Tomato
1yr ago
Condom use is an endogenous, equilibrium outcome. You’re more likely to use condoms if you think you or your partner have or are exposed to STDs. I don’t think those unconditional correlations are surprising at all, they’re just not informative in the slightest about causation. It’s just like how if you looked at Covid cases and Covid lockdowns between 2010 and 2022 you’d certainly find a positive correlation between Covid lockdowns and Covid cases. You can’t make a causal statement unless you do careful econometrics.
Tomato
1yr ago
Tech people are terrible at creating cultural amenities, for whatever reason. SF and the Bay Area more broadly have terrible cultural amenities compared to New York or LA or even second- and third-tier American cities. Even tech people in New York instantly notice this when visiting SF. Old money, or lots of finance bros, or art hoes, or whatever population SF seems to lack, provide a real positive externality in creating good cultural institutions.
Stipulating that they’re not just made up or otherwise fraudulent, these companies just don’t understand what reasonable empirical standards are for making causal claims using observational data. There exist rigorous methodologies for bridging the gap from correlation to causation in these settings but it can be tricky and subtle and McKinsey has no incentives to put in the effort nor do the consumers of these studies.
I know this because I’m an academic in a field with high empirical standards and I run across this McKinsey style of study in my domain from time to time and they’re just useless. Like the standards are so low it’s not even worth debunking. Down-thread substantive arguments about this are honestly kind of a waste of time; you wouldn’t spend time listing the reasons that a kid’s make believe is unrealistic or that some Aella poll is pointless. Consulting company studies, and I am really not exaggerating, carry the same epistemological weight. They just aren’t a valid way to learn about the world.
Tomato
1yr ago
Not sure what your role is but unless it’s something directly tied to DEI stuff this will probably never ever come up for you. I’m a faculty member at a big progressive university in a very progressive area and nobody has ever brought any of this up with me. A few random staff have pronouns in their signatures and that’s it.
Tomato
1yr ago
A lot of the examples you mention, besides the “you hear about it and then convince yourself you have it,” mechanism, seem to go further and have communities dedicated to actively spreading the condition and making sure people who have the condition keep having it. This often seems to be exacerbated by the architecture of modern social discourse: Victims of the disease congregate online and can wall themselves off from opposing viewpoints, meanwhile there’s kind of a “recruiting” community (e.g., /r/egg_irl) which sources new members. Illnesses whose communities build these recruiting hubs are more successful in spreading. Some are even so successful that the hijack public institutions.
These are literal meme (in the old sense of a self-replicating idea) mental viruses that compete and thrive in the 21st century social lattice. Put that way it seems like no surprise whatsoever that societies with less developed communication infrastructure have a lower prevalence of these diseases.
I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population. Is there some kind of immunizing treatment? Alternatively does the same mechanism that tends to make “real” illnesses become less severe also exist here?
I wonder if a society with much more restrictive communication like China has less of this. I would support “internet mask wearing” to combat this but at least in the west I’m pretty sure the people in control of making these decisions already have the disease.
Tomato
1yr ago
I see statements like this a lot on here and they always leave me so confused because it’s so far outside my own experience and the experiences of other guys I know. I’m an okay looking nerdy guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area, which is apparently the epicenter location/demographic for these kinds of dating difficulties and yet neither I nor any of my male friends experiences them at all.
Ever since I moved here a few years ago there has been a constant flow of good looking, in shape, smart, well educated, my age-and-younger women who have their shit together and want to go on dates/sleep with/get serious with/get engaged to me, with honestly very little effort or grind on my part. Sometimes people don’t respond to my messages on bumble. Okay?
I could go on dates with women like this every day if I had the energy. And they’re almost all nice, not manipulative, not looking for handouts, not romantic climbers at all. It’s the same for all my guy friends. And we’re pretty average / below average in terms of income. Where are all these sexless dudes?
There was a thread on here last week about how the EA movement was basically a way for nerdy guys to meet women. Huh? It’s all so bewildering.
