I personally found it well-written, if a bit wordy; the first few sections are indeed refutations / literature review, but that’s, uh, that’s the point. The whole essay is about how we use the word loosely and existing definitions don’t fit well enough, so publishing a paper that didn’t cover all the (recently, semi-prominently) proposed definitions would be seen as lazy or incomplete. Personally, I think it’s a fun exercise to read through and update your own personal definition as you go. If you’re like me, all these papers start with a “oh well that word is simple and obvious” reaction that slowly disintegrates!
Materially; I couldn't c/p it, but I think their line about “indirect or diffuse danger” that gets right at the crux of the issue. So I’d say I’d find this analysis convincing
A concept that's specific to the English language is probably a rather idiosyncratic disjunction of properties and not worth writing philosophy papers about. E.g. German has no proper translation for "creepy", we would use different words for various cases described by it. It's like thinking there is some global concept "can" that includes both "being able to" and "being allowed to", just because in the English language "can" can express both. Chances are, it's just an ambiguous word.
> A concept that's specific to the English language is probably a rather idiosyncratic disjunction of properties and not worth writing philosophy papers about.
Sure it does. To English speakers/linguists it could have a ton of reason to exist. In the same way a paper on wanderlust or schadenfreude would be useful to contextualize a realized phenomenon and how culture/language reflects that.
This specific paper has no reason to exist because it is simply bad, however.
> E.g. German has no proper translation for "creepy", we would use different words for various cases described by it.
Do you think creepy is the universal word for an unnerving feeling in English? There's "menacing", "sinister", "eerie", "ominous", "macabre", "ghoulish", "distasteful", "repugnant", "offensive", "cloying", "odious", etc, etc, etc. All with different subtleties to their implications.
The fact that German lacks a word for something has no effect on the lexicon of another language.
> It's like thinking there is some global concept "can" that includes both "being able to" and "being allowed to", just because in the English language "can" can express both. Chances are, it's just an ambiguous word.
The difference is cultural contextualization. English defers more to the agents in discussion to defer meaning. There are multiple words that all express a functionally equivalent meaning of "to be able": "can" (capability), "might" (desirability), "ought" (necessity), "may" (permissive), "able" (strictly neutral), etc; but each is used in a context that grants it more specified meaning.
Sort of? It's along the lines of "Das kannst Du hier nicht machen!" it's sort of a metaphor. Yes, technically there's no physical impediment, but the social ones are high.
If you want to speak to the social / political impossibility, you use "can." If you want to speak to the fact that it's forbidden by authority, you say "allowed."
It's still ambiguous. There are (at least) two possible interpretations, which means it isn't the same concept. Same for "creepy", it is used to refer to quite different things.
> Being creeped out is a feeling or reaction that is valuable for some other reasons as well. A shared sense of what is creepy can make for social bonding, either in the face of a joint threat or annoyance, or just to feel fellow feelings in shared reactions.
Being creeped out as a bonding circle jerk is all fun and games, until what the group is creeped out by are people from some ethnic group.
> It can also play a useful role in social coordination: when we evince being creeped out at another’s behavior, this can be a signal to those who notice that we dislike or disapprove of that kind of behavior. If it gets back to the person engaging in the behavior, it may regulate their actions as well. Few people enjoy being thought of as a creep. A sexual harasser, for example, might not mind being thought of as a scoundrel, but would not want to be considered creepy.
Further reading:
> The trend results from 2003 to 2012 showed the vast majority of crimes were still committed by men with around 88% of homicides and 75% of all legal felonies.
Doesn't matter what you would call an instance of a criminal, tho. Creepiness happens prior to victimization. Men are more violent. Women are associated with violence less, consequently they are less likely perceived as a risk by default. A sense of danger is required for creepiness.
I think we both know, that's how it is, if we're being honest. no?!
