Spousal Hiring in Academia
I'm curious what people here think about spousal hiring in academia. It's a topic that I have thought a lot about without reaching any firm conclusions so I thought it might be interesting to discuss it here. Since the practice might not be well known to people outside of academia, I'll explain how it works before sharing some of my own thoughts.
Spousal hiring is meant to address a common problem in academia: academics are often in romantic relationships with other academics and it can be hard for them to both find a job in the same city. The reason this is hard is that academic jobs are unusually spread out. Even the biggest cities have no more than about 10 major research universities—for mid-sized cities there's often only one—and even a large department at a major university may only hire a couple faculty members per year. Some people call this the "two-body problem" but I kind of hate that name. Regardless, this can be a major source of frustration for people in academia and some couples spend years living far apart from each other because of it.
To deal with this problem, it has become increasingly common for universities to offer spousal hires. When a university wants to hire a researcher whose romantic partner is also in academia, they will sometimes also make a job offer to the partner (note that I said partner not spouse; in spite of the name, there is almost never a marriage requirement). Sometimes, the partner is hired as a tenure-track professor. Other times, they are given some kind of less prestigious position, like lecturer (a teaching-only role with lower salary and no tenure). Often, they would not have considered hiring the partner if not for spousal hiring. There is a related situation that is sometimes also referred to as spousal hiring where a researcher at a university starts a new romantic relationship with a researcher at another university and asks their current university to offer a job to their new partner. See here for a much more detailed account of how spousal hiring works on a practical level.
You might wonder what's in it for the university. The answer is basically that this is a way for lower-ranked universities (or even just not-literally-Harvard universities) to recruit better researchers than they would be able to otherwise. So usually spousal hires are only made on behalf of researchers somewhat better than the typical researcher hired by that university. Some universities also view it as a way to guarantee that professors will stick around for longer. Not all universities are big on spousal hiring, and even when they are it makes the whole process more complicated. So if you are an academic couple who managed to get jobs at the same university due to a spousal hire, you might be less inclined to go through the whole job search process again just to move to a slightly more prestigious university.
My impression is that in the past, spousal hiring was frowned upon or even outright forbidden due to concerns aobut nepotism (see here for a reference to this). Nowadays, however, it is common, at least in the US and Canada. I personally know of several examples and have heard anecdotes about at least a dozen more.
I have mixed feelings about spousal hiring. On the one hand, it can be very frustrating to not be able to find a job in the same city as your romantic partner. On the other hand, there are some obvious negative aspects:
- The most obvious is that spousal hiring leads to worse researchers being hired than would be otherwise. Of course, universities usually deny this, but it seems implausible that it's not true at least in some cases. Even when the partner is hired as a low-salary lecturer it still means that a lecturer is being selected not because they are the best teacher but because of other factors.
- It seems that in the US at least, it is no longer common to see spousal hiring as nepotism and claiming it is can sometimes even get you accused of sexism (or of being a dinosaur). But... it seems like spousal hiring matches the plain reading of the definition of nepotism pretty well. Now I can imagine responding to this by saying that not all nepotism is especially bad and this is one example, but I'm not sure I've ever actually seen someone make that argument.
- Relatedly, spousal hiring just feels unfair. When you fail to get hired for a job you want, there is rarely a single cause. But it is probably natural for some people to feel resentful if they don't get a job, but someone seemingly less talented does because of spousal hiring.
- Spousal hires have the potential to cause a lot of drama. There are obvious problems like: what if there is a nasty breakup and you're left with two people who hate each other stuck in the same department. But that's not all. For example, departments usually only hire a few faculty members per year and current faculty often compete to have their preferred candidate hired. If that preferred candidate is pushed out in favor of a spousal hire, that can create hurt feelings.
- It's also not clear that spousal hiring is even good for the partner who is hired, at least in terms of job satisfaction and research productivity. I suspect it doesn't feel good to think that you were hired not because of your own abilities and talent but just because of who you are in a relationship with. Also, even if unintentionally, other faculty members may treat spousal hires differently. In this essay, a spousal hire thoughtfully discusses some negative psychological and social consequences of being a spousal hire.
