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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34506 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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New Frontiers in Algorithmic Racism - Tax Edition

The New York Times has an article out on the IRS algorithmically targeting black Americans at higher rates than other racial groups. The claim is that there's something in the algorithm that inappropriately biases it against black Americans. Summarized in the opening paragraphs:

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.

The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.

OK, so what exactly is causing them to get audited more if it's not individual bias, the machines are blinded to the race of the individual, and the rules are the same for everyone? Apparently some of it comes down to targeting EITC filings:

Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because I.R.S. data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.

But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared with E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.

Unless I'm missing something, the article does not explicitly state what the relevant factors are that result in this targeting are. In what I see as typical NYT style, it does leave a breadcrumb that might be suggestive if you're ignoring the narrative quotes embedded in the article:

Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

To me, this reads like the most likely explanation for black taxpayers being audited more frequently is that they report their income incorrectly in easy-to-detect ways. Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong. There isn't really any elaboration that I find after this, so I'm unclear on how much this accounts for auditing disparities. The implication of the article and the quotes from "equity" advocates imply to me that we should figure out a way to make sure that white Americans are audited at least as much as black Americans, regardless of who is misreporting their income more frequently.

As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group. If a program that is optimized for detecting incorrect tax filings works as intended to detect them, but turns up more black Americans than white Americans, the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue. The "algorithmic bias", from my reading of this would be injecting a deliberate racial preference to counter the program noticing actual disparities. I am reminded of the racial resentment scale, in which people who say that "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" are not racially resentful, while those who think things like "Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up, Blacks should do the same without any special favors" are racially resentful.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see if the study is released more publicly and details what exactly is causing the disparity.

Evidently the problem is not the fraud, but the detection [and corrective action] of said fraud. The implication is that blacks should be allowed to do fraud. It sounds dumb but this is the only possible conclusion I can draw from this article, which is probably why they didn't want to specify a remedy.

This seems isomorphic to other conversations about achieving social justice, where they're often spoken more explicitly. In affirmative action, for instance, one of the main pro- arguments goes that blacks/women, at the moment of applying for a job, on average are less qualified for the job than whites/men, and this lower qualification is due to the bigoted discrimination they faced in a white supremacist/patriarchal society limiting their ability to fulfill their potential. As such, it is the responsibility of the individual company to make up for the injustices perpetuated on those blacks/women by society by putting their thumb on the scale in their favor at the moment of hiring. Usually, one of the handwaving justifications for this is that by giving certain individuals within these subgroups a leg up, it will lead to those individuals having greater ability to contribute back to their communities of similarly oppressed subgroups, helping to uplift them out of the hole that the oppressive society placed them in. Perhaps the handwave for this IRS situation hasn't been developed and matured to the same extent yet, though I imagine adapting the existing one to this one shouldn't be hard.

there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others

So this statement is just a lie right? Like the kind of lie Scott spent thousands of words trying to tell us that the NYT doesn't tell.

I specifically called out Scott in pointing out that the phrase "no evidence" is often a flat out lie.

Scott's response was that that can't be an example of the media lying because the example is too good and would actually prove that the media lies:

Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned.

I mean yeah. I chose a good example. Condemning the media is the whole point of using a good example.

It is a weird retort. Side A: Media sucks. Side B: No it does an okay job. Side A: Here is an example of media doing a bad job. Side B: By god, that can’t be otherwise the media sucks.

It sure looks that way to me, and contradicted by their other statement:

Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

I guess this leaves room for the idea that there is equal tax evasion between ethnic groups and that black Americans simply commit errors that are easy to spot. I don't necessarily find that entirely implausible, but I don't see any work here done to justify the assertion. Perhaps this is "no evidence" in the weasel-word usage that it's actually difficult to know what the rates of tax evasion are between groups. Personally, I would regard automated flagging of returns for misreporting income and claiming unwarranted credits as evidence of evasion.

Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

Sure but this leads immediately to the question that are Black Americans disproportionately stupid or are they disproportionately malicious? I don't think it's something any modern day progressive wants to grapple with at all.

There's already a very well developed fully general explanation for anything of this sort, which is that Black Americans are oppressed in this white supremacist society, and as such, they have greater stress on their lives leading them to make more mistakes, or they have fewer resources to turn to, leading them to turn to crime to make ends meet. This is actually generalizable - and often generalized - to any subgroup that has been deemed to be oppressed.

Well, most Americans don’t do their taxes themselves. Blue collar Americans(a group including the overwhelming majority of blacks) either pay for a tax prep software or go to specialized tax prep businesses that pop up in strip malls around this time of year and have mascots outside waving people in with signs.

‘Black people usually choose the shittier option for some reason’ isn’t necessarily due to incompetence or maliciousness; it could just be fashionable to use a different chain or set of chains, or they could advertise to different communities.

Technically, if true, all it tells you is that African Americans are more likely to make this specific kind of error. An error is not necessarily tax evasion (which at least to me implies intent), and there are probably lots of errors that are not counted. I would say more such errors is Bayesian evidence in favor of more actual evasion, but it's weak, and the error being made is this one.

Higher rates of underreporting of income is absolutely evidence of higher rates of intentional underreporting of income. It’s not proof, but it’s what you would expect to find in the case of intentional tax fraud.

I guess the question is does the IRS check for overpayment. If yes, then if blacks aren’t not generally represented on each side then it’s evidence of fraud.

Depends on the type of overpayment. There's an entire industry and retail advertisement culture built around the yearly (interest free) repayment of overpaid taxes.

I meant that this particular mistake results in overpayment and underpayment roughly equal.

To me this sounds like the same old issue that the GOP has been complaining about for years namely that it's been de-facto IRS policy for years now to preferentially target rural/low-income individuals because they are viewed as being "easier marks". Wealthier people/businesses have the money to hire lawyers and accountants to fight you which is not what you want if you're an IRS agent trying to make a quota.

As for the accusation of racism is, impression is similar to yours, the democrats in general and the media in particular have been so thoroughly mind-killed by identity politics/intersectionality that they are simply incapable of not projecting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc... onto everything they see.

I wouldn't even call it "mind-killing", because of the impressive mental gymnastics required to avoid ever even considering the idea that there could be meaningful group differences. The bizarre hypotheses, type errors, or misdirections that my friends and colleagues come up with when I ask if there is even in principle a possible difference in group averages is constant source of surprising creativity in my life.

The fact that the NYT article even mentions the possibility (to immediately dismiss it) already puts it in the top tier of clear thinking on the issue in my experience.

I wouldn't even call it "mind-killing", because of the impressive mental gymnastics required to avoid ever even considering the idea that there could be meaningful group differences. The bizarre hypotheses, type errors, or misdirections that my friends and colleagues come up with when I ask if there is even in principle a possible difference in group averages is constant source of surprising creativity in my life.

On the contrary, I would say that the extent of these gymnastics is strong evidence of mind-killing. After all, they already know what the cause is, they simply need to get there, whatever convoluted reasoning it takes.

The fact that the NYT article even mentions the possibility (to immediately dismiss it) already puts it in the top tier of clear thinking on the issue in my experience.

Yet the question is whether it is genuinely considered, or just 'our enemies would say it, so we have to address it.' Given the poor reasoning to dismiss it, I would argue the latter.

I think you have to be pretty "mind-killed", IE have drunk deeply from the Progressive/Marxist Kool-Aid to sincerely believe that "group differences" in genetics are not only going to outweigh individual variation, along with as other group-wide factors like culture and social policy, but outweigh them to such a degree that those factors can be safely dismissed as unmeaningful.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about. The NYT dismisses the possibility of different amounts of tax fraud between races for any reason. Whether or not it's genetic, or whether other factors might be more important, are separate questions, and are secondary to the question of whether the fraud detection algorithms are biased. Again, I'm saying that even acknowledging group average differences in behavior as a possible explanation for group average differences in outcome is already less mind-killed than most of my interlocutors.

Since I have you here, what do you mean when you say that a group-level difference could "outweigh" individual level variation? They're just two levels of variation, and nothing changes if one is bigger than the other - they're both still there.

He's trying to equate HBD with wokism but imo it doesn't really make any sense

I'm equating one flavor of socialist infused identity Politics to other flavors of socialist infused identity politics.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about.

And to be blunt, I could say the exact same thing to you.

Charitably you're latching on to genetics because it seems easy to quantify/measure, life would be so much simpler for the budding academic if things like intelligence, virtue, and propensity to defraud the government could be determined via a simple blood-test or looking at an individual's skin color. See the old saw about the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp.

Less charitably you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid considering the possibility that the IRS might be following perverse incentives. One of the reasons you might being doing this is that your ideology requires you to frame things a certain way (IE in terms of the intersectional stack) while discounting the importance of individual character/agency. You believe that group differences exist, they are meaningful, and they are wholly a product of genetics, because biological determinism, and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics say they must be so, and believing those things is what separates rational high-status human-beings from the plebs and chatbots.

I'm sorry, I never raised the issue of genetics, I was only talking about group differences in behavior in general. I also heartily agree that the IRS could easily be following perverse incentives. I have no idea what you mean about Hegelian dynamics here, nor how individual character + agency precludes discussions of average differences in behavior between groups, which the article raised as a possibility.

I would really love it if you'd read my first reply again - I wasn't claiming that group differences explain anything here. I was saying that it's astounding the variety of behaviours people will display if prompted to acknowledge, in principle, the possible existence of average group differences (genetic or otherwise). Do you think such differences are possible?

Do you really get the runaround on those sorts of questions? Because in my experience, if you give social sciences types any opportunity to talk about factors that could affect metrics of success by race / gender / immigration status / whatever, they will happily talk your ear off for hours. They are unlikely to mention genetic factors (outside of epigenetics and "did you know about DNA methylation [...] response to stress"), but that will not stop them enthusiastically brainstorming hypotheses and what studies one might run to test those hypotheses for as long as you're willing to listen.

I don't get to talk with many social scientists, but the two I've talked to about these things were so appalled by the mere suggestion that I quickly shut up. But for example, a Bayesian ecologist told me that his prior on there being differences in behavior driving differential arrest rates was 0 (I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean). A mathematician who said epigenetic trauma was an explanation for poor black outcomes, astoundingly also suggested that Jews' excellent outcomes after the holocaust were also due to epigenetic trauma. Like, that hypothesis wouldn't have even occurred to me in a million years.

The behavior I've seen is consistent with people sensing that they are discussing something sacred and not to be questioned. I've made my peace with this - except when it comes up in relation to policy discussions. In those cases, I wish we had some galaxy-brained norm about separation of church and state that we could invoke. In fact, that might be a great contribution to diffusing the culture wars - some version of "Render unto the racists..."

More comments

Less charitably you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid considering the possibility that the IRS might be following perverse incentives.

I'm not OP, but would you mind clarifying whether you personally in fact believe that the racial difference in audit frequency is due to the IRS following perverse incentives, and if so which perverse incentives? And, if you do, do you believe that astrolabia does not believe that the disparate results are causally downstream of the IRS following the incentives which you believe are perverse?

Because I predict that both you and astrolabia believe that

  1. The IRS is more likely to audit tax returns where there is a high probability of a small amount of easy-to-prove fraud than tax returns where there is a small probability of a large amount of hard-to-prove fraud, even when the expected monetary value of prosecuting the rare annoying high-value fraud would be higher

  2. If you were to segment tax returns by (race of filer, was EITC claimed, had obvious inconsistencies), then audit frequency would vary based on whether there were obvious inconsistencies when holding (race of filer, was EITC claimed) constant.

  3. Audit frequency would not vary significantly based on race when holding (was EITC claimed, had obvious inconsistencies) constant.

  4. Holding (was EITC claimed) constant, (had obvious inconsistencies) would vary significantly by race.

I don't think "the IRS follows perverse incentives" and "propensity to have obvious, easily provable inconsistencies when filing taxes varies by race" are mutually exclusive hypotheses, and honestly I don't expect that either hypothesis is even particularly contentious (unless you make the stronger assertion that the rate of inconsistencies varies due to genetics rather than education quality or other environmental factors, but then you're just dealing with the standard "HBD discourse is brain poison" problem).

Yes, I agree with all 4 points. I think you're also right that HlynkaCG agrees with me on these points.

I think what happened here is that, HlynkaCG saw me defend discussion of the possibility that there might be group differences in behavior (possibly due to poverty, or whatever the palatable explanation of the month is, I didn't say), saw this (correctly) as allowing more avenues for arguments in favor of HBD, and became mind-killed.

I'm not OP, but would you mind clarifying whether you personally in fact believe that the racial difference in audit frequency is due to the IRS following perverse incentives, and if so which perverse incentives?

It's no secret that due to factors both historical and cultural, blacks are disproportionately represented in lower to middle ends of the socio-economic spectrum within the US. Likewise it's no secret that the IRS disproportionately targets the lower and middle classes for the reasons already described. The Idea that this must be about race (because how could it not be) rather than IRS agents simply following through on their instructions/incentives is where the partisanship/id-pol comes in.

When you say "about" race I'm genuinely unsure what you mean - the reading that seems most natural to me is "the difference in audit frequency by race is causally downstream of race", which seems obviously and almost tautologically true to me.

But you have a history of making insightful posts, so I'm guessing you mean something else which is not that. I'm not sure what though (again, not intended as a gotcha, I'm just not understanding how "the IRS follows incentives" is an alternative hypothesis instead of "an additional factor that is causally upstream of the observation").

Or maybe I can just read between the lines and recognize that "meaningful group differences" is a shibboleth for various flavors of HBD partisan.

How do you get different species at all? Populations diverge until they are different species. It looks like most of progeny neardertal-sapiens was infertile. Where's Flores Hobbits now? They didn't die because of climate change, nor they were assimilated.

Black Americans and White Americans aren't living on different sides of Iron Curtain set by a totalitarian dictatorship(s). Same language, same religion, same currency, same sports, same worship of Kim Kardashian's rear parts.

it's been de-facto IRS policy for years now to preferentially target rural/low-income individuals because they are viewed as being "easier marks"

This is, at the very least, a very misleading summary. The IRS is an order of magnitude more likely to audit people making $10m+ than those making under $1m.

what's the old saw? there are lies, damn lies, and statistics? People making $10m+ are a tiny fraction of those being audited. As such I don't think you've actually rebutted my claim

people making $10m+ are a tiny fraction of

...people. There is nearly no system imaginable that wouldn't result in them being a tiny fraction of those being audited, unless we're willing to let large quantities of even the most obvious errors/frauds go without audit in every other income range.

there are lies, damn lies, and statistics

To have a bit of fun with this: so are you damned lying or manipulating statistics when you trivially point out that a miniscule portion of the population has fewer audits than the vast supermajority of the population?

23,456 U.S. households reported income of $10 million or more [for the] 2018 tax year

Mind-killed seems strong. A sufficient explanation of their actions would be to say that they are consistent in the application of the belief that any discrepancy between groups that benefits whites or disadvantages blacks is a racism.

Considering how many people hold to that belief only when convenient I can only congratulate the democrats and media in general and the NYT in particular for their consistency.

As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group.

I suppose "always was" is a glib response so I'll say:

This tendency is widespread and isn't even specific to algorithms: leftists always first insist that society did a wrong via its social engineering to then demand social engineering to ostensibly "correct" this.

You see this all the time with nebulous complaints about how "the media" brainwashed people into not liking everything from fat people to Africa to the WNBA and therefore have a responsibility to fix it despite very little evidence being adduced for this (and people ignoring more obvious explanations for why these things are low status)

It's just part of a fundamental, distorted Rousseauianism that has swallowed the Left: any inconvenient situation must be blamed on some sort of malignant social programming and, not just that, on the usual villains: white supremacy, Western sexism,etc. (as if minorities can't "program" themselves with awful beliefs).

This tendency is widespread and isn't even specific to algorithms: leftists always first insist that society did a wrong via its social engineering to then demand social engineering to ostensibly "correct" this.

If too many whites or "X" get ahead, the system is broken. Otherwise, the meritocracy is working (like in sports, Hollywood, etc. ) but not in STEM (in which Asians, Whites are overrepresented).

the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue.

The most obvious stuff seems like it wouldn't even require much of an algorithm. If (Times SSN Claimed As Dependent >1), Then Audit (All Taypayers Claiming SSN As Dependent). If (Claimed Income) != (Reported Income), then Audit.

If this sort of thing is really the source of the discrepancy, then it's not even some AI algorithm thing. It's just basic computerized logic checking. The sane solution is to try to teach the black community to not commit easily detectable tax fraud, and instead engage in incredibly based tax avoidance.

The sane solution here would be to simplify the tax code and automate it as much as possible. People will inevitably screw up on the taxes, and I feel bad even for folks who try to cheat it without realizing basic facts about it (your employer reports your wage income!) It takes up way too much time for everyone (why should I need to research depreciation schedules of real estate?) and creates millions of pointless make-work jobs.

Another case of racializing a real problem thus turning it partisan. Police brutality manifests in ways that non BLM- supporters could see and even in ways that BLM would find difficult to explain (the recent incident 5 Black cops beating up a Black guy), but the topic which could previously unify disparate interests, now bitterly divides.

From my, non-American, understanding there is a corrupt relationship between TurboTax and US lawmakers which leads to this proprietery software being basicly required to file taxes. Now the topic of filing taxes is at risk of suffering the same fate where instead of the goal being to make it more intuitive and less likely likely for laymen to make mistakes, racism is blamed and nothing which solves the problem is done.

From my, non-American, understanding there is a corrupt relationship between TurboTax and US lawmakers which leads to this proprietery software being basicly required to file taxes.

This is not true for what it's worth. I've actually filed taxes purely by hand before. The government puts out a freely available booklet that walks you through each step of the process, and all the inputs come from the tax forms businesses are required to give you (e.g. the W2 form which reports your pay and how much tax was withheld from it). There are more complicated tax scenarios, but if your only income comes from working a regular job (which is most people) it's actually really easy to do your taxes by hand.

That said, tax software is nice and it is easier. But way too many people in the US treat filing taxes as some arcane process they could never understand, when the truth is they've just been deceived by the hype.

But way too many people in the US treat filing taxes as some arcane process they could never understand, when the truth is they've just been deceived by the hype.

They type of person who plays D&D might be slightly more capable than the median person when it comes to navigating a paperwork process or cross-referencing data. Many folks even ones who by all indication should be able to handle certain types of mental tasks when confronted with a problem shutdown and refuse to process to the point that someone else literally reading an error message to them but because the information channel is not from a stubborn impersonal piece of paper or computer lets them move forward. It's like the quote in Dune about learning to learn being something of a superpower for time sensing space Jesus.

They type of person who plays D&D might be slightly more capable than the median person when it comes to navigating a paperwork process or cross-referencing data.

Maybe back before they got rid of THAC0.

I'm kidding.

Wait, no I'm not.

Sometimes I think of the type of person who claims they "aren't a good test taker", but they believe themselves otherwise intelligent. I wonder if we are witnessing an extremely sophisticated "Clever Hans" effect. Or that they are cold reading their way through intellectual discussions. Then when alone in the room with a form and a pencil, none of their faculties that they've been told count as intelligence can be deployed.

THAC0 is an easy mode hack. Non linear-formula-based results tables are the lindy option true to the wargaming roots of the game. But today even miniature wargaming rule sets are forgoing tables in favor of simple stat value add/subtract dice roll formulae.

I work in anti wire-fraud, prevention, detection, and recovery after the fact. I've worked with multiple doctors that I am confident couldn't complete a 1040ez if their life depended on it. Yes, I know their own finances are to complex for the ez form and using an accountant is probably a good thing for them. My point is most people are only competent at a small number of things they do a lot and this is very seldom one of them. On a related note doctors make fantastic scam marks. They think they are smart, they often really aren't ,they have money to take, and personality types that make them resistant to reporting it or getting help until they've lost A LOT of money.

Is MDs medical doctors or managing directors in this context?

I don't disagree, but that's very much a character flaw of those people rather than the system actually being difficult to work with. It's very easy if you actually read the instructions and follow them instead of shutting down in some kind of learned helplessness mode.

From my, non-American, understanding there is a corrupt relationship between TurboTax and US lawmakers which leads to this proprietery software being basicly required to file taxes.

True, but somewhat exaggerated in my view. When filing without business and investment income, it's pretty easy to file taxes without going through any proprietary software. The industry is also fairly competitive rather than monopolistic. The fact that the American tax code is so complicated it's difficult for an individual with a house, business, investments, kids, and more to do without professional assistance is (in my view) a bad thing due to the deadweight loss, but it really shouldn't have much impact on low-income filers, who tend to have straightforward W-2 income to report and pay on.

I'm sure the complicated nature of the American tax filing system is exaggerated, but the comparison here would be something like the Finnish tax system, where the "filing process" for many typical employees at the tax filing date would be... doing nothing at all, since almost everything has already been calculated on your behalf in the system, or at most checking the government's site to confirm everything is correct.

If I was doing the same thing I do now as an employee, the only thing I'd need to add would be the household services tax deductions for hiring a cleaner and using renovation services a couple of times - the standard housing credit deductions, child deductions etc. would already be on file. Since I'm a sole proprietor my tax stuff is somewhat more complicated, but my accountant takes care of it and her standard hours for doing all my accounting are one hour per month, one extra hour if there's some particular thing to take care of and one hour annually for annual tax stuff, so it's fairly limited on that end, too, and (AFAIK) since all my business and invoicing etc. happens online all the tax stuff can be done online, too, without a need for any physical receipts or filings.

Eh. IRS Free File allows anyone with an adjusted gross income under $73000 to use tax software for free.

There are multiple software companies. It is reasonably cheap.

From my, non-American, understanding there is a corrupt relationship between TurboTax and US lawmakers which leads to this proprietery software being basicly required to file taxes.

Yeah, here's the latest Propublica article on the topic with back links to their earlier reporting: https://www.propublica.org/article/what-to-know-about-turbotax-before-you-file-taxes

Like other replies, I also do my own taxes. But I'm under no illusion this is a realistic option for most people.

One issue is that the IRS very threatening about any mistakes bringing very serious consequences, including jail time. In practice, they do tend to be understanding and work with people to correct mistakes. But many people don't know that... and that might not be the experience poorer people have. Tax prep companies provide legal guarantees that mistakes are their problem not yours.

There's no reason (other than lobbying by the makers of TurboTax) for the IRS to not send you everything they know, which should cover your entire tax situation if you just have W-2 jobs, investments through a brokerage firm, and a mortgage, all of which are already reported to the IRS and if you omit or typo any of the information that was sent to both you and the IRS, then you're in trouble. In practice, this "trouble" usually means the IRS contacts you saying you made a typo, they fixed it, and here's your recomputed tax amount, but you did have to sign saying they're well within their rights to throw you in jail instead.

It's not that bad filing on paper unless you have a busines with a large number of transactions and your transaction record is a physical ledger book or something that will require a lot of calculations at year end, or you have some very odd investments (certain types of partnerships create some rather challenging tax scenarios).

