RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
I'm not interested in resegregation in any way, but I think people are really bad at understanding the historical perspective. For the great majority of history and places, the average person would see almost nobody except a very small set of fixed local ethnicities, often only a single one. The few situations where they would, it was either very strongly controlled like large-distance-trading (and even that was still often changing hands exactly at the lines where ethnicities changed) or in a very negative context like an invasion, vagabonds or large scale population movements (where the moving people might not necessarily be ill-intended, but the difficulties involving the movement still meant that it rarely worked out well).
It absolutely makes sense that historically, people would by default simply distrust anyone who wasn't of an ethnicity they knew; But in fact it was worse than this: People were xenophobic in a much more general sense in that they simply distrusted anyone, full stop, that wasn't already well-known in their local environment. And this made a lot of sense! Moving around into unknown communities back then was expensive and dangerous, something that was only done if you had no other option. And when would someone have no other option? Usually because they did something sufficiently bad somewhere that they had to flee. Not to mention that someone who has nothing to lose is inherently dangerous in an environment where everyone is still fighting for their survival. On average, even a single stranger arriving - not to mention a group of them - was a very net-negative thing for a community for most of history.
But even back then, there absolutely were ways around these problems; Letters of recommendation, bringing resources with you and immediately sharing them as a proof of goodwill, being part of a generally accepted institution like a monastery or long-distance-trading, let's call this whole category credentials. So the capacity to trust strangers has always been there. But credentials were entirely inaccessible for something like 99% of the population. Guilds were possibly the first larger scale credential that made the concept accessible for something like an extra 10% of the population I guess? I admittedly don't know the exact numbers here. There is some argument that christianity and religions in general can fulfil a similar role as a low level credential.
Now comes pre-modernity, or the colonialism period or however you want to call it. As rapidly improving technology allows people to move much further than they could before, suddenly the equations changed; The baseline for "my situation is bad enough that it's worth trying my luck elsewhere" increased and increased, and hence the average quality of the stranger (again, stranger meaning not just personally unknown but someone without credentials) increased from "probably literally a multiple murderer" to just "regular poor person" . Furthermore, our general situation improved enough that (violent) criminality in general was worth less, and violent mental illness also has diminished. But as it always goes, social technology tends to lag behind regular technology, and hence both people's instincts were slow to change and modern-style credentialism hasn't established itself yet (or just partially through the aforementioned guilds).
I think people underestimate how much of pre-modernity style racism is mostly just the combination of this instinctive, historically rational distrust of strangers and the poor experiences that predictably happen when groups with very different norms clash. And unlike a teutonic moving into a roman village, who might cause some issues but who can show his goodwill, adopt local norms and become increasingly indistinguishable, the obvious differences between very different ethnicities makes fitting in much more difficult and hence slows everything down. Racism is not in any way this special kind of evil that is entirely irrational, it's just our instinctive distrust of strangers that used to be very adaptive.
As we near modernity, people increasingly start to trust strangers more in a fully general sense, and modern-style credentialism gets established so that almost anybody can travel from one place to another where they literally know nobody and still show proof of who they are, what they are capable of, that they're not a threat to anyone, etc. And this process happened almost simultaneously as racism toned down, and I don't think that is an accident. It's fundamentally the same process in my opinion. In medieval times, a black guy turning up somewhere complaining that nobody trusts him falls on deaf ears; they're trusting no strangers, and they are struggling to survive already. Today, if anybody turns up somewhere and is treated with distance and distrust, you need a specific reason and "racism" as a concept starts to even make sense at all. Early this century was just the weird inter-period when our society hadn't fully caught up with the changes. Or more precisely, societies, since I think other ethnicities actively westernising has been a large part of the process as well.
Btw, none of this is incompatible with the sort of "light" HBD that expects some average differences between groups (but which is unfortunately still taboo in the modern western consensus position). I guess this post also ended up slightly off-target in that it is not describing how the switch actually happened in detail, and more on the why it was the way it used to be and why it has changed. but I hope it's still interesting enough for some people.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
29d ago
Yes, this is the claim that I also encounter most often in medical science, i.e. that the majority of the so-called gender neutral research is actually biased towards men because the majority of consenting subjects is male. And this makes me furious. Yes, medical researchers generally prefer male subjects because having to consider the period, which unfortunately can have a major influence on many medications, is an absolute pain in the ass. But if there was a huge number of female subjects desperately wishing to be included in early phase trials, they'd take them; But women are by and large very risk averse, and in particular when it comes to untested substances that give them no expected benefit. This is well reflected in the data for different phases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5867082/
Phase I is for testing the safety and distribution of medication. There is no benefit for the subject, and hence the percentage of women in these trials is small, only around 22% in this particular review (but this is pretty consistent).
