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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Bryan Caplan has a new book. His typical approach is to tour around the ideas in his book to various libertarian gatherings and podcasts. His latest book is in the form of a letter to his daughter. Various essays are put together. The title says it all:

"Don't be a feminist".

He has a talk out on the topic here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4C-Rz3Wv5c

@The-WideningGyre sums up the video:

I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).

Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.

The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.

It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"

I think The-WideningGyre is correct that most of this stuff is probably not new to a lot of people reading on this discussion forum. What is maybe a little new is someone sticking out their professional reputation to say these things.

That gives us a good opportunity to register predictions on how Caplan's book will be received. He says he had multiple friends come up to him and suggest that he not publish the book, or give it a different title.

Caplan is a tenured professor and shares a department with Robin Hanson (who has also courted some pretty big controversies). Caplan has also released books on controversial subjects in the past.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy. Caplan has a dry argumentative style, and tends to laugh at his own very nerdy jokes. I think those aspects play badly for drumming up a culture war controversy. And he has plenty of experience saying controversial things in a way that makes it sound like he is apologizing for the world. He also has a well insulated job and few easy avenues for people to go after him. If I am wrong in my predictions I should update in the direction of thinking that the culture war is hotter and more intense than I previously believed.

He’s at George Mason. They long ago new they couldn’t compete with Harvard etc at their game and instead courted the people of different abilities who couldn’t be Harvard professors. He’s not cancelable, his departments apparently extremely well-funded with Koch money. The mob doesn’t have any power there so they won’t attack.

He cannot suffer , because he is tenured, but his reputation may take a ding. But I doubt it . Agree..mot many people will read it or care. Everything is on YouTube ,podcasts ,substack and hot takes on Twitter. Books don't seem to have as much of an impact anymore on the national debate.

He will be doing a round of podcasts and talks on the book, and I did find out about it on a substack article that linked to his substack.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored.

Probably right, but IMO it's because he isn't goring any sacred cows. Women aren't on top of the progressive stack anymore. They can't even keep the natal males out of their bathrooms and sports leagues. MeToo had its moment, but the moment passed, probably because it took out so many woke-adjacent men and failed to stop Trump.

Let's come back to this when he publishes "Be a Transphope" or "Be a Racist" with excruciating data to justify all of the Trans/Blacks Less Likely hypotheses. Then we'll see if his cultural immunity persists.

They can't even keep the natal males out of their bathrooms and sports leagues.

That's because of a lot of progressive women supporting this stuff.

Yup... and they support that stuff because they've internalized the idea that trans are higher on the progressive stack than women.

MeToo had its moment, but the moment passed, probably because it took out so many woke-adjacent men and failed to stop Trump.

Biden's alleged improprieties didn't help either. In 2020, many MeToo activists had to say things like "We never meant believe all women, we meant don't automatically disbelieve women, but let them speak their story."

There is some cosmic irony about a woman claiming that Biden literally grabbed her by the pussy (forced a finger in anyways), and it was met with a nationwide collective shrug. Turns out people don't much care.

MeToo had run out of steam a bit at that point, for various reasons that people have mentioned (didn't stop Kavanaugh's nomination, boomeranged against a lot of Democrat politicians) but the Biden accusations really killed it off.

Yeah... they killed a bunch of Democratic donors, they killed Al Franken, then they pulled out all the stops and still failed to stop Kavanaugh, they didn't put a dent in Trump, and then they had to walk back their Kavanaugh positions to defend Biden.

Maybe women aren't a sacred cow. But they are not not a sacred cow. Also Caplan has smart friends, many of them are academics that deal in ideas, and some of them like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson have achieved their own degree of fame. If his friends say this might harm him, and I think it won't harm him I have to wonder why I disagree with some very smart people that I normally agree with.

That gives us a good opportunity to register predictions on how Caplan's book will be received. He says he had multiple friends come up to him and suggest that he not publish the book, or give it a different title.

Sam Harris has spoken about starting a book on feminism and stopping cause the backlash would be too great.