Try getting company restricted stock; the brokerages are required by law to report the basis value wrong and then send a correction statement, which you have to arduously match up yourself to fix.

Well, no, there’s lots of alternatives to TurboTax and you could in theory do it manually if you’ve been appropriately trained(average training time is 3-6 mo, so not something most people would learn to do for themselves). It’s definitely true that tax prep companies lobby the govt heavily to avoid the tax code getting simpler, but the tax code’s complexity also works in favor of the poor(who receive large cash payments every year because of that complexity), families with children(ditto), and the wealthy(who manage to substantially reduce their taxes by taking advantage of that complexity).

Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong.

IANAAccountant, but I have taken a tax accounting course. This is, IIRC, precisely how it works. It's called the Document Matching Program, and it dispatches notice letters to taxpayers when a discrepancy is detected between the filed return and the IRS' copies of the taxpayer's W-2s and 1099s.

https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-irs-tax-compliance-activities#Underreporter

https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/newsroom/irs/upfront-information-statement-matching/

Is this what they are calling an audit? "Your form doesn't match what we have on file, send us the difference plus some interest." I mistyped my income and got one of those. Not exactly Will Ferrell coming to my bakery and giving me flours.

The IRS refers to those as correspondence audit, so I would think they would be tracked by the IRS as audits.

I'm reminded of a NYT piece from a few years back (about genetics, definitely wrongthink now) that small-print warned that big data and rigorous statistics were likely to turn up results that progressives wouldn't like very much.

Will be interesting to see how long the hands-in-ears-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you strategy will remain viable.

I worked in a central government agency and sometimes dabbled in AI policy. When race is blinded, sometimes the computer will still disproportionately target certain races because of correlated factors.

As long as the algorithm is detecting actual errors, it's okay for it to disproportionately impact certain races (although it will still make the news and people will complain). What's more controversial is when the computer is copying existing human behaviour. If human behaviour can be truly racist (e.g. in an irrational way), the computer can inherit that irrationality, even if blinded.

Right, this is the steelman of the ai bias argument, along with other training data bias like those facial recognition algos that couldn't' detect black faces. But as far as I know they aren't even using an ai. Just a system that looks for potentially suspicious filings to have someone take a look at. Like if your w2 doesn't match the one your employer sent in or in this case the eitc seems to be wildly off.

Yet another reason the FairTax would be fairer. As only businesses would pay taxes, consumer-laborers would be freed from fear of the taxman, and used goods such as thrift store clothes, used cars, and pre-owned houses would be completely tax-free.

The problem with FairTax, is that the United States chose to implement several of its largest federal welfare programs through the tax code. That's one of the big reasons there's very little political will on the left or right to truly rip up the tax code by the roots and replace it with something better.

Ding ding ding. FairTax is so obviously superior that this is the real answer.

Not to mention taxing consumption instead of income incentivizes people not to buy a ton of random shit which a lot of our economy is based on. The government is very happy with the moral hazard of punishing the productive more than strong consumers.

No amount of weak hole-poking can disguise that fact.

Not to mention taxing consumption instead of income incentivizes people not to buy a ton of random shit which a lot of our economy is based on.

Why do you think buying random things is a bad thing for an economy?

Is that a real question? Have you ever driven through a poor neighborhood where every front yard is stuffed with plastic crap rotting away?

It incentives low-quality, non-durable goods that don't provide value to the people purchasing them and generally require cross-planet shipping on vessels burning bunker oil. It's not efficient and that's putting it politely.

Is property taxed at all under this system? Wouldn't this usher in a landed gentry situation?

Property tax is one of the taxes NOT replaced by FairTax. The used house purchase itself is untaxed. There are more details on FairTax.org in their FAQs.

Suffice it to say, they already thought of most of the easy objections and worked an answer into the bill.

That sounds like a major loophole. If "used" goods aren't taxed, why would anyone ever sell "new" goods?

The definition of “used” is that the FairTax has already been paid on it, or that it predates the existence of the FairTax. So not much of a loophole.

So why don't I sell all items "new" for 1 cent to myself (well, presumably a fictional legal entity so it counts as a sale) and then sell them "used" for the real price?

Because Fairtax functions similarly to a VAT and so you’d still have to pay, plus in practice it would be revised to have 10,000 pages of regulations defining what goods are new.

Presumably for the same reasons you don’t currently commit tax fraud.

I guess it would be the same reason you don’t say all your employees are actually unpaid volunteers, but they have access to an off-shore account that happens to have money put into it every two week, so you don’t have to pay the payroll tax.

Because goods eventually wear out. Used clothes tear. Used cars break. Used houses subside. And only a small part of all purchased goods are on the market at a given time.

Thrift stores currently exist, many of them nonprofits. Why would anyone not buy all their clothes there at a 50-90% discount from retail?

Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. I understand why people buy actually new items instead of used items. The question is how the law defines "new" vs. "used" to avoid legal gymnastics to allow for legal tax evasion.

Thrift stores currently exist, many of them nonprofits. Why would anyone not buy all their clothes there at a 50-90% discount from retail?

This actually seems to be an interesting cultural thing. While division probably isn't actually quite so clean, I feel like a lot of people I know can be divided into "buys all clothes new, would never occur to them to shop at a thrift store" and "buys all clothes used, would never occur to them to buy new".

Ah, yes. That’s defined in the text of the bill as retail goods at point of sale: basically the point at which a finished new good is sold the first time. The FairTax is included on the receipt, and that good can never again be sold taxed.

I think the idea is that you only get to forgo paying taxes up to the amount of taxes that were paid for the new item. Usually used items cost less than new items so this is a total elimination of taxes but if you buy it "new" for $1 and sell it "used" for $1000 you still pay tax on $999

Presumably, the answer would be (I am not a Fairtax proponent but do support creating a VAT on new durable goods) to create some definition of used which precludes doing this. Eg must have been sold to an end user, must be through a specialized resale shop, etc. I would expect, like most regulations, that this would create counterintuitive scenarios and probably define different goods differently, but ‘vehicles must have at least 15,000 miles to be sold as used, while firearms can only be sold as used if through a licensed pawnbroker and not ordered from out of state(both of which are extremely plausible definitions of used for those particular goods)’ has the helpful side effect of employing the legions of CPAs that would otherwise be unemployed to fairtax.

If I'm reading this right, the FairTax is a strict 23% tax on goods and services at the point of sale. No brackets, no deductions, just any new sale getting 23% more expensive. Oh, and I guess the "prebate" basic income each month.

Interesting.

How does this interact with taxes-as-an-incentive, e.g. vice tax or tariffs? I understand there are reasons to consider those "unfair," but I'd expect to lose a lot of utility by slicing them out entirely. It sounds like this would be the biggest market-capitalist policy victory since the Gilded Age.

…just any new sale getting 23% more expensive…

That’s the easiest misunderstanding to make, and the easiest to deal with, so I’ll work on it before dealing with your main point.

The FairTax is designed to replace the “embedded” taxes hidden in the prices of market goods. First, think of the income taxes currently embedded in a Big Mac cheeseburger. The cashier and the cooks, the manager, the franchise owner, the owner’s LLC, the food truck company’s drivers, packers, owners, the farmers who grew the food, the business owner’s and manager’s investment firms’ personal and corporate income taxes, etc.

And all of these taxes are built into the existing customer cost of the hamburger. That means, on top of your own income taxes (supplied by your job’s customers), you’re also paying everyone else’s whenever you buy anything. On average, the embedded taxes in American goods and services make up about 25% of the cost. For every dollar you spend, a quarter already goes to Washington D.C. through the IRS.

The bill outlines a transition between the income tax regime and the FairTax regime where, instead of part of the gross receipts of that burger going into everyone’s paychecks only to be immediately yoinked out for withholding, the FairTax portion of 23¢ from each dollar just goes right to Washington. Prices will remain basically as-is. Paper wages will go down but take-home gross remains the same. During the first year of transition, price gouging due to greed or misunderstanding will be heavily watched and penalized. After that, markets should be adjusted to the new reality, but fraud will continue to be watched for by a much smaller tax authority.

How does this interact with taxes-as-an-incentive, e.g. vice tax or tariffs? I understand there are reasons to consider those "unfair," but I'd expect to lose a lot of utility by slicing them out entirely.

You are correct, it removes the incentive structures and turns American taxation into merely a source of government revenue, collected exactly once from each commercial activity, automatically and without loophole or bias.

If governments, federal and local, want to continue behavioral modification of the populace, they’ll have to find other ways. With all the overlapping incentives built into taxes and embedded in pricing, the market is hopelessly distorted and most people simply assume a price is a price and pay it. Keep in mind, nothing in the bill precludes laws increasing regulatory burdens which companies would predictably move into the price.

the "prebate" basic income each month

I do like that you noticed that! It would decouple revenue from labor in an increasingly automated marketplace, and it would institute the infrastructure for additional reforms such as replacing means-tested welfare (filtered through layers of salaried bureaucracy) with direct-deposit flat universal welfare.

Whether you see the FairTax “prebate” as basic income provided by the state, a tax rebate, or an “American dividend” akin to Yang’s proposal, goes back to the philosophical nature of what taxes are, and whether they’re theft or justified. I see the FairTax as a direct tax on economic activity, which income tax was always a proxy for anyway.

To switch to a sort of meta-discussion of media fairness and lying: I see this genre of post a lot where someone reads an article and "debunks" the framing/implied conclusion of the article with facts from the article and whether that is an indication of honesty or not. On one hand, the piece is clearly biased and wants you to take seriously the idea that this audit rate is a problem that reflects poorly on IRS practices, but it accurately reports that the system is totally race-blind and the obvious socioeconomic factor (EITC use) doesn't explain the disparity which allows you to draw the opposite conclusion.

This sort of biased headline and framing but with enough true facts critically thinking people can draw opposite conclusions is how a lot of media bias ends up. My favorite example of this was when Fox News published "BREAKING NEWS: Roy Moore accuser admits she forged part of yearbook inscription attributed to Alabama senate candidate" based on an ABC interview where the accuser stated that the date and location underneath Roy Moore's message was something she added. To me, that seems like an irrelevant detail, it's obvious from an image of the yearbook that the handwriting is different, Moore's message also contains the year, and she never explicitly stated before that he had written that part. Though once she read his message aloud and also read the part she added which may have implied he di. The purpose of characterizing this minor clarification as an admission of partial forgery the day before the election was obviously to cast her story in doubt so as to rally Republicans to Roy Moore and seems a clear-cut instance of bias. Yet, I cannot get too frustrated with Fox because I was able to read the article and find the same set of facts that lead me to believe it was an irrelevant clarification and not blatant forgery in the body of the article.

These biased articles with accurate facts that undermine the conclusion the author is pushing with the framing and headline seem fundamentally dishonest in some way, but it's not lying or information being withheld. If you read these articles closely and critically you end up with a lot of good information about the subjects at hand, but if you just skim the headlines you end up pretty misinformed.

P.S. I really don't want to relitigate Roy Moore.

This sounds like yet another case of blacks being more likely.

Expecting any sort of consistency is a fool's errand. The left vacillating on being pro-DHS/FBI during trump abut anti-DHS/FBI during Bush. Or pro-IRS during Obama. Both sides do it, so it's not just to pick on the left. The leopard does not care whose face it is that gets eaten. I think these organizations have too much power, and that bias is secondary to this.

As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group. If a program that is optimized for detecting incorrect tax filings works as intended to detect them, but turns up more black Americans than white Americans, the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue. The "algorithmic bias", from my reading of this would be injecting a deliberate racial preference to counter the program noticing actual disparities. I am reminded of the racial resentment scale, in which people who say that "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" are not racially resentful, while those who think things like "Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up, Blacks should do the same without any special favors" are racially resentful.

A solution could be transparency, but if people knew how the the algorithms worked, like what triggers an audit, they would be gamed and rendered infective.

My priors are that most cases of ‘tax fraud’ are poor, low-IQ people trying to slide one over with techniques they learned by word of mouth from other poor, low-IQ people, and not from carefully designing strategies based on available algorithmic data. I know this because I hear poor, low IQ(or at least uneducated; these are not quite the same thing, but lack of education probably severely hampers the ability to understand accounting algorithms even for those with high IQ in ways that it doesn’t necessarily effect other things) people quite openly discussing this every year in February and march. I doubt that will be strongly effected by algorithms for targeting potentially fishy returns except in the form of third hand rumours that will get them to be temporarily more honest.

My priors are that most cases of ‘tax fraud’ are poor, low-IQ people trying to slide one over with techniques they learned by word of mouth from other poor, low-IQ people, and not from carefully designing strategies based on available algorithmic data.

See also: Sovereign citizens going to court and claiming it has no jurisdiction for some bizzare and inane reason.

Well yeah, but poor and not very well educated people doing things that would technically be tax fraud if they got caught is way more widespread than that, and also pays off often enough for most success stories to be true.

Yeah this pretty much torpedoes the popular media/pundit narrative of how it's just rich people who try to not pay taxes

How would they game a fraud detection algorithm? By not committing fraud?

The classic example would be the old 10,000USD deposit at a bank triggering a reporting requirement, those reports focusing attention and investigation into one's finances and also slowing things on the customers end. Depositing 5,000USD and then later depositing 5,000USD does not trigger those reports and sometime between 1970 and 1986 there may have been common advice to do just that for convenience's sake. Of course, specifically depositing money in that way with the intent to avoid that sort of detection is now a federal felony. Often times many of the detection algorithms that have to be run by people end up as straight forward rules of if-this then-that so avoiding triggering detection in the common case might not be that difficult.

"Structuring" (breaking up a deposit into smaller deposits to avoid reporting) being a crime infuriates me. This is another aspect of the war on drugs seeping into financial regulation and corrupting the rules. In another horrifying example, the IRS is trying to find someone $2.1 million for failing to file a disclosure form. https://reason.com/2023/01/23/supreme-court-declines-case-challenging-excessive-irs-penalties/ No crimes were alleged, it wasn't drug money, the IRS just wants to know if you have a foreign bank account with more than $10k in it and if you don't file the form, they can take half the money in it. It's terrible.

I'm annoyed at the reporting requirements too, but the mirror image of money laundering is tax evasion, and governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows.

With respect to the specific requirements to report foreign accounts: the reporting requirement is clearly stated in tax instructions and up to a few years ago the IRS was remarkably lax about requiring people (with less than $50,000 in their accounts) to report on time. The form for reporting foreign accounts even included checkboxes where one could state one's "reason for reporting late": "I forgot" and "I didn't know I had to" were valid options.

Granted, I'm still a bit confused by the reporting requirements and process for large wire transfers.

governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows

Absolutely. That motivation is why any hope of a non-totalitarian end state requires strong pushback on this kind of thing. "Money laundering" is the "think of the children" of financial regulation. If one could report drug sales as "miscellaneous goods" there would be no reason to go through all of the hoops of washing the money. If all the government cared about was tax evasion, it would allow an amnesty category to report any income one didn't want to specify. Instead, the tax department has been roped into the criminal enforcement department and it makes for ridiculous regulations that shouldn't apply to 90% of the population.

You can report drug dealing as miscellaneous income. The problem is you're not allowed to deduct the costs of doing illegal business, so it's really not practical; you'd have to pay full income tax on the gross.

governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion

bit of a tangent, but in light of MMT is this even true anymore?

Anyway, I'll be curious to see if the study is released more publicly and details what exactly is causing the disparity.

It would be interesting to learn:

  1. If these audits happen with equal imbalance when the auditee self-prepares their tax return VS. when their return is professionally prepared

  2. If the professional tax preparations for blacks are handled by accountants with less experience / lower quality education than the professionals hired by less-audited racial groups.

2 Is probably the culprit. Black people are stereotyped as being more likely to go to liberty tax and the like rather than getting hr block, and most stereotypes have some truth to them, so it’s probably just that liberty tax is more likely to mess up.

Here's something annoying I found on liberal part of reddit (doesn't matter where, and I don't want to accidentally create drama by linking to it):

What’s really sad and frustrating is how the education system has completely distorted the actual concept of restorative justice. In criminal justice, restorative justice is intended to allow the victim or family of the victims to have a say in how the convicted criminal should be sentenced, while focusing on rehabilitation and a compromise between the two parties. Regardless, the offenders are still held accountable for their actions, but they’re given the opportunity to repair the relationship between themselves and their community - it’s not a free pass to do whatever you want and face no consequences.

Here's the part I found annoying. People have basically never been more atomized in the entire human history and the above text is unironically talking about repairing relationship between a criminal and some made up community. Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.

I don't even care about restorative justice all that much. I can even see myself supporting it in certain situations. For example, If I happen to be a criminal.

What I absolutely find grating is that this person takes the existence of community for granted when it's for most people no more real than bigfoot. At least conservatives recognize this lack as a problem (tho they don't have any real solutions ) while liberals kinda always assume that communities exist when they mostly don't. They don't even realize that they are talking about phantasm.

It gets even more annoying when they talk about e.g. fandoms as "communities." Are people you met on comic book convention going to build you a house? Help you find a wife? Are they going to watch over your children?

Could we have tightly knit communities without brutal punishments? Should we? I have no idea. But any analysis has to start from the fact that we mostly don't have communities right now.

It gets even more annoying when they talk about e.g. fandoms as "communities."

Other examples: the "African American community", the "gay community," the "trans community". These are categories, not communities. They have no unified voice, nor interests, nor (non-trivial) location. The "international community" is also a metaphor at best.

There is another aspect to this. If you allow the victims a say in the punishment it increases the probability of victim intimidation for certain crimes, especially if the legal punishment is weak. The victim of a house invasion for example has to worry that requesting a higher sentence will result in their house being invaded again as soon as the perpetrator is out of jail. In Korea this was recently an issue as a 12 year old rape victim decided not to pursue charges against her home invading rapist, who was looking at 2 years in prison.

What I absolutely find grating is that this person takes the existence of community for granted when it's for most people no more real than bigfoot.

It's perfectly sensible, when you think a little and remember the politics of people known as 'community organizers'.

That there's no community doesn't mean you can't appoint yourself to be a spokesman for a community.

It's not like they're organised enough to prevent you from speaking in their name, besides, the media knows what message it wants to hear so they'll know who to ask.

Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.

Actually most clan based societies used a collective responsibility system where serious crimes were punished by reparations- often a fine- paid by your relatives. This is a poor fit for the society we live in, obviously, but if you insist on shoehorning reparation based justice into the US using race as a definition of community, well, this is not a very progressive world.

(doesn't matter where, and I don't want to accidentally create drama by linking to it):

Admirable, but by you quoting it, I needed <10 seconds to find the post via Google.

What I absolutely find grating is that this person takes the existence of community for granted when it's for most people no more real than bigfoot.

There's probably a lot to unpack there, since the undergirding factor of most if not all leftists is their ideology is collectivist and considers the primacy of the group's interests over the those of the members that compose it. So in the criminal justice realm, the harm a criminal does to an individual seems strictly less important than the harm done to the 'fabric' of the community and thus repairing the relationship between the offender and the victim is a smaller step in restoring the community to health and enabling the offender to re-enter the community and continue to contribute to the group.

(Or so I interpret the lefty approach to criminal justice)

And you nail it, this falls apart entirely when there is no coherent 'society' or 'community' and long term relationships in general are nigh-impossible to maintain.

Victims suffer the harm directly, in the meantime, and this does, indeed, contribute in the aggregate to a toxic social environment which is bad for the community. But does anybody genuinely feel as though they have a stake in the community that is somehow more important than their own personal loss?

Seems unlikely. The victim wants compensation for the loss, and maybe some psychic pleasure from seeing the miscreant suffer. After that, as long as said miscreant doesn't reoffend against them, personally, I doubt they care what eventually becomes of them.

Certain exceptions would exist, in the many cases where the offender is immediate family or friend, but in that case there IS an extant community (albeit a small one) which the individual victim might feel loyalty which overrides their own immediate interests.

The collectivist is starting with the assumption that the community is the most important factor, and how the victim's interest is slotted into that framework, which in this case comes down to the 'relationship' between the victim and the perp, and the victim and perp to the society, and how it is 'good' to restore those relationships rather than simply punish the perp and move on.

But if there is no community in which the victim has a stake, what exactly is the purpose of attempting to restore relationships that never existed and indeed the victim will presumably feel affronted if you're clearly subordinating their interests to a 'social good' that is hardly real.

I make no real normative claims here, but I do observe the while it is better for society to rehabilitate criminals where possible, the basic first step towards achieving that outcome is for someone to give a shit. And under current conditions there is not likely many who are invested enough to really care.

People have basically never been more atomized in the entire human history and the above text is unironically talking about repairing relationship between a criminal and some made up community. Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.

Depends. Prison sentences in the US are longer than ever despite this atomization (rather than being hanged, you die in prison). Same for bad prison conditions. Crime thrives in countries/regions like Italy, Russia, South America, etc. which are more close knit and religious. It sorta makes sense that it's like this. Kinship offers some protection compared to the impartiality of a blind but punitive justice system.

Kinship offers some protection compared to the impartiality of a blind but punitive justice system.

True, however a blind but punitive justice system is not on the menu for people in Russia.

I think there are different levels of communities. Yes, what existed a couple hundred years ago, or today still in rural villages disconnected from globalism, are much more connected and interreliant communities. Every person knows every single other person in their community like how I know my own close family. Maybe we should have a different word for that sort of thing than what we use for fandoms. But community is a sliding scale. Is a 1930s rural American town of a couple thousand where everyone goes to one of five churches a community, if it's not literally everyone knowing literally everyone personally? Was my highschool graduating year of ~400 people, where everyone knew about half the class personally and would do reasonable favours for each other but not go as far to help them build a new house a community? Where do you draw the line before getting to fandom? Especially since some portions of fandoms do get pretty close, there are lots of stories of people meeting and getting married through a fandom.

On another level, I think moving away from the death penalty may have degraded communities. You can worry less about whether strangers are trustworthy if you know untrustworthy strangers get executed and thus aren't around anymore. But also degrading communities morally necessitate the removal of the death penalty. It's one thing for a group of people who've known a criminal since they were a baby to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, it's sad but the best option here, they simply are a danger to keep in the community". It's another thing for a jury of strangers to say "yeah that person needs to be killed, even though all we know about them is what these two very biased lawyers have seen fit to show us".

  • Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.

Back when communities were tight knit, there were informal processes to deal with crime committed by your family or neighbours. Hanging criminals is the point where people are using the power of the state to punish people (usually it starts with outsiders; you wouldn't do this with your in-group). It's a failure of community, and it usually ends up falling out of favour once enforcement comes to the point that your in-group is liable for the same treatment.

In many tight knit communities, justice was dolled out by the church. Since outsiders tended to not be a member, courts provided a great system for punishing them. Even when courts pushed out the church as the main arbitrator in a community, it still relied heavily on church officials' opinions. 30+ years ago, having a priest testify about how great you were was all but a get out of jail free card (where the judge was religious, at least).

We still have tight knit communities these days. They aren't region locked, though.

Anyways, restorative justice was more akin to what your average church would have done in the past (and many continue to do to this day).

