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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   27194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

Some excerpts:

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.

And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?

I found the whole essay quite interesting and also somewhat obvious in that 'oh I should've realized this and put it together before' sense. I read somewhere else on twitter that you could track the origins of civil rights/student activism to women gaining full entry to universities in America, as opposed to just chaperoned/'no picnicking out together' kind of limited access. Deans and admin no longer felt they could punish and control like when it was a male environment, plus young men behave very differently when there are sexually available women around. So there's also a potential element of weakened suppression due to fear of female tears and young men simping for women, along with the long-term demographic change element.

Though I suspect it may be more multi-factorial than that, with the youth bulge and a gradual weakening of the old order. A man had to make the decision to let women into universities after all.

I also find Helen Andrews refreshing in that she's not stuck in the 'look at me I'm a woman who's prepared to be anti-feminist, I'm looking for applause and clicks' mould, she makes the reasons behind her article quite clear:

Because, after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. I am—we all are—dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.

Another idea that occurred to me is that the committee that drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was instrumental in establishing what we now understand as progressivism. That piece of international law, (really the origin of 'international law' as we understand it today, beyond just the customary law of embassies) directly led to the Refugee Convention of 1951 that has proven quite troublesome for Europe's migrant crisis, it introduced the principle of non-refoulement. It also inspired the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965):

Each State Party undertakes to encourage, where appropriate, integrationist multiracial organizations and movements and other means of eliminating barriers between races

Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination

Sounds pretty woke! Note that states don't necessarily follow through on international law or sign up with it fully in the first place: Israel, America, Russia and so on routinely ignore these kinds of bodies in the foreign policy sphere. The Conventions and Committees are feminine in a certain sense in that they can be ignored without fear of violence, unlike an army of men. Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

To some extent international law could be considered an early feminized field, or perhaps it was born female. Are there any other feminized fields we can easily think of? Therapists, HR and school teachers come to mind, though that seems more recent.

Putting women in law and medicine is also dumb for another reason, which is that you force the most intelligent women to have a lower TFR than they otherwise might have. And you force them into a dysgenic and unhealthy motherhood environment, because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

Also, it seems to me that women just don’t think up interesting ideas at the same rate men do. As someone who ravenuously pursues interesting ideas and thoughts (as I imagine many themotte users do as well), about 99% of interesting ideas I read are produced by men. And if you look at the places where interesting ideas proliferate without the allure of a secondary reward (social attention), it’s overwhelmingly men, like on the anonymous humanities or political board of 4chan (which like it or not has had an enormous influence on today’s online culture). And the games which focus on creative problem solving, strategy or Minecraft style games, are overwhelmingly male, whereas the cosmetic and nurturing games are overwhelmingly female. This tells us something because what people do in their leisure is what they like to do without the watchful eye of society. So, women can do systems-oriented creative problem solving, but will they if they don’t have a structure involving secondary rewards of cogent social reinforcement (degrees and peer competition), by which they can feel superior to their pretty peers? I’m going to say usually not, most just don’t do that, but that’s an issue if we want people who intrinsically love problem-solving in every kind of role like that — such people require less mentoring, less extrinsic reward infrastructure, might come up with a novel insight out of the blue, etc

My parents are gynecologists, and I don't think I've suffered in the least from having my mom be a working doctor.

I believe that it is nigh universal for female doctors to work fewer hours/in less hectic specialties than their male peers, on average. That is not necessarily a bad thing, the concerns @Throwaway05 raises below have far more to do with the AMA limiting medical seats and residencies than it has to do with a universal requirement for all doctors to be Type A workaholics. Yes, if there is a severe paucity of doctors, you want doctors who work longer and harder. Yet the option to have more doctors who don't work brutal hours exists.

because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

These specific claims are dubious to say the least. The amount of maternal cortisol in breast milk is tiny, and the effects on nursing infants negligible. I think there is a rather significant difference, both quantitative and qualitative, between a "wire mother" and a mother who works full-time.

AMA limiting medical seats and residencies than it has to do

Sir!

I expect better from you, that's not how it works at all. ;_;

What have my rants been for!

Hmm? Doesn't the AMA limiting seats lead to increased wages for physicians plus a relative lack of doctors everywhere, which makes it easier for them to only work in preferred locations (cities)?

I'm not sure which rant in question says otherwise!

This is a meme passed around by anti-doctor idiots.

