MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
In a perfectly efficient market, this would be the case. But it's easily disproven in practice by the fact that market prices can change by effects which have absolutely no impact on the utility value.
Ie, suppose we have a city with a bunch of plumbers, all of equal plumbing skill/ability, and a company that hires them and manages their distribution to clients, and pays between $80k and $120k depending on how skilled and aggressive the plumber is at negotiating (aggressive meaning they demonstrate an ability/willingness to quit and do a different job instead if they don't get the salary they want). We've assumed by axiom that they provide the same value, and yet get paid different amounts, let's assume the frequency is evenly distributed across this range, such that the average plumber is paid $100k. I suppose you could say that the "utility value" is the highest the company is willing to pay, $120k, and anyone being paid less is simply a bad negotiator, but I'm not sure if you'd say the "market value" is $120k given that most of the plumbers aren't earning that, and a new plumber entering the field is unlikely to get an offer that high.
Suppose then that the plumbers unionize and negotiate that all of them will receive the same pay of $110k. That's now the market value, unambiguously, that's what the market, as created by this single local monopolistic company (which is the only company offering reliable and consistent pay for plumbers in this city) and this one union (which all employees of the company must join) will pay. And yet the utility value of plumbing has not changed, because the union doesn't impact plumbing skill/ability in any way.
Suppose that the company actually takes in revenue of $140k for each plumbing employee it has, and keeps the difference as overhead/profit. There's a sense in which the utility value of a plumber is actually $140k since that's what clients are willing to pay, although if the overhead is necessary then I suppose the utility of the plumber themself is lessened by that. However if a plumbing emergency happens and the company gets a lot more business, earning $150k per employee one year, but takes the extra as profit and changes no salaries, then the utility value of plumbers goes up that year, the market price (from the client and owner's side) goes up, but the market price (from the employees side) remains unchanged.
And suppose that the employer uses local regulations, an army of lawyers, and relationships with local politicians to crush any new plumbers that try to form their own company or go independent in this area. It is not a free market, it is effectively a local monopoly. If you want to be a plumber, you negotiate here, or you leave the city and pay whatever transition costs it takes to uproot your life and your family and be a plumber somewhere else. The fact that this changes market prices but doesn't change the utility value of plumbers should clearly demonstrate that market prices are distinct from utility prices, even if an ideal perfectly efficient and free market would cause them to be equal. In practice, no market is perfectly free, therefore we should expect deviations in precisely the areas where these imperfections drive them apart.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
And yet, some proportion of rapists are 6'5 attractive sociopaths who go on romantic dates with women and then rape them. And probably don't marry them afterwards, if they were interested long term they'd probably be patient. But I assume that people not being traumatized and therefore not reporting it to the police would cause a rapist to keep going and thus become disproportionately prolific than some disgusting homeless person who gets reported and caught quickly.
Also, I'm not at all suggesting that this is typical or average. It's an exception, I'm just wondering if maybe it's on the order of 1-5% rather than 0-0.01% mentally ill people that society's failure to entertain it as a possibility would imply.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I suppose if you have some sort of selfish or elitist morality system where only you and people like you matter. But even then, "helping" homeless people doesn't just mean reducing their suffering but also converting them into productive members of society.
As a utilitarian, I think all humans matter. Failure to own a home (which is a state that literally all humans are born into and only manage to avoid by having kind/competent parents or producing enough to earn money for a place to stay on their own) does not discredit one from being a human and having inherent worth as a human being.
Now, if the cost to help a drug-addicted violent person fuel their addiction is the blood sweat and tears of five other people who have to pay for it out of their wages and suffer from crimes, then yeah, that's not worth it. But if you can help fix their addiction, and their behavioral issues, and turn them into a functioning and contributing member of society, then you've done all that AND saved an entire person's life, and then they can go and help other people as a productive member of society.
That's a big if. But it's a big gain if done. I'm sure that some homeless people are irredeemable scum who can't be changed. I'm equally sure that some people with homes and lots of money are also irredeemable scum who cause more harm than good but do it sneakily enough not to get caught. Houses are correlated with being a good person, but not even close to perfectly.