Where and when did the local church act as a local community arbiter?

The crowns judges have been in firm control of law for at least 500 years here, with churches not having the role you describe for at minimum 2 centuries if not for longer.

Tight-knit communities are built around something, and that something is almost always the church. In tight-knit communities you do not yield the state's power against your neighbour. Even if courts exist, there's a police force, you'll almost always create bad blood by invoking the state's power in your disputes. And the police, prosecutors, judges, and juries, will all be members of the tight-knit community.

If you believe neighbour wrongs you, you'd go to your priest for help, or other neighbours. Part of being a tight-knit community is that social consequences can be enough to affect a resolution, and one that is moral/just, rather than one that is technically legal.

When you go to the police, you're basically going above the community. If the legal consequences for something are worse than what your community will tolerate, then it's likely the police will try to dissuade you, the prosecutor will decline to bring charges, the judge will give the defendant every benefit of the doubt, etc. Because they are all part of the same community.

But an outsider isn't going to be influenced much by social pressures, and so using the force of the state is seen as acceptable.

If you look at Hasidic Jewish communities, they often have their own police, 'courts', their own schools, etc. They aren't willing to use the state's violence against each other. If they were, they wouldn't be tight-knit communities. Many native reserves are also like this.

I'm sorry but in England this hasn't been the case for a very very long time, I believe for longer than America has been a country.

There is no "local community" for non elite natives.

Kinship based judgement systems were often extremely formulaic and worked off of collective responsibility. This is not what restorative justice activists are pushing for.

I don't think people, say, in 17th century London saw themselves as part of "London community" any more than people of New York now see themselves as parts of "New York community". Hanging haven't got anything to do with it. I mean, sure, you could hang the thief in the village. Or you could expel him from the village and he'd probably die anyway (unless he's particularly talented at highway robbery and then maybe he'll stick around for a while until it becomes annoying to the local lord and he sends a squad to get rid of him). But those times are so far in the past we can't recreate them by any means short of dismantling our whole civilization infrastructure. The days of living in Dunbar-number communities are past for most of us (numerically). I mean, you still can find many real Dunbar communities, if you are either rich enough or ready to downshift enough, but vast majority of people aren't living in them and never will.

My read of the quoted comment is different than yours.

To your point that 'community' is overused to the point of meaninglessness in liberal circles, well, I think that's what's actually going on here. My perspective is that the quoted comment isn't really arguing for any criminal justice reform because it will help mend communities in any real way. They're just pro-criminal justice reform community effects notwithstanding, with a focus on rehabilitation and reconciliation between the criminal and victim (which are goals one could have for criminal justice reform without caring about 'mending the community') and then at the very end of their comment, they merely happen to name-drop 'community' because, as you said, its become such a meaningless term in liberal discourse that they use it almost without intentional meaning.

Elevatorgate: Effective Altruism version?Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse

Does anyone remember Elevatorgate? Long story short: the atheist "movement" had gotten going, many books were published and cons were attended. At one a figure in the community "Skepchick"- Rebecca Watson- was propositioned by a man who'd attended her talk in an elevator and made a video stating - in understated tones given the conflagration it started tbh - that she didn't like it and it made her feel unsafe.

Because this was pre-#MeToo and the Great Awokening and atheists at the time kind of prided themselves on being assholes truth-tellers , figures like Dawkins jumped in, criticizing or mocking her for complaining about such an anodyne event. Dawkins wrote a notorious letter titled "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the suffering of a hypothetical circumcised Muslim woman with Watson in the sort of move that wouldn't even begin to fly today.

Well...that led to an absolute shitstorm that split the atheist community with some using it to create "Atheism+": basically atheism that was sufficiently woke, after insisting atheism had a racism/sexism/whatever problem. As foreshadowing for a now pervasive social tendency, it then ate itself with circular firing squads and purity spirals.

At the time, there was enough pushback that Watson and her defenders didn't outright win but she probably won the moral victory. Years down the line most of the leftover "100% atheist" communities were pretty woke, see the banning of RationalityRules for arguing against trans-identified males in women's sports.

Now...

But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”

...

Gopalakrishnan is one of seven women connected to effective altruism who tell TIME they experienced misconduct ranging from harassment and coercion to sexual assault within the community. The women allege EA itself is partly to blame. They say that effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated “rationalist” groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away. Several described EA as having a “cult-like” dynamic.

...

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

I'm torn.

On the one hand, I recognize the same tactics (and, tbh, it doesn't escape my notice that the first victim seems to have social competition with males for funding on her mind) that ripped the Atheist community apart. I also find most of the examples of harassment to be of the all-too-common nebulous and vague variety that allow people to claim victimhood. I honestly don't know if people are this fragile nowadays, or are exaggerating their fragility for points, but it is a bit absurd. If you're an adult, I don't want to hear about you being groomed. A "22f-44m" relationship is one where one party is twice as old but it'd be absurd to act like one party didn't have agency.

A lot of the complaints also seem to be that alleged rationalists and effective altruists - for some reason - don't just take people at their word.

On the other hand: some of these (e.g. the final one I quoted, the one about a male jumping into a woman's bed at night) are more egregious and the quokka point is well-applied here for those "good" EAs who still encouraged people not to go to the cops. It's exactly the sort of problematic math I can see some people doing. Hell, people did it all the time in churches, schools and so on. It's not a particular foible of EAs.

Also:

Several of the women who spoke to TIME said that the popularity of polyamory within EA fosters an environment in which men—often men who control career opportunities–feel empowered to recruit younger women into uncomfortable sexual relationships. Many EAs embrace nontraditional living arrangements and question established taboos, and plenty of people, including many women, enthusiastically consent to sharing partners with others.

I have to say I find this funny. People discovering that looser social and sexual norms allow bad actors - or merely "people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve" - to accrue sexual and social benefits and blur the lines. Quelle surprise.

These criticisms can apply to virtually every community. Every single community that has both young men and women in it, and which doesn’t cling to the values of young marriage and gender separation, will have these issues. They’re found in every music and art scene, every socialist community, every college house party, Hollywood and so on. Hit pieces like these are just a way for the powerful to selectively come down on whichever community they want to destroy. And if you form a community which actually has structure in the way of preventing these problems, like Mike Pence and his evangelicalism, they’ll write a hit piece about you, too!

The proper response is to start interviewing Time Magazine employees, and cataloguing how many more of them are doing much worse — probably with cocaine rather than psychedelics.

The autist women of the EA community write hit pieces on their own community, you can't fault the media for taking such easy bait

Hell, young marriage and gender separation may not save you, e.g. Mormons.

which doesn’t cling to the values of young marriage and gender separation

These too, though I think these practices help, at least in my experience.

In an another decade, this complaint would have just straightforwardly been expressed as "these unwashed hippies from San Fran-sicko say that they're about LOVE and HELPING YOUR FELLOW MAN, but they're all just a bunch of OVERSEXED PERVERTS praying on the CHASTITY OF THE YOUNG WOMEN!"

I'm not saying this to claim these women are wrong in their complaints, mind - it's just interesting, the degree this is basically a conservative complaint expressed in the language of the people who are so far removed from conservative culture that they can only express their conservative complaint in progressive language.

Well yeah, "I'm not interested in being partner number four on your concurrent fuck-list" is a conservative view.

I’m not sure that ‘men take an interest in me beyond the point at which they should stop’ is specifically a conservative complaint as opposed to a generic complaint by young women.

And the proper progressive response to such generic complaints by young women should be "You want equality, you get fucking equality. Men don't get protection from your unwanted advances, so suck it up." EDIT: But no, these women want the protective benefits of conservative social and sexual norms without the restrictions. They want the ability to exploit men's desires for them granted by progressive norms without the risk of men exploiting them in return.

While you can certainly make the case that those protective norms being applied, specifically, to interactions around romance and sex with such furor is a holdover from older conservative norms, the norms of repeated unwanted attention being bad behavior is because it’s dickish and rude.

In any case I rather doubt the idea that the furor in such norms is mostly about social conservatism because very conservative communities do not generally see sexual harassment as some sort of ultimate evil, but rather as a more ordinary kind of bad behavior.

While you can certainly make the case that those protective norms being applied, specifically, to interactions around romance and sex with such furor is a holdover from older conservative norms, the norms of repeated unwanted attention being bad behavior is because it’s dickish and rude.

Yes--conservative norms restricted young women from behaving that way towards men, which these young women want to do to exploit those men's desires for them to their benefit. They just don't want men to be able to behave that way towards them. Thus, this "furor" is not a holdover from older conservative norms, but rather the result of such women trying to have their cake and eat it too.

In any case I rather doubt the idea that the furor in such norms is mostly about social conservatism because very conservative communities do not generally see sexual harassment as some sort of ultimate evil, but rather as a more ordinary kind of bad behavior.

I think this is agreeing with me: it is not about social conservativism, but rather about trying to get some of the benefits of social conservatism for a particular demographic without actually having social conservatism.

There's an idea that I've seen a lot in these kind of articles that I find quite odd. It's the idea that attempting to convince someone that they should date you (or otherwise change their sexual preference/behavior) is inherently wrong and abusive.

But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

Note that what is absent from this anecdote is any sort of actual coercion. It seems that, "casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach," is interpreted as "shame" or "pressure". Now, I don't agree with that argument in favor of polyamory, but it's a perfectly valid argument one can make. If, as Gopalakrishnan and TIME seem to think, that no flirting or discussion of sexuality should be allowed at even informal gatherings, it begs the question, where and how should people try to meet partners? I'm not going to take the establishment media perspective on sexual ethics seriously until it answers that basic question.

There's an idea that I've seen a lot in these kind of articles that I find quite odd. It's the idea that attempting to convince someone that they should date you (or otherwise change their sexual preference/behavior) is inherently wrong and abusive.

The idea usually at least implied is that there is a time and place for that sort of behavior and a time and place for everything else, and never shall those meet. This is in fact entirely bogus, and even if you accept that it holds true in the special case of the workplace, it certainly doesn't hold in all the situations it's applied to, such as social events attached (formally or even informally) to academic and professional conferences, or even other purely social occasions (I've seen it applied to dances and to women sitting at a bar). I don't think, however, that this is the real objection; the real objection is that women don't want men who fail the SNL test ("Be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive") hitting on them, and this is a way to do it.

Great post. The men who who aren't attractive or high status produce a very uncomfortable capture avoidance instinct from the women, and the women need to come up with BS PC rationalizations to pretend it's not just discrimination. One thing this discussion often misses, is that if the male still succeeds in gaining sexual contact after the woman puts the additional test in place by trying to evade him, she can still fall for him. Women will fall for some ugly mfers.

I don't know, guys, how open would you be if you were in a relationship and the woman tried to convince you that "polyamory exists and she wants to do it and believes it's not bad and wrong"? Would you go "Of course, darling, you have convinced me in a non-abusive way that I should change my sexual preferences/behaviour" or would you go "There's the door, you cheating bitch"?

You all seem to be very sure that the women here are in the wrong but you're not considering what if it happened the other way round to you.

Adding the clause that you're already in a relationship with this person seems to dominate the indignation of the cheating accusation and removing it diffuses the whole metaphor. Men, by and large, are not offended at being offered the role of bull in some random woman's love life.

I mean. It might be good or valuable to occasionally roast the living shit out of guys for what are essentially minor awkwardnesses in courtship. It serves as a warning to the ugly, or the unpopular, or the awkward: If you try to have a relationship, you are playing by different rules. It can extend as far as expecting an individual to be celibate for life and never express interest in sex or relationships, if you're disabled. This doesn't just go for guys...women that are very unattractive or disabled get this treatment as well.

Didn't someone take him aside when he was 19 and tell him that he can't do things like other men can? That it was basically understood that he would never have a partner, and that people would be grossed out at him for wanting one?

Didn't someone take him aside when he was 19 and tell him that he can't do things like other men can? That it was basically understood that he would never have a partner, and that people would be grossed out at him for wanting one?

This smells like trolling. Either that, or you are laying on the sarcasm way too thick and failing to speak clearly.

Don't do this.

Not trolling or sarcastic; I've seen things like this happen IRL. Hell, something like that happened to me around that age.

The actual argument, that isn't actually made because it's...well...ugly, but I actually do think it's the argument being made a lot of the time in these cases, is that men should know their Sexual Marketplace Value and act accordingly. And actually, just to be safe, men should probably underestimate significantly their SMV.

The problem is that basically makes it a world for narcissists, really.

I mean, the disability theorists have been talking about the special case where you are literally Quasimodo for at least what, 20 years? Quasimodo and his equally-ugly sister don't get to openly want sex or relationships. Otherwise, they're gross and transgressive and at least Quasimodo is creepy. Usually this is dealt with by discreetly taking young Quasimodo aside and explaining what is going on, if he's not socially apt enough to figure things out for himself.

Now, I don't agree with that argument in favor of polyamory, but it's a perfectly valid argument one can make.

Sure, but not if it's being used in the service of "You absolutely should sleep with me because otherwise you're a prude" when someone has said "Thanks but no thanks" beforehand.

"Want to sleep with me?"

"No"

"But here are six arguments about why it's the rational thing to do!"

"Still not interested"

"Hm - are you morally deficient in some way? After all, monogamy is governed by jealousy and poly is more enlightened and rational, so only a less moral and enlightened person would refuse this offer"

Yes, insults and shaming are the way to get women to sleep with you, friend. 🙄

Is that what happened? Or is the article about the creepy EAs who had the nerve to say polyamory exists and they do it and believe it's not bad and wrong?

If you're not into poly, it may well sound creepy. If a guy tries to recruit you for his harem and you say no and he keeps pushing you, that is creepy.

Right, I'm asking if the "keeps pushing you" part actually happened, or if the person was so weirded out by the whole concept that they felt creeped on simply because someone dared to offer.

It's the idea that attempting to convince someone that they should date you (or otherwise change their sexual preference/behavior) is inherently wrong and abusive.

I don't understand in which situation it would be right either.

There is a mating dance: flirting. Either party can gracefully back off. Usually, "attempt to convince" sounds a bit wrong kind off approach, no room for graceful exit or positive atmosphere afterwards. I suppose you can have a playful argument with flirtatious undertone, but it sounds a bit too much like a thing that works in a TV script but not in a real life. People can become distracted by the argument. (Big romantic gestures are a bit similar. Maybe one could pull it off, but one should be aware that attempting to initiate a 19th century courtship dance in a different time and place where likely nobody knows how to respond, it just might not work.)

In most situations, person doing the convincing would usually make a fool of themselves. If they appear to hold some leverage (social, professional or otherwise), or person being convinced is a bit too meek, it can become quite creepy and manipulative.

A nugget of wisdom from the old PUA sphere was that you cannot logically argue a girl into sleeping with you. You can convince by displaying your attractiveness, being discreet etc, but 'A Beautiful Mind' style rationalizations are almost certainly doomed to fail.

I think the criticism of the "professional incestuousness" of EA is spot-on, though; wasn't that part of the problem with FTX? They all knew each other out of the little bubble of the Bay Area, they'd all been in college together or met via work or rationalist/EA groups, and they all lived together and dated/had been dating each other. There was no outside oversight, it was Sam and his gang. And that spilled over into the types of things they were funding, the people they interacted with in the broader EA movement, and so on, how he was able to trade on his reputation as 'one of them' who knew the same people and said the right things and believed in what Will MacAskill was doing etc. (even working for CFAR). So whether or not there were or should have been alarm bells ringing, nobody in EA would hear them because he was 'one of them'.

So there very definitely is an entire set of "taking in one another's washing" vibes in EA.

It seems that, "casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach," is interpreted as "shame" or "pressure".

I think that can be a reasonable interpretation. Depending on what kind of autist you are, you might not relate to this, but theres a state where people believe that they have lost an argument, really lost and not just because of some stupid tactical error that they can fix, but also not believe they were wrong. They will agree that youre right, and that they should do X, but also obviously not want to do X, and not really do it. In that case, if you keep bringing up the argument to them, that is generally considered bad manners and a kind of social pressure. Basically its a bit as if ordering them.

Now you can propably see why the rationalists wouldnt like this kind of norm, and I grant them that theyre propably consistent in not applying it, but it does take some protection away from people.

The Effective Altruism crowd might be more ambitious such that their careers are their passions and so there doesn't seem a clear demarcation between personal life and work life. Most people might think "meet people outside of work."

I believe their answer to ‘how should people meet partners’ is ‘at contexts specifically designed for that’, by which they mean nightclubs, dating apps, that sort of thing.

The fact that this idea has obvious drawbacks doesn’t mean they don’t have one.

And, tbh, ‘attempting to convince women to change their boundaries and entire lifestyle in order to sleep with you’ is maybe not the sort of thing that should be illegal, but it’s a very central example of the sort of thing that should come with the label of ‘pushy and kind of a creep’.

'attempting to convince women to change their boundaries and entire lifestyle in order to sleep with you'

I mean, that's kind of what dating/flirting is. Going from single to living together, having intimate emotional connections, having regular sex, starting a family together, ect. is very much a radical change in boundaries and lifestyle. There's no polite way to ask for that which is compliant with any standard HR policy. Yet it is a bedrock assumption of our social policy that you can just put men and women in the same society and they will spontaneously rearrange themselves from "single" to "married"(or whatever the PC equivalent with minor variations is).

But this is in the context of polyamory. It's not Guy A flirting with Girl B and wanting to date and maybe have a relationship in the conventional sense, it's Guy A wanting to date and maybe have a relationship within the context of "oh and I'm poly and in a relationship with three other people".

If Girl B is not interested in being a side-piece, keeping on insisting that poly is the superior rationalist thing instead of monogamy which is yucky is creepy. Guys A, C and D may well have believed that they could present the Superior Rationalist argument for poly and have Girl B be immediately convinced because she too is a rationalist, but it's entirely possible for Girl B to go "Yes, your argument is good but I still prefer monogamy so I'm not going to join your polycule".

And if Girl B has to have the same song-and-dance with guys C and D after guy A, can you see why she finds it more and more like some kind of creepy cult rather than "I thought we were here to discuss ways of helping the world?"

This is probably the right analysis in regards to polyamory in 99% of normal situations. The curveball is that this is an effective altruism event, and the whole point of effective altruism is to apply rationality and scientific argument to charity in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering.

So some guy comes along and says, "You know what generates a lot of happiness? sex. Yet most people don't have nearly as much sex as they could be having. If more people were poly and didn't let jealousy or embarrassment get in the way of having more sex, then there would be much more happiness in the world." This is a very basic utilitarian argument. The kind of argument that EA is full of.

Now, our heroine has three options here. She can:

  1. Accept the argument, become poly, and have easy sex.

  2. Have a principled consequentialist reason why the above argument isn't valid, or at the very least does not apply to her.

  3. Say, "Yes, your argument is good but I still prefer monogamy so I'm not going to join your polycule".

Options 1 or 2 are acceptable. Option 3 simply doesn't fit in an EA framework. You're surrounded by people who dedicate their lives, pick jobs based on EA criteria, or become vegetarian even though they love eating meat, and yet you are admitting to selfishly leaving utility on the ground.

Frankly, the argument isn't that hard to refute. I'd argue that anyone that doesn't accept it who can't (or doesn't want to) refute it should not have any decision-making power at any EA organization at all. The bar needs to be higher than that.

Rephrase option 3 as "Sorry, I'm narrowmantic." Now it sounds logical and scientific and pushing further would make you a bigot.

Have a principled consequentialist reason why the above argument isn't valid, or at the very least does not apply to her.

"The happiness I gain from exclusivity far outweighs the happiness I gain from lots of crap sex."?

Because that's... all it is, isn't it?

Or just "You don't appeal to me sexually, and since your argument would equally apply to me having random sex with any person at all I met on the street, and I do not agree that would make me happier, then I reject your premises".

'yes more sex might make me happier but only if it's with someone I find attractive and I don't find you attractive' is, I think, the underlying reason and why the guys tried arguing her into being poly, because nobody wants to think they're not attractive.

Isn't it valid to say "I get jealous and it makes me feel bad and I don't think it's something I need to work on. Thanks"?

No, because then you're opening yourself up to needling and further evangelising about why feeling jealousy is sub-optimal and blah blah blah.

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I take it that's what he was getting at with the last paragraph, the one starting "Frankly, the argument isn't that hard to refute".

Being nasty here, there's also Option 4:

"Yes, your argument is good, people don't have as much sex as they could be having, and if I were poly and didn't let jealousy or embarassment get in the way of having more sex then I would be happier. So I will now go and offer to be poly with that hot, rich, high-status guy over there, thanks for convincing me!"

If she ain't into you, bro, all the rational argument in the world won't convince her. As to leaving utility on the ground, the counter-argument is weighing up the utility, if any, of having sex with Polycule Guy versus not having sex with him and having it with someone else, and if the utility of "someone else" seems higher, then not joining his polycule is the right decision. Which is better: a quarter share in him or the whole of a different relationship? Is he that hot, clever, rich and high-status that being one of a harem is better than being the monogamous partner of someone else? Is sex that important to her that it does make her happier than some other activity? Would sex with Polycule Guy make her happier?

I suppose if you’re a turbo autist, yes it is.

In reality being pushy towards a woman who is not interested in the kind of relationship on offer, and who has made that clear, is quite a bit different from a date request to a woman who’s looking for one. More analogous to pursuing a married woman.

Being pushy is just traditional and courtship. That’s not “autistic”. Being pushy is just part of every romcom ever made.

Like in yougotmail for example Meg Ryan hated Tom Hanks in person but he realized she was his pen pal they both got along with. He spent months courting her with the today awful secret ambition of boning her and having kids and living happily ever after. Or Mathew Mcconaughey chasing down his girl on his motercycle going to the airport in how to lose a guy.

Basically every romcom plays some story of guy realizes he loves girl then stubbornly pursues her because she’s his special little snowflake.

So I don’t understand how that is autistic when it’s the plot of every moving I ever saw growing up on how a guy should pursue a girl.

So I don’t understand how that is autistic when it’s the plot of every movie I ever saw growing up on how a guy should pursue a girl.

I also, and that's a large part of why I thought that was absolutely horrible. She said "no", why are you trying to force her to do something? It's like okay, you love jazz so you want her to like jazz too and if she says she doesn't like jazz you keep pursuing her and playing jazz at her and trying to make her give in. Nobody would tolerate that!

Movies are a terrible way to get the information of what the world is like, but that's how most of us do get it - and then we eventually run our faces into the wall of "movies and TV are not real, they're fiction, and the real world is not like that".

Every woman says "no". That's the most basic of shit tests. In order for a man to become romantically/sexually successful, he needs to learn to differentiate between a fake "no" and a real "no" and power through the former.

If people actually took the feminist line about how "no means no" seriously, nobody would ever have sex, because that is simply not how women work.

I've definitely gone all the way without ever hearing "no". (Sometimes it's "yes yes yes" all the time haha.)

The line is far less distinct then you're letting on. What one person sees as too pushy is often times completely effective and other times will make a woman quite uncomfortable or even angry. It's difficult to know which is which until you try, and the threshold is actually far below the aforementioned case of trying to get some women to join what amounts to a harem.