Phase II and later is for testing whether a drug works for humans, and hence most subject actually have a specific disease that they hope the medication will help with. Hence, the percentage of women suddenly reflects the population very well, usually around 45+%.
So somehow if women refuse to sign up for medical research that doesn't benefit them personally so men take up the slack, who is the primary victim? Obviously, the poor women.
And, just to be clear here, kudos to the minority of women who do sign up for early research. I agree this is an issue, but critically it is an issue that can only be solved by women willingly signing up more. And it also is a somewhat minor issue, since a lack of efficacy or the presence of female-specific side effects will still be caught in the later phases when women are well represented.
One point I haven't seen here is that there imo has been a general move towards always pandering to all groups, all at once in our media, and movies are no exception. There's more indie games, sure, but all media that costs a lot of money to produce and is expected to earn lots of money is generally designed to appeal much more to an average perso than to a small niche. As a very different example, look at the casualization of most traditionally nerdy gaming franchises such as Civ.
You might wonder what this has to do with nudity. Simple, women by and large do not like explicit nudity very much, as you can see even when they consume schlocky stupid porn, they read it, they don't watch it, and sex only happens sparingly. So what happens when you want to make an action movie, but also want to get the guys girlfriend to watch it alongside him to earn double the money? The MCU. You make the guys hot but never nude, they're manly but never rude (except to people who clearly deserve it). You include just enough of love stories for the women to not get bored. You include some female heroes, but they're even more idealized than the already-unrealistic male action heroes. All of this is (and more, such as your already-mentioned example of pandering to non-western audiences) imo just the logical endpoint of a slow march of optimization towards earning maximum money with your media.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
This, so much. This is how it works everywhere. In academia, everyone is broadly leftish but mostly apolitical. A small minority of far-left is not only tolerated & rarely challenged, but is allowed & financed to actively proselytise. Anything remotely right is ostracised or at best tolerated as long as its just talk among colleagues. If you try to point this out, you will be reminded "well, the last inequality retreat was very badly attended, so clearly we need to Do Better". The fact that this inequality retreat was actively financed by the university, mostly peddles extremely shoddy science that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise and that there is absolutely nothing remotely comparable that the average person would consider right does not even occur to them.
It's the same on reddit; I'm fairly confident that a) the great majority of the other mods, if not all of them, are still broadly left-leaning b) critically, the non-political mods almost never challenge the political mods, and almost all political mod actions are broadly the left cracking down on the right, never the other way around.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
No, I do not think that the average women high-five each other every time they get pumped & dumped by a high status man and I find the insinuation rather insulting.
What I do claim however is that the average woman who struggles to find a long-term partner (note that this is already not the average woman) often has already been asked out by perfectly respectable similar-status men but rejected them for flimsy reasons. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll frequently mention a single, maybe two or three, high-status married men (or, to take an extreme example, the aforementioned non-existent Prof. Brad Pitt). Depending on their taste, they might instead be into a flaky artist they've been having an on-off relationship/affair with for years, their boss, or their most popular co-worker, but the principle stays the same. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply deem no men worthy of being in a relationship with them, except the ones that clearly have other options. The moment they actually want to settle down and have a family, they'll often find someone in an instant. It's just they're still hoping for a better deal.
On the other hand the average man who struggles to find a long-term partner has already asked out similar or slightly below status women than themselves and been rejected. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll give you a long list of all their female friends, as well as most their female co-workers except the batshit crazy or disfigured, and the same for female acquaintances that may even be significantly below their own status. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply are not deemed worthy of being in a relationship by almost all women (no, a women telling other women to date him bc he's so "nice" doesn't count). If they wanted to reliably find a girl, they would have to go to great and unusual lengths that may even cause their peers to lose respect for them, like going to Thailand and hitting on every non-prostitute they can find. Otherwise their main options are a) waiting until the women among their peers become sufficiently desperate with age or b) work harder to become higher-status. But unfortunately the latter is a zero-sum approach that will mostly kick down other men even further.
