Not in person, but Michael Vassar is with his current partner because they were both high and had sex at Burning Man and she told him she was Isis sent to inform him that he was John Galt, finally incarnated from the higher planes, and he would lead the world to Ascension.
I know this because he told me over the phone.
> they were both high and had sex at Burning Man and she told him she was Isis sent to inform him that he was John Galt, finally incarnated from the higher planes, and he would lead the world to Ascension.
whomst among us...
> Women are utility monsters/exaggerating how bad rape is
Would rather have every girlfriend I've ever had or will have cheat on me than get raped once. Getting cheated on isn't that bad, you get to bounce out of the relationship on a high horse as long as you keep a straight face in public.
>Getting cheated on isn't that bad, you get to bounce out of the relationship on a high horse as long as you keep a straight face in public.
It's a loaded mindset. "I can't be raped, so it's not a big deal...but I can be cheated on, which therefore is the worst possible outcome." It betrays such an emptiness of empathy and such a pitiful worldview of solipsistic proportions. Throw in some 'tax rape' memes and you've got a libertarian, aka an alt right bigot!
> Ludicrously unscientific poll to make a political point to credulous readership
I can't get over how trash the poll is. If he wants to be pseudo-dispassionately contrarian, whatever. But then please formulate a halfway-sensible poll.
> Ludicrously unscientific poll [WHICH IS FOR SOME FUCKING REASON ACTUALLY BEING TREATED AS IF IT WERE APOLITICAL] to make a political point to credulous readership
>You're going to demand that more women kill their rapists before you'll consider that being raped is at least as traumatic as being cheated on? What the fuck is wrong with you?
By that logic I should go on an endless killing spree given how several of my family members (yes even children) were murdered under a dictator in the 80s! Oh wait... it doesn't count because such incidents weren't related to status of a man's sexual desirability compared to his peers, therefore not being as bad! Once again, First World romantic problems are treated with orders of magnitude more severity than actual Third World life-and-death problems...
Jesus fucking christ, it's extremely obvious you haven't been through such a thing before, let alone have a passable sense of proportionality.
>It's maladaptive to go on a killing spree 30 years after the fact.
As is murdering someone who cheated on you -- that's what I was trying to demonstrate.
>Presumably over all of human history, it's a better strategy to be conquered, submit and survive with reduced reproductive potential than to rebel and risk getting killed, so people instinctively comply. Again for the avoidance of doubt, that is not the correct or moral or rational strategy, I'm just saying that it's descriptively true.
And even after bending over backwards to appease a tyrant, many still die at the hands of said tyrants. This "logic" is exactly what they're counting on from the powerless -- the LIE that if you give the tyrant what he SAYS he wants, he will spare you, except the tyrant gives no fucks about upholding the "keeping you alive in return"-part of the deal.
Fuck what happens empirically -- evolutionarily, I'd be so much better off either A) dead 30 years ago even after playing by the rules, or B) alive as unpaid labor locked in a fucking sweatshop, rather than where I am right now as a software developer in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the San Francisco Peninsula. Many other immigrants here have similar experiences like mine and the antithesis of your theoretical framework. Thank you for serving as a damning example of why trying to treat evo-psych conjecture as axiom in lieu of empirical observation hasn't led to much progress.
EDIT: By the way -- if I supposedly don't have strong instincts about what took place 30 years ago, no one alive right now has strong instincts about what took place millennia ago.
I'd like to take a moment to apologise briefly to the local Sneerers.
As an SSC CW thread regular, I lurk here regularly because it's occasionally good for a sanity check. But I'm not much of a sneerer most of the time, and I get that the locals here occasionally get tired of disaffected r/ssc folks showing up and making this place more "complain about r/ssc" than "sneer at the failures of rationalism," so I don't generally post. Predictably, when I *did* post, below, I was (alas) all sincere and no sneer.