And this is the man who provided a moral justification for torture during the War on Terror.

Things have gotten even less sane since then so...I'd agree that, if Caplan faces no consequences, it's mainly because the book will be obscure.

Unless he singled out WOC, the backlash cannot possibly be worse than the backlash he got about Islam

The internet has a way of dragging things out of obscurity if it finds a good enough target. A person walking their dog in a New York park isn't exactly an example of a mainstream topic, but one such person got dragged onto the national stage.

I guess my belief is that they will just not consider Caplan a good target on this topic.

the man who provided a moral justification for torture during the War on Terror.

You mean, doing the thing that the government and military of the most powerful nation on the planet at the time was doing, and wanted very much to keep doing? The government and military which had the support of many multi-billion-dollar corporations? And the thing which many, if not most, Americans - particularly those who thought of themselves as conspicuously patriotic - were in favor of out of sheer outgroup-bashing righteous anger?

Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say providing a moral justification for torture wasn't the most unrewarding activity during the GWOT.

You mean, doing the thing that the government and military of the most powerful nation on the planet at the time was doing, and wanted very much to keep doing?

There is difference between doing things clandestinely, in the shadow, and doing them openly and proudly.

1952: "Torture? Yes, the commies love torture like the bad guys they are. We fight for freedom and democracy, we are good guys, we do not torture. Trust us, do not believe dirty commie lies!"

2002: "Torture? Yes we torture, and we are rather good at it! America Fuck Yeah!"

The government was doing it. The media and intelligentsia that Sam often swam in as a sort of hawkish-but-otherwise-Democratic person had to display outrage and they did.

Same goes for the "War on Terror": a lot of people supported it and then decided otherwise but justifying a potential first strike against Muslim nations and stating that Islam was just unequivocally worse at this point in time were just no-nos in many circles and those are the media people whose enmity and contempt Harris permanently earned.

Besides, there's his own subjective view of the situation. Even putting aside the GWOT Sam Harris has jumped into unquestionably controversial things like race and IQ and Charles Murray specifically. But he said the heat from this would be too much.

FWIW, I think you're right, it won't be a big deal.

I think you're also missing -- he's right, it's backed by data and presented in a sympathetic way, so probably the best move by feminist activists is to pretend it doesn't exist and hope it goes away.

There may be some value in the near-willfully ignorant people who didn't know some of the things presented.

I think you're also missing -- he's right

When you this I didn't think it would be necessary to point out that I think he is right.

it's almost entirely preaching to the choir

I do agree their best move is to ignore it, but movements run on passions and emotion don't always make the best strategic decisions. I feel like Trump and Desantis have weaponized the enraged reactions they get, and have used it as a way to let their political opponents make unforced errors.

Oh I realized you also think he is right.

My (apparently not well expressed) point was that because he's right, calm, and backed with facts, he's extremely hard to attack for his opponents, so they are better off ignoring and hoping he goes away. (If any of the three things were missing, they would have a way to attack...)

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy.

Scott Aaronson was speculating on why, when Caplan visited his university to speak, no one seemed to care. No protests, nobody in the audience even asking snide questions. As he pointed out, by a reasonable definition of feminism ("women are people too"), Caplan is a "feminist" and considers "feminism" to be so obviously true as to not be worth talking about, but in his own experience, stating one's agreement with feminist beliefs never protected one from accusations of sexism or behavior that negatively impacted women. Maybe we've passed peak feminism, but Scott offers his own explanation: The worst actors, the kind who actively take pleasure in tearing down other people, wished to tear him down specifically because he claimed to be an ardent feminist. They enjoyed being able to say, "he said he was a feminist, and clearly he was lying." I have another hypothesis, though: That Caplan actually doesn't care about slacktivists and won't be guilted into capitulating, so he's not as easy of a target.