For reference, I'm talking about upper-middle class behaviour here (i.e. the group of people we hear the most complaining from & about). So, well-mannered people with decent hygiene, good work ethic and enough income that any reasonable family can be provided for. I'm a research postdoc at a decent western university, and the number of women with frankly delusional expectations and a surprising amount of sneering disgust towards even slightly below their status men that try to hit on them is downright frightening. Single female professors with bitter attitudes towards the male professors who dared to marry a non-professor are basically a running joke. Plenty of my wife's female acquaintances and friends, who are mostly also researchers, therapists, or I/O psychologists at companies show exactly the behaviour described above, and my wife, who has also become a bit sick of their attitudes, occasionally digs a little deeper into who would actually be good enough for them, and it's reliably exactly who you'd expect.
And to repeat myself, I'm specifically talking about the women who claim to struggle to find a partner, not those that are in stable long-term relationships (I do think women in general are hypergamous, but for most women that preference is weak enough to not lead to this obvious failure mode). And also to be clear, I have plenty of gripes with male mate-finding behaviour as well and do not consider women's behaviour worse overall. But the topic here is the existence of female hypergamy, and the specific issue of a seeming pandemic of unhappy single people is in my opinion mainly caused by female hypergamy, and not by men playing too much video games or similar claims in mainstream journalism.
As an aside, I'm also quite frustrated how reliably every time one complains about how much men suck as a group in some way (they're more violent & criminal, they constantly try sleeping around if given the chance, they flake on family duties, they're less reliable in general, etc. are all things I genuinely think are true on average), it's just everyone nodding along, but if one mentions a single way in which women might not be so great, they get these ridiculous assertions thrown at them.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
Unfortunately, the opposite effect exists as well. Normal high-functioning law-abiding citizens who technically break a law will often get it enforced on them over low-functioning criminals because it's less risky and/or an easy way to make numbers look good. And this especially happens on people whom the police is biased again in the first place, which is the entire point of anarcho-tyranny. A typical example is that honest & otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants will often get into more trouble with the state than criminal immigrants, because the former will naively seek out directions from the state, while the latter will just actively avoid the state entirely. Independent on whether you think the former should be here, this is often a misallocation of resources & attention away from the difficult but truly important towards the easy but overall meaningless (aside from also setting up terrible incentives).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5mo ago
In fact, if you look at @EverythingIsFine's post, you're not sufficiently cynical. If you take the hosting cost, and double it for overhead, it's still less than 5% of the yearly donations.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
It's still nonsense though. The male advantage is very well replicated. You can't just assume as a baseline that our current choice of treatment for dysphoria, HRT, perfectly eradicates all differences. You have to prove it. Saying "transwomen are women, therefore they should be assumed to be the same in everything unless proven otherwise" is pure word games.
I'm not even completely against transwomen in women sports, as @rae correctly points out XY people born with androgen resistance become largely indistinguishable from regular women. Though I'm admittedly incredulous about the obvious physical advantages accrued in male puberty and also the neurological advantages during early development (better developed spatial reasoning and reaction times), which seem unlikely to be changed through HRT after the fact.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
For some, that is the point; Many AA initiatives cite white over-representation as a reason why whites can't be allowed to benefit from them, which is reasonable until you realize that whites are hardly monolithic themselves and there absolutely are very different groups with very different performance in them. I'm not opposed to helping people from difficult backgrounds achieve their potential, nor do I have a problem if that disproportionally ends up benefitting certain groups over others. But I dislike the current reality were privileged rich kids often get benefits on top because they happen to have the correct skin color or gender.
Just to give an example that happened to me personally, as a PhD I've been lectured on my male privileges and how we need to support women by a female scientist who is literally a decendant of some british noble family, while none of my ancestors have to my knowledge even finished high school. And it's not just about the lecturing, someone like her has access to a vast array of Women In Science Initiatives that makes sure that she succeeds.
The Group That Must Not Be Named is just the most extreme example of this, since separating them out will show you that not just specific smaller groups, but gentile whites as a whole are actually underrepresented in many important ways.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making?