In my defence, I had an attack of SIWOTI syndrome, of the "must ... correct ... obvious ... factual ... error" kind. I justified it to myself by telling myself that where Robin Hanson is concerned, my sentiments are more with SneerClub than with my usual tactics of patient argumentation (seriously, fuck that guy). Still, I must atone for polluting this space with sincere reasoning. In that spirit, I'd like to draw people's attention to the following passage in particular from the comment above:
> A basic understanding of inclusive fitness is all you need to realise that being cuckolded is more evolutionarily costly than being raped. For a K-selected species, it's more costly to raise a cuckoo who is totally unrelated to you (as a male) than it is to raise a child of rape who at least has r=0.5.
> Now if we assume that human psychology is the product of evolution, it stands to reason that it would be more painful for a man to be cuckolded than for a woman to be raped.
> That doesn't necessarily imply anything about morality or what someone should rationally do about being cuckolded or raped. But it does seem like a good argument that being cuckolded as a man is probably at least as traumatic as being raped as a woman - unless you're a creationist?
Now, pause. Breathe. Look upon this phrasing. It is a thing of beauty. Think of the possibilities! Truly, such an opportunity for sneering ought not to be wasted.
A basic understanding of inclusive fitness is all you need to realise that hitting your thumb with a hammer is more evolutionarily costly than giving birth. Hitting your thumb with a hammer while attempting to perform manly feats of carpentry will make you look stupid in front of chicks, who will conclude that you are an unfit partner and not have sex with you. Giving birth, by contrast, achieves the ultimate deep psychological goal of all humans[1], which is to pass on your genes.
Now if we assume that human pain responses are the product of evolution, it stands to reason that it would be more painful for a man to hit his thumb with a hammer than for a woman to give birth.
Unless you're a creationist?
[1] Some humans claim this is not their ultimate deep psychological goal, but this is because they are white people who have never fucked and are $100,000 in debt because they were tricked into studying some wypipo bullshit like Lacan. Smdh
> You're still very confused about the difference between evolutionarily adaptive in the ancestral environment, rational and moral.
You seem to be assuming that elaborate concepts like spousal fidelity are deterministically encoded in genetically transmitted biological characteristics. I'm curious about how closely you've examined that assumption, and the bandwidth required for such a genetic transmission. How do you imagine this concept is encoded in the genome? I'm extremely skeptical that it works that way. It seems much more likely that the concept is culturally transmitted, and that there is a lot of leeway to adjust the behaviors associated with it.
[You literally don't know how to read, do you?](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/9gmtiz/makes_you_think_yglesias_pointing_out_just_how/e65uroz/)
Praise be to /u/unsail.
>But any rational account of human behaviour has to accept that women will strongly dislike being raped, and men will even more strongly dislike being cuckolded.
You literally just asserted your argument you fucking dullard.
Men acting out with violence only proves what we already know--men are more prone to violent actions / retaliation than women. See literally any violent crime statistics. Should we conclude that it's less painful for women to be told off in a bar because they're less likely to smash a pool cue over the offender's head? This is some seriously specious reasoning.
Women are also just as hurt in relationships when they're cheated on, yet they have no reproductive / armchair evopsych reason to, since their man has tons of sperm, right? Yet women might still kill themselves over a cheating husband (I have no idea what the statistics on this are tbh). Pain caused by cheating isn't because of reproductive harm you donut, it's because it's an emotionally painful thing for pretty much any monogamous type. I've been cheated on too, it fucking sucks. It's shitty and neither men nor women should do it, we don't have to justify it with theories of reproductive harm, because people don't think like that.
Violent violation of bodily autonomy is, however, traumatic in a way that learning about your partner's infidelity isn't, because you're there. The lasting emotional and physical trauma is frequently a cause of PTSD. Are there cases where women might not be super traumatized by their rape? Yes! It happens. Are there individuals (men, women, & non-binaries how bout that?) who feel the pain of infidelity so intensely that we might conjecture that the negative utilons are greater than those women who are not especially traumatized by their assault? Maybe, if you're a fucking tool who needs to whatabout away the pain that women are telling you they feel by contrasting it with the emotional pain of cuckolded men for no good reason - literally the only reason is to downplay the seriousness of rape; if cuckolding is as traumatic as Hanson suggests, he could advocate for its recognition as such and make his case without making such a bullheaded and asinine comparison.
