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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34462 thread views

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.

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.

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.

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