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
I didn't even understand this post at first, thinking a "marker" was something like a honorary statue. It's just a small plaque describing her life. From reading it, it's mostly rather neutral in tone except for the single mention of the Smith Act being "notorious". You could argue though that it is deceptive since it leaves out many of her worst associations though.
I'm hardly a fan of communism and looking at her life also not a particular fan of her, but she is certainly a notable person. Having a sign "this notable person was born here and is notable for X" seems totally appropriate. Given what other posters here write about her, the text should certainly be more critical, but I don't think having such a sign up is at all an insult to anyone, not even patriots. Ironically you could argue that communists should be offended, since the sign clearly tries to minimize all her communist affiliations, only mentioning that she joined the party at one point.
Afaik, the usual claim is that the hugo awards have always been left-leaning, but tolerated right-wing authors and would occasionally even give awards to them. But then in the last 20 years it veered hard off the lefty deep end and the awards are now pretty much exclusively given to left-wing authors. See the sadpuppy controversy. So your description is pretty much perfectly in line with this.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5mo ago
I think that the most pervasive cause is still that none of us have any mental conception of a (capital-g,l?) good life that features children.
I agree that this is a big reason, but imo it's so much more than that. Our society strongly incentives childlessness through multiple channels: Companies actively try to punish you for having children as far as the legal system allows, the government itself guarantees a pension for childless people that we barely can afford, both the culture and the government work hand-in-hand see it as their prerogative to judge parents as they see fit and take away parental rights if need be and finally, possibly most of all, the culture strongly pushes teens and young adults to delay pregnancy and in fact most contact with younger children until both their biological fitness has atrophied so much that a decent percentage of people struggle to have kids despite wanting to, while another part has, as you point out, no conception whatsoever what a life with children actually looks like. It doesn't help that media very consistently pushes an image of children as just getting in the way of the adventure that is usually central to the plot.
And I think another big issue is that society pushes exceptionalism in general - everyone is supposed to find their one true calling, be it an amazing career, true love, personal self-realisation (which conveniently always ends up to be some kind of hedonism) etc. Children are not only too mundane to fit the bill, they also make many of those things very difficult to achieve, especially with the limitations modern life heaps on parents.
Imo doomerism has always seemed much to convenient to me. Most people, especially women, know that not having kids is a thoroughly antisocial choice in general (there are exceptions of course, such as having serious genetic disorders), so doomerism allows them to reclaim the moral high ground. They get to continue their life of short-sighted hedonism while also feeling morally superior. Of course, there are people whom I believe their doomerism to be sincere, but it's quite rare. Much more common is partying all the time, except the parties are totally for a cause and not just for fun. Perfect example is fridays for future, which consisted of 99% getting to skip school and 1% thinly-veiled excuses how that's the moral thing to do.
experiences (which children get in the way of) over things (which children don't get in the way of as much)
Ironically this is a great example of your earlier point. As a parent, I'd actually say it's the opposite: With kids, you get a ton of amazing experiences entirely for free, so much that experiences you used to enjoy such as travelling start to become boring & pointless in comparison. On the other hand, kids are genuinely expensive, so you can afford a lot less things.
When I heard this, the first thing that came to mind is how unfun woman soccer is. Especially if I grant the critics that, yes, non-consensually kissing a woman in such a situation is a Big Deal.
You could have literally have the same situation in men soccer, with a significantly bigger and stronger, literally gay coach kissing a male player on the mouth in a moment of excitement, the receiving player looking baffled & awkward at first but laughing after realizing what happened. It would be the kind of thing that everyone considers HILARIOUS, that would be remembered positively for a long time as showing just how emotionally invested everyone was in this win. In fact, in male soccer people constantly do stupid shit to celebrate winning, often things that in any other situation would be considered kinda gay. I'm not a particular fan of soccer in general, but I can sympathize with the kind of excitement you may generate when winning something as big as a world cup. Also, as some people have already pointed out, kissing is one of those things that varies A LOT by culture. In some it's not a big deal, even among acquaintances, in others it's strictly for lovers. I've been surprised at times by kisses from southern european girls (and had to remind myself afterwards that it wasn't a big deal, despite what my cultural instincts were screaming at me).