I think spousal hiring mostly continues (and remains reasonably popular) because it's so convenient for many of the people involved. Universities get to hire researchers who would normally be out of their league. Superstar researchers get to work in the same city as their romantic partner. Grad students, postdocs and other young academics who have partners in academia (which is extremely common) get to imagine that they too will not have to choose between a career in academia and living in the same city as their partner. I also think this very convenience is one of the strongest arguments in favor of spousal hiring. The thing that sucks the most about the academic career path is not having much control over where you live, which makes it harder to maintain relationships, start a family and so on. Is doing something that makes that a little better really so bad?
However, I think that because spousal hiring is so convenient for so many people, it is often a bit controversial to question it (also since traditionally spousal hiring was seen as benefiting women, questioning it can be seen as vaguely sexist). To gain better intuition for the topic, I think it is interesting to consider some thought experiments.
- In the future, polyamory has become normalized. A superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and he asks for spousal hires for his two partners. Is this okay? If not, why not? If so, is there any number of partners for which it would not be okay? Or does it just depend on how much of a superstar he is?
- A superstar researcher is happily single. While being recruited by a university, she asks that, instead of being offered a spousal hire, she is simply given a salary increase commensurate with what the spousal hire would have cost (and agrees to do the extra teaching and committee work that the spousal hire would have done). Is this okay?
- A superstar researcher is single (his wife died) but is very devoted to his daughter, who is also an academic. The superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and asks that his daughter be hired as well. Is this okay? Is it nepotism?
- A superstar researcher is single (her husband died) but is extremely close friends with another, less accomplished, researcher. The superstar is being recruited by a university and asks the university to also hire her friend. Is this okay? If they refuse and she then reveals she is in a relationship with the other researcher, does that make it okay? Why is a sexual relationship better than an extremely close friendship? What if after she reveals that she is in a relationship with her friend, they hire the friend but then find out that she just lied about the relationship to get her friend hired?
- A superstar researcher is hired and his wife is hired with him as part of a spousal hire. Later, they get divorced and he starts a relationship with another researcher at a different institution. He asks his current university to hire his new partner. Is this okay?
- A superstar researcher is married to a stay-at-home husband but is also having an affair with another researcher. The superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and asks that her boyfriend be hired as well. Is this an acceptable spousal hire?
- A superstar researcher wants his friend to be hired but his university refuses. So he starts a romantic relationship with his friend and then asks for a spousal hire. Has he done something wrong?
As I said, I really don't have a firm opinion about whether spousal hiring is good or not (or under what circumstances) and I'm curious what all of you think.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not? Surely you agree that not every drunk girl at a party is trying to get laid and that there is some level of drunkenness where someone's failure to dissent (or even positive consent) should not be taken very seriously (e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).
pro_sprond
11mo ago
While I believe that RFK Jr has many inaccurate beliefs, some of his claims that you mention in your post are at least arguably correct, including a couple that may sound outlandish at first. However, after briefly going through all the claims you mention, I have concluded that RFK Jr makes a number of claims that are either false or hard to believe without a lot of strong supporting evidence. Also, his most explosive claims seem the most fishy. I don't think he is someone who is rigorously seeking truth, but rather someone who is prone to believe shocking claims and occasional conspiracy theories but for this reason also occasionally entertains plausible ideas that are somewhat verboten in polite discourse. Overall, I think you should be very skeptical of him but remain open to the possibility that some of his hard-to-believe claims are correct.
Let me now go through his claims one by one.
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Endocrine disruptors are "everywhere to be found" in our daily lives. This is hard to evaluate since the phrase "everywhere to be found is vague, but it's at least arguably true. Endocrine disrupters are found in a number of products which it is possible to encounter in everyday life, such as pesticides (though note that some products containing endocrine disrupters have been banned, e.g. DDT was banned in the US in the 1970s). I wasn't able to quickly find information about the precise prevalence of endocrine disrupters in human environments, but see here for a very long report commissioned by the EU which claims (among other things) that current tests for the presence of endocrine disrupters are insufficiently sensitive. See here for some basic information about endocrine disrupters from the NIH.
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[Endocrine disrupters] can sexually feminize frogs. This seems to be true. See here for one study claiming this. Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley has studied this extensively and claims to have subsequently been harassed by the pesticide company Syngenta who (he claims) are trying to cover up the negative effects of their products. He was recently inducted to the National Academy of Sciences, so he seems to be well respected. Here's another study claiming that exposure to endocrine disrupters present in some paint can cause masculinization in mollusks.