Just for emphasis:

I suppose if you’re a turbo autist, yes it is.

And if you don't know - if you don't know until you're trying - you're gonna have to git gud and try it anywhere that isn't in bed net-slinging charity circles. This is a painful lesson for turbo autists like you and I, but it's not really unfair on the part of normal people who consider this so obvious that only a child would fail to realise it.

I'm not a turbo autist, and to prove it, I won't brag about my sexual exploits on an internet forum.

I think if anything, only a turbo autist would think the line is clear, because they wouldn't have the experience to realize otherwise. You can often guess how a woman will react to a certain kind of advance, but you often can't as well. Also a non autist will also realize that making a women a little uncomfortable is also not the end of the world if you're otherwise passably social.

Of course, there are also just people who are too afraid to make explicit advances, but I don't think that's """autism""", but something else entirely.

I'm not saying the line is clear, I'm saying that the reported behavior is quite obviously on one side of a fuzzy line between legitimate flirting/pursuit and creepy.

Exactly, the threshold is far below trying to talk some woman into joining a harem after she's said she wants nothing to do with the whole thing.

Just because someone is a degenerate weirdo in silicon valley doesn't mean that dating norms, or the stated (but entirely ignored) norms set out by HR departments and oversocialized libs are valid either. Nor is being a silicon valley degenerate weirdo particularly a big deal. People don't have a right to social comfort beyond the option of just getting up to leave. This is a case of hysterics in the face of someone who is maybe slightly out of line.

And the point was that the threshold for discomfort can be lower. Again, a person doesn't have a right to total social comfort. The moral question of polygamy is a whole other thing which really isn't done justice by any leftist lenses.

Agreed that the question of whether polygamy/amory is OK is ancillary to the question of whether or not the specific behavior in question is OK.

Disagree that this is only slightly out of line(at least if true; I will very much allow for the possibility that the story is greatly exaggerated). This is worse than more central examples of being aggressive and pushy because the woman has demonstrated a previous opposition to the lifestyle in question. It's very much the equivalent of badgering a conservative Christian woman into a friends with benefits situation, or a happily married woman into cheating.

And, realistically, this is the problem with live and let live liberalism more broadly- it only seems to go in one direction(that is, in favor of degenerate sex weirdos and drug addicts). You see the same thing with lesbians getting pressured into sleeping with intact biologically male transwomen, or the constant odor of marijuana smoke in major American cities, or that Colorado baker that's been sued so many times that if I put out a number it'll have to be edited right after I hit "comment". And yes, some of those examples are sympathetic to me, but some of them aren't. I have no illusions that these women trying to join up in EA spaces are going to follow socially conservative norms otherwise, but that doesn't mean it's OK to try to pressure them into joining a harem over their own objections to such an arrangement. It shouldn't be #metoo level to say that. SJW's writing a set of ridiculous norms about dating doesn't mean they're wrong in every particular just like gun control advocates saying ridiculously false things about AR-15's doesn't mean I'm not going to leave if I see a skinny teenaged boy open carrying one in a Walmart.

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where and how should people try to meet partners?

Can't their parents arrange a meeting?

More seriously, I think the idea is either (a) you already know someone, (b) your mutual friends set you up, or (c) "Of course we all hate online dating, but I suppose it's the only option?"

Unless your value and pedigree are pre-established you must submit your bid in the most dehumanizing and easily disregarded possible way.

And yet in cultures with arranged marriages we successfully manage to pair people to their equals and have long lasting, happier than westerners and stable marriages. Westerners destroyed their own system and now get to reap the fruits. I've had white friends of mine who by all measures should be an absolute catch (6ft, degree from elite university, good job, recently purchased their own house on a single income) -very nerdy though- ask me whether they too could somehow get an arranged qt3.14 (his words, not mine) to marry them. Unfortunately it's very difficult to do this unless the man is Muslim (no self respecting Muslim father will let his daughter marry a non-Muslim man, for good reason) so alas no luck there for him, he's currently having minimal luck finding a wife quality woman on Tinder. But hey, he likes gaming and got the new PS5 very soon after release so at least he's happy.

I hope he manages to find someone suitable, but after seeing the modern state of the western dating market I just feel sorry for him and extreme relief at the fact that I don't have to go through this shit.

My parents are in an arranged marriage and it's been pretty heartbreaking. My father is psycho but my mother feels that the crushing weight of extended family makes getting divorced impossible. So color me skeptical by anecdata.

Are we sure that we're not mistaking long lasting and happier with trapped and miserable?

My parents are in an arranged marriage and it's been pretty heartbreaking. My father is psycho but my mother feels that the crushing weight of extended family makes getting divorced impossible. So color me skeptical by anecdata.

And my parents and uncles/aunts all had arranged marriages and they're all going pretty damn well. The only one which is (from external appearances) going less well (and where she has to work because he doesn't earn enough to support a family on his own) is the one where my grandparents were reluctant on the match initially but eventually gave in to her protestations. Our anecdata clashes, now what?

The real point is that marraiges are very varied and come in happy/unhappy variants in all systems. A ton of western marriages are also unhappy. The percentage of unhappy marriages in all systems is so high that anecdata is pretty much useless and you need to look at generalised statistics.

The data on arranged marriage happiness is sparse (this is an area no modern day sociologist wishing to stay in the good graces of Woke Inc. will touch with a 10 ft barge pole) but from the few studies out there results either show increased long term happiness (10+ years down the line) in arranged marriages or no difference. None of the studies are particularly high quality, but they all seem to find an effect in the same direction (arranged is better) when they find an effect For instance here's one I just found right now by Googling: https://twu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/11274/11516/KAZEMI-MOHAMMADI-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

It's some dude's PhD thesis where he shows that on average arranged marriages long term have higher levels of intimacy, passion and commitment, then tests arranged vs free choice marriages on MSI-R (an inventory of marriage stability) and finds that on most counts arranged marriages are more stable, with the only exception being sexual dissatisfaction (higher in arranged marraiges), but this is 1 item vs 10 other items that all show no difference or worse outcomes in free choice marriages. It's not particularly high quality (n=180 and the couples are all from the subcontinent/middle east basically) but it's weak evidence in that direction, and pretty much all the evidence there is currently on this quesiton is either saying no difference or pointing this way, there's almost nothing saying free choice marriages are long term better.

I'll check out the PhD thesis but still color me skeptical. My mother would tell anyone who asked that she was happily married.

Additionally, the way I know of arranged marriages is in a cultural context that includes a high degree of honor violence. So I have kneejerk disgust feelings around the whole part and parcel.

There are probably confounders out the ass here as well. Is it that the arranged marriages are higher quality, or the fact that people who practice them are a close knit tribe / large extended family with high support / super gung ho religious together / not poor and closer to dynastically wealthy?

I'll come back with an EDIT if the thesis updates me.

It only has to be better than what we have for his argument to work.

But hey, he likes gaming and got the new PS5 very soon after release so at least he's happy.

Which is why it's going to be tough to find someone who wants to be a wife and mother. She's evaluating "will this guy be a good husband and father, or will he be holed up in his room playing games while I'm left to handle running the house and raising the kids and dealing with real life?" Unless he can communicate that he will step up to the plate when necessary, all he's left with is women who are in the same boat of "I'm young, I want to have fun and enjoy my life before settling down" and aren't looking for anything long-term so okay, he likes gaming and is a huge nerd? That's tolerable for a short-term fling.

I mean, look at this guy. He's very young (only 21 or 22) so it's understandable, but does he sound ready to be a husband and eventual father? He had to hire a nanny to make sure he would do his work. Indeed, five nannies. And when he stopped the experiment, he slid right back into his unproductive ways. What's he going to be like at 25? 30? Will he be someone dependable in an adult relationship, or will his wife have to be his mother as well?

As a guy who also holes himself up to play games regularly getting ready to be married, I think a less cynical interpretation may be "this guy has lots of free time, perfect to be put towards helping me rear children" which at least in my case is the truth. I'm sure there are plenty of guys who wouldn't convert their time spent gaming to time spent child rearing but those guys also wouldn't convert their time spent doing outside of the house hobbies to child rearing either.

I mean, look at this guy.

your link has an extra 0 in it.

This feels less like breaking social and sexual norms and more like the same old problem with mixed gender workplaces under a different name.

I don't think I have ever been in an adult work environment where there wasn't at least one couple. I met my wife at work, I had two other work romances before I met my wife.

If you put people together a bunch, and give them a common interest then they will at a minimum develop some friendships and social ties. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of the friends start taking it further if they share a sexual interest in each other.

I think people should be responsible and be adults. Which is a whole package of norms and expectations. And I'm guessing the EA crowd broke some of those rules.

However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace. I feel that such a thing is largely impossible, but would also be a travesty. Once an adult leaves college the workplace can become one of their best places for finding a compatible life partner. Apps and bars are a shitty replacement.

However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace.

That's where it's inexorably trending, not because most people explicitly want that, but because nobody wants to get sued for unwanted sexual attention but nobody has any principled way to handle the situation because, the minute romance is involved, it'll get messy and complicated and people will be hurt (especially since there seem to be gendered cognitive biases here like men having an optimism bias or some men & women being bad at cross-sex mind-reading). To say nothing of the fact that modern norms are in flux and messy.

And, as we've seen, faced with being hurt, some women* lack any moral vocabulary (or tools for revenge, frankly) for describing it beyond sexual harassment/sexual assault. Which companies must take seriously. But, of course, the "validity" of the case varies but must go through litigation first.

The uncertainty here gives corporations an incentive to be proactive (and thus more restrictive).

So it's simpler to just try to cut it out, even though I doubt that's optimal for even most feminists actually (obviously, people of all stripes want the right kind of attention).

* It's mostly women reporting abuse lbh

To be honest, I think you’re spot on the nose with women(or at least a subset thereof) not having any way to describe unwanted attention beyond sexual harassment. Feminism has reduced thinking about the ethics of sexual relationships to a consent binary which leads to redefining lots of things as consent issues, so women who want to complain about more typical bad behavior have to frame it as somehow leading up to rape. Which is ridiculous, obviously, for a lot of these cases.

Good point, except it's probably not feminism but a natural effect of male status differentiation in the presence of women and their observable reactions (yes, "hello, human resources?!" meme), recreating low-class school social dynamics.

I think this is a major source of differences in attitude – in this thread and elsewhere – toward mixed workspaces and generally the idea of adding women to environments where they were historically absent. People who believe that it's an unalloyed good since you can meet your soulmate or something are, probably, just not ugly; for less lucky ones (and who are also not exceptional in some way), flirting in the workspace is a non-starter, so they just lose the possibility to make a living without humiliation. When one looks up blackpill content on the distribution of attractiveness and growing proportion of sexless men, and non-infrequent incel-type assessments like this one on Quora –

Women are not only disgusted by ugly looking men they have have a major fear and hatred towards them due to the “devil effect”. This often leads them to believe an ugly male is more likely to have malicious intentions and will even harm them when it’s proven to not be true. It is always a reflection of self worth and insecurities.

Ugly men showing them attention of any sort, even if not sexual is considered an attack on their worth and they often leash out or give looks of immense disgust as a defence mechanism to dissuade any current and future attempts. If you’ve noticed that you’re getting frequent looks of disgust and you’re hygiene is great (which it should be if you’re a fully functional adult), chances are you are an ugly male.

A few rules to follow in most scenarios especially if you’re encountering this at work, pay absolutely no attention to them in any form whatsoever unless necessary, keep it professional and don’t abandon basic social routines. Read the news, play on your phone, read a book on the bus stop. Avoid sharing stairs or lifts and small enclosed spaces without a cctv camera if you’re alone and sharing a space with a woman, alone or in a group.

– it's hard not to come away with the feeling «holy shit, tens of millions of guys are forced into a lifetime of being severely bullied». It's the kind of thing non-targets aren't prone to notice or connect to external factors (did you care that they were suicidal losers in your school?) so it may be arbitrarily intense. Even if it's an exaggeration based on insecurity and not an accurate stereotype, the very fact that there exists strong social pressure to dismiss it as a delusion is telling. There's no «lived experience» clause for ugly men.

And contrariwise, it may be the case that the incessant wringing of hands about sexism and harassment, and demand for National Incel Strategy, generalized tyranny, censorship, surveillance etc are products of many women being unable to remove uggos from their life, developing chronic stress and fear, and growing desperately violent as a result (in their own passive-aggressive socially manipulative manner).

We may underestimate how much gendered animosity the society contains at the margins; and the consensus about its direction is very likely wrong.

People who believe that it's an unalloyed good since you can meet your soulmate or something are, probably, just not ugly; for less lucky ones (and who are also not exceptional in some way), flirting in the workspace is a non-starter, so they just lose the possibility to make a living without humiliation.

I think people really miss how dehumanizing that is, the idea that you can't do something that other people around you can do. And I'm not even saying it's necessarily wrong that we are that way. But it is going to impact people, no doubt about it.

I think people really miss how dehumanizing that is, the idea that you can't do something that other people around you can do.

I mean...women and minorities get The Talk - yep, the one - as teenagers. Why not ugly men, from older guys that they trust? Fathers, uncles, older male friends. Nothing wrong with that.

Ugly men showing them attention of any sort, even if not sexual is considered an attack on their worth and they often leash out or give looks of immense disgust as a defence mechanism to dissuade any current and future attempts.

Yeah, that's kind of a keen observation, and a really bitter pill to swallow. The exact mechanism here is that they are offended that (they think) a low-status male believes he has a chance with them. In their mind, that means he thinks they are low status too. That's where the insult comes from. In reality the man probably has not thought about it all that deeply, or indeed at all. This is high-neurotic behaviour.

But a great many first world women are utterly incapable of not typical-minding, or of empathising with anyone who is very different from themselves. Many women go through life without ever considering the male experience, or even realising that there is one that is separate to the female experience. They simply never need to -- thanks to rampant feminism, society is built and centered almost entirely around the female perspective. (Men are inculcated with the extreme importance of considering the feelings of girls and women almost from the cradle -- women are never told any such thing about men.) So they assume that this interaction must have been thought about as deeply as they consider their own interactions, with all the high-school politics and status gaming that entails.

Because the men in this example don't think about it that deeply, they go away confused and hurt by the reaction. Naturally, they wonder why. They band together with others also wondering why. And those groups slowly, piece by piece, reverse engineer the social mechanics that caused the situation. And this realisation is often terrible for them, because it reveals that there is no escape and it will never get better for them unless they can increase their status. All the fairy tales about true love overcoming all -- the princess and the frog -- that they held onto, were just stories. The real world doesn't work that way. These groups, by the way, are vilified for piecing this together, because the most important thing about the rules is you're not supposed to state them explicitly. Everyone playing is well aware of how utterly vile and two-faced this game is, and dragging that out into the light makes them look bad. Which lowers their status, so it is not acceptable. And so any attempts to lay this all out plainly and explicitly must be railed against.

And because society is, once again, built and centered around female feelings first and foremost, there is no justice to be had. They're branded as toxic and disgusting and entitled for expecting to be able to partake in the same core parts of the human experience as everyone else. "Don't they know their place?!" is the undertone carried throughout all this. Other men go along with this characterisation to win points from the women, because men are taught to please women at all costs from a very young age. There is no brotherhood or solidarity -- why would there be? They're all competing for favour. Men are taught outgroup bias their whole lives.

So while women with ugly friends will stick by them in solidarity and try and inflict them on unsuspecting men on blind dates or whatever (because being the queen bee, the best looking one in your circle of friends raises your status), men are pressured into ditching their ugly friends by women who don't want to be around those types of guys because it lowers her implied social standing to be seen with them. They apply this pressure through accusations of creepiness or malfeasance, as others have noted, typically centered on actions they would tolerate or welcome from higher status men (because attracting high status men means you are high status).

It's social climbing all the way fucking down.

But a great many first world women are utterly incapable of not typical-minding, or of empathising with anyone who is very different from themselves. Many women go through life without ever considering the male experience, or even realising that there is one that is separate to the female experience. They simply never need to -- thanks to rampant feminism, society is built and centered almost entirely around the female perspective.

Feminists may overplay "male gaze" theory and the claim that everything is centered around the male perspective, but I think they are not wrong that many women are, in fact, raised exactly the opposite of what you claim, to learn how to cater to men and male preferences. Neither men nor women are a monolith; your description may accurately describe young urban white women raised in a deep blue bubble on a steady diet of anti-male grievance, but it's not the experience of all women in the first world, let alone the entire world. You did qualify this screed with "many" women, but when you then project it onto a claim about society being built and centered around female feelings and "no justice to be had" for men, you're just mirroring the feminists who blame all their negative feelings on men.

As another aspect, men typically have to make multiple approaches for a single success. If only 20% of women have the extreme negative reaction described, that amounts to a significant number of experiences that, to men on the sensitive side of things, are traumatic. Those experiences will play an outsized role in the mental universe of those men and make them overstate how ubiquitous they are.

Awkward approaches are bad and should be reduced as much as possible for the benefit of everyone involved, but they're also correctable and learning is possible with only a slight negative reinforcement. Rhetorically claiming they're rape-adjacent, on the other hand, drives men to extreme positions. Heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room, while heterosexual women have the obligation to respond commensurate with the offense to allow that learning to happen. The issue is that, although the large majority of people of both genders follow this, defectors on both sides make it an unsustainable system.

I agree with all this. Most people learn pretty early that men approach, women get approached. Men take the risk of rejection and humiliation, because the risk for women is an entirely different calculation. You could say all the risk for men comes before they get a "yes," and all the risk for women comes after it.

There's nothing pernicious or oppressive about acknowledging that men are less choosy (for both social and biological reasons) and therefore any woman who wants to get laid probably can, much more easily than a man, but that comes with definite drawbacks on the female side of the equation.

The problem every time these threads get spawned is that the aggrieved men complain only about the disadvantage they perceive (namely, that they can't get laid as easily as they'd like while the women they desire get to pick and choose and aren't punished for it), and won't acknowledge the real risks (not just "feeling bad" or "offended that an ugly guy approached me") that women have to contend with. A lot of them will react to "heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room" the way feminists react to "women should learn to have situational awareness and exercise good judgment in choosing partners" - both get really pissed off at being "victim blamed" for being told that some negative consequences are actually avoidable.

I'm not a fan of the Rebecca Watsons of the world making a big cause out of being approached in an uncomfortable way, or the "defectors" you refer to turning every approach into sexual harassment. But yeah, Elevator Guy should have "read the room" - it is pretty creepy to ask a woman you're alone in an elevator with late at night to "come back to your room for coffee" unless you have been given prior signals that she might be receptive to such a proposition.

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The exact mechanism here is that they are offended that (they think) a low-status male believes he has a chance with them.

Yes, and there's a broader generalization in that other men may be uncomfortable or find it gross that this man even has a sexuality in the first place; for unattractive people, the only really socially safe thing to do is to work hard at repressing your sexuality and making people believe that you want nothing more than to dedicate your life to something noble and that you are not in a relationship because you are too busy doing that. This is a fig leaf and a polite fiction, but most people will buy that.

We may underestimate how much gendered animosity the society contains at the margins; and the consensus about its direction is very likely wrong.

I've argued before that the cross-gender animosity is not only at the margins but is borderline mainstream (Most young guys I know follow and like Andrew Tate, social media comment sections are much more adversarial than they used to be, from both sides ). Which to me seems like a rather recent development.

Of course there's no way to quantify this, but you can tell which way the cultural/psychological wind is blowing if your eyes and ears are open enough.

Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.

Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.

If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.

I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.

On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.

Unfortunately, significant amounts of ink were spilled on the post defending myself of accusations of being an incel or whatever against discussing the central thrust of the post which I meant to be the worsening relations gaining enough mass to be noticeable in mainstream forums.

I'd love to hear what you have to say about this topic. Maybe consider an effort post?

I think the thing about Tate and co, is that they represent what essentially is an aspirational culture these days. Represent isn't exactly the correct word, but I'm not sure how else to put it. But I think they're reflecting a view based on a certain "Social Media Yuppie" perspective that's coming out of a few large cities, frankly, London is the biggest example here I think. Where they're wrong of course, is that the SM Yuppie mentality, isn't as common outside of these places as these people think. But that doesn't mean that it's not influential either. I do think there's reasons why people see this as pretty much the peak of attainable status right now.

And I think people do see traits of SM Yuppie culture "bleed out", and I think there's a reaction to it.

I've always argued that the manosphere as a whole (and it's a bunch of different parts and I acknowledge that) should be more focused on teaching people to avoid red flags. And I understand avoiding these red flags are tough, because again, these are relatively high-status baddies we're talking about here. But still...you don't want to deal with the narcissistic traits here. Just say no. It's not worth the headache. But educating men about potential red flags has always been seen as misogynistic by people who well...promote and sell those flags, giving them out to women to be honest.

And then there's the concern that this SM Yuppie culture will be picked up on by your partner in an existing relationship. What do you do then?

Anyway, I think largely that's what this is all about. I think you can avoid it if you want to, especially if you recognize status pressures and try your best to avoid them. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy or without cost.

I mean, you're not wrong that a lot of the things redefined as sexual harassment are just ugly guys doing things that would be well-within-the-pale if their more attractive peers did them. I've got personal stories of being saved from accusations of sexual harassment by virtue of being conventionally attractive, and besides, when has anything ever been as good a deal for unattractive people as it has for attractive ones?

That being said, I still think this specific expression of it is due to feminism. Women in very conservative communities in the west largely don't label unwanted attention as sexual harassment, they just say no, and consider having to occasionally say no a part of life.

keep it professional and don’t abandon basic social routines.

I don't think this is bad advice for both sexes.

Avoid sharing stairs or lifts and small enclosed spaces without a cctv camera if you’re alone and sharing a space with a woman, alone or in a group.

Again, unironically, this is not bad advice. I know it seems like women are just being paranoid, but there are too many stories about women getting attacked or murdered. When I was younger, I did the stupid thing of "I'm just being paranoid, this guy is harmless" and I was wrong.

it's hard not to come away with the feeling «holy shit, tens of millions of guys are forced into a lifetime of being severely bullied»

Why on earth is it put as "if you can't flirt at work, you are condemned to making a living with humiliation"? If you can't flirt, this is humiliating? Would you consider flirting in a single-sex environment, or are there no ways of being humiliated at work if you're all guys together?

I don't think most women regard ugly men with "looks of disgust" even if the ugly men are not trying to hit on them, so that seems to be proving too much. Work is for work, so be professional and courteous and keep flirting for after-hours. And that's whether you're handsome or not. I think it's not ugly men, I think it's weird people - and women make remarks about other women who are weird or odd as well, I've heard them (hell, they've probably made the same remarks behind my back because I'm weird/odd and socially awkward).

Do your job, keep your head down, and try and find love elsewhere.

First of all, this stuff happens everywhere, not just work. Second of all, this is extremely humiliating to men but I guess we'll never be able to make you empathize with us, so I don't know what to say.

