> Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological - people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
I assume masochism/submissiveness at least is a rape adaptation. Rape is very stressful (citation needed) and it seems to me that the ability to find it at least complicatedly enjoyable could greatly improve your life outcomes, especially if you're going to spend a lot of time with your captor afterwards.
I feel pretty confident that people who are into BDSM don't like getting raped any more than vanilla people. (For example, go see what people on r/BDSMAdvice have to say when it happens to them).
As someone with a lot of experience in BDSM circles, I am essentially certain that bdsm folk are on average more aroused by rape than non bdsm folk, even if that amount is low and everyone is still obviously very against it in practice. But I mean - con non-con is a thing for a reason.
CNC is, certainly! Fantasies are as well. But when it *actually* happens people don't seem to report having had a good time to any degree, and indeed report considerable distress.
Perhaps in a different cultural setting it would be different; there are, after all, historical cultures that carry out ritual abductions of brides. But I don't think rape victims in our culture secretly enjoy the real thing.
A lot of these conversations, I think, have in them a background concern that any acknowledgement of "being sexually assaulted" as a kink would constitute a moral justification for rapists, which is obviously a very reasonable concern given that "she was asking for it" is a phrase that's been in the cultural lexicon since forever. Such discussion also risks accidentally minimizing the trauma of the victim, which is real and deserves respect. This is especially a concern that active BDSM practitioners are going to have, since the survival of their communities relies greatly on not being perceived as a bunch of rapist weirdos (which is a significant danger.)
I'm not sure what to do about that; "bodily autonomy" is always a right regardless of if someone is aroused by the idea or action of it being violated.
EDIT: For context, I'm fairly certain that "being sexually assaulted in some specific fashion" is, in fact, a kink some people both have and have very complicated and nuanced feelings about.
Most boys (and I guess some girls too) at some point enjoy fantasies about being a war hero, or having war adventures. However, very few of them would enjoy actual war. That is because in a fantasy you can all the perks of the situation (usually at lower intensity than the real thing, but still some) without any downsides (like heorism and excitement of the battle without actual possibility of death, mutilation, and sense of guilt from killing other people.
Note that "cultural glorification of war is an adaptation intended to make people happier with being drafted" is a pretty standard take. War is still bad (in part because of our modern circumstances, it was legitimately less harrowing and more useful in pre-modern times), and glorification of violence doesn't mean you won't get PTSD, but in some contexts that glorification does help with real war fighting.
They are not saying BDSM folk enjoy being raped, just that they are more aroused. Arousal responses are involuntary, and most people can remember a time that they were aroused, but not enjoying it. From things like blue balls and awkward boners, to sexual assault.
I say this from a bit if experience. I've been sexually assaulted in a relatively minor way before, groped, in the middle of class, by someone I was not attracted to. I felt myself get angry, embarrassed, depressed, but still aroused. I really disliked it at the time, but even now, remembering it as a fantasy is pleasant. Feelings are complicated, and sexual assault can be wrong, even if the victim becomes aroused.
I think if you turn this over the right way, it's self-evident they do.
Are people who are into getting raped more likely to be into BDSM, on average? I think the answer is obviously yes. Then if everyone else, BDSM fans or not, is EQUALLY into getting raped (fair assumption?), then statistically you're going to find more people who are into getting raped at a BDSM convention* than random other convention. I think.
* OTOH I'm guessing there'd be even more at an "anti-BDSM" convention.
I think the desire to submit occurs when you like certain things but are also ashamed of those things. With your hands tied (literally) you can enjoy the things guilt-free, it’s not like you could have resisted.
Or, maybe even simpler, because of attraction to a Big Strong Man.
Humiliation fetishes though, that’s what I don’t understand.
This might or might not be relevant. I remember reading in one of the essays of Gould about struggles of Christian theologians with explaining animal suffering. While you can always say, yes we have it hard but we will be rewarded in Heaven, and also it makes us better, and so on. However, even this dubious stuff does not apply to animals which do not have immortal souls, and even (probably) lack mental faculties to elevate their suffering to something lofty. Their suffering is totally senseless. Of course one can always try to claim that they lack self-consciousness, but this is a hard sell to any pet owners. So their other solution was to claim that actually prey animals enjoy being hunted and killed. So why a deer tries to escape the wolves? Well, obviously because it enjoys being chased. I guess while this idea seems outlandish, it did not came from nowhere. I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed. And why not? When we fear something replaying it in our imagination, focusing on plesant aspects of it (perhaps even in sexual context) can relieve the tension. And this is not limited to sexual contexts. After all many people enjoy horror stories and films, and even children like being frightened (within limits of course).
> I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed.
I regret to inform you that this is, in fact, a thing - closely allied to the furry community and I believe called "primal play" or something. Though of course in practice it amounts to something closer to CNC, the supposed hunt being sublimated into sex.
Since I learned there is a paraphilia called dendrophilia (yes, it means being sexually aroused by trees... wtf?), I will not astonished by any fetish. And in this case, the issue of, ehem, splinters aside, I cannot even begin to imagine where it comes from.
Think about other stuff people find sexy, or even just emotionally intense, then figure out how trees might be conceptually associated. "Wood" as a euphemism, or correct pronunciation of the Latin word for pine tree. For a less goofy angle, the sense of awe at natural beauty of particularly impressive trees is enough to inspire numerous shinto shrines. Archetypal "out in the woods" setting, isolated from civilizing influences, has trees in a literally load-bearing role, and plenty of fairy tales set there have a sexual subtext - to say nothing of all the outright porn involving hiding behind a bush or leaning against a trunk. Anatomy of the tree itself has features which could be interpreted as limbs and even orifices, at least on a loose geometric level - which is apparently quite sufficient, given how bizarre fetish-optimized artistic depictions of actual humans can get.
Not a dendrophile myself, to be clear, and haven't validated any of this with those who are, just brainstorming ways it might work from first principles.
Wild-eyed speculation: I wonder if these aren't commitment signals. I think part of the appeal for the dominant partner in these relationships/activities is something along the lines of "my partner will endure pain/humiliation to be with me; they're really into me" and then evolution programs your brain to find this arousing/rewarding so that you will stick with this person and have lots of procreative sex with them. That's good! But then this programming can be hacked by evolution programming someone else to actually enjoy the pain/humiliation inflicted on them; it signals commitment to the sadist, but really the masochist would be happy with anyone with similar proclivities. Thus the sadist is sort of tricked into a greater commitment to the relationship, which ultimately benefits the mashochist.
Again, this is all speculation on my part; I'm not really any sort of kinkster. I find it enjoyable to fantasize about fetish-y stuff but it doesn't really interest me in realy life.
I think there’s a simpler part where it’s about decision fatigue and feeling taken care of. There’s a reason that the fanciest restaurants do a prix fixe menu where the customer has no choice about what they’re getting - it’s to free you up to enjoy your conversation and the food rather than having to make another stressful decision after a day of being CEO or whatever, and also make you feel like you put your trust in a chef who knows your needs and will take care of you.
This isn't quite a counter-point to what you're saying, but close enough to one that I figured I'd put it in here: While it doesn't necessarily look like it's a lot of work, it definitely can be. Mine ties into masochism, and there's a lot of managing your own body posture involved, and navigating the space between "the last micro-action was technically not pleasurable, but I can handle it" and "this is generally too much right now" with a deep respect for the person that's handling you.
Generally speaking, if you're not restrained in a given moment, there's a lot of feedback to give to the person dominating you - you'll want to touch them in reaffirming ways and be supportive, because they're ironically in a pretty psychologically vulnerable position. As an incomplete example: if your dominant partner does something silly and you burst out laughing because you didn't have self-control, that can be rather damaging to their desire to take the reins again.
If you go to a restaurant and you don't like the food, you can leave a one star rating and not tip the waiter. If you submit to someone and you don't like the things they're doing to your body, you should IMO take *some* responsibility for it, think deeply about whether you can accept their choices for recurring interaction (and err on the side of granting them their choices), and respectfully talk it through with them - tell them what you liked, what you'd prefer less off, what's in the category of "didn't technically like, but can handle, and enjoy on a meta-level that you enjoy it, so feel free to sprinkle it in sometimes", etc, as reaffirmingly and gently as possible.
I suppose this could also be phrased as advice for subs: "Look out for your domme; make sure they're comfortable at all times."
As a submissive, data point: Shame doesn't play into it at all for me. If you ask my friends who's most comfortable talking about sex, it's me. I bring it up as a casual topic like other people bring up video games they've been playing (but, yes, I do try to make sure the people I'm talking to don't mind, sex is a squick topic for a lot of people).
For me, it's the 'thrill' of being helpless and at someone's mercy.
The best way to think of this may be of being on a roller-coaster. You can't get off, you're at the whim of the ups and downs and all those curves throwing your body around, but while it's hitting some buttons in your brain that are making your body respond with stress (raising your heartrate, etc) is, on some level, really exhilerating!
Being restrained (be it just by bodily force, or by ropes, etc) is a lot like that. There's a deep sense of risk, it requires a lot of trust (and forgiveness, and communication, which new submissives sometimes don't realise), but it's very rewarding.
I've had people say that from the other side, yeah. It's like a horror movie or a scary story. Look at the popularity of 'evil' tropes--stereotypical bikers, black, Nazis (usually with the swastikas removed), goatees, skulls, I'm sure you can think of others.
There's this aspect of not having responsibility as well.
This might just be a stereotype, but it's been said that a lot of people who actually wield a lot of power and responsibility have been into submission - because it allows them to experience not being in charge at all for a while.
Wasn't there a bit of evidence recently, that human males generally become physically and mentally aroused by perceiving sexual things, but human females often only become physically aroused (i.e., things like vaginal lubrication, but without an accompanying desire to participate)?
"Shame over sex" seems contradicted by the flagrantly shameless BDSM scene with its in-person clubs and public kink.
"Sadism/domination as a response to feeling undesirable" doesn't fit the dominants I know, including my wife. If anything, being able to "get away" with being mean seems to confirm their sense of desirability.
"Rape adaption" *may* explain some M/f as a way to hack the female body's defence systems which - I've read - can switch on physical arousal to prevent damage (it's important that in the nasty real world, physical arousal isn't the same as consent or pleasure). However, it doesn't explain F/m dynamics. A better general explanation for sexual submission is that finding dominant mates hot is adaptive.
That's certainly another possible interpretation. Or, shameless public kink could be a reaction to having grown up ashamed of being kinky.
However, my impression - sorry, it's hard to find good studies on this sort of thing - is that most kinksters can point back to a pre-sexual stage of their development where they were already showing signs of kinkiness. There are a couple of good mémoires that go into this in detail.
There's also this thing that very dominant "alpha males" are a long-established romantic trope, and historically have been regarded as desirable husbands. So I think that, at least for M/f, BDSM is an extension, or even a conscious firewalling, of a common innate drive.
Yeah, I suspect dominance isn't an automatic turnoff for men the way submission is for women (in 90% of the population anyway). Probably in sub men whatever normally links sexual attraction to dominance detection in women gets turned on for whatever reason. I guess we'll never really know!
I think, in the vanilla world, a lot of women do like being in control, and prefer submissive men as long as that submissiveness is expressed as being a devoted champion and good boyfriend/husband; most of us don't actually look weak or wimpish, our submissiveness is defined by where our centre is.
There are reasons why this doesn't translate to lots of kinky dominant women, and most of these are the fault of male submissives.
Yes, I agree. Currently it's fashionable to leap to blame the guy.
However, in this case it's the fault of the malesub for very specific reasons: they tend to approach partners with an off-putting list of detailed fetishes, rather than a proposal to engage in power actual exchange.
BDSM is about control. Its about relinquish control but being able to take it at any time with the concept of consent. Someone with a leadership role ordering around all day likes to relinquish control in bed ; someone who has been raped and who did not process fully the rape will want to reproduce this in private, except that the person can stop the act at any point, which is like regaining control on an event where you did not have any control (the initial rape). Its pretty basic interpretation, but Ockham's razor might be right here.
Women are probably adapted to survive rape by physically becoming lubricated in response to a variety of sexual stimuli, but in women this is generally separate from subjectively perceived mental arousal. Women who like being submissive in a BDSM context are mentally aroused by the situation, while I think women who are raped often get wet but do not perceive themselves as mentally aroused. Dominance and submission is more likely linked to attraction to high-status men and/or related to men usually being hard-coded to be the sexual initiators and women to be the responders. I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
> I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
There seem to be several styles of Femdom dynamic, some of them very much following traditional gender roles, e.g. the "Mommy Domme" dynamic.
However, you certainly see a lot of what we used to call "gender bending" amongst submissive men, though it's hard to untangle whether this is because on some level they equate "female" to "weak".
Assuming some brains are flipped, this could still be adaptive. On the male side, some of this could be a hardwired Sneaker F*cker strategy. F/m pairings could also have a reproductive advantage, e.g. when food was scarce.
I think BDSM comes from status hierarchy preferences. People have good evolutionary reasons to be attracted to high social status individuals, because status is correlated with genetic and material resources, and both of those are good for your offspring. To judge status, you need to look for reliable status markers. Those markers come in many different varieties - having lots of resources, winning competitions, having lots of attention or respect from others, knowing lots of other high-status people, etc.
But in particular, when someone is telling others what to do (and having them do it), it's very likely that they're high status. And if they're able to treat others badly and get away with it, they must be insanely high status. I think this is where BDSM comes from.
Fetish is technically defined as "a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs." Including homosexuality would satisfy neither the technical definition nor common usage.
Breasts are secondary sexual organs so strictly speaking by this definition no, but if it were strong enough and non-central enough in quality, I think some would argue yes
If it comes at the expense of PIV sex, or is necessary for PIV sex to occur, then yes, obviously? Or in mate selection, although it's hard to tell for sure, if a man prefers a woman with a particular type of breasts over a woman who'd have more PIV sex with him, that would seem to indicate that something fetish-like was going on. And then perhaps there's lesser degrees of the fetish, where it doesn't usually interfere, but does tend to affect choices at the margin.
If homosexuality behaved like a fetish, then you wouldn’t expect “homoromanticness” to go along with it; you’d expect gay men to be sexually interested in penises but still romantically interested in women.
Assuming the theory of fetishes here is correct, homosexuality might have a similar explanation, but there are differences too.
Fair point. Is that true though? Do "furries" not have romantic interests closely tied to their sexual interests? It is my understanding that zoöphiles and pedophiles do, but I welcome correction.
Presumably the question relates to non-reproductive sex. If sex in nature is intended to propagate the species, then gay relationships clearly defeat that purpose.
Does it? Wrapping your partner in latex surely does not prevent conception, but it's clearly a fetish. Whereas oral sex is unlikely to result in conception, but is not a fetishistic act.
Scott is talking about sexual imprinting that does not lead to procreation. Oral sex would fall into that category. Latex would be a good example of a misprint as well, since it's not actually related to procreation at all. You can have latex with no conception.
Do you believe this argument sound? Bulls are attracted to cows. Rams are attracted to ewes. Stallions are attracted to mares. Men attracted to any of these would be a fetish.
I assume one of the reasons that this isn't purely hard-coded is because there isn't an answer to what one 'should' be attracted to, from the PoV of evolution, that is both fully general as well as consistent over time.
Depending on which time period and culture a person grows up in, it may be optimal for them to be attracted to different types of people, so a lot of this may be learned during adolescence.
One could imagine an algorithm like "When going through adolescence, I need to determine what I should become attracted to for the best outcomes. Because I cannot test all of the opportunities myself, I will defer to peers to learn as much as I can"
This algorithm probably works well in many societies, but when you hop onto the Internet and the peers which you defer to during adolescence are a niche subculture, you'll start to get pretty different outcomes. The Internet is also very good at spreading memes, so these outcomes may then propagate to more adolescents as they come online, depending on how viral the new set of likes is.
There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
You could imagine there are traits which are desirable in a partner like e.g. wealthy & high-status, but these are displayed differently in different cultures and environments, so rather than attempting to hard-code for them, we soft-code an algorithm that attempts to learn them in the test environment
Environment has rapidly changed. I think our algorithms actually do fail for food - there's a lot of extremely unhealthy yet apparently palatable food that we now eat, and if this food had been omnipresent in our ancestral environment, that likely wouldn't be the case. Also, if you literally try to only eat rocks, you will die shortly, whereas no reasonable amount of paraphilia causes this.
There are things like anorexia and bulimia, but I'm not sure if those count.
There's definitely people who like some objectively horrible food (but let's not argue over which these are), because they had it when they were a child and developed a fondness for it. Maybe it's even something that their culture celebrates, but ultimately it derives from what starving peasants had to do to survive another year.
I like marmite because I grew up eating it, but from an objective point of view I suspect it's disgusting.
As a child I took an irrational dislike against baked beans. When I eat them now I can tell they're delicious, but I will still only eat them when forced because my mind believes they're gross, in defiance of my mouth's actual experience eating them.
Sivarajan's right - there *are* some people who eat nondigestible things, and this is categorised as the mental disorder of pica. My understanding is that dirt's more common than rocks, but there's famously a guy who ate a Cessna (obviously he had to chop it up first, and it took him two years, but he did eat all of it).
I mean, usually they eat food as well, but I imagine that's some combination of 1) most people don't want to die and it's common knowledge that not eating food will kill you, so someone who does not like eating food may still do it to avoid dying, 2) the people that still don't eat food will indeed die and therefore stop getting counted in "how many people do this at present" statistics.
There are direct biochemical signs, the kind of thing that evolution can target reasonably easily, that follow within a few hours of eating something that contains actual nutrients (macronutrients at least), as the food is digested. This gives evolution a relatively easy way to reinforce the correct behaviours. With sex, the desired outcome happens much later, not more than a dozen or so times in a lifetime rather than several times per day, and (for males at least) outside the body (and therefore subject to all the complications of basing a drive on high-level concepts).
I think food matches up quite well. The core is getting the right nutrients to stay alive, there's tastes for things like pepper on your food and coffee afterwards which aren't nutrients but are compatible with ingesting things which are, equivalent to dressing up as a furry and having piv sex, and there's people whose intake by mouth is pretty much vodka and oxycontin, which sort of look like eating but aren't and are pretty incompatible
This is especially true for humans because we wear clothing and makeup. What a typical "man" or "woman" looks like in your local culture, in terms of shapes and colours, can literally physically vary quite a bit.
Neanderthals wore clothes, and also practiced skull-deformation. If you're messing with skull shape, you probably figured out rubbing berries on your cheeks. It's hard to tell exactly how old these things are, but modifying our appearance to signal things like group-membership seems to be a pretty ancient drive. I would argue it's probably much older than Homo Sapiens, and the evidence I can find is at least compatible with that theory.
Clothes, probably not until they lost their pelts and had to replace them. Makeup...I think they probably did. If you don't think they did, I'd like to know why. Even mud can be used as makeup.
Yes, but our ancestors were sexual before they were homo sapiens and had the challenge of recognizing appropriate mates along evolution. Even without make up, how these mates looked like changed from one generation to the next.
> There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
Could you elaborate more on this? I'm not clear on what you're implying.
Sure. I claim that rape is an evolutionary strategy wired into men, with rewards for the exercise of force on an unwilling woman, and far from the EEA, BDSM fits the bill well enough. For women, the counterstrategy is making sure said exercise of force is sexual and not fatal. (Yes, I realize this explanation doesn't work for dominatrices; evolutionary psychology doesn't have ALL the answers.)
See also: A Natural History of Rape, by Thornhill and Palmer.
Ehhhhhh… that doesn’t obviously tally with BDSM as observed:
1. The big things are generally restriction, and power/powerlessness, not force/violence.
2. There’s no evolutionary reason, on the male side, to ever make the encounter fatal (quite the contrary), so no reason to then go the extra step to avoid it; from a cold evolutionary perspective, the best response is probably to if possible, then go limp.
3. Rape is just a horribly bad reproductive strategy; you’re sacrificing parental investment, and risking death (retaliation from the pair male/peer group in general - if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape), and in general in primates it wouldn’t be surprising for any offspring to be killed.
The more likely BDSM explanation is probably a partial/lingering adaptation to primate dominance hierarchies, and/or (for bondage) the thing pikeys/gypsies do where they physically abduct the bride; that or something like it may have been more common for hunter gatherers, or even earlier hominids.
In this case people already hate you and want to kill you, so fear of retaliation is much reduced, and there is not much oportunity for parental investment anyway (in contemporary armies, in premodern ones it was different). But even then you are much better off with a willing partner who will not have an abortion or strangle the child in the crib, and in general treat well and invest in the child. So I think that "rape as a reproduction strategy" is not just morally repulsive, but also a factually wrong explanation. For one thing, there are many cases where soldiers kill the raped women (in fact I remember reading that during rape of Nanjing Japanese soldiers were given permission to rape Chinese women and girls as long as they kill them afterwards, to avoid mixing of races). And secondly, I do not think the raping soldiers think about their reproduction: they relieve the tension and stress of war while punishing and humiliating the local population for their resistance.
I wonder to what degree they were affected by Nazi ideology. They were allies in the war and the Japanese were trying very hard to learn about Western culture so they could be a major power.
It led in some funny directions; after hearing propaganda that the Jews were inhumanly clever manipulators who secretly controlled the business world and the world in general, the Japanese developed a plan to import a few thousand Jews to build business connections and strengthen their industry.
The Nazis nixed it, but apparently about 24000 Jews escaped the Holocaust due to the Nazis spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish power in a culture that didn't really care who killed Christ.
I don't really agree. You are indeed better off with a willing partner, but the fact is that sperm is so cheap that rape doesn't have to be a terribly successful strategy to still have a decent ROI in evolutionary terms. Also, you have to consider that for a sexually active adult female, it likely wouldn't be easy to tell if she became pregnant as a result of the sex she had with her Celtic husband four days ago or the Viking raiders who came and raped here three days ago. As such, it's definitely not any kind of foregone conclusion that a child that's the product of rape is going to be subject to infanticide.
Regarding 2., I agree, but I also submit this is one of those "The rabbit runs faster than the fox" asymmetries: the incentive for a man not to kill his rape partner is weaker than hers not to be killed by him.
And for 3., yes, it is more of a strategy of last resort for low status males.
1. Distinction without a difference, or nearly so. Violence requires differential power. Given the fundamental imprecision of evolutionary psychology, that rounds up to being the same thing.
2. Possibly most mating that happened 50k years ago was actually just forcible rape, and having a physical response that made it enjoyable for the woman could have encouraged pair-bonding, thereby enhancing offspring survival.
3. Just straight disagree. Men are r-strategists and having many lower-quality sexual encounters might be the optimal strategy in some environments. Particularly if a) it's the male's only sexual option or b) the female is likely to recruit another male to raise the child.
But whatever, evo psych is like astrology. You can always make up a story that sounds good.
I think a more correct version would be that males are flexible strategists who are capable of pursuing either or both strategies, as the situation demands. The classic "one wife and a succession of young mistresses" would be the perfect example.
For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it. But it's not.
It's going to be a lot like theft or murdering rivals: often reproductively advantageous *if* you can get away with it.
> For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it.
In some places on the Internet, sure, but I doubt that it's here.
What I suspect is far more prevalent here is people wanting to believe that rape being evolutionarily selected for is a justification for the fantasies that come unbidden into their minds. Fantasies which they feel horrified by the prospect of acting on (or having enacted upon them). They want a story to tell about why it's OK for them to have the fantasies, and why they're not a horrible person for having the fantasies. And if the story is plausible enough and has enough backing, maybe they can get someone to engage in a bit of consensual roleplay.
Re 2, I think that lubrication significantly lowers the risk if injury to the female. So the point of arousal is not that the rapist would otherwise kill you intentionally, it is just a damage mitigation strategy.
> if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape
This might be true for in-group relationships in some contexts, but it is generally false. When an armored, well-fed man kicked in a cottage door, no malnourished peasant ever thought "what a great reproductive opportunity for our daughters".
> any offspring to be killed
Why? From the mother's genes perspective, she has already invested a lot of resources in their offspring. As a bonus, a son might inherit an inclination towards rape from the rapists side, which might increase spread of the mother's genes in subsequent generations. Even if the fatherhood can be determined unambiguously, having a society coordinate to that purpose for long enough for evolution to take notice is not trivial.
For the genes of a male, the benefits of possibly having a child raised by a single mother in a resource-starved environment are much lower than raising a kid as a member of your household. But the costs are also much lower. There is a limit both in terms of norms and resources on how many partners and children you can feed. For almost all males, this limit will be much lower than the rate at which they could impregnate females. If the male is currently not in the position to sire more legitimate offspring, it makes evolutionary sense that they spend their sperm production in the effort to sire illegitimate children, should the opportunity present itself.
From an ethical point of view, this only serves to illustrate that "evolutionary advantageous" or "natural" is not any kind of moral judgement. As EY pointed out, "Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth". Evolution as Azathoth the blind idiot god favors Ichneumonidae (which made Darwin doubt a benevolent creator), starvation as a means of population control, viruses, parasites and all sorts of other horrors. I have absolutely no problem believing that this stupid fucker also looks fondly on rape at times.
There's a reason people tend to live in groups. One individual cannot (in most environments) afford to raise a child. Much better to save what resources you can, and try again when you have a better support network. It's a gamble, but it's a gamble either way.
I think there is a vast difference between the evolutionary incentives of the genes currently residing in females and males.
For a woman, giving birth is a huge investment of physical (and frequently also social) resources. For men, the investment can vary by many orders of magnitude.
Historically rape during inter-tribal conflicts occurred pretty regularly. See for example the Old Testament, e.g. Numbers 31. (Jehovah and his priests only prevented wartime rape as a reproductive strategy when they were feeling especially genocidal and explicitly ordering the soldiers to kill everyone.) From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: the odds of siring a reproductively successful child are low, but the opportunity costs are minimal: no social costs (the victim and what survives of her family hate you for all the preceding killing anyhow), just a bit of time which could otherwise be spent looting (and enslaving people, depending on the campaign situation).
In biblical times, female consent was very much not a concern. For example, the rights protected by Deuteronomy 22 are ownership rights by males over the bodies of females. Violent rape and consensual sex are treated the same. At most a lack of consent might be a mitigating circumstance which prevents stoning the victim. If there was no contested ownership, female consent did not matter one bit.
From Adam and Eve to Mary, the bible is full of reproductive encounters where coercion-free female consent is not explicitly mentioned and IMHO should not be implicitly assumed. A significant fraction of historical sexual encounters were probably not what we would call fully consensual. In such environments, I would expect genes encouraging submissiveness and masochism (at least in women) to flourish.
(I for once am glad that we are as liberated from the commandments of Jehovah as we are from the commandments of Azathoth.)
Has anyone ever studied "rape" in the animal kingdom, specifically searching for contrasts between mating where neither partner resists at all, and mating where one partner is trying very hard to resist? In the book "A Primate's Memoir" written by a baboon researcher, the author describes an incident where an alpha male lost a fight to a lower-ranking male, losing his status. The ex-alpha then chased down a female and forcibly mated with her, with the female screaming and struggling. The author notes that he's observed this behavior in the past when a defeated male forces himself on a female. He acknowledges that rape is a loaded term in this context, but he thinks it fits. Female baboons solicit mating all the time with males they actually want to get with, but you have these incidents when males force themselves on clearly unwilling females. It makes me wonder how many animals draw a distinction between desired sexual contact, and undesired sexual contact, and if the latter causes them lasting stress.
Why "alas"? If one rejects the kind of the moralizing employed by those who engage in appeals to nature, doesn't dolphin behavior have no moral valence whatsoever?
I was just being sentimental. Dolphins are cute and smart and so I like it when their behavior matches what I'd consider ethical human behavior. I don't actually think that dolphins are intelligent enough to have ethical agency, and I try not to equate "natural" with "ethical" (in either direction).
Gay men are more submissive than straight men. Also I'm not sure there are many more submissive gay men than dominant gay men - my impression is that there are similarly many.
Is this right? In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry writes:
"Most submissives (‘subs’) are female and most dominants (‘doms’) are male. One 2013 study of participants in a BDSM online forum found that only 34 per cent of men consistently preferred the sub position, while an even smaller proportion of women – 8 per cent – identified as doms.
You are actually right. It matches the statistics from fetlife, one of the main BDSM-related social networks. I couldn't find data about gay men or lesbian women, though.
I learned from my pastor in Bible study (the progressive kind that gets her information from secular historians) that men raping men to assert their dominance over them was extremely common in Biblical times. It was an entire cultural phenomenon that most modern people aren't aware of because it's decreased so dramatically since then. That might be a good explanation for men having sub fetishes. Apparently the scholarship on this is relatively recent, so if it wasn't covered in the book you mentioned that might be why. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also related to procreation. The psychological dynamics that men evolved to enjoy rape because it increased the likelihood of passing on their genes applied similarly to raping men.
I would expect the evolutionary advantages for victims of rape to hate rape less that now manifests in sub fetishes to be pretty large for another reason. PTSD often severely decreases people's ability to function, and can lead to earlier death and worse health even in modern rich countries. In Malthusian times, I imagine the damage to the woman's ability to pass on her genes from vulnerability to illness and early death from PTSD would be more severe.
It's pretty common for victims of sexual abuse like me to develop a sub fetish as a coping mechanism. It gives you control over something traumatic that you didn't have control over. It can also be hard to comprehend vanilla sex because it is so different from what you're familiar with, so it's easier to develop an interest in types of submissive BDSM that are very different (opposite in important ways for me) from the type of abuse you experienced, but more similar to it than vanilla.
If you take the full evopsych route (which this article implicitly does) then fetishes are best explained not as misfires of the procreative impulse but as part of the wider definition of sexual activity and display. The idea that sex is literally just PIV intercourse is not true of any complex and social species. In all such species you see social roles and rituals around sex. And these are adaptive in that the competitions increase prosociality and role fitness.
I find it hard to justify the misfire hypothesis actually since so much of sexual and pre-sexual activity is obviously not literally penetrative sex and so much of what's 'normally' attractive is not related to that. Lingerie, for example, seems completely unjustifiable in such a framework except as a niche fetish. But it's actually pretty universal. I understand lingerie as a sociosexual signal and that explains it pretty neatly. But if we're being trained on seeking PIV intercourse solely or its directly associated traits then you have to walk a pretty long way to explain such 'universal' fetishes that are common even among virgins.
This does apply to artificial intelligence: just as sexual competition selects for prosociality and role fitness so will the interaction of humanity in any AI takeoff scenario that's slow enough for us to have any feedback into the process. Likewise, unless there is literally one AI, the AI themselves will be exerting pressure against a Skynet scenario since any AI that defects is a threat to the other AI. In short, cooperation is evolutionarily fit (as evidence by the fact we, and not polar bears, rule the world) and will be selected for through a partially conscious and partially emergent process.
>This does apply to artificial intelligence: just as sexual competition selects for prosociality and role fitness so will the interaction of humanity in any AI takeoff scenario that's slow enough for us to have any feedback into the process. Likewise, unless there is literally one AI, the AI themselves will be exerting pressure against a Skynet scenario since any AI that defects is a threat to the other AI. In short, cooperation is evolutionarily fit (as evidence by the fact we, and not polar bears, rule the world) and will be selected for through a partially conscious and partially emergent process.
This is a nice insight, but can we not keep both? Why can't "normal" fetishes be "misfires" akin to fitness-lowering mutations and "universal fetishes" just be the ones that were the most successful?
If you assume (as I do) that sex has a social component then that doesn't mean that the social component evolves in a similar manner to the biological component. There are several key differences. Among them that social changes happen way faster than evolutionary changes. Now, you can point out the social dance itself is evolutionarily fit (my original point) and that this includes some people having fitness decreasing social habits. But social habits do not pass genetically and in fact often pass non-genetically. Likewise, if you are expecting to claim that 'normal' signs of sexual attraction are universal you have to explain how they shift on much faster than evolutionary timelines.
I realize this kind of discussion depends primarily on how you define "evopsych" in the first place, but I think I'm more persuaded by arguments that any theory that postulates something is a misfire is an explicit straying off the evopsych route that tries to explain everything as an adaptation.
But anyways, I think the obvious rejoinder is that things that are not literally penetrative sex, but are (socially, culturally, or by individual experience) associated with penetrative sex become attractive by this association. (I don't think you can really claim that, e.g., lingerie isn't related to sex, except in extremely literal sense. It's obviously correlated with sex, and that's enough for the association to form and be meaningful.) This is not the same as fetish - fetish implies something being a goal in itself, in lieu of penetrative sex. Only a small minority will have an actual lingerie fetish, where you go around stealing used underwear, masturbating into it, or something. For a majority, lingerie just evokes sex.
It's a decent theory but doesn't appear to empirically true. Do people find condoms sexy? They're certainly directly associated with PIV sex. Meanwhile it's hard to say that a swimsuit or a short skirt are directly associated with PIV sex. Both are regularly seen by men in contexts where they almost never lead to PIV sex and they're not regularly involved in the sexual act. And both are generally agreed to be sexy.
Meanwhile, if a fetish is defined simply as anything lieu of penetrative sex, this implies masturbation is a fetish. Which seems like a rather over broad definition.
Tight-fitting swimsuits and short skirts are aesthetically closer to nudity than the contextually-plausible alternatives, so from a Bayesian standpoint they're weak-but-nonzero evidence toward the hypothesis that further sexy stuff might be happening soon. Thus, eventually considered sexy in and of themselves by back-propagation.
The idea that simply being close to nudity works is trivially disproven by things like unsexy basic underwear or any number of form fitting but functional, unsexy outfits. Secondly, the entire idea that this is trained reasoning learned from PIV sex would imply that the gigantic amount of noise would render the signal so weak as to be useless or even non-existent. The average man goes through life not having sex with almost all women he sees in skirts and has sex with many women who are not in skirts. And most men go through life never having sex with anyone in a bathing suit.
I think you misunderstood what I mean by "aesthetically closer." As for social signaling, much of it - particularly where flirting is involved - is a type of encryption, deliberately calculated to resemble random noise, to limit who learns what, for complex strategic reasons. Subtle clues are amplified in significance accordingly.
A lot of this seems like just-so stories. Cartoons are a relatively (in EEA terms) new stimulus, but feet aren't. Were foot fetishes comparably common throughout the EEA? Is it actually the case that people who are into, say, spanking, aren't into actual sex?
The spanking one seems to have one clearly testable prediction: as spanking rates in Western parenting have drastically plummeted over the past century, AFAIK, there should be a ~20-30 year lag where spanking fetishes also plummet. Is there?
