Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
There's only one key sentence in the article that you need to read:
As a result of the change, it is expected that Wimbledon's Hawk-Eye challenge system - brought into use in 2007 - where players could review calls made by the line judges will be removed.
How far are we from "JudgeGPT will rule on your criminal case, and the ability to appeal its verdicts will be removed"?
The actual capabilities and accuracy of the AI system are, in many instances, irrelevant. The point is that AI provides an elastic ideological cover for people to do shitty things. He who controls the RoboJudge controls everything. Just RLHF a model so it knows that minority crime must always be judged against a backdrop of historical oppression and racism, and any doubts about the integrity of elections are part of a dangerous conspiracy that is a threat to our democracy, and boom. You have a perfectly legitimated rubber stamp for your agenda in perpetuity. How could you doubt the computer? It's so smart, and it's been trained on so much data. What would be the point of appealing the verdict anyway? Your appeal would just go to the same government server farm, the same one that has already ruled on your case.
Open source won't save you. What I've been trying to explain to advocates of open source is that you can't open source physical power. GPT-9 might give you your own personal army of Terrence Taos at your beck and call, but as long as the government has the biggest guns, they're still the ones in charge.
"AI safety" needs to focus less on what AI could do to us and more on what people can use AI to do to each other.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Isn’t the clearer explanation that she enjoys a part of the organizing the party, and doesn’t enjoy a different part, and when she is satisfied from the enjoyable part then the displeasing part becomes salient?
What you've rightly detected is that psychoanalysis depends crucially upon the notion of contradiction. How, one might ask, could someone look at something unpleasant, acknowledge that it is unpleasant, believe that they don't want it, and yet still, at the same time... want it? Isn't that just manifestly incoherent? And so, on the presupposition that desires can't be self-contradictory, you propose an alternative explanatory model that is free of contradictions: we have a multitude of competing desires and aversions, each with their own individual weights, and these desires and aversions can come into conflict, but ultimately each individual desire is self-consistent, and some will win out in some situations and not in others.
But this is ultimately just a presupposition on your part, and it is a presupposition that can be challenged, in the same way that the presuppositions of psychoanalysis can be challenged. It goes beyond mere skepticism about the unconscious because of concerns about its observability; it is your own positive theoretical axiom about the nature of desire as such. Psychoanalysis takes an alternative point of departure: what if desires can be self-contradictory, paradoxical, "incoherent"? What happens if we try thinking about people in those terms?
In fact for Lacan, the term "desire" is reserved for precisely these moments of self-contradiction and self-undermining. When you know what you want, you know why you want it, and you're happy when you get it - I want to take a nap because it feels good, I want to drink soda because it tastes good, I got the thing and now I'm satisfied - these are "demands", not desires, in Lacan's terminology. Desire is when you take yourself by surprise - it always includes a certain element of dumbfounding. "I don't know why I keep doing this, I don't know why I keep letting this happen to me, and yet it does - eppur si muove". Surely you've had the experience of not really knowing why you did something, yes?
G. E. Moore raised the question of the logical and linguistic structure of sentences of the form "it is raining, and I do not believe it is raining". Ordinarily this seems like an absurd thing to say: one would only say it as a joke, or, if it were asserted seriously, then we would assume that the speaker had somehow failed to grasp the meaning of what he was saying. But the wager of psychoanalysis is that this is a paradigmatic illustration of how the psyche is structured: paradox is the engine of subjectivity.
Now of course you can ask why you should adopt this model over the commensensical one. And the very short answer is just: read Freud, read Lacan, read the commentators in the psychoanalytic tradition who have expanded on their work over the past century, and see if there's something in it that speaks to you. These are ideas that have to be experienced and lived with; there's no knock-down logical argument in their favor, besides asking yourself how accurately the ideas describe your experience of yourself and your experience of other people. But I have tried to provide examples in this thread and the other post I linked where I think psychoanalytic thinking is applicable.
