Well no you see the thing is, the rapist is guilty of
> the crime of continuing to exist, despite having been judged by women as genetically inferior. And that explains why he attracts so much more condemnation than Man A: because the condemnation is less about what he did than about what he is.
Somehow he is even more unsettling than the pzombie motter from the other day; where the motter would rake his brain for reasons to dehumanize, this here aberration has not humanized in the first place.
pretty sure that’s not getting the Darwinian perspective
right
fucking wild how long it took in the comments for someone to be
like “oh because in case A the harm suffered is that some food gets
eaten and in B, the harm suffered is violation of a person’s bodily
autonomy and physical assault and consent”
And human sexual desires are much more complex than just purely reproduction. Leaving aside the issue of birth control, we’re one of the relatively few species that have sex when pregnancy isn’t possible due to where a woman is in her cycle. Most (but not all!) other species have sex when the female is in heat, and at no other time.
We have sex to maintain social bonds, sex because we’re in love, and sex when we’re bored. It’s not just about reproduction.
Consider two men, A and B. Man A steals food because he’s starving to
death, while Man B commits a rape because no woman will agree to have
sex with him.
From a Darwinian perspective, the two cases seem exactly analogous.
In both we have a man on the brink of genetic oblivion, who commandeers
something that isn’t his in order to give his genes a chance of
survival.
Yes, it is very tragic, and that is also the weird lure into the whole MRA/Rationalist business. Sadly, the people who take the trauma seriously in this case also make it worse.
It goes from 'I find it hard to talk to women and express my romantic/sexual interest, because I don't want to hurt people, or because I don't know how' to 'women don't want to sleep with me' to 'womankind has decided I'm genetically inferior, and must be removed from the genepool' to 'why not rape?', which sucks so much.
(This does not excuse us sneering at Scotts trauma of course, I just wanted to point out how mentally worse it gets due to the people taking it seriously).
> The fact that the rationalist nutters like Hanson are the only ones who took that trauma seriously can’t be ignored.
What the fuck are you on about? Perhaps if he didn't fucking talk about it in a way that assumed women are simply a resource to be distributed for men's sexual gratification less disgusting people would have taken him seriously.
Being lonely and fear of rejection are fucking near universal problems.
Would this be something he could talk to a therapist about and get reasonable help? yes.
The real problem here is that Scott decided that it was *because he was a nerd*. One can speculate as to how an academically successful teenager and young adult would end up having trouble relating to his peers and seek the reassurance of a framework that puts the responsibility for it on the world rather than his own difficulties with social interaction. If he didn't assume he was *simply different* from other people who had trouble finding a romantic relationship he might have had some success in getting help from sources that weren't Robin Hanson.
Regardless, the argument you make applies equally to people who get redpilled so it's stupid as fuck.
Looking at your other comments in the subreddit, it's hardly a one off either so /u/noactuallyitspoptart could you please consider ridding us of this nuisance?
I don’t think this really deserves a ban or to have the comment removed, although I see your point, I think it’s just a misguided person who hasn’t done the reading - which can be changed
Aaronson gets zero sympathy from me when he uses his trauma to downplay the trauma of others, for instance the time he responded to a woman talking about the sexual harassment she's faced in STEM academia with a story about how it's lonely nerds like him who really have it tough.
A traumatising experience
On the other hand, I don’t know anything about her: she could be a horrific person to be around too
In fact perhaps that’s why he’s still so fucked up
The other time about a year ago he responded to someone asking about COVID with the (usual at the time) flu whataboutism, then went later on to write a blog post explaining that sneerclub somehow bullied him into that.
Or the traumatizing experience of his grabbing money from the tip jar and being a total ass about it, resulting in a fairly minor reciprocation from the society.
Ultimately any time he does anything wrong, he'll look at it in retrospective, and somehow become the victim. And this is just a derailing tactic, although he's probably doing it mostly to derail himself.
Does make you wonder what he did wrong in his early college years that he's that much of a victim of feminism and sexual harassment prevention videos now.
