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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   23883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic

Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way. No idea if he still endorses that opinion but it's a majorly sus thing to say.

Hanson likes throwing out interesting ideas. I'd be shocked if he was actually okay with rape.

Hanson throws a lot of crazy ideas out there. I think to have a really high number of good ideas in absolute numbers, you've also got to have a lot of stinkers in absolute numbers, so I don't hold his worst ideas against him as long as he doesn't start constantly shouting about them

It's not misogynistic though.

Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way.

No he said being cuckolded as in literally raising someone else's child as your own would be worse. That's worlds apart from an affair that leads to no children.

The whole problem is that Hanson's arguments are usually based on a number of different premises that can't be easily reduced to a single sentence, so by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.

And him being autistic as hell means that a 'gentle, silent' rape that inflicts no physical injuries can certainly be compared to other acts in terms of psychological impact and harm, because he doesn't place any special sacredness on the word 'rape' that renders the act inherently more evil than any other act which humans find traumatic and distressing.

by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.

This grants him too much charity. To put it another way, there's a motte and bailey. The "simplified rephrasing" is the motte. Like when he arged that medicine doesn't work, where the motte was that, well, medicine didn't work, and the bailey was a bunch of much less serious criticisms of medicine that are much easier to defend than "medicine doesn't work".

Hanson is almost the definition of a guy who DOES NOT Motte and Bailey his arguments.

I might believe he artfully phrases some of his arguments to avoid explicitly admitting his belief or disbelief in a certain point. I've never seen him fall back from any 'outlandish' arguments he's made to a simpler or stronger one while pretending he's not backing down at all.

Where did he argue for the bailey, and what is it?

Did you read the linked post? He's making the claim that it's a bigger harm in terms of genetic interests.

Can you expand on what you mean by "majorly sus"? Is the idea that the fact that he'd raise a hypothesis that could also be used to argue for taking crimes against women relatively less seriously, that's evidence that he's misoginystic?

I suppose that's a reasonable inference, but I also think he does raise a good question and point to a genuine mystery. More generally, if academics can't raise wrong-sounding ideas without being cancelled, then there's not much point in having them or listening to them. So I guess I implore you to ask if there is any venue or method by which someone could discuss disgusting-sounding ideas that would lead you to actually try evaluating their claims.

Am I the only one who's noticed surprisingly high overlap between describing behavior as "sus" and vague gestures that someone is problematic? Like that entire cluster of person converged on using the same word? That kind of dark hinting has been a primary part of the progressive playbook for awhile, but what's with the word sus?

I first time I heard "sus" was when Among Us went viral. I'm not very good at these social deception games, so of course I was never a fan of playing them. I'm curious, are other average motte spergs similar?

Enjoying those games and applying that lense to everyday social/political interactions seems like the extreme right-tailed distribution version of the oversocialised, status-obsessed sociopath

It's not a good inference because he explicitly states that he isn't trying to argue that rape is less bad.

I agree, but I was trying to be maximally charitable in case all that Folamh3 knew about Hanson was that he was arguing against rape being worse than something else. That's why I was asking if he read the post.

It's not very charitable to Hanson though.

I'm not saying "Hanson said this, therefore he should be cancelled". I'm saying that it's reasonable to characterise that specific belief as misogynistic.

I don't see how that's reasonable. He didn't say anything to diminish the perceived severity of rape. He only made an argument about the severity of cuckoldry.

Okay, but the framing as "sus" makes it sound like a hidden, rare opinion. What do you think of his claims?

why is it misogynistic? Being cheated on is remarkably traumatic for men or women, as evidenced by the evident link to homicide/suicide. The "gentle" and "silent" modifiers are there to disambiguate theories of where the harm is coming from, not to claim that harm doesn't exist.

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