>Women are also just as hurt in relationships when they're cheated on, yet they have no reproductive / armchair evopsych reason to, since their man has tons of sperm, right?
Evopsychers would say she's threatened with the loss of her mate's resources and social connections.
>It's shitty and neither men nor women should do it, we don't have to justify it with theories of reproductive harm, because people don't think like that.
But the entire point of evopsych is trying to understand why people think the way they do. People usually engage in activities that sate immediate impulses, not because they're thinking mechanistically, e.g. people eat because they're hungry, not because they're thinking about glycolysis. Or how people can catch a ball without doing any math.
As for the rape apologia, besides regular old misogyny they also want to see themselves as a victim, a common fash characteristic, and I think they feel left out in a strange way. I swear the alt-right started using "deus vult" because they wanted their own version of "Allahu akbar." Lots of pathology going on there.
>they also want to see themselves as a victim
Need to look for the link, but on another sub months ago someone posted an article where an expert on the FBI who profiled domestic radicalization referred to these types as "wound collectors".
>Evopsychers would say she's threatened with the loss of her mate's resources and social connections.
Relationships are essentially about resource extraction for the woman from the pop evo psych perspective. One of the things I love about Satoshi Kanazawa is that he puts the implications of these dunderheaded theories as bluntly as possible: [Are all women essentially prostitutes?](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201103/are-all-women-essentially-prostitutes) (Spoiler: The answer is yes.)
Do you really not see how laughable it is that you're calling your myopic sitcom-level observations "basic facts" and then go on to demand that we accept your field as valid science... lmao falsifiabile evidence retired!
>Violent violation of bodily autonomy is, however, traumatic in a way that learning about your partner's infidelity isn't, because you're there.
Problem is, these types don't see an autonomous person being violated. They're the narcissists The Last Psychiatrist often wrote about -- people who throw everything and everyone into the fire to preserve an identity, especially when ego / status is on the line.
Wtf, progressives do not generally agree that rape is "obviously not such a big deal" if the victim is male.
Note also that plenty of murder-suicides in which men kill their partners and children do not involve infidelity on the part of said partner. Abusive men are generally perfectly capable of abusing faithful wives.
>progressives do not generally agree that rape is "obviously not such a big deal" if the victim is male.
I've never heard of any of the SJW-hating internet subcultures actually doing anything tangible for male rape victims. They just use male rape victims as a distraction from other people's suffering.
This is why evo psych is such bullshit: purely ideological ^sniff phrases like "low-quality male" being trotted out as a matter of fact, the forming of theories to explain social illnesses when you don't know the basic of how they work (**please read Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft**), being so removed from the larger discourse that you don't know that "Asia Argento situations" are in fact a big deal to feminists... I've never in my life encountered a sociologist that abuses your field the way you do theirs.
Edit: You are not a "survivor" of cuckoldry. Nothing in the experience of being cheated on constitutes a threat to one's bodily autonomy.
[*me trying to talk a cuckoldry survivor out of a dissociative episode*]: hey, can you hear me? it's u/b7yat. we're in a safe place. what you're experiencing right now isn't real, you're safe with me, it's u/b7yat, we're in the living room and it's 8 PM, we just got finished watching a seinfeld rerun. can you hear my voice? you're not being cucked right now, you're not witnessing your SO kissing someone else, you're in the living room with me and we're safe. can you try to move your finger to show me you understand?
>To be fair, the evopsych perspective is not that people care about "reproductive harm" directly, it's that evolution will make experiences which cause more reproductive harm more painful.