I can check age, and I also asked people a 'how frequently did you get spanked as a kid' scale.
K, this is 0-4 'how frequently did u get spanked', from 'never' to 'very regularly', and the corresponding numbers are avgs of "I find spanking to be" (0=not erotic to 5=extremely erotic
0.0 1.560779
1.0 1.579973
2.0 1.669818
3.0 1.830603
4.0 2.189530
correlation .07
Here it is for biological males:
0.0 1.269131
1.0 1.265089
2.0 1.304543
3.0 1.444171
4.0 1.835753
and females:
0.0 1.693182
1.0 1.734986
2.0 1.827433
3.0 1.989596
4.0 2.323308
It's late and i'm about to sleep so I'm not spending a ton of time on this but
this is the 0-5 'how arousing do you find spanking' scale, and average age for each bin:
Wouldn't this become confounded by porn? My impression is that there are some sexual practices that have spread memetically through porn. If spanking were prevalent enough in porn, perhaps it could spread via the same mechanism?
Corporal punishment was phased out long before porn skyrocketed in prevalence through VHS & then Internet. I'd also expect the effect of being spanked or rodded as a child regularly to be far greater than some glancing exposure to porn as an adult, if these theories were true.
I'm not so sure. I've seen a stat that "50% of parents reported spanking a child in 1993", although that wording is ambiguous. And there's this which reports 47% of parents of 0-9 year olds spanked in the last year.
As for the glancing exposure, that's also my default assumption. But things like shaved pubic hair and choking have spread through porn, so I don't see a reason why this couldn't do the same.
I accidentally developed a bit of a foot fetish earlier this year, because of AI.
Midjourney 5 had not come out, and so we were using 4 to generate some characters for our app.
We needed some full-body images in transparent PNGs. The faces were very realistic, and even the hands generally had a good number of fingers, but it was really hard to get a full body shot without the feet or legs being cropped. Even though the prompt had "full body" and "head to toe" and a few other adjectives tossed on at the end, 9 times out of 10 it would end up cropping around the knees or just have the upper torso.
But the rest was really good — consistent characters and outfits, just missing the bottom. After a few hours of experimentation and re-rolling we could generally end up with the ideal full-body image, including feet. I developed a whole toolbox of tricks, from changing the aspect ratio to be really tall to blending in an example pose as a second image. One of the tricks to get this was to get really specific about the feet. What kind of shoes and socks? Mentioning feet a few times with emphasis. Things like that. My language was one that I imagine a foot-fetishist’s google search history. "Tall woman with feet showing, high heels, extra feet please with an order of foot." Or extreme detail like "orange nikes with shoelaces and socks and shadows under the shoes" That would generally convince the AI that the feet should also be shown. Not all the time, but some combination helped. I dreamt of feet, and kept trying to come up with more synonyms to get my desires across to this stable diffusion model.
Eventually after enough fiddling around a render would eventually come in with feet and we would be happy. After a few weeks of this process, anytime I finally saw some feet in a render (or shoes, rather) was a delightful feeling.
Then Midjourney 5 came out and started behaving a lot better. Feet were pretty trivial to generate (and hands reliably had 5 fingers) and the excitement of seeing them quickly wore off.
To the extent I have experienced foot, armpit, kneepit, or similar attractions it seems to be strongly connected to the unusual sight of something that more typically would occur in an intimate setting
If the availability of contraception is actually a big part of the decline in fertility it seems that the decline should be self-limiting over a fairly short time-frame. The genes of the people who like sex but not children will comprise a rapidly diminishing share of the gene pool. My personal observation is that a significant share of the population strongly desire children, and would have them even if sex were unpleasant. To the extent that either homosexuality or fetishes reduce procreation the effect should be the same.
Only to the extent that desire is genetic. A lot of fundamentalist groups have high fertility rates but low retention rates; how likely are the people who leave - ex-Mormons, lapsed Orthodox Jews, etc - to have kids?
But that is what he is talking about: such groups might have low retention rates, but usually are still considerably above replacement level (i.e. enough of them stay to make the group grow, in spite of the leavers). Which almost inevitably amounts to a genetic selection of traits that favour procreative behaviour in our current porn and contraception laden environment - if there is any genetic aspect to this, of course.
It depends how much of the variation in number of kids is based on a genetic component of liking kids, as opposed to a learned behavior of liking kids or other factors (economic, cultural, etc) that affect how many kids you have.
Basically, it would have to be hugely determinative to take over the population 'quickly' in the colloquial way we view time.
Even a 5% contribution could become fixed in the population 'quickly' in terms of evolutionary time, of course; but 'quickly' there means more like 'within 50 generations, ie ~1000 years for humans'.
At which point historical events probably overtake it.
My surmise is that (1) there is a genetic component of liking kids, and that it varies in people, (2) in the past it did not have a very large effect on average fertility, because other factors (liking sex, economic, cultural, etc.) meant that even people who did not particularly like kids frequently had lots of them, and (3) in developed countries at present those other factors that caused people to have children have largely gone away. Therefore going forward the inborn desire to have kids could be determinative to a far greater extent than in the past. If there are systematic genetic differences going forward between the people who on average have one kid and those who on average have three kids, how many generations will it take for the genes of those with three kids to predominate? I understand this assumes a lot, but it seems reasonable to me and consistent with my experience that wanting to have kids is at least in part based on a genetic component.
Let's apply Occam's razor here and assume there isn't a separate explanation for every fetish. I'll assert that all fetishes have one source, which is that humans can sexualize anything. Any configuration of body parts, fluids, and objects that doesn't defy the laws of physics has a community of people who think it's the best thing ever. Same for any relationship dynamics. This diversity is an outgrowth of the fact that we come out of the womb as relatively blank slates so that we can adapt to any environment. Why would sex be different from every other thing we learn through culture? Our genes may give a push by making genital stimulation and sexual fantasy pleasurable, but they don't specify how to get this stimulation any more than they specify how group cooperation is accomplished or how to find food. If 95% of sexuality is learned, it's no longer surprising that we find so many ways to do it. We're not looking at out-of-distribution examples, we're looking at an open loop reinforcement learning system that's writing its own reward function.
Depending on the definition of "taboo", that could make a lot of sense. If a taboo is a restriction designed to set one group of people apart from another, then it's basically defined as arbitrary restrictions on normal human behavior, so it's no surprise that people in a society with those arbitrary restrictions are going to pay a lot more attention when they have visions of otherwise-normal-but-societally-restricted things dancing through their heads at night.
I don't think all taboos are arbitrary (though of course many are). Presumably taboos against incest and scat have survival value. Note this doesn't say anything about the taboos having a genetic origin. Culture is allowed to add survival value.
I commented on this post that averaging popularity and tabooness could be a distortion by hiding bimodal distributions. But the averaging provided the best way to explain varying popularity.
> Evolution controls the genetic code but not the reinforcement environment. Humans have the option of training AIs directly, a much higher bandwidth and less lossy communication channel.
I don't think the comparison is clear-cut.
Yes, in reinforcement learning, humans have the option of rewarding the AIs for doing certain behaviors, which seems nice, and is genuinely something that evolution cannot do, except when those behaviors can be operationalized into relatively simple detector code that evolution can put in the brainstem etc.
On the other hand, "rewarding the AIs for doing certain behaviors" is a terrible idea, from an AI alignment perspective. We want to reward the AI for doing the right thing FOR THE RIGHT REASON, not just for doing the right thing full stop. Otherwise we reward the AI for being deceptive.
And in that sense, it seems to me that the genome is in some respects beyond the state-of-the-art of ML reinforcement learning alignment approaches. In particular, the genome sets us up such that some THOUGHTS are rewarding and others are not—not behaviors. There's interpretability right in the foundation, I think.
I think good theories of sexual attraction may be somewhat related, and I would definitely be interested in them, although I haven't spent any time looking into that topic so far.
Hmm, yes "We want to reward the AI for doing the right thing FOR THE RIGHT REASON, not just for doing the right thing full stop. Otherwise we reward the AI for being deceptive." sounds like the task of getting generalizations about preferences, both for terminal goals and for instrumental goals "right".
This does sound similar to understanding: "Is this because something about the autistic ultralocal processing style favors misgeneralization? Is there some equivalent in AI parameters that could make them more or less autistic, and would that change how correct (or maybe how consistent) their category generalization is?"
Evolution cannot select against bad thoughts with good outcomes, because if a gene causes good outcomes for bad reasons the organisms with that gene will still survive and reproduce. You're imagining an evolution-agent that can make decisions, a classic blunder
I'm pretty confused by your comment. Maybe this will help?
The human brain does within-lifetime learning, and it involves reinforcement learning. For example, if you touch a hot stove, then you probably won't do it again. This within-lifetime RL, like all RL, involves a "reward function" which says that touching the hot stove is bad, and more generally pain is bad, eating when hungry is good, sleeping when tired is good, and hundreds more things like that. This within-lifetime reward function is under evolutionary pressure, and is not the same as evolution itself. Things can be rewarding as assessed by the within-lifetime reward function despite not advancing genetic fitness, and vice-versa. In fact, this is unavoidable, because it's impossible for your brainstem to exactly calculate inclusive your genetic fitness in real time as you go about your day.
So in that sense, stepping back a level, there’s an analogy between the way that “evolution” is “trying” to choose a within-lifetime reward function such that the animal will have high reproductive fitness, versus the way that a human RL researcher is trying to choose an RL reward function such that the trained RL policy will do whatever the human was hoping that the trained RL policy would do (be helpful, invent better solar cells, you name it).
> Humans have the option of training AIs directly, a much higher bandwidth and less lossy communication channel
That's *extremely* underselling it; breeding vs nn-training are a difference in scale that makes a difference in kind.
Imagine your attempting to find the best value in a 2d space, the way your attempt to do this is random and by breeding, so you select lets say 4 random points from a circle where you "are", and you set the new center to be the average of the 2 best, sure your "evolve" and eventually find a good value but what the calculus does is go you a 2d vector to the best local update without taking 1000 random points.
Most nn's have some absurd number of parameters, so its not 2d or even a 3d sphere, its 1000000d sphere and training is making a very reasonable update direction.
I honestly have a hard time seeing what fetishes have to do with evolution or AI. Fetishes are generally a result of childhood experiences and are not heritable, as far as I know.
AI is just an emulation of intelligence and IMO can never approach the complexity of biological evolution which is governed by processes that we are unlikely to fully understand. We can try to allow AI to evolve by itself but in the absence of that magic juice it’s doomed to failure. Of course it can still kill us but so can many other things of our own doing.
It's easy to create a system that's extremely good at one well-understood task, but what actually matters is to be able to adapt to a changing, unknown future. Which is what biological intelligence is all about.
I think to claim that AI doesn't differ from natural intelligence in some substantive way is the thing what would require proof. Consider the typical blunders of categorization systems...blunders that people didn't even imagine as possible ahead of time.
First, fetishes even in humans are not necessarily a result o childhood experiences. But one needs to look at fetishes more broadly: In general you fetishize something if you take same aspect of a give action and you give it undue importance. It is often applied to sexual matters, but in case of AI a more general meaning is relevant: we may expect that AI's will be (sometimes already are) distorting their reasoning and rule sets by giving undue attention to some of the rules or features to the (incorrect) exclusion of others. I once read story about americans training (during cold war) an early AI to recognize russian and american tanks on photographs. Problem was that photos of Russian tanks were grainy (unlike American ones) so the AI just learned that grainy=Russian, clear-American. It fetishized quality of pictures. This is not a good example for AI fetishes, in this case it was more like bad, training data, but I do not have better one. Still I think we will see weird twisting of any rules we try to give statistical AI's.
PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL—REGARDLESS OF THE SOURCE—CAN CONTRIBUTE TO SEXUAL AROUSAL
That seems true to me, and seems to explain (or at least contribute to the explanation of) four of your list items—spanking, sadomasochism, urine/scat, and bondage/domination/submission.
Physiological arousal just means your heart-rate goes up etc. I think it's common sense that if you're tied up and then subjected to pain and threatened with more pain, your heart-rate is gonna go up. That's obvious and has nothing to do with sex. E.g. it's equally true for baby squirrels as for adult humans (but please don't do the experiment on baby squirrels to check).
We have lots of innate defense-related reactions (or in the case of urine/scat, disgust-related reactions) that also increase our heart rate etc. Right? Does that help?
'This hurts people very very badly, that doesn't' is not a 'thin pretext' unless you are a sociopath.
Many things that are legal and fine are extremely superficially similar to other things that illegal and bad. Cutting meat with a knife is fine if it's a steak and bad if it's a struggling human victim. The difference is not a 'think pretext' and no one is confused by this.
People can argue all sorts of things. So you're definitely right. But I don't actually believe your asserted facts are true in an large degree. If a "marriage was ruined by pornography" it would be my guess that it was already broken. The people I know of who went through gender transition had to fight to be allowed to do that. (I may think they made a mistake, but that's my opinion.) However, buyer's remorse is a real thing, so I think they *should* have had to fight to go through the procedure.
OTOH, delaying puberty ... I'm not sure what the costs and side effects are, but I think that a LOT of people would benefit from delaying puberty, if the side effects aren't too bad. Our civilization isn't set up to facilitate people who aren't out of high school being sexually active.
Informed enthusiastic consent is essential, and children can't do the former. And yes, I agree that the issue of "gender-affirming care" before puberty is fraught. But the two are not even comparable. Still this post about fetishes, not CW items. I should not have brought it up.
In practice, the children themselves usually aren't the ones giving consent to gender-affirming care, or most other medical treatment: their parents or guardians consent on their behalf.
Medical consent works like that, but most other forms of consent don't. For example, in many states parents can't give consent for their kids to get tattoos. And while parents can often give consent for their kids to get married, they can't give consent for their kids to have sex.
In general, norms about minors consenting have more to do with necessity and practicality than consistency (or science). For example, minors who are emancipated, married, homeless, or who have children of their own can sometimes consent to things other minors can't. Minors can often consent to specific types of treatment (e.g. for mental health, substance abuse, pregnancy, STDs) at a younger age than other treatments, not because the decisions are any simpler or less consequential, but precisely the opposite: because timely access to that treatment is seen as especially important.
What a strange thing to ask, especially in response to a comment in which I didn't express disapproval or approval of anything at all, but simply explained how consent works in these different situations and why the same standard doesn't apply to all of them.
I'll charitably assume you meant to ask "is pedophilia allowed with parental consent", and direct you to the last sentence of the second paragraph of my previous comment.
"But now that we are allowing children to decide to forgo puberty..."
I assume you're referring to adolescents who use puberty blockers in preparation for gender transition, but they don't stay on blockers indefinitely, and thus don't really "forgo" puberty: they experience puberty once they start taking cross-sex hormones.
There's no evidence that this actually works, which is why there's so much controversy about it.
The reality is that this treatment is not evidence-based medicine, which is why the UK has pulled back from it and other countries are considering it, and why many states are banning it.
None of these treatments have ever undergone RCTs for the treatment of gender dysphoria. There's a good chance that they don't work - probably ~50-75%, given that most treatments fail clinical trials.
Puberty blockers certainly have the intended effect, that is, they stop the development of secondary sexual characteristics when taken at the relevant time. And cross-sex hormones certainly also have the intended effect of inducing the development of the cross-sex secondary sexual characteristics.
There's no evidence that any of these treatments alleviate psychiatric symptoms beyond the placebo effect.
There's no evidence that puberty blockers improve outcomes, and it is possible they may make them worse (puberty in many cases may naturally resolve symptoms of gender dysphoria as the child matures).
If people are attracted to health, and health correlates with youth, no wonder in some people that genetic dial accidentally undershoots the mark and makes them attracted to way too young people.
I've spent quite alot of time going over the male heterosexual chronophilia research, Freund, Blanchard, Cantor, Stephens, Seto etc. If you seriously dig into the phallometric data it's pretty clear that actual pedophilia is very rare (even using a 0.0sd cut point) among even various samples of offenders, with some combination of sadism or power dynamics or emotional congruence etc. Being better explanations as drivers of offending. Lots of problems with the field but this seems like one of the few robust findings.
Hmm, I am not familiar with the data, but I have come across people who ended up on virped.org because they hated their kink and themselves. Anecdata, but would be unlikely if your references were accurate.
In the case of virped my best guess is that a lot aren't strictly pedophiles in the technical sense, either by preferring later age ranges/developmental stages or their preference being better described in terms of emotional congruence etc. Possibly quite a few just have POCD, but even if we do say that most are pedophiles or nepiophiles, the internet is vast such that even a very rare minority of people can congregate to form such a community, the interesting question would be how they compare to other similar communities and also the general population. I should also add that I'm strictly talking about male heterosexual pedophiles, and not other groups.
Perhaps you need a cultural context. Child brides were very common before that became illegal...and to some extent afterwards. Australian bushmen often married girls as young as eight...though I don't know whether the marriage was commonly consummated. In India often both the bride and the groom would be children. Again I'm not sure what "marriage" means in that context. But brides as young as 13 were not that unusual in recent US history, and marriage implied consummation.
From what I understand the general pattern historically was marriage around puberty, with elites marrying much younger, and consummation occurring after menarche i.e. well into puberty, such patterns of evidence may or may not be evidence of preferred sexual attraction in that age range (their could be other reasons for certain norms to evolve), but even if it is strong evidence of such preferred sexual attraction, such attraction would not constitute pedophilia as the term is standardly used by various experts in relevant fields, it's true that such behaviour would fit the contemporary lay persons account of pedophilia as used in ordinary language, but as I have implied I'm using the much stricter account. Such an account is more relevant when talking about evolution or the etiology of such a condition, and based upon past comments made by Scott presumably the account he uses to internally model the world.
From what I can gather various people have tried to dispute the cultural/legal and anthropological claim that such marriages were common or that they resulted in pregnancy at that early of an age, with famously Ashley Montagu having quite a large influence on this matter even today. Yet interestingly we know that the extreme version of his claim, namely adolescent sterility can't be true since we know from de novo mutations that human generation times in non African women hovered around 20, and that prior to 2000 generations ago, gen times were consistently in the teen years, it should also be noted that such estimates represent the mean age of the middle parturition and not the age at first reproduction, as they are usually interpreted by lay persons. And in fact looking back at Montagu's work you can see his data for age of menarche is significantly older than that of both contemporary and historical populations, with later anthropological studies such as those by Hochberg predicting a AFR at 15 based upon usual development times, via extrapolation from natural fertility hunter gather populations. The less radical claim of subfecundity is more plausible and relevant for r/K selection theory and life history strategy, but if you look into the anovulatory data and such, its extremely low quality and of dubious merit, and if you think seriously about the issue its clear that the model of fecundity as used by experts is missing various important parts.
"Latex/rubber: Plausibly the evolutionary specification includes details about attractiveness. Attractive people (ie those you should be most interested in having babies with) should be young and healthy (characteristics associated with better pregnancy outcomes, especially in the high-risk ancestral environment). The simplest sign of youth and good health is smooth skin" The part about the high risk ancestral environment leaves me to suspect that Scott may have read Lassek's and Gaulin's paper on nubile primiparas, they make some mistakes but for the most part its a great paper.
> A reasonable next question would be “what’s on the other side of the genitalia, and do people also have fetishes about that one?”
If you follow your diagram past the genitalia into the contiguous area of neocortex, then you’re now at Brodmann area 31, a.k.a. the dorsal posterior cingulate area, if I'm understanding the anatomy right. I don't know much about what it does though.
Separately, if you go along the cortex in the perpendicular directions from the genitalia part of S1, then the contiguous areas of cortex are in Brodmann area 4 (primary motor cortex) on one side and in Brodmann area 5 (something to do with somatosensory, I don't know the details) on the other side.
For some reason I do not understand this passage: "But it’s still fascinating that evolution accomplishes this difficult thing at all. Is there some sense in which evolution 'solved the interpretability problem' such that it can pick out connections in a neural net and edit them to try to get a message across?"
Would someone who does be willing to state whatever the point is in different words? I think main sources of my confusion is this: What is the interpretability problem? Is it evolution's problem getting across to us that we are supposed to procreate, even though it cannot tell us that directly, but only wire us to desire things that are likely to lead to procreation? So for instance evolution has wired us to enjoy genital rubbing, but that message from evolution can be "misinterpreted" as a demand that we masturbate, rather than procreate. But since evolution's message that we should procreate can instead be misinterpreted as a demand that we masturbate or engage in various fetish behaviors that don't make babies, what does it mean to say that evolution has "solved the interpretability problem" ? It seems like clearly evolution has *not* solved it, although evolution's message gets correctly interpreted by enough of us that plenty of people do have children.
And then, I completely do not understand what is meant by evolution's "picking out connections on a neural net." I know what a neural net is. What is it that evolution does that's equivalent to picking out connections on a neural net? Is it selecting for certain genes?
If I understand right, Scott is pointing out that it's nontrival how information like "be aroused by xyz" could be decoded from DNA, and instantiated in our brains. There is a large gap between the input data (strings of nucleotides in our DNA), and the intended result, which would presumably need to manifest in terms of patterns of connections in the individual's neurons.
The "interpretability problem" I think refers to the fact that neuronal connection patterns look like spaghetti code, and it's very difficult to "interpret" whatever they encode, such as a tendency to be attracted by something.
It's been a while since I read any evo psych, but I seem to recall that the existence of homosexuality was considered to be a big evolutionary puzzle. Most proposed theories seemed to go in the direction of trying to find some indirect evolutionary benefits from it, but none seemed too plausible. Knowing little about biology, but having a background in computation, I intuitively tend to favor the same explanation that Scott is putting forward here: maintaining a stable encoding from DNA to neural patterns of "finding the opposite sex attractive" is hard work, and nature has only managed to do so with ~90% precision.
Seems to me that the you can explain BDSM in terms of overgeneralization. On feature of sex is that people are "controlled" by the person they are attracted to (in the sense that they feel irresistibly drawn to them) and by their own horniness. People often "give in" to desire or feel "ruled" by it. People sometimes feel humiliated by how conquered by desire they are, and by things they do when turned on that they think are wrong or at least very undignified. BDSM seems like it's picking up these features of sex, which for most are just one feature, and exaggerating them and making them central to the actual acts that people engage in. So in Scott's terms, it's a kind of overgeneralization. Evolution tried to tell us to do this thing that feels very good, & sometimes involves love and bonding, and involves sexual intercourse, and also often makes people feel controlled and outmatched and humiliated by the power of the experience. A BDSM orientation results from people just picking up on the latter of these features.
Or in a way, it's a fetishization of the duality of being a mind riding around in a meat body. To somewhat misuse Haidt's metaphor, the rider on the elephant, who can nudge at the margins, but mostly ends up doing sour-grape rationalization of why they always wanted to go to wherever it was that the elephant decided to go. We are at the mercy of our flesh, to a degree that can shock us until we directly pit our mind against the meat. (OK, that sounds kinky right there.)
Honestly, the people I know who are into BDSM seem to be having awesomely intense experiences. In fact many fetishists seem to be, so long as they can find partners or settings where they can indulge their kink. It's like they've found the mother lode. In exchange for looking like ewww to a lot of people, they are gobbling Eros pure.
Yeah, I've known a few people like that. Over the course of a couple of months, they became deeply into the local BDSM community to the point where it appeared to gobble up every aspect of their life. And they were super happy about it, eyes shining faces glowing, the whole bit.
I think we might have miscommunicated? I wasn't meaning "or, alternatively it is this different thing" but instead "or, here is a different way of describing the same thing".
You are right, we miscommunicated. What happened was that I didn't understand how your analogy about riding elephants was a different way of describing what I was describing, I suppose because your picture of riding elephants has a substantial negativity element ("sour grapes," for instance) and I am trying to describe how it works for BDSM fetishists, whom I sort of envy, because the core of their experience seems ecstatic. Still don't understand. Want to explain, or is that too much trouble?
It was generous of you to respond to my idea before pointing out that we had miscommunicated. I would probably have pointed that out first, then re-explained my point, then gone on to respond to whatever it was that misunderstanding-my-point you had said.
This is an instance of what I have in mind when I say that it's hard to understand why anyone would want to hurt you. When in doubt you do the generous thing, yet you do not come across as a people-pleasing wimp, not in the slightest. Still, as I said before, it does not matter how many good qualities you have if the other person is a fucking soul-gobbling monster
It's mostly because the non-fiction book I'm finishing off right now is "The Righteous Mind", which among other theories advances the idea that the purpose of rational thought is to persuade other people to coordinate with you. That is, the primary ethical sense comes from intuition (the "elephant"), and rationality ("the rider") is used partly to rationalize the intuition, partly to persuade other people to adopt our own intuitions, partly to bind groups of people together using shared intuitions, and only rarely to alter one's own intuitions. Does that make sense?
"Sour grapes" does have a pejorative sense to it, which was misleading when applied strictly to BDSM. I guess I was sort of intending the negative aspect to apply to the whole "rational mind playing second fiddle" thing, which I'm grumpy about because I don't want to agree, but it sure does seem like he's right. That was a bad bit of writing on my part; I got all the pieces there but they were arranged in a misleading way.
> It was generous of you to respond to my idea before pointing out that we had miscommunicated. I would probably have pointed that out first, then re-explained my point, then gone on to respond to whatever it was that misunderstanding-my-point you had said.
That's very kind of you to say so. What happened was that I've twice noticed that same phenomenon that you were talking about, and it was fascinating to see happen, and has stuck vividly in my mind, so I wrote something about that. Then I went back and reread, because something didn't seem quite right, and noticed stuff like the "honestly" and "in fact", which seemed out of place on my first reading, but made sense if you thought I was saying something negative about BDSM. So just a bit of mild spectrumy behavior on my part, not a lot of real virtue. But thanks anyway! :-)
>That is, the primary ethical sense comes from intuition (the "elephant"), and rationality ("the rider") is used partly to rationalize the intuition, partly to persuade other people to adopt our own intuitions, partly to bind groups of people together using shared intuitions, and only rarely to alter one's own intuitions.
That's interesting. Not having read the full argument I don't know whether I agree. Anyhow, here's an interesting add-on for the idea above: There is one way to use rationality to alter intuitions that is very powerful: Do something that rationality tells you is OK to do, but intuition tells you is a bad idea. If the results of the first attempt are decent, do the thing on a regular basis for a while. Usually your intuition about the thing will change, and it will stop seeming like a bad idea and start looking good in various ways. Sometimes it sprouts all kinds of intuitively appealing properties. I work a lot with people who have phobias, & getting them try doing the thing they dread is an extremely powerful treatment. But the approach works also for things you do not dread, but just intuit will feel tedious, or silly & humiliating or whatnot.
>I've twice noticed that same phenomenon that you were talking about,
Is the phenomenon you mean the ecstasy fetishists seem to have access to ? Or are you talking about the sense of being overpowered and sort of used & abused by one's own sex drive?
Indeed. The psychoanalytic distinction between neurotics, hysterics, and perverts is beautifully descriptive for those who have invested in understanding the terminology. Fetishists are a subset of the pervert class - they have fully embraced desiring the object.
Most anyone rational-ish will regard Lacanian neoFreudianism as more like prose poetry than science, and that's probably fair. But there's a descriptive power to poetry, a subtle tension like that between the first and second lines of a good haiku. Similarly... actually no. I've reworked the rest of this three times and can't beat it into a shape I can hit 'post' on.
Hmmm .... that's reminiscent of one of Dawkins' arguments about males and females controlling each other via indirect signals. I can't remember just how it went, or which work it was in, but he was talking about co-evolution of the sexes and sexual signaling.
I think it has a lot to do with how the person first encounters sex. For me, it was reading biology textbooks at around age 10, and I think this explains my kinks pretty well.
It's weird how *sure* people are about their sexual interests. Especially for people with not a lot of experience. It's like if you asked someone whether, in their alternate life as a three-tentacled being on Pluto they spun clockwise or counterclockwise they confidently answered 'clockwise' and got very uppity about how noone can answer this question except for them.
The correlation between autism and fetishes/gender issues may simply be a correlation with innate brain things being a bit broken.
Well, if you try the thought experiment, and imagine yourself as a three-tentacled being on Pluto spinning clockwise and nothing happens, and then imagine yourself as a three-tentacled being on Pluto spinning counterclockwise and OH MY GOD I JUST CAME, it can be pretty obvious?
Frankly but glibly, the concept of even having an identity in the first place is technically against my religion, so from that perspective I view the entire "gender" thing as a giant delusion.
I'm just making a joke about Buddhism. It's not literally that having an identity is prohibited, but to a first approximation, I view with extreme skepticism any attempt to promulgate definitions of "who you are". And for more advanced work, "who" and "you" and "are" need a lot of unpacking, but in my personal experience that only starts to make sense when I've been doing more meditation than I am right now.
Buddhist? More particularly Theravada Buddhist? (I'm sorry I don't know a better name, because some people have told me that's an impolite term, but it's the only one I know for that group.)
If so, I don't think it's having an identity that's technically against your religion, but only wanting to have an identity.
Mahayana, actually, although I vary in my degree of seriousness and practice.
"Theravada" is generally considered fine. "Hinayana" is the one you don't want to use: it's an exonym used by some Mahayana practioners. "Mahayana" means "great vehicle", and after having the audacity to name one's practice that, it probably was only a matter of time before someone referred to the old-style practice as "hinayana", which means "lesser vehicle".
And yeah, it's more complicated. In practical terms, I'd say that, aside from a few special cases ("Hi, I'm so and so, and I'm an alcoholic."), it's probably best not to make one's "identity" the core of one's, well, "identity".
You specifically asked about sexual interests not gender identity, it's not surprising that you got a reply that explains just what you asked for and not more.
On the other hand, it's not hard to see why similar mechanism can be the case for gender identity as well. If our biology somehow encodes "man" and "woman" for the purpose of sexual attraction, it can also use the same representation for the purpose of gender identity. Heterosexuality is a function of two variables. Who you are, whom you are supposed to be attracted to.
It's a metaphor. And what this metaphor for you stated yourself: sexual interest. Not gender identity.
You can still use it as a metaphor for gender identity as well. But if you do so, it's useful to explicitly state that, in order to evade miscommunication.
Nearly nothing is fundamental. Nearly everything is made from smaller things. We can still meaningfully talk about non-fundamental stuff, make predictions and judgements about it.
I have an alternative proposal: they provide me with advanced Yuggothian weaponry, and I destroy my notes on how to psychically bombard them with monkey porn, which I have arranged to be widely distributed upon my death, disappearance, incapacitation, etc.
I think there are many other people who are less sure about any given facet of preference or identity, but they're underrepresented among the groups willing to get in internet arguments about the facet in question, because getting caught in the middle of a culture war - having offended both sides by saying you don't see what the big deal is - isn't most people's idea of a good time.
" humans can invent contraception. Evolution’s main alignment strategy was totally unprepared for this."
I'm not certain it was. Consider that handing out condoms to High Schoolers tends to increase pregnancy rates.
I mean, the big thing with contraception seems to be that educating women results in fewer children. So it's not *just* the invention of contraception which reduces birthrates, but a society which supports its regular use by interested parties.
In any case, the notion of decreased reproductive drive associated with increasing population densities makes me think of behavioral sinks in rats.
In the ancestral environment, overpopulation could lead to destruction of habitat and population crashes. Human populations have never been as dense as some of them are today. So we might reasonably ask if modern population densities could have any impact on human behavior.
Also, as it's once been observed: "Considering that it's nearly impossible to tickle yourself we really got lucky with masturbation." I'd speculate that a lot of non-productive sex serves a kind of educational purpose in highly social species.
"even though modern rich people have more child-rearing resources available than the pioneers."
In fairness, pioneer families could extract labor from very young children and farmers often relied on that labor. With modern parents unless your child is a successful actor or something odd like that, children tend to be a cost till very late in their development, if ever. Modern parents also aren't relying on children as much to take care of them in their old age.
200 years ago, raising kids to your own standard of living wouldn't diminish your quality of life much. Today, it almost certainly will.
Re: Foot fetishes. I just have to ask, is there any part of the female anatomy that men *don't* fetishize? Are foot fetishes just obvious from their rareness and oddness. You give an interesting mechanism in terms of the somatosensory cortex. But I'd like to know how we distinguish between a foot fetish and, say, a lip fetish or a belly fetish. (Also, is there any evopsych reason that the part of the somatosensory cortex that maps to the feet should be next to the genitals?)
RE: Urine. I'm curious how much this has to do with pheromones. (I'm not kinky in general. I just speculate. )
Re BDSM, I do agree with you. I've heard there's a correlation between conservative upbringing and a desire for restraint during sex. I don't have data to back this up, but it would make for interesting confirmation if true. The whole notion of a preference for dominant men or vulnerable women could also play into some kind of sexual script, independent of upbringing.
I'd also suggest that disgust is a relevant aspect of attraction. It's not just the stone that makes the sculputre, but the portions that have been carved away.
I've known some asexual individuals interested in BDSM as a substitute for sex. I'd imagine that maybe a weak drive in one area allows more drift in the formation of sexual associations.
I've very briefly skimmed the UK study, which does nothing to isolate condom usage as a variable (I don't think?) but considers it along with social interventions and use of long acting reversible contraception. Long acting reversible contraception has been empirically shown to be effective in reducing teen pregnancy rates. So using the UK study to advocate for school distribution of condoms is kind of like a headline which reads "thousands of lives saved each year by antibiotics and daffodils" then arguing for government funding of daffodil distribution on that basis.
The source I was going off of looks at under-18 pregnancy rates in the areas around where school condom distribution programs, specifically, were located and uses changes in conception in a slightly older cohort of women as a control. An interesting methodology, given they found a statistically significant effect.
Incidentally, the source I was relying on seems to be co-authored by a guy I was on speech team with in college. A very nice guy (liberal Christian at the time, if it matters) in an apparently very small world. :-)
Oh, also from my linked cite: "We find that the fertility increase is driven
by communities where condom access was provided without mandated counseling, and that these fertility effects may have been attenuated, or perhaps even reversed, when counseling was mandated as part of condom provision. "
In both cases here the question being asked, for much of history, was essentially , “why do value-maps exhibit deviations from the territory?” It’s interesting that in modernity there doesn’t seem to be a agreement that there even is a territory at all.
I would think if we were still a religious culture the debate would be, “are we about to summon a demon, or an Angel,” and this seems to roughly map onto the question of alignment, but I would guess you’d have religious people saying “if we just train it on scripture, it’ll obviously be aligned.” I’ve been trying to think about what the rational equivalent would be here, and the best I can come up with would be, “make sure the AI reads the New York Times” or some such thing.
