy effectively leave no way to opt in?
If noöne can interact with you without violating your boundaries, only boundary violators will interact with you—an asshole filter.
Sex is interesting because, while private, it is often discussed. People (including myself) have a certain tendency to deduce what sex is like for everyone from what sex is like for ourselves.
Corollary 1 – If you're a socially awkward and isolated, nerdy male loser in your twenties, you will be shocked when you accidentally learn that most of your peers are not still virgins, and that if they talk so much about sex, it's not only due to complex social motives beyond your comprehension, but also because they actually have sex.
Corollary 2 – If, in addition, you've been raised with a mix of feminist ideas about equality and the default expectation that you won't have sex till marriage—and even then, possibly only when you're trying to have children—women will suddenly become very different creatures to you, far less relatable than they used to seem, when you learn about their rôle as gatekeepers to sex. It'll take a while for you to come to terms with the unexpected fact that they most emphatically do not wish the kind of intimacy with you that you crave with most of them, and that failure to anticipate this makes you a sleazy criminal.
Corollary 3 – If you've grown up used to following rules society seems to enforce, that determine your behavior almost entirely, leaving no room for your desires to matter, you'll have a hard time realizing other people do pursue their desires—often making up fancy, selectively applied rules as they go to rationalize them—and you'll keep fruitlessly looking for the mysterious social script they seem to know so well and follow without fail. People will be offended by your expectations; after all, if you are a loser and expect them to be like you, you're calling them losers.
- Agree/disagree voting does not translate into a user's or post's karma — its sole function is to communicate agreement/disagreement. It has no other direct effects on the site or content visibility.
Then that's not much incentive for me to stop upvoting/downvoting stuff I agree/disagree with, then, is it?
[/pro-echo-chamber-jack-sparrow]
I wonder if there's any other post with more examples of status moves; particularly those likeliest to clue socially naïve people in on how dismally low status everyone else perceives them to be. So far, I haven't found such a post.
I'll contribute an example I found striking: whenever you arrive second at some place where you'll have to wait in line, do you dutifully stand behind the first, or do you ignore them and start a new line in parallel with them? If everyone else waits behind you and ignores them, too, you've won!—they'll be forced to join your queue at the end. Of course, you need to be careful not to try this with someone physically able and willing to reclaim their place in the line by beating you to a pulp, but this is basically true of any status game.
That's an interesting perspective.
At this point, I'd concluded all violations are mainly challenges. Since most people are socially skilled enough to smell weakness from a mile away, they know when they can assert their status by conspicuously disregarding your presumable boundaries, thus advertising, to you and to any bystanders, that you have no credible means to defend yourself and are therefore entirely at their mercy. What I've found the hardest to learn is that merely asking someone to respect your boundaries may well be itself a violation of their boundaries ("Noöne replies to me like that!"), which they most assuredly will defend, by escalating the abuse to prove the point that you're no match for them and have no choice but to yield, unconditionally, forever. Calling abusers abusers offends them.
That's part of the fight. Bullying works by normalizing the idea that there's nothing morally wrong with harming the victim. After all, they deserve it for being a victim, rather than a survivor, don't they?
It probably goes without saying that you need a pretty high status to make use of the advice in this post. A predictable failure mode for naturally status-blind people not very successful in life is to keep forgetting how low-status you are, and how little others can be bothered to listen to three words from you before they start talking over you or walk away mid-sentence to ask someone else. Only when you consciously learn status is a thing and its implications do you realize how hopeless all those communication attempts were to begin with, how powerless you are to stop people from ascribing to you any ideas or motives they like, how well-advised you'd be to shut up most of the time, and how screwed you are when shutting up won't do.
It also takes some time to learn that, in written communication, people who would interrupt you will instead skim your text for isolated keywords, hold you responsible for the message they make up from those, and give you an accordingly useless or hostile reply.
Chesterton fences to examine before changing
I think there's a crucial difference between Chesterton's fence and this situation: in the former, Chesterton is in a position of power over the would-be reformer ("I certainly won't let you clear it away"). Your past self, on the other hand, is powerless to stop you, so the dialogue would be more like
Past you – I don't see any reason to clear away my dear fence; please honor me by keeping it.
Present you – If you don't see the use of clearing your fence away, I certainly won't let you keep it. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see why I'm looking forward to getting rid of it, I may allow you to keep it. That is, if only you could still do anything at all, because you don't exist anymore. (Laughs at past you) Screw you! (Eagerly tears the fence down at once).
Typo nitpicking – There's "Politicans are unwilling" instead of "Politicians are unwilling" up there. I'm tempted to read it as a pun with pelicans or cans.
I wonder when a venerable old article reaches the "any remaining bugs become features" stage.
There's still "things that arent true", instead of "things that aren't true", in the second paragraph.
Hello!
Here's another old lurker. I don't remember when I started reading the occasional article, but it must not have been much later than 2009. I came back on and off to the site, and in the last years got interested in becoming part of the community, though I'll probably have to learn an unfathomable lot before I can contribute much. I'm still slowly reading the Sequences.