Would you rather hitchhike with a man, or a woman? Would you rather pick up a group of female or male hitchhikers?
i would rather hitchhike with a man or pick up a male hitchhiker, but i agree that a group of male hitchhikers would seem more dangerous to me
not creepy, though; danger is clearly not necessary for creepiness. earthworms, socially awkward people, garter snakes, cockroaches, etc., are all considered creepy by most people despite the total lack of danger
nor is danger sufficient for creepiness. the people who i've most seen victimize others have zero creepiness; in fact, they push the creepometer into negative numbers. they're anti-creepy. creepy people suck at victimizing others because they attract attention and because their possible victims are suspicious of them. so i strongly disagree with your assertion that 'creepiness happens prior to victimization'. derek chauvin was not creepy. donald trump was not creepy. elizabeth holmes was not creepy. the guys who mugged me on the train were not creepy
if we want to limit the topic specifically to sexual assault, my own personal experience is that i've only ever been sexually assaulted by one or two people, both women; but most of the other people i know who have been sexually assaulted (that i know of) have only ever been sexually assaulted by men
however, your rhetorical question, 'i think we both know, that's how it is, if we're being honest. no?!' is super creepy. your implication that anyone who disagrees with you is simply being dishonest about their true beliefs, and their true desires are the same as your desires even though they're saying the opposite, that makes me want to reach for my pepper spray or find a bouncer. i'm glad you don't know where i live
> It can also play a useful role in social coordination: when we evince being creeped out at another’s behavior, this can be a signal to those who notice that we dislike or disapprove of that kind of behavior. If it gets back to the person engaging in the behavior, it may regulate their actions as well.
The problem is that this is not a rational argument against someone's behavior, it's just an appeal to popularity. Disapproval based on nothing empirical is just a taste-based argument, which is fallacious. Basically, the Overton window as applied to socially-acceptable behavior. 50 years ago, anything remotely homosexual was met with extreme social disapproval; it was just as bad an argument against it then as it is now- the only difference is that social approval progressed, and arguably became more rational.
> sex differences in crime
This is a sexist argument. By definition. You could make a racist one just as easily.
So basically, you start off with a nonsensical/irrational argument, and end with a sexist one. Congrats?
I think, you picked a single sentence out of context, kind of dismissing the point of the article.
> The fact that being creeped out is a relatively visceral reaction that appears to require little cultural scaffolding suggests that it is a response with origins, at least in part, deep in our evolutionary history: and we might predict that there would be a suite of relatively old emotional responses with the function of avoiding threats in our environment, including by drawing attention to those threats.
Calling someone a 'creep', does not necessarily require the experience of being creeped out by the person, which the articles points out as distinction several times.
I think prejudices, racism, etc. and induced emotions like anger, fear, hatred and resentment, usually come from a place of fiction, simplification and overfitting - somewhat the opposite of perceived unpredictability and uncertain danger in innate actuality, required for being creeped out.
That said, I think people, hate groups, do deliberately invoke the feeling of being creeped out for propaganda purposes, to associate these feelings remotely and to induce fear, or a sense of threat. By projecting common, genuinely creepy experiences or situations onto uncreepy scenarios. For example, the archetype of the 'creepy pervert man' is projected onto the "bathroom confrontation with a trans woman" scenario. That only works as abstract fiction in media, as actual confrontations would not induce the feeling of being creeped out - missing the innate perception and response to an uncanny, unpredictable behavior and uncertain threat - because trans women, and most people assigned 'trans woman' are not, in fact, creepy pervert men. However, meeting a trans woman may induce a sense of threat, now.
If you meet a bear in the woods you may feel fear, you have a clear threat model. If a wolf howls close-by at night, you may feel creeped out, as you are uncertain about a concrete threat. If a racist meets a black person on the street they may feel fear, since "all black people are criminals". If a man follows you at night, you may feel creeped out, because you are uncertain about his motives. I'd argue, being creeped out has a bias towards in-group threats, as it increases the ambiguity of situational safety.
> For example, the archetype of the 'creepy pervert man' is projected onto the "bathroom confrontation with a trans woman" scenario. That only works as abstract fiction in media, as actual confrontations would not induce the feeling of being creeped out
Actually they do induce that feeling, but because it's women saying so, we just get ignored and belittled and told to "be kind".