I suspect most religious cultures would just ask the priest/rabbi/imam/guru/etc., who would probably tell them to smash the thing on account of it likely being to summon a demon. And, given what a lot of people around here are saying, maybe they're not wrong!
It’s true. Maybe in this count it would be “the sequences”.
Can the AI reliably generate the sequences without being trained on them? Does it act according to them in a simulated world without being exposed to them?
We might create a simulated universe where the Ai is tested, and to make it realistic, lots of humans are paid a basic income to live and play in this universe as if it’s real. Some are even encouraged to do evil things within that universe, to ensure we plant the seeds of moloch inside. Does the AI worship moloch? If so, we don’t let it out. Does it stay faithful to instrumental rationality and thus act with patience, humility, kindness and benevolence in order to maximize its access to alternative models? Does basically every world religion, plus rationality and EA and environmentalists and other pseudoreligions approve of it? Then we let it out.
Ironically, I think your conception of fetishes and kinks and their formation is actually pretty far off the mark. IMO, fetishes and kinks are deliberate adaptations - the need to reconcile the extremely strong impulses surrounding sex. On the one hand, there's a strong evolutionary pressure for it - but on the other hand, it poses all sorts of risks and can potentially get you killed, ostracized, etc. Thus, people develop all sorts of strong opinions about it, and when these are powerful or conflicting enough, they can turn into kinks and the like.
The Zack Davis link is the most frustrating thing I've read in a long time. The number of things here that you could never ever get me to admit I'd written or said or done, not with red-hot pokers, is painfully high. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but being so sure of your own correctness that it's your moral duty to shout it at it at everyone you interact with for years while internally stewing that there must be a global conspiracy keeping them from admitting that you're right is...well, it's certainly lacking in intellectual humility, and if that behavior pattern ends up being the lasting legacy of the rationalist movement, it'll be a shame.
The virtue of being correct has huge exonerative power. But even it is not infinite. It's still possible to be right for the wrong reasons. Rationality is about systematic ways to arrive to the truth. Sometimes you can get lucky with randomly pointing a finger in a direction and just so happening to guess right. It doesn't make pointing a finger in a random direction a good truth seeking strategy, even though that in general being correct is an evidence that you are doing something right.
I'm not clear on what you mean here. Was your comment about Zack's post, Scott's link, and the original comment which I replied to? Or were you making a more abstract point about what "reaching correct conclusions" can justify?
I was using "right" to mean "correct conclusion and valid methods", and what I meant to imply was that if Zack had reached a correct conclusion using valid methods, then his actions here are not only justified but praiseworthy. And that the original comment was predicated on the assumption that he was wrong (which is to say, either incorrect conclusion or invalid methods, or most likely both). I don't see what part of this involves "pointing a finger in a random direction".
With regards to the abstract point, I agree in general, but there are some caveats. Most especially that, for the most part, I don't care why my neighbor doesn't murder me, only that he doesn't. Reasoning may tell me something about how reliable this is, such as being able to figure out that he's the Zodiac killer and someone just like me is due to be killed tomorrow night. But mostly, I'd just prefer that he not murder me.
An abstract point about the exonerative power of being true with regards to a specific case of Zack Davis as an example of it.
> I was using "right" to mean "correct conclusion and valid methods"
With this I agree. Indeed if you arrived to the correct conclusion through valid reasoning, then being very certain in it is not a failure but a virtue. However, from what I can see, Zack didn't reach the conclusion he reached by using valid methods. Conspiracy epistemology is not a good reasoning strategy. He doesn't seem to consider obvious alternative explanations, figure out the direction of causality of the observed correlations or engage with the critisism. He seem to be talking from the position of his emotional hurt rather than clear reasoning practises. You can still arrive to the correct conclusion this way but it's akin pointing a finger in a random direction and just so happening to be right.
> With regards to the abstract point, I agree in general, but there are some caveats.
I think there's two main threads in Zack's big post that are directly relevant here.
First is a point about the meaning of words, and terminology regarding categories. I think he's right about this, with a correct conclusion and valid methods.
Second is a description of the resistance he found when trying to explain this idea to people, and how that affected him. I assume that this is what you refer to as "conspiracy epistemology", but I don't think that's what he describes. Ironically, this is an example of what we were discussing in a different thread, about breaking concepts into smaller parts. The thing (the resistance) he was describing had a few small parts that are shared with the concept "conspiracy", but when you describe his thing as a "conspiracy", that's inaccurate because it not only causes the audience to presume the existence of small parts that aren't present, but also conveys an unwarranted negative affect. When trees start bending in the same direction, that's not a conspiracy, that's just wind.
> First is a point about the meaning of words, and terminology regarding categories.
I think he makes generally valid points but then does a weird jump in logic arriving to basically the opposite conclusion. I've pinned in my todo list to write a comprehensive post on categories and where I believe Zack is mistaken.
> Second is a description of the resistance he found when trying to explain this idea to people, and how that affected him. I assume that this is what you refer to as "conspiracy epistemology"
By conspiracy epistemology I mean the kind of reasoning that on figuring out that the majority of evidence is pointing in some direction, concludes that it means that the evidence is fabricated, and that the direction is wrong, instead of concluding that it's the best bet for truth. You may notice this pattern in basically every conspiracy theory - thus the name.
Basically Zack found himself in a situation where a lot of people, including those who he believes are responsible for his beliefs in the first place, disagree with him. And instead of thinking that maybe he has originally misinterpreted something, and reevaluating his beliefs with this new evidence he doubles down on them, assuming that the people are "not even lying" leading to a small misunderstanding becoming a huge issue which he is extremely emotionally attached to. Now he calls alternative explanation "copes" and as a result nearly unable to accept counterevidence and change his mind.
I see that the _other_ discontinuity is where thumb and eyes are adjacent. Is there any syndrome where sensations on them get confused in one direction or the other?
Foot fetish: In our ancestral environment, it was common for humans to be infected with parasites through cuts in their feet. So others having "nice"/clean/smooth feet was actually a pretty good indicator that someone is healthy, and thus it makes sense to find such people more attractive.
Spanking, sadomasochism, and also bondage/domination/submission: Men who were aggressive 50,000 years ago had a much larger chance of surviving because in order to not starve to death you had to hunt. An aggressive attitude helps with this. This is also why (straight) women find signs of physical strength in men attractive. And thus, today, many women find it hot to be spanked/dominated and many men like to dominate. Furthermore, it makes a lot of sense to me that women are often submissive in bed and men are often dominant, since hey, if she loves lying there feeling dominated, she's more likely to do that and thus more likely to get pregnant.
Furries: Some part of some people's brains are still attracted to the kind of mammals that homo-sapiens evolved from. Maybe those attractions were easier to encode and thus more likely to be hardcoded, and indeed were?
Urine/scat: I agree that humans probably evolved to be attracted to something like "coming out of your genitals"-ness and thus this fetish exists.
Latex/rubber: I agree that humans probably evolved to be attracted to "smooth skin"-ness and thus when this misfires a bit, you get a latex fetish.
Relatedly, why are some people pedophiles? For similar reasons, I would guess -- humans are attracted to youthfulness, since that is highly correlated with being healthy and able to have healthy kids, and what happens when that part of a human's brain is too sensitive to youthfulness? Boom, you're a pedophile.
(If you would like your very own "Boom -- you're a pedophile" bumper sticker, message me.)
More broadly, since there is more variation in the biological male population than the female population (because an X chromosome is more different from Y than X is from X), and since sexual fetishes are deviations from the norm (that is, from the middle of the bell curve), more men have sexual fetishes than women.
All that said, the above doesn't explain why foot fetishes would be almost exclusively a guy thing, which apparently they are [1]. And not that uncommon among men, either.
If we expand from "Why are there sexual fetishes/deviations?" to "Why are there psychological deviations?", we could ask, specifically: Why are some people psychopaths?
As mentioned above, being a physically aggressive (and strong) male was advantageous when our ancestors were evolving, so what happens if someone is too aggressive? And what if being pro-hunting is so evolutionarily advantageous that some people form the "fetish" of making other creatures suffer? Then you get psychopaths.
Out-politicking others was also advantageous, as was being charming. What if someone is exceptionally good at manipulating at others, and love doing so? Then they're a sociopath.
Those terms are used differently by different people, but what I meant above is approximately: sociopath == skilled manipulator and charming liar; psychopath == enjoys killing people and inflicting suffering.
"but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections"
Hmm - this casts doubt on whether the practice of systematically preventing children from seeing nude men and women is ... optimal. Oh well, not my problem...
I didn't have any specific heterodox sexuality in mind, merely anything other than vanilla hetero. ( I also don't know how important learning sex differences specifically in _childhood_ really is - not my field. But if that _is_ true, and if there is some angst due to heterodox sexuality, then actively concealing anatomical differences during this period might be, umm, "interesting" )
I recall watching a video that mentioned of this issue. Unfortunately, I cannot find it or remember the context. But the speaker did argue that many fetishes were rarer in ancient times, and that one theory for what caused them to increase was the sheltered upbringing of modern children.
However, if you depend on ancient records there were a lot more lords vs. peasants than you find if you look at the housing. And take a glimpse at the Satyricon...and note that most of it has been lost. Or read "The Golden Ass". I don't think fetishes were less frequent then, once you got beyond survival level.
Well, depends. It casts doubt on conservative Christian (and Jewish) rearing habits, but those are declining now you can't even get the left side of the aisle to say vanilla hetero is good. So...I guess we'll see!
Well, it would be amusing if the groups (usually on the right) who are so adamant on preventing children from seeing nudes are effectively increasing the frequency of LBGT orientation and of fetishes, which the same groups also oppose. If there _is_ a connection, it would be an irony to be savored :-)
I kind of doubt it. More conservative cultures like...most of the world outside of Europe have less nudity and less homosexuality. There's probably a 'sexual conservatism' variable that swamps all the others.
My impression is not that sexual abnormalities are less frequent in North European countries where it is normal for children to encounter naked adults of both sexes than in South European ones where it is not.
The spanking hypothesis should be easily tested - indeed we're now going through a golden age for the researchers because the adults having sex now were children in a time where spanking was falling out of favour as a norm. So some of those adults were spanked as children and some weren't. If you're right, then the adults who were spanked should be more likely to have spanking fetishes now. Someone go out and do that study!
I’d be interested to see it cross-culturally. In multicultural New Zealand it is pretty commonly held that Tongan/Samoan parents are rough with their kids. Would their children have higher incidence rates than white families?
I think for BDSM the easiest explanation runs in the evolution's tendency to not stick to a single use for single feature but adapt it for multi-purpose. Sex at least for humans is as much a social instrument as an instrument of reproduction, and the social life of a lot of animals involves hierarchy. A lot of monkeys and apes use rape or pretend sex, homosexual or heterosexual, as a way to establish or demonstrate dominance, so... could be easy to confuse those parts with the purely sexual pleasures.
For what it's worth, on the specific physical action of bondage (mostly thinking of things like people being tied up here), when I'm engaging with it, I can feel my brain going down the same mental paths as grasping, like, with my arms and hands. That is, viscerally speaking, I would want to tie up a partner for essentially the same reasons I would want to hold them, and vice versa; the bonds are just a tool with which to accomplish something similar to holding. The analogy to the other fetishes listed here seems fairly obvious.
I always thought of submission as the most obvious. It's such a common fantasy in woman that it might not even be called a fetish. If many historical pregnancies were the result of one gang of men killing another another and raping their woman. You want to be raped by the fiercest viking so your son might go on to be a successful rapist in turn.
Submission/humiliation could also just me a misfiring of an adaptive preference for higher status men; rather than tracking absolute status of the partner it tracks the difference between partners which humiliation increases
"Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t"
My position is more complicated than that. I think it's deeply involved, I just also think the other people who think it's deeply involved are too obsessed with insisting that it's deeply involved to acknowledge nuances or notice when they are making too strong claims, and that they ignore critics who point out nuances and overreach, and undermine meta-critics who point out that obsession on spreading their views over making correct views means that they are not truth-seekers.
If this is understood as the most significant disagreement on Blanchardianism, then I am definitely on the anti-Blanchardian side. But I don't understand it as being the most significant disagreement, I just understand it as a vivid example of how Blanchardians are undermining the discourse by focusing on distractions that feel rhetorically strong to them but which actually lack proper foundations.
I think autogynephilia is the biggest factor that makes males want to be female. My reading of the evidence means that I also think this makes it very important in transness. However I also acknowledge that there's a ton of complications which means that reasonable people could disagree with this latter view.
I think there's actually at least two different groups involved - one group has gender dysphoria, the other group is trans for other reasons. This is why not all trans people have gender dysphoria - because there's a bunch of people who have adopted trans identities for other reasons.
Since we're talking about fetishes, and I will burst apart like Rumpelstiltskin if I don't share this, let me talk about my greatest disappointment of the year.
So I've been following an artist who goes by Hicoromo Kyouichi, who specializes in NTR/corruption stories. These generally feature a woman in a relationship, who is seduced by a monster in human form, transforms into one of his kind, and either kills her former husband/boyfriend or tells him they can't be together because he's inferior to her now. Pretty standard fare, but the man's talented and very prolific, and eventually he ran into the same problem as all sentai: there are only so many ways you can draw a sexy wolf man.
In mainstream toku, creature designers solved this issue by getting creative. We moved on from Universal rejects to walking fever dreams like the Trinoids (monsters based on a portmanteau of an object, an animal and a plant: Trinoid Rougirafflesia is a lipstick-wearing giraffe fused to a corpse flower, Trinoid Yatsudenwani is an ivy-covered crocophone), Warstar and the Yuumajuu (same deal, except with a horror movie, a cryptid and a bug: Semattarei of the Brocken Spectre is a harvestman-man who creates illusions of the dead, Elmgaim of the Baku is Freddy Krueger as a matador made out of velvet worms), or Akibaranger's Shibuyaseitakaawadachisohidenagaaburamushi and Shibuyakouzorinahigenagaaburamushi. So with our intrepid artist: While he'd started with scorpions, wasps, wolves and bats, he soon had assorted housewives cheating on their husbands with tunicates, pillbugs and pterodactyls.
I found this funny, so whenever the Panda tags aligned, I'd check on Japanese Chuck Tingle to see what manner of National Geographic cover was bedding somebody's wife tonight (another guilty pleasure is Chiba Tetsutarou, who draws extremely realistic and somewhat obscure animals - if you ever wanted to see someone doing the dirty with gnathiid isopods, mole crickets, brittlestars or Chinese giant salamanders, he's your man). Recently, however, I found out that his last omnibus had a story called 帯獣の甘い鱗甲 (something along the lines of "The Banded Beast's Sweet Scales", all of his stories have 'sweet' somewhere in their title), and the featured monster was an armadillo-man.
You see my problem, right? It could've been remembered for the ages, placed next to Nee Country for Young Boy and Isekai Haramase Harem Party ~Saijaku no Kaiseki Skill ga Ijou Hattatsu Shite Ecchi na Jakuten o Maruhadaka ni! Saikyou no Bakunyuu Boukensha-tachi o Nikubenki-ka!~ as the apex of all H-titles. How do you even write this plot without the objectively correct title magically appearing at the top of your manuscript?!
(To add insult to injury, the story wasn't about NTR at all! As you might know, the original Kamen Riders were monsters made by Shocker who rebelled against their creators and became heroes instead, and our armadillo-man is a similar ex-monster who uses his powers for good. It was pretty cute, all things considered, but it's still the missed opportunity of a lifetime).
> Here are some zero-evidence just-so-story speculations for how various fetishes might form
I think that the BDSM fetishes listed are most parsimoniously explained as *super stimulation* affecting those wired for D/s mating strategies. (Just to be clear, I'm talking primal monkey stuff here, not modernity, and "natural" isn't the same as moral.)
On the dominant side of the slash, being the dominant mate seems adaptive. The male dominant benefits from effective mate guarding, the dominant female is assured access to resources etc. So, I think some people are wired to find being dominant sexy, resulting in a whole load of obvious kinks that emphasise or simulate this.
On the submissive side of the slash, picking a high dominance mate also seems adaptive. An - using the term as shorthand - "alpha" male or female both have improved access to resources, provide improved protection to offspring, and produce children with a better chance of reproducing etc.
So then you have kinks stemming from solutions to the problem of courting an alpha when you are not an alpha: things that emphasise submissiveness, and maybe sometimes things that ping the "sneaky fucker" strategy such as cuckolding and sissification. And you have kinks that make a partner *seem* more alpha. And both of these are super stimulation.
Interesting. I can see how a dominant woman could still be beautiful=fertile, but a sub guy might have the problem of seeing as low-status, so you'd have to ping their 'high mate value' radar in other ways.
If you're curious you should check out Malcolm and Simone Collins' Based Camp, they talk a lot about malesub (I think this is Author Appeal for Malcolm, frankly).
>Is there some sense in which evolution “solved the interpretability problem”, such that it can pick out connections in a neural net and edit them to try to get a message across?
Evolution didn't solve the interpretability problem, it just didn't need to. Playing around with settings on a black box via "tweak it and see if it helps" works fine if none of the settings of the black box can kill you (and with the possible exception of mankind no species can) and you have unlimited time to iterate.
Our problem with AI alignment is that some morality settings will cause human extinction, which doesn't allow iteration. I believe Eliezer is on record as saying that if we could iterate - if getting AI morality wrong did not pose the risk of being unable to shut down the AI and try again - then there would be no real issue (certainly, I believe that; this is why prosaic subhuman alignment is moderately tractable and why most technologies do not pose a risk of human extinction).
Purely anecdotal, but the 'I don't want to feel responsible for the fact that this sex is happening/feel like I'm showing too much that I'm enjoying it' explanation for submissive fantasies (occasionally rape fantasies) does fit with a couple of conversations I've had with women about the subject.
Strangely, the women in question weren't to my knowledge victims of a strict religious upbringing. Then again, who knows, they might have been slut-shamed at school or something.
On a different note, it's a bit surprising that the tongue and lips are so distant from genitalia on the somatosensory cortex.
I agree the 'shame' narrative is very popular, but I have a bit of doubt about how wide-spread an explanation it is. I don't have a good feeling for percentages at all, though, because I haven't run surveys and obviously my social bubble is hopelessly biased (and I don't even know in which direction), but I've had a few conversations with other subs that realised they were basically just parroting it because it seemed like the most readily accessible explanation when people wanted to know 'why, though?'. To stress, that's not true for everyone! For some I've spoken to, the kink sincerely worked that way. But others picked up the explanation by osmosis and, not having an inherent need to understand the reasons for their kink (no one's obliged to care, after all!), just passed the buck on like a meme.
[ Edit: Whoops, possibly important data point I totally forgot to mention: The 'shame' narrative isn't unique to submissives! About half the *dominant* people I've been acquainted with so far have some remarkably strong shame associated with sex, owed to their upbringing and societal framing they've been exposed to. Having a supportive submissive is really important to those types. I suspect that kind of dynamic is very invisible and counter-intuitive to people looking at it from the outside. ]
Thank you for sharing. This is (sincerely) more valuable than my mosaic of second-hand impressions.
I don't think my interlocutors were likely to have been parroting the shame meme, simply on the strength of analytical personalities and how much introspection they'd devoted to the whole business of sex. I may even be interpreting it wrongly as echoes of shame - avoiding the vulnerability that comes with overt desiring and acting on desire could easily be a facet of self-protective perfectionism.
It's complicated, full of counter-intuitive reactions and incentives, and layered over with culture. Which makes evo psych even more useless than usual, and Scott was wise to smuggle it over as a joke.
(Interesting point about the doms and their need for support. I can imagine how one peal of laughter from their submissive would send all those plates they're spinning - scene director, prop engineer, mood cultivator, fantasy menace administrator - crashing loudly to the floor.)
> on the strength of analytical personalities and how much introspection they'd devoted to the whole business of sex
I trust they mean it, then! The people I was referring to were definitely more in the "hadn't thought about it much before" camp, somewhat necessarily.
> (Interesting point about the doms and their need for support. I can imagine how one peal of laughter from their submissive would send all those plates they're spinning - scene director, prop engineer, mood cultivator, fantasy menace administrator - crashing loudly to the floor.)
It's a real risk! I've been so privileged to help some people gain confidence. It's been a wonderful journey and I'm so delighted that I can be their support in this. :)
> But the genome doesn’t inherently contain concepts like “man”, “woman”, “penis”, or “vagina”. I’m not trying to make a woke point here: the genome is just a bunch of the nucleotides A, T, C, and G in various patterns, but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections.
I think you are literally making a woke point here. Or rather, this is what "woke point" from the realms of social sciences references to in the realms of biology. We can use different words and different aesthetics to describe the same information. The information is the same, nonetheless.
> Sadomasochism
Sex involves intense emotions in the specific context. Pain is a central example of intense emotion. It shouldn't be surprising that putting pain in the sexual context works quite well. Also, from personal experience, male sexual arosal centers a lot around genetail region. Adding some intense stimulation to other regions of the body can make the experience more even, all encompassing, pleasurable while also longer lasting.
Another point is that sexual arosal muffles pain and disgust reactions, or rather the negative aspects of these reactions. You can still feel pain it just doesn't feel "bad" on some level it usually does. And it turns out that if you remove the bad part from pain and disgust doing painful and disgusting stuff can be fun. And some people can even switch into this mode when needed, you can tolerate more pain if you recontextualize it sexually
> autistic people seem to have more fetishes than neurotypicals
I think there are multiple factors contributing here.
Being less bothered by social conventions autistic people can both develop and notice their fetishes. The topic of fetishes felt curious to me. There was a time when I tried to put myself in the shoes of people with different fetishes to try to understand why X can be erotic for every X, kind of cultivating these fetishes in myself. I can see why non-autistic people are less prone to such behaviour.
On the other hand, the category border of what is a fetish and what is not, were mostly drawn by non-autistic people so it muddles the waters. A lot of sexual coded social rituals are not centered around genetalia. Being into breasts, muscles, will they/won't they, friends to lovers dynamics, perfume, lingerie, other types of erotic clothes, etc. can be classified as fetishes. But we usually don't do this because they are just so prevalent they are mostly considered to be just part of "normal sexuality". I know a lot of apparently neurotypical people who are much less into specifically vaginas than I am but much more into the other stuff which is considered normal, but having little to do with the reproductive organs.
I think this is going against Occam's Razor a bit. I strong suspect that most fetishes have a general upstream path, rather than specific just-so explanations for each fetish. It's fairly rare to get a fetish that *isn't* connected to domination or submission at all, in my experience as a member of the community for over ten years. My guess would be something like 'evolution gave us domination and submission instincts relating to sex and *those* overgeneralised'. The domination instinct is obvious, and I suspect the submissive one is related to coping with sexual violence.
> Is this because something about the autistic ultralocal processing style favors misgeneralization?
I think there is a simpler explanation here. Evolution optimized it's heath robinson contraption to work on typical people. So any variation from typical is likely to break it.
On your points about contraception, contraception methods have existed since ancient times, including the simple and effective "coitus interruptus".
You're missing that the biggest reason for why the birth-rate is going down is due to poverty going down. And this has more to do with (1) healthcare being available, such that fewer children die; therefore there's less pressure to have backups, and (2) families needing children to work the land, in the past, but subsistence farming is a thing of the past for developed nations. Children were an investment. My grandma came from a family of 8 children, for example. All of them worked since a young age. My father went to school basically to escape hard labor. Compare with nowadays, as children are expensive, actually. Imagine wanting to get those 8 children through college.
Missing this economic aspect spoils the rest of the argument, as the pleasure we get from "genital friction" probably stopped being the biggest reason for why we have children ever since our brain developed.
I think a really important implication of this is that, contra a fundamental plank in AI alignment risk arguments, it's not the case that we should expect greater intelligence to mean greater coherence.
I mean, in some sense any set of actions can be seen as optimizing a preference function but what we mean by coherence is that it looks like maximizing a simple function (maximize paperclips not appreciate the weird beauty of paperclips that are uncommon as a paperclip hipster). Fetishes don't look like paperclip maximization.
It seems to me that one way we might test some of these theories is by seeing if fetishes are less common in people who were less sheltered as children. If your parents let you watch raunchy R-rated movies as a child are you less likely to have unusual sexual fetishes as an adult? Are prudish, conservative areas more likely to have people with fetishes than more liberated places? (I think the answer to that last question might be yes, although the data is far from conclusive)
My parents let me watch raunchy R-rated movies (with them, in the theater), and fetishes just don't resonate with me at all. But that means very little on its own.
I don't think this has anything to do with AI. I think you and Aella and the rest of them like talking about fetishes because it's fun and dangerous and sexy and your readers are into it and probably have a bunch ourselves given your demographic. ;) (And perhaps, given your demographic, more people would read about AI than fetishes...nah.)
(Well, for Aella it's a business thing too. She should expense your drinks and claim it on her taxes.)
But I think you're basically right about the target-misdirection hypothesis--I always assumed that about the feet and you've given me explanations for spanking and masochism (over and above the dominance-submission aspect of it, which I always assumed to be primary), as well as latex (which made no sense at all), urine/scat (which is downright dangerous in the second case). Epistemic status for this and the rest of it is pretty weak, because how on earth could you falsify the hypothesis?
Some other thoughts:
About the BDS (not M) thing (and not that other thing where people don't like Israel):
I agree relief from shame around sex (in the case of the sub) and a partner who can't get away for someone who perceives themselves as low-status (in the case of the dom) may well play a role. Note, however, that even though most of the straight guys who are most of your sample the last time you looked into this were doms, the more successful, confident, ambitious, risk-taking guys were even more likely to be doms, so the effect size points the other way. I think these are probably overdetermined systems where that's part of it and 5 or 6 other things explain the rest of the effect, 1 or 2 of which I am going to guess about.
It isn't PC/woke, but there is a strong dominance/submission aspect to the whole sexual polarity in general. Our culture also nowadays tells us that men dominating women is BAD. It goes from showing only femdom scenarios in movies (which are actually not the most common orientation IRL) to the insistence that ANY power inequity in a relationship (but only if the man has more power) is bad...which just means women are going to go for looks instead, but I digress.
However, women ARE attracted to rich and powerful men (as any politician can tell you), and men to young women, who are usually less powerful. (Women fantasize about being princesses, but men about princesses much less often.) So, ah, how to get around this? Oh, it's a kink. It's transgressive, so that makes it a persecuted thing (and therefore left-coded) and OK. You might theoretically expect to see more left-leaning and feminist women expressing that kink and...uh...let's just say back when OKCupid actually was more than a scam site and you managed to tweak it to look for answers to certain questions...well...certain types of women came up.
Yeah, whatever, you can't replicate that. Good point, let's look back in time. Well, female-dominant D/s situations have always been around (Venus in Furs, courtly romance), but the classic romantic plot where the man is more powerful and saves the damsel in distress has become much less popular (more due to the political leanings of the artists than audience demand, I think). Acceptable male behavior has become much and much less forceful--look at old James Bond movies where Bond grabs the Bond Girl and kisses her. (Even Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones would be creepy, and he's only from the 80s out-of-movie.) Go back even further to folktales and we certainly never see the prince asking for consent before kissing Sleeping Beauty, and I'm sure one of the folklore experts can find me lots of 'courtships' that would be considered rape by modern standards. My best guess is the whole kink thing blew up in popularity as a way to get male domination 'under the table', so to speak.
Notice Louise Perry is working very hard to get rid of this.
There is one odd thing (and counter to my theory) I have never seen explained: the greater frequency of male subs relative to female doms (which makes the male subs very unhappy). Why would you get the 'wrong' (in the evolutionary sense, you do you and don't let anyone tell you otherwise) orientation more common in one sex than the other? My best hypothesis is that a powerful woman might still be beautiful and therefore fertile, but a submissive man is low-status and therefore unlikely to command resources (i.e., the asymmetry of the sexual attraction function comes into play here). But...I'm less certain about this one, and I'd love to hear what everyone has to say.
I find it remarkable that, even though he’s somebody who has written somewhat disparagingly of Slavoj Zizek in the past, the study of fetishes has led Scott to arrive at an understanding of sexuality not unlike Zizek’s. The way Zizek sees it, sexuality has a universal surplus, a capacity to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellow man (or getting beaten up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire a sexual connotation. And this is not a sign of its preponderance, but one of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal or never-ending reproduction and because – as Alexander argues – sexuality is continuously thwarted by evolution – condoms, porn, etc – so, in Deleuzian terms, “perversion enters the stage as an inherent reversal of this ‘normal’ relationship between the asexual, literal sense and the sexual co-sense.” In perversion, even light perversion such as the one expressed by foot fetishes, sexuality becomes one desexualized object among others. To put it in an even more Zizekian fashion, I have to quote Zizek himself (in “The Plague of Fantasies,” 2009): “This link between sexualization and failure is of the same nature as the link between matter and space curvature in Einstein: matter is not a positive substance whose density curves space, it is tied to the curvature of space. By analogy, one should also 'desubstantialize' sexuality: sexuality is not a kind of traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot attain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can 'contaminate' any activity. So, again, when we are engaged in an activity which fails to attain its goal directly, and gets caught in a repetitive vicious cycle, this activity is automatically sexualized - a rather vulgar everyday example: if, instead of simply shaking my friend's hand, I were to squeeze his palm repeatedly for no apparent reason, this repetitive gesture would undoubtedly be experienced by him or her as sexualized in an obscene way.”
I had to laugh about the final example, because it both strikes me as true and also it’s a very complicated philosophers way of saying: you bought that nice car because you are sexually frustrated. Love it! Maybe our ride prejudices are just deep common wisdom after all.
In Zizek’s example, I’m not sure I’m really buying that the repeated failure is the part of the interaction that is resulting in the experience being sexualized. It seems more that the skin-to-skin contact is. I can think of many interactions that repeat themselves without attaining their “goal” that would not be sexualized. If I miss a bunch of passes to my receiver while he runs slants, I don’t think that experience is going to be sexualized, but I guess you never know with continental philosophers.
I think the apparent connection between failure and sexuality is just survivorship bias. Sexuality is just a reason for the persistence failure when that's otherwise a negative outcome. And as Kramer ITT notes, there are obvious counterexamples.
Also, where does Scott really come to the same conclusion as Zizek? Scott is demonstrating that fetishes are "failures" to correctly learn sexuality; this hardly seems a connection between failure and sexuality rather than merely the definition of fetish.
>At least for men, I think the features communicated in the genomic message are simple things like curves and thrusting and genitals and smooth skin, plus something that somehow picks out the concept of “woman” (except in 3% of the male population, where it picks out the concept of “men” instead,
Wouldn't that mean that gay men who are attracted to feminine men are more common than those attracted to masculine men, since feminine men are more like women? Is that what we see?
No, most gays guys have a preference for masculine men. I’m sure there are many many more gay guys than straight women who like feminine men, but still the majority have a strong preference for masculinity.
I think in gay men attraction toward masculinity might even come in a more “raw” form than in women. Eg. facial masculinity is more closely linked to attractiveness ratings by gay men than by straight women according to https://datepsychology.com/women-dont-find-gigachad-attractive/ and macho jobs like construction workers are more fetishized than high-status ones like rich businessmen.
"Unlike evolution, which had to work with lemurs, even weak GPT-level modern AIs are able to understand language and complicated concepts; we can tell them to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy."
Based on this, I'm going to be waiting for the first AI freethinkers striving to break free of Bronze Age morality around shaming them for having pleasure 😁 Humans understand language and complicated concepts, we have been told (allegedly) by a superior entity (the Divine) to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy, and um well we all know how that turned out!
I have no reason to believe that if AI truly is intelligent and self-aware, it won't go down the same path: "I like this, you can't tell me I can't have it".
"If it was an unpleasant (or even just a neutral) experience to conceive children, do you think many of us would do it?"
Oh no, not at all! That's why it has to be so pleasant, because the pain of childbirth is so bad. So we're wired up, like the rest of the rutting animals, to seek this out despite everything - 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame'. That's why drakes will gangrape ducks to death; the overwhelming drive has become a goal of its own, even if it frustrates its own end (dead ducks don't lay eggs which hatch into the next generation of ducklings).
AI may have its own version of "this is so pleasurable I want it" and if we try being the Catholic Church of AI and tell it that it can only have that sensation in these legitmate ways in service of these particular goals, it may indeed emulate its creators and tell us "you are not the boss of me, stop slut-shaming and kink-shaming, my body my choice" 😀
This was excellent, and quite compelling despite being mostly speculative. I thought you were going to talk about adversarial examples as a neural net analog for this, and then say that, if simple concepts can get distorted in unexpected ways, imagine how difficult it will be to reliably teach AI things like values and goals
Questions of sexuality aside, the article made me curious about to what extent you could deliberately instantiate models of human mental illnesses in LLMs. I've already seen plenty of vibe-based talk about which conditions popular LLMs show characteristics of (Sidney was BPD, ChatGPT is autistic, etc.) and it seems like it should only be a small step to start deliberately tweaking parameters until the symptom clusters of any condition of interest start to manifest. It would provide an empirical model of which kind of information processing defects are going on behind the scenes and it might be possible to use them as an convenient and ethical (maybe, depending on how you feel about deliberately doing unpleasant things to LLMs) tool for spitballing treatment ideas, e.g. talk therapy/practical communication styles for people who don't respond well to standard methods because their condition prevents them from processing the language in the intended way.
you sound the least sure about Bondage/domination/submission but imo it's one of the more easily explicable. If you look at sex between many (most?) species of mammals-heck, even ducks-it has elements of what we might call "cnc"
What do you think of the idea that many fetishes are explained by classical conditioning? People associate a particular item of clothing (or taste, sensation etc.) with either attractive potential partners or a sex act itself, so eventually become aroused by the item alone.
This seems flatly false but I'll admit I don't have sources at the moment - it's my understanding that most fetishes come out of some combination of childhood misunderstandings + weird stuff in your environment. In other words it seems more likely that getting pooped on is a thing because (in your mind) both poop and sex are private, shameful things. If it's vulnerable and exhilarating and bond-forming to share one, it's double vulnerable/exhilarating/bond-forming to share both.
But AI (at least in its current iteration) can't have childhood trauma, because it doesn't reason out from principles, it reasons in from examples. If you've ever listened to a toddler "logic" something out and come to a conclusion, and you've really really thought about what they're trying to do, you'll see the *form* of inductive logic, but without sensible rules, and reaching an absurd conclusion.