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[Endocrine disrupters] must be responsible for the apparent explosion of gender dysphoria and transgender identity that has taken place over the last 5-10 years. This claim is hard for me to evaluate. I was not able to quickly find any strong evidence in support of it. On the one hand, it does not seem totally implausible. On the other hand, some things don't quite fit. Endocrine disrupters have been around for many decades and perhaps were even more prevalent in the past (before things like DDT were banned), but the explosion in the number of cases of gender dysphoria is very recent. Also, the feminization/masculinization effects of endocrine disrupters observed in frogs and mollusks were at the level of gross anatomy whereas gender dysphoria is a (purely?) psychological phenomenon. There may have been an increase in sexual developmental disorders caused by endocrine disrupters in the environment but I'm not sure to what extent this has occurred nor to what extent this can be connected with increases in gender dysphoria. I'd be happy for someone more knowledgeable about any of this to weigh in. Also, the number of exclusively homosexual men does not seem to have seen a significant increase from the Kinsey report until today (the number of bisexual men has increased a lot, but this seems much more contingent on social facts: it is easy to imagine mildly bisexual men opting to identify as purely straight in a homophobic environment but as bisexual in a homophilic environment). At the very least, this seems like a very bold claim for someone like RFK Jr to make without strong supporting evidence.
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A Cochraine [sic] collaboration report has declared Pharma drugs are the third leading cause of death in the US after cancer and heart attacks. There are really two claims here: first that a Cochrane review has made this claim and second, that the claim is true. I am unable to find any Cochrane review claiming this, but I didn't look very hard and I'm open to being proved wrong. The second claim seems straightforwardly incorrect. This page from the CDC claims that the third leading cause of death in the US is covid, with about 400,000 deaths per year. Excluding covid, the third leading cause of death is accidents, with about 225,000 per year. I don't really see how drugs could be the third leading cause of death unless you split up several other causes in unnatural ways (e.g. splitting "accidents" into several smaller categories). By the way, I'm not sure why the CDC page I linked to leaves out drug-related causes, but this document claims that in 2019, there were 75,000 drug related deaths. However, about 95% of these were deaths from drug overdose, mostly illegal opiods. So even if RFK Jr's claim is true, it's only by breaking down several categories in unnatural ways and lumping all drug overdose deaths together into a single "Pharma drugs" category, which seems unreasonable.
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Masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19. I'm going to skip this one because it has been written about a lot already, both on this forum and elsewhere. My personal opinion is that saying masks are "entirely ineffective" is much too strong a claim, though I'm on board with a more limited claim that their effectiveness was exaggerated in popular media, especially the effectiveness of cloth masks.
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70% of advertising on the news is from pharmaceutical companies. I'm highly skeptical of this, but had trouble finding concrete data. Also it's a bit vague: what does "news" entail? Does it include news websites? Newspapers like the NYT? Weighted by viewers, spending or something else? In any case, it just defies my own personal experience. I agree there are a lot of drug ads, but I don't feel like I've ever watched TV and seen almost 3 out of every 4 ads be about drugs.
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Big Pharma gives twice as much as the next biggest industry to congress in lobbying efforts. This seems to not be literally true, but close enough that it's not worth the quibble. This chart by Statista shows that the pharmaceuticals/health products industry spends about $370,000,000 on lobbying in the US per year and the next leading industry, Electronics manufacturing and equipment, spends about $220,000,000. Now 370 is not quite twice 220 and I'm sure "health products" includes a number of non-pharmaceutical companies, but the claim was reasonably close to correct and violated my intuition so I'll give it to him.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
Here's an honest question: many people in the comments here are saying that Wikipedia could be run for about 5-10% of the donations it receives each year. Given that, it would only take a couple years for Wikipedia to collect enough donations to set up an endowment that would pay their costs in perpetuity without ever needing to do any fundraising again (usually one can expect to withdraw 4-5% of an endowment each year without eating into the principal). Is the Wikimedia foundation already doing something like this? If not, has anyone proposed it and has the Wikimedia foundation explained why it's not doing it?
pro_sprond
6mo ago
I realize this is kind of besides the point, but it's pretty funny to be worried about the US becoming a majority black country. Currently the white and black fertility rates are nearly equal and a higher percentage of immigrants are white than black (though most immigrants are neither). You could make the case that the US will eventually become majority Hispanic (they have the highest fertility rate of any major group and also a high immigration rate), but majority black would require some pretty extreme changes in current trends.
pro_sprond
7mo ago
This is such an extremely poorly-thought-out idea that it's kind of hilarious.