A bit of a tangent, but in 2015 Ben Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame) noted that cancellation efforts by woke mobs tend to be targeted at perceived heretics, rather than heathens:

For you see, the shouty fringe harassment squad only go after soft targets. Their pattern is to go after people nominally on their own side who got too comfortable and made a tiny slip-up. The hope is that an apology and retraction can be extracted, at which point the harassment intensifies, because that’s what happens when you show weakness to the pack. They swiftly get bored and move on when they realize they are having no effect. No effort against [intentionally shocking 2015 video game] Hatred could be sustained because Hatred just waved its middle fingers and blew raspberries until its attackers used up all their energy. E3 came around so they all moved on, to compete in the now-annual Offended Olympics that goes hand-in-hand with the show, trying to concoct the best way to be offended about Doom being violent without seeming like a clueless bellend. Mostly unsuccessfully.

Croshaw was by no means the first to note this, but it was the first example to come to mind. The mob went after Aaronson in large part because he self-identified as a feminist: they hate someone who is 99% onboard with their worldview but has some tiny reservations (i.e. a heretic) far more than they hate someone who openly scorns their worldview (a heathen).

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi, rather than someone who generally supports trans rights but still thinks female-only spaces are important in a few limited contexts? But I can understand how an evolutionary urge to punish heretics more than heathens might have arisen. A heathen was never a member of the in-group, whereas a heretic was until they started mouthing off: it's not hard to see how someone you trusted who then turned traitor/defector stings more than "heathen does heathen things, story at 11".

I think there's also a perception of how best to spend one's energy.

Attacking a social conservative or anyone to their right gets you nowhere if you're a social progressive. They'll just say YESCHAD.jpg and move on. You accuse them of hating gays and they'll shrug because ultimately, they don't care and find homosexuality evil. There was never any hope in a progressive's heart that these people would change their tune.

A liberal? A liberal cares about the same things a progressive does, meaning it's much easier to scold them for failing to live up to shared ideals. Engaging in purity spirals with a liberal might them towards progressivism in a way impossible with the conservative.

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi,

Those are pretty hard to find. And once you actually do it, you're mostly just punching a homeless guy who can't do anything without an FBI informant holding his hand through the process.

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi, rather than someone who generally supports trans rights but still thinks female-only spaces are important in a few limited contexts?

Isn't that what "Punch a Nazi" is for? You send death threats to people which they will work on, and act violent towards people you think won't be persuaded by anything else.

Agreed. We also see this dynamic with the Kiwifarms/stormfront/etc stuff. They don't threaten the site itself because the owners just tell them to fuck off. Instead they threaten sympathetic people upstream to destroy the site.

I think this is definitely the same thing Aaronson was getting at, and to some extent it's true (although there's certainly plenty of efforts to purge heathens).

Caplan does not take the bait. Aaronson defends himself, which never works at changing minds of those who hate him.

I hate to say this, but Scott Aaronson has always struck me as more bullyable than Bryan Caplan. And some of the people who revel in "cancelling" others are almost certainly just bullies.

But I also think they approached the debate in radically different ways. Scott Aaronson made an impassioned emotional plea to lay back on the man hating. The response was a bunch of emotional attacks. Scott stepped into their arena and they beat him badly. Bryan Caplan has laid out a logical case for why Feminism doesn't make sense. Bryan setup his own arena and said 'come get me, but play by my rules'.

I hate to say this, but Scott Aaronson has always struck me as more bullyable than Bryan Caplan. And some of the people who revel in "cancelling" others are almost certainly just bullies.

I think this is very likely true--see my reply to another commenter. I don't know how much of a difference emotion vs reason made--I think Aaronson can make logical arguments, and emotional attacks against logical arguments are standard fare for zealots.

But Scott Aaronson was never massively popular either. I'm not sure I could compare their levels of popularity because they are both sort of obscure, but I would feel safe in saying they probably aren't an order of magnitude different in popularity. Just looking at number of book reviews on amazon, they are both in the hundreds.

Aaronson's brand is way bigger. His blog is way more popular; he has more clout in academia compared to Caplan, such as being involved in cutting-edge fileds like quantum computing. This tends to attract big egos compared to more mundane stuff. It does not help that Aaronson does not put up a shield to criticism, unlike most public intellectuals.