Tomato
1yr ago
I think there's a category error underlying a lot of the discussion on this. I don't think it's right to think of sex and gender as being two distinct (though correlated) categories, where everyone has a sex, and everyone also has a gender, and we can place you into a little 2x2 box of what you are (non-binary, or whatever, aside). Rather, sex is some primitive physical category, and gender is the social result of your sex.
Put another way:
Sex is the physical category.
Gender is the set of assumptions, expectations, rules, and roles that society places on you as a result of your sex. It is socially constructed not in the tautological sense that "gender" (like "sex") is a categorization that people made up, but in the meaningful sense of "gender" being a set of material things that society does to you.
Notice, and let me emphasize:
-
Gender is not a category, it's a bunch of things that happen to you because of your category. Language often elides gender as the category, but everyone is really talking about sex.
-
Gender is a real thing in the material world. We in 2023 America expect that males (sex) will do man (gender) things like wear pants, get called "he", and pee in the restroom that other males do. It's not some metaphysical voodoo.
-
Gender being socially constructed doesn't imply that it can be changed from the individual's perspective. This is again a category error. It's not a category, it's a bunch of ways that society treats you.
-
A lot of components of gender probably make sense given sex differences, e.g., males are bigger and more aggressive, and gender roles need to clamp down on that; females are the sex class that gives birth and nurses children, and gender roles need to make that possible. On the other hand, there are likely many components of gender that make less sense given sex differences, either because they never did, or times have changed.
From this perspective it seems like the way forward is the so-called gender critical view, where we ask whether various components of gender are really appropriate social reactions to your sex category. Like, "girls can be good at math too!" and "boys can wear dresses!"
On the trans activist side, it the sex-gender is different argument is kind of a red herring. You don't get to choose your gender, not because gender and sex are the same thing, but because gender is what society does to you because of your sex. We can slowly change how society treats members differently by sex class, but you, an individual, don't get to control that. Also, by the way, it seems sort of obvious that the overall trajectory of their rhetorical move here is (1) say "fine, you can't change your sex but at least you can change your gender," and soon enough (2) "actually you can change your sex too." This leaves me thinking that they don't really believe sex-gender distinction that they emphasize.
Likewise people on the cultural right seem to think that separating sex and gender is merely a sneaky way to legitimize how trans identified males self-identify. I sort of think that's true, but at least analytically I think the distinction outlined above is useful. A lot of the more basic right wing discussion of this seems to blend together two issues: "can men become women" (no) and "do the gendered expectations we put on people because of their sex make sense?" (maybe, maybe not). Separating them is useful.
I think the relevant “Silicon Valley” aspect of this is that since so many of their startup clients have been burning cash for the last several months, there have been lots of correlated “fundamental” (non-bank run) deposit withdrawals which have forced SVB to liquidate long-term fixed income investments at a time when they’ve lost a lot of value. It’s sort of fuzzy, imo, whether this is a liquidity issue or a solvency issue. Should you be marking to market on assets that are “matched up” against liabilities with a very long expected duration when whether or not you mark to market endogenously changes the actual duration of your liabilities.
Maturity transformation works when deposit withdrawals are not too correlated. A bank run is obviously an example of correlated deposit withdrawals but so is the slow bleed affecting many startups right now.
Tomato
1yr ago
This is the tech bro version of the labor theory of value. I think nobody seriously disputes that a small group of unbridled engineers can be absurdly productive in creating X; the question is more like, “who the heck needs X?”
Tomato
1yr ago
I live/work in the middle of all of this with what I think is a pretty good big picture view. Almost everything these guys do lately is some combination of absurd and/or hyper niche, and at the very least incredibly overvalued.
Tomato
1yr ago
This will be good in the long term as long as the folks in charge don’t get tricked into the ””””depositor backstops”””” (read, bailing out VCs’ portfolio companies) that various VC and assorted tech people are telling us we need or else everyone will lose their jobs, innovation will grind to a halt, and China will win. I’m not super optimistic.