An actual solution to homelessness means solving the root cause of the issue, be that mental, behavioral, cultural, economic, social, or some combination. And then they're not homeless in the first place and that solves their issues and the problems they cause for other people at the same time. Anything less is a bandaid. Maybe useful as a temporary patch, but not ideal.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
You misunderstand. I'm not saying it's never okay to do that. If Omelas were literally the only solution then yeah, I'd probably be okay with that. I'm saying it's less than ideal. Suppose we have 1 homeless person simultaneously suffering from homelessness and whatever mental illness or anti-social personality is causing it (1 point) and inflicting suffering on 3 people (1 point each). And the following options:
-
Do literally nothing: Everyone suffers, (-4 points)
-
Pay to house the homeless person. They no long suffer, but they still harass everyone else, and it costs money (though less than the suffering of being homeless or else ordinary people wouldn't buy homes. So maybe (-3.5 points)
-
Exile the homeless person to another town. They suffer double, but the three people they were harassing are no longer harassed. BUT the new town has three new people for them to harass. (-5 points)
-
Exile the homeless person from all society and/or incarcerate them and/or execute them. They suffer.... I dunno, a lot, call it X. But the three other people are fine. (-X points)
-
Fix the homeless person's issues so they transform into a normal person. Let's suppose this is very difficult and expensive (-Y points). But everything else is resolved. They no longer suffer, the other people no longer suffer. (-Y points)
Your imagining of utilitarianism seems to be the claim that X < 3.5, that if we sacrifice homeless people via option 4 it's better than letting them inflict suffering on others. If option 5 did not exist, I might tentatively agree. 5 Does exist. I think Y < X < 3.5, and so Option 5 is ideal. Utilitarianism does not require sacrificing people to make other people happy, sometimes it just involves making everyone happy simultaneously. That's not always possible, but given that in this instance the very issue that is causing homeless people to inflict suffering on others (mental illnesses, addictions, and/or criminality) is the same thing inflicting suffering on themselves, solving that would get us both simultaneously.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.?
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions?
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
But this should then translate to a small fraction of real life encounters, right? It's certainly not the central example of rape, but there are powerful and wealthy man in real life, and a lot of them are horny and unethical enough to wield their power and influence to coerce the women around them into sex, which in turn removes responsibility for her choice. While probably the majority of the women in this scenario have a bad and icky and possibly traumatizing experience, it seems like some of them might enjoy it because it's literally their fantasy playing out in real life.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them". There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.
What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.
In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.
Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
But this would require skill and insider information and subjective analysis. Having a deterministic, mechanical process with known inputs that can process this data goes a long way towards preventing someone from corruptly picking and choosing which places they count as "high risk" and which they don't. And lowering variance, since some individuals are going to be better at doing this sort of subjective guesswork than others, while the AI can have its performance actually tested.
And goes a long way towards laundering this in the public perception. Even if everyone "knows" that this group is high risk, having an AI with testable metrics say so is probably going to be easier to sell (in the long run) than having human beings say so.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated.
I think that's the meat of my claim/conjecture though. Not just that it feels physically good in the moment, but that they literally are happier as a result of the encounter than they were before. Or at least would be absent the social ramifications. You can imagine it happening for any type of crime, but it seems highly implausible for most crimes, but rape seems like the scenario where, because things are so complicated and unstraightforward, you'd have more variance: with some people being damaged by it way more than something simple like being mugged, but some being damaged way less and possibly negative.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
Absolutely. I'm not really sure how it should worded though. Because you definitely want to avoid the ability to pardon people the President himself encouraged or enabled to avoid the ability to wilfully break the law on his behalf. But you can't entirely say "no political crimes" in a broad enough sense without preventing good pardons. Like the go-to example I keep thinking of is Julian Assange, who should be/should have been pardoned, so any rule needs to make sure that people like that still can be.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20C, which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting their thermostats to anything meaningfully distant from ~20C is doing it to save money. If you're outdoors, you maybe want a bit more if it's windy, or a bit less if it's sunny or you're doing a lot of physical activity, but you want the sum of all effects to average you back so your individual subjective feeling is around 20C.
Whatever combination of sunny/cloudy/rainy gets you closer to 20C is the ideal weather for your region.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
The best story I have ever read is Mushoku Tensei. The original webnovel, although I believe the light novel is just a more edited and refined version of it (and the anime is also fantastic although it skips a lot of the deeper worldbuilding and isn't finished yet).