I doubt it is clearcut one way or the other. Clout in academia is one measure of popularity. Vaplan probably has more TV news appearances, he has been on national debate stages, and certainly has more social media followers (since Aaronson got rid of his).

I think if you both of them who was more popular theyd give an answer similar to mine.

Comparing Aaronson and Caplan specifically, Aaronson seems incredibly neurotic, the kind of person that's likely to create an issue where there wouldn't be one and respond with histrionics to the situation he created. See, for example, his bizarre airport incident. In stark contrast, Caplan seems like a delightfully goofy nerd that sees the humor in everything, the kind of guy that would react to that airport incident with "lol fuck me, right?".

Thinking about dramatic people I've known, I know which one of those would be more likely to get antagonized and trolled.

I don't know if neurotic is the right word, but I think he does definitely catastrophize. He also has the trait of many an earnest, not-very-socially adapted nerd who just wants to explain things when they don't look good and see the best in most people. Understandable--I was probably like that as well--but unfortunate when the Inquisition, which cares about finding a heretic more than it cares about truth, turns its eye in your direction.

(Which is not to blame Aaronson entirely for the way some people treated him, any more than I would blame the Maya for wanting to keep their culture as the real Inquisition burned all of their texts and tried to convert them by force. That some people respond badly to malicious, unreasonable, and bad-faith accusations certainly does not justify those accusations or the accusers making them!).

That's the funniest thing I've read in a while.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book.

My personal prediction is that whether someone suffers from publishing something anti-woke has a huge element of chance. So you're probably right, but that doesn't mean much in the broader picture.

Eh, it's the usual Caplan stuff.

If he re-defines feminism to mean "the (false) belief that men are unfairly treated better than women" and he wants his daughter to be Not A Feminist, then what does he want her to believe?

"Men are not unfairly treated better than women" which is:

(1) Men are treated better, but this is fair

or

(2) Men are not treated better

Anyway, it doesn't much matter. If she's the daughter of Caplan, she already has a set of advantages (dare I whisper the word 'privilege'?) that means she already has advanced a couple of rungs up the ladder than lower-class men or women.

You can't define (or redefine) the meaning of a word in common language. It already has a meaning. What you might call a definition is a description of the meaning, and you measure it by how accurately it overlaps the usage.

Caplan notes that the "classic" description of feminism is inaccurate and offers a better one.

This shouldn't be surprising as a self-description of a political movement is unlikely to be optimized for accuracy or clarity. It's optimized for supporting a political goal, and that goal may well be furthered by deception and deliberate confusion.

(You can take a word, redefine it, and then use it throughout the scope of that definition (e.g. a book).

In math, this works fine, but in politics/political science, it takes exceeding intellectual rigor and honesty, because the words you use have connotations and it's hard to keep them out and use your definition straight.

And when you talk to other people, who don't subscribe to your definition, you have to redetermine all implications of the new concept, and that's not going to happen.)

then what does he want her to believe?

He wants her to not believe feminism because:

  1. Its probably not correct

  2. Wrong ideas when converted to policy can hurt people

  3. Having a belief in feminism can be personally detrimental. (being angry all the time is a rough kind of life to live)

It is possible to have a negative preference for one thing while not having a strong positive preference for any alternatives. I really don't like olives on my pizza, it ruins the whole pizza for me. There are lots of other pizza toppings I'm happy with being on my pizza, but no lack of a topping I enjoy will completely change my mind about whether to eat a pizza.

If he re-defines feminism to mean "the (false) belief that men are unfairly treated better than women" and he wants his daughter to be Not A Feminist, then what does he want her to believe?

Going off The-WideningGyre's summary, I'm fairly certain it's something along the lines of "Men are not treated better". Most anti-feminists (including myself) don't typically think "Men are treated better than women and this is okay", rather they're anti-feminist because they reject the idea of patriarchal oppression of women which is what feminist theory is based on.