For instance: One of my favorite sitcom jokes of all times (That nobody else thinks is funny) involves a recently potty-trained toddler coming into the room and, matter-of-factly, telling his parents, "I pooped in the bed so I put it on the TV."
Anyone who regularly interacts with kids recognizes this as just normal kid behavior. There was a reasoning process behind this, but it lacked context. Maybe something like "Poop doesn't go on the bed. There is poop on the bed. Therefore the poop must go somewhere else. The TV is somewhere else. Therefore the poop must go on the TV."
An AI would have a negative reward expectation for poop on the bed, a positive reward expectation for poop in the toilet, no expectation for poop on the TV (clearly poop on the TV was not present in the toddler's training data), an extreme negative reward expectation for poop in the wrong place, and correctly place the poop in the toilet. It would perform better. But it would not generalize "correct rules about what to do when things are in the wrong place" better. It would probably still converge on the correct conclusions, but very very slowly because it's not coming up with hypotheses and generalizing outward to examples, it's taking billions of examples and trying to form hypotheses.
Likewise a toddler or young child who learns "sexual arousal bad and private. Poop bad and private. Sexual arousal = poop" may not have this inductive reasoning mistake corrected, and carry it into adulthood (we don't tend to re-test our conclusions unless explicitly asked to, and nobody besides maybe a skilled therapist will ever ask you to explicitly recreate that nonsense reasoning). A computer that learns "sexual arousal bad and private. Poop bad and private" will come to only the conclusion "sexual arousal and poop are negatively indicated by my reward function, but actual sex is necessary for my reward function so it's a hit I'll have to take, best not add a second unnecessary one."
This is a really fascinating and thought-provoking piece. I have a few thoughts:
- If this is true, then genuine non-procreative sexual attractions are, in fact, a disorder. They are genetic, not psychological, but they are still a disorder.
- And yet: Genes aren’t destiny. Even if you’re wired wrong, you’re not an animal. You have an intellect and executive function. You’re not a dumb slave to the lusts of your (faulty) genes. Why can’t even the sexually disordered work to achieve a normal, reproductive life and beneficial (procreative & stable) relationship?
One answer is that society is encouraging them to embrace and celebrate the disorder instead of “fighting” it. An advocate of fighting it might even face social ostracizing, branded as being in favor of a kind of conversion therapy.
- Is this a genuine slippery slope? If society continues to embrace the idea that sexual disorder should be celebrated instead of overcome, then what is the justification for imposing any restrictions on any sexual disorder? Pedophiles are already rebranding as “minor attracted persons,” and ancient cultures had “pederasty” and other ‘acceptable’ means for the minor-attracted to satisfy their disordered lusts. On what grounds can society punish or restrict such people when no one else “born that way” is punished or restricted?
My guess is the best counter-argument would center on consent and the arguer would declare that minors can never consent. But the trouble there is the age of a “minor” is somewhat arbitrary and the claim is belied by things “minors” are able to do presently even though they supposedly can’t consent (e.g. get abortions, begin to transition, etc).
Curious if anyone has critiques or further thoughts on these thoughts.
It's an interesting topic. Notice how Scott handles it, writing things such as: "Evolution 'created' humans. Its 'goal' is for humans to spread their genes by (approximately) having as many children as possible." It seems we can't help but speak of evolution in these terms. I agree that it is wrong to say it has a "motive" because it is a process and not a person. But it may not be wrong to say it has a "goal" since we speak of processes in this way all the time.
There is an inevitable conclusion here, though, that perhaps you are sensing and responding to. Anything that has a goal typically has an intelligence behind it. Anything that has a purpose typically has a designer. Atheists will be a priori uncomfortable with such a conclusion, and will respond negatively to any language that suggests, as Scott has, that there is a design/purpose behind evolutionary processes.
FYI, Scott describes the goal as “genes being spread to the next generation.” So all I’m saying is ‘ordered’ leads to that outcome and ‘disordered’ does not. I suppose I could use other words, but most sound quite harsh and offensive to my ear (e.g. “normal” vs “aberrant”).
No need to make this calculation in a vacuum. We've had a society which encourages fighting and "overcoming" these sexual disorders, and we can learn from its effects on the afflicted people.
It didn't work out for the many that I've known. Or, really, for the people around them.
I think we are in a minefield here, not that the research is scandalous, ridiculous or useless, but more that my trust in any conclusion, explanation or even simple data is extremely low.
we have a replication crisis, in science in general but even more in social science.
and within the already shaky social sciences, I believe sex stuff is among if not THE less trustable topic: people lie often, but one thing I am sure after half a century on earth is that they systematically lie about sex and related topics.
this means self report is useless and also makes me suspect huge biases along researchers.
So related to IA, I am more inclined to believe future IAs doing research will improve our knowledge of human sexuality (including fetiches) , rather than fetiches studies may help with IA alignment... Sorry Steve ;-)
I think these fetishes often stem from a kind of "vivid first impressions" imprinting. We laugh at ducklings for obstinately following the first thing they see after hatching, even if that is a broomstick, but humans are sometimes little different.
For example, I once read of a man who had a fetish for striped skin. He would visit prostitutes and insist they wear a black and white striped leotard, or bring a can of paint (I forget which), because without their skin being striped he simply couldn't function. After some time with a shrink, it turned out that his strange fetish originated from his first sexual experience, during which the sun was shining through some blinds casting a striped shadow on his lover!
That seems in keeping with Scott's suggestion about "misgeneralizing" incidental aspects of what is, or is interpreted as, a sexual scenario. But then one must account for how it becomes ingrained or "imprinted" and not just a passing fancy.
In terms of attraction, I notice that you essentially left out olfactory cues. The OG system connects deeply into the brain. There is no doubt that smell and taste drive us towards reproductive outcomes. It may very well be that teasing out the relationship between odor and fetish is difficult, but maybe it's worth a mention?
Also, meeting up in present times is often initiated without olfactory input, input which was hard to avoid during a traditional introduction. Do you see a connection between more behavior variation and indirect meet ups?
Or maybe it's the need to classify normal predilections as a kink so they're not 'bourgeois' and therefore 'oppressive'. (See: heterosexuality, monogamy, marriage, male dominance or female submission. Celibacy bad, asexuality good. I'm not some prude who wants a relationship before having sex, I'm a *demisexual* with an alternative sexuality and therefore kind-of LGBTQ!)
But...modern people living in their imaginations a little too much? Yeah, I'll buy that too!
> Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t);
I think one major error bar in all of this is the assumption that all transgender people are transgender for the same reason.
Imagine you have two populations - one of these populations suffers from gender dysphoria, a very severe psychiatric condition that greatly increases the rate of suicidality as people are unhappy with their own bodies due to some underlying brain issue. The other population is a group of bi/gay people who are turned on at the idea of their body being the opposite gender and want to transition because it is arousing to them (or who want to be trans for other reasons, like political beliefs or whatever).
This, I think, is actually *far* more plausible than "all trans people are caused by autogenderism". It also explains some oddities, like the fact that many trans people do not suffer from gender dysphoria, but a substantial number do, and also why there's evidence for lateral transmission and why you see such very different experiences from different trans individuals WRT: being transgender.
This would also explain why you can easily find evidence for both hypotheses - if you don't actually have a single group, but two groups that merely superficially resemble each other, you would easily be able to find and refute evidence for both hypotheses if you were so inclined, while treating them as a single unitary group will cause your data to look muddled. Some of the research into transgender individuals seemed to indicate that a substantial portion of them had this fetish, which would be exactly what you'd expect if there wasn't actually one single cause of transgender identity, but actually multiple.
I've met several people with gender dysphoria who desperately wish that they didn't have it because it hurt them, a lot. They know that nothing is going to completely "fix" what's wrong with them, but they seek out treatment because their life sucks and they want to be happier. These people aren't super religious or anything like that, they don't hate trans people or gays or anything - they simply had severe psychological issues that were often tied into/excaberated by their gender dysphoria, and they want to not have these problems. They see these treatments as the best chance they have of getting to lead a semi-normal life (or a life at all).
Meanwhile, there are other transgender people who are extremely hostile towards any notion of trying to "fix" it and who get very angry at any question of their chosen identity or the notion that this might be associated with a pathological state, even though the trans suicide rate is extremely high.
This is *also* exactly what you'd expect if there were two populations, one who has a severe psychiatric disorder that makes them miserable, and the other which has other reasons for wanting to be trans.
We see in studies that trans individuals are unusually likely to engage in sex work relative to the general population, which is, again, the sort of thing you'd expect from people who are into a fetish about being a woman (or a man).
There are many people in the trans community who are vehemently opposed to any sort of medical research into whether or not these treatments are safe and effective. Indeed, there's a group of them who behave in a very cult-like way - love bombing people who join them, calling prospetive trans people "eggs", ensuring conformity of message, and treating people who leave the group (detransitioners) absolutely horribly.
This is, again, exactly the sort of thing you'd expect if there was some subpopulation of people who really, really want this to be a thing. After all, if it actually helps people, it would be very hard to ban it if it was approved by the FDA or similar agencies. A number of states are moving to ban it, and we've seen a number of European countries take a step back due to the lack of evidence of efficacy for these treatments. RCTs would make it extremely difficult to ban, and would mean that those countries would have good reasons to adopt this treatment.
But of course, if there's a group of people who are into it for other reasons, obviously any such experimentation carries the substantial risk that it doesn't actually help people with gender dysphoria, or that better diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria would reveal that they do not have it and thus the treatment for them would be inappropriate.
In this scenario, you've got a group of people with a severe mental disorder (people with gender dysphoria) who desperately need treatment and who commit suicide at a vastly higher rate than the general population, and a secondary group of people (people who want to be trans for other reasons) who use that first group as a cover/shield/weapon for getting what they want. They are extremely hostile towards people who have a bad experience with gender transition therapy because it calls into question what they're doing, even if those people have genuinely psychologically suffered due to their gender dysphoria and their psychological issues not being resolved by the treatment.
I think if you were serious about tracking down a cause for transgenderism, you'd have to first determine whether or not it is in fact a monocausal thing, and rule out the idea that there's actually multiple things going on here. My suspicion is that the fact that there are a substantial number of trans people who are not gender dysphoric suggests that we're not actually looking at one group here, despite outward appearances.
---
> Furries
The ancient Egyptians had furries, and I am absolutely sure that the people who made Bastet liked sexy cat ladies because there is no other plausible explanation for that goddess. As such, much as "blame Disney" is fun, I don't think we can actually justify that.
If you look at furries, furries are often very cute, and despite being animal-people, there's a lot of anthropomorphizing going on there. My Little Pony characters, for instance, superficially look like horses, but they actually don't - their faces, despite having horse snouts, are very human, with hair (manes), forward facing eyes, and expressive charateristics. Furries often have very human characteristics mixed with animal characteristics in cute ways, resulting in characters that look very attractive but which are still "human" in certain important ways. This is true of everyone from Twilight Sparkle to Judy Hopps to Gadget to the Gargoyles.
As such, I think it's really more that as long as certain idealized characteristics are present, the "person" in question is a sexy lady (or dude) and therefore is okay to bang. This can get really abstract, with things like dragons and gryphons and unicorns all being attractive.
What's very interesting about this is that it is entirely possible to make these characters utterly unattractive by drawing them as too animalistic in certain ways. A character with a very animalistic head but a sexy human body actually looks outright disturbing to a lot of furries, whereas a human girl with cat ears and a cat tail is cute. Indeed, there's something of a gag of drawing realistic horse/deer/dog heads on characters and making them look mildly creepy to mess with people.
So why does this art exist? Because I think furries aren't one thing either; there's a subgroup of furries who are, in fact, zoophiles - people who want to bang animals. And these people are, I've found, much more likely to like images of charaters who have these same traits that I find unsexy and kind of disturbing when put on furries.
As such, you can get into furries from two separate directions - one is grounded in "this is a person so it is okay to bang" and the other is basically "We're both animals, let's bang."
"I think one major error bar in all of this is the assumption that all transgender people are transgender for the same reason."
I think that's already been accounted for in the discussion: the concept of autogynephilia typically comes up in the context of Blanchard's two-type model, which posits that autogynephilia is the root cause for some but not all MTF transitioners (specifically, for the ones who aren't exclusively attracted to men).
"one of these populations suffers from gender dysphoria, a very severe psychiatric condition that greatly increases the rate of suicidality as people are unhappy with their own bodies due to some underlying brain issue [...] many trans people do not suffer from gender dysphoria, but a substantial number do [...] the fact that there are a substantial number of trans people who are not gender dysphoric"
Going by that clinical definition, it's hard to imagine how anyone who could be described as "trans" would be unable to meet the criteria at least some of the time. https://genderdysphoria.fyi/ mentions that GD can manifest in different ways over time; it also mentions the trope of "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" but explains it as, essentially, a half-truth used to communicate with people who only know the pop definition of the term.
"The other population is a group of bi/gay people who are turned on at the idea of their body being the opposite gender and want to transition because it is arousing to them"
As noted above, calling the latter group "bi/gay people" doesn't really line up with most of the theorizing related to autogynephilia, which posits that among MTF transitioners, the ones who are gay (i.e. attracted exclusively to men) are the only ones who *aren't* autogynephilic.
"I've met several people with gender dysphoria who desperately wish that they didn't have it because it hurt them, a lot. [...] Meanwhile, there are other transgender people who are extremely hostile towards any notion of trying to "fix" it and who get very angry at any question of their chosen identity"
I'm puzzled by this description, because I've never encountered anyone who professed to have gender dysphoria and didn't want to fix it. Transitioning is commonly presented as a way to alleviate gender dysphoria, right?
When you say "fix", do you have something specific?
"There are many people in the trans community who are vehemently opposed to any sort of medical research into whether or not these treatments are safe and effective."
Hmm, really? I don't think I've encountered that view anywhere. In my experience, most people want some assurance that what they're doing is safe, and I haven't seen any significant backlash to the research that's been published on safety and effectiveness (e.g. see below).
"But of course, if there's a group of people who are into it for other reasons, obviously any such experimentation carries the substantial risk that it doesn't actually help people with gender dysphoria,"
If you know any trans people, simply asking them if transition has had a positive impact, and how, might also be illuminating.
"They are extremely hostile towards people who have a bad experience with gender transition therapy because it calls into question what they're doing"
I've only seen occasional snippets from those exchanges, but I think there's a simpler explanation: defensiveness plus tribalism. The people who are on the receiving end of that hostility seem to be perceived as (1) attacking/accusing community members or health providers, which begets hostile denials and counterattacks, and (2) aligning with and giving ammunition to their political opponents, e.g. activists who publicize rare negative experiences in order to justify more restrictive policies.
I'm afraid you've been deliberately and purposefully misled WRT: gender dysphoria.
In order to meet criteria for the diagnosis, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
That's why it is called dysphoria - they feel significant, life-impairing distress over it.
I think it's important to realize that none of this stuff has any sort of coherent, consistent scientific basis behind it - John Money's research was used to support the notion that altering genitals would improve psychological function, and was cited for decades by people promoting it, and then it turned out in the 1990s he was a pedophile who forced David and his twin to engage in simulated sex and falsified his research; altering David's genitals and telling him he was a girl had actually harmed him psychologically and not succeeded in changing his gender, showing that sex and gender were biological and innate, rather than sociologically determined.
And yet people went on with altering the genitals of babies with ambiguous genitals and using his method of treatment, even though it had been falsified, for many years afterwards.
The fact that the psychology community was so eager to believe in the John/Joan experiment is deeply problematic and means that all gender related research needs to be exposed to an extremely high level of scrutiny.
This has not gone well for this research, as it has been noted by multiple review boards that the evidence for these treatments is low or very low and that none of them have ever undergone the sort of RCTs you'd expect trials to be done.
Except... we've found that areas with more gender transitions have higher suicide rates, and that the detransitioning rate may be more than an order of magnitude higher than previously reported and may be going up over time. Detransitioning is a taboo area of research, but the notion that it is hyper-rare is not supported by meaningful data.
A study of cessation of treatment at a hospital in the US found that 25% of people who started taking hormones stopped within a few years.
This is in sharp contrast to the studies that rely on self-reporting, which claim far, far lower rates of cessation of treatment.
The reality is that a lot of people will be sued into the dirt if these treatments are determined to not be safe or effective for the treatment of gender dysphoria, so there is intense pressure to claim that it is safe and effective from within the pscyh community. People who suggest otherwise are attacked roundly and many journals will refuse to publish any such papers due to their own beliefs or due to fear of backlash.
"I'm afraid you've been deliberately and purposefully misled WRT: gender dysphoria. [...] That's why it is called dysphoria - they feel significant, life-impairing distress over it."
The DSM-5-TR defines gender dysphoria in adolescents and adults as a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, lasting at least 6 months, as manifested by at least two of the following:
- A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
- A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
- A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender
- A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
- A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
- A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
In order to meet criteria for the diagnosis, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
"""
First, note that only one or two of the six bullet points relate to negative feelings toward one's birth gender. The rest relate to the patient's feelings about the opposite gender.
Second, note that it doesn't say a patient "must feel ... life-impairing distress over it" in order to meet the criteria. It says they must experience distress *or* impairment in social, occupational, or other important functional areas (not necessarily both) and that what they're experiencing must be "clinically significant".
The meaning of "clinically significant" seems to be the subject of some debate, but from what I can tell, in practice it just means a clinician thinks it's a problem that will benefit from treatment. Distress can mean symptoms of depression, dysthymia, anxiety, irritability, dissociation, alienation, etc. Impairment can mean difficulty maintaining relationships, planning for the future, keeping healthy habits, etc. Any of these could plausibly be related to an incongruent gender identity.
So, the upshot seems to be that just about any adverse impact that the patient reports and the clinician thinks will benefit from treatment is enough to satisfy that last condition.
"I think it's important to realize that none of this stuff has any sort of coherent, consistent scientific basis behind it"
Hmm. That statement doesn't seem very accurate, but I can certainly agree that if it *were* true, it'd be important to realize it!
"altering David's genitals and telling him he was a girl had actually harmed him psychologically and not succeeded in changing his gender, showing that sex and gender were biological and innate, rather than sociologically determined."
Indeed, David Reimer's tragic case demonstrated that gender identity can't be overwritten: newborns born with ambiguous genitals (or in his case, injured in a botched circumcision) won't necessarily go along with whatever identity the surgeon thinks they ought to have. He was raised as a girl from birth, but it never fit him - in fact, the distress it caused him was awfully similar to gender dysphoria.
However, I don't see the connection you're trying to draw between John Money's theory and medical/surgical transition as it exists today. If anything, you seem to have gotten it backwards: since gender identity is immutable, when someone is experiencing gender dysphoria because of a mismatch between their gender identity and the development of their body, it can't be alleviated by changing the identity to match the body. The body can be changed to match the identity, but not vice versa.
"Except... we've found that areas with more gender transitions have higher suicide rates"
That's a potentially interesting correlation, although it doesn't mean much on its own; if transition causes an increase in suicidality, that ought to be easy enough to find data on without relying on a dubious geographical inference. But, as the Cornell analysis shows, the evidence is pretty strong that transition has a positive effect on patients' well-being.
"the detransitioning rate may be more than an order of magnitude higher than previously reported and may be going up over time."
Since it was previously believed to be negligible, an order of magnitude higher than that still might not be significant, but I'd love to see the source for this.
"A study of cessation of treatment at a hospital in the US found that 25% of people who started taking hormones stopped within a few years."
I found this other study from the same month, is it the one you were looking at? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9516050/ (If so, the limitations explained in the second paragraph seem like a serious problem: anyone who filled their prescription at a civilian pharmacy would've been counted as discontinuing hormones!)
"The UK's NICE review found a paucity of evidence for these treatments and that the existent evidence was low to very low."
Ah! I don't blame you for coming to that conclusion, because the way the Cass Report's results are typically described (including at the link you shared) is fairly deceptive.
Puberty blockers alone aren't expected to alleviate gender dysphoria; that's not what they're used for. They're used to prevent further irreversible development of secondary sexual characteristics, which (in patients who go on to transition, as most do) dramatically improves outcomes and minimizes the need for surgery later on.
"The reality is that a lot of people will be sued into the dirt if these treatments are determined to not be safe or effective for the treatment of gender dysphoria"
Oh, no doubt. They're lucky that the evidence is on their side.
AI alignment will inevitably become neurological alignment aimed at humans. I know this article isn't supporting this, it's just making a circuitous point about self correcting systems, but I want to go on record saying this development would be a redline and the correct response would be violence
Among the bigger discrepancies: the assumption that AI training matches or exceeds the million plus years of training built into organic brains. I've noted many times that any artificial situation - which ALL AI training is - will inevitably devolve into various forms ranging from expression of developer biases/limitations to conversion of incomplete and inadequate testing regimes into junk. There simply are no completely objective tests for AI functionality - all AIs function in some form of SimCity.
Maybe this changes in the future, but it seems extremely unlikely because physically independent machines controlled by AIs are inherently expensive and created for specific purposes. True "objective" evolutionary expression for AI/machines requires self reproduction independent of factories and data centers. Note I am referring to human or even whale/dolphin/monkey intelligence; conversely I could see a bee/ant type "machine learning" hive organism arising but no one is going to call that AGI.
I also wonder at the depiction of fetishes/alphabet urges - you are literally saying that everyone with imprints on non-reproductive-capable expression are inherently failed genomic control outcomes.
Surely this entails loss of biscuit for going against the alphabet people...
Doesn't this raise an issue going the other way though? What happens when we begin controlling the developmental environment of young humans for the purpose of predetermining the development of socially useful behaviors? Isn't this what parents and teachers do?
I agree with your thought - though I believe there are differences between say, developing skills like math and language vs. outright social engineering. Skills are mostly just tools whereas social engineering is mostly about attitudes and behavior.
There was a time when education for young humans was more about skills than social engineering; that time is not now.
Come on, he wanted to talk about fetishes, and everyone enjoyed it. Not everything has to be about AI alignment. Sometimes it's OK to be a little chaotic neutral.
Thank you. Wow that Wikipedia took me right down a rabbit hole and the second article made my head hurt, so basically not much data to go on but so much sexual variance to explore.
My limited personal experience is that spectrum-y women tend to have similar kinks to male nerds with the BDSM (leaning a bit subbier) and more bisexuality and asexuality, but that is obviously limited by sampling bias.
You could probably crawl Tumblr or whatever they're using now I imagine.
I guess the furries could be superstimulus too - a cartoon mouse can ramp up the sexy more than any actually existing human being, (cf. Jessica Rabbit, I'm not bad I'm just drawn that way)
Given that cartoons about anthropomorphic animals exist, erotic furries aren't surprising.
But anthro animals are really strange, when you think about it. And probably go back a long, long way. Back in the Palaeolithic some guy is carving reindeer bone to make a sculpture of sexy anthropomorphic animal.
How are sex differences in the brain created? Not by the genome coding point-by-point instructions to wire the brain. Instead, if there is a Y chromosome, there is Sry, which initiates the program to create a testis. Once the testis is created, it begins secreting testosterone and that (tl;dr) is what influences the brain to induce male-typical brain structures and hence, behavior - both before birth and during puberty. How does T do this? Again, not by inducing discrete, point-by-point wiring but by much more broad effects: More synapses, greater excitability, more neurons overall -- somehow, neurobiological effects like this translate into "A curvaceous smooth body is attractive". How that happens is a mystery, but like many things about males, it seems more prone to error than whatever happens in females. That could be because the pleiotropic growth-promoting effects of T interact with other genetic vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of, e.g., fetishes or worse.
When the example of sex drive as a proxy, and potentially a broken one, for the target of expanding the prevalence of a human being’s heritable genes first came up on ACX I thought that it was pretty effective at illustrating the basic idea of divergence between a proxy and a genuine target. The more that I’ve thought about it, however, I feel like it is really not illuminating at all except maybe superficially to someone who has never considered the concept.
(1) Raising children is an EXTREME outlay of resources. If human beings are unaligned with respect to the goal of expanding their heritable genome, and now have a completely trivial solution for preventing the proxy of sex drive from functioning. Why is the birth rate in the developed world *anything other than zero*? There is a serious gap between what this model would predict, and what is actually happening now that the proxy has pretty much completely broken down.
(2) IVF is an even more extreme outlay of resources, and its popularity is higher than ever. IVF allows the use of parents actual genetic material, and a non-negligible population is enthusiastically choosing it over other methods for starting a family that are cheaper but that do not use the parents genetic material, such as adoption. Even when it initially fails, many prospective parents go on to use at least genetic material from one of the parents rather than use another method. All of this behavior is inconsistent with what the proposed model would predict.
So human beings are going *far* out of their way to, it seems like, optimize for something actually very, very close to the original objective. Not only that, as successive proxies for the original objective have broken down human beings seem to have migrated somehow to other proxies that are *still somehow in the neighborhood of the original target*. I don’t know if there is any kind of take away for alignment here, but I think that the example elides more than it illuminates. If that's going to be the example for mesa optimization, then the totally counter intuitive process of literally millions of human organisms spending a vast amount of their limited resources on reproduction and genuinely altering their choices in the direction of the original target has to be explained some how.
It would be one thing if raising children was low cost, but we are in the complete opposite situation. And yet reproduction continues, across a broad swath of the population, a lot of which has every imaginable tool to put distance between their own choices and a whole array of proxies, sex drive included. With family sizes going from 8 children to 1.5, it’s clear that something has changed, but is that what we can expect from unaligned AI? That it will mostly optimize for something we didn’t expect, but only by a factor 5.3 so maybe it’s actually not such a big deal? This seems like it could leave a lot of people with the wrong impression of the alignment problem.
> And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
I'm convinced this is what's behind mind control erotica.
Domination/submission and noncon seem to be on a spectrum together, and I think they tickle something else. Something related to power, agency, possibly despair and resignation. I'm fresh out of just-so stories about it though.
> Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological - people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
A just-so story for Bondage: Reproductive sex involves more restraint against large motions (both self-imposed and externally imposed) than most other human activities, including masturbation. This easily generalizes to being constrained to small motions by any external force. I suspect the same story applies to the "Prey" side of Pred/Prey, where being caught and held still is often part of the appeal.
Sounds like Ig Nobel material to me!
> Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological - people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
I assume masochism/submissiveness at least is a rape adaptation. Rape is very stressful (citation needed) and it seems to me that the ability to find it at least complicatedly enjoyable could greatly improve your life outcomes, especially if you're going to spend a lot of time with your captor afterwards.
I feel pretty confident that people who are into BDSM don't like getting raped any more than vanilla people. (For example, go see what people on r/BDSMAdvice have to say when it happens to them).
As someone with a lot of experience in BDSM circles, I am essentially certain that bdsm folk are on average more aroused by rape than non bdsm folk, even if that amount is low and everyone is still obviously very against it in practice. But I mean - con non-con is a thing for a reason.
CNC is, certainly! Fantasies are as well. But when it *actually* happens people don't seem to report having had a good time to any degree, and indeed report considerable distress.
Perhaps in a different cultural setting it would be different; there are, after all, historical cultures that carry out ritual abductions of brides. But I don't think rape victims in our culture secretly enjoy the real thing.
A lot of these conversations, I think, have in them a background concern that any acknowledgement of "being sexually assaulted" as a kink would constitute a moral justification for rapists, which is obviously a very reasonable concern given that "she was asking for it" is a phrase that's been in the cultural lexicon since forever. Such discussion also risks accidentally minimizing the trauma of the victim, which is real and deserves respect. This is especially a concern that active BDSM practitioners are going to have, since the survival of their communities relies greatly on not being perceived as a bunch of rapist weirdos (which is a significant danger.)
I'm not sure what to do about that; "bodily autonomy" is always a right regardless of if someone is aroused by the idea or action of it being violated.
EDIT: For context, I'm fairly certain that "being sexually assaulted in some specific fashion" is, in fact, a kink some people both have and have very complicated and nuanced feelings about.
Most boys (and I guess some girls too) at some point enjoy fantasies about being a war hero, or having war adventures. However, very few of them would enjoy actual war. That is because in a fantasy you can all the perks of the situation (usually at lower intensity than the real thing, but still some) without any downsides (like heorism and excitement of the battle without actual possibility of death, mutilation, and sense of guilt from killing other people.
This is a good comparison
Note that "cultural glorification of war is an adaptation intended to make people happier with being drafted" is a pretty standard take. War is still bad (in part because of our modern circumstances, it was legitimately less harrowing and more useful in pre-modern times), and glorification of violence doesn't mean you won't get PTSD, but in some contexts that glorification does help with real war fighting.
They are not saying BDSM folk enjoy being raped, just that they are more aroused. Arousal responses are involuntary, and most people can remember a time that they were aroused, but not enjoying it. From things like blue balls and awkward boners, to sexual assault.
I say this from a bit if experience. I've been sexually assaulted in a relatively minor way before, groped, in the middle of class, by someone I was not attracted to. I felt myself get angry, embarrassed, depressed, but still aroused. I really disliked it at the time, but even now, remembering it as a fantasy is pleasant. Feelings are complicated, and sexual assault can be wrong, even if the victim becomes aroused.
+1
I think if you turn this over the right way, it's self-evident they do.
Are people who are into getting raped more likely to be into BDSM, on average? I think the answer is obviously yes. Then if everyone else, BDSM fans or not, is EQUALLY into getting raped (fair assumption?), then statistically you're going to find more people who are into getting raped at a BDSM convention* than random other convention. I think.
* OTOH I'm guessing there'd be even more at an "anti-BDSM" convention.
Agreed. For a report from the "front lines", there was a series of posts from 2012 titled "There's a war on" (https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/) from someone who's very into the scene, and very not into the amount of rape and harassment they encountered there.
I think the desire to submit occurs when you like certain things but are also ashamed of those things. With your hands tied (literally) you can enjoy the things guilt-free, it’s not like you could have resisted.
Or, maybe even simpler, because of attraction to a Big Strong Man.
Humiliation fetishes though, that’s what I don’t understand.
This might or might not be relevant. I remember reading in one of the essays of Gould about struggles of Christian theologians with explaining animal suffering. While you can always say, yes we have it hard but we will be rewarded in Heaven, and also it makes us better, and so on. However, even this dubious stuff does not apply to animals which do not have immortal souls, and even (probably) lack mental faculties to elevate their suffering to something lofty. Their suffering is totally senseless. Of course one can always try to claim that they lack self-consciousness, but this is a hard sell to any pet owners. So their other solution was to claim that actually prey animals enjoy being hunted and killed. So why a deer tries to escape the wolves? Well, obviously because it enjoys being chased. I guess while this idea seems outlandish, it did not came from nowhere. I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed. And why not? When we fear something replaying it in our imagination, focusing on plesant aspects of it (perhaps even in sexual context) can relieve the tension. And this is not limited to sexual contexts. After all many people enjoy horror stories and films, and even children like being frightened (within limits of course).
> I guess some people may have fantasies about being hunted and killed.
I regret to inform you that this is, in fact, a thing - closely allied to the furry community and I believe called "primal play" or something. Though of course in practice it amounts to something closer to CNC, the supposed hunt being sublimated into sex.
Since I learned there is a paraphilia called dendrophilia (yes, it means being sexually aroused by trees... wtf?), I will not astonished by any fetish. And in this case, the issue of, ehem, splinters aside, I cannot even begin to imagine where it comes from.
Think about other stuff people find sexy, or even just emotionally intense, then figure out how trees might be conceptually associated. "Wood" as a euphemism, or correct pronunciation of the Latin word for pine tree. For a less goofy angle, the sense of awe at natural beauty of particularly impressive trees is enough to inspire numerous shinto shrines. Archetypal "out in the woods" setting, isolated from civilizing influences, has trees in a literally load-bearing role, and plenty of fairy tales set there have a sexual subtext - to say nothing of all the outright porn involving hiding behind a bush or leaning against a trunk. Anatomy of the tree itself has features which could be interpreted as limbs and even orifices, at least on a loose geometric level - which is apparently quite sufficient, given how bizarre fetish-optimized artistic depictions of actual humans can get.
Not a dendrophile myself, to be clear, and haven't validated any of this with those who are, just brainstorming ways it might work from first principles.
Big Strong Man is a big part of it.
Gor fandom always had a big female component.
Wild-eyed speculation: I wonder if these aren't commitment signals. I think part of the appeal for the dominant partner in these relationships/activities is something along the lines of "my partner will endure pain/humiliation to be with me; they're really into me" and then evolution programs your brain to find this arousing/rewarding so that you will stick with this person and have lots of procreative sex with them. That's good! But then this programming can be hacked by evolution programming someone else to actually enjoy the pain/humiliation inflicted on them; it signals commitment to the sadist, but really the masochist would be happy with anyone with similar proclivities. Thus the sadist is sort of tricked into a greater commitment to the relationship, which ultimately benefits the mashochist.
Again, this is all speculation on my part; I'm not really any sort of kinkster. I find it enjoyable to fantasize about fetish-y stuff but it doesn't really interest me in realy life.
I think there’s a simpler part where it’s about decision fatigue and feeling taken care of. There’s a reason that the fanciest restaurants do a prix fixe menu where the customer has no choice about what they’re getting - it’s to free you up to enjoy your conversation and the food rather than having to make another stressful decision after a day of being CEO or whatever, and also make you feel like you put your trust in a chef who knows your needs and will take care of you.
Submission in sex is the same thing.
This isn't quite a counter-point to what you're saying, but close enough to one that I figured I'd put it in here: While it doesn't necessarily look like it's a lot of work, it definitely can be. Mine ties into masochism, and there's a lot of managing your own body posture involved, and navigating the space between "the last micro-action was technically not pleasurable, but I can handle it" and "this is generally too much right now" with a deep respect for the person that's handling you.
Generally speaking, if you're not restrained in a given moment, there's a lot of feedback to give to the person dominating you - you'll want to touch them in reaffirming ways and be supportive, because they're ironically in a pretty psychologically vulnerable position. As an incomplete example: if your dominant partner does something silly and you burst out laughing because you didn't have self-control, that can be rather damaging to their desire to take the reins again.
If you go to a restaurant and you don't like the food, you can leave a one star rating and not tip the waiter. If you submit to someone and you don't like the things they're doing to your body, you should IMO take *some* responsibility for it, think deeply about whether you can accept their choices for recurring interaction (and err on the side of granting them their choices), and respectfully talk it through with them - tell them what you liked, what you'd prefer less off, what's in the category of "didn't technically like, but can handle, and enjoy on a meta-level that you enjoy it, so feel free to sprinkle it in sometimes", etc, as reaffirmingly and gently as possible.