The obvious problem is that any kind of substantial homeless presence in hotels would have such a negative impact on business that hotels would go to great lengths to avoid it. Perhaps they would follow some of the suggestions listed in other comments and sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking (e.g. booking day of, or willing to move around their booking) or even gift some guests an extra room or two. More simply, they could gift employees free rooms whenever there's a vacancy. It's also possible that most hotels in LA proper would simply close and relocate to cities in the LA area which wouldn't be affected by this law (there are many other municipalities essentially embedded in the city of LA).
But after thinking about it a bit, I think an even bigger problem is something pointed out in the article: the number of vacant rooms in a hotel can change unpredictably from day-to-day so you either have to constantly kick out homeless residents on short notice or essentially accept a permanent fraction of your rooms being used to house the homeless. Even worse, if you opt for the latter then every time there's a dip in your number of regular customers, you risk having to increase the "permanent homeless" fraction of rooms. And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly. Not to mention it would be insanely disruptive to regular customers.
I think the hypothesis mentioned in the article—that this is a negotiating tactic by the hotel workers' union—makes a lot of sense. Basically it is a threat against hotel owners that if they don't increase salaries then they will be put out of business by an insane law. If this is really the union's strategy then it seems a bit risky. There is always a chance that even the law will take on a life of its own and get passed even if negotiations succeed and salaries are raised. And then everyone (hotel owners and workers alike) will be out of a job.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
I inhale at the thought of such a dreadful fate. What horror!
The fact that this is such a common reaction is part of why I think that (absent other incentives) middle managers would be undersupplied.
Seriously though, most countries already have progressive taxation and a welfare system. Wealth is redistributed from the most capable and luckiest to the less lucky and capable.
I agree, though of course wealth distribution is a continuous variable, not a discrete one. My view is that as societies become richer they become more and more capable of providing poor people with welfare. This is one of the benefits of being a rich society and part of the argument for why we shouldn't jeopardize the things that drive our societal wealth (though I realize that increasing welfare benefits can hurt that goal; there's some tradeoff and it's not always easy to decide what exactly the best path is).
I think it also serves to shore up social stability aside from moral concerns.
Good point.
It looks like he's beginning to believe HBD but is trying to retroactively justify his earlier highly egalitarian beliefs anyway, which leads us disturbingly close to Handicapper-Generals.
I don't think deBoer believes in HBD per se, but he clearly believes that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability and he has believed this for a while (it's a major part of the premise of his first book). I don't think he's trying to retroactively justify his egalitarian beliefs; I think he really just sincerely thinks it's unfair that people who are kind but stupid will not do great in a meritocratic society and has somehow failed to see the reasons why a meritocratic society might be good despite that.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
I honestly find this a very strange attitude. First, sex can and often does have nontrivial physical consequences, ranging from mild soreness the next day to pregnancy or STDs. Second, many people obviously have a very strong emotional reaction to sex. I certainly think emotional consequences are different from physical consequences but I don't think they don't matter at all. For example, suppose you had a child and told them they are stupid and unlovable. No necks have been broken and yet it's clear that your actions are morally relevant (I'm not trying to equate this example to drunk sex, just trying to point out that physical harm is not a prerequisite for moral relevance). I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight. Obviously a lot depends on the situation, often both parties are partly responsible and just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean it should necessarily be illegal. But I think it's wrong to discount it completely.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
I was assuming we were in the context where the girl is already drunk and perhaps so intoxicated that she may not be making decisions she would agree with when sober. In this context, I think it may be hard to determine if part of her reason for getting drunk was to make it easier to get laid (and I wouldn't necessarily trust the accuracy of an extremely drunk person's response to such a question).
pro_sprond
9mo ago
He claims that we should ensure that even stupid and untalented people still have some minimal level of material comfort.