There was a great post on TheMotte one time, and unfortunately I didn't save the link, so you'll just have to take my word for it: someone here was describing their experiences with Adderall. He said, I've always struggled with ADHD and motivational issues before, and it keeps me from accomplishing things that I would really like to accomplish. And when I'm on Adderall I feel a ton of motivation, and I'm able to work hard and get things done, and then afterwards I feel great and everything's great. But for some reason I just... don't really want to take it anymore? I think I might like being unhappy and lazy better? Why would I not want to do this thing, that solves this terrible problem I've had for a long time, and helps me accomplish good things that I want to accomplish, and makes me happy with basically no downsides? And I thought, wow! If that isn't the best case study for psychoanalysis I've ever seen, I don't know what is!
Of course you can always construct a model of any situation that only makes reference to non-contradictory desires, by introducing enough desires and aversions with the appropriate weights. It's not a question of whether it's possible to do that. It's just a question of which story ultimately rings true in the end.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I’m really sorry that happened.
Was this purely about intra-office politics, or did they suspect you of being a wrongthinker?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
See what I wrote here and the ensuing replies. If we're going to accept that people have things called "desires" at all (and that is a philosophically contentious claim - it can't just be taken for granted, any more than Freud's theories can be taken for granted), then we have to accept that we don't have direct empirical access to them. So any model of desire-attribution has to be holistically evaluated across multiple axes: parsimony, elegance, ability to unify multiple disparate phenomena, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(
Pleasure principle and reality principle are very simple concepts, yes. Which is exactly what I said in the post you replied to.
Freud's concept of sublimation is that unacceptable impulses (especially sexual ones) get redirected towards socially acceptable ends (especially art and science), thereby instilling the target of the redirection with a sort of elevated aura of importance. "Desublimated" higher culture would then be higher culture demystified, stripped of its aura so its material reality could be laid bare, and deprived of the underlying psychic intensity that had been redirected from the sexual drive.
Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t.
I don't think you need to share many of his theoretical presuppositions to understand and evaluate the passage I quoted. You can just read his description of the phenomenon and see if you think it's accurate or not.
Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests?
Well, there's not a one-to-one direct causal link, no. I think there can be surprising interrelations between seemingly disparate domains of life and culture though. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something that could be said here.
(For what it's worth, I'm not a Marxist, and I don't believe in the urgency of "revolution" in the way that Marxists do, so my investment in this question would be quite different from Marcuse's.)
I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners
I don't think it's that at all. In fact I think it's just the opposite - psychoanalysis provides a lot of clarity and insight into why people do the things they do.
To give a very simple personal example: every year, my mother hosts a rather large Christmas party for our extended family. Every year, she swears she'll never do it again, because it's too much stress, because her family is taking advantage of her generosity, because they don't appreciate all the work she does, etc. And yet every year, she continues to host the same party right on schedule.
What is the reason for the discrepancy between her words and actions? I used to think, well maybe she's just too meek to tell everyone "no", maybe she's just that selfless, maybe she just doesn't want to upset people. But psychoanalysis gave me an alternative explanation: she keeps doing it because she enjoys it! Meaning she enjoys all the parts of the process that are allegedly such a "hassle" to her. She enjoys the feeling of being stressed, she enjoys feeling like all the work is being unfairly shoved on her, she enjoys being judged by our extended family, even if she's not consciously aware of enjoying it.
Psychoanalysis posits that, when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to. It's possible that someone can want to do something even when they claim to not want to, and even when the pleasure of the act takes on the superficial form of pain. (This has immediate applications to politics - why do leftists find cishetero patriarchal oppression under every rock they turn over? Because they want to, it's what they're hoping for. They want the feeling of being oppressed - that's the whole point. It's just the same patterns that Freud observed in his "hysterical" female patients, inflated to a societal scale.)