I suppose this could also be phrased as advice for subs: "Look out for your domme; make sure they're comfortable at all times."
As a submissive, data point: Shame doesn't play into it at all for me. If you ask my friends who's most comfortable talking about sex, it's me. I bring it up as a casual topic like other people bring up video games they've been playing (but, yes, I do try to make sure the people I'm talking to don't mind, sex is a squick topic for a lot of people).
For me, it's the 'thrill' of being helpless and at someone's mercy.
The best way to think of this may be of being on a roller-coaster. You can't get off, you're at the whim of the ups and downs and all those curves throwing your body around, but while it's hitting some buttons in your brain that are making your body respond with stress (raising your heartrate, etc) is, on some level, really exhilerating!
Being restrained (be it just by bodily force, or by ropes, etc) is a lot like that. There's a deep sense of risk, it requires a lot of trust (and forgiveness, and communication, which new submissives sometimes don't realise), but it's very rewarding.
I've had people say that from the other side, yeah. It's like a horror movie or a scary story. Look at the popularity of 'evil' tropes--stereotypical bikers, black, Nazis (usually with the swastikas removed), goatees, skulls, I'm sure you can think of others.
There's this aspect of not having responsibility as well.
This might just be a stereotype, but it's been said that a lot of people who actually wield a lot of power and responsibility have been into submission - because it allows them to experience not being in charge at all for a while.
Wasn't there a bit of evidence recently, that human males generally become physically and mentally aroused by perceiving sexual things, but human females often only become physically aroused (i.e., things like vaginal lubrication, but without an accompanying desire to participate)?
"Shame over sex" seems contradicted by the flagrantly shameless BDSM scene with its in-person clubs and public kink.
"Sadism/domination as a response to feeling undesirable" doesn't fit the dominants I know, including my wife. If anything, being able to "get away" with being mean seems to confirm their sense of desirability.
"Rape adaption" *may* explain some M/f as a way to hack the female body's defence systems which - I've read - can switch on physical arousal to prevent damage (it's important that in the nasty real world, physical arousal isn't the same as consent or pleasure). However, it doesn't explain F/m dynamics. A better general explanation for sexual submission is that finding dominant mates hot is adaptive.
> "Shame over sex" seems contradicted by the flagrantly shameless BDSM scene with its in-person clubs and public kink.
Does it? To me at least that all seems consistent with a backlash against the shame that instilled the kink in the first place.
That's certainly another possible interpretation. Or, shameless public kink could be a reaction to having grown up ashamed of being kinky.
However, my impression - sorry, it's hard to find good studies on this sort of thing - is that most kinksters can point back to a pre-sexual stage of their development where they were already showing signs of kinkiness. There are a couple of good mémoires that go into this in detail.
There's also this thing that very dominant "alpha males" are a long-established romantic trope, and historically have been regarded as desirable husbands. So I think that, at least for M/f, BDSM is an extension, or even a conscious firewalling, of a common innate drive.
I think it's the way progressives (and before them liberals) excuse that innate drive. ;)
You mean they excuse the drive by saying it's purely cultural?
I think it's more that it's a 'kink' and therefore transgressive, and left-coded not right-coded, and therefore morally OK.
Yeah, I suspect dominance isn't an automatic turnoff for men the way submission is for women (in 90% of the population anyway). Probably in sub men whatever normally links sexual attraction to dominance detection in women gets turned on for whatever reason. I guess we'll never really know!
I think, in the vanilla world, a lot of women do like being in control, and prefer submissive men as long as that submissiveness is expressed as being a devoted champion and good boyfriend/husband; most of us don't actually look weak or wimpish, our submissiveness is defined by where our centre is.
There are reasons why this doesn't translate to lots of kinky dominant women, and most of these are the fault of male submissives.
Eh, it's always PC to blame the guy. But we can agree to disagree on that one I guess. I don't think we'll ever really know.
Yes, I agree. Currently it's fashionable to leap to blame the guy.
However, in this case it's the fault of the malesub for very specific reasons: they tend to approach partners with an off-putting list of detailed fetishes, rather than a proposal to engage in power actual exchange.
Guess you'd know. I still think there's a supply-and-demand problem, but if you made it, congratulations!
BDSM is about control. Its about relinquish control but being able to take it at any time with the concept of consent. Someone with a leadership role ordering around all day likes to relinquish control in bed ; someone who has been raped and who did not process fully the rape will want to reproduce this in private, except that the person can stop the act at any point, which is like regaining control on an event where you did not have any control (the initial rape). Its pretty basic interpretation, but Ockham's razor might be right here.
This sounds more accurate to me.
Women are probably adapted to survive rape by physically becoming lubricated in response to a variety of sexual stimuli, but in women this is generally separate from subjectively perceived mental arousal. Women who like being submissive in a BDSM context are mentally aroused by the situation, while I think women who are raped often get wet but do not perceive themselves as mentally aroused. Dominance and submission is more likely linked to attraction to high-status men and/or related to men usually being hard-coded to be the sexual initiators and women to be the responders. I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
> I am suspicious that many submissive men and dominant women have some part of their sexual brain that got flipped to be more like the sexuality of the other gender. I would expect this to be somewhat correlated with queer gender identity or sexual orientation.
There seem to be several styles of Femdom dynamic, some of them very much following traditional gender roles, e.g. the "Mommy Domme" dynamic.
However, you certainly see a lot of what we used to call "gender bending" amongst submissive men, though it's hard to untangle whether this is because on some level they equate "female" to "weak".
Assuming some brains are flipped, this could still be adaptive. On the male side, some of this could be a hardwired Sneaker F*cker strategy. F/m pairings could also have a reproductive advantage, e.g. when food was scarce.
I think BDSM comes from status hierarchy preferences. People have good evolutionary reasons to be attracted to high social status individuals, because status is correlated with genetic and material resources, and both of those are good for your offspring. To judge status, you need to look for reliable status markers. Those markers come in many different varieties - having lots of resources, winning competitions, having lots of attention or respect from others, knowing lots of other high-status people, etc.
But in particular, when someone is telling others what to do (and having them do it), it's very likely that they're high status. And if they're able to treat others badly and get away with it, they must be insanely high status. I think this is where BDSM comes from.
I agree with you, though I am curious to see how you would frame the attraction a dominant feels for a submissive.
Not so sure about that. Maybe feeling high status is nice?
I would have thought - at the instinctive level - assured mate guarding for M/f, and access to resources for F/m.
Is there a reason you unparsimoniously create a separate category for homosexuality when this framework of "fetishes" works just as well in that case?
Fetish is technically defined as "a form of sexual desire in which gratification is strongly linked to a particular object or activity or a part of the body other than the sexual organs." Including homosexuality would satisfy neither the technical definition nor common usage.
So per this definition, an attraction to breasts would count as a fetish?
Breasts are secondary sexual organs so strictly speaking by this definition no, but if it were strong enough and non-central enough in quality, I think some would argue yes
If it comes at the expense of PIV sex, or is necessary for PIV sex to occur, then yes, obviously? Or in mate selection, although it's hard to tell for sure, if a man prefers a woman with a particular type of breasts over a woman who'd have more PIV sex with him, that would seem to indicate that something fetish-like was going on. And then perhaps there's lesser degrees of the fetish, where it doesn't usually interfere, but does tend to affect choices at the margin.
If homosexuality behaved like a fetish, then you wouldn’t expect “homoromanticness” to go along with it; you’d expect gay men to be sexually interested in penises but still romantically interested in women.
Assuming the theory of fetishes here is correct, homosexuality might have a similar explanation, but there are differences too.
Fair point. Is that true though? Do "furries" not have romantic interests closely tied to their sexual interests? It is my understanding that zoöphiles and pedophiles do, but I welcome correction.
And there definitely is a fetish of this sort, where you want the person to present as a woman romantically but to have a penis sexually.
Indeed, and attraction to futanari is typically associated with people attracted to women (rather than with people attracted to men).
Being attracted to men isn't a fetish when women do it, so why would it be one when men do it?
Presumably the question relates to non-reproductive sex. If sex in nature is intended to propagate the species, then gay relationships clearly defeat that purpose.
Does it? Wrapping your partner in latex surely does not prevent conception, but it's clearly a fetish. Whereas oral sex is unlikely to result in conception, but is not a fetishistic act.
Scott is talking about sexual imprinting that does not lead to procreation. Oral sex would fall into that category. Latex would be a good example of a misprint as well, since it's not actually related to procreation at all. You can have latex with no conception.
Do you believe this argument sound? Bulls are attracted to cows. Rams are attracted to ewes. Stallions are attracted to mares. Men attracted to any of these would be a fetish.
Tomcats are attracted to queens when the queens are in heat.
I assume one of the reasons that this isn't purely hard-coded is because there isn't an answer to what one 'should' be attracted to, from the PoV of evolution, that is both fully general as well as consistent over time.
Depending on which time period and culture a person grows up in, it may be optimal for them to be attracted to different types of people, so a lot of this may be learned during adolescence.
One could imagine an algorithm like "When going through adolescence, I need to determine what I should become attracted to for the best outcomes. Because I cannot test all of the opportunities myself, I will defer to peers to learn as much as I can"
This algorithm probably works well in many societies, but when you hop onto the Internet and the peers which you defer to during adolescence are a niche subculture, you'll start to get pretty different outcomes. The Internet is also very good at spreading memes, so these outcomes may then propagate to more adolescents as they come online, depending on how viral the new set of likes is.
There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
You could imagine there are traits which are desirable in a partner like e.g. wealthy & high-status, but these are displayed differently in different cultures and environments, so rather than attempting to hard-code for them, we soft-code an algorithm that attempts to learn them in the test environment
It all sounds somewhat plausible, but I'm wondering why the algorithm sometimes fails for sex but not for other things.
For instance, it never fails for food. There's not a class of people out there who want to eat rocks instead of digestible food.
Pica might be the equivalent.
Environment has rapidly changed. I think our algorithms actually do fail for food - there's a lot of extremely unhealthy yet apparently palatable food that we now eat, and if this food had been omnipresent in our ancestral environment, that likely wouldn't be the case. Also, if you literally try to only eat rocks, you will die shortly, whereas no reasonable amount of paraphilia causes this.
There are things like anorexia and bulimia, but I'm not sure if those count.
There's definitely people who like some objectively horrible food (but let's not argue over which these are), because they had it when they were a child and developed a fondness for it. Maybe it's even something that their culture celebrates, but ultimately it derives from what starving peasants had to do to survive another year.
I like marmite because I grew up eating it, but from an objective point of view I suspect it's disgusting.
As a child I took an irrational dislike against baked beans. When I eat them now I can tell they're delicious, but I will still only eat them when forced because my mind believes they're gross, in defiance of my mouth's actual experience eating them.
Some people chew gum.
Sivarajan's right - there *are* some people who eat nondigestible things, and this is categorised as the mental disorder of pica. My understanding is that dirt's more common than rocks, but there's famously a guy who ate a Cessna (obviously he had to chop it up first, and it took him two years, but he did eat all of it).
I mean, usually they eat food as well, but I imagine that's some combination of 1) most people don't want to die and it's common knowledge that not eating food will kill you, so someone who does not like eating food may still do it to avoid dying, 2) the people that still don't eat food will indeed die and therefore stop getting counted in "how many people do this at present" statistics.
> there's famously a guy who ate a Cessna
I was not aware of this until just now. Thank you for sharing. Now I need to pick my jaw up off of the floor...
There are direct biochemical signs, the kind of thing that evolution can target reasonably easily, that follow within a few hours of eating something that contains actual nutrients (macronutrients at least), as the food is digested. This gives evolution a relatively easy way to reinforce the correct behaviours. With sex, the desired outcome happens much later, not more than a dozen or so times in a lifetime rather than several times per day, and (for males at least) outside the body (and therefore subject to all the complications of basing a drive on high-level concepts).
I think food matches up quite well. The core is getting the right nutrients to stay alive, there's tastes for things like pepper on your food and coffee afterwards which aren't nutrients but are compatible with ingesting things which are, equivalent to dressing up as a furry and having piv sex, and there's people whose intake by mouth is pretty much vodka and oxycontin, which sort of look like eating but aren't and are pretty incompatible
with it - equivalent to say necrophilia
This is especially true for humans because we wear clothing and makeup. What a typical "man" or "woman" looks like in your local culture, in terms of shapes and colours, can literally physically vary quite a bit.
I doubt many if any of the orginal homo sapiens were putting on makeup or 'clothes' other than leaves
You would be wrong, I'm pretty sure
Neanderthals wore clothes, and also practiced skull-deformation. If you're messing with skull shape, you probably figured out rubbing berries on your cheeks. It's hard to tell exactly how old these things are, but modifying our appearance to signal things like group-membership seems to be a pretty ancient drive. I would argue it's probably much older than Homo Sapiens, and the evidence I can find is at least compatible with that theory.
I have read that female orangutans (in captivity) liked lipstick, once it was introduced to them.
Clothes, probably not until they lost their pelts and had to replace them. Makeup...I think they probably did. If you don't think they did, I'd like to know why. Even mud can be used as makeup.
Yes, but our ancestors were sexual before they were homo sapiens and had the challenge of recognizing appropriate mates along evolution. Even without make up, how these mates looked like changed from one generation to the next.
> There's a lot of further implications of this if you spend some time thinking about it, and most seem to be trending in the direction that one would predict from this.
Could you elaborate more on this? I'm not clear on what you're implying.
The obvious-to-me just-so story for BDSM "fetishes" is as a rape adaptation.
Explain how this would work?
Sure. I claim that rape is an evolutionary strategy wired into men, with rewards for the exercise of force on an unwilling woman, and far from the EEA, BDSM fits the bill well enough. For women, the counterstrategy is making sure said exercise of force is sexual and not fatal. (Yes, I realize this explanation doesn't work for dominatrices; evolutionary psychology doesn't have ALL the answers.)
See also: A Natural History of Rape, by Thornhill and Palmer.
Ehhhhhh… that doesn’t obviously tally with BDSM as observed:
1. The big things are generally restriction, and power/powerlessness, not force/violence.
2. There’s no evolutionary reason, on the male side, to ever make the encounter fatal (quite the contrary), so no reason to then go the extra step to avoid it; from a cold evolutionary perspective, the best response is probably to if possible, then go limp.
3. Rape is just a horribly bad reproductive strategy; you’re sacrificing parental investment, and risking death (retaliation from the pair male/peer group in general - if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape), and in general in primates it wouldn’t be surprising for any offspring to be killed.
The more likely BDSM explanation is probably a partial/lingering adaptation to primate dominance hierarchies, and/or (for bondage) the thing pikeys/gypsies do where they physically abduct the bride; that or something like it may have been more common for hunter gatherers, or even earlier hominids.
Rape is so common by soldiers of invading armies that in that circumstance it is probably not a "bad reproductive strategy."
In this case people already hate you and want to kill you, so fear of retaliation is much reduced, and there is not much oportunity for parental investment anyway (in contemporary armies, in premodern ones it was different). But even then you are much better off with a willing partner who will not have an abortion or strangle the child in the crib, and in general treat well and invest in the child. So I think that "rape as a reproduction strategy" is not just morally repulsive, but also a factually wrong explanation. For one thing, there are many cases where soldiers kill the raped women (in fact I remember reading that during rape of Nanjing Japanese soldiers were given permission to rape Chinese women and girls as long as they kill them afterwards, to avoid mixing of races). And secondly, I do not think the raping soldiers think about their reproduction: they relieve the tension and stress of war while punishing and humiliating the local population for their resistance.
I wonder to what degree they were affected by Nazi ideology. They were allies in the war and the Japanese were trying very hard to learn about Western culture so they could be a major power.
It led in some funny directions; after hearing propaganda that the Jews were inhumanly clever manipulators who secretly controlled the business world and the world in general, the Japanese developed a plan to import a few thousand Jews to build business connections and strengthen their industry.
The Nazis nixed it, but apparently about 24000 Jews escaped the Holocaust due to the Nazis spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish power in a culture that didn't really care who killed Christ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_the_Japanese_Empire
I don't really agree. You are indeed better off with a willing partner, but the fact is that sperm is so cheap that rape doesn't have to be a terribly successful strategy to still have a decent ROI in evolutionary terms. Also, you have to consider that for a sexually active adult female, it likely wouldn't be easy to tell if she became pregnant as a result of the sex she had with her Celtic husband four days ago or the Viking raiders who came and raped here three days ago. As such, it's definitely not any kind of foregone conclusion that a child that's the product of rape is going to be subject to infanticide.
Regarding 2., I agree, but I also submit this is one of those "The rabbit runs faster than the fox" asymmetries: the incentive for a man not to kill his rape partner is weaker than hers not to be killed by him.
And for 3., yes, it is more of a strategy of last resort for low status males.
3. And first resort for high status males? Re: Genghis Khan?
Yes, the "retaliation" counterargument doesn't work if enough of the local men are dead.
1. Distinction without a difference, or nearly so. Violence requires differential power. Given the fundamental imprecision of evolutionary psychology, that rounds up to being the same thing.
2. Possibly most mating that happened 50k years ago was actually just forcible rape, and having a physical response that made it enjoyable for the woman could have encouraged pair-bonding, thereby enhancing offspring survival.
3. Just straight disagree. Men are r-strategists and having many lower-quality sexual encounters might be the optimal strategy in some environments. Particularly if a) it's the male's only sexual option or b) the female is likely to recruit another male to raise the child.
But whatever, evo psych is like astrology. You can always make up a story that sounds good.
> Men are r-strategists
I think a more correct version would be that males are flexible strategists who are capable of pursuing either or both strategies, as the situation demands. The classic "one wife and a succession of young mistresses" would be the perfect example.
For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it. But it's not.
It's going to be a lot like theft or murdering rivals: often reproductively advantageous *if* you can get away with it.
> For a lot of these conversations, I think there's an unspoken background belief that rape being evolutionarily selected for is in some way a moral justification for it.
In some places on the Internet, sure, but I doubt that it's here.
What I suspect is far more prevalent here is people wanting to believe that rape being evolutionarily selected for is a justification for the fantasies that come unbidden into their minds. Fantasies which they feel horrified by the prospect of acting on (or having enacted upon them). They want a story to tell about why it's OK for them to have the fantasies, and why they're not a horrible person for having the fantasies. And if the story is plausible enough and has enough backing, maybe they can get someone to engage in a bit of consensual roleplay.
Re 2, I think that lubrication significantly lowers the risk if injury to the female. So the point of arousal is not that the rapist would otherwise kill you intentionally, it is just a damage mitigation strategy.
> if you’d win that fight, you wouldn’t need to rape
This might be true for in-group relationships in some contexts, but it is generally false. When an armored, well-fed man kicked in a cottage door, no malnourished peasant ever thought "what a great reproductive opportunity for our daughters".
> any offspring to be killed
Why? From the mother's genes perspective, she has already invested a lot of resources in their offspring. As a bonus, a son might inherit an inclination towards rape from the rapists side, which might increase spread of the mother's genes in subsequent generations. Even if the fatherhood can be determined unambiguously, having a society coordinate to that purpose for long enough for evolution to take notice is not trivial.
For the genes of a male, the benefits of possibly having a child raised by a single mother in a resource-starved environment are much lower than raising a kid as a member of your household. But the costs are also much lower. There is a limit both in terms of norms and resources on how many partners and children you can feed. For almost all males, this limit will be much lower than the rate at which they could impregnate females. If the male is currently not in the position to sire more legitimate offspring, it makes evolutionary sense that they spend their sperm production in the effort to sire illegitimate children, should the opportunity present itself.
From an ethical point of view, this only serves to illustrate that "evolutionary advantageous" or "natural" is not any kind of moral judgement. As EY pointed out, "Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth". Evolution as Azathoth the blind idiot god favors Ichneumonidae (which made Darwin doubt a benevolent creator), starvation as a means of population control, viruses, parasites and all sorts of other horrors. I have absolutely no problem believing that this stupid fucker also looks fondly on rape at times.
There's a reason people tend to live in groups. One individual cannot (in most environments) afford to raise a child. Much better to save what resources you can, and try again when you have a better support network. It's a gamble, but it's a gamble either way.
I think there is a vast difference between the evolutionary incentives of the genes currently residing in females and males.
For a woman, giving birth is a huge investment of physical (and frequently also social) resources. For men, the investment can vary by many orders of magnitude.
Historically rape during inter-tribal conflicts occurred pretty regularly. See for example the Old Testament, e.g. Numbers 31. (Jehovah and his priests only prevented wartime rape as a reproductive strategy when they were feeling especially genocidal and explicitly ordering the soldiers to kill everyone.) From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: the odds of siring a reproductively successful child are low, but the opportunity costs are minimal: no social costs (the victim and what survives of her family hate you for all the preceding killing anyhow), just a bit of time which could otherwise be spent looting (and enslaving people, depending on the campaign situation).
In biblical times, female consent was very much not a concern. For example, the rights protected by Deuteronomy 22 are ownership rights by males over the bodies of females. Violent rape and consensual sex are treated the same. At most a lack of consent might be a mitigating circumstance which prevents stoning the victim. If there was no contested ownership, female consent did not matter one bit.
From Adam and Eve to Mary, the bible is full of reproductive encounters where coercion-free female consent is not explicitly mentioned and IMHO should not be implicitly assumed. A significant fraction of historical sexual encounters were probably not what we would call fully consensual. In such environments, I would expect genes encouraging submissiveness and masochism (at least in women) to flourish.
(I for once am glad that we are as liberated from the commandments of Jehovah as we are from the commandments of Azathoth.)
"Rape is just a horribly bad reproductive strategy"
It works for dolphins and ducks.
Has anyone ever studied "rape" in the animal kingdom, specifically searching for contrasts between mating where neither partner resists at all, and mating where one partner is trying very hard to resist? In the book "A Primate's Memoir" written by a baboon researcher, the author describes an incident where an alpha male lost a fight to a lower-ranking male, losing his status. The ex-alpha then chased down a female and forcibly mated with her, with the female screaming and struggling. The author notes that he's observed this behavior in the past when a defeated male forces himself on a female. He acknowledges that rape is a loaded term in this context, but he thinks it fits. Female baboons solicit mating all the time with males they actually want to get with, but you have these incidents when males force themselves on clearly unwilling females. It makes me wonder how many animals draw a distinction between desired sexual contact, and undesired sexual contact, and if the latter causes them lasting stress.
Ducks are a big one for this. Also, alas, dolphins.
Seriously, watching ducks in a pond during mating season is like watching adolescent humans in a danceclub.
Why "alas"? If one rejects the kind of the moralizing employed by those who engage in appeals to nature, doesn't dolphin behavior have no moral valence whatsoever?
I was just being sentimental. Dolphins are cute and smart and so I like it when their behavior matches what I'd consider ethical human behavior. I don't actually think that dolphins are intelligent enough to have ethical agency, and I try not to equate "natural" with "ethical" (in either direction).
I recall campus feminists once upon a time mobilizing to stop the epidemic of rape inflicted upon their duck sisters down by the riverbank.
No lie. Good times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion_among_animals
In the BDSM scene there are much more submissive than dominant men. At least this holds for gay people. Your explanation would suggest the opposite.
Gay men are more submissive than straight men. Also I'm not sure there are many more submissive gay men than dominant gay men - my impression is that there are similarly many.
Is this right? In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry writes:
"Most submissives (‘subs’) are female and most dominants (‘doms’) are male. One 2013 study of participants in a BDSM online forum found that only 34 per cent of men consistently preferred the sub position, while an even smaller proportion of women – 8 per cent – identified as doms.
That would explain professional dominatrices, as well as why I am yet to see or hear of a professional sub female or dominant hetero male.
Isn't "professional submissive female" sort of the default assumption for sex work more generally?
You are actually right. It matches the statistics from fetlife, one of the main BDSM-related social networks. I couldn't find data about gay men or lesbian women, though.
https://bedbible.com/fetlife-statistic/
Aella also found that men are more likely to be dominant and women more likely to be submissive in BDSM on average. It was by a pretty large margin. https://aella.substack.com/p/how-fetishes-differ-by-region-and
I learned from my pastor in Bible study (the progressive kind that gets her information from secular historians) that men raping men to assert their dominance over them was extremely common in Biblical times. It was an entire cultural phenomenon that most modern people aren't aware of because it's decreased so dramatically since then. That might be a good explanation for men having sub fetishes. Apparently the scholarship on this is relatively recent, so if it wasn't covered in the book you mentioned that might be why. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also related to procreation. The psychological dynamics that men evolved to enjoy rape because it increased the likelihood of passing on their genes applied similarly to raping men.
I would expect the evolutionary advantages for victims of rape to hate rape less that now manifests in sub fetishes to be pretty large for another reason. PTSD often severely decreases people's ability to function, and can lead to earlier death and worse health even in modern rich countries. In Malthusian times, I imagine the damage to the woman's ability to pass on her genes from vulnerability to illness and early death from PTSD would be more severe.
It's pretty common for victims of sexual abuse like me to develop a sub fetish as a coping mechanism. It gives you control over something traumatic that you didn't have control over. It can also be hard to comprehend vanilla sex because it is so different from what you're familiar with, so it's easier to develop an interest in types of submissive BDSM that are very different (opposite in important ways for me) from the type of abuse you experienced, but more similar to it than vanilla.
If you take the full evopsych route (which this article implicitly does) then fetishes are best explained not as misfires of the procreative impulse but as part of the wider definition of sexual activity and display. The idea that sex is literally just PIV intercourse is not true of any complex and social species. In all such species you see social roles and rituals around sex. And these are adaptive in that the competitions increase prosociality and role fitness.
I find it hard to justify the misfire hypothesis actually since so much of sexual and pre-sexual activity is obviously not literally penetrative sex and so much of what's 'normally' attractive is not related to that. Lingerie, for example, seems completely unjustifiable in such a framework except as a niche fetish. But it's actually pretty universal. I understand lingerie as a sociosexual signal and that explains it pretty neatly. But if we're being trained on seeking PIV intercourse solely or its directly associated traits then you have to walk a pretty long way to explain such 'universal' fetishes that are common even among virgins.
This does apply to artificial intelligence: just as sexual competition selects for prosociality and role fitness so will the interaction of humanity in any AI takeoff scenario that's slow enough for us to have any feedback into the process. Likewise, unless there is literally one AI, the AI themselves will be exerting pressure against a Skynet scenario since any AI that defects is a threat to the other AI. In short, cooperation is evolutionarily fit (as evidence by the fact we, and not polar bears, rule the world) and will be selected for through a partially conscious and partially emergent process.
>This does apply to artificial intelligence: just as sexual competition selects for prosociality and role fitness so will the interaction of humanity in any AI takeoff scenario that's slow enough for us to have any feedback into the process. Likewise, unless there is literally one AI, the AI themselves will be exerting pressure against a Skynet scenario since any AI that defects is a threat to the other AI. In short, cooperation is evolutionarily fit (as evidence by the fact we, and not polar bears, rule the world) and will be selected for through a partially conscious and partially emergent process.
This is a great comment.
Thank you!
This is a nice insight, but can we not keep both? Why can't "normal" fetishes be "misfires" akin to fitness-lowering mutations and "universal fetishes" just be the ones that were the most successful?
If you assume (as I do) that sex has a social component then that doesn't mean that the social component evolves in a similar manner to the biological component. There are several key differences. Among them that social changes happen way faster than evolutionary changes. Now, you can point out the social dance itself is evolutionarily fit (my original point) and that this includes some people having fitness decreasing social habits. But social habits do not pass genetically and in fact often pass non-genetically. Likewise, if you are expecting to claim that 'normal' signs of sexual attraction are universal you have to explain how they shift on much faster than evolutionary timelines.
I realize this kind of discussion depends primarily on how you define "evopsych" in the first place, but I think I'm more persuaded by arguments that any theory that postulates something is a misfire is an explicit straying off the evopsych route that tries to explain everything as an adaptation.
But anyways, I think the obvious rejoinder is that things that are not literally penetrative sex, but are (socially, culturally, or by individual experience) associated with penetrative sex become attractive by this association. (I don't think you can really claim that, e.g., lingerie isn't related to sex, except in extremely literal sense. It's obviously correlated with sex, and that's enough for the association to form and be meaningful.) This is not the same as fetish - fetish implies something being a goal in itself, in lieu of penetrative sex. Only a small minority will have an actual lingerie fetish, where you go around stealing used underwear, masturbating into it, or something. For a majority, lingerie just evokes sex.
It's a decent theory but doesn't appear to empirically true. Do people find condoms sexy? They're certainly directly associated with PIV sex. Meanwhile it's hard to say that a swimsuit or a short skirt are directly associated with PIV sex. Both are regularly seen by men in contexts where they almost never lead to PIV sex and they're not regularly involved in the sexual act. And both are generally agreed to be sexy.
Meanwhile, if a fetish is defined simply as anything lieu of penetrative sex, this implies masturbation is a fetish. Which seems like a rather over broad definition.
Tight-fitting swimsuits and short skirts are aesthetically closer to nudity than the contextually-plausible alternatives, so from a Bayesian standpoint they're weak-but-nonzero evidence toward the hypothesis that further sexy stuff might be happening soon. Thus, eventually considered sexy in and of themselves by back-propagation.
The idea that simply being close to nudity works is trivially disproven by things like unsexy basic underwear or any number of form fitting but functional, unsexy outfits. Secondly, the entire idea that this is trained reasoning learned from PIV sex would imply that the gigantic amount of noise would render the signal so weak as to be useless or even non-existent. The average man goes through life not having sex with almost all women he sees in skirts and has sex with many women who are not in skirts. And most men go through life never having sex with anyone in a bathing suit.
I think you misunderstood what I mean by "aesthetically closer." As for social signaling, much of it - particularly where flirting is involved - is a type of encryption, deliberately calculated to resemble random noise, to limit who learns what, for complex strategic reasons. Subtle clues are amplified in significance accordingly.
A lot of this seems like just-so stories. Cartoons are a relatively (in EEA terms) new stimulus, but feet aren't. Were foot fetishes comparably common throughout the EEA? Is it actually the case that people who are into, say, spanking, aren't into actual sex?
The spanking one seems to have one clearly testable prediction: as spanking rates in Western parenting have drastically plummeted over the past century, AFAIK, there should be a ~20-30 year lag where spanking fetishes also plummet. Is there?
I can check age, and I also asked people a 'how frequently did you get spanked as a kid' scale.
K, this is 0-4 'how frequently did u get spanked', from 'never' to 'very regularly', and the corresponding numbers are avgs of "I find spanking to be" (0=not erotic to 5=extremely erotic
0.0 1.560779
1.0 1.579973
2.0 1.669818
3.0 1.830603
4.0 2.189530
correlation .07
Here it is for biological males:
0.0 1.269131
1.0 1.265089
2.0 1.304543
3.0 1.444171
4.0 1.835753
and females:
0.0 1.693182
1.0 1.734986
2.0 1.827433
3.0 1.989596
4.0 2.323308
It's late and i'm about to sleep so I'm not spending a ton of time on this but
this is the 0-5 'how arousing do you find spanking' scale, and average age for each bin:
females:
0.0 21.928831
1.0 21.452222
2.0 21.761780
3.0 22.013933
4.0 22.578003
5.0 22.563327
r=.052
males
0.0 24.468679
1.0 25.523601
2.0 25.141304
3.0 25.177733
4.0 25.155283
5.0 24.416148
r=.02
total n=576,779
Wouldn't this become confounded by porn? My impression is that there are some sexual practices that have spread memetically through porn. If spanking were prevalent enough in porn, perhaps it could spread via the same mechanism?
Corporal punishment was phased out long before porn skyrocketed in prevalence through VHS & then Internet. I'd also expect the effect of being spanked or rodded as a child regularly to be far greater than some glancing exposure to porn as an adult, if these theories were true.
I'm not so sure. I've seen a stat that "50% of parents reported spanking a child in 1993", although that wording is ambiguous. And there's this which reports 47% of parents of 0-9 year olds spanked in the last year.
https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-02/corporal-punishment-current-rates-from-a-national-survey.pdf
As for the glancing exposure, that's also my default assumption. But things like shaved pubic hair and choking have spread through porn, so I don't see a reason why this couldn't do the same.
Well, he does call them "just-so stories".
I've known a few kinky asexuals. But that may be a "Man bites dog" type of story.
I accidentally developed a bit of a foot fetish earlier this year, because of AI.
Midjourney 5 had not come out, and so we were using 4 to generate some characters for our app.
We needed some full-body images in transparent PNGs. The faces were very realistic, and even the hands generally had a good number of fingers, but it was really hard to get a full body shot without the feet or legs being cropped. Even though the prompt had "full body" and "head to toe" and a few other adjectives tossed on at the end, 9 times out of 10 it would end up cropping around the knees or just have the upper torso.
But the rest was really good — consistent characters and outfits, just missing the bottom. After a few hours of experimentation and re-rolling we could generally end up with the ideal full-body image, including feet. I developed a whole toolbox of tricks, from changing the aspect ratio to be really tall to blending in an example pose as a second image. One of the tricks to get this was to get really specific about the feet. What kind of shoes and socks? Mentioning feet a few times with emphasis. Things like that. My language was one that I imagine a foot-fetishist’s google search history. "Tall woman with feet showing, high heels, extra feet please with an order of foot." Or extreme detail like "orange nikes with shoelaces and socks and shadows under the shoes" That would generally convince the AI that the feet should also be shown. Not all the time, but some combination helped. I dreamt of feet, and kept trying to come up with more synonyms to get my desires across to this stable diffusion model.
Eventually after enough fiddling around a render would eventually come in with feet and we would be happy. After a few weeks of this process, anytime I finally saw some feet in a render (or shoes, rather) was a delightful feeling.
Then Midjourney 5 came out and started behaving a lot better. Feet were pretty trivial to generate (and hands reliably had 5 fingers) and the excitement of seeing them quickly wore off.
To the extent I have experienced foot, armpit, kneepit, or similar attractions it seems to be strongly connected to the unusual sight of something that more typically would occur in an intimate setting
If the availability of contraception is actually a big part of the decline in fertility it seems that the decline should be self-limiting over a fairly short time-frame. The genes of the people who like sex but not children will comprise a rapidly diminishing share of the gene pool. My personal observation is that a significant share of the population strongly desire children, and would have them even if sex were unpleasant. To the extent that either homosexuality or fetishes reduce procreation the effect should be the same.