The government funds a good chunk to most of the residency spots, this number has been flat mostly due to US government dysfunction. Hospitals and States are welcome to fund their own spots and in recent years have increasingly done so (with mixed results since one of the biggest funders is a shitty for-profit health system).

Every year there are tons of unmatched residency spots (almost always in less desirable specialties). Places would rather not be fully matched than pull from the candidacy base.

When it comes to Medical Schools, the number of them has increased wildly in recent years. This has been questionably helpful because most of the new ones are bad and residencies won't take bad applicants, they'd rather try and SOAP or try again next year.

Additionally, because of the salaries the U.S. never has to deal with an applicant shortage - most of the world's best students will try and match here, even if the U.S. schools don't have enough graduates they don't need to worry (again they just won't take them because reasons).

Lastly it seems reasonable to assume that the AMA has some questionable lobbying on this subject in the past, I don't know about this for sure though - what I do know is that most of their lobbying has been spent on social causes and expansion of mid-level practice rights in the last few decades and they have rock bottom support from U.S. physicians at present. They are not an influential lobby either, which is why our salaries have been going down also for decades.

Thank you for taking the time to explain! I'll commit this to memory, whatever is left in it that's not receptor binding variances.

I will say that the shortage in specific competitive subspecialties is a little more complicated - I can't say for sure that they are lobbying to reduce training volumes but it wouldn't be a stupid thing for them to do. That said for many things (especially surgery) getting requisite case volumes and educational quality is an important complicating factor, especially in the era of robotic surgery.

Most of the "shortage" is inadequate primary volume, but primary care doesn't actually pay that much and people want to be in big cities so it is an allocation and funding problem.

But since "pay the doctors more" is an unacceptable response...it doesn't go anywhere.

If you'd like to learn more about the noodly bits of the American system their is a YouTuber Sheriff of Sodium who does long form videos analyzing these things.

Hmm.. I appreciate the context, but it seems somewhat orthogonal to the concerns I'd raised earlier. It is nigh universal (across professions to boot) for doctors to want to live in urban environments as opposed to some sleepy Appalachian town. You can increase the number of rural doctors by either increasing salaries (as you've mentioned as untenable) or by having so many doctors that market forces... force some of them to go to less desirable locales.

Now, I'm not advocating for the latter, I would like to live in a proper city myself. But I think it's obvious that that approach works.

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Female doctors are by and large hiring nannies to give their children the stay at home mom experience, just with someone other than mom. Not daycare. These are, after all, high income women- they buy the cadillac plan for childcare, not the base model. There will functionally always be more teenagers on a gap year than there are high income mothers of young children, this equation is unlikely to change.

A much bigger and more immediate objection to the high female percentage in medicine- it isn't going to be, and probably shouldn't be, 0%, because like gynecologists- is that a limited number of doctors are produced per year and women doctors on average retire early and work fewer hours before then.

Yes female doctors hire nannies, and they are more likely to drop out of residency, have shorter careers, take more vacation, work less hours, and take on more administrative roles.

The absolutely huge gender disparity in medicine is a complete disaster because you need psycho hard working men for the whole thing to work.

God I wish I could get people IRL to think about this at all.

The absolutely huge gender disparity in medicine is a complete disaster because you need psycho hard working men for the whole thing to work.

And those men are either increasingly choosing to not work in medicine or have a different view on work life balance from their predecessors.

From what I've gathered from my doctor friends this issue is magnified in rural areas. Doctors choose to work there have a ton of leverage and their salaries are completely out of step with the local cost of living so just working part time still puts them in the local upper middle class, which many now choose to do. The local government can do nothing because most doctors want to work and live in the larger cities and they currently have no way of forcing doctors to work there beyond residency.

The exception to this is are smaller population centers that are effectively pseudo resort towns, like Östersund and Åre.

Night time shifts are another matter and don't seem like a problem for now, as apparently some people kind of enjoy them and the benefits they bring.

The local government can do nothing because most doctors want to work and live in the larger cities and they currently have no way of forcing doctors to work there beyond residency.

Cries in British physician

Isn't working in a rural hospital approximately 7 zillion times more chill?

SMH already answered but at a busy city health system you have a level 1 trauma center, inpatient consults, outpatient clinics for everything, internal medicine teams with appropriate specialties etc etc.

At a rural hospital all of those things are Phil, the local family medicine doctor.

Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration but true rural medicine involves the ability to do anything which is both empowering and terrifying.

Also you are always on call - the city hospital has a dedicated nocturnist and moonlighters for holidays.

Uh.. Depends? The workload can vary, and you're often under a lot of stress because dedicated specialists are far away.

My contention is that the British government has, in fact, figured out the means to trap doctors in undesirable localities, including past residency in many cases. Of course, our residencies are almost twice as long as the global average, so we're effectively indentured for that duration.

Sounds like you are talking about outside the US - the US is usually different in medicine when it comes to a bunch of stuff. However it seems pretty similar on this issue. Yes male doctors are more "normal" now but you are still significantly more likely to find the population we want in men over women.

Doctors in the US also avoid rural areas but its a bit thornier because the US has a ton of them, the salaries involved can be eye popping in some places (like Alaska) and because a good chunk of the problem is downstream of politics. Since the student population is overwhelmingly leftist and feel like they are giving up good leftist opportunities by learning in Iowa City or Scranton, once given freedom they centralize on big blue cities much harder (especially since many are non-white and have racism fears in white places).

At this point we've spent decades farming poor and rich minorities and made no effort at all to grab people who are likely to return to Iowa after graduation. It's a problem.

Also it seems like night shifts in the U.S are increasingly done as part of part time money farming, poor resident staffing, and shit mid levels.

My sister in law is a nurse, not a doctor, but she has a lot of experience in surgery and trauma lvl 1/ER stuff. She's worked mostly in rural/super-rural/underserved areas for many years now, taking generally 6 month contracts all over the US. Wherever is paying the most she generally takes, with 2-3 months off in between, sometimes longer. Her kids are grown and she's single, no pets; we watch her place for her while she's out. Apparently there are some gov't programs that help fund this, I don't know all the details. She says she makes 4x-6x more doing this than if she just took a ER nurse job at the local hospital, and if they don't have surgeries or ER cases she spends a lot of the time not doing much work at all.

Yeah all kinds of arrangements do exist, I'll note specifically that nurses tend to wear a much more limited number of hats and have less burden associated with "being on call" and if no patient is in the ED no work for the nurse. The PCP may be seeing clinic patients in between ED patients.

The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years, or providing the skin contact and natural maternal affection that leads to healthy offspring. And because women are averse to pairing with men below their income unless the men compensate with unusual attractiveness, they have a lower rate of marriage than they would otherwise have. And because the school years are intense, they are delaying marriage. This dysgenic effect is more serious than the economic inefficiency effect, because you can’t easily produce more high iq citizens. In a pronatal culture, high iq women have more children than average, learning the skills of husband-acquiring and homemaking at an earlier age.

Besides AWFLs being perhaps the most likely demographic to breastfeed, there's no convincing evidence for benefits of breastfeeding outside of a slight reduction in minor rashes or gastrointestinal upset in babies. Nobody has demonstrated long-run benefits for the child of any kind.

This... doesn't pass the sniff test. Formula almost certainly isn't quite as good as breastmilk and we know early childhood nutrition is very important.

There's a wealth of literature on this. A Belarusian RCT is perhaps the most rigorous. It found reductions in skin and digestive conditions, but these conditions were rare even in the formula group, and it found no effect on respiratory conditions.

They followed up with the kids at age 6.5 (Kramer 2010) and found no evidence of health benefits.

It's a subject ripe for a more classic 'political correctness' to overtake it since there are mothers out there who can not breastfeed and the notion that these loving parents are depriving their children of optimal nutrition and upbringing is charged to say the least.

If you've ever been in a maternity ward it's difficult to convey how hard the staff pushes for breastfeeding. In my deep blue area mothers who just had a C section and have a baby in the NICU are constantly pressured to breastfeed (despite the pain from the surgery site while holding the baby) and pump to provide milk to the baby. All the usual progressive suspects (WHO, APA) are pro-breastfeeding. We are very much in the "breast is best" era.

That has not been my experience with my 3 kids. My impression is that there has been significant pushback against the push for breastfeeding so now the nurses and doctors are so careful not to push for breastfeeding that it feels like they are marketing formula.

I've talked with similarly aged parents (35-45) in other countries, including the US, and they shared similar experiences.

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And having been around a person who could not breastfeed, the only reassurance that can possibly be offered is 'it doesn't really matter' and 'babies that are breastfed also get 'gastrointestinal upset' all the time, it's not your fault'.