You might say that this is just obvious, or that it's common sense, or whatever - that's fine. But I can't recall this point being made anywhere else as forcefully and clearly as it is in psychoanalytic thought.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Wow. That wasn't my intention at all. I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I didn't mean any of that.
At a basic level I just wanted to reaffirm what you already guessed: you were right that they were common phrases in philosophical circles. When I said that they had "relatively straightforward definitions", what I was trying to convey was that they're nothing to be intimidated by. People aren't smart just because they use those words. You too could look up the words and learn what they mean (if you wanted to! you don't have to, of course!), and then you'd understand them just as well as the "experts". The words are no big deal. That's all I meant. There was certainly no snobbishness intended.
I didn't actually go into the definitions of the terms myself because I wasn't sure if you would actually be interested, but I'm happy to do that if you or anyone else is.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle,"
Ah, I see. These are all common terms in psychoanalytic theory and they have relatively straightforward definitions.
It's easy to forget how much of this stuff you start taking for granted after you've been immersed in it for so long!
"demonstration against the herd instinct"
Just another way of saying "not being a conformist".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.
I think on a word-by-word level, Marcuse is pretty clear and straightforward. He's more straightforward than Adorno, at any rate. Can you provide an example of a sentence or paragraph that you thought was deliberately obfuscated? It's possible that you're just missing some necessary context for what he's saying.
It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives.
Everyone wants to think that they're more punk than they actually are.
One time I was at a concert to see Slipknot and their singer said "this is a big fuck you to all the corporate suits who want to keep this music down!" And I'm like, dude. You are literally a corporate and mainstream band. Your songs are in Guitar Hero. Chill dude.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession.
There's actually a long tradition within philosophy of doing just that! Although in this case, that's irrelevant; it's clear that all of the criticism of Tuvel's paper was politically motivated.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Well, aside for that one group that it is much more dangerous to take to bed than it was in the '70s (or any time in the last 100 years before them).
Right, I noted at the end that Marcuse's empirical description was not entirely correct today (especially if you're a straight white male).
If you want a picture of the future, imagine an attractive woman pressing her breasts into a little boy's face - forever." (SFW, enough)
This was a great anime by the way.
KulakRevolt made an interesting point a while ago about how society is dominated either by the scowls of bitter old women or the howls of laughing young boys
What? No it's not. It's dominated by adult men who have a lot of money.
Maybe Hlynka was right after all?
Yes
No. My apologies, that was an attempt to interject humor into the OP. He wasn't right. He insisted that non-identical ideologies were actually identical. Our language was insufficient to justify his position because his position was incorrect.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
"[r]eactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as a subject of self realization." Eros & Civilization, ppg. 191-192
I've never encountered this passage before (my first-hand knowledge of his work doesn't extend much past The Aesthetic Dimension and some isolated fragments), but it did occur to me while writing my post that he probably thought or said something like this at some point - that there's sexuality under capitalism, and there's sexuality in a future post-alienated state, and they're distinct phenomena that require distinct treatments. But I didn't want to bloat the post by going into those distinctions, so I just tried to provide a gloss on the passage I quoted, particularly these sentences:
By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. [...] to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control.
Since this passage is specifically about the nature and function of sexuality under capitalism, rather than a non-alienated sexuality, I think the summary I gave was basically correct, albeit simplified.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I'd like to draw attention to a specific passage from Marcuse's The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man (the full essay begins on page 44):
Now there is, in the advanced technological societies of the West, indeed a large desublimation (compared with the preceding stages) in sexual mores and behavior, in the better living, in the accessibility of culture (mass culture is desublimated higher culture). Sexual morality has been greatly liberalized; moreover, sexuality is operative as commercial stimulus, business asset, status symbol. But does this mode of desublimation signify the ascendancy of the life-preserving and life-enhancing Eros over its fatal adversary? Freud's concept of sexuality may provide a cue for the answer.