Very enjoyable. A bit skittish for sure. The keyword in the whole
essay is "ineffable". Creepiness is one of those pre-cognitive
states, awareness before we are able to name it, and the urge to
trepid investigation. The word "curiosity" doesn't appear but I think
it belongs in the proximity.
Reading some comments here, people had difficulty with the tortuous
prose. That reminds me where literature succeeds over philosophy. Any
page from Franz Kafka contains, in essential form, this whole essay.
While the essay touches the utility of creepiness it doesn't venture
into The psychological cost of being creeped out. Research shows the
extremely deleterious effects of this cluster of such 'gnawing'
emotions like anxiety. Those who shrug off surveillance whimpering "I
have nothing to hide" are neck deep in denial and complex defence
mechanisms.
In some digital self-defence classes we arrived at "Creepiness is the
new cool" - simply because there's so much of it around and everyone
wants to talk about it but lacks a vocabulary. I think that's how
Charlie Brooker arrived at Black Mirror, not through any technical
understanding, but observing the dominant emotion in the air.
There's a weird thing in online discourse, especially Twitter, where creepy, gross and disgusting stand in for moral judgements and enforcement of social norms. Maybe it's just a current style, or maybe people choose it because it's hard to argue against a feeling the way you argue against a judgement.
I feel, though, that it's infantilizing the discussion. We are not going to find common ground if, for example, one person thinks it's gross that people aren't masking up anymore, while another is creeped out by mask wearers. But these statements of feeling seem to tickle the algorithm better than statements of fact and discussions of public safety.
This paper is almost a parody of philosophical writing. It's pages and pages of telling you what it's not going to tell you, contrasting it with other things it could tell but chooses not to, mentioning other things others have told you (which will not be repeated here), disagreeing with the claims of other writers (without quite explaining the refutations), telling you what it intends to tell you, telling you in what form it will tell you what it intends to tell you, and then reminding that it told you.
I admit I was skimming a bit by the end, but I seemed to have overlooked the part where it actually said anything.
I was trying to see if there were any references to major works on discomfort from a philosophical perspective that I was familiar with, but I couldn't find any.
I think its constitutive: here we have a field of thought that has spent the last however many years attempting to understand the mind in a sort of isolated, atomized way, now having to grapple with the social reality of thinking, and having little to no resources to draw from, and presumably the author is some poor Master's or PhD student who is only familiar with the small segment of materials that their professors and advisors have to offer them.
The so-called field of "analytic philosophy," if such a distinction is even important anymore, has produced numerous studies on Heidegger[0], for instance, who takes the feelings of Anxiety (and boredom) as the ground of Being. Less frequently cited in Philosophy, but common in cognitive science, is Freud--specifically I'm thinking of his essay "The 'Uncanny'."[1] I can think of others who would be more controversial, since they, being, perhaps, too heavily influenced, made such feelings of discomfort and confusion constitutive in their writing, and so many criticize them as being "nonsensical" without realizing how facile such criticisms are...
In any case, just as I am familiar with Heidegger and Freud, simply because of who I've come into association with, there is always a universe of thought that I am excluded from in one way or another, so its good to see, regardless, other takes on these subjects. But I agree, this lacks the kind of depth you'd like to see out of research that addresses this topic.
I see it as a small dog trying to pick up a big stick - he's making all the right motions but nothing's coming off the ground.
I have to believe it's written by a young person who knows what papers should look like, but doesn't have the life experience to get any leverage on the topic.
But yeah, difficult to read, my eyes glanced off like I was trying to read wallpaper.
>written by a young person who knows what papers should look like, but doesn't have the life experience to get any leverage on the topic
So basically an LLM, which by its nature (and often also by external controls) can't say anything non-trivial about love, sex, money, or death. Or even politics. Because that requires a point of view narrower than Wikipedia's and at least half as stable as nitroglycerin
Materially; I couldn't c/p it, but I think their line about “indirect or diffuse danger” that gets right at the crux of the issue. So I’d say I’d find this analysis convincing