I don't disagree that we are in the "breast is best" era, but the subject is nevertheless ripe for political correctness to overtake it.

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And so we're back around to the subject of the OP.

Given the social class correlates of breastfeeding, female doctors almost certainly pump so the nanny has breastmilk on hand, and being literal doctors they have access to medical interventions to enable later childbearing- I'd be surprised if female doctors had fewer kids than female accountants, lawyers, etc. Upper class modern women have a low TFR because they choose to do this, not because they start having kids in their thirties(it's totally possible to have 3+ kids starting after thirty- I know a lot of people who've done it- and once more doctors have, by virtue of their incomes and training, access to much better medical interventions for enabling such things than the general public). Female doctors simply don't want to have more than two and so they don't. Yes yes cultural values. But 'women can go to medschool' is a minor part compared to the barrage of antinatalist propaganda shoved down their throats.

Given how good formula is, the chances that pumped, refrigerated, then reheated, breastmilk is providing whatever marginal benefits from-the-source breastmilk does is probably dubious at best. I mean, the formula powder is made to be mixed, heated, etc. Breast milk is made to be drank from the breast. Anything else and its probably rapidly degrading, particularly if you are returning it to body temp for serving.

Not that I dont applaud the effort of pumping. At the very least its converting your excess fat into something useful. It might even provide a 0.1% advantage for you (any greater seems dubious with the stats now, plus my own experiences).

It is significantly less pleasant being the parent of a young child in your late 30s compared to your late 20s

I saw someone remark 'You're able to pull all-nighters in college because that's when you should be having children' and that line as stuck in me like a thorn.

I'll second this. I know, I know, starting later means you've had more time to improve your economic situation, but I just don't see that as worth the downsides, as far as my own life and those others I observe IRL go.

Having experienced the latter and currently experiencing the former, I wish I could have started in my early 20s.

Yep. My wife and I had our final kid mid 30s. The first few months hit harder compared to our first in late 20s despite having a lot more experience re mid 30s

I 100% believe this but there's like 10,000 things that push upper middle class women to have kids in their thirties instead of their twenties, it isn't a 'education takes too long' problem even if that's part of the problem. If we're going to worry about that maybe worry about how long courtship takes nowadays first.

The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years

A brief search suggests wet nursing still exists as a practice in the US, but isn't terribly common. Maybe that'd see a resurgence, but honestly formula babies seen to turn out mostly okay too.

This is some JB-style made-up evpsych, along with JB-style "I am a very manly and interesting thinker." Come on, if you are going to argue something as dubious as "Women shouldn't be in stressful intellectual fields because they're dull and it also turns their kids autistic," you need to point at something more rigorous than monkey studies and oxytocin.

The bailey of your argument is far too narrow to support that motte.

What is JB?

He was a manifestard regular on here who's been permabanned for poor engagement in his repetitive one note posting about lowering the age of consent.

Oh, was that Julius Branson of Powerology fame? I didn't associate age of consent stuff with him but then I didn't read most of what he wrote. He did show up on a mutual discord server for a while though.

Maybe I confused him with EuphoricBaseball? Or wait were they the same person under different alts?

Baseball's thing wasn't age of consent but the idea that anyone who reached puberty should be legally treated like an adult and be able to skip school, evidently unaware that compulsory schooling laws end at 16 in most states. He also thought that the government shouldn't really treat them like adults and that their parents still had an obligation to take care of them.

Yes, that was one of his alts.

I don't recognize the latter name so couldn't say. But again there's a lot of Branson I didn't read so I wouldn't be shocked if I missed or just forgot about the age of consent angle, which... is interesting to think about, I guess, but never productive to discuss ime. So I'd have pretty much screened it out anyway.

That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.

Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do?

I would argue that the curve is slow, but parallel Muslim societies are beginning to outcompete Western societies.

I would argue that the curve is slow, but parallel Muslim societies are beginning to outcompete Western societies.

At what? Turkey and Iran are technologically and militarily less dysfunctional than the Arab Muslim states, but that ain't saying much.

Sorry, I had a more detailed response and lost it, but I hope this suffices to give you the point of view I use to think about these things.

He who builds the biggest bridges and the fanciest paved roads is not necessarily going to be the last man standing. There are other very successful strategies for overcoming your neighbor.