I also don't quite know how to fix this. I can see where people are coming from, woman genuinely are often more susceptible to being pressured into uncomfortable sexual situations and so a sense of protectiveness is not misplaced. Likewise men are genuinely biased towards doing something ambiguously sexual and then go for a mediocre justification if it doesn't work out. The current trajectory is pointing towards boring adjustment, where even in exciting situations people consciously suppress their emotions and play it cool, which we already do in most other, especially work, situations. But I think that takes out a lot of the fun of sports, it's one of the few areas where genuine, strong emotions like this are still acceptable.
That’s a difference in values between us; you consider sex to be an important characteristic that carries with it a certain weight and thus should be truthfully communicated, while I think it’s an unfortunate holdover from our evolutionary history that has trapped people in roles they didn’t want, both biologically and socially. I recognise the usefulness of having police officers and military service members be correctly identified, but I think the sooner we make biological sex irrelevant, the better
I actually think that argument is much better for gender than it is for sex. Gender roles are in many, many ways entirely irrelevant in the modern world. Child rearing and housekeeping has gotten so efficient that it simply makes no sense to keep women in the kitchen, as the saying goes. Physical fighting and hunting is even worse, both have been effectively completely replaced and the obvious male optimisations towards it are pointless now. Instead, almost everyone is doing office or light physical work that can be done by both sexes, and that both sexes are clearly broadly unoptimised for.
A pet theory of mine is that a lot of the modern confusion around gender and sex stems from the fact that in the ancestral environment sex differences were just so obvious that there was no chance to become confused, so we didn't evolve to recognize our sex outside of them. If you go fight to protect your family because you're obviously much more physically capable than your sister, while your sister got pregnant at 14 from her husband, it really makes no sense whatsoever to ask "maybe I'm a woman?". I know the alleged trans identities of some older traditions, but they're almost exclusively weak submissive males that probably would have been killed or left to die being allowed to instead serve as prostitutes for the capable men, and they're deliberately kept apart and considered distinct from the women.
On the other hand sex: As another transhumanist, I don't mind eventually abolishing it! But the reality is, we can't. For the foreseeable future, you'll need a women to create a new human being. Insemination is not quite as far off, but still for the time being AFAIK only possible from male to female. Likewise, there are massive hormonal differences and otherwise between the sexes that make them very distinct across a wider range of attributes. Most notably the massive physical differences. If I want to date you, I want to know your sex, not your gender; If I'm working with you, I want to know neither. HRT can make you more similar to the other sex, but is still very crude and only includes a portion of the hormonal differences between the sexes.
And to go further, most trans people I've met or indirectly heard about quite frankly still make more sense to be grouped in with their sex than with their alleged gender. I don't know you and so don't take this personally, just talking from my own average experience. I'm usually respecting everyone's wishes in regard to pronouns and such and have no desire to insult anyone in person, but I'm being a bit candid since I want to be clear on my impressions.
Most MtFs have stereotypically male hobbies and jobs, male mannerisms and blatantly obviously male bodies. Joking about G.I.R.L.s in video games is only half a joke; MtFs are so ridiculously overrepresented in techie spaces that you will frequently run into places with more MtFs than cis women. They're much more similar to the typical shy male nerd than any women. MtFs are also very commonly hyper-sexual compared to women; physically speaking they look like someone wanted to turn a scarecrow into a blow-up sex doll. All the online "passing" MtFs I've seen do not pass anymore once you see their movements in a video or hear their voice. If you look up these " first female to do X" news where X is a super-stereotypical male job or hobby, it's extremely disproportionally an MtF.
FtMs on the other hand I've almost exclusively ran into thanks to my wife, since they are quite common in, you guessed, female-dominated fields like psychology. The two I've personally met and talked with could easily star as the main character of any female librarian anime (and in fact had similar jobs). They were less superficially female, but overall had a clearly quite sensitive feminine personalities. Physically speaking, they're tiny dorky guys with a silly sounding voice (and frankly Buck Angel is as well, not to mention Elliot Page!). They're not or minimally interested in any stereotypically male hobby. I don't know it personally for these two, but FtMs AFAIK have the typical lesbian dead bedroom issues as well.
These differences become most obvious once you see their behaviour around babies and small children that aren't theirs; MtFs are often entirely uninterested just like cis men, while FtMs are often actively thrilled like cis women.
