Additional layer of fail: If you accept the kind of PUA logic that Gloster is working from, you also believe that women WANT it to be hard to guess how available/open/interested they are.
After all, if their yes meant yes and their no meant no, and if they were consistent enough about it for men to start to believe them, then
- ALL men (not just Dark Triad Chads) would feel free to approach them when they signaled "yes",
- NO men (not even Dark Triad Chads) would approach them when they signaled "no".
Women would thus lose their favorite way to filter out betas: make them self-select out of the game by saying "no" but meaning "alphas only".
Logically, someone like Gloster should assume that effectively all women would wear their leave-me-alone ward at all times. Even the horny single ones. Especially the horny single ones.
I may or may not be overestimating Gloster's commitment to Pure Manly Rationality here.
clearly the solution is to create garment specifically saying that they don't want greasy incels to interact with them, problem solved, everyone's happy.
This is probably my favorite one:
>chaperones
Why am I seeing this word in any context other than a field trip or middle school dance? Oh, right, these people think women are the social and intellectual equals of children.
Again with the bloody chaperones, huh? Where did this shit come from? Did they all watch *The Handmaid's Tale* (Lord knows they didn't read it), see the Aunts, and say, "Aha! Yes, this is exactly what we need."
I can't think of a non-fringe Western culture in the last 400 years has required women to be attended by "chaperones" while in public. If they didn't get it from Atwood, they must've come to the conclusion that [Restorationist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorationism) movements (e.g., Mormonism) or fundamentalist Shariah - both of which are known for being so very rational - were the ones to crack the code on gender relations.
**Restorationism**
Restorationism (or Christian primitivism) is the belief that Christianity has been or should be restored along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church, which restorationists see as the search for a purer and more ancient form of the religion. Fundamentally, "this vision seeks to correct faults or deficiencies (in the church) by appealing to the primitive church as a normative model."Efforts to restore an earlier, purer form of Christianity are often a response to denominationalism. As Rubel Shelly put it, the "motive behind all restoration movements is to tear down the walls of separation by a return to the practice of the original, essential and universal features of the Christian religion." Different groups have tried to implement the restorationist vision in a variety of ways; for instance, some have focused on the structure and practice of the church, others on the ethical life of the church, and others on the direct experience of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. The relative importance given to the restoration ideal, and the extent to which the full restoration of the early church is believed to have been achieved, also varies among groups.
***
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I also love Gloster's very very typical "extremely offended dork" response:
> First, please don't quote xkcd comics to me as though they represent some kind of authority. Unless it concerns physics or math.
Including a complementary link to the comic about Freeze Peach, which apaprently prompted them to #Cancel xkcd
the legitimacy of interuniversal techimueller theory is still outstanding because math authority Randall Monroe hasn't gotten around to drawing stick figures about it yet
Apologies if this is ranty or not sneering enough but the way this comic has been deployed over there with respect to the whole China censorship thing is driving me up a wall. Like, thinking Chinese censorship is bad and companies shouldn't cave to it doesn't contradict that comic *in any way*. The idea that if you think economically pressuring companies to make decisions you think are moral means thinking any economic pressure on a company to achieve any outcome is moral is some serious lazy thinking.
I keep feeling (out of some masochist desire) to make a post over there pointing this out because they do it with *everything*. They have this crazy tendency to take regular leftist positions, infer "meta" principles out of them, then accuse leftists for being hypocrites for not following the "meta" principles they imagined, even though no leftists would endorse these inferred principles.
I guess Scott [actively advocates](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/16/you-kant-dismiss-universalizability/) this so I can see how it happens.
It's an interesting distinction, identifying "meta-" vs "object-" arguments and privileging the former, because it's very hard to see what motivates it.
Practical reasoning is often a matter of identifying what looks like a solid "object-level" argument, and adjusting a "meta-level" principle appropriately (this is stating the obvious, but fine).
Why then should we obsessively seek consistency on the "meta-level" in the first place? It isn't clear.
I'm not even really sure what "meta-level" is supposed to mean. I fancy myself as a pretty hardcore empiricist, right down to matters that are normally considered the realm of the "a priori", so if - as I like to think I do - I privilege "object-level" matters of fact such as "I like oranges" a "meta-level" proposition looks rather to me like a vague abstraction from matters of fact to very malleable opinings about whether that proposition is consistent with "I don't like apples". It should be clear then, as you rightly point out, that any "meta-level" proposition which renders these two propositions consistent with each other should be responsive to the *fact* that I don't like apples but do like oranges, rather than vice versa.
Again, what is most important to me here is that what motivates the vice versa remains totally unclear.
