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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33160 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Do you believe false things?

You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?

Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?

It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.

For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.

"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"

Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".

It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.

The short xeet that went viral:

Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other

And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:

How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.

TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.

All this person is describing is remaining forever a child. It's actually kind of amazing. He blames that on being neurodivergent? I can't really assess whether that's a valid defense of his willful ignorance or not.

Even in his own post, he repeatedly points out all the places he recoiled from any exposure to base reality.

Men don’t compete against women, so a casual watching of a nearby TV during a conversation doesn’t give any observations. To notice a difference I would have to look for the reported numbers somewhere on the screen, write them down, and compare them across the events.

I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.

I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn't have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.

I mean, did his school never do the Presidential fitness tests? He never noticed how different the standards were for even barely pubescent boys and girls?

Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence. And it's like after he got through childhood carefully selecting the reality he was exposed to so as to not challenge his pre existing views that were passed onto him, he just never gave it another thought ever again. Nor spent any time being physical with women, as even relatively sedentary man strength is often greater than female gym bunny strength.

Also his argument is silly. You can look at women top tier athletes. You can look at top tier male athletes. They don’t look the same. The men look bigger and stronger.

In all fairness, there's a very long history of underdog sports and fighting stories where it's also presumed that tiny, willowy men can totally beat the brawny jocks through sheer pluck or clever moves or ancient Asian secrets, or whatever. Likewise films and books where humans defeat obviously larger and stronger animals in physical fights.

Cope-oriented David-vs-Goliath media tropes were being served up to insecure men long before they got cross-applied to women.

I guess — never found those stories reasonable but then again I played sports.

Main characters in media and games are depicted as unrealistically powerful across virtually all material domains, including physical contests and bodily feats of skill but also depictions of physical handicrafts, animal interactions, vehicles and projectiles, etc. That's because almost nobody in the audience has any actual experience making, building or doing anything with their bodies in the real world, so they have zero gauge of what's plausible and no reason to care.

So yeah, a woman can't beat a guy at arm-wrestling, and also mining doesn't mean swinging a weightless pickaxe until big nuggets of gold drop out of the rock face, and also IRL that pudgy gamer could barely even lift that longsword, and also a roadrunner mostly can't outsmart a coyote. But audiences like cartoon logic because it's nice to imagine that we are powerful and other people's skills are easy.

David used a ranged weapon.

In that specific story, yes, but the emotional thrust of the trope is that a little guy can beat a much larger opponent through his superior bravery, skill or virtue. And underdog physical conflict stories are all over 60s-90s boys' media, from Tom & Jerry through The Karate Kid. TvTropes helpfully points out that this is the convention for final boss levels in videogames, as well.

So Muscles are Meaningless is not one-sided in its gender appeal.

But isn’t the trope accepting that the smaller guy can’t physically compete so he has to figure out another way (eg out smart his opponent)?

Even so, who said pure brute strength is the only legitimate way to fight? If you win, you win. Even outside complete changes of frame or dirty tricks, there's plenty of space for "superior speed" or "technique"-style workarounds.

Sure but the idea is in the context of “men and women are equally strong” which even those tropes suggest is not true (because of course it isn’t true)

"Headshot your enemy. Doesn't matter how strong he is if his head is broken open."

Timeless wisdom.

A person who is not interested in sports will not spend time (1) looking at top-tier athletes and (2) comparing their musculature in detail.

Or at least they won't be looking at top-tier athletes of both sexes in order to make the comparison.

I seem to remember at least one issue of Sports Illustrated each year being widely purchased by men who were not particularly interested in sports, although I agree not everyone depicted therein (whose musculature would, indeed, be looked at in detail) was a top-tier athlete.

It doesn’t require detail. Pick any NFL WR. They don’t look like any women. It’s obvious.

Even if literally all you watched was blue-coded, scripted media where they used the same camera tricks used to make people like RDJ and Tom Cruise look taller, you can't avoid noticing the difference in stature/physical expectations for people who are cast to look like the top physical specimens for their sex.

Yeah I just don’t know how people can look at men and women and think “physically pretty similar.”

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