It's clear to me that gender is the unfortunate evolutionary holdover that has become unnecessary, while sex is a basic biological category that we will not get rid off for the time being.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5mo ago
Seriously, he is? Man, between "being a doctor" and "did some pointless nature challenge", doctor wins out very easily for female attention. Let alone the US part.
Though I kind of have to snicker imagining him actually completing the Hock, but everytime he tries to tell a woman she just wants to talk about him being a doctor all day.
I have to admit I've been moving from a position of sympathy for Gaza towards more sympathy for Israel in the last years, and this attack perfectly exemplifies the reasons why.
Israel aims to destroy military targets, and at most you can complain about a lack of concern for civilians. Though in general they at least attempt to minimize civilian casualties. Hamas actively targets civilians, gleefully massacres them en masse, and then parades their naked bodies through the streets where common people spit on their corpses, so it isn't even just Hamas specifically. And they happily put all of it online, where other arabs cheer them on. WTF would you even attack a music festival?
On top, even when an Israeli attack kills a large number of civilians, you'll often find out that it's because Hamas deliberately put a military base inside a civilian building, actively aiming for this outcome.
Sure the Israelis also have plenty of questionable tactics such as the creeping settlements in the west bank, but everything they do just seems so much ... saner in comparison. It's the difference between a cutthroat CEO who'll backstab you in a corporate deal when it is beneficial for him to do so, and the murderhobo who'll physically backstab you because you were the nearest person and fuck jews, that's why.
Oh, the irony! I know talking about a lack of context is quite popular currently, and it is occasionally appropriate. If, say, a norwegian guy is dunking on native american casinos and how they totally could have other sources of income, and lists a bunch of options while knowing nothing, it's a rather reasonable charge.
But critically examine my post and your post, and who is lacking context here: The person talking about his own wife, friends & acquaintances? Or the person offering a bunch of possibilities while knowing nothing about us? If anything, you may say that I have an overabundance of context, that I'm steeped so deep in it that I can't see the greater picture. I don't think so, but it would make vastly more sense.
So, to cure you of your fatal lack of context: When my wife got pregnant (which was planned), we both were PhD Students in our first (me) and second (her) year. We both agreed to share obligations perfectly 50/50 and did in fact do so. She was 100% convinced that she would get tired of the little one rather fast and would be thrilled to get back to work. We both finished our PhD's, and we are both Postdocs now, at the same university (in different fields though), earning exactly the same per hour. But she realised that she simply cares much, much less about her work now. Finishing the PhD was an obligation she pushed through. We regularly have the situation that I'm technically obligated to take our daughter from daycare for the day, but she simply WANTS to do it and will hassle me until I agree. Or that I do it, and then she comes home 5 minutes later to spend more time with us. In light of the realisation that her priorities and mine are quite different after all, we agreed that I work full-time and she works ~80%, and that for the next child, she will stay home much more than me. In fact, she has gotten quite anti-feminist recently since she feels betrayed and tricked; All her life, she was told how amazing a career is, how women are held back by children, by wrong-headed social expectation and by unwilling husbands, and how having children should be postponed as far as possible (and if you don't have any, it's fine as well). But now her (and mine) view is the inversion: Women are manipulated into careers they don't really enjoy and talked into having less children later, to keep them in the workforce for longer (similar to the former claims, we don't think this is a conscious conspiracy, merely the automatic and implicit market forces of the modern world at work).
And this isn't just my wife, this is the majority of mothers I know. My wife's current (female) professor has a baby, and the plan originally was for her to stay home only 3 months and then her husband takes over (he has a rather flexible job as a programmer), since there was a large project that she was heading. It's now a year or so, and the project she was heading is now de-facto led by my wife. The professor is working waaaay less and when at work is regularly talking about her baby, how she wants to get back and how unimportant work feels to her now.
Another acquainted couple is a well-earning high-performance physician at a clinic and her husband, a programmer (you may see a pattern here; Yes we have A LOT of programmers, often in home office). They also split up obligations 50/50 when the child was very small, I know because I regularly met him alone with the child in the park or at the playground. But now that the child can go to daycare and it isn't necessary anymore, do you want to take a guess who is pulling back now? By your theory, it should be the husband; His job is less demanding and can easier incorporate a child, he doesn't really earn much more and they generally earn enough that they can afford it either way and he can't weaponise his incompetence since, just like me, he has regularly cared for his child on his own. Also, daycare is both comprehensive - as a shift-working clinician, she would have access to a round-the-clock daycare - as well as ridiculously cheap here, so neither really needs to pull back at all if they don't want to. But no, she decided that she doesn't want to sent him to daycare full-time yet and that she doesn't want to continue her work because family is now more important, so she switched to a part-time government (pre-school checkups etc.) job. He is working significantly more than her nowadays and you usually see her alone with the child.