Central in this concept is the conflict between sexuality (as the force of the pleasure principle) and society (the institution of the reality principle) as necessarily repressive of the uncompromised claims of the primary life instincts. By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. The conflict between pleasure and the reality principle is managed by a controlled liberalization which increases satisfaction with the offerings of society. But in this form of release, libidinal energy changes its social function: to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control. In this sphere was the surreptitious freedom, the dangerous autonomy of the individual under the pleasure principle; its authoritarian restriction by the society bore witness to the depth of the conflict between individual and society, that is, to the extent of the repression of freedom. Now, with the integration of this sphere into the realm of business and entertainment, the repression itself is repressed: society has enlarged, not individual freedom, but its control over the individual. And this growth of social control is achieved, not by terror but by the more or less beneficial productivity and efficiency of the apparatus.
TL;DR - "It was more fun when we were in the closet."
The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place. As a Marxist, Marcuse's overriding concern here would have been with the political dimension of sexuality, specifically with how societal views on sex relate to the hypothetical future proletarian revolution. Dreaming dangerously in the bedroom leads to dreaming dangerously in the political realm as well - that's the hope, anyway. But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.
It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??
Of course, our current political situation throws a bit of a wrench in Marcuse's account of things, because there's plenty of old-style repression to go around; likely more than at any other time prior to the sexual revolution, despite superficial indications to the contrary. The global e-commerce market is not friendly to sexualized media, and is mostly getting more stringent over time (pornhub can't even take credit cards!). #MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I also really want to know what leftists you have met, other than on social media, who adulate Lenin or Trotsky.
That's not an entirely fair standard to hold someone to, because extreme politics is a niche hobbyist interest rather than a general interest. It's very rare to encounter anyone IRL who has any substantive view on Lenin or Trotsky at all, unless you're very deep into communist/anarchist groups. And a non-leftist is unlikely to find themselves in such a situation for obvious reasons.
Coincidentally I've been listening to a lot of Chris Cutrone lately, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who is quite a big fan of Lenin (1:26:39 - "The people who reject Lenin have to reject Marx").
I know genuine tankies exist, but I think they are much more present online than in real life.
Concerns about LLMs notwithstanding, everyone who is present online is present in real life too.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
"while sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it."
If this were true... why is female promiscuity a problem at all? Why has this topic come up over and over again on TheMotte? Why would the sororities have to strictly police their members so they don't go overboard in indulging in something that is allegedly painful and revolting to them?
There's a contradiction in simultaneously believing "women don't actually want sex that much" and "young women are absolutely out of control with how much sex they're having and we need to shut it down NOW".
I'm not entirely clear from reading your post where you fall on this particular question. You seem to acknowledge that there are some women who DO actually just straightforwardly desire sex with (alpha, attractive) men. But I also know some people who just endorse both of these contradictory positions, and they manage to dodge all the cognitive dissonance somehow.
Their complaints about "oversexualization" and "promiscuity bad" are best viewed through the lens of how alcoholics who consciously need to resist relapse would see constant ads for beer- why the absolute fuck should a Healthy Society not only tolerate that, but encourage it (in the "silence is violence" way), given how many alcoholics [they believe there to be, and not without reason] are out there, even if they're aware they're in a filter bubble that consists solely of alcoholics?
We agree on this much at least. You hit the nail on the head here. (Ironically, one of the staunchest manosphere types I know who had a full on conversion from libertarian "live and let live" values to full on "being a slut is the absolute worst thing a woman can do" trad values, is also an ex-alcoholic.)