Tomato
1yr ago
I agree with all of this. Btw I am noticing a bunch of the “give us money” VC and founder crowd keeps menacingly referencing MBS in what feels like an effort to make us think this is some big systemic thing like 2008 all over again, and justify government handouts. Just something I’ve noticed.
Tomato
1yr ago
criticize her surveys as less than rigorous
They’re comically unrigorous. Barely internally valid and definitely not externally valid. We learn less than nothing about the world from them. I have no idea why people pay so much attention to her (just kidding, I do). The whole community’s obsession with her is really embarassing tbh.
Tomato
1yr ago
You learn about how the people who follow her on Twitter answer the questions she posts on Twitter. To try to generalize that into something broader is the problem.
Tomato
1yr ago
I’ve had around 100 casual sexual partners. I’m engaged now but a strong desire for novelty is still there.
Tomato
1yr ago
Honestly these people are all just awkward social losers; there’s nothing deep going on there beyond the gross horniness of the high school band bus that makes outsiders cringe when they see it.
It’s in observing this crowd that I’m thankful that I’m good looking/social and upper middle class, rather than ugly/awkward and rich. Imagine having to pay someone, directly or implicitly, for companionship. What a sad life.
Tomato
1yr ago
I think if you’re a good looking woman you probably don’t end up in this subculture.
Tomato
1yr ago
They exist on the high end. I was recruited into one of these in the Bay Area where women were paying like $50k to be set up on dates with someone like me (pretty normal guy) who they could find on bumble but thought too highly of themselves to try. It made for interesting sociology but I ended up meeting my fiancée the old fashioned way (a dating app).
Tomato
1yr ago
I think getting to the point in her life where she’s advertising herself on a Google form is a major red flag. I understand the argument of maximizing the number of people you encounter but frankly normal people who you can expect to have a normal happy productive relationship with do not do this.
The url being different is a big deal! We expect you to go to the thick market, if you don’t, we wonder why they didn’t work for you and make some inferences about you.
Also, the medium is very different. A couple sentences dating app profile versus for some reason feeling the need to wordswordswords about herself. Like I’m a cerebral guy who values that in a partner but you convey that by being cerebral and intelligent, not by writing a novel about how you’re cerebral and intelligent. Show don’t tell is like a writing 101 concept.
But also being honest I wouldn't care about any of this if she was hot lol.
Tomato
1yr ago
This was definitely my experience being on the other side of this (women paying for a high-end matchmaker getting matched with me). The women doing this were definitely successful and had impressive resumes (but not any more so than that top 5% or so of women on normal dating apps in the Bay Area.) They all made the classic woman mistake of thinking that men will care about the same traits in women that they care about in men, and so on the basis of being a successful doctor or professor or VC or whatever were shooting way out of their league. I think the matchmaker's main job was basically to get them to be realistic and aim lower.
Tomato
1yr ago
I think a decline in social trust sort of goes the other way actually. I was in this matchmaker network thing and the fact that matchmaker would contact me and see what I was up to kind of stopped me from hooking up with a zillion people at the same time like I did on dating apps because there are minimal social consequences for that. The matchmaker's value seems higher in the low social trust scenario. I think what really killed them is just direct competition from dating apps.
Tomato
1yr ago
Which women are fuckable is culture war.
I was thinking about this for another reason but I have noticed polite liberal society seems to have this view that people who receive dick should be more or less entitled to receive whatever dick they want, whenever they want it. This is obviously true in the instances you mentioned but it was also true for, e.g., monkeypox, where it was somehow considered morally out of bounds to suggest that gay men stop having anal sex for a hot second while this all clears out.
You can twist yourself in knots coming up with a complicated theory that threads the needle here, or you can just accept the much more parsimonious explanation that it’s entirely driven by identitarianism.
More options
Context Copy link