A lot of people bounce off of it, because first of all it's very japanese weeb anime harem. And the main character starts off as a creepy pervert scumbag with some very uncomfortable behaviors that turn a lot of people off. And the story does not smite him down with the force of a thousand suns. It gives him time. It lets him grow and change and learn and slowly become a better person. Slowly, there isn't ever a moment where the story tells him "no, you were bad and now you have to do a 180 and become the opposite and shun everything you once were." It's about redemption through slow and gradual growth and understanding. And also building a harem of cute anime waifus, there is still that, so it's not actually a story for everyone. But it basically mastered the isekai genre before it was even a proper genre, and every generic isekai slop to come out has been cargo culting features from Mushoku Tensei without understanding why they were there in the first place.
I highly recommend it. It's super long, it has a single broad overarching plot that was planned for from the very beginning rather than the author flailing around inventing new plot threads every arc, and it masterfully sets up characters and plot elements in early chapters that show up again way later in interesting ways. And it subverts a lot of tropes too and does stuff with the main character and villain and side characters that I haven't seen in other stories. It's not for everyone, but people who do like it it really really really like it. It's my favorite story ever, so I recommend it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
I'm not sure what the alternative is. It seems to me like all of the problems with liberalism amount to "what if people try to impose not-liberalism?" Which, sure, difficulty practically implementing a set of ideals is a form of criticism against it. We should try to uphold liberalism, and when people try to tear it down and create unfair and unequal laws and norms we should oppose them and maintain the liberal order. That's how you uphold any order. The solution to "people trying to stop liberalism" certainly isn't "voluntarily stop liberalism", that's just surrendering immediately.
And even if you make some other order, it doesn't escape "what if people complain" unless you suppress them somehow, like if the alternative is "uphold a brutal dictatorship where we genocide anyone who opposes our regime" which tries to prevent dissidents from organizing that way. But that seems like a bad society that I don't want to live in, even if the dictator happens to share my skin tone.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
Sure, but my example is basically a disproof by counterexample. In this example, prices don't match utility, therefore, the statement "prices always match utility" is logically false. It's really easy to disprove an "always" statement with a single example, even a hypothetical one, because an "always" statement is such a strong claim that it's almost never true. Utility value and market value are different things: sometimes they will be equal, sometimes they will not. I'm not saying they're never equal, I'm not saying they won't usually be close, especially in an efficient market. My point is that markets in the real world are not always efficient, therefore the two values are not always equal in the real world. This should not be controversial.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
Better yet, just close the loopholes on capital gains taxes.
If you buy $100 mil of stock and it grows to $1.1 bil, you have capital gains of $1 billion. Someone needs to pay capital gains taxes on that $1 billion. Figure out exactly how each wealthy family is paying less tax, and change the laws so that that process results in an identical tax burden. If you sell the stock, you pay tax. If you give the stock as a gift or inheritance, have the tax burden stay attached to that stock and then when they sell it, it gets taxed. If people take out loans using the stock as collateral, make sure the tax burden stays attached to that stock, which deflates its value because eventually some day it will be sold and whoever sells it owes the tax out of the proceeds. The only way the tax never gets paid is if the stock crashes in price, in which case the stock didn't actually generate a real profit that needs to be taxed, and nothing was dodged.
Inheritance and estate taxes shouldn't be relevant here, just tax the profit directly when it's realized, no matter who is currently holding the bag.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
Treating people kindly and with love and trust is always the solution to any is-ought problem in any culture I've been to because it absolves yourself of the guilt of having acted unkindly or unlovingly and if someone interprets it incorrectly it is not because your underlying intentions were wrong.
This is only true if you tautologically define the term "kindly and with love and trust" to contain all of the complexities and nuances of the broader "is-ought".
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to lock your house or your car? Well, it's kind to the people inside the house, less kind to the thieves that want your stuff.
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to guard your wallet from pickpockets in a crime-ridden area and stop one if you catch them mid-theft?
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to punish someone for a crime? You can argue that it's kind to the victim, but unkind to the perpetrator being punished. Or you can make a complicated argument about how it's ultimately "kind and loving" to the perpetrator because the punishment will help them learn the error of their ways and become a better person which will ultimately be for their own good.
I'm not saying generally acting with kindness, love, and trust is wrong. They're good guidelines when to look to when trying to ground your decisions, but those words alone do not automatically solve all of the potential ethical dilemmas and tradeoffs inherent to the complexity of the real world.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
I broadly agree with you, with the caveat that I think there's a little more room for charity/empathy/forgiveness for people who are being harmful by accident rather than on purpose.
A murderer knows that what they are doing is wrong. They know that they are going to inflict a huge harm on others (both the direct victim and everyone who knows them), and they do it anyway. They are evil and they know this and they do it anyway because they are angry/selfish and care more about themselves than others. It's an issue of bad morality.