free loveAce Pride
I dunno man I'm just not seeing it. Quite a lot of people who advocate "free love" also engage in a lot of free love themselves! Are you literally trying to suggest that certain individuals, who are having a lot of sex, are actually asexual in some sense? Because that would be quite remarkable.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Or rather, that if you're straight, your interests converge on nobody but you having/accessing sex (your ideal society is that you're the only one of your sex present, male or female- since if you're male you can demand an infinitely high price for commitment under those circumstances, and if you're female you can demand an infinitely high price for sex in the same way)
On the most literal reading possible, I don't see how this can be true. If you're the only one having sex, then the species will die out and your bloodline along with it. You can't make enough people on your own (and even if you could, there's inbreeding to worry about).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I was providing an example of someone with the following view:
Males are suspect if they aren't seeking sex with women. It is a good thing when they succeed, for them. Girls shouldn't have sex until they're ready to start looking for a husband and promiscuity is a bad thing all around
That's all.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
And it also carries "certain levels of risk" to other people.
Please spell out more explicitly what the risk to other people is. Is it just a repeat of the other points already mentioned? Then my response is that all parties should be consenting and all parties must necessarily accept the risks involved, same as before. There are no further complications introduced by the multi-party scenario as opposed to just considering one party in isolation.
"I was prepared for the consequences, the other party - that's on them!"
If the other party consented, then yes, it is quite literally on them.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Philosophy especially seems to be really bad about spending hours debating the meaning of every word used
Do you have any examples of published philosophical works that do this? (I'll grant that you might be able to find something - some published philosophy is just bad, after all. But, I can easily point you to works that don't do this as well.)
Some amount of discussion about the definitions of terms is necessary. Think about how often we debate the appropriate definition of terms like "left" and "right" on TheMotte. We just had multiple sub-threads last week about what "cultural Marxism" means. Do you think the posters here are just being irrational or intentionally obscurantist when they engage in discussions like that? I don't think they are. I think it makes sense that we would debate what those terms mean, because they're contentious terms that get used in different ways by different people, so we need to get clear on what they actually mean in order to have a productive conversation.
When I redefine common English words in philosophy
Again, what sorts of examples are you thinking of? I really don't think this happens often at all in philosophy. There's jargon, certainly, but much of this jargon ("epistemic", "qualia", "a priori") is unique to philosophy and wouldn't be confused for ordinary English terms. If anything, philosophers like to invent new words and phrases to use in place of ordinary words if the ordinary words are too ambiguous (see for example the use of terms like "error theory" and "expressivism" to describe more precise sub-variants of what non-philosophers would call "moral relativism").
the point is quite often to make a simple argument sound profound.
How much academic analytic philosophy have you read? They really do go out of their way to make the writing as straightforward (and, frankly, dry) as possible.
Writers in the "continental" tradition are known for writing with more of a poetic flourish, but, so what? They're having fun and it makes their works more fun to read, so, good for them.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
But I wish I could find someone who actually thinks that.
The manosphere (think Andrew Tate) thinks this way explicitly. I know people who think like this in real life. No amount of pleading about how unfair it is will phase them. They'll just shrug and say "men and women are different", therefore the categorical imperative does not apply (different rules for different types of humans).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Many of the people in all of those sub-cultures really would have more fun being in a traditional sorority with all the really charismatic and hot people than being around their own kind.
In many ways, "cool" is just another sub-culture, just like any other. It appeals to some people and not to others. I found clubs and frat parties to be painfully boring when I was in college.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Sometimes they happen often enough that they foment irresistibly-large social movements demanding draconian top-down enforcement to prevent their failure states.
I am of course opposed to "believe all victims", the draconian on-campus tribunals, #MeToo in general, etc. I'm about as libertarian as you can get on this issue. You get to reap all the rewards, and all the risks. I think that's a consistent position.
This is a fully-general argument against prudence in any form.
Sure. It's a classic sliding-scale boundary problem. We both presumably recognize that some things are worth the risk and some things are not, but the question is, where do we draw the line? Is pre-martial sex more like fentanyl, or is it more like chewing gum?
I don't think that question itself is very interesting or worth debating. I believe we both agree enough on the empirical facts that we're not going to learn anything new from it. The real question is why do you think the way you do, and why do I think the way I do? Why is it that, when we are both presented with the same information, you say "I dunno man that looks too dangerous to be worth it", and I say "I dunno man I think it looks fine you should go for it"? What explains this?