Only to the extent that desire is genetic. A lot of fundamentalist groups have high fertility rates but low retention rates; how likely are the people who leave - ex-Mormons, lapsed Orthodox Jews, etc - to have kids?
But that is what he is talking about: such groups might have low retention rates, but usually are still considerably above replacement level (i.e. enough of them stay to make the group grow, in spite of the leavers). Which almost inevitably amounts to a genetic selection of traits that favour procreative behaviour in our current porn and contraception laden environment - if there is any genetic aspect to this, of course.
So we're on our way to "A Mote in God's Eye" moties.
It depends how much of the variation in number of kids is based on a genetic component of liking kids, as opposed to a learned behavior of liking kids or other factors (economic, cultural, etc) that affect how many kids you have.
Basically, it would have to be hugely determinative to take over the population 'quickly' in the colloquial way we view time.
Even a 5% contribution could become fixed in the population 'quickly' in terms of evolutionary time, of course; but 'quickly' there means more like 'within 50 generations, ie ~1000 years for humans'.
At which point historical events probably overtake it.
My surmise is that (1) there is a genetic component of liking kids, and that it varies in people, (2) in the past it did not have a very large effect on average fertility, because other factors (liking sex, economic, cultural, etc.) meant that even people who did not particularly like kids frequently had lots of them, and (3) in developed countries at present those other factors that caused people to have children have largely gone away. Therefore going forward the inborn desire to have kids could be determinative to a far greater extent than in the past. If there are systematic genetic differences going forward between the people who on average have one kid and those who on average have three kids, how many generations will it take for the genes of those with three kids to predominate? I understand this assumes a lot, but it seems reasonable to me and consistent with my experience that wanting to have kids is at least in part based on a genetic component.
Let's apply Occam's razor here and assume there isn't a separate explanation for every fetish. I'll assert that all fetishes have one source, which is that humans can sexualize anything. Any configuration of body parts, fluids, and objects that doesn't defy the laws of physics has a community of people who think it's the best thing ever. Same for any relationship dynamics. This diversity is an outgrowth of the fact that we come out of the womb as relatively blank slates so that we can adapt to any environment. Why would sex be different from every other thing we learn through culture? Our genes may give a push by making genital stimulation and sexual fantasy pleasurable, but they don't specify how to get this stimulation any more than they specify how group cooperation is accomplished or how to find food. If 95% of sexuality is learned, it's no longer surprising that we find so many ways to do it. We're not looking at out-of-distribution examples, we're looking at an open loop reinforcement learning system that's writing its own reward function.
Does that prove too much? Why are some fetishes so much more common than others?
Aella has shown that fetish prevalence is inversely proportional to tabooness.
Do you have a link?
Depending on the definition of "taboo", that could make a lot of sense. If a taboo is a restriction designed to set one group of people apart from another, then it's basically defined as arbitrary restrictions on normal human behavior, so it's no surprise that people in a society with those arbitrary restrictions are going to pay a lot more attention when they have visions of otherwise-normal-but-societally-restricted things dancing through their heads at night.
I don't think all taboos are arbitrary (though of course many are). Presumably taboos against incest and scat have survival value. Note this doesn't say anything about the taboos having a genetic origin. Culture is allowed to add survival value.
https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-vs-popularity
I commented on this post that averaging popularity and tabooness could be a distortion by hiding bimodal distributions. But the averaging provided the best way to explain varying popularity.
Thanks!
Yeah, there's a number of ways to define "taboo", and I was using a fairly restrictive one, which isn't what Aella was using.
If that is the case, then Arabs ought to have a huge prevalence of foot fetishization.
No idea whether or to what extent that may be true.
But what's cause and what's effect? If something never occurs to most people, how likely is it to be taboo?
> Evolution controls the genetic code but not the reinforcement environment. Humans have the option of training AIs directly, a much higher bandwidth and less lossy communication channel.
I don't think the comparison is clear-cut.
Yes, in reinforcement learning, humans have the option of rewarding the AIs for doing certain behaviors, which seems nice, and is genuinely something that evolution cannot do, except when those behaviors can be operationalized into relatively simple detector code that evolution can put in the brainstem etc.
On the other hand, "rewarding the AIs for doing certain behaviors" is a terrible idea, from an AI alignment perspective. We want to reward the AI for doing the right thing FOR THE RIGHT REASON, not just for doing the right thing full stop. Otherwise we reward the AI for being deceptive.
And in that sense, it seems to me that the genome is in some respects beyond the state-of-the-art of ML reinforcement learning alignment approaches. In particular, the genome sets us up such that some THOUGHTS are rewarding and others are not—not behaviors. There's interpretability right in the foundation, I think.
My own main technical AI alignment research interest is to figure out the nuts and bolts of how the genome makes people (sometimes) nice to each other — https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/qusBXzCpxijTudvBB/my-agi-safety-research-2022-review-23-plans#2__Second_half_of_2022__1_3___My_main_research_project .
I think good theories of sexual attraction may be somewhat related, and I would definitely be interested in them, although I haven't spent any time looking into that topic so far.
Hmm, yes "We want to reward the AI for doing the right thing FOR THE RIGHT REASON, not just for doing the right thing full stop. Otherwise we reward the AI for being deceptive." sounds like the task of getting generalizations about preferences, both for terminal goals and for instrumental goals "right".
This does sound similar to understanding: "Is this because something about the autistic ultralocal processing style favors misgeneralization? Is there some equivalent in AI parameters that could make them more or less autistic, and would that change how correct (or maybe how consistent) their category generalization is?"
This is over-anthropomorphizing "evolution"
Evolution cannot select against bad thoughts with good outcomes, because if a gene causes good outcomes for bad reasons the organisms with that gene will still survive and reproduce. You're imagining an evolution-agent that can make decisions, a classic blunder
I'm pretty confused by your comment. Maybe this will help?
The human brain does within-lifetime learning, and it involves reinforcement learning. For example, if you touch a hot stove, then you probably won't do it again. This within-lifetime RL, like all RL, involves a "reward function" which says that touching the hot stove is bad, and more generally pain is bad, eating when hungry is good, sleeping when tired is good, and hundreds more things like that. This within-lifetime reward function is under evolutionary pressure, and is not the same as evolution itself. Things can be rewarding as assessed by the within-lifetime reward function despite not advancing genetic fitness, and vice-versa. In fact, this is unavoidable, because it's impossible for your brainstem to exactly calculate inclusive your genetic fitness in real time as you go about your day.
So in that sense, stepping back a level, there’s an analogy between the way that “evolution” is “trying” to choose a within-lifetime reward function such that the animal will have high reproductive fitness, versus the way that a human RL researcher is trying to choose an RL reward function such that the trained RL policy will do whatever the human was hoping that the trained RL policy would do (be helpful, invent better solar cells, you name it).
The analogy I’m invoking here is between ML training and within-lifetime learning, NOT between ML training and evolutionary learning. See Section 8.3 here: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/fDPsYdDtkzhBp9A8D/intro-to-brain-like-agi-safety-8-takeaways-from-neuro-1-2-on
> Humans have the option of training AIs directly, a much higher bandwidth and less lossy communication channel
That's *extremely* underselling it; breeding vs nn-training are a difference in scale that makes a difference in kind.
Imagine your attempting to find the best value in a 2d space, the way your attempt to do this is random and by breeding, so you select lets say 4 random points from a circle where you "are", and you set the new center to be the average of the 2 best, sure your "evolve" and eventually find a good value but what the calculus does is go you a 2d vector to the best local update without taking 1000 random points.
Most nn's have some absurd number of parameters, so its not 2d or even a 3d sphere, its 1000000d sphere and training is making a very reasonable update direction.
<mild snark>
"its 1000000d sphere"
Actually, an underestimate...
"According to some sources, it is true that GPT-4 has 1.7 trillion parameters." :-)
</mild snark>
I honestly have a hard time seeing what fetishes have to do with evolution or AI. Fetishes are generally a result of childhood experiences and are not heritable, as far as I know.
AI is just an emulation of intelligence and IMO can never approach the complexity of biological evolution which is governed by processes that we are unlikely to fully understand. We can try to allow AI to evolve by itself but in the absence of that magic juice it’s doomed to failure. Of course it can still kill us but so can many other things of our own doing.
> AI is just an emulation of intelligence
In order to make this claim you need to:
1) define intelligence
2) show that AI differs from natural intelligence in some substantive way
It's easy to create a system that's extremely good at one well-understood task, but what actually matters is to be able to adapt to a changing, unknown future. Which is what biological intelligence is all about.
I think to claim that AI doesn't differ from natural intelligence in some substantive way is the thing what would require proof. Consider the typical blunders of categorization systems...blunders that people didn't even imagine as possible ahead of time.
Tom N - You need to read this story to understand your bias:
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
First, fetishes even in humans are not necessarily a result o childhood experiences. But one needs to look at fetishes more broadly: In general you fetishize something if you take same aspect of a give action and you give it undue importance. It is often applied to sexual matters, but in case of AI a more general meaning is relevant: we may expect that AI's will be (sometimes already are) distorting their reasoning and rule sets by giving undue attention to some of the rules or features to the (incorrect) exclusion of others. I once read story about americans training (during cold war) an early AI to recognize russian and american tanks on photographs. Problem was that photos of Russian tanks were grainy (unlike American ones) so the AI just learned that grainy=Russian, clear-American. It fetishized quality of pictures. This is not a good example for AI fetishes, in this case it was more like bad, training data, but I do not have better one. Still I think we will see weird twisting of any rules we try to give statistical AI's.
Here's a really simple theory:
PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL—REGARDLESS OF THE SOURCE—CAN CONTRIBUTE TO SEXUAL AROUSAL
That seems true to me, and seems to explain (or at least contribute to the explanation of) four of your list items—spanking, sadomasochism, urine/scat, and bondage/domination/submission.
Isn't that circular? WHY physiological arousal from these stimuli?
Physiological arousal just means your heart-rate goes up etc. I think it's common sense that if you're tied up and then subjected to pain and threatened with more pain, your heart-rate is gonna go up. That's obvious and has nothing to do with sex. E.g. it's equally true for baby squirrels as for adult humans (but please don't do the experiment on baby squirrels to check).
We have lots of innate defense-related reactions (or in the case of urine/scat, disgust-related reactions) that also increase our heart rate etc. Right? Does that help?
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, I agree completely.
This seems much closer to the mark to me than anything Scott wrote above.
Actually, maybe it ALSO contributes to the explanation of foot fetish. Note that feet are ticklish, which is (I claim) indirect evidence that having your feet touched is an innate trigger for physiological arousal; see discussion in Section 4.1.2 here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7kdBqSFJnvJzYTfx9/a-theory-of-laughter#4_1_2_More_discussion_of_tickling_in_particular
Conveniently skirted elephant: pedophilia.
'This hurts people very very badly, that doesn't' is not a 'thin pretext' unless you are a sociopath.
Many things that are legal and fine are extremely superficially similar to other things that illegal and bad. Cutting meat with a knife is fine if it's a steak and bad if it's a struggling human victim. The difference is not a 'think pretext' and no one is confused by this.
People can argue all sorts of things. So you're definitely right. But I don't actually believe your asserted facts are true in an large degree. If a "marriage was ruined by pornography" it would be my guess that it was already broken. The people I know of who went through gender transition had to fight to be allowed to do that. (I may think they made a mistake, but that's my opinion.) However, buyer's remorse is a real thing, so I think they *should* have had to fight to go through the procedure.
OTOH, delaying puberty ... I'm not sure what the costs and side effects are, but I think that a LOT of people would benefit from delaying puberty, if the side effects aren't too bad. Our civilization isn't set up to facilitate people who aren't out of high school being sexually active.
You could argue a lot of things, but I notice that you haven't actually done so.
So there's not much to respond to here, aside from hollow innuendo.
Informed enthusiastic consent is essential, and children can't do the former. And yes, I agree that the issue of "gender-affirming care" before puberty is fraught. But the two are not even comparable. Still this post about fetishes, not CW items. I should not have brought it up.
In practice, the children themselves usually aren't the ones giving consent to gender-affirming care, or most other medical treatment: their parents or guardians consent on their behalf.
Medical consent works like that, but most other forms of consent don't. For example, in many states parents can't give consent for their kids to get tattoos. And while parents can often give consent for their kids to get married, they can't give consent for their kids to have sex.
In general, norms about minors consenting have more to do with necessity and practicality than consistency (or science). For example, minors who are emancipated, married, homeless, or who have children of their own can sometimes consent to things other minors can't. Minors can often consent to specific types of treatment (e.g. for mental health, substance abuse, pregnancy, STDs) at a younger age than other treatments, not because the decisions are any simpler or less consequential, but precisely the opposite: because timely access to that treatment is seen as especially important.
What a strange thing to ask, especially in response to a comment in which I didn't express disapproval or approval of anything at all, but simply explained how consent works in these different situations and why the same standard doesn't apply to all of them.
I'll charitably assume you meant to ask "is pedophilia allowed with parental consent", and direct you to the last sentence of the second paragraph of my previous comment.
Postulating that opens an even bigger can of worms, if _both_ partners are underage, is all sex automatically non-consensual and thus rape?
that does not seem to fit the topic of fetishes.
That’s a very diplomatic way of staying away from a very CW-prone topic :-)
"But now that we are allowing children to decide to forgo puberty..."
I assume you're referring to adolescents who use puberty blockers in preparation for gender transition, but they don't stay on blockers indefinitely, and thus don't really "forgo" puberty: they experience puberty once they start taking cross-sex hormones.
There's no evidence that this actually works, which is why there's so much controversy about it.
The reality is that this treatment is not evidence-based medicine, which is why the UK has pulled back from it and other countries are considering it, and why many states are banning it.
None of these treatments have ever undergone RCTs for the treatment of gender dysphoria. There's a good chance that they don't work - probably ~50-75%, given that most treatments fail clinical trials.
What do you mean by "works", exactly?
Puberty blockers certainly have the intended effect, that is, they stop the development of secondary sexual characteristics when taken at the relevant time. And cross-sex hormones certainly also have the intended effect of inducing the development of the cross-sex secondary sexual characteristics.
There's no evidence that any of these treatments alleviate psychiatric symptoms beyond the placebo effect.
There's no evidence that puberty blockers improve outcomes, and it is possible they may make them worse (puberty in many cases may naturally resolve symptoms of gender dysphoria as the child matures).
If people are attracted to health, and health correlates with youth, no wonder in some people that genetic dial accidentally undershoots the mark and makes them attracted to way too young people.
Yeah, the just so story is obvious.
I've spent quite alot of time going over the male heterosexual chronophilia research, Freund, Blanchard, Cantor, Stephens, Seto etc. If you seriously dig into the phallometric data it's pretty clear that actual pedophilia is very rare (even using a 0.0sd cut point) among even various samples of offenders, with some combination of sadism or power dynamics or emotional congruence etc. Being better explanations as drivers of offending. Lots of problems with the field but this seems like one of the few robust findings.
Hmm, I am not familiar with the data, but I have come across people who ended up on virped.org because they hated their kink and themselves. Anecdata, but would be unlikely if your references were accurate.
In the case of virped my best guess is that a lot aren't strictly pedophiles in the technical sense, either by preferring later age ranges/developmental stages or their preference being better described in terms of emotional congruence etc. Possibly quite a few just have POCD, but even if we do say that most are pedophiles or nepiophiles, the internet is vast such that even a very rare minority of people can congregate to form such a community, the interesting question would be how they compare to other similar communities and also the general population. I should also add that I'm strictly talking about male heterosexual pedophiles, and not other groups.
Perhaps you need a cultural context. Child brides were very common before that became illegal...and to some extent afterwards. Australian bushmen often married girls as young as eight...though I don't know whether the marriage was commonly consummated. In India often both the bride and the groom would be children. Again I'm not sure what "marriage" means in that context. But brides as young as 13 were not that unusual in recent US history, and marriage implied consummation.
From what I understand the general pattern historically was marriage around puberty, with elites marrying much younger, and consummation occurring after menarche i.e. well into puberty, such patterns of evidence may or may not be evidence of preferred sexual attraction in that age range (their could be other reasons for certain norms to evolve), but even if it is strong evidence of such preferred sexual attraction, such attraction would not constitute pedophilia as the term is standardly used by various experts in relevant fields, it's true that such behaviour would fit the contemporary lay persons account of pedophilia as used in ordinary language, but as I have implied I'm using the much stricter account. Such an account is more relevant when talking about evolution or the etiology of such a condition, and based upon past comments made by Scott presumably the account he uses to internally model the world.
From what I can gather various people have tried to dispute the cultural/legal and anthropological claim that such marriages were common or that they resulted in pregnancy at that early of an age, with famously Ashley Montagu having quite a large influence on this matter even today. Yet interestingly we know that the extreme version of his claim, namely adolescent sterility can't be true since we know from de novo mutations that human generation times in non African women hovered around 20, and that prior to 2000 generations ago, gen times were consistently in the teen years, it should also be noted that such estimates represent the mean age of the middle parturition and not the age at first reproduction, as they are usually interpreted by lay persons. And in fact looking back at Montagu's work you can see his data for age of menarche is significantly older than that of both contemporary and historical populations, with later anthropological studies such as those by Hochberg predicting a AFR at 15 based upon usual development times, via extrapolation from natural fertility hunter gather populations. The less radical claim of subfecundity is more plausible and relevant for r/K selection theory and life history strategy, but if you look into the anovulatory data and such, its extremely low quality and of dubious merit, and if you think seriously about the issue its clear that the model of fecundity as used by experts is missing various important parts.
"Latex/rubber: Plausibly the evolutionary specification includes details about attractiveness. Attractive people (ie those you should be most interested in having babies with) should be young and healthy (characteristics associated with better pregnancy outcomes, especially in the high-risk ancestral environment). The simplest sign of youth and good health is smooth skin" The part about the high risk ancestral environment leaves me to suspect that Scott may have read Lassek's and Gaulin's paper on nubile primiparas, they make some mistakes but for the most part its a great paper.
Dude has Sneer Club and the NYT waiting on him to make a mistake so they can pounce. Can't blame him for being cautious.
> A reasonable next question would be “what’s on the other side of the genitalia, and do people also have fetishes about that one?”
If you follow your diagram past the genitalia into the contiguous area of neocortex, then you’re now at Brodmann area 31, a.k.a. the dorsal posterior cingulate area, if I'm understanding the anatomy right. I don't know much about what it does though.
Separately, if you go along the cortex in the perpendicular directions from the genitalia part of S1, then the contiguous areas of cortex are in Brodmann area 4 (primary motor cortex) on one side and in Brodmann area 5 (something to do with somatosensory, I don't know the details) on the other side.
For some reason I do not understand this passage: "But it’s still fascinating that evolution accomplishes this difficult thing at all. Is there some sense in which evolution 'solved the interpretability problem' such that it can pick out connections in a neural net and edit them to try to get a message across?"
Would someone who does be willing to state whatever the point is in different words? I think main sources of my confusion is this: What is the interpretability problem? Is it evolution's problem getting across to us that we are supposed to procreate, even though it cannot tell us that directly, but only wire us to desire things that are likely to lead to procreation? So for instance evolution has wired us to enjoy genital rubbing, but that message from evolution can be "misinterpreted" as a demand that we masturbate, rather than procreate. But since evolution's message that we should procreate can instead be misinterpreted as a demand that we masturbate or engage in various fetish behaviors that don't make babies, what does it mean to say that evolution has "solved the interpretability problem" ? It seems like clearly evolution has *not* solved it, although evolution's message gets correctly interpreted by enough of us that plenty of people do have children.
And then, I completely do not understand what is meant by evolution's "picking out connections on a neural net." I know what a neural net is. What is it that evolution does that's equivalent to picking out connections on a neural net? Is it selecting for certain genes?
If I understand right, Scott is pointing out that it's nontrival how information like "be aroused by xyz" could be decoded from DNA, and instantiated in our brains. There is a large gap between the input data (strings of nucleotides in our DNA), and the intended result, which would presumably need to manifest in terms of patterns of connections in the individual's neurons.
The "interpretability problem" I think refers to the fact that neuronal connection patterns look like spaghetti code, and it's very difficult to "interpret" whatever they encode, such as a tendency to be attracted by something.
It's been a while since I read any evo psych, but I seem to recall that the existence of homosexuality was considered to be a big evolutionary puzzle. Most proposed theories seemed to go in the direction of trying to find some indirect evolutionary benefits from it, but none seemed too plausible. Knowing little about biology, but having a background in computation, I intuitively tend to favor the same explanation that Scott is putting forward here: maintaining a stable encoding from DNA to neural patterns of "finding the opposite sex attractive" is hard work, and nature has only managed to do so with ~90% precision.
Calling it "spaghetti code" is understating the problem. Remember, this is a parallel processing system.
Seems to me that the you can explain BDSM in terms of overgeneralization. On feature of sex is that people are "controlled" by the person they are attracted to (in the sense that they feel irresistibly drawn to them) and by their own horniness. People often "give in" to desire or feel "ruled" by it. People sometimes feel humiliated by how conquered by desire they are, and by things they do when turned on that they think are wrong or at least very undignified. BDSM seems like it's picking up these features of sex, which for most are just one feature, and exaggerating them and making them central to the actual acts that people engage in. So in Scott's terms, it's a kind of overgeneralization. Evolution tried to tell us to do this thing that feels very good, & sometimes involves love and bonding, and involves sexual intercourse, and also often makes people feel controlled and outmatched and humiliated by the power of the experience. A BDSM orientation results from people just picking up on the latter of these features.
Or in a way, it's a fetishization of the duality of being a mind riding around in a meat body. To somewhat misuse Haidt's metaphor, the rider on the elephant, who can nudge at the margins, but mostly ends up doing sour-grape rationalization of why they always wanted to go to wherever it was that the elephant decided to go. We are at the mercy of our flesh, to a degree that can shock us until we directly pit our mind against the meat. (OK, that sounds kinky right there.)
Honestly, the people I know who are into BDSM seem to be having awesomely intense experiences. In fact many fetishists seem to be, so long as they can find partners or settings where they can indulge their kink. It's like they've found the mother lode. In exchange for looking like ewww to a lot of people, they are gobbling Eros pure.
Yeah, I've known a few people like that. Over the course of a couple of months, they became deeply into the local BDSM community to the point where it appeared to gobble up every aspect of their life. And they were super happy about it, eyes shining faces glowing, the whole bit.
I think we might have miscommunicated? I wasn't meaning "or, alternatively it is this different thing" but instead "or, here is a different way of describing the same thing".
You are right, we miscommunicated. What happened was that I didn't understand how your analogy about riding elephants was a different way of describing what I was describing, I suppose because your picture of riding elephants has a substantial negativity element ("sour grapes," for instance) and I am trying to describe how it works for BDSM fetishists, whom I sort of envy, because the core of their experience seems ecstatic. Still don't understand. Want to explain, or is that too much trouble?
It was generous of you to respond to my idea before pointing out that we had miscommunicated. I would probably have pointed that out first, then re-explained my point, then gone on to respond to whatever it was that misunderstanding-my-point you had said.
This is an instance of what I have in mind when I say that it's hard to understand why anyone would want to hurt you. When in doubt you do the generous thing, yet you do not come across as a people-pleasing wimp, not in the slightest. Still, as I said before, it does not matter how many good qualities you have if the other person is a fucking soul-gobbling monster
It's mostly because the non-fiction book I'm finishing off right now is "The Righteous Mind", which among other theories advances the idea that the purpose of rational thought is to persuade other people to coordinate with you. That is, the primary ethical sense comes from intuition (the "elephant"), and rationality ("the rider") is used partly to rationalize the intuition, partly to persuade other people to adopt our own intuitions, partly to bind groups of people together using shared intuitions, and only rarely to alter one's own intuitions. Does that make sense?
"Sour grapes" does have a pejorative sense to it, which was misleading when applied strictly to BDSM. I guess I was sort of intending the negative aspect to apply to the whole "rational mind playing second fiddle" thing, which I'm grumpy about because I don't want to agree, but it sure does seem like he's right. That was a bad bit of writing on my part; I got all the pieces there but they were arranged in a misleading way.
> It was generous of you to respond to my idea before pointing out that we had miscommunicated. I would probably have pointed that out first, then re-explained my point, then gone on to respond to whatever it was that misunderstanding-my-point you had said.
That's very kind of you to say so. What happened was that I've twice noticed that same phenomenon that you were talking about, and it was fascinating to see happen, and has stuck vividly in my mind, so I wrote something about that. Then I went back and reread, because something didn't seem quite right, and noticed stuff like the "honestly" and "in fact", which seemed out of place on my first reading, but made sense if you thought I was saying something negative about BDSM. So just a bit of mild spectrumy behavior on my part, not a lot of real virtue. But thanks anyway! :-)
> a fucking soul-gobbling monster
That's a pretty good description. :-/
>That is, the primary ethical sense comes from intuition (the "elephant"), and rationality ("the rider") is used partly to rationalize the intuition, partly to persuade other people to adopt our own intuitions, partly to bind groups of people together using shared intuitions, and only rarely to alter one's own intuitions.
That's interesting. Not having read the full argument I don't know whether I agree. Anyhow, here's an interesting add-on for the idea above: There is one way to use rationality to alter intuitions that is very powerful: Do something that rationality tells you is OK to do, but intuition tells you is a bad idea. If the results of the first attempt are decent, do the thing on a regular basis for a while. Usually your intuition about the thing will change, and it will stop seeming like a bad idea and start looking good in various ways. Sometimes it sprouts all kinds of intuitively appealing properties. I work a lot with people who have phobias, & getting them try doing the thing they dread is an extremely powerful treatment. But the approach works also for things you do not dread, but just intuit will feel tedious, or silly & humiliating or whatnot.
>I've twice noticed that same phenomenon that you were talking about,
Is the phenomenon you mean the ecstasy fetishists seem to have access to ? Or are you talking about the sense of being overpowered and sort of used & abused by one's own sex drive?
Indeed. The psychoanalytic distinction between neurotics, hysterics, and perverts is beautifully descriptive for those who have invested in understanding the terminology. Fetishists are a subset of the pervert class - they have fully embraced desiring the object.
I would love to hear more about this, but that may be a tall order...
Most anyone rational-ish will regard Lacanian neoFreudianism as more like prose poetry than science, and that's probably fair. But there's a descriptive power to poetry, a subtle tension like that between the first and second lines of a good haiku. Similarly... actually no. I've reworked the rest of this three times and can't beat it into a shape I can hit 'post' on.
I think I get what you're saying; I suspect I'm more of a mystic than most people here.
Hmmm .... that's reminiscent of one of Dawkins' arguments about males and females controlling each other via indirect signals. I can't remember just how it went, or which work it was in, but he was talking about co-evolution of the sexes and sexual signaling.
I think it has a lot to do with how the person first encounters sex. For me, it was reading biology textbooks at around age 10, and I think this explains my kinks pretty well.
At the fantasy level this seems to match my experience, but not when you get beyond the fantasy level.
It's weird how *sure* people are about their sexual interests. Especially for people with not a lot of experience. It's like if you asked someone whether, in their alternate life as a three-tentacled being on Pluto they spun clockwise or counterclockwise they confidently answered 'clockwise' and got very uppity about how noone can answer this question except for them.
The correlation between autism and fetishes/gender issues may simply be a correlation with innate brain things being a bit broken.
Well, if you try the thought experiment, and imagine yourself as a three-tentacled being on Pluto spinning clockwise and nothing happens, and then imagine yourself as a three-tentacled being on Pluto spinning counterclockwise and OH MY GOD I JUST CAME, it can be pretty obvious?
That must be part of it for sexual orientation, but doesn't explain people knowing their gender
Frankly but glibly, the concept of even having an identity in the first place is technically against my religion, so from that perspective I view the entire "gender" thing as a giant delusion.
I'm dying to know more. Can you elaborate on how your religion is against having an identity?
I'm just making a joke about Buddhism. It's not literally that having an identity is prohibited, but to a first approximation, I view with extreme skepticism any attempt to promulgate definitions of "who you are". And for more advanced work, "who" and "you" and "are" need a lot of unpacking, but in my personal experience that only starts to make sense when I've been doing more meditation than I am right now.
Thank you for your comments in this thread. I wish I encountered this sort of thing more.
Buddhist? More particularly Theravada Buddhist? (I'm sorry I don't know a better name, because some people have told me that's an impolite term, but it's the only one I know for that group.)
If so, I don't think it's having an identity that's technically against your religion, but only wanting to have an identity.
Mahayana, actually, although I vary in my degree of seriousness and practice.
"Theravada" is generally considered fine. "Hinayana" is the one you don't want to use: it's an exonym used by some Mahayana practioners. "Mahayana" means "great vehicle", and after having the audacity to name one's practice that, it probably was only a matter of time before someone referred to the old-style practice as "hinayana", which means "lesser vehicle".
And yeah, it's more complicated. In practical terms, I'd say that, aside from a few special cases ("Hi, I'm so and so, and I'm an alcoholic."), it's probably best not to make one's "identity" the core of one's, well, "identity".
You specifically asked about sexual interests not gender identity, it's not surprising that you got a reply that explains just what you asked for and not more.
On the other hand, it's not hard to see why similar mechanism can be the case for gender identity as well. If our biology somehow encodes "man" and "woman" for the purpose of sexual attraction, it can also use the same representation for the purpose of gender identity. Heterosexuality is a function of two variables. Who you are, whom you are supposed to be attracted to.
Whether you your pluto incarnation spins clockwise or counterclockwise is an identity, not a sexual orientation
It's a metaphor. And what this metaphor for you stated yourself: sexual interest. Not gender identity.
You can still use it as a metaphor for gender identity as well. But if you do so, it's useful to explicitly state that, in order to evade miscommunication.
> If our biology somehow encodes "man" and "woman" for the purpose of sexual attraction
How do you know it encodes one binary thing, as opposed to a lot of little scalar things that tend to be correlated in 2 big clusters?
I don't think it's relevant either way.
Nearly nothing is fundamental. Nearly everything is made from smaller things. We can still meaningfully talk about non-fundamental stuff, make predictions and judgements about it.
I've got a complaint from the Mi-Go about your thought projections. Please desist or they will be forced to bring out the lightning guns.
I have an alternative proposal: they provide me with advanced Yuggothian weaponry, and I destroy my notes on how to psychically bombard them with monkey porn, which I have arranged to be widely distributed upon my death, disappearance, incapacitation, etc.
I think there are many other people who are less sure about any given facet of preference or identity, but they're underrepresented among the groups willing to get in internet arguments about the facet in question, because getting caught in the middle of a culture war - having offended both sides by saying you don't see what the big deal is - isn't most people's idea of a good time.
Need more righteously disinterested people
" humans can invent contraception. Evolution’s main alignment strategy was totally unprepared for this."
I'm not certain it was. Consider that handing out condoms to High Schoolers tends to increase pregnancy rates.
I mean, the big thing with contraception seems to be that educating women results in fewer children. So it's not *just* the invention of contraception which reduces birthrates, but a society which supports its regular use by interested parties.
In any case, the notion of decreased reproductive drive associated with increasing population densities makes me think of behavioral sinks in rats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
In the ancestral environment, overpopulation could lead to destruction of habitat and population crashes. Human populations have never been as dense as some of them are today. So we might reasonably ask if modern population densities could have any impact on human behavior.
Also, as it's once been observed: "Considering that it's nearly impossible to tickle yourself we really got lucky with masturbation." I'd speculate that a lot of non-productive sex serves a kind of educational purpose in highly social species.
"even though modern rich people have more child-rearing resources available than the pioneers."
In fairness, pioneer families could extract labor from very young children and farmers often relied on that labor. With modern parents unless your child is a successful actor or something odd like that, children tend to be a cost till very late in their development, if ever. Modern parents also aren't relying on children as much to take care of them in their old age.
200 years ago, raising kids to your own standard of living wouldn't diminish your quality of life much. Today, it almost certainly will.
Re: Foot fetishes. I just have to ask, is there any part of the female anatomy that men *don't* fetishize? Are foot fetishes just obvious from their rareness and oddness. You give an interesting mechanism in terms of the somatosensory cortex. But I'd like to know how we distinguish between a foot fetish and, say, a lip fetish or a belly fetish. (Also, is there any evopsych reason that the part of the somatosensory cortex that maps to the feet should be next to the genitals?)
RE: Urine. I'm curious how much this has to do with pheromones. (I'm not kinky in general. I just speculate. )
Re BDSM, I do agree with you. I've heard there's a correlation between conservative upbringing and a desire for restraint during sex. I don't have data to back this up, but it would make for interesting confirmation if true. The whole notion of a preference for dominant men or vulnerable women could also play into some kind of sexual script, independent of upbringing.
I'd also suggest that disgust is a relevant aspect of attraction. It's not just the stone that makes the sculputre, but the portions that have been carved away.
I've known some asexual individuals interested in BDSM as a substitute for sex. I'd imagine that maybe a weak drive in one area allows more drift in the formation of sexual associations.
Do you have a source for the claim about condoms and high schoolers? I'd always heard the opposite, which seems supported by eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758683/
Sorry for the late reply. I thought I'd posted, but my post didn't go through. I have a bit more time now to address the matter properly.
Here's the study I was looking at previously.
https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/condoms.pdf
The cite you give does not discuss conception or pregnancy (that I can find?), but refers, in passing, to a UK study which does.
vis.
"The evaluation showed that over 16 years, during which the strategy was implemented, there was a 51% decrease in the under-18 conception rate."
Here's the UK study that was referred to.
https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(16)00102-6/fulltext
I've very briefly skimmed the UK study, which does nothing to isolate condom usage as a variable (I don't think?) but considers it along with social interventions and use of long acting reversible contraception. Long acting reversible contraception has been empirically shown to be effective in reducing teen pregnancy rates. So using the UK study to advocate for school distribution of condoms is kind of like a headline which reads "thousands of lives saved each year by antibiotics and daffodils" then arguing for government funding of daffodil distribution on that basis.
The source I was going off of looks at under-18 pregnancy rates in the areas around where school condom distribution programs, specifically, were located and uses changes in conception in a slightly older cohort of women as a control. An interesting methodology, given they found a statistically significant effect.