I mean, these guys are essentially clueless spergs. The Human Resources meme depicts a guy doing something that is, at best, crossing the line a bit. Hot guy gets away with it, fat ugly guy is busted. Fat ugly guy should have known long before he got to the workplace that he can't do the shit that Adonis gets away with. We see it in lots of aspects of life...the rich guy gets off because he can afford a great lawyer, the poor guy gets railroaded.

It would probably be a lot easier and simpler if we just were more explicit about expecting unattractive people to be celibate for life and take some kind of prosocial job that didn't mesh well with family life, like truck driving or travel nursing.

The vast majority of "unattractive people" aren't celibate. Look out in the US. Yes, maybe a very specific brand of unattractive person who works in a specific industry and who works in a specific area of the country might be out of luck, but there's lots of ugly people of both genders getting laid. Usually by each other.

However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace

Their actions seem to align more with a group looking for a sexual dynamic that is totally dominated by the female sex than an asexual workplace. For example, it seems that their opposition here lies in the man benefiting from his status, not the sex in itself.

I think you could argue that this set of beliefs or values is espoused because men are more likely to benefit from workplace hierarchies and status in terms of sexual benefits. I also think to effectively argue that you would need to build up a very blank slate view of gender dynamics and values thereof that doesn't hold up to scrutiny because status games are an intrinsic part of male attractiveness (although I won't go into detail there simply because it would take a lot of time) This seems more and more like a deconstruction of that dynamic under nebulous claims of misogyny than any principled criticism of workplace dating dynamics.

Their actions seem to align more with a group looking for a sexual dynamic that is totally dominated by the female sex than an asexual workplace.

I don't really think so. There is competition among females in the workplace as well. I think I've seen more anger among women about other women using sex to get ahead in the workplace.

It can certainly be a personal benefit for men in positions of power, but that doesn't translate to a general gender preference. I've never been in a position to exploit workplace power for sexual favors. I am somewhat happy with that for a multitude of reasons:

  1. I don't trust myself with that power.

  2. I'd be a worse worker as a result of exploiting that power.

  3. I'd probably become more interested in the exploitation of workplace power than the more honestly earned sexual results of my dating world exploits.

I don't know; the examples of workplace romances I've seen or heard about didn't end up well. I've never heard anyone say "I met my spouse at work" but I do know of two examples from a former workplace of men who picked up a new romance at work, left their wives, got the new girlfriend pregnant, then left her/were left by her.

Part of it is down to change in attitudes; formerly, women at work were expecting to get married and then be housewives and homemakers and leave their jobs, so finding a match at work was not a bad idea (the trope of nurses and doctors or boss and secretary). You might meet someone at work or through work. You weren't going to continue working afterwards so the divide between home and workplace was much clearer. Today is different, women are going to have careers (or at least jobs) even after marriage, and a workplace romance need not lead to marriage at all. So the lines are blurred - work is not a place to find a mate, but human nature means that attraction happens and people do get into relationships, but if the relationship ends then it can be uncomfortable for both parties to still be seeing each other every day because they are also work colleagues. That leads to bad relationships at work and makes it more trouble than its worth for the business employing them.

IIRC work is now the most common place to meet a spouse, and if not, its ones of the most likely. Of course workplace romances can end poorly, because most romances do. I don't think that's a good argument against them. I have had some regrettable workplace romances. One was so nasty that I was credibly threatened by the woman, among other things. On the other hand, I don't think there are many other good places left in the modern world to find a spouse that are widely accessible.

As for the business, it probably isn't worth it in an abstract sense, but what people forget is that companies are just groups of people, and people want to get laid. HR can't really fight human nature and they're never going to fire top people over getting laid. If you suck at your job? Yeah, they might use it as an excuse.

There has been a large decline in couples meeting through work. It was equal 2nd place in 1995 at 19% dropping to 11% in 2017.

Given remote work trends, it may well be even lower now.

Graph

I met my spouse at work

I realise I'm commenting on an environment I have no direct experience of, and going by second- and third-hand reports, so this is treading on thin ice. But I do think the EA/rationalist movement does have a problem with this, and it's down to them all being so nice and trusting and religiously trying to be open to experience and all the rest of the good things in the Big Five/OCEAN inventory and not kink-shaming or being judgemental and being accepting of non-conventional ways of doing things. And that includes tolerance of, if not enthusiasm about and for, things like polyamory and sex work and underage sex (by which I mean "well if the fifteen year old is mature enough to make up their own mind, who are we to say that they shouldn't be in a relationship with an older person, be that five years older or more? of course so long as there is no coercion or manipulation involved", not anything like paedophilia).

That leaves them wide open to being exploited by bad actors. One of the frustrating things for me was reading accounts of 'investigations' by the communities into accusations, where nobody would do anything because they were all so paralysed by terror of even appearing to create rules and set up judgements and impose consequences, just like the big bad normie world out there. There were accusations by the alleged victims that the alleged assailants or guilty parties had too much influence within the group and this is why the committees set up to look into accusations did nothing, which may or may not be true, but the general impression I got was paralysis because nobody wanted to be the one to say "Okay, I'm making the decision that we do this or that". They preferred to rely on whisper campaigns about "of course we all know that if X shows up at a conference or whatever, they shouldn't be let in and if they are let in, someone needs to follow them around as a minder".

Normies would have said "this person is a sex pest, boot their ass out the door and if they keep doing it call the cops", but the rationalists are so much better than normies that they couldn't do such a thing. They're lovely people, in general, and way nicer than me, but too much tolerant of weirdness that does spill over into creepiness.

Yes. This is no different to why other nerd groups are easy pickings for sociopaths, in principle. Nerds often share an experience of being ostracised, and so, are in turn loathe to ostracise anyone themselves -- even when to do so would be absolutely in their own interests. Why do games workshops or whatever always have that one reeking BO dude hanging around? Simple. Nobody wants to be the bad guy and kick him out. "That's exclusionary, and it makes us no better than them." This is the mentality.

Coupled with "anti-gatekeeping" rhetoric -- which I must reiterate, as far as I can tell is only EVER espoused by people who really need to be kept the fuck out of any group or community you even remotely value -- nerd groups become wide open for exploitation by terrible people, who will come in and, not being nerds, immediately start imposing all their own rules and kicking out dissenters in a way that the nerds would never do themselves. Because they're not nerds. They're parasitic invaders.

I suppose my prediction is that the EA lot, after all this poly nonsense gets out into the mainstream, is going to see an influx of people shallowly parroting the most basic EA rhetoric while trying to build a harem.

Does it make me a person who needs to be kept the fuck out of any group if I say "I don't want this gatekeeping"? Not all gatekeeping, but specifically this kind, the kind I see most often, the kind that targets big sweaty guys who are already obviously miserable as fuck and usually hiding funny and generous personalities behind a tough facade built by years of being shit upon.

It is always the guy at games workshop with bad bo. It was funny at first, because there was a guy like that at my games workshop too, but it's not like there aren't other nerd stereotypes, and body odour is such a minor problem! Do you know what I did the third time I entered the tiny store to feel my eyes watering and throat seizing up? I introduced myself to the guy and told him his body odour was killing everyone. He was in it all day so he didn't realise, and nobody else anywhere had the courtesy to tell him. He started wearing deodorant and washing his clothes properly and soon he was one of the most popular guys there.

Body odour, overweight, ugliness - these things are halo/horns effected, so I understand it is instinctual to be negatively predisposed towards them, but to me it also means you have to try to look deeper. Sex pests can fuck off, but I think nerd communities were indisputably better when they had sweaty ugly guys than when those guys got kicked out for making passive aggressive newbies uncomfortable. Hell, the internet was better too.

No, I don't think so honestly. I more mean people who rail against the concept of gatekeeping at all. Once we're just arguing over the specifics, that's a different matter, to me.

This does seem possible.

I've been in a few different groups that had "sex pests". It does seem that many groups have developed anti-bodies to this type of problem. But maybe the EA anti-bodies to the problem is "make it a glaring issue with the whole movement, and thus make everyone hyper-aware of the problem."

The adult co-ed sports league I was in had the solution of 'macho guy gets offended that his girl got hit on by sex pest and threatens to beat the guy up'. The political groups I was in had the solution of 'ah that person might be a sex pest, never invite him to anything ever again, and don't tell him why'. The workplaces I was in had the solution of 'everyone breaks our byzantine set of rules at some point, threaten to fire them for breaking them, hope they quit so we don't need to explain to everyone else how the rules are still BS that you can mostly ignore'.

Maybe this is a result of working in a heavily gender-imbalanced field but I have never once seen a romantic relationship between coworkers. An asexual workplace would be great. In fact I would guess this is the norm actually. I doubt many kindergarden teachers or oil field workers even have many people of the right sex to pick from.

Yeah, no. Workplace relationships are completely normal, and insisting on their impropriety feels absolutely inhumane to me. I'd call it a strictly American obsession, but of course neuroses seem to be one of USA's top exports, so I'm seeing it creep into where I live as well. Well, I'm married so I don't care, have fun on the dating apps, kids.

Americans act like sex is illegal under Federal law.

I worked in gender imbalanced tech industry when I met my wife. Ratio was probably 70:30 :: Male:Female.

My wife was also far more aware of relationships between coworkers than I was. I thought it was uncommon, but with her connection to the social grapevine at work she told me of dozens of couples.

I've worked at a large tech company, with SWEs being roughly 80:20. Every woman on my team and partner teams ended up dating a coworker. One of them, a 24 year old new grad, ended up dating her 30-something TL. They got married last year.

I'm sure they would be frowned upon by the powers that be, but all of them were happy relationships, and the world would be worse off if those weren't allowed to happen.

Amen, brother. Workplace romances are cancer, though it doesn’t surprise me they would be so common in “tech.” The people who flock to that industry aren’t exactly known for their adaptability to adult social spaces, and the workplace gives them a captive audience with at least a shared interest in profession. It’s “easy mode” for nerds, to an extent.

I also innately detest the kinds of people who try to shit where they eat. It’s an annoyance for those of us just trying to do a job when Boy and Girl are going through a rough patch and can’t work together properly (though they love to insist they can keep it professional, that’s always a lie).

Is tech special? If anything I've seen much more workplace cheating and stuff outside of tech in the business world.

Romantic relationships happen in any human social setting, assuming it's because tech people are weird is unfounded.

Tech isn’t “special,” just contemptible. I observed it all too much in high school and college: the desperate, one-sided infatuation of a large group of nerdy, undersexed men toward their handful of female peers. I have no reason to believe this becomes less contemptible as these young nerds became old, working nerds, though the inflated salaries likely does a number to their egos and baseline confidence.

As I said, these men are typically very bad at cold socializing outside of work, so they become desperate and obnoxious to those around them who are just trying to do a job, since their priority is finding a willing fuck monkey while they’re young.

If this isn't pure trolling, it's an impressively antagonistic simulacrum. Don't post like this, please.

I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.

what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos

Which we know because at least by second- and third-hand accounts of the Bay Area bubble and the general community around EA and rationalism (I know a lot more than I wanted or needed to know about accusations of sexual abuse and harassment in the rationalist circles due to the trickling out of information via various blogs and references to the scandals on other blogs, all because of being on here and via SSC/ACX). But if you only learn about EA by things like this, when you go off to college, and you think "This sounds great, I want to make a positive contribution to changing the world", then you don't know about the poly and the non-conventional attitudes and all the rest of it.

So yeah, normie goes to conference and is shocked to be propositioned to join polycules and when refusing gets the lecture on compersion and the rather holier-than-thou attitude the poly evangelists within rationalism adopt about "we don't get jealous, we're so much better than you monogamous types" which I am, sorry to say, glad to see coming back to bite them in the backside even if it is in the context of a TIME article which isn't going to be the greatest in the world.

This reminds me. About ten years ago I asked a girlfriend who was an advertising exec if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet. Without missing a beat she replied "polyamory". Adding "it's just too weird".

With that in mind, the obvious enlightenment of polyamory aside, I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.

Everyone's on-board with being part of a smart do-gooder club until they're introduced to some metamours.

if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet

There have been several trial balloons over the recent years with pieces in the 'respectable' news media, but yeah: we normies are just too stuck-in-the-mud to realise that this is poly which is a cool new original novel thing, not adultery and cheating and all the other old ways of having your cake and eating it too.

Poly helps keep love alive!

Here are the facts!

Poly is the future!

But we still obstinately stick to this view of it 😁

Or, as W.H. Auden put it:

To the man-in-the-street,

Who, I'm sorry to say

Is a keen observer of life,

The word ''Intellectual''

Suggests straight away

A man who's untrue to his wife.

I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.

It wasn't meant to keep out normies; the poly stuff was there long before EA had to worry about the general public becoming aware of them. I wish it worked better at keeping the mainstream away, though. There are a lot of "effective altruists" these days who don't seem to care about effectiveness, just evaluate charities based on vibes, and don't even know what "on the margin" means. (REEE!)

refusing gets the lecture on compersion

I remember once talking to a woman at a (non-EA) conference whose big fetish was basically her partners having sex with other people. She was a bright, attractive, and charming young woman, but her self-esteem was painfully low.

That's the cuckold fetish, isn't it? Women can have it too. I think there's a lot of old stuff that gets dressed up with new names. For those who can make it work, good luck, but my impression is that it's a young person's notion and eventually they'll either partner up and marry/pick one person as their main partner, or it'll be well-off/high status older guys with a set of younger female partners (but that's totally not the same thing as mistresses or a harem or whatever that people did before the new enlightened days).

Thank you for linking that page on compersion, I got a great laugh out of that.

Oh man, I had to look up the Kerista Group who coined the term "compersion" as mentioned in that article, and dear oh dear. I think "cult" is the kindest word I can find. It started up in 1956 and lasted until 1991, which is pretty impressive, but it wasn't all free love and frolicking through the daisies by any means:

Kerista was founded by John Presmont after an auditory hallucination telling him that he was the founder of the next great religion of the world. After time spent in New York in the 1950s, and several island experiments in Dominica, Honduras, and Belize in the 1960s, Jud settled in San Francisco at the end of the 1960s

(Always Honduras! Same with Prospéra and for probably the same reasons: loose government regulations/amenable to bribery so you can set up and do what you damn well like so long as you grease the right palms).

From 1971 until 1991, the community was centered at the Kerista Commune (not a single physical building), founded in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. The Keristans maintained a very high profile that included publication of a popular free newspaper and several national media appearances.

Entrance to the commune was extremely selective. Potential members were expected to attend the Growth Coop for several months, interact with other Keristans at potluck volleyball and during newspaper distribution, and socialize with various BFIC families. This intense mutual-selection process included months of transitional celibacy. Starting in Fall 1986, it included screening for AIDS/HIV before joining a sleeping schedule. By 1987 there was no celibacy period, but three months of transitional safer sex and quarterly HIV testing for the duration. A more controversial policy was men being required to undergo a vasectomy in order to join. That policy was overturned a year before the New Tribe ended.

Being 'unresolved-on-the-lifestyle', even momentarily or temporarily, warranted immediate gestalt and possible expulsion from the family or commune. Practically, a member could be "called out" on any standards violation or non-utopian thought or action by anyone at any time.

And the techie element was strong with this one, and naturally they went for Apple:

The Keristans shared income and could choose whether to have outside paying jobs or work within the community (which operated several businesses, a legally incorporated church, and an educational non-profit organization).

The most successful of the businesses was Abacus, Inc., an early Macintosh computer vendor in San Francisco, which eventually offered a variety of computer hardware, training, and services. At its height, Abacus had over 250 employees, offices in five cities, and revenues in excess of $25 million a year. It was voted the 33rd and 42nd fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. Magazine in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and was the top reseller of Macintosh computers in the Bay Area in 1991.

Is this sounding like a cult yet? Because it's sounding sort of like a cult to me.

In 1979 and 1980, two children were born in the community. Beginning in 1983, the adult male Keristans underwent vasectomies to deal with birth control and address global population issues. All male members subsequently had the requirement of having a vasectomy within a set period of time after joining the community.

The family structure of Kerista was composed of fidelitous groups called B-FICs (Best-Friend Identity Clusters). Keristans practiced non-preferential polyfidelity, which required consensus to accept a new person into the group.

Non-preferentiality was an important concept of Keristan polyfidelity, and had lofty goals but was more intended to keep people from coupling up. Keristans had a transitional celibacy period after joining a group of three months, sometimes waived.

A single B-FIC was composed of men and women who rotated sleeping with all of the opposite-sex members on a balanced rotational sleeping schedule. The sleeping schedule assigned each family member to sleep with a different opposite-sex partner each night. Since the BFICs were rarely balanced between men and women (typically more women than men), on any given night several family-members would have no partner to sleep with and were assigned a 'Zero-Night' when they slept alone. In addition to the programmed sleeping schedule, it was permitted to sleep with any opposite-sex family member at any time, which was termed a 'freebie'.

Oh yeah, way better than boring old monogamy and all its jealousy and conditions and restrictions on sexual and emotional freedom! 😁

I wonder how many other trendy terms or ideas have histories like this, if you actually go digging into their backstories. Somehow the sex/gender split in modern English has been laundered from its origins with John Money and his uh... unorthodox practices, and nobody remembers that the trans pride flag was invented by a man who stole his female colleagues' underwear and wrote stories about an adult man marrying a teen girl who doesn't age.

This is basically my attitude, with more aggressive schadenfreude. EA is a community built by autistic nerds with more money than sense; this is just whining that some other group of sociopaths was running cons on the quokkas first. You don't want to deal with the weird nerds? Go build your own mountain of grant money.

Many of the women on the spectrum are deeply mentally ill and will find a way to make anything fit into a sexual harassment accusation. Trying to seduce these few women in the "rationalist" autist community is a guaranteed shitshow.

Your view of women is very enlightening, in that it reveals more about you than about actual female behaviour.

Sometimes even ignoring the hard "no's" causes the women to submit and often she doesn't tell society / her mate and that starts an affair.

Where a 'soft no' is "No", I don't even want to imagine what a 'hard no' is. How do you think this does not come across as an apologia for sexual assault/coercion and indeed all the way up to rape? "Sure, she's screaming and struggling, but ignore that hard no, she really wants you!"

And then of course this gem:

Many of the women on the spectrum are deeply mentally ill and will find a way to make anything fit into a sexual harassment accusation.

I suggest to any women out there not to get into an elevator alone with you at any time of the day or night, given your views on "hard no" and "if she makes an accusation it's only because she's a mentally ill autist".

Where the "hard no" part is coming from? It's quoted but I don't see it in the commend above. Was it edited?

As someone who has been raped, twice, and sexually harassed by men and women many times, I personally would rather live in a world where I get raped or harassed sometimes than a world where, like in America, I am not able to have a social life because everyone just sees me a dangerous creep.

Elaborate on how you're not able to have a social life because everyone sees you as a dangerous creep? Knowing america, I can't really imagine what you mean. Most people manage to have social lives despite the small, but existing risk of false rape accusations.

Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.

But when you're giving preferential treatment to people who join your "polycule," you're basically in pure Harvey Weinstein territory. He could argue that he created those jobs too, but there's no principle that job creators get to exchange those jobs for sex.

My take is that everyone involved here, including the "victims" is a shitty human being. The predators obviously but also the so called "victims" who willingly exchanged (note: willingly isn't the same as wanting to, I willingly go to work multiple times a week, but I much rather want to stay in bed and have a lie in) sex for favours. The real victims here are the people who refused the advances and thus lost out on career progression, as well as men who were locked out of the roles on the basis of their sex (I'd like to see a discrimination trial some day against abusers with this as its argument, it would be enlightening to see how the progressives react).

Amen brother. Amen.

I still don't know what the coherent principle is that would say that job creators don't get to exchange those jobs for sex if one buys into the whole "sex work is work" paradigm.

I don't think it was said preferential treatment was given to polycule members, the complaint us have to occasionally hear about them at informal events.

Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas.

I don't think, "I should be able to have sex with multiple women that seek status by association with me" is actually that weird of an idea, even if "polyamorous" people have concocted a bunch of window-dressing to make it sound different than that straightforward arrangement.

I'm widely not a fan of the polyamorous ideas around these things but this is not a very good description of the silicon valley weirdo version of polyamory, which seems much more likely to be male heavy than female heavy. I do think they're actually sincere, which may be the weirdest thing about them.

You know, I discovered something about myself a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, that I have since been working on. I was doing some mindless heavy lifting at work so I put on All Day by Girl Talk because it has a fast tempo and good bass, and my boss complained. But the way she did it was to say she didn't like it and it was too rap heavy and ha ha ha, I didn't really like that kind of thing did I? I mean really ha ha, this is the kind of... music you like? And I almost quit on the spot.

It was a pretty over the top reaction from me, but there was an enormous amount of pressure inside me to terminate the relationship when I felt her trying so hard to manipulate me. And I think what it is is that I have been burned so many times by manipulative actors (my brother and I used to have a gallows humour joke that our family get togethers were daes dae'mar there was so much manipulation going on) that now if I sense manipulation I have a visceral reaction.

And so this is obviously something I have to work on (because it makes me easy to manipulate), but in the meantime, I have to say this is excessively manipulative and I don't give a shit if they have a point, they need to be fired - from a cannon into the sun. Otherwise just give them EA already and save us all the extra drama, because that's where this is going to end up, yet another "smart" community 'to be fair'ing a sociopath into power.

Side note: Dawkins was right, elevatorgate - and this shit too - is pure first world problems and had we listened to him and taken that route - the route you describe as truth telling - the woke would be a lot less powerful. And yet you still act like he was in the wrong for being an asshole. It feels like you are being the kind of quokka who would advise against going to the cops, but instead of covering for creepy losers you are covering for manipulative cunts.

Side note: Dawkins was right, elevatorgate - and this shit too - is pure first world problems and had we listened to him and taken that route - the route you describe as truth telling - the woke would be a lot less powerful. And yet you still act like he was in the wrong for being an asshole. It feels like you are being the kind of quokka who would advise against going to the cops, but instead of covering for creepy losers you are covering for manipulative cunts.

Nobody said Dawkins wasn't right. He's a smart guy, he's right often enough. He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11. IMO a Dawkins approach hurts more than it helps, because it makes people angry and double down rather than actually thinking about the topic. But whether or not that's correct, he was most definitely in the wrong for being an asshole. But that doesn't mean his claims weren't correct - the people he was mocking were also in the wrong.

Sometimes you can't tell the truth nicely. Sometimes people won't hear the truth if you are nice about it, and I also think that there are times only an asshole can see the truth. A lie can circle the globe before the truth gets its pants on sometimes, and a forceful personality is required to shock people out of complacency.

I think you get a healthier society with smart and honest assholes than with smart and polite manipulators. This kind of Manipulative behaviour is almost always nicer than turning the be a dick dial up, but it is always worse for your community.

To put it another way, when you set the truth aside for propriety you give control to whoever defines propriety. That's how you get purity spirals and sociopaths. Maybe there was a way for Dawkins to make his point without being a dick. I would like to think that's true, even though it feels naive to me these days. But that isn't what happened, atheists had a choice between honest assholes and polite manipulation - they chose manipulation and reaped the rewards. I hope EA don't make the same mistake.