It's gestured at with references to things like utilitarianism: Peter Singer is, after all, the great populariser of moral consistency arguments. But those arguments can cheerfully be non-foundationalist and admit of consistencies which violate sound moral laws (at the "object-level"), which is why we have both critics of those arguments but also advocates who ground them in a reliance on *foundational* moral truths (utility, preferences, virtues, rights).
Even then, however, there doesn't look like much reason to extend that sort of moral reasoning to wider discourses about the rationality of this or that belief. Perhaps moral beliefs have a different character, or a different sort of import which imposes different normative constraints on belief. My relatively neutral beliefs ("I like oranges") have different constraints than my morally important ones ("I like murder"), because the latter demands that I face up to a belief that I like something which is for the most part morally wrong. Furthermore, other beliefs I might hold "I like scientific anti-realism" impose still different normative constraints on my believing them.
What seems most likely to be the main event here is the avoidance of hypocrisy, but "you should not be a hypocrite" is a weak normative constraint with many counter-cases and/or stronger alternatives. I can be a pescatarian hypocrite who believes in veganism and perhaps that will still be better than being a beef-eater who is a nihilist or otherwise unconcerned about the environmental and utilitarian consequences of farming cattle.
Nonetheless, I'm minimally confident that this avoidance of hypocrisy thing has explanatory power for Alexander and his followers. We had a long discussion here not very long ago about the observation that so much of Alexander's writings are framed around an almost pathological avoidance of conflict. As with "incel" or "racist" or "misogynist", the accusation "hypocrite" may just be one of those accusations which Alexander and his fans pathologically and selfishly go out of their way as best as possible to avoid because it is hurtful.
That's mostly speculation, but it is just simple and explanatory enough to have my tentative backing.
I've allowed myself over the last few months to essentially be outed as an actual human person with a real name attached, so you may be interested here in the second part to this three-parter, where I will be going into the issues you raise in some depth, with particular respect to an "overwhelming amount of emoition and politics and even *identity*"
It's worth mentioning at this point that the chief random number generator over at /r/TheMotte has been repeatedly outed (I only learned recently, thanks to the research of another) as a twenty-something American dude with a troubled personal history of aliases that - on examination - seem to be mostly about overcoming his own lack of self-esteem by backing mad racist causes with faked up numbers
That person is TPO. And it's relevant because all of TPO's fake numbers are run in the service of some edgy political ideal.
Anyway I'll try to run down everything I can in the next instalment on Dom Cummings
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/dlq3bu/the_uk_saw_this_evening_how_lesswrong_rationalism/
> It's an interesting distinction, identifying "meta-" vs "object-" arguments and privileging the former, because it's very hard to see what motivates it.
this is a holdover from early LW - it's very about leveraging the level up to achieve more. (Yudkowsky [said in a video Q&A](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YduZEfz8usGbJXN4x/transcription-of-eliezer-s-january-2010-video-q-and-a) "In one sense, a whole chunk of Less Wrong is more or less my meta-thinking skills."
they embraced this wholeheartedly because it would make them more effective u know
(also it saves on doing the reading)
but they worked so hard on meta level 1 "thinking about thinking", and meta level 2 "thinking about thinking about thinking", that they ignore - or actively deprecate - level 0 "knowing what the fuck you're doing."
this is because they try to do rhetoric with no idea what the fuck it is - because, as with all fields of endeavour, they haven't done the reading - so fail to understand just how much of rhetoric is paradigm battles between levels of meta
The thing where apparently you aren't allowed to have specific opinions about specific issues because of some imagined meta-principle is really weird. It's like telling someone because they think the death penalty is constitutional, they have to be in favor of the death penalty for every crime.
Opinions can't be determined empirically or calculated with Bayes' rule, so Twoo Rationalists disdain such things.
The problem -- and honestly I'm not sure how much I'm speaking as a Twoo Rationalist here versus in my own voice -- is that object arguments can be turned around, and meta-arguments can't (at least, not as easily). In other words, my proof that good things are good and bad things are bad is powerless in the face of someone who categorizes things differently from how I do, but if I can prove all things are good (or bad), I (feel that I) am on firmer ground.
What a bizarre way to introduce a post about Kant. I'm constitutionally opposed to much of Kant in certain ways similar to the way Alexander is, but a first-year undergraduate course on Kant would disabuse you of the notion that his deontological principles are somehow "naive", at least if you spent more than 5 minutes on the "lying to an axe murderer" case - and Alexander holds an undergraduate philosophy degree. Kant's moral law is, moreover, deliberative, and applies to a whole way of life (including, in a famous anecdote, how much tobacco one should smoke in a day) which practice is almost completely absent from the post.
