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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Would these people also be vile exploiters?

Fiirst of all, yes.

Second, the whole argument should start with "is such a thing as exploitation at all?" A lot of the extreme rationalist arguments on this subject aren't really about sex, they're about the idea that exploitation isn't real unless you're forcing someone at gunpoint.

If you believe this, it's an extreme minority position among pretty much everyone that isn't a weird Internet guy, and really needs to be defended on its own terms, not taken for granted.

If you don't believe this, you should lay out exactly what you do think counts as exploitation before trying to argue that something can't be exploitation, especially based on a principle that you don't believe anyway.

So your position is that if two people have sex, but their idea of what a 99th percentile good outcome might be (say, "he falls in love with me and marries me, so that I can move to the West" vs "she brings another hot girl along and we have a threesome"), exploitation is taking place? By that test, every human interaction is exploitive. (How do we determine who is the one being exploited? Easy, whoever is higher on the woke totem pole.)

I mean, if we twisted that scenario a lot, saying that the guy is happily married in an open relationship, but falsely indicates a willingness to marry some woman in the third world so that he gets to fuck her, then sure, that would be exploitive.

I find your comment deeply unethical, but I won't substantiate why. Instead, I want you to either admit that you are a nihilist who does not believe unethical behavior is a useful category or otherwise lay out in detail a coherent theory of ethics and argue why your comment is in fact ethical. See what I did there?

See what I did there?

It's not what I did.

"There is no such thing as ethical or unethical, as long as nobody is at gunpoint" is an extreme minority position. "There is such a thing as ethics" is not. The more extreme your position is, the clearer you need to be that you actually hold that position, and the more you need to explain it. This also applies if you are making arguments that can be easily and reasonably mistaken for that extreme minority position.

I haven't expressed such an extreme minority position myself, so that doesn't apply to me.

So your position is that if two people have sex, but their idea of what a 99th percentile good outcome might be (say, "he falls in love with me and marries me, so that I can move to the West" vs "she brings another hot girl along and we have a threesome"), exploitation is taking place?

This sentence isn't parseable. If you mean what I think you're trying to say, the "exploiter" is entitled to make reasonable assumptions about the other person. If the "exploited" has unreasonable expectations, but hides them, the"exploiter" isn't exploiting. If the exploited has sufficiently unreasonable expectations, and the exploiter does or should know about them, yes, it's exploitation.

If the exploited has sufficiently unreasonable expectations, and the exploiter does or should know about them, yes, it's exploitation.

I think that is the crux of our disagreement.

In my model of the world, the woman on tinder likely has a realistic estimate of how rare it is that white men marry their tinder dates. After all, she is likely in contact with other women who are applying the same strategy, and knows how many Westerners they had sex with without getting married by any of them. She likely has some mid-status life and job in her home country (it is hard to invite Westerners over if you are living in a street or in a room with ten family members, after all). She enjoys being part of the hookup culture, and preferring white dudes is simply optimizing for the unlikely case that a hookup nets her a long term boyfriend (whom she would prefer to have a Western passport).

From what I can tell, in your model, the woman on tinder is desperately looking for a ticket to the west, in the same way that someone who sinks all their disposable income and then some into lottery tickets it trying to win the lottery. Like that gambler, she is totally deluded about her chances. She despises having meaningless sex, but carries on regardless, always convinced that the next date will finally be the one, and always being heartbroken when the guy leaves in the morning.

I think that we can both agree that having sex with someone one knows to be in the latter situation so one can save the costs for a hostel would be exploitative. I also maintain that having sex with the former woman is not exploitative.

The reason I consider the latter situation somewhat unlikely is that it basically is contrary to how women traditionally try to attract high quality mates, which is making a credible effort of appearing to be hard to get. If you are 25, on tinder and willing to fuck a man you have just met, that man can likely make an educated guess at the number of partners you had before him. While I am sure that there are men who tend to fall for woman who had tons of partners, I would assume that the average man would be slightly less likely to consider a long term relationship given that information. For example, getting hired by a Westerner as a tour guide for some token amount, being a bit flirty but not having sex with him in the first week, while also spending a lot of time with your mark seems a lot more likely to net you a boyfriend than just fucking your way through tinder. But what do I know.

She enjoys being part of the hookup culture, and preferring white dudes is simply optimizing for the unlikely case that a hookup nets her a long term boyfriend (whom she would prefer to have a Western passport).

Weird Internet guys drastically change their actions based on tiny optimizations. Nobody else does. That suggests she thinks the chance is unrealistically large.

I would agree that if your scenario is correct, it's not exploitation.

So your position is that if two people have sex, but their idea of what a 99th percentile good outcome might be (say, "he falls in love with me and marries me, so that I can move to the West" vs "she brings another hot girl along and we have a threesome"), exploitation is taking place? By that test, every human interaction is exploitive.

I mean... we do kind of apply that framework to most, if not all interactions. A lot of things are left unspoken, and the person who breaks such unspoken conventions is treated as a transgressor of some sort, if he does not follow them.

I had the understanding that tinder is used by people looking for sex. But perhaps I am ignorant.

I would argue that it is indeed rare that the motives of people are 100% aligned. If person A hires person B as an uber driver, the shared baseline expectation is that B will transport A in a safe manner and A will pay the pre-agreed fee. If you ask A "what would be a 99th percentile outcome?", they might reply that to meet the trip would have to be quicker than expected, and B would delight them with good conversation. If you ask B, they might say if A gives them a 50% tip. While the 99th percentile outcomes might coincide for both participants of the transaction, it likely won't.

Or take a man who buys a woman a drink in a bar. Both of them have a prior probability estimate that this will not end with a "thanks for the drink" ten minutes later. In most cases, the estimates of the nonstandard outcomes (sex, marriage, becoming the next Bonnie & Clyde, whatever) of both participants will not coincide. However, this does not make their deal unfair. Even if the woman knows beforehand that the outcome the man is hoping for is not in the cards, she is under no obligation to give him a warning that she is not in the mood for sex / would not fuck him if he was the last man on earth / has vowed never to marry again / is strictly against gun violence. This does not make her an exploiter. The line I would draw is intentional deception.

Again, this is a matter of social conventions, which are of course somewhat arbitrary. I could imagine some weird culture where the buying of a drink is equivalent to marriage vows being exchanged, et cetera. Now, if the white backpacker is in a country where 80% of tinder dates lead to marriage, and knowingly flouts this convention by planning to go on tens of tinder dates without marrying anyone, then I would say that he is taking advantage of his partners.

A lot of things are left unspoken, and the person who breaks such unspoken conventions is treated as a transgressor of some sort, if he does not follow them.

As often, the "unspoken conventions" are either applied selectively (Hello Human Resources), or wholly made up after the fact and imposed by the higher-status party.

I'm sure that's what those Tinder gals that have absolutely no romantic or sexual intentions, and just want to go on a series of first dates where the guy pays for everything, tell themselves and others.

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