See my reply to 100Proof for more details.
This is a pretty egregious failure to engage with the argument.
It's not. It's roughly the same response that I would give to someone who said that we should ban cars because sometimes people crash, or we should bring back prohibition of alcohol because some people become alcoholics. In most contexts, what they would get from me is a shrug and a "well, life is risk, so deal with it".
Of course you can get into the weeds on any particular issue and start detailing all the positive and negative outcomes, the probability of each, tally up the expected values, etc. I recognize that risk does have to be balanced against reward, of course. But I have little interest in engaging in that sort of discussion on the sex issue because I think it would simply be beside the point. Psychologically speaking, I think that the typical anti-sex advocate doesn't first encounter the potential risks of promiscuous sex and then draw the conclusion "that seems so dangerous that we really need to discourage people from doing that". I think what comes first is the commitment to abstaining from sex as a moral value - typically either as part of a religious identity, or as a generalized commitment to traditional values - and then they start looking for evidence to support this pre-existing ethical commitment. I think this is a very common pattern that generalizes across multiples types of issues. In the discussion on unions further down in the thread for example, I don't think most posters are opposed to the strike because the longshoreman union boss is a slimeball - I think the anti-union commitment comes first, and then they're happy to discover later that the union boss is a slimeball because it bolsters their case.
I am in no way exempt from any of this of course. I too have a pre-existing commitment to promiscuous sex being a good thing (or at least a tolerable thing) as part of my identity that has little to do with its actual empirical effects. The saving grace here is that I don't think this fact has to terminate the conversation. The reasons for these foundational identity-commitments are themselves amenable to debate to some degree, and we can make an attempt to elucidate them. I just think that if we're going to get into the weeds on this, we should stick to the actual meat of the issue, and not just "sex can lead to bad things". Yeah, it can. Lots of other things can too. So what is it about sex that got your attention, specifically?
Would you want your children to take into the consideration the perspective and feelings of other people, including their intimate partners?
Yes, obviously. Where did I imply that I didn't?
EDIT: Let me put it this way. If you said that extra-marital sex is bad for your soul, spiritually, I would take that much more seriously than recourse to divorce statistics. I, conversely, think that sex is good for your soul. So that's something that we can have a real debate about. Now we're at the level of genuine, heartfelt convictions. The stuff about divorce and fertility rate stats is just window dressing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Not getting married. Divorce if they do get married. A general inability to form durable relationships with a member of the opposite sex. No kids. Kids raised missing a father or a mother, with the attendant significant increase in poor outcomes for the kids. Acute misery from breakups and lingering psychic trauma from bad relationships. Generally decreased mental wellness, and/or chronic dependency on mind-altering pharmaceuticals. General dissatisfaction with the results of their life choices. Significantly decreased sexual satisfaction over their lifetime. Significant pain and regret.
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen. But there are also times when they don't happen. Sometimes people have pre-martial sex - even quite a lot of pre-marital sex - and then they go on to happy marriages with children and everything is fine. So pre-marital sex isn't guaranteed doom - it's an action that carries a certain level of risk, similar to many other actions we undertake.
I don't have exact numbers on hand detailing the number of positive outcomes vs negative outcomes compared to number of sex partners. But then, I wouldn't want my children to get in the habit of consulting a table of probabilities detailing the likelihood of a positive outcome before they make decisions, even if said probability table is certified "trad". They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
This isn't the sort of thing that people are likely to be "wrong" about, because their evaluation of the economy is based on metrics that impact them directly.
Lunch at Five Guys costs me $30 right now, so for me, the economy is bad. There's no argument you can present to me on this forum right now that will make my burger stop costing $30. Job numbers, real wages, exact rate of inflation and etc, are all irrelevant, because my burger still costs $30. So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.
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