RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo 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
7mo 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
6mo 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
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.
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 always find it funny that in the soft(er) sciences, the "hardest" theories are reliably the most hated. The average psychology enthusiast will gladly cite papers with vague definitions and findings on discrimination, priming, growth mindset and so on, but they'll suddenly be very skeptical for clearly defined and well-quantifiable traits such as IQ, reaction time and so on. Almost any complaint that is thrown at the latter group applies moreso to the former.
In biology, the hardest and most hated theory is, of course, evolution. Pure biologist will try to avoid it if possible because applying it involves too much math, and almost all ideologies hate some part of its implications. On its most basic level, its also rather trivial (though not tautological); In laymans terms, it goes something like:
Axiom 1. There exist things that can replicate themselves
Axiom 2. Different things have different proficiency at replicating themselves, which is called their fitness f
==>
Conclusion: Things with higher fitness will outscale things with lower fitness, irrespective of their original prevalence
You'll notice that while it's easy, you still need to prove the intermediate here, and in the past this was absolutely called into question. There's a lot of theoretically possible growth functions - linear, logarithmic, root, and so on - that would make it mostly implausible for an originally small group to outscale a large group in any feasible amount of time. As we know now, the correct growth function is exponential, which has this explosive property of jumping orders of magnitude quickly. Even better, the exponential has a rather rigid shape, which you'll come to recognize time and time again when you're actually working with biological data, as I do.
This is, as said, the most basic version. It gets even better! We can actually set up different systems of replication, add mutation generation and how these mutations affect individuals, and the theory of evolution will give us different predictions of the exact shape of the course of the population over time and the distribution of mutations we should expect. And we can prove these in simulations! For one of my favorite examples of this rather theoretical portion of biology, see Gunnarson et al https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580921000666. The short version is that we can distinguish between a population that has recently grown fast and one that has been mostly stagnant entirely based on its current distribution of mutations, no time-based data needed. But we need evolutionary principles to explain this. Or for a much older examples, look at the differences between a Moran Process and a Wright-Fisher Process; Both are plausible, albeit very simplified, population models, and they lead to different predictions, which can be quantified and measured. Of course in the lab, as others have pointed out, we can further watch this process in action. Macro-evolution is then simply the only plausible extension of these finding without invoking some magical "essence" of beings that is not stored biologically and thus never changes.
So you're plain wrong that it leads to no new conclusions; In fact we haven't even come close to finding out all the implications. Tbh, you're argument is on the level of arguing against the entirety of modern particle physics by saying: "well, of course there has to be something that is the smallest, which is even the literal meaning of the word atom. Greek philosophist already thought the same!" while ignoring that a) it actually was controversial in the past - yes for almost any basic concept you can find a greek philosopher who argued in favor of it, just as you can find one who argued against it - and b) that particle physics, just as evolution, is well-quantifiable and can be shown to work the same on multiple levels - analytical mathematical proofs, numerical differential equation simulation, stochastic/Monte-Carlo style simulations, and finally in the lab itself. Your distinction between "Evolution" and "Natural Selection", which doesn't really exist in evolutionary theory, doesn't add much conceptual depth imo, either.
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
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5mo ago
As someone with lots of personal & professional experience with doctors (working as a postdoc in medical science and helped the father of a close friend navigate his own cancer diagnosis), I have to take the opposite position. Doctors have a very strong tendency to groupthink, to defer to the leading doctor and to generally behave in such a way as to maximize ass-covering as opposed to the best interest of the patient. They can and will manipulate and keep secrets from you for the purpose of their own convenience. Don't misunderstand me, they do so since they're extremely overworked and just try their best to do good with limited time and resources, but they will frequently miss the mark especially in unusual cases.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
In addition, even the UN sheepishly admits that the protestors engaged in "significant violence" but that it doesn't technically constitute a "combat or military campaign". Hamas did what it always does: It deliberately mixes violent, dangerous offenders with children and other sympathetic victims, and when in the chaos the sympathethic victims are hurt, they go complain and pretend it's Israels fault. In comparison, Hamas goes into a village and deliberately executes children.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3d ago
I think at the core it's surprisingly a variation of "might makes right", but updated for a modern audience. It vaguely sounds moralistic at first glance, but it can also be used as a simple "your objections don't matter, you will die and we will prevail". It's also an important part of the progressive message as a counter to the natalist objection: Progressive ideologies generally have terrible TFR, and as such are liable to simply be replaced. So they adopted a self-conception as a vanguard that lives on in the ideals of the future society, even if they may not have biological offspring.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
"Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned"
For some reason I read this as ""Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape or Degradation of Women - And Should Be Banned".
On the main point, hasn't it been pointed out that the lower classes generally tend to have more real sex in general, while the higher classes are too busy studying for the real thing, so they cope through porn? Also, as usual I see no way to properly control for the direction of causality with this kind of study, and almost any negative claim here can just be turned around - of course someone who is unhappier and has poorer wellbeing (maybe due to lack of sex?) is more likely to use porn. They don't even argue chronologically ("Men who have used pornography in the past now are X"), they argue concurrently ("Men who use pornography have higher X"). The former has at least a little bit of a claim for causality in the direction of chronologicity (is that a word in english? I guess you get what I mean), the latter not so much.
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.
More options
Context Copy link