I'm not convinced that his point is this simple. First, stupid and untalented people do have some minimal level of material comfort in every rich country around the world today. You could argue that it's not enough comfort or that it leaves out people who are psychotic (and children of people who are psychotic) or who have other problems much larger than "lack of talent" but then it becomes mostly a question of what is the necessary "minimal level of comfort." Second, and more importantly, I have never, ever heard someone who argues for "equality of opportunity" say that they want stupid/untalented people to not have some minimal level of material comfort. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand the debate about "equality of opportunity" vs "equality of outcome." If this is Freddie's whole point then it's like weighing in on an argument about taxation to say that we shouldn't execute people who don't pay their taxes. It's fighting a complete strawman of a position. Third, deBoer is an avowed socialist, of the pretty-much-a-communist type and I'm not convinced he doesn't favor a pretty radical program of wealth redistribution.
DeBoer, in this essay, does not claim that we should use money to reward people for being good.
At the very least, he seems to think that most people arguing for equality of opportunity think this. Otherwise it's hard to explain this line: "Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual." My point is that, no, that notion is not at all core to the argument for "equality of opportunity" and also, the best argument for "equality of opportunity" is not really about "justice" in the way that people normally use the word.
In defense of inheritance, one could argue that letting parents pass on their wealth to their children encourages the parents to work harder and thus leads to better social outcomes overall.
I agree that this is a reasonable argument for allowing inheritance (and for not taxing it too heavily). It's also an argument easily overlooked by people too invested in the "virtue theory of money." The children who inherit their parents' money did not do anything virtuous to earn it so (some people think) why should they get it?
What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?
To the university, their main value is prestige (but also occasionally lucrative patents). For society as a whole, it greatly depends on the field the researcher works in. In humanities, it is sometimes hard to quantify the worth of a researcher's output but in science and engineering, it is often more clear-cut. To take one recent example, Jennifer Doudna became a superstar researcher for her part in discovering CRISPR, which seems likely to have a lot of value to society.
In my opinion, you have a level of cynicism about academic research that does not seem warranted. I agree that a lot of research is not useful and some is also in service of a political agenda, but over time a lot of tremendously useful/important scientific discoveries and inventions have come out of academia. I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
One problem, on top of what other people have already mentioned, is that an explicitly conservative version of Wikipedia would likely be more politically biased than the current officially-apolitical-but-left-leaning version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia started out fairly apolitical and certainly not obviously left-wing (the founders met on a forum for discussing Ayn Rand's philosophy!) but over time has drifted in a leftward direction. Despite this, most articles are still fairly objective and accurate. Part of this may be because lots of text on Wikipedia was just literally written years ago (before the political bias became noticeable) and part of it is due to the composition of the population of editors and the cultural norms that have developed, which both have a lot of momentum and don't go from apolitical to extreme far-left in a few years. Moreover, at least conservative people are not explicitly banned or discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia and so there are probably more conservative editors than there would be if that was not the case.
Actually we don't need to just imagine a hypothetical "Wikipedia, but conservative." We can look Conservapedia, which was founded with the goal of being a conservative version of Wikipedia. Comparing Wikipedia and Conservapedia, I think it is clear that Wikipedia is substantially better and more factual than conservapedia. Take, for example, their articles on Ronald Reagan. Conservapedia's article describes him as "one of the greatest American Presidents and part of the conservative movement since the late 1970s" whereas Wikipedia says he was "a member of the Republican Party, his presidency constituted the Reagan era, and he is considered one of the most prominent conservative figures in American history." I find the second to be much more objective than the first.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
I honestly don't care if it sounds patriarchal or not. I'm not a modern progessive (though I'm not exactly conservative or traditional either) and the things I care about are not based on what sounds patriarchal or not. Consent is not the only moral value that matters in sex and sometimes you do have a responsibility to not enable people to make bad decisions, and especially not to take advantage of their propensity to make bad decisions for your own benefit. That's true when a man does it to a woman, when a woman does it to a man or any other combination of genders.
Both parties share some responsibility; how much depends on the details of the situation. As an analogy, imagine your drunk friend asked you where his keys were because he wanted to drive. If you help him find his keys and then he drives drunk and gets into an accident then he certainly is responsible, but so are you. If you have sex with someone intoxicated and know that they will likely regret it then in my opinion you are partly responsible.