Aaronson has a very long history of deliberately making himself the centre of the universe, including directing his personal insecurities at this sub, and indeed at me in particular
I feel bad for the guy, I really do, but when you compare a minor incident with the police at an airport to the plight of the globe’s oppressed masses you lose all credibility
Aaronson isn’t just an innocent bystander, he wields his significant influence within certain circles like a sledgehammer and the world is worse off for it, he’s a bad guy
cursed question.
For my sins, i read the thread as it happened back then. I was into complexity theory and was taking a class at MIT actually although not with Aaronson. Was a huge fan before this all went down, it took me a while to realize how *much* of a douche he was though.
[Archive link](https://web.archive.org/web/20141227172148/https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)
[version up now with Scott's commentary (notable for his complete inability to avoid being self-centered) in bold](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)
All this controversy over whether Walter "sexually harasses young students" Lewin's lectures should remain on MIT OCW even after he was fired for sexually harassing a student through OCW.
My best friend was raped (not even for the first time) not very long ago, and I spent hundreds of pounds flying us both to Serbia in September so that she could give testimony at the rapist’s trial in NYC (long story), in fits of absolute holy rage
I will never ever forgive these people for being so privilegedly thoughtless about what rape entails for the victim
I think that it’s about time some brave, original intellectuals blew
past society’s unreasoning sensitivities about rape, so Aaronson’s and
Hanson’s gedankenexperiments regarding the ethical
ramifications of rape vs. cuckolding, rape vs. theft, magical
consequence-free rape and so on were heartening to me at first.
Unfortunately, until I see some documentary evidence that either man has
pragmatically increased his wealth by auctioning the rights to his
corpse away to rich necrophiles, I can’t really take them seriously as
truly rational thinkers.
I’m very much a layman, but it’s startling to me that he doesn’t seem
to be considering the fact that a woman is alive/concious/sentient. This
seems like an obvious reason why one would be more wrong. Am I missing
something here?
Edit: I know everyone else is pointing this out, it is just
unfamiliar territory for me here. Apologies
This is a puzzle until someone reveals to you the clever super secret tricky answer: women are people.
pretty sure that’s not getting the Darwinian perspective right
fucking wild how long it took in the comments for someone to be like “oh because in case A the harm suffered is that some food gets eaten and in B, the harm suffered is violation of a person’s bodily autonomy and physical assault and consent”
This is literally just incel screeching with a ‘rationalist’ framework.
Ignores that rapists get off on power, there’s not a level of horny that just unlocks someone’s latent rapist.
And the guy starving could die, the guy whose sex-starved faces no such threat.
And masturbating is thing, whereas you can’t just magic up food to feed yourself.
Absolute moronic article all round. If you’re going to trade off of being ‘a thinker’ at least fucking think.
it’s unbelievable to me that neither Aaronson or Hanson could find the obvious answer, here (although Hanson got closer)
It’s almost as if morality isn’t judge based on an individual’s ability to replicate their genes.
This puts new perspective on Scott’s explanation for why he’s shtetl optimized.
We don’t generally ask food for consent…
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“Our” is doing a weird job here, I spend a decent amount of money on charity for such people
I think that it’s about time some brave, original intellectuals blew past society’s unreasoning sensitivities about rape, so Aaronson’s and Hanson’s gedankenexperiments regarding the ethical ramifications of rape vs. cuckolding, rape vs. theft, magical consequence-free rape and so on were heartening to me at first. Unfortunately, until I see some documentary evidence that either man has pragmatically increased his wealth by auctioning the rights to his corpse away to rich necrophiles, I can’t really take them seriously as truly rational thinkers.
I’m very much a layman, but it’s startling to me that he doesn’t seem to be considering the fact that a woman is alive/concious/sentient. This seems like an obvious reason why one would be more wrong. Am I missing something here?
Edit: I know everyone else is pointing this out, it is just unfamiliar territory for me here. Apologies