Aella believes that she is doing good. She has a distorted view of society/psychology in a way that makes her think that her lifestyle will make the average person more happy instead of less happy. She does what she does partly in order to make herself more popular and justify her lifestyle, but in part because she genuinely thinks it will make the world better. Now, likely some of this is cognitive dissonance: maybe somewhere deep down inside she knows its wrong but doesn't care, but I think the majority of the issue is a question of bad objectivity.
Now, from a consequentialist perspective Aella is probably worse and so, if necessary and in isolation, we would be willing to inflict a higher cost in order to stop her. But the norms of "have harsher punishments for people who hurt others on purpose than those who do it by accident" is useful in general, as is "have harsher punishments for people who hurt others in unambiguous ways than those who hurt others in ambiguous and indirect ways". This makes it easier for people to know what to expect and adjust their behavior ahead of time (decreasing the rates of bad behavior) instead of doing it anyway and then getting punished randomly and unexpectedly afterwards. It also decreases the ability of people to apply punishments to good behaviors by making convoluted arguments about indirect harms. It also gives more opportunities for forgiveness and redemption. There's a non-negligible chance that at some point Aella will observe more of the effects of her actions, realize her mistake, and then change and start genuinely helping people and undo the damage she's caused. Because her underlying motivation: wanting to help people, doesn't need to change, she just needs to reconcile it with the desire to be popular and slutty and realize they're opposed instead of synergistic. I suppose murderers can also change and become better people too, but it's a different kind of change and it's impossible to undo the harm they've already caused.
This is entirely consistent with the principle of "shame Aella and jail murderers" rather than the other way around. But the shame on Aella should be tempered by education and a hope that she herself learns from her mistakes instead of just having the shamers by maximally cruel to make her suffer and hate them and reject what they say.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
Mutual insurance already exists! Some of the biggest insurance companies of today started as mutuals, I think Liberty still is one.
I am immediately suspicious. Because if so why do they have so many ads? If they're not profit-driven, that seems negative sum.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
Most normal people are never going to be happy about that.
And who's to say that they're normal? Some people are weird. I'm not even slightly suggesting that this is the typical case, because it's obviously not. But some people are weird.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
provided it is a mere territorial claim with no further risk of aggression
I don't think this scenario has ever happened in the history of the world. Conquering powers that aggressively steal land from others typically only pause to consolidate their gains, reshore their power and morale, cooldown international outrage, etc, before continuing to conquer. And even if the particular nation decides not to go further, if it becomes known you explicitly have a policy of not fighting back against conquest plenty of other nations will swoop in to exploit this. Nations with no militaries and no allies very quickly cease to exist.
When we send a soldier to die in war
Nobody ever explicitly sends soldiers "to die", except in very rare and very evil exceptions. People send soldiers in the hopes that they live and their enemies die. Again, killing bad people is good, killing good people is bad. If your enemies are aggressive and unprovokedly attacking you, then they are bad and you are good, so every soldier of theirs you kill is acceptable, and every soldier of yours they kill is yet another evil they have committed. The fact that your own people die is a horrible tragedy, but the blame for it lies on the enemy for killing them, not on you for sending them in self-defense.
The argument “it is okay to kill bad people” must be rooted in something, not axiomatic. Why is it okay to kill bad people rather than jail them for life? Human life ceases to be sacred when it is a bad person? This isn’t the religious argument whatsoever.
This is pretty typical natural rights stuff, which can be religious or not depending on whether or not you believe the natural rights are inherent to humans or derived from God. Everyone is born with an inherent right to life, liberty, property, etc. Violating these is not okay. But if you willingly violate them in others then you forfeit some of yours (in various amounts depending on how harsh a perspective one has, but generally proportional to the amount that you violated from others.) Your natural rights are contingent on respecting the natural rights of others, and if you can't do that then you don't get the respect of others for yours.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.
My bad, that's what I meant to ask but got their names mixed up.
To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.
But why was that necessary? Shouldn't there have been an option to do the thing he tried to do? That is, have his case proceed but, because the accident occurred prior to the bankruptcy, anything that exceed the insurance value can retroactively be voided by the bankruptcy? Or is that not possible because it would make him a creditor and the bankruptcy has to figure out how to pay those out?
Wouldn't it make more sense to put a hold on the bankruptcy proceedings and handle the lawsuit first?
Do some people enjoy being raped?
I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?
A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.
Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.
And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.
I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)
More options
Context Copy link