Edit: "How would you know/foresee this?" The same way you try to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation. Of course sometimes it is possible to make an honest mistake. For example, suppose that someone wants to have sex with you and tells you over and over that they just want to hook up but later you find out that they really wanted a relationship. In most such situations, I think your position would be quite defensible and the person who wanted to have sex with you should bear most or all of the responsibility for their decision. But I think anyone who's been an adult long enough has seen some situations where a man was knowingly using a woman's emotional neediness for sex and I don't think that's a good thing (and even less so if intoxication is involved). By the way, I think you could read Moran's advice to young men from the OP's post as, in part, advice for "how to know/foresee this."
pro_sprond
9mo ago
I mostly agree with your explanation of how spousal hires came to be common and accepted, but I think feminism might play a somewhat smaller role than you ascribe to it. It had some influence, but in my opinion, its most important effect was simply increasing the number of couples where both partners are academics. As long as such couples are common, and as long as the academic job market works the way it does now, spousal hiring will be appealing.
pro_sprond
3mo ago
The origins of People's Park are a little more complicated than you imply. The area was originally obtained by the university by eminent domain, forcing homeowners to sell against their will after which the university bulldozed the houses and then left the site vacant for more than a year (see here). I think those original homeowners at least had a legitimate reason to be pissed off at the university.
That said, I find myself deeply irritated by the actions of local protestors in the decades since. I see no reason why the university has an obligation to maintain a homeless camp which was involuntarily forced on it in the first place, especially when there is an acute shortage of housing for students (the actual paying customers of the university). Some context is useful here: for many years the university has had a severe lack of housing for students. Most undergraduates live off-campus after their first year and even then, the university has trouble accommodating just the freshmen and transfer students who are guaranteed a spot in the dorms. A few years ago they were housing some students at Mills College about 10 miles away and at times have also housed students in the lounges of the dorms (which were not intended as bedrooms). By the way, the increase in enrollment that led the student housing situation to get this extreme was not unilateral action on the part of the university, but rather part of a University of California system-wide deal with the state to freeze tuition and enroll more in-state students in return for an increase in funding (see here for example).
I'm also annoyed by protestor complaints that the university should has plenty of alternative sites to People's Park and should use one of the those. Not only are some of those alternate sites much smaller than People's Park, most of them are already in use by the university (unlike People's Park) and developing them would likely face neighborhood anti-development activism of its own. Moreover, why can't the university develop multiple sites at once? The student housing shortage is so severe that even adding another 1000 beds (which the People's Park development is expected to do) would not come close to fixing it.
On another topic, I'm really skeptical about the university's plan to put a homeless shelter right next to a student dorm in the proposed People's Park development. I imagine most students would prefer not to live next to a homeless shelter, many parents would be freaked out by the idea and it would likely create a chronic source of problems for the university, especially if there are any altercations between homeless people living in the shelter and students in the dorm. Perhaps the university is simply planning to build the dorm first and then drop the homeless shelter idea once the dorm is already fait accompli.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
What's in some ways even weirder about this is that you don't have to look very hard to find examples of science fiction, from the same time as Kim Stanley Robinson or earlier, in which people in the future make radical changes to their gender. Around the same time as the Mars trilogy, Greg Egan published Distress which features a future in which there are seven different genders (including asexual) which people switch between based on their self-identification and in which such gender changes are accompanied by medical interventions and changed pronouns. Much earlier than Kim Stanley Robinson's work, there's Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon which features a society of people who have intentionally modified themselves to be gender neutral.
pro_sprond
6mo ago
Perhaps this counts as "victim blaming" according to the way the phrase is generally used in popular culture, but it also seems like relatively good advice and to me, that's the more important thing. To slightly steelman the argument, I think there are a few key points:
- There are actions that you can take to reduce your personal risk. Yes, maybe in a perfectly just world, people who don't lock their bikes would never have their bikes stolen, but that's not the world we live in. In practical terms, advising someone to never lock their bike because advising otherwise would be "blaming the victim" would be doing them a huge disservice. Advising young men (and young women) to be careful about who they sleep with is good advice for a whole lot of reasons.
- Not every false accusation is completely false. In reality, viewing everything as a dichotomy between "totally rape and a horrible crime" or "totally consensual and completely fine" is wrong. There are lots of things that are not clearly rape but still bad. For example, most people would agree that having sex with an unconscious stranger is clearly rape and having consensual sex with a sober person is fine. But what about in-between? How intoxicated or incoherent does someone need to be before it counts as rape? The most accurate view is that there's a sliding scale of badness with "unconscious" at one end and "sober" at the other. So if you have sex with someone in the middle of that spectrum and they accuse you of rape then maybe it could be considered a false accusation, but you still did something wrong.