The Vandals and the Goths out-competed the Romans. The Seljuk Turks outcompeted the Caliph in Baghdad. The Mongols outcompeted the Chinese, the Persians, the Turks, and the Eastern European principalities.

Those are the obvious military accomplishments, where a significantly less advanced and technological state has the vigor to punch way above its weight class when fighting against more, allegedly, militarily capable states.

There are also other strategies. One might say that the Goths, either wittingly or unwittingly, pursued a strategy of educating their sons in the advanced society of their day, while retaining their essential Goth-ness (by going to clubs), and eventually completing the long destruction of Western Roman society even while they adopted on the surface some of its formalities. What matters here is that the Goths were the last culture standing.

This is obviously an endlessly iterating game, but in this current iteration, I think that the curve might be slow, but the parallel Muslim cultures growing in the West and supported by the Dar-al-Islam, are beginning to outcompete the societies they are embedded in while retaining and even doubling down on their, uhhhh, less than fully feminist laws and cultural traits.

Could this change? Of course. It didn’t take the Chinese very long to out-compete the Mongols via a different strategy, after all. But that strategy is not a silver bullet. The Tatar Yoke wasn’t lifted by the Golden Horde converting to dome-based architecture and Orthodoxy, after all.

So, I don’t count “We have more bridges, McDonalds, and better military toys” as a definitive killer app in the endless war between peoples/nations/cultures.

Mate, not all of the West is the USA. Europe literally ran out of bombs when ousting Gaddafi.

I have a directory of some hundreds of dsp papers from the last 20-30 years I’ve accumulated over time and I’ve at least browsed through if not outright read every single one of them. The number of papers with a female first or second author is less than ten. The ratio has been similar in other subfields of electrical engineering I’ve read papers and books from.

Unsurprising, isn't it? If we normalize for the number of women in EE author positions (let's say grad school and above), I wouldn't have expected more, especially if you have papers from the '90s in that database.

I would have actually expected slightly more just based on the ratio I saw while working in a university lab 20 years ago but not massively so. Certainly nothing close to 30%. Once you account for how the number of useful papers are divided between publishing researchers (something resembling the usual 80-20 thing), the result I got isn't all that surprising.

I have no understanding of that field so I’ll take your word for it. But if you look at open source contributions on GitHub as recently as 2021, which is far from theoretical computer science but is at least something technical and important, women make ~5% of contributions. This study looked at names, and there are many transgender programmers active on GitHub, and they seem to love Linux… so the number of real female contributors may be as low as 1-3%. This is a good metric because it’s technical work for the pure love of technical work.

I dispute that it's such a good metric, because GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).

Hell, even in my personal space, my SO has probably written 5x the volume of shell scripts to automate random chores that I have (my tolerance for annoyances being much higher), but mine are on github with a nice readme and Show HN post to introduce them and hers are not.

it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.

More anecdata, but some of the most mathematically interesting code in one of my favorite open source projects had its first version written by a female programmer, who doesn't have a single commit, because her conditions for being persuaded into contributing were basically "you own the translated code, you don't put my name on it, you don't ask me for support, you don't suggest others ask me for support".

She got like 5 papers and a dissertation for her PhD (which she finished at least 25% faster than I did) out of the research that led to that code, during a period when I was spending a ton of time helping new users of the rest of the software for no immediate personal benefit, so it's hard to say that she was doing the wrong thing, at least in the short run. On the other hand, today those papers have ~140 citations between them, none since 2022; the one paper about the project she was a silent contributor to is over a thousand now, and that's because most users' papers cite a downstream project instead.

GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit)

What do you think is driving useful research if not just that?

Someone just going with the flow isn't going to email their prof with "I've been trying to solve this open research problem but got stuck two thirds of the way, do you maybe have some pointers..." followed with publishing several papers before even considering PhD studies (like I did way back in the day).

GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).

Right, but the former is good! Computing runs on this kind of person. It’s very important if female programmes don’t like to draw attention or be the best at something, and especially if they become the majority of a profession and start discouraging it in men. That’s a big part of Andrews’ point.

Huh. Sounds like the rise of LLMs should disproportionally benefit women. It turns coding from grind into review/discussion and it strongly benefits local development.

