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I saw a study offsite about the lack of male role models and there was a lot of anxious whining about how men are afraid of being seen as creeps/pedophiles but I think any attempt to explain the problem without accounting for the general reasons why men are under-included in communities in general is going to fall prey to occam's law. It seems obvious to me that a satisfyingly complete explanation for why men don't join the scouts will also explain...
... And so on, and so forth.
But agreeing on that explanation is near-impossible because nearly without exception, people work backwards from their preffered solution to determine what the cause of the problem is. Anti-safetyist mottizens want to make scouting dangerous again, anxious redditors want counter-propaganda to convince women to not be afraid of men, women want to pressure single fathers into taking responsibility, and I even saw one dude that thinks the solution is masculine bonding via class warfare. If any of these groups is right, I suspect it's mostly by accident.
Maybe men shouldn’t be shamed every time they stick their head up to get involved. There are all kinds of stories about men being assumed to be a pedophile for the crime of taking his own child to the park. Men don’t dare to volunteer to work with kids because again, the meme of “any male showing interest in kids is dangerous” means that the male who gets involved in scouting is assumed to be grooming.
"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.
I think there are two related reasons: one, motivation dies quickly after becoming mired in bureaucracy. Someone who is highly motivated to provide a mentoring opportunity for a group of boys might not be able to find the drive to complete more than a single form, let alone typing up paragraphs of baloney. Same thing hampering science IMO.
Second is legitimate fear of liability. Even if you jump through all the paperwork hoops, even a minor accident can easily result in years of expensive legal wrangling, even if you ultimately win. Insurance against this is expensive and yet scourge bureaucratic hurdle to doing anything.
As usual, if you want to make the world a better place, first kill all the lawyers.
Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.
Nobody tolerates liability unless they can insure it away, and that means accepting the constraints the insurance companies put in to prevent actually having to pay a claim.
Yes, because you have a reason in mind (in general terms, that men, in some way, suck), which is wrong, but is the only reason within the Overton window.
Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.
Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.
But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.
If you insist on using your own state of mind as if it were evidence, prepare to have the contents of your mind interrogated.
As for the position that no one should have epistemic confidence to have a position, if that were to be universally adopted it would mean either throwing up ones hands or trying things at random. But in practice, that position is only deployed against certain positions -- usually but not always positions that imply a change should be made -- and so it is not the neutral agosticism it would appear.
It means that we should first devote our efforts to concerted study and systematization of the phenomenon before throwing away effort on advocating for speculative solutions that often backfire and reduce credibility for future attempts. See: "the boy who cried wolf." See: the modern history of feminism.
That's a fair complaint, but not actually a counterargument. If you see me overconfident in other positions and want me to apply this same reasoning feel free to argue for that. I recognize your username so I think we were probably arguing about eugenics and/or immigration before? My eugenics position is already "lack of epistemic confidence" so that would be a miss, but I'm pro-immigration so I can see the outlines of an argument that goes, "we can't be confident that immigration is good, so we should avoid it as a default." Were you to make it, I would accept the fundamental "epistemically uncertain->don't do the thing" argument but then disagree with the "epistemically uncertain" premise.
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