- Some things that are legal are still wrong. This seems to be one of Moran's main points. Suppose you are a young man and you meet an emotionally unstable young woman, have (consensual) sex with her and then ignore her. Yes, you haven't raped her and you haven't broken any laws, but you still haven't treated her well and her life is probably worse because of you. And if you did so knowingly and intentionally to fulfill your own sexual desires, that's even worse.
- The optimal amount of crime is not zero. Reducing the incidence of some type of crime comes with costs and it is usually the case that the costs outweigh the benefits before the amount of crime is literally zero. False accusations of rape are the same. Adjudicating "he-said-she-said" cases are difficult, especially when one or both of the parties was intoxicated at the time of the incident. Always believing the accuser is probably not optimal, but neither is always discounting what the accuser says. In this environment, advising young men to try to avoid potential "he-said-she-said" situations is both good advice on an individual level and potentially makes adjudicating such cases easier in general since it decreases the number of false accusations.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
Yes, but doesn't this imply that if endocrine disrupters are the main cause of the explosion in gender dysphoria cases then we should also see an explosion in sexual development disorders (with e.g. changes to anatomy) that are also linked to endocrine disrupters? I'm open to being convinced that either (1) this is wrong or (2) such an explosion is occurring. Absent such an explanation, it at least seems like a potential inconsistency in the story.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
I don't agree with the claim that RFK Jr is "essentially a left-wing version of Alex Jones." While both seem prone to spreading conspiracy theories and to hold many false beliefs, Jones has much crazier beliefs (at least comparing the beliefs that both have expressed in public). For example, Jones has claimed that globalists built the LHC to create a portal to let in evil elves/demons to ensalve humans. That's a whole different disconnection from reality compared to anything I've heard RFK Jr claim.
Also see my comment above for my attempt to briefly fact check the claims that the OP mentions RFK Jr making. While overall they don't inspire great confidence in RFK Jr's accuracy, at least a couple of the claims are correct or arguably correct and also fairly surprising.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I think you are overstating your case here. It is clear that Prop 209 did have a major effect on admissions in the UC system. For example, you can see here that the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% from 1997 to 1998 (the first year the new rules were in effect) from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%. I believe that the UC system did try to circumvent Prop 209 in various ways and may have become more effective at this over time, but claiming that "UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed" doesn't seem correct.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
My observation is that wokeness proceeds in waves. Imagine you are standing on a beach watching the tide come in. The water level appears to rise each time a wave hits the shore and then fall again as the wave recedes. If you have never seen the ocean before then it is easy to think that the crest of each wave marks the highest level that the water will ever achieve. But in truth, each wave crests a little higher than the one before and gradually the water level rises until much of the beach is under water.
Wokeness has not advanced in a straightforward manner, increasing a little each day. Instead, wokeness advances and recedes in waves but each wave leaves a somewhat higher baseline level of wokeness than came before.
I remember thinking in late 2019 that wokeness seemed to have abated. The worst excesses of #metoo had already come and gone. BLM, Ferguson, etc seemed to be a long time in the past. It felt like there was a little more space to speak openly. And as bad as covid was, I remember feeling like it had led to even less focus on woke issues, at least for the first few months of 2020. Then George Floyd was killed and within a few days, wokeness had become more popular and more intense than I had thought possible.
Eventually I realized that this pattern has played out many times in much the same way. Wokeness seems to be declining until some new event ignites the public's passion, re-energizes the woke and facilitates new achievements for wokeness. Gradually the fervor dies down and some people start to question the worst excesses of the moment. For a time it seems that wokeness is in decline until the cycle repeats again. There are the major ones: Ferguson, #metoo, George Floyd. But there are also many minor incidents that follow the same pattern: JK Rowling, the Atlanta spa shootings, each new Dave Chappelle show, and so on.
But even though each of these waves eventually subsided, most of them left wokeness at a higher level than it was before. Presumably wokeness will not increase forever. Eventually the waves will cease or diminish so much that they don't matter. I am genuinely unsure if that will take closer to 2 years or 200. But it is a mistake to think that just because wokeness seems to be receding now it has truly peaked.
Is there any evidence about Peter Singer's alleged infidelity that is not ultimately based on the word of the woman who sued him? I looked at the websites you linked to in your post and did not notice any other evidence, but I did not watch the video so if some additional evidence is mentioned there I may have missed it.