>For example, studies show that women are more traumatised by being raped than by being stabbed. And that makes sense, because given that you have survived the experience, being raped is more costly (a decade plus of raising the child that has half the genes of a low-quality male, as opposed to a few months of healing).
Not only is trying to find an evolutionary psychology explanation for the fact that people don’t like to get raped a totally dumb and pointless idea, your model doesn’t even explain why women who don’t like being raped would be preferentially selected for over women who don’t mind being raped.
>It's very simple: if, as a woman, you don't care if you're knocked up by the village idiot or the club-footed tribal outcast,
Yeah, that’s not how this works. You don’t get to just assume rapists are particularly more likely to be an idiot or clubfooted than anyone else. You actually have to prove that.
I do feel contempt for basement dwelling neckbeards (such as you), but I'm a lesbian. Please tell me what this means, o lord of evopsych, I'm dying to find out.
Evopsych is all unfalsifiable claims and just so stories. Anyone with any interest in the scientific method or a shred of integrity should be immediately suspicious of any claims made under the jurisdiction of evopsych.
Evolution is both irrational and imperfect, so to claim that "evolution should do X" based on an argument like this is bullshit, and we don't do it for anything else as complex as sexual assault, *especially stuff we have first hand non-bullshit evidence for*. Is depression adaptive? Is a vasectomy as traumatising as rape? Are evopsych arguments evidenceless bullshit used to justify horrible things by people who just believe those horrible things?
Even from a rationalist "lol all that matters is numbers because I am objective and impartial" perspective, evopsych arguments are such weak bayesian evidence as to be meaningless, so maybe, just maybe, you should *stop making incredibly insensitive arguments and minimising the trauma of rape.*
Edit: [See point four here](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-heartiste-faq/) for an example of how evopsych can tell you both one thing and it's reverse. Even your rationalist brain should be able to understand that something that can be twisted to tell you anything you want is evidence of nothing. It's by Ozy, who is better than Scott Alexander on everything but psychopharmacology.
maybe i would feel for you if you weren't an asshole with a disturbingly distorted view of the world. no matter how bad it made you feel, cheating ain't 'abuse', and you're not a 'survivor' for getting cheated on.
also i love that evopsych concluding that rape is, like, bad is lauded as a success of it as a discipline
Cheating is 100% an abuse of trust but there is a qualitative difference between an abuse of trust and physical abuse and this guy is a fucking wanker so he can just fuck off.
I'm gonna go ahead and remove this garbage, if anybody insists on reading it they can use removeddit.com, fuck you you solipsistic nightmare of a person.
This guy really needs to get fired from GMU. The fact that you can
get away with publically bringing up this topic over and over “for the
sake of argument” without any negative professional consequences is
evidence that political correctness hasn’t really gone far
enough.
Hmmm, and weren’t there a bunch of utilitarian lanyard factories
defending Hanson at me not so long ago? Is it possible that Effective
Altruists can’t read? I think it’s possible that Effective Altruists
can’t read.
> Is it possible that Effective Altruists can't read?
It would help explain how pervasively they ignore GiveWell and related recommendations, when following these measures of effectiveness was supposed to be the whole point of the movement.
I confess I actually quite like Eton Mess, pork pies, and even sufficiently delicate aspic, miss me with those huge lumps of gelatin though (also I don't generally eat meat anymore, so it's largely moot, but you try going veggie in Japan: I'll wait)
It's surprisingly cheap relative to the distance if you ever find yourself with more cash than you'd glumly anticipated.
Now spending money *once you're there* is another matter entirely.
aaaaand that’s enough internet for me today
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This guy really needs to get fired from GMU. The fact that you can get away with publically bringing up this topic over and over “for the sake of argument” without any negative professional consequences is evidence that political correctness hasn’t really gone far enough.
Hmmm, and weren’t there a bunch of utilitarian lanyard factories defending Hanson at me not so long ago? Is it possible that Effective Altruists can’t read? I think it’s possible that Effective Altruists can’t read.