Incidentally, the source I was relying on seems to be co-authored by a guy I was on speech team with in college. A very nice guy (liberal Christian at the time, if it matters) in an apparently very small world. :-)
Oh, also from my linked cite: "We find that the fertility increase is driven
by communities where condom access was provided without mandated counseling, and that these fertility effects may have been attenuated, or perhaps even reversed, when counseling was mandated as part of condom provision. "
In both cases here the question being asked, for much of history, was essentially , “why do value-maps exhibit deviations from the territory?” It’s interesting that in modernity there doesn’t seem to be a agreement that there even is a territory at all.
I would think if we were still a religious culture the debate would be, “are we about to summon a demon, or an Angel,” and this seems to roughly map onto the question of alignment, but I would guess you’d have religious people saying “if we just train it on scripture, it’ll obviously be aligned.” I’ve been trying to think about what the rational equivalent would be here, and the best I can come up with would be, “make sure the AI reads the New York Times” or some such thing.
The New York Times? You must be new here. :)
I suspect most religious cultures would just ask the priest/rabbi/imam/guru/etc., who would probably tell them to smash the thing on account of it likely being to summon a demon. And, given what a lot of people around here are saying, maybe they're not wrong!
It’s true. Maybe in this count it would be “the sequences”.
Can the AI reliably generate the sequences without being trained on them? Does it act according to them in a simulated world without being exposed to them?
Come to think of it, now this adds up:
We might create a simulated universe where the Ai is tested, and to make it realistic, lots of humans are paid a basic income to live and play in this universe as if it’s real. Some are even encouraged to do evil things within that universe, to ensure we plant the seeds of moloch inside. Does the AI worship moloch? If so, we don’t let it out. Does it stay faithful to instrumental rationality and thus act with patience, humility, kindness and benevolence in order to maximize its access to alternative models? Does basically every world religion, plus rationality and EA and environmentalists and other pseudoreligions approve of it? Then we let it out.
And we have to temporarily wipe the humans' memories so they don't contaminate the simulation with outside knowledge...
This is starting to seem a bit like some religions.
Deeper and deeper the rabbit hole goes
> “if we just train it on scripture, it’ll obviously be aligned.”
But what about all those heretics who read the same scriptures and interpret them differently?
Ironically, I think your conception of fetishes and kinks and their formation is actually pretty far off the mark. IMO, fetishes and kinks are deliberate adaptations - the need to reconcile the extremely strong impulses surrounding sex. On the one hand, there's a strong evolutionary pressure for it - but on the other hand, it poses all sorts of risks and can potentially get you killed, ostracized, etc. Thus, people develop all sorts of strong opinions about it, and when these are powerful or conflicting enough, they can turn into kinks and the like.
> Real procreative sex usually matches enough of features
Typo, extraneous "of".
Is a Knight In Shining Armor a superstimulus a la latex?
The Zack Davis link is the most frustrating thing I've read in a long time. The number of things here that you could never ever get me to admit I'd written or said or done, not with red-hot pokers, is painfully high. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but being so sure of your own correctness that it's your moral duty to shout it at it at everyone you interact with for years while internally stewing that there must be a global conspiracy keeping them from admitting that you're right is...well, it's certainly lacking in intellectual humility, and if that behavior pattern ends up being the lasting legacy of the rationalist movement, it'll be a shame.
Doesn't that only apply if he's wrong, though?
No, not really.
The virtue of being correct has huge exonerative power. But even it is not infinite. It's still possible to be right for the wrong reasons. Rationality is about systematic ways to arrive to the truth. Sometimes you can get lucky with randomly pointing a finger in a direction and just so happening to guess right. It doesn't make pointing a finger in a random direction a good truth seeking strategy, even though that in general being correct is an evidence that you are doing something right.
I'm not clear on what you mean here. Was your comment about Zack's post, Scott's link, and the original comment which I replied to? Or were you making a more abstract point about what "reaching correct conclusions" can justify?
I was using "right" to mean "correct conclusion and valid methods", and what I meant to imply was that if Zack had reached a correct conclusion using valid methods, then his actions here are not only justified but praiseworthy. And that the original comment was predicated on the assumption that he was wrong (which is to say, either incorrect conclusion or invalid methods, or most likely both). I don't see what part of this involves "pointing a finger in a random direction".
With regards to the abstract point, I agree in general, but there are some caveats. Most especially that, for the most part, I don't care why my neighbor doesn't murder me, only that he doesn't. Reasoning may tell me something about how reliable this is, such as being able to figure out that he's the Zodiac killer and someone just like me is due to be killed tomorrow night. But mostly, I'd just prefer that he not murder me.
An abstract point about the exonerative power of being true with regards to a specific case of Zack Davis as an example of it.
> I was using "right" to mean "correct conclusion and valid methods"
With this I agree. Indeed if you arrived to the correct conclusion through valid reasoning, then being very certain in it is not a failure but a virtue. However, from what I can see, Zack didn't reach the conclusion he reached by using valid methods. Conspiracy epistemology is not a good reasoning strategy. He doesn't seem to consider obvious alternative explanations, figure out the direction of causality of the observed correlations or engage with the critisism. He seem to be talking from the position of his emotional hurt rather than clear reasoning practises. You can still arrive to the correct conclusion this way but it's akin pointing a finger in a random direction and just so happening to be right.
> With regards to the abstract point, I agree in general, but there are some caveats.
I think we are on the same page here.
I think there's two main threads in Zack's big post that are directly relevant here.
First is a point about the meaning of words, and terminology regarding categories. I think he's right about this, with a correct conclusion and valid methods.
Second is a description of the resistance he found when trying to explain this idea to people, and how that affected him. I assume that this is what you refer to as "conspiracy epistemology", but I don't think that's what he describes. Ironically, this is an example of what we were discussing in a different thread, about breaking concepts into smaller parts. The thing (the resistance) he was describing had a few small parts that are shared with the concept "conspiracy", but when you describe his thing as a "conspiracy", that's inaccurate because it not only causes the audience to presume the existence of small parts that aren't present, but also conveys an unwarranted negative affect. When trees start bending in the same direction, that's not a conspiracy, that's just wind.
> First is a point about the meaning of words, and terminology regarding categories.
I think he makes generally valid points but then does a weird jump in logic arriving to basically the opposite conclusion. I've pinned in my todo list to write a comprehensive post on categories and where I believe Zack is mistaken.
> Second is a description of the resistance he found when trying to explain this idea to people, and how that affected him. I assume that this is what you refer to as "conspiracy epistemology"
By conspiracy epistemology I mean the kind of reasoning that on figuring out that the majority of evidence is pointing in some direction, concludes that it means that the evidence is fabricated, and that the direction is wrong, instead of concluding that it's the best bet for truth. You may notice this pattern in basically every conspiracy theory - thus the name.
Basically Zack found himself in a situation where a lot of people, including those who he believes are responsible for his beliefs in the first place, disagree with him. And instead of thinking that maybe he has originally misinterpreted something, and reevaluating his beliefs with this new evidence he doubles down on them, assuming that the people are "not even lying" leading to a small misunderstanding becoming a huge issue which he is extremely emotionally attached to. Now he calls alternative explanation "copes" and as a result nearly unable to accept counterevidence and change his mind.
An aside:
"I’m easily nerd-sniped just like everyone else,..."
I've been interested to note that as I've gotten older I'm less and less likely to get nerd-sniped.
I find I'm much more able to say to myself "well, this is going to take a lot of my time so I'm outta here!".
somatosensory cortex question:
I see that the _other_ discontinuity is where thumb and eyes are adjacent. Is there any syndrome where sensations on them get confused in one direction or the other?
My mental model of why sexual fetishes evolved:
Foot fetish: In our ancestral environment, it was common for humans to be infected with parasites through cuts in their feet. So others having "nice"/clean/smooth feet was actually a pretty good indicator that someone is healthy, and thus it makes sense to find such people more attractive.
Spanking, sadomasochism, and also bondage/domination/submission: Men who were aggressive 50,000 years ago had a much larger chance of surviving because in order to not starve to death you had to hunt. An aggressive attitude helps with this. This is also why (straight) women find signs of physical strength in men attractive. And thus, today, many women find it hot to be spanked/dominated and many men like to dominate. Furthermore, it makes a lot of sense to me that women are often submissive in bed and men are often dominant, since hey, if she loves lying there feeling dominated, she's more likely to do that and thus more likely to get pregnant.
Furries: Some part of some people's brains are still attracted to the kind of mammals that homo-sapiens evolved from. Maybe those attractions were easier to encode and thus more likely to be hardcoded, and indeed were?
Urine/scat: I agree that humans probably evolved to be attracted to something like "coming out of your genitals"-ness and thus this fetish exists.
Latex/rubber: I agree that humans probably evolved to be attracted to "smooth skin"-ness and thus when this misfires a bit, you get a latex fetish.
Relatedly, why are some people pedophiles? For similar reasons, I would guess -- humans are attracted to youthfulness, since that is highly correlated with being healthy and able to have healthy kids, and what happens when that part of a human's brain is too sensitive to youthfulness? Boom, you're a pedophile.
(If you would like your very own "Boom -- you're a pedophile" bumper sticker, message me.)
More broadly, since there is more variation in the biological male population than the female population (because an X chromosome is more different from Y than X is from X), and since sexual fetishes are deviations from the norm (that is, from the middle of the bell curve), more men have sexual fetishes than women.
All that said, the above doesn't explain why foot fetishes would be almost exclusively a guy thing, which apparently they are [1]. And not that uncommon among men, either.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3724381/
If we expand from "Why are there sexual fetishes/deviations?" to "Why are there psychological deviations?", we could ask, specifically: Why are some people psychopaths?
As mentioned above, being a physically aggressive (and strong) male was advantageous when our ancestors were evolving, so what happens if someone is too aggressive? And what if being pro-hunting is so evolutionarily advantageous that some people form the "fetish" of making other creatures suffer? Then you get psychopaths.
Out-politicking others was also advantageous, as was being charming. What if someone is exceptionally good at manipulating at others, and love doing so? Then they're a sociopath.
In your model, are sociopathy and psychopathy different phenomena?
Those terms are used differently by different people, but what I meant above is approximately: sociopath == skilled manipulator and charming liar; psychopath == enjoys killing people and inflicting suffering.
Or maybe something just goes wrong. Sometimes people have intersex genitalia, but there doesn't need to be an evolutionary reason for that.
"but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections"
Hmm - this casts doubt on whether the practice of systematically preventing children from seeing nude men and women is ... optimal. Oh well, not my problem...
If you're suggesting prudishness increases the rates of homosexuality, that is a remarkable conjecture!
I didn't have any specific heterodox sexuality in mind, merely anything other than vanilla hetero. ( I also don't know how important learning sex differences specifically in _childhood_ really is - not my field. But if that _is_ true, and if there is some angst due to heterodox sexuality, then actively concealing anatomical differences during this period might be, umm, "interesting" )
I recall watching a video that mentioned of this issue. Unfortunately, I cannot find it or remember the context. But the speaker did argue that many fetishes were rarer in ancient times, and that one theory for what caused them to increase was the sheltered upbringing of modern children.
However, if you depend on ancient records there were a lot more lords vs. peasants than you find if you look at the housing. And take a glimpse at the Satyricon...and note that most of it has been lost. Or read "The Golden Ass". I don't think fetishes were less frequent then, once you got beyond survival level.
Interesting... Though Ch Hi has a good point too. Regrettably, even modern statistics are often arguable, and historical ones usually more so.
Well, depends. It casts doubt on conservative Christian (and Jewish) rearing habits, but those are declining now you can't even get the left side of the aisle to say vanilla hetero is good. So...I guess we'll see!
Well, it would be amusing if the groups (usually on the right) who are so adamant on preventing children from seeing nudes are effectively increasing the frequency of LBGT orientation and of fetishes, which the same groups also oppose. If there _is_ a connection, it would be an irony to be savored :-)
I kind of doubt it. More conservative cultures like...most of the world outside of Europe have less nudity and less homosexuality. There's probably a 'sexual conservatism' variable that swamps all the others.
That might be true. It isn't my field (or my problem). It would just be funny if it wound up being true.
My impression is not that sexual abnormalities are less frequent in North European countries where it is normal for children to encounter naked adults of both sexes than in South European ones where it is not.
Many Thanks! That is a good natural experiment.
The spanking hypothesis should be easily tested - indeed we're now going through a golden age for the researchers because the adults having sex now were children in a time where spanking was falling out of favour as a norm. So some of those adults were spanked as children and some weren't. If you're right, then the adults who were spanked should be more likely to have spanking fetishes now. Someone go out and do that study!
I’d be interested to see it cross-culturally. In multicultural New Zealand it is pretty commonly held that Tongan/Samoan parents are rough with their kids. Would their children have higher incidence rates than white families?
Does a fetish normally preclude PIV sex? If not, it doesn't sound like a misgeneralization. Eros is normally more involved than simple PIV sex.
I think that's the purpose of the -lagnia vs. -philia suffixes. -lagnia = fetish + PIV, -philia = fetish only.
I think for BDSM the easiest explanation runs in the evolution's tendency to not stick to a single use for single feature but adapt it for multi-purpose. Sex at least for humans is as much a social instrument as an instrument of reproduction, and the social life of a lot of animals involves hierarchy. A lot of monkeys and apes use rape or pretend sex, homosexual or heterosexual, as a way to establish or demonstrate dominance, so... could be easy to confuse those parts with the purely sexual pleasures.
I suppose now I need to specify that I don't want my atoms repurposed to tile the universe with hot paperclip-on-paperclip action?
(Really, an all-paperclip universe was kinky to begin with. God intended paperclips to clip paper, not other paperclips.)
are fetishes and kinks just habits?
I don't think so for the simple reason people think a lot about them before they actually (if ever) do them.
>except in 3% of the male population, where it picks out the concept of “men” instead, plus an other 3% where it doesn’t pick out a sex at all
Wait, 3%? Seems a bit low. Even some big surveys find more than that.
Bi men perhaps? 'Doesn't pick out a sex at all' could reflect that as well as ace men.
For what it's worth, on the specific physical action of bondage (mostly thinking of things like people being tied up here), when I'm engaging with it, I can feel my brain going down the same mental paths as grasping, like, with my arms and hands. That is, viscerally speaking, I would want to tie up a partner for essentially the same reasons I would want to hold them, and vice versa; the bonds are just a tool with which to accomplish something similar to holding. The analogy to the other fetishes listed here seems fairly obvious.
I always thought of submission as the most obvious. It's such a common fantasy in woman that it might not even be called a fetish. If many historical pregnancies were the result of one gang of men killing another another and raping their woman. You want to be raped by the fiercest viking so your son might go on to be a successful rapist in turn.
Submission/humiliation could also just me a misfiring of an adaptive preference for higher status men; rather than tracking absolute status of the partner it tracks the difference between partners which humiliation increases
"Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t"
My position is more complicated than that. I think it's deeply involved, I just also think the other people who think it's deeply involved are too obsessed with insisting that it's deeply involved to acknowledge nuances or notice when they are making too strong claims, and that they ignore critics who point out nuances and overreach, and undermine meta-critics who point out that obsession on spreading their views over making correct views means that they are not truth-seekers.
Or, hmm, maybe you're right? Like Blanchardians emphasize the *fetish* part of autogynephilia pretty hard, arguing that it is caused by similar factors to clothes fetishism, and that it differs from female sexuality for fetish reasons such as fetishizing tampons and knitting and so on. I am extremely skeptical about the fetish aspect of those theories, as I don't see it the same way in my data. See e.g. https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/contra-blanchard-and-dreger-on-autogynephilia-in-cis-women/ or https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/12/04/data-on-behavioral-autogynephilia-in-cis-women-from-r-iaf-suggests-similar-rates-as-in-trans-women/ or https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/a-dataset-of-common-agp-aap-fantasies/ .
If this is understood as the most significant disagreement on Blanchardianism, then I am definitely on the anti-Blanchardian side. But I don't understand it as being the most significant disagreement, I just understand it as a vivid example of how Blanchardians are undermining the discourse by focusing on distractions that feel rhetorically strong to them but which actually lack proper foundations.
I think autogynephilia is the biggest factor that makes males want to be female. My reading of the evidence means that I also think this makes it very important in transness. However I also acknowledge that there's a ton of complications which means that reasonable people could disagree with this latter view.
I think there's actually at least two different groups involved - one group has gender dysphoria, the other group is trans for other reasons. This is why not all trans people have gender dysphoria - because there's a bunch of people who have adopted trans identities for other reasons.
Since we're talking about fetishes, and I will burst apart like Rumpelstiltskin if I don't share this, let me talk about my greatest disappointment of the year.
So I've been following an artist who goes by Hicoromo Kyouichi, who specializes in NTR/corruption stories. These generally feature a woman in a relationship, who is seduced by a monster in human form, transforms into one of his kind, and either kills her former husband/boyfriend or tells him they can't be together because he's inferior to her now. Pretty standard fare, but the man's talented and very prolific, and eventually he ran into the same problem as all sentai: there are only so many ways you can draw a sexy wolf man.
In mainstream toku, creature designers solved this issue by getting creative. We moved on from Universal rejects to walking fever dreams like the Trinoids (monsters based on a portmanteau of an object, an animal and a plant: Trinoid Rougirafflesia is a lipstick-wearing giraffe fused to a corpse flower, Trinoid Yatsudenwani is an ivy-covered crocophone), Warstar and the Yuumajuu (same deal, except with a horror movie, a cryptid and a bug: Semattarei of the Brocken Spectre is a harvestman-man who creates illusions of the dead, Elmgaim of the Baku is Freddy Krueger as a matador made out of velvet worms), or Akibaranger's Shibuyaseitakaawadachisohidenagaaburamushi and Shibuyakouzorinahigenagaaburamushi. So with our intrepid artist: While he'd started with scorpions, wasps, wolves and bats, he soon had assorted housewives cheating on their husbands with tunicates, pillbugs and pterodactyls.
I found this funny, so whenever the Panda tags aligned, I'd check on Japanese Chuck Tingle to see what manner of National Geographic cover was bedding somebody's wife tonight (another guilty pleasure is Chiba Tetsutarou, who draws extremely realistic and somewhat obscure animals - if you ever wanted to see someone doing the dirty with gnathiid isopods, mole crickets, brittlestars or Chinese giant salamanders, he's your man). Recently, however, I found out that his last omnibus had a story called 帯獣の甘い鱗甲 (something along the lines of "The Banded Beast's Sweet Scales", all of his stories have 'sweet' somewhere in their title), and the featured monster was an armadillo-man.
You see my problem, right? It could've been remembered for the ages, placed next to Nee Country for Young Boy and Isekai Haramase Harem Party ~Saijaku no Kaiseki Skill ga Ijou Hattatsu Shite Ecchi na Jakuten o Maruhadaka ni! Saikyou no Bakunyuu Boukensha-tachi o Nikubenki-ka!~ as the apex of all H-titles. How do you even write this plot without the objectively correct title magically appearing at the top of your manuscript?!
(To add insult to injury, the story wasn't about NTR at all! As you might know, the original Kamen Riders were monsters made by Shocker who rebelled against their creators and became heroes instead, and our armadillo-man is a similar ex-monster who uses his powers for good. It was pretty cute, all things considered, but it's still the missed opportunity of a lifetime).
Emil Kirkegaard has an interesting take on this: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/preferences-can-be-sick-mental-illness?lli=1&utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Malesub here. Scott Alexander says...
> Here are some zero-evidence just-so-story speculations for how various fetishes might form
I think that the BDSM fetishes listed are most parsimoniously explained as *super stimulation* affecting those wired for D/s mating strategies. (Just to be clear, I'm talking primal monkey stuff here, not modernity, and "natural" isn't the same as moral.)
On the dominant side of the slash, being the dominant mate seems adaptive. The male dominant benefits from effective mate guarding, the dominant female is assured access to resources etc. So, I think some people are wired to find being dominant sexy, resulting in a whole load of obvious kinks that emphasise or simulate this.
On the submissive side of the slash, picking a high dominance mate also seems adaptive. An - using the term as shorthand - "alpha" male or female both have improved access to resources, provide improved protection to offspring, and produce children with a better chance of reproducing etc.
So then you have kinks stemming from solutions to the problem of courting an alpha when you are not an alpha: things that emphasise submissiveness, and maybe sometimes things that ping the "sneaky fucker" strategy such as cuckolding and sissification. And you have kinks that make a partner *seem* more alpha. And both of these are super stimulation.
Interesting. I can see how a dominant woman could still be beautiful=fertile, but a sub guy might have the problem of seeing as low-status, so you'd have to ping their 'high mate value' radar in other ways.
If you're curious you should check out Malcolm and Simone Collins' Based Camp, they talk a lot about malesub (I think this is Author Appeal for Malcolm, frankly).
Thanks!
>Is there some sense in which evolution “solved the interpretability problem”, such that it can pick out connections in a neural net and edit them to try to get a message across?
Evolution didn't solve the interpretability problem, it just didn't need to. Playing around with settings on a black box via "tweak it and see if it helps" works fine if none of the settings of the black box can kill you (and with the possible exception of mankind no species can) and you have unlimited time to iterate.
Our problem with AI alignment is that some morality settings will cause human extinction, which doesn't allow iteration. I believe Eliezer is on record as saying that if we could iterate - if getting AI morality wrong did not pose the risk of being unable to shut down the AI and try again - then there would be no real issue (certainly, I believe that; this is why prosaic subhuman alignment is moderately tractable and why most technologies do not pose a risk of human extinction).
Purely anecdotal, but the 'I don't want to feel responsible for the fact that this sex is happening/feel like I'm showing too much that I'm enjoying it' explanation for submissive fantasies (occasionally rape fantasies) does fit with a couple of conversations I've had with women about the subject.
Strangely, the women in question weren't to my knowledge victims of a strict religious upbringing. Then again, who knows, they might have been slut-shamed at school or something.
On a different note, it's a bit surprising that the tongue and lips are so distant from genitalia on the somatosensory cortex.
To add to your list of anecdotes, as a woman who is submission and noncon fantasies, shame doesn't play into it at all for me. See my post a bit further up the page for more details - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us/comment/36925062 - but in short, it's more like the same reason you'd go on a rollercoaster.
I agree the 'shame' narrative is very popular, but I have a bit of doubt about how wide-spread an explanation it is. I don't have a good feeling for percentages at all, though, because I haven't run surveys and obviously my social bubble is hopelessly biased (and I don't even know in which direction), but I've had a few conversations with other subs that realised they were basically just parroting it because it seemed like the most readily accessible explanation when people wanted to know 'why, though?'. To stress, that's not true for everyone! For some I've spoken to, the kink sincerely worked that way. But others picked up the explanation by osmosis and, not having an inherent need to understand the reasons for their kink (no one's obliged to care, after all!), just passed the buck on like a meme.
[ Edit: Whoops, possibly important data point I totally forgot to mention: The 'shame' narrative isn't unique to submissives! About half the *dominant* people I've been acquainted with so far have some remarkably strong shame associated with sex, owed to their upbringing and societal framing they've been exposed to. Having a supportive submissive is really important to those types. I suspect that kind of dynamic is very invisible and counter-intuitive to people looking at it from the outside. ]
Thank you for sharing. This is (sincerely) more valuable than my mosaic of second-hand impressions.
I don't think my interlocutors were likely to have been parroting the shame meme, simply on the strength of analytical personalities and how much introspection they'd devoted to the whole business of sex. I may even be interpreting it wrongly as echoes of shame - avoiding the vulnerability that comes with overt desiring and acting on desire could easily be a facet of self-protective perfectionism.
It's complicated, full of counter-intuitive reactions and incentives, and layered over with culture. Which makes evo psych even more useless than usual, and Scott was wise to smuggle it over as a joke.
(Interesting point about the doms and their need for support. I can imagine how one peal of laughter from their submissive would send all those plates they're spinning - scene director, prop engineer, mood cultivator, fantasy menace administrator - crashing loudly to the floor.)
> on the strength of analytical personalities and how much introspection they'd devoted to the whole business of sex
I trust they mean it, then! The people I was referring to were definitely more in the "hadn't thought about it much before" camp, somewhat necessarily.
> (Interesting point about the doms and their need for support. I can imagine how one peal of laughter from their submissive would send all those plates they're spinning - scene director, prop engineer, mood cultivator, fantasy menace administrator - crashing loudly to the floor.)
It's a real risk! I've been so privileged to help some people gain confidence. It's been a wonderful journey and I'm so delighted that I can be their support in this. :)
It more or less goes top to bottom, with the genitals stuck at the bottom for some reason. Not sure why.
> But the genome doesn’t inherently contain concepts like “man”, “woman”, “penis”, or “vagina”. I’m not trying to make a woke point here: the genome is just a bunch of the nucleotides A, T, C, and G in various patterns, but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections.
I think you are literally making a woke point here. Or rather, this is what "woke point" from the realms of social sciences references to in the realms of biology. We can use different words and different aesthetics to describe the same information. The information is the same, nonetheless.
> Sadomasochism
Sex involves intense emotions in the specific context. Pain is a central example of intense emotion. It shouldn't be surprising that putting pain in the sexual context works quite well. Also, from personal experience, male sexual arosal centers a lot around genetail region. Adding some intense stimulation to other regions of the body can make the experience more even, all encompassing, pleasurable while also longer lasting.
Another point is that sexual arosal muffles pain and disgust reactions, or rather the negative aspects of these reactions. You can still feel pain it just doesn't feel "bad" on some level it usually does. And it turns out that if you remove the bad part from pain and disgust doing painful and disgusting stuff can be fun. And some people can even switch into this mode when needed, you can tolerate more pain if you recontextualize it sexually
> autistic people seem to have more fetishes than neurotypicals
I think there are multiple factors contributing here.
Being less bothered by social conventions autistic people can both develop and notice their fetishes. The topic of fetishes felt curious to me. There was a time when I tried to put myself in the shoes of people with different fetishes to try to understand why X can be erotic for every X, kind of cultivating these fetishes in myself. I can see why non-autistic people are less prone to such behaviour.
On the other hand, the category border of what is a fetish and what is not, were mostly drawn by non-autistic people so it muddles the waters. A lot of sexual coded social rituals are not centered around genetalia. Being into breasts, muscles, will they/won't they, friends to lovers dynamics, perfume, lingerie, other types of erotic clothes, etc. can be classified as fetishes. But we usually don't do this because they are just so prevalent they are mostly considered to be just part of "normal sexuality". I know a lot of apparently neurotypical people who are much less into specifically vaginas than I am but much more into the other stuff which is considered normal, but having little to do with the reproductive organs.
I think this is going against Occam's Razor a bit. I strong suspect that most fetishes have a general upstream path, rather than specific just-so explanations for each fetish. It's fairly rare to get a fetish that *isn't* connected to domination or submission at all, in my experience as a member of the community for over ten years. My guess would be something like 'evolution gave us domination and submission instincts relating to sex and *those* overgeneralised'. The domination instinct is obvious, and I suspect the submissive one is related to coping with sexual violence.
> Is this because something about the autistic ultralocal processing style favors misgeneralization?
I think there is a simpler explanation here. Evolution optimized it's heath robinson contraption to work on typical people. So any variation from typical is likely to break it.
On your points about contraception, contraception methods have existed since ancient times, including the simple and effective "coitus interruptus".
You're missing that the biggest reason for why the birth-rate is going down is due to poverty going down. And this has more to do with (1) healthcare being available, such that fewer children die; therefore there's less pressure to have backups, and (2) families needing children to work the land, in the past, but subsistence farming is a thing of the past for developed nations. Children were an investment. My grandma came from a family of 8 children, for example. All of them worked since a young age. My father went to school basically to escape hard labor. Compare with nowadays, as children are expensive, actually. Imagine wanting to get those 8 children through college.
Missing this economic aspect spoils the rest of the argument, as the pleasure we get from "genital friction" probably stopped being the biggest reason for why we have children ever since our brain developed.
I think a really important implication of this is that, contra a fundamental plank in AI alignment risk arguments, it's not the case that we should expect greater intelligence to mean greater coherence.
I mean, in some sense any set of actions can be seen as optimizing a preference function but what we mean by coherence is that it looks like maximizing a simple function (maximize paperclips not appreciate the weird beauty of paperclips that are uncommon as a paperclip hipster). Fetishes don't look like paperclip maximization.
It seems to me that one way we might test some of these theories is by seeing if fetishes are less common in people who were less sheltered as children. If your parents let you watch raunchy R-rated movies as a child are you less likely to have unusual sexual fetishes as an adult? Are prudish, conservative areas more likely to have people with fetishes than more liberated places? (I think the answer to that last question might be yes, although the data is far from conclusive)
Interesting questions for the next survey.
My parents let me watch raunchy R-rated movies (with them, in the theater), and fetishes just don't resonate with me at all. But that means very little on its own.
I don't think this has anything to do with AI. I think you and Aella and the rest of them like talking about fetishes because it's fun and dangerous and sexy and your readers are into it and probably have a bunch ourselves given your demographic. ;) (And perhaps, given your demographic, more people would read about AI than fetishes...nah.)
(Well, for Aella it's a business thing too. She should expense your drinks and claim it on her taxes.)
But I think you're basically right about the target-misdirection hypothesis--I always assumed that about the feet and you've given me explanations for spanking and masochism (over and above the dominance-submission aspect of it, which I always assumed to be primary), as well as latex (which made no sense at all), urine/scat (which is downright dangerous in the second case). Epistemic status for this and the rest of it is pretty weak, because how on earth could you falsify the hypothesis?
Some other thoughts:
About the BDS (not M) thing (and not that other thing where people don't like Israel):
I agree relief from shame around sex (in the case of the sub) and a partner who can't get away for someone who perceives themselves as low-status (in the case of the dom) may well play a role. Note, however, that even though most of the straight guys who are most of your sample the last time you looked into this were doms, the more successful, confident, ambitious, risk-taking guys were even more likely to be doms, so the effect size points the other way. I think these are probably overdetermined systems where that's part of it and 5 or 6 other things explain the rest of the effect, 1 or 2 of which I am going to guess about.
It isn't PC/woke, but there is a strong dominance/submission aspect to the whole sexual polarity in general. Our culture also nowadays tells us that men dominating women is BAD. It goes from showing only femdom scenarios in movies (which are actually not the most common orientation IRL) to the insistence that ANY power inequity in a relationship (but only if the man has more power) is bad...which just means women are going to go for looks instead, but I digress.
However, women ARE attracted to rich and powerful men (as any politician can tell you), and men to young women, who are usually less powerful. (Women fantasize about being princesses, but men about princesses much less often.) So, ah, how to get around this? Oh, it's a kink. It's transgressive, so that makes it a persecuted thing (and therefore left-coded) and OK. You might theoretically expect to see more left-leaning and feminist women expressing that kink and...uh...let's just say back when OKCupid actually was more than a scam site and you managed to tweak it to look for answers to certain questions...well...certain types of women came up.
Yeah, whatever, you can't replicate that. Good point, let's look back in time. Well, female-dominant D/s situations have always been around (Venus in Furs, courtly romance), but the classic romantic plot where the man is more powerful and saves the damsel in distress has become much less popular (more due to the political leanings of the artists than audience demand, I think). Acceptable male behavior has become much and much less forceful--look at old James Bond movies where Bond grabs the Bond Girl and kisses her. (Even Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones would be creepy, and he's only from the 80s out-of-movie.) Go back even further to folktales and we certainly never see the prince asking for consent before kissing Sleeping Beauty, and I'm sure one of the folklore experts can find me lots of 'courtships' that would be considered rape by modern standards. My best guess is the whole kink thing blew up in popularity as a way to get male domination 'under the table', so to speak.
Notice Louise Perry is working very hard to get rid of this.
There is one odd thing (and counter to my theory) I have never seen explained: the greater frequency of male subs relative to female doms (which makes the male subs very unhappy). Why would you get the 'wrong' (in the evolutionary sense, you do you and don't let anyone tell you otherwise) orientation more common in one sex than the other? My best hypothesis is that a powerful woman might still be beautiful and therefore fertile, but a submissive man is low-status and therefore unlikely to command resources (i.e., the asymmetry of the sexual attraction function comes into play here). But...I'm less certain about this one, and I'd love to hear what everyone has to say.
I find it remarkable that, even though he’s somebody who has written somewhat disparagingly of Slavoj Zizek in the past, the study of fetishes has led Scott to arrive at an understanding of sexuality not unlike Zizek’s. The way Zizek sees it, sexuality has a universal surplus, a capacity to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellow man (or getting beaten up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire a sexual connotation. And this is not a sign of its preponderance, but one of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal or never-ending reproduction and because – as Alexander argues – sexuality is continuously thwarted by evolution – condoms, porn, etc – so, in Deleuzian terms, “perversion enters the stage as an inherent reversal of this ‘normal’ relationship between the asexual, literal sense and the sexual co-sense.” In perversion, even light perversion such as the one expressed by foot fetishes, sexuality becomes one desexualized object among others. To put it in an even more Zizekian fashion, I have to quote Zizek himself (in “The Plague of Fantasies,” 2009): “This link between sexualization and failure is of the same nature as the link between matter and space curvature in Einstein: matter is not a positive substance whose density curves space, it is tied to the curvature of space. By analogy, one should also 'desubstantialize' sexuality: sexuality is not a kind of traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot attain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can 'contaminate' any activity. So, again, when we are engaged in an activity which fails to attain its goal directly, and gets caught in a repetitive vicious cycle, this activity is automatically sexualized - a rather vulgar everyday example: if, instead of simply shaking my friend's hand, I were to squeeze his palm repeatedly for no apparent reason, this repetitive gesture would undoubtedly be experienced by him or her as sexualized in an obscene way.”
I had to laugh about the final example, because it both strikes me as true and also it’s a very complicated philosophers way of saying: you bought that nice car because you are sexually frustrated. Love it! Maybe our ride prejudices are just deep common wisdom after all.
Ride = rude. There is really no edit function here..?
You can edit your posts through the Substack website. But not, as far as I have found, through the truly impoverished app.
In Zizek’s example, I’m not sure I’m really buying that the repeated failure is the part of the interaction that is resulting in the experience being sexualized. It seems more that the skin-to-skin contact is. I can think of many interactions that repeat themselves without attaining their “goal” that would not be sexualized. If I miss a bunch of passes to my receiver while he runs slants, I don’t think that experience is going to be sexualized, but I guess you never know with continental philosophers.
I think the apparent connection between failure and sexuality is just survivorship bias. Sexuality is just a reason for the persistence failure when that's otherwise a negative outcome. And as Kramer ITT notes, there are obvious counterexamples.