If it's really true that the only public evidence is the word of the woman who sued him then I'm not sure how confident we should be about her allegations. Yes, it would not be shocking if a powerful male figure in a field used his status to seduce and/or coerce women into sleeping with him. On the other hand, it is also not impossible that someone would either exaggerate or even make up accusations against a powerful and controversial figure in their field. I also find it slightly suspicious that the accuser's blog post you linked to spends much more time talking about Peter Singer's ideological faults than his sexual bad behavior. The accuser hardly seems unbiased.
Edit: Additionally, I find some of the claims in the accuser's blog post and lawsuit hard to believe. She claims he has either been sexually involved with or made his sexual interest clear to all of his female coauthors from 2002 to 2020. Peter Singer has published a huge number of articles, op-eds, etc in that time, many with female coauthors, and it is hard for me to believe he has really propositioned all of them.
Just wanted to note that Orson Scott Card is Mormon, not Catholic and George Orwell definitely did not consider himself as a communist, but rather a socialist.
Edit: Also, imo, a book with a more interesting tension with Card's religious beliefs is Ender's Shadow in which the child genius main character has some extremely lucid thoughts about why religious people are mistaken.
The Virtue Theory of Money
Recently, Freddie deBoer published an essay called "What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers" complaining about how unfair "equality of opportunity" is. The main point is that since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. It's a little hard to tell exactly what way of distributing resources Freddie would prefer instead, but he seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role. In Freddie's words: "it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control."
I think Freddie's essay is a good example of a misunderstanding about the benefits of equality of opportunity—a misunderstanding I've come to think of as the Virtue Theory of Money. Basically, this is my name for the belief that the main purpose of money is to reward people for being good.
In my experience, many people seem to have some sort of implicit belief that people should be rewarded by society according to how virtuous they are. This takes different forms: some people emphasize hard-work, conscientiousness and so on. Others emphasize the difficulty or social value of the job that someone is doing. For example, some people argue that affirmitive action is bad because it prevents talented, hardworking people from getting the jobs/university spots that they deserve. As another example, some people argue that teachers should be paid more because of how important their jobs are. The labor theory of value also seems to be partially motivated by this idea.
Read in this light, Freddie is basically complaining that talent is not a virtue and so we should not reward people for being talented. (He also seems to believe that the reason talent is not a virtue is because it is influenced by genetics, which is outside our control. I find that idea somewhat incoherent—all sorts of other apparent virtues like generosity or open-mindedness are also influenced by genetics, but that's irrelevant to my main point.)
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
As an example, I believe that the best argument against affirmitive action is not that it personally hurts the individual people denied positions because of it (though I do feel sympathy for them) but because it deprives society of having the most capable people in the most important jobs. The reason that we want to select the most talented people to become doctors is because it's good to have good doctors not because being a doctor is a nice reward for being a top student. Likewise, the best argument for paying teachers more is if doing so would lead to better educational outcomes of enough magnitude to be worth the extra cost. I agree that plenty of teachers (though far from all) are nice, hard-working people who do a demanding job. But again, a job is not supposed to be a reward for being a good person, it's supposed to be a way to get something useful done.
I also think this is a serious issue. Basing hiring decisions and salaries on how virtuous people seem can cause resources to be poorly allocated in a way that hurts everybody. If we followed the Virtue Theory of Money then too many people would want to be teachers (it's already a popular job even without a major salary boost) and not enough would want to be middle managers or accountants. We would have worse doctors, engineers and scientists.
So my main response to Freddie complaining about "equality of opportunity" leading to talented people being rewarded more is: that's exactly the point! We want talented people to be incentivized to apply their talents instead of doing some routine job that almost anyone else can do. Stop trying to use the virtue theory of money and think about the long-term conseuqences of policy decisions.
Now, I do want to add a couple caveats to this. First, I think it's bad to let people suffer a lot when society has sufficient resources to help them. So I think it's reasonable for the government to give some help to people who don't have the ability to get high quality jobs. But I think we should be aware that the government is only able to do this because of how rich our society is and that this wealth depends on incentivizing talented people to use their talents. Second, I do think that there is some value in rewarding people purely for their virtue. I want to live in a society of virtuous people and so I would like virtue to be incentivized even if the economic benefits are not always easy to measure. However, I think this should usually be a secondary concern.
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