Over a long enough timeframe is the operative word you're missing. Now, are there societies which combine female domesticity with a functioning sewage system? I can think of two- the gulf muslim countries(which do not maintain the functioning sewage systems themselves, they spend oil money to buy them wholesale and have indian indentured servants3CNs maintain them) and conservative Christian parallel societies in parts of the west(who likewise support themselves through productive labor but generally rely on the more egalitarian society around them to maintain a modern developed society). Maybe Italy and Japan are partial examples, but they demonstrate pretty conclusively that this is not a magic bullet for TFR.

Most of Central and Southeast Asia has functioning sewage and maintains it themselves, along with female domesticity.

Now, are there societies which combine female domesticity with a functioning sewage system?

Well, what is the cause and what is the effect there, though? It's suspicious that even for well-sewered Western society, by the time proper sewer systems proliferated, female workforce participation was already most of the way to the modern value. (Quick Google says 56% for the US now, and 40% for Victorian England.)

I don't think TFR>2.1 is compatible with affluent liberal modernity without speculative innovations in the class of artificial wombs and AI childrearing with no humans in the loop, so I'd rather just enjoy its boons while they last. We'll have to destroy freedom and fun to get TFR up eventually anyway; why be in a hurry about it?

Israel would disagree; as until recently would Utah. It's clearly possible to have affluent, modern societies which replace themselves and have basic equal rights.

I don't know enough about Utah, but I would assume Israeli fertility is nontrivially carried by subgroups that are not living in affluent liberal modernity. Maybe, assuming that the subgroups are not actually genetically distinct from the general population and have a steady rate of evaporation (as in children who leave the group and join modernity), such a strategy could be viable - maintain a self-sequestering pronatalist cult, and keep the rest of society running on a steady trickle of apostates from their circles - but it hardly seems stable, especially since I assume evaporative cooling will cause the cult to drift genetically towards who knows what over time.

Israeli society has a large percentage of the population with normal jobs, electronic communication, and 4+ kids. It's not all ultra-orthodox.

Considering the figures on the Wikipedia page, with the sub-replacement values for "Christians" and "others", I'm inclined to believe that whatever they are doing at least does not work as a society-wide intervention. "Jewish non-Haredi" is already given as only 2.4, and I assume that there is a large number of sufficiently aberrant lifestyle people (like settlers) in that group pulling up the average without resembling "affluent liberal modernity".

I mean, sure, with a sufficiently compelling religion you will find some people willing to live on a farm and multiply for your ethnoreligious group's manifest destiny; the fraction of people willing to do that might however not be that large, and Israel already has an easier time there because their baseline Jewish population is preselected for propensity to go for such a thing from a much larger global Jewish population. I'm however not convinced that that group could sustain itself even at its current level of lifestyle without a much larger and lower-TFR group subsidising them. I'm in fact not even convinced that Israel as a state could sustain itself at its current level of lifestyle without the much larger and lower-TFR group that is the USA subsidising them. Israel's TFR is also secured by weapons and money built by/earned by Americans burning their fertile years in the rat race at Raytheon.

"Egalitarian" societies have really not been around long in the grand scheme of things and the wheels are already clearly coming off with cratering TFR and solutions like mass migration causing massive destabilization. If anything the fact that no society that put women in this position ever lasted long enough to become dominant until after the industrial revolution seems to paint a pretty different picture of whether this is a positive thing. At current rates Europe will be ruled by patriarchal muslims in a couple centuries and the US by the amish.

Well, that sucks, but all the counterproposals look an awful lot like "we should turn into patriarchal muslims/amish with a different paint job first".

Besides, in a couple centuries, I wager both Europe and the US will either be ruled by Clippy or members of whatever type of cockroach (literal or metaphorical) emerges from the rubble of WWIII, and in the latter case the TFR probem might be solved for Westerners too since erasing industrial society seems like a reliable enough way to get the opportunity costs of childrearing under control.

Well, that sucks, but all the counterproposals look an awful lot like "we should turn into patriarchal muslims/amish with a different paint job first".

Was pre-1960s America/Europe "Muslim/Amish with a different paint job"? I guess if the only thing you care about is women's rights, you might see it that way; but I don't.

Besides, in a couple centuries, I wager both Europe and the US will either be ruled by Clippy or members of whatever type of cockroach (literal or metaphorical) emerges from the rubble of WWIII

It's true that AI is probably going to kill us all first, but in that case nothing matters; all political discussions should be assumed to be Current Rate No Singularity.

Was pre-1960s America/Europe "Muslim/Amish with a different paint job"?