That latter point is *gestured* at in the body text, but it belies that Alexander has absolutely no citations to refer to in Kant's work, in spite of his opining about it at length, and much of his confusion referenced further down would be happily resolved by **doing the reading**.
I think you’ve just stumbled across one of the benefits of arguing at the meta level: you don’t have to do the reading. Don’t argue about what Kant wrote, instead argue about his *principles*.
Well, Gloster80256 could be 15, you never know. Otoh, he also could be a divorced boomer trying to get back into dating and who internalized all the antifeminist stuff without getting out there again.
The logical endpoint for this whole manosphere thing is for straight men to be able to transition smoothly from unfuckable misogynist virgins to bitter middle-aged divorcees without having to go through the intermediate stage of convincing a woman to marry them.
It’s really sad that there’s an entire movement dedicated to recruiting kids in their formative years and reinforcing unhealthy habits and self destructive patterns of thinking. Adolescence is hard enough without adults conspiring to make it 1.) worse and 2.) permanent.
I just described the 4chan demographic ;).
E: not even totally joking, iirc a qanon researcher on twitter mentioned that a lot of qanon boomers are advising other interested people to go to 4chan for the real truth the MSM isn't giving YOU.
If you had told b/tard me circa 2007 that in a decade, 4Chan would be filled with idiot boomer retirees hunting for clues to an obviously fake conspiracy, I would have thought it was the funniest thing ever. Absolutely top show. Now, it's horrifying, because I understand the deeply sad implications of a bunch of old racists who are completely isolated from society (and often their familes) grabbing desperately at a rope of sand as they try to construct an (in)coherent schema to understand the crumbling world order that had undergirded their reality.
> Yeah, because after we set fines for speeding, it never happened again.
You don't understand. Men only violate our existing laws against sexual assault because they're too confusing. "Don't rape anybody"—what does it even mean?!
I do enjoy how that thread is like 50% people patiently explaining to
Gloster80256 the many, many ways this wouldn’t work, and he just
nit-picks something minor to argue over so he doesn’t have to engage
with the criticism.
Basically any scheme like this can only work if it is strictly and
consistently enforced, whether or not the women in question want it
enforced. Otherwise many will simply use the signals as a way of
filtering out undesirables by raising the cost of an approach, while
still allowing approaches from Chad.
There’s already such a thing. Phones. If she responds with a polite
1-phrase chitchat and goes back to her phone, and/or says “sorry i’m
texting myboss” etc., she’s not interested. If she keeps the
conversation going , looks up from phone with a smile now and then,seems
attentive between phone activity, she’s open to further chitchat.
Edit: if she’s texting at a rapid pace, turned away from you a bit,
not looking up from phone much, she’s probably trxting her friend “some
random is hitting on me”
Well, except for completely misunderstanding the problem with “she was asking for it”, it’s just weird and not technically misogynis…
thanks nybbler for making everything worse
The insistence they’re not incels is only matched by the constant use of incel jargon and worldview
This is like silicon valley inventing the wheel again (but worse), but for misogynist reactionaries.
Is no one else gonna? Alright, fine: XKCD 592.
Edit: Ah, God bless Darwin, posting it in the thread. What a lad.
A brief moment of respect for:
> I doubt that this sexual fantasy of mine could ever catch on in any formal capacity.
That’s some self-awareness peeking through the clouds!
I remember coming up with confabulated and complicated things like that when I was about 15 or so…
Yeah, because after we set fines for speeding, it never happened again.
Can these rationality freaks not figure out a simple calculation for “utility of action”>“utility of not paying fine for action” in their heads?
If Gloster put half as much effort into a dating profile as he did into this idea, he might have a lot more fun.
I do enjoy how that thread is like 50% people patiently explaining to Gloster80256 the many, many ways this wouldn’t work, and he just nit-picks something minor to argue over so he doesn’t have to engage with the criticism.
just fucking learn how to talk to people jfc
Ah yes of course!
When are they going to go fully mask off and declare that fighting for DAESH is rational?
all politics is sexual pathology
There’s already such a thing. Phones. If she responds with a polite 1-phrase chitchat and goes back to her phone, and/or says “sorry i’m texting myboss” etc., she’s not interested. If she keeps the conversation going , looks up from phone with a smile now and then,seems attentive between phone activity, she’s open to further chitchat.
Edit: if she’s texting at a rapid pace, turned away from you a bit, not looking up from phone much, she’s probably trxting her friend “some random is hitting on me”