Edit: added the words "This kind of" in front of manipulative behaviour until I can think of the term I should have used in the first place to describe the behaviour I mean.

I think you get a healthier society with smart and honest assholes than with smart and polite manipulators. Manipulative behaviour is almost always nicer than turning the be a dick dial up, but it is always worse for your community.

I think the opposite actually. The fact that tighter packed societies (Japan, UK) tend to have much more indirect polite rules to avoid being direct might indicate that when people are in closer proximity fake politeness is an adaptive behavior for society. If truthful asshole behavior causes your society to fragment then polite manipulation is probably preferable.

In other words we can only put up with lots of other human beings when we are dishonest about how we feel about each other. I think that fits how people perceive truthful assholes in general.

I think that conflating politeness and manipulativeness is not reasonable. Also, are the UK and Japan distinguished from demographically comparable countries by greater dishonesty? I'd say they have excelled by being somewhat more capable of engaging object-level truth, while many others have fallen into forms of mysticism, self-delusion, indulgence, corruption and goodharting.

There is a subtle mechanism here: these societies have regimented culture, rigid protocols for polite interaction, yes, and for preventing and deescalating conflicts, but that allows to break the bad news without relying on extreme overpowering stimuli. Kind of what we have here.

(Alternatively, those are just societies with many survivors of a true aristocratic class).

But that's not necessarily the global optimum. The closest thing to a nation of truth-telling assholes that we have is probably Israel. And New York. Both are even denser than the UK and Japan, and even more successful.

Bonus: https://twitter.com/Ghostof_Atticus/status/1591559230695538688

I think that conflating politeness and manipulativeness is not reasonable.

I think I'd agree with Fruck above, polite standard of behaviours are essentially deceptions we all (more or less) agree to. I don't call Bob an annoying loud ass and he doesn't call me a sanctimonious pencil pusher. Those may allow us to more carefully engage with difficult subjects because we aren't pissed off at each others existence all the time, so our white lies and deceptions may also facilitate truth discussion, but not by being a truthful asshole as mentioned.

I think it's likely that the most successful classes in say New York are probably more likely to be more polite/deceptive in this way than the least. And looking at some of biggest drivers of violence in US cities currently, it seems to be driven by a very direct insult/response culture. Israel I am less familiar with but given their own specific circumstances may not be all that representative.

Politeness allowing truthful discussions can only last so long as the rules of politeness are mutually agreed on.

And, somewhat tautologically, on the rules of politeness allowing truthful discussion. If there is a rule of politeness which says some true fact may not be mentioned or even recognizably hinted at, you can't have truthful discussions which involve that fact. That once the rule is broken the polite people will tell you "Oh, you can say that, you just have to say it in the right way" does not mean the polite people are telling the truth when they make that claim.

I think I'd agree with Fruck above, polite standard of behaviours are essentially deceptions we all (more or less) agree to. I don't call Bob an annoying loud ass and he doesn't call me a sanctimonious pencil pusher. Those may allow us to more carefully engage with difficult subjects because we aren't pissed off at each others existence all the time, so our white lies and deceptions may also facilitate truth discussion, but not by being a truthful asshole as mentioned.

I like how you started but I strongly disagree with how you ended that paragraph. Politeness may be better for harmony, and sometimes productivity, and sometimes capability, but it doesn't help truth telling, the only times I think it might are when the situation is so dire that lives are currently at stake, and I hope it isn't consensus building to say the stakes aren't that high in these situations.

The first thing that I feel like maybe has been forgotten in all this is that politeness is deceptive. It is not to be trusted. We rely on it as a society, but trusting it is madness, it is designed to betray. I think a lot of people know that instinctively, even if they don't think about it consciously - which is why they push so hard to add their values to it. Using pronouns is 'just being a decent person' and so on.

Furthermore, it is specifically politeness which is facilitating grifters around the world, in the exact way it is being used against the EA community here. Because there is no polite way to object to a sociopath currently bringing all of her knowledge about human behaviour and social mores to bear against you. There is only submission, because she knows exactly which buttons to push to get her way, she knows how to frame her story for maximum sympathy, she knows who to take it to for favourable coverage, and she knows that her targets may as well be drinking baby seal blood the way society currently looks at them.

What happens after you politely respond with something like "yeah look I understand your concerns, but our community is made up of weird scrupulosity afflicted autists trying to paperclip happiness, and we don't want our soul drained and dessicated until we are yet another bland cookie cutter corporate tax dodge"? If you aren't just ignored, you will be shamed into submission, because by being polite you have already admitted that you can be shamed into submission. Sorry folks, being an effective altruist is now asshole behaviour.

I think grifters can exploit any social norm. For example it may be politeness being exploited in the EA community, because the social norm is something like I know when I am politely deceptive it is for the greater good therefore when Sue does it she must also be doing the same thing. If Sue is a bad faith actor she can exploit this.

However in our direct and honest society, the typical minding will be, I know I tell the blunt truth therefore Sue must also be doing the same thing. In a society where everyone tells the truth a lying grifter will also be able to prosper in other words, because if everyone tells the truth, defenses against lying will be even worse.

You can't stop grifters exploiting social norms. They have done it in every society no matter how polite or how truthful. In every conceivable arrangement from communism to capitalism to evangelical churches to atheist movements and beyond. Barbarian tribes had grifters, the Roman Empire had grifters, Victorian England had grifters.

It's not deceptive politeness that enables that, it's people being willing to exploit social norms, whatever they might be. Removing politeness norms and replacing it with something else means grifters have to use different tactics but the result will be the same I think.

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Ah damn, yeah you are right, I got carried away by the rhetoric there. Politeness is necessary for a functional society and it is also essentially deceptive manipulation everyone agrees to, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not all manipulative behaviour is worse for a community than being an honest asshole. There is a term I should have used instead to refer to the manipulative behaviour I mean, but for the life of me I can't think of it right now. Shit, this is going to drive me mad.

Maybe there was a way for Dawkins to make his point without being a dick.

Is it objectively worse to undergo FGM than to be groped? Yes. Does that mean being groped is okay? No. And that's where Dawkins was being a petty little bitch: "oh boo hoo worse things happen at sea". He was motivated by wanting to protect his in-group: atheists (men, mostly, because that's the majority). Nasty old religion has all the sex scandals, not clean shiny new atheism.

For him to go "Dear Muslima" was particularly hypocritical, because on another day he'd be attacking Islam, including burqas. Wearing a burqa is objectively less bad than undergoing FGM too, Richard.

Lol you are probably right about him wanting atheism to be clean, I bet that annoyed the shit out of him. But I think you missed the point of the Muslima letter - it was a dig at Islam as much as it was at Watson, maybe moreso. I think Dawkins genuinely does feel bad for women living under Islamic rule, patronising as it might be.

He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11.

I think @Fruck is looking at this from today's perspective with "SJWs" having the whip hand and making more and more deranged claims. So the assholishness of people like Dawkins and Amazing Atheist seem less important.

But they were assholes at the time and it mattered. There's "good" assholes - i.e. anally nitpicking expert types who don't care to "read the room" which is good. But there's also the "asshole"' in the more colloquial sense. Atheism had both, sometimes in the same person.

I recall AmazingAtheist engaging with Anita Sarkeesian before she was (in)famous and, instead of just "destroying her with facts and logic", going on a tangent about how she was broken because she was fidgeting. Even then, it seemed a bit fucked to me.

It's also worth remembering that Watson was actually relatively toned down compared to the absurd SA claims being made today, and the reaction was OTT and mocking. Watch the video, it's actually a relatively offhand thing and there was context; she stated that she had spoken about not liking this sort of thing in the conference which adds a point in her favor.

... All of you except for the one man who didn't really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel, because, at the bar later that night — actually at four in the morning, we were at the hotel bar, four a.m. I said I've had enough guys, I'm exhausted, going to bed, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more, would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don't do that. I don't really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I, don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I've finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualise me in that manner.

This wasn't a general puritanical thing like today. Nor did she try to humiliate him by naming like the recent video of a woman getting mad at a gym "creep" for staring. She explicitly says she had made her preferences clear here.

Then people like Dawkins jumped on it in an assholish way and this led to the other side responding (I can see how this was seen as male nerd rage and entitlement) and it became way bigger than it ever should have been.

It may not have been a general puritanical thing, and my memory is fuzzy when it comes to the precise ordering of 201x socjus scandals, but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with. Scott wrote his meditations on livejournal in ~2012, and the elevator incident became the type specimen of "If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".

And despite being warned about the dangers of superweapon-builders, here we are. Confined to an obscure internet forum because it turns out that superweapons are pretty powerful.

but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with

I've seen others making similar claims in this thread and I think it reverses cause and effect. That brand of atheism was pushed by mainly urban, educated, cosmopolitan, secular humanist types, i.e. already progressive. If it represents anything it's just that they were more likely to be subject to those ideas earlier than the rest of us, they didn't spawn it.

"If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".

I think there is a clear difference here: Watson didn't publicly humiliate the man or claim she was abused and she had allegedly made it clear beforehand that she didn't like being approached that way. Basically, she did say no.

She did publicly humiliate him; she just didn't name him.

All Day by Girl Talk

Thanks for the rec; 5 minutes in and this sounds absolutely fire.

Sounds like you would have preferred straight up "turn that shit off, I'm not paying you to listen to music" from the boss. I've worked in jobs where we absolutely were not allowed to play music or listen to the radio because it was office work and "you won't hear the phone/doorbell/whatever". Current boss actually took away the speakers from the work computer so we can't turn on music at work. It's annoying because I never have music on loud enough not to hear the phone etc. and the place is generally quiet and boring that I would appreciate something in the background to help me concentrate, but all I can say is "yes sir no sir three bags full sir".

Like it or lump it, most workplaces will insist on "no distractions". Your boss, being a woman, was trying to manipulate you - but in a social manner, not the direct "turn that shit off because I'm the boss and I say so" that a man might do but the 'softer' way women do so as not to cause ruption in the relationship. Which didn't work, because you react badly to manipulation. But that's why she went the "you don't really like that kind of music, do you?" route instead of the "turn that shit off" route.

Damn it, I was hoping that the idea of playing music at work being the trigger would demonstrate how outsized and primal my reaction was. I'm definitely not complaining about my job or my boss - I love my work and my boss is great.

I mean, I am constantly amazed by all the SWE guys talking about how they just put on their headphones and block out the world. Not all of us have the kinds of jobs where we're allowed cut off all communication like that, we have to be constantly available. Some of it is petty micromanagement but when you can't simply say "fuck you" and walk straight into a new high-paying job, you have to go by the rules.

Though the current wave of tech layoffs might change that for people in such careers as well, who knows? The thing is that I do administrative/receptionist work, so I do have to be able to hear the phone ringing or people calling to the door and so on. But there's no reason that playing the classical music station at a low level would interfere with that, which is why I'm disgruntled. Ah, well. Work is not fun and not meant to be fun so all those going "make your job your passion" can stick it up their jumpers, I keep my passions for my time outside work.

This is why I loved the Covid lockdown because it engendered "working from home" for me, which I do most of the work week now for the past two (going on three) years. I want to play the radio station while I'm working? I can! I want to slob around in my pjs and slippers? I can! I want to take a break, put on a load of laundry or the mid-day meal or whatever? I can! Need to be home for a delivery or workmen calling or such? I can be! Bliss! 😁

While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote,

Interesting phrasing on the part of TIME here: in the blog post they're selectively quoting, "It puts your safety at risk" was referring to "socializing in the presence of alcohol/psychedelics" because doing so makes it "harder to give informed consent". The quote wasn't fabricated, because it didn't need to be; TIME can just come in and helpfully make it sound like it's saying something completely different.

Can anyone possibly look at this and think that the journalist was acting in good faith?

Certainly there's some element of bad faith here...but I do think there's an open question in terms of determining what. Is it a way to slag off those dirty hippies? Or...is the person just defending the culture of alcohol/psychedelics? (more than likely the former).

It's surprising how many people out there for whom talking about the potential downsides of social alcohol use is a 3rd rail.

It's surprising how many people out there for whom talking about the potential downsides of social alcohol use is a 3rd rail.

Because in contexts like these it's essentially never in good faith, but an attack on drinkers and/or drinking.

A lot of the complaints also seem to be that alleged rationalists and effective altruists - for some reason - don't just take people at their word.

I remember that atheism+ stuff, though I wasn't a part of it at the time, just an observer. But I really think you hit the nail on the head here. People were applying their skepticism and agnosticism to women telling their stories back then, and feminists just didn't like that. They wanted atheism plus feminism, or as I (uncharitably) look at it, atheism minus skepticism when it is applied towards specific groups, because that makes those groups uncomfortable.

I do think that some feminist and woke values are antithetical to skepticism and rationalism, but at the same time, I know a lot of people in rationalist communities who are not against wokeness, and many in favor, and I've never seen great schisms in the rationalist community like what happened in atheism. Maybe just the woke rationalists value rationalism enough to be able to compartmentalize and have lively debates. They value keeping an open mind enough, maybe more than atheists. Atheism as a movement ended up with atheism being somewhat fanatical in it's own right.

Oooh I have thoughts on this. I'll be honest, I actually think Atheism+ is the "root" of what makes up much of Woke/Neoprogressive culture today. Or more specifically, it was the vector that took this stuff from forums to social media. I was actually there for it. In fact, I would say that during it was when I "switched sides"....or more specifically, I realized that me, as a liberal, really had nothing in common with this form of Progressivism. What I saw, was people wanted power more than actual systematic change. Simple as that.

Later on, I came to the conclusion that Elevatorgate more than likely was always "inside the house", that is, it was specifically a problem for this Neoprogressive/Polyamorous community. And in reality, so much of the problems that were being claimed were linked to that. I still find it hard to believe that nobody actually knew who "Elevator Guy" is, to be blunt.

Now, let me make it clear. I have nothing at all against Polyamory. In fact, I am Poly myself. However...I do think that this combined with a sort of moral license that can come from political activism can be a negative thing. And I don't think it's limited to the left...or even directly linked to polyamory actually. Certainly it's a problem you see on the religious right as well.

I am disappointed that EA is used in this way, although in retrospect it's probably impossible to avoid.

I have to say I find this funny. People discovering that looser social and sexual norms allow bad actors - or merely "people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve" - to accrue sexual and social benefits and blue the lines. Quelle surprise.

See, I'm not even convinced that it's the looser social and sexual norms per se. I mean in a way it is. But I do think the second half of that..."people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve", preys on a lot of status hunger among people. Frankly, that's what makes people vulnerable, both because they want the social status power, and they're also afraid of it being used against them.

The term I used way back when was "Theme Park". It seemed to me that people wanted this edgeless, curated environment for them to explore whatever they wanted to. However, that's not realistic at all.

Oooh I have thoughts on this. I'll be honest, I actually think Atheism+ is the "root" of what makes up much of Woke/Neoprogressive culture today. Or more specifically, it was the vector that took this stuff from forums to social media. I was actually there for it. In fact, I would say that during it was when I "switched sides"....or more specifically, I realized that me, as a liberal, really had nothing in common with this form of Progressivism. What I saw, was people wanted power more than actual systematic change. Simple as that.

I am not sure I agree that Atheism+ is what spawned wokeism; I think they were just the atheist community's metastasization of a phenomenon that began in communities like LiveJournal and Tumblr. But they certainly were influential in taking it mainstream and spreading it outside of rather rarified fan and hobby enclaves.

I was an early participant in Atheism+, even considered myself an "ally," and that experience was a turning point. It's not the only thing that turned me against wokeism (back then we still called them SJWs), but it was probably the most significant.

I was an early participant in Atheism+, even considered myself an "ally," and that experience was a turning point.

Tell us how they removed your ally card, everyone loves a good redemption arc.

I parted ways with wokism around elevator guy, I could never figure out what he did wrong, and that sent me down the antifeminist rabbit hole.

I mean, I'll give mine.

After the whole EG thing, I started talking about how they needed to change the code of conduct/create a schedule to make these events more professional on the whole. Sure you could have your fun/flirty drinky time, but they'd be limited to certain events that people could opt-in/opt-out of.

Went over like a lead balloon.

It's when I realized people were full of shit, they didn't want any actual change, they just wanted the power to enforce arbitrary rules to both get rid of undesirables and to protect themselves.

Reading back those old blog posts, I'm reminded how ubiquitous the 'invitation' to check your privilege was. Has that meme died, or am I no longer hanging out with any SJWs. Clearly privilege theory is still part of the SJW canon, but perhaps the sides have hardened, and it has never been of any use against the committed anti-woke. Atheism + parted humanity into those who check their privilege and those who don't.

Honestly, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I actually think it's a power fight over who has to check their privilege and who doesn't. Who is going to be deconstructed and who is going to be spared that inspection. As people say in this community, it's the "Who, Whom" problem, Who sets the rules and on whom are they going to be enforced. Truth be told, I don't think any of the individual issues actually matter all that much in terms of the culture wars.

I'll be blunt, actually "checking your privilege" is basically riddled with anxiety, if you're actually doing it. I'm speaking as someone with personal experience in this. It's about always second and third-guessing everything you actually do. It's not healthy in any way shape or form. The goal is to get the outgroup to do it, but not the in-group, so the in-group has decided advantages in society.

I don't think check your privilege is a particularly new or SJW aligned idea, it's literally just thanks giving and he Christians have had their version of it for thousands of years. The SJW angle was weaponizing it as a way to enforce the progressive stack, still in its proto form back then, over decoupled arguments.

I don't mean thanksgiving, I mean the specific idea that 'oppressed' perspectives are inherently more valuable than 'oppressors' because they have to know oppressors to survive while oppressors don't have to, and therefore oppressors of any axis should generally shut up and listen, which is how it was used. It creates a bit of a paradox, since they are asked to check something that should be invisible to them, according to the theory. So they have to default to oppressed people perspective, who can see fine, and guide them through the invisible knapsack.

Tell us how they removed your ally card, everyone loves a good redemption arc.

Someday maybe I will write it up, except I'm afraid there might be too much identifying information. But I think I can take partial credit for the Atheism+ forums imploding.

I could never figure out what he did wrong

Horny, drunk and stupid in the wrong way at the wrong time. Assumptions that an atheist chick would be up for sex anytime because hey, she's an atheist, doesn't have the same hang-ups as religiously raised women. Waited till it was just him and her in the lift, which makes it a confined space she can't get out of if she says no and you turn nasty. Everyone was probably slightly drunk because they'd been talking in the hotel bar. It was early hours of the morning and she was dog-tired and not in the mood for anything but grabbing some shut-eye in her own room. She didn't know him except as "one of the group of us in the bar talking" so she had no priors on whether or not he would turn nasty if told "no". Five minutes consideration if he was sober/less clueless should have told him "Not now, Horace" but horny, drunk and stupid like I said.

And no woman likes the implication that "Just because I'm an atheist that means I'll open my legs for any guy at any time".

EDIT: Now, I can understand it from his side: waited till it was just him and her in the lift because this was his best chance and he didn't feel comfortable saying it in front of the group and getting turned down; probably a tiny bit star-struck because this was the Skepchick; hey if he didn't try then he'd never get anywhere - 'if you're not in, you can't win'; also they'd been in the bar, probably drinking, probably a bit tiddly so alcohol and horniness over-rode good sense. He probably never even considered he would come across as a possible threat because men don't think this way the way women do, and we can argue over that later, but women are raised to be careful about being alone with strange men in confined spaces especially when the possibility of sex arises. There needn't have been any bad intentions on his part at all, but it was still a poor move.

She could say no, if she felt uncomfortable with a simple proposition, she if not fit to even participate in society.

This "He'll turn violent so I couldn't say no!" is a ridiculous excuse, but I hear it as an excuse all the time for women doing horrible things like adultery.

Consider this a moderation response not just to this post, but also this one and this one and this one and this one.

Basically, a whole string of bad posts, none of which are super terrible by themselves, just generally sneering and low effort inflammatory claims without evidence, but when you plop this many bad hot takes into the mod queue at once (note I am only linking to the ones that have actually been reported), it indicates someone coming in hot with an attitude that needs to be adjusted.

Don't post like this. Put some effort into your arguments. This is not the place for spewing your "bitches, amirite?" grievances.

Take two days off to chill out.

Assumptions that an atheist chick would be up for sex anytime because hey, she's an atheist, doesn't have the same hang-ups as religiously raised women.

Those are all your assumptions. But even if they were his, I don't find this insulting or creepy in the least, if those are valid categories. Maybe to religious women, but who cares in that situation. In the end, all he did was say what he wanted to say for 10 seconds, got turned down, went on his way. Everything worked out as it's supposed to, except quicker and more painlessly than usual.

Confined space

What, is she claustrophobic as well? It’s an elevator, the least private place in the building, people always a ding away.

from your other comments:

While I'm not broadly sympathetic to the whole organised atheist movement of that time, I can empathise with Watson

I don’t see why you put this as some sort of disclaimer. Obviously, it’s easy for you to believe that your ideological enemies ‘talk creepily’ to women. But would you be as ‘empathic’ if the allegations were about your own ideological group ?

How could you explain her position, since your solution presumably includes waiting until marriage to invite a woman over for room coffee.

Then came Elevatorgate, and suddenly "Do you want to come to my room for coffee?" simply meant an offer of coffee and how could anyone imagine it was an offer of sex? You see my confusion?

It’s ambiguous on purpose, everybody knows this. As that video says, "using the literal form to signal the safest message to the listener while counting on them to read between the lines". It has a part that’s literally about how old the line 'would you like to come up and see my etchings?' is.

You're doing the same thing by mixing awkwardness with the threat narrative. The ephemeral privacy of the elevator lends itself to awkwardness, not crime.

Certainly I agree with you.

My point is that I really do think it was the Atheism+ strand of the whole thing that "caught fire" and was broadly picked up. I don't think it was picked up directly from LJ, Tumblr or SRS so much, although certainly, and I specifically think it was SRS that was embraced by the A+ crowd...

Actually let me rephrase that. I think the FTB side of the whole A+ thing was heavily influenced by SRS, and the whole ironic cruelty thing. But there was also the A+ forums, (and the two didn't really get along) that was much more Tumblr influenced I think. (Honestly, the whole LiveJournal as radical thing missed me, so I can't really tell you much, the only things I ever read on there were Scott's journal pre-SSC and various Tales from Tech Support type stuff)

Anyway, I do think that largely it's that "ironic cruelty" that set the stage for what we see as woke culture today.

Had to think for a minute, was FTB the ironically named "free thought blogs(?)" site? Ashamed I recognized all the other acronyms...

Yup. You got it.

What was the ironic cruelty thing?

I don't know of another way to put it. Maybe there's nothing ironic about it, but I do think that the ShitRedditSays culture that IMO A+ fundamentally is based on is stupid levels of cruel. I know, even back when I was on the other side of things, and people were raving about how cool that culture was, I took one look at it and just noped away. It's something I want no part of.