No, but we can't go back to anything like it, because not having invented smartphones and Uber Eats looks very different from upholding a ban on smartphones and Uber Eats and we have neither the coordination nor the technology to just forget a capability.

Again I'd like to point out that the author's proposal is to simply repeal antidiscrimination laws pertaining to sex, which is a much more reasonable objective than dispensing with smartphones, the relevance of which I can't figure out regardless.

Do you think Western civilization just decided to try feminism on a whim, or was it more like feminism arose because we had the capability?

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"Egalitarian" societies have really not been around long in the grand scheme of things and the wheels are already clearly coming off with cratering TFR and solutions like mass migration causing massive destabilization.

I came to this same conclusion and it was a real doompill for me. The kind of modern secular liberal egalitarian democratic system we've been running for the last fifty or sixty years just isn't standing up to the test of time very well. That system has reacted by tabooing any values other than its own, but that hasn't actually fixed anything, and so now we have a decrepit empire rife with heresy.

Everywhere Urban and modern has extremely low fertility not just modern liberal societies.

I came to this same conclusion and it was a real doompill for me.

Really? I felt a tremendous amount of relief. To me it seemed like everything was just getting worse and worse with no end in sight and I had no idea why. When I realized that, oh, we're just insane when it comes to women and race and fixing that will fix pretty much everything else, it was like the horizon began to lighten in the East.

To doompill about this would require me to think that egalitarianism had triumphed in ridding the world of people who can perceive the truth. But it hasn't! Racism and sexism are both alive and well, thank God, and will soon be coming to the rescue of benighted Western Civilization.

The problem in the meantime is that so many positions of consequence are held by people who can't or won't notice what's happened.

This new generation is so strangely split. Young men radical reactionaries; young women radical... uh, I don't even know what to call them. Hateful, shrewish, self-defacing cat-ladies? No idea how this is going to play out politically but it's going to be fascinating, and in the long run I think women will ultimately buckle and follow the lead of men back to a social model which actually works.

When I realized that, oh, we're just insane when it comes to women and race and fixing that will fix pretty much everything else, it was like the horizon began to lighten in the East.

Heuristic: if you find yourself thinking "once we fix [my pet issue], most other problems will solve themselves", that means your mind has been hijacked by a hostile ideology. This is true regardless of the contents of [my pet issue]. This failure mode is more common on the left than the right - usual contents are "capitalism" or "consumerism" or "patriarchy" - but it happens on the right too ("immigration", "atheism", "homosexuality", "political correctness") and even to believers in weird fringe stuff ("prediction markets").

Solid point and I accept it, though in this case my reasoning is more that "Once those problems are solved we'll be back in a position to deal with the others." It's a sort of faith in my heritage.

I could expound on my own subjective view at length, but I think it would be more useful to just say that at some point my vision of the far future went from Star Trek to, I don't know, Dune or something, and I didn't like it.

Funny. I was just wondering why entire subgenres of SciFi and althistory don't work for me anymore as I get more conservative/blackpilled.

"Written with the assumptions of Star Trek in mind" captures the commonalities even across genres surprisingly well.

There's a goldilocks zone between "obnoxiously poisoned by leftism" and "Randian libertarian blowhard" in SciFi.

...I haven't exactly found it yet, but it has to be there.

Heinlein's cocktail of beliefs is at least bizarre enough to be more entertaining than irritating.

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I'm in favor of the move, all things considered.

Star Trek is not a human future. It's a fictional scenario constructed to serve as the vehicle for the political assertions of people laboring under any number of ridiculous misapprehensions about human nature. Humans would have to be substantially modified in all sorts of ways to make that work, and I think we'd lose much of what I value about humans in the process.

Dune looks like a human future full of people living human lives. Most of the 'bad' things in the books are straightforwardly contrived for plot purposes. I think Dune would be a good future. Caladan seems nice. And I don't think most of the Landsraad would actually put up with the Harkonnens except for, again, contrived Imperial support.

But, in such cases, the question one ought to ask is what ruler one is even using to measure 'good' and 'bad'. And if it turns out one's answer is 'the social consensus prevalent when I was young' one is due to have a bad time in short order.

What actually matters to you in the future? What patterns are worthy of preservation and propagation?

FWIW, I don't recall getting any view of the common people's lives in Dune. We know of the high drama of the aristocracy, and the supposed macrohistory, and not much else.

OTOH, I never read past God-Emperor.

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