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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28091 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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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?

I think it arose because Capital demanded that it arise.

"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.

Jerry Pournelle has at least an interesting ideology that shows through his writing.

Honestly never heard of him. But he has short stories which are enticing as a sample. Really I'd like more good apostolic Christian sci fi.

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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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