We obviously also know traditional couples where the man does earn significantly more anyway, but ironically that makes them less conflicted than us.
Yes I know, if you're just doing some context-free pondering you can make up a an arbitrary number of possible explanations. But once you know a bit more, you'll see that they don't hold up.
Btw, don't put words in my mouth; I don't think childcare is a lesser type of work, in fact I think it's under-appreciated compared to its importance (as are having children and families in general).
I studied applied maths in biology/medicine and my year was literally 4 men and about 20 women. I already knew that it was much more gender balanced than pure/theoretic math but was still surprised, so I talked with some of them about why they chose to study this. The answer was fairly uniform: They had always been very good at math, but didn't particularly like it. Some originally wanted to study medicine, but were put off for some reason (and there's more than enough good reasons!). This allowed them to take advantage of something they're good at, while still ultimately working on a topic they like.
I'd wager data science is in a similar boat, albeit to a slightly lesser degree.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:
Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).
Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.
We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!
RenOS
Dadder than dad
11mo ago
That's quite some time ago. Even mentioning The Bell Curve with anything but disdain is asking for trouble nowadays.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
18d ago
By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
30d ago
That's certainly a possibility, but it just does not at all fit with my experience both with IRL nerdy friends and online communities. The old guard just is consistently unhappy with the directions these franchises are taking, but just gets utterly swamped by newcomers who think the old games are weird and customer-unfriendly (admittedly not 100% wrong, a lot of older games had awkward UIs and missed QoL features that are normal nowadays). And while the old guard is almost exclusively socially awkward white and asian nerdy men, the newcomers are genuinely much more mixed along all axis of identity (which isn't surprising given that the whole point of the new direction is making the game more accessible to a larger group of people). And even the newcomers who agree with the old guard turn out to be ... socially awkward nerdy men.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
I think there is a simple explanation for this dynamic. Imagine you're big media conglomerate such as Disney, and you own an innumerable number of IPs. If you try to do a "full revival" of a reasonably old show with not only all/most of the cast but also all/most of the original creative team, you'll run into the problem that media has not only a particularly extreme rate of turnover and both mobility and stickiness at different points in the career. Some people will not even be in Showbiz anymore and you will have to hunt them down, some will have become so sucessful that they're exceptionally well-paid, some will have carved out a comfortable main role in a mediocre but long-running TV show that they flat-out refuse to join the revival no matter what. It's tedious, it's expensive, and you might still just end up with a few anyway since the others refuse. So you ONLY attempt this if you're really, really confident about its success.
Now imagine you want to do a fully new IP. It has no old fans that you can appeal to, it has no basic structure that you know to work. So it's inherently risky.
On the other hand, a "lazy revival" is easy & cheap . It's basically all the upsides of a new IP, but much safer; You're almost guaranteed to have a lucrative first season, and if the viewer numbers are visibly crashing on the later episodes than you just discontinue it right there. And it costs you nothing extra as you're already owning the old IP anyway. You just send a call out to a small number of original cast members that seem likely to join and add to the recognisability. You hire a bunch of cheap, new creative members who get a chance to show their chops or get the cut. And the woke/SJW worldview lends itself very well to replacing most of the cast, so you use that as the cover ("we're just updating this old, beloved western classic to be more in-line with modern global viewer preferences"). Not that people don't believe that worldview, but the other way around, people tend to believe worldviews that are convenient for them.
Obviously, there is always some cases where it seems to be just dumb; Buying an expensive IP and then ruining it with a bad new cast & creative team. But I think it has become an almost industry-standard because of the former. And in some cases, such as Star Wars, they arguably did put in a lot of work; They got decent parts of the original cast, J.J. Abrams, whatever your opinion of him, is a sucessful movie director and they clearly tried to replicate the structure of the old movies (and too much so, in my opinion).
On respect
Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).
Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!
Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.
But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.
In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.
Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.
There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.
They do not respect any science except their own.
Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.
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