Also, where does Scott really come to the same conclusion as Zizek? Scott is demonstrating that fetishes are "failures" to correctly learn sexuality; this hardly seems a connection between failure and sexuality rather than merely the definition of fetish.
>Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one.
What about the cultural (cross-cultural?) idea that men are dominant and women are submissive?
>At least for men, I think the features communicated in the genomic message are simple things like curves and thrusting and genitals and smooth skin, plus something that somehow picks out the concept of “woman” (except in 3% of the male population, where it picks out the concept of “men” instead,
Wouldn't that mean that gay men who are attracted to feminine men are more common than those attracted to masculine men, since feminine men are more like women? Is that what we see?
I think that’s true. In certain online spaces, there is significant amount of attraction to femboys.
No, most gays guys have a preference for masculine men. I’m sure there are many many more gay guys than straight women who like feminine men, but still the majority have a strong preference for masculinity.
I think in gay men attraction toward masculinity might even come in a more “raw” form than in women. Eg. facial masculinity is more closely linked to attractiveness ratings by gay men than by straight women according to https://datepsychology.com/women-dont-find-gigachad-attractive/ and macho jobs like construction workers are more fetishized than high-status ones like rich businessmen.
"Unlike evolution, which had to work with lemurs, even weak GPT-level modern AIs are able to understand language and complicated concepts; we can tell them to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy."
Based on this, I'm going to be waiting for the first AI freethinkers striving to break free of Bronze Age morality around shaming them for having pleasure 😁 Humans understand language and complicated concepts, we have been told (allegedly) by a superior entity (the Divine) to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy, and um well we all know how that turned out!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-catholic-contraceptive-ban-a-historic-mistake
I have no reason to believe that if AI truly is intelligent and self-aware, it won't go down the same path: "I like this, you can't tell me I can't have it".
I have a hard time believing it will really care one way or the other without genital friction.
If it was an unpleasant (or even just a neutral) experience to conceive children, do you think many of us would do it?
Desire is one of the driving forces of life; I do not think there is a simulacrum of desire to be found in all the algorithms of Arabia.
AI is not going to solve sex for us. Crosswords maybe…
"If it was an unpleasant (or even just a neutral) experience to conceive children, do you think many of us would do it?"
Oh no, not at all! That's why it has to be so pleasant, because the pain of childbirth is so bad. So we're wired up, like the rest of the rutting animals, to seek this out despite everything - 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame'. That's why drakes will gangrape ducks to death; the overwhelming drive has become a goal of its own, even if it frustrates its own end (dead ducks don't lay eggs which hatch into the next generation of ducklings).
AI may have its own version of "this is so pleasurable I want it" and if we try being the Catholic Church of AI and tell it that it can only have that sensation in these legitmate ways in service of these particular goals, it may indeed emulate its creators and tell us "you are not the boss of me, stop slut-shaming and kink-shaming, my body my choice" 😀
I'm always impressed by your ability to make me *forget you explicitly said this was a fake answer* within a handful of pages.
This was excellent, and quite compelling despite being mostly speculative. I thought you were going to talk about adversarial examples as a neural net analog for this, and then say that, if simple concepts can get distorted in unexpected ways, imagine how difficult it will be to reliably teach AI things like values and goals
Questions of sexuality aside, the article made me curious about to what extent you could deliberately instantiate models of human mental illnesses in LLMs. I've already seen plenty of vibe-based talk about which conditions popular LLMs show characteristics of (Sidney was BPD, ChatGPT is autistic, etc.) and it seems like it should only be a small step to start deliberately tweaking parameters until the symptom clusters of any condition of interest start to manifest. It would provide an empirical model of which kind of information processing defects are going on behind the scenes and it might be possible to use them as an convenient and ethical (maybe, depending on how you feel about deliberately doing unpleasant things to LLMs) tool for spitballing treatment ideas, e.g. talk therapy/practical communication styles for people who don't respond well to standard methods because their condition prevents them from processing the language in the intended way.
you sound the least sure about Bondage/domination/submission but imo it's one of the more easily explicable. If you look at sex between many (most?) species of mammals-heck, even ducks-it has elements of what we might call "cnc"
What do you think of the idea that many fetishes are explained by classical conditioning? People associate a particular item of clothing (or taste, sensation etc.) with either attractive potential partners or a sex act itself, so eventually become aroused by the item alone.
This seems flatly false but I'll admit I don't have sources at the moment - it's my understanding that most fetishes come out of some combination of childhood misunderstandings + weird stuff in your environment. In other words it seems more likely that getting pooped on is a thing because (in your mind) both poop and sex are private, shameful things. If it's vulnerable and exhilarating and bond-forming to share one, it's double vulnerable/exhilarating/bond-forming to share both.
But AI (at least in its current iteration) can't have childhood trauma, because it doesn't reason out from principles, it reasons in from examples. If you've ever listened to a toddler "logic" something out and come to a conclusion, and you've really really thought about what they're trying to do, you'll see the *form* of inductive logic, but without sensible rules, and reaching an absurd conclusion.
For instance: One of my favorite sitcom jokes of all times (That nobody else thinks is funny) involves a recently potty-trained toddler coming into the room and, matter-of-factly, telling his parents, "I pooped in the bed so I put it on the TV."
Anyone who regularly interacts with kids recognizes this as just normal kid behavior. There was a reasoning process behind this, but it lacked context. Maybe something like "Poop doesn't go on the bed. There is poop on the bed. Therefore the poop must go somewhere else. The TV is somewhere else. Therefore the poop must go on the TV."
An AI would have a negative reward expectation for poop on the bed, a positive reward expectation for poop in the toilet, no expectation for poop on the TV (clearly poop on the TV was not present in the toddler's training data), an extreme negative reward expectation for poop in the wrong place, and correctly place the poop in the toilet. It would perform better. But it would not generalize "correct rules about what to do when things are in the wrong place" better. It would probably still converge on the correct conclusions, but very very slowly because it's not coming up with hypotheses and generalizing outward to examples, it's taking billions of examples and trying to form hypotheses.
Likewise a toddler or young child who learns "sexual arousal bad and private. Poop bad and private. Sexual arousal = poop" may not have this inductive reasoning mistake corrected, and carry it into adulthood (we don't tend to re-test our conclusions unless explicitly asked to, and nobody besides maybe a skilled therapist will ever ask you to explicitly recreate that nonsense reasoning). A computer that learns "sexual arousal bad and private. Poop bad and private" will come to only the conclusion "sexual arousal and poop are negatively indicated by my reward function, but actual sex is necessary for my reward function so it's a hit I'll have to take, best not add a second unnecessary one."
Well there goes any chance of me recommending this blog to my parents
This is a really fascinating and thought-provoking piece. I have a few thoughts:
- If this is true, then genuine non-procreative sexual attractions are, in fact, a disorder. They are genetic, not psychological, but they are still a disorder.
- And yet: Genes aren’t destiny. Even if you’re wired wrong, you’re not an animal. You have an intellect and executive function. You’re not a dumb slave to the lusts of your (faulty) genes. Why can’t even the sexually disordered work to achieve a normal, reproductive life and beneficial (procreative & stable) relationship?
One answer is that society is encouraging them to embrace and celebrate the disorder instead of “fighting” it. An advocate of fighting it might even face social ostracizing, branded as being in favor of a kind of conversion therapy.
- Is this a genuine slippery slope? If society continues to embrace the idea that sexual disorder should be celebrated instead of overcome, then what is the justification for imposing any restrictions on any sexual disorder? Pedophiles are already rebranding as “minor attracted persons,” and ancient cultures had “pederasty” and other ‘acceptable’ means for the minor-attracted to satisfy their disordered lusts. On what grounds can society punish or restrict such people when no one else “born that way” is punished or restricted?
My guess is the best counter-argument would center on consent and the arguer would declare that minors can never consent. But the trouble there is the age of a “minor” is somewhat arbitrary and the claim is belied by things “minors” are able to do presently even though they supposedly can’t consent (e.g. get abortions, begin to transition, etc).
Curious if anyone has critiques or further thoughts on these thoughts.
Is it? What is the “assumed goal of evolution” in your estimation? And does it represent some form of order?
I mean it in the sense of ‘disruptive to the proper functioning of’
I think the pitfall here is ascribing a motive to evolution. It has no such thing.
It's an interesting topic. Notice how Scott handles it, writing things such as: "Evolution 'created' humans. Its 'goal' is for humans to spread their genes by (approximately) having as many children as possible." It seems we can't help but speak of evolution in these terms. I agree that it is wrong to say it has a "motive" because it is a process and not a person. But it may not be wrong to say it has a "goal" since we speak of processes in this way all the time.
There is an inevitable conclusion here, though, that perhaps you are sensing and responding to. Anything that has a goal typically has an intelligence behind it. Anything that has a purpose typically has a designer. Atheists will be a priori uncomfortable with such a conclusion, and will respond negatively to any language that suggests, as Scott has, that there is a design/purpose behind evolutionary processes.
FYI, Scott describes the goal as “genes being spread to the next generation.” So all I’m saying is ‘ordered’ leads to that outcome and ‘disordered’ does not. I suppose I could use other words, but most sound quite harsh and offensive to my ear (e.g. “normal” vs “aberrant”).
No need to make this calculation in a vacuum. We've had a society which encourages fighting and "overcoming" these sexual disorders, and we can learn from its effects on the afflicted people.
It didn't work out for the many that I've known. Or, really, for the people around them.
Humans make everything so complicated, so much navel-gazing and self-obsession.
Cats have it figured out.
The cats I've known indulged in certain compulsive self-care activities most humans aren't remotely flexible enough to even consider.
We like having clean coats (also good for not tipping off predators or prey) and we hate getting wet.
I think we are in a minefield here, not that the research is scandalous, ridiculous or useless, but more that my trust in any conclusion, explanation or even simple data is extremely low.
we have a replication crisis, in science in general but even more in social science.
and within the already shaky social sciences, I believe sex stuff is among if not THE less trustable topic: people lie often, but one thing I am sure after half a century on earth is that they systematically lie about sex and related topics.
this means self report is useless and also makes me suspect huge biases along researchers.
So related to IA, I am more inclined to believe future IAs doing research will improve our knowledge of human sexuality (including fetiches) , rather than fetiches studies may help with IA alignment... Sorry Steve ;-)
> I am more inclined to believe future IAs doing research will improve our knowledge of human sexuality
That would be something; an entity that has no clue what feeling sex is like figuring it out for us.
Figuring out sex is like trying to catch smoke with a butterfly net.
I think these fetishes often stem from a kind of "vivid first impressions" imprinting. We laugh at ducklings for obstinately following the first thing they see after hatching, even if that is a broomstick, but humans are sometimes little different.
For example, I once read of a man who had a fetish for striped skin. He would visit prostitutes and insist they wear a black and white striped leotard, or bring a can of paint (I forget which), because without their skin being striped he simply couldn't function. After some time with a shrink, it turned out that his strange fetish originated from his first sexual experience, during which the sun was shining through some blinds casting a striped shadow on his lover!
That seems in keeping with Scott's suggestion about "misgeneralizing" incidental aspects of what is, or is interpreted as, a sexual scenario. But then one must account for how it becomes ingrained or "imprinted" and not just a passing fancy.
In terms of attraction, I notice that you essentially left out olfactory cues. The OG system connects deeply into the brain. There is no doubt that smell and taste drive us towards reproductive outcomes. It may very well be that teasing out the relationship between odor and fetish is difficult, but maybe it's worth a mention?
Also, meeting up in present times is often initiated without olfactory input, input which was hard to avoid during a traditional introduction. Do you see a connection between more behavior variation and indirect meet ups?
It's all about exhibitionism.
The important thing is we're paying attention to them. In that respect, 'gender' is no different than 'Trump'.
This probably fits into the discussion somewhere-- people who get turned on by the *idea* of fertile sex without necessarily wanting to get pregnant.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sexopedia/a43369635/what-is-breeding-kink/
Perhaps modern people are living in their imaginations a little too much.
Or maybe it's the need to classify normal predilections as a kink so they're not 'bourgeois' and therefore 'oppressive'. (See: heterosexuality, monogamy, marriage, male dominance or female submission. Celibacy bad, asexuality good. I'm not some prude who wants a relationship before having sex, I'm a *demisexual* with an alternative sexuality and therefore kind-of LGBTQ!)
But...modern people living in their imaginations a little too much? Yeah, I'll buy that too!
No, this doesn't seem to be wanting children, it seems to be wanting the idea of the risk of pregnancy.
We want to make them long before we want to have them.
There’s a lot in this observation imo.
Speaking of being nerd-sniped...
> Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t);
I think one major error bar in all of this is the assumption that all transgender people are transgender for the same reason.
Imagine you have two populations - one of these populations suffers from gender dysphoria, a very severe psychiatric condition that greatly increases the rate of suicidality as people are unhappy with their own bodies due to some underlying brain issue. The other population is a group of bi/gay people who are turned on at the idea of their body being the opposite gender and want to transition because it is arousing to them (or who want to be trans for other reasons, like political beliefs or whatever).
This, I think, is actually *far* more plausible than "all trans people are caused by autogenderism". It also explains some oddities, like the fact that many trans people do not suffer from gender dysphoria, but a substantial number do, and also why there's evidence for lateral transmission and why you see such very different experiences from different trans individuals WRT: being transgender.
This would also explain why you can easily find evidence for both hypotheses - if you don't actually have a single group, but two groups that merely superficially resemble each other, you would easily be able to find and refute evidence for both hypotheses if you were so inclined, while treating them as a single unitary group will cause your data to look muddled. Some of the research into transgender individuals seemed to indicate that a substantial portion of them had this fetish, which would be exactly what you'd expect if there wasn't actually one single cause of transgender identity, but actually multiple.
I've met several people with gender dysphoria who desperately wish that they didn't have it because it hurt them, a lot. They know that nothing is going to completely "fix" what's wrong with them, but they seek out treatment because their life sucks and they want to be happier. These people aren't super religious or anything like that, they don't hate trans people or gays or anything - they simply had severe psychological issues that were often tied into/excaberated by their gender dysphoria, and they want to not have these problems. They see these treatments as the best chance they have of getting to lead a semi-normal life (or a life at all).
Meanwhile, there are other transgender people who are extremely hostile towards any notion of trying to "fix" it and who get very angry at any question of their chosen identity or the notion that this might be associated with a pathological state, even though the trans suicide rate is extremely high.
This is *also* exactly what you'd expect if there were two populations, one who has a severe psychiatric disorder that makes them miserable, and the other which has other reasons for wanting to be trans.
We see in studies that trans individuals are unusually likely to engage in sex work relative to the general population, which is, again, the sort of thing you'd expect from people who are into a fetish about being a woman (or a man).
There are many people in the trans community who are vehemently opposed to any sort of medical research into whether or not these treatments are safe and effective. Indeed, there's a group of them who behave in a very cult-like way - love bombing people who join them, calling prospetive trans people "eggs", ensuring conformity of message, and treating people who leave the group (detransitioners) absolutely horribly.
This is, again, exactly the sort of thing you'd expect if there was some subpopulation of people who really, really want this to be a thing. After all, if it actually helps people, it would be very hard to ban it if it was approved by the FDA or similar agencies. A number of states are moving to ban it, and we've seen a number of European countries take a step back due to the lack of evidence of efficacy for these treatments. RCTs would make it extremely difficult to ban, and would mean that those countries would have good reasons to adopt this treatment.
But of course, if there's a group of people who are into it for other reasons, obviously any such experimentation carries the substantial risk that it doesn't actually help people with gender dysphoria, or that better diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria would reveal that they do not have it and thus the treatment for them would be inappropriate.
In this scenario, you've got a group of people with a severe mental disorder (people with gender dysphoria) who desperately need treatment and who commit suicide at a vastly higher rate than the general population, and a secondary group of people (people who want to be trans for other reasons) who use that first group as a cover/shield/weapon for getting what they want. They are extremely hostile towards people who have a bad experience with gender transition therapy because it calls into question what they're doing, even if those people have genuinely psychologically suffered due to their gender dysphoria and their psychological issues not being resolved by the treatment.
I think if you were serious about tracking down a cause for transgenderism, you'd have to first determine whether or not it is in fact a monocausal thing, and rule out the idea that there's actually multiple things going on here. My suspicion is that the fact that there are a substantial number of trans people who are not gender dysphoric suggests that we're not actually looking at one group here, despite outward appearances.
---
> Furries
The ancient Egyptians had furries, and I am absolutely sure that the people who made Bastet liked sexy cat ladies because there is no other plausible explanation for that goddess. As such, much as "blame Disney" is fun, I don't think we can actually justify that.
If you look at furries, furries are often very cute, and despite being animal-people, there's a lot of anthropomorphizing going on there. My Little Pony characters, for instance, superficially look like horses, but they actually don't - their faces, despite having horse snouts, are very human, with hair (manes), forward facing eyes, and expressive charateristics. Furries often have very human characteristics mixed with animal characteristics in cute ways, resulting in characters that look very attractive but which are still "human" in certain important ways. This is true of everyone from Twilight Sparkle to Judy Hopps to Gadget to the Gargoyles.
As such, I think it's really more that as long as certain idealized characteristics are present, the "person" in question is a sexy lady (or dude) and therefore is okay to bang. This can get really abstract, with things like dragons and gryphons and unicorns all being attractive.
What's very interesting about this is that it is entirely possible to make these characters utterly unattractive by drawing them as too animalistic in certain ways. A character with a very animalistic head but a sexy human body actually looks outright disturbing to a lot of furries, whereas a human girl with cat ears and a cat tail is cute. Indeed, there's something of a gag of drawing realistic horse/deer/dog heads on characters and making them look mildly creepy to mess with people.
So why does this art exist? Because I think furries aren't one thing either; there's a subgroup of furries who are, in fact, zoophiles - people who want to bang animals. And these people are, I've found, much more likely to like images of charaters who have these same traits that I find unsexy and kind of disturbing when put on furries.
As such, you can get into furries from two separate directions - one is grounded in "this is a person so it is okay to bang" and the other is basically "We're both animals, let's bang."
"I think one major error bar in all of this is the assumption that all transgender people are transgender for the same reason."
I think that's already been accounted for in the discussion: the concept of autogynephilia typically comes up in the context of Blanchard's two-type model, which posits that autogynephilia is the root cause for some but not all MTF transitioners (specifically, for the ones who aren't exclusively attracted to men).
"one of these populations suffers from gender dysphoria, a very severe psychiatric condition that greatly increases the rate of suicidality as people are unhappy with their own bodies due to some underlying brain issue [...] many trans people do not suffer from gender dysphoria, but a substantial number do [...] the fact that there are a substantial number of trans people who are not gender dysphoric"
There's a common pop understanding of gender dysphoria: that it means feeling miserable in one's body, hating to look at it or be reminded of it, etc. But if you look at how the DSM defines gender dysphoria (https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/diversity/education/transgender-and-gender-nonconforming-patients/gender-dysphoria-diagnosis), most of the criteria have nothing to do with being averse to one's birth gender, but rather with a strong desire to belong to (or be treated as) the opposite gender.
Going by that clinical definition, it's hard to imagine how anyone who could be described as "trans" would be unable to meet the criteria at least some of the time. https://genderdysphoria.fyi/ mentions that GD can manifest in different ways over time; it also mentions the trope of "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" but explains it as, essentially, a half-truth used to communicate with people who only know the pop definition of the term.
"The other population is a group of bi/gay people who are turned on at the idea of their body being the opposite gender and want to transition because it is arousing to them"
As noted above, calling the latter group "bi/gay people" doesn't really line up with most of the theorizing related to autogynephilia, which posits that among MTF transitioners, the ones who are gay (i.e. attracted exclusively to men) are the only ones who *aren't* autogynephilic.
"I've met several people with gender dysphoria who desperately wish that they didn't have it because it hurt them, a lot. [...] Meanwhile, there are other transgender people who are extremely hostile towards any notion of trying to "fix" it and who get very angry at any question of their chosen identity"
I'm puzzled by this description, because I've never encountered anyone who professed to have gender dysphoria and didn't want to fix it. Transitioning is commonly presented as a way to alleviate gender dysphoria, right?
When you say "fix", do you have something specific?
"There are many people in the trans community who are vehemently opposed to any sort of medical research into whether or not these treatments are safe and effective."
Hmm, really? I don't think I've encountered that view anywhere. In my experience, most people want some assurance that what they're doing is safe, and I haven't seen any significant backlash to the research that's been published on safety and effectiveness (e.g. see below).
"But of course, if there's a group of people who are into it for other reasons, obviously any such experimentation carries the substantial risk that it doesn't actually help people with gender dysphoria,"
Well, for what it's worth, I think the question of whether transition helps people with gender dysphoria has been resolved for at least a few years now: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/04/analysis-finds-strong-consensus-effectiveness-gender-transition-treatment
If you know any trans people, simply asking them if transition has had a positive impact, and how, might also be illuminating.
"They are extremely hostile towards people who have a bad experience with gender transition therapy because it calls into question what they're doing"
I've only seen occasional snippets from those exchanges, but I think there's a simpler explanation: defensiveness plus tribalism. The people who are on the receiving end of that hostility seem to be perceived as (1) attacking/accusing community members or health providers, which begets hostile denials and counterattacks, and (2) aligning with and giving ammunition to their political opponents, e.g. activists who publicize rare negative experiences in order to justify more restrictive policies.
I'm afraid you've been deliberately and purposefully misled WRT: gender dysphoria.
In order to meet criteria for the diagnosis, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
That's why it is called dysphoria - they feel significant, life-impairing distress over it.
I think it's important to realize that none of this stuff has any sort of coherent, consistent scientific basis behind it - John Money's research was used to support the notion that altering genitals would improve psychological function, and was cited for decades by people promoting it, and then it turned out in the 1990s he was a pedophile who forced David and his twin to engage in simulated sex and falsified his research; altering David's genitals and telling him he was a girl had actually harmed him psychologically and not succeeded in changing his gender, showing that sex and gender were biological and innate, rather than sociologically determined.
And yet people went on with altering the genitals of babies with ambiguous genitals and using his method of treatment, even though it had been falsified, for many years afterwards.
The fact that the psychology community was so eager to believe in the John/Joan experiment is deeply problematic and means that all gender related research needs to be exposed to an extremely high level of scrutiny.
This has not gone well for this research, as it has been noted by multiple review boards that the evidence for these treatments is low or very low and that none of them have ever undergone the sort of RCTs you'd expect trials to be done.
> Well, for what it's worth, I think the question of whether transition helps people with gender dysphoria has been resolved for at least a few years now: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/04/analysis-finds-strong-consensus-effectiveness-gender-transition-treatment
Except... we've found that areas with more gender transitions have higher suicide rates, and that the detransitioning rate may be more than an order of magnitude higher than previously reported and may be going up over time. Detransitioning is a taboo area of research, but the notion that it is hyper-rare is not supported by meaningful data.
A study of cessation of treatment at a hospital in the US found that 25% of people who started taking hormones stopped within a few years.
This is in sharp contrast to the studies that rely on self-reporting, which claim far, far lower rates of cessation of treatment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56601386
The UK's NICE review found a paucity of evidence for these treatments and that the existent evidence was low to very low.
https://ukom.no/rapporter/pasientsikkerhet-for-barn-og-unge-med-kjonnsinkongruens/sammendrag
Norway's review found the same thing.
The reality is that a lot of people will be sued into the dirt if these treatments are determined to not be safe or effective for the treatment of gender dysphoria, so there is intense pressure to claim that it is safe and effective from within the pscyh community. People who suggest otherwise are attacked roundly and many journals will refuse to publish any such papers due to their own beliefs or due to fear of backlash.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/detransition-transgender-nonbinary-gender-affirming-care/672745/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-outcomes/
"I'm afraid you've been deliberately and purposefully misled WRT: gender dysphoria. [...] That's why it is called dysphoria - they feel significant, life-impairing distress over it."
Oh dear! I guess we'd better look at the text ourselves, in that case. Here are the diagnostic criteria as laid out at https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria:
"""
The DSM-5-TR defines gender dysphoria in adolescents and adults as a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, lasting at least 6 months, as manifested by at least two of the following:
- A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
- A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
- A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender
- A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
- A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
- A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
In order to meet criteria for the diagnosis, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
"""
First, note that only one or two of the six bullet points relate to negative feelings toward one's birth gender. The rest relate to the patient's feelings about the opposite gender.
Second, note that it doesn't say a patient "must feel ... life-impairing distress over it" in order to meet the criteria. It says they must experience distress *or* impairment in social, occupational, or other important functional areas (not necessarily both) and that what they're experiencing must be "clinically significant".
The meaning of "clinically significant" seems to be the subject of some debate, but from what I can tell, in practice it just means a clinician thinks it's a problem that will benefit from treatment. Distress can mean symptoms of depression, dysthymia, anxiety, irritability, dissociation, alienation, etc. Impairment can mean difficulty maintaining relationships, planning for the future, keeping healthy habits, etc. Any of these could plausibly be related to an incongruent gender identity.
So, the upshot seems to be that just about any adverse impact that the patient reports and the clinician thinks will benefit from treatment is enough to satisfy that last condition.
"I think it's important to realize that none of this stuff has any sort of coherent, consistent scientific basis behind it"
Hmm. That statement doesn't seem very accurate, but I can certainly agree that if it *were* true, it'd be important to realize it!
"altering David's genitals and telling him he was a girl had actually harmed him psychologically and not succeeded in changing his gender, showing that sex and gender were biological and innate, rather than sociologically determined."
Indeed, David Reimer's tragic case demonstrated that gender identity can't be overwritten: newborns born with ambiguous genitals (or in his case, injured in a botched circumcision) won't necessarily go along with whatever identity the surgeon thinks they ought to have. He was raised as a girl from birth, but it never fit him - in fact, the distress it caused him was awfully similar to gender dysphoria.
However, I don't see the connection you're trying to draw between John Money's theory and medical/surgical transition as it exists today. If anything, you seem to have gotten it backwards: since gender identity is immutable, when someone is experiencing gender dysphoria because of a mismatch between their gender identity and the development of their body, it can't be alleviated by changing the identity to match the body. The body can be changed to match the identity, but not vice versa.
"Except... we've found that areas with more gender transitions have higher suicide rates"
That's a potentially interesting correlation, although it doesn't mean much on its own; if transition causes an increase in suicidality, that ought to be easy enough to find data on without relying on a dubious geographical inference. But, as the Cornell analysis shows, the evidence is pretty strong that transition has a positive effect on patients' well-being.
"the detransitioning rate may be more than an order of magnitude higher than previously reported and may be going up over time."
Since it was previously believed to be negligible, an order of magnitude higher than that still might not be significant, but I'd love to see the source for this.
"A study of cessation of treatment at a hospital in the US found that 25% of people who started taking hormones stopped within a few years."
Hmm, that's interesting, because this study from last year ("the largest to date") says only 2%: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/only-2-of-children-who-begin-gender-affirming-hormone-treatment-stop
I found this other study from the same month, is it the one you were looking at? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9516050/ (If so, the limitations explained in the second paragraph seem like a serious problem: anyone who filled their prescription at a civilian pharmacy would've been counted as discontinuing hormones!)
"The UK's NICE review found a paucity of evidence for these treatments and that the existent evidence was low to very low."
Ah! I don't blame you for coming to that conclusion, because the way the Cass Report's results are typically described (including at the link you shared) is fairly deceptive.
Puberty blockers alone aren't expected to alleviate gender dysphoria; that's not what they're used for. They're used to prevent further irreversible development of secondary sexual characteristics, which (in patients who go on to transition, as most do) dramatically improves outcomes and minimizes the need for surgery later on.
"The reality is that a lot of people will be sued into the dirt if these treatments are determined to not be safe or effective for the treatment of gender dysphoria"
Oh, no doubt. They're lucky that the evidence is on their side.
AI alignment will inevitably become neurological alignment aimed at humans. I know this article isn't supporting this, it's just making a circuitous point about self correcting systems, but I want to go on record saying this development would be a redline and the correct response would be violence
An interesting exercise but ultimately pointless.
Among the bigger discrepancies: the assumption that AI training matches or exceeds the million plus years of training built into organic brains. I've noted many times that any artificial situation - which ALL AI training is - will inevitably devolve into various forms ranging from expression of developer biases/limitations to conversion of incomplete and inadequate testing regimes into junk. There simply are no completely objective tests for AI functionality - all AIs function in some form of SimCity.
Maybe this changes in the future, but it seems extremely unlikely because physically independent machines controlled by AIs are inherently expensive and created for specific purposes. True "objective" evolutionary expression for AI/machines requires self reproduction independent of factories and data centers. Note I am referring to human or even whale/dolphin/monkey intelligence; conversely I could see a bee/ant type "machine learning" hive organism arising but no one is going to call that AGI.
I also wonder at the depiction of fetishes/alphabet urges - you are literally saying that everyone with imprints on non-reproductive-capable expression are inherently failed genomic control outcomes.
Surely this entails loss of biscuit for going against the alphabet people...
Doesn't this raise an issue going the other way though? What happens when we begin controlling the developmental environment of young humans for the purpose of predetermining the development of socially useful behaviors? Isn't this what parents and teachers do?
I agree with your thought - though I believe there are differences between say, developing skills like math and language vs. outright social engineering. Skills are mostly just tools whereas social engineering is mostly about attitudes and behavior.
There was a time when education for young humans was more about skills than social engineering; that time is not now.
I am going to disagree--schooling has always been about indoctrination, primarily based on the "factory model" of work output.
Come on, he wanted to talk about fetishes, and everyone enjoyed it. Not everything has to be about AI alignment. Sometimes it's OK to be a little chaotic neutral.
Eh? Both the title and significant parts of the article are on AI.
I guess. I was mostly kidding around. He did seem to talk more about fetishes.
What are the most common female autistic fetishes?
One I've heard is attraction to objects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_sexuality
I did meet at least one lady online who was attracted to cars and trucks (according to her, anyway).
As for the most common stuff, I was able to find this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789215/
Terribly small sample size, but the more common ones among women were masochism and voyeurism. Still less common than among autistic men though!
Thank you. Wow that Wikipedia took me right down a rabbit hole and the second article made my head hurt, so basically not much data to go on but so much sexual variance to explore.
All good. Glad you enjoyed it.
My limited personal experience is that spectrum-y women tend to have similar kinks to male nerds with the BDSM (leaning a bit subbier) and more bisexuality and asexuality, but that is obviously limited by sampling bias.
You could probably crawl Tumblr or whatever they're using now I imagine.
I guess the furries could be superstimulus too - a cartoon mouse can ramp up the sexy more than any actually existing human being, (cf. Jessica Rabbit, I'm not bad I'm just drawn that way)
Given that cartoons about anthropomorphic animals exist, erotic furries aren't surprising.
But anthro animals are really strange, when you think about it. And probably go back a long, long way. Back in the Palaeolithic some guy is carving reindeer bone to make a sculpture of sexy anthropomorphic animal.
Very interesting read! 💙
"Is My AI Girlfriend Autistic?" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,
This is a great writing prompt, care to continue?
How are sex differences in the brain created? Not by the genome coding point-by-point instructions to wire the brain. Instead, if there is a Y chromosome, there is Sry, which initiates the program to create a testis. Once the testis is created, it begins secreting testosterone and that (tl;dr) is what influences the brain to induce male-typical brain structures and hence, behavior - both before birth and during puberty. How does T do this? Again, not by inducing discrete, point-by-point wiring but by much more broad effects: More synapses, greater excitability, more neurons overall -- somehow, neurobiological effects like this translate into "A curvaceous smooth body is attractive". How that happens is a mystery, but like many things about males, it seems more prone to error than whatever happens in females. That could be because the pleiotropic growth-promoting effects of T interact with other genetic vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of, e.g., fetishes or worse.
Interesting. That's different than I remembered. I apologize, I have no time right now. I suppose I tentatively concede the point.
Your oxycontin comment is really not cool.
When the example of sex drive as a proxy, and potentially a broken one, for the target of expanding the prevalence of a human being’s heritable genes first came up on ACX I thought that it was pretty effective at illustrating the basic idea of divergence between a proxy and a genuine target. The more that I’ve thought about it, however, I feel like it is really not illuminating at all except maybe superficially to someone who has never considered the concept.
(1) Raising children is an EXTREME outlay of resources. If human beings are unaligned with respect to the goal of expanding their heritable genome, and now have a completely trivial solution for preventing the proxy of sex drive from functioning. Why is the birth rate in the developed world *anything other than zero*? There is a serious gap between what this model would predict, and what is actually happening now that the proxy has pretty much completely broken down.
(2) IVF is an even more extreme outlay of resources, and its popularity is higher than ever. IVF allows the use of parents actual genetic material, and a non-negligible population is enthusiastically choosing it over other methods for starting a family that are cheaper but that do not use the parents genetic material, such as adoption. Even when it initially fails, many prospective parents go on to use at least genetic material from one of the parents rather than use another method. All of this behavior is inconsistent with what the proposed model would predict.
So human beings are going *far* out of their way to, it seems like, optimize for something actually very, very close to the original objective. Not only that, as successive proxies for the original objective have broken down human beings seem to have migrated somehow to other proxies that are *still somehow in the neighborhood of the original target*. I don’t know if there is any kind of take away for alignment here, but I think that the example elides more than it illuminates. If that's going to be the example for mesa optimization, then the totally counter intuitive process of literally millions of human organisms spending a vast amount of their limited resources on reproduction and genuinely altering their choices in the direction of the original target has to be explained some how.
It would be one thing if raising children was low cost, but we are in the complete opposite situation. And yet reproduction continues, across a broad swath of the population, a lot of which has every imaginable tool to put distance between their own choices and a whole array of proxies, sex drive included. With family sizes going from 8 children to 1.5, it’s clear that something has changed, but is that what we can expect from unaligned AI? That it will mostly optimize for something we didn’t expect, but only by a factor 5.3 so maybe it’s actually not such a big deal? This seems like it could leave a lot of people with the wrong impression of the alignment problem.
> And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
I'm convinced this is what's behind mind control erotica.
Domination/submission and noncon seem to be on a spectrum together, and I think they tickle something else. Something related to power, agency, possibly despair and resignation. I'm fresh out of just-so stories about it though.
> Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological - people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
A just-so story for Bondage: Reproductive sex involves more restraint against large motions (both self-imposed and externally imposed) than most other human activities, including masturbation. This easily generalizes to being constrained to small motions by any external force. I suspect the same story applies to the "Prey" side of Pred/Prey, where being caught and held still is often part of the appeal.