Ah shitredditsays, they were one of the first things I saw on reddit - back around 2013 I think - and I basically wrote the whole site off for years as a result. I thought there might have been some kind of flashpoint or the like centred around the idea, but I do think it's a good description. The drama-miners have a bit of that too.

Yeah, way too many acronyms in that post. What's "SRS"? I think, with the help of your post, I get all the others.

Subreddit called shitredditsays.

It was the main watering hole of the woke back in the day

Probably /r/ShitRedditSays

Elevatorgate was really a problem of bad timing. It's two in the morning, she's been talking and involved in events all day, she's tired and possibly a little drunk and all she wants is to grab a few hours sleep before the events of the next day. This is not the time to wait until you get her alone in the elevator to ask for a rub of the relic. Slightly drunk and obviously clueless guy is going to come across as mildly threatening in that scenario, even if his intentions are harmless and he's operating on "this is a modern, progressive, liberated, and atheist woman, surely she'll be up for casual sex at the drop of a hat unlike the Catholic Irish girls I've grown up with!" assumptions.

Think about it, gentlemen: some guy you don't know and only met ten minutes ago is hinting he wants to get into your knickers when it's way too late and you're way too tired and not in the mood - does this sound like the recipe for romance?

Most men would appreciate the offer from a woman.

If you agree with this and say "that's not the same because men and women are different!", then whatever happened to gender equality and feminism? If men and women aren't the same in this scenario, it's bizarre that we treat the same in every other "unequal" scenario, so feminism/liberalism itself breaks down.

Even hardcore feminists (who I doubt are in this thread) don't argue that men and women are the completely the same, socially or biologically.

The biological differences in this case are obvious, but even socially: just about any woman coming on to a guy is a signal to hin that he's a hot piece of ass; just about any man coming on to a woman is a signal to her that she has an ass (and maybe not even much of that).

I mean they were going back from the bar. when all you want to do is grab a few hours sleep before the next day you aren't really hanging out in a hotel bar for hours. I think the elevator was a maximally bad place to make the proposition but if you can't proposition people at or around bars where on earth can you?

...well definitely not in an elevator in the wee hours of the morning. i'm actually kinda surprised at the controversiality of @FarNearEverywhere's comment. it seems obvious if you haven't been irony poisoned.

Yes, I agree not in the elevator. But that really doesn't fit with the previous post's characterization. The beginning and end of the issue is the enclosed space, not the whole "I'm so tired, woe is me" thing.

Without doxxing myself too hard, my experience of EA has been a bit different to what's described above in relation to polyarmory at least. N=1, but my perspective might be of use for a few people who have not experienced the EA subculture themselves.

It's possibly due to the fact I was not in AI risk or anything Bay Area related/rationalist adjacent, but the majority of people I've interacted with in EA are not poly. In addition, while younger EA parties have fair amounts of poly people (which can be a bit jarring, you're discussing legal policy with someone and four people of various genders are making out in lingerie in the corner), the high ranking figures who control donations and jobs I've interacted with are either explictly monogamous or they show no sign of being poly. The higher ups tend to be older (poly tends to be a young persons' game), and those with standard academic careers, lots of papers and titles tend away from poly as well (one girl rising in the movement who I know fairly well made sure she was not seen to be poly when dating as it would undermine her respectability, and is now in a mono power couple with another senior EA).

However, it's certainly possible I've missed out on the pressure from polycules, being male, already established skill wise and not just out of college, not living in a EA house, and now married. I'm not sure if there are any published figures on how many EAs are poly, I would be very interested to see them, but my guess is its far less than people expect, and it tapers off as you go up the ranks/experience.

The feel of EA orgs and their culture also varies hugely, from things like assessing grants/admin, to interventions and direct giving today, planning for unlikely but still grounded scenarios, all the way to the very theoretical work on philosophy, AI and X risks, EA is far larger than the Bay Area and its culture. EA orgs tend to be pretty male (maybe 70:30 by my guess), but I think that's mostly due to the nature of what is being researched rather than hostility to women, and are pretty desperate to appeal to as diverse a group as possible.

There a few interesting dynamics however - one is that there is far more smart grads right out of college who want to be EAs than there is useful work for them to do, unless you have some rare skills, experience or papers under your belt it can be hard to get a position, and that can eat you up and generate unhealthy pressure. Secondly, the nature of the work can make it very seductive and high pressure - you're working on catastrophic scenarios and some potentially very interesting and serious things - and that has burnt out good people that I know. They felt that if the catastrophe happened tomorrow their guilt that they had not done more would consume them forever: they would literally have damned civilization. The pay is lower than for other equivalent positions and the work life balance can be odd, especially if you only live in EA houses.

younger EA parties have fair amounts of poly people (which can be a bit jarring, you're discussing legal policy with someone and four people of various genders are making out in lingerie in the corner)

I don't think that's a party, friend. I think there's a different word for that sort of occasion. But this is exactly the kind of 'blurring the lines' that the article complains of, so it's a good example.

It's true - that possibly needs a bit of context. Broadly:

It was an EA party in a big city hosted by an EA figure (who wasn't poly).

I went, talked to people and socialized. Some of that was interesting in the context of their work (that a solid part of the challenge of cultured meat is not the science, but the law, that was my legal policy comment, but it's not a work setting).

There were poly people at the party, making out in one corner of the room. They were maybe 5 out of 100 people. More were probably poly there but not so... in your face about it.

I can see how it's a bit offputting, it was to me, but it's more "those crazy kids" than pressure to be poly from my experience.

Have you considered that an attractive young woman in an environment that's 70% male is far more likely to experience any "pressure to be poly" than a man would be? Seems like a major confounding variable.

I'm not doubting your story that most EA figures are at least claiming to be monogamous.

I agree, it's a different point I'm trying to make. You may be asked if you want to be poly or join a polycule at an EA party, some may claim it's better, but not nothing will be gated from you if you say no in my experience, the seniors (other than Elizer? Who isn't a central EA example) aren't.

“My safety at risks” is just an institutionalized version of what the early seduction artists called a shit tests. Girls and feminists now claim this to scare unworthy men from pursuing them. Since the worthy ones will just ignore their claimed victim hood and realize they like male attention.

I’ll make it simple every women wants sexual attention to boost their ego even from unworthy men. It’s just our legalistic culture has now enabled a second game to play that they can sue you for it and then have a course case stating that men can’t help but show interest in them while getting paid.

Sorry, that's some horrible post-PUA logic bordering on delusion. I don't want to get «shit-tested» by a very specific and thinly veiled threat of character assassination, better take it at face value and try my luck elsewhere. In general, the idea that rejection is always insincere and/or that the girl actually wants you to be more assertive (and high assertiveness suffices to make you attractive) when she's saying you aren't wanted is as close to the default feminist accusation of rape culture as can be.

In the original meaning, «shit test» referred to trivial coyness or obstinacy when you already have some basic rapport (admittedly, men get deluded on this account too, but less), or to stirring trouble in a relationship, not to «you're making me scared, please go away or I'll call for help» kind of posture. Is such a posture shitty behavior, and cruel response to a normal friendly expression of interest? Totally. Shit test? Assume at your own peril.

This is an argument that left likes to make. Someone makes an argument based on science in this case psychology and the normal response by those groups is accuse the others opinion of being racists if they are unable to directly rebut the idea. In this case you are using rape culture. It’s fine if you don’t want to debate an idea but you are basically just making a witch accusation instead of contributing anything.

Uncharitable, weakmanning, and personally antagonistic, in response to a response to another terrible comment full of uncharitable claims without evidence. You have a ton of reports in the mod queue with this kind of comment, and a pretty poor record already, so I'm giving you a 2-day ban. (It would be longer but you're hardly the only culprit and this thread is full of awful hot takes.)

Exactly how assertive do western women want us to be?

Since the worthy ones will just ignore their claimed victim hood and realize they like male attention.

Ah, the good old "women mean 'yes' when they say 'no' so just keep on going" which never ever ended in assault or rape. I thought this one had gone the way of the dodo, but apparently there are still men out there who don't believe "no" does in fact mean "no" and not "overpower me you big manly caveman".

That’s very uncharitable to equate a man showing interest and flirting as the same thing as supporting grab her and drag her into your cave and take her.

grab her and drag her into your cave and take her.

This is far more attractive to women than saying "please say yes to sex with me" or any variant of that. It's quite bizarre because feminist women I've met often say they want explicit consent, but get off to the forced dynamic.

This is far more attractive to women than saying "please say yes to sex with me" or any variant of that.

[citation needed]

I am not disputing that some get off on it, I am disputing that all or even majority would consider "grab her and drag her into your cave and take her" as actually attractive.

I would expect that more than 99.999% of woman would prefer to not be raped.

This does not mean that they want doormat as partner or someone powerless! But if anyone considers that being rapist is more desirable by woman than equally powerful and attractive etc person that is not a rapist then they are heavily misinformed and dangerous.

I guess that rich, powerful charismatic powerful rapist may be more attractive than poor lame doormat - which is not changing that "rapist" part is not really helping here.

Situation is made worse by people who cannot imagine other expression of masculinity than through a rape, both on male (red pill "how to get prostitute for free" vision of relationship) and female spectrum (bad romance stories).

If women don't want a doormat, why does western society work so hard at bullying us into being doormats?

If women don't want a doormat, why does western society work so hard at bullying us into being doormats?

That's a test. If you are successfully bullied, you fail.

If the Soviets didn't want to starve, why did their society work so hard to collectivize agriculture? Societies often do things with consequences that the people in those societies don't actually want.

That seems fitting, since it was very uncharitable in the first place to assert that women generally both want attention from men and will cry victim to get status when they get said attention. Two wrongs don't make a right, sure, but your original post was super uncharitable.

Bro - I actually believe that. So there’s nothing wrong with saying what you believe. There is something wrong with accusing someone of advocating for rape when I clearly did not say rape was ok.

By your own rationale - if he believes you said rape was OK, then there's nothing wrong with saying that. I don't agree with that logic, but if you're gonna defend your own uncharitable post with that logic then it applies to his too.

Most men who are sexually successful in short-term encounters ignore soft "no's". If you want success with women you need to keep persuing after soft resistance (shit tests) and give plausible deniability instead of being honest about intentions. Sometimes even ignoring the hard "no's" causes the women to submit and often she doesn't tell society / her mate and that starts an affair. There is a reason rape by a more powerful male is a common female fantasy and found in many romance novels, women are complicit in rewarding this dynamic.

"Shit test" is a male conception and invention. I've never heard another woman use such a term. That's not saying there aren't women out there who enjoy making guys jump through hoops because they like the attention and the sense of power, but it is not a female dating strategy or whatever the hell it's supposed to be.

This is men making up explanations for why women say "no" and why they will then give in if you keep nagging, pressuring, and subtly coercing them in order to make you shut up, go away, and leave them alone. It's not "women want to test you to see if you are alpha enough to bother with", it's "women want you to stop making them nervous so they appease you in hopes you'll stop doing that".

Women fantasizing about rape/= women wanting to be raped.

This is pure PC nonsense. Would you apply the same logic to pedos and child porn?

The reality is that women respond to the same things in real life that they fantasize about, and why wouldn't they? Why else would they fantasize about it instead of the nice guy who asks them politely.

This is pure PC nonsense. Would you apply the same logic to pedos and child porn?

No, but I would apply it to men and "lone hero vs a gang of baddies" situation. It's a fantasy so common we have made movies about it, but I don't think anyone would want to get stuck in Nakatomi Plaza without shoes on Christmas Eve for real.

The fantasy is that the man is so badass that if he were stuck in Nakatomi Plaza without shoes on Christmas Eve, he could still singlehandledly whip the asses of Hans Gruber and his gang.

This is pure PC nonsense. Would you apply the same logic to pedos and child porn?

Yes, broadly defined. Lolicon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon - includes NSFW images) vs raping children seems to mirror rape fantasies vs actually being raped.

(disclaimer: I am not an expert on this topics nor done research in either topic nor have a personal experience)

Even if we posited that the circumstance women fantasize about rape scenarios does in fact imply that they would enjoy those scenarios if they happened for real, it's not like the scenarios they fantasize about involve average men, the typical PUA, or you in particular. Quite a few men also fantasize about being raped by a(n attractive) woman. Does that mean that "just drug and bed him, that's what he actually wants" as advice to an ugly 300lbs woman is (a) useful (as in the man will actually come around that he was just denying his true preference as part of an evolutionary strategy) and/or (b) moral (as in the man's fantasies amounted to forfeiting the right to protest or retribution)?

Would you apply the same logic to pedos and child porn?

Probably. Most people want harsher punishments for the former over the latter.

Why else would they fantasize about it instead of the nice guy who asks them politely

Do you only fantasize about stuff that you would want to happen to you in real life? How about non-pornographic media? Do you only enjoy films and books where you want to be the characters? Do you only play games where you would want to live in that world?

I generally fantasize about things I want, yes.

Not the question.

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I fantasize about taking people I don't like outside and beating the shit out of them; and yet somehow it has never happened!

Almost as if there is a difference between imagination and reality.

It hasn’t happened because you would go to jail if you did it. That had nothing to do with whether you want to do that. If you lived in a different world where you wouldn’t go to jail then you likely do it. Like if you were a conquistador you probably would have beaten up some natives and enjoyed it.

You can "want" something on one level without actually wanting it. I "want" to eat 2 pounds of ice cream right now, but don't really want to because I don't want the consequences. Jail is one consequence, yes, but there are plenty of others, from social ramifications to the possibility that you lose the fight.

Fantasizing about something, and even wanting it on one level, doesn't mean that you actually want it.

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Wow, thanks for this insight into psychology, fjwief! So if I ask a guy "do you want me to cut your toes off with a pliers?" and he says "no", I should just go right ahead and do that - because "ignoring the hard "no's" causes the person to submit and often they won't tell society and that starts an affair". You can't get much harder a "no" than "no, stop, I don't want this, why are you doing this, you're hurting me, aaaaaahhhh!" and that just means I'm succeeding in winning his heart!

I'll head right on down to the hardware store in order to pick up suitable implements and get started on my future romance!

Fantasy and reality often have a sheer chasm between them. There definitely is some truth to the fact that some girls enjoy some level of non-consensual encounters, but there is also a wide range from "I said no, but if he ignores that it gives me cover to not feel bad about cheating" to "Some random stranger held a gun to my head and forced me to blow him."

I don't think many, even those who have non-consensual fantasies, would enjoy the latter.

The non consensual fantasies are not about some low-life dragging them into the ally raping them. It’s being raped by 35 year old Donald Trump or Tom Brady or perhaps even for an ugly version something like Harvey Weinstein. So I guess the fantasy still has consent since it’s only with someone desirable. But that person not being able to control himself and taking her without caring about her opinion of the matter.

Of course it’s obvious why females evolved to have rape fantasies. It was a survival tactic. Females survived by being able to emotionally deal with being raped by the more powerful. The rape of the Sabine was a founding story of Rome. 5-10% of the population in some regions have dna directly tied to Ghengis Khan. The Aztecs took the females of their conquored as additional wives (who could become high status)

5-10% of the population in some regions have dna directly tied to Ghengis Khan.

Or, more probably, a possible patrilineal ancestor of Genghis Khan who was also the ancestor of a bunch of other Mongols that did a lot of raping. We don't have Genghis Khan's remains, so we don't even know if he was part of this patrilineal line.

Of course it’s obvious why females evolved to have rape fantasies. It was a survival tactic. Females survived by being able to emotionally deal with being raped by the more powerful.

In a thread full of pretty terrible hot takes, it may be unfair to single this one out, but since you've been particularly plentiful in providing them, I'm going to use this post as an example to point out the rule to proactively provide evidence for inflammatory claims. Is it "obvious" that women evolved to have rape fantasies, or is this your personal theory, or an evpsych just-so story? You provide zero evidence that it is an "obvious" fact. We are pretty lenient with interesting, even inflammatory, hot takes, but when you're talking about a large group of people you still need to justify your claims about how they all evolved in a way that happens to conform exactly to your assumptions about them with something more than possibly-apocryphal stories about Ghengis Khan and the Aztecs.

Like I said in another thread. Rationalists like to imagine themselves as being one step ahead, but the thing about recursive loops is that they are recursive. Being one step ahead is the same thing as being one step behind.

What's that saying, "everything old is new again"? You will always get drama where people are involved, where sex is involved, where the tangles of attraction and current rules and what is or is not permissible are involved. I think all parties in Elevatorgate were to blame to some extent - the guy should have the basic cop-on to recognise that was not the time or place to chance it (the next day when all parties were rested and he could make an attempt at getting to know her a little would have been better), Watson should not have blown it up to the extent she did.

"I am fucking sick and tired of going to conferences and getting hit on by guys who think atheist women are sex-mad because atheist spaces are majority male, men do want sex more than women, and their basic unevolved view is that atheist women will have dumped the attitudes to casual sex along with all the religious rules around sex" is probably the background to her reaction which explains why she took it so far, but this was part of a wider and longer problem than the "guy hit on me in the elevator way too late at night when all I wanted was some sleep" occasion.

Watson was entirely in the wrong. As long as it is the case that men, by and large, must initiate in sexual or romantic encounters for them to happen, it must not be ipso facto wrong for them to initiate such encounters (unless perhaps you are a Shaker). At the time Watson made her complaint, conferences were absolutely not places where such approaches were categorically off limits. And as long as men are not mind-readers nor even perfect body-language readers, approaches will happen when the woman is not receptive, and the man has not done anything morally wrong by making such an approach; his punishment should be limited to rejection. Not public shaming, not shaming of the entire community (as happened here), and certainly not ejection from a venue, firing, blacklisting, and all the rest of things that have come along since.

He did do something "wrong", in that the flirting game with strangers has guidelines and he skipped the first half. If he had approached her in a bar in public to start the interaction he is doing so with other people around. Then you can go through the flirting dance while your target has some safety. Its why first online dates should always take place in public places and the like. This is not new information. You escalate but allow easy safe outs. Some pressure yes, but with a safety valve. If at the bar after buying a drink, flirting, reading her body language and so on, he offers to walk her to her room, then in the lift asks her up for coffee he has built the social edifice his sexual request can lean on. At each step both parties are signalling interest.

He didn't do anything criminal but he did make a social faux pas and being shamed is an appropriate response. That's how social conventions become social conventions in the first place.

This is what the flirting game is for, to gauge and slowly escalate interest, you might be able to short circuit that and jump to the end, but you are taking a risk in doing so. Whether you are publicly shamed by having a drink thrown in your face or something else, it is a risk you take when trying to speed run.

Sure you might be in bed with her in 5 minutes flat, but you also might mistime the lift glitch exploit and doom your entire run.

It is also necessary to do things like this to encourage the others...

the guy should have the basic cop-on to recognise that was not the time or place to chance it

Here's some quotes from a random internet search:

We met at at a work conference.

I met one of my current partners at a conference at our university. We both attended a conference on high altitude balloon launches, and lunch was after that session.

We met eight years ago at an old car meet in Nevada.

How We Met At A Marriage Conference and Married 9 Months After

None of these are from sites that detail sexual harassment or abuse. So I think the assumption that it doesn't happen is not entirely correct. It is rare, though, and it is true most males and females are at the conference for different reasons. Same as they also in many other places for different reasons, and still couple meet and form relationships at the same place. I don't think there's any place outside of specially designated blind date meetups where a low-rank male could timidly approach a high-rank female and not be forcefully repulsed with strong disgust reaction. And since high-rank females have zero reasons to visit such designated places, there's no place at all.

Girls and feminists now claim this to scare unworthy men from pursuing them. Since the worthy ones will just ignore their claimed victim hood and realize they like male attention.

I am perfectly fine with not having relationship with stupid people with tragically idiotic mind games.

This subset of woman (I really doubt that feminists are over-represented there, BTW) can deal with consequences, people pursuing this strategy will end either with rapes/attempted rapes or in relationship with stupid manipulative people. Does not seem like a good strategy to me.

And anyway: vast majority is actually not interested and "rape them until they like it" is existing only in really bad porn - and not a viable dating strategy.

Take your brainworms back to Reddit. If you'd arrived at these opinions through personal experience, you'd have your own way of talking about it, rather than the exact same PUA Redpill lingo that gets compulsively parroted.

You really don't have any original dating advice to pass on?

This thread is full of terrible comments, but this kind of personal antagonism is still not acceptable. Focus on the argument and not on the person.

I have similar opinions due to personal experience. I don't know if sliders is correct about why western women behave this way, but they do.

My totally original dating advice is this: move out of hellhole countries where everyone hates you.

While I'm not broadly sympathetic to the whole organised atheist movement of that time, I can empathise with Watson, even though she did exaggerate somewhat; it was very late at night, they'd been drinking in the hotel bar and talking and she just wanted to go to bed. This guy goes up in the lift with her and propositions her. I do understand why she'd feel at risk in a confined space with a possibly drunk guy where she has no idea how he'll react (and her being possibly drunk and tired as well didn't help with how she reacted or felt).

Mainly what I took away from it was confusion; first when I heard about "do you want to come back to my place/come up to mine for coffee?" I was young and stupid and thought it just meant that: an offer of coffee. "Ha ha, don't be silly, it's an offer of sex and if you accept then you are consenting to sex" was the explanation I got when wondering about why women complained men were asking for sex on such occasions. Then came Elevatorgate, and suddenly "Do you want to come to my room for coffee?" simply meant an offer of coffee and how could anyone imagine it was an offer of sex? You see my confusion?

The way I remember the drama was that the guy asked her out, in pretty polite way IIRC, she said "no", the guy said "ok" and went on his merry way. Later on she brought that up as an example of "sexual objectification", and it was something the skeptic community was supposed to self-flagellate about.

If anything, comparing it to EA's low-key pressure to participate in drug fueled poly-orgies is unfair to the elevator guy. From today's perspective it's like watching a guy in the 19th century get slapped in the face for a misstep in obscure Victorian etiquette.

There's a timeline (from the anti-Atheism+ perspective) here. The two things that made it blow up was when Watson "called out" Stef McGraw and then when Dawkins responded to a blog post defending that calling out. The original negative responses to Watson's video were just some Youtube comments, Stef McGraw's blog post, and Rose St. Clair's video response. Stef was a student who posted a blog post disagreeing with the idea that the encounter was an example of sexism. Watson, giving a talk at the CFI Student Leadership Conference, mentioned Stef was in the audience, called out her "parroting of misogynistic thought", conflated fear of "sexual objectification and assault", and claimed people like her were scaring women away from atheist conferences:

Because there are people in this audience right now who believe this: that a woman's reasonable expectation to feel safe from sexual objectification and assault at skeptic and atheist events is outweighed by a man's right to sexually objectify her. That's basically what these people have been telling me, and it's not true.

Since starting Skepchick I've heard from a lot of women who don't attend events like this because of those who have this attitude. They're tired of being objectified, and some of them have actually been raped; quite a number of them have been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted. And situations like the one I was in, in an elevator, would have triggered a panic attack. They're scared, because they know that you won't stand up for them. And if they stand up for themselves, you are going to laugh them back down. And that's why they're not coming out to these events.

