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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34393 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.

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".

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.

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