GBRK
1d ago
If you want to talk about actual combat scenarios...
If you can de-escalate the situation, you should. If you have a weapon and your opponent doesn't, use it. If your opponent has a weapon and you don't, just do what they tell you instead of getting stabbed or shot. If your're both unarmed and there's nothing keeping you where you are, just run. If you're both unarmed and you're trapped-- and this is the scenario woman (rationally) fear the most-- you're probably already grappling, so you might as well bring out the bjj.
Striking may be tactically useful, especially as a supplement to grappling, but if you get into a stand-up fistfight you've almost certainly making some sort of strategic mistake. I say this as someone who's dabbled in a few different martial arts. The most important thing your instructor can teach you about fighting is how not to. The second most important thing they can teach you is how to win the specific kind of fight you're training for-- whether that's in boxing ring, or in the living room against a rapey tinder date. To that extent, I think it's an important result that a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man.
GBRK
1d ago
A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.
Sorry I posted the wrong link. I mean to link this: https://aibm.org/research/men-and-volunteering-gender-gaps-and-trends/
Admittedly, a 5% gap still doesn't seem like as much of a difference, but you need to compare the proportions of the people volunteering. 27% vs 35% already means that the base ratio of volunteers is 84 men for 100 women. Then add in the fact that the genders choose different types of volunteering-- men are much more likely to be coaches, for example, while women are much more likely to be anything else. Finally, volunteers are going to spend different amounts of time volunteering. It all multiplies together into a crisis of male volunteers for specifically mentorship roles.
Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked.
I occasionally hateread crystal.cafe and they complain pretty often about unwelcome males (successfully) inserting themselves into female spaces and disrupting them. My priors are telling me to that their complaints are still less relevant than yours, and I'm confident in those priors because if I wasn't I would have them, but I'm not meta-confident in those priors because I'm fully aware that my incentives as a man are to seek out information that supports pro-man priors. Generalizing, I find myself in this situation pretty often when it comes to gender-war stuff-- I'm confident enough in my object-level beliefs to argue for them, but I'm not confident enough in my confidence to accept any totalizing theories because even small changes to my priors should force me to completely rethink the specifics of a broad philosophy.
For example, I was talking to my little brother about the lack of male mentorship recently and he said he thought about doing big brothers big sisters/boys and girls club, but decided against it because he figured if he was going to be doing that sort of thing anyways, he might as well be paid for it-- like he got paid for working as a substitute teacher. If you let your eyes go out-of-focus this generally melds into the "particular gender roles are unfairly imposed on me" supertheory, but in-focus it's completely at odds with the, "men don't want to be mentors because they're afraid of being called pedophiles" theory.
GBRK
1d ago
The most politically active individuals remain men, but as a cohort men are less politically active
GBRK
2d ago
HPMOR has many flaws, but it really does achieve what it sets out to do. It...
- Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.
- Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.
- Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.
- Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.
GBRK
5d ago
Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.
Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.
But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.
GBRK
5d ago
Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.
GBRK
5d ago
You're really underestimating female bjj practitioners. I'm fat at 6'1" 245 lbs, but I think I'm pretty convincingly 80th percentile or higher at fighting compared to men in my age cohort thanks to previous martial arts experience. But the (short, fat, female) purple belt at the jiu jitsu gym I joined still beat my ass on the rare occasion that we fought. Multiplying it out a female jiu jitsu purple belt is probably far rarer than 1%-- relative to women her age, I'd guess she's at or above the top 0.01% in terms of fighting ability-- but the interesting result is that it's not athleticism, but technique that puts her over the edge.
"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.
GBRK
6d ago
I saw a study offsite about the lack of male role models and there was a lot of anxious whining about how men are afraid of being seen as creeps/pedophiles but I think any attempt to explain the problem without accounting for the general reasons why men are under-included in communities in general is going to fall prey to occam's law. It seems obvious to me that a satisfyingly complete explanation for why men don't join the scouts will also explain...
- Why men volunteer less
- Why men commit suicide more often
- Why men so often abandon their children
- Why men are more politically inactive
... And so on, and so forth.
But agreeing on that explanation is near-impossible because nearly without exception, people work backwards from their preffered solution to determine what the cause of the problem is. Anti-safetyist mottizens want to make scouting dangerous again, anxious redditors want counter-propaganda to convince women to not be afraid of men, women want to pressure single fathers into taking responsibility, and I even saw one dude that thinks the solution is masculine bonding via class warfare. If any of these groups is right, I suspect it's mostly by accident.
It means that we should first devote our efforts to concerted study and systematization of the phenomenon before throwing away effort on advocating for speculative solutions that often backfire and reduce credibility for future attempts. See: "the boy who cried wolf." See: the modern history of feminism.
That's a fair complaint, but not actually a counterargument. If you see me overconfident in other positions and want me to apply this same reasoning feel free to argue for that. I recognize your username so I think we were probably arguing about eugenics and/or immigration before? My eugenics position is already "lack of epistemic confidence" so that would be a miss, but I'm pro-immigration so I can see the outlines of an argument that goes, "we can't be confident that immigration is good, so we should avoid it as a default." Were you to make it, I would accept the fundamental "epistemically uncertain->don't do the thing" argument but then disagree with the "epistemically uncertain" premise.
More options
Context Copy link