The call-out provoked some criticism on Twitter, and Watson responded with a blog post defending her actions and calling out some other people like Rose St. Clair and CFI intern Trevor Boeckmann. More criticism followed, such as Abbie Smith's Bad Form, Rebecca Watson blog post and McGraw's own response. This in turn provoked a bunch of blog posts supporting Watson's actions, such as PZ Myers's "Always Name Names!". In the comments for "Always Name Names", Richard Dawkins made his famous "Dear Muslima" comment mocking the idea that being asked to have coffee together at a conference was an example of sexism. (It is sometimes characterized as being a "don't complain because things are worse elsewhere" argument, but his other comment specifically said that wasn't his point and explained his reasoning.) This got too many blog posts to count calling him a misogynist and so on and got Watson to say she would boycott his work.

Often when Elevatorgate is summarized from the pro-social-justice side it's described as if Watson just made the comparatively mild original video and the atheism/skepticism community blew up at her, but what really got it going was how she responded to those like McGraw who disagreed. As well as ramping up her condemnation of the original interaction. (Something many of her supporters took even further, such as Amanda Marcotte arguing that Elevator Guy's invitation amounted to a rape-threat.)

Richard Dawkins made his famous "Dear Muslima" comment mocking the idea that being asked to have coffee together at a conference was an example of sexism.

Yeah, but it wasn't just "fancy getting a coffee together?", it was that euphemistic way of "want to have sex with me?" of asking which makes it different. Plus, I may be being a bitch here because I don't like Dawkins, but he would be flattered by a young woman asking him for a coffee with the implication that she wants to knock boots with him. In today's environment, of course, accepting would be very stupid to do due to the risks of accusations of sexism and power imbalance, even if he didn't grab the chance to knock boots with her.

There's exaggeration on both sides and I agree it's hard to find a reasonable balance, but while I think Watson over-reacted, I also don't think she was totally unreasonable: there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men. And of course "not all men", but we don't know all the background - if she was constantly being hit on by guys at conferences, in similar circumstances - just met her and were strangers to her - then she would see it as a problem of sexism. Men would not have that same experience so would feel she was over-reacting and exaggerating and creating a problem where none existed.

It's the curse of all organisations that get together to do good, especially in reaction to the current social environment. "We're supposed to be better than that, we're supposed to be past all the old shibboleths and taboos, we're supposed to all be clear thinkers acting on reason and not the same old sexism/racism/ -phobia/ -ists!" It's human nature, is what it is, and we'll never be free of it no matter how progressive we think we are.

I also don't think she was totally unreasonable: there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men

She wouldn't be unreasonable if that's what she said, but she couched in terms of "sexual objectification" and "unwanted sexual advances". Metooers, and even people in this thread argue about the evils of workplace relationships, Watson argued about the evils of propositioning someone at a hobby group meet-up, and the other day I heard something about how wrong it is to try to chat someone up at the gym. So where, pray tell, is a guy allowed to make a pass at someone without it becoming an international scandal?

I made fun of the Victorians in the other comment, but at least they had clear rules for this kind of stuff.

Scott had an old LiveJournal post about this, where he likened dating to Russian spies trying to identify each other while undercover in the US. On the one-hand, Scott is a pretty neurotic and anxious person who has stared too long into the CW; on the other, it's not exactly wrong. Anyone else remember this? I couldn't find it in the best archive of squid314 that I was able to unearth.

From "The Fourth Meditation On Creepiness" by Scott Alexander:

Imagine two Soviet spies in the Cold War US who have to get in contact with one another. The KGB forgot to give them a silly code phrase like "the wombat feeds at midnight" so they've got to figure it out on their own. The Americans know these two spies are trying to get in contact, so if one were to just ask random people "Are you a Soviet spy?" the Americans could quickly guess that the asker was a spy and arrest him.

You are one of the two spies, and you spot someone who you're about 50% sure is your colleague. How do you confirm they are also a spy with the lowest possible risk of getting arrested?

I bet there's some fancy cryptographic solution here, but my intuitive strategy would be as follows:

Me: Excuse me, sir, do you know any good borscht restaurants around here?

Other Spy: Ah, borscht. I love borscht!

Me: I hear Russian borscht is the best. Have you ever had any?

Other Spy: Yes, I was in Moscow once many years ago, before the war.

Me: Really? Have you ever been to [street the KGB headquarters is on?]

Other Spy: All the time! That's my favorite street! I used to talk to [name of KGB head] a lot.

Me: I am a Soviet spy. Are you one too?

Other Spy: Yes.

You would be immediately under suspicion if you asked patriotic Americans "Are you a Soviet spy?", since they would then know you were probably the other spy yourself. So instead you lead up with a question that seems innocuous to an American who's not thinking about spying, but to a Soviet who is specifically looking for another spy is sorta kinda suggestive of Russia. The other spy can't just say "Ah, I understand your code, I too am a spy" because then he might blow his cover to an American who was just looking for some good borscht. So he says something that slightly escalates the Russianness. You can't just blow your cover now, because you're still not sure he's not just an American who appreciates a good plate of borscht himself, so you escalate the Russianness slightly further. In other words, you start off with a conversation that could happen by coincidence, decrease the chance of coincidence a little bit at each exchange only once you get the signal from the other, and eventually the conversation becomes one that couldn't possibly happen by coincidence and you know he's the other spy.

When I was much younger and more terrified of women, this was exactly the route I would take. I didn't want to know if she was my fellow spy, I wanted to know if she liked me. I can't just ask, or I might end up as the next Julius Rosenberg. So instead - maybe we're sitting next to each other, so I move a little closer to her. If she moves a little closer to me, or does anything that could be interpreted in my feverishly optimistic brain as resembling this, then maybe I touch my leg against hers. If she touches her leg against me, maybe I rest my arm against her shoulder. If she rests her arm against my shoulder, I smile at her. If she smiles at me, then I ask for her hand in marriage.

One can also do this verbally. It would pain me to even type out the conversation, but I assure you it's still pretty awkward.

And when this doesn't work, sometimes if the other person just looks super Russian it's tempting to worry you've miscalibrated your subtlety ("Man, what if this guy just really hates borscht? Maybe I should call him Comrade and see what happens?) and try something else.

And okay, this is all super creepy, and I know that now, and I'm sorry for doing it, and I won't do it again.

(by the way, the one time this worked I was so flabbergasted and confused I completely forgot to ask for her hand in marriage. In case you haven't figured it out from this latest series of blog posts, I'm kind of an idiot.)

But let me try to explain (not justify, mind you) why this might seem like a thing someone should do.

I had a friend a few years ago, let's call her Alice. I asked Alice out on a date. She said she wanted to keep being friends. This went well. No, really. It actually went well.

Alice moved to another state, and a little while afterwards I went to visit her for a week. I worried if it might be creepy if I asked her to cuddle after she had said she wanted to be friends, but eventually I asked her anyway, and she said that was great and she loved cuddling and had been pretty desperate for someone to cuddle with.

We cuddled all week, but I was super super careful not to touch her breasts or any other part of her body that might be interpreted as outside the spirit of friendly platonic cuddling. On the last day she basically grabbed my hands and put them on her breasts and told me that she really liked having her breasts touched and obviously I was never going to get around to asking her of my own initiative.

And, being male, I thought Darnit, I could have been doing that the last six days!

And on the train home I was thinking about this, and I tried to figure out if there was something I could have done differently, and I decided that there is literally no non-creepy way to say "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?" Try it. I dare you to construct a non-creepy version of that sentence.

(as an aside, the existence of the non-threatening and socially acceptable word "cuddle" is super helpful. Before I learned that word I just never cuddled anyone, there is no non-creepy way to say "Excuse me, do you mind if I touch and stroke your body?")

Putting your hands on someone's breasts without asking them is a much worse offense than asking "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?". But, someone who actually puts their hands on someone else's breasts without asking them is likely to get swatted away and get a "Go away, creep!" and then the issue will probably never be spoken of again. If there were a rumor at my high school that some guy had put his hands on some girl's breasts, it would die down in a week, two weeks tops. On the other hand, someone who goes up to a girl and asks "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?" becomes a creepiness legend. If there were a rumor at my high school that some guy had asked a girl for permission to put his hands on her breasts, then that rumor would pass down from upperclassmen to lowerclassmen through the generations, and a thousand years from now when the high school exists only in cyberspace the disembodied transhuman freshmen would still be giggling to one another about it.

The same is true of the creepy Soviet-spy escalating thing. Is it creepy and horrible? Yes. Is it so utterly non-juicy that it would never make a good rumor? Also yes. So the more terrified a guy is of asking "Would you like to go out?" or "Would you like to cuddle?" or even "May I put my hands on your breasts?", the more likely he is to try creepiness instead. On the other hand, the day you can ask consent without any fear of reprisal or shaming is the day that men give a huge sigh of relief and just ask out the women they like without going through the whole creepiness rigamarole which honestly is pretty stressful for us too.

This is why I keep stressing that creepiness comes from male weakness rather than male privilege. If there were no risk of getting arrested, then the Soviet spy wouldn't ask silly questions about borscht. If there were no risk of being pilloried as a horrible creepy person for asking out a person "above your station", then creepy high school me wouldn't have sat uncomfortably close to girls in the hopes that this would prompt them to spontaneously show interest.

It's probably worth noting that later in that chain of posts Scott noted that commenters reassured him that what he was doing wasn't necessarily that creepy in and of itself—that gradual escalation is sort of how things go a lot of the time, and that works out pretty well.

If that is right, Scott was somewhat incomplete in that male weakness analysis of creepiness—although that might be the occasion for the whole thing. It's not from the mere existence of this phenomenon, but from mistakes. Creepiness would come instead from communication issues in this activity—either men showing interest too overtly too quickly, or men failing to pick up/women failing to communicate that they're not wanted, and so interest is shown mistakenly. This is of course made more difficult by the fact that people are not the same.

Another useful Scott post, along the same lines, is this one, where he talks along the same line of deliberate ambiguity.

The "Do you like borscht?" dialog

So where, pray tell, is a guy allowed to make a pass at someone without it becoming an international scandal?

Developing countries.

there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men

This argument always struck me as strange. An elevator literally opens its doors on its own and has more traffic than a normal room, it's halfway to being a hallway. Under what plausible circumstance does it pose more of a risk than a normal room? The timeframe that you can't leave it is a matter of seconds. Anything you could do in that timeframe (like groping/stabbing/purse-snatching someone) can be done elsewhere by attacking by surprise. The thing that stops someone from attacking you isn't that you can open the doors without waiting 10 seconds, it's the combination of most people not being violent criminals and the violent criminals getting arrested.

Removing the gender aspect, if you're in a fight with a substantially stronger person, your first order of business is going to be putting distance between you and him and hopefully buying a few seconds to scream for help or find something to defend yourself with. That's possible in a regular room or hallway; it's not possible in an elevator, where you may well be knocked out as soon as anything starts. Not too different from the risk of being in a narrow alley as opposed to a wide street.

That doesn't detract from the fact that it's social norms and laws that are doing most of the work here. But it's defense in depth; adding a layer of being in a physical space where you're not as disadvantaged is a reasonable approach to risk mitigation.

Well, if you're really "knocked out as soon as anything starts" in knockout-game fashion then the 10 seconds don't matter. It's just a matter of letting someone within arms reach, which you do all the time when inside buildings. Meanwhile realistically most unarmed struggles don't involve being knocked out at all and last longer than the time inside an elevator. The length of the fight needs to be in a very specific timing sweet-spot to be advantageous to the attacker. In exchange it's going to open doors to a floor that might have people waiting in a matter of seconds, plus anyone could subsequently press the elevator button and call it to them. Alleys are riskier because they're more isolated from other people, they're not narrower than how close people get inside a building and the only thing preventing you from running away from an alley is the attacker. This is particular relevant for the "rape threat" interpretation, since rape obviously wouldn't fit inside the timeframe.

Don't elevators often have cameras, too?

early in the morning? i mean... it's very very reasonable for us to be uncomfortable if there's a guy (who is probably stronger than us) who is essentially propositioning, early in the morning, in an area with no escape.

the exact issue here is that an elevator is an isolated space. with a hallway there are potential ways to get help or escape, but in an elevator there is none of that.

if a guy i didn't know said something similar to me in that context, i'd be very weirded out too

Then came Elevatorgate, and suddenly "Do you want to come to my room for coffee?" simply meant an offer of coffee and how could anyone imagine it was an offer of sex?

I've never personally seen anyone defend the coffee-propositioner by saying "he just meant coffee, not sex". I've always seen people saying that of course he meant sex. But that it's no excuse for Watson to act like she was in danger or anything. I've seen people saying that "do you want to come back to my room for coffee" is the civil way of propositioning sex in polite society, and that if women are going to shame men for saying that, then there's basically nothing women won't blame men for.

Also, I've never seen anyone remotely saying that consenting to coffee means that you're consenting to sex. Yes, it's a coded suggestion of sex, but no one thinks that that is enough to say it's a done deal.

I haven't any bookmarks but I do remember reading comments about "he only meant coffee, not sex, how could she blow this up about that kind of misunderstanding?"

No bookmarks either, but I'll back you up on this. I do remember some blog post where "he could have just meant coffee" was used as an argument, but it was more of a cherry on top, than the core argument. And to be fair to whoever made that argument, there was something about the way he asked her out (as quoted by Watson herself), that made me go "Jesus, the guy sounds autistic enough that he could have actually just meant coffee".

Well, I'm not saying you're wrong that some people somewhere, possibly even many people, have made that argument. I'm sure some people have. But I don't think it's representative of the discourse that I saw around it during the time. I saw no arguments myself from a lot of the popular online anti atheism+ folks, Thunderfoot and The Amazing Atheist for example, and even Dawkins, that hinged around the idea that the man in question could have meant anything else other than trying to nicely proposition sex. And I think most of those people made great cases for why Rebecca Watson and atheism+ in general were completely out of line and antithetical to the values of atheism, even if the guy was actually asking her to have sex.

This guy goes up in the lift with her and propositions her. I do understand why she'd feel at risk in a confined space with a possibly drunk guy where she has no idea how he'll react (and her being possibly drunk and tired as well didn't help with how she reacted or felt).

If this is a big enough worry for someone, it may be worth following a reverse-Pence rule and actively avoiding getting into confined spaces with young men.

The Pence Rule is a good one. Don't, in situations where alcohol is involved, be alone with a person of the opposite sex. It's a good rule for women and for men. Because stupid crap happens - people do get tempted, people do get carried away, misunderstandings like this one happen. There's too many cases of "married boss and secretary/assistant had affair" because of propinquity and time spent together and getting close.

Yes, I think it's laughably ironic that all the 'bad' old religious rules about "leave room for the Holy Ghost" are coming back in our era of liberation and openness and no kinkshaming, but it's evidence that the old rules weren't stupid but were based on practical experience of what happens when sex and alcohol and temptation are in the mix. They chopped down the Chesterton's Fence and then were astounded to be gored by the bull, so now they're busy building giant walls in place of the fence, which is an over-reaction.

propinquity

It's relatively rare I learn a wholly new, non-technical word these days. Thanks.

I haven't conducted a rigorous survey to determine preferences, but anecdotally a lot of women do avoid being alone with men they don't know/don't know well. However, it isn't necessarily easy in all contexts - sometimes you're stuck using a nominally public space which doesn't afford the usual 'protection' of crowds of people to witness any bad behavior (such as a hotel elevator late at night).

Then, I think, it's time for a risk assessment and an exploration of mitigation strategies. Have any of the women you've known ever carried a self defense weapon like mace or a taser?

They've gotten their fear of social danger mixed up with their fear of physical danger.

I've spent lots of time around women who actually have been physically assaulted, and they don't pull this "I feel unsafe" crap. They have some idea of what dangerous men actually look and smell like, and don't regard all men they meet as incipient rapists.

My own theory is that women get told constantly to Be Afraid, but don't actually know what it is they're supposed to be afraid of and thus their Danger Sense isn't particularly well-calibrated.

They have some idea of what dangerous men actually look and smell like, and don't regard all men they meet as incipient rapists.

And, of course, approximately zero of their attacks will look like, "goes to an atheist conference, drinks with a group, and then attacks one of the other conference-goers in an elevator". I'm not saying that none of the men there are predators or that none of them would use physical force under some circumstances, but I'd bet that this is not the modus operandi. This was right around the peak of Law and Order: SVU popularity though, so "nerdy atheist brutally attacks women in elevators" probably sounded like the kind of thing that happens all the time.

I've privately theorized that the reason the woke seem to be predisposed to latch on takes like all men are rapists, all blacks are criminals, etc... is that they're actually unable to read the subtler queues of predatory behavior and are thus defaulting to coarser proxies.

the woke seem to be predisposed to latch on takes like ... all blacks are criminals

In what universe do the woke subscribe to this take?

The woke oppose each and every anti-criminal policy because they believe, correctly, that such measures will have a disparate impact on blacks. It's a doublethink situation similar to Dreher's Law Of Merited Impossibility, except instead of "it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it" it's "blacks are not more criminal than average, and if you support any tough-on-crimes policy you are a racist because criminals are disproportionately black."

As Covfefe Anon says, "The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream".

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This one. Have you not been paying attention to the last decade or so of rhetoric surrounding policing, no cash bail, decriminalization, etc.?

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It's like a psychological allergy. Growing up in an environment that's too clean prevents your immune system from calibrating appropriately, and it seems that growing up with too much psychological safety has a similar effect. Unfortunately, this trait has become a kind of status signifier among women, and so they're now actively cultivating their psychological allergies.

A lot of this is just not being exposed to this stuff, and not being willing to listen to people who are without it going through 27 layers of academic theory. They’re sheltered, not stupid.

seem to be

Ah, there's your problem.

Who actually does this? Who is latching on to "all blacks are criminals" and using that to justify reparations or whatever?

This is one of the least charitable takes I've seen on this board. At least from someone who isn't actively trolling. It assumes your enemies are both incompetent and malicious, and to do so, it relies on an absolutely bizarre example.

Okay, let's throw out that example and replace it with something more credibly woke, like "all cops are bastards." What advantage does this theory have over one based on negotiation?

There is obvious strategic and historical precedent for using a "coarser proxy," like a slogan, to start negotiation from a stronger point. "54-40 or fight!" It has the added advantage of making it harder for enemies to dramatically mislabel one's position. You can explain the worst excesses of woke sloganeering as a signaling race to the bottom. No need to construct a narrow form of autism.

She could just say "no". There was no evidence that it was a risk.

If anything, by using euphemism it should signal she was in less danger. The whole point of the euphemism is plausible deniability so the woman can demur without hurting anyone’s feeling.

Its like, either there's a polite way for a man to inquire about sexual availability or there's not.

If there's not, then that leaves the man with the option of keeping silent or just blatantly blurting out his desire.

If there is, then the social expectation goes both ways, and the man should expect that he will be politely rejected and the incident will not be spoken of again.

Instead, it seems more like the only way to know if your inquiry will be considered 'polite' or not is to somehow perfectly model the woman's feelings about you before you ask.

There was no evidence that it was a risk.

Naturally.

It.

Never.

Happens.

She could have been killed just for getting in the elevator with him!

Since we're among rationalists, what probability would you ascribe to this?

If the fear is being accosted or killed by a male who is angry at sexual rejection...

And we assume that this is a rational fear...

I would argue that she should probably find a person who can accompany her to unfamiliar places to act as a deterrent to such aggressive men.

Going around alone seems like an insane risk, under these circumstances.

Preferably a male, who has some investment in her wellbeing. Like a brother or uncle or, perhaps, a boyfriend?

Does this solution seem like a socially acceptable one?

It sure seems logical under the facts you're implying here.

possibly drunk guy

If he were drunk or threatening Watson would have mentioned it. The only real dig she has against him is that while the man was part of the group with her at the bar, she didn’t talk with him before, so there was no rapport.

Then came Elevatorgate, and suddenly "Do you want to come to my room for coffee?" simply meant an offer of coffee

Hu? No, the issue was if it was a big deal or not. And everyone had an opinion on it, and it was a scissor statement, because this is playing out countless times every weekend in social settings, men trying to make a more or less suave/cringy move, and women rejecting it or not.

It is a scissor statement. Can people not see why a total stranger making a proposition at a bad time was unwelcome? I think she did go too hard on it, but I think a lot of the reaction was just as bad.

Unwelcome? Sure.

A clear sign that the community as a whole has a sexism problem? No.

It's just not a big deal. The guy took no for an answer. Normal people have uncomfortable interactions like this and shrug and move on.

The problem is when a man has his life dismantled because of a few words spoken to the wrong person. This has happened several times to me in my life, at a small scale but it was scary enough at the time that I still have psychological problems related to it. Why should I have my life ruined just to spare a woman a few minutes of discomfort?

It's not exactly an invitation for sex. It's an invitation to move to an isolated place where sex might plausibly happen. It's the next step in escalating the flirting dance. By agreeing to go back to a man's room for coffee, a girl is not necessarily saying "I will have sex with you", but rather "I am open to the possibility of having sex with you if you play your cards right."

The coffee is just an excuse. It could just as easily be "do you want to come to my place to watch Netflix?" or "do you want to go back to my room to see my marble collection?" Conversely, nobody thinks that "do you want to grab a coffee at Starbucks?" is going to lead to public sex on the Starbucks bar. The move from a public space to a private space is the key.

It just has to be plausibly deniable so that the girl can tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband...) that she really didn't mean to sleep with the guy, but it "just happened". It's a way to get past her anti-slut defense. Otherwise, there is too much common knowledge.

t just has to be plausibly deniable so that the girl can tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband...) that she really didn't mean to sleep with the guy, but it "just happened". It's a way to get past her anti-slut defense.

It's not an anti-slut defense. It's a reasonable out "if I change my mind once we are alone" defense. Even with people I know well and have had sex with before (exes) I don't like the pressure of inviting someone over for sex explicitly. Because sometimes you change your mind, and you feel pressured by your earlier offer/commitment. Much less with a stranger. (I've never found myself in this situation with a stranger).

I'm on the side of "of course it's an offer for sex, phrased in a way that someone can offer and be accepted or turned down in a socially acceptable way". The thing is, this seems like a pretty reasonable offer given the whole drinking in a hotel bar at a conference thing. Maybe he should have said it before getting on an elevator, I can empathize with her not feeling great about the interaction, but this really isn't a particularly weird thing to do at a conference where people are drinking in the hotel lobby.

Well, it was very late - something like 2 in the morning, if I can go by shaky memory, and it had been a bunch of people including Watson who stayed chatting after the formal conference ended. So as far as she was concerned, he was just Random Stranger.

Had it been the pair of them alone chatting in the bar, I agree he would have had steadier grounds for assuming she might be open to an approach, but it wasn't.

The offer of coffee that late/early in the morning increases my prior that it wasn't just coffee being offered.


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