EDIT: Just noticed you stated that Caplan is "re-defining" feminism. I think Caplan's definition is fairly accurate, and while it doesn't entirely capture the sheer extremity of the idea that underpins the entirety of feminist activism (the idea being "male dominance, exploitation and oppression of women") it works well enough. The repeated feminist attempts to paint themselves as being a gender equality movement, no ideological strings attached, is what looks like re-definition to me. It's a classic example of a motte and bailey that's engaged in to maintain a fluffy-bunny image of feminism, often justified by pointing to whichever dictionary definition suits their purposes as if dictionaries are meant to be prescriptive instead of descriptive and acting as if they are unchallengeable.

If I form a group called the justice league and pitch it as "a group that wants to achieve a just world for everybody", then start promoting rhetoric that states that in order to have a just world we need to tear Jews down because they use their stranglehold over culture to unduly benefit themselves, there will be a lot of people who say that the justice league is antithetical to their idea of justice. For me to tell them "if you believe in the idea of justice then you're part of the justice league" would be absolutely ridiculous, my ideology does not have a monopoly on justice which is an abstract thing anyone can believe in without agreeing on what justice actually looks like in practice or what actually needs to be done to achieve it. The fact is that people's ideas surrounding "justice" and "gender equality" are almost entirely informed by their underlying beliefs about 1: How they think the world looks and 2: How they think the world should look, and feminists hold a set of beliefs ("patriarchy theory") that informs their views of what needs to be done. Similarly to how the justice league cannot define itself simply as the movement for justice without being intentionally misleading, feminism cannot define itself as the movement for gender equality and expect everyone to simply accept that as a valid description.

often justified by pointing to whichever dictionary definition suits their purposes as if dictionaries are meant to be prescriptive

Ironic, coming from a (formerly) revisionist movement.

What is maybe a little new is someone sticking out their professional reputation to say these things.

Edgy by the standards of most American academics, but pretty tame by Caplan's standards, no?

Well, it's certainly a milder criticism than "almost all education is just signaling".

Yeah, the book has been out for a bit already without much attention. I haven't read it all yet, but my impression so far is that it is much less meticulous than The Case Against Education. This may be a good thing--The Case Against Education was extremely strong, but sometimes felt like a Gish gallop against public education. Nothing in Don't be a Feminist is surprising, but then, Christina Hoff Summers took a similar approach almost 30 years ago, and everyone who liked it already doubted feminism, and I don't know any feminists who were persuaded by it.

So this seems like a piece of (welcome!) cultural maintenance from Caplan--something novel to hand to smart girls who are surrounded by indoctrinating "girl power" nonsense--but I don't see anything groundbreaking here.

but sometimes felt like a Gish gallop against public education

I really think you are using Gish gallop incorrectly here. From wikipedia:

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments.

Providing a bunch of high quality arguments is not a Gish gallop. And with how heavily researched and cited The Case Against Education is, it seems wrong to say they are low effort and low quality arguments. Also Gish Gallop doesn't really apply for book format. There is a nearly unlimited amount of space and time to reply to all of Caplan's argument. In fact, calling it a Gish Gallop creates a catch-22 for an author in Caplan's position. Either they address all the arguments against their case and get called a Gish Gallop, or they only present their strongest arguments and get called out for 'not addressing x problem'.

I really think you are using Gish gallop incorrectly here.

Well, maybe, but I didn't say it was a Gish gallop--just that it sometimes felt like being on the receiving end of a Gish gallop. More toward the latter half of the book, where sometimes it can feel like he might be smuggling libertarian axioms in with the rest of the actual research, but there's so much research on offer that it's difficult to pick any one claim and say "okay, here's the unproven bit." This is not my personal criticism, mind--I loved the book--but it is a criticism I have encountered, and which it seems plausible that Caplan might be responding to, consciously or unconsciously, with the slightly different approach taken in Don't be a Feminist.

and I don't know any feminists who were persuaded by it.

What possible reason do they have to be convinced?

Feminism is a useful lobbying tool, masquerading as a human rights movement. Not just that: it's the ideology that a lot of people use to make sense of the world.

Just out of pure self-interest I don't expect many feminists to turn.

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