site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

23
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Much has been written about the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles. The defence of gender quotas would be that no quota means quota for white men. That the issue isn’t whether women and girls are talented enough, but that they’re simply overlooked. So women don’t get on the short list for promotion because the people who promote someone promote those who are most similar to them, closer to them (usually white and male), that they’re most used to male bosses. With quotas, they have to check their lists more consciously for competence and not what they're used to.

The counterpoint could be that none of these hypotheses explain the underrepresentation of women in STEM, but depending on which are true, they call for dramatically different solutions. If the underrepresentation of women in STEM and managerial roles is entirely attributable to social norms and stereotypes which push young girls away from them at a young age, resulting in the female pool of talent being smaller than the male - then gender quotas and zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies in STEM companies will do absolutely nothing to address the issue (they're not quotas on society after all).

And what of in gender unequal societies? Should nations in West/South/South-East Asia and Africa pursue these quotas until they "achieve equality"? Many women, even engineering graduates, from these countries do not participate for long in the workforce before they marry off. Combined with the severe lack of jobs, female LPR in India is actually decreasing. Would more quotas in education and the workforce reverse this trend, or are we missing the forest for the trees (that is, the lack of formal jobs)?

I think the interesting nuance comes to considering the possibility of both of these things being true:

  1. Social reinforcement is a real effect, significant enough to be worth counteracting, and disproportionately hurts women.

  2. The upper end of the merit distribution naturally skews male, due to biological differences alone.

In such a world, which I have strong reason to believe we occupy, the meritocratic solution would be to enforce male/female quotas that are tuned to counteract 1 without negating 2. In other words, we want to find the correct ratio p of men:women that cancels out the evaporative cooling of women in tech but without lowering the resulting quality of tech workers as a result. (In other words, we want a policy that correctly identifies and counteracts any time a more skilled woman is usurped by a less skilled man because of gender bias in hiring/exposure, but without ever hiring a less skilled woman to replace a more skilled man just to fulfill a ratio)

The combination of my two assumptions leads to a correct ratio that's somewhere in between 0.5 and 1.0. For example, say that 90% of tech workers are currently male, then perhaps a '20% women in tech' quota would be net beneficial for overall merit. I think we would arrive somewhere fruitful if the discussion was about where on this scale that figure lies. But this is a discussion that can't happen, because insinuating p>0.5 is extremely taboo in the blue tribe, while insinuating that quotas could be beneficial at all is taboo in the red tribe.